One of the benefits of having travelled a lot is you get exposed to a lot, a virtue that is compounded if you keep your eyes and ears open, use the brain you were born with, and live for enough years.
Quite often, if not usually, the “data” you pick up is “useless” from many perspectives, let me give you an example.
If you are a driver, you will know all about periodic and cyclic traffic changes, you can have a given road from point a to point b that takes 50 minutes to drive Monday to Friday in the morning or in the later afternoon, 30 minutes during the day, and 15 minutes at 2 am.
Then you can have days where it is 10 am but the journey takes 15 minutes, the roads are all inexplicably empty.
While the morning and evening rush hour traffic is useful data, because it is predictable, the quite 10 am journey is useless data, because you can’t predict it or do anything with it.
I have this year (2014) done journeys of 100 miles or more on main roads in my region, and felt like it was 1970 again, there was fuck all traffic on the roads, but in every other way it was a perfectly normal working weekday, with no explanation whatsoever for the lull.
So this observed data is real, but “useless”, and yet, there are things to be learned from it, perhaps the biggest thing you can learn is that for no apparent reason that you can discern, you can go out one day and discover that there is only 20% of the traffic on the road that you would expect, which tells you that rather than having a central, known to all, reason for the other 80% to be absent (eg it’s -10 and a blizzard out) the reasons are collective and subconscious, (eg it’s not sunny enough to buy an ice cream)
When you become open to this, you will start to notice more subtle trends that come out of nowhere one day and are gone the next, one day the roads are empty, one day everyone is driving like a cunt and not paying attention, one day everyone is driving frustrated and impatient and nobody will let anyone else in from a side road, one day everyone is parked badly.
Again, this is “useless” data in that you can’t centrally model it or predict it or take advantage of it, but it is nonetheless real, every single one of you reading this who has been driving ten years or more, in any country on the planet, knows exactly what I am talking about.
This is however, essentially closely related to the phenomenon that you can look at your watch and note that it is 11:32 am, and the 8,000 peaceful protesters in the street are slowly walking by holding their placards and singing, and you can look at your watch and note that it is now 11:41 am, and it is a fucking riot, and nobody is quite sure why…
Oh yes AfOR, you have talked about this shit before, crap changes real quick, well, yes, I have, but just because I am talking about it again doesn’t mean I am repeating myself, yeah it’s all birds, but last time I was talking about sparrows, this time I am talking about chickens… it’s all fowl… but the devil is in the detail, as always.
Now, like everyone else, I can see correlations, increased fuel costs, lowered real wages, less money for fuel, less journeys taken, migration to monthly salaries paid into the bank and not weekly in cash, OK, maybe the roads are dead because it is the 3rd week in the month and everyone is broke.
It’s now Friday, I got zero work in my diary so far, I had one small job on Monday, and one small job on Tuesday, and it’s not just me, I look at some of the other guys diaries, same story, it’s not nationwide though, just our region, the south west.
It’s another one of those “inexplicable” quiet spells.
The dating / fucking scene, it’s basically vanished, the people are there, but I personally am getting fuck all action, and judging by what others are saying, I’m not alone.
It’s all inexplicable, it’s all useless, it’s all vague and unpredictable, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t mean anything or have any significance.
I can remember being in Spain, which was using the Peseta then, when Gulf War 1 kicked off, the closest involvement we had was the 6th fleet stopping by for drinks and some shore leave on their way to that end of the Med, 2,000 miles away, nevertheless, all kinds of businesses and day to day working and projects and plans and even routine maintenance for all sorts of things that were in no way related to the war or the yanks or the iraqis or anything else, fucking died overnight….
Officially of course the exchange rate between the US Dollar and the Spanish Peseta collapsed, to this day, given the geography and everything else, god alone knows why, but it did, so you can see why people who thought in greenbacks put every Spanish project on the books on hold, suddenly everything got 50% more expensive, in dollar terms, but none of that explains all the people earning and spending and thinking in Pesetas also going quiet.
So we have a situation where we are not a million miles away from some old fart noticing the birds flying south and thinking it may be time to chop firewood, and the birds flying south early, so chopping more, it’s not that the birds, or the other drivers on the road, or the other people on fucking sites, or the other engineers at my company, or anything else, are privy to some secret that I am not aware of, or got some news before me, or anything else. Correlation != Causation
The important lesson is that LACK of a causative link does not mean that there is little or no importance or value or benefit to be attached to observation.
It is wrong to note sudden and unexpected periods of inactivity in any field, and to try to forge a causative link out of observation or correlation.
It is equally wrong to extend that logic and say that since there is no observable causative link, just the odd bit of correlation, that the two things are therefore completely unconnected.
The *connection* between brush fires and birds migrating is summer, there are very few brush fires up on the moors when the birds have all flown south for the winter…. even if the agency that started the fire in question was a shard or broken bottle or a discarded cigarette.
A E Van Vogt wrote about this, there was a spaceship full of scientists, and they were all specialists in their respective fields, they know 100% of their own field, and 0% of everyone else’s, and there was one guy who was a generalist, he knew 2% of every field, and he prevailed because real life was not a speciality situation, all nuclear physics, or all surface chemistry, or all germ biology, and so on.
By definition then, we are dealing with a subject that by its very nature defies simple analysis, or simple explanations, or simple modelling.
It’s like a modern supermarket where *everything* is tracked, even to the point where they know your teenage daughter is pregnant before you do, but the one thing they CANNOT track is the most important information of all, how many people did NOT walk into that shop, and what were their reasons for doing so?
BP, Tesco, PC World, and a whole host of others, do not know why I will never set foot in their stores or buy any of their products as long as I live, while they are ascendant, they don’t care, when they start to care, it will be far too late.
It was with deep joy that I watched Comet, to give but one example, go to the wall, fuckedcompany dot com, go bust and shut up shop. (can’t wait for the rest of the group to follow)
It is really any surprise that I can feel EXACTLY the same way, for EXACTLY the same reasons, about a person, or a state, or an institution?
You treated me like a cunt, there is no upper limit to the pain or suffering or agony of grief that you can now endure, before I even twitch the end of the little finger, you are already, to quote one chick I used to bang, “fucking dead to me”, and I am not the only one, far, far, far from it.
Turnabout is fair play.
I fear that much of the MRM is populated by men who are trying to understand, trying to comprehend, trying to make a difference, let’s take DMJ for example, I don’t know the guy from adam in the flesh, but he absolutely reeks of an intelligent man trying to understand and make sense of shit.
Fui quod es, eris quod sum
I fear it, not because it makes me afraid, but because of the waste… I fear that one day I will see my son, and have a literal lifetime of experience and wisdom and tips and tricks to impart, and I will just look at him in silence, mutter “meh”, and turn and walk away, because ultimately he has to learn his own lessons, there are no shortcuts.
In that sense I fear, I fear the loss, I fear the waste, I fear that he will become more like me.
There are many things in a man’s life that he is a fool to ever put into words, no matter the passage of time or distance or anything else, something things, there is just no possible upside to saying, save for some vain and juvenile hope that the words themselves will impress for a short time.
Particularly now in the digital age where all forms of communication are monitored and recorded, it is spectacularly stupid to say many things in a man’s life, doubly so if they are not even true in the first place.
When I was a boy, in the analogue age, it was perfectly possible to say “I’m going to fucking kill Terry”, because Terry had done something, crashed your car, stolen your girl, whatever, it was possible because it was transient, if you wanted to make your world last longer you could go out and pay a stonemason to carve them into a lump of granite.
Now I am a man in the digital age where *everything* is monitored and recorded, what I can tell you is that 99% of that stuff is never going to be talked about by me, because *everything* is monitored and recorded, which means that 99% of analogue real life has been lost to the modern generation.
If we look at actual facts, the abduction and serious sexual abuse of small children has remained pretty much constant in the UK since the end of the last war and the beginning of record keeping, the number is around 40 or 50 children a year.
The digital age hasn’t changed that number.
The digital age just meant that old ladies doing the flowers for the church now need to pass a load of checks, because that same church also has a kids playgroup, and some of those old ladies, like me, did shit they didn’t oughta have done, back in the analogue age, so now they fail security checks in the digital age.
I have a prison record, clearly this reflects the stuff I was caught, tried and convicted for, and in my nature, if I did it I admitted my guilt in plea right after confirming my name and date of birth and so on to the court.
More motoring offences than you can shake a stick at, some drink driving, one drugs, one theft (insurance job…) of a vehicle. All this was in the UK, never had any troubles with the law abroad, and 99% of this was between the ages of 18 and 22, and I am now in my fifties.
Now I can tell you I’d be a fucking fool to admit anything else now, and that’s the truth, and it is also pretty obvious that I am likely like most everyone else, I did a lot of stuff I got away with, but it is also the truth to state that you really, really, really cannot put me in that class of people who spent their lives being a mobster, but only ever got convicted of motoring shit and not paying taxes.
I can tell you, hand on heart, that at no time did I ever go “outside” the circle, for example burglary, mugging, theft, supplying drugs, arson, are all crimes that go outside and involve third parties, the only way you could get involved with me was if you chose, of your own free will, to adopt the lifestyle and join us.
Like the Tescos bit above, the present security and screening services that basically 99% of modern workers in the UK have to take part in, are singularly inept at it, in exactly the same way that Tesco cannot tell who does not walk into the store, and why.
The screening processes cannot actually track those that are a risk, to your data, or your security, or your children, mainly because they can only work with those who are IN the system, and even then, it has to trust data entered in the analogue age, so it generates lots of false positives, lots of false negatives, and has no idea at all about those it is not tracking, or things it is not tracking for.
Again, like the suddenly empty or busy roads, I see flurries of these security clearance things, in my own day job there have literally been so many, by so many different agencies, that I actually have no idea what my current status is, nor do I care, a feeling shared by many.
Again, like all of the above, I don’t know that there is any useful data you can pull out of this, it’s “useless”, from a management and control perspective, but nevertheless it exists, and has its own complete ecology.
The monitoring or screening or assessment or whatever process doesn’t actually have even the remotest link to the actual risk that I present to your company, to your property, to your image, to your deadline, to your data, to your children.
But when the birds fly north for the summer, you do get far more brush fires up in the moors….
I am a reasonably intelligent and observant and honest and forthright and practical and so on and so forth bloke, and I know I can’t work out all this shit, I can see signs and patterns and trends, I can make guesses, I can even have a history of making fairly accurate guesses, doesn’t mean I know shit, understand shit, or have a handle on shit.
This is why I KNOW FOR A FUCKING FACT all these cunts and leaders and policy makers and behind the scenes head honchos are flying as fucking blind as me, they really have no more idea, probably less of an idea, than me.
I know because I have come to observe and deduce that there is no missing link, no higgs boson, no quantum theory, no rosetta stone, which will suddenly bring reason and understanding and order to things.
If there is no missing crucial quanta of data, then cleanly these other fuckers are lying or delusional when they make the claim that they do know what they fuck they are doing, because they do have access to seekrit data that I do not.
They may well have access to seekrit data that I do not, but it is really just more of the same sort of data that I already have, it is not the missing crucial quanta of data that are a pre=requisite to understand and unlock and make meaning of all the rest.
This is the biggest confidence trick of all time, not that Merkel is a better statecunt than I could ever be, for that is clearly now not true, but the deeper lie that simply BEING Chancellor of Germany somehow gives her access not just to more data than me, or just better data than me, but access to the missing crucial quanta of data, without which, more data is nothing of value whatsoever.