LIFE LESSONS
1) Make very few commitments.
2) If you make a commitment, then hold to it.
3) If you do commit to anything, never within a definite time frame. All costs are opportunity costs. Fulfill any opportunity at the highest discount.
4) Search for every possible opportunity.
4) Failure indebts you.
Source date (UTC): 2013-03-03 11:50:00 UTC
REAL MEN
For posterity
Source date (UTC): 2013-03-03 07:33:00 UTC
Status? What’s that? Panic? π
THE TOUGH
A) I’m behind on getting the Propertarian Institute off the ground. I wanted to do it in January, but it’s the end of february already. (Apologies to my friends that this is affecting.)
B) We are refactoring Oversing’s code to reflect the UI model we’ve adopted. And the development team has caught up to me again, meaning that I”m behind designing the UI again. Sigh. The problem is that the part I’m designing is one of the hardest feature sets in the product.
C) We’re having a conflict with our vendor here in Kiev because of space and network quality. We’ve taken our own office. (Which is walking distance from all sorts of good things.) And so I have to get an office together on short notice.
D) I am trying to put two web sites together for two companies (which is fun really – I love positioning and marketing.)
E) I am burning more money per month than I wanted to. And being the cheap b_____ that I am, it really bothers me. π
F) The guys developed a xlat (multi-language) function set and it’s all implemented. But I found a commercial bit of code that does the job perfectly with fewer requests and less labor and it’s just got to be put in, and the other code pulled. This will get us every language we could possibly want. Saving us months of time, and lots of money.
G) There is a Libertarian ‘conference’ next month. Ukraine doesn’t want me going in and out of the country without my residency permit. So my lawyer is sprinting to get it done.
H) The post-soviet government stuff here is simply impossible. It doesn’t matter that the politicians are corrupt – they actually pass good laws. The problem is that the bureaucracy self-perpetuates silly soviet process orientation (blame avoidance really) and the judges don’t enforce the rule of law. So literally, the bureaucracy and the judiciary has to literally die off before these people can get out of the hole. And that means that I have to be in this hole with them.
GOOD STUFF
A) Steven is designing the system reports and they are amazing. Seriously. I was blown away this morning when I read his spec. No one in the world has this kind of business intelligence combined with this kind of ‘social engineering of the organization’. No one. It’s … amazing.
B) Integrating with accounting systems is easier than we thought.
C) Max and I had a brilliant conversation about document stores. I am adamant that I want all docs to be stored by mail, so that anything can be cc’d to an account or project and no other steps are necessary. It should just be a simple inbox list. That’s it. Max fought with me and got me to see how we could use existing stores. He was right.
D) The software looks awesome. π And the code is both fast and elegant. Really. Every other product will look two or three generations behind. We’re right in-trend.
E) The weather is changing – it’s becoming spring. π
Source date (UTC): 2013-02-27 01:50:00 UTC
EUROCON, sci-fi convention, will take place soon in Kiev. Maybe it interests you – http://eurocon.org.ua/press-release.html
Source date (UTC): 2013-02-24 16:50:00 UTC
LEARNING EUPHAMISMS
“She isn’t friendly with her head.”
(Not friendly with her head. )
Russian for “shes crazy”.
ΠΠ΅ Π΄ΡΡΠΆΠΈΡ Ρ Π³ΠΎΠ»ΠΎΠ²ΠΎΠΉ
I love russian. π
Source date (UTC): 2013-02-23 05:19:00 UTC
You know, I don’t really pay much attention to philosophers outside of economics and politics any longer. But I have to give Rorty another go. Just to see if I’m missing something of value. Every time I re-read a great author I get something new. I can re-read a work by Mises or Hayek a half-dozen times before I feel that I’m not getting something new from it.
My work with Propertarianism assumes that Rorty is right. But I don’t really care to further justify why he’s right (that the discipline of philosophy – epistemology – has been a failure.) It’s pretty obvious that science has solved the problem and will continue to do so. It’s pretty obvious that academic philosophy has become immaterial to society.
This is somewhat odd, because, at least until recently, philosophy has effectively been the religion of our upper classes since ancient greece. (Which is why its in the religion section of the book store. π
But the art of philosophy: which is to reorganize and reorder our perceptions of causal relations, and the values that we should attach to those causal relations, is still a worthy discipline. We are too reliant on norms and flights of fantasy about ourselves not to have philosophy at our disposal.
And really, it is far better to conduct our political warfare in philosophical debates than it is to in religious conflict, or open war and revolution.
What I do care about, is that **the mind is a property engine**. Saying it’s a “difference engine” is kind of cute, and politically correct. But the differences it calculates are differences in property. If property is to be understood in it’s full scope: as humans actually use it. Rather than the narrow legal or philosophical variants of private property.
Source date (UTC): 2013-02-22 11:15:00 UTC
NIGHT LIFE IN KIEV
So, we kind of overdid it since the first of the year. And I’ve been sick now for almost three weeks with one cold or another – probably my body rebelling. So, for the past week or so we’ve been trying to be good guys and keep our noses to the grindstone. (There is a Russian phrase that goes something like ‘keep working while the sun is up’. And we’ve been doing that and more. Usually till ten at night.)
This means, however, that my posts are not anywhere near as interesting. π And I don’t have any fun photos to share.
But luck is with us. It’s Friday. We’re invited to the anniversary party at our favorite local restaurant and pub, and they’ve reserved a table for us. (Thanks to Kirill and Alex for flirting with the girls who work there, I’m sure. It wasn’t me this time. I flirt with almost everyone. But not everyone there for some reason.)
So maybe we will be rescued from our sobriety today. π At least everyone else will be. I’m still too iffy to celebrate much.
I’ll just have to cheer everyone else on. π
Source date (UTC): 2013-02-22 10:34:00 UTC
PAJAMA PARTY?
No kidding. Today, two women who barely know me invited me to a pajama party. (!?)
Is this really my life?
I love this country. π
Source date (UTC): 2013-02-20 14:35:00 UTC
DUALITY : GUILT WHETHER WRITING OR ‘WORKING’.
When I was writing full time I felt guilty about not ‘working’. And now that I’m ‘working’ I feel guilty about not writing. I have to make time for it. :/
RESEARCH SOFTWARE ON THE MAC?
Well, honestly, I just save everything to a directory on my laptop. Dropbox copies it. And once in a while I organize it.
But it’s pretty easy really. In the case of libertarian political philosophy, the canonical works are pretty limited. And conservative philosophy even more so. One might argue that the entire conservative body of work is a demonstration of a failure of conservatives to undertand themselves. I understand that they’re relying on heroic, inspirational language that is effectively structured as a traditionalist or legendary religion. But they’re just indefensible against secular socialism because they don’t really understand their own belief system.
On top of that limited amount of canonical information, we’ve incorporated economic thought pretty thoroughly into our philosophical framework and pretty much figured out the problem of measurement. So, I don’t really have to address those issues. Our problems are institutional. It’s not that we haven’t accommodated economics.
Libertarians are still lagging because we haven’t solve the problem of ethics – rather, we haven’t articulated the full scope of ethics necessary to describe the moral framework of aristocratic egalitarianism used by Conservatives. And Rothbard’s little side-adventure into ghetto ethics has both provided the means to solve the problem of ethics, and at the same time, done it so badly that we haven’t been able to either gain the cooperation of the conservatives, or solve the problem of political systems in heterogeneous polities.
Hopefully I’ll fix that. π
But all that said, the problem of writing libertarian philosophy isn’t so much one of academic research. The problem is reordering our thinking back toward aristocratic ethics, and away from the ghetto, while at the same time realizing that we have extended the scope of the market to include those who do not share such aristocratic ethics, and for whom those ethics pose a genetic hindrance that forever will keep them out of our quarter.
So my work isn’t so much one of citations, but of articulating what we have failed to articulate to date, about aristocratic egalitarianism on the one and, and the totality of human political requirements in a market society on the other.
TOOLS I USE ON THE MAC:
Scrivener
WordPress (I sketch a lot of my ideas online – my entire glossary is up there.)
Notepad/Wordpad
Skim
Papers
Dropbox and Evernote
I’m considering moving into DevonThink.
And Alfred for searching.
My biggest technology problem seems to be copying text in and out of Kindle, now that I’ve switch to buying on Kindle whenever possible. (Maybe someone has a bright idea on how to help me with this?)
Source date (UTC): 2013-02-18 07:05:00 UTC
Trying to figure out how to get to Buchovel now that Max has left for the states…. I’m navigationally incompetent around here. If I can’t walk to it, it might as well be on the moon. π
Source date (UTC): 2013-02-16 13:46:00 UTC