Last week, one of our lawyers, spent thirty minutes telling us how we could obey the law and screw our shareholders. Our legal system has lost all concept of property rights and involuntary transfer. Its time to blow it up and start all over. I don’t want to know what’s legal. I want to know what is right and just, as well as legal.
WTF is wrong with people. F–K.
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-08 16:36:00 UTC
If you negotiate morally, it is much easier to accuse the opposition of unethical conduct and walk away unassailably. I do this pretty often as a vehicle for killing the other side’s posturing, or replacing their negotiator.
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-08 16:34:00 UTC
Always preserve some unsettled point of conflict in any deal for the very end, so that you can blow up a deal once the momentum has taken root and the intellectual investment has been made, and everyone is committed. This allows you to crush minor points of petty theft that tend to occur by the participants in the negotiation and at the eleventh hour use their desire to profit from invested time and energy to veto a large set of sketchy provisions.
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-08 16:17:00 UTC
Sometimes you threaten to divide the child in half.
It doesn’t mean that you actually plan to do it. It means that the belief that you might do it, clears people’s heads a bit.
Great management technique really. When deliberation fails. Go to the great minds of history.
🙂
(No. I’m not telling)
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-08 16:00:00 UTC
DEAR ASCENTIUM FOLK
(karma)
The investment banker, Erik Anderson, of WestRiver Capital, that destroyed your beautiful company, and even once we’d rescued it from him with the ultimate Hail Mary, pulled all the money out that we’d worked two years to get, and drove it into near insolvency, has been terminated by the parent company, removed from the board, and removed from his duties.
Can’t recreate that one. The window passed. But sometimes there is at least some sense of justice in the world. It’s cathartic to me, at least. And I’m not shy about it. He’s every example of what Americans deservedly hate about the financial sector. And yet another example of why the financialization of our economy was a cultural and economic disaster.
Maybe there is a special cell in hell. 😉
Just sayin’.
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-08 15:37:00 UTC
Freaking last minute board call at midnight my time. sigh. That means sleep at 3:00am… argh. Sometimes the whole kiev thing is brutal.
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-08 15:24:00 UTC
(I have no idea how many words I wrote today across the various documents and postings I’ve put out. My fingers hurt a bit. So is that a good enough excuse to spend an hour playing my twice-per-year limit on a computer game? Can I do it without guilt? Ok? Wow. Thank you Jiminiy Cricket for your permission. Good. ‘Cause my brain is tired.)
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-08 14:18:00 UTC
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001EQ4OLA/ref=tsm_1_fb_lkGREGORY CLARK – ANGLO SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS AND THE ORIGINS OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION.
“A Farewell to Arms) discusses the divide between rich and poor nations that came about as a result of the Industrial Revolution in terms of the evolution of particular behaviors originating in Britain. Prior to 1790, Clark asserts, man faced a Malthusian trap: new technology enabled greater productivity and more food, but was quickly gobbled up by higher populations.”
“In Britain, however, as disease continually killed off poorer members of society, their positions in society were taken over by the sons of the wealthy. By that according to Clark less violent, more literate and more hard-working behaviour were spread culturally and biologically throughout the population. This process of “downward social mobility” eventually enabled Britain to attain a rate of productivity that allowed it to break out of the Malthusian trap. Clark sees this process also til today as the major factor why some countries are poor and others are rich.”
COMMENT
Now, you might not make the same association. But what I see is that immigration prevents downward rotation. It just promotes dissatisfaction. A body politics is BOTH an extended family AND a system of production. And you cannot just assume the latter universally trumps the former.
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-08 14:01:00 UTC
“I WILL COOPERATE WITH YOU BUT I WILL NOT SERVE YOU”
We can take care of people by cooperating with them, or by serving them. Cooperation is mutually beneficial. Service is purely extractive. Oppression and extraction are exactly the same thing.
Redistribution against one’s will is simply oppression.
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-08 12:52:00 UTC
(work) DESIGN
I did, today, in between manic postings, manage to write the first draft of the design spec for that damned set of features I have been avoiding since last week.
I can’t figure out how to gamify it. I will. I just haven’t done it yet. But at least it’s there.
Bringing libertarian business philosophy into software is …. not all that easy.
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-08 11:49:00 UTC