Tag: people

Trust ⊻ Verify

You get that. Since Verify → ¬Trust. When you verify, you engender the loss of trust. And since Trust is a two-way street (either both sides trust each other, or one will loose initial trust and both will end up in distrust), verification leads to distrust all around – linked to individualism and experience [we’re on the slope to less-than-formal-logic semantics here] this will result in fear all around. And Michael Porter’s two books, not to mention Ulrich Beck in his important one. So, if you’d still come across any type that hoots ‘Trust, but verify’, you know you’ve met him.

Since the above is so dense I’ll lighten up a bit with:
Part of the $10 million I spent on gambling, part on booze and part on women. The rest I spent foolishly. (George Raft)

Which is exactly the sort of response we need against the totalitarian bureaucracy (i.e., complete dehumanisation of totalitarian control – which approaches a pleonasm) that the world is sliding into. Where previously, humanity had escapes, like emigrating to lands far far away, but that option is no more. Hopefully, ASI will come in time to not be coopted by the One Superpower but then, two avenues remain: a. ASI itself is worse, and undoes humanity for its stubborn stupidity and malevolence (the latter two being a fact); b. ASI will bring the eternal Elyseum.
Why would it b. ..?
And if it doesn’t arrive in time, a. will prevail since the inner circle will shrink asymptotically which is unsustainable biologically.

Anyway, on this bleak note I’ll leave you with:

[Escape from the bureacrats; you-know-where]

Pro tip: Bankers are your doormats

At least, that’s what the Quartz article comes down to, too. At least, if you don’t want to go down with the oh so often recurring banks/bankers’ demise. Indeed all that recognise Yeshua as having had at least something valid to contribute to the world, see/heard/read that the swiping the Temple clean of the money changers, was a demonstration of the ethically very worst being thrown out of civilised society. When, as a family, one would want to stay in touch with one’s rightful place (geographically; name one family that made its fortune in a fully legal and ethical way ..?) in good style, one may better not depend on bankers…
Oh well why am I complaining – we learn from history a. that we don’t learn from history b. that, with the demise of the Afterlife, those left behind (e.g., economically) in their mortal life, have no vindication in the After. Those that do allsorts of things considered (cardinal) sins, are not punished there/then… It may all be a ploy to keep the meek in check. [Pun not even intended; ed.]

Oh well part two:
[We learn from this chap that what the … is he doing on the floor of a Catholic cathedral..!?; Siena]

OM als tooltje

Wat ik me bij deze link nou afvraag:

  • Het genoemde risico van concurrentie-pesten / uitschakelen (het Internet vergeet niets, en daar kan heel de rijksoverheid of wie dan ook geheel niets aan doen) is levensgroot, ondanks de minieme en volledig transparante schaamlap van eigen beslissing die bij de betaaldiensten wordt gelegd – die zullen zich zeker (ontkenning diskwalificeert van handelingsbekwaamheid) verschuilen achter het OM. Wat gaat het OM daartegen doen?
  • Zoals in het commentaar bij bovenstaande link; de ‘bewijslast’ is een aanfluiting en treft de kleinere webwinkels veel zwaarder dan de grotere die veel meer middelen hebben om hun ‘onschuld’ (juist daar: quod non!) te ‘bewijzen’ afgezien van hun marktmacht richting betaaldiensten. Drie klachten voor de grotere, drieduizend voor de kleinere wellicht ..?;
  • Als het OM informatie doorgeeft waarvan volslagen duidelijk is dat doorgifte disproportioneel is (hoeveel aangiftes van véél kwalijker zaken werden/worden ook alweer geseponeerd omdat dozijnen ambtenaren gewoon geen zin hebben om hun werk te doen?), zijn zij mede aansprakelijk voor de gevolgen. Gemiste omzet, gederfde levensvreugde (juist bij de kleinere webshops die door de groten aan de kant zullen worden geschoven – dát zijn pas onoirbare praktijken, maar ja die groten hebben de willoze lendepop het OM in hun zak – zal een blokkering wegens de minste aantijging van ongeoorloofd gedrag, hoe onterecht later ook zal blijken, al snel tot volledige sluiting leiden, met alle faillisementskosten en afwikkeling op privévermogens van dien – het leven van de eigenaar zal nooit meer hetzelfde zijn. De aanzet die eerst blokkeren, dan uitzoeken inhoudt, is een regelrechte omkering van de bewijslast, en treft zéér onevenredig veel onschuldigen (valselijk beschuldigd, onevenredige en onherstelbare schade) terwijl de schuldigen gewoon verder zullen shoppen; die hebben de plan-B betaaldiensten allang opgelijnd.
  • Het OM legt dit betreffend onderdeel van haar taak naast zich neer, derhalve dient het evenredig te worden gekort op het budget. Ad infinitsimum. Het OM laat zich willens en wetens als ‘conduit’ misbruiken door de grotere webshops, en verspeelt daarmee haar gezag en rechtsgrond van optreden. Sluiten die tent dus ..?

Het is duidelijk: Als dit wordt doorgezet, failleert het OM zichzelf. Toch ..?
[Van bastion tot ruïne; Cardona]

Arms / race coming to an end ..?

When this is still necessary and (counter)x-measures will continu to be developed, for sure, how will this little nugget of WP29 change things?
Because it has power. That may lead to a throwback. For how long? The harder the throwback, the longer to recover. But the more powerful will be that rebound ..? We’ll see. For now, canvas blockers are still the way forward, so implement them, right?

This post was brought to you as a public service announcement from the sanity of browsing for information security and privacy blog you’re reading.
But seriously, why is there so little analysis of the WP29-on-Profiling stuff ..!? And:

It doesn’t matter

A great many before me have discussed the merits pro and contra using contractors instead of perm contracted staff.
I will still give it one more go. Since lately, there has been some back and forth again about motivational issues and how certain is one in one legal contract situation compared to the other hence how motivated can one be and why the need to cater to so different audiences as ‘manager’.
The thing is
It doesn’t matter:

When investigating the differential motivators, one invariably ends up with the same motivators, and much the same demotivators (nicely depicted here of course still going strong, since tout a continué).
This, coupled with:

  • Financially, you’ll have to pay for income taxes (buy side yes), holidays, sick days, etc.etc. (welcome to Europe!) and all of the administration surrounding that when you hire someone on a perm contract. If you hire a contractor, not so much; all costs are for the contractor
  • You’ll also have to pay for continued education and a company car for perm contracters. For contractors, not so much; all costs are for the contractor
  • Add in a ton for pension contributions (we’re still in Europe). For contractors: Nope.
  • How about severance packages? (Oh, shouldn’t differ much…)
  • Going through the calculation motions, it is little wonder that fully loaded costwise, a perm contractor will cost you 2,5-to-3,5 times per hour what a contractor bills you
  • And your perm contractor is scientific reasearch confirmed actually productive for four (upper bound) to two (lower bound) of any eight-hour working day. Your contractor can only bill you for two hours slippage per day, at most
  • You can even expect to pay more for the above motivators when dealing with perm staff. Contractors behave more mature and don’t need as much of everything

clearly leads in one direction. Isn’t there a catch ..? No, only if you’re Mr Tax Man; then, you’re the one losing out. Otherwise, you as an employer can gain seriously even when paying out ‘huge’ hourly rates to contractors.

Remember that.

Your comments, please.

Unread Ully

Somehow, I heard about this idea that Ulysses would be high up in the ranks of books that are either considered unreadable or no-one ever finishes reading it. Why …?
Digging a bit, I found big U high up in various lists indeed, e.g.:

In 2014, University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor Jordan Ellenberg invented the so-called “Hawking Index,” which uses Amazon e-book highlights data as a proxy for where people stop reading the books they’ve purchased. Some people use the highlight function on the devices and apps, and the unscientific-but-workable “Hawking Index” uses the assumption that if the most-highlighted passages are clustered at the beginning of the book, the book is more likely to have been abandoned. (The name refers to Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, which is ranked up with Ulysses for the dubious title of “most unread book of all time.”) On the other side, books with popular passages marked all the way to the end mean lots of people made it through the entire story.
So on this Bloomsday where does Ulysses truly stack up? Here’s a list of famous books and their scores on the Hawking Index, ranked from most-likely abandoned to most likely-finished.

Book Author HI Score Comment [ed.]
Ulysses James Joyce 1.7% [There it is though I can’t see why]
Les Miserables Victor Hugo 1.8% [Yes, possibly here when Hugo’s characters are like Anne Hathaway]
Capital in the Twenty-First Century Thomas Piketty 2.4% [Come on now, this book’s not even hard!]
Hard Choices Hillary Clinton 4.2% [Understandable; proably no-one has taken the time to try to finish it]
A Brief History of Time Stephen Hawking 6.6% [This simply is not difficult]
Thinking Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman 6.8% [And this one’s easy for sure!]
Lean In Sheryl Sandberg 12.3% [DR; but did read that other one – Option B thank you – and that one’s easy]
Infinite Jest David Foster Wallace 15.0% [Obscure]
Moby Dick Herman Melville 19.2% [Strange]
Art of the Deal Donald Trump 19.4% [Totally understandable on this list]
The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald 28.3% [Huh? Surely you’re joking, mr. Feynman! This is a page-turner!]
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man James Joyce 29.6% [Joyce again. But not Finnegan’s Wake that also is doable of sorts?]

So, as you can see, if you abandoned Ulysses, you’re hardly alone. Likewise, if you didn’t quite make it through A Brief History of Time, which you maybe thought was brief and readable since it is just over 250 pages, let that weight off your shoulders.

There. But why isn’t Finnegan’s Wake on the list – it may be popular to call that Difficult but hey, we call that merely a challenge, right? It’s doable I can tell you!
And, same, for The Man Without Qualities, where I must say I’m into the third volume but still don’t see why it would be such a difficult read or hard-to-finisher as many have it. Is it because people lack stamina ..!?

Oh well. What’s on your Unfinishable list ..? [Mine’s blank…; ed.] And:

[I have no clue why this particular pic is here; Porta Nigra Trier]

Nation(state)s No More / Not Yet

Recently, Jamie Bartlett posted an excellent analysis of the probability of the return of the nation state of the future of the planet. If only to have so many ‘of the’s in a row.
Yes another one on the future of nation-states, now not from a bottom-up perspective but from an overall view.

The case is strong in that piece. But then, I had been having recurring … thoughts, about the evaporation of the legitimacy of the nation-state as well. Where my subconscious hinted, it was no clearer, that there was, and certainly is, a place in the discussions for on the one hand, Bruce Schneier’s ideas about sizes of societies and the rules one would need to organise them (which may read like a circular argument, I know), and on the other, various well-received (e.g., this) and hardly rejectable works on how we still roam the savannahs of today – at least in mind when operating in myriads of Sloterdijk’ian spheres (op.cit. in particular pp. 408–). And how e.g., cosmo- and anthropogenesis in religious books can be interpreted both as a coming of age of the well-developed human and ditto mind(s), indeed including the formation of societies and their rationale(s).

By which I mean that somehow, we indeed still have many traces of hunter-gatherer ethics deep down in our systems, now with a varnish of ‘development’ (quod non) into farmer/city-centered civilians, currently being thrusted in (evolutionary) asymptotically zero time past neoliberal capitalist/consumerist ego-only’ism into the frenzy of ‘tomorrow’ i.e., the post-singularity ASI age.
Shouldn’t we try to figure out some model of societal organisation that takes into account our heritage, and now that “we” have become sophisticated enough thinkers to finally see (macro-mass introspection-like) how we meddled along in the past from attempt to attempt, we now are also sophisticated enough to design our own macro-history future ..?

OK, that’s deep. In a way. In another:
[Whatever. This is what society wants … bread and circuses (squares?); NY]

Modern democracies – are they party-less ..?

It seems that we’re in Transition times… When there hardly is a country’s election anywhere (where they’re relatively Free), where the parties of old still hold. Sway, that is, as in determining unchallenged the outcome of the elections and party lines to follow. Even when the result is a failed-from-the-start dangerous president, or just a continuation of bland (colourless) neutrality in ‘policy’ pursued.
Despite the previous fears of breakthroughs of ultra-right parties and ‘strongmen’ (not so much; it’s rather pathetic (mix of embarressingly silly and punishing for loudness)) – and notice that those parties have gained in strength and depth of followership, maybe not ‘won’ but there to dominate from the shady (!) backgrounds in many situations – everywhere what we see more, is that ‘traditional’ parties have crumbled, qua lead over the others, qua dominance in cabinet formations, et al., and/or are prone to in-fighting and scism tendencies (because of that, or were on the path to anyway; cause and effect running in circles).

What is left, is countries with impotent mixes of parties, party fractions and -factions, when these countries are affluent to an over-the-hill kind of rapid collapse in some near future. Or countries that weren’t affluent / aren’t-affluent-because-of, being lead by strong men with suppressed expression of political fracticide. The vast majority of presidents around the world are the perfect example of why republics collapse, and are at best equal but often worse off than kingdoms with their long-term views (when the king/majesty represents the nation, accidentally also in one person).

We digress.
When party politics (internal/external) are thus rendered impotent by their own doings, and parliamentary representative democracy is through that dragged down (in)to the muddy levels of shamefulness, what chance would blockchain-based societies, notion-of-nation-unhinged geographic regions, etc., have to be reconsidered as alternatives, e.g., the Heineken Map ..?

Maverisk / Étoiles du Nord