WalterMittyCalifornia

@SeanTrende In calmer times ahead when the data gets cleaned up and we can finally see what the truth is a lot of people are going to regret what they said.

A team of researchers in New Zealand followed 1,037 babies from the day they were born for the next 45 years to find out what actually determines a successful adult life, and the strongest predictor they found had almost nothing to do with intelligence or family wealth. The findings have been published in the most prestigious scientific journals in the world. Almost no parent has heard of them. His name is Avshalom Caspi. Her name is Terrie Moffitt. They are a husband and wife research team based at Duke University and King's College London, and the study they have spent their careers running is called the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study. It started in 1972 in a single hospital in Dunedin, New Zealand. Every baby born there in a 12-month window was enrolled. 1,037 of them. The study is still running today. The retention rate is the part that should astonish anyone familiar with how research usually works. After more than 45 years, over 90 percent of the original participants are still being tracked. Most longitudinal studies lose half their sample inside ten years. The Dunedin team has lost almost nobody. They measured everything. Blood. DNA. Brain scans. Income. Criminal records. Romantic relationships. Drug use. Dental health. Sleep. Mental health. Lung function. They flew participants who had moved abroad back to Dunedin every few years for a full day of assessments. Some of those people now live in seven different countries. They still show up. For the first decade of life, the team did something nobody else was doing systematically. They measured each child's self-control. Not IQ. Not family income. Not parenting style. Self-control. They watched 3-year-olds in a research lab and rated their ability to wait, regulate frustration, follow instructions, and resist impulsive reactions. They added teacher ratings. They added parent ratings. They added the children's own self-reports as they grew older. They combined all of it into a single highly reliable score. Then they did the thing nobody else had the patience to do. They waited. When the data came in at age 32, the result was so consistent it should be illegal to teach a child without it. The children who scored lowest on self-control at age 3 grew into adults with worse physical health, more substance dependence, lower incomes, more credit card debt, higher rates of single parenthood, more criminal convictions, and worse mental health than the children who scored highest. The pattern was not subtle. It was a clean gradient. Every step up in childhood self-control produced a measurable step up in adult outcomes across every domain the team could measure. The detail that should disturb every parent reading this is what happened when the researchers controlled for the obvious objections. When they controlled for IQ, the effect held. When they controlled for family income and social class, the effect held. When they compared siblings inside the same family, the sibling with lower self-control still had worse adult outcomes than the sibling with higher self-control. Same parents. Same house. Same dinner table. The trait was running independently of everything researchers expected to explain it. The paper landed in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2011. The title was as plain as it gets. "A gradient of childhood self-control predicts health, wealth, and public safety." It has been cited thousands of times since. Almost no policy maker has acted on it. The reason most people resist this finding is that it sounds like a sentence handed down before the child could speak. If the trait that determines your adult life is locked in by age 3, the rest of your life is a formality. The Dunedin researchers say that is the wrong way to read the data. They found something else in the same paper that almost nobody quotes. Some of the children whose self-control scores improved between childhood and adolescence ended up with adult outcomes far better than their early scores predicted. The trait is not destiny. It is a muscle. Children who learned to wait, regulate, and resist between ages 5 and 15 caught up with kids who started ahead. Self-control is the one childhood trait nobody seems to teach on purpose anymore. Schools focus on test scores. Parents focus on activities. Coaches focus on performance. The part of the brain that decides between five seconds from now and five years from now is left to develop on its own, and the data shows it usually does not. The most uncomfortable part of the research is the cost calculation Moffitt and Caspi ran. They estimated that if a country could move the bottom 20 percent of children up one rung on the self-control ladder, it would measurably reduce healthcare spending, welfare dependency, and incarceration costs at the national level. The intervention is cheaper than almost any other public health investment available. Almost no country has tried it at scale. The reason adults struggle with money, weight, addiction, and relationships is rarely intelligence. It is the gap between what you want right now and what you want in ten years, and which side of that gap your nervous system is built to listen to. Most people lost that fight at age 4 and never went back to learn the technique. You were not behind because life dealt you a bad hand. You were behind because the part of you that decides between right now and the rest of your life was never taught how to choose. The good news is the muscle is still there. Almost nobody trains it after age 10. You can be the one who does.

@ChrisLandauUSA @JackPosobiec In the early days of email the rule was to never send an angry message unless you sleep on it. It works.

Just finished Walter Isaacson’s excellent biography of Benjamin Franklin, who really helped shape our common American identity and our values of hard work, thrift, and meritocracy. One small point that jumped out at me was how many letters (often intemperate) Franklin wrote but never sent. The unsent letter was a valuable tool for venting frustration without incurring the consequences. In our era of instant communication by email and text, I fear there are fewer unsent communications, which is not a good thing.

@TomlinsonCJ @Sargon_of_Akkad It's also about never doing anything fun with the kids unless it involves discomfort.

@Sargon_of_Akkad Being norwiegian is a vibe. It’s about eating putrid fish products, speaking some hurdy gurdy language and pretending you’re better than everyone else despite having accomplished virtually nothing in 500 years or more.

This "all men are created Norwegian" narrative is genuinely funny.

If you look deeply into Mike's background, he is a patriot.

@MattWalshBlog The beatings will continue until we become what they want us to be.

What is the audience for “Supergirl” exactly? My sons like superheroes but they want to see Superman, not a girl. My daughters dont really care about superheroes generally. So who’s watching this slop? Seems specially designed to appeal to no one.

@zslayback @firasmodad Great stuff. The absolute bomb would be canonizing Isabel I. Pope Francis started the process.

I'm probably reading too much into it but it's pretty based of the Pope to declare a bunch of Catholics murdered by the Communists in the Spanish Civil War to be martyrs right before he goes to a Spain newly under a left-wing government.

@Christy4Change @govt_corrupt Yeah, similar issue in the U.S. What exactly do conservatives propose to conserve?

There is no “right wing” currently in Canadian politics. They are literally all the same.

“You guys are called Bankless” - @PunterJeff Please listen to this 2 minute clip. Reestablishing the benchmark for trust built on 24/7 transparency is an unlock. Clip from @Bankless

@DisgracedProp MTV swan song of the cool boomers in the mid-80s. It kind of anchors me. Respect.

I once walked into a coffee shop in North County San Diego and they had a poster of the lyrics of Boys of Summer by Don Henley on the wall. Just: I can see you your brown skin shining in the sun You got your hair slicked back and those Wayfarers on, baby That was it. And there's not a week that goes by where I don't think about that poster. No idea why.

@mtmalinen @ArmchairW I believe this, and the only thing that will topple Putin is the increasing frustration of the Russian people that he hasn't gone hard enough. Americans have no idea that Putin is a moderate compared to Medvedev, and other possible successors.

NATO-Russia conflict would now follow the same script as the Iran-U.S.(Israel) conflict. The only difference would be that it would not take Russia 40 days to decapitate European NATO forces. With its current missile capabilities, it would probably take just four days. Moreover, anyone in Finland "dreaming" of a land or even a drone war is delusional. 12 missiles to strategic locations (half of them Oreshniks or tactical nukes) and we're done. We also have zero capabilities of intercepting them. I would take this warning very seriously, as I was right about Iran. @PetteriOrpo @ir_rkp @SariEssayah @elinavaltonen @AnttiLindtman

The system is stressed with expansion from old people who equate the number of appointments and prescriptions with health. My father is 84 years old. Has appointments each week. Takes at least ten things. He's had a catheter in for 8 months, can't walk, and he's miserable. Great job, healthcare!

welcome to the doctor's office that you have gone to for years please fill out this paperwork where you give us the information on your insurance company that we've already billed four thousand times and please attach a copy of your insurance card and then write then number you just sent to us via picture six trillion times and

@thatthingido2 @untappedgrowth We've sat down for dinner for a couple decades. Some of the best meals are refashioned meat from a previous dinner. "Peasant food".

I was addicted to meth and heroin for the first several years of my adult life. I am grateful every day that I was caught and arrested in a state like Montana that was tough on crime, and didn't just supply me with accoutrements and leave me on the street to die a slow death like they do here in California. My charge was felony possession. I spent 90 days in jail detoxing because I couldn't afford to pay bail. Thank God for that. When I was let out I was forced to wear a drug patch and report for random supervised urine tests, or risk going back to jail. I was put on the strictest probation, and forced into an outpatient treatment program. I was able to go to the shelter, which required sobriety and an honest effort to better my life. The very real threat of going to prison to serve my full sentence if I screwed again motivated me to stay clean. Because of tough love policies, I am alive today. What people are doing here in California, Oregon and Washington is NOT compassion, it's toxic empathy, and it's manslaughter. Decriminalization only serves to remove ANY hope of the addict ever getting sober. I couldn't get sober on my own, I tried for years, without being forced to detox in jail I'd probably be dead today. Part of me wonders if that's the point? 9 years sober as of January 31st.

Just think about how many DoorDashed Chipotles he had to give up for this.

@asimplefoolblog Sweet. Rush Moving Pictures was my first show (age 12).

Introduce yourself with 10 bands you’ve seen live… Rush Journey Black Sabbath (Dio version) Sammy Hagar Robert Cray Def Leppard The Police Bruce Springsteen Miles Davis Herbie Hancock

I'm testifying today. The Bank Secrecy Act has created a financial surveillance regime that violates our privacy, increases the cost of banking, and doesn't stop crime.

@shipwreckedcrew @willchamberlain Yes, I keep wondering what the definition of an Epstein file is.

There is no “list”. There has never been a list. The “collection of names” came up in the Maxwell trial. There is an exhibit under seal and Maxwell explain what it was in the interview with Blanche. This has always been an invention of the plaintiffs’ lawyers in FL who have made millions keeping this fraud/grift alive via social media.

@SantiagoAuFund I love you man

Dear Democrats: Donald Trump is not the Devil on Earth. Dear Republicans: Donald Trump is not the second coming of Jesus Christ. You have all lost your f*cking minds… #ToSeeTheFarmIsToLeaveIt

@denverbitcoin This guy censored COVID info. 52 weeks, minimum.

16 weeks of severance pay for those laid off + 2 weeks for every year at the company…

@MK_Foxbat @ArmchairW There was no victory in Kiev. The Russians withdrew voluntarily upon the Istanbul Agreement in April 2022. Nobody knows this, but everybody will pretend they knew it when this is all over.

Some of the most famous battles in American history took place in towns with around or less 5,000 people living in it at the time. It's even worse in Russian history where arguably one of, if not the most famous battle took place in a village described as having a few dozen residents. Pretty sure this is how history works. Nobody cares about some backwater town until something happens there...