What's the Opposite of a Duck

 

You might quickly brush it off, a duck doesn't have an opposite. Or is a duck just too complex to have an obvious opposite?

What makes dead the opposite of alive? What makes hot the opposite of cold?

What's the opposite of a boat, is it a car, a plane, or even a submarine? Can you only have opposites for things with two opposing features, or could you have multiple opposites?

Of course, it depends on how you wish to define "opposites."

But maybe you could define boats, cars, planes, and submarines as being just as opposed to each other as black and white. Or you can call these something else instead of opposites, if you don't like the idea of having multiple opposites.

Male and female are opposites, until you imagine a species that needs a third gender, and now the opposite has turned into a tri-opposite.

 

Opposite Categories

You can have simple concepts, normally judged on one axis, where the opposites sit at either end of the extreme — hot/cold, light/dark.

You can have an opposite based on a binary choice — male/female. In these cases, even a complex concept can have an opposite, because the cultural context makes it obvious what metric we're measuring them against.

You can get situational opposites too. If you went to collect an animal and the choice was a duck or a pig, you'd pick the duck, and the opposite is the pig. But if the choice was a duck or a goose, the opposite is now the goose. These opposites change based on the situation rather than being inherently opposite.

 

What's the opposite of 2? Minus 2. But what about a culture that hasn't discovered the concept of negative numbers — do they simply not have an opposite concept for numbers? Are there opposite concepts out there we haven't come across yet?

What's the opposite of blue? Depending on which colour wheel you pick, it could be one of a few different answers. Sometimes an opposite is based on the metric you're measuring by, rather than something inherent to the item itself.

Competition with government contracts

Governments are introducing new measures to improve quality and reduce cost in government departments and services, one way believed to do this is giving out government services to private companies in health, local government, policing and other services, but when government is paying on behalf of a third party how do you make sure companies don't just undercut on quality to undercut on price?

One way to do this is not allowing companies to make bids on contracts based on price but based on

quality, such as satisfaction ratings for social care companies. You would allow individuals to make a choice of what social care company they would like taking care of them, as all social care companies will get paid the same, so people can not just choose the most expensive social care providers bringing up costs.
Companies with a high level of social care ratings will be awarded new contracts and companies not meeting minimum standards and low level of satisfaction rating would not gain new contracts.

How to reduce cost?
In a market where companies do not bid based on price how do you reduce cost? One way to try and reduce cost is having strict rules over their accounts, looking at profits and reducing the tariffs paid out to companies for the same service. 
The main problem are companies hiding profits this is why it might be advised to have stricter rules on these companies to police their accounts, another option is to always have a government competitor making sure government isn't being overpriced by a service we can do better at a lower cost.

Local government vs national
I would like local government to have more accountability so they could decide on the best quality and price for local people, until people are more informed about their local government and hold their local government to account, I believe it's best for central government to decide what tariffs will be given to each region and what companies will be awarded contracts. local government can only provide new contractors ,help companies provide better services and refer people to companies in certain cases.

Being a good consumer
Making informed decisions is vital to improved quality for services, if people are uninformed about the quality competitors offer, or unwilling to change to a competitor this can harm improvements to services.
People have to be informed of the best schools, hospitals, universities, etc so people can choose the best service.

Not in all cases do you want the individual to make the choice on the service they are given such as prisoners choice on prisons and vulnerable people such as drug addicts on rehabilitation services. In certain cases you want local government to choose on behalf of a third party, as tariffs are set by central government local government will more likely choose based on quality as there is no cost element.

When competition doesn't work
When you have a lack of competition, such as high number of children and low level of school places, we will have to be quick to spot such situations and tougher restrictions will come in place to make sure companies still offer good services and in the worse cases government take over if companies do not meet standards.

Sometimes too much competition can create a fractured market that is less productive than what the government can do on it's own, this is why the competition commission would have to take a bigger role in looking at government services to make sure people are getting the best services for their money.

The Darwin economy 

Here's a talk by Robert H Frank on the ideas behind the book The Darwin economy (30 min lecture)

Synopsis

The Bull elk's antlers are to help in the elks individual reproduction advantage. The bigger your antlers are compared to your competitors, the better placed you are in securing a mating partner. 
But having such big antlers put the elk at a survival disadvantage when it comes to escaping from predators. It would be in all the elk's interests if they all had smaller antlers, as it doesn't matter how big your antlers are, just how big they are compared to your nearest competitor.

Politicians salaries and corruption
How much does political corruption have to do with the average politicians wage rather than generally well organised and less corrupt countries will tend to have more money because of that?
I have collated data from 21 countries included corruption perception, average weekly wage and politicians wages and tried to do some analysis.

Politicians salaries This graph shows politicians wages in the x axis and corruption perception on the y axis. Higher on the corruption perception index means less corrupt. There is weak correlation between politicians wages and corruption though there is still a slight correlation.

Average workers salaries

This graph shows average workers wages in the x axis and corruption perception on the y axis.

Taking in mind there are only 21 countries in this graph, there is a strong correlation between average workers wages and a perception of less corruption.

Does it make a difference if you increase the average politicians salary higher than the average population? This graph shows politicians wages minus the average workers wages in the same country on the y axis and corruption perception on the x axis. The trend is again weak, I have also created a graph showing politicians wages above workers wages as a percentage and a fraction and there is still no clear correlation at all.

Summary

There is no clear evidence in this data that higher politicians wages lead to less corruption perception. There is a high correlation between average wages and corruption where this could be a factor that less corrupt countries are better environments for more prosperous companies and people what will increase average wages.

Again there is little data showing that increasing politicians wages will combat corruption though we haven't looked into very low paid politicians compared to workers as they maybe more perceptible to corruption.

Again we have to remember this only included 21 countries and only goes off corruption perception and average wages doesn't directly translate into better organised companies.

What nets can be folded into a cube?
Not all nets of six squares can be folded up into a cube, such as a line of six squares, so is there anyway to know what nets can be folded up into a cube with a few simple rules? I am glad to say yes.

Find any point of the net where three squares meet. From this point draw three lines that goes across two squares but diagonally one. Remember where two squares meet you will have two vertices but the lines can't land on anything above three vertices If you can do this the net can be folded up into a cube.

Why across two and diagonally one?

Any point where three squares meet on the net would be the corner of the cube when folded, going across two squares and diagonally one would be the opposite corner of the cube. When the lines go across every square it shows it has to be able to fold into a cube. The lines do not have to go through every square though so how do we know the reminding square is in the correct position? I will not explain it here but you will find that it has to be in the correct position otherwise you would not be able to link three corners to three other vertices.

Deterministic paradox

The Deterministic Paradox — Can the Universe Know Itself?

Imagine you've built a swarm of nanobots. Their sole purpose: to scan every subatomic particle in the universe — position, momentum, spin — and from that complete snapshot, compute the future. Earthquakes. Stock markets. The random number you're about to think of. Everything, predicted.

This is essentially Laplace's Demon — the 19th-century thought experiment in which a sufficiently intelligent being, given perfect knowledge of every particle, could in principle calculate all future events. The nanobots are just a modern, more concrete version of the same idea.

Now I ask them a single question.

"What hand will I raise? You must tell me before I decide — and whatever you say, I will raise the other one."

If they say left, I raise right. If they say right, I raise left. If they stay silent, I raise whichever I like and their silence is a failed prediction. There is no correct answer.

At first glance this looks like a dressed-up version of the Liar Paradox — "This statement is false" — a sentence that undermines itself the moment you accept it. And the family resemblance is real. But I think this paradox points to something deeper.

The nanobots' problem isn't simply that they guessed wrong. It's that the act of telling me the prediction becomes part of the system they're trying to predict. The moment the output of the model enters the world, it changes the world the model was describing. The prediction is no longer about a closed system — it's about a system that now includes the prediction itself.

This is structurally similar to a result from computer science: Turing's Halting Problem. Turing proved in 1936 that no program can exist that reliably determines whether any arbitrary program will halt or run forever — because you can always construct a program that does the opposite of whatever the checker says. The checker, if it could exist, would contradict itself. The nanobots face the same trap.

There's also a connection to Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems: any sufficiently powerful formal system contains true statements it cannot prove from within itself. A system complex enough to model reality in full cannot fully model itself as part of that reality without generating contradictions.

So what does this mean for determinism?

The nanobots might still predict the future of everything except a self-aware agent who knows the prediction and can act against it. This isn't about quantum randomness or Heisenberg's uncertainty principle (though that adds another layer of infeasibility). It's a deeper problem: a deterministic system cannot make accurate real-time predictions about subsystems that are aware of and reactive to those predictions.

In other words — even in a perfectly deterministic universe with no quantum fuzziness — omniscience may still be impossible in practice, not because the universe is random, but because knowledge of the future, once introduced into a self-aware system, changes the future.

The universe might be a clockwork machine. But the clock can't read its own face

Stability in business
Business' want stability and profits, sometimes companies can put long term stability at risk due to the pressure on surviving in business. This is not necessarily business' fault just how economics works, it's similar to athletes who can put their long term health at risk by taking certain drugs to improve short term goals.

Retail and investment banks
Combining the retail banks and the investment banks adds greater risk to the whole economy if you potentially go under as everyone loses their money, the benefits for the company is using the money from the retail banks in the investment banks what is more profitable.

Any company that decide to combine both sides of the bank can make more profit and make better offers to customers. Even though decisions like these can make you more unstable in the long run, any company that decides not to combine both sides of the bank can be less profitable and is more likely to go out of business, so you will more likely see companies putting their stability at risk to survive in the short term.