Curt Doolittle

Form: Mini Essay

  • CULTURAL OBSERVATIONS : MASCULINE FEMININE RELATIONS Ukrainian woman are probabl

    CULTURAL OBSERVATIONS : MASCULINE FEMININE RELATIONS

    Ukrainian woman are probably the most prized in the world. Part of it’s genetics, and part of it’s culture, but the most important part is the female self image.

    They see being feminine is power. Pretty much all of them. I won’t go into depth on the topic right now. I’m still working at understanding the behavior here. But it has a lot to do with the fact that women do not perceive themselves as weak. And because of this, there isn’t the same stratification by appearance and class that exists in the states and canada. It’s fascinating.

    In mating rituals, I’ve had a few interesting observations so far.

    1) In the states a marriage is a business partnership that hopefully has some sentimental content. This is partly an effect of our high trust society. We have been dating outside the family in northern europe for a thousand years. And the transient society and the melting pot, as well as the sexual liberation have changed the ritual into one that filters relationships over time, while preserving the option to exit easily.

    Here, Men court women they don’t date them. It’s a pursuit. The depth of this isn’t really something I understood. Men chase women here and women decide. But men don’t sort of idly date a bunch of women. I mean, I’m exaggerating this a bit for effect but it’s the only way I can articulate it right now. Over time I’ll get better at it. Subtlety isn’t appreciated. It’s weakness. I guess that’s the best way I can manage to describe it. (I know that there is a book somewhere on how people think in the east. I have to find it. I’ve heard it mentioned but not it’s title or author yet.)

    2) Women are much more mature at a much earlier age. (perhaps that’s true for both genders) But it’s much more obvious that women are at least ten years ahead of their western counterparts.

    4) there is a shortage of men, and a shortage of economically productive men. But unlike in the states where a) you have a state that can be used to expropriate money from a man if you’re a woman and b) where there is a shortage of unproductive men in the lower classes, but lower class women can still earn enough to support themselves, women are still accountable for their mating decisions here. Which is something I don’t like about the western way of doing things. And the shortage of men increases the natural problem of fewer desirable men than desirable women in any given population. So the women work harder at it because a) they see it as power and b) they have greater competition.

    3) The ‘Crazy’ factor that seems so prevalent in the west doesn’t see to exist here in anywhere near the same proportions. This is the part I find really fascinating. I want to understand it. It has something to do with the feeling of individual power instead of externally recognized status, and something to do with the fact that it is absolutely acceptable for a woman to vent emotions here ‘so that she can have a rational conversation’. And this is only possible because there is an agreement between men and women that this is how the world SHOULD operate and MUST operate.

    4) I didn’t see it at first but the culture of white lies is absolutely insane. You literally cannot believe anything anyone says. Asia has the same problem. It prevents a high trust society from forming. And when you lived under governments that force you to lie, and force you into black markets, then of course you get certain norms. And these people have those norms.

    Anyway. This is probably too amateurish a bit of opining. But I’d rather form my own opinions and then read the opinion of an authority. That way I can understand myself and my misjudgments better, than I would read an authority and see everything through that person’s lens, assuming that I possessed the same level of insight.

    That would be unscientific. lol

    Source date (UTC): 2012-12-06 10:34:00 UTC

  • ON MICROSOFT’S FUTURE : YES SURFACE LOOKS LIKE A FAILURE (From something I poste

    ON MICROSOFT’S FUTURE : YES SURFACE LOOKS LIKE A FAILURE

    (From something I posted on Dave Quick’s page)

    OK. While I’m thinking about it:

    1) everyone knows msft’s problem is a combination of their dependence on OEM’s paired with the threat of suits, especially from governments, if they try to alter this dependence. They must get into the hardware business. but they can’t without buying someone like Asus, Dell or HP.

    2) The first concept of a desktop everywhere was a correct prediction. The second conceptual bet, of owning the living room was a failure. This again, is a hardware ownership problem, and a distribution network problem. The software is trivial.

    3) Abandoning the pc as a gaming platform in favor of attempts at the living room was a failure. Especially in light of the fact that it was the gaming technology that caused advances in processor demand that fueled increasing creative destruction in the field.

    4) Abandoning the application server market to Oracle and IBM is irreversible, and was driven by at least the following factors a) the failure of msft to create sufficiently advanced products for enterprises, b) because of the performance challenges of the architecture and the slow response to the internet c) losing the IQ during the revolution by killing ASP for example rather than improving windows architecture to tolerate transactions rather than processes (and failing to make PHP part of visual studio) and perhaps creating a compiler for it that would give windows an advantage in productivity d) as I have argued for years, because they underfunded their services organization, which did poor work using poor technology and threatened their cash cow of operating system revenue with top customers, and e) letting the sharepoint group kill off both Commerce Server and nCompass, which together, if funded, could have performed as well as the others f) not-in-redmond that ruined the potential for the Navision acquisition to expand beyond accounting.

    4) The vast majority of microsoft employees have meaningless jobs with little to no impact where they are totally isolated from the pricing system and supported only by the network affect. Survival is as much political as anything else. The hardware business is much less tolerant of this extremely politicized environment. And the losses from hardware failures more substantial. These employees cannot transfer to that environment. ( I won’t go into the other cultural problems there.)

    5) Any management that saw technology as joy has been forced out of the company along with most of the evangelists that actually connected the bureaucracy with the consumers. Much of this management has been forced out largely because there is no technical visionary in the company, and the senior execs are operators, not inventors, so they do not actually know what to do with the business. Furthermore, those that do have been forced out of the company as soon as enough analysts suggest that they would be better at replacing Ballmer. Esp Raikes.

    6) Microsoft’s core technology (Windows) is architecturally unsuited for low cost, high performance computers. It was designed to be heavy, and it remains heavy. It should because underneath it’s conceptually still a product of digital equipment’s minicomputer architecture. If you understand this you will also understand that there is almost nothing that can be done about it without some extraordinary invention that alters the user interface (think talking to your box) the way that touch and hi res altered the interactive experience. It is this kind of innovation that makes substantial investment possible. Because it reduces the transaction cost of working with computers – and all information.

    When I spoke with Stephen Elop about this over lunch a few years ago it seemed as if he simply couldn’t even grasp the idea. Of course, when he went to Nokia I understood the strategy. But I also understood that he was not intellectually capable of improving office nor or altering the course of Nokia. In few meetings I’ve had with Ballmer (I’m out of the industry so I feel safe talking about it) his only concerns were expressed in global terms and the company’s overall revenue potential in the middle term. But every time I think about it, I can’t get away from the famous email to Buffett that stated that in ten years anything could happen to MSFT. And it has.

    Continuing on this thread, Touch eliminates the barrier to use for navigating. It reduces transaction costs. It does not require that the user comprehend abstractions. Gramma would never have had trouble with the ipad the way she had to learn the keyboard.

    But touch does nothing for engineering, finance, science, writing contracts, or even making movies. It does very little for content creators.

    THEREFORE

    Microsoft owns the content creation business. It owns the complex interaction business. It has ceded the application business to the major firms. It has ceeded the consumer to Apple. So microsoft’s market has, like IBM before it, narrowed. It’s narrowed to the need for businesses to have an active directory service to manage security, and the administrative desktop tools (Office) needed for clerical work. IE: Microsoft owns the CLERICAL WORKER. That term includes people who use structured data in its loosest form (verbal arguments and persuasion) to those who use it in it’s common form (financial clerical work) it’s next broadest form (statistical information possible only with Excel or other tools), to it’s creative form (engineering and science). But this is all clerical. The inabilty for msft to control display quality (as does apple) prevents it from being in the visual business.

    No one can or is willing to replace Excel, and the vast network of spreadsheets that most companies (foolishly) run on instead of ERP, PSA and other financial systems which are far more expensive to implement. But if someone creates a version of excel that replaces two dimensional functions with n-dimensional processing like sql, then that would be a significant invention that would make the value of the new product worth the transaction cost of changing it.

    When Word came out, it’s fundamental improvement was the use of the paragraph marker to store formatting data, which allowed rapid redrawing of the screen. Wordperfect for example, used document level tagging, which stayed in effect until altered. This meant that wordperfect had to redraw or rather reprocess the document. It wasn’t just marketing. It wasn’t just that word was carrying the burden of it’s dos roots. It’s that architecturally it was a flawed model in the newer context. Even though the paragraph marker is the source of all the stuff we hate about word.

    Now, If you follow writing it’s split between four camps: text fragments that we use for the majority of our work today (email, text, web pages, forms) , simple word processors (glorified wordpads, which is about all anyone needs), html word processors (formatted text processors), business word processor (word) and writers tool’s (Scrivener and Final Cut models). Fundamentally, the writer’s tool has taken over writing in all professional forms except business writing and contracts. This process will continue.

    WHAT DOES THIS MEAN

    So the point here is that it’s not worth it for anyone to get into microsoft’s office business YET. It is possible for microsoft to DEFEND that CLERICAL business. It is probably NOT possible for microsoft to expand into the CONTENT CONSUMPTION BUSINESS. It has no advantage there. And any attempts to do so (windows 8) will probably be a failure. computers are NOT general purpose devices any more. They’re appliances. THe operating system is not a competitive advantage, It’s a commodity. And in microsoft’s case, the windows architecture is a liability.

    What I have suggested in the past, is that once a competitor has the ability and incentive to eradicate microsoft’s lead it’s actually quite easy to do it with software:

    a) active directory replacement

    b) an inexpensive desktop appliance with superior user interface for the majority of clerical workers, that provides increased protection from theft.

    c) the ability to run a window for legacy windows applications until they are replaced with web based (that this is in process should be obvious) or at least iOS level apps.

    d) a spreadsheet with all Excel functions PLUS a sql like or at least close to sql like langage. esp one that handled graphs (not pictures, data structures).

    This will consume the administrative worker that accounts for the majority of desktop systems.

    My prediction was that Apple would do this as soon as either the iphone/ipad revenue stream threatens to peak, and/or the television strategy that they are starting to roll out fails. It is just too easy for them to use brand preference for apple to displace all clerical systems and support for the simple reason that windows user interface and office features sets are too complex for all but a minority of jobs.

    It might not be apple. It will be someone else (who cares abut this opportunity more than I do….)

    So, for the above reasons both the environment at msft, it’s revenue stream, it’s product architecture, and the few points of advantage taht their technology possesses are all weaker than the network effect is powerful.

    And only someone very visionary can change all that. And that person would have to be CEO.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-12-02 14:27:00 UTC

  • CONSERVATIVE STRATEGY The conservative strategy has been 1) to ally with Christi

    CONSERVATIVE STRATEGY

    The conservative strategy has been 1) to ally with Christians and the wealthy to oppose the expansion of the non meritocratic, non-proportional, anti-nuclear family, anti aristocratic, anti decentralized, secular socialist state. 2). To force the bankruptcy of the intertemporally redistributive fiat money state before the social capital of the aristocratic European model in American civic society is expended, and the nuclear family, the protestant ethic and all it entails are bankrupted. In the sense that social capital consisting of norms is as valuable or more so than money capital and built capital. Which is true given that Protestants have created the only high trust societies.

    The strategy is not to get the rich richer for their own sake. But to pay the rich to oppose the expansion of the socialist state.

    Marketing campaigns, slogans, and silly phrases being what they are, they obscure the complex and rational content of political strategies.

    And that is the purpose of ideology: to motivate, not educate.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-12-01 02:23:00 UTC

  • SIZE OF NATIONS I argue in favor of small countries (not states) for simple reas

    http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/size-nations#.ULl0k5CpEjE.facebookTHE SIZE OF NATIONS

    I argue in favor of small countries (not states) for simple reasons:

    1) the high trust normative economy can develop with lowest transaction costs.

    2) Government’s emphasis is on selection of priorities using scarce resources, not profiting and expanding from conflict resolution between opposing minorities.

    3) Societies are more egalitarian when norms are homogenous.

    4) It is extremely difficult for small states to conduct war because they have limited access to credit via fiat money.

    5) They are better, happier, places to live. (the USA is still living off it’s stored social capital that peaked with the baby boom. Although that’s just about depleted.)

    Source date (UTC): 2012-11-30 22:16:00 UTC

  • STUPID STUFF: CELEB TRAIN WRECKS Why are celebrity train wrecks so fascinating?

    STUPID STUFF: CELEB TRAIN WRECKS

    Why are celebrity train wrecks so fascinating? I mean, Lohan, Sheen, on one end, Spears in the middle, and Moore and Stone on the other.

    Most of human existence is pretty transparent to me. Tediously obvious even. But the crazy stuff people do never ceases to amaze me, and I find it endlessly fascinating – even if I wish I didn’t. Even if I’m embarrassed that I do.

    But somehow I love to live in a world where we have all these entertaining characters who tests the limits. Not of criminality. Not of violence. But of some insanely uncontrollably misdirected passion.

    When I was younger I used to love to watch the Dead-Heads go to concerts. I have no interest in them. I dont want to know them. But they’re all happy and adorable in a completely ‘white’ kind of way. And I just loved living in a world with people like that in it. Where it’s perfectly OK to be peaceful counter-culture.

    It’s beautiful – in a sort of twisted way.

    But American civic culture has declined with the ascent of the government, the decline of the family, and the misplaced admiration for division-inducing multiculturalism. And so our countercultures, except for possibly the burning man phenomenon, are almost entirely forms of politica agitation.

    I wont’ get into why this state of affairs exists. It’s a depressing distraction. I’ll just appreciate that a few outrageous individuals can buck the prohibition on revelrous passions.

    Even if it’s just vicarious.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-11-29 16:35:00 UTC

  • CULTURAL OBSERVATIONS : OFFICES WITHOUT PHONES First, cell phone plans and costs

    CULTURAL OBSERVATIONS : OFFICES WITHOUT PHONES

    First, cell phone plans and costs are absurdly cheap here. I think in the states I tend to pay well over a hundred a month, and close to two hundred. During heavy business usage plans run six to fifteen hundred a month. (And yes, I have enough knowledge of the different phone companies to know how much of that is wasted on marketing to customers who are not loyal, and how much poorly our regulators protect us from penalty pricing. In penatlty pricing the profits are made by enticing customers with low prices and setting low limits on account usage and charging absurd penalties for going over those limits. This violates the principle of asymmetry of knowledge. And it ends up sending the lower classes to collection and further charges. So yes, I think it’s a hazard, and yes, I think it violates libertarian property rights.

    Second, when you go into an office here, at least the offices that I’ve been into, it’s just not a given that everyone will have a company provided phone, unless they absolutely need one for their work.

    Desks, as we know them. are places where you can store clerical equipment. they are workbenches for people who calculate abstractions rather than modify the physical world.

    But if you have a laptop and a cell phone (or a laptop and skype) you pretty much can work lying down on a couch, or standing at a bar, or in my favorite repose, sitting in a chair with your feet up. Now the truth is, that comfortable seating inversely proportional the the impact on your health. We need to walk. We compensate by standing at standing-desks. Some of us have discovereed the abdominal value of sitting on an exercise ball at a desk, which works your abs eight ours a day. Most of us sit in chairs at desks, which if we use reasonable posture is bad for our hearts and waistlines, but that’s all. Ohters of us recline in couches and chairs, because all we have to do is talk or write text, and a desk is unnecessary, but this is the worst possible place to put your body if you don’t get up and move around every thirty minutes or so.

    All that said, if we don’t need phones, at least some portion of us don’t need desks. But that’s probably bad for our health. So, the next work environment I”m going to put together will have desks at the perimeter, and lots of lounges for working comfortably, and ad-hoc, with the people that you need to.

    Now, I realize that technologists are a narrow segment. And that technologists don’t necessarily signal using office spaces. But for some of us, it’s just paradise to sit in a comfy chair and crank out our ideas.

    Offices need not be structured around phones.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-11-17 03:37:00 UTC

  • NO ONE KNOWS WHERE THE ECONOMY IS GOING Well. Less so than usual. It’s easy to l

    NO ONE KNOWS WHERE THE ECONOMY IS GOING

    Well. Less so than usual. It’s easy to look smart during a boom. The arrow is in flight. We only need to watch its arc.

    But Europe fell back into recession and its confirmed as of today. And I don’t see why the USA won’t as well. I thought that we’d stimulate like hell but I can’t see any sings that the status quo will change in congress or the fed.

    But I’m not following the numbers. I’m following the people that follow the numbers. And they are quiet and clueless still.

    I was pretty wrong on china. Late on the euro. Early on the states. And right on housing prices. So my record is now mixed.

    But I think I’ll be proven right about structural unemployment. Every contradictory paper I can find presupposes that demand will cause us to sop up people. And I agree a bit. I just don’t agree it’s meaningful. This unemployment will be with us I think.

    When I said 2014 at the earliest followed by the demographic cliff in 2017-2020 I sounded nuts. But it looks pretty rational now. Economics in the end, all other things being equal, is reducible to demographics.

    I stopped fussing with data and started focusing exclusively on political theory about a year ago. And the reason is that I don’t see that anything interesting will occur to get us out of this scenario for a couple of years.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-11-15 20:09:00 UTC

  • DESPITE ITS INFLUENCE, THE FACEBOOK USER INTERFACE DOES NOT GRACEFULLY COLLAPSE

    DESPITE ITS INFLUENCE, THE FACEBOOK USER INTERFACE DOES NOT GRACEFULLY COLLAPSE ONTO PHONES AND TABLETS – AND THE SOLUTION?

    We all know this of course. We also know that this presents a terrible problem for companies that seek to make their revenue from advertising – which decidedly doesn’t work well on phones.

    But then again, the windowed desktop UI model doesn’t work that well any longer either – even on the desktop – and it certainly doesn’t collapse to handheld devices. The web v1 and v2 UI model doesn’t collapse that well either. The newer reflexive UI model, with iPhone controls collapses fairly well – that is, until you try to do anything terribly complicated. Because it’s pretty hard to convey a lot of context, when we’re used to space consuming navigation controls providing all that context, and we don’t have space to work with.

    So it’s a lot of fun to take a few choice elements from FB’s edit-in-place document model, and incorporate them into a reflexive ‘box’ model, and then try to eliminate all the navigation that’s possible while retaining context. Then hopefully allow the graceful re-expansion of the user interface back to a rich desktop, adding just the right amount of context along with the information density.

    And in doing so, make what is essentially an enormous pile of financial software appear like it was downloaded from the Apple store on one hand, and forged in an accounting department on the other.

    When hiring the staff, I told them, “I really wish that I could tell you that we’re building something sexy like a social media music and dating site. But we’re not. We’re building a piece of business management software. And the only thing sexy about it, is that it doesn’t look like it was written in 1992, along with all the rest of financial management software.” And for some reason they still took the job. 🙂

    Somehow it all just works.

    🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2012-11-15 17:39:00 UTC

  • CULTURAL OBSERVATIONS : MOTHERS, USELESS MALES AND MISSING CHIVALRY A country wh

    CULTURAL OBSERVATIONS : MOTHERS, USELESS MALES AND MISSING CHIVALRY

    A country where the men stand around, watch what’s going on, direct the women as if they are somehow adding value to the obvious, and the women humor the men, mollify them sufficiently as if they’re afraid of being beaten, and then do all the work as if the men weren’t there anyway.

    I am not a feminist. I also do not believe that men should willingly abandon their wealth of violence in order to become subjects of a mythical common good. But the fact is, that more than 1/3 of men are unnecessary unless we rely on manual labor, and they are entirely useless to society.

    However, they are born to and raised by mothers whose genes and choice of mates is insufficient for producing individual males capable of production in post-labor societies.

    “Choice” means that a woman has full control of breeding, and that the compromise “peace” that was achieved by the nuclear family under agrarianism, where the farm was a family business, and the family was the smallest tribe that it is possible to form, and where both male and female breeding strategies could be satisfied with limited compromise.

    Men are what mothers breed, and make them. While they have innate tendencies that are very different from those of women, most of what we call civilization is creating rules and incentives that direct men’s energies to the pursuit of status and behavior that is beneficial for all.

    So who is to blame for the behavior of men here?

    They have not abandoned their wealth of violence. That’s obvious. Neither domestically, politically, economically or socially. And for that I admire them. HOwever, without chivalry, they have no means of directing their energies to service of others.

    And without mothers who understand chivalry, they have no one to teach them.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-11-11 03:44:00 UTC

  • CULTURAL OBSERVATIONS:SEXUALITY An advertisement that’s everywhere downtown for

    CULTURAL OBSERVATIONS:SEXUALITY

    An advertisement that’s everywhere downtown for a strip club that caters to women.

    There are all sorts of strip clubs. Not having moved fully to the Internet, prostitution is pervasive in nightclubs, and according to the local English language newspaper, includes average girls just trying to pay for college.

    I am not a feminist by any means. And as a libertarian I don’t have a problem with prostitution. But the fact they the government has abandoned the common people to a degree that it’s this pervasive is simply an institutional failure of absurd proportions given the literacy and education of the populace.

    Like most countries the political class treats education as a ticket to prosperity and a cheap enticement to earn the loyalty of citizens.

    But the distribution of intelligence, manners and morals guarantees that education is available for use by 20% of the populace and the remainder are saddled with disappointment and debt – neither of which can be satisfied.

    Meanwhile the state uses the disaffection that it created with false promises to justify attacks on the private sector.

    It’s madness.

    Curt

    ( Did you see how I used sex to talk about education and statism? ). Lol

    Source date (UTC): 2012-11-10 16:21:00 UTC