Curt Doolittle

Author: Curt Doolittle

  • SARTORIALIST DOES KIEV I can’t believe you were here and I didn’t catch it!!! Si

    http://www.thesartorialist.com/photos/the-sartorialist-in-poland-and-ukraine/THE SARTORIALIST DOES KIEV

    I can’t believe you were here and I didn’t catch it!!! Sigh.

    Ukraine fashion any day, on the way to work in the morning. Friday night at the restaurants. Saturday night at the restaurants and clubs. Any sunny day on Khreshchatyk.

    But you know, Sartorialist fashion is PROLE fashion, and Kiev fashion is ARISTOCRATIC. Not sure it’s a fit. (And our way, here in Kiev, is better, thanks. )

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-28 13:20:00 UTC

  • ( Please to not invite me to games. It irritates the hell out of me. I play a ga

    ( Please to not invite me to games. It irritates the hell out of me. I play a game for a living: entrepreneurship. I play another one for fun: that game is politics. And I try to avoid the really addictive ones on the PC. I don’t need other games. OK? 🙂 )

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-28 13:07:00 UTC

  • WATCHING THE PRESIDENT : TRENCHANT NAIVE IDEALISM Watching Bush II was kind of i

    WATCHING THE PRESIDENT : TRENCHANT NAIVE IDEALISM

    Watching Bush II was kind of interesting. He sort of looked at his job and it unfolded as he expected, and he knew what the price would be, and his position was that history is the only judge of presidential actions. Now, I disagreed with him on a bunch of them. And his presidency was the last hope of restoring the republic. Demographics have made it impossible now. We have to break up the empire to preserve western civilization in any form at all.

    Watching this guy is something quite different. Most of us knew he was symbolic. That he’s an empty suit elected by the media as a cure for white sins. And honestly, given the change in behavior of black males, I wish we could have elected a black man earlier, and done it with a conservative.

    But this guy has a different bias. He actually believes all the nonsense he was exposed as a child, all the hate he was told, and is taking revenge on america as best as he can with his time in office. He undoubtably thinks he us undoing injustices.

    He makes gaffe after gaffe, idiotic policy move after policy move, and they all fail. And he doesn’t understand why. He doesn’t understand why his is unappreciated. He doesn’t understand why they fail.

    But you can see it in his face that he expects people to love and appreciate him. He doesn’t understand why we don’t agree with him. He doesn’t UNDERSTAND.

    “HE DOESN’T UNDERSTAND”

    It’s either that or he’s the most evil person to get into politics since Pol Pot and Joseph Stalin. Because you couldn’t screw up the world more than this if you tried. I didn’t think we could have a president worse than Carter, or more inept at execution than Bush.

    But I was wrong.

    You know, Clinton was a freaking genius at politics and if he hadn’t been so freaking stupid with feminizing the military, radical conservatives, and his attraction to large breasts, he’d be unassailable. I mean I loved and hated him at the same time.

    People underestimate Reagan. He was brilliant. Charismatic, profoundly moral. He read Hayek and applied it. He understood it. He changed the world. He was a perfect high priest of american culture. He was the last high priest of it.

    Obama is just another politically approved, symbolic fool put into a administrative job in control of the empire – an empire past its peak, purpose, and utility.

    And you can see it on his face as he runs away to play golf to get away from the work load.

    KINGS AND QUEENS AND GUILLOTINES

    A monarch’s job is to be the high priest of civic culture. THe most envied societies are monarchies. Monarchs must have veto power, and little else. They are the representation of the people’s moral code. And their morality is guaranteed by guillotine. YOu cannot kill a bureaucracy but you can kill a king.

    We need to break up the empire. We are now for to twelve different cultures and we need to break into four to twelve different countries.

    The only value of the federal government is in the efficiency and power of a combined military force, and the function of an insurer of last resort. It has no value in law. No value in trade. No value in culture. No value in morality. And may in fact produce just the opposite.

    Let us see how the northeast and the left coast function with a hostile and conservative farmland between them.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-28 13:04:00 UTC

  • OVERSING : STATE OF THINGS : THINKING OF VALUATION Right now, as it sits in its

    OVERSING : STATE OF THINGS : THINKING OF VALUATION

    Right now, as it sits in its current state of development, Oversing is about three times the scope of Jira’s functionality.

    It will have something like ten times its functionality when we are complete. Plus our Workflow interface and engine is, orders of magnitude better. Our Agile planning, and working boards are radically better. And it’s not difficult to make the UI better. Jira’s is…. terrible. Really. It’s a bug tracking system that grew into an agile development system because of Greenhopper. We used it. It was the best available. But that doesn’t mean we like it.

    So, that scale of 10x is just useful for putting our work in context.

    I think the closest product would be TenRox, which is probably the previous generation of software for this industry. But Tenrox is a bit antique in terms of project management features, and is traditional in its resource management. I mean, we couldn’t buy it for my company in the last decade, and we are already in a new one. Good product though.

    The product that’s customer base is quite large is Compuware’s Changepoint. Which, with some development work is pretty good for IT centric organizations in the old WBS model. We couldn’t make it work for us. Too much custom development would have been needed to get it to handle Oversing style of resourcing.

    FunctionPoint is a product I’ve always loved. It’s for smaller agencies and tech shops. But it has a good UI and most of the features you need for small firms.

    The most popular agency-ware I think is Workamajig, and it’s a bit old but it does most of what you want these products to do. I’m not sure about adding media buying to Oversing. I think maybe as a later add-on.

    Really, nothing at all has our feature set. Some products have pretty good agile boards (they are a dime a dozen now – the world has pretty much taken the agile method as the defacto workflow model. And if anyone in the world hasn’t they should. Our model collapses the two so that your agile is always sitting on top of a WBS that’s either visible or not, at your discretion, but allows you to meet contracts (WBS management) for delivery as well as manage your workflow in streams (kanban) or sprints (agile).

    And we have tried to keep it ‘creative friendly’ for the agency market. And that is something I hope to work into the product in ‘the win without pitching’ sort of way of thinking. And to push collaboration even harder.

    Oversing is sort of like Facebook with the option of working on stuff with your friends in agile or wbs format, for customer who is also on FB and where you can work together to get your projects done. While at the same time, there is someone in charge of those projects to drive them, and someone above that person to drive all of them.

    Microsoft Dynamics of course, is a full financial system. And Dynamics PSA is very powerful – the most powerful in my opinion. And the’re our sort of benchmark target. The problem is that most of us want something that works like FunctionPoint, that has the power of changepoint, and that integrates with financial packages as well as Dynamics PSA. And Dynamics is freaking hideous and painful to ask your staff to master.

    Oversing does not have the ability to add dynamic dimensions yet (which is what drives up development cost of any ERP system exponentially.) I wrestled with it. But that takes the product from one that can do almost everything except financial accounting, and sort of invades the turf of financial accounting, breaking the barrier between management accounting (how well we run the business) and financial accounting (how well we finance the business). And it takes it from a product that you spend some time configuring, into one that you spend a lot of time planning and installing. And, that jus doesn’t make sense to me. I think financial accounting is an art, and I think management accounting is an art, and neither should be compromised. If you bundle them together you start to get extraordinary compromises. And we have worked too hard to insulate the user from the sense that he’s in an accounting system to fall into that trap.

    Oversing can easily integrate with Dynamics (or SAP for that matter). But with Oversing and even a Peachtree product you would probably have every thing possible of value to your international business.

    My original take was that we could build oversing for 5M in the states if I was very careful, and we’d get no less than a 20M business out of it at 60%. So, 5M in, and no less than 4x, means 50M out. So that’s a good turn. 10x in under 5 years.

    But building it here, at 1/5 the cost, changed the multiplier a LOT by cutting the costs of development by 80% – Albeit I had to move here to make it happen.

    The thing is, that I think, it’s turned into a product with +50M in annual revenue potential just at the conservative end. And that market is there, pretty easily really. I mean, like anything, we can screw it up. But I think we probably hit the feature / functionality / price point / sweet spot. And we didn’t make crazy financial promises to worried investors. We just focus on the product. Which I gotta say, is a lot more interesting than focusing on managing the expectations of others.

    It will be pretty difficult to compete with Oversing. At least by V2.

    So it’s looking pretty good right now. Normal stuff. “This looks ugly this way”, and ” why are we making all those SQL calls here?” and “Did you think to TEST that before checking it in?”, and “You know, that might sound intelligent in russian but in english it means….” and “Um.. where is the currency selector on this form? Is it like dryers and socks? It was there yesterday!”.

    Like I said. Normal stuff. 🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-28 12:26:00 UTC

  • Interesting how the MORAL people who CHOOSE to sacrifice something ELSE in order

    Interesting how the MORAL people who CHOOSE to sacrifice something ELSE in order to have health care, are now paying for the IMMORAL PEOPLE who CHOSE something OTHER than health care.

    It is not that health care is ‘unaffordable’. It’s that health care is something you would prefer to spend your marginal income on LESS than whatever you spend it on, such as your own apartment, your car, your entertainment. etc.

    I won’t go into all the incentives here, but if you made a law that you had to have health care or you couldn’t drive, couldn’t vote, couldn’t collect social security or anything else for that matter – and that you had to ‘earn’ your redistribution by ‘beautifying the country’ (cleaning it up and maintaining the commons) then that would make perfect sense to me.

    But everything we do in the statist empire is to create every immoral malincentive possible to encourage the free-riding that the west worked so hard to stamp out.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-28 11:24:00 UTC

  • Dear House and Garden. I’m all in favor of the Small House trend. I really don’t

    Dear House and Garden.

    I’m all in favor of the Small House trend. I really don’t understand the whole purpose of half empty mc-mansions. I mean, living in a 3500 square foot house is actually kind of frustrating. You must clean and maintain it.

    So advocating small homes is a reasonable good idea- and we can always make them bigger – like everyone before us did for the past ten thousand years. But small lots are not a good idea. All they do is drive up the price of everything, encourage fences, and increase the wear and tear on infrastructure. Close neighbors are more likely to be unpleasant neighbors.

    So while I understand it, this is one of those things that if you encourage something bad, you’re complicit in it. Below a quarter acre is a bad idea, and below a half acre is probably the minimum.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-27 10:06:00 UTC

  • Given the difficulty in constructing and maintaining lies, and the value of obsc

    Given the difficulty in constructing and maintaining lies, and the value of obscurant language in constructing the least detectable and most successful lies, what book would you recommend that could best, through study, teach one to lie?

    Now, having made that estimation, what book has empirically demonstrated the greatest ability to teach people to lie?

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-26 19:12:00 UTC

  • (silly) (personal) I know that dryers eat socks. Everyone knows that problem. Bu

    (silly) (personal)

    I know that dryers eat socks. Everyone knows that problem.

    But it seems to me that luggage has started eating my 7 Jeans.

    Socks are a couple of bucks. But jeans are two hundred.

    I’d blame it on the TSA just for fun.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-26 05:03:00 UTC

  • RUTHLESSLY MORAL DOT ORG (personal history) I have managed to put a few companie

    RUTHLESSLY MORAL DOT ORG

    (personal history)

    I have managed to put a few companies out of business for immoral practices in the past.

    The first company, I was 28, and it took me a few years to put the crew together, but we eventually used racketeering laws to take them down. Didn’t cost me a cent. 🙂

    The second company, I was 30, and just out of the Justice Department (Yes, I used to work for the JUSTICE DEPARTMENT. My libertarian friends might find that interesting.) For a very short time. But before then, I spent a few years working in technology related to the bankruptcy system. It only took me about 90 days to force them into a sale after I got the justice department and one other federal agency involved. But I managed to force him to lose most of everything he had. Cost me a few thousand dollars.

    The third company I helped set up the owner with the IRS but it was easy. They took all his houses and his Bentley. They left him a motorcycle for some reason I can’t attribute to much other than irony. Cost me a few thousand dollars.

    The key thing is patience and determination.

    And the next is to find people who can profit from pursuing an injustice. And that, it turns out, is a pretty common preoccupation in America.

    Starting with …. journalists.

    🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-25 18:46:00 UTC

  • FREAKING COOL TIMES MTV 1981 It was so freaking cool at the time. To be there. T

    FREAKING COOL TIMES

    MTV 1981

    It was so freaking cool at the time. To be there. To know we were going through the change.

    THE EXPURGATION OF MIDDLE MANAGEMENT 1985

    It was freaking cool to see it. At the time. To know that American business, like american politics, was abandoning the socialist method of production. And to sell franchises of every sort to those newly unemployed middle managers.

    THE BERLIN WALL 1989

    It was o freaking cool at the time. To be there. To know the world was changing. To lose that feeling of possible nuclear war. The relief of it all.

    THE MICROSOFT-ING OF SEATTLE 1992

    It was so freaking cool to be there. To be part of it. The flood of money and wealth and nerds everywhere. The Entros Restaurant. The Galleries. Reasonably inexpensive housing. The feeling that the future was a straight vertical line into infinity.

    QUAKE 1995

    It was so freaking cool to be there. The feeling that the world had changed. That everything was changing. That the future we read about in science fiction was happening. That William Gibson didn’t imagine a future – he created it.

    WEB BOOM 2000

    It was so freaking cool to be there. Just to participate in it. Just to do a startup and have it explode overnight with everyone else’s. To know that none if could possibly work, but to run with the pack, economically naked through the financial streets wearing nothing but network cables and no chance of crossing the finish line.

    SEPTEMBER 2001

    It was freaking horrible to be there. To see it. To experience it. To know that the world was forever changed.

    HOUSING BOOM 2006

    It was so freaking cool to be there, Just to revel in it. I means, stores were full of interesting stuff, and consumption was everywhere. Knowing all the while that we were running naked through the financial streets wearing nothing but fiduciary instruments made from toilet paper.

    IPHONE 2007

    It was so freaking cool to be there. To know the world just changed. To know that the problem of teaching people the use of computing hardware, was the abstraction created by the need to use a keyboard to control a machine, rather than the intuition of touch, was gone forever.

    NOW

    It pretty much sucks since then. And really, I am pretty sure that somewhere between 2017 and 2025 it is gonna suck on a scale that no one alive remembers. I dont know what that suck is going to look like. But it’s really, really gonna suck.

    Just no way these economic conditions, the world’s demographics, the state of existing knowledge, can function with the current allocation of power and capital given the allocation of individuals.

    Just no freaking way. It isn’t a complex model. It is just napkin math.

    Pretty curves. Pretty lines. Very un-pretty conclusions. There is no rainbow there.

    Because the incentive to protect the existing order is such that there is no means of easily transitioning

    The only hope for the USA is the secession and nullification movement.

    Otherwise, there will be something very bad.

    I don’t know what.

    But the disruption of world patterns of power, transit and trade will mean a lot is up for grabs. It’d be like the USA didn’t survive the second world war, and everyone ran around picking up the british empire.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-25 16:13:00 UTC