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AT&T Leadership Is Just Dumb

As I described previously, I am currently holed up in a beautiful cabin on Pleasure Lake in the Catskills, NY, courtesy of a friend who believes in the need to reinvent the operating systems for humanity, finally writing my book ten years in the making. 

The book’s subject was a moving target as I worked my way up to the seemingly unending root causal chain of humanity’s ill-performing foregone conclusions. Hence the delay. My book had to cover more than just identifying humanity’s problems but also offering a systemic way to resolve them. Stay tuned. 

With no other internet connection than hot spotting through my almost thirty years of reliance on a mobile connection with AT&T to recall what I wrote previously in 1,659 articles, I came to find out AT&T does not allow more than one extension of hotspot data on my elite plan per pay period. How idiotic. 

Think about this for a moment. Let’s assume I am in the business of selling ice cream. Do I send customers away because I think I’ll run out of ice cream by the end of the month? AT&T is in the business of selling mobile network bandwidth. Why in hell would you not sell me more? This can only happen because they have carved out a monopoly position our government does not comprehend. With free-market competition, AT&T would not get away with this stance.  

First, courtesy of Congress asleep at the wheel of creative destruction, AT&T gets away with violating the free-market mechanism upon which the free roaming of the universal GSM protocol was conceived. By default, they lock their phones to their network, preventing small network operators with strong signals in less populated areas from gaining a foothold. 

Second, AT&T is equally asleep. The need for people to be connected in rural areas with a laptop without a built-in radio will lead more people to consider alternatives like Starlink. AT&T’s stance gives way to a gigantic opportunity for its land-based mobile network to be replaced by other forms of universal internet connectivity, spreading its wings.

AT&T already lost ground by not offering a viable, high-speed home internet connection through 5G on its network and letting Comcast and Time Warner eat their lunch with old-fashioned modems installed in every home. Limiting data bandwidth promotes the decline of AT&T’s core competency in providing a data network sans modem that everyone can rely on.

The future of AT&T, as the largest mobile communications company in the U.S., can be very bright when it hires a CEO who can see the bigger picture of how to provide, not stifle, universal access to the internet. Operational excellence is important to keep Wall Street tuned in, but the attachment to an unprecedented new normalization of truth keeps them coming back for more. Renewing a company’s vision and duly executed product strategy trumps the false premise of sustainability any day.

Conflict Reveals Essence

I am a sucker for love and determination to build a strong, peaceful, and lasting relationship and treat its pursuit like how I built successful startup companies. One at a time and fully dedicated. 

Ambiguity

In today’s dating environment, where the instability of ambiguity reigns supreme, my dedication appears to be an anomaly many women take for granted. As psychologist Sadia Khan explains in the riveting interview embedded here, women attempting to be as independent as possible and dating men who do the same leads to widespread relationship failure and epidemic loneliness and depression.

In my view, the art of a successful relationship is maintaining a delicate balance of dependence, the opposite of the all-to-easy flight of independence–the latter stance promoting the mistaken identity of equality.

He who seeks equality amongst unequals seeks absurdity.

–– Spinoza

Women are not like men, thankfully, and nor should they attempt to become equal. Respect and evolutionary principles value our differences, not our commonalities. 

Plight

An excellent way to test a relationship is to throw dirt at it and see what happens. I did so recently when I moved to another state for a sweet woman proclaiming to love me, in her words, more than I’ll ever know. I reciprocated by showing my determination by moving from idyllic Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, to not-so-happening Hot Springs, Arkansas. I put my faith in the words of psychologist Esther Perel.

The quality of your life depends on the quality of your relationship.

–– Esther Perel

And so, I went all in.

Three months in, I noticed her respect for my plight of reinventing the operating systems of humanity starting to wear off. Without asking me what the term meant, she began to ridicule the evolutionary meritocracy I described publicly as the replacement for the deadbeat democracies we deploy today. Her contempt for my ten-year self-funded work, more than twice Malcolm Gladwell’s ten thousand hours, had already set in. Its undercurrent slowly seeped into other aspects of our relationship, eating it from the inside out.

Contempt

Knowing full well how contempt kills all relationships, I began to revisit my decision to move to Arkansas mentally. I lost access to the beach and was disenfranchised from people from all walks of life to exercise my debate style. I also lost access to diverse food options, including a few essential bakeries. A problem for a former European who loves good food.

People who are crazy enough to change the world are the ones who do.

–– Steve Jobs

I became frustrated with the person who initially proclaimed wanting to be with someone intent on changing the world she could learn from, yet in short order, lost respect for the much-needed patience, investment, and determination such endeavor required. Her contempt for my life’s work demonstrated she had mentally reneged on who I was and what I stood for. 

So, I did the same. I reneged on the financial agreement we had. My anticipation of her rejection, followed by my proposal to leave, ignited her borderline personality disorder to start yelling and screaming at me, as she often did, and everything blew up. She told me to get out, and I left with my car packed for survival one week before I was supposed to travel with her to meet her parents and her ninety-year-old grandmother in Hungary.

Psyche

What happened next is precisely what the psychologist above pointed out. 

With her in Hungary texting me multiple times a day, probably hoping I was down on my luck and indeed homeless, I devoted myself to writing my book from a sailboat in Rock Hall, Maryland, offered to me by a brother from another mother. Subsequently, I moved to a cabin in the Catskills offered to me by a new friend keen to support the need for a new operating system for humanity

During my absence from her, the only real question this woman asked me was not how I was doing or if I was okay, but how many women I had slept with since. Again, her question revealed she never knew who she was with, making clear how a person who does not dare to trust anyone cannot be trusted. I could never emotionally detach myself that quickly to have sex with someone else. Call me old-fashioned. 

Destiny

Two weeks after her return from Hungary, I bet she already had sex with people from the gym she alluded to previously, with the swipe-right irreverence so prevalent in society today. My suspicion, corroborated by empirical evidence, past and current, demonstrated the kind of character I was dealing with. As the video above explains, her irreverence will define her lonely future. So much for the expression above of love for me. That was a lie.

The best litmus test to the essence of someone’s character is to throw conflict, controversy, and the dedication of a worthy struggle around. Only then will you see what a prospective teammate is made of. Good people will try to solve problems collectively to benefit the team rather than outright discredit the merit of one team member by elevating the importance of their agenda to crush another. Never again will I share my upside with people unwilling to stand by my downside.

Pity

People who attack, disrespect, or discredit their team members are not necessarily bad. They are mere serfs soaking in a societal soup lacking the proximal development needed to change the flawed constitution they blissfully bow down to. If they cannot independently develop themselves, solve problems collectively, and instead prefer to ruminate in the consensus of their uninformed peers, you must leave them where you found them. 

Conflict reveals the essence of character, determining whether life with that person is worth building and living. A process of detecting false positives I whittled down from twenty years to six years and now to four months—progress of a kind.

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.

–– Helen Keller

P.S.: I do not plan to divulge the progress of all my relationships, only those that inherit the systemic dysfunction from societal norms gone awry.

The New 15 Inch MacBook Air Is Amazing

As you can read in my many articles about Apple, I am not impressed by how Tim Cook runs Apple. He steered Apple into as many convulsions of downstream evolution as he could to appease Wall Street and Warren Buffet, neither of which understands that without upstream reinvention of the company, Apple’s days are relegated to the size of greenfield and numbered. A business strategy akin to selling sugar water to as many people as possible is the failure that made Steve Jobs return to Apple and now turns him in his grave. The escapism to a virtual world with Vision will not improve human adaptability to nature’s entropy and is, therefore, a net negative.

Forced to buy a new Mac laptop after I poured rosé over my already crackling and not-that-old MacBook Pro, I decided to replace it with a 15-inch MacBook Air after a two-week writing isolation stay on a friend’s sailboat in Rock Hall, Maryland. The built-in screen was no longer functioning, and a helpful Apple employee at the extremely busy Annapolis store dug out an external display and helped me transfer all my data from the old to the new in about three hours. Ready to write my book in the Catskills, NY.

My experience with the MacBook Air has been fantastic overall. The screen is big and bright, and the battery life is absolutely amazing. The sound emanating from its tiny speakers is fantastic and true to life. Finally, it has a 1080p built-in camera. Magic Island is whimsical and stupid, but extending the screen to all corners is probably necessary. My systems management tools reported the battery will last for twenty hours with 87% remaining. This Macbook Air will go all day and then some without needing to drag a charger around. Hooking it up to Apple’s external display was seamless with Thunderbolt, and connecting a mouse and Logitech wireless keyboard was equally so.

The CPU performance, apparently with an M2 chip, is more than sufficient for my work. Albeit you would be surprised to know everything at methodeva.com, and I mean everything, is produced by myself on this Mac. My website storefront is my brand, and I control every aspect of it. Video editing in Final Cut Pro, editing images in Photoshop, presentations in KeyNote, financial modeling in Excel, and writing my book in Scrivener all work splendidly without the MacBook Air breaking a sweat. Although not as thin as previous MacBook Airs, the form factor is very slim and easy to slide into most bags or backpacks.

The one gripe I have is something I have complained about years back. I avoid the use of the built-in trackpad like the plague. Apple decided to make the trackpad as big as possible for some unexplained reason, running too close to the edge. And so whenever you actually hold the laptop in your lap, tilted up, a small portion of the shirt you are wearing interferes with the clickability of the trackpad. The trackpad then refuses to acknowledge clicks unless you hammer it down. This is a major multi-year flaw indicative of the many mistakes the input device people at Apple have made over the years. Putting the MacBook Air on an even surface resolves the issue. Apple should just decrease the size of the laptop and design built-in algorithms to detect false positive interference.

Overall, I love this new MacBook Air and highly recommend it to people who do a fair amount of creative work on the road and need a reliable and lasting laptop to keep going. The MacBook Air is a worthy successor in Apple’s downstream evolution.

A Nation Of Suckers Leads A World Of Suckers

Carl Sagan hit the nail on the head with this quote:

Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion and bamboozle requires vigilance, dedication, and courage.

But if we don’t practice these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly serious problems that face us and we risk becoming a nation of suckers, a world of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who saunters along.

–– Carl Sagan (1934-1996)

I recognize the depth of Carl’s quote when I debate with people about how to change the operating systems of humanity, and they do not even realize how flawed our current constructs are. In the words of Noam Chomsky:

The general population doesn’t know what’s happening, and it doesn’t even know that it doesn’t know.

–– Noam Chomsky

Most people are so enslaved to the existing constructs of humanity that they forget the constructs we sell to the world as human excellence own the burden of proof of their merit. And they have none. Why are we promoting the value of human wants, called a democracy, not living up to the value of human needs defined by nature? Why do we assume and sell this foregone conclusion is the best we have on offer for the world?

It is difficult to persuade our population of the need for change when 30% of Americans are functionally illiterate, 63% do not believe in evolution, and according to Carl Sagan’s baloney kit, President Dwight Eisenhower expressed astonishment and alarm upon discovering that fully half of all Americans have below-average intelligence, producing a lack of social mobility that has not improved much since 66% of Americans still live paycheck to paycheck.

Broken Systems

Change, derived from a new and higher normalization of truth, has no precedent and is unlikely to yield the initial consent from the masses. Nor does my approach and proposition of method EVA count on it. I just tell the best version of our current truths. A truth that requires your proximal development, not mine. I have developed mine to discover it. Now it is your turn to adopt it. Or not, and the solutions to yesterday’s problems will compound into an anthropogenic cascade.

Leadership to –for the first time– adopt a natural theory for humanity requires proximal development not vying for the populism of suckers. Only then can we expand the merit of humankind to improve human adaptability to nature’s entropy and build a renewable society in which everyone can flourish.

We need leaders not in love with money but in love with justice.
Not in love with publicity but in love with humanity.

–– Martin Luther King, Jr.

Don’t Regulate AI; Govern It

It is apparent from reports in the media Elon Musk has met in a closed-door session with Congress to discuss the dangers of Artificial Intellgence (AI). Interviewed afterward, he stated how AI must be regulated, as most prominent technologists now concur.

But he is wrong. This is precisely the reason why post-mortem corrections to laissez-faire governance do not work. You must first govern the theory, then set up the marketplace systems to embed the theory, and then, and only then, establish the rulebook of regulations to which marketplace participants must comply to establish trust in the marketplace systems.

The government is responsible for setting the theory of human gameplay. Preferably before a single game is played or in a more free society soon thereafter. We have not established a theory for humanity, and thus, we cannot gauge whether AI meets the objective of the theory or not. Then, regulation rules are established as a consequence, not a cause of a governing theory. This means that once the human theory is defined and the marketplace criteria identified, the gameplay rules can be established and a referee appointed to enforce them. In the same way, any sports game plan functions today.

The theory of human gameplay must be to improve human adaptability to nature’s entropy. Or else humanity is doomed. Then, technology providers must establish and prove what they do with AI improves human adaptability to nature’s entropy. They must deliver a theory that aligns with the human theory. And only then can we regulate whether the conformance to the human theory is met.

We cannot let AI rule the roost of human efficacy and determine the theory of humanity. But without a theory of humanity established first, the wild goose chase of technology fantasies will surely put a damper on the future and survival of humanity.

The debacle of confounding consequence and cause, as in confounding a rulebook with a theory, is why laissez-faire governance fails in the long run. We are the creators of a fantasy world the world looks up to but miserably fails the most basic litmus test of how it contributes to the strength of human renewal. And it shows. In simpler terms, we deploy gameplay without a game plan, leading to each player doing whatever they like gameplay to be.

We must change how we govern, which, to everyone’s delight, will reduce the need to regulate.

The Clawback Of Human Development

I recommend my readers to watch the Disney/Pixar movie Ratatouille. It is full of important life lessons. In the movie, the leading rat drifts down the sewer system, suddenly accelerating at warp speed down an intersection of pipes, not knowing what direction to steer his float and the outcome of his choice. Life is full of those kinds of decisions where you cannot predict the outcome.

Rat Race

Fortunately, unpredictability is no longer the case for the development of the human species. We took the path of least resistance and ended up with a mess many of us are blissfully unaware of and sell to the world as human excellence. We developed constructs fundamentally incompatible with nature’s evolution and, therefore, have put undue pressure on human existence and renewal as we hurtle down the sewer of a fantasy world we have created for ourselves.

I suggest reading The Rodents in America’s Viscera for an update on the dire consequences of mistaken reality.

The futile ability to write our own report card hides the bleak reality that nature’s first-principles in actuality, determine our success. We are only great when nature approves of our greatness. Therefore, we must begin to understand and play nature’s game to survive the test of time. Fortunately, we are an intelligent species who can admit our mistakes and reason for systematically better outcomes. All it takes is to diss manmade make-believe and crawl back to a new and higher normalization of nature’s truth to follow the direction nature lays out for us.

Choose Wisely

Here is the fork-in-the-road animation I created to remedy our debilitating state of humanity:

The path we rolled down is the growth for the sake of growth ideology of a cancer cell pursued by the short-term personal interests of those managing the arbitrage of finance now grown to the tune of eleven times the size of production, to which only a very narrow sliver of the population contributes. This unsustainable predicament will implode or explode on us no matter how many sauces of oxymoronic sustainability are poured over. Today’s growth artificially promotes all-for-me-and-nothing-for-anyone-else vile maxims responsible for the distrust in our collective societal interests and, when globalized, an anthropogenic cascade.

We need to focus on the strength of human renewal and build policy, capital, and innovation systems to use that guide as our compass. We rebuild the strength of human renewal as nature’s evolutionary imperative and reestablish the freedom and trust in our personal interests that contribute to the strength of human renewal, squeezing out the vile maxim of personal interests that destroys societies. A large swath of the population with diverse skill sets will then be able to contribute to human adaptability to nature’s entropy, the essence of human survival.

Choose wisely because the future of humanity depends on it.

Twitter Is Dead To Me

We may have hit the scrutiny of Elon Musk by how he does not understand money, living on Mars is stupid, the integral conflict of xAI, Twitter’s transparency copout, and the musth of Elon. Or we may just have hit the pay-to-play wall of the free version of Twitter we signed up for way before he took over.

Who knows what the new overlord of our freedom is doing using technological advancement as the pacifier to put governments to sleep?

Twitter no longer lets me log in, as the dubious error message without further explanation indicates. Twitter, for me, is like anal sex. No thanks, that channel is for output only.

Despite having some 10,000 followers, we never saw any real uptick in readership or intelligent interactions from the barking dog syndrome that is the Wild West of freedom of speech. Outlier propositions that have no precedent do not appeal to the masses.

Again, technology must prove the theory determines what needs to be discovered, in the words of Albert Einstein. Twitter’s make-believe to enhance humanity by connecting the opinions of vast amounts of people who “freely” spew what to think, cannibalizing how to think, is not the kind of proof scientists can get away with to influence the world.

We must curtail the technology fantasies that cater to the expanse of greater-fools.

The Internet Doesn’t Poison Us—The Apps On Top Do.

Relationship coach Sadia Khan tells Lewis Howes at The School of Greatness how social media hurt our relationships. In her words, the impact of technology leads to a complete identity crisis in men and women, with external, extrinsic values that do not benefit anybody, manifesting in self-inflicted depression and loneliness—something I described previously in a different way in the instability of ambiguity.

I recommend you watch the video in its entirety.

As a female friend recently reminded me whilst building startups in Silicon Valley, I predicted this would happen when Facebook launched publicly in 2006. The Internet allows us to connect with each other, which can be a good thing. How we do so requires, in the words of Albert Einstein, the development of a proven theory that determines what can be discovered.

No technology company has developed a proven theory by which the efficacy of humanity is served. No scientist would get away with having a theory adopted by the public without proof. Only a bamboozle of technology sold to the greater fool can.

I suggest we pull the reins of laissez-faire governance and verify that technological advancement leads to human advancement before we allow it to run free and poison our world.

Think Collectively

Thinking revolves around two axes: the pursuit of individual interests to do what one wants and collective interests to pursue what our society needs. Today, our government allows laissez-faire constructs to fester, prioritizing and glamourizing personal interests over collective ones, poisoning the evolution of humanity.

New threats to the survival of the human species continually present themselves. Natural threats such as climate change, viruses, and disease combined with manmade threats such as sixteen percent extreme poverty in the U.S., national debt outgrowing our GDP, and obesity, killing forty thousand Americans each month, force us to think collectively about how to combat those challenges best. Combining individual skills, strengths, and expertise to serve collective interests was and remains an essential benefit to the survival of the great ape species.

Pursuing individual interests requires thinking about how to get the upper hand over others and to become more dominant to achieve a leadership position or to become free from the shackles that enslave others in the group. Pursuing individual interests incompatible with evolutionary benefits beyond the boundaries of collective interests will damage the trust in the efficacy of the group. This is called a vile maxim; “the all for me and nothing for anyone else” stance.

It seems really very unfair that man should have chosen the gorilla to symbolize everything that is aggressive and violent, when that is one thing that the gorilla is not, and that we are.

Sir David Attenborough

For our great ape cousin, the gorillas, their limited purview of foraging and procreation is finetuned to their well-defined local environment, which restricts the group’s collective interest and need to think. Gorillas rely on the hierarchy of a dominant male to ensure the pack operates per the group’s collective interest of well-being and security. In a surprisingly delicate balance, the female gorillas collectively rail against the male to ensure his behavior subscribes to the same. The power of neither is absolute and shifts dynamically based on who is best suited to serve the group’s collective interests at a given time. This balance of power ensures a vile maxim cannot wreak havoc on the group. 

Humans have a much broader intellectual purview and use thinking and predictive reasoning to expand the purview of our collective interests. That is how early humans fled the plains of Africa in search of milder climates to escape extinction. We have learned that our survival as a species is predicated on more than our status quo within a group in sight. We interact with and are part of groups worldwide and realize how the dynamic equilibrium with our environment impacts us today and how the strength of our renewal determines the quality of life of our offspring tomorrow. The packs we belong to and depend on have become much more extensive and diversified, crossing geographical boundaries. Each sovereignty requires a rebalance of collective interests with individual contributions to serve it. 

The operating principle of gorillas has evolved by nature to provide for the well-being and safety of the pack; their individual contributions to the group are renumerated in kind. Humans expect the same outcome of well-being and safety, yet have developed our own constructs to do so—a methodology quite different from gorillas and violating nature’s first-principles. To use an analogy, when nature tells us to play the game of soccer, and we keep playing basketball as our preferred game, we will surely lose the battle for human survival.

A new method must be developed to balance our individual and collective interests to protect the trust in a future that serves us all. A method we call method EVA.

Elon Musk Doesn’t Understand Money

People get all starry-eyed over the financial success Elon Musk has achieved by producing groundbreaking innovations and now believe everything he says on any subject.

Such is life in America, where anyone who has made a little money is worshipped without scrutiny. That’s why we elect peanut growers, movie stars, and real estate moguls, knowing nothing about our evolutionary challenges as Presidents. And you wonder why nothing works.

Serving online payments as Paypal’s cofounder, Elon’s affection for Dogecoin is as flawed as believing in cryptocurrency valuations without trust in value. Now, he is on his way to turn the installed base of Twitter into an audience for his upcoming financial network, X, saying in an interview money is just a record in a database. He could not be more wrong.

Money is the exchange of trust in products or services rendered. And while money can come in many forms, including through blockchain constructs, establishing trust cannot. Crypto is the proverbial horse before the cart.

Trust is the cause that leads to the exchange of money as a consequence. The presumption of money as the cause of trust is the grave depravity of reason, in the words of Nietzsche, that leads greater-fools to believe the valuation of a cryptocurrency represents an economy. It does not, thankfully.

Here is how the value chain of money ought to work:

Evolutionary Merit => Trust => Value => Money => Currency => Valuation

Elon’s misplaced understanding of money and crypto is as dangerous as his desire for humans to live on Mars, as humans will, by evolutionary principle, become Martians. Living on Mars is the fastest way to kill humanity. Exchanging money without the evolutionary merit of money is a sure way to destroy the trust in the collective interests of society.

I greatly respect what Elon has achieved, but we cannot let his explorations of a fantasy world prevent us from adapting to nature’s reality. The excitement to wake up every day should not come from the mindless endeavor of turning life into a videogame but from improving our understanding of nature’s gameplay, which we have no choice but to adapt to.

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