bliss-o-matic

it's nice to follow your bliss

I read a joke in an old  Reader's Digest that I picked up from a shop in Gemini Plaza - it involves a lady who tries to purchase a pastry from a shop but the girl working the counter tells her she can't ,because they aren't fresh ,coz they are frozen - but they will be fresh in the morning the next day, when they'll be re-heated.

While we can point to the incorrect use of language or the deceit of the establishment in selling re-heated food as fresh, or the apathy of the employee towards the condition of the customer being exploited , we see the humour to laugh it off.

Let's take each of the things that irk me.
Why is it an incorrect use of the language to call the pastries as fresh ?
 Because, for the customer, the pastries are not really fresh - they are frozen and re-heated.
Even if they were frozen immediately after preparation, transported, and heated once before serving, they shouldn't  be considered fresh, because we typically think fresh means consumed within an hour of preparation.
For the employee working in the shop, 'fresh' has a working definition, and if the process followed defines 'fresh' as  :
-  new pastries are  frozen immediately after preparation, and are heated once in their lifetime, before serving
We can see that this is a plausible definition of fresh, as per the establishment, and exists simultaneously with the customer's version of fresh, albeit in different minds.

When you assume that the economy exists to serve you,  which might seem arrogant but if you rephrase it as "I'd only go to the economy if it gives me what I want,  , and what you want is a  freshly prepared pastry, then someone selling you frozen-overnight pastries as fresh is almost much lying to you. I say 'almost' because you and the seller haven't agreed on a definition of fresh, and you probably haven't gotten a contract signed to the effect that 'fresh' means not-frozen.
But the seller , if you are in a first-world country with a working  legal apparatus and laws , there is probably some document somewhere involving some quasi-legal body posing as voice of the sellers who would jump to protect the seller when you attempt to rectify the situation by suing the seller.

Welcome to the Economy, homo economicus . You are not going to the economy to get what you want, you are going to the economy to get what you can, without which you are worse off.
Everybody's learning Java ? there are better languages, Java is beneath me etc ... a few years later, there is AI and ML in Java and your better languages are almost invisible. Everybody's constructing - me ? I won't sell out my land for an ugly 4-story-plus-one-illegal-penthouse-with-water-problems-needing-a-borewell-and-cramped-parking mostrosity. Guess what, all the neighbours are doing it, and if you don't, someone will eventually buy you out with all the money they get from doing what you wouldn't, and you'd have to take the offer and move 'coz the local economy has left you behind.
States which don't want to become sweatshops will eventually have to follow the lead (and dictates) of states which inflict that upon themselves ( and have made provisions to ensure that they retain the money).

So why are millenials so lack-a-daisical about things ? well, you should ask yourself if there is a reason why they shouldn't be ?

Ranprieur talks about Peter Thiel talking about Unabomber's  notes on why there are no hard problems available and hence no motivation to be focussed.

Notes:
sahlins - original affluent society
diamond - mankind's worst mistake
interestingly, the Unabomber talks about how the two above were wrong
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ted-kaczynski-the-truth-about-primitive-life-a-critique-of-anarchoprimitivism.html
I have trouble believing Jared Diamond's works, they seem too 'pat'. The above link seems to be proof of that.


* what has this to do with Howard Bloom's swarms ?
* what has this to do with Tainter's collapse ?
* what has this to do with John Gall's systems ?
* what has this  to do with DeLanda's  stratification , and indirectly ?
* what has this to do with Godel ?
* what has this to do with Kahneman and Cialdini

Cryptonomicon is my close-to-reality fiction book that I use for comfort. Same as  William Gibson's Pattern Recognition or Atrocity Archives or Halting State by Charlie Stross. Snow Crash is the for when  I want my brain smashed far outside the current world

i was supposed to write something down, it came to me when i was out for a walk/run.
something like :
life is training
training is lifting a bit more than yesterday
living in the stretch zone
it's always war
ceasar class or legionnaire class or farmer class

2020 book reading attitudes

I do confess that I have a lot of unread books. A lot of them are purchased, even larger number are downloaded, and some are bookmarked.
[ Some of them are not books at all but are courses on coursera (indy), udemy (portillo), complexity explorer, youtube, mit-ocw .,udacity ....  but we'll ignore this for now]

All of them share the condition of being partially, or even wholly unread.
So I propose a solution. The solution is designed to work for tiny snatches of time, and also compensating for mood.
Stick a piece of paper in each book. As you run by it, write a short summary or precis, or failing that memorise and  write down the table of contents. When the water clears, capture them in a blog post, and throw away the paper. Label that post . Add a new piece of paper to the book.
With a tiny bit of  effort, grazing will now have some output.

Having got that out of my mind, here is my reading list for now:
Weinberg - Introduction to General Systems Thinking
Weinberg - Secrets of Consulting
Grobmeier - The Zen Programmer

Things like Forrester, Senge, Hofstadter have been relegated to tangentially relevant. So is calculus, economics, microeconomics etc. All B list books merit a piece of paper and blog commentary.

All A list books merit reading and assimilating - words that I don't know how to actualise.

The nice thing here is writing as a means of capturing thoughts as a prelude to action. My writing can be inexact and incorrect and non-factual, and still conform to a structure in  my head and hence be of value to me .
  Maybe if I can mumble enough, I can use my other blog to structure the  noise into threads of logic so that can eventually distil into a real world portfolio of projects and reputation, moolah and leisure time.

list manager

list of things that go into each project,  with temporal or logical associations
a list of items in other lists, so that it forms a sequence to achieve

Fundamental mistakes - part 2

----contd

I guess the idea was that having the ingredients in place would make the dish appear magically, eventually. It was not like I was trying to avoid the cooking part.  What was missing was the 'making it happen' task, which is largely figured out and can never be written down.

The  advantage of the affiliate marketing idea is that the inventory is free , and the actual heavy lifting, such as handling orders, shipping, payments etc is borne by the merchant. So all you need to do is handle search . The problem is no one will come to you .