Curt Doolittle

Theme: Incentives

  • Well, of course you can be wealthier if you don’t pay the costs of holding a mon

    Well, of course you can be wealthier if you don’t pay the costs of holding a monopoly on a territory. Free riding is profitable.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-04 06:14:00 UTC

  • Anyone want to buy a Kiev nightclub with me? (Cheap) One of the best? I can’t ju

    Anyone want to buy a Kiev nightclub with me? (Cheap)

    One of the best? I can’t justify it because I can’t give it that much attention. Best management, best property available. Right in the center. $20-25k buy in. I don’t need to remind you of the various benefits. :).

    I really want to do it but not alone. I’ll do 50k but not the rest. This would leave us with lots of working capital and runway.

    I wouldn’t do it myself if it wasn’t a good idea.

    Cheers.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-03 05:17:00 UTC

  • GAMIFYING THE WORKPLACE : OVERSING BRINGS UNIVERSAL STANDING TO THE ENTERPRISE O

    GAMIFYING THE WORKPLACE : OVERSING BRINGS UNIVERSAL STANDING TO THE ENTERPRISE

    Oversing has many uses, and many features, and tries to help the user get work completed, but overall, the idea is to treat your business as a series of weekly (or longer) ‘sprints’, in an effort to teach you to understand your predictive (or non predictive) ability, and therefore posses a more ‘true’ vision of your business, the staff, and yourself.

    And yes, by organizing your company as a dynamic set of projects, it is possible to reorganize your company more easily and constantly, in response to strategic ambitions and market demands. Bureaucracies calcify around rent seeking, but project based organizations cannot so calcify. Like market entities they can perish easily if no longer needed.

    But, Oversing is at its core, a bit of libertarian social engineering: it provides an information system that increases transparency, and decreases if not eliminates the need for (expensive) middle management. Now this saves money. Sure. And it crushes office politics. Sure. But it also empowers the individual employee to speak the truth. And by speaking the truth, build trust. And by building trust build a workplace that better serves employees, customers, management, owners and investors.

    Universal standing in law means that all citizens can take up lawsuits on behalf of any other, or any commons (say, pollution). And he pays the consequences of losing, or enjoys the benefit of winning. The same is true for the workplace. We have found that transparency matters both directions. Management has to be willing to tell employees ideas are stupid and unprofitable, or simply economically impossible. But again this builds trust.

    And yes, there are businesses where trust may be impossible. I just can’t think of any. Or at least, none that are legal.

    It will not take us the three years we had thought to finish Oversing’s core feature set. If we go to market this March as we anticipate, we will be able to get most of the now-known features finished this coming year.

    The most extensive of these is career building – which oversing is uniquely designed for – again, to eliminate management bias. We just cannot get it done this spring. We are six months past our ‘financial’ target date already. Adding products – or at least, product sales, to the product is not challenging. We just cannot get it done this release either. And our CRM functionality (Sales scripting) is somewhat limited, because honestly, I find that kind of work offensive – I hate spam sales and I prefer marketing. We can import and export to accounting systems but I am not confident that we can get the accounting api done before summer if not fall.

    We will have to evolved the features for all of the business processes – but we will have created an application platform that solves the needs of the entire white collar enterprise – front to back.

    And brought liberty and universal standing to the workplace.

    And that is really, really, cool.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-01 03:59:00 UTC

  • FACE CONTOL Interesting half hour conversation with the guys who do the face con

    FACE CONTOL

    Interesting half hour conversation with the guys who do the face control at the clubs here. And it is what you would expect: just about all the girls but only guys with money, and nobody with a hint of color.

    Reason? Only the girls matter. And the Girl’s only want to see money.

    Damn.

    Men are irrelevant. 🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2014-11-30 13:43:00 UTC

  • Dear Budding Entrepreneurs: Smart people have a disease: they are lazy. They thi

    Dear Budding Entrepreneurs:

    Smart people have a disease: they are lazy. They think too much. And they gather too little information. If you’re thinking rather than researching you’re just lazy, not smart. The same is true of Rationalism versus Empiricism: if you’re thinking rather than researching, then you’re just lazy (and not very bright).

    Smart people exhaust all possible knowledge until the answers all come back the same. Talk to people. Get information. Look at details. As advice. Analyze competitors.

    Smart people don’t plan so much as have clear goals, do lots of research, and seize opportunities. And why to some people fail to do this even if they think they’re smart? Because despite the fact that other humans are the source of knowledge and you need to seek to understand others, to empathize with them, and to work with them – and it’s something you’re simply avoiding.

    If you think you’re smart and efficient – you probably aren’t either of them. You’re avoiding work and avoiding social interaction. And the primary reason you avoid social interaction is fear that your bubble will be burst.

    Advantages are found in unpredictable outliers.

    A plan is a bubble to be burst. A goal is merely the end point obtained by seizing identified opportunities.

    Business plans are sh_t. The ultimate business plan? Find customers. Sell them what they need.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-11-30 09:11:00 UTC

  • Tilting Against The Market’s Use of Available Information

    Guest Post by Michael Phillip

    [A]ll the efficient market hypothesis (EMH) says is that markets use all available information. Which does not sound like much until one works through the implications. One of which is, as William Easterly states, economists correctly predicted that they could not correctly predict. In Cochrane’s words:

    “It’s fun to say we didn’t see the crisis coming, but the central empirical prediction of the efficient markets hypothesis is precisely that nobody can tell where markets are going – neither benevolent government bureaucrats, nor crafty hedge-fund managers, nor ivory-tower academics. This is probably the best-tested proposition in all the social sciences. Krugman knows this, so all he can do is huff and puff about his dislike for a theory whose central prediction is that nobody can be a reliable soothsayer.” – John Cochrane

  • Tilting Against The Market’s Use of Available Information

    Guest Post by Michael Phillip

    [A]ll the efficient market hypothesis (EMH) says is that markets use all available information. Which does not sound like much until one works through the implications. One of which is, as William Easterly states, economists correctly predicted that they could not correctly predict. In Cochrane’s words:

    “It’s fun to say we didn’t see the crisis coming, but the central empirical prediction of the efficient markets hypothesis is precisely that nobody can tell where markets are going – neither benevolent government bureaucrats, nor crafty hedge-fund managers, nor ivory-tower academics. This is probably the best-tested proposition in all the social sciences. Krugman knows this, so all he can do is huff and puff about his dislike for a theory whose central prediction is that nobody can be a reliable soothsayer.” – John Cochrane

  • Racism Is Curable: By Eliminating Demand for It

    RACISM AND REVERSE RACISM: OR PERHAPS IT’S TRIVIALLY SIMPLE AND SUCH DISCUSSION IS DISHONEST

    In response to Matt Zwolinski : http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2014/11/on-reverse-racism-three-thought-experiments/

    [F]acts:

    1) The distribution of physical desirability for mating, the demonstrated behaviors of impulsivity and time preference, aggression, and demonstrated intelligence vary between individuals. (true)
    2) The social classes are organized by these distributions due to reproductive desirability, status utility, and cooperative (economic) utility. (true)
    3) The races demonstrate different relative distributions of these classes. (true)
    4) Racial groups demonstrate kin selection in mating, neighborhoods, friendship, social organizations, and business organizations. (true).
    5) The norms demonstrated by racial groups reflect behavior at the mean (true). This means lower trust, less intelligent groups must compete against norms in groups with higher trust and higher intelligent groups. (true). It also means that the group that holds dominant political power, and biases toward their norms, determines the economic velocity of the entire polity (true).
    6) Racial groups demonstrate kin selection in voting (true).
    7) INABILITY to use the state for rents and privileges limits political competition and conflict, whereas ABILITY to use the state for rents and privileges increases political competition and conflict. (true)
    8) Economic Wealth reduces dependence upon kin for mutual insurance under kin selection. (true). Economic stress increases dependence upon kin for mutual insurance via kin selection. (true)
    9) The difference between economic, political, social, reproductive and status success of one race or another is due to the distribution of superior talents versus inferior liabilities of the members of those races – plus normative factors, the most important of which is in-group trust, and the second is the degree of the suppression of free riding. (true)
    10) As such the only reason for racism is the rates of reproduction between the classes. And the only possible means of achieving equality in any and all cases is to suppress the reproduction of the lower classes of the races whose distribution is bottom weighted.
    11) It is non-rational to treat unknown individuals who are visually indistinguishable by other than the properties of their peer groups. (true) (which is what people do). One cannot both demand rational action, defend Praxeology, and deny this statement.
    12) Equality is achievable and desirable in just four generations. But it is upward reproductive redistribution that must mach downward economic redistribution for equality to be possible. If china can do this so can the rest of the world.

    Otherwise, it is non-rational for people with higher reproductive desirability, lower impulsivity, lower aggression, and higher intelligence to tolerate political competition from those who are less desirable and in the net, parasitic, just as it is politically preferable to compete via parasitism if one is less desirable at the bottom.

    Human beings are not unique and precious snowflakes. It is only that disregard for life is a moral hazard. The fact that mothers MUST believe their dysgenic offspring are precious is an evolutionary convenience, not a demonstrable fact.

    The purpose of science is quite often to force us to acknowledge uncomfortable truths. Equality is not a problem of belief (lying), but one of fact (truth).

    Try not to lie.

    It hurts the discipline of philosophy. It hurts mankind.


  • CRITICIZING PUBLIC SPEAKER’S DEMANDS (cross posted for archival purposes) So and

    CRITICIZING PUBLIC SPEAKER’S DEMANDS

    (cross posted for archival purposes)

    So and so speaker, actress, musician, diva etc, demands these things from his/her hosts.

    You know, this stuff is pretty normal – its not demanding. When you come to talk somewhere they ASK YOU what you want for intelligent reasons. You write it into the agreement. For me I want apples, pears, bananas, coca cola, Evian. No local bottled water please. Coke is safe world-round, grapes contain allergens that set off my asthma, and other fruits are too challenging to be sure are safe. If I can’t eat local-anything, I can survive on Evian, fruit and coca cola for a few days – especially if I can find granola bars.

    If you haven’t lived your life in planes, airports, taxis and hotels over many time zones – and done so for extended periods, then you don’t really grasp how important it is to have ‘anchors’ – things that are familiar. I stay in five star hotels for an extra two or three hundred dollars a night. I fly business class. And I eat very carefully. Because otherwise I can’t PERFORM my function when people pay a LOT for you to perform your function. (and get really angry if you can’t.)

    Now if you’re just an average joe that doesn’t matter. But when people pay you real money for your time, and when their time is precious, the RISK of non-performance is a serious issue for everyone involved. So rooms that are away from elevators (noise) above a certain floor (noise) without the hindi-family next door (noise), where you can count on the heat, air-conditioning, and cleanliness (disease). Where fans, prostitutes, scam artists, paparazzi, thieves, and whatever are trying to put you on the defensive or get your scarce, tired, attention.

    So it’s not self appreciation that these things are meant to serve, but SELF PRESERVATION.

    Only privileged […insert derogatory….] who live life in a western-bubble fail to grasp this kind of thing.

    Anchors matter.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-11-29 05:35:00 UTC

  • Um … The Market Is A Computer.

    —“When I was in high school, I thought we should put the robots in charge. … Then I realized the market is a computer.”—
    Eli Harman