Category: Sociological, psychological notes

Misquote: Eat this!

Let them eat cake

No. No, no, no, nonono. This wasn’t what Marie Antoinette said. She didn’t even say anything of the kind. Not even

Qu’ils mangent de la brioche

that Rousseau put in his memoires. And for those that suspect something akin was said by Merry Anthonia, there’s some more explanation of the miss in the quote here.

The more serious side of it all being that in its day, it might have been sound advice to eat brioche, for its nutritional value… If only the pesky 1% (rather even, 0,1%) like explained here, would have made that a challenge. … Very much like today’s USA … recognize and weep. And take heed of this.

Well, I’ll leave you to ponder, on a doughy note with:
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[Casual dining; Het Loo]

DroneSF

Among the more thinking part of you, there probably has been some ideas on the ‘Joint (not so much) Strike (not by a long mile yet) Fighter (not or by proxy of lobbyists for its program)’.
Then, why wouldn’t forward-looking nations develop much more of an Future Strike Joystick; an air fleet of drones ..? How incredibly much more efficient isn’t such a fleet, with ridiculous amounts of safeguards for safe platform/pilot return (in that order of importance) ditched for efficiency, robustness by the numbers and failsafe-testing ..?
The efficiency, for not having to care about pilot’s safe return hence many over-redundant systems need not be needed. The robustness, mainly in numbers, but also in safety / security systems being bolted on easily as weight savings to be traded in, are aplenty already. And failsafe-testing leading to much more robust systems anyway — but with the robustness gains there mainly going on in the G/A comms. The AFBs could house so many more of these smaller-size things, with ample comms and/or rapidly-deployable forward bases; with possibly much shorter runways hence enabling many more bases without even increased (better spread, too) noise levels for the dorks.

Two things, then, from a Dutch perspective.
One, why not resurrect Fokker to build many more full-fledged squadrons of these than ever had in the RNLAF? They have all the experience with composite materials still, and have plentiful highest-trained development, build and maintenance staff available as well or at short notice. Let’s dub it the G-1B for reference to unsurpassed excellence.
Two, in the mean time the current F16 ‘fleet’, hardly operable anymore by atrocious ‘savings’ i.e. dumbest of budget cuts, can be extended to Block 60 or V versions and all these drones be developed and bought, at a sliver of the costs of the JSF program as spent already let alone when the actual handful will have to be purchased (with ridiculous maintenance costs attached).
Three, against your Yes But: The JSF is still so far from delivery that the G-1B could be here before it ..!

Am I romantic in looking ahead instead of stumbling forward with yesterday’s doctrines in a future that already now have been surpassed ..? Yet again,
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[Ah, Delft… Where another, this even today, undervalued product comes from]

Untrained accountants

Somewhere in Rise of the Robots (approximately p.253, 2nd line from the top), ever infamous [but very, very right] Carr is ideaquoted about pilots not getting enough experience with flying and (well, mostly: continue to keep on …) flying in adverse conditions and hence are paradoxically (much) less capable to handle the few exceptional situations for which they are kept aboard on ever more fully automated flights. [Except from the passengers’ comfort, but if only they knew the previous…] The Shallows, indeed…

Now, how would this compare to accountancy …? Ever encountered an assistant auditor that would recognize, let alone be able to do himself, double-entry bookkeeping ..? Which is of course already quite fully automated or will be in the very near future. All of accountancy/audit (in many worlds except a few slackers, this can and will be used mixedly though the latter is so much more ..!) that is stacked on top of such simple things, like checking on the bookkeeping let alone at the other end of the spectrum concluding that ‘the books’ represent a true and fair view (to the dime) of business performance (sic; more that just having debit=credit; author knows of a bank where this proved literally Impossible to do, with all the latest overfully automated bookkeeping information systems with a margin of € 1B e-ve-ry month, wiping the slate clean with a one-sided journal entry…!!), will come into question qua ability — in particular where the once usual decades of training was needed to establish sufficient experience to be able to, with an error margin always still!, declare the True and Fair parts, and now, such experience can be had less and less, with the disruption starting from the bottom with audit automation turning into big data (process) analyses supported by IT audits and what have we.

There simply aren’t the entry-level experience gainers jobs anymore; any complete-greenhorn (and uni grads are that, more and more it seems; just ask them to write a simple business report…) will have to jump to an immediate medior-level performance level. So what does one end up with? Mostly n00bs posing as l33ts. Posing, as content-wise performance is … well …

Oh well, it’ll get worse, much worse before it gets better. And:
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[Graciously having opened my back garden to the public (but this is Het Loo of course)]

This time will be different

… If only for the following reason(s):

  • So far, Technology has been developed by humans, willy-nilly mostly as also fitting in the Selfish Memes sort of way (including Blackmore’s Meme Machine), to alleviate and overcome the very humans’ weaknesses that set us below a great many respective animals, and Nature.
      
  • Now, I(o)T slash AI (ASI) will soon be overcoming humans’ only few strengths in Thinking. At once leaving us vulnerable to become, at best, prey for <something> but with no place to hide (sic) nor any defenses…

So, this time will be different and the Luddites (actual sense, not the loom-smashing caricatures) will be right. For the one time they ‘need’ to be and then immediately need be no more. No more ‘but past technological innovations bringing temporary unemployment have all been overcome with growth of something new’. Read Martin Ford and you see that this will simply not be true — if only for the failure, this time of the Comparative Advantage mechanism but actually quite something more pervasively.
As a simple hint: What would you advise your 8yo nephew to be good at in school, to find … what kind of job or career later …!?

Don’t be discouraged! The End Is Nigh! Until it is:
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[They look cute but will outdo you in an instant….; Het Loo]

Misquote: The End(s)

The ends justify the means.

Attributed to Machiavelli (of course), who said:

One must consider the final result.

Going from the latter to the former, quite exposes your morality, no? But then, you’re not alone. Yet you’re so very, very alone. And make it more so by taking heed to the former not the latter.
The attributee even had morals (a lot!) but if you didn’t see that (before), you’ve been taken for a ride by … whatever I don’t even care. Just keep up the good misquoting …! And:
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[Symbol of the brevity of purity, beauty and life; Amstelveen — the symbol of your intelligence would be a blank or this ..?]

Rules for Writers

By popular demand:

  1. Verbs has to agree with their subjects
  2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with
  3. And don’t start a sentence with a conjunction
  4. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive
  5. Avoid clichés like the plague (They’re old hat)
  6. Also, always avoid annoying alliteration
  7. Be more or less specific
  8. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are (usually) unnecessary
  9. Also too, never, ever use repetitive redundancies
  10. No sentence fragments
  11. Contradictions aren’t necessary and shouldn’t be used
  12. Eschew obfuscation
  13. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos
  14. Do not be redundant; do not use more words than necessary; it’s highly superfluous
  15. One should NEVER generalize
  16. Comparisons are as bad as clichés
  17. Don’t use no double negatives
  18. Avoid ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
  19. One-word sentences? Eliminate
  20. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake
  21. The passive voice is to be ignored
  22. Eliminate commas, that are, not necessary. Parenthetical words however should be enclosed in commas
  23. Never use a big word when a diminutive one would suffice
  24. DO NOT use exclamation points and all caps to emphasize!!
  25. Use words correctly, irregardless of how others use them
  26. Understatement is always the absolute best way to put forth earth shaking ideas
  27. Use the apostrophe in it’s proper place and omit it when its not needed
  28. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, ‘I hate quotations, tell me what you know’
  29. Resist hyperboles; not one writer in a million can use it correctly
  30. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms
  31. Who needs rhetorical questions?
  32. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement
  33. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors
  34. Do not put statements in the negative form
  35. A writer must not shift your point of view
  36. Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences of ten or more words, to their antecedents
  37. Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided
  38. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is
  39. Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing
  40. Always pick on the correct idiom
  41. The adverb always follows the verb
  42. Use the rite homonyms
  43. Proofread carefully to see if you any words out

Personally, I agree that to go from obedience to the rules resulting in mere mediocrity of the most boring kind, to greatness, one only has to break the rules.

At leisure

Musing with the ideas of yersteryear, where the working class had been replaced, gradually, by the ‘managing’ class in its various forms and sizes. But everywhere, productivity being misattributed. Though appearances would have it still among ‘managers’ too, their combined overwhelming bureaucratic bloat pressing on the carbon yet not achieving diamond productivity but gravel at most. While ‘managers’ (line just behind one’s heels!) get so much credit, unearned, and earn so much income and bonuses that it deserves the gallows; the workers ‘hence’ being mis- and disregarded.
When suddenly, the already next trend shone through: The move from the Leisure Class to the Leisure Cohorts.

Yup, you are now reminded of the massive shortfall in education that so many already have … that have flown into the workforce for years already — producing ..? Not the nice workspaces that they have to hang out in. Do they..? For how long still ..? And then ..? The generations that could actually be productive of any sorts, have seen their work shipped off to places of want, of want of actual productivity opportunities but will be depleted of markets sometime soon — and then they’ll retire like in the West with not much going for them by way of either pensions or opportunities go stagger on in business life, nor of anything after them by way of experience-transfer-loaded young crews that would seriously do anything different, better. No, don’t fall for that trap of thought that this all has been said before throughout the generations… It hasn’t, not in this way, not in any comparable situation.
So, the return of the leisure class, as ‘proven’ by Graeber and others, and reality, is there. But also, the Other 99,x% might (not) shift to the Leisure Cohorts. Not good for anything (as recently in all sorts of press, if (big if) you read it well) by lack of education, formal and certainly also practical, with the few smart ones in between skating towards a bright future but the others … at best, at very best, dunce consumers; passive, living on the edge. Yes, helped a lot by AI, progressively more, but leaving … dunce consumers. Don’t kid yourselves. Leisure cohorts without anything to leisure from nor anything to leisure with — as money and (through that or directly) other necessary goods come from productive work .. that has vanished into the ASI-out-there.

I could ramble on, like I so often do. But this time, I’ll leave it to you to do the hard work, I’m off leisuring. With:
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[Artsy Berlage, at his Beurs; inspirational not just to consume]

Book by Quote: Chesterfield’s

Ah, there we are again, for once, after a long while of want: A Book By Quote. Again, not in the plain vanilla version of just jotting down some bon mots but again, wherever appropriate ..! annotated with some of my interpretations. Which may be biased, as they are of human thought made. You know who I compare myself with, here.
Without further ado then, from Lord Chesterfield’s Letters:

(On people’s thoughts) … if we take them upon trust, without examining and comparing them with our own, it is really living upon other people’s scraps, or retailing other people’s goods.
To add, the quote by Ford: “It is a poor business that only makes money” as this so neatly maps to banking business. But do keep on reading this post 😉

To know the thoughts of others is of use, because it suggest thoughts to one’s self, and helps one to form a judgement; but to repeat other people’s thoughts, without considering whether they are right or wrong, is the talent only of a parrot, or at most a player.
Hence the annotations… And the parrot/player part is where so many (most?) ‘consultants’ and ‘business advisors’ (have) end(ed) up.

Whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well; and nothing can be well done without attention. It is the sure answer of a fool, when you ask him about any thing that was said or done where he was present, that ‘truly he did not mind it’.
Yes that’s the Original. And the surety of any answer of remark that you don’t particularly like (to receive), about the speaker. I feel a need to insert a just-found pic here:
ron-swanson-advice

If a man uses strong protestations or oaths, to make you believe a thing, which is of itself so likely and probable that the bare saying of it would be sufficient, depend upon it he lies, and is highly interested in making you believe it; or else he would not take such pains.
Ah, there we have all the bankers’ oaths, the quality (quod non) assurance (quod non) frameworks (quod non) of auditors, etc … In the style of Qui s’excuse, s’accuse — There should be a law against such things. Continue reading “Book by Quote: Chesterfield’s”

Paradise Lost

.. of not the Milton kind, unfortunately.
But of the kind of Age of Innocense. In crowdsourcing. You remember, from before the days of Mechanical Turk and similar no cure, no pay but the pay’s a rip-off scams. Close to (?) post-slavery slavery by Hobson’s Choice.

But as said; before that, there were the dreams of free agents delivering their best efforts to common problems and getting handsomely rewarded for their solutions (if the best). The Age of Aquarius dawned. No more masters, no servants, all equal.
Or so.
The brevity of hapiness…

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[All play and sunny weather now that you have been returned to Consumer status (pejorative). Sure to (have) change(d) …; NY of course]

Maverisk / Étoiles du Nord