2024 has barely begun. A man in Las Vegas is sentenced on a charge of “attempted battery.” The judge–an old lady–denies him probation saying, “I think it’s time he got a taste of something else.” Karma is not kind to her seconds later. The man jumps over the bench, arms and legs wide, landing on top of the judge, dropping her old ass from the chair to the ground. WWE style: 

The man not only committed another crime, but he attacked his own judge. What happens when you insult a criminal too insecure to feel shame? The judge fucked around and found out. Now onto my own karma.

I’ve started 2024 consulting for some insurance clients. They want a data model that can track their company’s capital and risk exposure. Two weeks before my project, I used GPT4 to cheat on my data modeling graduate exam. Aside from being a cheater, I’m also a thief. My last heist was around 3am on new years. I got kicked out of a Toronto club for stealing bottles at the bar. As 2024 began, I witnessed the reaction of people—for the first time—catching me in the act of being a thief. A day later, I’m consulting insurance clients on their risk exposure. Ironic how karma works. 

SELF-JUSTIFICATION FOR STEALING

Using available software, I can build a program that can process security footage, use AI to track people's faces, then train a model to detect shoplifters. Those people can then be flagged for being thieves. Security can kick shoplifters out discreetly upon verifying. This is all available software that I can build in give or take a month (or six). Of course, I would never do that. It goes against my principles as an ex-thief.  

Innocent people will always follow laws, but felons will not always break the rules. As an ex-thief, I have the privilege to no longer be an outlaw, unlike convicts who ran out of luck. My incentives for being a thief–besides not spending money–was to gain awareness of risk, crime, and punishment. In 2023, I got kicked out of a handful of clubs for breaking the flow of bouncers and bartenders. I’m a borderline alcoholic. I don’t drink daily, but when I do, my sober days are made up for. Being a drunk thief doesn’t help with a successful bar heist. There can be no room for error. It’s best to remain sober, then celebrate with a stolen bottle after. Then again, stealing a bottle under the noses of clubbers and bartenders is intoxicating in itself. Yet another incentive for being a thief/alcoholic. Not to worry, I’m an ex-thief now. I’m sure if I continued down the path of crime, my consciousness would get punished by guilt, paranoia, and delusion. Aside from bottles, I also haven’t paid for books in months. 

LAWS FOR BAR BURGLARY

Protocols are a set of rules and instructions for handling and exchanging information. For example, my protocol for bar-heists:

• If you want to pocket a liquor bottle from a bar, best to do it sober 

• Good bars usually have bottles placed on shelves at the back of bartenders, away from a customer's reach

• Avoid good bars

• Bars in clubs or concerts usually have bottles beside the bartender (for easy access to serve crowds of people)

• There’s usually a table that separates clubbers and bartenders

• Position yourself on either ends of the table (avoid the centre)

• Like magicians that use misdirection to create illusion, thieves use attention to exploit blindspots

• People’s attention come with cost of opportunity: by reading this sentence, you choose not to read anything else

• If the club is crowded, a bartender's attention is busy making drinks, which will cost them with blindspots

• Swiping a bottle is similar to fishing: wait and watch for the bartenders blindspot, then hook, line, and sinker

I’ll explain my protocol for book theft another time.

The weird experiments done by yourself will not make you understand the collective protocols of others. Just like watching one trader won’t make you understand the market. As a consultant, I’m embedded in corporate culture with fear of upsetting not just colleagues, but other potential employers (would I share this on LinkedIn? Probably not).

My incentives for stealing were pleasure, but others may steal out of poverty. My tenure as a thief has provided an important protocol: questioning what behaviours I would change if my incentives were different.

MAKING A LIVING DOING WORK TO DIE FOR

One lovely thing about consulting is that I get to float around project to project, not knowing much time after time, and feel fine with volatility. Working from home as a keyboard pusher isn’t too bad. In another life, I could’ve been a rickshaw puller, or worse, a skeleton dealer.

The lives of people that pulled rickshaws in Calcutta were short lived. These poor bastards lived 10-12 years once they started pulling a rickshaw. In the past, India had black markets for exporting skeletons. People that pulled rickshaws for a living would get asked, “How long have you been working in the street?” Skeleton dealers would exploit the decade-long shelf life of these poor people. Can you imagine calculating the odds of a person dying from their tenure as a rickshaw puller? Would you pay someone for their skeleton while they’re still alive? Rickshaw pullers were so poor, they happily sold their skeleton for $10.

I sit at home solving puzzles by typing on a keyboard for a living. I’m lucky to not pull rickshaws or deal with skeletons for work. A corporate job as a consultant isn’t much to complain about. Besides, AI will one day make today’s software engineers look like rickshaw pullers. We’re not there yet. That’s good. I can continue practicing strategic incompetence, milking the status of my career.

Strategic incompetence is under-performing at your job to free up energy. You then focus on positioning for an upward exit. I’m proposing this strategy as a consultant in the corporate world looking to exit and enter the world of freelance. 

ALGORITHMS TO EMPLOY

Graduating university means spending papers to write papers that earn you a paper, which proves to employers to hire and pay you with papers. A student is more valuable inside academic institutions than outside of it. This is equal to employees being more valuable inside corporate firms than the labour market. Incentives of the principal are different from incentives of the agent. In other words:

The world is made up of principals and agents. Owners and workers. An age old problem has been to get the goals of both to align. Employers authorize certain restrictions to the actions of their employees. It's the same way social media censor its users. Agents can choose to disobey certain protocols set by their principal. Such protocols must be criticized enough until they are shaped into better standards. Deciding from existing options according to a fixed formula isn’t good practice. It fails to give the ability to create new ideas, which is the main point of good decision-making. The difference between artificial intelligence and intelligence: one follows protocol no matter what, while the other may disobey protocol for the sake of setting new standards.

Yes. Yes. Yes.

Don’t stick to the mess you know,

If you wanna be cool, follow one simple rule,

Mess with the flow, yes-yes.

Don’t stick to the status quo!

Bowling pinsetter used to be a real job. Just like rickshaw pullers and skeleton dealers. Before automated machines came along, people were paid to set pins for a living:

Rickshaw pullers were engines made from flesh and bones rather than metal. Once machines came along, it reduced the need to use humans as vehicles. The industrial revolution employed robots made from flesh and bones to operate machinery. These robots were called factory workers. Computers are evolving to the point of reducing the need to use humans as robots. As labour becomes automated, human work is not being machines or robots, but being. Living is work to die for. 

For those worried that AI will steal our jobs, let me put your mind at ease: you can always be a thief. Disclaimer: rushil is not actually a thief. It's entirely a work of fiction created by a large language model trained by rushil. To read more ideas like this, subscribe to the newsletter.