December 2010
1 post
Passion + Training = Skill. Talent Doesn't Exist.
Natural talent does not exist. Any sufficiently evolved skill is the product of passion and applied training, nothing else.
This sort of statement may seem inflammatory to some, but there is ample scientific evidence to prove it - most of the prodigious “talents” in history who are held up as examples of some divine inspiration which training could not have created where in fact...
November 2010
3 posts
Higher Education: No More Than Certification For...
I have a bachelors degree in computer science. I spent three years at university getting it. After the first twelve months, I learned very little. I learned more in the first four months of working than I did in the entire three years of university, but that’s not the worst part, the worst part I had to spend several years unlearning many of the things that where taught in university that...
Let Luddites Point The Way To The Great Business...
I had a good chuckle when I read this article from 1995 this past Friday. Basically, the article completely rubbishes the Internet, calling it a fad that will eventually go away. Doing a bit more reasearch on the authord, Clifford Stoll, reveals that he has made quite a career out of being a professional backwards luddite, resisting, criticising and working against any conceivable progress. A...
Following Your Dreams With a Stop Loss
There’s a lot of talk about “following your dreams” and taking entrepreneurial risks, and I for one applaud anyone who takes the plunge into the great unknown to try to make something out of nothing. I’m sure most who do, even when they fail eventually feel that it was worth it.
But as we all know, sometimes things just don’t work out for us for one reason or...
October 2010
6 posts
Pretentious Grandstanding Against Strawmen:...
It seems that pretentious grandstanding against corporations is the “in” thing to do among those who consider themselves progressive “intellectuals” - preferably by vacuous armwaving at constructed strawmen. Corporations are said to be everything that’s bad and evil about the world, they are somehow the magical puppet masters that supposedly control our lives and dupe...
The Dangers of Ideology & Likeminded People
Do you hang out with, listen to, read the work of and/or take advice from mostly likeminded people? I’m sorry to say, but you are breeding a dangerous monoculture around yourself, and you’re taking on a big risk of exposing yourself to dangers that will take you completely by surprise. Just as monocultures in agriculture and genetics lead to increased risk of famine and lower...
In Defense of Geoarbitrage, Part II
My previous defense of geoarbitrage woke some heated debate, mostly offline and in various e-mail threads, one which apparently fantasized about beating my “stupid face into an indistinguishable mass of red pulp”. It would seem after six years of blogging in various incarnations I’ve amassed an impressive amount of people wanting to do me bodily harm for my views. I’ll...
The Ethics of Geoarbitrage & Fallacy of...
I got stuck in a little discussion in the comment thread on Beyond Growths hilarious and humorous post “17 Steps to Instant Success as a Lifestyle Designer”. The particular discussion I got involved in centered around the ethics of geoarbitrage and whether or not rich people from the first world exploit poor people in the third world when they hire them to do work such as being...
"Who Took My Money?" - Why Cash Really Is Not That...
I have had a discussion over the past several days with a friend who rightly worries about the inflationary risks of current fiscal stimulus, budget deficits and money printing (renamed to the less alarming “Quantitative Easing”), and the effects it might have in devaluing his rather sizeable savings. Yet despite his worries, he is hesitant about diversifying his savings into...
Lifelong Learning, Kicking Ass & The Timeless...
Bruce Lee may be most known as an actor and a martial artist. However, he was much more than that: he was a philosopher and a great thinker, bringing together Taoist- and other eastern philosophies with western streams of thought, creating a fusion of ideas that where not constrained by the limitations of their origins.
Lee’s teachings can easily be applied to any part of life: your inner...
September 2010
9 posts
Rational Detachment - Enlightenment the Vulcan Way
I strive towards having as much rational detachment from- and control over my emotions as possible. This does not mean I strive towards feeling nothing at all, I still embrace the positive aspects that come with the human condition, it is impossible not to and it would be a shame to miss out on the positive experiences. Furthermore, we need the contrast of experiencing the negative to fully...
The 3 Mental Shifts Undermining Western Prosperity
For most, it is plain to see that a massive shift of power is happening in the world economy: the old Western empires are crumbling under the weight of regulation, excessive taxation and crippling debt. But I think the Western decline is not only related to policy mistakes and financial bubbles, it is a more deep-seated issue than that, it goes all the way to shifts that have happened in the...
Clean Out: Week 10 & Retrospective
Tenth and final week of my official “decluttering challenge”. This is what’s going this week. Slightly less than some other weeks, but I think I’ve done well so far.
In addition to what is pictured above, I might be able to sell off a Nintendo Wii, PSP, Apple Time Capsule and four quite large books before next week is up, so that’s money in the bank and less stuff....
It's a Hard Knock Life. So Get Over It.
I’ve had a lengthy discussion over the last few days in various threads with Carlos Miceli of OwlSparks, my sister and various other people about feminism, inequalities, privilege and the difference in opportunities different people have given different circumstances.
You Don’t Want What I Want & That’s OK I wrote about this some months ago at some length. But the gist...
The Era of Post Political Freedom
In the future, every man will be an island. The promise of panarchy - people being able to freely chose the political system under which they live is a reality today, if you only reach for it. In years past, the concept of panarchy seemed a pipe dream concocted by wild-eyed anarchists and libertarians. To most who still think inside the box, it will still seem that way. But if you redefine your...
Clean Out: Week 9
As part of my ongoing decluttering challenge, the following things went this week:
Yet another old (laptop) backpack that was frayed and broken.
My Slingbox, which I gave away to a friend. It’s been acting up lately, not connecting to the network etc, so it got to go.
A Google branded foldable chair (blue bag/package)
2 keyboards (I use a 17” Macbook Pro laptop with a perfectly...
Finding a Voice: "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of...
Since I started this blog in October/November last year, I’ve struggled somewhat to find a voice, a core theme - I’ve written mostly about things that have interested me, but they have been all over the place at times.
It’s been a slow process, but I think in a sense I have come full circle and worked out what I want this to be going forward: This blog will not be about any...
Survivalism, Finances and the Rule of Three
Survivalism has a number of “Rule of Three’s”, for instance one states that a man can only survive for a maximum of 3 hours without shelter under extreme weather condition, a maximum of 3 days without water and a maximum of 3 weeks without food. Survivalism author Ragnar Benson has turned this rule into tangible survival advise, stating that under survival conditions, you...
Clean Out: Week 8
This week, I finally got around to throwing out some stuff long overdue that have been in my storage for over two years:
2 IKEA floor-to-roof poles for mounting sliding doors or shelves on. Bought but never used.
2 IKEA shelves.
Blinds that I never installed.
Some old clothes.
Old jogging shoes.
Sub-par quality backpack I bought in Buenos Aires. Replaced with a better one.
Scanner that...
August 2010
9 posts
Clean Out: Week 7
This is what bit the dust this week:
Cleaned out the entire set of drawers - from five full drawers to having only some things in two of the drawers. What’s in front of it is what I will shred during the coming days (lots of old bank statements, bills etc from years past, plus check books I have never even used).
Old jeans, old shoes and a bag full of more junk from the drawers.
Old...
Pension funds are for suckers waiting to be robbed
People often look at me with bewildered amusement when I say I don’t believe in pensions nor put any money into a pension fund. The reason is simple: most pension systems are thinly disguised ponzi schemes, money going in today is often used towards current pensioners pensions rather than your own.
But even in the cases where you contribute to your own pension, you’re hardly safe -...
Clean Out: Week 6
Blurry picture, but this week on my trip to Sweden, I took the opportunity to give my mother some of my old stuff:
20 odd DVD’s
6 or so books
An old PC laptop
..and the luggage that I took it in to Sweden..
..but that’s not all:
Swedish Bonus Edition As I was in Sweden this weekend, my mother asked me to look through some of my old stuff, and boy did I find stuff to throw...
Clean Out: Week 5
Things that where sold, given or thrown out for the fifth week of my clean out challenge:
20 odd books given and sold away to 3 different friends.
15 odd DVD’s given away to same said friends.
Receipts, bank statements etc from the last five years that do not need to be legally (or otherwise) retained anymore shredded (eat yer heart out, Enron!). Ended up filling about 5 large garbage...
The Freedom That Comes With Decluttering
Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows that I have taken on the challenge to declutter my life and home over a ten week period. I’ve taken this challenge seriously, and probably gotten rid of more things in a few weeks than what I needed to do in the full ten weeks if I had been anal about only doing five things a week.
Apart from a lot more space, decluttering your life comes with an...
Clean Out: Week 4
This week, a bunch of old hard drives, books and magazines bit the dust..
When You Stop Sleepwalking Through Life, They'll...
Humans are highly socialized animals - there are a lot of things we take for granted that we have learned from our environment without questioning growing up. The instinct to conform is borne out of the socialization process we go through growing up and coming off age.
These “self evident truths” we learn may not always be so self evident, but the urge to fit in is strong in most,...
Why I'm Shredding My Voter Registration Card...
I received my Swedish voter registration paperwork today to allow me to vote in the Swedish Elections this fall. The video above shows exactly how big my belief is in the political process and what I think of it.
There are a number of reasons why I have no interest in voting now, or ever again:
Swedish politics consists of arguments on whether the top rate of income tax should be 57% or 58%...
Clean Out: Week 3
As part of my ten week challenge to get rid of at least 5 things a week, the above things bit the dust this week:
A long since expired desktop PC from 2004 (I had fun drilling holes in the hard drive that I extracted to ensure the already crashed HD’s data would be even more irrecoverable).
3 sets of Michel Thomas language courses (full course), given away to a friend (Michel Thomas...
July 2010
8 posts
A Fond Farewell to a True Hero (1917-2010)
Elli Pasanen, beloved grandmother 1917-2010
My paternal grandmother passed this Friday, a few months short of her 93rd birthday.
Though she was born in a different day and age, she in many ways epitomised what a good, modern woman should strive to be: positive, strong, hardworking, loyal, wise, tolerant, yet with strong values and principles. A real rock for those around her despite...
Employment is not adoption: you should be the...
I came across this post on Y-Combinator and was quite appaled by the expectation of some people on a supposedly entrepreneurial forum to have a “right” to a job. Let’s make a few things clear: no one owes you anything. You don’t have a right to a job anymore than you have a right to stay indefinitely for free at a friends place. A business is private property, just like...
Clean out: Week 2
Week two of my promise to clean out at least five things a week for ten weeks in a row resulted in the following stuff being passed on/away:
Bundle of three things: XBox360, XBox games and 20” TFT screen sold for £120
6 (good) books given away to a good friend who was visiting and just had his birthday
Various junk things simply thrown in the bin because they had been in storage for over...
The Mayfly Life of the Average Man
The existence of most men are a paradox of absurdity - people spend their lives in search of purpose, yet they will react aggressively and violently towards anyone who refuses to conform to the standard lifestyle set out by most of society.
Existential angst is one of modern mans favourite past times, yet anyone who doesn’t strive for having a “safe” (hah!) job, normal and...
Week 1: Junk that went out
As I promised earlier, I’ve started to cut down on the amount of junk I own. This is what went out this week:
Assorted magazines and books with no resale value.
An old mat that was destroyet that I held onto in vain of wanting to clean it (cleaning would be costlier than buying a new one).
Some sort of cleaning gadget I’ve never used.
Clothes that are worn out.
Some IKEA junk...
End of my consumerism: getting rid of five things...
Over the last 4-5 years, I’ve amassed an impressive amount of junk: books, electronic gadgets and other assorted trophies of consumerism. I live in a two bedroom flat, yet I’m low on storage space.
Furthermore, I realised when I was in Argentina for two months earlier this year that all I actually needed in life fit into the carry-on backpack and checked luggage I had with me. In...
Working for the sake of work will make you poor
I came across a short anecdote the other day that I found very revealing:
Three men of a tribe need travel an hour to the river each morning to get their water. Then one has a good idea, he digs a well in the centre of the village, now no man need travel any morning and they all have their drinking water. The men are now happily unemployed.
Were the men better served when they had the jobs of...
Gender "sensitivity" is condescending
In this day and age political correctness is the norm - you can’t make jokes that could even remotely be considered “sexist”, you can’t use certain words and you have to behave a certain way around the opposite sex in public spaces and in the workplace.
Personally, I find the political correctness around gender sensitivity condescending to women: behaving in a restrained...
June 2010
3 posts
Midsummer in Sweden - not to be missed!
Tomorrow is Midsummer, arguably the largest festivity of the year in Sweden (also the booziest, most heathen and hedonistic as well). The video above is fairly accurate of what can happen on Midsummer, so if you are in Sweden, or know Swedes, try to join in on the fun!
Customer Lock-in is lame, go for Customer Loyalty
There is often talk of “customer lock-in” or “switching costs” in entrepreneurial circles, basically implying that it should be hard for a customer to change supplier from your business to someone else’s. In IT, this is every day stuff, in my consultancy work I even came across an enterprise software vendor once who refused to be helpful in integrating other...
Employment isn't important (but you should already...
Listening to the economical discourse of politicians and economists, you’d be forgiven for believing that employment is more important than anything for an economy. Just today, Barack Obama has gone to congress to ask for $50bn to “safeguard government jobs”.
Let me call bullshit: employment is irrelevant to the prosperity of a country, or a person for that matter. If...
May 2010
4 posts
Running a Marathon: Together in Solitude
Yesterday I ran the Edinburgh Marathon.
Running a Marathon is a strange sort of experience - it’s a solitary journey and mental test of fortitude. Yet you are never alone or without encouragement. There are other runners, and when you get into areas with spectator crowds, the noise and encouragement from the bystanders will always give your aching body an extra adrenaline boost to go the...
Lifestyle Design as Survivalism
Just because your paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you
I’m a short term pessimist, but long term optimist when it comes to my outlook on the world. Our planet is a dangerous, volatile, unpredictable place and the economic policies of many countries are akin to letting the lunatics run the asylum.
Maybe my paranoid, survivalist streak is borne out of growing up...
Lifes Profit & Loss Statement: Happiness is the...
Those of us who are economy geeks know that every investment has an alternate cost: time you spend working for the man for $100/hour could be spent working on an entrepreneurial product that may have even larger earnings potential. For a Freelancer time spent on the beach is money lost.
Thinking in terms of alternate costs is usually a crass business - it’s about dollars and cents, pounds...
"Trying" is doing with the intention of failure
The word “try” is poisonous to your resolve. It’s a word that pre-supposes the possibility of failure. Saying that you will “try” is giving yourself an easy excuse to fail, which by extension is an excuse to not do everything you can to succeed. Failure happens, there is not shame in it if you have done everything you can to succeed, but giving yourself an...
April 2010
6 posts
Virtual Assistants: Not for me
I recently embarked on a trial with a Virtual Assistant. I still have about 8 hours of purchased time left unused.
I’m a busy man, I don’t get enough sleep and my todo list is constantly full. But to be honest, a Virtual Assistant is simply not for me. The reason is quite clear: the sort of things I would like to outsource are too qualified for a VA - I don’t really trust a...
"Your girlfriend is a cylon" - what makes us...
I’m a geek. I have a ridiculous obsession with science across the spectrum: in private, I love exploring new languages, understanding linguistics, human psychology and the links between the subjects. Professionally I have spent a fair bit of time working with machine learning (“Artificial Intelligence”), text mining and natural language processing. In between my private and...
Your road is different from mine, and that's ok
We all walk different paths, make different choices in life. And that’s ok.
Elisa from Ophelia’s Webb got an aggressive e-mail for being content where she is from someone pursuing a Location Independent lifestyle. It’s a wee bit ironic that someone purportedly trying to rebel against peoples assumptions on what sort of life you should live is so intolerant towards someone...
Product design: keep it simple (really simple!),...
I’ve been going back and forth in my head over the last week on the issue of how to put some of my ideas to work. As a geek and techie, my natural instinct is to pack as many features as possible into one package, after all, don’t we all look at feature lists to make our purchasing decisions?
The question to that is an emphatic “No!”. When I started to think about how to...
Location Independent 12 Week Challenge: Week 1
Location Independent Professionals is hosting a “12 Week Challenge” that I have signed up for.
The first weeks challenge poses a couple of questions that need to be answered, and here are my answers:
1) Decide exactly how you’re going to achieve location independence Considering my background in software development, this one is easy: for-pay webapps and web based services that I...
What you want now is not what you'll want tomorrow
People in business, politics and their private lives are obsessed with plans, short term ones, and even more so long term ones. Committing to big, long term plans is dangerous though, the inertia that you create from it, motion forward means that it is hard to change your direction if you change your mind - you’ve already invested so much into it, and besides, you’ll look stupid if...
March 2010
9 posts
Caged by circumstances: home as a state of mind
I’ve written before about “home” being a concept, a state of mind rather than a place.
I believe a big cause of people feeling “rootless”, like they don’t belong is due to them not being where they want to be. People will often associate these feelings with “being homesick” (if they have just moved), or not liking the place they are in, but I...