LET MY PEOPLE GO!
If your government services are so good, then why do you need a monopoly?
Why would a government be afraid of competition? Why do governments demonstrate that they are afraid of competition?
Are you afraid someone would do better than you?
Let my people go.
Nullification, secession, insurrection, revolution, civil war.
It’s a five card deck of choices. Choose one.
Let my people go.
Let my people go.
Source date (UTC): 2013-12-31 12:11:00 UTC
ANTIQUE SOFTWARE – LETTING LICENSES LAPSE
We will let our licenses lapse next month.
We no longer need Atlassian’s Jira, Agile or Confluence. We will never need Microsoft’s CRM or Salesforce, or Sharepoint, or Dynamics PSA, or Exchange, or Changepoint, or FunctionPoint, or recruiting software, or even Outlook.
They’re ‘antiques’.
Remnants of a past era. The remaining artifacts of the 80’s.
We know the model that replaces Word. (Final Draft, Scrivener and Ulysses, and we know markdown and css replace RTF.)
We know the model that replaces Outlook (Oversing and Facebook).
We know the model that replaces standalone CRM packages.
We know that there isnt’ any value from an accounting system beyond what the high end of Sage Provides.
We can’t eliminate Excel yet, but we can best it in the next decade.
It will take us three versions to finish it all. And of course, we can blow it. But the model is done. Oversing’s the model.
Oversing’s the killer app for managing a business – no more looking in the rearview mirror.
“Everything in context”. 😉
I remember telling Stephen Elop over lunch that this revolution was coming and that the entire cultural model would have to change with the next generation…. while he stared at me over salad. (I told you he would be a disaster for Nokia. Microsoft internal success is a contrary indicator of competency, because it is so abnormal an organization – entirely insulated from the market and its effects by the network effect and the consequential rent seeking on windows investments.)
Everything in context. LOOKING FORWARD.
Source date (UTC): 2013-12-31 10:56:00 UTC
BERMUDA
Ostensibly Zero Taxes. Common Law Courts. Great infrastructure. Nice weather. Most of the Fortune 100 are there.
Source date (UTC): 2013-12-23 08:45:00 UTC
ADVOCACY IS INCOMPATIBLE WITH SCIENCE
Sorry. The state has created the problem of bad science like it has created almost all other ‘bads’ in our society.
Advocacy is the job of public intellectuals.
Facts are the job of scientists.
Skepticism is the job of citizens.
Judith Curry’s blog is fascinating to read – the moral hazard of scientific advocacy is inescapable, but there are a thousand regulatory prognostications a day, none of which will make any difference. People follow incentives. And advocacy makes for bad science. Books are the only advocacy that science appears to make possible. Papers are merely property claims on intellectual products. The are IP rights for ideas among scholars, scientists, and academics.
Advocacy is advertising for grant money.
Source date (UTC): 2013-12-23 08:43:00 UTC
INTERESTING DEVELOPMENT TEAM AND PROCESS
(cultural observations) (transparency into the process)
The standard dev model that we practice in Seattle, and in san francisco isn’t followed here in Kiev. It’s partly cultural, in that males here are ‘different’ in their trust, expectation, and collaboration methods. Its partly that most of the development here is support, web, and ‘do it cheap’ work. So no matter who you talk to, almost everyone sounds like a 1999 tech boom developer.
So, you can’t sort of hire people and expect them to have the full suite of product developer skills and habits.
Second, I’ve learned a lot over the years, partly at Microsoft, and that is to produce a feature complete product, and then refine it. The reason for this is that most product management and technology people in most organizations try to overly simplify the software. And I didn’t want that. The web only exacerbated this problem, and so did the apple and iPhone design ethic. Microsoft has taken it too far, in that they have thrown the kitchen sink into their products. But we are trying to develop something very special (the full impact of which will take another year of work to be visible). And I need a rich desktop level of application written for the web, with rich features.
I am perfectly happy throwing away code if I’m going to produce something better. And so I prefer low investment up front, and then to harden later. If you know what you want to build, and you’re clear abou tit, then you can work with high up front investment. But I can’t do that because we’re engaged in research and development, and so we must buy experimentation cheaply.
So, we sort of work like this:
1) I have this enormous list of features.
2) Starting from the foundation on the back end we have built from the back to the front, and are now building from the front user experience and modifying that back end.
3) I make a list of features we need to work on, make the drawings, fill out an excel spreadsheet, and work with Denis on the general design. It is very loose. If there are any strategic questions we round-table them and get everyone’s interest and criticism.
4) Denis implements the user interface, improves the design and finds all the holes in it. Then we debate back and forth. I want a rich desktop interface that i can sell. Denis is always trying to minimize the information density and produce something reasonably clean.
5) Vitalii refines the UI and makes al the complex JS work.
6) Kirill integrates the back end, because he basically ‘owns’ the core engines: Organizational Dimension System, Workflow, Messaging, Currencies, and the Database.
7) Heavy lifting (stuff that has to be ‘right’) and performance is done by Alex.
8) Then I do the testing and bug reporting.
9) Then they all divvy up the bugs and changes I put through and do the work at their discretion.
It took a while but it’s a pretty good workflow. It’s not anything like ‘feature teams’ that I’ve generally used. It’s totally organic. And it works.
But, since we are done with the R&D phase, and have our model figured out, soon I’ll have to basically double or more, the size of the staff, and harden the application rather than conduct R&D. And that means more than doubling the burn rate.
I’d originally planned to spend all of my own money, but the government’s latest torture of me has changed that, and I’m going to pull in some early money.
Given that I expect no less than 10x, I’m pretty sure that’s an easy raise.
(Thanks for listening. Apparently people like this ‘working in public’ thing, like watching pre-industrial silversmiths, cobblers, and potters constructing their wares in open shops. I wish more people did this. It promotes honesty. And we all can learn from each other.)
Curt
Source date (UTC): 2013-12-17 05:34:00 UTC
WHY THE GOVERNMENT ‘DOESN’T WORK’
(cross posted for future reference)
FACTS
0) The government doesn’t work because it was designed for extended, related families with similar interests, not an empire over those lacking similar interests – particularly interests in reproductive structure (family structure), where the absolute nuclear family of the English is eugenic, and the traditional and inbred family is dysgenic. There is no possible means of reconciling these differences in strategies and their corresponding moral codes.
1) Democracy (Majority Rule) is a monopolistic form of government, not a pluralistic, or competitive. Given any diversity of opinion, there is no means for both sides to win. Unlike the market, where all participants can win.
2) Democratic voting can only solve a problem of selecting priorities among a body with similar interests. Democracy cannot be used to select between opposing interests. As such democracy, as was intended, is a means for a homogenous people to select priorities, peacefully rotate power, and suppress dissenters.
4) The american experiment, was an attempt to create an aristocracy of everyone – or at least everyone who ran a small business or more (a farm). It was a commercial entrepreneur’s dream. This strategy worked for a long time, because immigrants desired land, and would leave traditional family structures behind, come to the states, adopt the nuclear family out of necessity as well as cultural norm, and
5) The Northern european high trust absolute nuclear family model cannot survive in a heterogeneous polity. It never could. We did a pretty good job with the massive post civil war to great depression era of immigration, by using a large, conquered continent, and forcible indoctrination in to the culture. But we reversed that necessity of conformity within two generations. And by 1963, the combination of racial tensions, feminism, the new proletarians joining the work force, the postwar soldiers in little pink houses, and temporary peak in earning potential by proletarians because of the collapse of the world economy during the wars.
Our culture, as predicted at the time, did not survive that immigration and attack on our institutions. It was an interesting period in human history. But a unique social model of the North Sea People (british) and a unique period in time (collapse of european civilization) did not create a new norm. Just a short period where everything was in our favor.
6) Family structure and origin determine morals and political preference. The more inbred a polity (the more outbred the families in it) the more homogenous it is. The more inbred the families are and the less outbred the polity is, the more demand for state intervention to compensate for moral and ethical differences.
The problem we have today, is that very soon the majority of americans will come from diverse, single parent families. And the majority of wealthy americans will come from homogenous, two parent families. And, as you can see in the voting pattern, what’s happening, is that white married voters are objecting to rents to support single voters.
I don’t see this changing any time soon. And this diversity of moral and financial interests is too diverse to tolerate. It may be possible to use totalitarianism to destroy the family entirely, but we can measure the impact of that at present, and no society can tolerate it.
CLOSING
I don’t know which way this future will fall,. But I do know that it is not possible, purely on incentives, for the high trust high performance society to exist without the nuclear family. We are riding on our history now, but that history will be spent within the next generation.
– Post Script –
One not so subtle point.
Voluntary associations only occur where trust is high because of a homogeneity of values (interests). Civic voluntary associations of any scale only occur where the population is outbred and relies on nuclear families. Wherever diversity is present, demand for government rapidly increases due to irresolvable conflicts between interests, and irresolvable conflicts between implied allocations of property rights between the individual, family and commons.
So, while it is true to say, as you have (and do often and well) that Voluntary Associations are superior to bureaucratic associations. Or, as the Ancap’s argue, that consumer associations functioning as competing insurance agencies, are superior to bureaucratic associations. One can argue that incommensurability of values in a heterogeneous population can only be solved by bureaucratic tyranny. And in fact, on commensurability alone (the ability to resolve conflict rationally) it is hard to defeat this argument.
As such, it is not sufficient to state that voluntary associations are preferable to the bureaucracy. Or that consumer associations (insurance agencies) are preferable to the bureaucracy. Unless we first grasp that heterogeneity forces bureaucracy, and homogeneity encourages if not forces, voluntary association.
This is of course, contrary to libertarian doctrine. But then, libertarian doctrine in this matter is rational, and not empirical. And empirically, libertarian doctrine is false.
Diversity is possible under private monarchies because no one has access to power. This is perhaps the often lost genius of the Manorial system: without access to power, groups must compete in the market for goods and services for their signals, rather than compete in the government for rents.
So recommending voluntary associations without first recommending the homogeneous normative environment necessary for voluntary associations is either misleading, self destructive or error.
Source date (UTC): 2013-12-15 12:55:00 UTC
BRAND POSITIONING
I’ve settled on the brand positioning for Oversing. And I’m excited about it.
Now, as some of you know, I wanted Oversing to serve the Enterprise market. We designed it for the large international business with multiple offices, and time zones, and management models. That means, multi-location, multi-language, multi-currency, with organizational structures, ACL security, and complex workflow.
As we built our previous 100M tech and internet agency, we acquired smaller firms.
If your product starts out in the market able to satisfy the needs of the enterprise, you can, remove or turn off features and satisfy the medium business market, and of course the small business market.
But the reality is, we built Oversing for the Enterprise. And so we’re going to address the enterprise market. We will configure a smaller version that does not allow multiple currencies, or multiple locations, and this product will serve the SMB and individual market.
Source date (UTC): 2013-12-13 04:44:00 UTC
THE HBD MOVEMENT ATTRIBUTES TOO MUCH TO GENETICS
I agree that genetics play an enormous role in the biases of the polity. I disagree that we cannot create institutions that redirect those differences to mutually beneficial ends.
What I disagree with, is that any system of property rights is severable from the reproductive strategy of the people in the population.
Furthermore, I, unfortunately, agree with the eugenicists: redistribution so that the lower classes can outbreed the upper classes has no support in logic, morality, or history.
We can pay them not to have children. But we cannot pay them to have children.
THat’s what we do wrong.
One child per couple who requires benefits, with loss of benefits, and imprisonment, for breaking it, is the only moral solution to the problem of reproduction by those whose reproduction decreases the ability of the middle and upper classes to reproduce.
Source date (UTC): 2013-12-12 13:37:00 UTC
INSURER: FAMILIES vs UNIONS vs INSURERS vs PARTIES
(sketch of a thought)
Declining guarantee of return:
1) Family (pay limited mutual support)
2) Insurer (Pay premiums)
3) Union (Pay dues)
4) Party (Pay donations)
Source date (UTC): 2013-12-08 15:31:00 UTC
YES, ITS GENETIC TOO, BUT THAT DOESN’T HELP US WITH INSTITUTIONS – JUST THE DESIRABILITY OF INSTITUTIONAL MODELS FOR DIFFERENT GROUPS.
1)I don’t think that the genetic argument needs to be terribly complicated.
(a) impulsivity is not a complex trait (gives time to consider)
(b) activation is not a complex trait. (desire to obtain stimuli through action)
(c) familial empathy is not a complex trait.(consider others as well as self)
(d) intelligence IS a complex trait, but it can be more easily expressed with lower impulsivity and higher activation.
2) liberty is uncommon and largely undesirable.
The evidence is mounting that liberty is a north-sea-peoples trait. That in objective terms it is an aristocratic philosophy, intolerable to the masses.
3) institutions should be genetically tolerant.
The problem with democracy is that it is a MONOPOLY and as such it is a means of conquest of others by whatever majority exists. The virtue of the market is that it allows us all to get what we want one way or the other, and virtually assures it, as long as it is done in cooperation with others.
Monopoly is bad everywhere, But everywhere it is created by the state.
Federations that use the ‘government’ as a market for exchanges, and where the only monopoly that must exist, is private property rights, BETWEEN groups, is all that is necessary.
Source date (UTC): 2013-12-08 07:01:00 UTC