And now, "Lao Phil" -

Legislators' salary should never exceed the mean annual income of the taxpayers who pay their salary, or they become insulated and isolated from their constituents, system feedback is lethally damaged, and the system goes into self-destruct mode. Notice that no other job in the economy can set its own salary which makes this ability a major and justified element in rightwind attacks on government. Legislators' salaries urgently need to become non-arbitrary, and this is the most intuitive variable for them to be based on - and automatically indexed to with no political interference allowed.

Life's too short for perfection.
[Sample application: forget the 47th edit & fling the book to the printer.]

The love of beauty is the fear of impotence.
[Sample application: a trophy wife may be an embarrassing admission.]

Sexiness is the ability to threaten the boundary* while standing firm on your own side.
(*between "masculine" and "feminine")
[Think of Barbarella, 7 of 9, Lara Croft; Elvis Presley, David Bowie, Orlando Bloom.]

The older I get, the more it's about fiber, and self-morale-management.

[How to lose a pound a day if you're over 200 pounds:
Start in the spring, when there's new life all around to offset your depression and celebrate your victories instead of food.
Then repeat after me -]
Fiber, sardines,
Salad, and beans.
[A small bowl of fiber cereal for breakfast, a tin or a half of sardines for lunch,
salad for supper, garnished with mandarin-orange slices, bleu-cheese crumbles, & honey-mustard dressing,
and if you're still hungry, a small can of pork and beans
- the beans are inflationary, and give you the illusion that you're full.
Toss in a coupla baby-cut carrots and broccolli florets anda halfa sticka celery in between.
Where's dinner fit in? Maybe once on the weekend to forestall your body's hyper-efficient starvation reflex.
Make sure you go for a walk, a bike ride, or both, every day it's not raining.
If it is raining, rev up the Nordic Trak in the basement
while watching the most distracting available halfhour-plus TV show.
And remember, when you're below 200 lbs, you can ride the mules down the *Grand Canyon
(and the camel at the *Granby zoo in Qué.
- if you flunk, you can still ride the rickety monorail over the tigerpark,
or if you don't like rickety, fly to Seattle
- its *monorail is shorter but solid.]

The function of dieting to slim down is to practice the way you should be eating routinely even when you're not trying to slim down - and if "routinely" sounds boring, yes, food has to become boring and lose its uses of high-point, comfort, celebration... - sex can healthily substitute since it lengthens your life, but the main thing must be your mission, your agenda - the thing you want to lengthen your life for = so you can push your life agenda a little further.

I am a biodegradable organic robot, who imagines he has an immortal soul for the rather important purpose of self-morale-management. Plus it helps square with the overwhelming impression I have of the conscious reality of me. I'd like to say "the conscious reality of I" here, but each time I objectify I, I gets automatically translated into the objective case of the pronoun, i.e., me. Ergo, I cannot objectify I because the real I has already slipped out of the predicate into the nominative area before the verb to do the verbing.

Religion is self-morale-management.

Evolution is a very long-term trend away from greater violence, drama and quantity, & toward greater gentleness, diversity and quality.

The function of radicals is to broaden the category of "moderates."
[Sample application: without the Technocrats' push for a 16-hour workweek, Art Dahlberg would have looked crazy pushing for 20.]

Downsizing is an insult to human versatility - it sells people short.
Downsizing says, "People can't change, so get rid of them."
Timesizing says, "Humans are the most changeable species there is. Of course people can change!
The only truth in 'You can't change human nature' is the unparalleled changeability of human nature, dba versatility."

You can't loot your corporate pension funds indefinitely without hurting your senior customers and their purchasing.
You can't slash your workforce forever without cutting into your own markets.
You can't pass costs along to your customers indefinitely without shrinking your own sales.

Contemporary contradictory, short-term capitalism privatizes & funnels profits & security, but nationalizes & scatters losses and risk. This is how it spawns stock bubbles and economic instability while complaining about "government inefficiency."
Incoming, consistent, long-term capitalism (timesizing & successors) targets the point where the funnelling becomes top-heavy, and at that point automates reinvestment in its own consumer base. This is how it avoids stock bubbles and keeps the economy stable.
The funnelling becomes top-heavy at the point where the interests of the wealthy and everyone else diverge so much that the wealthy no longer connect the dots between their workforce and their consumer base, and begin to think it's all about investing in production with a minimum of employees, never mind having strong market-supported productivity to invest in and a high velocity of currency circulation to support the value of that investing.

Getting your third-world economy "rescued" by the IMF or the World Bank is like getting saved from the Titanic by a great white shark.

We couldn't be inducing depression faster if we were doing it on purpose.
(Quoted from end of 3/13/99 items on Collapse page.)

It takes a lot to bring a big economy down, but we're making every possible effort.
(Quoted from end of 4/4/99 items on Collapse page.)

The Series of Extensions

This is Phil's brand of nominalism, now called post-modernism or post-structuralism. Structuralism was probably coined by Jean Piaget in the 1950s but was retroactively applied to pre-Chomskian linguistics from Ferdinand de Saussure to Bloomberg and Gleason. Postmodernism raises the already high bar in academic discussions for obscurantism (ie: makework). It was started by Frenchmen like Michel Foucault (Order of Things) and Jacques Derrida (Of Grammatology) - no wonder the French have been forced to resume workweek reduction instead of probing further realms of makework. Postmodernism also appropriates the Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis = the BGO (blinding glimpse of the obvious) that your language determines the set of ideas you can get; that is, the current forefront in the advance of language evolution strictly limits the creativity of the age.

• There's no such thing as objectivity - only specifiably extended subjectivity.
  [or even just, estimatably extended.... In the Economic Age, we have learned to estimate a lot more things, along with our increasing skills in quantifying things that we previously just described qualitatively because "you couldn't put a number on them."]
  Compare -

• There's no such thing as altruism - only specifiably extended self-interest.
  
  
• There's no such thing as the absolute - only the specifiably extended relative.
  
  
• There's no such thing as "abstract" - only specifiably extended "concrete."
  
  
• There's no such thing as perfection - only specifiably improved imperfection.

• And for lonely hearts -
  There's no such thing as a perfect soulmate - there's only specifiably greater compatibility with one's own imperfections.

Other gems -

Canoe down the river of like-minded people.
(John Paul Kowal of Buffalo NY, 19?-1997)

(And that's a special case of the following advice -)
Make it as easy as possible for reality to give you what you want.
(Naida Denise Dyer, Phil's first wife)

Do you feel like something's wrong with you [your complexion, your clothes, your house, whatever]?
Quit obsessing about it! If it doesn't bother you, it won't bother anyone else.
(Naida Dyer)

If in doubt, revert to original plan.
[or simply]
If in doubt, don't.
(George Herbert Dyer, Naida's dad)
[Compare Lao Phil: If in doubt, choose the path of maximum optionality (= with the most options).]

Attack at the point of consciousness (it may be the only chance you'll get).
(Lally Thomas, or was it actually her sister, Ianthe Thomas?)
[Compare Lao Phil: Start with the task that's hardest to remember (it may be the only time you'll remember it).
Or the dining-at-a-potluck version: Start with the foods that are vanishing fastest.]

Folks, you can usually get what you really want in this life. So just be v-e-r-y careful what you want.
(Evelyn Waugh, not the famous man but the wonderful woman who taught English to Lawrence Park Collegiate highschoolers, including Richard Philip Hyde in Grades XI-XIII, in Toronto in the late 1950s.)
[Compare today's commonplace: Be careful what you wish for.]

If you don't like it, don't look at it.
(Mr. Moses, the best teacher at Huron Street Public School in Toronto in the 1940s and early 50s. Richard Hyde had the pleasure of his teaching in Grade 5, and he allowed Richard to skip Grade 6 - Grade 6 topics like Magellan and Vasco da Gama became mysterious - had to find out about them independently later = small price to pay for avoiding an entire year of makework #3.)

The difference between good science and great science is the quality of the questions posed.
(One of the professors Dr. William Hunter had when a student. Cited in "Best innovations are those that come from smart questions," 4/13/2004 WSJ, B1.)

Put up in a place where it's easy to see
The cryptic admonishment, "T T T."
When you think how distressingly slowly you climb,
It is well to remember that ... Things Take Time.
(from Piet Hein's "Grooks")

Ensconced in his big armchair in the living room of Grannie's bungalow in Oak Ridges, Ontario, Canada,
Grandpa Hyde used to intone...
(Philip Edward Hyde, 1880-1955 = Philip Hyde I) -

None are so blind, as those that will not see.

and

Oh what a world of sin and sorrow
For all those who beg and borrow.
For their debts, though paltry sums
They promise to repay tomorrow -
But tomorrow never comes.

and then

God made man and God made woman,
And God made man the stronger.
But to give the woman an equal chance,
He made her tongue the longer.

To which Grannie (Louise Elizabeth Reppen Hyde, 1885-1969) would retort -

Patience is a virtue.
Possess it if you can.
'Tis often found in woman.
But seldom in a man.

(Note Grannie's more concise poem also rebuts Grandpa's charge of female verbosity.)

Will Rogers says...

[Re Oct. 29, 1929 -]
I have been in Washington on Inauguration day, Claremore on Fourth of July, Dearborn on Edison Day...But to have been in New York on 'Wailing Day'...You know there is nothing that hollers as quick and loud as a gambler.

See where Congress passed a two-billion-dollar bill to relieve bankers' mistakes and loan to new industries...You can always count on us helping those who have lost part of their fortune, but our whole history records nary a case where the loan was for the man who had absolutely nothing. (1931)

There is one rule that works in every calamity, be it pestilence, war or famine - the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.... The poor even help arrange it.