Curt Doolittle

Theme: Agency

  • FUTURE NOIR The world is a beautiful place. The essence of Conservatism is joy a

    FUTURE NOIR

    The world is a beautiful place. The essence of Conservatism is joy at present happiness over future utopian perfection. The minute and subtle improvement of the existing art and artifice over the crass flatulence of dramatic public assaults on our senses. The self knowledge of contribution, over the attention seeking of public recognition. It is the politics of the private. The harmony of uncoordinated achievement, made possible by uncoordinated plans.

    NYC is a declining, decaying memory of it’s Anglo Dutch past. It has become the mirror of the extended slum of Los Angeles, separated only by the architecture and order of it’s anglo heritage, and the interdependence between it’s financial sector and the war machine that is washington DC. The city’s gothic legacy is obscured by the implicit praise of temporal consumption and the consequential irrelevance of a mandate for production. It is a society only in that it is so perversely anti-social.

    There is nothing beautiful about it. Nothing to be learned from it. It is the expression of consumer sedition. The brightly burning flurry of consumption by locusts. It’s a dead carcass being feasted upon by every passing scavenger, and attracting vermin by the scent of its decay.

    The world has moved on. No civilization in history has survived urbanization.

    Although we did not know why until recently. The formal institutions of economic calculation we call ‘property’ which require that we act, and the informal institutions of manners, ethics, morals which constrain us from acting, can no longer operate in concert. We have made significant progress in the development of our formal institutions, by implementing credit ratings – the equivalent of ‘reputation’. Credit is an institutional memory of our formal and informal adherence to the social contract.

    But it is not enough. When combined with easy credit, consumption increases without corresponding increases in productivity. And from that one act, men become locusts, and the fecundity of the upper classes is consumed by the malthusian fertility of the lower classes.

    And over time, only the most durable monuments of stone leave a record of our having existed at all.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-01-23 10:24:00 UTC

  • WRITING SKILLS Online writing has improved significantly since that paper was wr

    http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/01/how-well-can-you-communicate-over-email-or-blog-posts-how-about-in-person.htmlONLINE WRITING SKILLS

    Online writing has improved significantly since that paper was written. We err. We fail. We get slapped around. And we learn.

    Or at least, most people do.

    The three biggest problems with online discourse are: a) that it’s very difficult to negotiate a contract on the meaning of terms, and as such, most debates are eristic or autistic. b) that the medium does not tolerate the level of exposition needed to convey vast differences in the categories and judgements that are under discussion. c) almost no one, even the very best people, are able to articulate their positions by other than allegorical means, or without relying on the assumption that the methodology underlying their reasoning, is merely a convenience, not a representation or means of identifying true statements. (My glossary is fifty pages long. and it’s not anywhere near complete.)

    Conservatives are the worst offenders because they rely on sentimental, historical and allegorical concepts, which if fully articulated as human actions, are demonstrably true. But since they’re so poorly expressed, usually as post-religous moral statements, they are all but useless in debate.

    FWIW: I am absolutely nothing like my online persona, and everyone who meets me in person comments on it. Interpersonal relations are, well, personal. Debate online is political – purposeful. If I learned anything from the 20th century its that Friedman’s and Rothbard’s antagonistic relentlessness was more successful than Hayek’s modest civility.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-01-20 17:20:00 UTC

  • GOSSIP Back in Seattle for a few days. Hearing the usual industry gossip. (This

    GOSSIP

    Back in Seattle for a few days. Hearing the usual industry gossip. (This is still such a small town.) And, I suppose nothing should surprise me. But the daftness of human beings, and their ability to envision drama where none exists, never ceases to amaze me. How on earth do people come up with this stuff?

    Nothing ever happens to or with money without a lot of bankers and investors agreeing to it. The world is a mundane, bureaucratic, procedural place administrated by lawyers who are incentivized to over analyze everything.

    Each of us has a narrow view of the world, and an exaggerated concept of our place in it.

    This region is extremely simple. We had one company that created a lot of manufacturing and engineering jobs, that was overtaxed, over-regulated, and finally fled the state. We then won the lottery and got a second company that concentrated an unheard of amount of money in what was a previously semi-rural population. That company had an atypical organizational structure that asked purchasing decisions to me made by very junior people. That purchasing strategy was important when technology was new – since the older generation would not have been as aggressive or experimental – or cheap to hire.

    But times change. People learn. Competitors emerge. And the Innovator’s Dilemma (curse) and the rent-seeking and laziness, politicization and disutility of bureaucracy take their normal course. That company no longer spends money in the same manner. It’s stock no longer appreciates in value as it did. And it’s employees no longer posses the relative wealth that they did. And so the entire region is affected by those changes.

    And many people, who previously sold their skills and labor to that company, and because of it, who had an impression of themselves and their skills as special, scarce or unique, are now stunned and despondent over the change in their fortunes. They lived in homes, worked at companies, and built organizations, during a period, where the entire American economy was booming with debt, booming with cheap overseas products, and while at the same time, that regional company was exporting cash into a town with scarce resources, and a small population. Those frustrated people are competing the broader economy, not the unique and temporary economy that they were living in during the past. Like American laborers, who must now compete in the global economy against people who will work 14 hours a day doing the same work, people in this area must compete globally.

    Revel in our time. In what we had. But don’t expect that it is repeatable. Or that there is anything you, or the people you work for, or the politicians that supposedly administer our governments, could have done anything about. If you had the opportunity to live during the period from 1988 – 2008 in this area, then appreciate having had the joy of participating in one of the greatest times and places to live in human history. (Remember the fun of Entros? The art galleries prior to 2001? The multiple playhouses? The increase in great restaurants? The feeling that it would never end? Daily life when Neo came upon our movie screens? Remember when Redmond was the ‘sticks’, and when Bellevue didn’t have a skyscraper?)

    The American dream was first built on cheap land. Second on jobs that were possible because of cheap land. Third because the world went into a debilitating war. Fourth because of cheap credit made possible by the petrodollar and our postwar anti-communist military capability.

    But the world caught up. There was no malfeasance – on anyone’s part. It’s just the slow five hundred year grid, as industrial capitalism moved from the heartland of England to every nation in the world. People in Beijing and countless other cities are living the seattle experience today. We can envy them, or celebrate them.

    It’s a choice.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-01-17 17:22:00 UTC

  • During their schooling years, we ask our children to find their natural talents

    During their schooling years, we ask our children to find their natural talents and virtues. To find themselves. And the truth is, they don’t have any natural talents. It’s just whatever they spend 10,000 hours doing. So we don’t find ourselves, we maker ourselves, and asking children that question is actually destructive. It only forces them to be more introspective – self centered. When in fact, the world treats you far better if you try to master the art of satisfying the wants of others, rather than yourself. You only get to live your fantasy for having made the satisfaction of others come true. So Instead, we should ask our children what very obscure thing that they could imagine being really good at, and imagine enjoying, that others will pay them for.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-01-04 10:55:00 UTC

  • IN NEED OF A CONE OF SILENCE Sitting in a restaurant having breakfast. Overheari

    IN NEED OF A CONE OF SILENCE

    Sitting in a restaurant having breakfast. Overhearing a conversation next to me. A woman is planning her divorce over the next two years; including how she will increase her expenses, quit her job, take all the cash, run up the credit cards, lie to her husband in the process so that he doesn’t suspect anything. She’s asking her friend for advice on how long she can probably prolong the situation to get the maximum return.

    Source date (UTC): 2011-12-21 11:45:00 UTC

  • If you want to do something that is meaningful to you for a very long time, you

    If you want to do something that is meaningful to you for a very long time, you can become very angry at those things that prevent you from doing it. The feeling starts out as distraction, and matures into simple dissatisfaction, then dissatisfaction turns to frustration, frustration to exhaustion and exhaustion to anger. That anger then tends to spill out onto people around you, and you can treat even those you care most about in ways that they dont deserve, for reasons that are not related to them whatsoever. Your dreams are real if and only if, you are more willing to bear the difficulty of achieving them, then you are the frustration from not trying to achieve them.

    Source date (UTC): 2011-12-12 18:41:00 UTC

  • Aren’t Meant To Be Friends. Men spend time with women to place a put on an optio

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_lh5fR4DMAWe Aren’t Meant To Be Friends.

    Men spend time with women to place a put on an option for sex. That’s the reason. That’s the only reason. Even if it’s a long option. Even if it’s an infinitely long option. Time is a cheap put. (Women’s gracious illusions to the contrary.) Somewhat interesting and intelligent women decrease the cost of the put. Hot dull women increase the cost of the put. Unattractive women decrease the utility of the return on the put. But its all about the put. Women just aren’t that interesting. Male empathy tends by way of testosterone to make them ‘feel’ abstractions, machines, and processes, not people – something few woman ever seem to be able to grasp.

    Now, if you find an educated and successful and honest woman over 50 or so, who was very attractive in her youth, she’ll give you a similar story about men: Mainly, that you should ‘try an athlete, try a troublemaker, try a musician’, to get ‘it’ out of your system, and then find yourself a decent man who w…

    Source date (UTC): 2011-12-09 09:11:00 UTC

  • to this study, the more you swear, the less effective it becomes at reducing pai

    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22078790According to this study, the more you swear, the less effective it becomes at reducing pain.

    That’s not really material though is it. I just use “F__K” as many times as I need to. It may require a lot of them. but they’re infinitely cheap, and in infinite supply. 🙂 – The economics of cursing.

    Source date (UTC): 2011-11-17 19:24:00 UTC

  • As a geek, I love the economics of affection, dating and relationships, and foun

    As a geek, I love the economics of affection, dating and relationships, and found this quote today in line with what I’ve written. It’s from a posting about Laura Sessions Stepp’s book “hooking up”, where the writer poses an obvious economic actor’s solution to Stepp’s questions:

    “Why do young women make themselves so available, unmarried, to young men in hopes of making themselves happy? (This clearly makes the young men happy, but that’s beside the point).”

    “This downward spiral that women have been caught in — the dwindling supply of available men — induces women to make themselves even more sexually available than the next women in order to compete, thereby further dampening the supply of potential mates—seems impossible to break out of. At the heart of the problem is a classic, Olsonian collective action failure. All women would benefit if, collectively, women were to require more of men they had sex with. But every woman knows that her behavior, by itself, will not cause market prices to change, so she cheats—and by “cheats” I mean she cheats the female collective. The problem with this free riding behavior is that everyone faces the same incentives and there is not an effective punishment for cheating. The result: men get more sex and women can’t find mates.”

    Source date (UTC): 2011-11-04 20:39:00 UTC

  • Power: “The opportunity to alter the probability of outcomes”. Sovereignty: “Pow

    Power: “The opportunity to alter the probability of outcomes”.

    Sovereignty: “Power”

    Will to Power: “The Human Desire For Sovereignty”

    Given the diversity of individual ability, the diversity of individual knowledge, and the diversity of the social classes, all desire for sovereignty is constant, but the expression of it varies almost infinitely. Those at the bottom desiring sovereignty from constraints of scarcity and status deprivation, and those at the top desiring sovereignty of expression over that of their competitors for the ultimate in status attainment. Amidst this vast chaos of wills, the public intellectual attempts to define status – a re-distributor and appropriator of not just money, but status and power.

    Make no mistake. It’s all about money, status and power.

    Source date (UTC): 2011-10-13 11:51:00 UTC