The Incredible Shrinking Tim, and e$lab

[Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>]

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At 11:19 am -0500 on 11/12/97, Tim May wrote:

> There seems to be an unhealthy desire by some to "armchair psychoanalyze"
> the motivations and inner motivations of others. In recent days, me.

Guilty. Too much data. Too little pattern. Of course, the definition of
"unhealthy" is always relative, especially in a pseudoscience like
psychology.

> Detweiler used to rant for pages and pages about my state of mind and how
> my words were "torturing" him, and on and on. This was an unhealthy
> fixation on me, in my not so humble opinion.
>
> Now Hettinga seems to have again fallen into this state.

Yup, Tim. That's it.

Me. Detweiller.

Same people.

"Movies. Laundry. Same thing." as the MoviePhone commercial goes...


> Though he styles
> himself as an astute observer of human behavior, he fails utterly to
> persuade with his insults and whinings.

Well, I think you've got me beat on the insult front so far in *this* little
bit of repartee, Tim. As for whining, I suppose it's relative. I mean, when
all you can hear is mortar cuncussions, I bet *everything* sounds like
whining. If you can hear anything at all.

> Bob, get a life. Go do something useful. Make some real money.

Now, Tim. Are you *jealous* of my impecuniosity? I have to admit, I have
more fun than money these days, but things *are* getting interesting.

Fortunately, you seem to be making great strides to solve that problem you
have with our asset disparity... I guess chips on the sholder, mountaintop
fortresses, overwhelming firepower, and, someday, a team of defense lawyers
(if you live that long) are God's way of telling you that you have too many
assets and not enough people around you?

> Just stop whining about how I'm not sending you money to finance your
> "Geodesic Hothouse Enterprises," or whatever, startups.

Well, fortunately, e$lab's doing fine without such sage counsel. We're
spec'ing the first product, hopefully by the end of this week, and, we're
hoping to announce before, of course, FC98 in February.

And, actually, you were right, and we listened to you. We don't *need* that
much money to bootstrap these first few products (the technology of
peer-to-peer internet transactions with a 3 orders of magnitude cost
reduction goal seems to work quite nicely on the investment side of the
balance sheet, as well), so we might not need to go the "hothouse" route at
all. At the moment, e$lab looks more like a good old fashioned
investment/trading partnership than anything else. And, I'll admit that
your stinging rebuke on the subject a few weeks ago got me thinking about
what I was doing and how to do it better.

Also, I wasn't asking *you* for money at all. I was suggesting that you
might want to put your money where your mouth was, technology wise, which
is what more of us should be doing. Those of us with money, anyway. :-).
However, if you've been saving it up shoot it out with John Law, and, if you
survive, to bail yourself out and skip the country someday to continue the
revolution from Bolivia, I think I see the grand design, now. :-).

> And just stop
> whining about how we all ought to tone down our words and so not make Big
> Brother angry.

I've already answered this in a post which crossed with this one, so I'll
leave this little troll alone.

Of course, Tim, in turn, I wish you would stop "whining" about how the end
of the world is neigh. You're sounding positively millenialist, these days.

Or, now that I think about it, you sound a lot like I did in college when
the Russians invaded Afganistan and, horrors, Ronald Reagan looked like he
was going to be elected. I thought all the bombs were going to drop the day
Uncle Ronnie got the button. At that point, I had too much reputation
capital (not to mention hashish :-)) and not enough people around telling
me I was paranoid, if not just stone batshit. I had at least 20 people
working with me on various anti-war projects, all thinking the way I did.
RDF=13, Data=0.

Learned what "Liberal Until Graduation" meant, I did...

So, Tim, in that vein, are you an anarchist until after the firefight?

Fortunately, I made my mistakes at an age when I could afford them.

Cheers,
Bob Hettinga


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-----------------
Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com), Philodox
e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/
Ask me about FC98 in Anguilla!: <http://www.fc98.ai/>