Precedent for the Short in The Biggest . . .
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine is the 2010 bestseller* by Michael Lewis about the inflating of the U.S. housing bubble that burst in 2008. From The Big Short:
A smaller number of people—more than ten, fewer than twenty—made a straightforward bet against the entire multi-trillion-dollar subprime mortgage market [i.e., said people shorted said market] and, by extension, the global financial system. In and of itself it was a remarkable fact: The catastrophe was foreseeable, yet only a handful noticed.
* #12 on Amazon’s 2010 list of bestsellers, #98 in 2011; 2015 movie The Big Short (based on the book) grossed $133 million
Re: the biggest short (i.e., the basis of The Biggest . . .)
From a 2004 email sent to me by Amazon.com’s first Director of Personalization:
Frank, I just spent about an hour surfing around your website with a bit of amazement. I run a [now defunct] little company [funded entirely by Amazon] . . . We are a team of folks who worked together at Amazon.com developing that company’s personalization and recommendations team and systems. We spent about 1.5 years thinking about what we wanted to build next. We thought a lot about online education tools. We thought a lot about classified ads and job networks. We thought a lot about reputation systems. We thought a bit about personalized advertising systems. We thought a lot about blogging and social networking systems. . . . I guess I’m mostly just fascinated that we’ve been working a very similar vein to the one you describe, without having a solid name for it (we call it “the age of the amateur” or “networks of shared experiences” instead of [AI-powered] CLLCS [i.e., customized lifelong learning and career services], but believe me, we are talking about the same patterns and markets, if not in exactly the same way). Thanks for sharing what you have—it’s fascinating stuff.
From a 2004 email sent to me by an analyst at then top VC firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson:
Hi Frank, Thanks for your time today. If you would like to provide us with further information about your [business] plan [for providing CLLCS], we would be happy to review it in more detail.
From a 1998 email sent to me by the then Manager of the Learning Sciences and Technology Group at Microsoft Research:
Frank, you are a good man. Have you thought about joining this team? Your only alternative, of course, is venture capital. But their usual models require getting rid of the “originator” within the first eighteen months.
My work from 1992 to 2006:
is the foundation of my current plan to provide the most popular online market for customized education and artificial intelligence (e.g., CE-for-AI, which will be to the AI economy what oil has been to the industrial economy)
included co-founding an AI-&-data-science startup* in 1995
didn’t yield a business model that would’ve been disruptive to Amazon, Google, etc. (i.e., that would’ve enabled me to launch a startup that could be expected to survive competition from Amazon, etc.)
Since 2006 my focus has been innovating so my planned startup will:
outperform all classes of competitors (e.g., would disrupt a future startup funded initially by Bill Gates, who has donated/invested a LOT of money to advance CE)
become to the AI economy what John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil (SO) became to the industrial economy of his era (SO made Rockefeller the richest person since the Industrial Revolution)
* The 2000 conference paper details work done during and after my tenure at Medicine Rules** (‘95-’98). One of the paper’s co-authors—Joseph Gartner, M.D.—is MR’s other co-founder; another of the co-authors—Allen Tien, M.D.—is the founder of Medical Decision Logic, the company that MR merged with in 1998.
** MR’s early focus was developing rule-based expert systems for diagnosis support; other applications of RBESs include intelligent tutoring.
— Re: CE for AI —
Keywords: customized bundles of data, software and services, purchased to: 1) launch each buyer’s “1.0” AI, 2) augment buyers’ AI (e.g., software purchased to add features to a 1.0 AI, data that a 2.0 AI can learn from).
From 2015 book Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction, co-authored by University of Pennsylvania professor of psychology and political science Philip Tetlock:
Doug knows that when people read for pleasure they naturally gravitate to the like-minded. So he created a database containing hundreds of information sources—from the New York Times to obscure blogs—that are tagged by their ideological orientation, subject matter, and geographical origin, then wrote a program that selects what he should read next using criteria that emphasize diversity. Thanks to Doug’s simple invention, he is sure to constantly encounter different perspectives.
From 2018 book Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together, by the MIT professor who’s the Director of MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence:
What if each participant [in a market] has his or her own “stable” of [AI-powered software ro]bots? Then participants will compete to create smarter and smarter bots [my emphasis]. If your bots are better than mine at making accurate predictions, then you will make more money than I will.
. . . Today’s financial markets are leading the way, with investment managers increasingly relying on quantitative, often AI-based, trading algorithms.
— Re: CE will be the oil of the AI economy —
From Nobel laureate economist Paul Romer’s entry on Economic Growth in the 2008 edition of The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics:
[T]he country that takes the lead in the twenty-first century will be the one that implements an innovation that more effectively supports the production of new ideas in the private sector [e.g., AI-produced ideas].
From 2006 book Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations:
This book tells the story of a single technical paper in economics [Romer (1990): Endogenous Technical Change] . . .
. . . Romer won a race of sorts, a race within the community of university-based research economists to make sense of the process of globalization at the end of the twentieth century and to say something practical and new about how to encourage economic development . . .
From 2004 book The Mystery of Economic Growth, by a Harvard economist (my emphases):
Interest in growth theory abruptly revived . . . in the 1980s. The two key papers were by Romer (1986) and Lucas (1988). . . . Romer also initiated the second wave of research on the “new” growth theory.
. . . A more detailed study of the U.S. economy is provided by [Stanford economist Charles] Jones (2002). He found that between 1950 and 1993 improvements in educational attainments, which amounted to an increase of four years of schooling on average, explain about 30 percent of growth of output per hour. The remaining 70 percent is attributable to the rise in the stock of ideas that was produced in the United States, France, West Germany, the United Kingdom, and Japan.
— Re: founder’s equity in the Amazon of CE & AI (AoCEAI) is (very) likely to yield a Rockefeller-ian fortune —
From said entry of Romer’s on Economic Growth:
Perhaps the most important ideas of all are meta-ideas—ideas about how to support the production and transmission of other ideas. . . . North Americans invented the modern research university . . .
From 2014 book SuperIntelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, published by Oxford University Press:
From 2020 book The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives (my emphases):
In the 1990s, Ray Kurzweil, the director of engineering at Google . . . discovered that once a technology becomes digital—that is, once it can be programmed in the ones and zeroes of computer code—it hops on the back of Moore’s Law and begins accelerating exponentially.
. . . The technologies now accelerating at this rate include some of the most potent innovations we have yet dreamed up: quantum computers, artificial intelligence . . .
. . . [F]ormerly independent waves of exponentially accelerating technology are beginning to converge . . . For example, the speed of drug development is accelerating, not only because biotechnology is progressing at an exponential rate, but because artificial intelligence . . .
From 2008 book Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns:
Students need customized pathways and paces to learn.
. . . The second [phase of the disruption of standardized education] will be the emergence of a user network, whose analogues in other industries would be eBay . . .
Disrupting Class was co-authored by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, originator of the canonical models of disruptive innovation.
From 2015 book The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere:
“I asked Michael [Staton, a partner in a venture capital firm focused on education and technology] to introduce me to some of the startups that he found most exciting . . .
[Clayton] Christensen was cited ad nauseum by everyone we met.”
“The University of Everywhere will solve the basic problem that has bedeviled universities since they were first invented over a millennium ago: how to provide a personalized, individual education to large numbers of people at a reasonable price.”
2007 book StrengthsFinder 2.0:
primes readers to seek out CE for themselves, their children, et al.
is #2 on Amazon.com’s list of best-selling books of 2016, #5 on the 2015 list, #1 on 2014 and 2013, #5 on 2012, #4 on 2011, #7 on 2010, #6 on 2009, #9 on 2008 and 2007, #25 on 2017, #78 on 2018 and #70 on 2019
— More re: my work —
Name of my planned startup: The Opportunity Services Group (OSG).
A key to OSG providing the AoCEAI is OSG providing the most popular implementation of my Amazon-/VC-praised* design that:
will yield a next-gen variant of LinkedIn
fixes the fatal flaw of 2003 “sensation” BlogShares.com
* From said 2004 email sent to me by Amazon.com’s first Director of Personalization:
We thought a lot about reputation systems. We thought a bit about personalized advertising systems. We thought a lot about blogging and social networking systems. . . . [W]e’ve been working a very similar vein to the one you describe . . .
A key to OSG providing the most popular implementation of said design is OSG producing and popularizing a startup comedy (SC) that will:
originate as a serial “non-fiction novel” (SNFN) published online
be designed to motivate readers to become equity-crowdfunders (i.e., part-owners) of OSG
adapt and expand on the 200 pages of my unpublished SNFN titled Post-Romantic Comedy: A Startup Comedy
show that said LinkedIn variant is (very) likely to expedite the “emergence” of a variant of what complexity scientists call “order for free” (keywords re: the latter variant: flow; often, “group flow” sparks romantic attraction)
be titled Orgies for Free (OfF)
feature a “set-up subplot” that’s designed to yield two KEY spin-off SCs
spin-off from this serial narrative (i.e., the making of OfF will be a focus of future chapters of The Biggest Short)
. . .
Details about the above follow.
Re: said Amazon-/VC-praised design
OSG’s 1.0 implementation of the site/app will feature:
a market for the advertisement spaces on solo-blogger blogs (e.g., portfolio blogs) [1]
a virtual currency (cash transactions will be supported also)
Prices in OSG’s virtual currency (OVC) will contain/reflect only truthful peer ratings of work samples. Ratings of this kind are a top predictor of work performance, according to a much-cited meta-analysis of 85 years of personnel-selection research (5670 citations as of October 16, 2020) [2]. Other top predictors of work performance are often unavailable (e.g., test results). So OVC prices will be ideal for ranking people within individual job/skill categories. These rankings will make it much easier for Jane Q. Upwardly-Mobile to identify others who (can) best complement her (ditto for John Q.).
[1] An ad space sold for OVC will typically be on the homepage (i.e., front page) of the seller’s blog; key reasons: 1) sales of spaces for OVC will occur via weekly auctions, 2) per week, each blogger will be able to sell only one ad space for OVC (which space is sold can vary weekly). Keywords re: said auctions: sealed-bid, second-price; combinatorial auctions via fractional allocations, so each week’s auction will provide a “spot” market and an “up-front” market; traders will make these markets “information-efficient.”
[2] From 2015 book Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead, by Google’s then head of “People Operations”:
. . .
From the Schmidt-Hunter paper linked-to above:
Name of OSG’s planned site/app
Adver-ties
Re: Adver-ties will be a debugged version of BlogShares.com
From a 2003 article on rediff.com:
The latest sensation that’s grabbing the attention of netizens is BlogShares . . . an online stock market in which you get to speculate on the future of your favourite blogs. . . . Every player gets 500 BlogShare dollars upon signup.
. . . How you play BlogShares depends on what you want from it. For some, the objective is to get their blogs on the Top 100 Index.
. . . At the end of a three-week phase of beta testing, there were a staggering 40,000 listed blogs. Over 5000 active players carry out thousands of transactions every day . . .
Re: the fatal flaw of BlogShares
The price mechanism was easily gamed. From the rediff.com article:
[Inbound] links are the assets that drive valuations.
Re: bloggers will be able to parlay a high and/or fast-rising ad rate in OVC into cash via: 1) sales of other ad spaces, 2) affiliate-marketing commissions, 3) subscriptions
Keywords: influencer marketing (IM), antidote to the epidemic of IM fraud. Some details follow; more below.
Izea: 71% of influencers had a blog in 2018; 39% of advertisers sponsored blog posts in 2018; 67% of social-media users in 2020 aspire to be paid social-media influencers.
Mediakix: 44% of advertisers consider blogs to be among the social-media channels that are most important for IM in 2020 (Facebook: 45%; Twitter: 33%; LinkedIn: 19%); 50% of advertisers consider fraud the #1 drawback of IM in 2020.
Re: a high and/or fast-rising ad rate in OVC will be achievable partly via OSG’s prediction markets (OPMs)
High prices/rankings in OPMs will serve as PageRank-like pointers to high-quality blogs. Details are in a section below. Keywords: OPM prices denominated in OVC.
From 2018 book Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence, published by Harvard Business School Press:
AI is a prediction technology . . .
. . . What will new AI technologies make so cheap? Prediction.
. . . When prediction is cheap, there will be more prediction and more complements to prediction [my emphasis].
More re: Adver-ties
See below.
Precedent for OfF being an SC
From a 2015 issue of a newsletter about podcasts:
Gimlet, your friendly neighborhood podcasting company that narrates its own emergence [on its podcast titled StartUp] . . .
[A]ccording to the StartUp episode that dropped last Thursday, Graham Holdings invested $5 million into the $6 million round [raised by Gimlet], with the remainder split between some existing investors upping their commitment and a crowdfunded pool [via StartUp listeners] that was mediated through Quire, the equity crowdfunding platform [my emphasis] . . .
Re: OfF will be a flowmantic comedy
— Summary (some details follow; more below) —
Flow is the state-of-mind that enables top performance/problem-solving.
Often, flow via collaboration—“group flow”—sparks romantic attraction.
Adver-ties will give rise to MANY flowmances.
— Re: flow —
From 2014 book The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance:
“Flow’s two defining characteristics are its feel-good nature (flow is always a positive experience) and its function as a performance-enhancer. The [neuro]chemicals described herein are among the strongest . . . the body can produce.”
“A ten-year study done by McKinsey found top executives reported being up to five times more productive when in flow. Creativity and cooperation are so amplified by the state that [a] Greylock Partners venture capitalist . . . called ‘flow state percentage’—defined as the amount of time employees spend in flow—the ‘most important management metric for building great innovation teams.’ ”
More below.
— Re: group flow sparks romantic attraction —
From The Rise of Superman:
[T]here are extraordinarily powerful social bonding neurochemicals at the heart of both flow and group flow: dopamine and norepinephrine, that underpin romantic love . . .
More below.
Re: orgies-for-free (part of the basis for OfF)
— Summary (some details follow; more below) —
For each of us, maximizing the amount of time we’re in a flow state is a key to thriving/surviving amid “superstar-biased” technological change (e.g., amid “winner-take-all” markets).
So keeping collaborators happy . . . polyamory . . .
Human society is a type of “complex adaptive system” (CAS).
In CASs, “order for free” (OFF) emerges at “the boundary between order and chaos.”
Orgies-for-free (O-F-F):
would be a variant of OFF
seems very likely to emerge soon, partly [1] via group flow and Adver-ties
O-F-F would be women-FRIENDLY almost certainly [2].
Keywords re: [1, 2]: “new science” re: “women, lust and infidelity.”
— Re: MANY orgies (will) result from people adapting to evolutionary selection- pressures that are intensifying rapidly (e.g., superstar-biased tech change) —
From 2018 book Tell Me What You Want: The Science of Sexual Desire and How It Can Help You Improve Your Sex Life:
I will offer an analysis of the largest-ever survey of Americans’ sexual fantasies . . .
89 percent [of respondents] reported fantasizing about threesomes, 74 percent about orgies, and 61 percent about gangbangs. . . . [T]he majority of women reported having each of these sex fantasies . . .
More than three-quarters of the men and women I surveyed hope to eventually act on their favorite sexual fantasies.
Tell Me’s author has a PhD, is a former lecturer at Harvard and is a Research Fellow at the Kinsey Institute.
— Precedent for O-F-F, via humans’ closest primate relative —
From 2018 book Untrue: Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust, and Infidelity Is Wrong and How the New Science Can Set Us Free:
[T]he bonobo, with whom we share nearly 99 percent of our DNA . . .
A 2017 study comparing human, chimp and bonobo muscles confirmed what previous molecular research had suggested: “Bonobo muscles have changed the least [from our common ancestor], which means they are the closest we can get to having a ‘living’ ancestor,” according to the research head of the George Washington University Center for the Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology.
. . . [P]erhaps the most remarkable thing about bonobos . . . Basically, they seem to have sex constantly throughout the day, with just about anybody. Meredith Small reports being in a room of three hundred or so primatologists and journalists of some early footage of bonobos in 1991, before much was known about them. Moments after the film began, the room fell utterly silent as the assembled took in the spectacle of these primates having sex more times and in more positions and combinations than most humans in any culture could even imagine.
. . . [B]onobos have sex to diffuse potential tension—when they come upon a cache of food, for example, or a new bonobo troop, having sex is a way to bond and take the stress level down. Parish pointed out that this was happening as we observed them being fed. Once the food was flung down to them, at least one pair of bonobos began to “consort” immediately. Only then did they get down to the business of eating.
Possible comedy opener of OfF
“Eleven states,” I said, “have legalized recreational marijuana. A lot of partying happens away from home. Smoking weed gives people the munchies. Many popular night-spots don’t serve food. So there’s greenfield opportunity at the intersection of mobile storage, weed storage, and food storage. Specifically, opportunity for OSG to patent my design of clothing-pockets that close via Ziploc.”
Mindy’s eyes widened for an instant. Then her lips formed a thin smile.
“I see you’re worried about developing laugh lines,” I said. “You shouldn’t be. Laugh lines are no match for modern cosmetic surgery. After all, cosmetic surgery is getting so advanced that, soon, it will be a simple matter to make a woman’s face after surgery appear completely different than her face before surgery.”
Then I tried to appear struck by a flash of insight.
“Which means,” I said, “that soon millions of Caucasian women will find it impossible to get a date! Unless . . .”
I picked up the handset of my desk phone, then appeared to dial an extension.
“It has come to my attention,” I said into the handset, “that OSG can profit obscenely by purchasing the rights to develop and market the only DNA test that enables a woman to prove she’s not Lorena Bobbitt!”
Mindy laughed.
I restored the handset to its cradle, then used my laptop. A new presentation slide appeared on the wall-mounted screen:
From a 1978 article in The New Yorker:
“When it comes to saving a bad line, [Johnny Carson] is the master”—to quote a tribute paid in my presence by George Burns.
. . . One sometimes detects a vindictive glint in Carson’s eye when a number of gags sink without risible trace, but [Tonight Show writer Pat] McCormick assures me that this is all part of the act . . .
Re: the making of said comedy opener, said business plan, said site/app design, etc.
— Summary (details follow) —
I have what some neuroscientists call “comedy-writer brain” (e.g., my neuroanatomy includes a “flat” memory hierarchy that enables non-conscious processes of my brain to reliably identify associations that are perceived as very remote by other types of brains).
My focus from 1992 to 2006 was developing a likable comic persona.
My focus since 2006 has been developing the craft/artfulness required to excel as a creator/writer/producer of startup comedies (SCs). (Equity-crowdfunding was legalized in 2012. From 2006 to legalization my focus was leveraging comedic SNFNs to run marketing and user-showcasing as a profit center.)
— Re: comedy-writer brain —
From 2014 book Ha!: the Science of When We Laugh and Why, by a cognitive neuroscientist:
[I]t’s worth noting that no single brain region is responsible for this type of creativity. One scientific review of seventy-two recent experiments revealed that no single brain region is consistently active during creative behavior. There is, however, something special about people who make novel connections or imagine the unimaginable. What sets them apart is the connectivity within their resting brains. This finding was discovered by a team of researchers from Tohoku in Japan, who observed that people with highly connected brains—as measured by shared brain activity over multiple regions—are more flexible and adaptive thinkers. Connected brains are creative brains.
From 1999 book The Entertainment Economy:
— Re: non-conscious processes identifying remote associations —
From 2017 book Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work:
Carhart-Harris set out to take real-time pictures of the unconscious [using neuroimaging technologies (e.g., fMRI)] and when he did, he saw the unconscious actively hunting for new ideas.
— Re: my focus from 1992 to 2006 on developing a likable comic persona —
My approach to said developing comprised 3 steps, with a corollary:
S1: Select a problem that’s causing many people a lot of distress.
S2: Try to solve (part of) the problem.
S3: Mine the experience for comedy.
C1: The more effective I am at solving (part of) the problem, the more likable my persona will be.
— Re: my focus since 2006 on developing the craft/artfulness required to excel as a creator/writer/producer of SCs —
Title of a 2007 paper in The Journal of Creative Behavior:
Ten Years to Expertise, Many More to Greatness: An Investigation of Modern Writers
Precedent for excelling at creating/writing/producing SCs
Alloy Entertainment is the book packager that was acquired for $100M in 2012 by the Warner Brothers Television Group. Re: Alloy, via a 2009 article in The New Yorker:
Millions of girls have consumed Alloy Entertainment’s products, but the company’s name does not appear on the spine of its books. Rather, it packages about thirty novels a year for publishers, and also generates television shows and a growing number of ideas for feature films. In order to do all this, Alloy has developed a process with an industrial level of efficiency. Ideas are typically suggested in weekly development meetings and, if they gain the approval of Morgenstein and Bank, are fleshed out into a short summary by an editor. A writer is asked to create a sample chapter on spec; if Alloy executives are happy with the sample, they put her (or, on occasion, him) on contract. The writer hashes out a plot with Bank, one or two other editors, and Sara Shandler, Alloy’s editorial director—an alumnus of Seventeen, who, at the age of nineteen, put together the anthology “Ophelia Speaks,” in which young women respond to the best-selling book “Reviving Ophelia.” The group spends days brainstorming in the conference room, in the manner of television writers developing a series. The writer then goes off and completes the “first act”—roughly, the first ten chapters of the book. When the first act is in good shape, it is sent to potential publishers.
More re: the business case for OfF
Re: OSG outperforming competitors partly via OfF
— Summary (details follow) —
OSG will need to outperform two types of companies:
big, monolithic companies that “clone” Adver-ties (e.g., LinkedIn, Facebook, Amazon)
startups that:
clone Adver-ties
clone OSG’s business model (e.g., by producing would-be substitutes for OSG’s SCs)
are funded initially by people who have VASTLY more investment capital than OSG’s founders and early investors
Keys to OSG outperforming both types include OfF and (planned) spin-off SCs.
Re: OSG disrupting BigCos
Keys will include:
developing software that complements Adver-ties
systematically spinning-off the product groups that develop the complements*
excelling at helping these spin-offs raise equity crowdfunding
This spinning-off and excelling will make joining one of said groups MUCH more attractive to TOP software developers than working at any monolithic BigCo that clones Adver-ties. Via attracting TOP devs: top complements of Adver-ties . . . more Adver-ties users . . . Adver-ties attracts more TOP devs . . . more top complements . . .
From 2019 book Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World:
[T]he “10X” coder . . . describes a programmer who is provably better, multiple times so, than the average code monkey.
. . . Bill Gates once said, “ . . . a great writer of software code is worth ten thousand times the price of an average software writer.”
. . . When I ask venture capitalists and founders whether 10Xers really exist, many immediately say: Oh yes. Hell yes.
“I think it’s probably 1000X,” . . . Marc Andreessen . . . cofounder of Netscape . . . tells me.
From a 2014 article:
“One top-notch engineer is worth 300 times or more than the average,” explains Alan Eustace, a Google vice president of engineering.
Said excelling at helping will equate largely to excelling at creating, writing and producing SCs.
* Each spin-off will continue to develop its complement(s).
Re: OSG thwarting BigCos that try to eliminate OSG via funding passage of anti-competitive regulation (ACR)
— Summary (details follow) —
There’s a long history of BigCos eliminating would-be disruptors via ACR.
ACR of the CE-AI industry could yield a variant of what sociologists call a poverty trap (PT).
My planned second spin-off from OfF will:
depict a fictional PT that derives from fictional ACR of the CE-AI industry
be set in the near future
show how Adver-ties and the AoCEAI could be leveraged to prevent ACR of the CE-AI industry
be an SC
A PT is depicted on the 2002–2008 HBO series The Wire (“routinely called the best television show ever”).
Said spin-off will be titled F*ck a Re-Up: The Making of “The Wired.”
— Re: F*ck a . . . —
From season 5, episode 9 of The Wire:
Police officer: So this is a re-up.
Lester Freamon: Fuck a re-up, son. This, here, in the middle of nowhere—miles from anywhere these mopes meet—this is re-supply.
— Re: BigCos eliminating via ACR —
From 2010 book The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires:
“Again and again in the histories I have recounted, the state has shown itself an inferior arbiter of what is good for the information industries.”
“Most of the federal government’s intrusions in the twentieth century were efforts at preventing disruption by new technologies . . .”
“The federal government’s role in radio and television from the 1920s through the 1960s, for instance, was nothing short of a disgrace. . . .
Government’s tendency to protect large market players amounts to an illegitimate complicity . . . [particularly its] sense of obligation to protect big industries irrespective of their having become uncompetitive.”
From the 2018 article on BusinessInsider.com titled “Netflix and others warn about the end of net neutrality rules”:
As the Federal Communications Commission was readying its repeal of net-neutrality rules towards the end of 2017, and picking up more speed in recent months, dozens of companies have warned in regulatory filings about the threats to their businesses. The warnings come from startups and tech giants alike, including Spotify, Snap, Dropbox . . .
As a result of the repeal of net neutrality “coupled with potentially significant political and economic power of local network operators, we could experience discriminatory or anti-competitive practices [my emphasis] that could impede our growth, cause us to incur additional expense or otherwise negatively affect our business,” Netflix warned in its annual report.
— Re: The Wire depicts a PT —
From the 2010 article on Slate.com subtitled “Why so many colleges are teaching The Wire.”:
Professors at Harvard, U.C.—Berkeley, Duke, and Middlebury are now offering courses on the show.
Interestingly, the classes aren’t just in film studies or media studies departments; they’re turning up in social science disciplines as well, places where the preferred method of inquiry is the field study or the survey, not the HBO series, even one that is routinely called the best television show ever. Some sociologists and social anthropologists, it turns out, believe The Wire has something to teach their students about poverty, class, bureaucracy, and the social ramifications of economic change.
. . . One of the professors teaching a course on the show is the sociologist William Julius Wilson—his class, at Harvard, will be offered this fall.
. . . Asked why he was teaching a class around a TV drama, Wilson said the show makes the concerns of sociologists immediate in a way no work of sociology he knows of ever has. “Although The Wire is fiction, not a documentary, its depiction of [the] systemic urban inequality that constrains the lives of the urban poor is more poignant and compelling [than] that of any published study, including my own,” he wrote in an e-mail.
For Wilson, the unique power of the show comes from the way it takes fiction’s ability to create fully realized inner lives for its characters and combines that with qualities rare in a piece of entertainment: an acuity about the structural conditions that constrain human choices (whether it’s bureaucratic inertia, institutional racism, or economic decay) and an unparalleled scrupulousness about accurately portraying them. Wilson describes the show’s characters almost as a set of case studies, remarkable for the vividness with which they embody a set of arguments about the American inner city. “What I’m concentrating on is how this series so brilliantly illustrates theories and processes that social scientists have been writing about for years,” he said in an interview.
— Re: leveraging Adver-ties and the AoCEAI to prevent ACR of the CE-AI industry —
From 2007 book The Populist Vision, published by Oxford University Press:
“[T]he Populist revolt [in the U.S. during the 1890s] reflected a conflict over divergent paths of modern capitalist development.
. . . By the 1880s, two firmly entrenched parties dominated the political scene. At the national level, Democrats and Republicans held much in common as they shared a conservatism that was acceptable to the financial and corporate establishment.
. . . Progressive Era legislation in the first years of the new [i.e., 20th] century expanded the role of government in American life and laid the foundations of modern political development. Populism provided an impetus for this modernizing process, with many of their demands co-opted and refashioned by progressive Democrats and Republicans.”
“The Farmers’ Alliance [was] the largest and most important constituency of what would become the Populist coalition [of the 1890s].
. . . From its earliest stirring [in the 1870s], the Farmers’ Alliance defined itself as an educational movement.
. . . The farmers needed to organize for self-education to better engage the complex problems of modern society . . . To get people reading and thinking required what [Alliance president Macune] described as a modern educational machine. The engine driving this machine was the reform press.
. . . By the late 1880s, the Alliance had grown to an intellectual enterprise that stretched across much of rural America . . . [The Alliance] built lecture circuits across thirty states and a network of approximately one thousand weekly newspapers.”
“The Farmers’ Alliance . . . realized that without the political levers of control, even the best-laid business plans would come to naught. . . . Convictions about . . . political action flowed directly from business strategies.
. . . Most of the Populist ‘revolt’ took place not in the streets but in lodge meetings and convention halls, where participants pored over problems of commerce and government and adopted resolutions for the creation or expansion of state and federal agencies, institutes, commissions, departments and bureaus.”
“A Texas experiment provided the most widely imitated prototype . . . The Texas Farmers’ Alliance Exchange . . . would offer Texas cotton growers all the advantages of a centralized and regulated market, with a rational structure and direct access to credit and to the commercial centers . . . From Georgia to California the Farmers’ Alliance set up state exchanges.”
From 2016 book This Is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-First Century:
After two years of research, Chenoweth crunched the numbers. Examining the first data set of 323 campaigns [i.e., social movements], she . . . found a direct correlation between the success of a campaign and the popular involvement [in it.]
. . . Chenoweth found that, in fact, “no campaigns failed once they’d achieved the active and sustained participation of just 3.5 percent of the population[”] . . .
This is not an insignificant number: in the United States, 3.5 percent of the population would mean gaining the support of some 11 million individuals.
. . . Spurring people to this level of engagement is not easy.
Re: OSG outcompeting future startups that clone OSG’s business model and are funded initially by people who have VASTLY more investment capital than OSG’s founders and early investors
— Summary (details follow) —
By adapting the design of Adver-ties, I designed a complementary site/app (CSA).
Implementing the complementary design is a key to OSG outcompeting . . .
Other keys:
implementing a particular software complement of CSA
popularizing both implementations
Keys to said popularizing include:
showcasing users of the implementations
spinning-off the product group that develops said complement
HELPING this spin-off raise equity-crowdfunding
Keys to said showcasing and HELPING include leveraging OfF and the first planned spin-off from OfF.
— Re: the design of CSA —
Summary (details below)
A key to popularizing Adver-ties will be attracting 10s (i.e., people whose work is top-quality on a scale of 1 to 10). Re: “key”: 10s will attract 9s, 9s will attract 8s . . .
The ideal 10s to attract first include software developers with Blockchain expertise (i.e., the expertise that’s most in demand in the U.S. and worldwide, according to a 2020 report from LinkedIn).
Top Blockchain devs are likely to be attracted to a Blockchain app (i.e., dapp, short for decentralized-application) that seems likely to become the first “killer dapp” (KD1). Keywords re: “attracted”: developing complements to KD1.
It seems likely that KD1 will:
derive from the design of CSA
decentralize sugar-dating, and maybe XXX-camming
be implemented by OSG
be named Adver-tease
— Said complement to Adver-tease —
the most valuable sub-system of a particular recommender system
Some details (more below):
On the most popular site for sugar-dating, there are four sugar babies for each sugar parent.
So sugar babies on Adver-tease can be expected to compete partly via their pseudonymous blogs.
A key to blogging pseudonymously is preventing AI from outing you via “your fairly unique and individual linguistic fingerprint or style.”
A key to blogging pseudonymously, then, is making abundant use of excerpts.
An ideal way to popularize Adver-tease, then, could be facilitating the provision of software that recommends sexcerpts (e.g., passages from erotic fiction).
— Precedent for an excerpt recommender —
https://books.google.com/talktobooks/
— Re: AI identifying a “fairly unique and individual linguistic fingerprint or style” —
From 2015 book The Bestseller Code: Anatomy of the Blockbuster Novel:
“[Y]ears of research in authorship attribution and stylometrics have suggested that each of us has a fairly unique and individual linguistic fingerprint or style.”
“In early July of 2013 a U.S. professor received a random phone call from across the Atlantic. The stranger on the end of the line asked him to help solve a mystery. The professor was asked to bring his special expertise in hidden patterns to correct history. Within a week he would be in the spotlight, all over the international news. The story sounds just like something Dan Brown would make up and then sell about a hundred million copies. But in this instance, the professor was not Robert Langdon but Patrick Juola, his domain was not symbology but stylometrics, and his case study was not the Catholic Church but J. K. Rowling. Juola, a professor of computer science and an expert on computational authorship attribution, was asked by a Sunday Times news reporter to investigate a new novel. That novel was The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith, a debut author who had ostensibly drawn on his years as a member of the Royal Military Police to write a detective story. But the reporter had been tipped off. The anonymous hint was that Galbraith didn’t really exist and that the real author was in fact the Harry Potter creator. Was it true? Juola worked on the case. Within thirty minutes, his computer gave him sufficient evidence to support the tip-off.
. . . Even when Rowling tried, very consciously, to write like “Robert Galbraith” and not like J. K. Rowling, there were habits and patterns to her prose that she could not successfully suppress.”
— Re: the first planned spin-off from OfF —
Summary (some details follow; more below)
Planned title: Sexcerpts and the City: the Making of “Girl Groups” (SATC).
In particular, SATC will showcase cam models (e.g., (groups of) “diversified” adult entertainers (AEs) who: 1) use Adver-tease, 2) want to raise equity-crowdfunding).
SATC is likely to be the first startup CAMedy.
Re: AEs using Adver-tease (e.g., being (open to becoming) sugar babies)
Title of a 2014 article on Salon.com:
When porn stars become escorts: Lucrative new trend could also be risky
Re: AEs who cam raising equity-crowdfunding
From 2020 book Camming: Money, Power, and Pleasure in the Sex Work Industry, published by NYU Press:
[O]f all the models in the sample who have earned $10,000 in any month camming, there was not one who had been camming for less than a year. Alicia once earned $54,000 in one month and averages $11,000 a month; she has been camming for seven years. Quinn, who one month earned $50,000 and averages $5,000 a month, has cammed for five years. Tanya once earned $25,000 in a month and usually makes $10,000 a month; she has worked as a cam model for over eight years. . . . [E]xtremely high wages occurred but disproportionately went to full-time cam models who have worked in the industry for long periods of time and who labored incredibly hard to build popular brands.
From a 2015 article on CNBC.com titled “Porn stars’ best business advice: Diversify”:
Today’s big stars aren’t just performers. They’re also directors, sex educators and lecturers. They oversee huge social media empires on Twitter, Instagram and their own websites. And they license their names to adult novelty companies in return for a portion of the sales of their branded sex toys.
From Camming:
Two of the four reasons* that Bill Gates et al. might not clone Adver-tease, OfF and SATC
— Summary (details follow) —
SATC will yield a casting couch that’s popular with:
AEs
equity-crowdfunders who:
become part-owners (POs) of SATC (i.e., of the company that: 1) produces SATC and unplanned spin-off camedies, 2) spins-off** from OSG)
as POs, influence the casting of AEs on SATC
Parts of SATC will be sexxxually exxxplicit.
* Reason 3 will be detailed in chapter 2 of this serial narrative (TBS). Reason 4 might be detailed in a future chapter of TBS.
** OSG will remain the majority owner.
— Re: AEs exchanging sex for showcasing in/on startup camedies —
From a 2012 article on PsychologyToday.com titled “Porn Stars and Evolutionary Psychology”:
What seems very clear from these studies is that both male and female performers have unusually high sex drives and a willingness to have sexual relations with a large number of partners.
From 2017 book Watching Porn: And Other Confessions of an Adult Entertainment Journalist:
With few exceptions, my adult entertainer interviewees have reported that they love their jobs because they love sex, and always have.
From a 2000 paper titled “Conflicts of Interest in the Hollywood Film Industry,” co-authored by a Claremont Colleges economist:
If their need for subsistence did not prevent it, most new actors and actresses would accept no wage at all and even pay for the opportunity to appear in a film. Lacking money, many choose to “sell” their sexual services in an attempt to influence producers, who otherwise have few ways to distinguish one newcomer from another. According to this view, hanky-panky though common is not really coercive but represents quid pro quo exchanges . . . As one lawyer who talked with us off the record said, “it’s part of the wages on both sides of the exchange.”
— Re: POs of SATC will influence the casting of AEs on SATC —
Men who are hypersexual and (becoming) wealthy could bid up the price for equity shares of SATC (i.e., OSG could up/UP its profits via POs being able to influence . . .).
Re: said two reasons might not deter Bill Gates et al. from cloning . . .
— Summary (some details follow; more below) —
SATC will be exxxplicit via erotic flowmance.
Fifty Shades of Grey (50SoG) is an erotic romance; copies sold exceeds 150 million.
OSG’s offerings and/or clones will HELP to advance longevity science (LS), and medical research more generally.
— Re: 50SoG is an erotic romance —
From The Bestseller Code:
The critics’ decision that “kinky fuckery” [in 50SoG] was the explanation for the sales numbers was likely a red herring. The novel is not so much outright erotica but is instead a spicy romance that has the emotional connection between its hero and heroine as its central interest.
— Re: copies of 50SoG sold exceeds 150M —
From 2017 book Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction:
If a book sells one million copies total, it is a historic bestseller. In the spring and summer of 2012, Random House was printing one million copies of the Fifty Shades trilogy every week. Now with more than 150 million sold copies, Fifty Shades of Grey is the bestselling book in the history of Random House.
— Re: LS —
From The Future Is Faster Than You Think:
[Google’s] Ray Kurzweil and longevity expert Aubrey de Grey have begun talking about “longevity escape velocity,” or the idea that soon, science will be able to extend our lives by a year for every year we live. In other words, once across this threshold, we’ll literally be staying one step ahead of death. Kurzweil thinks this threshold is about twelve years away, while de Grey puts it thirty years out.
From 2019 book Lifespan: Why We Age―and Why We Don't Have To, by the Harvard geneticist who’s one of Time magazine’s “100 most influential people” of 2014:
“It is not at all extravagant to expect that someday living to 150 will be standard. And if the Information Theory of Aging is sound, there may be no upward limit; we could potentially reset the epigenome in perpetuity.”
“How long will it be before we are able to reset our epigenome, either with molecules we ingest or by genetically modifying our bodies, as my student now does in mice? How long until we can destroy senescent cells, either by drugs or outright vaccination? How long until we can replace parts of organs, grow entire ones in genetically altered farm animals, or create them in a 3D printer? A couple of decades, perhaps. Maybe three. One or all of those innovations is coming well within the ever-increasing lifespans of most of us, though. And when that happens, how many more years will we get? The maximum potential could be centuries . . .”
“If I am wrong, it might be that I was too conservative in my predictions.”
“When technologies go exponential, even experts can be blindsided.”
“We often fail to acknowledge that knowledge is multiplicative and technologies are synergistic.”
— Re: OSG’s offerings a/o clones will advance LS —
Summary (details follow)
Many/most advances of LS will derive at least partly from the “garage biotech” ecosystem (i.e., from (very) small biotech firms).
In many cases, these firms (LS-GBFs) will be co-founded by specialists who leverage Adver-ties a/o clones to find each other.
In many/most cases, LS-GBFs will:
post-founding, leverage Adver-ties a/o clones to recruit specialists (e.g., employees, contractors)
use a LOT of AI
Many LS-GBFs will seek equity-crowdfunding (i.e., will want to be showcased in/on SCs).
Many of said specialists will enter their field via CE, not least because OSG will:
race to provide a loan program for CE consumers (i.e., loans that will be variants of today’s “private” student loans)
learn continuously as a means of:
lowering the interest rates of CE loans
providing alternatives to loans (e.g., income-share agreements, livelihood insurance)
improving these alternatives
LS-BigCos will benefit also from OSG’s offerings a/o clones.
Re: garage biotech
From 2011 book Biopunk: Solving Biotech's Biggest Problems in Kitchens and Garages:
Schloendorn told me his new company had just received a half-million dollar investment . . . To raise money, he needed to show he could create the right conditions for a white blood cell to kill a cancer cell. . . . [Schloendorn says:] “To blow up the first cancer cell—that’s the risk. And so we just went with the minimal equipment needed to blow up a cancer cell. And we could do that at the kitchen table.”
From 2010 book Biology Is Technology: The Promise, Peril and New Business of Engineering Life, published by Harvard University Press:
Biotech . . . technology is changing so rapidly that, within just a few years, the power of today’s elite academic and industrial laboratories will be affordable and available to individuals. . . . It is thus no surprise . . . that garage hacking—that garage innovation—has come to biology.
Re: many/most LS advances (partly) via LS-GBFs
From a 2018 article on CNBC.com:
[P]int-size ventures are driving pharma innovation. The majority of drugs approved in recent years originated at smaller outfits—63 percent of them over the last five years, according to HBM Partners, a health-care investing firm.
Re: LS-GBFs leveraging Adver-ties a/o a clone (part 1 of 2)
From a 2011 article in The Atlantic:
The Rise of Backyard Biotech
Powered by social networking, file sharing, and e-mail, a new cottage industry is bringing niche drugs to market.
. . . FerroKin is seven employees who work from home, and a collection of about 60 vendors and contractors who supply all the disparate pieces of the drug-development process. Rienhoff, a physician and former venture capitalist, founded it in 2007 as a start-up, a virtual biotech company. Since then, his team has picked up talent and resources as needed, raising $27 million and seeing a drug from development into Phase 2 clinical trials.
. . . The small industries and biotech freelancers springing up are, in some ways, like the divisions of the old behemoth drug company, but connected only by the tendrils of the Internet, and the relationships that grow so easily there. Rienhoff is contemporary biotech’s answer to the lost Renaissance man. He pulls the renaissance effect out of the network around him, using . . . the global community to fight the terrible complexity of disease.
Re: LS-GBFs using a LOT of AI
From 2020 book Longevity Industry 1.0 (my emphases):
“AI for Longevity is the ‘smart money’ sector of the industry, and can achieve enormous results and accelerated timelines in terms of progress in actual, tangible, real-world Healthy Human Longevity, even with comparatively tiny levels of financing compared to other sectors.”
“The intensive application of AI to all stages of Longevity and Preventive Medicine R&D has the potential to rapidly accelerate the clinical translation of both validated and experimental diagnostics, prognostics and therapeutics, to empower patients to become the CEOs of their own health through continuous AI-driven monitoring of minor fluctuations in biomarkers . . .”
“AI will come into prominence as the critical and fundamental driver of progress in the industry . . .”
From The Future Is Faster Than You Think:
[T]he speed of drug development is accelerating, not only because biotechnology is progressing at an exponential rate, but because artificial intelligence . . .
Re: LS-GBFs leveraging Adver-ties a/o a clone (part 2 of 2)
From Longevity Industry 1.0:
The fourth pillar, the one with the greatest potential to create real-world effects on human Longevity in short time-frames, and the one with the highest ratios of cost to effectiveness, is the application of AI and Data Science to Longevity.
. . . What the fourth pillar needs for this to become reality, however, is intelligent coordination and harmonization of experts and industry stakeholders (AI specialists, Longevity scientists and entrepreneurs, investors [my emphasis] . . .) . . .
Re: GBFs wanting to be showcased in/on SCs
From a 2015 article titled “Biotech in the Garage”:
Sites like Experiment offer nontraditional sources of funding for researchers in the early stages. One example of what the future might hold is a project aimed at discovering a new treatment for Ebola, which recently raised $140,000 in crowdfunding. Before launching the $140,000 campaign, they first launched a $5,000 fundraising campaign, which gave them enough capital to prove some assumptions cheaply by running experiments through Science Exchange. Only after getting positive results did they decide to raise more for the next phase. This lean setup—raising a small amount to test assumptions cheaply then repeating the process with increasing amounts of capital—will likely become more common over the next decade. This mirrors what happens now with software but has only recently become possible in biotech because of the trends mentioned above.
Re: LS BigCos will benefit from OSG’s offerings a/o clones
From a 2019 article in Outsourcing Pharma:
The demand for AI technologies and AI talent is growing in the pharma and healthcare industries and driving the formation of a new interdisciplinary field— data-driven drug discovery/healthcare. Acquiring the best AI startups will dominate the biopharma industry [my emphasis].
From 2011 book The New Players in Life Sciences Innovation, published by the Financial Times Press:
Rapid advances in science and its applications, together with changes in market conditions, are forcing a transformation of business models within the life science industries. . . . Perhaps the most obvious change in business models is the gradual demise of the large fully integrated pharma company (FIPCO) and its gradual replacement with the virtually integrated one (VIPCO) . . . based on complex systems of partnerships, both with academia and scientific institutions and with contract research, manufacturing, and sales organizations (CRO, CMO, CSO).
. . . Lilly is quickly transforming itself from a vertically integrated pharmaceutical company into a fully integrated pharmaceutical network that outsources most functions. Merck has chosen to close many of its R&D labs in Europe and relies on a network of collaborative partnerships that include R&D, drug development, and technology licensing.
From a 2018 entry on the company blog of Ideaz, a provider of “remote R&D”:
FirstBuild—a subsidiary of GE—famously launched their Nugget Ice Maker following a wildly successful Indiegogo [crowdfunding] campaign in 2015. The project was built on a pre-existing GE model that had been repeatedly stalled in development over concerns about whether or not it was marketable. Using support and feedback generated on the crowdfunding platform, GE was able to validate their existing research and launch the product successfully.
Re: my ability to write erotic flowmance that’s at least passably artful
I completed the penultimate draft of PRC in 2016. The final draft features the same opening, with the exception that I added an excerpt from a 2017 book. The opening:
Tracy tweeted:
Take control & u have my heart
My first thought: Fifty Shades. Next thought: verify.
I revisited Tracy’s Instagram . . . scrolled down . . . scrolled . . . scrolled . . .
Yep, T at 16, face buried in a paperback copy.
I scrolled up . . . scrolled . . .
Passed pics, a few weeks old, of T celebrating her 18th birthday . . . scrolled . . .
In the top row of pics was a frontal view of T, posted a few days earlier. She is standing . . . slim-fit jeans . . . heels . . . a short-sleeve top that is cut conservatively but is semi-sheer.
I hadn’t seen this pic before.
Her face’s angles . . . luster . . . softness . . .
Her body’s shapeliness . . . tautness . . .
From 2015 book Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life, by a Wellness Education Director and Lecturer at Smith College who has a PhD in Health Behavior with a doctoral concentration in human sexuality:
The standard narrative of sexual desire is that it just appears—you’re sitting at lunch or walking down the street, maybe you see a sexy person or think a sexy thought, and pow! you’re saying to yourself, “I would like some sex!” This is how it works for maybe 75 percent of men . . .
T is 5’5’’. Four or five inches taller? One of the first supermodels who are half Asian, half Caucasian. The first?
My aesthetic contemplation was interrupted by a recent-news bulletin from my memory.
From a 2012 article in The New York Observer:
S&M Sex Clubs Sprout Up on Ivy Campuses . . .
The popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey has accelerated a mainstreaming of the BDSM subculture already underway—the initials stand for bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism—and the trend has been especially pronounced in our more elite institutions of higher learning.
My brain’s way of telling me that it had resolved to reply to T’s tweet.
From 2011 book Who’s in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain, by University of California at Santa Barbara neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga:
The brain has millions of local processors making important decisions. . . . You are certainly not the boss of your brain. . . .
[Many] actions [e.g., decisions] and . . . feelings happen before we are consciously aware of them—and most of them are the results of nonconscious processes . . .
Phase one of Operation Reply: more verifying.
A pic on Insta of T at a Halloween party, age 17, costumed as a kissing booth? I scrolled . . . verified.
From 2016 book Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape:
[The girls I met talked about] the hookup culture, in which casual encounters precede (and may or may not lead to) emotional connection; now commonplace on college campuses, it was rapidly drifting down to high school.
. . . I admired the young women’s bravado, their willingness to be overtly on the prowl.
Next stop: T’s Ask.fm, last used when she was 16.
Anonymous asked: Best scent for a guy? Cologne? Deodorant? Soap?
T: mmm all of the above… just smelling any guy with any of the above is mmm. i mmm when guys smell good :-)
Anonymous asked: dave shiavo mike mccarthy joe campagna erik gartner or the rick? for hotness and best chance to get in-between
T: rick for the gold, but he’s taken. then mike, but also taken. lol this is awk w/ people in relationships… then d, e, j… but this is just about who’s hottest, not about who can “get in-between” cuz dunno if any can these days :-)
Anonymous asked: why did u date joe if u knew he was w/ jean? no disrespect, just asking
T: we never dated… y did i hook up w/ him? no reason… out of the blue, just happened :-( fugly mistake… very sorry i hurt jean… really no reason y i did it…
Anonymous asked: bf now? Ever?
T: 9th grade. i’m not the relationship type… but idk kinda down to switch it up… so where r u dream guy?
From Come As You Are:
The sensitive accelerator plus not-so-sensitive brakes combination describes between 2 and 6 percent of women . . . [If you’re one of these women:] Because the brain mechanism responsible for noticing sexually relevant stimuli [i.e., the accelerator] is very sensitive, you’re highly motivated to pursue sex, and because the brain mechanism responsible for stopping you from doing things you know you shouldn’t do is only minimally functional, you may sometimes feel out of control of your sexuality.
Next stop: back to the pic of T in slim-fi . . . tight jeans.
Professionally styled hair, brows. Again, tautness. Her appearance is provocative, because her, but the outfit, heels and accessories are all upscale and in great taste.
My brain’s way of telling me to confirm a pic of T reclining on a couch, legs spread very wide.
I scrolled . . . The photographer was standing over T. Her lower back is curled upward. Full frontal cheerleader-style spandex short-shorts.
From 2016 book American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers:
[Teenage s]exting and the sending of dick pics and nudes have become normalized. . . . [M]any girls have come to feel that the acquiring of likes and congratulatory comments on sexualized pictures of themselves is an achievement, a sign of self-worth—even when the likes and comments come from strangers. The comments about their bodies and beauty they receive from boys and men they know, but also some they don’t, are very often valued . . .
From 2011 book A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the Internet Tells Us About Sexual Relationships:
Don Symons found that more than half of women’s fantasies reflect the desire to be sexually irresistible. Women frequently fantasize about being a stripper, harem girl, or Las Vegas showgirl and “delighting many men.”
T’s comment on the Insta page: all good, yo. Her friend’s comment: vamp.
Back to the pic of T in tight jeans. A leg is bent forward slightly, an arm is around a friend. My brain extrapolated an hour-old thoroughbred that has just about gotten the hang of standing, is starting to dream of trotting . . . galloping . . . “Secretariat is widening now! . . . [M]oving like a tremendous machine!”
I scrolled to a pic of T posing pre-prom. The photographer was to her side, behind her. Her hair is swept up, middle and upper back exposed. Swanlike. Besequined. Radiant in the sun.
I scrolled to a pic of T in a lace tank-top. Cleavage confirmed fullness . . .
My anonymous reply to T’s tweet, via the “ask” page on her Tumblr:
we prep 2 enter a party. u: heels, stunning dress a 2nd skin, braless. my fingers hook ur shoulder straps, slide. beauty spills. i cup, caress, handle. pinch, pull, twist. lick, kiss, suck—softly, hungrily, very. when u r very stiff i cover u. fine fabric. we enter. many civilized, attractive men. ur beauty, ur conspicuous arousal…their arousal. my party, so i control who else… so u r quick 2 wrap ur hand around the shaft of my cock, pump, use ur other hand 2 guide my fingers…
T’s reply, via Twitter:
you get what you deserve
A subsequent retweet by T advises a guy to call the tweet’s authoress when the guy has his life together.
My subsequent reply to T’s tweet, via Tumblr:
ex-lover of 2+ yrs was pretty teen daughter on a tv sitcom 3 yrs be4 she & i met @ univ (her b.s. = 2x major in physics/compsci). 2 her, i deserved 2 b told our sexual chemistry made her a nymph, ‘this is ur pussy’, ‘i want 2 b ur whore’, etc #notpimp y deserved? she had desires, fantasies; i helped her cede control 2 them & feel safe/comfortable everywhere they led. my life2gether progress since? full $peed. summing up: i deserve u in ur 2nd latest tumblr, everywhere i control who else deserves 2 get…
Her second-latest tumblr (i.e., pic) showed a fashion model from behind, the length of her dress pulled to a side, exposing lingerie, garters . . .
T retweeted:
the exquisite pain of wanting someone so unattainable
Is a line from Sex and the City. #google
From Girls & Sex:
Some girls considered sexting and sexy video chatting a way to experiment with sex safely . . .
From American Girls:
On AOL [in the late 1990s], it was kind of a game with your friends to try and ‘hot chat’ with adults and make them think you were older,” says a young woman in L.A., age thirty-one. “My girlfriends and I learned a lot from doing that,” . . .
I replied in two parts. First:
t, artful retweet re: satc. interest in a gig in investor relations? my (prospective) investors skew young, male, very upwardly mobile. ofc, we’d work closely to ensure their satisfaction, & yours. me: bayimg.com/HaDFIAaFb is this a yes? instagram.com/p/K6Say8O7/ :-) #tgonemild #veryclosely #fail2plan=plan2fail #goodsign4biz=planturnsuon #greatsigns=uncontrollable #spread #rub #plunge2 #tellme2watch&strokecock #rockhard4urpussyoruwitholdinfothatwillimproveplan #universeisagenius #xlegs #squeeze
Me:
The Insta URL linked to the pic of T reclining, legs spread very wide. The last two hashtags were included because it was Thanksgiving (T > watching football).
Part two of my reply:
2ward sample plan: ur style, so u help investors shop 4 gifts 4 ladies. our security as approp (eg, u like guy, he invests more = more $ 4 u, u model outfits, recount reactions 2 u in such outfits, ur resultant arousal. so he’s aroused…) key 2 u clo$ing: guy max confident u control ur desires, so no drama later. tactic: u exhibit self-ctrl when arousing 2 clo$e (eg, ur words: exxxplicit; tone: even, matter-of-fact) tone ctrl via practice=we role-play ur fantasies, u narrate maxxx detes #50shadesofgaines
T’s last name is Gaines. Of course.
T’s reply, via Twitter:
lovin every second, cause you make me feel so alive
From 2017 book The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity, by Esther Perel:
The one theme that I hear above all else from those who have bitten into the forbidden apple is this: It makes them feel alive.
If I played guitar? Jimmy Page. #licensedbeats #aroundtheway #circachampwinningrbidoubleoffsomepunkrockefeller #mvpofas #seasonbaover700 #b411atmkab4ki #REALballer . . .
From The Rise of Superman:
[T]he “paradox of control” is another of flow’s defining characteristics.
. . . It’s the sense of controlling the uncontrollable. . . . Too frequently, athletes fall back on clichés and machismo [to describe how it feels to experience the paradox] . . .
In the [flow] state . . . our inner critic is shut down . . .
From a 2003 article in The New York Times:
[There’s a] fundamental difference between how we behave in “hot” states (those of . . . sexual excitation and the like) and “cold” states of rational calm. . . .
Data from tests in which volunteers are asked how they would behave in various “heat of the moment” situations . . . have consistently shown that different states of arousal can alter answers by astonishing margins. “These kinds of states have the ability to change us so profoundly that we’re more different from ourselves in different states than we are from another person,” [George] Loewenstein says.
From the chapter in 2009 book Predictably Irrational titled “The Influence of Arousal: Why Hot Is Much Hotter Than We Realize”:
In 2001, while I was visiting Berkeley for the year, my friend, academic hero, and longtime collaborator George Loewenstein and I invited a few bright students to help us understand the degree to which rational, intelligent people can predict how their attitudes will change when they are in an impassioned state.
My next message to T, two days later, via Tumblr:
wut is the holdup re: 50 shades o’ gaines? specifically, re: key info about the setting, premise? oh right, the holdup is me. cuz i’m surrounded by biz details. thrilling 50sog details by tomorrow, i’m 95% sure. #foundational4manyfantasiesthatfitu #thatuwillseecanbecomereal #forsomeinvestorrelationsisacalling :-)
Later that day, T tweeted a link to the John Legend song All of Me.
My reply:
(part 1 of 2) true: drafts of my earlier note included #beautifulmind & #muse. related: was working on a biz write-up y-day, thought it needed to invoke music, worked out an approach last night, had second thoughts earlier today, was just about to struggle toward an in-or-out resolution when i saw ur tweet. #heavyrotation #writingprobsolved #muse2.0 #universe #respect the universe is talking/screaming so much shit at me right now #toofunny i get it universe, ur running the show #help
(part 2 of 2) just assured the universe that i’m thankful beyond all telling for any mercy i receive for my efforts. now the universe is screaming ‘any mercy!? any mercy!?’ #universehasaveryhighopinionofyou #okuniverseoncemorethistimewithfeeling #uhoh
From The Rise of Superman:
Surfers frequently report becoming one with the waves; snowboarders become one with the mountain. “It was like I reached a place where clarity and intuition and effort and focus all came together to bring me to the highest level of consciousness,” says professional kayaker Sam Drevo. “A level where I was no longer me; I was part of the river.”
. . . It was Jefferson University neuroscientist Andrew Newberg and University of Pennsylvania neuropsychologist Eugene D’Aquili who gave us our first real insight into this experience. Back in 1991, they were investigating a different kind of oneness . . . In deep contemplative states, Tibetan Buddhists report “absolute unitary being,” or the feeling of becoming one with everything, while Franciscan nuns experience unia mystica, or oneness with God’s love.
My next message to T:
(part 1 of 3) understanding how 50 shades of gaines will bring ur fantasies 2 life starts w/ knowing that my biz = launching & popularizing partic online markets. key 2 popularizing = produce & popularize complementary media. key 2 max pop media = guest stars. key 2 best stars = give them company stock (attractive cuz markets en route 2 being HUGE biz). another key = ownership has privileges. a privilege = experiences company provides via xxx part of biz (small part, like 4 google, media congloms…)
(part 2 of 3) investor relations works closely w/ “best” owners 2 design/customize these experiences, then connect owners w/ fitting xxx talent. exps can b fantasies of urs, that u want to exp w/ partic owners (ie instead of connecting owners 2 others). ofc, no ALWAYS means no. this is 100% legit biz, just incorporates beauty, desire, pleasure… cuz life… so 50sog = ur private menu (men-you?) :-)
(part 3 of 3) key to max artful 50sog = we collab, in part cuz we want exps 2 reinforce value of company ownership (50sog private in relation 2 star-owners; u also decide wut parts i c). in partic, u want exps 2 reinforce thus so owners want more stock, so treat u like queen. ur fantasies = their commands :-) ur turn 2 take shit from the universe :-)
T’s reply, via Twitter:
you gotta show me
— End of excerpt from PRC —
The making of the above excerpt from PRC
— Summary (details in a future chapter) —
My parents had a flowmance, which was always thrilling to be around.
So I’ve long had an interest in be(com)ing a great relationship partner.
As means to said be(com)ing:
I’ve long had an interest in blending relationship comedy and what I used to call the comedy of solution
I dated attentively/inquisitively/vigorously for many years (e.g., for many years before I knew about flow)
Re: the use of excerpts in PRC
Details below.
More precedents for Adver-ties
Google’s PageRank search algorithm (first use of hyperlinks to inform search results)
Peer assessments associated with popular MOOCs (massively open online courses)
LinkExchange.com
GitHub.com
PageRank 1.0 was based on insights from social network analysis that were decades old when PageRank was conceived. (Similarly, LinkedIn et al. could’ve productized said 85-years-of-personnel-selection-research long ago.)
From a 1998 paper co-authored by Google’s founders:
There has been a great deal of work on academic-citation analysis [Gar[19]95]. Goffman [Gof71] . . .
Number of search engines launched before Google: 20.
From 2013 paper “Tuned Models of Peer Assessment in MOOCs,” co-authored by several employees of MOOC provider Coursera ($443M raised):
Peer assessment—which has been historically used for logistical, pedagogical, metacognitive, and affective benefits . . .—offers a promising solution that can scale the grading of complex assignments in courses with tens or even hundreds of thousands of students.
From the 1998 article in The Wall Street Journal titled “Microsoft Buys LinkExchange For About $250 Million in Stock”:
LinkExchange . . . places ad banners on about 400,000 Web sites, though many of those sites are obscure personal homepages [e.g., blogs] . . .
LinkExchange, founded in 1996, has taken a unique approach that has allowed it to grow its network of sites very quickly. The company allows member Web sites to advertise for free on other sites throughout the LinkExchange network—provided they agree to return the favor.
From a 2016 article on the website of Harvard Business Review (my emphases):
How can companies get a better idea of which skills employees and job candidates have? . . . One potential model is GitHub.
. . . Ideally, this [desired variant of GitHub] would also be a social network and e-portfolio, allowing an employer to see samples of work and trust that the skills presented had been validated by others. (The social component of GitHub is important to underscore because other developers validate and consume another developer’s work. This contrasts starkly with the “skills”— if we can call them that—that users can tag so quickly on LinkedIn, such as “higher education” or even “ninja.”)
More re: the business case for Adver-ties
LinkedIn was acquired by Microsoft for $26.2 billion in 2016.
Title of a 2018 article on TechRepublic.com:
Why Linkedin + GitHub profiles could be the hidden gem in $7.5B Microsoft acquisition [of GitHub]
Re: popularizing Adver-ties will be foundational for popularizing OSG’s market for CE & AI
Outputs from activity at and around Adver-ties (e.g., prices) will be inputs to OSG’s prediction markets (PMs). After Adver-ties catalyzes the popularization of OSG’s “1.0” PMs, outputs from activity at and around the PMs (e.g., 2.0 PMs) will be inputs to Adver-ties (i.e., the popularization of Adver-ties and the PMs will become mutually reinforcing). Both sets of said outputs will be inputs to OSG’s market for CE/AI (e.g., the outputs will help/enable consumers of CE/AI to feel confident that they’re receiving value for their expenditures).
— Precedent for said dependencies between markets —
financial-capital markets (e.g., prices output by an equities market are inputs to an equity-derivatives market)
— Re: outputs from Adver-ties being inputs to OSG’s CE/AI market —
From the 2015 article in The New York Times titled “Finding a Career Track in LinkedIn Profiles”:
[M]uch of what we need to know about the changing labor market is crowdsourced in real time. And many of those digital breadcrumbs end up in LinkedIn profiles.
From a 2015 interview of Michael Horn, co-author of Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns:
[W]e’re really in the early beginnings of the dramatic revolution that we’ve seen in a lot of other technology sectors where really smart recommendation engines come in and assist the student in picking and choosing their unique path. . . .
In order to really go towards adaptive learning, you need huge numbers of students on your platform . . .
We need platforms that can collect the data we need and can make better use of data so that we can figure out different ways to serve different learners.
From 2016 book Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations:
At the high end of the labor ladder, professionals already have a global intelligent algorithm to draw on: LinkedIn, the career professional social networking site. But its founders now want to extend that intelligent algorithm to the whole world of work by creating a global “economic graph.” Here is how LinkedIn’s CEO, Jeff Weiner, describes it on his company blog:
Reid Hoffman and the other founders of LinkedIn initially created a platform to help people tap the value of their professional networks, and developed an infrastructure that could map those relationships up to three degrees. In doing so, they provided the foundation for what would eventually become the world’s largest professional graph.
Our current long-term vision at LinkedIn is to extend this professional graph into an economic graph by digitally manifesting every economic opportunity [i.e., job] in the world (full-time and temporary); the skills required to obtain those opportunities; the profiles for every company in the world offering those opportunities; the professional profiles for every one of the roughly 3.3 billion people in the global workforce; and subsequently overlay the professional knowledge of those individuals and companies onto the “graph” [so that individual professionals could share their expertise and experience with anyone].
Anyone will be able to access intelligent networks such as LinkedIn’s global graph, see what skills are in demand or available, and even offer up online courses. You might teach knitting or editing or gardening or plumbing or engine repair. So many more people will be incentivized to offer their expertise to others, and the market for it will be vastly expanded.
Added Weiner:
With the existence of an economic graph, we could look at where the jobs are in any given locality, identify the fastest growing jobs in that area, the skills required to obtain those jobs, the skills of the existing aggregate workforce there, and then quantify the size of the gap. Even more importantly, we could then provide a feed of that data to local vocational training facilities, junior colleges, etc., so they could develop a just-in-time curriculum that provides local job seekers the skills they need to obtain the jobs that are and will be, and not just the jobs that once were.
Separately, we could provide current college students the ability to see the career paths of all of their school’s alumni by company, geography, and functional role.
From 2018 book A New U: Faster + Cheaper Alternatives to College, by a VC whose focus is education:
“LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner’s vision for an ‘economic graph’ is the clearest expression by any technology company of the competency marketplace future.”
“[T]echnological developments will complete the faster + cheaper revolution. The resulting ‘competency marketplaces’ . . .”
“The historic disconnect between higher education and employer needs is a data problem. . . .
Technology has begun to change this . . . first via the increasing availability of competency data: e-portfolios . . .”
Re: OSG’s prediction markets (OPMs)
Users will be able to transact with: 1) Adver-ties’s virtual currency, 2) cash.
From Wikipedia:
Prediction markets . . . are speculative markets created for the purpose of making predictions. The current market prices can then be interpreted as predictions of the probability of the event or the expected value of the parameter.
From 2012 book Oracles: How Prediction Markets Turn Employees Into Visionaries, published by Harvard Business Review Press:
One reason you may not have heard much about corporate prediction markets is that executives that use them are reluctant to admit that some decisions come in part from secretaries and technicians. Check annual reports or corporate Web sites of Microsoft, Yahoo!, General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, General Mills, or any of the other sixty major corporations now running internal markets and see if you can find a single mention of the technique.
From a 2017 article on Forbes.com:
Gnosis, a decentralized platform for prediction markets that . . . [is] built on Ethereum [i.e., blockchain] technology, has set a new record by raising $12.5 million in a token offering via a Dutch auction, the first successful one of its kind in crypto, and the fastest crowdsale to date to sell out more than $10m.
The platform is touted as enabling anyone to create a prediction market for any event . . .
From a 2017 article on VentureBeat.com:
Gnosis . . . raised $12.5 million in 15 minutes, giving it a valuation of nearly $300 million.
Since then, speculation has taken it to over $1 billion.
Re: OPMs will complement Adver-ties
Again, high prices/rankings in prediction markets will serve as PageRank-like pointers to high-quality blogs.
From a 2012 article on Mashable.com:
Barack Obama may have comfortably won reelection in the electoral college, and opened up a decisive lead (two million and counting) in the popular vote. But here is the absolute, undoubted winner of this election: Nate Silver and his running mate, big data.
The Fivethirtyeight.com analyst, despite being pilloried by the pundits, outdid even his 2008 prediction. In that year, his mathematical model correctly called 49 out of 50 states, missing only Indiana (which went to Obama by 0.1%.)
This year, according to all projections, Silver’s model has correctly predicted 50 out of 50 states. A last-minute flip for Florida, which finally went blue in Silver’s prediction on Monday night, helped him to a perfect game.
From a 2012 article on the website of The Atlantic magazine:
Responding to a question about the future of Silver and FiveThirtyEight [at The New York Times], Executive Editor Jill Abramson said she “would love” to keep him around, not least because he drove so much traffic to the paper’s site in his first election year since it bought out his blog in August 2010.
That Abramson would want to keep developing Silver’s presence seems pretty obvious: “He got huge, huge readership. Half the people coming [to NYTimes.com] searched for Nate. They weren’t coming for the rest of the Times, they came for him [my emphasis],” said Abramson.
Re: the Amazon of CE will be a “workflow market”
At its most basic, a workflow comprises 2+ operations performed sequentially. A workflow can also include operations performed in parallel with 1+ of the sequential steps. Each operation can be defined with conditions (e.g., pre-conditions).
A course of study is a type of workflow, usually with conditions (e.g., passing 101 is a pre-condition for enrolling in 201).
The AoCE will enable consumers to:
specify a desired course of study
specify conditions (e.g., can only spend $X for the 101 course; will only “hire” software with credential Y)
receive competitive bids from many suppliers
From 2007 book Competing In a Flat World:
[In 2005 book The World Is Flat, author] Thomas Friedman identified . . . a third, less visible driver of the flattening world: workflow software [my emphasis]. These software programs allow individuals to collaborate on projects anywhere in the world.
From 2010 book The Power of Pull:
Li & Fung . . . operates a global network of more than 10,000 business partners to configure customized supply networks for customers.
From Competing In a Flat World:
Li & Fung does not own a single factory. . . . The company indirectly provides employment for more than two million people . . . but only less than half a percent of these are on Li & Fung’s payroll. With this lean structure, each of the company’s own employees generates about US $1M in sales, earning a return on equity of more than 38 percent per year.