Exile From the Herd - Life, the Universe and Everything

Life as a lemming

nospam@example.com (Mark Jeftovic) — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 10:31:18 -0400

Apparently today is iPhone-day in Canada, and this is one of the smaller line-ups for them, out near my place on the way into work. Bear in mind it has been raining fairly hard all morning and from what I've heard, the data pricing on the Rogers iPhone isn't the greatest.

Readers of this blog know I've been using a an unlocked iPhone on fido for quite some time now - I have a very old contract with Fido, unlimited data transfers that's been grandfathered in ever since. You can't buy these anymore, which is why I faithfully renew this contract with Fido and just use whatever phone I want on their network by only buying GSM unlocked phones, or in the case of the iPhone, finding out how to unlock them.

My former CIRA-Board colleague Michael Geist has pointed out that if Bill C-61 passes, GSM unlocking your (repeat YOUR) own phone will become unlawful. (I was unaware of this, which is why I recommend everyone subscribe to Michael's blog feed, he keeps on top of this stuff).

Suffice it to say, this is retarded but life is sometimes a tale told by idiots, especially when we implicitly feel like we couldn't get through our daily lives without installing a few of them to govern us.

This morning's post basically comes down to three themes for me:

People are lemmings. The ones that really wanted an Iphone waited, and waited, and waited until somebody told them "now is the time but you have to use Carrier X" and they will wait, in the rain, for hours to get it on terms dictated to them by somebody else. A cursory cost/benefit analysis by any of these people would have led them to the conclusion that they would have been further ahead buying one off of Ebay, or even right here in Toronto at a place like Bongo Wireless, already unlocked and able to use under one's own existing cellphone contract.
Apple is making the same mistake again. They originally lost the desktop market to windows because they wouldn't open up the licensing, yes, they've bounced back in recent years but not too long ago, they were on a deathwatch. All it takes is somebody (*cough* google *cough*), it doesn't matter who, to come up with the next "sexy must have wireless device" and release it unlocked and unrestricted and Apple will take it up the nads again. The sheer volume of the "grey market" for iphones should have telegraphed to Apple that there was far more upside to selling the damn phone unlocked to anyone who wanted it with any carrier.
For good or ill, for the right reasons or the wrong reasons, Artificial barriers create opportunities. If Bill C-61 passes, I will not sign some NDP petition, I will not picket in the streets, I will not go egg Jim Prentice's car. I will go into business. I have already been researching GSM unlocked, Wifi-enabled, dual-mode SIP/VOiP smartphones: there are a bunch being manufactured in China, there are a few Linux based ones - I'm going to start selling these things and running my own sip proxy to route the VOIP traffic. I am betting that over the long term, people will choose open access and mobility over lock-in - we built easyDNS on this concept - the telecom landscape is ripe for it.

What would Eckhart Tolle do with incontrovertible proof that 9/11 was an "inside job"?

nospam@example.com (Mark Jeftovic) — Fri, 30 May 2008 10:35:32 -0400

Today's post considers far-fringe deep-politics within the context of individual spirituality and consciousness cultivation. It doesn't aim to come off sounding apathetic (9/11 was an inside job? So what?), but it takes a serious look at the "what if it were true" consequences from a viewpoint of "what could we do about it that isn't as bad as the mindset that precipitated it in the first place"?

I come to the conclusion that retribution-oriented finales, be it a blood-in-the-streets revolution or a neo-Nuremburg spectacle where the guilty are hung from meathooks en masse, though understandable, entirely predictable and possibly even probable, are not the enlightened choices. Rather what is needed is a mass exodus from the Herd. It is the Herd that makes these crimes against humanity possible, and it is the Herd which must be fled from and dissolved. Without it, corrupt power mongers are absent a pack of lemmings to drive off a cliff.

I'll then end the post with 7-steps anybody can take to quit the program and say goodbye to the Herd. Bon Voyage!
Continue reading "What would Eckhart Tolle do with incontrovertible proof that 9/11 was an "inside job"?"

YABR: Yet Another Blog Rebranding

nospam@example.com (Mark Jeftovic) — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 16:09:32 -0500

I've changed my blog name again. I realized I really like the "private world" meme and plan to expand on it at length and that "privateworld.com" was just a way better domain name than "mark.jeftovic.net".

I also ditched the "Under the Radar" caption because I found out awhile back that there is another tech blog that calls itself that. So after some consideration I've gone with "Exile From the Herd" because it follows on some thinking I've been doing about the very rough division of all people into three groups:

The Herd If you're aware of it, you do not want to be in it. This is the vast majority of the population who live in a comatose dreamworld, delegate their thinking to others and will happily follow their next door neighbour or somebody they perceive to be "in charge" off the edge of a cliff if they think everybody else is doing it.
Predators These guys love the herd because they prey on them. For the most part it's like shooting fish in a barrel or clubbing baby seals to death. Amoral, easy and lucrative. Predators can be found in many guises: televangalists, snake-oil salesmen, cult leaders and all politicians are predators. If everybody got smart, these guys would all be hung from meathooks. An informed citizenry is the bane of the predator's existance.
Sovereign Individuals These are people who have separated themselves from the herd and have built up suitable defenses around themselves to be largely free from predation. Predators for the most part leave these guys alone and move onto easier pastures. Sovereign Individuals don't care who thinks they're in charge of what. All that matters is that they can run their own lives. For the most part, they write their own tickets and mind their own business.

I of course aspire to the third group. It is largely an ideal and can only be progressed toward but never truly attained.

In thinking on this I also came up with another one of my silly "socialist, conservative, libertarian" jokes because the three groups align very roughly along those definitions.

Question: What happens when a libertarian, a conservative and a socialist witness a fisherman overturning his boat on a lake?

Answer: The libertarian tries to help the guy. The conservative pontificates that the fisherman needs to take responsibility for his own life circumstances and the socialist argues that the fisherman suffers from an unfair disadvantage compared to people on shore and suggests we should all jump into the lake to make everybody even.

Anyway, this is more or less a test post, people subscribed via the old URL RSS feed should still see posts, and new subscribers should end up under the new URL.

Another day, another singularity

nospam@example.com (Mark Jeftovic) — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 14:23:52 -0400

I've been pondering a post for sometime about the pure implausibility of capital-C Conspiracies. The one's where everything under the sun is orchestrated and executed by a behind-the-scenes power block "at the top" THAT CONTROLS EVERYTHING.

Bear in mind that everything is relative: One man's knitting circle is another's shadowy cabal.

Whether it was Alfred Pike meticulously planning three world wars over two hundred years ago, William Guy Carr's Luciferian-Communist conspiracy which engineered every siginificant event of the 20-th century, or even David Icke's "we really do live in a Matrix controlled by lizards" fantasy, there was an obvious impossibility to it that I was having a hard time articulating.

Continue reading "Another day, another singularity"

Life At The Margins

nospam@example.com (Mark Jeftovic) — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 11:42:23 -0400

The elevator in my office building hasn't been working since last week. I meant to do this yesterday but today I finally called building management to report it. It turned out nobody else had done so. I overheard a lot of people in the halls complaining about it, but none of them actually did anything about it, even if it only required the most innocuous of actions to set a remedy in motion. So eventually, I did something about it. What's the difference between me and everybody else? About ±10% I figure.

That means most of the time I'll go an extra 10% over the crowd, one extra mile out of ten, or maybe my exasperation threshold is 10% lower than everyone else's.

Over a lifetime, this not only adds up, it compounds. The Daily Reckoning crew often point out that "Life is won or lost at the margins". What separates successful people from the mob isn't one or two mind blowing qualities nobody can compete with, like an IQ of 192 or a trust fund the size of a third-world GDP. It's the margins, consistantly going just a little bit further, being a little bit more thorough, acting just a little bit sooner, most of the time, over time.

These little differences feedback into each other and as I said, compound. After a few years you notice the person who goes the extra 10% is a little ahead of his peers. He may be self-employed while the others are working up the corporate ladder. She may own her condo outright while the rest are chisling away at 10% down mortgages. At this point it still looks like little things and subtle differences.

Fast forward a decade, or more. The picture changes dramatically and the consistant margin player (not to be confused with the consistantly marginal player) seems light-years ahead of the pack. "Why are they so lucky?" People around them wonder. "Goddamn horseshoe shoved up his ass I tell ya. What's on TV? Pass me the cheesies, why is the remote way over there?"

I probably didn't invent this expression, so I apologize to whomever I picked it up from

Overnight Sensations are often 20 years in the making.

What makes it seem "overnight" are those margin plays, compounding for decades, 5% more dilligence here, 10% more elbow grease there, 7% more perserverance over there and a dash of extra tenacity all got together and exploded past critical mass at some point.

And the nice thing about it is anybody can put in an extra 10% anytime, anywhere. Do it all the time and you will come out ahead of the pack.

So the next time you ask you yourself "Why are they so lucky?", the answer is "Because you haven't built up a big balance of 'luck' in your own life".

But you can start now. The sooner you realize that you are the "somebody" in "somebody should...", your luck in life will abound.

Life's inevitable ironies, twists and turns

nospam@example.com (Mark Jeftovic) — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 15:16:33 -0400

I haven't blogged for quite some time. The longer I'm away from blogging, the harder it is to get back in because I feel a need to adequately write about all the events that transpired in the interim, those which kept me from writing. It's such a daunting task I put it off until I break down and usually dispense with the entire gap in once sentence:

I'm a daddy, I have baby daughter now.

Enough said.

Now that I'm a parent, I find myself marvelling at the twists and turns my life has taken to get me to this point. The point where I find myself looking into the 7-week old eyes of a newborn infant who flashes that dazzling smile of hers which simply floors me and thinking: there's a little baby soul in there, and that soul needs her daddy, and that's me.

Speaking of life's ironies and twists, I choose today to resume blogging because Bob Rae is expected to announce his candidacy for the federal liberal party. The man led the socialist NDP to a one-term government in Ontario which took the province from a surplus to about a 27 billion dollar deficit in 5 quick years wants to run the surplus running, federal debt-reducing libs. Man that's weird.

The other weird thing is when Rae was premier he wrote a little song called "We're in the Same Boat Now", a joyful ditty about multi-racial harmony, and submitted it to Sony Music for publication and was laughed at publicly.

Always the opportunist, I jumped on the situation and the heavy-metal band I was in at the time, Landslide, recorded a power-punk version of that song and released it to the media for a very fun, albeit short-lived, moment in the sun for our band. (We predictably distingrated shortly after that).

I still have 7" singles of our rendition of Bob Rae's song, and I recently managed to snag the landslide.ca domain name, so I think I will quickly throw a website up there and put the old Rae ditty and the other Landslide tunes up for posterity.

Who is this Atavist guy anyway?

nospam@example.com (Mark Jeftovic) — Sat, 29 Oct 2005 12:29:35 -0400

A lot of my blog entries reference Sieg, the Atavist and you may wonder "who is this guy?". He is not a peer, he's from a different generation than I am. More of a mentor, he gave me my first job in computing back in 1993.

His software company was getting near the end of the list in the phone book, and I was cold-calling them all looking for a job (and getting nowhere). He agreed to see me, and had in mind the task of porting his courier company's COBOL applications and data from an old Tandy microcomputer (with 8" floppy drives) to a shiney new 486 running SCO Xenix. Did I know anything about it? Nothing. "Sink or swim" were his parting words to me as he loaded me up with a stack of manuals and sent me on my way.

It was the beginning of a long and fruitful friendship (I hope for both of us). I spent many an afternoon in his office combing through source code, figuring out how stuff was supposed to work and Sieg would teach me about investments, economics and a crazy political theory he subscribed to which turned out to be Libertarianism. It sounded like workable anarchy to me and it made no sense (I was still pretty left-leaning in those days, having been a recent student, and when you're safely nuzzled away in an academic cacoon, you inevitably turn into a raving pinko. I'm probably still further to the left today than most capital L Libertarians if only for the simple fact that I haven't left Canada)

Sieg, pictured above at age four, came to Canada from Germany (as did my own mother), but I didn't know about his early life until I read his blog post about it today. The fact that his family spent their first winter in Canada living in a chicken coop in Alberta is a testament to the principles Sieg embodies: self-reliance and personal responsibility. Something we're woefully short of in today's world full of entitlements and reluctance to accept responsibility for one's own actions.

So quote Sieg:

I have never felt disadvantaged because of the less than perfect circumstances during some parts of my life. I never wanted anyone to feel sorry for me or to help make things better. I learned that from the example of my parents. They just wanted to be left alone to succeed on their own. That is all I have ever wanted. Don't help. Just get the hell out of my way. Don't give me anything, but don't take from me what isn't yours either.

Amen to that.

This is not to say that people shouldn't help each other, and I don't think Sieg means to say that. I know this because several times over my life, he has come to my aid in one manner or another but I think the key point here was that at the time, I asked for his help.

Self reliance doesn't mean nobody co-operates and you let your fellow man starve to death or drown, but it does mean picking up the cards you are dealt and playing them.

Between Batgirl and a Monkee

nospam@example.com (Mark Jeftovic) — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 16:58:21 -0400

Friday night/early saturday AM, around 12:30 EST am I'll be doing a segment about WEHT.net on a special "Where Are They Now?" show on WBZ NewsRadio 1030, which I'm told goes out across 38 states.

Word is that I'll be on after Micky Dolenz and before former Batgirl Yvonne Craig. Kinda cool.

Stupidity, mentors and bye-bye to the CIRA Board

nospam@example.com (Mark Jeftovic) — Tue, 07 Jun 2005 23:54:36 -0400

I'm sitting up late in my hotel room in St. John's, Newfoundland having just completed two things:

1) A few hours ago I left my last Board meeting as a CIRA Director, aside from a short teleconference slated for next week, as of June 22nd, my term is over and I'm done.

2) Because I can't sleep, I just watched Albert Nerenberg's documentary Stupidity which just aired on CBC's Rough Cuts.

I'm glad I watched it. Something I've been trying to do over the last few years is come to grips with my own stupidity. Being on the CIRA Board didn't help. It was an honour and a priviledge to serve on the Board, but it was also one of the my more intimidating experiences.The CIRA Board is stacked with incredibly smart people who really know what they're talking about and most of them are drawing from intellectual wells that are far deeper than my own.

I could go around the table and individually cite each person's acumen and intellect but that may drift this post into "fluff job" territory. Suffice it to say that there is a formidable array of intelligence there.

As for myself, I have a talent for seeing patterns amongst the obscure and an ability to extrapolate present conditions in a non-linear way to come up with unexpected and sometimes surprisingly compelling predictions or models. Because of these knacks I sometimes appear to be of above-average intelligence.

But I also have a problem with what I call being "oblivious to the obvious". I overlook things which are right in front of my face and from time to time I appear to be dumb as a post because of it. I suspect it stems from a variety factors ranging from a short attention span to genuine lack of comprehension skills but I've come to recognize it as my own personal disability and I have to constantly compensate for it.

My primary method of doing this is through trusted mentors and advisors who I constantly barrage with a steady stream of ideas and notions to "reality test" and "sanity check". My wife is the closest and first line of defense against my own dull-wittedness. Then I have layers of friends and advisors expanding outwards in concentric circles. Most of my stupid ideas will get null routed somewhere along those shells before they can hit the real world and do any real damage.

The documentary briefly touched on expectations driving results and in one interview scene a fellow described how he was branded an "idiot" as a child, and as a result he acted and felt like a dolt for a number of years. He managed to shirk the confines of those expectations and went on to become the president of the American Psychiatric Association (sorry, his name eluded me).

My childhood was driven by the expectations of intelligence. My parents nutured my sister and I in an atmosphere of "can-doism". We were constantly reminded that we were exceptionally bright children and thus could accomplish anything we set our minds to. These attitudes spilled over into our school environments and we were both fast-tracked into enrichment programs for our entire primary through high-school careers.

I used to concur with all this and thought I was a pretty brilliant person. As of a few years ago (it started around the time I stopped drinking and smoking grass) I began to suspect that maybe I wasn't as smart as I thought. Today that "maybe" is a "probably". I suspect now that the expectations of high intelligence enabled me to rise to a higher station in life than had I been left to what would have otherwise been average potentials.

So in effect, expectation drove accomplishment which outstripped capability.

If it wasn't for awareness (or at least suspicion) of this, I would be a textbook example of the Peter Pyramid. Fortunately my friend and mentor Sieg, the Atavist explained the Peter Principal to me many years ago, when I was doing my first computing job for his courier company. He told me how 95% of the efforts of mid-to-top-level managers are spent hiding their own incompetence. I was younger and dumber then but I gleaned enough to promise myself that I would never fall into that, and if I found myself in at the apex of a Peter Pyramid, I would put a stop to it.

If I wanted to boil this down into the Lowest Common Denominator™ I would say something banal like "Embrace Your Incompetence" and maybe even wrap a management theory around that and wait for someone like Fast Company to elevate it to a new management fad.

But more realistically, and less sensationally I will say "Be Aware Of Your Inadequacies" and deal with them. Part of the way to deal with them is to get help, seek mentors and bring on people who are smarter than you are to be part of your team[1].

Closing the loop on this insomnia-powered post I can say that one of the factors driving my decision not to run for re-election on the CIRA Board was that at this time I don't think I'm smart enough to be sitting at that table.

The other thing is that now is the time for me to devote my full attention to running my own company. So...

[1] If anybody is interested, I'm currently looking for a Director of Marketing and a Director of Software Development to join my team. Qualifications are that you have to be a smarter than me. My email address is my firstname at my lastname dot net.

Booktagged: I'm it

nospam@example.com (Mark Jeftovic) — Wed, 01 Jun 2005 16:39:07 -0400

My friend The Atavist has tagged me in some booktag thing making the rounds across the internet faster than a Star Wars bootleg. Maybe one day Sieg will notice I've long since changed the name of my blog from Blah Blah Blog to Under The Radar

At any rate, here is my book tag thing:

Number of books I own: A lot. At least a few hundred and when I figure the boxes in storage it may go over a thousand. I come from a long line of bookworms and now that I'm married to another one, it makes for lots of books piling up around the house. Most of mine are non-fiction, economics, history, futurism, social issues, technology, culture.

Last book I bought: I go on binges. If I'm logged into Amazon, look out. Although I think the last one I grabbed was the Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil. I'm about halfway through (watch this space for my review).

Last book I read: I just finished Leading at the Speed of Growth: Journey from Entrepreneur to CEO and recently finished my friend Jim Carroll's What I Learned From Frogs In Texas.

5 books that mean a lot to me: Here's a few I remember devouring more than once over the years, off the top of my head (since I can't see my bookshelves from here) In no particular order:

Rees-Mogg and Davidson's The Sovereign Individual

Alvin Toffler's Future Shock

Financial Reckoning Day

Jame's Gleick's Chaos

Colin Wilson's The Occult

And 5 other bloggers I have to now "tag":

Ross Rader

Rick Segal, Post Money Value

Jim Carroll

*and my bandmates Noise, and Mark Collins.