Truth on and off the page

The truth is not found on the page, but is a wayward sprite that bursts forth from the the readers mind for reasons of its own. I once thought that the Truth was a set comprised of all the things that were true, and the big truth could be obtained by taking all the little truth statements and evaluating them till nothing remained. I would approach my rhetorical battles as a logical reductionist, tearing down, atomisiing, proving, disproving, discarding falsehoods and reassembling truths till the Truth was pure and unarguable. But then when truth matters most, when truth is the agent of freedom, I stood before Justice and with truth, lost freedom. Here was something fantastical, you could show irrefutably that (A => B) and (B => C) and (C => D) and Justice would agree, but then, when you claimed your coup de grace, A => D irrevocably, Justice would shake its head and revoke the axiom of transitivity, for Justice will not be told. Transitivity is enabled when Justice decides for emotional reasons A => D *feels nice*. What horror, here is the truth not as a bridge, sturdy to every step, a marvel of bound planks and supports from the known into the unknown, but a surging sea of smashed wood, flotsam and drowning sailors. So first the poetic metaphor, to make the reader want to believe, then the facts, and miracle, transitivity is evoked as justification for prejudice.

The cream of Australian Physics

There are no unarguable axioms of value or worth, there are only inclinations and my inclinations have turned to an intense loathing of institutions, and most of the people in them; those spineless supplicants agape at the passing of other men's ideas, not drawn by desire, but driven by fear and ignorance, to the tepid hearth of
institutionalism. One may argue as to the qualities of a passing man's wife, but as a life philosophy it can only appeal to self-loathing celibates. How much better the subjective stance which curls the mind around the lovely creature in one's embrace!

This perception etched into me when I attended an Australian Institute of Physics conference at ANU with 900 career physicists, the body of which were snivelling fearful conformists of woefully, woefully inferior character. For every Feynman or Lorentz, 100 pen pushing wretches scratching each others eyes out in academic committees or building better bombs for the DSTO (Defence Science & Technology Organisation), who had provided everyone with a bag, embossed with their logo, which most physicists pathetically lugged about with pride and ignorance.

A year before, also at ANU, I represented my university at the Australian National Physics Competition. At the prize ceremony, the head of ANU physics, motioned to us and said, 'You are the cream of Australian physics'. I looked around, and thought, 'Christ Almighty, I hope he's wrong'.

Practical participatory economics

There is a foundation (herein called "the Institute") which holds some of my copyrights and which I have used from time to time as a front, gently concealing my freedom from the social covenant. There are activities that the Institute should engage in that require substantial cash reserves. Normally NGOs beg, but I'm no good at that sort of thing, so the the Institute has created an offshore startup company ("thing2thing.com") to fund it.

This little seed has pushed through into the light from the dark loam wherein ideas are born and now calls for gardeners and manure. To supply them the Institute will pool auction off 40% of the company over two months (i.e angel investors get their investment / total investment of the 40% auctioned) to anyone who will invest. There's no higher reason for this approach, it is a method of gaining initial funding.

There are two dilemmas (di-lemma = "two truths". 2 dilemmas = 4 truths).

The investment. It is a great blessing to have courage and foresight that results in wealth producing rather than wealth destroying acts. However foresight is limited and the connection between dividends and the intelligence of the original investment, assuming there ever was one, slowly dwindles to zero, whittled away by fate's unrelenting peturbations of man's activities; above this plunging donkey, dividend payments may soar exponentially till they yearn for the Islamic opprobrium on unearned wealth. Now this very possibility, this pleasant vision of pocketing of the dividend fatwa, increases investment without increasing investment discrimination unless some investments can be seen to exclude this eventuality.

Dilemma#1

There is thought of engineering investments so that after a substantial return, dividends are transformed into a donation to the Institute or some other charity, but this will reduce total investment, perhaps resulting in a net evil, since we define the Institute's ability to act as a good. Examining the extremes, we see immediately that if the company makes nothing, the Institute makes less than nothing and the investors make less than nothing while if the investors receive substantial unearned wealth, then the Institute is well funded and able to act. But wealth flows from the ongoing daily labors of those running the startup. Here we see the disparity. Their labor is ongoing and connected to wealth production at all times. Individuals who start companies try to minimise share dilution while maximising investment. While larger companies will sell bonds or borrow at market rates, startups succeed in attracting investors to their roulette table by offering the carnal vision of l'amour without l'commitment. Can we reinvent the bordello? This brings me to the next dilemma.

Dilemma#2

How should employees, if that word is not too psychologically confining, be compensated for their time and abilities? "anyway they want to be" for supply and demand works for novel compensation schemes just as it works for traditional wages. So my question becomes, 'given that the founders loathe paperwork & consensus and need to satisfy investors that their investment isn't going to be entirely returned in form of employee stock options, what is left to offer employees? How can their hearts be opened to the new?'