guest blogs and book club

[taxie]

Guests can post their blogposts in this thread. Accountant infiltrators can impersonate guests relentlessly.

I'm going to blogpost books I read in here.

I make audiobooks and listen to them. It sucks when there are a bunch of numbers or symbols in a text. I strip out all the symbols and sometimes the numbers to make the audio turn out better. The best audiobooks for when you're doing other things read like blogposts, which sadly works better for less useful and less interesting stuff than STEM things. I can share my workflow and tips if people want.

I just finished a basic legal textbook on contracts. I don't need a full brain to grasp the reasoning 90% of the time and still notice when something about the procedure surprises me. I figure that law is a good field to learn the 20% that matters 80% of the time.

Started on Burton Klein's theory of dynamic economics- but I don't think I'll finish it, even if there is something to his theories about risk-taking and corporate culture it doesn't seem useful or interesting enough to justify the work.

I started "Arrest-Proof Yourself" by Dale Carson. Colorfully sincere book by an ex-cop ex-fed lawyer. He describes the cop mindset as that of a hunter. The target audience is not career criminals but normal people who still need to worry about arrests and prosecution. Opines and advises on specific life-ruining aspects of the american system without being a soft-on-crime libtard. There is a lot of interesting dynamics at the interface of law and enforcement.

I am interested in power in obscurity. I would like to learn more about things like money laundering, foreign influence laws, mercenary companies, white collar crime, corruption in practice, tax avoidance and privacy techniques.

I would like to learn more about things like how charities form a sort of branch for pseudo-government. Running a 501c3 "Qualified organization" lets your allies fund your operations with (a portion of) their tax dollars instead of the government. Regular americans donated over half a trillion dollars- which is 11% of the 4.4 trillion federal revenue or 8% of the 6T spending. Not that I know how much of that was itemized and tax-deducted, and you can't deduct all your tax responsibility. Not an insignificant fraction if you think of them as a branch of the government because if they didn't exist the funding would go to the government proper.

 

[Ongezeligzzz]

I've been reading but haven't been posting. I need to post now because Culture's Consequences by Geert Hofstede mirrored Ongezellig mockery of Belgians too clearly for me to leave alone.

The vast majority of the book is about analyzing an dataset of IBM employees internationally. He talks about cultural dimensions across nations: power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism/collectivism, masculinity/femininity and long/short term orientation.

Keep in mind that the author is a Netherlander, but he is not biased against Belgians.

Every Belgian student knows a famous citation from Julius Caesar in his book on the Gallic War (written 50 B.C.) that states that of the three Gallic tribes, the Belgians were the bravest.

The fun is when he casually points out how neurotic Belgians are with anecdotes and statistics.

If I take the train
from Rotterdam, Holland, to Brussels, Belgium, I can
usually tell the Belgian passengers from the Dutch; most
Dutch people greet strangers when entering a small,
enclosed space like a train compartment, elevator, or
doctor’s waiting room, but most Belgians do not

UAI is Uncertainty Avoidance Index. They don't trust one another.

An American resident of Brussels
discussed with her Belgian neighbors the increasing
number of burglaries in the area. She said that in such a
case people in the United States would probably organize
a neighborhood patrol. Her Belgian neighbors
responded, “Well, we could never do that here, since we
don’t trust one another.” The United States has a UAI
index value of 46; Belgium’s is 94.

Belgians are motivated by fear, not vision. There was another part that explained they were more motivated by equity than efficiency but you don't care, do you?

Achievement motivation may have to be differentiated into “hope of success” in low-UAI countries
versus “fear of failure” in high-UAI countries. This
would at least explain a difference between Belgians
(UAI 94) and Americans (UAI 46) found in a
comparative laboratory experiment by McClintock and
McNeel (1966). They used a two-player game in which
either player could get a maximum payoff by
cooperating but a competitive advantage by not
cooperating. Belgians preferred the competitive strategy
when they were behind, whereas Americans preferred it
more when they were ahead. Belgians wanted to avoid
losing; Americans wanted to win.

The following Belgian reactions correspond to gigachad and the IFLS soyjak respectively:

The American lived in a
neighborhood in suburban Brussels that suffered more
and more from noise pollution caused by the nearby
airport. The American went around the neighborhood
with a petition for the authorities to take noise-limiting
measures. Other expatriates in the neighborhood, mainly
from Britain and the Netherlands, all signed. The
Belgians reacted to the request either with a denial of the
problem (“What noise?”) and refusal to sign or with
resignation (“We are willing to sign but it won’t help”)

Belgians trannyheart authority, like the worst Frankenstein gangster capitalist control apparatus, for instance

One aspect of citizen competence on which modern
nations differ and that, for example, divides Western
Europe is whether citizens are obliged to carry identity
cards or documents that they must produce at the request
of the police or other authorities. In the lower-UAI
countries (Denmark, Sweden, Ireland, Great Britain, Norway, the Netherlands, and Finland) this obligation does
not exist (although many people do carry credit cards and
other identifying material for convenience); not being
able to identify oneself to a police officer is not an
offense. In the higher-UAI countries (Belgium, France,
Spain, Italy, Austria, Germany, and Switzerland) this obligation exists and is usually maintained very strictly.

Belgians trannyheart authority, like teachers.

A difference between the two types of cultures that
operates specifically at the elementary and secondary
school level is the expected role of parents versus
teachers. In cultures with strong uncertainty avoidance,
parents are supposed to watch over their children’s
proper motivation and behavior at school—for example,
by signing children’s homework assignments and/or
performance records. They are sometimes invited to information meetings with teachers, but they are rarely
consulted. Parents are laypersons and teachers are
experts who know. I experienced the embarrassed
reaction of an (eminent) Belgian teacher when the
parents of her English and Dutch pupils wanted to raise
an issue not on her agenda (Belgium is a high-UAI
country, Britain and Holland are much lower). In
countries with weak uncertainty avoidance, it is normal
for teachers to try to get parents involved in school
issues: Parents’ ideas may be actively sought.

Anyway that's all I had to say.