Curt Doolittle

Theme: AI

  • OVERSING UPDATE : AMAZING PROGRESS You know, there hasn’t been a significant inn

    OVERSING UPDATE : AMAZING PROGRESS

    You know, there hasn’t been a significant innovation in the means of using technology to operate a business in almost twenty years.

    And, I’m not claiming to have invented the shoemaker’s elves or anything. And it’s the combination of small advancements together that makes the difference.

    And it took a year to get the UI right. And it’s right. It just FEELS right.

    Yes, oversing is complicated. It’s an ERP scale piece of software. Yes, you can use it for a small company, and yes, even as an individual it will help you significantly run queues of work, jobs and work orders, Agile and Kanban projects, WBS projects and our ‘mixed model’ of agile and WBS. Yes, you can do all those things. And you can even mix them together.

    Yes, resourcing uses our funnel-model, so you can schedule out in the future and refine as you move closer to delivery.

    yes, you aren’t treated as a dollar per hour piece of meat by oversing either. We track six or seven basic measures, including likability.

    Those are all positives.

    But you can also run your accounting periods, payroll periods, sales process, recruiting, career development, strategic initiatives. You can MANAGE your business with full transparency.

    And it’s not this trivial little list-making nonsense you get from products like salesforce. And unlike Microsoft Dynamics, it completely hides the accounting functions. Unlike Jira/Greenhopper, underneath, first and foremost, it’s a financial package that lets you see your financial performance into the future.

    THERE IS NOTHING ON THE MARKET LIKE THIS PRODUCT.

    OVERSING IS A CATEGORY KILLER.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-12-12 14:58:00 UTC

  • A RESPONSE TO GARY NORTH’S POSITION ON BITCOINS (I’ll leave it to the reader to

    http://www.garynorth.com/public/11828.cfmDISAGREEMENT: A RESPONSE TO GARY NORTH’S POSITION ON BITCOINS

    (I’ll leave it to the reader to suggest which one of us makes a better argument.)

    I agree bit-coins aren’t money (a commodity). Nor are they are fiduciary media (redeemable). But they do qualify as a money substitute as either token money, or shares of a stock that is highly liquid (non-redeemable tokens).

    1) GREY MARKET TOKEN MONEY

    The very worst I can see, is that Bitcoins or some equivalent will evolve into a grey market money for grey market goods. This has already begun to occur.

    2) LOW TRUST TRANSACTION MONEY

    Their value is lower costs and protecting your credit card information. It lowers the consumer’s perception of risk.

    Bitcoins eliminate the problem of recurring charges from online transactions and subscriptions.

    3) LOW FEE HIGH RISK TRANSACTION MONEY

    As soon as someone creates an escrow service for more expensive grey market transactions, that will succeed.

    As such it is an exceptional currency for elites.

    4) A MONEY SUBSTITUTE FOR LOW CONSUMER VALUE TO MONEY BROKERS

    Bitcoins eliminate the problem of needing a ‘bank’ that can identify you by abstract means. In other words, it is an exceptional currency for the margins of society, just as credit cards are an exceptional currency for the upper quintiles, debit cards for the lower middle, and cash is for the lowest.

    BUSINESS MODELS

    I have proposed a number of business models where the transaction costs are low, but lower transaction costs are meaningful (retail). The grey market.

    I think it is unwise to be fooled by the environmental legitimacy of the enduring credit system that is used to manage human beings.

    So at this point I think I might take the issue up with North directly. Because while I agree with his position on MMT as permanently inflationary, I think he is confused by the term ‘money’ when it comes to Bitcoin, and while he is CORRECT that the price of Bitcoins are speculative for INVESTORS in Bitcoins, he is incorrect that the price of Bitcoins are intolerable for CONSUMERS of Bitcoins when they are used as a means of clearance.

    Once Bitcoins have burst a few times, the speculation will drop as it has with other speculative commodities, and because of low volume, volatility should continue. But holding Bitcoins for ten minutes while you make a purchase on your credit card, then use the Bitcoins for an online purchase is not going to impede the transactions. My self, I’d love to see a credit card service for doing just that, instantaneously charging my card, transferring the funds to someone else via bitcoins, or at least just resolving exchange between parties via bitcoins.

    THEY ARE’T MONEY – BUT THEN LITTLE *IS*

    Bitcoins are NOT MONEY. They are speculative shares of stock in a custom stock exchange, whose advocates seek those shares to be universally owned, and therefore usable as a money substitute.

    Fact is we don’t know if it can work or not because this particular attempt at creating a money substitute has not been tried as a pre-purchase good, and similar efforts have been previously limited to evolutions on the wire transfer system – which is high cost and omnidirectional. I am arguing that like pornography built the Internet, the grey market will build Bitcoin or some equivalent.

    And I think that it is very hard to argue against those facts simply because one is confused by the marketing use of the term ‘money’, and failing to see this particular media as non-redeemable token-money, or highly commoditized shares of stock.

    CLASS OF MONEY SERVES DIFFERENT CLASSES OF SOCIETY

    Something I found very obvious when we built software for check cashing services. Classes serve each other. They use the same money. But in different forms. With different transaction costs. Cash has a VERY HIGH transaction cost to the lower classes. It is easily stolen. It is nearly impossible to secure. And I suggested, for example, a payroll service in Bitcoin that would bypass the check cashing services, and therefore the need for the lower classes to have bank accounts. This eliminates the need for low income areas serving low income people, cash that can be stolen in robberies. It eliminates bank fees on checks, debit cards. It eliminates clearing times on funds.

    In fact, on a moral basis, I’d push Bitcoins as a public service for the poor on that basis alone. Where the WEAKNESS of Bitcoin as a non-redeemable good is a benefit precisely because it is NOT redeemable: it helps transform cash into abstract property that cannot be easily stolen, as we have transformed MOST assets into abstract property that cannot be stolen, and which is one of the reasons for the decline in crime: you can’t steal what’s hard to steal.

    ON THESE BASIS ALONE

    I do not see Bitcoin fulfilling the libertarian fantasy of an alternative to fiat currency or hard currency at any particular point in the future. However, the low transaction costs of these goods for markets currently NOT served by the banking system, (or tolerated by regulation) is, as we have seen with online pornography and drug purchases, sufficient to drive demand for this product.

    But iff and only iff the user interface problem can be sufficiently solved to serve as I’ve stated above.

    CONTRA AUSTRIANISM

    I do not let my consensus with the Austrian trade cycle, and the Austrian recognition of opportunity costs, or my distaste for (hatred of) the immoral socialist, totalitarian state, interfere with my analytical reasoning.

    We should not defend the ‘brand’ money, by reducing it to as an ideological term subject to sanctity and reverence. And we should not fail to understand the multitude of uses for the multitudes of mediums of exchange.

    If you want to argue that Bitcoins are not money. That’s well and good. Because as a store of value they are as weak as a fiduciary media, without the benefit of being redeemable. They are in a speculative phase right now like any stock that is issued and has low volume. They are likely to crash.

    So if you are an investor in Bitcoin, then you may or may not succeed. I’m betting that people are not buying low and selling at the highs on the way up and taking advantage of the lack of transaction costs. We can’t do that with stocks because of high transaction costs. We can manipulate Bitcoin prices more easily for this reason. But investors will be ruined in waves, and that’s fine.

    That has no bearing on the short term use of BTC. It only has bearing on its use as a store of value over longer periods of volatility. And even that volatility will be eliminated by more extensive use.

    The grey market is sufficient incentive for BTC success.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-12-02 02:41:00 UTC

  • The Contributions Of Computer Scientists To The Reformation In Libertarian And Conservative Political Thought.

      When I went to Mises for the Austrian Scholars Conference the first time, I was struck dumb; first, by the incredible genius of the economic calculation argument, second by hoppe’s solution to the problem of institutions… But then equally by the failure to see that that BOTH Hayek and Mises were very close but wrong; the failure to grasp the importance of Popper’s contribution; the failure to grasp that no, the calculation issue was not ‘complete’. I realized something was wrong with Rothbard fairly quickly. It took me a few years to understand what Mises had done wrong with Praxeology, and only recently how to solve it completely. Hoppe was right about just about everything, but still had both Rothbard’s and Mises’ errors. But even so, he’d managed to get it all right anyway. Which, to me, is an even greater statement of his brilliance. Although, I’m still frustrated by his fascination with Argumentation. But it is this emphasis on experience and morality and preference instead of calculation that is everyone’s distraction. ( A topic that needs some reflection and exposition. And so I’ll return to it.) COMPUTER SCIENTISTS AND REFORMATION So strange. You know, there is this strange anti-computer-science bias in academia. But since the majority of intellectual revolution has come out of Mencius’ application of Austrian thought to conservatism, and my application of Austrian thought to libertarianism, while political science is fascinated by democracy, philosophy still squandering in the artifice of metaphysical pseudo-rationality, and mainstream economics is fascinated by growth and efficiency, and the left (literature) with obscurantism, pseudo-science, equality, diversity, and central control. And since, computer science is the only discipline that intersects between theoretical constructs and human interaction directly, I kind of think that, empirically speaking, computer science has more right than math, and certainly more right than economics. And political science and social science don’t even register signal above noise. Economics is a process of deduction from aggregation. Computer science is atomistic by its nature. It’s not deduction. It’s calculation. And therein lies an amazing difference in perception. We do not HAVE the economic data to tell us about human behavior at the level of atomicity we do with computers that interact with people on a daily basis. This teaches you about the hubris we must avoid when interacting with human beings. Math is platonic. Economics is idealistic. Computer science understands ‘ignorance, bias, incentives, and the limits of calculation’. Which is probably why we solved the political problem and the other groups didn’t.

  • The Contributions Of Computer Scientists To The Reformation In Libertarian And Conservative Political Thought.

      When I went to Mises for the Austrian Scholars Conference the first time, I was struck dumb; first, by the incredible genius of the economic calculation argument, second by hoppe’s solution to the problem of institutions… But then equally by the failure to see that that BOTH Hayek and Mises were very close but wrong; the failure to grasp the importance of Popper’s contribution; the failure to grasp that no, the calculation issue was not ‘complete’. I realized something was wrong with Rothbard fairly quickly. It took me a few years to understand what Mises had done wrong with Praxeology, and only recently how to solve it completely. Hoppe was right about just about everything, but still had both Rothbard’s and Mises’ errors. But even so, he’d managed to get it all right anyway. Which, to me, is an even greater statement of his brilliance. Although, I’m still frustrated by his fascination with Argumentation. But it is this emphasis on experience and morality and preference instead of calculation that is everyone’s distraction. ( A topic that needs some reflection and exposition. And so I’ll return to it.) COMPUTER SCIENTISTS AND REFORMATION So strange. You know, there is this strange anti-computer-science bias in academia. But since the majority of intellectual revolution has come out of Mencius’ application of Austrian thought to conservatism, and my application of Austrian thought to libertarianism, while political science is fascinated by democracy, philosophy still squandering in the artifice of metaphysical pseudo-rationality, and mainstream economics is fascinated by growth and efficiency, and the left (literature) with obscurantism, pseudo-science, equality, diversity, and central control. And since, computer science is the only discipline that intersects between theoretical constructs and human interaction directly, I kind of think that, empirically speaking, computer science has more right than math, and certainly more right than economics. And political science and social science don’t even register signal above noise. Economics is a process of deduction from aggregation. Computer science is atomistic by its nature. It’s not deduction. It’s calculation. And therein lies an amazing difference in perception. We do not HAVE the economic data to tell us about human behavior at the level of atomicity we do with computers that interact with people on a daily basis. This teaches you about the hubris we must avoid when interacting with human beings. Math is platonic. Economics is idealistic. Computer science understands ‘ignorance, bias, incentives, and the limits of calculation’. Which is probably why we solved the political problem and the other groups didn’t.

  • HEALTHCARE SOFTWARE DISASTER IN THE BILLIONS “The department has been unable to

    http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/nhs-pulls-the-plug-on-its-11bn-it-system-2330906.htmlUK HEALTHCARE SOFTWARE DISASTER IN THE BILLIONS

    “The department has been unable to demonstrate what benefits have been delivered from the £2.7bn spent on the project so far,” Margaret Hodge, chair of the PAC, said. “It should now urgently review whether it is worth continuing with the remaining elements of the care-records system. The £4.3bn which the department expects to spend might be better used to buy systems that are proven to work, that are good value for money and which deliver demonstrable benefits to the NHS.” A further £4.4bn was expected to be spent on other areas of the vast IT project.

    The nine-year-old NHS computer project – the biggest civilian IT scheme ever attempted – has been in disarray since it missed its first deadlines in 2007. The project has been beset by changing specifications, technical challenges and clashes with suppliers, which has left it years behind schedule and way over cost.

    Accenture, the largest contractor involved, walked out on contracts worth £2bn in 2006, writing off hundreds of millions of pounds in the process. Months earlier, the US supplier IDX, contracted to provide software in and around London, had also withdrawn from the project, making a $450m (£275m) provision against future losses from the two contracts.

    — LIST OF UK GOVERNMENT IT DISASTERS —

    IT disasters…

    E-Borders (Cancelled June 2011)

    The scheme was originally created to check passenger details against UK police immigration watch lists. The Government tore up supplier Raytheon’s £742m contract on the e-Borders immigration programme in July last year, after delays led the Home Office committee to say it had “no confidence”in the company.

    Department Home Office

    Cost £118m

    ID Cards (Cancelled in January 2011)

    Ministers claimed ID cards would help in the fight against illegal immigration and terrorism by storing details of all UK citizens on a centralised database. The scheme proved unpopular and was scrapped in January this year.

    Department Home Office

    Cost £257m (Source: Home Office)

    Electoral register database (Cancelled in July 2011)

    Plans to create an expensive database of electors were abandoned by the Government last month. The Co-ordinated Online Record of Electors (Core) was legislated for in 2006 and intended to make it easier for political parties to verify the legitimacy of their donors.

    Department Ministry of Justice

    Cost The database, which would have been administered by a new independent public body, would have cost an estimated £11.4m.

    Firecontrol (Cancelled in December 2010)

    Firecontrol aimed to replace 46 fire control centres in England with nine regional sites. The project was scrapped in December 2010 after suffering a series of delays, increased costs and an inadequate IT contract, according to a select committee report.

    Department Communities and Local Government

    Cost £469m (Source: National Audit Office)

    Scope 2 (Cancelled July 2009)

    The project was designed to allow the secure sharing of sensitive intelligence data between relevant departments in government and officials abroad. It was cancelled after reports of technological problems and escalating costs.

    Department Cabinet Office

    Cost £24.4m (Source: Cabinet Office)

    Story of a sick system

    October 2002 The Department for Health launches the NHS National Programme for IT, in a bid to create an electronic care record for patients in England and connect 30,000 general practitioners to 300 hospitals.

    2006 Accenture, the largest contractor, walks out on contracts worth £2bn, writing off hundreds of millions of pounds in the process. Months earlier, the US software supplier, IDX, also quit the project.

    2007 The Government misses its first deadlines as a report by the King’s Fund criticises the Government’s “apparent reluctance to audit and evaluate the programme”.

    2008 A report to the Enfield Primary Care Trust reveals difficulties with the system the previous year saw 63 patients of the Barnet and Chase Farm Hospitals NHS trust have their operations delayed because of missing data. The trust previously found the system had failed to flag up possible child-abuse victims.

    2009 An earlier Public Accounts Committee report notes that the project has provided “little clinical functionality… to date”.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-30 03:08:00 UTC

  • THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF COMPUTER SCIENTISTS TO THE REFORMATION IN LIBERTARIAN AND C

    THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF COMPUTER SCIENTISTS TO THE REFORMATION IN LIBERTARIAN AND CONSERVATIVE POLITICAL THOUGHT.

    When I went to Mises for the Austrian Scholars Conference the first time, I was struck dumb; first, by the incredible genius of the economic calculation argument, second by hoppe’s solution to the problem of institutions… But then equally by the failure to see that that BOTH Hayek and Mises were very close but wrong; the failure to grasp the importance of Popper’s contribution; the failure to grasp that no, the calculation issue was not ‘complete’.

    I realized something was wrong with Rothbard fairly quickly. It took me a few years to understand what Mises had done wrong with Praxeology, and only recently how to solve it completely. Hoppe was right about just about everything, but still had both Rothbard’s and Mises’ errors. But even so, he’d managed to get it all right anyway. Which, to me, is an even greater statement of his brilliance. Although, I’m still frustrated by his fascination with Argumentation.

    But it is this emphasis on experience and morality and preference instead of calculation that is everyone’s distraction. ( A topic that needs some reflection and exposition. And so I’ll return to it.)

    COMPUTER SCIENTISTS AND REFORMATION

    So strange. You know, there is this strange anti-computer-science bias in academia. But since the majority of intellectual revolution has come out of Mencius’ application of Austrian thought to conservatism, and my application of Austrian thought to libertarianism, while political science is fascinated by democracy, philosophy still squandering in the artifice of metaphysical pseudo-rationality, and mainstream economics is fascinated by growth and efficiency, and the left (literature) with obscurantism, pseudo-science, equality, diversity, and central control.

    And since, computer science is the only discipline that intersects between theoretical constructs and human interaction directly, I kind of think that, empirically speaking, computer science has more right than math, and certainly more right than economics. And political science and social science don’t even register signal above noise.

    Economics is a process of deduction from aggregation. Computer science is atomistic by its nature. It’s not deduction. It’s calculation. And therein lies an amazing difference in perception. We do not HAVE the economic data to tell us about human behavior at the level of atomicity we do with computers that interact with people on a daily basis. This teaches you about the hubris we must avoid when interacting with human beings.

    Math is platonic. Economics is idealistic. Computer science understands ‘ignorance, bias, incentives, and the limits of calculation’. Which is probably why we solved the political problem and the other groups didn’t.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-22 09:33:00 UTC

  • OVERSING UPDATE (revised) DONE : Main UI / Login / Authentication Registration M

    OVERSING UPDATE (revised)

    DONE :

    Main UI / Login / Authentication

    Registration

    Multi-currency (everywhere)

    Multi-language and Translation (everything)

    Permissions (ACL)

    Chron System

    Organizational Design and publishing

    Workflow engine and designer.

    Logging and history service

    Notification System

    Users (employees)

    Peer 360 System (likability)

    Roles/Pricing/Rate System

    Skill System (with weights, and value-to-business-weights)

    Skill Search System

    Disciplines

    Customers

    Contacts

    Net Promoter Score System

    Contracts/terms

    Allocations

    Projects

    Project Accounts

    Project Management UI

    Task UI

    Work Object System (WBS, Agile, Kanban, Jobs, Tickets, Sales, Revenue, Career and Recruiting projects )

    Agile Boards, searching and tagging and planning.

    Agile State Management

    Gantt Panel

    Resourcing Panels

    Delivery Management UI (cross organization resource management)

    ON DECK

    Ideas

    Requirements

    Briefs (Jobs)

    Test Cases

    Project Templates

    Estimating Game (triangulation and poker)

    Estimate approval system

    Time, Calendar, ‘Market’ System

    Timesheet approval system

    Expenses and Adjustments

    NEXT

    Rule System (rules to apply to outputs)

    Calendaring System / Accounting periods

    Billing (charging the client’s account)

    –Note: we separate the record of work (charging the project) actually done by the employee from what is billed the client (charging the client’s account) to make leakage visible.–

    Posting: (Oversing is a Journal/Ledger system after all)

    Invoicing: allocating, authorizing and printing invoices.

    Receipt/Payment/Reconciliation: reconciling payments, and apply.

    Export (to financial package)

    Import (from financial package and apply)

    API (integrate with financial package)

    CLOSING

    My Work

    Transparency System (must wait till last)

    Dashboards

    Reports (Profitability, utilization, charge-ability)

    Licensing System

    Upgrade/Update System

    Skinning UI (tuning it again)

    Help Text

    German and French Translations (Russian and English)

    Performance Optimization

    ADDITIONAL MODULES (2014 Q2)

    Career Management (positions, salary levels, MBO’s, reviews,budget etc) + Morale Events,

    Recruiting Management (estimating, planning,sourcing etc)

    Sales Management (budgeting, targeting, working, pitching, etc)

    Commission Management (extremely awesome!)

    Media Planning

    Lead Generation

    Status Reporting System.

    “Who Supports Me” System (integrator reference)

    Exchange, Gmail, Active Directory Integration

    Document Server (more sophisticated storage)

    Federation (multi site roll up)

    EXTENDING OUR OFFERING

    SAS Infrastructure and Offering.

    Inventory and Products System.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-21 18:14:00 UTC

  • (Feeling guilty about not writing more) My company’s product has really needed m

    (Feeling guilty about not writing more)

    My company’s product has really needed my attention for the past six months – and it’s paid off. We have made more progress on the software since July than we had in the previous six months. It’s exceeded my expectations considerably. Although I’ve doubled my expected investment too, because I understand we have a category killer on our hands.

    But my writing suffered. And while in the few months of 2013 I’d made incredible progress, and while I’ve managed to solve a few core theoretical problems over the summer, I haven’t put the additional chapters to paper.

    But, you know, I’ve been thinking about the PFS Interim Meeting in London and the talk I want to give, and not surprisingly, I realized once again, that every six months that go by, I can distill the arguments further, into increasingly clear and compact statements.

    So maybe that isn’t such a bad thing. 🙂

    Good. My guilt is assuaged for the evening. Now, do I have permission to do something mindless now? lol

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-19 15:43:00 UTC

  • GOOGLE IS THE MOST SOCIALLY IMPORTANT COMPANY IN THE WORLD Yep. The next ‘singul

    GOOGLE IS THE MOST SOCIALLY IMPORTANT COMPANY IN THE WORLD

    Yep. The next ‘singularity’ doesn’t have to come from machines. It can come from the gradual elimination of fringe (irrational), false (contrafactual) or loaded (metaphysically biased) ideas.

    I could not have accomplished what I have in the past ten years without the internet. It would have been impossible.

    I just believe, strongly, that postmodernism on one end, islam on the other, with Buddhism somewhere in the middle, will defeat reason just as religion has defeated reason so frequently in the past.

    The only way to defeat religions is to aggressively advance science faster than dysfunctional religions can react to it.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-08 09:55:00 UTC

  • SPREAD OF TECHNOLOGY AND INSTITUTIONAL KNOWLEDGE IS NOT JUST CAUSING UNEMPLOYMEN

    http://bloom.bg/1bGSoKjTHE SPREAD OF TECHNOLOGY AND INSTITUTIONAL KNOWLEDGE IS NOT JUST CAUSING UNEMPLOYMENT FOR PARKING LOT ATTENDANTS – BUT FOR LAWYERS TOO.

    We can never have the 50’s again. We’re in the new normal. Immigration is BAD for this reason.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-23 09:02:00 UTC