Kimmo’s Blog 2.0

The Busstop-queue -index

The busstop-queue -index gives you an approximation of the time you have to wait for the bus. If there are already people on the busstop when you arrive, it is safe to bet that you won’t have to wait for too long. This holds true regardless the people are aware of busschedules, which I am usually. If there are no people on the busstop as you arrive, it might mean that you have to wait for a longer time, but it is not that certain. In my neck of the woods busses drive right after each other, sometimes in line, which is a by-product of having three different companys running approximately the same route.

Popularity -index

The ratio between sent personal emails to received personal emails implys how popular you are. If you send out more personal emails than you receive, you can’t consider yourself to be that popular. Usually communication like this isn’t symmetrical, it often follows the form: 1.) Query of some kind to person A from person B, 2.) Answer from person A to person B 3.) Acknowledgement of message from person A to person B. In this situation person A is one down and this situation is usually mirrored in all communication situations, he/she who initiates it will be one down. You have to be popular enough for people wanting to proactively engage in communications with you.

When To Sell Your Stock -Guideline

Simply when everybody tells you to buy.

Who’s Fault Is It -Guideline

It’s probably your fault, it might be somebody elses fault but it probably isn’t.

The brain-in-a-vat -concept points to the question, how do you know that you are not really living in a awfully sophisticated virtual reality? You have no direct access to the universe itself, you have to experience it through your sense and those can be fooled. This is an ancient old question debated in Philosophy in many forms since at least Descartes. Matrix has made this idea ‘pop’ in recent years.

If you are a brain-in-a-vat how could I find something like that out? Of course, without direct access to the outside world, you can’t know anything about it, but there are ways to suggest that the reality you think is real is not. Of course these ways come in different degrees of certainty and you can never be absolutely sure, but absolute certainty is rarely an requirement outside philosophers, others are usually content with bloody damn sure.

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Cute is something that seems to have found a perfect way to propagate itself in the Internet. There are websites such as cuteroverload and lolcats that are especially catering for peoples need for cute. In the Internet, cuteness is usually associated with animals, but also on inanimate objects, like toys. The defining quality in cute is not the object matter but that it somehow possesses some human qualities such as sadness, vulnerability, guilt, speaking, stealing etc. When a duck has learned to steal packs of crisps from a store, it’s cute. When a cuttlefish appears to be sad, exhibited by its (apparent) droopy eyelids, its cute, nevermind that a cuttlefish has no eyelids. If a cats mouth seems to portray a smile (preferably in a manga style) thats cute. You get the point.

Sometimes this humanizing animals for cute has its drawbacks. If a pomeranian lets out something that sounds like a human giggle, is it really enjoying the “tickleing” administered by its (apparent) mistress? Some of the viewers don’t seem to think so.

As a petless person, this tendency to see human qualities in animals is quite, should I say puzzling? It clearly gets it wrong in many occasions and therefore the whole meaningfulness of this tendency becomes questionable. Afterall we are talking about mostly people who claim to be animal-lovers who administer procedures on their pets based on their loaded view of their pets. It has been said that a dog understands its owner better than its owner understands it.

This entry is represents a play on numbers, it assumes that you can get a 5% annual interest for your euro adjusted for inflation, which is quite a reasonable assumption. I also submit to you that you can get a very decent living in Finland for 50.000€ a year.

One billion euros is 1.000.000.000€.  With 5% annual interest you are looking 50 million € in interests every year for those billion euros. So, every year your capital grows with 50 million. One million euros carries an interest of 50.000 euros a year, which, as mentioned, secures one person a very decent living in Finland. Every year your billion euros interests interest could provide for 50 people a steady income for the rest of their lives. The next year for another 50 people, and so on.

All this without ever needing to touch your initial capital of one billion euros, or without the fear of it losing its value. The money it would earn wouldn’t be ‘free’ money, it would be only distributing the generated wealth of those billion euros in a manner most would find unfair and surrendering. With one billion dollars you could, every year, for the foreseeable future, turn 50 people financially independent.

That’s exactly what I would do if I had billion euros.