Curt Doolittle

Theme: Agency

  • OVERHEARD IN KIEV. “I don’t hit. I’m a woman. I don’t want to have scars on my h

    OVERHEARD IN KIEV.

    “I don’t hit. I’m a woman. I don’t want to have scars on my hands. I’throw things. Anything. Especially bottles.”

    WTH?

    Sigh.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-05-26 10:13:00 UTC

  • It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on t

    It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence.” – Gandhi

    Violence is a virtue not a vice. Violence and time are the only capital nature grants us at birth. The institution of private property is the product of the organized application of violence. There is no greater return on our use of violence than the creation of the institution of private property. There is no greater loss than the loss of the institution of private property. And the loss of the institution of private property can only occur if we fail to use violence to create and maintain it.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-05-11 10:24:00 UTC

  • LIFE’S GREAT DECISIONS Last summer, battling yet another illness, and realizing

    LIFE’S GREAT DECISIONS

    Last summer, battling yet another illness, and realizing the northwest would never again be a place I would want to live, I looked at the world in an effort to try to find a place to start a new business and write.

    One by one I eliminated most of the cities in the USA, other than perhaps a few in texas – I want an urban lifestyle. But there are almost no urban centers left that are culturally aristocratic. None. In fact, Urban culture is decidedly proletarian, with aristocracy, if it hasn’t moved out of the city altogether, restricted to walled enclaves.

    I can sit here in a cafe in a country where I can’t even reliably speak traveller’s level of the language, and identify with people better here than I can anywhere in the coastal states. This culture is an extended family. It’s relatively homogenous, even if torn between catholic east and orthodox west. But despite that division, I look on everyone as my people – my family. Because they feel look like and act like family.

    They are us before our decline.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-05-01 09:11:00 UTC

  • WITH A WIFE WHO IS A HOARDER IS A CRUSHING BATTLE THAT YOU WILL EVENTUALLY LOSE

    http://www.psmag.com/health/hoarding-science-55196/LIVING WITH A WIFE WHO IS A HOARDER IS A CRUSHING BATTLE THAT YOU WILL EVENTUALLY LOSE

    I lasted 17 years. But the eventual understanding that no matter how much money I made, it wouldn’t matter, and when she had a child, her nesting behavior, and the natural tiredness that comes from caring for young children amplified her hoarding behavior, and life became unbearable. I could not survive in that environment.

    Her apartment, when I met her, was piled floor to ceiling with papers and magazines, and junk. What’s fascinating to me is that she actually knows the contents of every box, pile, and drawer. I mean, to some degree, I’m envious of that kind of recall. Until of course, you realize that without those real-world indexes, that the hoarder cannot recall anything. And that this is one of the things that causes their behavior.

    We didn’t understand ‘hoarding’ as a compulsive behavior when we met. We just assumed it was harmless and silly. And I thought I could live with it, and control it. And I managed to contain it to ‘her’ one room – a studio. But when we had the baby, that studio became the baby’s room, and there were no boundaries.

    Not that I’m a piece of cake either. I mean, can you imagine living with me? Women seem to love it. But I think it’s just because I’m an uncontrollable catnip toy that doesn’t ever become boring. It’s not because i’m easy. I’m not. When combined with my health problems it was more than I could bear.

    I still love her to death and always will. And I miss her all the time. But living with that kind of thing is just unbearable. And its ruinous. And it’s incurable. And its tragic.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-05-01 03:48:00 UTC

  • IN A BAR. A GUY FROM COMPUWARE. HE TRIES TO START A FIGHT WITH ME. AND UNTIL TOD

    IN A BAR. A GUY FROM COMPUWARE. HE TRIES TO START A FIGHT WITH ME. AND UNTIL TODAY I DIDN’T UNDERSTAND WHY.

    Three years ago, or so, maybe four. I’m in a bar at a fashionable restaurant with some friends. And this drunk guy from two tables over comes up to me and says “do you remember me?” and sticks out his hand.

    Now, I never forget a face. Ever. I recognized his face. But I couldn’t place him. And honestly, I was just stumped. So, as usual, I shook his hand, and stalled for time while I tried to remember where I knew him from.

    He says “I know what you did”. Now, when a drunk guy says something like that to me, I gotta tell you that this particular farm boy’s first instinct is to hit as hard and as fast as I can – ’cause nothing good is likely to follow.

    However, I’m also with four guys, the place is packed, I’m a regular, and there are really good bouncers. Besides, even if he gets going I’m not sure he’s too threatening in his current state, and I’m not sure it’s clear yet to others that he’s begging for a fight – and I don’t like unnecessary imperial entanglements.

    I still can’t place the guy. Until he tells me he’s a salesman from Compuware, that we cancelled a deal with when the credit crash picked up steam. And so I get this confused look on my face – because I’m genuinely confused.

    Now, you know, you can abuse me all you want. I know who I am. I know how and why I make decisions and I’m ok with the decisions that I make. And god knows that I’m not exactly a nice negotiator – I’m ruthless about money. And I have a mercenary view of ethics in negotiations. But if you come after one of my partners, both of whom are virtuous to such a fault that I want to wring their necks at times, all bets are off, and so are all barriers.

    My partner Steven is about as level headed as god has made a human being. And he has told me, maybe a month or two earlier, that the Compuware software can’t do what we need. And that we’re going to have to back out of it. Not only can’t they do it but we’re starting to get really nervous about revenue and sales, and it’s expensive software. So we don’t want to be in a position where we have trouble paying for it either. So it’s just better right now if we make a few mods to our own code and suffer through the current crisis.

    So the next thing I say is that “Steven is the most honest man I know, and if he says it won’t do it, then it won’t do it, and that’s all I know, all I want to know, and all I need to know.”

    At which point he starts coming at me with F-bombs, and one of the guys he works with starts pulling him backwards away from me.

    I know I have got him now, and it’s evident to everyone in the bar that he’s loaded and violent, so I have moral authority to find his jaw if necessary. But his friends prevail, and drag him out of the place.

    Unfortunately, I never really understood why he was so pissed. I just discounted it out of hand as losing a commission and being drunk. But, this morning, sitting here, I realize that he thought we were playing them for information so that we could develop our internal software on our own. It never occurred to me before, and I feel stupid for not getting it.

    At least that makes sense. Of course, it’s not true. But then, that’s one of the problems with ethics and asymmetry of knowledge. It also one of the problems of assuming that you understand the motivations and incentives of others.

    Even if their software would have done the job (it wouldn’t) It would have been far cheaper to buy their software than to develop our software ourselves – that this is logically self evident is why it didn’t occur to me. But the cash flow impact of modifying our fragile and aged existing software ourselves albiet very slowly was less risky than trying to heavily modify an already expensive piece of software using external consultants, and the cash flow impact of a liability of that size on the balance sheet given that our bank had just failed, and our customers were spending less money.

    Unfortunately, had he talked to me as a gentleman, I would have explained this. But he talked to me as an impassioned drunk. And I never had the opportunity.

    I don’t so much mind if people dislike or are angry with me when I screw up. But it really bothers me when people dislike or are angry with me for things that I don’t do.

    We go back to Montaigne: In life it seems that we are disliked by people who blame us for accidents, but are forgiven or ignored by those whom we have done intentional injustice.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-04-26 02:54:00 UTC

  • What Advantages Or Disadvantages Do Social Media Contribute To The Educational Development Or Problems Among Our Youth Today?

    I don’t think the concept of ‘problem’ makes a great deal of sense in this context – or at least I’m not sure what you are referring to.  Our world changes.  Agrarianism, organized religion, government, literacy, industrialization, and even electric light, have had a dramatic impact on people’s lives.  We are always in a state of change.  I don’t see this as a ‘problem’ unless it creates some outcome or other that is demonstrably a material ‘bad’ that we can measure. And I have a problem seeing social media as anything other than a free market for information that is not impeded by organized mysticism or organized statism.

    I think that the way we educate children in schools could easily be described as prisons, where we subject them to artificially exaggerated social stresses because they interact with too few adults and do so in abnormal circumstances. We artificially induce extended childhoods, and delay the onset of mature adulthood.  This not only causes absurd stresses but creates alienation from the nuclear family that would normally provide the adaptive environment that creates the calm, confident and healthy mind. So, we create  alienation as a systemic condition in society.  (Childhood as we understand it is a recent invention. And probably a bad one.)

    I think that social media provides a form of competition against this destructive environment, that reduces alienation.  And that the internet in general, provides so much information, that it is possible for children to find membership in groups regardless of locale. 

    So I think the argument is that school is the problem of alienation and we see social media providing a solution to alienation, and that some of us would prefer that such alienation did not need to be mollified by social media, and instead a healthy individual was developed inside of the nuclear family.  But the problem here is not social media. It is education and the incentive for two parent incomes that make possible our intergenerational redistribution.

    So, the net is, that social media, and the interenet in general, are net goods.  The problem is everything else.

    https://www.quora.com/What-advantages-or-disadvantages-do-social-media-contribute-to-the-educational-development-or-problems-among-our-youth-today

  • HOW DO YOU FEEL WHEN THE PEOPLE WHO RUN A COMPANY THAT YOU BUILT, KILL THE COMPA

    HOW DO YOU FEEL WHEN THE PEOPLE WHO RUN A COMPANY THAT YOU BUILT, KILL THE COMPANY YOU BUILT?

    Like you lost a child.

    You know, most of my companies still either exist or were acquired by companies that still exist. I love best the ones that are still independent, even if they’re not very big.

    One of the virtues of leaving that company, was that it became clearer that the problem was the board. If investors divide your board, two things need to be true a) they need to understand your business, b) they need to be able to liquidate your business.

    If (a) or (b) is true, the company will degrade. If both are true it will die.

    </Diary Moment On>

    I love it when people are more knowledgeable than I am. I hate it when people assume that they are smarter than I am. The first is true almost all the time. the second false almost all of the time.

    </Diary Moment Off>

    Source date (UTC): 2013-04-17 13:26:00 UTC

  • “THE PROFITABILITY OF DAYDREAMING WITH REASON” QUESTION VIA EMAIL “Curt, how do

    “THE PROFITABILITY OF DAYDREAMING WITH REASON”

    QUESTION VIA EMAIL

    “Curt, how do you write all this stuff during the day? And still get work done?”

    MY ANSWER

    We all screw-off differently. When I’m working, I focus on some problem until I am not in the ‘flow’ — which means, working by effortless free association. Then I take fifteen or twenty minutes to eat a piece of fruit, have a cup of coffe, look out the window, walk across the room, or visit a variety of economics blogs, facebook groups, Quora, my web site’s draft pages, SSRN, whatever stack of books I have on the table, and whatever, and I let myself react to whatever it is that interests me, and I write about it.

    Then, when that’s done, after my short term memory has changed contexts, I go back to whatever I was working on, and keep going with renewed interest both conscious and subconscious, letting my short term memory do it’s work of free association for me. (This is the secret to all creativity.)

    In this way, I’m never really ‘working’ in the sense that most people mean it. I’m daydreaming and writing down the content of my dreams. It takes a very long time to develop this habit, which is why most writers and programmers will tell you ‘just write’, and most artists will tell you ‘just make work’. Reason is actually a pretty weak property of the human mind. If you can teach yourself to daydream (intuit) something useful, then it isn’t work. It’s just habit and its effortless – like watching a campfire, or boats on the horizon. And when that happens, you end up chasing your feelings rather than fighting to suppress your feelings. Discipline is a function of reason. Creativity is a function of intuition.

    I write software, proposals, arguments, and analytical philosophy by daydreaming. Seriously. The entire skill is just to teach yourself to type fast enough that you can narrate your dreams.

    I do not think in words. It’s a very visual process. I feel logic the way most people feel space, or emotions. I’ve just become adept at becoming an observer of those feelings and intuitions, and capturing them. Editing’s the hard part. That’s work. I don’t have much patience for real work. lol.

    The byproduct of daydreaming as a profession, is that you can literally work eighteen hours a day, because you can’t imagine doing anything more wonderful than daydreaming for a living.

    The mind is just an enormous volume of memory with a few primitive instincts. Fill your short term memory with stuff. Let it do it’s job. It helps a whole lot if you like the stuff you fill your memory with. And you can only make money at filling your memory with things that are scarce, because only those things that are scarce are things that are valuable. It doesn’t do much good to fill your head with pop music, and gossip, it’s just easy to acquire. So the trick is to fill your head, constantly, with something that is interesting but rare.

    Marginal differences in intelligence simply make it easier to acquire increasingly scarce information. Because marginal differences in the intelligence necessary to produces scarce information are rare.

    There isn’t much mystery to man really. We’re pretty simple. It’s just that every other creature we know of has to evolve by dying or breeding and incorporating that knowledge into genes. We have the ability to incorporate it into memory. Both serve the same purpose.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-04-10 08:05:00 UTC

  • How Does A Police Officer Determine If A Woman Is Lying?

    It’s actually pretty simple. They try to figure out who tells the first lie, or provides the least believable explanation.

    It is VERY easy to tell when people are lying. If you spend time at it, it’s patently obvious. The problem is, most of the time, everyone is lying.   Which is why you shouldn’t bother to lie to police. Just remain mute and let them do their thing, no matter what they say. If you must say anthing at all, then the only advice you can give anyone is to make sure that you are very clear what it is that the policeman is asking you.  Because every word you use is not evidence as you intend it, but evidence as the officer iterprets it.  

    If you say nothing other than your name and address, the worst that will happen is that you will ride in a car, go through some process, and come home the next morning a little tired. It is fear of this process that causes people to try to lie their way out of something.

    Most importantly, the police don’t try to solve crimes. They try to find reasons to arrest people, so that they can separate them, so that there isn’t any greater conflict. The only reason they odn’t arrest people is when it’s too much work to do the paper, and they’re afraid that you might spend time and money criticizing them.  But you should never even dream that the police are there to make good judgements or solve crimes.  They exist to make arrests and let the court make judgements.

    If there is a risk that their careers will be affected by a decision then they will be hostile and basically find every possible charge that they can dream up, and let the court system figure it out later.  This is their only defense against charges of impropriety or poor judgement.

    You are never in a debate or argument with a policeman. You are being interrogated, and they are trying to either catch you in a lie or make you lie and if they find that they will assume everything is your fault.

    If you are a man and the complainant is a woman, unless you can show blood it is your fault, always, everywhere. Women are never accountable for their words or actions unless they create visible harm to you.  The general assumption is that they are fairly harmless.  The general assumption is that men are dangerous.

    These are not irrational, or empirically false assumptions.

    That said, if the woman has a seedy past and the man has any assets at all it’s an even bet she’s lying. Statistically speaking we have pretty good numbers now on false rape and assault accusations.  It’s a substantial number, and I don’t keep up with it, but it’s not less than 5% and I think the 10% number looks believable.  

    The best advice is to stay away from easy women, women who are drunk, or who use drugs.

    I know…. I know….  That’s like telling moms not to shop at Walmart for the discounts, but that’s just reality.  Women don’t come at a discount.  The cost is always higher than the savings. 🙂  Its reproductive math.  It has to be that way. 🙂

    https://www.quora.com/How-does-a-police-officer-determine-if-a-woman-is-lying

  • FREUD IS WEARING A SLIP? 🙂 What is it called when you say one thing and mean an

    FREUD IS WEARING A SLIP? 🙂

    What is it called when you say one thing and mean another?

    1) A slip of the tongue (parapraxis) where a word is accidentally replaced by another. In a nervous setting, a slip of the tongue can be called a Freudian Slip.

    2) It can also be innuendo, whereby ones says something which is apparently innocent but means something else, usually of a sexual nature.

    3) It can be metaphor, where a difficult idea is expressed in simple or picturesque terms eg “It’s raining cats and dogs” to mean “Its raining heavily”.

    4) It can be euphemism, where the word(s) used substitute for other words or ideas that are being avoided, for reasons of sensitivity, secrecy, etc.

    5) It can be hyperbole, (exaggeration) where the truth is stretched for emphasis eg “I’ve told you a million times not to do that” when you mean “I’ve told you many times”

    6) It can be metonym, where a simple idea is used to represent a larger concept eg the White House to represent the US presidency.

    7) It can be slang. A Londoner might say “Where’s my trouble and strife” when he means “Where’s my wife”

    8) It can be a malapropism where a word is accidentally replaced by a similar sounding one eg “I can say without fear of contraception..” instead of “I can say without fear of contradiction..”

    9) It can be a spoonerism, where the initial letters of two words are swapped eg saying “Its roaring with pain” instead of “Its pouring with rain”

    10) If it is intentional, is called deceit, lying, misleading, mendacity.

    At least for this particular writer and speaker, malapropism is an almost guaranteed daily occurrence.

    When talking quickly I often skip words, to confusing and sometimes humorous effect.

    I am really conscious of my tendency to make freudian slips so I’m careful when I’m nervous.

    I intentionally use hyperbole because it is the only access to decent humor available to me. :0

    THANKS TO ANSWERS.COM FOR THIS CONTRIBUTION TO HUMOR

    Source date (UTC): 2013-04-05 14:40:00 UTC