king of gondor

You've just rented a PS2 from Video Ezy for 24 hours. You and your sibling(s) get to do this once a year. It’s Friday night and you’ve got Pizza Hut on the way. Your parents don't care if you stay up all night long. You are 11 years old. The year is 2005.

@Liquid_Times Yes but remember how much she cared about those issues

Cost of living, health system, inequality, poverty, housing affordability, crime rate... pretty much all the things normal people care about.

This news feels overblown because it is actually the standard across most competitive markets According to recent study, percentage of trader who lose money in > Options: 90% > Futures: 95% > Day trading: 80% > Sports books: 90% People underestimate just how win-lose most market structures are, especially if you are taking directional views with binary outcomes Compared to most of these, prediction markets are surprisingly still less concentrated

Many of you would understand the world much better if you took 4-5 economics classes, or purchased a textbook and made an honest and rigorous effort to understand it. Many of you appear to think ~0 about incentives, trade-offs, constraints, or second-order effects.

It really did used to be a lot more fun to be young in this city when it was run by coke head investment bankers. At least they had the dignity to not pretend it was counter culture

A surprising amount of adulthood is finally realizing that structure is not the opposite of freedom. It’s the thing that keeps freedom from turning into aimlessness.

"IF YOU ARE SO SURE BURN THE SHIPS" The quickest way to attract what's meant for you is to express yourselt so honestly and be so delusional that everything fall in the right place on its own. If you burn the ships, you can't go back home, so you won't have any option other than to win the war. And even if you sink to the bottom. Then don't come back up without the pearl. If you really believe in what you're doing then just prioritise that thing and forget everything else, just remove all the noises. you can start to feel how magnetic you attract your goals in life. And always ask yourself "Am I being true to myself or to the projections I've made?"

You look out the window and realize that human being, under sheer willpower, built this out of nothing In indomitable human spirit.

It's astonishing that anyone still listens to the antitrust populists given their track record.

This is a colossal failure on the part of the Biden admin (and antitrust hawks generally). The government stopped Spirit from merging with JetBlue over concerns about ticket prices. So instead the low-price company will just shut down instead. A total faceplant.

> spend 20 years studying a philosophy about not letting your emotions control you > build a career teaching it to other people > get emotional at a 30 second video of the daughter of the guy you don’t like best argument against stoicism is its biggest evangelist

The absence of a respectable channel for dissent leaves only disreputable ones, which are then used to discredit the underlying concerns

Imagine a 19-year-old scrolling TikTok. She watches a creator list five "signs you have undiagnosed anxiety." She recognizes three in herself. By the end of the week, she's describing herself as anxious to her friends. A month later, she's avoiding situations she used to handle fine. What went wrong? In a new paper by my PhD student Dasha Sandra, titled "Why mental health awareness can harm: Converging explanations for a societal problem", we argue that well-meaning mental health awareness can backfire, and we identify how. Four separate literatures (concept creep, nocebo effects, prevalence inflation, and illness self-labeling) have been circling the same problem from different angles. We show they converge on three mechanisms: 1.Awareness lowers the threshold for what counts as a disorder. 2. It trains people to scan their inner lives for symptoms and reinterpret normal distress as pathology. 3. Once someone adopts an illness identity, they behave in ways that confirm and deepen it. The evidence is wide. Learning that loneliness is harmful makes solitude feel worse. Learning that stress is harmful worsens well-being and performance. Awareness videos about fake conditions like "wind turbine syndrome" produce real headaches. Trigger warnings raise anticipatory anxiety without reducing distress. This does not mean awareness should stop. It means awareness can have unintended consequences, including manufacturing the suffering it tries to prevent. Inoculating people against these mechanisms works, and we already have evidence it does. Link to paper: michael-inzlicht.squarespace.com/s/The-psycholo…

180 mins away from a champions league final and you think i care about entertaining the neutrals (they’re not neutral they all hate arsenal) we will entertain you when im hanging off a traffic light in north london at the parade

There’s going to be a completely braindead population who went to school during covid and were allowed to use cell phones in school sandwiched between generations of people who actually know how to read

This is legitimately insane. Banning cell phones in schools might turn out to be the best thing we’ve done for our kids in a generation.

Pumped Hydro they said

Former Singapore PM Lee Kuan Yew on the fundamental difference between American and Chinese society:** Why do America and China see the world so differently? Lee Kuan Yew argues it comes down to one thing: history. "The difference in the core philosophy between the American and the Chinese... it's a reflection of your history." He traces America's worldview back to its origins: "You came over in the Mayflower. You were seeking religious freedom so much so that you refused to allow it to be taught in the schools. You believed in the individual as the creator of all things." That belief in the individual shaped everything that followed: "You captured the wild west. I mean, on horseback. New town, main street, you be mayor, I'm sheriff, you're saloon keeper. We build a gold rush town or cattle or whatever it is." And then came extraordinary fortune: "You have been immensely fortunate and successful. Two world wars left Europe in a shambles and you emerged as the undamaged technological and industrial power." China's story, Lee explains, looks nothing like this. "China has a completely different and a checkered history. 4,000 to 5,000 years of ups and downs. Long periods when there was no governments, anarchy, warlords." He shares a personal moment that brought this reality home to him: "I once had a Chinese masseur when I was in Beijing working my game shoulder and we were talking and I said during the war, Japanese time, what currency did you use? So Japanese currency if it's in Japanese controlled areas or other currencies in other areas. So I said how many currencies are there? Two, three? Says 14 or 15 depending on which warlord's area you're in." So how did the Chinese people survive centuries of chaos, when the state itself kept collapsing? "Why have they survived in spite of anarchy, disaster, floods, famines? Because there was a social network independent of government that sustained them. The immediate family, the extended family, the clan. You owed them an obligation. You cannot turn them away. That's how they survived." This is the philosophical fork in the road. America placed the individual at the centre. China placed the family. Lee describes the system Singapore deliberately chose to preserve: "If we keep those family bonds, those traditional life raft systems not dependent on the state, which places the emphasis on family, extended family, and then the government, and not the individual at the expense of the family and the state, which is the American system." He acknowledges what the American system produces: "So you have Bill Gates or John Chambers of Cisco... you look up Forbes or Fortune or whatever and 50 of the best and the brightest and the wealthiest. That's your experience. That's not China's experience." But the goal in Asia is different: "Yes, we also now want to try and get our little Bill Gates going, but in the context of keeping our society solid so that we will survive as a people." He closes with a sharp reminder of why these two civilisations may never fully understand each other: "You have never been occupied. You have only had one civil war. So you will never understand what it is." The takeaway is uncomfortable but worth sitting with: a society's values aren't chosen in the abstract. They're forged by what that society had to survive. Individualism is a luxury of stability. Family-first collectivism is the inheritance of centuries of collapse.

Robert Sapolsky is a Stanford neuroscientist who proved chronic stress is the silent killer doctors ignore. On Chris Williamson's podcast, he revealed 10 "normal" habits you do every day that wreck your sleep, mood, and nervous system: 1) Replay conversations in your head

Literally just having a delusional golden retriever mindset measurably changes outcomes and physiology. Sleep badly? Convince yourself you're well rested. Stressful day? Convince yourself it's fuel. Failed? Convince yourself it's useful data.

ZELENSKYY to Rheinmetall CEO Papperger: Drones have replaced your German tanks — our Ukrainian drones. And we're already producing our Ukrainian drones together with Germany, but with different German company. Sorry. In other words, we're partners with Germans, but you can't monopolize Ukraine’s relations with Germany solely through your own production. We still have some joint projects with Rheinmetall today, but this was a wrong move on his part regarding competition. Competition must be fair and honest. Ukraine is breaking the old system. Yes, and I believe statement by director of Rheinmetall is actually recognition of this reality. It is recognition of Ukrainian competition on world stage — worthy competition. In terms of quality, quantity, and price, we're number one in the world.