Curt Doolittle

Theme: Productivity

  • LEFT VS RIGHT WING ECONOMICS? NOPE. There are no ‘wings’ to economics. We can ar

    LEFT VS RIGHT WING ECONOMICS? NOPE.

    There are no ‘wings’ to economics.

    We can argue good economics or bad economics. Using economics, one can advocate left, redistributive, dysgenic policies, or right concentrating, and eugenic policies.

    But economics is just a science. It is a science of inconstant relations. But it is still a science.

    Left and right are preferences. Economists demonstrate that they advocate a pretty normal distribution of policy biases.

    Science doesn’t have preferences.

    People do.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-19 13:55:00 UTC

  • LABOR IS MEANINGLESS – CONSUMERS ARE NOT Obvious but interesting, is that marxis

    LABOR IS MEANINGLESS – CONSUMERS ARE NOT

    Obvious but interesting, is that marxist labor theory of value, and even their supposed social value of ‘labor’ are both in fact valueless and non-logical. But the presence of a ‘consumer’ is not.

    It’s not that business value labor. It’s that business and capitalists need CUSTOMERS in order to organize production.

    The challenge in expanding any economy, and in the satisfaction of consumer wants, is not production – it is voluntarily organization production for the satisfaction of demonstrated consumer wants.

    Money supplies us with information that represents the accumulated savings of time, created by the division of knowledge and labor.

    I know this is pretty obvious (and incomplete as an argument) but I still am amazed at how the marxist zombie simply continues to walk the face of the earth.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-19 08:49:00 UTC

  • CONSEQUENCES OF COMPETITION ON PRICE, CREDIT, AND SIGNAL If we compete on price,

    CONSEQUENCES OF COMPETITION ON PRICE, CREDIT, AND SIGNAL

    If we compete on price, then the person with the greatest access to credit will use that credit to drive competitors out of the market and then recapture the losses with gains in market share.

    The only solution to financial competition is aesthetic competition (signaling) which inverts the value of price.

    Most goods today are sold on aesthetics or signals not price, because the marginal difference in the utility of goods is near zero.

    This presents high cultures with a material economic problem because it is all well and good to move people out of the farm, then out of physical labor, and into their own proprietary spaces. But after that, you are stuck with all competition for consumers and their spending limited to little more than signaling.

    And the luxury and signaling goods that people seek once material signaling is exhausted, are free time, and rents.

    That’s the death spiral of the consumer society.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-04 09:22:00 UTC

  • I don’t know what Arnold Kling is doing these days. How would data look differen

    I don’t know what Arnold Kling is doing these days.

    How would data look differently to economists if all accounting software, everywhere, reported sales data from A to B, whenever it was posted, to an independent database using a (large) generic chart of accounts, so that we could measure PSST at that level, rather than the macro level?

    Policy is enacted upon what can be measured.

    I suspect that we would just see even more intervention. On the other hand, the impact of all the intervention would be more visible. And that our counter -arguments would be much better.

    household data is nonsense. Macro data is all but useless. PSST is actionable.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-02 11:04:00 UTC

  • ANTIQUE SOFTWARE – LETTING LICENSES LAPSE We will let our licenses lapse next mo

    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

  • HAPPINESS, INCOME, AND TAXES Daniel Kahneman states that above $60k, happiness d

    HAPPINESS, INCOME, AND TAXES

    Daniel Kahneman states that above $60k, happiness does not increase with wealth. And that pretty much reflects the other observations that almost all spending above about 70K is signaling. That’s it. Bigger more expensive homes, bigger more expensive cars, personal rather than state investments, and access to more cushy work environments.

    Now, unlike foolish equalitarians, I understand that signaling is terribly necessary, because without it, we can’t really function. After all, wealth and signals are a test, and it turns out that given how hard they are to obtain, they’re a pretty good test.

    Recent analysis says that not 47%, but 70% Pay Zero Net Taxes. Once it s 80%, then the Pareto principle will be again proved as well. The economy will consist almost entirely of abstract property that is held by the 20% who know how to use it, and the 80% will provide little other than consumption, and status to the upper 20%. Who will then use the artifice of state the capture and protect their positions – like always.

    I don’t like this kind of world. 🙁 But that’s just how it is. I am not sure I understand a world without families, where the vast majority of the population is manorialized into white collar serf labor managed through laws, credit and taxes at threat of deprivation of consumption. I mean, how is that any better than agrarian serfdom other than we have fuller bellies and lonelier lives? Does that mean that serfdom is our necessary and desired state? What happens when all simple desires are easily sated?

    I think that such a society cannot compete with a paternalistic society, and strong families, whether they be absolute nuclear families or traditional. Families create calculability and aggregates destroy it. Just like prices. Without families we cannot calculate anything because no category exists in common other than the individual, and the individual is a meaningless category.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-12-31 06:54:00 UTC

  • ARE WEALTH

    http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2013/12/redistribute-wealth-no-redistribute.htmlSIGNALS ARE WEALTH

    Source date (UTC): 2013-12-30 14:34:00 UTC

  • The single political action that provides the greatest return for any people, is

    The single political action that provides the greatest return for any people, is to suppress the breeding of the unproductive and expand the breeding of the productive.

    The only answer that I can come up with is that while harsh cold climates facilitated this eugenic process, in modern era, we must simply pay unproductive people not to bear children, and punish them severely with the withdrawal of funds if they do.

    The institution of private property is a method of self defense. Then institutional cost of eugenic reproduction is again, simply a method of self defense.

    Unfortunately, due to the errors of christianity, the enlightenment, and the socialist state, we do precisely the opposite.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-12-27 03:09:00 UTC

  • INTERESTING DEVELOPMENT TEAM AND PROCESS (cultural observations) (transparency i

    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

  • MORAL CAPITAL, ECONOMICS, CONSUMPTION (a table)(insight) The Long Term – The Med

    MORAL CAPITAL, ECONOMICS, CONSUMPTION

    (a table)(insight)

    The Long Term – The Medium Term – The Short Term

    Conservatives…- Libertarians ……….- Progressives

    Moral Capital….- Productive Capital.- Consumption

    The Tribe……….- The Family…………- The Offspring

    Militia……………- Industry…………….- Services

    Law……………… – Trade……………….- Religion

    Force…………… – Remuneration……- Words (shame)

    Male……………..- Neutral……………..- Female

    Order……………- Wealth……………..- Care-taking

    Warrior………….- Merchant…………..- Mother

    THE INTER-TEMPORAL DIVISION OF LABOR

    We aren’t engaged in a dialectic, but a tri-alectic, between the production cycles of the tribe, the family, and the child.

    WE ARE A LOT CLOSER TO ANTS AND BEES THAN WE ADMIT.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-12-10 06:12:00 UTC