FabiansMustDie

> At the moment, I'm pretty pleased with Project: SRO though it's small and I don't know how to get traction with it.

Peddle the idea.

If you have the political chops: city planning meetings. There are usually developers going to these meetings.

If you can find a way to monetize these buildings (e.g perhaps establish a homeless-to-work program with the city, that provides subsistence jobs to homeless people, that they can then turn around and be funneled into these SRO properties, and make these commercial real estate developers bank), then you can talk your way into being a consultant.

There's a more humanitarian way to phrase this (and assuredly, a more humanitarian way to organize and build this type of venture), but I frankly do not have the emotional bandwidth.

Human as its own word, not as a derivative for others---and in its own, separate, unmodified context---has a specific, insipid connotation, compared to humanitarian, "human touch," etc.

Frankly, my experience has been that men are the real moves and shakers (and women impelling them to move, shake, and writhe around). It takes a certain amount of ego, and internal and emotional drive to "shake" and "move" (which I must assume you consider to be "good" aspects of humanity) the world -- one that most women do not have, and the ones that do require external resources to maintain that "drive" (mostly food).

I don't understand why you would rally around for this point. Being someone of substance is a worthless affair, compared to being someone of culture. The first comes easily to men, and arduously for women. The last comes easily to women, and arduously for men. It's an atrocity to eschew woman's gifts, to pursue men's. That's how you destroy a nation's culture, tradition, its children, and thereby its society. There must be a duality, with a strict boundary, else you get muddied people that don't know a single thing about what it means to be human. (in this context, it fit just right)

I use man in this way. I don't care what anyone---justifying their schooling and existence---has to say about it. Progress without purpose is wasted breath. Conforming for its own sake is death. Anything Western Intellectuals have written in the past 70 years I believe to be without merit.

...

Yet, I'll admit Hofstadter got a chuckle out of me with that riddle: I thought the surgeon was the male spouse of the deceased father! I yield.

I agree with your take, after it's been shoved in my face, and forced me to self-reflect. However, I'll still use "man" as a more archaic synonym of "human," albeit with a more apt note this time.

You got me. Take your upvote, and let me live in my crotchety, curmudgeon fantasy-land.

The greatest irony is they're just another throwback to Platonic thinking, and completely---I mean truly---worthless in practical application (i.e real life, vs. academic theory).

People organize themselves in "capitalistic," "socialistic," and even "anarchistic" manners depending on the context, and level of scale (informal, local, global, etc.); many times even pushing one way, then the other; and finally ending with a mix that would be foolish to arbitrarily try and separate, much less "categorize" (what has that ever achieved, but some wishy-washy "more accurate communication?").

Politics is basically the human drama over power, in its rawest form. Everything else is a derivative of this drama.

An interesting aside: the "every programmer thinks every problem can be solved with more tech" extends to other areas, viz. economics, "political science"/geopolitics, etc.

All problems are people problems; and most people problems are power problems (which themselves are super-ordinate to ego problems).

Entire generations of people, forcibly made less literate, and unable to find out their culture's past.

With this detachment from their history, their tradition has been rewritten completely. There's now no real reference point to illustrate how things were; how they've changed.

It's no similar to hoe American school-children are taught a watered-down "unbiased" (only the facts) versions of history. This ends with a failure to understand what the American culture really is, and its tradition is lost on the masses.

What's left is a public that can only comprehend the surface-level meanings, much less understand or create new words and concepts to rebel against their authorities.

I absolutely understand.

Your post was like a poem -- advertently or inadvertently -- singing to my soul.

I can now find peace with this reminder of what must be done.

Thank you.

You write good stuff.

Are you on amphetamines, or do you just have so much time and inclination to sit down and write all you do? Frankly, I am in awe at the quality of your posts.

Teach me your ways. Please. What tricks to living a good, dignified, and alive life have you found?

What do you do to stave away the soul-killingness of the world? How do you keep your morale up so high?

Dear god, man where do you get the mental energy? Are you akin to Kant's 40 cups of coffee a day eccentricity?

Felix Dennis was "on the dole" (welfare) and wasn't born into riches -- unlike Elon.

Read the book. It's available on LibGen, and is absolutely worth coming back again to -- if you want to be rich.

There's an irony here. It's almost as if the code is a parody of the unwritten one we have in the U.S, albeit more on the nose.

> So a weak elected legeslative body and a strong indirectly elected executive with very few checks on their power.

Weak elected legislative body (Congress) and a strong indirectly elected executive with very few checks on their power (the president).

> Under the Code, living and working in the Mars Colony is a privilege, not a right. All those who come to the Mars Colony will be permitted to stay under a license. That license is revocable. Similarly, all real property is held by the Mars Colony and leased to individuals or companies working in the Colony. Misbehavior results in losing the right to remain within the Colony.

It's a very roundabout way of saying: you can live in the U.S, but we can send you to jail and remove your rights as we wish. Similarly, your assets are tied up as collateral, that will be collected and liquidated if we decide to revoke your rights. Misbehavior is a "Go directly to jail. Do not pass Go" ticket.

The Association of Prescriptive English Supports should be round up and shot.

Forcing an entire peoples to bend to some arbitrary semantics system is social engineering of the worst sort. Who knows what kind of ugliness has been unleashed onto the world- well, we already know. China is a perfect example of an entire culture completely obliterated once its language system was seized, and rewritten to suit the new regime's ends.

Angela Duckworth is but one evangelist, among many others. It's its own phenomenon: academicans (see: people whose self-worth is predicated on the popularity of their ideas) preaching their new gospel -- itself just a spin-off of some old, not-that-enlightening observations. But! If you sell it with enough passion and vigor and conviction, it sure does rile the masses into believing.

> “My lab has found that this measure beats the pants off I.Q., SAT scores, physical fitness and a bazillion other measures to help us know in advance which individuals will be successful in some situations,”

Need more be said? Science is itself a self-perpetuating industry. Statistics and findings can be massaged into whatever you want to see -- that's simply abusing our propensity to recognize patterns, to its utmost extreme.

More new, novel, monkey-go-ape patterns to fuss about. More books to sell. More speeches to give. More money to make.

Here's a hot-take, that won't drive unneeded publicity and revenue towards another idea salesman: the more you persevere -- i.e the more grit you have -- the more chances you get to succeed.

Please please, there's no need to write a PhD dissertation a la "A meta-analytic synthesis of the grit literature."[0]

Absolutely absurd.

[0] Credé, M., Tynan, M.C., & Harms, P.D. Much ado about grit: A meta-analytic synthesis of the grit literature. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 113, 492-511 (2017).