Karma Sutra

Now as a woman is like this or like that,
according as she acts and according as she behaves, so will she be;
a woman of good acts will become good, a woman of bad acts, bad;
she becomes pure by pure deeds, bad by bad deeds;

And here they say that a person consists of desires,
and as is her desire, so is her will;
and as is her will, so is her deed;
and whatever deed she does, that she will reap.

Whatever bad deeds she reaps, she will not do
and as she does not, by her will;
and her desire will follow;
and whatever she desires, that she will reap.

– Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, with mods by me.

Odds Off

​Overheard on the Tannoy…

‘He took a big risk and it came off. The American people like that.’ 

‘What? Taking a risk?’ 

‘No, the risk coming off. That’s seen as leadership.’

That’s so odd that it’s probably true. A whole nation that has no simpatico with regression. 

My guess is that we all have to worry when their luck finally runs out, as it just has.

Rule of Thrum

What dribbles on the couch stays on the couch.

Bollarks

​He’s a thinker that Malcolm. Maybe we can line all of our roads with bollards and then tell the Kiwis that they are footing the bill.

English Collective Noun

A meal. Them’s crisp wrappers.

Australian Collective Noun

A pig of chip packets.

Leonard

​At high school we had a pair of identical twins, Ronald and Leonard.

Therefore there must be a Leonard Trump, seeing that Donald is really Ronald.

Anti-genetic symmetricalization is a CIA plot after all.

Beerexit

The first good argument against Brexit.

Ronald

My mum asked me what I think about Ronald Trump.

She said Donald and I said Ronald. I think it suits him better. Ronald it is.

She can’t figure Ronald out because she’s convinced there must be an agenda.

I countered that it doesn’t matter; Ronald’s agenda, as it haphazardly emerges, will reflect the will of the majority of the American people, even the ones that hate him.

Ita ut sit.

Ethical Politicians?

Prosody

The French must hate Google.

Phil has a little of the French in him and just last night he started to muse upon the subject of gay speech.

You know, the queenie voice that some gay people affect. And then, years later, they don’t. 

Brian was the example and Tony was the counter example. Time was on the x axis and the night was young.

Rather than go the French route of debating the subject for hours from a position of complete ignorance, I cut Phil off and just Googled it.

The answer; prosody and perceptions of integration in a causal model of queenly persistence. 

That’s my three-minute condensed milk summary and it just about explains it.

There’s not a single topic of beer conversation, and I mean not one, that hasn’t been the subject of some dodgy PhD.

The French though, they don’t want answers.

They want to wallow in the process of pondering all the options for all the solutions that could ever be imagined. Out loud.

If only they could constrain their addiction to problems that don’t have actual known answers, they’d be world beaters.

In the meantime, thank you Google.

Inspiration

A wank of collective nouns.

Pouffe

The collective noun for pom-poms? 

Rue the less

You never hear of someone being ruthful or reckful, do you?

In any case, there’s a difference between ruthlessness and the selective suspension of ruthfulness in the interests of ruthfulness.

Forecax

Predictions of the future have been on my mind of late.

For all of us, a good fraction of our efforts are aimed at framing the future in our own favour.

This requires some insight into the probabilities of this and that occurring.

And we can do this because of two rules:

1. Many things happen tomorrow because they happened yesterday. They always do.

2. For those things that don’t conform to this rule, we have been collectively placing constraints around them for centuries, such that they do.

I still believe that we all conform to the mean when it comes to our futures, as expressed in the present, when it arrives. The mean of the futures of people, that is.

That said, there is a distribution around the mean which is impacted by the distribution in a non-linear fashion. 

Ours goes to eleven … and your’s just might go to twelve if you try hard enough.

Ennui. There’s a word I haven’t used for a while.

The French own it but misuse it. Well, that’s harsh. They know what it feels like but have the least chance of all God’s children of explaining it’s source.

I believe that ennui derives from rule 2 above.

So if you are lucky enough to have arrived at ennui then you know what to do; stop taking advantage of those constraints that guarantee tomorrow but that also limit your downside risks.

That’s easier said that done because, like sugar, it’s a hidden addiction. Step one is awareness. After that, you’re on your own.

But here’s a tip; try to give up forecasting, planning and even contingency analysis. Anything, everything, all of it. 

You’ll be surprised how often you do it, once you force yourself to be aware of when you do.

Recalcitrant Engagement

“Grace cannot be bought with repentance; it cannot be bought at all.”

High five, Hermann baby.

Diminutive Musings

​Siddhartha is claimed to have said; “Words do not express thoughts very well; everything immediately becomes a little different, a little distorted, a little foolish.”

Well, every rule is disproven by the exception I guess, Sid.

In the same breath he went on to say: “And yet it also pleases me and seems right that what is of value and wisdom to one man seems nonsense to another.”

A displeasing nonsequiter, for mine.

Sid was clearly a smart-arse. And you can’t be a smart-arse and a prophet at the same time.

I said.

Desire

Query: is it completely natural to desire what one has not?

Deconstructing the proposition…

First, one has to notice the object of attainability.

Then, one has to admire it.

After which, things get curly.

Some will desire to have it and some will not.

Those that don’t may simply feel unworthy.

Or they might assume that their attempts at ownership will be unsuccessful.

They may feel that they are alright just as they are.

They may even forecast the consequences of ownership and assess the benefits as undesirable, all things duly considered.

Eeeyu

The European Union’s fundamental values are respect for human dignity and human rights, freedom, democracy, equality and the rule of law.

That all sounds good in a vaguely American way, but it looks awfully guide-linish and aspirational. Not much for the common person to align to there.

Ironically, it’s the mismatch in social and cultural values between the member states that is the root cause of their issues. Not surprisingly, these aren’t really referenced at all in the EU’s fundamental values statement.

For example, their espoused freedoms resulted in the removal of internal borders. This is great for travel but has created issues in the labour markets that has lead to increased racism. The problem here is that the folks that weren’t in a position to take advantage of the freedoms were the ones that suffered as a result of them. I’d call that an unnecessary polarising effect.

A free market is a wonderful thing unless that leads to unwanted erosion of cultural identity, regional losers in the economic battle zone and a general reduction of society to consumerism. If you’d have asked many people whether they wanted to become consumer slaves to the detriment of other values, family for example, they’d have said no.

The EU aims for sustainable development based on balanced economic growth. Not even close; only the northern countries have cultural values to match this aspiration.

It would have been sensible to slowly develop a free market but with a clutch in place to prevent excess trade or capital imbalances between the regions. To put it bluntly, the profits of a trading excess to a region should have been required to be invested in that region until things were evened up.

The EU would have been well-placed to find and articulate a set of genuinely shared cultural values and then have used these as a wedge towards the slow organic development of a proper union.

Right now the EU reminds me of an old Ford Escort that I once owned, an ill-conceived product of English and German engineering, financed by the Americans with the French sales & marketing team looking on in despair. It was sold all over Europe but loved by no one.

My particular Escort ran, but just. Missing one cylinder (the UK) and full of rust, my feet got wet every time it rained, and I was always surprised that it kept running. Until it didn’t; one night on a German Autobahn it started overheating and it was with great relief that we (me and the car) managed to limp home to Eindhoven.

But it never started again and I had to pay for it to be removed and scrapped. I am pretty sure that no one wanted any of the parts.

EUxplode

Really, what’s the point of the EU if the Germans think that this is a macchiato?

Random Political Discourse

Streek says:

“Life under social entropy elevates being optimistic to the status of a public virtue and civic responsibility. In fact, one can say that even more than capitalism in its heyday, the entropic society of disintegrated, de-structured and under-governed post-capitalism depends on its ability to hitch itself onto the natural desire of people not to feel desperate, while defining pessimism as a socially harmful personal deficiency.”

I vaguely agree but would position it slightly differently.

The madness of desirable happiness is the preferred tool of marketing that drives consumption which is fuelled by debt, which in turn relies on predictability in economic growth that is underpinned by political stability and ever-increasing productivity which stands upon the shoulders of technology and, most importantly, the unsustainable consumption of resources.

The more parts in any construction, the more risks of systemic failure. And our daily food and water, amongst much other fluff, relies on one awfully complex machine.

Just a suggestion here; the problem that we are facing isn’t whether our economic and political systems are up to the task of maintaining the status quo. No, the issue is whether they will be able to adapt to the changes ahead without either substantial bloodshed and/or a reversion to genuine and widespread unhappiness.

To some degree, politics matter. I suspect that we’re best placed to get the Trumps out of our system now when we can afford to. In a decade or so, hopefully we’ll be properly educated as to the uselessness of false prophets and turn to leaders of genuine merit.

Frankly, I don’t care or even pretend to be able to predict whether that post-consumption future is driven by class, race, national, corporate, regional or transnational interests.

The future is as predictable as the past is explicable. That is, not very, unless one is deluded or inherently conservative.

And it’s the conservatives that we need to watch out for. They want to constrain the future with visions of the past. I don’t think that we can afford the the luxury of such unnecessary constraints.

Brown or Wet

It’s a trend.

In the Guardian there’s dozens of articles written anonymously by UK scientists, and now their spouses as well, whining about all aspects of their lives.

Once a revered profession, it is now of diminishing social and commercial importance and constrained by guild-like structures that enshrine poor social skills.

It is also inhabited by idio savants that cannot reason themselves out of their own unhappiness, or a wet paper bag.

In that last statement there lurks a root cause.

Causation v. Correlation

​In my experience, unlucky people have a habit of kicking the can down the road and a general ignorance of all things statistics.

Which makes one wonder … is the corollary true? Do lucky people deal with important things immediately and appreciate that regression to the mean is the first law of human dynamics?

I guess so. They just happen to have a different mean to the unlucky ones.

All the excuses for killing

​Mad, mad, whoops, licensed, greedy and hungry.

Postal Weather Warning

Interesting

​Those Chinese, they know there’s an RMB in everything. So what do you reckon the interest rate is at the school marks bank?

Framing

Here’s a classic example of ‘framing’ – the tube operators in London label ‘maintenance’ as ‘improvement work’. 

Alternatively, on the Tannoy they say ‘planned engineering’ just to emphasise that the thing isn’t randomly breaking down; which it is.

They aren’t fooling anyone. Even the most casual of observers will note that it’s a toy rail system that is about 50 years past its use-by date.

Any imagined improvement would require a complete replacement. Even the maintenance seems a tad optimistic. The system barely works, and then only sometimes.

Right now the staff seem intent on ensuring it doesn’t work at all. Rolling strikes protesting against tourists, me-thinks.

Craft Rotary Blur

​Why this morning, of all mornings?

I have what could only be labelled as a craft beer hangover. The poor bloody English; they think ale is normal when in fact it’s completely avoidable.

Back to the narrative; I was just woken by an adherent of the Japanese high rpm rotary engine fucking movement. In the room next door, or upstairs; I couldn’t tell.

Starting at 4,000 RPM, he finished about ten minutes later at 10,000 RPM, complete with a high pitched crow call (faaaaaaarrrrk).

Ok, so I’m awake. No way to reverse that unavoidable fact. A shower, that’ll fix it.

Problem number two. I can’t find the reading glasses and things are blurrier than usual, due to the craft fucking ale.

But I can discern that the English still can’t do bathrooms. It’s a cargo cult; they know what they should look like, probably from magazines, but they have no idea how they should function.

How does one explain constant water temperature to a moron? Or that the toilet buttons shouldn’t need an instruction manual. That drains in shower baths should be able to cope with a standard shower pressure and not allow the bath to fill up. Or that clingy shower curtains aren’t appreciated by anyone.

Back to the primary problem. This one is universal. The smallest writing on the little bottles is of course the description of the contents. Who wears their reading glasses in the shower? Yeah, right.

Have you ever heard of shampooing conditioner? Me neither.

Two Panadol and back to bed. I’ll pretend it didn’t happen and that it doesn’t exist.

Centre Unhinged

​For some odd reason I find this fascinating.

Centrelink, Australia’s social welfare cash agency, has new software that is sending out debt notices based on prior over-payments.

The maths in the software is incorrect and does not conform to Centrelink’s own rules.

It doesn’t allow for periods of employment and non-employment. It just uses annual averages, and thus incorrectly sends out large debt notices to people that are often penniless, and sometimes ill-equipped to handle the complexity of the issues.

Could such a basic error be caused by utter imbecility, or was it done on purpose? Who knows. This government appears devoid of all sense of humanity and this is seeping down into the agencies.

But I do know this. The unfairly treated recipients of these debt notices aren’t going to be treated well.

I’d like to see one of them declare bankruptcy, and then sue the agency for damages after showing that the debt notice was usurious and incorrect.

Which makes me wonder why they don’t treat unemployment benefits as they do HECS.

One could just rack up a debt and then incur an extra tax increment when employed, one that works to repay the debt.

Oh hang on, we do that already, in reverse. We pay tax and if we’re ever unemployed we benefit from the national insurance scheme. Well we don’t actually; many people simply can’t stomach Centrelink.

The benefit of the HECS debt approach is that it would turn recipients into customers and thus curb Centrelink’s mad and bad ways.

They could even build this debt into an estate tax; the government could recoup all unpaid benefits from the estate as a primary charge in all circumstances.

None of this would address the issue of multi-generational unemployment. But it wouldn’t make it worse either.

Usefully, the gig economy will rise to prevent people being unemployed. Diving an Uber, delivering for Deliveroo, freelancing on line, and other cash earning options; these will allow people not to panic when they lose that job.

Maybe the concept of unemployment needs to be replaced with the concept of a minimum wage. Which Finland is just trialling.

My idea. If one works a minimum number of documented hours then your earnings are topped up if they fall below some threshold, with no debt.

If you work less than the minimum number of hours, then you get unemployment benefits and it’s debt.

Companies of course would rush to underpay people, so I’d make corporate tax rates linked to pay rates in companies, or earnings rates in gig companies.They’d figure it out.

It all sounds very tiring. I’ll leave it to people that care more than me.

The Undoing of Undoing

I’ve just learned that I’m different to most people in a way that surprises me. 

Apparently humans, as a means of coping, have a habit of ‘undoing’ bad things, using the imagination.

For example, if a relative dies in a car accident, someone might wish ‘If only so-and-so hadn’t taken the new route to work that day.’

In fact, this habit of undoing has rules. 

The undoing must be something that could have ‘reasonably’ happened.

In the car accident example above, a less reasonable yearning would have been ‘if only cars had never been invented’ or ‘if only aliens had swooped down and kidnapped him the day before’.

This habit of undoing, I recognise it from people that I know, movies that I have watched and books that I have read. 

But until this day, I’ve never noticed that I do not do it. 

My brain just says ‘you may as well fantasize that the problem never existed, for all the good it will do’.

In fact I judge it to be feeble-minded to fantasize away the impacts of reality in this way. 

I’m guessing that there is also a price to pay for this facile luxury; the more one practices undoing, the easier it is for one to be deceived by ‘framing’.

Framing is the practise of fooling people with tricky descriptions that dress up, say, a potential loss as riskless gain.

This is from the school of psychology that says that people don’t choose between things. What they do is choose between the descriptions of things.

Undoing and framing – they both rely on temporal misdescriptions. As does Donald Trump and any Hollywood movie.

In the case of undoing, we have a misdescription of what might reasonably have been different in the past. Framing is the misdescription of what might reasonably be otherwise in the future.

So there are two aspects to this phenomenon. The scope of the misdescriptions and the degree and sign of non-temporality.

We actually live in the present and things are what they are. But people, to a greater or lesser degree, live in the past and the future, and this gives them the luxury of misdescribing things. 

Because, although things are what they are, that is only true of the now. In the past and in the future, things can be anything because they don’t really exist. 

It’s a fine line that people draw here. If their imagination is too outlandish, too unreasonable, then they cannot use or share their interpretations of the past, or meaningfully constrain the future, or prepare for it.

As in all things human, this habit of using reasonable temporal misdescriptions must be the most efficient means of using our limited processing power for the purposes of surviving and procreating. That’s a given. 

I suspect that we live in fractal-like social environment. It looks at times free-willish, chaotic and random, but if you pull back and view it from the right distance then it’s got a certain familiar look and feel to it, no matter the era.

And no wonder, if we distort our current existence with the same limited set of reasonable temporal misdescriptions. That would bring us back around to where we started, time and time again, with no competitive disadvantage.

Myself, I think it’s more lucrative to imagine away at the future and leave the past well enough alone. But I guess I’m mostly alone in this view. 

In fact, more and more, I’m leaving the future alone as well these days.

It’s not just about living in the now. Another important aspect of ‘personal peace’ is to avoid the process of creating temporal misdescriptions, for whatever reason.

To do so requires that you face things as they are, thus removing subconscious dissonance, leaving the soul to settle amicably with reality, no matter what it brings.

The best course of action, the most likely truth, is that things are what they are. Now, in the past, and in the future.

If you accept this, then the power of reasonable temporal misdescriptions is removed. Then you will find that you stop the process of imagining them, and find yourself here in the now.

As a side effect, you will also find movies almost unbearable to watch. They are usually examples of vaguely unreasonable temporal misdescriptions.

Before doing all this though, you might be well warned that you will be at a competitive disadvantage in the competition for resources. You simply won’t be arsed. 

So make sure that you are well stocked up beforehand, or that you can live very leanly.

Postscript – the eastern cults that practice ‘removal’ from life as a path to enlightenment; it’s just occurred to me that they are cargo cults. They practice lean living in the now without reasonable temporal misdescriptions, but ironically without the enlightenment as to why they are doing so. It’s all backwards!

Unreasonable Temporal Misdescription

Plenty of Fish

​One of the most powerfully sad emotions that a human might feel is the loss of a partner through a breakup.

There’s two aspects to this; the loss itself and the regret that things could have been different if one had just behaved a little differently.

It is wired into our souls to want a partner. For having and raising kids, and for survival.

By why all the regret for losing the one that we had? Especially when the evidence suggests that there may be plenty, ca. billions, of options out there.

Well, we all believe that we are in control of these things. That our own behaviour determines the success or failure of a relationship. We feel regret at our own failings, or what could have been ‘if only’.

And then there’s the myth that the best part of a relationship is the first part. Deep down, very few really believe this. Otherwise they’d be jumping for joy at a break up, ready to go again.

Many of us recognise that humans are risk averse. What this means is that there has developed, in evolutionary terms, a greater desire to avoid loss than to attain gains.

In fact, humans are so wired against loss that it’s bloody amazing that relationships break up at all.

Oddly, this can be explained away by maths. As a second order effect, humans do actually have some obscure awareness of odds and probabilities.

In the case of a relationship, if it’s crap for at least one party, eventually this overrides the fear of loss. But this usually happens long past the point where the break could have been made rationally, to the satisfaction of a third party.

And, even so, the decision-making party is punished with emotions of guilt and loss.

So you see, maybe the maths aren’t so fucked up as they seem. The less than certain benefits of leaving the relationship are just offset by the calculated net present value of the emotional costs of leaving.

Rather than suggesting that humans are irrational because of all these emotions, one might be better placed to consider that humans are actually quite good weighing up the risks and benefits to their emotional futures.

Being risk averse is simply a consequence of our ability to forecast certain negative emotions far more accurately than uncertain future positive emotions.

And I say uncertain future benefits because we can imagine hundreds of futures, but many of these are worse off than the present. There’s simply more ways to imagine a messed up future than there is a Hollywood ending.

Indeed, we are better at imagining futures that are closer to our current situation. There’s a greater probability that these imaginings are correct if less has changed, or so we believe. And if we are currently unhappy in a relationship then the imagination is skewed towards futures where, even though things are changed, we remain unhappy.

One might wonder why we developed so. I’d say that in prehistoric times that the balance in the forecasted values of emotional losses and gains accurately reflected the best outcomes in terms of the survival and growth of the individual and the species.

It must be so; evolution is a brute force numerical algorithm that searches for and finds the best solution, every time. When I say time, I mean millennia not the years of your life. It’s not about you; never was and never will be.

Today, however, we have got ahead of evolution. We have engineered so much risk out of our daily lives that our assessment of the emotional and physical costs of risks and gains is all askew.

So when we assess the judgement and decision making of ourselves, and that of others, we appear irrational. However all we are is retarded! Recalcitrant, if you want. You get the idea.

My guess is that this will correct itself in time. Either we will over time evolve to assess these risks and gains differently, or we will miscalculate ourselves back to prehistoric times.

In the meantime, if you want to escape the sometimes misery of being human, all you need to do is to convince yourself, all mantra like, that your future is not constrained by your past.

In Venn diagram terms, your future is a circle, happily with no overlap with that of your unhappy past or present.

This takes advantage of another quirk of human nature; if something is said often enough, or by many people, or both, then belief may follow. 

Belief is a mechanism that short circuits other mechanisms of judgement and decision making. I’ll write this one up another time.

Brisbanites

​Never in my life have I encountered a group of people that get as angry as the Brisbanites do when another breaks the rules.

There seems to be a general acceptance that anger in such circumstances is A. justified, and B. free from the risk of personal harm resulting from retaliation. 

As a result, it’s like being in primary school with a bunch of library monitors, all wearing their badges proudly and ready to dob you in for the most minor of indiscretions.

Wherefore comes such anger? After admittedly very little thought, I have concluded that the suburbanites of Brisbane are the most locked-in that I have encountered. 

They have everything one could hope for, except any sense of freedom or freewill. They have unwittingly sold their souls to the consumption devil and they are subconsciously seething at the unfairness of the honey trap.

Hence they lash out at anyone that seems to be skipping along, ignoring the lobster traps.

The absence of any fear of retaliation upon their expression of disgust can be explained by their collective physical and mental uselessness.

They couldn’t fight their collective way out of a brown paper bag and they don’t really believe that there are people that can. 

In summary, they are like the flightless birds of New Zealand; dumb, fat and free from predators. That is until the Maoris turned up.

Brief Encounter

​Walking my bike through one of the pedestrian malls in Brisbane, I found myself in a cross current to the majority of the swill.

Because I was targeting a specific cafe, my aim was true. There’s was not.

A meandering and oblivious family, one mother and three kids, seemed intent on blocking my path.

They unwittingly zigged when I zagged, and zagged when I zigged.

As a result my front wheel passed close-ish to one of the kids, maybe a metre at the closest.

The mum belatedly noticed my presence and the metre; a sudden look of rage passed over her face.

She controlled it and we all moved on.

What wherewith do you say? A brief reminder that everyone is at the centre of their own universe and that the whole thing is a mirage.

Chook

All effort had been spared to create the impression that all effort had been spared.

Ocean Shores

What one can teach one’s kids, if one has the courage:

Learning how to make big decisions is better than being a victim of the avoidance of them.

That all bad feelings eventually pass, and are replaced with better ones.

That being able to sustain mental stress is a skill in life, but not one to be used just to avoid making decisions.

Intelligent Life Found!

​If the SETI folk found dolphins on Mars they’d jump over the moon.