Never, Ever Give Up

Never, ever give up.

There is no guarantee of success, but giving-up is guarantee of failure.

There is only as much for humans as they effort for. (Quran).

You may have so many failures, slowed down so much or caught in a loop that the destination seems unattainable. Still, you cannot justify giving-up. Stop worrying too much about mistakes, just avoid repeating them. Sooner or later, a time has to come where you exhaust the mistake-space, now since you cannot make any more mistakes, and you are not repeating old ones, success is guaranteed.

You may have already suffered from so many lives, time or material losses that the endeavor is indeed no longer profitable. You must still complete the task, even at further loss. Its because a half-completed task is more dangerous than failure. During your efforts you had to spill yourself along the path and create a mess of environment. Now if you give-up in between, ghosts of failure would keep haunting you while you try to re-gather or clean-up. These ghosts are in form of gorilla attacks from your enemies, your lack of confidence in yourself is one of those. These ghosts go away when task is completed, no matter you win or loose. Then only you can re-gather and clean-up in peace. Its because even at failure, as long as task is completed, you have confidence that you did complete the task, at a higher-than-desire cost-benefit-ratio but still less than an infinite cost-benefit-ratio.

The very fact that you tried till the end, create a reputation about you. Next time your enemies would think twice. Also you are more likely to get help from yet unknown friends.

Even at failure, you do learn important lessons. Once you know the way, you can always come back and do the thing over and over again till reach proximity-to-perfection.

You never know how close your enemy is to breakup, may be if you drag for a little long it is the first one to give-up.

Failures are must. We learn from failures, we do not learn from success. Any trouble that do not kill you, makes you stronger.

Do not care about people who make fun of you. Losers make fun of others. There are a lot of jealous people around you who want to pull your leg. They are afraid of not only your success but also of your steadfastness. They are afraid of these because they do not have these.

You not have to win the race. Winning is never the point in race, its the effort, the harding-up, the lessons.

Once you get over the fear of failure, you will try to indulge yourself in more activities. Soon you get so much practice of failures that you smell them at distance and change tactic before suffering. You also get power of avoiding too much pride of your successes because you know that that one success come after how many failures.

The left-overs of your failed projects: the tools you acquired, the skills you learned, the flexibility in yourself that you achieved, the money you saved, the alliances you made etc are going to pile-up. In your later projects, you can use these assets directly so you not have to start from zero.

When you do succeed, be quick to invest some of the bounty for further projects.

Like a star exists only as long as it keep its internal engine burning, and collapse after that, your struggles if not expand you atleast stop or slow down your contraction. It keeps your enemies at bay.

You have to continue running to a certain level, just to stay at place.

Essence of Slavery

Essence of slavery is GETTING IMPRESSED.


When impressed, you value other people's judgements more than your own, in your PERSONAL MATTERS. You let other people decide for you, intimidate details about yourself, such as what clothes you wear, what way you talk, what way you handshake, what food you eat, what hairstyle you adopt etc., i.e. lifestyle things. You have lost confidence in yourself.

This is the substance of slavery. Chains, whips and dungeons just make the form.

Having a leader is not slavery because leaders decide group matters, not personal matters.You can ofcourse mess this up and let your leaders decide about your personal matters too, ending up with pharaohs and fascists.

Getting advice is not slavery because you not blindly follow what told. You do reject some advices. You follow only those advices that you choose, not all of them. Also you not ask advice about everything.

Taking help from experts is not slavery. There are matters in life where you are better off following advices of those who have more knowledge of subject. The tell-tale sign of this that differentiate it from slavery is that you have different experts about different subjects. If you find yourself blindly following a single person, or a single group of people in all subjects then beware, you are a slave. You are also a slave if you are following a person who has no in-depth knowledge about a subject that you are following him in, such as following a cricketer's ad of shampoo.

There are people who want to make other people their slaves. They shout, criticize, argue. Its because they cannot handle disagreements. They want to be kings. Their mission is to make you loose confidence in yourself. They never talk about your natural weaknesses such as height or color because you didn't decide about them. They always question your judgement. They are quick in pointing towards your mistakes. They never talk about your achievements. They try hard to "prove" to you that you are an idiot.

Like drops of water continuously dropping on a stone after a while make a hole in it, the criticisms of these people make you feel less confident in yourself. A vacuum is created which you subconsciously fill with their judgements. You start valuing their decisions on your decisions. Slowly but surely you loose ability to think on your own and start depending on them to make decisions for you. You become one of those people that always seek advice, even about minor personal details of their lives. They have no confidence in themselves and always want somebody else to do the thinking for them. They are not willing to take responsibility of their failures. They want to fire gun putting it on somebody else's shoulder.

Another trick of these people is to be shiny. They wear shiny clothes, have extremely polished shoes, decorate themselves with sparkling jewellery, drive in unnecessary expensive therefore shiny cars, talk about foreign vacations and shoppings, live in unncessary large houses, throw in wastefully luxurious and insanely often parties etc. After a while you start believing that these people are more successful, therefore more wise than you. That these people can solve your problems, because being wise and successful they have already solved these problems, otherwise they wouldn't have move up the ladder. You forget that they might not be that successful as you think, that they might have got what they have through inheritance instead of hard work and clever thinking, that they were just plain lucky to be at right place at right time to get what they have. You view their achievements with microscope and failures with telescope, reversing this when viewing yours.

Another trick of these people is to appear connected. They always verbally or non-verbally boost about how many powerful people they know, that how often they meet them, that since how many decades they know them etc. It turns out that they are not lieing and this really impresses you. What you forget is that you are jumping from one person to another, looking for real guts and are still looking. That may be the guts are not present in any of those people, but present in not-famous people you are ignoring. That the shiny people are supporting each other, hiding absence of skills of each other.

Once you are a slave you are like a monkey. You blindly follow your "masters", imitating both their good and bad actions. You will be happy to even kill yourself if that makes you more like them.

Once you are a slave you become like jews at time of moses in egypt. You would reject having freedom because you are happy being a slave. You would become lazy. You do not want to go through the natural ups and downs, take risks and rewards, that you have to when you run your own enterprise. You will fight, plot and argue against your own kind. You would stop getting angry on anything, no matter what your "owner" do, including killing your first-borns. You would complain and whine about small bumps on road to freedom, because they are inconvenient. You would be like birds of cage who are afraid of outside world.

Anger leads towards freedom. So do weapons. So do history. So do worshipping Allah. So do having wife. So do having children. So do running own business. So do owning property. So do having money. So do friendships, alliances and unions.

The path to freedom begins with confidence in yourself. Then comes criticism over your "owners". When you learn to say "no", know that you have reached a very significant milestone, that freedom is not far. When you find yourself brave enough to actually fight, understand that you are already free. That the mental state is gone. That the substance of slavery is no more, what is left is form and that cannot live long without the substance.

If you are not too worried about failures that you stop taking risks, then understand that you still have the spirit of freedom. That you want to steer your own boat.

If you do not want to strive for more and are content in what you already have, beware that although you are still free, you are close to being a slave. If a person offer you comfort in return of freedom there are strong chances you will take that offer.

Once upon a time, dogs and wolves used to live together, freely in wild. Then during a famine, in a dark winter night, while they were struggling to find some food, they observed some strange light in distance. They decided to investigate the matter. On getting closer they observe that its coming from a village, from houses of humans. The warmth of light was comforting and inviting, making them go even nearer. There they saw plenty of food, heat and a general sense of security. Dogs decided to exchange freedom for convenience, while the wolves made the opposite decision and returned.

Decide for yourself which one would you prefer.


Even now, at every full moon night, wolves woo towards moon, asking dogs to return. Its called CALL OF WILD. The wilderness, the freedom and honor is calling back.

Ofcourse thats a false story but you get the message.

A sign of slavery is too much worry about power of your enemies. You must never think that your enemies are weak, but you also must never think that they are very strong. If you believe that your enemies are very strong, then you go for compromises. Compromises have natural tendency of quickly leading towards slavery.

If you feel comfort in losing ground, in letting go one of your assets hoping to manage the rest better than before, then beware that you are having the mentality of accepting defeat. This has same effect as compromise. While some compromise is needed here and there, after a certain threshold, compromises do lead to loss of confidence. That not to say that you should not contract if you are over stretched. The point is, you should never feel content in making compromises. Your goal should be to get back those assets once you have got matters in control, not to let go of them forever.

A sign of slavery is not pursuing your hobbies because it do not make your "owner" happy. If you are so much pressed that you not get time for your hobby, or have to choose a hobby, then you are not free.

Monetizing Living Cost In A Long Term Currency Unit

Definitions

Long term here means centuries, millenias, eon.

The idea is to find out some unit of currency which is valid both in long term and across most regions of world. Then figure out how much in that currency is needed to live.
 

Constancy

The amount in that currency needed for living costs must be constant.

What Is Included (And What Is Not)

Living cost includes this:

• Food
• Clothing (clothes to wear + bedsheets + curtains etc)
• Commercial Services (barber + traders' profit + transportation + entertainment etc)
• Industrial goods (housing + utensils + furniture etc)

Living costs do not include:

• Savings
• Medical (supposed to be provided by govt for free)
• Education (supposed to be provided by govt for free)
• Utility bills  
• Wastes (luxuries + losses etc)

The calculation is for a livable as well as pleasurable living but do not include luxuries, savings, welfare services (education, medical, security) etc.

The Currency

The currency is goat's meat. Unit is 200 grams of that. This works well as a universal unit, free of inflation, appropriate for most of the last eon of history and is good enough across most regions.

Lets name this unit "star". One star = 200 grams of goat's meat.

How Much Is Needed

It turns out that money needed for food when cooked at home is 1.5 stars per day per average person. Average person here includes children and old people, therefore a working-age woman is 1.2 average person and a working-age man is 1.5 average person, due to higher than average food and other needs. Working age is 20 to 50, after 50 its age of taking work from others then retirement.

For clothing the need is of 0.5 stars.

For commercial services and industrial goods, the need is 0.5 stars.

For entertainment the need is 0.5 stars.

Altogether, the minimum long-term livable living expense is 3 stars per person per day.

Adjustments

Now the adjustments part. If we include medical and educational expenses, then 1 more star have to be included, making it 4 stars. If we include utility bills then another 1 star have to be added.

Therefore money equal to 0.5 to 1.0 kg of goat's meat is what is needed per person per day. Below 0.5 one has to borrow, above 1.0 either there is waste or saving or both.

In Terms Of Hours Of Labor

In terms of hours of labor needed to produce these stuff, when all work is done manually i.e. without electricity and fossil fuels, it takes 72 hours to produce and gather enough food, herbs, honey, fiber for clothes. 24 hours to process fiber and leather to make clothes and shoes. 12 hours to  produce minimum industrial goods. 12 hours to produce minimum commercial goods. 12 hours to produce more commercial services (this includes entertainment). 12 hours to produce more industrial goods (means better quality, more quantity, more items). 24 hours for education services, 24 hours for medical services. The calculation is per year and for an average person's need during that year. The calculation is for both production and expenditure.

At Minimum

In short:

Food: 72 hours = 1.5 stars
Clothing + Shoes: 24 hours = 0.5 stars
Minimum commercial services (no entertainment): 12 hours = 0.25 stars
Minimum industrial services: 12 hours = 0.25 stars

This add up to 2.5 stars or half kg goat's meat. This is the lowest sustainable level of living in long term.

Appropriate

On top of this, further things can be added:

More commercial services (e.g. entertainment): 12 hours = 0.25 stars
More industrial services (better housing, better other industrial stuff): 12 hours = 0.25 stars

This becomes 3 stars by now. This is a reasonable level of living because it is livable as well as pleasurable. This is the level of labor class. It do not include utility bills. It do not include services that are supposed to be provided by govt.

First Extension

On top of these, further things can be added:

Utility bills = 1.0 stars

Now it becomes 4 stars.

Second Extension

On top of these, further things which are education and medical can be added. If govt is weak then one has to pay for these too. The added cost is 1 star.

Conclusion

One point to note is, actual living costs never exceed 5 stars i.e. 240 hours. What comes after it is waste or saving. Driving in a personal car is actually a waste because proper public transportation should exist and be used. Living in a larger than needed house therefore increasing utility bills is still a waste. Going to far off places on vacations each year is also a waste.

Bonus: On The Production Side

The above is on the expenditures side. Now a little on the production side. A person working 7 hours per day, taking one day off a week, having 15 gazetted holidays a year, having 24 casual leaves a year, can work 1920 hours a year. This is equal to 40 stars.

We can get 1 worker of age 20 to 50 years and male gender out of every 4 people in population. Therefore, at most, 40% of production have to go to the labor. Rest goes to profit of business men, taxes, depreciation costs and expansions. We can make people work till age 60 but this is compensated by unemployment (due to lazyness + lacks of skills + disability etc).

Bonus: Where The Money Should Go

10% of production of a business should go in charity. Another 10% in compensating depreciation. Another 10% to 20% in operating expenses. Operating expenses includes seed and manure for farm, medicines for livestock, utility bills for offices, business-travel expenses etc. Its the rest 60% that is actually available.

Each of the worker produce on average 40 stars, out of which 60% is available which means 24 stars. We have to keep life standard of labor class to 3 stars. Since there is one worker in a population of every 4 people, we need to pay 12 stars to the worker. This is 30% of total income and 50% of available income.

The rest 12 stars is to be divided among business-owners and govt.

How to Win Over Competition

The only right way to win over competition, is to avoid competition altogether. This can be done by providing some unique services that your competitors don't. Then there is no competition and you have monopoly.

This is a great victory because you not just win over your competitors but also over the very idea of competition.

The other way i.e. the wrong way of fighting competition is to do same things that your competitors do, just do them more. The problem is, your competitors will likely respond with same action, evening out efforts of you and them both. Situation therefore become worse for both parties.

An example of this madness is price war in marketing, where two competitors striving for larger market share lock themselves in a race to bottom by reducing prices. In each cycle profit of both companies shrink making it harder for both of them to operate. Both continue this practice in anticipation of the other party failing first giving them monopoly. The problem is, it may happen that the damage is so huge that BOTH parties fail and a third one come and take over. Even if a third one do not come, the two can still sieze to exist.

In addition of damage to the fighting parties, there is a larger damage to the society as whole. Though consumes benefit initially by reduced prices, in long run they suffer as either the product is entirely lost due to failure of both parties or the winner now having monopoly raise price back to previous level and then some.

Another example of this in politics is arms race between two countries. As one country develop a new weapon after expenditure of enormous resources, the other soon develop a similar one of its own again with a huge expenditure of its own. This may continue till both of them die due to lack of reinvestments in productive sectors as an unsustainable portion of GDP is allocated to development and maintainence of weapons.

There are many ways of avoiding competition. One is to move to another market by a company, or move to another field such as arts or architecture by a country. Sometimes arts, architecture etc, i.e. the soft stuff, impress and nuetralize an adversary lot more than weapons technology or even a hot war.

In a forest, different kinds of animals exist, and do not compete with each other. There is a place for all kinds of birds for example because each of them get feeded on atleast slightly different food depending on shape of beak, have different survival tactics etc. While both lions and tigers feed on grass-eating animals, their diet is different. Tigers which cannot defeat lions in physical one-to-one fights have abilities of speed and tree-climbing which lions don't.

Its the same idea that animals and birds in wild follows during drought. When food go scarce they instead of fighting on the same resources, tend to migrate to other land where there is plenty of food.

Its the same idea that when there is clutter of available candidates for jobs in a particular field, a lot of candidates simply abandon the field by learning new skills and moving on to other fields which have capacity to accomodate them.

The natural alternative of diversification is starvation. Since resources are not enough to sustain all of the existing parties, some have to die if they do not move on by diversification.

If you are a small company then you cannot compete with your large competitor company. You can however diversify yourself by operating only in the marginal markets which are too small for your competitor to work in but large enough to sustain you . You can diversify in other ways too, the most obvious is to moving to a different product, but also by providing direct sales, faster customer service etc.

If there is for example a large forest in a country producing high quality wood that another country wants, then one way is to fight over that resource, by invasion. This requires huge expenditure of resources by the invader and if the victory do not come fast then another large amount of resources are spend by the defending country. There is however another way for the first country to get the wood without a fight. Its called trade. Ofcourse the first country have to produce something of value to gain money to buy the wood but still its a net positive scheme.

Trade is the base of peaceful co-existence. It enables parties to share resources with benefit going to not just the trading parties but to all the parties because of increase in efficiency. Each of the two parties produce only what they are good in, resulting more and better, and then through trade getting those things they need and the other party produce and sale.

This is not to say that war and competition do not have its place.  One should go for them only when either one's survival is at stake, or when victory is reasonably expected to be cheap and fast. The latter happens when you have special divine help, enemy is too weak, you have just mastered a new technology and have a window, pillars of enemy are defecting to you, or you have just gained huge alliances etc. Its however useless to compete when enemy is roughly as strong as you.

In the light of above, nazi invasion of soviet union was the right decision as far as military strategy goes. Soviet military has just killed almost all of its officers down to level of major, had suffered huge losses by tiny Finland and is generally in middle of industralization. It was that at operation level that fatal blunders were made by nazis like spreading forces on a wide front, providing inappropriate clothing to soldiers, ignoring lacks of roads and general brutality towards conquered people that the defeat came.

Things You Should Never Do In A Software Project

Branching

Its when different branches of your code have different features. Problem comes when you built on features on basis of work already done in other features. Then when you need these new features in other branches you lack that basic work which is necessary. As a result you have to almost have those features in the branches, which means doing the same work over and over again.

The solution is to move on a single branch, adding features as needed. Then use end-user administrator-level configuration to turn off features that are not needed.

Finished but Unreleased Features

Once a feature is completed and appropriately tested, it should be released. Piling up features to be released in the next mega version is a waste.

The solution is to use sub-version to release less important features.

Having Multiple Owners

Owner here means administrator, that is, a person who is responsible for the project. There have to be exactly one owner of the project, who is fully responsible for the progress on the project. The person who initially started the project is also usually the person who done most of the base work, such as building the underlying engine/kernel, and is also the person who took many critical early decisions about the project such as what technology to use, what platform to support, what architecture to follow and what libraries to use. This person is naturally the most appropriate person to own the project.

No matter how large the project is, and how many hundreds or thousands of programmers are involved, the owner have to be one and only one person. This is the person whom you expect to be the first to go the extra miles for the success of project even when not asked. Its also the person who is brave enough to handle wrong decisions of management often by forcing a reversal.

Throwing In Extra Men On a Delayed Project

This never works. If a project missed deadline then adding new personnel to the project make it to be delayed further than in the absence of them. This is because software development is such a hi-tech job that new people requires project-specific training and there previous experience not help much.

The solution is to make the same people continue work on the project that are already working on the project. If the initial staff is no longer available, then its ok to have a fresh team but thats a separate thing and is a valid strategy irrespective of delay state of project.

Habitually Forcing Programmers to Work Extra Hours

While its ok to force your programmers to work extra hours, especially near release date of project, its a bad idea to make a habit out of it. Tired mind produce buggy code, because the components are not well-tested before they are relied on, certain shortcuts are made here and there, the approach used is too specific to be used elsewhere in project etc.

The solution is to allow programmers go home at end of day. Ofcourse to stay in profit this implies that you have to be very careful when hiring programmers to have only the skilled ones so they do not take undue advantage out of this strategy.

Avoiding Static Code

Languages have the feature of static methods for a reason. The methods that work ONLY on the sent in parameters are supposed to be static, because they do not depend (i.e. use) any object or global state. Examples include encryption, hashing, DAL used with stored procedures, selecting last item in dropdownlist, returning an array of values of items selected in a multi-select dropdownlist etc.

There are enormous benefits of static methods including having a ready library that can be used in other projects.

Static methods are anti-object-oriented because they defy architecture. In a sense they lie flat in the highly structured OOP environment. This is a good thing because of three reasons:

• You do not need boiler-plate instantiation and initialization code of building object graph before they can be used. Instead you can use them directly.

• Changes in class hierarchy structure do not effect them. So this is one less place to test and solve bugs when such changes happens.

•  They can be used in other projects which have different class hierarchies. 

These methods are inherently thread-safe because they do not depend on any state.

Having Noisy Environment Around Programmers

This reduces efficiency because programmers tend to slow down while keeping in mind workflow of a group of variables they are currently working on. Other problems include poorly thought or poorly implemented architecture, buggy code and resignations.

For a programmer, a silent environment is marginally more important than even proper cooling and furniture and is hugely more important than salary.