RELATIONSHIP HACKS:

1: It is remarkably difficult to have an unproductive argument while you’re walking together, and/or holding hands. (I think it subconsciously primes you to remember that you’re on the same team.)

2: Talk in the third person, pretend to be a friend. It’s very therapeutic and allows you to clear a lot of misunderstandings.

INTELLIGENT DISSENT

Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
– Bertrand Russell

MASSIVE BEAST

It’s kinda astounding to watch how when The Rock or Lady Gaga posts something on Facebook and you see the Likes and Shares and Comments catapult into the hundreds and thousands within seconds… reminds you that we’re all part of this massive beast of Humanity.

BOOKS NOT DEAD

“For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.”
— John Milton

WHERE’S THE VISION?

While our leaders built a system that was exceptional at filling buckets, they themselves must have been internally driven. They were passionate about what they were doing.

After all, they were educated and accomplished- they could have just left Singapore for greener pastures elsewhere.

But they chose to stay and make something of this place. Why? The only explanation I can think of is passion. Vision, too.

Both of which our education system systematically weeds out. What is school for? No, what is it really for?

GETTING OUT OF MARRIAGE:

“But choices have expressive functions only to the extent that we can make them freely. For example, consider the marital vow to stay together “for better for worse… till death do us part.” If you have no way to get out of a marriage, marital commitment is not a statement about you; it’s a statement about society.

If divorce is legal, but the social and religious sanctions against it are so powerful that anyone who leaves a marriage becomes a pariah, your marital commitment again says more about society than it does about you.

But if you live in a society that is almost completely permissive about divorce, honouring your marital vows does reflect on you.”

– Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice

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SUPPOSED MULTIMILLIONAIRE ON REDDIT

“I have a business degree from the University of Washington. Business school does not teach you how to run a business, they teach you how to be a good employee for a hedge fund or a bank.”

“avoid loans at all costs. If you graduate debt free you are already ahead of your peers that graduated years before knee deep in loans. you’d be surprised how much more wiggle room you have and how much more confident you are if you have no debt.”

“every dollar you earn, pretend you only have 25 cents.”

“persistence, you have no idea how many times things didn’t work out for me and I was ready to give up. I kept telling myself that if I keep trying the odds will be in my favor. I hate to say this but a lot of it has to do with who you know and what kind of life you are born into. I was given a lot of opportunities by my family. I think the message you should get across to your students is that no matter how many times they fall they should get back up and try again. I admit i’m not the best person for an example but I hope that they all find their path.”

– Multi-Millionaire on reddit

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WHAT IF CENSORSHIP WAS ITSELF OFFENSIVE

censorship is banning whatever might offend or mislead people, right? to protect them?

what if people are offended or misled by censorship?

because censorship IS offensive; it insults the intelligence and maturity of our people, and it makes us believe that we’re dumb and need to be mollycoddled when we not. the attempt to protect us is hurting us by preventing us from developing a healthy immune system

censorship is damaging to society and a dangerous, offensive idea that should be banned (lol)

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DARTH VADER AND THE PAP

Substitute “humanity” with “Singapore” and “Darth Vader” with “PAP” and it gets interesting and quintessentially relevant.

Joseph Campbell
“Star Wars deals with the essential problem: Is the machine going to control humanity, or is the machine going to serve humanity? Darth Vader is a man taken over by a machine, he becomes a machine, and the state itself is a machine. There is no humanity in the state. What runs the world is economics and politics, and they have nothing to do with the spiritual life. “So we are left with this void. It’s the job of the artists to create the new myths. Myths come from the artists.” Joseph Campbell, interviewed by Chris Goodrich, Publisher’s Weekly (1985)

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ON IMMIGRATION AND FOREIGNERS:

“If it’s okay to enrich ourselves by denying foreigners the right to earn a living, why shouldn’t we enrich ourselves by invading peaceful countries and seizing their assets? Most of us don’t think that’s a good idea, and not just because it might backfire. We don’t think it’s a good idea because we believe human beings have human rights, whatever their colour and wherever they live. Stealing assets is wrong, and so is stealing the right to earn a living, no matter where the victim was born.”
― Steven E. Landsburg

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LANGUAGE WAS A SINGULARITY:

“Singularities have happened before: Language was a singularity! This rich inner world with symbols, etc… The pre-language hominids could not have imagined how language was going to change the operating system of the brain!”

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our education systems train us to be interchangeable, not indispensable

-altucher techcrunch

and there are cheaper parts out there. you’re replaceable.

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THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING INTERESTING:

“The truth isn’t the truth until people believe you, and they can’t believe you if they don’t know what you’re saying, and they can’t know what you’re saying if they don’t listen to you, and they won’t listen to you if you’re not interesting unless you say things imaginatively, originally, freshly” – William Bernbach

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DEATH OF A MEME:

“The death of a meme is as interesting as its life. The logic of meme virality is rife with internal contradictions.

The conditions I’ve outlined for the success of the election-season meme — that it is seen as emerging spontaneously, authentically, from the bottom up, allowing the individual to declare their identity, to participate in a distant system, and to ironically mock the performativity of the political process — are also why they burn out as quick as they burned bright. Like a forest fire, memes use up the fuel that allows them to proliferate. […] The meme’s very success ends up making it part of the script, and no longer its alternative.

We stop retweeting and reblogging a meme when its ability to express a unique authentic identity diminishes into the mere performance of mob conformity.” – Nathan Jurgenson

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CREATING HEATHCLIFF:

“Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know: I scarcely think it is.

But this I know: the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master – something that, at times, strangely wills and works for itself. He may lay down rules and devise principles, and to rules and principles it will perhaps for years lie in subjection; and then, haply without any warning of revolt, there comes a time when it will no longer consent to ‘harrow the valleys, or be bound with a band in the furrow’ – when it ‘laughs at the multitude of the city, and regards not the crying of the driver’ – when, refusing absolutely to make ropes out of sea-sand any longer, it sets to work on statue-hewing, and you have a Pluto or a Jove, a Tisiphone or a Psyche, a Mermaid or a Madonna, as Fate or Inspiration direct.

Be the work grim or glorious, dread or divine, you have little choice left but quiescent adoption.

As for you – the nominal artist – your share in it has been to work passively under dictates you neither delivered nor could question – that would not be uttered at your prayer, nor suppressed nor changed at your caprice.

If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame.”

– Charlotte Bronte

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HOW TO CUSTOMER SERVICE:

“This contrast got me thinking about what we see when a customer takes the time and the effort to bring back something that didn’t work or disappointed her. Sure you could think her as a cost to be minimized. You could make sure that the clerk she speaks to doesn’t have the authority to make a call to do something to help her, and you could definitely write a policy that’s going to minimize unwanted returns from people trying to scam you.

Or you could see her as someone who cares enough about your product to come back, someone who’s ready and willing to be wowed or disappointed right at that moment, someone who may as well be holding up a sign that says, “THIS IS YOUR BIG CHANCE: turn me into an evangelist for your extraordinary service!””

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MIDDLEMAN ELIMINATION IN PORNOGRAPHY

http://straight.fleshbot.com/5943640/ladies-nows-your-chance-to-bang-james-deen

I actually find this absolutely fascinating. James Deen has discovered that his appeal is so powerful that it transcends the industry- and that it makes more sense to strike it out on his own rather than to tie up with any of the big boys. And he’s crowdsourcing his porn, and banging everyday girls who want to bang him. I find this oddly poetic and beautiful, parallel to other industries that are undergoing this flattening process.

TL;DR: Even in porn, the middleman is becoming obsolete. Rooting for James Deen!

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WALK LIKE A FISH

“The study of pedestrian movement took off with the urban sociologist William H. Whyte, who in the 1970s recorded walkers’ behavior in the city, noting loitering and flirting; capturing the dynamics of bus-stop queuing; and analyzing how the throngs of people mostly managed to cooperate, instead of dissolving into a turbulent rumpus. What he found is how reliably pedestrians automatically adjust to one another’s behavior. Modeling this behavior is now a field of study, invoking everything from fluid dynamics to behavioral heuristics to describe how we navigate our sidewalks, swollen with people, without saying a word to one another.”

I have been fascinated by complex systems and networks and swarm intelligence for quite some time so it was a pleasure to read this

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EVIL IS NOT OUTSIDE OF US:

“The concept of portraying evil and then destroying it – I know this is considered mainstream, but I think it is rotten. This idea that whenever something evil happens someone particular can be blamed and punished for it, in life and in politics, is hopeless.”

— Hayao Miyazaki