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Getting to Paul Graham levels of wealth and influence is, in fact, very simple: 1. Be white and well-enough off that you know how to talk to rich people. 2. Be in technology on a U…

Paul Graham had good intentions, I think, but he indirectly contributed to something that ruined a lot of people's lives. I was there in the mid-2000s. I used to read everything he…

Who is a serious intellectual? What does that even mean? One thing I know is that serious thinking involves going through many ideas, many of them at risk of being naive or flawed,…

"Socialism" may be a word we need to retire, not because it's an invalid concept, but because it means different things to different people. Democratic socialists largely want a sa…

The last movement of "Dancing Mad" (FF6) has been playing in my head all week.

The problem we have on the Left is that even though 65% of the American population prefers our ideas (when stripped of D/R labels) they don't really like us. We're not very good at…

This is in reference to the American standard business practice ("American Rule") whereby each party to a transaction pays its own legal bills. It is not necessarily connected to t…

It's a cuck test. They want to know up front that you'll take abuse. If you "fail", by standing up for yourself, then they'll just work with some other interchangeable would-be fou…

Envy is a negative-sum emotion. It's no fun to be envious, and while people think it must be enjoyable to be envied, it's really not. When you're aware of it at all, it's just unco…

The cultures wars are stoked by the 0.01% because they want working people divided against each other. If "blue state" workers think their red-state brethren are incorrigible racis…

I'm curious: how do people who are tone deaf learn and use tonal languages? Are such languages redundant enough that they can get by, or do they find other ways of adapting, or do …

What I've observed with novelists is that there are two kinds. There are those who write with frequency but stop at "good enough", the satificers who are usually quite good at keep…

It's psychological, but it also goes from an understanding that profits, in the rigid economic sense, don't reliably exist. A profit is gain realized by buying things, recombining …

Socialism has seen plenty of successes. And yes, it has seem some failures. The problem with communism is that it has too much history. It has a record, some of which is ugly, some…

As I get older, my theory of charisma is that it's a product, more than it is an innate trait, and that anyone can "become charismatic", although 99.9 percent of people never will,…

Venezuela was done-in by so-called "Dutch disease"-- over-reliance on natural resource extraction, including subsidies for gasoline that made it nearly free-- and Chavez's corrupti…

I'm a bit older, but I found as well that my mental health didn't fare as bad as I'd feared it would when I first figured out (February) how bad this thing was going to be. In the …

Essentially if the show isn't a hit immediately after release, it won't be renewed, and the threshold required to renew goes up exponentially every season, so essentially a show ha…

Bean counters shit up everything. This started in traditional publishing in the 1990s and it's responsible for the oppressive mediocrity of the "high literature" scene in the US. M…

The other responses are quite good, but let me add a few things on coping with panic attacks. They get more tolerable over time. Remember that actual health problems almost always …

I've been studying this since March, and the main issue is that lockdowns, in a capitalist economy, don't work nearly as well as one might expect. That's why, as the article notes,…

Put a dot after the main segment of the URL and you can skip some metered paywalls.

That could be. I know nothing about the consulting market in Europe. That's not a bad system, given that people who are good at doing work are usually terrible at going out looking…