HUGS ARE GOOD.
Just saw the latest UI for our product Oversing. We can’t really use breadcrumbs because it’s not a hierarchical model. Instead it “layers” screens so that you don’t get lost in difficult contexts.
Say what you want. But I will never stop hugging my staff when they do stuff that awes me. 🙂 They laugh at it.
But it works. 🙂
Source date (UTC): 2013-08-13 05:01:00 UTC
PROPERTARIANISM
Status
First daft of epistemology has been done for months.
Finished first sketch of metaphysics today.
Still having trouble with the necessity of Calculation in the broader sense.
Ready to put this section to paper soon. Get rid of axiom of action language and handle it as necessary for operational language.
In Propertarian context this material is just back matter but it takes trivial criticism off the table if its included. I don’t have to handle silly objections.
Source date (UTC): 2013-07-26 16:13:00 UTC
A MAN’S WORK IS NEVER DONE
God likes to torture me. That’s what it is.
I’ve had a few weeks, while we move from one technology framework to another, to work on the book a bit (and spam my friends on FB with my progress).
And of course, just as I get very close to being able to write one of the most difficult chapters, I get a crisis in business that steals my attention.
Next week we’ll estimate the last scope of work before we’re feature complete – about four months worth we think. And after that’s done, I’ll be drafted into involuntary programming (they only give me the back-end stuff you know – accounting and that kind of thing.) And so my time will be constrained again for a while.
I want to be done by September.
And it looks tough at this point.
And that frustrates the heck out of me.
A man’s work is never done (either).
🙂
Source date (UTC): 2013-07-25 11:46:00 UTC
YES I’M WRITING A LOT RIGHT NOW. SORRY IF I’M SPAMMING. IT WILL END SOON. 🙂
(FB is such an awesome substitute for a classroom.) 🙂
I’m trying to finish my work on reforming Austrianism in the context of libertarianism. And I have only one problem left, and that is this damned point of demarcation between the scientific and real, and the logical and platonic. (And I don’t find it interesting really. I actually find it ridiculous. )
But I’m close enough that I need only follow bibliographies and read a bit in order to understand the current state of the argument. And as such undermine the attack on skepticism as psychological and moral rather than a description about the universe.
Mathematical and logical platonism being a substitute for scriptural wonder isn’t actually good for anyone. Because it certainly looks like Hayek was right: The twentieth century was an era of mysticism. He said it was created by Marx and Freud. But at this point I’m going to have to throw in Cantor and Chomsky. With the opposition provided by Nietzsche, and Hayek and any number of finitists. And the absurdity is that this certainly looks like a conflict between the Jewish cultural predisposition for magianism and opposition to land holding norms, and the germanic cultural predisposition for mechanism and the necessity of land holding norms.
I hate it when these big ideas turn out to be complex silly fantasies that we and our cultures bring with us. The world is quite simple. Even the physics of the universe appears quite simple when we understand it. The complex mystical nonsense, as always, involves some sort of magical anthropomorphization or deification of simple processes, whether they be Religion, Philosophy, Logic or Mathematics. The reality is that the world is not very complicate. We make it complicated. If you go SEARCHING for a way to make numbers and sets infinite you will find it, because any ratio is an infinite expression. But measurements are REAL and finite even if RATIOS can be infinite. Sets are a simplistic function once you separate them from the universe of human knowledge. Of COURSE you can create infinite sets that way. But in human REASON using LANGUAGE that’s not possible. Look at the tricks Godel had to come up with – a variation on Cantor, to make his mystical game come true. But he went LOOKING for it in a platonic universe. Science looks for phenomenon using measurements in the real universe.
Why we desire the world to seem mystically complex, I think, is so that we can, like every mystic in history, use that pretense to take control over others – power from the presumption of knowledge to invalidate normative statements, even if one cannot provide a replacement answer to it. If instead, we admitted that the world was indeed as simple as it is, then most people who are public intellectuals would have very little to do.
The world is very simple really. The problem isn’t in collecting the 1500 or so ideas that constitute the entire human conceptual vocabulary. It’s in distinguishing them from the extraordinary number of permutations of error.
Mysticism is mysticism. Nothing real is infinite. Zero is a symbol that exists when we want to represent the idea of nothing countable. The infinity symbol is a shorthand for ‘I have no idea’: when we want to represent more than is countable. That’s it.
Platonism is silly.
Source date (UTC): 2013-07-24 07:24:00 UTC
PRODUCTIVITY
I haven’t written much on libertarianism lately. The business is in crunch mode. Its consuming.
But I hope to put out a few screen shots of the software that don’t give away too much in the next few weeks. 😉
I have written a bit. But mostly trying to test minor application of the ideas. Sketches.
Unfortunately the scoundrels that I work with are a bad influence on my productivity.
Like when i say i dont want anything to drink. And they buy an entire bottle of scotch from the bar. And then hand me a microphone. And start laughing because they know peer pressure will win out. 🙂
(Btw: these four women at the next table are really drunk and they cant sing in the first place. 🙂
Sigh …
Its hopeless. 😉
Source date (UTC): 2013-06-13 19:12:00 UTC
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=stick+a+fork+in+itSTICK A FORK IN IT. 🙂
I’ve pretty much completed Aristocratic Philosophy, articulated as Propertariansm. And I’m working now, largely on application of the theory to all topics in political discourse – something which I’ve taken from Mises and Rothbard’s organizations of the topics in their books. One short chapter per topic.
Now, it’ll become clear pretty quickly that I’ve stuck a permanent, irremovable fork in Rothbardian ethics. I’m not sure yet how to address conservatives and classical liberals, or how long it will take, before, if at all, it becomes clear that I’ve provided them with a rationally articulated rhetorical framework that makes their ideas defensible – so that they don’t have to rely on history, religious analogy and unarticulated morality as arguments. If I’m lucky, I will have, by invalidating rothbardian ethics, and articulating aristocratic ethics, provided the twin means of intellectually uniting the libertarian, conservative, and classical liberal movements.
What I didn’t expect was to stick a fork in Feminism. But I’ve absolutely done it. Not in the sense that women shouldn’t have equal property rights. But in the sense that the feminine social order of equalitarianism is supposedly ‘superior’ to the male order of individual property: meritocratic, aristocratic, egalitarianism.
I think I will just devote a single chapter to it in my book on Propertarianism. And, if more is necessary, write something specifically to address feminism as a shorter work later on. Even though it doesn’t interest me very much.
I’ve always planned two books: the first analytical and intellectual, the second narrative and inspirational. I have outlined the second book twice. And it is much easier to work on than the current one. It is not problem solving, but communication. Not analysis but art.
Source date (UTC): 2013-04-05 03:20:00 UTC
CELEBRATION!
We have left the building for the night.
We finished the last sprint on the new UI features, and the pricing system, and have started on the incredibly complex task of resource management – a difficult problem that all Agencies and Consultancies face. And we have absolutely the best solution on the market – if you have to manage a lot of TRAFFIC in production work. And that’s before we even talk about having tickets, work orders, production, agile and WBS all in the same product .
So we are going to celebrate.
Actually, I had to tell the guys that no, I would not fly to Istanbul tonight and come back in tatters on Monday. We deserve a celebration. But my body can’t take that kind of insanity right now. I called them on age. These guys are almost half my age. So I asked for mercy. 🙂
They were merciful but only to the extent that we must plan a party trip to L’viv.
Source date (UTC): 2013-04-03 13:03:00 UTC
PROPERTARIANISM THIS YEAR?
It looks like I will finish with Propertarianism – extending the work of Rothbard and Hoppe into institutions for heterogeneous societies – this year. I need, I think, about six weeks free, during the summer. And then it’ll be ready for an editor.
This work will be limited to the system of ethics.
Rewriting conservative and libertarian history as the history of Aristocratic Egalitarianism, and producing the time line, then documenting it, even in short form will take much longer. Easily a year or more.
I will still need to produce the institutional framework and provide some empirical support for it. That’s the hard work left to do.
Even then, I will still have another decade of work to do, if I live that long. (crossed fingers – ’cause I’ve put a lot of wear and tear on this collection of genes, water and chemicals ).
But at least I’ll get the system of ethics out there in complete form.
Source date (UTC): 2013-03-21 08:19:00 UTC
TODAY THERE ARE 45,000 WORDS IN THE PROPERTARIAN GLOSSARY
“To converse with me, first you must define your terms.” – Voltaire
I took that statement to heart, and about three years ago, started compiling my glossary. It is still a draft. And I’ve learned quite a bit writing it. Much of it needs a good editing pass. Some of the terms are still marked with ‘Undone’.
Today, it’s just over 45,000 words, or 180 novel length pages, and perhaps 120 academic lengthy pages. I would expect that when I’m done it is no less than a third larger. Making the definitions of terms as I use them, a 200 Page academic book, or full novel-sized paperback.
Oh. That’s WORDS not TERMS. 🙂
Source date (UTC): 2013-03-17 02:53:00 UTC
Status? What’s that? Panic? 🙂
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. 🙂
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. 🙂 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. 🙂
Source date (UTC): 2013-02-27 01:50:00 UTC