The "C" World

I've been thinking, as long time, or even one time, readers might assume I do, constantly, rendering this comma-laden opening sentence un-newsworthy; but let me get back to the follow on from that first ',': a lot about "C-students" recently.

But first I need to address an important point, people may assume this title to be a reference to the so-called "C-word" which is cunt, and I am a serious adult that may have grown up a short walk from numerous private schools, catholic schools and parklands and wetlands in Ballarat, but I got out enough to learn how to have "cunt" roll off my tongue without self-scandalizing at the appropriate age of however old kids are by grade-4 and I'm fucken proud of my Balifornian heritage and as such, need to make it clear that if you think I am alluding to cunts, you are mistaken, because if I'm alluding to a/some cunt(s), you will cunten-well know it.

And of course, my mid-90s heritage has no doubt turned off, via-ad-hominems some of the psychographic markets that would most benefit from hearing what I have to say from here out. But c'est-la-vie-cunts I guess. I am of course referring to the very common grading system in some primary schools and most prominently secondary schools the anglosphere over. "C" usually means a score of 50.

Now, a very safe way I could theoretically have introduced this concept is via the truistic heuristic:

"On average, people are average."

Which is to say, I may be above average in terms of something not very important like vocabulary, being someone who will eventually get the joke "eschew obscurantism" once it has been pointed out to me that it is meant to be a joke. And I'm probably now above average as-far as second language speakers of Japanese and Spanish are, but once you start adding "subjects" or fields of expertise, with the simple example of more languages like Mandarin, Cantonese, German, Italian, French, Greek, Vietnamese, Thai, Cambodian, Indonesian, Arabic, Pashtu, Finnish, Gaelic and Welsh etc. I conform to the global average - which is no ability at all to speak most languages.

 The significance of C-students, is based on two qualities:

1. It is the minimum grade with which one can pass, to be deemed "sufficiently knowledgeable" or "competent" to require no further investment in that student.
2. It is the grade at which the ambiguity of what a student actually knows is maximised, because they know roughly half of the subject.

I wish to now expand upon this second point. If you know someone is a D-student in a given subject, then we know that they mostly don't understand the subject. Likewise, with a B-student, we know that they mostly know the subject. More extreme, with F and A students, we can be even more confident that they don't and do know most of the subject respectively. With a C-student though, for any given aspect of that subject they may or may not know what they are talking about with roughly the same odds as flipping a coin.

There is no doubt, some logic to our education systems setting the threshold of competence at 50%. This logic may however, go all the way back to the industrial revolution. 

Furthermore, we should consider that in the context of education, there's a steady escalation of difficulty as kids progress K-12. Such that, a grade one student getting a C in maths (Australia, the commonwealth, cunts) may leave us guessing as to whether they can handle adding or subtracting, but a year 10 student getting a C in Math's methods leaves us guessing as to whether they struggle with locating asymptotes in quadratic equations or solving simultaneous equations (the latter, in my case, because of the bullshit 4 decimal answers that were supposedly "correct") but we can now safely assume that any and all students who've made it to year 10 maths methods, can handle adding, subtracting, multiplication and division by now, though they could still be fucking up BOMDAS/BODMAS (which if you are wondering, doing the division before the multiplication or vice versa is not the fuckup, forgetting either acronym is where they fuck up).

So it is now time to leave grade school as I did oh so long ago, in a place far away where the sensitive just had to flinch and cling to their "tuck shop" money when an exciting girl wearing Kappa pants on a bmx with poorly applied mascara and bleached hair with red-black regrowth asked if you were "a rich cunt" despite them having the $10 to spend on a pack of cigarettes from Poonie's milk-bar and $2.50 to spend on a 600ml bottle of coke that you wondered if they backwashed and wondered if they might abandon the last flat, luke-warm, saliva infused 50ml languishing in the 4 bevelled plastic nubs of the PET-adapted iconic rocket-ship bottle shape down by the tracks where a young man blushing uncontrollably as his limbic and endocrine system worked hard to confuse terror and arousal could somewhat one-sidedly experience the hygiene equivalent of kissing the terrifying and exciting girls from the other side of the tracks, because they were indeed "a rich cunt" and would never risk drinking the discarded dregs of coke because it most likely was discarded by a 50 year old man with a substance control problem where the substance was clearly not caffeine or sugar but some kind of amphetamine because they didn't finish their cokes.

Yes time to leave behind the good-old-days where girls didn't need tumblr memes or tik-tok influencers to convince them that doing their own "stick-and-poke" DIY underage tattoos were a good idea, and out into the real world. The fucken C-world.

The C-world

By which I mean it is simple. There are these shows I don't watch but have certainly heard about called "Dragon's Den" and "Shark Tank" where people present their ideas to wealthy investors hoping that some or all of the various sharks and dragons will invest in their idea to get their business off the ground or to the next level.

I propose a simple hypothetical exercise - have one of those arcade prize machine claws come down from the heavens, pick up the net worth of the sharks/dragons and have them deposit it on the Joe-nobodies that are pitching their business ideas of variable quality.

I predict two things will happen - the first is that more-than-zero of the contestants in suddenly becoming high-net-worth will discover they would not invest in their own ideas, and instead feel a sudden desire to talk to a financial planner about a diversified portfolio of stocks, bonds and real assets with a view to minimizing taxes. 

The second thing will be that the Sharks and Dragons, suddenly devoid of any capital to invest in a startup will have to pitch investment ideas to random millionaires and their ideas are likely to be as rejectable as the average contestant. 

Put simply, the pitching and catching relationship goes in the direction of people with no money to people with lots of money. The starting positions are unlikely to be based on meritocracy.

For the simplest example, just watch enough of Gordon Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares. Not necessarily ubiquitous, but a very common thread through abysmally failing restaurants is that the people who own the restaurant try to run the restaurant.

There is a management adage you will almost certainly hear if you spend at least 90 days learning about management:

"I hire smart people and get out of their way". Lee Iacocca.

You may remember Lee from Ford vs. Ferrari, the guy that interferes with the race finish for publicity so Christian Bale does not officially win Le Mans, the talented person Lee Iacocca helped hire.

This is the point of living in C-world. It is the reality we live in. Many people will be shocked to discover how untalented and downright mediocre many of the best compensated and most influential people in our society are. 

This phenomena that I challange ordinary working class people to go out and debunk, is largely due to the lack of social mobility - (for example, and the methodology may be somewhat dubious) we get headlines like "The Wealthy in Florence Today Are the Same Families as 600 Years Ago" and just think about it...

If you got rich, and had some kids, and some of them were complete pendejos or coños but you find yourself strangely attached to them despite your generational wealth, you might set them up with some bullshit business to ostensibly run as a hobby while consulting with an A-student of Accounting and Financial Planning to lock up ASSETS in a trust that can support them despite a COMPLETE ABSENCE OF BUSINESS ACCUMEN without them ever being able to sell off the very assets that generate the income that will support them and their stupid children and stupid grandchildren and finance their many divorces and unwillingness to pay child support for generations to come.

You'd do it. They have done it, for centuries.

The C-Curse Gets Worse: Nested Mediocrity and Subculture-Conformity

Something that I was slow on the uptake with, and hopefully it's not news to you, dear reader, was that our schooling system is I infer designed to test for conscientiousness and particularly industriousness, not intelligence. 

So I implore you not to get bogged down in C-student being limited to school grades I choose it because of the ambiguity of mediocrity. I'm going to invoke tertiary study now but I am not talking about grades and not just because RMIT continues to use A+ to DNS grades while Melbourne University uses an overwrought esoteric H1A, H2B grading system. 

I'm now talking about IQ, because by tertiary education specialization has begun in earnest. People do humanities, social sciences, hard sciences, technical disciplines and pure wank by University, and tend to further specialize by 2nd year after spending a year doing broad disciplinary subjects like Econ101, Acct101, Mktg101 etc.

IQ or "G" becomes more meaningful as a kind of predicter at how well a Law student might do understanding medicine vs a Medical student understanding law. It will likely be less predicted by their academic grades but by their relative IQs at that point.

I remember hearing roughly contemporary to my first time through University, some stat like the average Australian IQ was 107, but the average University students IQ was 127 or something, a whole standard deviation higher or there abouts (I am a C-student at probability). 

This I think in practice, is one of life's cruelties. Because tertiary education brings together a bunch of people who likely were king dick of their academic pool and puts them into a smaller pool where they are likely merely average or below.

Indeed, because our tertiary selection process favors superiority over excellence - superiority being relative and excellence being a threshold. It is very likely that for some people in some disciplines, they are merely mediocre in intelligence, but on campus, the dumbest people there.

Adding to the cruelty is what keeps me up at night, the Dunning-Kruger effect, which roughly states that if you are the dumbest person on campus, you are also less likely to notice you are the dumbest person on campus. 

Now it is time, finally, for this post to reject the null-hypothesis of Hitler's Law, a Law I coined which states:

"The longer one of tohm's blog-posts runs for, the probability he will invoke Lebron James approaches 1."

Lebron James is likely an NBA all-time great. I will concede that much. He is a fascinating case, because while he has tallied some impressive stat totals over his now 21 year professional career, including being by far the NBAs all time leader in turnovers with 5,459, he is among the all-time greats what I would call aggressively mediocre.

He is the athletic embodiment of Billy Conneley's joke:

"You know, I've been thinking about you a lot lately and you're a cunt. You've always been a cunt and in all likelihood you always will be a cunt. As a matter of fact, if they were giving a prize for World's Biggest Cunt, you'd probably come second."

"Second? Why wouldn't I come first?"

"Because you're a cunt." 

Truly, Lebron James is the Ford of NBA greats. His ability, in theory to play all 5 positions, means he isn't in any discussions like "who's the greatest point guard?" "who's the greatest shooter?" "who's the greatest center?" "who's the greatest rim-protector?" "who's the greatest shot-blocker?" etc.

He is theoretically in the GOAT debate, artificially restricted by a heavily invested NBA and NBA media, as though there is a contest between Lebron and Michael Jordan, an Orwellian position where 2+2=7 somehow. Yet Lebron has never been the best player in the NBA at any point of his long occassionally somewhat lustrous career. Early he was dominated by Kobe Bryant and Tim Duncan. His super team routed by Dirk Nowitzki's Also-ran all-stars of the previous generation, then eclipsed by the GSW dynasty of Steff Curry for his prime-late-prime years, before his deadweight stat-padding years on the Lakers saw Giannis then Jokic overtake him as greatest player in the world on their antithesis super-team no-help small market teams as Anthony Davis carried him on ice-skates uphill while killing coaches and smearing HOFer teammates Russel Westbrook, and the aforementioned AD,  soon to be Luca Doncic.

I think there's likely a real debate as to whether Lebron is better than Hakeem "the Dream" Olajuwon. Of which, Lebron probably loses, once you factor in the misfortune that Hakeem's career overlapped Michael Jordan's, and Hakeem is most likely the center I would compare to current best-in-the-world Nikola Jokic.

But this is the thing, by the time you are debating NBA players, let alone all-time-great NBA players, you are dealing with a level of nested mediocrity akin to the Guinness World Record holding most nesting of Babushka Dolls. 

The "White Mamba" Brian Scalabrine who averaged 3 points per game over his career famously said:

"I am closer to Lebron, than you are to me." ~ The White Mamba, producing a greater philosophical legacy than Lebron James in one sentence.

Which is to say, statistically speaking it is likely that the greatest athlete you ever personally know, was nowhere near good enough to go pro in any sport of sufficient popularity. 

(Again as a Balifornian, I have to make this qualifier, as I, the HS cross country captain of my small school was not in the top ten runners in my age group at the interschool competition. BHS by contrast had so many strong runners, that they did not even take the interschool comp seriously, playing on the playgrounds adjacent to the courses during the event and still beat me to a man. Their third strongest runner would go onto win an Olympic Gold Medal, because he realized he couldn't compete in long-distance running even at a state level and switched to walking. That school's prodigy, a freaky skeletal kid as far as I am aware, never made it to representing Australia nationally.) 

Another cruelty of life then, is that the field keeps getting spread as you pursue superiority such that all but the tiniest few, will forever be C-students, as Lebron James is, always has been, and ever will be, in the NBA hall of fame. He spends millions allegedly on his body every year, so that at age 40 he can stand blowing on his hands, or complaining to a ref as his team rushes back to play 4-on-5 defense. I cannot imagine what he spends per year to keep himself artificially in, and losing, the GOAT debate.

I believe this Nested mediocrity is called the Peter Principle and it's kind of a crueller form of natural selection, because at least with natural selection - you get put out of your misery. Whereas with nested mediocrity you live out your misery, and likely reproduce your children into that misery.

At which point, I need to then switch contexts from nested mediocrity to the adjacent concept that I'm sure works on the same fundamental mechanics - Subculture conformity.

So you work in hospitality or a call center or maybe you now hang out with other Ubereats/Door Dash/Deliveroo gig workers in front of a local McDonalds and shoot the shit as you await the opportunity to deliver takeaway to a C-student full time office worker, time poor and lazy because their only career strategy is based entirely on presenteeism. 

One of them, you find yourself respecting and admiring because of their unique self-expression. They don't dress like the rest of you, look at the same shit on their phones in downtime as the rest of you, they maybe even read an actual book. They are the most remarkable and unique person you know, and you feel somewhat privileged to have a friend like them, you consider it a perk of your shitty job.

Months pass and you both survive the natural attrition rates of your shitty jobs, and your unique colleague invites you somewhat sheepishly to their first-year art show. You go along, feeling self conscious wearing your seasonally-approved cut of jeans, cool conventional sneakers and clean graphic tee stepping onto an arts campus at night and walking into a show where...you discover everyone dresses, talks and acts like your friend.

No longer a unicorn literal they are just like all the other horses with the shift of context. Even the output of their distinct and unconventional mind is completely indistinguishable from the art exhibits of their peers.

Depending on where the art-scenes are in terms of the minimalist-maximalist cycle, they likely all look like this or this. Both examples taken from Exactitudes:

Started in 1994 in the streets of Rotterdam, this overarching and on-going project portrays individuals that share a set of defining visual characteristics that identifies them with specific social types. Be it Gabbers, Glamboths, Mohawks, Rockers or The Girls from Ipanema, Versluis and Uyttenbroek’s extremely acute eye allows them to discern specific dress codes, behaviours or attitudes that belong and characterise particular urban tribes or sub-cultures. Once they recognise an individual that fits the characteristics of a given group, they invite such person to be photographed at the studio with the only requirement of wearing the very exact same clothes s/he was wearing at the time they first encountered. ~ Taken from Exactitudes "About" page.

Exactitudes really use a methodology that isn't necessarily water-tight, to replicate the phenomena articulated in Monty Python's "Life of Brian"

Brian: "You're all individuals!"

Crowd (together): "Yes we are all individuals"

Individual: "I'm not..."

Crowd (together): "Shhhhh..."

While I don't have the direct experience myself, I imagine that this same manifestation of C-studentism, nested mediocrity, nested-normalization, is the constant bane of advertising firms. "We want to stand out so we came to you creatives. We want something like the gorilla-playing drums Cadbury ad." "Okay, well, you sell mostly goulash, how about we have two old hungarian ladies wrestling in goulash, weird, engaging, memorable." "Yeah wow! You guys really are creative, but we were thinking something more like a drummer in a gorilla suit playing the drums, like the Cadbury ad."

In which sense, subculture conformity mechanically is a movement away from the norm, but not too far from the norm. Hence the mediocrity drift of things like sleeve tattoos and neck tattoos. Whereas a unique individual wouldn't seek to move away from the norm, but from the population or sample.

It is also likely to be a manifestation of the Dunning-Kruger effect, in terms of self expression. If you want to be unique, it is very easy to not know how much there is to know about precedents of self expression. So people wind up not being unique, but conforming to a "unique" aesthetic, that changes constantly but has in the past two decades involved tramp stamps, fedoras, ugly sweaters, bicycle-frame glasses, bum-bags/fanny packs, 8 seasons of involuntarily writing material for Portlandia, griege attire, cultural appropriation from Japan, Korea and now Mexico.

It's hard to describe comprehensively, being fundamentally dynamic yet perennially tedious, in my own intellectual shorthand, I call it the "adolescent impulse" which is to say, adolescence was, for much of the 20th century post invention of the transistor radio, a period in which children migrated away from identifying with their family to awkwardly figuring out an individual identity. It likely manifested as going from adult-oriented to peer-oriented, hence kids start doing things like dressing, ostensibly, by their parents to dressing themselves.

If however they succeed at adolescence, they become adults, and here we get a perpetual push-pull, because the next class of adolescents need to differentiate themselves from adults like their parents and adults like you. Hence, the migration away from the norm becomes the new norm. 

The cachet of going to Japan loses its cachet and hence you have to find somewhere else to go to be interesting by looking to your peers, so you switch from Osaka to Oaxaca. Until that inevitably collapses.

Because the sad fact is, there will always be more people who want to be interesting, than are interesting. Most people, indeed the vast majority of people seem to be fundamentally unqualified to be interesting. Hell I don't know if I have the qualifications to be interesting, and the fact that you have read this far most likely means a person who is not very interesting is reading the writing of someone who is not very interesting.

Monkey-see-Monkey-do

This is my best guess at the fundamental principle underlying C-ciety. Blessedly but annoyingly, I've already written it up. But you don't have to go read a whole other blog post on my badly outdated html script. I'll do a brief recap.

It's basically this: I think about how easy it is for me a human of most likely average intelligence to trap a dog with intelligence comparable to a 3-6 year old child, in an inescapable situation. It's not just that unlike the velociraptor most dogs can't operate a door knob, it is the ease with which I can repeatadly trick a dog into entering the same inescapable room until I see fit to let them in or out.

Granted, Usma, my mexican terrier could easily get me up off my feet to slide open the metal mesh door onto our courtyard at will with the deployment of a simple scratch, often times I suspect, just to enjoy her power over me, to get me up and out of my chair, but hopefully you get my point.

Why then, don't the smartest people just obliterate people everyone not quite as smart and down, out of the gene pool. Why isn't the flynn effect more pronounced?

Likely there's multiple explanations, the ones at the limits of my limited imagination being - 

• the smartest people often foil eachother, rather than cooperate. cancelling out their mutual advantage.
• the smartest people are randomly distributed more-or-less throughout the population, whereas opportunity (power and influence) is hoarded by the wealthy. (we don't live in a meritocricy)
• survival of the kindest supersedes in social mammals, the selective benefits of intelligence, such that most intelligent people don't have any drive to destroy competitors for resources.
• The world is just too complicated for IQ or g to be a sustainable competitive advantage anyway because it only accounts for 20% of outcome.

But one I suspect is the big-one is "monkey-see-monkey-do" which is to say, when anyone figures anything out, most of the time, the solution is easily duplicated.

C-students everywhere, in every context just copy what the smart people are doing, so the half-life of advantage is incredibly small. Granted this can backfire:

And in terms of nested mediocrity, I myself mostly pass off other's opinions as my own, I just go further than the smartest person I know, to like books and public intellectuals like Chomsky and Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Kobe Bryant and Bill Russell.

In many ways, that's what learning is, hence most high school Physics graduates know more about physics than Isaac Newton did.

C-World In Practice

In terms of interesting opinions I've been passing off as my own, much of this post is inspired by Daniel Markovits interview with the Institute of Art and Ideas, I haven't even read his book.

This is where I'm taking monkey-see-monkey-do and applying the very useful dichotomy of "excellence" vs. "superiority" he elaborates on in the interview.

We live in a world based on superiority. This is in many ways the allegory of the bear, which may be an actual biblical allegory but I'm referring to the guy who hearing the bear's roar, puts his running shoes on and his companion asks him "you think you can outrun a bear?" and the guy says "I don't have to outrun a bear, I just have to outrun you."

Superiority is relative, and as such it means you and I for example, cannot both be superior. Excellence is a threshold, it is absolute, furthermore it is dependent on producing a social good. One cannot be excellent at something that is bad.

What has me thinking about C-students lately, is business advice. See, I'm still processing the trauma of changing from casual employment to full-time. You might think that this revolves around having to get out of bed in the AM and commute during rush hour. My metabolic cycles adjusted relatively quickly.

No the skunked-trauma I am referring to, is that of going from underemployment to overemployment, both align only in the sense that one struggles to keep up good work. But when you are casual, you work hard, where in full time, often you have to work hard to get any work done at all, or work hard at finding enough work to do. So far I am succeeding, and a big part of the motivation is that my memory is fresh of what hard work feels like.

But when you take a lunch break knowing nobody is watching a clock to chase you down if you go more than two minutes over the collectively bargained break time allowance, you can feel kind of sad. A kind of ongoing survivors guilt that you have seen behind the curtain and know that a bunch of remarkably unproductive C-students (not singling out anyone in particular, and not necessarily excluding myself) collectively and systematically apply pressure to another group of C-students to be unreasonably productive, until they burn out, to be replaced.

This though, is just one aspect, the other prominent aspect of life behind the curtain that somewhat evokes trauma, is the almost random way in which one student can be receiving quite a large distribution of resources whereas others are stuck on the bread line. A lot of this, if not most of this, is the endurance of feudalism, why, while I suspect I'd find a bunch of problems with methodology, I would never be surprised to find generational wealth can persist for 600 years,

Most of the rags-to-riches-to-rags stories we might hear as we progress through life, are likely largely noise. Some social mobility is luck, some is crime, but most is economic growth. Unsustainable economic growth. 

As such, most of our economy is C-students transacting with other C-students, and this is WAY unappreciated. I need to write about overemployment, that I am thus far successfully avoiding, by mostly sheer luck, but yes, I need to for my own sanity.

The thing is, in practice, holding down a job is finding a context in which you are a B-student, and then creating value for C-students. I suspect this will be the defining trait of consulting firms that sell Lean Manufacturing, 6 Thinking Hats, Matrix management, The Paperless Office, E-commerce, Internet Advertising, Online recruitment ... Agile management, AR, VR, the Metaverse, Blockchain and now "AI" will boil down to. In the kingdom of the blind - the one eyed man is king etc.

I need to stress however, the pertinance of C-students, versus average IQ. IQ is context independent (largely it still has linguistic vs geometric components or whatever) A C-grade is context dependent. Such that, industries that tend to attract broad-context A students like Law and Medicine, will still be populated largely by C students when you come to the ever evolving consultancy products for sale - from Snake Oil panaceas to AI.

AI is interesting, because it's big theoretical selling point is productivity. Something easy to sell to C-students it appears. Why? because while at a C grade, what is known and unknown is at max ambiguity, reliably C-businesspeople in particular, are in a form of upbeat denial as to how great a problem overemployment already is.

I may as well commit here, that I think AI is a bubble. It tickles all my marketing senses as being a load of hot air. I would wager, if I knew how and had sufficient assets to go short, that the hype cycle will collapse not into reality but oblivion.

The whole thing seems like a super expensive way to reinvent Clippy. So you know unambiguously where I tentatively stand.

My suspicion is that most of the sales, such as they are, are as Ed Zitrow points out, made by people who fill their days writing and reading emails, and now there's a thing that can somewhat accurately summarize emails. 

The thing is, that those emails most likely function as a solution to the wicked problem of OVEREMPLOYMENT. Which is to say, exactly what was predicted by Keynes in his essay "On the Economic Opportunities of Our Grandchildren" minus the opportunities being realized, and the actual outcome as described by David Graeber in his essay "On Bullshit Jobs" which build's on Keynes' essay.

Namely, anyone in say Australia, presently holding down a full-time job, likely has a very expensive housing arrangement eating up most of their disposable income. They have big financial obligations that will eventually force them to lose their generational wealth, as housing and schooling become ever more expensive and late-in-life care will be financed by what wealth they do manage to accumulate.

Furthermore, the increase in asset prices like housing has been driven in Australia by increased private sector debt, not economic growth despite economies world-wide becoming enormously more productive, because that hasn't translated into real-wage growth.

Those opinions, based in sanguine fact, are taken from Gary Stevenson and Yanis Varoufakis. As such, every full time employee has a really strong incentive to merely survive, by never letting on that they are overemployed and as a result tremendously unproductive. 

Most offices, long before surveillance software, adapted means by which to use "activity" as a proxy for "productivity" you write emails so that when the boss walks passed, it looks like you are doing something, you have meetings because they kill time and people assume you are meeting to discuss something of import and consequence. This opinion I take from Cal Newport.

So what I'm describing as the wicked problem endemic to C-world or C-ciety, is that wages are linked to hours, not value (especially not value in terms of social goods) vestigia from the industrial revolution. Full time employees cannot drop their hours, without dropping their wages, something they literally cannot do because they have financial obligations based on their full-time wage. 

The real shit-kicker though, is that C-ciety spend so much time and effort - fucking eachother up. It's hard to be productive as a B-A-student, because C-students send you emails and schedule meetings. C-students are also trying to escape their terrible overemployment situation by aspiring to higher wages, and most of them resort to competing for those higher wages by increasing their activity over even more hours. Something that can seem justified because all their activity makes it so hard to get work done.

Then you wind up with all these C-managers, not to be confused with C-suite as in the "Chief something Officer" roles. I mean middle-managers, those too useful to fire, too useless to trust with real responsibility.

These are professional disruptors that make overemployment work. The people who make it almost impossible in many organizations to get any work done during 9-5. I am taking this opinion from a TED talk I can't be bothered to track down, but I believe it is backed up by some data, even if it is survey data.

Japan has famously, excelled since the 1980s at voluntary overtime. They also famously, have one of the world's least productive workforces, with going on 3+ decades of stagnation. Virtually untouchable stock index by value investors.

Peter Drucker admired much about Japanese business practices, but he ultimately could not recommend them, and though he did not put it in these terms, it's more-or-less because Japan puts all the C-students onto busy work, and render them wholly irrelevant. Even in the heydays of the Economic Miracle and the Bubble Years.

So why the fuck would you try to build autonomous software to increase the productivity of a mostly overemployed workforce? The problem isn't productivity, its pricing and has been for a long time.

Conclusion

The C-World is the antithesis of the conspiracy theory. It basically bets against intelligent design, it may well be the foundation of Hanlon's razor. It is the very distressing and uncomfortable idea that people like Australians can be incredibly wealthy, with some of the largest houses on earth and best quality of life, and largely have no idea what they are doing. 

It is the uncomfortable reality, that just because somebody pulls up to your office in a BMW, tailored suit, hair transplants and enamelled teeth, they may be completely insolvent and about to drag you with them into a financial black hole.

It is the disturbing notion that the internet set up an ant-mill particularly apt if you like me, stole opinions from Julia Galef, but stupidly, forget to pass them off as your own, where Soldiers incurously defend their territory, including intellectual ones, and now the blind simply follow the blind, because all the C-student monkeys use google to find C-student monkeys to teach them what they already think they know.

Like maybe you, who stumbled across my C-student worldview because you searched for Julia Galef, James Maynard Keynes, Gary Stevenson, Yanis Varoufakis, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Noam Chomsky, Billy Connelly or "cunts".

 

 

 

 

"Sell Me A Landlord" Reducks

 I have this idea that I want to turn into a thing, some thing, that I've been testing and refining for quite some time.

The idea is "Sell Me A Landlord" where I try to get someone to pitch to me, the valuable service of a landlord.

In my mind, this seems like a really simple exercise, so what has been the result of stress-testing it so far?

Most people I challenge to sell me a landlord, find the concept unintelligible. Like really smart people, cannot comprehend the idea. This is not to say that they do not have a crack at it, but inevitably they wind explaining to me why I want to buy instead of rent.

In current iterations I set it up like this:

• I have $2 million dollars in cash, so if I want I can buy a house.
• I am moving to a town where I have a ten-year employment contract, and I've got a family so we need a place to live.
• An alternative to buying a home to live in, is renting one.
• What are the advantages of having a landlord?

Now, I wouldn't ask of people anything I wouldn't do myself. I do think there are likely going to be scenarios where having a landlord is a service of value. For one, in a University town or area, where there's a population that only are going to live there for 3-4 years, they may drop out or transfer and signing some leases to sharehouse is preferable to buying and selling a house.

The other, is Aged-care facilities, where companies do literally sell the landlord as valuable service except I don't think anyone thinks of it that way, but aged-care facilities are often saying "come live in our house, we've got nurses, water aerobics instructors, arts and craft, carpet bowls, a gym we maintain, really great services so come live and pay rent here."

But you'll notice from my scenario, that I've eliminated those two scenarios. This is a presumably healthy and mobile person in the middle of their working part of their lifecycle.

For example, in my locale a specific service that advertises, and makes a case as to why I should consume their services are funeral homes:

A woman's touch. Also, tax accountants:

They don't miss a thing. Also, lawyers:

No challenge too great. Also, companies that actually build homes:

Why indeed live anywhere else? Also, companies that lend money to buy a home:

Yeah don't just ask your bank. But you never see ads for people saying "come live in my surplus housing, I'm a great landlord, here are all the wonderful services I provide..."

Even on facebook pages where sharehouses advertise rooms for rent to potential housemates, the posts tend to focus on amenities and maybe nearby features before listing a fuck-tonne of demands about shit a successful housemate will be expected to tolerate or refrain from. Then 60 to 120 people apply regardless because everyone is so desperate and it costs nothing to apply.

Why does it matter?

The point of the exercise is, that if you can't make a sales pitch for a landlord, then you can't justify landlords providing a valuable service or social good. 

Hilariously, everyone who I've challenged to this hypothetical scenario, has wound up, quite quickly trying to convince me to buy instead of let.

Most recently, I was presented with a very clever argument to point out that the difference between owning and renting on cash flow is so pronounced, that provided a tenant channels the savings into an investment (index fund, government bonds maybe even) then they are not at a loss compared to owning. He then countered this pitch (the landlord is assuming the investment risk for you) with the argument that most tenants don't invest the savings, they spend it, where a mortgage forces ordinary citizens to commit their income into what is essentially a forced savings scheme. This was very similar to what I have heard Scott Pape say.

But I cannot say that landlords are not a valuable service because of the intelligibility problems I have come across. It literally does not occur to Australian's that a landlord is a profession, and a service at that. I am more confident in saying that based on my experiences thus far, to most Australians a landlord is simply a fact of life, and landlord is not so much a job title, as a title like the "Laird" of established titles.

The overwhelming sentiment I get is that landlords generally dislike their tenants and tenants dislike their landlords. Almost like it is a dirty job that somebody has to do.

I live in a district where the Liberals (Australia's conservative major party) are campaigning hard, not with respect to the fact that they lost a long held safe seat of former PM and longest serving PM Robert Menzies to an Independent in the Teal wave because of long standing frustration and dissatisfaction and are now trying to show the constituents that they have listened and learned and want another chance. But by spending a lot of money and putting a kid up who is some descendent of a former Victorian premier, running an absurd scare campaign and hitting non-sensically vacuous talking points.

One of which is that they are going to address housing affordability. This is incongruous though with the central complaints of what I infer to be their prime voter-base, complaints about how high land tax is.

When I first heard these grumbles I got fucking curious, because this is something organizations I have been involved in have been lobbying for, for a long time, and I mean over a century. So I looked up the rates that are causing so much ire. 

Acknowledging that I am a weirdo, with beliefs on the fringe, I don't think a land tax rate comparable to our marginal income tax rates are outrageous. Particularly since I would be advocating that land tax replace income tax, so you cut taxes on wages, replace the lost revenue with land tax. 

But putting myself in the head of an ordinary, largely economically illeterate land owner, what kind of rate would I expect to be outrageous? something between 8-10% would get someone with a property portfolio clutching at pearls I reckon.

If you clicked through that link though, you would know that what has landlords up in arms, is a land-tax of 1%, and it more-or-less trebles to 3% or maybe 4% on your beach-house. The term used is "absentee owner surcharge" and I will plead ignorance as to whether this applies to properties let by the owner in the case of an "investment" property.

What has the landed gentry up in arms, really is actually the price of houses. Because a $30,000 tax bill sounds large to a peanut like me who doesn't own a $3M property. But this is less than a medium wage. If somebody sitting on a $3M assett can't afford to kind-of-pay for a part time civil servent, why does the tax burden fall on my wages and 10% of my goods and services consumption. $90K sounds like a big tax bill, until you realize that that is for a landlords spare $3M property that they use for 14 weekends a year during daylight savings time. They are only paying $50K on the $5M house they live in.

Housing is considered affordable when the cost of housing is less than 30% of your pay, I'm not sure if this is take home or net pay. Australia has pretty good salaries in general, but this is largely because our overvalued property prices have forced them up, like the casual wage is somewhere between $24.10 an hour, which compared to California's $16.50 USD is roughly on par with the world's 5th largest economy. (Australia is in the G20, not the G7) and many people earn more than the minimum. Australia also has "casual loading" which is intended to compensate for the lack of sick leave and annual leave under that employment arrangement. 

Holding those wages constant though, if the median house price was set to one where a 30 year mortgage at 6.5% interest was = to 30% of the median take home pay, I calculate that an affordable median house price being $447K.

In a country where the Australian median wage in an urban center like Melbourne could be used to purchase an affordable house and pay it off over 30 years would put the median house price at $447K and the land tax would be $5K. 

Now the thing being, that if a landlord is not in fact a service that anyone values then why the fuck does Australian tax policy in fact, encourage people to invest in housing, which is to say buy a business where they can provide the services of a landlord?

That's the relevance. I won't go into negative gearing, capital gains tax concessions and the fact that a landlord can break a lease contract to enable them to sell their investment asset at any time (with whatever the notice is that tenants have to get the fuck out and find somewhere else to live nearish their job and schools and whatever.)

That's the significance.

On Wide-Leg Jeans

 They Are Already Here

I started a new job, which resulted in offices in the CBD. I am once again, being chafed by a suit and this means I haven't quite figured out the logistics of riding into downtown, so I train. Walking through the CBD I am struck by the almost ubiquitous and instantaneous adoption of "wide-leg" jeans.

Part of me has been awaiting this for a long time. I am old enough to recall that australians called the "low-rise" jeans "hipsters." The look attributed to Alexander McQueen from a mid 90s show he did, but I feel more accurately should be attributed to Mariah Carey who cropped her own jeans for the film-clip for "heartbreaker" released in 1999, ready for the mousekateers of Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and whoever else to usher in a brief era of muffin topping and exposed arse cracks for Y2K fashion. 

Women's jeans would go high-rise again by 2008 but remained skinny, and by then hipsters had also arrived and the general post-Bush pretentiousness of the Obama years. Obama himself was not a style icon, but next to the indie-film "Napoleon Dynamite" the tone of his administration was the biggest influence that would prevail in urban centers until pretty much yesterday.

Like, I don't like skinny jeans and even less, I don't like the lack of variation we have seen. Terrible cuts like bell-bottoms and the carpenter jeans are fine because they will be gone in a season or two. But jeans have been stagnant, at least to my ability to perceive it, for a long time. 

So now, that the contouring jeans are finally and quite abruptly gone, how do I feel? Well, mixed.

What is already and always alarming, is the speed of adoption. I feel it safe to assert that Australian fashion, even that driven by the growing Asian fashion infleunce, is not set in the southern hemisphere. Whatever process lead to the adoption of the wide-leg jean in 2025 likely happened 6 months ago in the northern hemisphere and may have been battled out over their winter such that Australia just accepts the fait accompli literally the moment the seasons officially change.

I assume "wide leg" jean is a response to a more spontaneous and quiet revolution that was the workman's or carpenters jeans. A cut that probably looks fine when sandwiched between a tool belt and steel-toed workman's boots, but I feel looked objectively terrible on everyone I saw wearing them. The most notable and pronounced aspect of the look being how they fell away from the arse and proceeded toward the ground like two PVC pipes stood upright next to eachother. 

My best speculation was that they had been appropriated by women tired of the post-J-Lo-peak-Kardashian emphasis on having a big round ass. No more jeans that looked great if you had a shelf or a dumper, but also left nothing to the imagination if your arse was flat and the cheeks migrated down the back of your legs, something men with shapeless arses also likely suffer from too, to a much lesser extent. Much like the low-rise or "hipster" jeans of the 2000s, that which was adopted by women was eventually adopted by men. 

From this, the designer labels responded with "wide-leg" for the 2024-25 winter season, and they do at least, not look terrible like the fucking workmans jeans that it should be said, managed to flatter nobody while giving no suggestion of irony, just a white flag of surrender. I'm sure they are very comfortable. Something that struck me was that seemingly every label was on top of this, as a brief perusal of Levi's, Calvin Klein, Uniqlo, Guess and Ksubi were all on top of the "trend" with products ready to sell for the trending.

This coordination is what leaves me uncomfortable, like having to pass through the walking dead of retail, regardless of whether the style is an improvement or not. The simplest explanation is that "the industry" caused the trend, supply created demand. Now I'm sure there was some attenuated process whereby the industry has consultants that were called "cool hunters" back at the turn of the century and served as protagonists for William Gibson's "Pattern Recognition" book, also written up in Malcolm Gladwell's tipping point, where they go and see what cool kids somewhere organically innovate and then mass market it - like around the turn of the century how cool hunters determined "Valley girls" were appropriating the Cholo sandals and next thing you know Private school girls in rural Victoria are wearing adidas sandals despite to this day never having heard of Selina.

For me my reaction is straight up Xenophobia, the idea of buying jeans to fit-in does not compute. Yet people clearly live this way, rendering me a stranger in a strange land right at home.

How long does a laptop last? Mine is getting on 7 years old, but performance wise I suspect 4 years is a long time to hang onto a laptop. How long does a pair of jeans last me? In my case anywhere between 10 to 26 years. I don't really understand the mind that would buy a new pair of jeans every year. At most, I can understand people who wear their jeans a lot, and so are not going to get by on one pair, maybe buying a new pair every year to replace the oldest pair whose pockets are worn through by their house keys and the zipper increasingly catches or breaks and the hems are all scuffed and frayed and the crotch seem is going to break any day now.

In this sense, the stability of a more or less conventional straight leg, high crotch jean where "baggy" is what I would call regular and regular is what I would call "skinny" and "skinny" is what I would call stockings, has been great for that.

Because of the context and timing I was exposed to the not so much trend as pandemic of wide-leg jeans, my initial impression was "oh cool the 90s are back" as Calvin Klein are inaccurately marketing their cut. Very quickly my acute sensitivity though was "something is off" it wasn't quite the 90s.

Part of it, no doubt, is racism. The melbourne downtown, particularly the retail parts of it, are post-covid a Asian student ghetto. All of my experiences of Asia, is that when they appropriate and adapt western aesthetics, they never think to just ask. So we get weird and often wonderful mutations, like the Japanese putting chunks of potato on pizza which I'm sure was based on somebody misinterpreting a photo of a hawaiian pizza.

I'm impressed with my sensitivity though, because almost everyone was layered so I couldn't see any of the jeans above the thighs. The geometry was just off though that I could see it tapering out instead of scrunching. Yes, it is right not to call "wide leg" jeans "baggy jeans" because they are somewhere between baggy and bell bottoms. A facsimile of 90s jeans, I suspect seeking to address the inherent problems of low-rise or, for a purest like me - sagging.

Why now? Fixie Alpaca Lips

A quick check of another Blog almost as old as mine: Bike Snob NYC and certainly more successful than mine ever has been and ever will be, I found it unsearchable to find when his "pistadex" indicated the fixed gear bicycle bubble burst. I did find this post though that alluded to the "boom-bust" of fixed gears in the early 21st century in the past tense. So I take it as more or less confirmed that the fixed gear is dead.

In my heart I already knew it, as soon as I got back from Mexico and started riding my own again, I saw pretty much nobody riding a single-speed. Melbourne single-speed bicycle specialty shop "Just Ride It" has moved out of Fitzroy/Collingwood. I have locked my bike up to numerous hoops in Smith st in the past year, I've never returned to find a fixed gear next to it.

I don't know what has killed it, I am guessing a combination of e-bikes and Ubereats, Deliveroo, Door Dash etc. you know, basically the human face of growing wealth inequality world wide. My best guess is that this new economy of serfdom basically crowded the hipsters out of the bike lanes. And maybe, people just got sick of watching someone on an e-bike zip uphill as they destroyed their knees and ankles climbing a hill in their one inappropriate gear.

But here's the thing, I think the fixie was intimately linked to the enduring staying power of skinny jeans for over a decade. Skinny jeans and bicycles are complementary - the sales of one drives the sales of the other. 

I certainly manage to clear a top-tube in low crotch, but low crotch pants are not great for cycling. The big thing though is having the hem of your jeans chewed up by the bike chain and gear. Something that snugly cuffs your leg is desirable, and bicycles probably also drove the turned-up and rolled-up jeans trend.

With fixies gone though, and cycling something for the proles once again, I think this has allowed the space for the wide-leg, literally. E-scooters, and also EVs probably made a bunch of people finally shout Ya basta! at their winter bicycle commute to somewhere...and of course Covid killed the commute, so that certainly would have killed a lot of bicycles...

Anyway, this is all to say, that the industry has probably been itching for years to arbitrarily change "how they're wearing them" from skinny to baggy - just to increase sales, but couldn't because baggy wouldn't fly in a world where cycling was tre chic. But with people not cycling, at last, it is a dream come true. A style so different conformists have to buy it. Which would have been true of a style shift that involved turning the cuff up a bit, or a barely noticeable change in placement and number of distress tears.

Here at last is the psychological pressure to say "nobody is wearing jeans skinny anymore." Which is of course bunk. Women who look good in skinny jeans will have an attentional advantage over anyone wearing anything loose fitting. I mean, to spill the tea on the whole scam of fashion, I can testify that clothing cuts have never fooled me, I can tell who is attractive and who isn't whether you are wearing jeggings and a crop top or a moomoo and a hijab.

The main differentiation clothes maketh of the wearer is in telling me whether someone has a personality or not, first and foremost, and secondly what that personality might contain. It isn't as easy however, as just getting goth-vamp-rave gear and being "tada! interesting" because those looks to me are good indicators in the 21st century, of an absence of personality.

Anyway, let me head into more speculative territory...

Why now? Dad shoes?

A curious key weakness of a jean cut that bunches at the bottom, is that it deemphasizes shoes. The decline in popularity of fixed-gear bicycles is an objective fact. Survey the streets and their numbers are waaaaay down. The decline of the importance of footwear is a different story. Highly subjective.

Now again with my sensitivities, I noticed when I walk into Hype or Platypus franchises that sell sneakers and street shoes, that the color pallet is now in the Greige-range. Perhaps gone are the days of limited edition colour-ways, the chunky Dad-shoe NB sneaker reigns supreme, if it ever possibly can.

I basically missed this, and I feel no emptiness as a result. It's a stupid fucking fashion worn by idiots. What slapped me in the face like private boarding school genitals when I returned from Mexico to Australia, was that people were basically wearing cushions on their feet - most prominantly NB or HOKA, and I would still suggest that given our ageing population and the general disenfranchisement and disillusionment of the youth by an economy designed to transfer wealth from the young to the old to finance phase 1) lavish retirements and phase 2) expensive end-of-life care, the majority of the market are wearing dad shoes because they are dads and grandads.

That said, Asians seemed to wear designer dad shoes as some kind of rave-culture techwear, leading to a monochrome colour scheme that perhaps...perhaps paved the way to just obscure the whole thing with bell-bottomed jeans with a less severe, more graduated taper.

That speculation, being the least likely to be correct, is also to me the most interesting, because frankly so long as this cut persists - shoes don't matter. The only solution I can predict to keep consumption of both wide-leg jeans and footwear high, is a resurgance in high-tops, provided the correct way to wear the look, is to actually allow oversize clothing to bunch up at the ankle - which is how baggy jeans sit when sagging off the hips or cinched below the butt cheeks.

So let's wait and see if one trend drives another, or people save money on "statement" shoes for a little while.

Do Dunlop Volleys still exist?

On Love

Since dislocating my shoulders (which is a pertinent reminder to write a post called "rationalizing my own stupidity" and look, I've already derailed this post) and yes I mean "shoulders" plural or the technical term I learned "bilateral dislocation;" I have found the new habit of taking long evening walks. This will probably change now summer is behind us, but the seasonal transitions are not as well defined as our calendar.

I walk late at night, and I walk far. I most often listen to audiobooks, but as my concentration and attention continues to improve, I tend to lift heavier weights - attention-wise - by walking in serene silence.

The lateness allows me to see fauna I had never really observed because I did not hit Melbourne's interlaced trails at night for all the decades I've lived here. Maybe once or twice riding a bicycle home along an actual trail rather than the most direct grab-bag of streets between a gig-venue and my home, I would see a fox. But Melbourne's many parks, gardens and park-like spaces accommodate an abundance of foxes. There is also the majestic silent flight of owls. The dusk exodus of cockatoos and commute of bats are well known and well observed, as are possums who often leave testimony of their nocturnal life through the electrocuted corpses found beneath above ground powerlines around suburbia.

If I walk later, I see more foxes, owls, spiders in the middle of highly ambitious webs. If I leave earlier I see more dog walkers.

And every dog on a walk has a smile for me and I for them. Two evenings ago I came across a little buddy for whom I had to pull out my headphones to say hello. He was happy as a clam, wobbling and fumbling around on two extremely gimpy back legs with a kind of boundless oblivious energy that resembled a kid in a candy store.

As one does, I asked his owner "how old?" (En Mexico gentes preguntar "masculino o feminino?" de sus perritos.) and surprisingly he said "Three" and began to detail that they were 1.5 years into extensive rehab after spinal surgery, including hydrotherapy. 

This, is love. One can look at a situation like this like a cautionary tale of the reverse lottery of dog ownership. Most people cannot just let a puppy die, the reverse lottery of dog ownership is to buy a dog (and the designer dogs can be quite expensive, breeders earn their keep on a single litter of puppies and pay for their house with one mother's total legal output) get attached and then discover yourselves in for medical bills.

Love is the attachment to your dog, and the simple reality that for $10,000 you can keep your dog around a little longer with some quality of life, and for $2,500 you can buy another dog, that merely has the potential to become your second or nth dog, but you will have a your-dog sized scar in your heart for the rest of your life.

For me though, though it sucks, love is what money is for. Yes, this is a post, and I know this is poor form, about economics. 

Watch for example The Martian, where millions of dollars are spent to rescue Matt Damon from Mars, his crew who decide to resupply and form his rescue mission lose themselves a year of terrestrial living in order to risk a small window of opportunity to get Matt Damon back to Hollywood.

Think then, on all the other causes that money could be spent on, to save more human lives than Matt Damon. For a fraction of the cost food security could be given to populations suffering famine. Vaccines could be rolled out and diseases that kill children eliminated. A few thousand dollars could prevent hundreds of deaths from preventable mosquito born diseases. 

But I think, The Martian works as a movie because we are not accountants and actuaries. We intuitively calculate the symbolic value of rescuing a stranded solitary human being on an alien planet, and most people would I think concur that it is worth the spend to expand our human frontiers in this way.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb in one of his books points out that during the Lebanese civil war, where people were being killed daily in violent armed conflict, the popular imagination was captured by an Italian girl who got stuck down a well.

I heard an argument from Cam Murray that persuaded me, at least, that Australia's superannuation should be repealed as a scheme, and I do focus here on one relevant argument, which is exactly the situation where you get a letter from your Superfund that tells you you have $20,000 and a vet tell you you need $6,000 for surgery for your dog or it dies. So you of course let your dog die, because there's nothing in the scheme that says you can access your super in these circumstances, you'll just have to wait 45 years to enjoy that $20,000 with which you can finally commission a memorial statue...or something.

(Other arguments against Super are that it is funded out of wage-rises, as in employers fund the contributions instead of giving pay rises. It helps grow wealth inequality, and most people should they have super use it to just pay down their mortgage and retire etc. etc.)

At which point, we can expand love beyond the love felt between man and dog, one of the purest and longstanding loves, despite like all forms of love, there being its perversions and betrayels in the specific. But the same goes for our lovers, our children, our family, friends, extended family.

This is what money is for, and I've monitored the exchange rates. In Mexico I heard of a particularly moving story where a woman we knew had a son get into a motorcycle accident. The local hospital said he would die if he was not transported to a hospital that can help him. In a country like Australia, this can arise for the uninsured if they need to be helicoptered to a big-city hospital from a remote area, because despite universal health care this does not cover ambulance services, and the ambulances that fly can hit you with a bill in the $100,000s. Btw ambulance membership is like 50 smackeroos a year and covers any and all bills.

Where was I? Blessed Mexico. Yes, so...[ugh] in Australia you would get the helicopter anyway, then declare bankruptcy and maybe have to sell your house. In Mexico, there's a good chance the house won't cover the cost of the IC ambulance transportation, so you get presented with "pay or die." scenarios. This mother was able to secure a loan from an In-law for some collosal sum that would be in Australian terms the vicinity of $100k, to be paid back...somehow. For this was not an investment opportunity, and even if it were a high risk one because there was so much to still do to save the son's life.

He was transported, some amputations and organ removals were made, an induced coma and I'm happy to report that he pulled through and to my knowledge is still alive to this day. It is entirely possible that somebody wound up financially ruined by this act of love, but the decisions made reflect well on everyone involved bar the state of Mexico.

That's but one example of the exchange rate. Desperate non-solutions to that of preserving our time on this planet and our opportunities to be in the vicinity of love include what an elderly Kerry Packer paid his long time helicopter pilot for his kidney to buy him a few more months of life, botox, ozempic etc.

I've heard many boomers remark and assert of their age cohort in general that the richest of them would give it all to be (our) age again. This remark I'm sure only holds under the assumption that such a transaction would be miraculous. Should rejuvenating technologies actually exist, I'm sure competition would drive the prices down, such that we would discover that boomers would stop short of giving it all to be my age or younger, and instead settle for helping some guy with a machine enough money to pay off his sportscar finances, or some guy with a machine made in China enough money to pay his rent for one week.

But if the Faustian pact was available, everything to be 21 again, I kind of wish boomers would take it, to gain an appreciation of how much youth is depreciated by the generational apartheid on assets. How I would love to see how an influx of 21 year olds entering the job market, who may know a lot more about financing a company and paying minimal income taxes, fare with their degrees from the 70s and early 80s held by a quarter of them, and their inability to type with ten digits over two, and their grasp of OSs, coding etc. hold up in an ultra-competitive job-market, especially when the devil now controls the majority of Capital.

I feel only the exceptionally successful boomers would have a chance. The rest, having a second wind of youth with which to truly experience the pleasures of meth, jenkem and bath salts.

And this brings me to the severity of the exchange rate, which is the how little respect we give for those who will fork over a fortune of money, literally the tokens of debt owed to them for work they have suffered through, for the love of puppy, or spouse, or child, or brother or sister. 

This is, one of the first and last good points Brett Weinstein made: We have to look at the fate of benevolent firms.

We live in a world where many successful businesses' true competitive edge is a disregard for laws and regulations. They get around minimum wages by having workers work twice the hours they are paid for and so on. 

The problem with the true price of love, are the people waiting, ready and willing to swoop in and take your house. 

In this sense I am somewhat sympathetic to former worlds-richest-man and oil magnate Paul Getty, though I know him mostly through the onscreen depiction from "All the Money in the World" where when his grandson and namesake was kidnapped, first by people he had instigated in his own scheme, and eventually by the Calabrian Mafia, he declined to pay the ransom - out of consideration of the safety of all his other numerous grandchildren. He eventually paid an agreed sum equal to the maximum he could claim in taxes or on insurance or something. It was sizeable but relative to his wealth miserly, and his grandson's physical and mental health by then was irreversibly damaged.

But we really have no protection for people who choose for their own sake and for the extended, integrated network of loved ones, to choose love over money. There's no backstop where people can go bankrupt but for their assets their generational wealth, which even while being quite modest, under growing wealth inequality must be defended at all costs.

Now people waste exorbitant amounts of money all the time at the top end of town, forget about surgeries for sickly dogs. First class flights? The price point difference between a 9am flight from Melb to Sydney on Jetstar in roughly 5 weeks from today is $122 (with baggage allowance) to $1,094 for a Qantas business class flight same time same day. There just isn't the utility to be extracted from Business class in a roughly 3 hour flight. Sure there is then the lounge memberships, early boarding etc. and many wealthy people use charter flights in private jets. 

Now the incremental utility grows with frequency of travel. It is fair enough that someone who has to fly for work a hundred times a year, be put in the peak comfort available. I'm also assuming that businesses get tax concessions for travel expenses like this, while keeping the financial assets like frequent flyer points becoming effectively public business infrastructure.

But there's also the car collecting, the country and town houses, the beach houses etc. and all the associated upkeep, the race horse part ownership etc. But can these low-utility excesses a) keep an even keel between people sacrificing all for love and b) be called a form of love of their own?

“I say that homosexuality is not just a form of sex, it's a form of love, and it deserves our respect for that reason.” — Christopher Hitchens.

Is love of limited run super and hyper cars a form of love that deserves our respect? If so, only in proportion. Certainly far less than the love of lovers, should be afforded to a love of things. With all but the most handcrafted by dead artisans, things, unlike your dog can be replaced by an identical thing. Whether new for old (like a new Lotus) or old for old (like a restored DeLorean). 

Bringing me to a question that I have had an uncomfortable amount of time to ponder, for which I will have to establish a little context.

My oldest friend, chronologically, killed himself which is statistically, one of the most likely ways for a man to die, so I am by no means alone in having such a thing disrupt my life and sense of place in the universe nor even unusual. What was of tremendous consolation to me, was how I had interacted with my friend while he was alive. The Hitchens phrase above is one that he oft repeated, having gone to the effort of crafting it, but I draw it from his memoir Hitch-22 as my most recent hearing of it. In the same audiobook there was packaged an interview with the author, contemporary to publication of his audiobook, where he was asked "why now" and he remarked that many of his friends had paid him the compliment of suggesting it was too soon, and that he had much good work ahead of him. But Hitchens pointed out that one doesn't get to experience the advent of it being "too late" to write an autobiography on account of being dead.

In the same sense, whatever my friend's state of mind was when he ended his own life, somewhere in the biological building blocks of that mind was the certain knowledge that I loved him, that I had said what needed saying before it was too late. This is because, while certainly the worst loss I'd experienced in my life, it was not the first. 

And here is the crux: I have observed people who live there lives, largely as habit (and I would too, were I secured enough) remarking about how a death can "put things in perspective" and I have no doubt they are experiencing the dizzying reorientation of how before the news they'd been consumed with some trivial task they were required to do at work. 

What I generally observe though, is that for many the grieving process is merely a disruption to the habitual life. What most appear to do (and this may be an illusion of the alienating nature of grief) is process until they rediscover the reasons their habitual life formed in the first place.

Something like "the reason I care about the reconciling the weekly stock reports with the monthly stock reports is that I am paid to care, by my employer, and with that pay I secure the things my children need so they may one day have a job like mine that will allow them to provide for their children."

Which is to say, they gain some perspective, but not a sustainable one. 

The question I was forced to ponder, was the debilitating effects of maintaining the kind of perspective that comes with grief. To truly realize that much economic activity, does not matter or at worst, is actually counterproductive to achieving love and life.

This is a perspective that is no doubt disquieting, but the reality we live in is one of FTX, Enron, LTCM, Theranos etc. People turned up to work at Enron, went through inductions including OH&S videos where they possibly were told technically they should change shoes in order to lift an archive box from a storage shelf, sexual harassment, they were given a desk and a swipe card to enter and exit buildings, a network login and an email, they received payslips and salary was deposited in their bank accounts and pension funds. They paid their taxes, and laboured away in various departments, all the while having no idea about the full implications of "Mark to Market" accounting that would enventually liquidate the entire firm and invalidate whole lifetimes of economic activity.

To be sure, many an innocent and unassuming productive worker at Enron likely paid down a mortgage and put their children through school through the attractive salaries offered and recieved. It was not a total waste of their lives, but the part of their life wasted was all that they produced for Enron. One has to chalk it up to a learning experience, but then the skills learned by doing useful work for an ultimately useless company carry the stink of the Enron brand to a resume, and job interviews are often decided in 40 seconds based on attire, demeanour, grooming, manner and punctuality before getting to the thorny question of whether you were caught up in the demise of Enron or a somewhat innocent drone.

An archetypal news story, I guarantee to recur so long as you are alive is "[Insert publicly listed company here] posts $x.x Bn losses" which means that the sum total culmination of effort exerted by workers in that company went toward delivering a service or product that more people didn't want or need than did.

The premise of "It's a wonderful life" is that Jimmy Stewart has one fucking job to deliver a fat wad of cash to the bank to avoid bankruptcy and forfeiture of assets and he fucks it up. He then wishes he'd never been born and an angel shows him what life would be like if he hadn't been, where he realizes the significant positive impact he has had and chooses to live.

The fact though for most of us, is that we are largely redundant. That in itself is fine, even with redundancy ultimately some component has to do the things that are of value. But in the recent 20th Century we had vast amounts of devestation and bloodshed - from the Trench Warfare of The Great War that ravaged Europe and fed a whole generation of young men into a meat grinder, where the Christmas day truce lasted so long military command had to force the soldiers to resume killing each other again. Then WWII that also had the Holocaust, through to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, famines in India etc. Then there was Stalinism (~10 million, mostly famine and gulags and 1 million in political executions) and Maoism (40 to 80 million estimated dead best summed up in Maoism) , and if you are reading this, you are probably sitting in a place where you are more or less fine, with access to water and food, shelter and internet. Sorry to those of you who are homeless reading this on a phone plugged into a socket in a train station or shopping centre.

Happily in recent times, I am inclined to concur that my perspective is likely not debilitating. I have no problem with people acquiring what I should dub a modest wealth. And consistent with my views on The Martian, a truly talented athlete that can capture the imagination of so many and expand seemingly the frontiers of human possibility like Michael Jordan is probably as rich as I think a person should be, albeit this is restricted to the exorbitant wages paid to him by the Chicago Bulls that were so in excess of what anyone else in the NBA was paid, that they actually put in a wage cap that held until inflation allowed Steph Curry to earn Jordan's 90s money some 20 years later. Not the having children make shoes for $s and selling them for $$$s side that has made Jordan a billionaire.

And there's nothing wrong with billionaire's so long as they are paying taxes, taxes like someone would pay if they were paid a billion dollars for work, and not the sale value of the assets they hold, where they pay destabilizingly little tax.

The fact is, mental health is king. We experience our own lives subjectively, and the tragedy of meeting an unhappy and insecure rich person, is not just that their lack of perspective has wasted their lives, but needs must be concluded that they have likely wasted much of everyone else's lives that have invested in them. Perhaps somebodies can sometimes throw money at a person who lacks perspective so they can take it and make money for them while they spend their precious time achieving Eudaimonia but right up to the POTUS and DOGEUS down to the local well-healed nobody whose bones will be indistinguishable from all the other hairless apes, the king goes back into the box with all the other pawns and all that, who cannot shut up about how smart he is to have built a property portfolio to provide a service valued by nobody (in many cases literally nobody, because they are just sitting on and speculating on property prices) and leaving a legacy that will not have their great grandchildren even knowing their names.

And I am not driving at achievement culture as described by Byung-Chul Han in "The Burnout Society" as the alternative here. Because someone is likely to remember Musk and Trump in three generations time, assuming there's anyone here to remember, and Putin and Xi and whoever else too, are not examples to look to and their lives, despite their accomplishments all, look like they lack perspective. The lives of people who have risen to heights of influence that have placed them completely out of touch. No a life quite ordinary can be meaningful and rewarding, so long as it keeps the price of love firmly in perspective.

As I wrote the last few paragraphs, I could overhear one of my loved ones on a phone advocating for another of our loved ones. This same loved one recently had a birthday and we the family that were able gathered to celebrate it in a modest and intimate dinner with modest but delicious food and cake. I was coming off a particularly challenging week, one filled with disorienting ambivalence as I met some of the best and worst people to deal with all mixed up like the climbs and dips of a rollercoaster.

My aunt was a tonic after that week, to sit down with because she is good and decent and kind, and maybe these very qualities have lead to her being denied much in life, though there are other factors at play. The fact is I love her and she is worth loving.

My chief persistent pang (which is good to write because an ear would likely hear "pain" where it expects to hear it) is from my Mexican dogs, and yes, I'm circling in for a conclusion. Some conscious part of me understands how worthy of ridicule it is to build my life plans going forward about reuniting with our short-lived companions before they die, when dogs are a dime a dozen, or un peso por docena, but they are my dogs not in any legal sense, but in the attachment formed. 

Yes, ironically, it was Usma that taught me there were more dogs to love after Bess, my companion of 15 years from childhood to prolonged adolescence. I know I can fall in love with another dog, but we already love eachother. And I know that dogs tend not to follow "absence makes the heart grow fonder" for their survival instinct are too strong, and they operate their affections more along the "what have you done for me lately" lines. But I am supremely confident it would take just a few hours before after a feed they want to curl up by me again, once again, in love.

Truly coming full circle on this long walk, yesterday on lunch break I happened across quite the opposite pairing of owner and dog. A healthy strapping dog in its prime, on the leash of a man who had severe burns covering at least 50% of his face. I don't know his circumstances, he was walking through the lawyer part of downtown, not in the student and shopper part sitting with a makeshift sign declaring him homeless. 

But those debilitating injuries and scarring can't make life easy, probably not easier than mine, and it puts me in mind of all those homeless, those sleeping rough be it in Melbourne, Australia freq. world's most liveable city, or the streets of Mexico, and their animal companions, typically dog who no doubt increase donations by their mere presence, help keep them safe from molestation and assault at night and form a precious loving bond, unconditional but fragile.

Herein lies the perspective, worth maintaining - if you are homeless you get a pass. Life must be constant stress, so insecure. Everyone else, keep and defend your best energy for those you love. You may be giving work and career your all for those you love, but they don't get to experience your energy. They get to nurse your exhausted self while you recuperate. The economics says, you are not reaping the rewards of your productivity. Productivity has surged in the last 50 years and workers have seen none of the gains, beyond the cost reductions of technology. 

The blind leading the blind is fine, provided your blindness isn't caused by shutting your eyes to remember your infrequently used pin number through muscle memory. If you can open your eyes and maybe lead a blind person instead to secure love and mental comfort. 

Honing in on "Patriarchy"

Usage

"England is under the rule of a patriarchy." ~ Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own 1929.

Nate: "I don't think the cleaners are cleaning the floor."

Jade: "There are no cleaners."

Nate: "Then why do we put the chairs on the tables?"

Jade: "The patriarchy." ~ Ted Lasso, Season 3, Episode 11.

It's become a thing for me, I've never really seen an episode of the Twilight Zone, maybe a couple, but it is the bizarre and disorienting feeling that everyone uses "patriarchy" like they know what it means, what it is referring to and how it works. I however have only the vaguest impression, and an incoherent and unintelligible one at that. 

"When people say '...because Patriarchy...' I don't know what the fuck they are talking about." was what I said to a female friend, and probably because of how I said it, this lead to an unproductive conversation, featuring a variation of "it's not my job to educate you." Albeit changed to be on behalf of all women.

To be clear, I believe in sexism, I believe in inequality. I'm not in denial, nor pro these things. It's just specific terms of art that I struggle with mentally. Like I have a problem with "reactionary" because it basically requires an assertion instead of an argument - it assumes that our notions are proved to be progressive (as in, will accomplish progress). "Patriarchy" is like that, because we can be talking about an actual something, and then someone basically uses "patriarchy" in the sense of "yeah well, the reason this is a problem in the first place is because of might Vectron." 

Every now and then, I get this pang of suspicion that I have not done the obvious and just google it, which pre-Gemini would bring up wikipedia, and post Gemini I scroll past Gemini as it burns fossil fuels to generate some summary whether I want it to or not, that I cannot trust and find the wikipedia page.

I fucking hate this term, because, now some 10 years later, I still have no fucking idea what people are talking about when they invoke "Patriarchy".

Let me give you my working starting point:

Patriarchy, by usage, can mean 1 of 2 things, and potentially both simultaneously:

1. A passive description of the status quo, where several if not most, metrics favour men.

2. A conspiracy theory.

By "both simultaneously" I am referring to the rhetorical strategy - Motte and Bailey, which is when you argue as if the Patriarchy is a conspiracy theory (men meeting in the back of a pub or on the golf course or strip club and plotting ways to stop women from achieving equality) if questioned though if that is what you mean, you retreat to the much easier to defend definition of Patriarchy which is the statistical reality of the status quo.

Now when I say "easier" I mean that in the context of conversations taking place in the 21st century in a Wealthy Democracy like Australia. If it was 1960 or 1970 I'd be like "oh yeah, you are referring to all the meetings we have in the back of a pub or on a golf course or strip club where moustached men basically trash women together." But now we are talking about pay gaps arising in a legal context where sex-based discrimination is illegal.

The trouble with the easily defended status quo, is that the statements appealing to Patriarchy as an explanation, leave us with nothing to do, it is like making an appeal to "rainfall" as in "because rainfall" and then elsewhere coming out with calls to action like "let's smash rainfall." 

My sense is, the greater one attempts to seek clarity on what people mean by Patriarchy, the more it will be asserted to mean it describes a kind of passive statistical picture - truisms - most CEOs are men, most Political representatives are men etc. So a large part of the problem is I think arising from the word "Patriarchy" itself, because "-archy" as a suffix implies a system of governance or rule, eg Monarchy or Oligarchy. 

Oligarchy might be a good example, because we have historical formal oligarchies like one that is close to my heart - the Republic of Genova where there's noble families that basically ran a city state for a handful of centuries. Then there is an informal oligarchy that some use to describe the US state, particularly the legislative branches, where wealthy campaign donors exist, and some 60% of legislation that passes aligns with donor interests, as compared to a minority of legislation that passes reflecting key campaign promises to the voting public.

Even so, it is relatively easy to explain how this informal oligarchy is operating, but if you take a phenomena like the unadjusted gender pay gap, often in my experience used as a synonym for Patriarchy, it is not easy to explain how the phenomena arises. It is certainly not clear whether the phenomena is invoked as an example of an emergent phenomena or some kind of intelligent design.

Economics' Intelligibility Crisis

I hold a bachelors degree in Economics, a social science and have done so for probably more than a decade now. Not only do I hold a qualification, it's a field I'm interested in since both before and after my studies. 

Only yesterday I learned from finance Youtuber Patrick Boyle that strictly speaking the term "inflation" should only apply to a loss of purchasing power as a direct result of increasing the money supply. I've seen many economists as a result, perhaps even most, misuse or mischaracterise the cost of living crises experienced around the world as due to inflation.

I make this technical error myself, because inflation tends to be invoked in conjunction with the Consumer Price Index, which will indicate inflation even without it being caused by an increased money supply diminishing purchasing power.

If the general public, and even economists don't understand what inflation means, this can result in for example the world wide ousting of democratic incumbents in 2024. Including equal and opposite oustings like the UK Conservative Party's historic loss in 2024, and Trump's ordinary victory in 2024. 

Perhaps for the economically illiterate, every time the news invokes "inflation" it is as frustrating for them as "Patriarchy" is for me. What the fuck are you talking about "inflation"?

The spikes in cost of living experienced worldwide since 2022 were driven not generally by increased money supply or quantitative easing, but instead by supply chain disruptions and companies simply putting prices up to increase their profit margins. 

But the news says "inflation, inflation, inflation" and central banks increase interest rates. Leading to my impression of Australian newspaper mastheads in 2024 - Interest rates high because inflation, interest rates not coming down because inflation isn't [Shakes fist].

Anyway, in contrast to "Patriarchy" inflation is a) not economics 101, b) I can point you to Mark Blyth's presentation on his book "Inflation - A Guide for Users and Losers" to give anyone who might exclaim in frustration "I don't know what the fuck they are talking about" by way of explanation and finally c) I'm actually pretty happy to have a crack at explaining inflation to my friends myself, though I don't have a basketball analogy for inflation.

Feminism 101

So I ask a feminist friend "what do you mean by Patriarchy?" they get angry and tell me it's not their job to educate me. I give it a google, skip Gemini and get to wikipedia - because a) Wikipedia is pretty good. and b) Wikipedia is also a good indicator of how obvious something is.

For example, if you want to know what "Ad Hominem" is:

Often currently this term refers to a rhetorical strategy where the speaker attacks the character, motive, or some other attribute of the person making an argument rather than the substance of the argument itself. ~ From Wikipedia "Ad hominem"

That's enough for me to get it, but someone can read on for pretty simple examples. Simples.

Now for Patriarchy:

Patriarchy is a social system in which positions of authority are primarily held by men. The term patriarchy is used both in anthropology to describe a family or clan controlled by the father or eldest male or group of males, and in feminist theory to describe a broader social structure in which men as a group dominate society.[1][2][3]~ From Wikipedia "Patriarchy"

In which sense is Jade from Ted Lasso using "Patriarchy" to explain to Nate why they put the chairs up on the table even though nobody cleans the floors? Anthropological or in feminist theory - common sense says feminist theory. 

I can use my quick google of Patriarchy to then understand what this joke means by substituting "positions of authority are primarily held by men" in for "Patriarchy" in which case, either the character is offering as a serious explanation that this particular procedure in this particular restaurant exists because men primarily hold the positions of authority in society - like the Executive, Administrative and Judicial branches of Government, editorial positions in media, and are the predominant owners of property. And not the specific individual that dictates how things are done in that one restaurant.

I mean sure "Patriarchy" explains it, the same as "Economy" explains it.

In which case, Patriarchy is often misused much like inflation is in economics.

But understanding what people are talking about when they invoke Patriarchy is not simply clarified by that first sentence. We then establish that anthropologists use "Patriarchy" in a very concrete way to describe actual formal systems of control, and feminist theory uses "Patriarchy" to describe something very abstract which is...well I don't know. Not from this at least because "broader social structure in which men as a group" becomes the "it's merely a commentary on contemporary mores" part where Elaine's next question naturally is "but what is the comment?"

Now Sociology 101 probably needs to cover "what is a social structure?" and "what is a social system?" so I'm going to go there, and to be fair, if I was looking up "Ad hominem" because someone had dismissed me as simply "being ad hominem" and I'd googled it, I might need to look up what a "fallacy" is. Wikipedia links the word "fallacious" on the Ad Hominem page, but I need to go look up "social structure"

In the social sciences, social structure is the aggregate of patterned social arrangements in society that are both emergent from and determinant of the actions of individuals.[1] Likewise, society is believed to be grouped into structurally related groups or sets of roles, with different functions, meanings, or purposes. Examples of social structure include family, religion, law, economy, and class.

Again, wikipedia is pretty good. This tells me, that if we are invoking a social structure, then we are by default referring to something ambiguous.

So now I have enough common sense to assume from context that most invocations of "Patriarchy" are not in an anthropological context, but feminist theory context, and so the natural question becomes "of this broader social structure, are we talking 'emergent from' or 'determinant of'?" Or both and which bits apply to what is under discussion?

Back to the Patriarchy page:

Sociobiologists compare human gender roles to sexed behavior in other primates and argue that gender inequality originates from genetic and reproductive differences between men and women. Patriarchal ideology explains and rationalizes patriarchy by attributing gender inequality to inherent natural differences between men and women, divine commandment, or other fixed structures.[4] Social constructionists sociologists tend to disagree with biological explanations of patriarchy and contend that socialization processes are primarily responsible for establishing gender roles[5], they further argue that gender roles and gender inequity are instruments of power and have become social norms to maintain control over women.

On the one hand, this explains a lot, but more immediately it establishes that "Patriarchy" is contentious? controversial? I'm not sure what the right word would be, what we can see though is that different approaches disagree as to the nature of the social system, and perhaps even if it's a social system. 

For me, I also don't understand what an "instrument of power" is. I could take a guess, and probably name examples across the spectrum from abstract to concrete. Concrete instrument of power: a handgun, abstract instrument of power: vocabulary.

Wikipedia doesn't have a page, so I googled it, Gemini was loading and I just went to sociology.instute:

The three key instruments of power—coercive, compensatory, and conditioned—represent distinct strategies to exercise control. Each of these relies on specific methods, ranging from threats and rewards to persuasion and education. These instruments not only shape individual behavior but also structure institutional relationships and societal hierarchies.

So while I'm here and it's giving brief friendly sociology 101 blurbs, I'll grab the definitions of coercive (pretty obvious), compensatory and conditioned. Starting with coercive:

Coercive power, also called condign power, relies on the use of threats, intimidation, or physical force to gain compliance. This form of power is direct and often aggressive, aiming to control behaviour by instilling fear of punishment or harm. It is frequently observed in authoritarian regimes, disciplinary institutions, and law enforcement mechanisms.

Then compensatory:

Compensatory power, on the other hand, relies on the promise of rewards to elicit desired behaviours. This approach incentivizes compliance by appealing to people’s self-interest, offering tangible or intangible benefits in return.

And conditioned:

Conditioned power is the most subtle and sophisticated instrument of power. It operates by shaping attitudes, beliefs, and values through education, persuasion, and cultural conditioning. Rather than using force or rewards, conditioned power changes how people think, aligning their behaviour with desired norms and expectations.

Okay, so now I'm up to speed on "Social constructionists sociologists tend to disagree with biological explanations of patriarchy and contend that socialization processes are primarily responsible for establishing gender roles[5], they further argue that gender roles and gender inequity are instruments of power and have become social norms to maintain control over women."

Though, I don't know how to categorize "gender inequity" as any of the three main types of instruments of power. It's not obvious to me, as a reader/listener whether "gender roles" are the product of the instrumentation of Patriarchy, or the instruments of power employed by the Patriarchy or both, in the Orwell 1984 sense of "power is the means and the ends" sense, but that's probably for feminism 102.

So let's finish off the wikipedia introductory text with it's last paragraph:

 Historically, patriarchy has manifested itself in the social, legal, political, religious, and economic organization of a range of different cultures.[6] Most contemporary societies are, in practice, patriarchal, unless the criteria of complete exclusion of women in authority is applied.[7][8]

This is for me and my subjective experience at least, the most concrete section of the introduction. Firstly, the last sentence introduces a new variability - a definition of Patriarchy with a "complete exclusion" criteria, so Qing dynasty China is patriarchal even under the implicit rule of Dowager Empress Cixi, The Hawaiian Kingdom is patriarchal under Queen regent Liliʻuokalani, the Yoruba in Africa were patriarchal even under queen regent Orompeto, Tudor England is patriarchal even during the reigns of Mary I and Elizabeth I, and contemporarily the UK is patriarchal even with Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher, Teresa May and Liz Truss. Germany is patriarchal even with former Chancellor Angela Merkle, the United States is Patriarchal even with AOC serving as a senator.

On this side I would be in agreement that common sense should eliminate the criteria of complete exclusion of women in authority. To me that strikes me as being like "there's not nothing in the fridge, because there's racks and drawers in there." and arguing it down to anything that isn't a void/vacuum containing no matter or energy does not constitute the fridge having "nothing" in it.

But the first sentence. At first blush it is a straight forward read, easily understood. It means there have been laws saying women can't own property or can't vote and that is a manifestation of patriarchy, there have been campaigns saying women can't be trusted with the nuclear code because of their period and that is a manifestation of patriarchy, there is scripture that says a woman ate forbidden fruit and was cursed with reproduction and that is a manifestation of patriarchy, there's economies where something painted by a man is worth more money than something sewn by a woman and that is a manifestation of patriarchy. 

The two things again are that there's a lot of overlap between social, legal, political, religious and economical systems. The political and legal and economic are often interdependent systems and religious was the (if I'm learning any sociology 101) structure in which many of those systems historically existed.

But if we take legal and economical manifestations, we may find societies where women cannot legally own property. So woman's husband dies, the estate goes to her husband's brother. But if we have a society like the Mexica (Aztec to most westerners) women could own property, but it is still patriarchal as a society due to the manifestations of patriarchy elsewhere.

With the second thing being that Patriarchy can "manifest" tying us back to the essential question of is Patriarchy emergent or determinant or both? 

I guess I would already conclude, that nothing from reviewing the Wikipedia article on Patriarchy contradicts my working impression of 2 definitions - inert status quo or conspiracy theory. "Patriarchy" may well be feminism 101, but it would a) carry a prerequisite of having completed sociology 101 and possibly further, b) it is not "a google away" from being well understood.

I remember my art teacher Mrs. G handing me back an essay I'd written, probably my artist statement where I'd just used the word "simply" as an adjective and though the context is forever lost to me, it had been circled in red pen and annotated with "nothing simple about it" which is great feedback and it applies to the word "Patriarchy" this is not a simple concept to invoke:

"Taylor Swift tickets are really in demand."

"When you say 'demand' I don't know what the fuck you are talking about."

"Oh, I guess I mean people want to purchase tickets to her concert, like it will increase their pleasure if they are able to attend and this motivates them to try and purchase a ticket. That's what demand usually means, and I guess relative to tickets to see a Boney M reunion concert, there are more people who want Taylor Swift concert tickets, so they are really in demand."

I contend, someone just cannot do that with "Patriarchy" it is not analogous to a fellow social science 101 concept like "demand" in economics. It's not even analogous to an advanced economic concept like "Say's Law" where supply creates its own demand which were I to invoke in the form of "...because Say's Law..." again a) I'd be happy to explain it to you and b) you are a quick google away from understanding what Say's Law is. c) there's a good chance most economists haven't heard of Say's Law or cannot recall it and won't apply it, d) wretched as economics is, it is my experience that most economists when discussing economics will concede all the problems economics has - like why unemployment is understated, why GDP is not a great measure of human progress and flourishing etc.

A quick google of Patriarchy gives the impression of a vague, nebulous, contentious concept where there is nothing simple about it.

Sociology's Intelligibility Crisis

The most important part of the above interview, that I feel is a very important interview, is where Chomsky talks about monosyllabic truisms. Mono means "one" and "syllabic" means "in syllables" so the words "one" "in" "at" "bin" "get" are all monosyllabic. It is of course an exaggeration, even when Chomsky, a famous linguist, stresses that you can "literally" express "these" ideas in monosyllables.

Examples like "it's perfectly true that most scientists are male." "It's perfectly true that women have had a hard time breaking into the sciences." "It's perfectly true that there are institutional factors making it hard for women in sciences. etc."

From your subjective experience it might be completely intuitive that these truisms are sufficient to become incensed, to politicize you, to radicalize you.

One of the stories in Genderqueer: Voices from Beyond the Sexual Binary is a recollection of someone who had a teacher failing their school work, because they were failing to conform to her expectations of femininity. That story incensed my sensibilities. It was an enraging read. My sensibilities are that the work should be graded on its substance, and a teacher was trying to leverage her legitimate role of grading schoolwork for evidence of comprehension, to try and socialize a child. 

The story in its telling makes its own argument, I care. Many invocations of Patriarchy though, will not distress my sensibilities, they will instead invoke "so what?" 

If someone asks the question: "Why hasn't a woman run a sub 10sec 100m sprint?" and the response is given "because the Patriarchy promotes and exults sports that men excel in, not women." This is not outrageous to me, this is a "okay, so what?" moment, Patriarchy here is too vague and nebulous a social structure or system to care about, this is not teacher is abusing her power, this is the economy, biology, psychology. 

These are examples, of what could constitute people mean by the word "Patriarchy" when they invoke it. Indeed whenever I question use or mention of Patriarchy, the most intelligible responses I get are illusions to specific examples of sex and/or gender disparities. 

For example, the Baiji is a critically endanged/possibly extinct species of River Dolphin, by contrast the Aberdeen Angus breed of cattle is globally designated at "least concern" for extinction. It is perfectly true to note the disparity, and a moral consensus could likely be reached that we don't want fresh water dolphins to disappear from Chinese river systems, and we overproduce Angus beef and could stand to lose some beef cattle. 

But it is almost banal to point out that a domesticated species that humans eat have grown numerous due to social structures like the economy, and Baiji a wild species that humans eat are possibly extinct because of social structures like the economy. So what? A major contributing factor was Mao's "Great Leap Forward" to the Baiji being depleted. Patriarchy then, covers everything from Maoist totalitarian command economies,  thru to Sri Lanken and Icelandic democracy.

This is not very informative though, and positing some social superstructure that "manifests" in the form of anywhere a disparity can be observed is not helpful.

Many parallels have been drawn between religion and postmodernism, perhaps notably Johnathan Haidt and Jon McWhorter. I just want to make a useful analogy.

There's a term called "Igtheism" that I would apply to myself, though in practice I would use "Atheism" because far more people know what it means and it conveys enough to be confident we both know essentially where I stand.

Igtheism is a contraction of "Ignosticism" and specifically it means "god is incomprehensible/unintelligible." in practice for me, it means if you tell me you are a Christian, I don't know what you mean and hopefully I can simply point to the phenomena of theologians on Youtube since September 11 arguing for a very abstract philosophical god, and like, Trump's evangelical Christian base particularly as manifested in Paula White and her calling for intervention from Angels in Africa. "Christian" refers to everything from someone who equates "God" with the phenomena of consciousness thru to people who believe a bearded man sits in the sky, especially when we take a historical perspective. 

These can set up frustrating cul de sacs of unintelligible language like "Patriarchy" and "Christianity" where people simultaneously assert that "nobody" and "everybody" does this and not that.

"No Christian believes in Heaven as a gated community in the clouds where Ben Franklin is playing Hendrix at Air Hockey, Christians believe the afterlife to be unity with God, and hell to be estrangement from God." It's a) helpful to actually know what you believe but b) a mischaracterization that all Christians are homogenous, or at least all true Christians are homogenous.

So this is a little aside to shore up my perspective that "Patriarchy" by usage, refers to the status quo (monosyllabic truisms) or a conspiracy theory, or both simultaneously.

If you just do nothing, do human societies emerge as Patriarchies? or are positive actions required to be taken to impose a patriarchy on a society? 

By usage, the "conspiracy theory" form usually leads to a common sense inference that men are doing Patriarchy. However, the example from Genderqueer is one where a woman is participating in Patriarchy right? Abusing power to enforce gender roles, clearly oppressive and I'm aware there is a term for this phenomena which is "internalized misogyny" at which point, we are talking about a super structure that is very very difficult to understand.

A good example of emergent behaviour though being the reality TV series "Survivor" I'm not going to invest in a rewatch, but my recollection is that in its very first season it was fairly clear what was intended in the design of the series was that contestants would compete for immunity challenges and then based on the challenge or interpersonal interactions they would individually decide who they would vote to be eliminated at tribal council after host Jeff Probst facilitated some questions. I think simplicity demands that the producers thought that challenges + tribal council + vote would create sufficient drama to make the show a hit.

In the first season, Rich and two other contestants didn't break any rules, they just did something contrary to the intended design, or intended scope of the design - they coordinated their votes. This lead to dramatic betrayal but Rich won. I'm confident that you can go back and watch the post "tribe merger" and the non-Rich tribe being disoriented that vote coordination is going on. 

Then flash forward two or three seasons, and there's an emergent behaviour - a "meta" to survivor, contestants arrive and very quickly negotiate alliances and sub alliances pledging to take one another to the final two, before forming a voting block of four. So with an American context you could quickly see a kind of Arabic Bedouin culture spontaneously emerge:

Bedouin apothegm is "I am against my brother, my brother and I are against my cousin, my cousin and I are against the stranger" sometimes quoted as "I and my brother are against my cousin, I and my cousin are against the stranger."

Did contestant Rich orchestrate a social system to parasitise all future generations of Survivor? or did it just evolve via natural selection of the rules of the show? I can't read the minds of the producers of Survivor to know what their intent was. I can infer from the challenges voting blocks posed to editors, that the producers never intended it to become a thing. They have certainly since shown a penchant for interfering to create drama, and then produced 180 more seasons after I stopped watching any series two decades ago. 

A similar potential phenomena renders Patriarchy unintelligible at worst, banal at best. Saying that "historically patriarchy manifests" is potentially like saying "historically it has rained, and it continues to do so."

Back to the Wiki Before I Give Up

So not a quick google away. Now I had done more copying and pasting paragraphs of text just from the Wikipedia article, for the sections of "Social Theories" and sub-section "Feminist Theories" 

After investing quite some effort into breaking down and writing out my own process of trying to apprehend Patriarchy, the quality of the wikipedia article itself devolved into what felt like just hate-reading. 

These would be my quick and dirty observations: 

The first is that these sections convey the unintelligible nature of "Patriarchy" because they cannot describe Patriarchy directly, but hone in on specific "manifestations" if you will, that are further diminished by the sources being Not In Our Genes (1984), The Menopause Industry (1994) and Theorising Patriarchy (1989) all of which are fine, because they could be landmark works, but when compared to the Wikipedia article on "Natural Selection" though it includes references by Aristotle, Charles Darwin and Malthus, it's actually hard to find references used to substantiate claims in the article about mechanisms that are older than 2008. 

This is the second thing, because after this section I recalled that what I was really interested in was some experiment that convinced most people that Patriarchy is a thing, whatever that thing may be, that they are referring to. An analogy to "The Peppered Moth" but for Patriarchy, rather than natural selection. What happened to the peppered moth isn't a lab based experiment either, just an observation of moths adapting when their habitat changed colour, so their wing colours basically turned from white with black spots to black with white spots within very few generations.

I suspect most people would just point to "the pay gap" as a documented phenomenon, but that just puts me right back to where I started - it doesn't explain what Patriarchy is. Is it intelligent design like creationism, or is it natural selection like evolution?

 The most concrete thing in this whole section is Sylvia Walby's checklist for Patriarchy that seems to describe a broad social system:

Sociologist Sylvia Walby has composed six overlapping structures that define patriarchy and that take different forms in different cultures and different times:[2]

1. The household: women are more likely to have their labor expropriated by their husbands such as through housework and raising children
2. Paid work: women are likely to be paid less and face exclusion from paid work
3. The state: women are unlikely to have formal power and representation
4. Violence: women are more prone to being abused
5. Sexuality: women's sexuality is more likely to be treated negatively
6. Culture: representation of women in different cultural contexts 

This though, I'm going to assume on common sense, works the same as "Historically Patriarchy has manifested..." in so far as, you don't need all six but any one of these criteria to be met to declare Patriarchy.

I gave up breaking down the wikipedia article at this point, because the Social Theories section is borderline incoherent, and there is still "Biological Theories", "Evolutionary Biology" and "Psychoanalytic Theories"

The article begins to have problems like "[who?]" "[citation needed]" and "[further explanation needed]" and there is very little action on it's corresponding "Talk" page.

Why Am I Talking About Richard Dawkins?

I like "The Selfish Gene" but like most people, I have been over Richard Dawkins for multiple decades now. I'm not pleased to read an article that puts me in mind of "The God Delusion" which though an important book at the time of its release, I do not view as more valuable than Bertrand Russell's much shorter "Why I Am Not A Christian" much of which was reiterated by Dawkins, almost wholesale in his book.

But in the God Delusion, Dawkins introduced an idea of "Sky Hooks" vs "Cranes" as a basketball fan, "The Sky Hook" is Kareem Abdul Jabbar's signature move, and so ingrained is this use of the term "Sky Hook" that I still find Dawkins' terminology confusing. 

As I understand it, a "sky hook" as I understand it, is a non-explanation, because it is a hook that just magically comes down from the sky, whereas a crane you can trace the hook back to the ground, to terra firma and it explains how it can lift something up.

Now I don't want to get into helicopters, but helicopters are cranes, not sky hooks.

But using the truism definition of Patriarchy, that things are unequal in men's favour we can expand and contract and substitute a statement.

"The gender pay gap exists because the patriarchy does not value women's work as much as men." I wrote this, I'm not actually quoting anyone, I just hope it strikes people as sufficiently cogent and cromulent.

becomes: "The gender pay gap exists because things are unequal in men's favour, women's work is not worth as much as men's."

Which we can now contract via substitution:

"The patriarchy exists because the patriarchy does patriarchy."

It may not be a perfect demonstration, but at least to me, it illustrates how frustrated I get when Patriarchy is invoked. I feel gaslit that people act as if everyone knows what Patriarchy means, and it produces statements to the effect of: "Wind is caused by wind blowing wind around."

The Rarest of Conversations

Very occassionaly something like the gender pay-gap can actually be spoken about. I can discuss with another human being whether we are talking about the adjusted or unadjusted pay gap, and from whence the pay gap arises, how it comes about and how it functions and what can be done.

But that's about the extent of it, and, I'm not sure I've ever had that conversation with a woman. 

I'm going to give another example, of a conversation that is difficult to have, because of the usage of Patriarchy.

Going back to the women's 100m world record which has been held by Flo-Jo since the late 1980s, stands at just a bit under 10.5 seconds. Usain Bolt holds the men's record, set much more recently at just a tad over 9.5 seconds meaning he beats Flo-Jo by over 10m. 190 men have run sub 10 second 100m since it was first done in 1968. Right this is a record measured in hundredth's of a second, and it can be hard to perceive the signifigant distances between first and last place with the difference of time being less than a second.

At which point, there's an interesting argument to be had as to why so much attention is lavished on the 100m sprint. It is certainly my perception that the Olympic 100m sprint champion is generally given more esteem than the 200m winner unless they are the same person. 

Of course, all the sex differences can be explained by biology, to broadly conclude that on average men are faster runners than women, even though I personally will never run as fast as the top 141 women of all time. 

Steven Fry on QI offered an explanation though, that men dominate sports because men invented most sports and they are specifically designed to make men look impressive.

Okay, so now hypothetically we are having an interesting conversation about the Patriarchy. We can sit back and think about establishing equality, not through equalizing prize money, salaries, air-time/media coverage etc. which they debate with WNBA and AFLW (maybe). 

But equalizing two sports, like put in a sport alongside the 100m sprint that women tend to excel at and not men.

Now these sports already exist on that narrow criteria. I'm thinking predominantly gymnastics, where women tend to excel men. What we can immediately see though, is that while women may hypothetically or in reality outperform men in gymnastics, gymnastics does not outperform track and field.

Part of it may be, that gymnastics have this subjective component. Competition is not direct, like a running race or team sport, but indirect where one goes to the beam, the pommel horse, the floor routine etc. and performs for judges who then score your routine, and then it is averaged and tallied and ranked.

But what if we just designed a new sport where it could be "run" race style but rewarded women's greater statistical flexibility as gymnastics does? I'm picturing a race through some kind of jungle gym...

I'll put a pin in this idle speculation to point out what is rare about conversations along this line - they are somewhat actionable. There's something to do, a unifying sense of purpose operating on the hypothesis that mens sports out-earns women's sports with very few exceptions because sports are designed for men's bodies. 

I suspect these conversations are rare, because they carry an inherent risk that it might reveal that it has very little to do with social systems or structures at all, or at least those systems and structures are really efficient.

Which is to say, that to celebrate a sport dominated by women equal to the 100m sprint, may require a massive energy input that just isn't expended by the Patriarchy. 

Feels like time to just 

Conclude

Use whatever words you like. I hope to make my case that invocations of "Patriarchy" are confusing, but everyone acts like its obvious what is meant and furthermore, what needs doing.

I am not going to police language, at least not directly. I intend to grant Patriarchy for the sake of argument, and then ask, to me, the crucial question "How efficient is the Patriarchy?"