While I have made some stupid purchases in my life I’ve never been bad with money, but I have gotten to a point in my life where I need to take my finances more seriously so I’ve been looking into a number of things and in doing so I discovered that Fidelity offers a credit card and that made something click in my brain. When you see Fidelity you don’t think bank you think investments and suddenly you see money not as something that sits there but something that grows.

At face value the Fidelity credit card isn’t very special, it is a zero annual fee 2% cash back on everything card, there are plenty of those out there, I have one from a different company sitting in my wallet right now and you probably do to, if you could only have one credit card that is the sort of benefits you should look for. The special thing about the Fidelity card is that that 2% reward can easily be transferred into a brokerage account and invested into the stock market to grow.

In the four and a half years I’ve been using credit cards I’ve made about $2,500 in rewards. Basically all of that money has just sat there because I haven’t known what to spend it on, I did use some of it to buy a new phone a few years ago, it was cool to be able to say I got a basically free phone but that was not life changing. The rewards have worked out to be about an extra 45 bucks a month for me which is nice but nothing that special.

Now let’s see what would have happened if I had invested that money instead, to make the math easier I’ll say that I made $50 a month from credit card rewards over a period of five years. If that $50 was put into the S&P 500 at the end of each month and we assume an 11% return rate (close to its average) then at the end of those five years I would have an extra $1,000 on top of the $3,000 that I would have without investing that free money. Still that isn’t that impressive, but compound interest gets more powerful over time, after twelve years of this $7,200 of credit card rewards points will have been put into the account but the total value of it will be nearly $15,000. After 20 years that investment would be worth over $43,000, after 30 years over $140,000, after 40 years it will be worth well over $400,000.

Some of you are probably reading this right now thinking, “This is just investing, it’s not that remarkable.” I don’t blame you for thinking that it is just investing, the special thing about this is that you’re not actively taking money from your pay check that you worked for and throwing it into the stock market, you’re taking free money (that you don’t have to pay taxes on) that your credit card company gives you and turning it into more free money. I can’t think of a better use for free money.

I’m in my late 20s, most people my age and younger know that investing is important but we don’t know where to start. The thought of setting aside money from each pay check and putting it in an account that shouldn’t be touched for decades is scary for someone who doesn’t have much to set aside. I never really knew where to start and I’d bet many of you didn’t either or still don’t know.

I’m telling you today that this is a great place to start (its not where you should finish but it is a great place to start). Get yourself a credit card or two with a decent cash back bonus, don’t spend more money than you usually would in order to get more rewards, ALWAYS pay off the entire ballance at the end of the month, then throw whatever rewards cash you get into a well diversified index fund. You don’t need to get the Fidelity card that I talked about earlier to do this but it does seem to be the easiest way to go about this. (Robinhood has a similar card that offers 3% cash back but it is more difficult to get) I don’t have the Fidelity card right now but I’ll probably apply for one soon so that I can have anything in one place.

From now on every penny I get from credit card rewards is getting invested. That money is not hard to come by, remember I’ve been getting around $45 a month in rewards with basically zero effort, now that I have a purpose for this money I’m motivated to do a better job at taking advantage of the banks. I don’t think an average of $100 a month in credit card rewards (over multiple cards including sign-on bonuses) is something that I wouldn’t be able to achieve, I think most of you can do it as well and some of you probably already are. $100 a month thrown into a decent index fund will build you some serious wealth, if that wealth came from credit card rewards then you would have built that wealth for free.

Don’t waste your free money on something you could easily save up for, don’t waste it by letting it sit somewhere it won’t grow. Invest your free credit card rewards money and turn it into more free money. Of course there is always risk involved with investing, I’m not your financial planner don’t sue me if you try this and it goes wrong, but there is no better money to risk than money you got for free. Don’t waste your opportunity to turn free money into more free money.

On a separate note, if you’ve never spent some time researching financial topics (or haven’t in a long time) to see what options are out there for places to keep your money you should, there are some amazing things out there. The Fidelity Cash Management Account is basically a checking account that you can earn two or three percent interest on. That blew my mind, I had no idea you could have something that functioned as a checking account that gave you interest like that. I’m not done researching all of this stuff, I may or may not (with the not option being more likely) share more of my findings and realizations with you, but you should do your own research on this stuff. All of us have been missing out on hundreds, if not thousands of dollars simply by having our money parked in the wrong place.

Also on the topic of credit cards, the Discover It card is a great card to accumulate rewards on, I learned about it from the Luke Smith video I referenced earlier, it offers 5% back on purchases in different categories throughout the year (right now it is 5% back on restaurant and hardware store purchases, next quarter it will switch over to 5% back on gas) it is a great card to have. If you don’t already have a Discover It card I have a referral link that if you use will give both of us $100 in rewards after you apply and make your first purchase. If you want that link send me an email and I can send it over to you and we can both enjoy an extra $100.

About two months ago I ran a 50k. People like to ask me how it was to which I simply say “it was good”, of course I was in pain by the end of it but overall it is something I’d do again, maybe even something I’d recommend everyone do at least once. The other question people like to ask is quite a bit harder to answer, in fact I don’t think I’ve ever actually answered it because I couldn’t explain it. The question is “Why?” more specifically “Why did I run a 50K?” and more significantly “Why do I run?”

The simple answer to the latter question is that it makes me feel good, but to really understand things we have to go back in time a few years.

July of 2023 was about a year after I had quit a physically demanding job and gotten into a much higher paying but much more sedentary job. A year before that I may have been in the best shape of my life able to casually throw hay bales around and chase down a loose animal when the need presented itself. But by that July I had lost a noticeable amount of strength and I wanted it back. On the eleventh I drove straight to Tractor Supply after work and bought two five gallon buckets. The first step in my plan to get back in shape would be to fill those buckets with water and carry them back and fourth in my backyard for long periods of time. I believed it would be a cheap and effective way to get a workout. When I got home I wanted to carry those buckets around for thirty minutes, it was hard, I think I tapped out after fifteen but it was something I was exited to improve.

The next day I was rear ended on my way home from work. When the shock and adrenaline of the accident finally wore off I realized my back was injured. There would be days where it was in so much pain that physically getting out of bed would take several minutes and I’d question if I’d even be able to walk out the door. It would be months before I was allowed to lift more than twenty-five pounds again. Getting back in shape was no longer an option for me, instead the next year was spent slowly getting weaker and weaker, then fatter and fatter.

The interesting thing about gaining weight and losing strength in today’s culture is that nobody else seems to notice or care, or if they do they won’t tell you. Of course I knew I was fat, every once in a while I’d hop on the scale and see a number like 235, which, at my height put, my BMI right at the bottom of the obese range. I was fat, but when I’d tell people that I was fat (which I often did) they’d tell me I wasn’t, that I’m just fine, that negative self talk is bad and stuff like that. We’re used to seeing people around 100 pounds overweight and calling them fat, I didn’t look like someone 100 pounds overweight because I wasn’t, but that didn’t mean that I was “just fine” being and looking 40 pounds overweight.

But what was more important than how I looked was how I felt, and I felt like crap all the time, I hated that. I’ve found that most people really don’t understand the effect being overweight has on how they feel everyday because there aren’t many people who have experienced both being fit and being fat while possessing an adequate level of humility. People who spend their entire lives fit never experience how bad it feels to be fat, I don’t think I can properly explain it but its sort of like you always feel like you have a cold but you don’t. People who spend their entire lives fat never experience how good it feels to be healthy. I know people who grew up fat then lost weight later in life who were surprised at how much better they felt once they were no longer obese.

Of course there are plenty of people who grow up fit only to become fat later. These people remember what it felt like to be young and fit and now understand the physical drain of being overweight. The mistake these many of these people make when looking back at their healthier years is they attribute the good feelings associated with health to youth rather than fitness. I’m in my late 20s as are many of my friends, I, along with many of my friends, have been guilty of saying something like, “I’m too old for that” as a way to avoid of some sort of physical activity or we’ll use our age as our reason why we don’t feel great all the time. In reality people my age don’t have the right to use those kind of excuses, those are reserved for people nearly twice our age.

If you feel like crap all the time when you are twenty-seven, it isn’t because you are twenty-seven, it is because you’ve gained fifty pounds since graduating college. Twenty-seven is the average age of an Olympic athlete you should still be in your prime at twenty-seven.

When I turned twenty-seven I certainly was not in my prime, I was probably in the worst shape of my life. To repeat something I’ve already stated, I felt like crap all the time and I hated it. By that time my back had healed to the point where my injury wasn’t a limitation anymore it was just an excuse. I knew I should be exercising but I wasn’t.

Rucking was something I’d dabble in from time to time. I had heard (and repeated) the claim that it was just as efficient at burning calories quickly as running was, but when I’d throw a pack on and walk around the neighborhood I began to doubt those claims. You can believe anything you want from the internet but if you never put it to the test you will never be able to differentiate fact from fiction. Rucking wasn’t satisfying to me, when I’d get home from a ruck I didn’t feel any sort of accomplishment, I didn’t feel like I had burned a significant amount of energy, so I quit doing it.

Unfortunately I had indoctrinated myself into the cult of rucking, I was closed minded to the idea of running, I thought running would kill me. I stopped rucking and replaced it with nothing. You should never let yourself be closed minded to something as beneficial as running. Luckily I was able to change that terrible mindset. (You can read more about my realization that rucking might not be the best thing here)

I believe it was this video of Cameron Hanes and Courtney Dauwalter casually running 60 miles together that opened my eyes to running. The thought that people could cover that much ground in one day and have fun doing it was absolutely inspiring to me. There is something deep inside of me that craves adventure and I knew that if I wanted to be capable of that sort of adventure I needed to start running.

It was March when I realized I needed to start running. There was a half marathon in June that a few of my friends had run in past years that I figured I could train and be ready for. I asked one of them if she was planning on running it this year because I wanted to run it with her. She wasn’t running it that year but she told me she was signed up for a half marathon in just two weeks that I could try to join her for. I thought about it fairly seriously, one of our friends had run a half marathon without training and I figured if Gary could do it I could do it. When I got home that night I finally went on my first run around the block, it was less than a mile and it was hard, I thought to myself there was no way I could do 13 two weeks later. The race had already sold out by that point so I wouldn’t have the chance to try.

It would be another week or two before I went out and ran again, but April is when I started to take it seriously, I bought a pair of running shoes (I had to buy and return two or three pairs before I found some that worked) and slowly started stacking miles. About one mile a day was where I started (although there were some days where I’d only manage half that). Through May I’d slowly build up distance, I’d start going a mile and a half instead of just one, then I stepped it up to two. I told myself that I wanted to run a 5k every day in June so I was building up to that distance. I didn’t end up achieving that 5k a day goal for June but throughout June and July I was running/walking about three miles fairly consistently with the occasional longer run of four or five miles thrown in.

Throughout this time I was consuming a lot of ultramarathon related content, documentary films following professional ultramarathon runners like King of Moab, The Kid and Walmsley all inspired me. I figured if those extraordinary people could go out and race hundreds of miles at fast paces I could at least do a fraction of that.

My first six mile run happened at some point in the middle of July and it was a great one. I was listening to Creed just as I got to the top of a hill to have a view of the city with the golden rays of the sunset cast over it, I thought to myself “this is what life is for.” That may have been the first time I experienced a runner’s high. When I finished that run I figured I could probably go out and do that all over again if I had a ten minute break.

Pretty soon I’d have the opportunity to test that theory. I was craving the opportunity to run a race so not many days later I was browsing ultrasignup and came across the Mountain Tiger Donner Summit race just one week away. It was advertised as an eleven mile race (in reality it was closer to thirteen) with a single aid station near the halfway point about six miles in, exactly the sort of thing I theorized I’d be capable of. I managed to sign up the last day registration was open. I had a week to prepare.

The Mountain Tiger race was a trail race near Truckee CA, the challenging course would take me to four peaks at high elevation. The distance wasn’t the only new challenge for me, 3,000 feet of climbing across a course that was almost entirely at an elevation over 7,000 feet added to the difficulty. Despite that I was fairly confident I could finish the race (as if I had much of a choice anyways) so I bought myself some trail shoes and a running vest and before I knew it I was in a car driving over the clouds to get to the race.

When I got to the start line I still didn’t really know what to expect, I was confident I could complete the race but when you are faced with something you’ve never done before it is impossible to know how it will go.

The first mile or two went along a relatively flat fire road, my goal was to run that entire easy stretch without walking and I accomplished that goal while packed in with all the other runners. Over time we began to separate and as the road began to climb higher and steeper I could see a bend off in the distance where it appeared to drop back down. I was looking forward to some gentle downhill running to give my legs a bit of a break but right when we hit that bend the pink flags marking the course went off the road and took us up the first big climb of the race. I hadn’t yet earned the downhill I was craving.

After reaching the fist peak in the race we ran along the beautiful Razorback Ridge then up to the second peak before I finally got the good downhill stretch I was craving. I was feeling pretty good by the bottom of that hill. I’d gone about six miles at that point and that was the farthest I had ever run, but the race was only halfway done. I refueled at the aid station and began the longest climb of the day, two miles up a fire road to the summit of Mt. Lincoln. I walked almost that entire climb (that was my plan) and by the end of it I could hardly go ten steps without having to pause and catch my breath (8,000 feet is no joke) but I eventually found the satisfaction of getting to the top.

Of course there were four miles left in the race at that point. I ran along another ridge, and climbed to another peak before before beginning the long decent to the finish line. My legs felt like jelly by the end of it all but overall the inaugural Mountain Tiger Donner Summit race was a great experience, the event was well put together, the finish line was a place worth hanging out at and most importantly the course had the perfect mix of challenge and beauty. I’ll be signing up to run again in 2026 and likely more years to come.

After the Mountain Tiger race I was physically depleted, because of that (and some other factors) it would be a while before I ran consistently again, but once I did I found myself running much farther than I was before. The length of my average run went from three or four miles up to five or six with eight and nine mile distances not being uncommon either. Accomplishing hard things will force you to realize that your boundaries are much farther away than you thought they were. I believe the Mountain Tiger Donner Summit race unlocked those farther distances in my mind and I suddenly wasn’t satisfied with shorter runs anymore.

My ability to run far enhanced other things in my life. I spent a day at Lake Tahoe able to swim as far as I wanted without fear of becoming exhausted in the middle of the lake. I had a weekend trip to Salt Lake and running gave me the ability to explore the city when I didn’t have access to a car. Running while on camping trips also allowed me to explore places where people almost never step foot.

I believe we naturally crave exploration and traveling somewhere on foot is the purest form of exploration, the ability to run far allows you to satisfy that craving better than anything else can. Running makes the world around you much smaller, it is almost a super-power.

As the summer came to a close and we entered fall two more races loomed in the back of my mind. First was the Peavine Peak Hill Climb put on by local runner Darren Thomas, it is a 9.4 mile race to the top of Peavine and back down. I grew up at the base of Peavine but somehow had never been to the top, when I first saw that race on UltraSignup I knew I needed to run it.

For some reason, when I finally signed up for the hill climb I didn’t have the same level of confidence I did going into the Mountain Tiger race. That lack of confidence didn’t make much sense, I had completed the Mountain Tiger race which was harder in every way difficulty could be measured and I was fitter than I was then in every measurable way as well. I think it was the mountain itself providing the intimidation I was feeling. Peavine is the most prominent mountain around Reno, you can’t go anywhere without being able to see it, Peavine is literally the first thing you see when you walk out my front door. Peavine Peak loomed over me like the Eye of Sauron awaiting my demise.

Thankfully by the time race day came around I had regained my confidence. I woke up early and was one of the fist people to arrive at the start line, I picked up my bib then spent an hour talking to other runners out in the cold, I joked to a few that I might finish last.

The race began as the sun finally came up. It beat on our backs as we began to run up Chalk Canyon and I realized I had made a severe miscalculation with my clothing choice. Less than a mile had gone by when I took my gloves off and by the time I reached the aid station midway up the mountain my back was covered in sweat. That is where I chose to shed my top layer but that action was long overdue at that point, I should have done that at least a mile sooner.

I left the aid station with a single potato chip having refused offers for a water refill. I then began the steep rocky section of the climb as I caught glimpses of the leaders of the race already running down. By the time I had reached the top the thin air at 8,000 feet and the fatigue of four miles had slowed me to the familiar pace from the Mountain Tiger race of ten steps followed by a pause to catch my breath.

I was the last person to make it to the top of the mountain in exactly the hour and a half I
predicted it would take. It was rewarding to be at the top but that was definitely the shortest amount of time I’ve ever spent at the top of a mountain because at that point I had caught a second wind. I may have been last to the top but despite my pre-race banter I didn’t want to be last at the bottom and I gave myself the challenge to get down in half the time it took me to get up.

Once I was out of the rocks and ice hiding in the shade I found myself on a smooth dirt road at a comfortable -10% grade. I passed five people by the time I got back to the aid station (which I blew right past) running under a 9 min/mile pace. The wind in my hair, the trail at my feet, and the views ahead all contributed to a wonderful decent.

Unfortunately those perfect conditions didn’t last long. As I was running down it felt like a large grain of sand had entered one of my shoes and it was causing pain in my heel at every step. By mile seven I couldn’t ignore the pain any longer and I found a rock off trail to sit down. I took off my shoe to find that there was no grain of sand, I realized that I was developing a large blister and I had no choice but to deal with that pain for the remainder of the race.

By the time I reached the finish line a blister had formed on my other foot as well, the blisters caused my pace to slow and my form to fall apart; I didn’t pass anyone else and I didn’t hit my goal of getting down the mountain in forty-five minutes but I also wasn’t passed by anyone so I wasn’t last. I stuck around for a bit to watch the last few people come in, meet some people and eat some free tacos. Aside from the silver dollar sized blisters on both my feet it was a good day and I felt great. The Peavine Peak Hill Climb is definitely something I’d recommend.

The next day I found myself on Ultrasignup.com again. By this point in time I had been following the sport of ultra running for about six months, I started paying attention to a few runners, tuned into a few race live streams and the podcast I most looked forward to listening to became The Next Aid Station. I wanted to experience the thing I’d been hearing stories about for months, but I didn’t know if I was ready. Earlier I had made a deal for myself that if I felt good after the Peavine Peak Hill Climb I’d sign up for one, and as you just read I felt great so I registered to run the 50k at the Ferris 50 Endurance Run and that race was only three weeks away.

This was the first Ferris 50, it takes place on dirt roads near the small town of Minden Nevada and I imagine it was dreamed up by someone who had learned the history of Leadville and wanted to bring money into their small community. (That isn’t confirmed, it is just my suspicion) I’m in no position to comment on the economic impact the Ferris 50 Endurance run had on Minden (although it seems to have been enough for the race to go on next year), I’m just here to talk about my experience as a runner.

When I signed up for the Mountain Tiger race I had never run twelve miles but I had run six so I felt like I had a good idea of how twelve would go. When I signed up for the Ferris 50 the twelve miles from that Donner Summit race was still the farthest I had ever run, and that wasn’t far enough for me to begin to comprehend how running 31 would go. Learning what that would be like was part of the reason I signed up.

A lot of ultramarathons, especially out here in the west, are characterized by their climbs, it seems like many course designers try to fit as much vert into their races as possible. The Ferris 50 was not like this, during the start line speech the race director mentioned that this was a fairly fast course, great for people to try to get a PR because it was relatively flat. This was one of the reasons that I chose the Ferris 50 to be my first ultra, a beginner like me is much more likely to survive an easy course than a hard one.

The first six or seven miles of the course contained the bulk of the climbing, the road and trails averaged about a 2.5% grade which was perfect because it was steep enough to keep me from going out too fast but not too steep to make me discouraged. I went out at a 12 min/mile pace that I knew I could maintain for a long time. How long I could maintain it was the question.

I got to the top of that hill and down to the aid station near mile 10 without much of a problem, I made sure to take my time there to shed my outer layer, fill up my water flasks and fuel up with some snacks. I left about five minutes later having drank the first bit of soda I’d had in at least six months and a handful of gummy bears.

I felt pretty good leaving that aid station, my second fastest mile of the day came soon after that and I made it to the next aid station near the halfway point of the race without slowing too much and still feeling fairly good. The gummy bears from the last aid station had messed with my stomach a bit so this time I fueled up mainly with grapes and watermelon. I chose not to sit down at all while I was there and I didn’t want to stay there too long, at this point I was on pace to finish the race around the seven hour mark and I wanted to keep pushing to finish around then. Evidently I didn’t seem to look as good as I felt because when I told the aid station volunteers I was leaving to continue the race they questioned my decision with a worried “Are you sure?”

From there the course took me on a five or six mile loop that would finish back at that same aid station. The first bit of that loop contained the steepest climb of the race, up about 500 feet over two miles not an insane climb but not one that is necessarily easy for a guy who had already ran about five miles further than he ever had before. I walked up most of that hill still feeling pretty good even though I hated the feeling of running north when I’d just have to turn to run back south at some point.

Midway through the loop was where the pain began, I had been pounding my feet against the trail for over four hours at this point and I could feel it. It was also the beginning of the isolation, up until this loop I had been near other runners, I had talked to a few of them throughout the day, but here it seemed there was a mile between me and another runner in either direction. I was alone wanting nothing more than to take the weight off my feet for a little bit but with no choice to press on. At one point I stopped to pee not because I really needed to pee but because I wanted an excuse to stop moving for a bit.

Eventually I made it back into the aid station and quickly found a chair to sit down it. I told myself I’d sit to let my feet recover for ten minutes but fifteen passed in what felt like five as I refueled with grapes, watermelon and a quesadilla. I could have stayed longer but I knew I had to go and I found myself saying goodbye to that aid station once again as I began my eight mile trek back into town.

It would be hours before I saw another 50K runner. After mile 23 I finally decided to put on my headphones and listen to some music so that my mind could wander a bit. In the moment I didn’t feel like the music was very helpful but looking back at my splits the first mile I spent listening to music was by far my fastest mile of the second half of the race so it must have done something.

A while later a few runners flew past me like I was standing still. I was confused at first but later realized they were the leaders of the 50 mile race who had started running and hour before I did. When I first learned of the Ferris 50 months earlier I wanted to run the 50 mile race rather than the 50K, I thought I would have enough time to put in the necessary training for a 50 miler. I had asked friends if I would be a wuss if I chose the 50K over the 50 mile. When it finally came time for me to sign up I knew I wasn’t in shape for a 50 mile race because I hadn’t done the necessary training but I was pretty sure I could make it through a 50K. As I ran I realized that nobody who runs a 50K is a wuss. I was glad I didn’t sign up for the 50 mile that day.

Somewhere around mile 27 I made it to the last aid station and the guys there were all great. When I fist got to the aid station someone came up to me with a printed map and energetically said something along the lines of, “You’re almost done, you got this, you only have four miles to go, you’ll run to the end of this road, take a right then take a left on the next road and you’ll follow that all the way to the finish.” I appreciated the energy, encouragement, and enthusiasm of everyone there, at that point in the race I didn’t have much of any of those things. Everyone there believed I could finish, I did too but I needed to sit down and eat a bunch of grapes and potato chips first.

When I left that aid station refueled I was thankful to be running on pavement. Dodging rocks along an uneven surface takes a lot of extra energy. Generally I enjoy trail running more than road running but at that point I was happy that the trails were behind me and I had nothing but flat consistent asphalt for the rest of the day.

Of course that didn’t mean the rest of the race was easy, I was running on empty barely able to run 100 yards at a time. The strategy that got me through was to take things one small landmark at a time. There were reflectors along the side of the road, I’d push myself to run to one reflector and let myself walk to the next. It was slow going, sometimes I’d stop short of a reflector, sometimes I’d need to walk past two before I could run again, and sometimes I’d be able to run twenty yards farther than I thought I could. Those certainly felt like my slowest miles of the race but it turns out I got through miles 28 to 31 much faster than I did miles 25 to 28, that strategy was probably the reason for that.

The longest stretch of any race is the distance between the point where your watch says you’ve run the distance of the race and the actual finish line. You can never know what that distance will be but for me on that day that distance was close to a full kilometer. It was by far the worst kilometer of the race because I just wanted to be done, I walked most of it but when the finish line was finally within reach I ran with whatever energy I had left and finished the Ferris 50K in 24th place out of 32 with a time of 7:57:26.

After crossing the finish line I headed straight to the nearest chair to sit down. Naturally my dad wanted to take a picture and I told him I wasn’t going to stand back up for it. Eventually I hobbled back to the car at a pace much slower than the average octogenarian. The next day I felt surprisingly fine, I sat through church having almost forgotten what I had put my body through the day before, only reminded of it when I struggled to stand up from my pew with incredibly sore legs. By Monday afternoon I was back to running and I had no problem running just as fast as I had before the race.

Now I’ve spent over five thousand words explaining how I got to the point of running a 50K but I still haven’t answered the question of why. The other night I was watching a video documenting a guy suffering through a 100 mile race and as I was watching him suffer I caught myself asking, “Why does this appeal to me? I am seeing this man suffer, but why does it make me want to try the same thing?”

The appeal of the ultramarathon is not something I feel like I can put into words. In the book The Explorer’s Gene Alex Hutchinson explains that it appears some people seem to be wired for adventure and exploration, wired to test the limits, we all crave it at some level but for some that craving is more extreme than for others.

After I finished the Ferris 50 I felt like that craving had been satisfied, I knew what the pain of an ultramarathon felt like, I didn’t need to do another. I could say that I’ve been there and done that. But the satisfaction didn’t last long, I soon found myself looking at other races. On a Tuesday morning I sat in my work truck with my credit card out signing up to run the Broken Arrow 46K seconds after registration for the event opened. Only after my payment was processed did the fear and adrenaline hit as I realized I had just signed up for one of the hardest races in the country, it was hard to focus on much else that day.

So why did I run a 50K? I ran it because I had to, to satisfy my need for adventure, that is something you will either understand or something you won’t. It appears that I am stuck on the ultramarathon train for a while now, I don’t know how long this ride will be or where I will get off, right now I just have to enjoy the ride.

“Why do I run?” is the easier question to answer. I run because we all have to. Fitness is not something we can afford to neglect and you cannot call yourself fit if you cannot run. If you take the advice that Peter Attia gives in his bestselling book Outlive everyone should be spending at least three hours a week running at an easy pace. Our bodies were made to run, we are wasting a gift if we don’t.

But more importantly running is something I have come to enjoy. The satisfaction of completing something hard, the thrill of exploring new places, and the time to reflect that the empty trails can provide are all things that are hard to find in other activities, they definitely can’t be found staring at some screen. Sure there are some days where getting out the door is harder than normal, days where the run hurts more than usual, and days when legs just won’t cooperate, but despite all that I’ve found that I never regret going on a run, I only regret failing to step out the door. I don’t want you to live with that regret, get yourself a good pair of shoes and see where your feet can take you.

I found the trail to the summit on the map and the hike was obviously one that could be done in an afternoon being a bit less than eleven miles from the trailhead to the peak and back. Most people would have probably planned out a day at least a week in advance to hike a trail like that but my schedule doesn’t really allow for scheduling. If I am to have the time to do anything like that I have to head out spontaneously whenever I get the chance. The chance came on Wednesday the first so I threw some gear into a backpack and drove up to the trailhead.

Getting off 395 to drive up Mt Rose highway is always a treat. You have a few miles of driving straight towards the mountain letting you take in it’s beauty. Reno gets well over 300 days of sunshine per year, meaning the mountains are usually clearly visible. Wednesday was not one of those days, the sky was grey and as I approached the mountain over half of it was hidden by clouds, adding an element of mystery to the quest I was about to embark on.

When I got to the trailhead I found myself inside the cloud as it was raining on me. I had to brush cobwebs off of my raincoat before putting it on reminding me that it had been too long since I’ve gone on an adventure like this.

The fog remained thick as I hiked the first mile, I imagine on a normal day people would spend that length of trail taking in the views of the surrounding peaks, mountain lakes and of course Tahoe off in the distance. I couldn’t see any of that, instead I got to focus in on the detail of the plants and rocks around me and, of course the trail ahead.

Eventually the fog did lift a few hundred feet, by that time I had already gone around Tamarack Peak so there was no chance of me getting a glimpse of Lake Tahoe anytime soon but I decided it was fine if I didn’t see any familiar scenery, maybe even preferable. The first few hours I was there the farthest I could ever see was a mile, taking away the sights I’ve seen thousands of times along with the sort of weather I am used to made me feel like I was a lot farther than the fifteen miles I actually was from home.

The scenery I was treated to on the north side of Tamarack Peak was a small valley filled with bushes beginning to turn to their fall colors surrounded by steep walls covered with rocks and scattered evergreens. The trail took me around the edge of the valley gradually lowering me down to the bottom where I’d stroll past a waterfall just before crossing over Galena Creek and later under an old power line that made me wonder what it would be like to work in such an environment every day.

Once I was on the other side of that small valley the trail took me up around some cliffs and up a gap in the mountains eventually taking me to a nice small clearing at the saddle of Mount Houghton and Mt Rose.

The climb up to that point had taken its toll on me, mentally much more than physically. A back injury from two summers ago forced me into a season of inactivity which caused me to lose a lot of muscle. I can walk along flat ground for days but hills are a battle. By this time I’d been on the trail for around two hours and the summit I’d been trying to reach was covered in clouds, I never saw the top meaning I didn’t understand how far I still had to go. I pulled out my phone to check my elevation only to find that I was much lower than I thought I was, this was discouraging but, despite that, I turned onto the trail that would take me up the thousand feet I still needed to climb.

Hiking alone is a much different experience than hiking with friends. When you are with friends you push each other through the hard parts, even if it is only subconsciously, your desire to stay with the group is your motivation. When you hike alone, like I was here, motivation is something a lot easier to loose.

As I climbed that last mile the temptation to give up and turn back entered my head. I found myself thinking things like, “You don’t have to do this, you won’t loose anything by quitting,” “You won’t be able to see anything through this fog at the top, so getting there is pointless,” and “You’ve already had a better adventure than everyone else on this random Wednesday, you can be satisfied with that.”

A year or two ago Michael Easter author of The Comfort Crisis had an AMA on Substack. I asked him how to convince unwilling people that there is benefit in doing hard and uncomfortable things, I think I had other people in mind when asking the question. In his response (that I wish I saved) Easter reminded me that it is completely natural for us to want to avoid the uncomfortable. Humans have been optimizing for comfort since the beginning of time. Convincing someone to go against their natural instinct and embrace discomfort is understandably a hard thing. It wasn’t until recently that I realized the person I’d have the hardest time convincing was myself. The battles we fight in our own heads could be some of the most demanding in history.

The temptations I was feeling came from the natural man within me and the thoughts placed in my head mostly expressed truths but they were peppered with lies. Sure I’d already had a more exciting Wednesday than most people, but there is no satisfaction in turning back. Yes, the chances of me being able to see anything other than grey on that peak were slim, but the point of a hike like this is the accomplishment not the views. Of course it was true that I didn’t have to keep going, nobody really has to do anything hard in our modern age, but the relief of quitting also comes with the bitterness of failure. That mental battle was much harder than anything physical I faced that day.

Of course that doesn’t mean that final climb was a walk in the park, that last stretch of trail had an average grade well over fifteen percent which is no joke. As I climbed higher the wind came and seemed to get stronger by the minute. The week before I had been enjoying the sunshine in short sleeved shirts but up there my gloved hands were holding my hat on my head as I wondered if my snot would freeze to my face.

While barren and dangerous, the landscape I found myself in was quite the enjoyable sight. It is always interesting to spend time in environments where almost nothing can live and when surrounded by fog it might be the closest one can get to feeling like they are on another planet. The fifty mile an hour wind gusts felt more like a feature of the alien world rather than normal earthly weather.

Eventually a pile of rocks came into view along with a man in an orange coat standing eating an apple. Tired, I asked him if this was the end, he told me the trail went on but this was the summit. I was instantly relieved that I had reached my goal and found shelter in the rocks.

For weeks I’d had the idea that it would be fun to cook myself a meal on that summit. Looking back that would have been a better idea on a sunny day, but I had set out to eat lunch on top of that mountain so I took out my stove and cooked myself some broccoli beef (from my updated recipe) as I rested my legs.

The warm food gave me some much needed energy but the realization that I needed to get off that mountain quickly was what really fueled me on my decent. I had struggled to get everything put back into my pack since my fingertips had gone numb from the cold and both my phone and my watch were running low on battery. I needed to get back to the trailhead before it got too cold and I had no way to contact the outside world and no way of knowing what time it was.

As I hiked back blood eventually returned to my fingertips and the skies began to clear. After a few miles I was able to turn around and finally get a good look at the mountain I had just been on top of.

After I exited the valley that Galena Creek ran through and got around Tamarack Peak I was able to take in the much of the landscape that had been covered by fog, including a glimpse of Tamarack Lake which looked like a good destination for another little adventure.

At one point I also heard a loud crack which caused me to stop and watch a dead tree fall down on its own. I can’t tell you if falling trees make a sound when nobody is around but they sure aren’t quiet when someone is there. That was a sight I don’t expect to be lucky enough to see ever again.

When I was about a half mile from the trailhead there were no longer any clouds blocking my view of anything, I stopped to appreciate the scenery that was hidden from me hours before. I almost didn’t turn all the way around to get a look at Lake Tahoe, I thought I’d go the whole day without seeing it but I’m glad I didn’t. The mountains on the opposite shore were covered in shadow making it look as if Tahoe’s clear blue waters extended to the ends of the earth.

Soon I found myself sitting in my car, turning the key and cranking up the heater. The modern luxury of a 2001 4Runner is quite nice compared to the harsh winds of the mountaintop. Despite that a part of me wished I could have stayed up there longer. Nature has so much to offer us mentally, spiritually and physically, especially when we challenge ourselves in it. When we are out there we are able to see our problems from a different perspective, we can hardly feel them and our minds become free to think about the things in our lives that are truly important. I need to get out there more and so do you.

In America we believe that we have unalienable rights granted to us buy our Creator, among these are the freedom of religion, the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press and the freedom to peaceably assemble. Those people who were killed inside their place of worship today did not deserve to die because of their religion. No man with the right to call himself an American believes that a man should be killed because of his ideas or for his religion, especially when peaceably assembled inside their place of worship. (Slightly edited passage from my last article)

After hearing the news I decided to conceal a larger than usual gun inside my waistband as I prepared to go to church, I’m sure you could understand why. When I got to church I noticed a guy (who I’ve seen coming for months but haven’t ever talked to) with a handgun strapped to the outside of his belt at the three o’clock position. Understandably he was concerned about church security and he wanted to do something about it but as I looked at this guy and the gun on his hip I realized there was no way I could trust him with my life. He thought that the simple act of openly carrying a gun would make him and those around him more safe but I believe the opposite was true in this instance and in almost every other circumstance when a civilian is open carrying a handgun.

In our age of entitlement we love to talk about our rights, but we rarely if ever talk about the responsibilities that go along with those rights. As Americans we have the right to bear arms for the security of a free state. Going along with that we, as Americans, have the responsibility to train ourselves seriously to be capable of securing our free state with said arms. I won’t claim to be a gun, or self-defense expert but I have spent enough time studying and training to realize that that guy, along with every other civilian I’ve ever seen open carrying a handgun, has not taken that responsibility seriously. I’ll explain how I could tell.

The first red flag I noticed with this guy was his choice of gun, which in fairness wasn’t terrible. Most of the time when I see someone open carrying they have a cheap 1911, a big revolver, or some clunky polymer gun from the 90s that hasn’t been produced since then. I didn’t get a very close look at this guy’s gun because it is a bad idea to stare at strangers’ guns but I’m 95% confident he had a Springfield Hellcat which is much better than any other gun I’ve seen someone open carry.

Objectively the Springfield Hellcat is not a bad gun, in fact it is a pretty good gun, but it has two problems, namely that it is a Springfield and (the one more applicable to this situation) that it is a Hellcat.

Springfield Armory makes good handguns, I pay fairly close attention to the gun industry (evidenced by the fact that I can name the model of a handgun from twenty feet away) so I know they make good guns, but because I pay attention to the gun industry I would never buy a Springfield product, they focus their efforts towards government contracts and have pushed for policies that hurt civilian gun rights. People have to be pretty big nerds to know that so it isn’t quite fair for me to judge people who ignorantly buy a Springfield based on that fact alone (especially since their guns are good) but you also have to be a pretty big nerd to be good at shooting handguns and you have to be pretty good at shooting if you want to stop a mass shooter in a building full of people. Owning a Springfield signals to me that you probably don’t know much about the modern gun industry which signals to me that you probably don’t go shooting very often which signals that you probably aren’t very good with a handgun and trusting you to make a precise shot under the stress of a mass shooting would be foolish.

But, like I said, it is not entirely fair to judge someone solely off of their decision to buy a Springfield since those are good guns despite the actions of their manufacturer. Let’s get to the Hellcat issue. The Hellcat is designed for concealed carry, it is one of the better concealed carry guns on the market. But that is the problem here, why open carry a gun designed to be carried concealed? Concealed carry guns like the Hellcat are smaller and harder to shoot than their full-sized counterparts. In the context of concealed carry choosing a gun more difficult to shoot makes sense when you need to optimize for concealability, but in the context of open carry concealability has already been thrown out the window so a larger easier to shoot gun is a much more appropriate choice. There is no reason to even own a gun designed for concealed carry if you aren’t planning on carrying it concealed. Had he been carrying his Hellcat concealed I’d have no problem with it, but the second it is carried outside the waistband it is the wrong gun for the job, better than any other gun I’ve seen someone open carry, but still a dumb choice for the scenario, suggesting to me he had not thought things through.

The next red flag I saw with this guy’s carry set up was his holster. It can be argued that one’s choice of holster is more important than their choice of gun and this guy (along with every other person I’ve seen open carrying a gun) chose the wrong one. Again, I didn’t get too close to the guy to take a good look but the holster appeared to be of incredibly low quality, he probably didn’t pay more than twenty bucks for it. The holster looked like it was not made for a particular gun, was not well secured to the guy’s belt and had a difficult to remove strap keeping the gun in place, all of these things are to be avoided. Nobody should ever buy a holster as bad as his.

When buying a holster you want one that is made from a material like kydex and is made specifically for your gun. A good quality kydex holster will securely hold your gun without the need for any straps or other mechanisms for you to fumble with when lives are on the line. Most importantly it won’t allow anything into the trigger guard that might pull the trigger unintentionally. Cheap holsters like the one this guy had are dangerous because they fail to do all of these things, they rely on additional straps to secure the gun in place because they are loose and probably can let objects into the trigger guard.

They are also a sign that the holster’s owner does not take their second amendment responsibility seriously. It is dumb to spend five hundred bucks on a gun but then be unwilling to pay fifty for a good quality holster. Someone who isn’t willing to sacrifice an extra fifty bucks for the right gear is unlikely to sacrifice the hours of practice it takes to be useful when combatting a mass shooter, another reason why I didn’t trust that guy.

In the state I live anyone who can own a gun is allowed to carry it openly but in order to carry a concealed weapon a permit is required. I have a concealed carry permit so I know from experience the process of obtaining a permit is not hard (at least in my state). It involves taking an eight hour class that goes over the laws, safety issues and a bit of the moral issues involved with self-defense, after that applicants have to prove that they can hit the broad side of the barn, then they can go to their local sheriff’s office to get their fingerprints taken and within a few weeks (assuming they pass a background check) the applicant will be mailed a permit. This is an easy straightforward process that doesn’t take more than a weekend of sacrifice and two hundred bucks. As far as the responsibility behind the second amendment goes I’d say going through this process is the bare minimum.

It is safe to assume that someone in my state (along with most places in the US) who choses to open carry in an urban environment has not gone through this simple process and thus has not taken upon themselves that bare minimum responsibility associated with the second amendment. This was the biggest red flag I noticed with the guy at church today along with every other person I’ve ever seen open carrying a handgun. Anyone who takes this stuff seriously would make the effort to jump through the simple hoops to get a concealed carry permit. Sure you could argue and say “shall not be infringed” all you want but it really isn’t that hard to get a permit, if you’re not willing to do the bare minimum how can I trust you with the responsibility of protecting our free state?

And I don’t think the bare minimum is enough, if you want to be able to stop a mass shooter, you should also be a good shot and have spent enough time training to know your capabilities and be striving to improve them. If you can’t consistently hit a man-sized target at 25 yards and a terrorist busts into your church through a door 25 yards away from you then it’s not the best idea for you to take that shot, the risk of hitting someone else is too high. People like to say “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” this is obviously true but many of these people also fail to realize that similarly guns don’t keep you safe, it is the person behind the gun who does assuming he has the necessary skills. A person who has not spent the time to develop those skills is not keeping anyone safe.

A person who walks around with a crappy gun in a crappy holster who hasn’t taken the time to attend a basic concealed carry class is going to get himself killed before he can save anyone. Also why is the focus always on the gun in these scenarios? A gun is helpful in a mass shooting, but what happens when the shooter is taken out? A bag full of tourniquets and chest seals would be even more important but nobody ever thinks to bring those. Self defense and the responsibility to secure a free state involve a lot more than simply having a gun on your hip, it requires knowledge, discipline and discernment, qualities I’ve never seen demonstrated in someone who open carries.

At the time of me writing this I know nothing about Kirk’s killer but it is undoubtable that Kirk was killed for the expression of his ideas, his killing was wholly unamerican. In America we believe that we have unalienable rights granted to us buy our Creator, among these are the freedom of religion, the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press and the freedom to peaceably assemble. Charlie Kirk did not deserve to die for his ideas. No one with the right to call themself an American believes that a man should be killed because of his ideas or for his speech, despite this there are many people today who were born within this country’s borders who are celebrating this noble man’s death. America is clearly sick.

I’m reminded of when Trump was shot in the ear last summer. At the time many people were saying that at that moment we were only an inch away from civil war, suggesting that if Trump had been killed that day the country would have broken out in violence. We should all be glad that God spared us from that happening but I remember thinking to myself, “I’m a fighting age male with the equipment to throw myself into a civil war. If this assassination was the sign that I needed to take my guns to war, who would I fight? And who would I follow? I realized that neither of those questions had an answer and it was clear to me then, and remains clear now, that violence is not the answer to the problem we find ourselves in.

But what is the answer? How do we fix this? We live in a world where thousands if not millions of people believe that people like Donald Trump and Charlie Kirk along with anyone who supports them are nazis and fascists, racists and misogynists. These people think that Christians and Republicans want to commit genocide on minorities and queer people then burn down every tree on the planet to kill the environment. These people believe that they, we, deserve to die; but none of these things are true, their beliefs about us could not be farther from the truth. Regardless of this, they’ve already shot Donald Trump and they just killed Charlie Kirk, so again I ask, how do we fix this? What is the answer?

As I pondered on those questions today I realized that Charlie Kirk was the answer, which makes his death even more heartbreaking. Unlike the sick people who are cheering the man’s death we don’t believe our political enemies are evil. Instead we believe they are mistaken, as they clearly don’t understand us. People liked to make fun of Charlie for going around debating dumb college kids in order to make himself look cool on the internet but that wasn’t what he was doing. Charlie Kirk spent his life trying to correct these peoples’ misunderstandings by teaching the truth at as close to an individual level as he could. He traveled the country to teach people that America was founded on the principles of freedom, not slavery; that Christianity is a religion of love, not hate; and that the people that happen to vote Republican are humans, not monsters. If more people understood these truths rather than the lies that have been spreading around in recent years Charlie Kirk would still be alive.

There is more that could be said but I feel like I should end here. Charlie Kirk was a great man who did not deserve to die, the world is a darker place without him. Pray for his family. Pray for this country which he loved. Pray for the type of hope he had that things would get better with action. Pray for the type of courage he had to stand up for the truth and to correct the misunderstandings of the people who now celebrate his death.

I believe we should follow his example and spread the truth about America, we don’t have to convince anyone to vote differently but we do have to convince people that we, the people who simply disagree with them, are human too, that we aren’t evil and that we don’t hate them. We need to do this
so that nothing like this ever happens again. America is sick but we cannot let her die, Charlie Kirk died fighting to keep her alive and it is our job to carry on the fight, the fight for peace and an end to the deep division we find ourselves in.

You can call me a fascist, a commie, or whatever you want but I’m largely in favor of this ban. I’ve read Johnathan Haidt’s Anxious Generation and gave it an extremely positive review. No social media before 16 is one of the recommendations Haidt gives to parents and governments to protect kids from all sorts of mental problems. It isn’t hard to see why he makes this recommendation, data shows that giving young girls access to social media will always result in decreased mental health outcomes for them, it places young boys on a dangerous path towards pornography addiction, and of course things like TikTok will rot anyone’s brain. The intent behind this ban clearly comes from a good place.

The issue many online privacy advocates have with this ban is in its implementation. How do you verify if someone trying to make an Instagram account is above the age of 16? The current method most sites use is to ask users their birthday, but that isn’t reliable because we have no way to tell if the user is telling the truth. Back when I was in middle school all my friends who had YouTube accounts had told the site they were thirty in order to get past any age restrictions the site had implemented.

The solution that it seems sites has come up with to solve the honesty problem is to ask users to upload a picture of their ID in order to make an account. There are several reasons why this is a bad idea, the recent hack of the gossip app Tea is an example of one of those reasons but there are others. The biggest one people are afraid of is in the slippery slope that comes with your online activity being linked to your government ID, I don’t want to live in the world that lives at the bottom of that slope.

Because of that slippery slope activists want to get rid of Australia’s social media ban and they don’t want any similar laws to be implemented anywhere else, but I think they are trying to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I believe there is a way to handle online age verification without compromising privacy beyond what most people are comfortable with. Age verification can and should be handled at the operating system level.

How would this work? The operating system of whatever device a user is using would store their birthday somewhere where no other program could access it. If a program or website needed to verify if the user is over 16 the developer of that program or website would simply ask the operating system using a function (that could look like: isUserOver(16)) that would return a simple true or false. With this sort of system in place a user should never have to enter their birthday into any program or website and no program beyond the operating system could ever have access to the user’s birthday.

But how would the operating system reliably know it’s user’s birthday? Unfortunately I don’t think we can get around the requirement for needing an ID but I do believe the ID thing can be handled without having to send a picture of it to Microsoft or something. It is 2025 and good image processing software exists that can run on just about any computer, using that kind of software one should be able to give a computer a picture of their ID and have it identify what the birthday on the card is without the need to connect to the internet.

And for those of you who are still paranoid about giving their computer a picture of your ID another solution exists, you could go to a store and have some verified third party tell your operating system when your birthday is. An iPhone user could take their phone into the Apple store and show the employee their ID and the employee could enter in the birthday after scanning some sort of QR code that would tell the phone’s operating system that that employee is authorized to honestly enter the user’s birthday. A system like that would have the same privacy
risk associated with buying a case of beer.

I believe this sort of system would allow for age verification laws to be enforced in a way that satisfies most online privacy activists as long as these conditions are met:

• A user’s ID is never sent to an external server
• A user’s birthday can only ever be known by the operating system
• The function a program uses to ask the operating system for the user’s age can only have an integer as an input and a boolean as an output

Some more things may be necessary to further protect privacy and other things may be necessary to prevent the system from easily being bypassed, but I think we have a pretty solid core idea here. This article is not meant to explore every edge case of this problem, it is meant to suggest a solution for something I haven’t seen people want to find.

Age verification laws for social media are a good idea, if I had a thirteen year old daughter I’d rather her be secretly smoking cigarettes than be using Instagram with or without my knowledge, it is that dangerous. We should not be advocating against laws like this instead we should be asking companies and lawmakers to implement a privacy respecting age verification system like this so that we can have our children protected from the poison of the internet without having to give Google our government ID.

In a perfect world age verification laws wouldn’t be necessary because parents wouldn’t let their kids on the parts of the internet they shouldn’t go but we don’t live in a perfect world so age verification laws are necessary to protect future generations from the mental health crisis the current one is in. Protesting these laws based on privacy concerns won’t get anyone anywhere. More people should be talking about ways to fix the privacy problem with age verification rather than demanding that we just give up on it. My solution may not be the best way to go (it may not be entirely mine either, I don’t remember if I saw someone else suggest something similar months ago) but I believe it is one worth considering and I hope the rest of you will try to think up solutions to other problems as well.

The world is not made better by people who spend all day complaining its problems, it is made better by those who figure out how to fix them.

MAHA Fast Food

I’m a fan of the MAHA movement but when it comes to their rhetoric surrounding seed oils they are acting like a herd of irrational vegans and they need to re-evaluate their priorities. Forcing MacDonald’s to change out the oil in their fryer won’t solve America’s health crisis.

Like seriously, do we really think that swapping soybean oil for tallow is going to turn french fries into a healthy snack? Sure, we assume they are healthier if they are cooked in tallow or something similar but they don’t magically become healthy. The terms healthier and healthy do not mean the same thing. Things like french fries and potato chips are going to be junk food no matter what you cook them in.

A part of me thinks the anti-seed oil movement will fizzle out in a few years. The movement is more popular than it has ever been and has more momentum than ever with RFK acting as the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services but for every health influencer you’ll see praising a business like Steak n Shake for ditching seed oils you can find three calling them stupid for promoting a fast food chain. Peter Attia has one of the top ranked health podcasts in the world, he is well read on health and was unwilling to villainize seed oils in his bestselling book Longevity because the claims made by the anti-seed oil crowd don’t have the sort of scientific backing he’d like to see in order to endorse them.

But, regardless of whether or not history will see this movement as another short lived health fad large companies have taken notice to the anti-seed oil crowd and have begun to cater to them. The Kettle Brand makes my favorite style of chips and they have recently come out with a few flavors cooked in avocado oil. I’ve tried their sea salt flavored chip made with avocado oil and I think it is their best tasting chip, definitely better than their normal sea salt chip. But is that boost in flavor due to the avocado oil? Probably not. Their avocado oil chip isn’t just sea salt flavor, it is “Sea Salt with a Hint of Pink Peppercorn” so it gets some extra help from the pepper, and other ingredients like sugar, garlic powder, onion powder, and citric acid that the regular chips don’t have. If it were a purely apples to apple comparison I don’t think you’d be able to tell a difference between the two flavors, Kettle adds extra ingredients to the more expensive chip to get you to give them more money. (If you see the two types of chips next to each other on store shelves they will have the be price but the seed oil chips will have 7.5 ounces of chips in the bag while the avocado oil chips will only have 6).

Sure there are some small companies out there who truly believe in ditching seed oils but the big companies out there doing it are just greenwashing. I’ve already mentioned Steak n Shake, but before hearing the news of them transitioning to beef tallow when was the last time you heard anything about that restaurant? It hss been a slowly failing burger chain, their food was never that good, they had to pull out of the city I live in. I’d be willing to bet that they were on their way to bankruptcy. The switch to tallow was a clever business move on their part to generate press and interest, I don’t think it was because they care about the health of their customers. If they did they wouldn’t be selling 960 calorie Reese’s Chocolate Peanut Butter shakes.

Nuts are Not Protein

Another nutrition related thing that people like to focus on these days is getting enough protein. Conventional wisdom for proper protein intake for the past several years is that one should be eating one gram of protein per kilogram (2.2 pounds) per day, but when you look into the research you find that that prescription is really the minimum amount of protein you need to stay alive. Optimum protein intake is closer to one gram of protein per pound of body weight per day which is quite a bit, over twice as much as the normal recommendation and definitely more than the average person is eating. One has to pay attention to what they are eating to meet that goal.

So knowing that we have such a high protein need we should know what foods are high in protein. If you were to survey a bunch of people asking them to list five good sources of protein, I’d be willing to bet that most people would have put nuts somewhere on their list. But are nuts really a good source of protein? The subtitle for this section spoiled the answer to that question for you but let’s take a look anyways.

If you look at the back of a can of Planters Peanuts you’ll find that a one ounce serving of peanuts has seven grams of protein. If that is the only number we look at it doesn’t look too bad but we should bet some context to that number. That same one ounce serving will also have fourteen grams of fat (technically oil). Seeing that peanuts have twice as much fat as they do protein shouldn’t we be touting them as an excellent source of fat rather than protein? Heck, peanuts have almost as much carbs per serving (five ounces) as they have protein. Clearly someone claiming peanuts are a great source of protein is mistaken, and if you take a look at other nuts you’ll find the same story.

Let’s look at calories now. A serving of Planters Peanuts has 170 calories, that number looked familiar to me because it is the same number of calories that a serving of the gras fed ground beef I buy has per serving. If 170 calories of peanuts has seven grams of protein how many grams of protein does 170 calories of gras fed beef have? Twenty-four, over three times as much. If you want to meet your protein goals without eating a million calories don’t bother with nuts, just eat meat, your body digests that protein better anyways.

Zero Drop Shoes Work Different Muscles

Now transitioning away from food I’d like to talk about shoes. Over the past number of years barefoot shoes have been gaining popularity and I jumped on the bandwagon about a year and a half ago. There are three traits that distinguish a barefoot shoe from a normal one, a wide toe box that allows your toes to splay out rather than be constricted to an unnatural shape, zero drop between the heel of the shoe and the toe (where the term zero drop comes from), and a low stack height (distance between the bottom of your foot and the ground). I’m of the belief that the third of these traits is dumb since our feet need more protection from “modern surfaces” so I guess the barefoot purists might say that I don’t actually wear barefoot shoes but it’s the second of these traits that I’d like to talk about today.

Since I recently started running I needed to buy some running shoes so without much research I went to my local running store and ended up with a pair of Altras which have a wide toe box and are zero drop (I probably would have ended up with the same shoes had I done research). After buying those shoes I did what a lot of people do these days and looked up reviews on YouTube to validate my purchase.

Because of this I began to be recommended videos on running shoes in general and came across this video made by some running nerds discussing the science of running in a zero drop shoe. The biggest takeaway I got from their research backed discussion was that running in a zero drop shoe will put stress in your ankles and calves while running in more traditional high drop shoes will transfer that stress into your knees and hips. The nice thing about the video was that the nerds weren’t biased in their presentation of these facts, they emphasized that shoes are tools that do different things and there is no such thing as a best shoe.

I found this information interesting and the unbiased reporting was refreshing. The barefoot shoe industry often makes scientific sounding claims as to why their shoes are better than normal ones but most of their claims lack serious scientific backing. Seeing some actual science that wasn’t intended to be marketing was nice.

Knee pain is one of the most common complaints for runners and it seems that switching to a zero drop shoe may put a stop to that pain since they transfers stress away from the knee. Of course this isn’t a guarantee and switching to a zero drop shoe might just move that pain to another part of the body. I’ve seen people report that the increased load on the calf caused by running in zero drop shoes gives them pain in the achilles tendon. I experienced this pain when I started running in zero drop shoes but after a month or so that pain has gone away as my calf has gotten stronger. I don’t think knee pain has the ability to resolve itself in the same way since, unlike the calf (which drives the achilles tendon), your knee isn’t a muscle that can be strengthened.

I’d say zero drop shoes are worth a try. Are they perfect? Probably not, traditional shoes probably have their own benefits that I’m not aware of. Remember the running nerds in the video I referenced said shoes are tools that all do different things, it is up to you to spend time researching and trying different pairs to figure out which tool is best for you.

The normal strategy runners have when running a distance race is rather simple. Start with a goal time, let’s use a three hour marathon as an example, (quite fast for the average person but incredibly slow for an elite runner) then calculate how much time each mile (or if more appropriate kilometer or lap) should take if the race is run at a consistent speed then figure out what time a runner should be at at each mile marker. With our three hour marathon example each mile should take about six minutes and fifty two seconds so the runner should hit the first mile at 6:52, the second at 13:44, the third at 20:36 and so on.

Some runners or coaches may adjust these splits slightly to push for faster times at either the beginning or end of the race, but in general this is the strategy most people use when running a race. It is what my coaches did for me when I ran cross country in high school (I wasn’t any good at hitting my times) and in reading Hutchinson’s accounts of his races, split times were usually among his primary focus while running. But, we learn from reading Endure, that isn’t how the average Kenyan runs:

Why do Kenyans run the way they do? According to filmmaker and former elite runner Michael Del Monte, who spent months in the heart of Kenyan running culture while filming the documentary Transcend about the rise of marathoner-turned-politician Wesley Korir, it comes down to belief. Even the humblest Kenyan runner, he noticed, wakes up every morning with the firm conviction that today, finally, will be his or her day. They run with the leaders because they think they can beat them, and if harsh reality proves that they can’t, they regroup and try again the next day. And that belief, fostered by the longstanding international dominance of generations of Kenyan runners, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. (pages 249-250)

This strategy, or lack thereof, first reminded me of the spending habits I observed in people while I was living in a third-world country. The concept of saving was completely foreign to these people so they’d keep spending money until they had none left to spend, (obviously a terrible financial plan). In races these runners would run as hard as they could until they couldn’t keep up anymore. Some may fall behind at mile six of a marathon, some at mile twelve, and some will hold strong up until mile twenty, but almost always each of these less elite runners will fall behind. Almost always.

It seems this strategy, or ,to phrase it more accurately, this mindset, eventually works. These Kenyans’ fuel is their belief that they are capable of great things, and because they have that belief they eventually accomplish those great things.

Let’s compare what could be going on in the head of a typical elite runner with a traditional running strategy before racing a marathon to that of a Kenyan running on belief.

The typical runner and their coach will spend time analyzing their training performance and will calculate the best time that they think they can achieve, let’s say the time they come up with is around 2:09 so if all goes according to plan the runner will cross the finish like right at that time. But what happens when he gets to the starting line and sees other runners there who typically run 2:07s? Before the race even starts he knows he isn’t going to beat them so he has lost the race before it even began. He might ask himself what the point of running the race is if he already knows he is going to loose, the only way he can win is if the runners he knows are faster than him have a bad day, he believes fate is outside of his hands.

Our typical Kenyan running on belief won’t have this sense of pessimism and dread. Instead he will be optimistic and excited to race. He sees the runners favored to win and believes today is his day to take them down. In reality he probably won’t do it but that isn’t important, he believes he can therefore he will try his hardest to do it, he believes he is in control of his own fate so he will be willing to put a lot more effort into that race than the guy who is convinced he already lost before the race began.

Of course if we were to place bets on which of these two runners would cross the finish line first I’d put my money on the guy who paces himself properly over the guy running on belief any day. But that isn’t the result we should really care about here because I’m not going to be racing olympians in a marathon anytime soon and I don’t think you are either. The point I want to focus on is that the guy who believe he can do great things is going to push himself harder and longer than the guy who doesn’t. The key to doing great things is believing you can.

My dad likes to learn about backpackers who go out on long thru hikes like the 2,600+ mile Pacific Crest Trail. He has learned that some hikers will spend months or even years training for that adventure while others will hop right onto the trail; some will be in great shape while others will start the journey 100 lbs overweight. You’d think that things like preparation or fitness would play a factor in predicting whether or not someone would complete the trail but they don’t, those who trained drop out at the same rate that those who didn’t, the fit hikers drop out at the same rate the fat ones do (although the fat guys don’t stay fat for long). The difference in those who complete the trail and those who don’t isn’t in preparation, fitness, social status or anything like that it is in mindset. The people who have a strong belief in themselves finish while those who don’t won’t.

I’ve heard similar things about people who enter training for special forces in the military; on day one nobody can predict who will complete the training based off of background or appearance, belief in oneself is probably the only thing that matters there. I’ve also seen a statistic out there that claims the vast majority of CEOs out there played some sort of sport at a high level in high school or even college. One cannot play a sport at that level without believing in oneself, that belief is probably what pushed them to work hard in their career to get to that level in their companies.

The “Revised and Updated” version of Endure includes an Afterward that the original version did not. In it Hutchinson explains that he met a lot of readers who were satisfied on his reporting of what human limitations were but they still wanted to know how to push past them. The book tells us how we can optimize material things like hydration and nutrition but the benefits of these optimizations are nothing in comparison to the power that changing what goes on inside one’s head does. Hutchinson writes:

I do discuss some limit-changers in the last section of the book: sports psychology techniques like motivational self-talk; brain endurance training; electric brain stimulation. The latter two options usually get most of the attention, despite evidence that remains skimpy. They feel fresh and counterintuitive. Self-talk, in contrast, just sounds like a fancy name for some generic and cliched advice. “Tell yourself, ‘You can do it!’” doesn’t seem like a very rewarding payoff after reading 300 pages, no matter how impressive the supporting research is. (page 270)

Like a lot of other readers I was a bit underwhelmed that the best way for one to improve their physical performance was to believe in oneself, in reading the rest of the afterward one can see that Hutchinson probably was as well. But when you think about it it makes sense, you can’t hack biology but you can hack psychology. And believing in yourself will improve every aspect of your life.

Now that I’ve gotten this far into writing this article I realize I should have spent some time researching more ways you can grow your self confidence and foster a belief in yourself, but I feel like it would probably be better and more personal if I share what I think of without such research instead of generic and cliched advice you might find elsewhere.

The “motivational self-talk” Hutchinson speaks of is great but it doesn’t work if you aren’t in the middle of doing something hard so make sure you do something hard every day. I’ve picked up running and the act of running sucks but the feeling of accomplishment afterwards is great and all I want to do after completing a run is go again. Doing something hard daily builds your self confidence and belief in yourself because you are actively proving to yourself that you can do hard things. If you realize that it has been a long time since you have done something hard, physically or mentally, you need to make a change.

You were born to do something great, but you need to believe that in order to do those great things. Strive to be like the Kenyan runner who, “wakes up every morning with the firm conviction that today, finally, will be his or her day.” Let today be your day to make a change, do hard things, and believe.

There are a few things that woke me up to this. One was a video I listened to where a guy argued that rucking isn’t a good idea. I wasn’t fully convinced by his arguments and he failed to suggest a better alternative for people wanting to exercise but he did say some things that are worth thinking about. The most important was his characterization of a lot of the rucking focused podcast episodes you’ll find, he claims they are all just marketing. If you get Jason McCarthy on a podcast he will eventually say that he believes rucking will one day be bigger than running. But Jason McCarthy is the founder of Goruck, if rucking becomes bigger than running he is going to be rich.

When you realize that you are being marketed to you have to increase your skepticism. The guy in the anti-rucking video claims the statistics people often cite to promote rucking are cherry-picked data highlighted by Goruck, over time I’ve become a bit skeptical of some of the claims people make about rucking. But the data he presents to counter Goruck’s statistics seem cherry-picked as well so it is up to you to decide whose cherries taste better.

You shouldn’t throw away someone’s arguments just because you think they are trying to sell you something. Even though it might be marketing I agree with McCarthy’s claims that rucking should become more popular because if you asked someone who is 100 pounds overweight to run a mile they wouldn’t be able to do it, but if you asked them to put on a 15 pound backpack and walk a mile they probably could and that experience would give them confidence and inspiration to start improving their life.

Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, the term marketing is not synonymous with lying, but back to our wider topic, if we say an obese person should ruck instead of run we shouldn’t also say a fit person can’t run.

Another thing that caused me to stat softening my stance on running was being exposed, via YouTube, to ultra-running which is running distances greater than a marathon of 26.2 miles. This video was probably the first ultra-running video that filled me with awe as I watched two people casually spend a day running over sixty miles sightseeing through an Oregon town and the mountains around it. Since then I’ve become fascinated with that style of adventure, the ability to cover that much ground on foot and see all that stuff in one day seems like a superpower but it is something real people can do.

Since seeing that video I’ve watched several more ultra-running videos. The casual forty to fifty mile rim to rim to rim trip in the Grand Canyon is a popular run for these people. It is also fun to watch someone go for an FKT (fastest known time) on a trail. Then there are the 200+ mile races which you can find countless well shot documentaries featuring people struggling through. Of course all of these adventures are hard, but like any worthwhile hard thing they are rewarding and I found myself wanting to be able to do something similar.

But I had a problem, I had bought into the rucking narrative so deeply that I could never picture myself running. People get hurt running they say, running destroys your heart they say, running is stupid they say. I had the mindset of someone in a cult.

But as I consumed more of this ultra-running content my mind began to open as I realized these people weren’t getting hurt that often, they were perfectly healthy, and what they were doing certainly wasn’t stupid. There is no good reason for a relatively fit person not to run.

One of the arguments I’ve seen others use (and been tempted to use myself) to dissuade people from running is, “Most people use bad form when they run which causes them to get hurt, therefore people shouldn’t run.” I’m embarrassed to say that I once found this sort of argument convincing, let’s apply it somewhere else. If we see someone at a weight rack benching with poor form do we tell them never to step foot in a gym again because they are going to hurt themselves? No, we teach them proper form. So we should teach people to run with proper form as well.

As I began to open my mind more to running I decided I needed to reexamine the thing that led me down the rucking rabbit hole. Michael Easter does not seem like the type of person who would discourage a person from doing a good thing. What did he actually have to say about running and rucking?

The general thesis of the rucking section of The Comfort Crisis is that humans are “born to carry” (page 234) and spending more time carrying things is something that is beneficial. Easter’s reasoning behind the “born to carry” claim stems from hunter gatherer times. Back then humans would have to carry the animals they killed back to camp to feed their tribe, often times these loads would exceed fifty pounds. Easter even observes that humans are the only species on the Earth capable of carrying things efficiently.

But where did the “born to carry” phrase come from? It was a play on “Born to Run”, the nickname of a famous paper written by anthropologist Dan Lieberman. Lieberman’s paper (which Easter cites and explains in his book) argues that humans are born to run because back during hunter gatherer times humans would chase the animals they hunted until the animals were exhausted. Lieberman observed that humans are the only species on earth capable of running extreme distances.

So are we born to run or, are we born to carry? Rucking evangelists would tell you that we are born to carry, and marathoners will likely tell us we are born to run. But really we are born to do both so we should do both. Michael Easter never told us we should only ruck. The first sentence in the paragraph after Easter coins the term “born to carry” reads, “Unlike running, most of us never reengineered carrying back into our days.” (page 234) Easter didn’t spend a lot of time talking about the importance of running in the modern day because he assumed we were already doing it (or knew we should be). A chapter on running would have been boring and wouldn’t have fit in with the story he was telling.

Rucking and running are two different things, they are not interchangeable so you should be doing both (assuming you are at a weight where you can safely run). I won’t tell you how much of each activity you should be doing because I don’t really know. My gut tells me that you should run at least the same distance that you ruck, or maybe even do each thing for equal amounts of time. If you’re good at one thing but not the other you should probably put more focus on the thing you struggle with. I could probably ruck ten miles without much of a problem but I haven’t run for more than ten minutes for years so I know what I need to work on.

We were born to run and to carry, we should be doing both and we should strive to get good at both. Improving your strength and endurance through getting good at these activities will help you in every other area of your life, so go outside and get moving.

Near the beginning of his 75 page dive into the topic of exercise Attia writes:

More than any other tactical domain we discuss in this book, exercise has the greatest power to determine how you will live out the rest of your life. There are reams of data supporting the notion that even a fairly minimal amount of exercise can lengthen your life by several years. It delays the onset of chronic diseases, pretty much across the board, but it is also amazingly effective at extending and improving healthspan. Not only does it reverse physical decline, which I suppose is somewhat obvious, but it can slow or reverse cognitive decline as well. (It also has benefits in terms of emotional health, although those are harder to quantify.)

So if you adopt only one new set of habits based on reading this book, it must be in the realm of exercise. (pages 217-218)

At an earlier point in the book Attia suggested that when you are trying to improve your lifespan and healthspan (which is what this book aims to help you with) exercise is more important than your diet, and more important than any drugs you may or may not be taking. He even suggested to people reading the book who wanted to get healthier sooner rather than later that they should skip 200 pages and start reading these chapters. Exercise is essential.

Of course you already knew this, or you at least knew that exercise is good for you. Doctors will often advise their patients to exercise but, as Attia observes, “the advice rarely goes beyond generic recommendations to move more and sit less.” (page 219). People, especially those who have never exercised regularly, need more than just generic recommendations. They need to have a good understanding of the benefits of exercise are so that they can muster the drive necessary to do it, and they need to know what they should actually be doing in their work-outs, generic phrases like, “moderate-intensity aerobic activity” (which the government recommends we get 150 minutes of every week) are meaningless because they lack context and specificity.

Attia explains both the benefits of exercise and tells us what we should focus on with all the context and specificity we need to start our fitness journeys. The benefits of exercise were pretty well summarized in the quote I opened this review with so I won’t spend any more time explaining that right now, but Attia digs into various pieces of scientific research to show you that there is no drug in existence that could possibly give you the benefits a good exercise routine will give you.

The more important question than if exercise is good for us is what should we do when we exercise. Attia breaks down the three types of exercise we should be doing and how much we should be doing it: Zone 2 exercise, VO₂ max training, and strength training. We’ll take a look at what he has to say for each of these.

Zone 2 Exercise

Most fitness nerds break down the levels of exercise intensity into five levels, or zones, with zone 1 being a calm walk and zone 5 being your maximum output. Zone 2 exercise could be something like a run, bike ride, swim, or light ruck where one is, “going at a speed slow enough that one can still maintain a conversation but fst enough that the conversation might be a little strained.” (page 237) If you can string multiple sentences together you aren’t working hard enough to be in zone 2, if you can only get a few words out at a time you are in zone 3. Zone 2 exercise is in the range where you speak one sentence at a time.

Zone 2 workouts shouldn’t feel painful. Proper zone 2 exercise should not be enough for us to accumulate lactic acid (the chemical that causes muscle pain during workouts) for us to feel the burn. You’ll have to spend some time experimenting with different types of workouts to see what a zone 2 workout looks like for you. At my current level of fitness a good zone 2 workout for me is a 25 pound ruck at a 2.5-3 mph pace, in the coming months I hope to be able to increase both that weight and speed while staying in zone 2.

After speaking with multiple exercise physiologists Attia says, “it seems that about three hours per week of zone 2, … is the minimal required for most people to derive a benefit and make improvements.” (page 243) That could be four 45 minute sessions, six half hour sessions, three hour long sessions, or some mixture of timing that can fit into your schedule. But there seems to be nothing wrong with going longer, three hours per week is the minimum, Attia tells us he does at least four. Even five or six hours a week shouldn’t hurt you assuming you have the time for it.

If you are following the sort of plan that Attia lays out here the majority of your time exercising will be at a zone 2 level of intensity, and if you are just starting out on your fitness journey zone 2 exercise should be your primary focus, so figure out what zone 2 activities you enjoy doing and find some good podcasts or something. For most of his patients Attia won’t introduce VO₂ max or strength training until they’ve spent five or six months working in zone 2 and improving their stability (another topic we’ll get to later). I do think most of Attia’s patients are in their 40s, 50s, and 60s so if you are younger than that and in decent shape you could probably move on faster, but I’m not a doctor or exercise physiologist so don’t trust me completely on that assumption.

VO₂ Max Training

VO₂ max is as far from zone 2 exercise as we could possibly be. It is essentially our maximum output. “At VO₂ max, we are using a combination or aerobic and anaerobic pathways to produce energy, but we are at our maximum rate of oxygen consumption.” (page 244) From what I understand our rate of oxygen consumption is what limits us from pushing harder, or that is at least the variable that we can actually measure and Attia thinks we should test our VO₂ max output once a year.

The test isn’t pleasant, it involves being put on a treadmill or stationary bike with a mask strapped to your face hooked up to a machine that measures your oxygen consumption as you are told to sprint as fast as you can. I’d imagine you’d either want to throw up or pass out at the end of the test but the number it gives us is probably the best quantifiable way to measure fitness. The higher your VO₂ max the fitter you are. Someone with a VO₂ max of 25 is able to walk up a steep hill while someone with a VO₂ max of 50 could run up that same hill.

The main focus of Attia’s medical practice (and this book) is improving patient’s lifespan and healthspan. Unless we are actively trying to improve it our VO₂ max naturally drops as we age. Attia tells his patients to get their VO₂ max up as high as possible so their decline starts off at a higher point and when they hit their 80s they won’t dread every time they have to walk up a flight of stairs. The lofty goal he initially sets for his patients is to achieve a VO₂ max score within the top 2% of people their age, and if they hit that aim for a score at the top 2% of people twenty years younger.

But how do we improve our VO₂ max score? Zone 2 exercise will help but what you really need to get things going is some high intensity interval training usually taking place on a stationary bike, rowing machine, treadmill or around a track. What Attia tells us, “The tried-and-true formula for these intervals is to go four minutes at the maximum pace you can sustain for this amount of time. … Then ride or jog four minutes easy, which should be enough time for your heart rate to come back down.” (pages 249-250) Four to six sets of that with a proper warm up and cool down is a great workout to do once a week.

If you have never done a workout like this before I can assure you it is quite difficult but it is rewarding. It has been nearly ten years since I have done something like it and I’m probably not in a good enough shape to do it now. Remember Attia has his patients wait at least five or six months before letting them attempt something like this; you’re not going to be able to get right off the couch and do something like this without a high risk of hurting yourself. Don’t hurt yourself.

Strength Training and Stability

Of the three types of exercise Attia tells us we should be doing, strength training is the one where he gives us the least amount of specific guidance on what exactly we should be doing, for how long, and how often. In fact I don’t think he gives us any of that at all.

Instead he tries to get us to think about strength differently than how most people do. For example instead of measuring strength like one would in a powerlifting competition Attia suggests, “A far more important measure of strength, I’ve concluded, is how much heavy stuff you can carry.” (page 256) He mentions that Michael Easter’s book The Comfort Crisis was an inspiration for that mindset and the thing that got him into rucking. (The Comfort Crisis was the main inspiration behind my 2023 rucking article and a book I think everyone should read.) Attia tells us that he goes on a heavy ruck (50 or 60 pounds) up and down hills multiple times a week.

One goal related to carrying things he suggests are being able to ruck a third of your body weight. Another is for men to be able to take a dumbbell half of your body weight in each hand and walk around for at least a minute, for women he suggests carrying two dumbbells whose weight adds up to 75% of their body weight. It is unlikely that you can do these things right now but you should be working towards being able to do them in the future.

Other things Attia focuses on during strength training are grip strength, concentric and eccentric loading (providing resistance both when shortening and lengthening muscles), pulling motions, and hip-hinging movements. Whatever strength training you do make sure you are improving yourself in all of these categories.

Weight lifting has its benefits but Attia tells us not to do it until we have mastered our stability, especially with heavy loads. Lifting with bad form and bad stability will only lead to injury so Attia spends an entire chapter talking about stability and has his patients spend six months working with stability trainers before they start lifting weights.

Attia spends a good bit of time in his stability chapter explaining its importance. To make a long story short I’ll say that virtually nobody is able to do simple movements (like a squat) optimally. Sub-optimal form in our movements will lead us to hurt ourselves so we need to train ourselves to move optimally before we start putting too much stress onto our bodies.

Attia then talks about multiple things we need to get under control, he talks the most about breathing and our feet suggesting those are the two things most important to focus on but he also spends a bit of time talking about our spine, shoulders and hands. I’m not going to go into detail on these topics because I don’t feel like I can give them the attention they deserve in the time I have, you should go read the book to get a proper understanding of these things rather than whatever confusion I’d give you if I tried to explain these things.

Is it feasible for you to spend six months with a trainer working on stability like Attia will tell his patients to do? Maybe, maybe not. Trainers with that sort of specialization may not be available where you live or something you can afford. Luckily Attia provided a series of videos here that you can watch to learn some of the more essential stability exercises. How long should you really wait before lifting heavy things? I’m not sure, six months might be a bit too conservative for some of you, just make sure you don’t hurt yourself.

Conclusion

I think you should read Outlive especially these three chapters. I’ve seen people around the internet claim this is the best health book there is, this will be the first one I finish so I’m not in a good position to verify that claim but Attia definitely sets a high bar here, he explains everything well, his suggestions and takes are rather conservative compared to a lot of stuff you’ll see floating around in the health world so you won’t feel like he is trying to get you to join a cult throughout the book, and he manages to make things relatable and entertaining. I had to force myself to finish writing this article before I finish the last two chapters because I struggled to put the book down otherwise. I plan on writing a review of the full book once I’m done but don’t let me failing to get around to doing that stop you from picking up a copy of this book.

The exercise guidance Attia gives here is guidance that should be followed. At some point in the beginning of the book Attia mentioned that he believed exercise was more important than diet for your general health and longevity. That is probably the most controversial claim in the whole book, but considering the fact that no diet or drug can give you the benefits that proper exercise can I’m inclined to believe it so stand up and start moving.

The description of the book on the inner cover tells us that it analyzes over one hundred studies and, “health differences among infants, children, and adults who have been vaccinated and those who have not are presented and put in context.” (inner cover) Further down it states, “this book is timely and necessary for individuals to make informed choices for themselves and their families.” (inner cover) I believe these statements are examples of false advertising as the book fails to provide much context for things and only presents one side of the pro-vax vs, anti-vax argument so any decision one makes based solely off of this book is not an “informed choice.”

While I am being critical of this book it is not because I am critical of Kennedy and Hookers’ “anti-vax” stance. I’m biased against vaccines myself but I realize the controversial nature of that bias means I need to do more research into the topic, I was hoping this book would give me some new and useful insights into the issue (ideally insights that I could share with pro-vax people to get them to think more about their position), but it didn’t.

Let’s look at Chapter 2 to illustrate this. It is titled “Health Outcomes Associated with the Vaccination Schedule” and it “analyzes” eight studies which compared vaccinated and unvaccinated children. I put the word “analyzes” in quotes there because I feel like it is a strong word for what Kennedy and Hooker really do there, because all they really did was pick out the data from the studies and present it to us in graphs then explain the graphs (the explanations aren’t necessary for anyone who knows how to read a graph). The data they present shows that, compared to unvaccinated children, vaccinated children had higher rates of ADHD, allergies, asthma, autism, eczema, ear infections, gastrointestinal disorders, respiratory infections, seizures, among other things.

This is all good data to know, but this data alone is not useful for anything other than fear-mongering. From Dune we see that “Fear is the mind killer,” we shouldn’t be trying to scare people into decisions, nobody feels like they’ve made an “informed choice” when they’ve been scared into it. In order for a person to make a good decision they need to have data from both sides and this book doesn’t provide that. The studies that Kennedy and Hooker pull their data from do, there are a few times in the chapter where they admit that vaccinated children don’t get chicken pox and whooping cough as much as the unvaccinated do but they don’t show us any numbers related to those statements. I would have liked to see those numbers.

The biggest problem I see with the vaccine debate is that it seems the people arguing either want all the vaccines or none of them and I don’t think those are the only two options, the best course of action for most people is probably somewhere in the middle. I was hoping this book would be able to give me the pros and cons of each vaccine so when I have kids I can make “informed choices” on each individual shot.

An example of what I was hoping for can be found in a segment of a recent episode of the Shawn Ryan Show with Peter Attia. In it Shawn Ryan asked Dr. Attia what his thoughts were on vaccines. Despite his general disinterest in the topic Attia has spent a good amount of time looking into the vaccine issue and has analyzed the pros and cons of a number of vaccines independent of each other. Hepatitis B is one of the first vaccines typically given to children but Attia says that if a child’s mother does not have Hepatitis B then the child has an incredibly low risk of contracting Hepatitis B so the risk associated with taking the Hepatitis B vaccine is much greater than going without so most children should go without that shot. However the MMS vaccine, (which Shawn Ryan brought up) Attia says, is a more beneficial one because, according to his research, the risk of going without that shot is much greater than the risk of taking it.

Vax-Unvax doesn’t give you that sort of insight. It has a whole chapter on the Hepatitis B vaccine but all it talks about is the risks of taking the vaccine, there is no discussion on the potential risks of not taking it which is necessary for people to make an “informed choice” on these vaccines. If Kennedy, Hooker, and the Children’s Health Defense (which I believe funded this book) want to be taken more seriously on the vaccine issue they need to be having actual discussions, like Peter Attia (who doesn’t care if your kid gets vaccines or not) did with Shawn Ryan. They can’t just continue to fear-monger and expect rational people to join their side of the debate.

Vax-Unvax is not the book I hoped it would be, I’m not sure the book I hoped it would be even exists and I might have to be the one to write it if it ever exists. The Hepatitis B chapter of the book that I hoped this would be would have spent some time explaining what Hepatitis B is, how Hepatitis B is contracted, the rates of Hepatitis B in the population, and the risks of taking the Hepatitis B vaccine; that is the information a person needs to make an “informed choice” on a vaccine. Vax-Unvax only gives you the risks of taking vaccines, and I do admit that this book is a good resource for finding that data, especially since the healthcare industry won’t give it to you. But unless you are trying to write a hit piece on vaccines this book is not worth reading.

The Solution to the Bird Flu Outbreaks

Over the past few months egg prices have been quite high here in the United States because of a bird flu outbreak killing off a bunch of chickens. This isn’t the first time this has happened in recent memory, although I can’t remember if it was last winter or the one before when we had this issue, but that isn’t important I have a feeling that we’re going to see bird flu outbreaks killing off hens for the next several winters as well unless a change is made in the egg farming industry.

The change needed is a very simple one, it comes from a Joel Salatin quote I saw on a meme while scrolling the internet. (Since it came from a meme I can’t give an exact quote or a direct source to it but I’m confident it wasn’t a fake quote.) Salatin’s suggestion for fixing our bird flu problems is to take the chickens who survive outbreaks and use them for breeding so the next generation of chickens is more resistant to the bird flu.

We breed farm animals selecting for all sorts of traits: size, growth speed, egg/milk production, and things like that. Animal breeders should also be selecting for disease resistance, and if they are at all worried about food security disease resistance should probably be their highest priority in selecting which animals are bred. I think breeding the chickens who are resistant to the bird flu would have a positive impact on the egg industry and would prevent us from having such large spikes in egg prices next winter.

Nature isn’t entirely to blame for the egg shortages, a lack of understanding and application of simple science is a huge thing contributing to the problem.

Another Note on Eggs and Chickens

That was all I had on that topic but it reminded me of another chicken related Joel Salatinism. This one probably comes from a chapter of Everything I Want to Do is Illegal but it has been quite a while since I have read it so I’m not a hundred percent sure on that. Salatin claims that if every household kept a few chickens whatever food crisis we’re in would be solved. Garbage collectors would also have smaller loads.

Backyard chickens would provide families with a daily source of fresh healthy eggs along with a food waste disposal system that takes a lot less effort than composting does. Of course the eggs wouldn’t be completely free as chickens still need to be fed but in many parts of the country there are enough bugs crawling around to feed a decent amount of chickens. Also if you’re cooking your own food, as one should be, you’ll have plenty of scraps as you are chopping meat and vegetables. I’ve also been wanting to take up coyote hunting and figured that if I did the meat could be fed to some chickens if I were to harvest the furs.

Unfortunately not every neighborhood is friendly towards chickens. Many cities and HOAs will ban backyard chickens out of fear of noise complaints. That annoys me because my neighbor has a dog that is way noisier than any chicken could be and there are no prohibitions on little dogs that bark nonstop when someone on the other side of the fence is outside. I’m a supporter of Tim Pool’s proposed 28th Amendment.

Vaccines Cause Peanut Allergies

There are a lot more people with allergies now than there were fifty or a hundred years ago and there are a lot of theories out there on why we have much higher rates of allergies than we had in the past. There was a while when I subscribed to the theory that allergies were really just sensitivities to the pesticides and herbicides used on modern crops that are more present on some foods than others but this argument doesn’t make perfect sense when it comes to the most common allergy because peanuts grow in a shell in the ground so nothing could be directly sprayed on the part of the plant we eat. Now that I think of it, the fact that almost nobody is allergic to strawberries disproves that theory because strawberries have thin skins that would absorb all the stuff sprayed on the plant. But we’re here to talk about peanuts today.

Vaccines are another thing people have lots of theories on. The most famous of these is that they cause autism. I don’t fully subscribe to this theory since there exist plenty of unvaccinated kids who have autism so if there was a singular cause to the disorder vaccines aren’t it, I think it is more likely that poor diet plays a bigger role in the autism equation since I’ve never seen an autistic person with a good diet.

Dozens of times I’ve heard the claim that vaccines cause peanut allergies but until recently when I learned the reasoning for it I was skeptical, but now that it has been explained to me I’m convinced. There are a lot of things injected into a person when the receive a vaccine. Of course there are the actual vaccine molecules that mimic a virus for your white blood cells to learn to fight. But then there is some portion of heavy metals (usually aluminum) to encourage an immune response. There is probably a few more things in a vaccine too but all that stuff has to be mixed into some sort of liquid so that it can be injected. In almost all cases that liquid is peanut oil.

I don’t know where other allergies are coming from but based on that information I’m pretty confident that peanut allergies come from vaccines. We shouldn’t need to conduct a randomized controlled trial to conclude that injecting peanut oil with a bunch of things mixed into it designed to provoke an immune reaction is going to cause a subset of the population to develop a sensitivity towards peanuts. It’s a no-braine, and a risk I think people should be aware of.

Do Not Comply by Will Witt

The last book I finished reading was Do Not Comply: Taking Power Back from America’s Corrupt Elite by Will Witt. It was a good read, but I don’t think it was noteworthy enough to write a long review for like I have with other books, but I’ll write a short one here.

In the introduction Witt writes, “This idea of America is dead, and we have killed her. The remnants of her great past live on in history books and nostalgic conversation, but the soul of America lies in a casket, buried beneath the steps of Washington D.C. We as a people have allowed out country to be taken over by traitors and tyrants, weak and lazy men, and godless liars and false idols.” (page 2) This sets the tone for how Witt feels about the state of the country today.

In the next chapter he quotes Fredrick Douglas who wrote, “I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one.” (page 16) Witt then spends the book explaining to us how things like modern politics, big tech, big media, big pharma and even the lack of good new art have pushed us into a state of thoughtlessness. Big ideas aren’t allowed in politics, big tech sells us a false reality through social media, only certain voices are allowed on both mainstream and alternative media, big pharma doesn’t encourage questioning, and dull architecture and uninspiring new movies leave us nothing to be inspired by.

If the typical Joel Salatin book can be classified as a collection of boomer rants then this one is a bunch of zoomer rants through the eyes of someone who isn’t afraid to see the world as it is. The book is full of some great quotes and insight on various topics and it does a good job at convincing the reader that the core message and title Do Not Comply are good words to live by in the context of modern American life. It was a refreshing read although I can’t say I learned a whole lot from it since a lot of the topics covered were stuff I’m already familiar with. I also didn’t come away from the book with any new practical advice on how to unplug myself from the matrix, but Witt isn’t more than two years older than I am so I’m not sure if he is in the best condition to be giving that advice to begin with.

Is Do Not Comply a bad book? No. Are there better books out there? Yes. Is there anything wrong with reading this book? No. It’s a quick read, it only took me a few days and it is a nice choice if you’ve been reading heavier books and need a little break from that, although it is fairly America focused so you probably won’t enjoy it as much if you aren’t American.

Avocado Oil is a Scam

Over the years I’ve promoted animal fats over plant-based oils but have said that if you are to use a plant-based oil it should be either coconut, olive or avocado oil. Coconut and olive oils have been easy things to recommend because they have been used in different cultures for thousands of years but I’ve been skeptical of avocado oil because it is a relatively new invention, sure it isn’t a seed oil but I still felt a bit strange promoting it but never took the time to dig deep into it. Well a part of a podcast I was listening to while driving home just justified my suspicions.

Olive oil and avocado oil are both made in the same way, you take the flesh of the respective fruits and press the oil out, very simple, very healthy. But olives and avocados are very different, nobody really ever buys olives but avocados can often sell for three dollars a fruit.

A good three dollar avocado is not going to produce three dollars worth of oil so the healthy avocados are not the ones that the oil is pressed out of, avocado oil comes almost exclusively from rotten fruit that would never sell in a grocery store.

It has also been speculated that most brands mix canola oil into the avocado oil they are selling. So avocado oil is a health scam, it is made from rotten fruit and is rarely sold pure.

Haidt didn’t originally plan to write a book on this topic, he wanted to write a book that was a bit more broad about the effects of social media on society but once he dug into the impact it had of Gen Z he realized it was a much more important problem, “And it wasn’t just about social media. It was about the radical transformation of childhood into something inhuman: a phone-based existence.” (page 289)

Early on in the book he defines two terms, a “play-based childhood” is the sort of childhood that would have been the norm for every generation up to Gen Z, kids who were allowed to play out in the street until the lights turned on would have enjoyed the best a play-based childhood had to offer. The play-based childhood began to die off in the 90s as parents became more focused on safety but the “phone-based childhood” didn’t fully take over until much later. Haidt marks the period between 2010 and 2015 as the beginning of the phone-based childhood as that is when smartphones and social media became common sights in a high school cafeteria. Of course smartphones aren’t the only pieces of technology that have defined the phone-based childhood; laptops, tablets, social media, video games, and internet pornography all share some sort of blame in the decline of teenage mental health.

The book is split up into four parts, but parts 2 and 3 are where most of the meat is. Part 1 contains a single chapter which Haidt spends citing several statistics that report a spike in teenage mental health issues between 2010 and 2015 where he claims the phone-based childhood begins. He does this to prove to any skeptics that the phone-based childhood is a problem. Part 4 contains multiple chapters worth of Haidt’s suggestions for governments, big-tech, schools and parents to pull us out of this phone-based childhood mess. Despite taking up nearly 80 pages part 4 feels like an elongated conclusions section. We’ll get to the most important of Haidt’s suggestions later.

Haidt titles Part 2 “The Backstory: The Decline of the Play-Based Childhood” but it covers more than just that. In this section Haidt explains the purpose of childhood, for kids to learn their physical limits and to learn how to interact with others.

In one part he reports on the work of Norwegian researchers Ellen Sandseter and Leif Kennair who focus on the need for “risky play” which they define as, “thrilling and exciting forms of play that involve a risk of physical injury.” (page 77) They found six types of risks that kids will take on when they are given the freedom to do so: heights, high speed, dangerous tools, dangerous elements, rough-and-tumble play, and disappearing. (paraphrased from page 77) Kids need to be able to take these risks so they understand their limits, sure they may get hurt by going beyond those limits but they almost never go far enough past them to get much more than a few scrapes and bruises.

Haidt calls the merry-go-round, “the greatest piece of playground equipment ever invented,” (page 78) because it is a bit dangerous so it allows kids to take some risks. But it is also great because it forces kids to cooperate if they want it to spin fast. Haidt explains to us that in a play-based childhood kids should be given lots of free time together with other kids to take risks together and to make up their own ways of having fun. Their time should be synchronous and in person so that they can learn social cues, have opportunities to get in and resolve conflicts, learn how to share and take turns, and understand so many other things. It is important to note kids who spend a lot of time with other kids in heavily supervised adult-led activities like sports practices music lessons won’t get all of these benefits, kids need to learn to govern themselves.

As I mentioned earlier the play-based childhood began to decline as parents became more and more enthralled in “safetyism”. It is scary for a parent to watch their son climb a tree that they know he won’t be able to get down from by himself so most parents these days won’t let him do it, but if he never does it he will never learn his limit. Ironically, as Haidt points out, parents these days are overly focused on their kids’ physical safety that they have paid almost no attention to their internet safety, and a kid getting caught up in the wrong stuff online is a lot more dangerous than climbing a tree.

Part 3 of the book digs into the phone-based childhood. In the first chapter of this part Haidt describes what he calls the four foundational harms of the phone-based childhood:

• Social Deprivation: decreased time spent in-person with friends
• Sleep Deprivation: something everyone, but young people especially should avoid
• Attention Fragmentation: time full of distractions decreasing attention span
• Addiction: a kid’s inability to live without their phone or some other device

While there are several pieces of technology that contribute to these harms social media is the biggest, and girls are hit much harder than boys are by social media (and the whole phone-based childhood in general) which is what Haidt dedicates the next chapter to discussing. In it he reports on some studies and experiments done concluding, “Social media use is a cause of anxiety, depression, and other ailments, not just a correlate.” (page 148) A young teenage girl given access to social media will rapidly experience decreased mental health, it is a poison for them.

Despite this some people still claim that social media has benefits for young people. Former U.S. surgeon general Vivek Murthy is among those people, Haidt included a long quote from that guy on page 136. Haidt also points to several surveys that were administered to teens where the vast majority reported believing social media improved their lives. Haidt is skeptical of these claims for several reasons. One of these reasons that I found interesting comes from a survey Haidt reported on that found, “LGBTQ girls were more than twice as likely as non-LGBTQ girls to encounter harmful content related to suicide and eating disorders.” (page 138) Many activists insist that social media is important for that demographic of teens because it gives them, as surgeon general Murthy stated, “It can provide access to important information and create a space for self-expression.” (page 136) But if the information these girls are getting is constantly promoting suicide or eating disorders social media is not a safe space for them and their lives are better off without it.

When Haidt turned to look at what was causing the mental health decline in boys things got a bit harder to pin down. Social media does harm boys, but boys aren’t drawn to it as much as girls are and don’t spend nearly as much time on it, so it can’t be the main cause of their troubles. Haidt initially wanted to point to video games as the villain behind declining mental health in boys but the data couldn’t support that claim. In moderation video games are perfectly fine and sometimes even beneficial to mental health. However pornography is a threat to boys’ mental health that has no upside and should be banned, it has a huge role to play in the mental issues boys face and is way too commonly used by young boys, many start at age 11.

Another harm that all technology has to boys and girls is simply the time loss, or social deprivation in Haidt’s terms. More time in front of a screen means less time engaged in risky play. It can be speculated that the reduction of risky play has made it so boys are less likely to take risks later like the risk of asking a girl on a date. Social media has undoubtedly hit girls harder than boys but I think the loss of the play-based childhood may have hit boys harder than girls.

Section 4, as I stated earlier, includes Haidt’s recommendations on how to get out of this mess. There are several, some of them are more doable than others, but he gives us four that he says are most important and should be implemented as soon as possible:

1. No smartphones before high school - Haidt never really mentions tablets but I’d assume this would apply to those as well. Simple phones with no internet access are fine.
2. No social media before 16 - Personally I’d push that back even farther but Haidt advises us that we should be giving kids more pillages as they age, at 16 teens have passed their most mentally vulnerable stage of adolescence so they should be able to learn to use social media responsibly.
3. Phone free schools - This does not just mean kids can’t use their phone in class, it means no phones in schools period. No phones in between classes, no phones during lunch; they should be kept inside backpacks or a locker where students can’t access them. This will encourage kids to interact with each other rather than stare at some object in their hands.
4. Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence - Don’t fill a kid’s life up with tons of time spent doing whatever an adult tells them to do, let them do what they want. Also trust them more, let them walk home from school or ride their bike to a friend’s house, encourage them to do things they’ve never done before so they can grow their skills and confidence.

These suggestions are simple, but simple doesn’t mean easy. All of these things were normal twenty years ago, but now all of these things are almost taboo. Your kid will feel cheated if he is seemingly the only kid in their middle school without an iPhone. Your kid will feel left out if all his friends are sharing memes on Instagram when he doesn’t have it. You can’t change your school’s phone policy by yourself. And you could have the police knock on your door and take you away if a nosy Karen sees your eleven year old playing in the park without adult supervision.

The changes Haidt advocates for in The Anxious Generation are necessary for our society to lift itself out of the mess we’ve found ourselves in where seemingly an entire generation is mentally ill. I encourage you to read this book to gain more insight on this issue and know how we can help the next generation of teens be better off than the last. Then encourage your friends to do the same so that we can create a community of people united in ending phone-based childhoods and letting kids play.

I have a lot more down time at my job than the average person does so I can easily slip a book in my backpack and find time to read a chapter or two fairly regularly, but you don’t need to have a job like mine to get some reading in while out and about. There are plenty of times in your normal life where you are sat waiting somewhere with nothing better to do than read. I get a chapter in every time I go to the doctor. If you get your oil changed at someplace you have to sit out and wait that’s another great time to read. If you have kids you pick up from school regularly you probably have five or ten minutes a day when you are sat waiting and could be reading if only you had thought to bring a book.

Unfortunately books are big and heavy, they take up a lot of space in a bag; they’re also fragile, their cover could get ripped or they could get ruined if water spills on it. Having a physical book with you at all times is impractical, so don’t, carry an old Kindle with you instead.

Near the end of last year I bought an old Kindle on Ebay for thirty bucks and it might have been the best thirty bucks I spent last year. E-book readers have not had any significant hardware advances since the invention of the touch screen E-ink display over ten years ago. The one I bought is a Kindle Paperwhite from around 2016 and the only significant difference between it and a new Kindle is that the new ones charge via USB-C. Sure the new ones have more storage and faster processors, but this is a device for reading text files so the extra speed and storage is not worth another hundred bucks.

Some of you may be hesitant to get a Kindle because it is made by Amazon, and there are good reasons to be angry at Amazon especially in the realm of literature. At the time of writing a lot of reading focused social media influencers are making videos warning people that within the week you will no longer be able to download E-books purchased on Amazon to your computer, you can only access them through Amazon’s software. You don’t own your E-books from Amazon. But you don’t need to worry about Amazon.

If you buy a used Kindle you have given no money to Amazon. I have never and will never connect my Kindle to the internet so Amazon can never spy on me (although I probably should have done a software update). I get my E-books from sites that don’t start with the letter A so I have no need to ever worry about Amazon’s DRM and other policies. Sure if you really hate Amazon you could buy an E-reader from a different company but used Kindles are cheap and plentiful on E-bay so there is no reason not to buy one.

Originally I intended my Kindle just to be used exclusively while on the go, because it is thin an light it is perfect to slip into a backpack or even a jacket pocket. But soon I found myself doing all of my reading with the Kindle. Reading a physical book in the dark requires more light than I like to have on at night, plus holding a book open can get tiring over time, especially when you have to reposition yourself to switch pages. You don’t have those problems with a backlit Kindle, I can now read by candlelight only needing to reposition myself when I become uncomfortable.

On the go use is great as well, the battery lasts a long time so assuming I remember to charge it once every week or two it won’t die on me. Next time I go backpacking I’ll defiantly bring it along because it is actually quite durable. A lot of people buy cases for their Kindles but I don’t think a case is necessary, as long as you don’t drop it onto hard concrete it should be fine. The privacy it offers in public is another good benefit, I’m currently reading Abigail Schrier’s book Irreversible Damage which is quite unpopular among the woke crowd for being critical of current transgender medical practices. While the situation is unlikely, I’m glad I don’t have to worry about some blue haired individual harassing me for reading that interesting book.

But I should stop trying to sell you a Kindle and get back to the bigger point. Having the means to read a book at all the time lets you spend more of your time reading, and less of it gets wasted on meaningless things.

All of us should be spending more time reading than we are. I tried something new today and asked AI what the benefits of reading are and it told me, “reading provides numerous benefits, from improving cognitive and mental health to fostering empathy and expanding knowledge, making it a valuable and enjoyable activity for people of all ages.”

But we need to be reading the right things. Over the past few years reading has become more popular on social media, specifically Tik Tok; but I don’t think this is really a good thing because most of the books being promoted there are smut. I shouldn’t have to tell you not to read that pornographic garbage, instead you should be reading good books.

These days I enjoy reading non-fiction books over fiction. I grew up reading fantasy and science-fiction but as I grew older I lost the patience fiction because reading it didn’t feel productive to me, there were years when I’d try to read but I just couldn’t get over the idea that what I was reading wasn’t valuable enough. When I started reading non-fiction reading felt more rewarding because I was learning a lot more things. If you, like me, grew up reading a lot but eventually became disenchanted with the hobby I recommend trying non-fiction; The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter is a great book to start with.

Reading books makes you more interesting, especially non-fiction. I love being able to reference things I’ve read in normal conversation. It’s one thing to state an opinion that you think doing hard things is important, but it is a whole other thing to be able to say you read a whole book on the topic.

Having either a Kindle or an actual book with you at all times gives you the ability to read anytime and almost anywhere. Before smartphones came about you’d see a lot more people reading in public, I remember going to the doctor’s office as a kid and almost everyone in the waiting room had a book or magazine to entertain them. Nowadays everyone just stares at their phone in waiting rooms, sure a phone is more stimulating but it is not as valuable as a book. I look forward to time I can spend reading a book, I’ve never looked forward to looking at my phone.

Unfortunately there are less public spaces where reading is possible now than there were even just five years ago. I saw a post on X the other day saying that Southwest Airlines has added an instruction to passengers not to play their music or videos on speakerphone as part of their preflight presentation. You would think people would understand wearing headphones to listen to things in public was a common courtesy but they don’t anymore. If you are out in public enough you will see someone somewhere watching Tic Toks without headphones so that everyone around them can hear their brain rot.

But it isn’t just the random people around us who can be an impolite disruption with their phones, many businesses have forgotten that they should provide their customers with a quiet waiting room. The place my work sends us to get oil changes plays compilations of puppy videos with annoying computer generated music playing in the background. Last summer I found myself in a doctor’s office that played terrible hip-hop so loud that I don’t understand how the receptionists were able to get any work done. I left both of those places with a headache and a desire never to go back.

Reading in public needs to be renormalized so that we can have more peaceful public places. But more importantly so that we can live in a more educated society. And even more importantly so that you can reap the rewards of reading more books. Since I’ve started carrying a Kindle with me everywhere and reading whenever I have the time my desire to read has increased, I get home and want to read rather than spend time on my computer. I’ve gone from taking a month or two to finish a book to being able to finish one in a week. I like writing book reviews for you guys but I’m three or four books behind right now and I probably won’t catch up. But that’s okay, if you want my opinions on the last few books I’ve read you can shoot me an email, otherwise I’ll probably just be reading, and so should you.

Life without Spotify has been great. I don’t miss having it at all. Without a streaming service to serve me unlimited music I have control over what I listen to. Music has an incredible influence on our mood, I don’t think anything can change our mental state easier than music can. Sad music will make us sad, and angry music will make us angry, but calm music will calm us down and happy music will cheer us up. If you are not in control of the music you listen to you aren’t in control of your mental and emotional state.

When you have instant access to virtually every song ever made you don’t feel like you need to be careful about what you are listening to. If a song you don’t like comes on it isn’t a big deal because there are millions of others for you to switch to. But if you had bought that song and come to realize you didn’t like it or it put you into a bad mental state it is painful because you wasted money on it. This pain is good because it causes you to be more careful about your music selection. Over time this pain motivates you to get better at selecting music and the end product of this is a music collection that you love and keeps you in a good mood.

When you have access to unlimited music a single song becomes replaceable content. If your music library is limited, each song is a piece of art that you have a personal connection to. Every once in a while I find myself with access to Spotify or something like that and while I could take advantage of that and listen to anything without limitation I’d rather listen to my music because it is mine.

I’m not the only one out there who has reported great results from quitting music streaming, you can search all around the internet for people quitting Spotify or switching to an iPod and feeling way more connected to the music they listen to and way less distracted by an algorithm that doesn’t have their best interest at heart. While I personally think switching to an iPod takes things too far (unless you are addicted to your phone) this video series is probably the best I’ve seen on the topic of ditching Spotify and I’d recommend taking a look.

But how do you go about quitting Spotify? I’ve had a lot of friends tell me that they could never quit Spotify because they listen to too much music and the investment to replace that would be way more than simply paying for Spotify does. If this is your mindset I’d invite you to consider if you need to be listening to that much music in the first place. I’ve found that when it comes to music less is actually more.

If you are ready to quit music streaming and to build your own music library start small and build slow. There are two reasons for this. First it is cheaper that way, you don’t want to drain your wallet on music so your initial investment into your music library should only be about thirty bucks this should last you a month or two. After that feel free to pick up some more songs every once in a while, as long as you’re spending less money per month than you were on Spotify you’re doing just fine. The second reason to start small and build slow is that it allows you to form a deeper connection with your music library; I lack the words to describe to you how great that is.

To do this carefully pick out your favorite thirty songs and buy them. If you aren’t ready to make the jump away from Spotify then put your thirty favorite songs into a playlist and see how long it takes for you to need more music, challenge yourself to live off of your thirty favorite songs for a week, then a month. If you can manage that then you can cut the chord from Spotify.

Now I realize that in the context of old iPod advertisements with lines like, “Thousands of songs in your pocket” and of course the, “Millions of songs anytime anywhere” that streaming gives you thirty songs is not a lot. But in reality thirty songs is between two and three hours of music and that’s plenty. These aren’t just any random thirty songs, these are your thirty favorite songs, songs you don’t mind having on repeat.

But you need to be careful when selecting these songs, they can’t just be ones you like they have to be ones that keep you in a good mood. Remember music has an incredible power over your emotions and mental state. You might love Taylor Swift but you shouldn’t buy any of her breakup songs because they can throw you into a bad mental state. It is okay to listen to those songs every once in a while, but only when you deliberately seek them out, having a song like that sitting in a playlist where it could come on and change your mood at a random time is incredibly dangerous.

On another note, you might have a great gym playlist that gives you the motivation that you need to push through the pain of your workout. I think it is a great idea to take advantage of music’s power to change your mental state like that. But you should never listen to that playlist, or any of those songs, outside of the gym. You need that push that music will give you when you are struggling through your last set; you don’t need it when you are stuck in traffic trying to get home after a long day at work.

As you become more mindful of the music you listen to you will find that a lot of the music you listen to now doesn’t really fit into your life, that is a good thing, there is a lot of music that shouldn’t be a part of your life. I don’t listen to a majority of the music that I used to listen to, and still like, because I don’t like the way it could make me feel at the wrong time.

Ultimately you should be in control of all the media you consume. I was working on a broader article on that topic when I decided focusing in on music would probably be more helpful for you. Quitting Spotify may have been the best decision I made all year. At the time I did it just to save money, and it has saved me money. Lately I’ve been buying songs at a rate of about one per week, the average price of a song is one dollar, which brings me to spend about $52 per year on music, a lot less than the $144 a year’s worth of Spotify’s standard subscription costs and still less than the $72 a year that the student plan costs. (Those are $12 and $6 a month now, not the $10 or $5 you probably thought you were paying.)

But after experiencing what it is like to have my own personal library I could care less about the money. I’m a lot more calm now that I’m in control of my music. I feel more connected to someone when I learn they enjoy the music I carefully selected for myself. And my music is now art that I enjoy listening to rather than just noise I put on in the background. I actually look forward to putting it on in the car when I drive.

I invite you to ditch music streaming and start curating your own music library. If you aren’t ready to make that jump yet then try my 30 song challenge; see how long you can go on your thirty favorite songs, you’ll be surprised by how far they will take you. If you need a separate playlist for the gym or something that’s fine, just limit it to ten songs that you only listen to there.

Be more mindful about the music you listen to. Music has the power to change your life, it already is changing your life. Don’t listen to the wrong music, the best way for you to prevent yourself from doing that is removing your access to it. Ditch your music streaming service, start buying your own music, and enjoy the art again.

The folowing addendum is not found in the Substack version of this post which has a different target audience than this website.

I realize that many of you in my regular audience probably weren’t Spotify users in the first place, I congratulate you for that. You’ve probably realized that you aren’t the target audience for this particular post but you have friends who are, at an appropriate time do them and me a favor and share the Substack version of this post with them. It is better optimized to be read on their smartphone and less likely to be blocked by their work wifi.

Some of you may have had the thought while (or even before) reading this that piracy would be a good alternative to both music streaming and buying music. It is not. Firstly it is illegal and it is my responsibility as an internet personality to tell you not to do illegal things, but it also takes away the benefits of buying the music. And I’m not talking about whatever rights your digital license will give you. The biggest benefit of buying music (or anything really) is that the fact you have to pay for it forces you to consider if that song you are looking at is really worth spending your money on, if it isn’t then you shouldn’t be listening to it.

Piracy robs you of that opportunity to be mindful about what you listen to just like music streaming does. Sure piracy can get you a music library independent from big tech music streaming services but that is not the point of this whole thing. The point is for you to have your own specially curated music library of which you enjoy every piece. When people pirate things they have a tendency to collect more than they consume which puts you into the same sort of meaningless music selection that Spotify would give you. Your goal in quitting music streaming is not to avoid big tech, it is to avoid bad music.

In his introduction to the book Ramaswamy lays out his reasoning for writing the book. He says the left has a clear unified vision that dictates their worldview and policy positions, “The believe our relationships to one another are defined by power dynamics. … The old left defined power based on wealth; the new left defines power based on race, gender, and sexuality. The role of government is to rectify these injustices.” (page 1)

The right doesn’t have the same sort of vision. Ramaswamy states, “As conservatives, we know we’re against that. We’re anti-woke. We’re anti-globalist. We’re anti-big government. We know what we stand against. But what do we stand for?” (page 1) Ramaswamy answers this question by saying, “We stand for truth.” (page 2) and he dives into ten truths that he believes the America First movement should emphasize:

• God is Real
• The Climate Change Agenda is a Hoax
• An Open Border is Not a Border
• There Are Two Genders
• There Are Three Branches of U.S. Government, not Four
• The Nuclear Family Is the Greatest form of Governance Known to Mankind
• Reverse Racism is Racism
• Nationalism Isn’t a Bad Word
• Facts Are Not Conspiracies
• The U.S. Constitution Is the Strongest Guarantor of Freedom in History

If you are familiar with Ramaswamy’s presidential campaign these truths should sound familiar to you, they were the focus of it. I believe Vivek became popular largely because he was not afraid to focus on these truths, I also believe his focus on these truths is also why he is still relevant unlike all of the other Republican candidates who lost to Trump.

It is refreshing to see someone proclaim these truths in a world where the truth is unpopular. Take the truth that there are two genders and the related truth that one cannot change their gender, a transgender individual was just elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. Some of the Republican women elected to the House are taking a stand to say that that man should not be allowed in the women’s bathroom just because he puts on a dress. Republican House leadership, however, seem too cowardly to stand up and protect the women of the House despite the fact that they come from the political party that is supposedly oppressing transgenders (by protecting women).

None of the truths Ramaswamy talks about are revolutionary, they are just unpopular in our modern day despite everyone knowing they are true. Ramaswamy identifies a pattern that leads people away from the truth:

Something bad exists in the world; the left then uses that “bad thing” to deny the existence of something else that is true; and if you call them out for it, you risk being tarred with punitive labels. This has the effect of systematically stifling dissent. Over time, that results in the public acceptance of certain falsehoods over the truth.

The pattern is ubiquitous. It’s a fact that there is a lot of suffering in the world; the nihilist left uses that fact as a basis to deny the existence of God. I’s a fact that racism exists; the woke left uses it to deny the existence of equality of opportunity. I’s a fact that a very small number of people suffer from a mental health condition called gender dysphoria; the sex-obsessed left uses it to deny that there are only two genders. It’s a fact that global surface temperatures have tended to rise very slightly in recent years; the climate-obsessed left uses that to deny the value of fossil fuels. If you deny their narrative, they will label you a racist, a transphobe, or a climate denier. (page 159)

Of course I’m not saying that because the book goes over truths you already know you won’t learn anything. It is a bit hard to read a whole book without learning. Ramaswamy dedicates a chapter (about 20 pages) to each of the ten truths he emphasizes. His goal with each chapter is to, “arm you with the right arguments for friendly arguments at the dinner table.” (page 3)

One cool thing I learned reading this book was that I learned from this book was that the man who discovered The Big Bang, that is said to be the origin of the universe, was a Catholic priest, the Church at the time celebrated this discovery claiming that is proof of a Creator. The science community of today will point at The Big Bang as proof that there is not a God.

Another interesting part of the book was where Ramaswamy said the next president should appoint “an Accountability Czar” to comb through the countless government agencies to get rid of redundancies, unfair regulators, and other wastes of taxpayer dollars. This is neat because President Trump just gave this job to Ramaswamy, so that portion of the book was a bit of a sneak peak at what the Department of Government Efficiency will be doing.

In another part of the book he talks about the extraordinary lives America’s founders lived. He uses their example to inspire us to do better. Ramaswamy says, “We need to revive that special combination of curiosity and confidence. Yes, we want to be a country of people who tinker in their garages. We want people who write great essays in the evenings, while working as mechanics or business owners during the day. We should expect more of one another as citizens. We should expect more of ourselves.” (pages 192-193)

This book is worth a read. Do I think you need to go out of your way to read it? No, it’s not going to get a spot on my reading list there are better books out there. But this book is refreshing and inspiring because it proclaims and defends the truth, if you find yourself discouraged because you are surrounded by people who refuse to acknowledge these truths this book might be just what you need.

I shouldn’t have to tell you that you should be reading good books, I trust you already know the benefits of reading so I’m not going to waste time explaining that. What I will say is that you should also be able to recommend good books to others. There are a lot of gems hiding on dusty shelves that you might know of that others don’t that you have the power to uncover. Everyone should know that they should be reading good books but most people struggle to find those good books, creating a reading list is a great service to those who trust you because it helps them find good books. Sure someone could go on YouTube and search “top ten books” or whatever but a recommendation from someone they trust is much better for a person than watching some random productivity YouTuber talking into a camera explain why Meditations by Marcus Aurelius is so great.

Your reading list should be yours. I won’t be putting Meditations on my reading list because it seems to be on everyone else’s, I also haven’t read it so I’m not actually in a position to recommend it. 1984 is another great book that everyone says you should read, and even though I have read it and do think you should read it I’m not going to put it on my reading list either.

I feel like a lot of people struggle to get into reading because they feel like they need to be reading the books that everyone else says they should be reading. Sure every business guru is going to tell you to read How to Win Friends and Influence People but that doesn’t mean you’re going to enjoy that book. A person is much more likely to find success reading if they read a book that was recommended to them by a friend. We should be providing this service to our friends and creating a reading list is a great way to start.

The T.Rex Arms Book List is a great example of a reading list. In its current form it is about 12 pages long, highlights a few dozen books divided into multiple sections and each book has a paragraph giving us an idea of what the book is about and why we should read it. I hope one day I will have a reading list long enough to take up that much space and be divided into sections like that but I don’t think I’ve read enough books to have that extensive of a reading list right now. If you are reading this article the same day I publish it my reading list (which I intend to have live) will likely just be a draft and I might not have an explanation for all the books I have on there. (I’d rather have this article out sooner so you can start working on putting together your own reading lists than wait until mine is perfect).

Of the sections of the T.Rex Arms Book List the children’s book section might be the most important. It is hard to find good kids books these days, a lot of parents are reading their kids books that I remember coming out when I was a kid. There is nothing wrong with those books but it could be hard for parents who didn’t grow up with a healthy reading habit to find those older good books in a sea of newer low-quality books. It will probably be a while before I add a children’s section to my reading list since I don’t have kids but if you do have kids you’ll need to keep your eye out for good books for them to read since there seems to be a lot more bad ones out there.

The T.Rex Arms Book List is also constantly evolving, as should yours. Isaac Botkin (the main curator of the list) has mentioned that he should have put a version number on it so people could tell which list they have when he starts updating it. You should do something similar with yours. Part of the header of mine will include a “Last Edited” date. Once you have written up your reading list you should revisit it once every couple of months to see if there is anything you need to add or subtract.

And I do hope I’ve made it clear that I believe you should write your own reading list, especially if you have a website. I know a lot of you reading this were inspired like I was by Luke Smith to make your own website and claim your own internet property but Luke never told you what to do with that property. I’ve visited a lot of your sites and you’ve put forth the effort to set up a homepage and a few other things (that often look nicer than my website) but after doing that you can’t seem to answer the question “What’s next?” You have a website but nobody has a reason to visit it. Your reading list is what’s next. Take some time to put one together, start with just five books or so and expand from there. Once you have that reading list up there you have a useful reason to show your site to other people other than, “Hey, look at this cool thing I made,” and you will feel more accomplished.

But you don’t have to have a website to have a reading list. Type one up for yourself and save it as a PDF on your phone so that you can share it with others when the need arises. People will think you are a lot more interesting if they know you read and can recommend good books.

If for some reason you haven’t read enough books to be able to put together a recommended reading list you should fix that problem. Feel free to pick something off of my reading list or find something else out there to read that I haven’t read and if it’s any good let me know. I’d love to see what books you’d like me to read.

Why did I buy a nearly ten year old Macbook Air? It was the same reason I bought a nearly ten year old Thinkpad four years ago, and another smaller one two years later. I wanted a cheap, portable, and durable laptop. The 11” Macbook Air beats the Thinkpad in all of these categories.

And yes, I’m serious when I say I think old Macbook Airs are more durable than old Thinkpads. If you take a look around YouTube you’ll find a bunch of videos of people buying lots of used Macbook Airs that had been abused by public school 6th graders for way too long that somehow still work. They’ll have all sorts of dents and be bent out of shape but they will still work and even clean up to be a decent looking computer. When it comes to old Thinkpads there is a limit to how many plastic things can break before you have to search eBay for a parts machine to keep it together. The external battery for my T420 is held on with electrical tape and my X220 has never had a hard drive cover. Sure you could beat someone over the head with an old Thinkpad but do you really need an impact rated computer? Are you really that clumsy?

Price and portability are where the Macbook is more clearly the winner, you can get a complete working old Macbook Air for around $150 these days while a Thinkpad with a decent amount of RAM is going to set you back at least $200 after you’ve bought a new SSD and battery for it (they are unusable without those upgrades).

But the portability of the 11” Macbook Air is what sold me on it. It is nice to have a small computer that I can just throw in a backpack and forget about. I have probably only used it 10% of the time I’ve had it with me and that’s okay because it is tiny. Carrying around the big black Lenovo brick without using it would be a waste of space and energy. If I were to put a Thinkpad in my current EDC backpack there wouldn’t be room for much else. You can almost forget the Macbook Air is there.

But there are a few things that the Apple computer lacks which the Thinkpad has which 2020 me cared about but 2024 me has gotten over. First is repairability, right-to-repair advocates loved to point back to the classic Thinkpads because it was incredibly simple to access and replace all of the computer’s important parts, anyone could do it with a small phillips screwdriver. Macbooks were seen as the antithesis to the Thinkpad when it came to repairability. All of their components are locked behind an uninviting panel with proprietary pentalobe screws. But is that really such a big deal? Just buy a pentalobe screwdriver, they aren’t hard to find or expensive. I just popped my Macbook open to tighten the hinge and it wasn’t a big deal at all.

The Air was also one of the first computers to come with RAM that was soldered onto the motherboard so if the RAM fails it can’t be replaced. But have you ever actually had your RAM fail? I haven’t, and all the times I have heard of it failing it was due to an improper connection which is a non-issue with RAM that is soldered onto the board. Sure if you were to spill your drink on your RAM it might malfunction but you’d have bigger problems to deal with at that point.

The soldered RAM also means that it isn’t upgradeable, this is something 2020 me, and even 2018 me cared about, but did I really need to? I never upgraded the RAM on the two Thinkpads that I used most because when I bought them I deliberately looked for ones that had the most RAM they were capable of using. I did the same thing when I bought this old Macbook Air, upgradeability is a non-issue when you already have the maximum spec. The SSD on these old Airs can be upgraded to have more storage because those chips aren’t soldered on but the right-to-repair still like to complain about these since Apple used some proprietary connection for them rather than the standard NVME port. Back when these computers came out this was probably a much bigger deal, but these days you can buy an adapter for ten bucks. So while upgrading the SSD isn’t as convenient as it could be it isn’t really that much of a hassle. The battery is the only other thing on an old laptop you’d want to think about replacing and this generation of Macbook Air isn’t like newer Apple laptops where the battery is glued it, just pop off the back, unplug it, undo a few screws and you’ve got it out. Is it harder than doing it on an old Thinkpad? Yes. Is it really that big of a deal? No.

What else would the younger me have complained about? The software, I was a believer in open source software back then and I’ve already written an article on why I stopped caring about that so there is no point in repeating that. But I could put Linux on the thing if I want to. It is possible that by doing so I could squeeze a bit more performance out of the machine but I’m not convinced that would make a noticeable difference. Because Apple has complete control over the hardware their operating system runs on MacOS is fairly well optimized even for Apple’s older hardware. Also the only programs I use on that computer are an internet browser and a text editor. If I switched to Linux I’d end up using the exact same browser and text editor so I wouldn’t really be changing much.

The lack of ports on the Macbook is something else that sounds annoying. Thinkpad people love to brag about all the ports their computer has, but it isn’t 2005 anymore, they aren’t really necessary. None of the ports on my X220 worked and yet I still used the computer for over a year without a problem because I never actually needed them. Why stress about port selection if you don’t actually need them.

At the end of the day the only benefit Thinkpads have over Macbooks are in the looks department. Classic Thinkpads look way cooler than any laptop Apple has ever produced, but when it comes to practicality Apple has them beat. If you are looking for a small and cheap old laptop for some light computing the 11” Macbook Air from 2013-2015 is worth considering. Sure it isn’t going to run any heavy programs very will but don’t be delusional, a T420 won’t be all that great either. If you ask me the Macbook Air is the new Thinkpad.

I know that some of you, my regular readers, have blogs where you post some writing of your own. I’ve read some of your work and I know you’d benefit from reading this book because I’ve seen some of you make the kind of enormous persuasion mistakes that Adams points out in this book and corrects. (To be fair I’ve probably made similar mistakes in my years of doing this) Your writing will improve if you read and apply the teachings of this book.

The improper use of analogies is one of these mistakes. Analogies are not arguments and should not be used in debates. Adams writes, “Analogies are not logic, and they are not relevant facts. An analogy is literally just two things that remind you of each other on at least one dimension.” (page 58) Using an analogy in a debate will just derail the conversation, you’ll go from debating the issue to nitpicking the analogy and you’ll look like a fool. A person who has facts and logic won’t use an analogy, Adams tells us, “There’s a reason your plumber never describes the source of your leak with an analogy.” (page 58)

This of course doesn’t mean we should never use analogies, they are still a powerful tool when used properly. Analogies are great for explaining a new concept for the first time. Analogies take something a learner is unfamiliar with and compares them to something which they are familiar. A good analogy used at the right time will create a powerful anchor in a person’s brain and they will be reminded of that analogy often as they learn more about whatever topic you are teaching. Donald Trump is often compared to Hitler, for people familiar with Trump this analogy is ridiculous, but someone whose first introduction to Trump was the Hitler analogy (or something similar) that comparison is stuck deep in their brain.

Speaking of Trump, the book uses his 2016 campaign as a kind of case study into the art of persuasion. Adams was one of the first people to predict that Trump would win the election because he saw Trump’s amazing persuasion skill. He tells us that Trump is a master persuader, possibly the best one alive. Adams claims that Trump won because he is so good at persuasion which is much more important than whatever policies Trump was pushing. Adams even says that if Trump had run as a Democrat with all of Bernie Sanders’ policies he still would have won the election.

So naturally the book talks about Trump quite a bit, but only as it pertains to his persuasion skill. The book doesn’t try to convince you of Trump’s policies and it doesn’t try to make you vote for him. Adams himself disagrees with most of Trump’s positions and has never claimed to be politically conservative. The book only analyzes Trump’s persuasion techniques, his major persuasion wins and his major persuasion losses up to early 2017 when Adams wrote the book. Trump is of course still in the news but I’d say most if not all of the book has aged quite well.

Trump’s nicknames were a huge part of his campaign and a great example of Trump’s persusasive power. Jeb Bush’s campaign died the moment Trump started calling him Low-Energy Jeb it was a linguistic kill shot and amazing to watch. As the election season went on Trump continued giving his opponents nicknames like this Lil Marco, Lyin’ Ted and of course Crooked Hillary.

Scott Adams tells us there were two main components to the effectiveness of these insults. Understanding why these nicknames worked so well has helped me see the genius in some of Trumps more recent ones like Sleepy Joe and Ron DeSanctimonious. I wasn’t a big fan of either of these when Trump first started using them but now I see they are perfect.

First the insults were fresh. The adjectives he used were unusual in politics. Jeb Bush was likely the first and last politician ever to be described as “low-energy.” Plenty of politicians have been accused of lying but Trump didn’t call Ted Cruz “lying Ted” he insisted it was “lyin’ Ted” freshening the word up. If you want your ideas to stick describe them in a unique way.

The other thing that made the nicknames so effective was that they all had a visual component to them. Jeb Bush looked tired. Marco Rubio is small compared to Trump. Ted Cruz looks a bit shifty. And Hillary Clinton doesn’t walk straight. Adams tells us that visual persuasion is among the most effective forms of it. If you want to up your persuasion game use visual words so that people can picture your arguments, but don’t be so descriptive as to paint the picture for them. The border wall was another great use of visual persuasion, everyone can picture a giant wall and Trump never described it in a lot of detail which let people form their own image of it.

The wall was also an example of exaggeration, annother one of Trump’s persuasion techniques. Exaggeration plays into what Adams calls the Intentional Wrongness Play, he lays it out like this:

1. Make a claim that is directionally accurate but has a big exaggeration or factual error in it.

2. Wait for people to notice the exaggeration or error and spend endless hours talking about how wrong it is.

3. When you dedicate focus and energy to an idea, you remember it. And the things that have the most mental impact on you will irrationally seem as thought they are high in priority, even if they are not. That’s persuasion.

Trump knew that building a literal wall across the entire US-Mexico border was ridiculous but that didn’t stop him from insisting the wall needed built. By doing this he caused people to talk and think about the border crisis a lot more than they otherwise would have and that made them realize how important that issue was. By doing this Trump positioned himself as the person most serious about fixing the problem.

Trump didn’t actually plan on building the wall as most people pictured it, he explained his more realistic plan (the one he partially executed) a few times. The wall was simply a persuasion tool. Remember facts don’t matter, persuasion is more important. In the first paragraph of this article I made the claim that all communication is persuasion, this isn’t factual, there isn’t much persuasion involved when you are telling someone church starts at ten. But saying “most communication is persuasion” is a lot less persuasive than saying “all communication is persuasion.” If you want to be persuasive strive for directional accuracy rather than factual accuracy. Once you have convinced people you can start ironing out the facts, but until then stay out of the weeds. Facts don’t matter.

Of course people challenging your position will always try to pull you down into the weeds, Adams proposes what he calls The High-Ground Maneuver to counter this. He defines this as, “a persuasion method that involves elevating a debate from the details on which people disagree to a higher concept on which everyone agrees.” (page 28) This maneuver is is something that you don’t see very often because very few people are good enough at persuasion to use it. Learning this trick will set you apart from most people.

Adams used an example from Steve Jobs to highlight The High-Ground Maneuver. The iPhone 4 had an issue where it would drop calls when held in a certain way and at a press conference addressing the subject rather than apologizing for the failure Jobs said, “We’re not perfect. Phones are not perfect. We all know that. But we want to make our users happy.” Most CEOs would have apologized in this situation making them look weak and their products inferior. Jobs used The High-Ground Maneuver to shift the focus away from the iPhone and highlight the fact that there is no perfect phone but they are trying to get there.

Often times opportunities to use The High-Ground Maneuver are times like this where an apology is expected. Trump’s Rosie O’Donnell moment was one of these, but not all opportunities look like that.

Sometimes an opportunity for The High-Ground Maneuver would be one where most people would call their opponent a hypocrite. People think calling out hypocrisy is good persuasion but it’s not. Adams explains that it, “can never be terribly persuasive to the viewer. The problem is it frames both parties as naughty children. There are no winners in that framing.” (page 101)

Adams gives us a hypothetical scenario with pundit 1 and pundit 2 from different political parties debating an issue. If pundit 1 says pundit 2’s party didn’t do a very good job managing an issue and pundit 2 responds by saying pundit 1’s party didn’t do a good job either (calling pundit 1 a hypocrite) then both pundit 1 and 2 look weak and whiny. An observer wouldn’t be able to tell which was better.

If pundit 2 had instead said something along the lines of, “Yes, we’ve failed in the past but we’ve learned from our mistakes and know how to handle the problem better,” pundit 2 would look strong compared to pundit 1. This is the power of The High-Ground Maneuver. Don’t waste time calling out hypocrisy.

There are of course many other scenarios where The High-Ground Maneuver could be employed and many other persuasion tactics that Adams gets into here but I don’t have time to get into all of those, and that wouldn’t be fair to you either. You should buy this book and read it. The book is written in a way that it is entertaining and easy to read. Of course it isn’t the best book on persuasion out there but it might be the best persuasion book for someone who has never read a persuasion book.

You should be reading books about persuasion. Remember all communication is persuasion, you need to get better at it.

In fact the guy in the video pushes them as “the ultimate learning tool.” Writing something is akin to teaching something and figuring out how to teach something is the best way to learn it. In order to sound smart the video guy brought up whatever dead semi-famous smart guy came up with the idea that teaching was the best way to learn but I didn’t need an appeal to authority to be convinced of that idea, it is how I’ve always learned and my most valuable motivation for keeping this blog going.

But again, I can’t write a two thousand word article about everything. For example, the other day I was watching Tucker Carlson interview Mike Rowe and Rowe brought up an interesting talking point that touches on a topic I’ve been wanting to revisit for a while. I considered writing a full article about it but that one quote didn’t have enough for me to milk and I didn’t have anything else I could really tie into it. So I gave up on that article and I hoped I wouldn’t forget about that quote when I’d need it but I knew I probably would because I’ve forgotten plenty of similar things in the past. My blog alone is only an effective learning tool for big things, small bits of knowledge can’t really be captured here.

The small things are what mini essays are for, luckily I hadn’t forgotten about my Mike Rowe quote before I learned about them so I wrote a mini essay about it. Here is the first paragraph:

I was watching a video where Tucker Carlson was interviewing Mike Rowe where Mike Rowe talked brought up something Marco Rubio said in one of the 2016 presidential debates. Rubio said something along the lines of, “What we need in this country is fewer philosophers and more welders.” To many people this would fall in line with the stuff Mike Rowe advocates for, but Rowe corrects those people saying, “What our country needs are more welders who can talk intellegently about Nietzsche . . . and we need more philosophers who can run an even bead.”

I went on and wrote a couple more paragraphs with my thoughts and now that quote and my thoughts on it are out of my head, I don’t have to stress about trying to keep them there anymore.

The YouTube guy explained that mini essays are a great personal note taking and reference tool. Writing about something forces you to try to understand it and once you have a collection of mini essays on a similar topic it doesn’t take too much effort to put them all together into a longer essay, article, or even book chapter. With some minor adjustment I could easily paste the example I have above into another piece of writing and you’d have no idea I did that. That thing took me like ten minutes to write and with just a few more of those I could quite quickly put together a quality article that would have taken me over three hours in the past.

It would really be beneficial for writing long book reviews like one I just published on Abigail Shrier’s Bad Theryapy. That thing probably took me a solid eight to twelve hours to write because there was a lot of stuff I wanted to cover but I hadn’t taken any notes as I read the book so I had to spend time digging through it to find the stuff I needed. And at the end I still didn’t cover everything that I really wanted to because I didn’t have it all laid out in front of me beforehand. If I had twenty mini essays my eight to twelve hours of writing could easily have been cut down to two or three. (Of course ignoring the time spent writing the mini essays)

But once we have a collection of mini essays where do we store them? Going back to my Mike Rowe quote example it is great that I’ve written about it but if I fill a directory with a hundred more files that quote is just going to get lost again and the effort put into writing about it would have been wasted. The YouTube guy tells us to use some note keeping software to organize everything, he uses a piece of software called Obsidian and I plan on giving it a try (there is an open-source alternative, but the mobile app for that alternative doesn’t look too great and a good mobile app is a priority for my current lifestyle and use case).

At its core, Obsidian is just a fancy way to store and organize text files and it allows them to be easily linked together. It is basically an IDE optimized for taking notes instead of writing software, it even has extensions. Nothing is locked away in some weird server and nothing is stored in a proprietary file format that a normal text editor couldn’t open. It is a powerful tool that I’ll have to figure out how to use properly.

In the past I wouldn’t have been so open to a piece of software like Obsidian, but I haven’t had an appropriate use case for it until now. I had some time to see how other people liked it and I came across one guy who advocated against using something as powerful as Obsidian because it was too complex, he argued that people should use whatever default notes app was on their phone instead. His claim intrigued me because I don’t believe in learning new software if I don’t have to but as I watched his video I realized to-do list and simple reminders were the extent of what he used his notes app for. Definitely not something that warrants complex software but also not what I needed.

This guy learned a lesson that a lot of software developers sometimes struggle to remember: Don’t use a piece of software unless you have an actual reason to. A lot of wannabe entrepreneurs have a similar lesson to learn: Don’t create a product unless you know people will actually buy it.

Anyways I’m starting to get off track. Mini essays are great, I’m going to start writing more of them and I think you should start writing them too. Organizing them will be a challenge but it isn’t a challenge that existing software can’t solve. This is a great use case for something like Obsidian but I have yet to even install it on my computer so I’m not the best spokesperson for it but I can see a future where I do almost all my writing in Obsidian like some weird people do everything in Emacs.

Keep hold of the things that you learn and the ideas you have. Write about them and share when the time is right.

The main idea of the book is that therapy, along with therapy inspired teaching and parenting practices, is bad for kids. But before I go on, it is important to point out that Shrier begins her book with a disclaimer which I will repeat in my own words. There are a number of obvious but rare exceptions to the claim that therapy is bad for kids. When Shrier says therapy is bad for kids she is not talking about the foster kid who was abused by her birth parents every day for five years, that poor girl needs therapy (from an actual therapist and nobody else). When Shrier says therapy is bad for kids she is talking about the millions of kids who have been convinced that they have severe social anxiety when the truth is they are just normal awkward teenagers, she is talking about the kids who are afraid to get a B on a math test, and she is talking about the kids who initially struggle to behave when they go into first grade because they aren’t used to having to sit quietly for that long. Therapists love treating these normal kids, they aren’t violent or crazy and their parents pay the bills; it is easy money for them and an absolute disaster for children and parents.

Iatrogenesis, Shrier explains, is the idea that medical treatment can result in harm. Before doing any sort of operation doctors are legally required to inform their patient of all the known risks of said treatments. This is not only important for the patient but it is an important practice for the doctor so they remember to be careful with what they are doing, no doctor wants to harm their patient. In the past few months I’ve had doctors inform me of these risks and the risks they mention vary from major ones to ones as simple as an infection at the site of an injection (which isn’t that big of a deal). Drug commercials list their side effects for this same reason. Therapists almost never do this with their clients, either they aren’t required to, or the mental health care industry hasn’t been interested in the potential iatrogenic effects of their treatment. I suspect most therapists don’t understand that their treatment has the potential to harm and have no idea how to recognize that harm when it happens.

Rumination is “one of the most significant iatrogenic risks of therapy,” it is, “a style of thinking characterized by brooding on past injuries and personal problems.” My simple definition for it is chronic venting. Shrier points us to Leif Kennair, an expert in treating things like anxiety, depression, and OCD, who says, “rumination is the major predictor for depression.” (emphasis in original text) Many therapy sessions led by bad therapists are ones where the therapist asks their client to talk about their personal problems and injuries, in other words they are encouraging their patients to ruminate. Therapists should not be encouraging behaviors known to promote depression.

But therapists aren’t the only ones doing it. In one part of the book Shrier expresses the frustrations of Sarah, a mother she met who had adopted some foster kids who came from parents who abused them over a long period of time (the type of kids who benefit from therapy). The kids’ therapist was making good progress in helping the kids move on from their painful past, but all that work was constantly being undone as the kids went to school and their teachers asked them to “talk about their trauma.”

On paper this sounds like a good idea. If a teacher understands the trauma of her students she could, theoretically, know how to better love and serve her students. And if students shared their trauma with the class the class could, supposedly, develop a greater sense of community and unity. But in reality teachers are not trained therapists, they are not equipped to deal with serious trauma like the stuff Sara’s adopted kids endured. And kids are cruel, one of Sarah’s kids was forced to eat kitty litter from the box before being liberated from her abusive parents, if that sort of information were to leak to a third grade class Sarah’s daughter could be given the nickname “Kitty litter girl” which would force the poor girl to relive that terrible moment of her life every single day. Sarah told Shrier, “by trying to do the right thing, [teachers] actually hurt my kid.” Even if the true extent of trauma Sarah’s adopted kids have endured never leaks to other kids in the class, how included or heard do you think they’ll feel when they learn that the worst thing that most of their classmates have gone through is no worse than a simple bike accident?

What other things do teachers and others ask kids (and adults) that isn’t helpful? The simple question, “How are you feeling?” (which is how most people interpret, “How are you?”, “How are you doing?” and, “How’s it going?”) is one of the worst things you could ask a person. German psychiatry professor Michael Linden taught Shrier:

Happiness is actually a very rare emotion, statistically speaking. Only a tiny percentage [or our day is] spent in a state we would call “happy.” Most of the time we are simply “okay” or “fine,” trying to ignore some minor discomfort: feeling a little tired, run down, upset, stressed out, irritated, allergic, or in pain.

At least 95% of the time when we ask someone how they’re doing, we are asking them either to lie about how they are actually doing or to admit that they aren’t happy in that moment. Neither of those things are good for a person, so we need to get out of the habit of asking those questions. This can be hard for a lot of us. I told a friend that these questions were bad to ask people and she told me she already knew and had been making an effort to avoid asking them to people; I resisted the urge to tell her that no more than five minutes before our conversation I watched her ask multiple people, “How are you doing mentally?” an even worse version of “How are you feeling?” This is a hard habit for people to break.

Shrier tells us that thousands of schoolteachers (from how she characterized it mostly elementary schoolteachers) start out class by asking students some variation of, “How are you feeling?” They all have their own unique ways of asking the question, they’ll often assign different colors or something to different points on the happy/sad scale for the kids to communicate if they are having a good day, a bad day, or a mediocre day. Using Linden’s logic we see that none of the honest kids will report they are having a good day and all of the kids who do report they are having a good day will be lying. Over time kids will be incentivized to lie and report they are having a good day, because they will get tired of being asked why they aren’t. My usual answer to the question, “How are you?” (and variations of it) is, “Alright.” People who don’t know me very well will then ask the follow-up question, “Why just alright?” which annoys me to no end. “Alright” is not a negative word, it literally means, “all is right,” but when “good” is the only acceptable answer to the question “How are you doing?” then people learn to lie to avoid further questions, especially when they are a kid being asked those questions by their teacher in front of the entire class.

Now we’ve spent enough time criticizing teachers playing “amateur therapist,” lets move on to school administrators who, Shrier tells us, often hand out mental health surveys that include questions which they probably shouldn’t be legally allowed to ask, or at least survey writers should be smart enough not to ask. For example, millions of young teenage girls insecure about their appearance have been given a survey, by their school administrators, that has a questions that sound like this, “Have you ever purposely gone a long period of time without eating in an attempt to loose weight?” or, “Have you ever purposely overdosed on laxatives in an attempt to loose weight?” Remember, a good survey is written to present questions from a neutral point of view, meaning these bad ideas aren’t presented as bad ideas, they are simply ideas being planted into our daughters’ heads, nowhere are they told not to do these things.

And sadly it gets much much worse. In the 80s and 90s the US government put out their “Just Say No” campaign as a part of its war on drugs. This campaign has earned a lot of modern criticism because it taught kids back then all the common street names for drugs, what drugs look like, where to find drugs, what drugs do, and essentially told them everything they needed to know to get their hands on drugs but told them to “just say no.” It had good intentions but incredibly poor execution. Nowadays schools aren’t doing that, instead, according to Shrier, they give students surveys which ask questions that force kids to consider whether or not their parents would care if they did drugs, and other questions that cause students to consider whether or not their parents actually care about them. If the “Just Say No” campaign of the 80s and 90s gave kids a roadmap to drugs, the surveys of today are giving them an invitation to try them.

And it gets even worse than drugs. Shrier has a whole chapter that shows us dozens of terrible questions given to students, it is the most poorly written chapter in the book, but, luckily for Shrier, good writing is not necessary for us to see how bad these questions are as they speak for themselves. Here is a question Shrier found that was given to middle school children in Delaware:

Sometimes people feel so depressed about the future that they may consider attempting suicide or killing themselves. Have you ever seriously thought about killing yourself?

This is not an appropriate question to ask anyone, let alone a fourteen year old child from the most mentally ill generation in history. The question presents suicide a logical and acceptable solution for depression. This is clearly unacceptable.

To quickly recap the things from the book I’ve touched on so far, we have therapists who convince kids they are depressed, teachers who amplify that depression, school administrators (often required by clueless state legislatures) giving kids surveys that present suicide as a cure for depression, and we wonder why kids are killing themselves.

But let’s take a step back now. Kids are distressed these days and adults recognize that fact but where is this distress coming from? According to Shrier, therapists would say, “Young people simply face more formidable challenges than did their predecessors. Therapists typically point to three: smartphones, COVID-19 lockdowns, and climate change.” Let’s work through these backwards.

Climate change anxiety is not a thing. Shrier interviewed a phych nurse named Beth who has spent over a decade working with college students in a mental health clinic. She asked Beth how many of her patients cited things like climate change or systemic racism as the source of their anxiety. Beth’s answer: None. Shrier tells us kids don’t stress about big social and political issues, if they say do it is because an adult encouraged it and they are just going along to make the adult happy. According to Beth, the things that actually stress students out are just normal school things and normal social mishaps, definitely nothing more formidable than their predecessors faced.

The COVID lockdowns and their aftermath, however, are a more unique challenge of our day. I don’t think I need to waste your time explaining why they were bad, Shrier didn’t waste that time either. But she did point out that mental health experts made no effort to stop the lockdowns or even denounce them despite the millions of parents and others who clearly saw that they were a problem from the beginning.

Then of course smartphones are a big cause of mental health problems in young people. One could probably write an entire book investigating that fact. So the simple solution would be to take the phones away right? Well parents are too scared to do it, and schools aren’t allowed to do it anymore. What do the therapists say? Shrier tells us, “Therapists typically discourage parents ever from taking away a teen’s smartphone, on the grounds that doing so will only sabotage the parent-child relationship.” So phones are a big problem but we’re not allowed to get rid of the problem, that sure makes a lot of sense.

So what solutions do the therapists provide? Shrier gives us a bunch and I’ll talk about a couple.

Drugs of course are a big one. Israeli clinical psychologist Yaakov Ophir advised countless parents that they should put their children on Ritalin to deal with their ADHD, until his four-year-old son was the patient. Once it was proposed that his son start taking Ritalin Ophir decided that he needed to do some research on the topic before proceeding. After his research Ophir proclaimed “ADHD is not an illness and Ritalin is not a cure” publishing an article in an Israeli newspaper and later a book with that title. Those are two things I plan to read at some point in the future.

Ophir explained to Shrier, “A real disorder interferes with the ability to lead a normal life.” ADHD doesn’t do that, but severe depression can, so can severe anxiety; are those feelings that we should medicate away? Probably not to the extent that we are. Depression and anxiety are emotions that serve a purpose in our lives. Shrier talked to University of Virginia psychiatrist Andy Thomson who told her a story of a patient who wanted to lower the dosage of the antidepressant she was taking. Thomson asked the patient if the drugs were working and she responded saying, “Yes, they’re working great. I feel so much better. But I’m still married to the same alcoholic son of a bitch. It’s just now he’s tolerable.” We shouldn’t completely mask feelings that are trying to warn us of things.

The drugs obviously do something, but they’re often not the best solution. My favorite few pages of the book are the ones where Shrier explains the smile she saw on Yaakov Ophir’s face as he would describe the funny things his ADHD son would do, the kind of behaviors that Ritalin would have erased. Shrier didn’t see that type of joy when she would talk to other parents about their drugged ADHD suffering kids.

Of course Ophir couldn’t raise his kid as easily as he would a normal kid. One thing that he does to help his son figure out how to deal with his ADHD is make sure his life has structure, rules, and responsibilities. This is the opposite of what many therapists would suggest for a kid suffering from some sort of mental health problem, they constantly tell parents and teachers to lower their expectations to help their kids succeed.

Nowadays kids are being sent to school carrying doctors notes that aren’t for just excusing an absence but now they exist to excuse a student from due dates and time limits on tests. I feel bad for the teachers who are being forced to play along with this nonsense, if an assignment can be turned in at any time then a teacher has to be ready to grade anything at any time which makes grading more complicated and time consuming.

But of course it is the kids we are focused on here. It sounds compassionate to push back a due date or take chores away from a kid who is stressed about them, but when we do that it tells the kid that they aren’t good enough. When they fail it isn’t telling them to try again and they’ll do better next time, the message is, “I guess you can’t do that,” which is the opposite of empowerment.

Kids, especially boys, thrive when they are given high expectations. Shrier points us to psychologist Rob Henderson who writes:

People think that if a young guy comes from a disorderly or deprived environment, he should be held to low standards. This is misguided. He should be held to high standards. Otherwise, he will sink to the level of his environment.

Henderson also writes, “young men will only do what’s expected of them,” so by taking away expectations like chores and homework we are depriving them of opportunities to succeed, grow, and gain the confidence they lack which is what lands them in a therapist’s office in the first place.

But what is causing parents to listen to the therapists? It is their fear of causing childhood trauma, but that scam requires a history lesson.

In the 1990s the psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk popularized a theory which claimed that traumatic experiences cause our body all sorts of trouble down the line that can’t be cured. Shrier paraphrased his 1994 paper saying, “The ‘memory’ of ‘trauma’ … is ‘encoded in the viscera, in heartbreaking and gut-wrenching emotions, in autoimmune disorders and skeletal/muscular problems.’ Traumatic memory can be stored anywhere.” That traumatic memory would then haunt a person for the rest of their life and seemingly any problem that a person has could be blamed on their past trauma. Van der Kolk called these debilitating traumatic experiences “repressed memories.”

The problem with the repressed memory theory was that it had no scientific evidence, it was completely bogus. Shrier quotes Harvard professor Richard McNally who said the theory was, “arguably the most serious catastrophe to strike the mental health field since the lobotomy era,” because it led to terrible treatments and outcomes. By the 2000s the scientific community thought they had undone the damage the repressed memory theory caused,they got the public to stop believing it and therapists to stop treating it. But in the last ten years the repressed memory theory is back with a new name, childhood trauma.

Shrier clearly teaches us that childhood trauma is the same dis-proven theory pushed out by the same controversial van der Kolk. Except the rebrand now preys on the gentle loving nature of inexperienced young mothers giving them more stress than they should have. I’ve heard people claim that something as simple as letting a baby cry themself to sleep is enough to cause debilitating childhood trauma, there is no scientific evidence for this. There were probably plenty of times when you were left to cry yourself to sleep because your mom had to do things like take care of other kids, or shower, or maybe your cries just failed to wake her up from her much needed sleep.

The fear of childhood trauma is one of the primary motivations behind the “gentle parenting” trend, which Shrier argues is bad for kids and bad for parents. She dedicates the longest chapter in the book to this argument. Gentle parents try hard to remove all sorts of discomfort and unpleasantness from their kids’ lives. Shrier writes, “The environment they curate is so frictionless, it offers the child no preparation for the normal chaos of the world.”

On top of that gentle parents end up letting their kids become the head of the house in many ways. If their three-year-old wants mac-and-cheese the parent makes mac-and-cheese and if the kid decided they want chicken nuggets the moment the mac-and-cheese was presented to them the gentle parent would take the mac-and-cheese away and throw some chicken nuggets in the oven and hope their kid doesn’t loose interest by the time they are done. These parents miss out on an opportunity to teach their kid an important lesson and instead teach them that the world revolves around them.

Over time, these kids become incapable of receiving discipline because their parents are afraid to give it. When the parent finally becomes fed up with their kid and attempts minor discipline they get hit with a manipulative line like the one (unqualified) parenting book author Keith Gessen got from his pre-school son, “You’re a bad dada and I’m never going to listen to you again!”

Gentle parenting is bad for society too. When these kids reach school they terrorize their teachers because they have never been forced to behave. Then when they go out in public they have no consideration for others around them. Shrier shared an experience she had sitting in front of a young family on a plane. At one point during the flight their little girl let out a loud scream. Her gentle father calmly explained to her that everything was okay trying to comfort her, her gentle father did not do what he should have done which was telling the girl that screaming on a plane is wrong because there are 100 other people on the plane who don’t want to hear her scream. Shrier tells parents they need to be authoritative, “loving and rule based,” it is okay for parents to have a bit of “give-and-take” with their kids but parents need to be willing to draw a hard line that is not to be crossed.

Shrier of course talks about a lot more things that will help parents. The book isn’t a parenting book but it is targeted at parents. She closes her book with a message to parents and I feel that it is appropriate to close my review with that message as well:

Remove …: the technology, the hovering, the monitoring, the constant doubt. The diagnosing of ordinary behaviors as pathological. The psychiatric medications you aren’t convinced your child needs. The expert evaluations. Banish from their lives everyone with the tendency to treat your children as disordered.

You don’t need them. You never needed them. And your kids are almost certainly better off without them.

Having kids is the best, most worthy thing you could possibly do. Raise them well. You’re the only one who can.

Obviously there was more in this book than I could have possibly covered here, I wish I could have gone over it all but that would be a waste of my time and yours. I highly encourage everyone to buy and read this book, it will help you guide the rising generations out of the rut they are in and enable them to succeed in our wonderful world.

That being said, there was probably a point in time where I said I’d post book reviews here and I’ve decided to start doing that, mostly for my benefit because I want to get better at remembering stuff from the books I read and writing about them seems like a great way to do that. I’m not really sure if “review” is the right word for whatever I’m about to write, but here is my review of Scott Adams’ book Looserthink: How Untrained Brains are Ruining America. Will I be writing more of these? I hope so, but I’m not making any promises.

Despite making up the word “Loserthink,” Scott Adams doesn’t do the greatest job of giving it a clear definition. I guess I don’t blame him because I can’t seem to do that either. Loserthink is basically unproductive thinking or reasoning patterns, they are the sort of arguments that make smart people look dumb. Adams gives the common idea that history repeats itself as an example of loserthink. Loserthink is prevalent because people are not trained how to think. Artists, engineers, and economists all think differently from each other, some of their thought patterns are worth emulating and others are loserthink. The majority of the chapters in this book are titled thing like, “Thinking Like an Artist,” “Thinking Like an Engineer,” and “Thinking like an Economist,” and because Adams has had experience either working as or alongside many of these professions he spends time teaching us the great ways these people think along with their loserthink. I’ll explain a few of the interesting points that stuck out to me, I’m sure that if you read the book different points would stick out to you.

“Artistic Integrity” is loserthink, at least if you have any interest in making money from your art. Scott Adams is most well known for creating the Dilbert comic strip. Dilbert was popular because it focused on workplace annoyances, Elon Musk once wrote a memo to all Tesla employees that read “If following a ‘company rule’ is obviously ridiculous in a particular situation, such that it would make for a great Dilbert cartoon, then the rule should change.” That’s how famous Dilbert is. But Dilbert didn’t start out that way. At first Dilbert comics included all sorts of things that Adams found funny but during the first year of Dilbert Adams was getting a bunch of fanmail from people telling him that the strips that had Dilbert at work were their favorite, so, understanding good entrepreneurship, Adams shifted Dilbert to be a workplace annoyance focused comic strip.

Adams explained that if he had stuck with the idea of artistic integrity and refused to make this shift Dilbert would not have been as successful as it was. Adams also explained that a lot of artists come to him for advice for success and he almost always tells them that they have to make what the market wants rather than the stuff the artist wants to make. Almost every artist he gave that advice to refused to follow it because of muh artistic integrity and their art failed. Humility is important.

“Word-Thinking” is another example of loserthink. This is another term that Scott Adams made up in this book (there’s a few more) and I’m not the biggest fan of this name for it, I prefer to call it the definition game. Playing the definition game “involves trying to understand the world, or trying to win a debate, by concentrating on the deffinition of words.” I wanted to talk about this phenomenon in my last post about axioms since it is a perfect example of what happens when two people are debating with different sets of axioms but I couldn’t fit it in.

Most debates on abortion ultimately turn into the definition game. At some point somebody in the debate will have a problem with the other’s definition of the word “murder,” “fetus,” or “human life” and the whole debate will just become an argument over the definition of these words and the whole thing will go nowhere. This is a clear example of loserthink. If you find yourself wanting to argue with someone over the definition of a word, don’t. You might be smart, and you might even be right, but playing the definition game will make you look like a looser, there are better ways to argue a point. Adams explains many better ways to debate, and more that are losertink of course.

Judging people by their mistakes is loserthink. Instead Adams teaches us that we should judge people based off of how they respond to their mistake. You’re a jerk if you chose to judge a person based off of the worst thing they have ever done, especially if they have corrected their mistake. One could argue that there could be some extreme exceptions to this but exceptions are not the norm and Christ teaches us to forgive.

Scott Adams is not familiar with Christ’s teachings but he somehow figured this one out. He tells us that if a person has a good response to their mistake then we should not judge them based on their mistake. Adams describes a pattern that people who respond well to their mistakes follow and without realizing it he taught the repentance process (of course without the parts that directly involve God). The whole section of this book Adams dedicated to this concept could be summarized by saying, “If a man repents of his sins, forgive him.”

I found that section to be an unorthodox testament to the truth and wisdom of Christ’s teachings. If a secular man like Scott Adams can teach the importance of repentance and forgiveness without even realizing that he was doing that then Jesus Christ is obviously who someone we should grow closer to and someone whose teachings we should study and follow.

Loserthink is full of many more good insights some better than others, I can’t say I agree with everything Scott Adams said in the book but I still think it is a book worth reading, especially if you want to become a more effective thinker (which we all should). If you know me in real life I have a second copy of the book I’d be willing to part with, if you don’t maybe I’ll set up an Amazon affiliate account so that you could buy it off a link I’d publish so that I could generate a penny’s worth of revenue from this blog of mine.

Also feel free to tell me what you think about my idea of starting to do book reviews, and any books you think I’d enjoy. Did I do a good job here? Would you even classify this as a book review? I’ve come to realize that a review for a piece of media is a bit of an abstract thing. Right now I am reading Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up by Abigail Shrier. I’m nearly a quarter of the way through it and it is very good so far but I do have one major concern with it which I hope Shrier will resolve by the end of the book. If I finish that book it will likely be the next review, but of course I’m not going to make any promises about that, I hope it happens but it might not.

Going into that research I knew a few things about poll taxes: I knew that a poll tax was a tax people were required to pay in order to vote. I knew they were made illegal at some point. And I knew that Henry David Thoreau went to jail because he refused to pay his poll tax, and he talks about his experience in jail in his famous essay On the Duty of Civil Disobedience. From those facts I had made a few assumptions, which for years my mind has treated as fact: I assumed that poll taxes were made illegal either while Thoreau was alive or within ten or twenty years of his death. And I assumed that Civil Disobedience would talk about the evils of poll taxes at some point, in fact I’m quite certain that at some point in my public school education a teacher taught my class that Thoreau was very anti-poll tax.

Then I did that research and found my assumptions to be wrong. First I saw that poll taxes were abolished by the 24^th Amendment and instantly I knew that that number was way too high for it to have happened anywhere near Thoreau’s time. I then decided to watch a few quick YouTube videos about poll taxes to get up to speed on poll taxes and they all focused on the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the videos lumped poll taxes in with Jim Crow laws and other things that some states put in place trying to prevent black people from voting. The videos made no mention of poll taxes before the Civil War or even before the 15^th Amendment which recognized the right of black people to vote.

These videos also didn’t mention Thoreau, a man who in my mind has always been a central figure in the poll tax debate. I then decided to take a look at Wikipedia’s article on poll taxes in America, and not only did I not see a mention of Thoreau, but according to Wikipedia the state of Massachusetts (where Thoreau resided) didn’t have a poll tax until 1865, three years after Thoreau died. This means at least one of two things: Wikipedia is wrong, or the poll tax which Thoreau was jailed for not paying wasn’t a poll tax as we understand it today, it could have been a more ordinary tax which people of his time referred to as a poll tax (I haven’t done any further investigation into this).

And of course to top off my research I reread Civil Disobedience which I found to be shockingly relevant to many of today’s issues. (I highly recommend reading it possibly annually probably around the time you pay your taxes) As I read Civil Disobedience I did not get the feeling that Thoreau was anti-poll tax, in fact he didn’t spend any time talking about the process of voting or advocating for the right of anyone to vote, he came across a bit skeptical of democracy. Instead he spent time talking about how he didn’t want to be associated with a State which was complacent with slavery and he explained that he didn’t pay his poll tax because he did not want to support a war which was being fought on (what to him was) the other side of the world against people he had nothing to do with. Thoreau was not anti-poll tax, he was anti-tax, or at least against paying taxes for things that would not benefit him and his community (he happily paid the highway tax). My understanding of all this history was wrong.

Now I ask, why did I tell you this story? There are a few reasons.

First, and most obvious, is that we need to recognize that our recollection and understanding of things we learned in school may not be accurate. We likely don’t remember all of the important details and we definitely weren’t taught all the details. I’m sure I was taught that poll taxes were something that MLK Jr and friends fought against but that information obviously didn’t stick in my head. And I’m positive Thoreau’s philosophy of civil disobedience was never explained to me, because why would a government run school want to teach anti-government ideas? Had I started talking about poll taxes based on the knowledge I had a few days ago I would have made a fool of myself. It is important for us to remember that we often don’t know what we are talking about when it comes to topics we have not personally dug into.

But another, more interesting, thing we learn here is that everyone has a different understanding of history and the world around them. The history lesson your parents had on poll taxes was different from the one you got and your children aren’t getting the same one you had either.

From mathematics we learn about the concept of axioms, or statements which we assume to be true in order to pursue an argument or to develop a greater understanding of things. For example, all the basic rules of arithmetic, geometry, algebra and calculus are standard axioms upon which the whole world of math, science and engineering rely upon. If two mathematicians aren’t relying on the same axioms for their work their work won’t be compatible. Or for a simpler example, if you have a math problem which reads, “Solve for y in the equation y=2x+4 where x=5,” then x=5 is an axiom that you are asked to work with and if you instead use the axiom x=3 you won’t find the correct value for y.

Our individual understandings of history, philosophy, science, along with our “lived experience” (to borrow a term from the woke crowd) form the axioms through which we understand the world and form our opinions of things. Because we all have unique understandings of things and unique experiences we are all working off of a different set of axioms, so in order to communicate effectively with others we need to take time to understand the axioms those around you are using and to let them know the axioms you view the world through. This is why they say that when you are in some sort of debate you need to understand where your opponent is coming from and why I had to spend a paragraph of this article explaining what an axiom is. One of the main purposes of education is to help people develop a set of axioms that are compatible with their neighbors’.

Bad things happen when people aren’t working off of the same axioms. Looking at the topic of Donald Trump is probably the easiest way to illustrate this. On one hand we have a whole bunch of people who trust mainstream news and are convinced that Trump is a dangerous insurrectionist who wants to destroy democracy, and on the other hand we have a whole bunch of people who see that this is a bunch of nonsense. It is not possible for an MSNBC watcher and a Republican voter to have a productive conversation about Donald Trump because they are working off of wildly different axioms.

So, what do we do about this? First we must seek to learn the truth in all things, especially in things like poll taxes where you think you already know it, this is a humbling lifelong endeavor which will help us view the world through the correct axioms. Next we need to spread that truth to others in a loving, charitable, and patient way; especially when you are trying to change their opinion on something. For example, if you want to convince someone that the climate change narrative is a scam then it would be much more productive for you to point out a fact like the polar bear population has been dramatically rising over the last several years despite what the activist have been saying, instead of bluntly saying that climate change is a hoax then going off into a rant about how Bill Gates is evil or something like that.

And I guess I’m starting to go off on a tangent here about persuasion so I should wrap up this article here since I could ramble on that topic for quite a while, I’ll save those ramblings for another day.

Anyways, learn the truth, correct your axioms, and spread the truth.

When I was a computer science student in college C++ was the first programming language that was taught to me. Except I don’t credit any teacher or course for teaching me how to code, it was the textbooks which deserve that credit. They were well-written and whenever I was diligently reading them before class I didn’t have the same sort of struggles other students were having with the material. In fact it eventually became clear to me that the students who were struggling in class weren’t reading their textbooks. When other students came to me with questions about the material I’d try to open up the book to the page that taught the concept that they were struggling with because that is exactly what I would do when I was struggling with something or couldn’t remember how something worked. I’d find myself opening up my first semester textbook to answer my questions throughout my entire college career.

Could I have learned C++ through video tutorials or something like that? Yes, but I don’t think I would have been as successful doing that. Reading a book takes effort, watching a video series doesn’t, learning should require effort. Also how easy is it to go back and reference past material in your learning? If you’re learning C++ through video tutorials and you forget the proper syntax to read data from a file you’ll have to go back to your video tutorials, try to remember which video contained the information you needed, then scrub forward and back through the video until you’ve found the exact frame you needed, or worse, the exact quote. Depending on how lucky you are this could take several minutes. If you are using a book to learn you just have to open up to the chapter on working with files and flip a few pages until you’ve found what you are looking for. If you are familiar with the book you are using (which you should be since you’d be spending several hours with it) then this process would take you less than thirty seconds. A familiar textbook is a much greater tool to a person than an internet search can ever be.

Coming back to my quest to learn 3D modeling, I’ve chosen to learn from a book called Mastering Fusion 360 by Jake O Sugden and Joshua Manley. I chose it because it was featured in a 3D Print General video and it seemed to be a good resource as Sean was able to feel confident designing things after working through the book. I tried to find reviews on similar books I could use to learn CAD (I would have preferred to learn FreeCAD over Fusion 360 since it is open source and isn’t cloud based) but I couldn’t so Mastering Fusion 360 it was then. I’m currently working through chapter 4 and have been happy with my experience with the book so far, it’s been enough for me to be able to design a replacement hard drive cover for my Thinkpad X220.

Something that I found a bit concerning in my search for reviews on other books to learn CAD and 3D modeling was that the reviews didn’t seem to exist. Even with the book I did end up buying the 3D Print General video I mentioned earlier seemed to be the only one. Internet people have shifted towards promoting online courses and tutorial videos rather than much more reliable books. I’m of course not saying that these courses are all bad, I’ve never taken one so I’m in no position to say that; but if the authors of your online course didn’t write a book to go alongside that course then you’re going to have trouble going back to find old information from the course later down the road. You need a physical book to be able to do that.

Now many people these days are hesitant to try learning things from a book because they don’t think they can. At some point within the last several years people have latched onto the pseudoscience of some psychologist and have adopted the belief that there are different ways to learn things and because they are a “visual learner” they can’t learn anything by reading a book. This is not the case. The biggest factor in your ability to learn something is your motivation to do so, not the results of some personality quiz your middle school guidance counselor made you take. If you struggle to learn things from books, especially textbooks, it probably isn’t because you are a “visual learner” or something, it is probably because you never actually learned how to read a textbook because your middle school guidance counselor led you to believe that you could never accomplish such a feat. Again, (unless you have a learning disability) you struggle with textbooks because you need more practice using them, not because there is something wrong with your brain.

Anyways, I’ve rambled on this topic long enough. If you want to learn something buy a book about it and read it. If you’re a beginner get one written for beginners, don’t try to read a textbook designed for college seniors on the topic. The For Dummies books out there are usually pretty good so start there if you can’t find anything else. Books are better than the internet, and to quote Mark Twain, “The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.” Go read a book and learn a new skill with it.

I recently found myself with some time to kill near my local Barnes and Noble so I decided to take a look at what was on the shelves and I happened to stumble upon John Lovell’s book. I realized I needed to buy it right then and there, and I’ll explain why.

Did I buy it then and there because I was interested in reading The Warrior Poet Way: A Guide to Living Free and Dying Well? Obviously I was, but not interested enough to go out of my way to buy it. Did I buy it then and there because Barnes and Noble was selling it for a good price? No, I’m sure I could have found a better price for it somewhere else. Did I buy it then and there because it was an opportunity to do so in a physical store rather than online? I guess that’s a part of the reason, but if I had found it at a store where it was less out of place I probably would have passed it by and considered going back to buy it at a later date. I bought it then and there because it was in a Barnes and Noble.

John Lovell and I are similar because both of us struggle to find things we want to read at Barnes and Noble (and other physical bookstores). Last month I went there hoping to find a copy of Michael Easter’s new book, he is a completely uncontroversial author and both of his books have been national bestsellers so surely my local Barnes and Noble would have a copy of his book? Nope. When Lovell went to his local Barnes and Noble he thought they’d surely have a copy of The Call of the Wild, but they didn’t. Instead the shelves of Barnes and Noble are filled with modern books on racism and others by people like Rachel Maddow and Hillary Clinton, books that John Lovell and I have no interest in reading let alone buying.

It is easy to blame wokeness for this and it is even easier to vow never again to set foot in that store, and I do think that corporate wokeness is a factor in why there are a lot of books in Barnes and Noble with a rainbow flag but I don’t think that the Barnes and Noble corporation has been completely taken over by the woke cult, there is something much simpler to blame here.

My local Barnes and Noble has a table full of Jordan Peterson books. The woke crowd is no fan of Jordan Peterson, why would the “woke bookstore chain” support Jordan Peterson’s “far-right ideology” by keeping dozens of copies of his books in stock? The only logical answer is that Barnes and Noble is not a political activist organization trying to make you gay, it is instead a business that is trying to make money. Jordan Peterson’s books are incredibly popular, that’s easy money for a bookstore, a business that makes money by selling books would be making a mistake if they didn’t make sure they had a healthy supply of Jordan Peterson’s books in stock.

Woke books sell fairly well because today’s university system is teaching the demographic of people most likely to buy books that they should be reading woke books. Books by political figures like Rachel Maddow, Hillary Clinton, and even Ted Cruz sell well because Covid forced a lot of people to have to work from home and those people needed to fill their bookshelves with books to make them look smart in Zoom meetings, so they bought a bunch of books by popular political figures without realizing that nobody actually reads those books.¹ Barnes and Noble tries to stock their shelves with books that sell well, that’s why they carry woke books and Obama books but also Jordan Peterson books. It is simple supply and demand, or I guess just demand. If there is no demand for a book why would Barnes and Noble supply it?

Now let’s get back to why I chose to buy John Lovell’s book at Barnes and Noble. I want Barnes and Noble to carry books like that, but if those books don’t sell why would they carry them? If I, and everyone else who follow people like John Lovell, saw John Lovell’s book at Barnes and Noble but chose to buy it elsewhere because we didn’t want to support a woke company, Barnes and Noble would notice that book collecting dust on their shelf and would replace it with some Bernie Sanders book that might actually sell. If you want stores to carry a certain type of product then you have to be willing to buy that product from them when they have it in stock.

Boycotts are stupid in the context of entire stores rather than single products, you can’t convince a store to carry the stuff you want to buy by refusing to shop there. Lovell was smart in his bookstore video. He didn’t do the click-baity thing and call for a boycott of Barnes and Noble, he didn’t even name the store Barnes and Noble. He simply encouraged people to buy good books when and where they could. He thinks that there will come a day when we won’t be able to do that, but if we make it an effort to buy good books from the places we are surprised to see them then maybe we can postpone or even prevent that day.

It isn’t healthy to sit around and complain about all the things in the culture you don’t like. You have to be a part of the change in the culture that you want to see, buying good books is one way to do that, and even if you don’t end up having an impact on anything by doing it you’d at least have some good books to read.

¹ - If you want proof that nobody reads those books go to your closest thrift store and look at the book section, those are always in the best condition.

Before I explain it I figure I should probably talk about my biases, experience and motivation behind writing this. My general philosophy on food is that we should try to eat the things our ancestors ate like red meat, animal fats, and organic produce and avoid things like ultra-processed food, seed oils, and high-fructose corn syrup that our ancestors never had access to. The diet I’m about to talk about does not come from someone of that school of thought and to be honest I took issue with it at first. This diet comes from someone who got their PhD at 23 but still manages to stand outside the thinking of mainstream nutrition experts. I, on the other hand have no formal education on this topic so you’re probably better off trusting this guy’s advice over my opinions, especially since he doesn’t seem to be bought and paid for by the seed oil and drug industries like so many nutritionists and doctors are these days.

I’m writing about this diet because I believe it can help people better than other, more well known, diets can and I want to be able to have an article I can point people to when they ask me for weight loss advice. I believe the diet I’m about to explain will be a lot more helpful to people struggling with obesity than any of the nutrition content I have put out in the past. The nutrition related stuff I’ve written in the past is a lot more helpful to healthy people than it is to unhealthy people because it sets the bar a bit too high for people who are just starting out on their health journey.

I learned about the diet through reading Michael Easter’s book The Comfort Crisis. The diet comes from Dr. Trevor Kashey who has a through understanding of the science behind nutrition, weight loss, and muscle building. The diet he recommends is quite simple: You are allowed to eat whatever you want, but you have to eat less than 2000 calories¹ a day.

Doing this will require that you actually track and measure everything you eat in a day. Research has shown that people are terrible at accurately estimating the amount of calories they eat, most people think they eat way less than they actually do either because they are not good at portion control or they forget that they had a snack or drink with something; it is not uncommon for people to eat over twice the amount of calories than they think they did in a day, this is why a lot of people are unsuccessful in various diets. Dr. Kashey tells the people he works with to buy a kitchen scale and weigh every single thing that they eat so that they can accurately track the calories they are taking in, they won’t be successful with their weight loss if they don’t do this.

When Micheal Easter decided to give this a try and weigh the food he ate he was surprised to see that the light healthy snack of an apple and some peanut butter he had been eating every day was nearly 700 calories. What he had always assumed was a reasonable amount of peanut butter was well actually over three servings of the stuff. I ’m sure if you were to start measuring the things you ate you’d have some similar surprises.

Over time I have come to believe that the reason this diet is so great is that it is not restrictive. Sure, you can loose a lot of weight rather quickly if you ate nothing but cabbage soup for a month. But the entire time you are on a cabbage soup diet you’ll probably be craving ice cream or something like that and once you hit your weight loss goal you’ll reward yourself with a big bowl of ice cream and pretty soon you’ll be right back to the weight you started at. Most people who use restrictive diets (like the cabbage soup diet, Adkins diet, keto diet, vegan diet, etc.) to loose weight will gain all their weight back within a year. When you go out of your way to loose weight you want to keep that weight off, so you want to use a diet that will teach you how to keep it off.

Using Kashey’s diet, if you are craving ice cream you can budget your calories for a day so that you can treat yourself to some ice cream before you go to bed. If you do this you’ll learn two things. First you’ll learn what a reasonable portion of ice cream actually looks like (something very few people have seen), then you’ll learn that ice cream isn’t very filling because you’ll go to bed hungry. And you’ll remember those two lessons long after you’ve reached your weight loss goal. A more popular restrictive diet would have never taught you that because it would have never allowed you to have that experience.

Kashey’s diet plan is genius because it allows you to discover for yourself the things that you should and shouldn’t eat to satisfy your hunger without overeating. Sure, he could tell you which foods to eat and which ones to avoid, but that won’t be as powerful of a teacher as going to bed hungry after eating that bowl of ice cream will. You understand things better when you learn then for yourself through experience.

Hopefully you already have some experience paying attention to how certain foods make you feel. I’ve never measured calories but I have noticed some things with foods I eat which changed how I eat now. For example I avoid eating pasta that doesn’t have a cream or cheese based sauce because pasta with a tomato based sauce doesn’t fill me up, I could eat a pound of it and still be hungry half an hour later. I’ve also found through research and experience that increasing protein and decreasing carbs will help you feel more satiated. There was a while where I was eating eggs, sausage and toast every day for breakfast and I was feeling alright but then one day my bread was moldy so I skipped the toast, surprisingly when it came to lunchtime I wasn’t very hungry so then I cut the toast out of my daily breakfast and soon began skipping lunch because I didn’t feel like I needed it.

Of course Dr. Kashey could easily tell you that you should try to eat more protein dense foods to stay full, or he could tell you that things like soda and juice are just wasted calories that would be better spend fighting hunger but he understands that you are better off figuring those things out yourself through trial and error. In fact if you plan on trying this diet for yourself forget about what I said about ice cream not filling you up and protein being useful to stay satiated, let yourself learn those lessons the hard way. I’m sure if you were one of Kashey’s clients he’d try to steer you in the right direction if you were struggling to figure those things out on your own, but for the most part the genius of this diet is that you are the one discovering what foods work for you and which ones don’t. I can’t think of a better possible way to loose weight and learn to keep it off.

¹ - If you were to work with Dr. Kashey he would give you a personalized calorie limit based on your body, but 2000 calories is a fairly good general limit. I suggest you do your own research to figure out what amount of calories would be best for you, or you could always hire Dr. Kashey.

Brodie highlighted a particular piece of open source software that had a fun feature where during the Christmas season it’s logo would put on a Santa hat. It is a fun and harmless thing that I’ve decided I want to do in my website next December. But some troll decided to harass the developers of this program by complaining that the Santa hat wasn’t inclusive to people that celebrated holidays other than Christmas and that they should include images that represented the holidays of other religions. (And yes based on the wording of the complaint it was obviously a troll and not somebody who was legitimately offended)

Now I could take some time to meme on this troll and bring up the fact that everyone I have ever met who would be offended by a Santa hat or the term “Merry Christmas” happens to celebrate Christmas (or at least a highly commercialized version of it), or I could suggest that the developers implement a system that randomly chooses a festive logo to show that would select said logo using a system where each religion’s holiday would come up equally proportional to the estimated number of followers it had (meaning it would still show a Santa hat most of the time), but there is a more important argument that I need to make here.

The whole point of free and open source software is that it is user modifiable, if someone is legitimately offended by something like this they could easily just go into the source code and change it themselves for their own installation of the software, why are we harassing developers about stuff like this? Sure, if there is some bug in a program you use that’s written in C and you don’t have the skills to fix it let the developer know so they can take a look at it, but this is not what this troll is doing. We’re talking about replacing a jpeg here. If you have the computer skills necessary to install Ubuntu then you should be able to find an image of a logo with a Santa hat and replace it with a hot anime chick or whatever internet trolls like to look at these days. It is not that hard to do. Anyone who would complain to open source developers asking them to change something that basic might as well use proprietary software because they are missing the point of the project being open source.

I was a bit disappointed that Brodie didn’t make this point in his video. The fact that open source software is user modifiable is what got me interested in it and is the cornerstone the FOSS movement. Legend has it that the whole idea behind free and open source software sprouted from Richard Stallman’s frustration with a printer whose code he couldn’t modify to to fix a problem with a printer which he had fixed in that printer’s previous model by modifying its code. Since that point the FOSS movement has been taken over by privacy geeks and commies, they have forgotten this important pillar of their own movement, the fact that a popular Linux YouTuber didn’t even mention it when he had the golden opportunity to do so is evidence of that. When these people explain the concept of free as in freedom,“ they are so busy talking about being free from Microsoft spying on them that they forget that it also means being free to force all your windows to render in the shape of a rubber duck.

FOSS influencers need to spend some time encouraging self reliance in their community. Their movement stands on the shoulders of people like Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds who took the time to create their own software that met their personal standards. They didn’t wait for someone else to do it for them, and they didn’t harass the developers of the popular software of the time to change it to comply with their personal ideals.

I’m not saying that everyone who uses open source software needs to become a software developer. What I am saying is everyone who uses open source software needs to remember that they have the power to modify it. Then if there is something you want changed in a piece of open source software, and you have the skills to change it, then you should just change it yourself rather than try to make your wishes somebody else’s problem. If that is not something you are willing to do then I’d suggest reconsidering proprietary software.

Another thing while I’m talking about things in the FOSS realm: Federated social media software is stupid, I’ve had this opinion for quite some time now but it hasn’t been something that I have cared enough about to write an article on. Luckily Denshi, who I occasionally check in on, recently released a video on that topic that made the sort of argument that I would have made much but in a much better way than I ever could have, so if that is something you are interested in I’d encourage you to give that video a watch.

I also recently posted an updated version of an old article I wrote to my Substack page, which is where improved versions of my older and most interesting content will live so I suggest following me there if that is something you want to see. Most of my new articles will also be mirrored there, although I feel like keeping this one as a website exclusive.

For a long time I thought people like my mom who refused to pay ten bucks a month to Spotify for unlimited music were a bit crazy. If you are the type of person who loves to listen to new music all the time or who listens to several different artists and genres then Spotify (or another music streaming service) sounds like investment for you. But the thing that most people don’t realize is that they probably aren’t that type of person, so Spotify is ripping them off.

Let’s take my current music listening habits as an example. 90% of the time I’m listening to music I’m listening to one of three artists. It is either my friend Patrick, his band Charity Kiss, or my friend Dustin. That isn’t very much music, and it is not uncommon for people to listen to such a small collection of music. If I were to buy every piece of content these three artists have put out it would cost me about fifty bucks. That sounds like a lot of money until you look at it in context and see that that is five years worth of new releases. I’ve spent over twice that over the last year paying for a Spotify subscription just to listen to that music. I feel stupid that I have paid $120 to listen to $50 worth of music, and that isn’t even counting the other years I’ve been subscribed to Spotify.

Now I will admit that I may be a bit of a special case only listening to three artists, but I’m not as special as you might think. You could probably identify your favorite 100 songs and be able to buy all of them for less than what a year of paying for Spotify would cost you, and be perfectly happy just listening to that.

Then as time goes by and interesting new music comes out just buy it. For my music listening habits I’d predict less than $20 worth of new music to come out over the next year (maybe even ten), spending that twenty bucks makes a lot more sense than spending a hundred twenty for the same stuff, and in one case your money is going to an actual artist while in the other it is going to some faceless company.

There are plenty of basic white girls out there who only listen to Taylor Swift. How often does she release an album? Maybe once a year. How much does that cost to buy? Like twelve bucks. Twelve bucks a year is better than a hundred twenty a year.

If you’re like me and have never bought music before the initial investment to get a decent music library going looks a bit scary. But spend some time thinking about it. Is it better to pay a hundred bucks for music now then maybe twenty to thirty bucks a year for new stuff, or start paying $120 a year to a company who will probably raise their prices to be closer to $200 a year pretty soon? I hope your answer is clear.

Online streaming companies have been ripping us off for years. I used to think that Spotify was a good deal because it let me listen to everything. But I don’t listen to everything, neither do you, why should we pay to listen to everything? Movie streaming was great back when it was only Netflix and it had a large selection, but now people need to have multiple streaming services just to be sure that they have access to the stuff they actually want to watch.

How often does a working adult even sit down to watch a movie these days? Maybe twice a week. What makes more sense: paying Netflix twenty dollars a month for access to bunch of movies you don’t want to watch, or spending two dollars to rent a movie that you actually want to watch when you are in the mood to watch one? Two movies a week comes out to eight a month, at two dollars each that’s eighteen dollars a month for movies compared to giving Netflix twenty, along with another fifteen to Disney, and to Amazon, then to Hulu and whatever else. A TV series might mess with that math a little bit, but you have better things to do with your life than binge watch The Office for the fourth time this year.

Unfortunately streaming has become a deep infection in the entertainment industry. If I want to watch Extraction I can’t just rent it for a night, I can’t even go to the store and buy a copy of it on DVD, I have to have a Netflix subscription just to watch that one movie. I wish it wasn’t that way and you should too. We should be able to buy just Extraction from Netflix without having to pay for Cuties too. The industry would be healthier that way, it would allow us to reward companies for producing good movies and punish them when they release bad ones. It would be much better than the Marxist system we have now where all movies are presented as equals but are far from it. But I’m starting to stray off topic now.

Streaming services are scams. Spend some time evaluating your media consumption habits. Are you really getting what you’re paying for with streaming services? Odds are you can find greater value without using them. Cancel your streaming subscriptions, then replace them with stuff you actually want and don’t look back.

The gym provides great opportunity for all of that but it is not practical for most people. Driving fifteen minutes so that I can spend ten minutes in a locker room praying that the equipment I want to use isn’t occupied just to spend 45 minutes lifting weights and walking on a stair stepper then afterwards going back into the locker room for a bit and driving fifteen minutes back home is not an efficient use of time. Of course if you live right by a gym this whole process is a bit smoother but most people don’t want to cut out an hour and a half of their day to spend twenty to thirty minutes getting a good workout.

You could set up a home gym but that’s expensive, takes space, and requires some knowledge. If you don’t know what you’re doing with your home gym equipment you could get hurt (the same can be said at the gym). So unless you already have those three things setting up a home gym isn’t an option.

Running has steadily been gaining in popularity but it has an incredibly high injury rate. Studies estimate that about 70% of runners will injure themselves running every year. On top of that running doesn’t do much to maintain and improve your strength as it is mainly a cardio exercise so it should not be your main form of physical activity. (Also while you are running it is hard to think about anything other than how much running sucks)

Lots of people will slow down and walk because it is much more pleasant than running and only has a 1% injury rate but walking is of course a much less effective exercise for quickly burning calories, plus it also doesn’t do much in the strength department. It is a great start for people who can’t do anything else but it should not be the end goal.

What we need is an exercise with the practicality and quick calorie burn of running, strength training potential comparable to the gym, and the low injury rate and ease of walking. That exercise would be rucking.

What is Rucking?

Rucking is simply walking with weight on your back. The term came from the military where 90% of their physical training involves moving with a heavy backpack (rucksack or ruck) on their backs and has produced many of the fittest people on the planet in special forces and what not.

But rucking is not new, we have been doing it since the dawn of time. Humans were all hunter/gatherers back in the day and a lot of people will talk about how our bodies were built to run long distances without overheating so that we could chase animals to exhaustion which is how we got our meat before agriculture and domestication. But what these people often forget is what happens after a group of hunters gets a 1000 lb. bison, they have to carry the meat back to camp so they can share it with their tribe. So we weren’t built just to run but also to carry.

The ability to carry is unique to humans. Sure you can put a hundred pound pack on a mule but it can’t put the thing on by itself. Primates like monkeys can be trained to carry things but they are incredibly inefficient doing it. A human uses less energy while carrying 15% of their body weight than a monkey will walking with empty hands. It has also been observed that most humans, even those of us who are quite out of shape, can lift and carry things that are one third of our body weight. It isn’t easy for everyone but almost everyone can do it. Rucking, like running, is simply doing something that our bodies were designed to do.

Benefits of Rucking

Michael Easter, an author and journalist who has helped popularize rucking recently, describes rucking as, “cardio for people who hate running and lifting for people who hate the gym.” Is rucking going to get you jacked like a bodybuilder? No. Is rucking going to turn you into an ultra-marathoner? Also no. Jason McCarthy, founder of Goruck a rucking equipment company, describes the body type that rucking sculpts a person into as “super medium,” not too lean and not to muscular, just the perfect balance between the two. It will lay some muscle on skinny people and shred some meat off of larger people without compromising strength.

And remember it does all this while being simple and safe. All you have to do is load up a backpack and start walking and as long as your ruck doesn’t weigh more than 50 pounds you won’t be likely to get hurt. Rucking’s injury rate is only marginally higher than the incredibly low 1% rate of walking while casually burning two to three times the amount of calories you would simply walking, roughly the same amount of calories that you would burn running over the same period of time.

But often times pure calorie burn isn’t the only thing we want to look for in a workout. Most Americans are overweight and have at least a passive desire to loose weight so it is important to prioritize exercises that burn more body fat. I have seen several people claim that rucking is an incredibly efficient fat-burning exercise although I have yet to find any scientific backing to that claim but I am inclined to believe it. My theory is that because it works nearly every muscle in the body at the same time your blood isn’t able to get more commonly used energy everywhere it needs to quickly enough so tapping into fat stores becomes necessary quicker. But I’m not a doctor so that reasoning, and this claim could be completely false. It is also quite likely that people recommend rucking for fat loss because nobody can go from the couch to running an hour straight but rucking for an hour is something that most people could probably already do (or at least work up to in under a month) and be able to burn the same amount of calories that they would running.

Another benefit of rucking comes from its ease, you can hold a conversation with someone while you are rucking, rucking can be a social activity. When you’re running you are too out of breath to talk to someone, and gyms are often filled with loud equipment, loud music and strangers so talking to a friend is a lot harder. Rucking doesn’t have any of those problems so it is a great way to casually workout with a friend.

Rucking is also great for back pain relief. I recently injured my back so I’ve been looking into back healing and came across the work of Esther Gokhale who studied the backs of tribespeople in Africa and other places where people live more primitive lifestyles as well as those of toddlers and found that the natural alignment of your back isn’t the S shape that you see on your chiropractor’s business card, instead it is much more straight and pulled back (if it wasn’t the discs in our spine wouldn’t be flat, they’d be wedged). We spend a lot of time in our modern world hunched over a desk or computer or steering wheel which brings our back farther away from where it should be. Dr. Stuart McGill, a back pain expert, has found that rucking pulls your spine back into a more natural position relieving muscle strain and decreases pressure on your discs which reduces back pain. Of course, if you have a serious back injury you should take it easy but rucking should be looked into as a tool for healing if you have the strength to do it and it doesn’t cause you extra pain.

And of course, all of the other general benefits to exercise like improved mental health and resilience can be gained from rucking as well as well as plenty of other benefits you’ll be sure to find as you start researching and rucking yourself.

How to ruck

If you haven’t figured it out already all you need to do to start rucking is to put some weight in a backpack and start walking with it, but there are a few things you should know to get the most out of your rucks.

First, when it comes to weight, start small and pack it as close to your body as you can, preferably high up. If you are just starting out and you haven’t been very physically active lately then you shouldn’t start with more than twenty pounds in your bag. Some people recommend starting lighter with ten or fifteen pounds, and some people will even recommend starting with no weight at all. Your starting weight is dependent on your situation, I probably wouldn’t tell anyone to start with nothing but you should start out with a weight that you are comfortable with and confident you could carry for an hour.

Add weight over time as you gain strength and become more comfortable rucking. But remember you don’t need a lot of weight to get a good workout from a ruck. Rucking organizations and researchers seem to have come to a consensus that thirty-five pounds is the sweet spot for most men and twenty-five pounds is the sweet spot for most women to have effective casual rucks. Unless you want to push yourself there really isn’t much of a reason to ever go above these weights while rucking.

Of course, if you do want to push yourself and ruck heavier you can but there are a few things to remember. I mentioned earlier that once you start carrying more than fifty pounds you start to increase your risk of injury. This doesn’t mean that you can’t ruck more than fifty pounds it just means that you need to be cautious when doing so. You probably shouldn’t do a heavy ruck more than ten or twenty percent of the time, maybe just do it once a week or once every other week. It is also a good idea to plan to do your heavy rucks to be the day before your rest day (remember we should only exercise 6 days a week) so that your body has time to recover, especially if you are going to ruck 100 or 150 pounds. You’ll also want to make sure that your bag can hold the amount of weight you want to put in it and if you are going to go heavier than 50 pounds you’ll definitely want a comfortable waist strap. Quality boots with good support may be something else worth looking into when rucking heavy. If you are rucking to relieve severe back pain don’t go above twenty five pounds until your back has healed.

Another mistake a lot of people make while rucking is running while rucking. Remember, one of the main benefits of rucking is that it doesn’t have the high injury rate of running, so if you start running with weight on your back you are throwing that benefit out the window and compromising your running form thus increasing your risk of injury. That is not a good idea. Most often the people who talk about ruck-running are those trying to help others meet the physical requirements to get into various military special forces programs. These requirements often include the ability to carry thirty five pounds on your back twelve miles in under three hours. But you don’t need to run to be able to travel four miles an hour. Will it be easier to hit that goal if you run during the downhill portions of your ruck? Yes, but you are better off putting in the extra effort to do it right than to risk hurting yourself by taking a shortcut. The only time you should run with a load on your back is if your life depends on it.

Rucking can easily fit into your lifestyle. Have dogs? Wear a backpack when you take them for a walk. Have small kids? Take them with you so they can breathe some fresh air too. Already enjoy exploring the outdoors on foot? Wear a heavy backpack. Can’t afford fancy weights to ruck with? Use bricks or other things you have lying around (I wrapped an old car part in foam and use that as a weight). Afraid you’ll wish you had a lighter pack midway through your ruck? Use water bottles as weights so you can dump them out when you need to shed weight. Have a busy day and no time for a long ruck but still want to burn the amount of calories you would on a long ruck? Double your weight and only ruck twenty minutes.

Rucking is a practical, effective, and enjoyable way to get some exercise in to meet your health goals. It of course isn’t the only way to exercise, if you like to run or go to the gym or whatever keep doing that, but if you don’t, or you just want to shake things up, I hope I’ve given you the inspiration to look deeper into rucking and give it a try.

Note: Some of the sources in this article came from Michael Easter’s book The Comfort Crisis which I recommend reading for more reasoning and inspiration to do hard things.

I think this phenomenon is best explained through some examples.

Heat treating a blade

I recently acquired a small coal forge and have gotten my hands on the tools necessary to do some basic blacksmithing. I haven’t used it to make anything terribly complex yet, or really much at all, but I have been looking into the things that I could make with it, the coolest of those things being knives.

I haven’t attempted one yet but there are really only four simple steps to making a knife, first you shape your steel into a knife, then you heat treat it, make a handle, and finally sharpen it. Three of these steps can be done however the knifemaker wants to do it but the heat treatment has to be done with some precision.

There are multiple steps to heat treating a knife but I’m just going to focus on the quench because that is where people get the most picky.

When you quench a blade you first want to heat it up to a specific temperature, this temperature varies based on the carbon content of the steel you are working with. For the steels that most beginners will be working with this temperature will be about a hundred degrees hotter than the point where a magnet no longer sticks to the steel so most people will check the temperature with a magnet but many people want to be precise with it and use a laser thermometer.

Once the blade is evenly heated to the right temperature you want to dip it in oil, but it can’t be any old oil for it to be an ideal quench, nor can it be room temperature. Canola oil heated to 130 degrees is what you want to dip your blade in according to most folk. (Other oils can be used but they’d have to be heated to a different temperature and are not as cheap as canola oil) Lots of people will have a stove running heating their oil somewhere before taking it over to their quenching location, or even have a small stove right there exclusively for heating oil for quenching, because if your oil is the wrong temperature then your quench won’t be perfect.

It is great that modern science has given us the knowledge and tools necessary to perfectly quench a knife, but is all this precision worth stressing over? Let’s turn back the clock a couple hundred years and picture a blacksmith making knives somewhere in 1700s Massachusetts or something.

How is a blacksmith from hundreds of years ago supposed to know the carbon content of his steel? How is he supposed to measure that carbon content? How is he supposed to know the exact temperature that he is supposed to heat his specific steel to for the quench? How is he supposed to measure that temperature? Where is he supposed to get canola oil if it won’t be invented for another 200 years? How is he supposed to know the exact temperature that whatever oil he does use needs to be heated to for quenching? How is he supposed to measure that temperature?

All these people on the internet who say to never quench a blade if it is at the wrong temperature because it would ruin the knife or something are completely disconnected from history. People have been making knives far longer than the tools that measure the tings that these nerds stress over have existed. I don’t expect anyone to be able to answer any of the questions in the above paragraph, and frankly none of them matter. The only question that does matter is whether or not that blacksmith’s knives were any good and I think it is safe to assume that they were.

Why am I comfortable making this assumption? One reason is that a knifemaking nerd tested the effects of bad quenches on knives and found that a screwed up quench doesn’t have a significant impact on the final quality of a knife (outside of its ability to hold up to abuse). But a more important reason is the fact that there hasn’t been a shortage of good knives throughout history. Much of history couldn’t have happened if all the knives made up until the 20th century or so were useless due to the lack of precise tools and science required for a perfect quench. Modern precision isn’t required for traditional crafts.

Tanning hides

I’ve been meaning to get into coyote hunting for a while now since it is fun that I can have year round where I live and valuable population control for the local environment but I also don’t know what I’d do with a dead coyote. If I had chickens or pigs I’d feed them the coyote meat, but I don’t have any farm animals at the moment so I wondered what else I could do.

I decided to see what it would take to tan and preserve the coyote hides in case that was something that I was interested in doing. Hunters are a bit more freethinking and nonconformist than the knifemaking nerds out there plus there are more ways that tanning can be done than there are to make a knife (so I won’t go over the general steps on how to do it). But you will still find a handful of people who will stress over the PH levels of pickling solutions and other things like that while they are tanning hides or making leather so that they can produce the perfect product.

But think about it, this is an activity that mankind has been doing likely since the time of Adam. The tools required to measure the PH level of a pickling solution have hardly been around for a fraction of that time. We have been tanning hides for thousands of years without stressing over those details, you can do it too.

The benefit of modern science in traditional crafts

Of course I’m not saying that knowing the exact temperature to quench your knife or the precise PH level your hide pickling solution has to be at is a bad thing. Being able to measure these things and pinpoint the ideal ways to do them has made success in these trades much more attainable and repeatable for people with little or no formal training like you and me. If you are going to do something it is important to learn how to do it right, but also to recognize that the parameters for doing something right are a lot wider than a lot of gatekeepers would lead you to believe.

When I get around to making a knife I’ll be sure to test the temperature of the steel with a magnet before I quench it to see when I’m close to my target temperature, will I know if I hit it exactly? No, but I’ll know that I’m close enough. Then when I go to quench it will I heat my oil up to precisely 130 degrees? No, but I’ll stick a hot piece of rebar in it to heat it up. Quenching in 160 degree oil won’t be as good as quenching in 130 degree oil but it will be much better than quenching in 60 degree oil which is really the point.

I haven’t quite decided if I’ll tan an animal hide but I’m glad I spent the time to learn some of the science behind it. If I ever do it I think I might take the extra time to test the PH levels of things just to make sure that I am getting the best final product that I can, since animal skins aren’t the easiest thing to come by these days. But if for whatever reason I can’t measure stuff, or something goes a bit wrong with my PH levels I’ll understand that my hide will probably still turn out fine and I won’t be mad at myself for messing up something that trappers going back to the beginning of time wouldn’t have even known to worry about.

Modern science is great, but when it comes to ancient crafts like these it should not be the focus. The satisfaction behind making your own knife does not come from a modern laser thermometer, it comes from the anvil and hammer. The satisfaction of tanning your own hides doesn’t come from a tub of perfectly proportioned chemicals, it comes from knowing you have used every part of an animal that you could. The satisfaction from making something doesn’t come from following a specific recipe, it comes from knowing you made it with your own hands.

The myth that he debunks is that exercise is worthless for weight loss. I’ve heard it countless times and I’m sure you’ve heard it as well. The myth probably isn’t worded that harshly but ultimately that is the message that people will get out of a study whose conclusion opens with the line, “The evidence that exercise contributes significantly to weight loss and weight maintenance is not firmly established.” For years people have been looking at studies like these (emphasis on the term looking at) and using them to promote ideas which are obviously ridiculous.

Easter actually read that study critically and realized that when the author of it was talking about “exercise” she usually meant the government recommended 20 minutes of daily moderate exercise like a brisk walk through a suburban neighborhood. She was not talking about things like mountain biking, distance running, rucking up a hill, lifting weights or other activities that would work up quite the sweat that normal people like you and I would picture alongside the word “exercise.”

Easter read some other studies which proved that people who exercised an hour a day without changing their diet lost weight at the same rate as people who simply dieted. Another one proved that more exercise lead to more weight loss. These ideas should be common sense, you shouldn’t need some PhD in a lab coat to tell you these things. Too many people these days have outsourced their thinking to people whose experience and motives they don’t understand.

And that’s really what I wanted to talk about here, we need to be more skeptical especially when it comes to scientists or the media making claims that go against our common sense. Scientific research and media narratives are proven wrong as time goes by quite often these days.

Years ago there was a study that lots of people reported on and remembered claiming that drinking a glass or two of wine every day prolonged lifespan. I always thought that study was BS and the other day I was talking to a friend who saw that some researchers looked back into that flawed epidemiological study with a skeptical eye and realized that the people in that study who were drinking one or two glasses of wine every day were higher income folk who typically live longer for other reasons.

A few years ago it was reported that Kyle Rittenhouse crossed state lines to hunt black people and killed a few of them with a deadly assault rifle when in reality he shot three white guys in self defense while he was trying to help his community.

All too often these days, whether it be due to ignorance, malice, or plain bad luck, things that are false are reported as fact. It is ultimately our job to determine what is true and what isn’t.

And in our quest to decipher fact from fiction the only real source we have to rely on is our gut. Remember Google is a confirmation bias generator. For every study or news report that claims one thing there will be another source that claims the opposite. The study that Michael Easter found claiming more exercise leads to more weight loss could have been funded by a company looking to sell more gym memberships, who knows? Is that going to stop you from believing it? What if you scroll down further on your Google search and find a paper that debunks Easter’s cherry-picked study? Which scientist are you going to believe? You can’t surrender your beliefs to a phrase like “trust the science” or “just Google it” if science and Google give you conflicting data. You are the one who has to think critically and make the decision on what to believe.

Again, too many people these days have outsourced their thinking to others. Don’t be one of those people, be a skeptic. If something people are saying sounds like BS look into it and report on your findings so that you can help others be more skeptical and find the truth.

To see this let’s take a brief look at the progression of gay rights in America. Over a relatively small number of decades gay people in the United States (and much of the west) went from being culturally shunned and legally unrecognized to being both culturally and legally accepted. How did this happen? The short and simple answer is that people in favor of gay rights talked about gay rights and got people to understand their viewpoint, or at least got them to understand that plenty of normal people are gay.

Gun owners should be doing this same thing because gun rights are widely misunderstood and constantly under threat by those who don’t understand them. We should be working to get more people to understand guns and gun rights and what I think is one of the most important ways to do that is to get people to see that plenty of normal people own guns.

How do we do that? By talking about our guns. We don’t have to be constitutional scholars or weapons experts or out there arguing with gun control activists all the time to promote gun rights, we simply have to be willing to talk about our guns.

What does this look like? Obviously talking about shooting with friends at work and stuff is one thing, you don’t have to make it your whole personality and you probably shouldn’t nerd out on it but if someone asks you what you did over the weekend and you happened to go shooting tell them you went shooting and if they ask tell them what kinds of guns you shot and that it was fun. It is that simple.

You could also choose to wear tasteful hats or shirts with guns or gun logos on them. Many people advise against doing this because they believe it might cause criminals to think you have a gun on you which would place a target on your back. Other people might say that wearing gun related clothes would scare criminals away because they think you could have a gun on you. There is no data to support either of these claims so you should ignore them both (these same sort of arguments are used when talking about the practice of open carrying firearms). What surveys of prisoners have confirmed is that smart criminals avoid attacking people who look “organized” so as long as you are relatively well groomed and carry yourself with confidence you shouldn’t have to worry about what criminals might think about the logo on your hat. I recently was tagging along with a friend through the employee entrance to of hospital and he talked to a nurse or doctor leaving who was wearing a Sig hat. I found the presence of a gun logo on a normal person encouraging in a generally anti-gun space.

Another thing you could do (assuming you are the type of person who regularly posts on social media) is posting pictures of you shooting on social media. There are a few reasons why people may be hesitant to do this. They might be afraid of loosing “friends” because of a post like that. If you think that way I’d like to invite you to ask yourself a few questions: Who are you? Are you you, or are you the fake you you put up on social media? And more importantly: Who do you want people to be friends with: you, or the fake you? If anybody ever unfriends you on Facebook over anything you post that person probably isn’t someone that you should want to associate with in the first place, it is simply necessary a removal of a fake friend from your life.

One other reason that people may be afraid of posting things about guns or even just talking about guns with people is that they are afraid of the feds coming after them. To these people I’ll simply ask “Why?” It is perfectly legal to own an AR-15 in the United States, the ATF is not going to come knock on your door if there is a picture of your perfectly legal AR-15 visible on your Instagram story for 24 hours. If you don’t want the feds to come after you don’t do anything illegal. (Of course you’ll need to know the law to do that) Someone might try to refute that argument by saying, “What if you are falsely accused of some terrible crime? They might dig those posts up and use them against you.” This is the kind of claim that you should ignore because it is unhealthy to live with that level of paranoia. Is this possible? Yes but it is incredibly unlikely and ultimately out of your control and you should not live your life stressing about things that are out of your control.

Now, could there be a future date where gun ownership in America becomes illegal and the feds start digging through your social media to find evidence of you owning guns? Yes, but that won’t happen if gun bans and gun confiscation remain unpopular. Talking about guns with people is how we can ensure this will never happen. Your friends, coworkers, and other acquaintances are unlikely to support a politician who would put you, a normal person, in jail for something that has been legal since the founding of the country. But if they don’t realize that there are normal people in their lives who own and enjoy firearms then they’ll be more likely to fall for the false propaganda the media puts out claiming that no reasonable person needs a gun or an AR-15 and that people who own them are terrible people who don’t care about public safety. You don’t have to convince people to start supporting the NRA, you just have to make sure people know that gun owners are human.

So talk about your guns with people, especially the guns the government wants to ban, and if you haven’t already buy an AR-15.

Until now I haven’t advertised those things here because I didn’t feel like putting rewrites of old stuff here but I’m beginning to reconsider that. I don’t know if I’ll post them here or not yet but I will start announcing Substack rewrites on my RSS feed to let you know they are there.

I’ve also come to the conclusion that this website no longer needs to have a history of everything I have ever written. The internet is not the Library of Alexandria and not everything needs to be preserved. In my case I don’t see a need to showcase my older and lower quality posts that share views I might not even hold anymore. I don’t plan to delete any files so old links will still work but expect many of those old links to disappear. This change will happen slowly over time as it will take quite a bit of work for me to decide what to get rid of and what not to and where I should put the things that I decide to keep. This website is metaphorically held together with zip ties and duct tape so a redesign is not an easy or clean procedure.

I’d appreciate it if you helped out by telling me which of my past articles you have enjoyed and which ones you think might be worthy of a rewrite to bring the ideas in them to new people. I want this website to showcase my best work and it would be helpful if you told me what you think that work is.

Anyways, thanks for reading and I look forward to hearing from you.

The video is a reaction to Oliver Anthony’s song Rich Men North of Richmond. I’m sure you’ve heard of the song by now and may have even listened to it, I’ve referenced it a few times and it has been the number one song in the country for a few weeks after it came out and among the places I frequent online it has gathered nothing but praise. But then I watched that video and my perspective on the song changed.

To quote the video (and break one of my rules) Rich Men North of Richmond is “nothing more than a bitch session and complaining.” I won’t get into the specific critiques the video does, you can do that yourself. Of course the music is good, it is well written and well performed, but I can’t disagree with the Wranglerstar take here since the song is really just a bunch of complaints. If a culture’s number one song is one that primarily features a man complaining what does that say about that culture? Is a culture of complaining a culture that we want to promote and participate in? No, we want a culture of optimism, hard work and solutions.

I realized that I didn’t want to publish that article I wrote last week because it was just a bunch of complaining. The gist of the article was that the debate last week was proof that the GOP establishment is completely disconnected from its voters and the debate did nothing productive choosing to talk about things like climate change that Republican voters don’t care about instead of more important issues like parental rights and the deep state. You don’t need to read a two thousand word essay of complaints on that nor should you. All that would do is make you feel angry and powerless, two emotions we should avoid.

Of course there will be times in our lives when we do feel angry and powerless, or powerless and depressed, or angry and rageful, or any other ugly combination of emotions. These are among the trials that are a part of life on Earth. You aren’t a bad person if you feel this way from time to time, and Oliver Anthony (or Chris as he is actually named) is not a bad person for making music that expresses those emotions. I believe channeling emotion into art is a healthy way to express it and help us realize that there is still good in the world. From what I have seen Oliver Anthony is not a man who believes that life is hopeless and you shouldn’t be either.

Satan is the one who wants us to feel angry and powerless and depressed all the time. He is the one who wants us to feel like there is no hope in the world. He is the one who wants us to put our faith in politicians who don’t have the power to save us. Don’t fall into his trap.

But of course politics isn’t the only thing that people tend to complain about. I’ve come to the conclusion that complaining is the modern human’s favorite pass time, we’ll go out of our way to complain about things to avoid being productive. We’ve even blinded ourselves to the point where we can’t always recognize complaints when we see them. Pointing out problems is by definition complaining if it isn’t coupled with some genuine attempt at finding a solution.

I recently read a rather good article on the male loneliness epidemic. There has been a lot of talk on that topic lately but most of that talk has been dedicated to simply observing problems and pointing fingers, in other words complaining. Most of the people who talk about this issue say that somebody needs to fix it but very few of them actually make an effort to fix it themselves. However, I will cut the people talking about male loneliness some slack though because there doesn’t seem to be, nor do I believe there is, a secular solution to this problem.

Now there are plenty of other global and societal problems that people love to complain about, climate change, air travel, woke movies, stuff like that and as regular people you and I along with the other people who love complaining about these things have little to no power to fix these problems, so we shouldn’t focus on them. Instead we should focus on the things we do have power over and rather than complain about those things we should exercise that power.

I once had a roommate who constantly complained about not having enough money but he refused to apply for a job across the street that paid better than the one he had. I had another roommate who frequently complained that the apartment stunk but he never took the trash out. I’ve met plenty of people who complain about their health issues but make no attempt to improve their health. Don’t be like these people, complaining doesn’t fix any of your problems, and neither does the pity of others that so many constant complainers crave. Apply for a better job, clean your room and take the trash out, quit drinking soda and start going for a walk every day. Nobody is forcing you to stay miserable.

Ultimately you are the person who has the most power to increase or decrease the quality of your life. Of course there are bad things that will happen to us that are out of our control but we need to realize that we also have the power to decide how we are going to react to those things. It sucks when your car breaks down but no amount of complaining is going to change the fact that you need to fix it.

We don’t want to be a culture of complaining, we want to be a culture of optimism, hard work and solutions. Don’t waste your time complaining. Don’t waste other people’s time complaining. Don’t encourage other people to complain. And don’t spend your time online voluntarily listening to complaints. Complaining is a sickness that is highly contagious don’t let it spread to or from you.

“No matter what has occurred in your life up to this point, it should have no bearing at all on how you live your life from now on.” - Alfred Adler

Alfred Adler was a prominent psychologist who worked around the same time that Freud did. But unlike Freud if you asked one of the countless 19 year old white girls studying psychology at a college they can’t afford about him, there is a good chance they would have no idea who Alfred Adler was, his stuff is not as commonly taught. This is likely because some of Alder’s ideas, specifically on trauma, are much less comforting than those of Freud, but in the context of working through difficulties in life I think Adler’s are much more useful and much closer to the truth.

The common belief among psychologists today, which originated from the teachings of people like Freud, is that trauma shapes our lives. If someone’s parents got divorced when they were a kid they will likely have a negative outlook on marriage. If someone was abused as a kid they will likely to grow up to be abusive towards others. If someone gets in a bad car accident they will likely feel anxious about driving. If someone has a relationship end in a bad way they will likely be hesitant going into future relationships and might even remove themselves from the dating pool completely. If someone fails at a task in some spectacular fashion they will likely be afraid to try again.

I’m sure this isn’t the first time you’ve heard this sort of thing. There are plenty of people these days who make their trauma their personality, but is this a good thing? I don’t think so, and Alfred Adler would go so far as to say that trauma dosen’t exist.

Freud looks at the world through an etiological perspective, meaning he is looking to the past for the cause of a person’s feelings and behavior. Adler takes a teleological approach and views a person’s thoughts and actions as derivatives of their goals both conscious and subconscious. If we take these ideas to their extremes we see that Freud believes that humans are incapable of change while Adler believes that with the right focus we can overcome any obstacle.

But, someone might ask, there is evidence for trauma, isn’t there? I provided a bunch of examples above and they all seem to prove the theory of trauma, but is that the only way that someone could look at these things? Let’s take a deeper look into a traumatic event and response.

Let’s say there is a teenage girl learning to drive and in her second month of learning she causes a car accident that totals the family car, gives her a concussion, messes up her dad’s back and breaks her younger brother’s leg. After this she vows that she will never drive a car again and doesn’t get a drivers license until she is well into her twenties.

Freud would see this behavior as a clear traumatic response to the accident. The accident was the reason she chose not to get a drivers license when everyone else usually does. That makes pretty good sense doesn’t it?

Adler would link this behavior to a goal. It is fairly common for people, especially young people, these days to want to avoid responsibility. Driving is a responsibility, you have to pay attention and drive safely to protect your life and that of others. Then when a teenager gets a drivers license they loose the comfortable dependence on their parents that they enjoyed their entire life, if they are given a car they are now responsible for getting themself where they need to be and may have to take on the responsibility to take younger siblings places as well.

Adler would say that the girl in our scenario didn’t want the responsibility of driving, her goal was to avoid it and she uses the trauma of the accident to justify her decision not to get a drivers license and avoid responsibilities. Of course she didn’t cause the accident on purpose, it is quite possible that she didn’t have that goal of avoiding responsibility, or at least hadn’t fully committed to the goal, until after the accident, but regardless of when she made that goal, or even if she is fully conscious of the goal, her actions after the accident took place because of that goal being in place. The accident was just a good excuse for her actions.

Now I will admit that my decision to include the point that the girl could have made the goal to avoid the responsibility of driving after the accident made the last few paragraphs a bit more difficult to write while trying to make the two outlooks on life sound as different as possible but I decided that it is okay if they sounded a bit similar because they are both describing possible reasoning for the same thing. It would be odd if there wasn’t a similarity there. But if we change just one detail of this hypothetical girl’s story the similarities between Adler and Freud’s theories describing her actions disappear and only one really makes sense.

Let’s say that girl causes that same accident when she is at that same low level of experience driving with the same injuries (or even worse ones) happening but then a few months later we find her in the DMV excited that she passed her drivers license test and drives without terrible anxiety for the rest of her life. How would these two psychologists explain how she was mentally able to do that?

Adler would say that she had the goal of getting a drivers license, and because of her commitment to that goal she was able to overcome the mental struggle that being in that accident would have caused.

On the other hand I don’t know how Freud, or someone who subscribes to his philosophy, would respond. The girl clearly went through a traumatic experience yet it didn’t seem to have any long-term affect on her, if trauma exists how could that be? I’m sure there is some explanation out there but I’m no psychologist and I haven’t gone out to look for it because I don’t think that it is useful to analyze the behaviors through an etiological lens in the first place.

There are plenty of people in the world who go through traumatic experiences and are able to get through it. There are lots of people driving on the road today who have caused terrible car accidents, even ones that have killed people, but they are still driving without anxiety, hopefully they are more careful than before, but regardless they are still driving.

Ultimately everyone has to decide how they view themselves. Are you an object that can only be acted upon, or are you an agent capable of choice? How you react to trauma is a choice. Reacting in a predictable and negative way is often the easiest, so much so that we don’t see any other way to react, especially when the traumatic event wasn’t foreseen, but it is not the only way to react. If we initially reacted in such a way it is okay to change. It is okay to overcome trauma. It is okay to get better.

The doctrine of repentance teaches us that we don’t have to, nor should we, be defined by the worst thing that we have ever done. In a similar sense I don’t think we should define ourselves by the worst thing that has ever happened to us, that’s not how Job lived, he didn’t see himself as a victim. We should recognize the truth that we are capable of overcoming hard challenges. We are not destined to be weak, we can be strong if we want to be and we can always strive to be stronger.

If there is such a thing as trauma then we have no agency. If there is such a thing as trauma then we are simply objects cursed with the ability to think and feel. If there is such a thing as trauma then the world would be a much darker place than it is.

“No experience is a cause of success or failure. We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences – the so-called trauma – but we make out of them just what suits our purposes. We are self-determined by the meaning we give to our experiences, and there is probably always something of a mistake involved when we take particular experiences as the basis for our future life. Meanings are not determined by situations, but we determine ourselves by the meanings we give to situations” - Alfred Adler

Give yourself a good purpose. Give your experiences good meanings. Give yourself good goals that you can commit to, and replace the bad ones you have trapped in your subconscious. Be a player in your own life, not a character in someone else’s. You can overcome hard things.

To show the difference between art and content let’s look at two recent country songs that gathered a lot of attention. First we have Jason Aldean’s Try that in a Small Town. It is a song with a fairly basic modern pop-country melody and lyrics that were considered controversial because they made reference to the fact that the type of crime that was common during BLM riots in big cities was deplorable and suggested that people who tried that in a small town wouldn’t make it down the road, it was sung by a man who has been in the music industry for years and didn’t really have a genuine small town upbringing.

In contrast we have Oliver Anthony’s Rich Men North of Richmod. It is a song where we see a poor blue collar man lamenting the tragedy of being an old soul living in the new world where the elites don’t care for him as their actions actively make his life worse. It is a song with some uncommon twang in it and some even more uncommon emotion as the person singing it actually means the words he says.

Now I don’t listen to country music very often so I’m not the best person to judge it but a friend of mine who does has said, “‘Try that in a Small Town’ is the Punisher skull of country music.” Sure it might say some controversial things that some people might agree with but people with actual country small town roots don’t think its that great of a song. It is lame. It is a song for posers sung by a poser, if it had different lyrics nobody would have ever cared about it. It is content that was designed to appeal to a certain demographic and ultimately failed after a brief time in the spotlight, it didn’t come form the soul it came from the desire to make money.

Rich Men North of Richmond however is art, it came form the soul. There is not one line in that song that doesn’t express something that the man singing it, nor the millions of blue collar men like him, hasn’t actually felt. Anyone trying to claim otherwise is a rich white liberal who has never talked to a blue collard person in their life and probably lives north of Richmond. Everyone who shares anything in common with Oliver Anthony (whose real name is Chris) is frustrated with the fact that people can take advantage of the welfare system to buy bags of fudge rounds when it is meant to help lift people out of poverty. Oliver Anthony didn’t write that song to make money, he made it to express his feelings and send a message, it came form the soul and that is where art comes from, the fact that he got famous from it is unrelated.

Of course not all art comes with a message like Rich Men North of Richmod but it all comes from the soul as a lot of it was made simply because the artist loved art and loved making art. I feel like the great composers of old loved putting together complex pieces of music because they loved pushing the boundaries to see what was possible in the realm of music. Painters and sculptors made beautiful things because they loved making beautiful things. Storytellers wrote stories and made movies because they loved telling compelling stories. Up until recently we consumers expected art to be art and would be disappointed when it was simply content. People used to look forward to new Star Wars movies because of the great story, characters, and visual effects; now they look forward to new Star Wars stuff because it is called Star Wars. What changed? Well there was a shift from artistic expression to content production.

The video I mentioned earlier goes into this phenomenon in the music world. It is made by a musician and it looks at the issue from the artist’s perspective in the modern music space. He makes the observation that all new music is starting to sound the same. He credits this to the advent of music streaming as the vast majority of music revenue these days comes from streaming services whose algorithms are designed to identify and cater to your individual music taste. I’d also argue that for most of us the algorithms will shape our taste quite a bit as they keep serving us the same dish over and over again, but that is a different topic. The video guy goes into how this affects the economics of the music industry as people are now incentivized to make shorter, catchier, and dumber songs. I won’t go into every detail of the video but by the end of it you can see that the people behind the most popular music these days aren’t artists making art but they are creators making content because that is what the market rewards.

And of course this extends beyond the music world, I’ve already mentioned Star Wars but it even goes beyond the art world. The YouTube channel Linus Tech Tips, which primarily exists to post tech reviews, recently found itself in hot water as it faced public criticism as another tech review channel critiqued its work showing that it often failed to provide accurate information in its tech reviews. This critique revealed to people that the priority of Linus Tech Tips in recent times has been to churn out content rather than publish reliable tech reviews because content is what pays, accuracy did not. Thankfully that company is now reprioritzing itself to better serve us consumers but it should make you think about how many other content farms are out there putting a higher priority on quantity rather than quality. For years the trick to growing in the YouTube world was daily uploads to appeal to the algorithm but is that really the sort of thing that appeals to us consumers? I don’t think it is, or at least I don’t think it should be.

What do we really want as consumers? Do we want content optimized to fill our time or art designed to fill our soul? Do we want to pay a large sum of money to stand in the back of a stadium where we can’t even tell if that is actually Taylor Swift singing, or do we want to see a local band play somewhere where we can go up and talk to the artists and compliment them after the show? Do we want a movie that has been sanitized for the modern audience, or do we want a film that shows an artist’s true vision?

As we ask ourselves these kinds of questions we see that the new stuff coming out of Hollywood and the music industry isn’t worth the hype anymore. Iron Maiden came out with a new album somewhat recently and I was excited to listen to it since I enjoyed a lot of their old stuff but when I finally did I was a bit underwhelmed because it wasn’t anything special, just more Iron Maiden. It wasn’t bad it was just something that I could have lived without, I felt the same about Metallica’s new album. Of course there are exceptions, I think a lot of Ozzy Osbourne’s new stuff is awesome, but for the most part I don’t really have a need for famous musicians anymore and I rarely listen to their stuff. 90% of the time when I’m listening to music it is music made by some of my actual real life friends. My buddy Patrick is trying to make money as a musician with his solo stuff as well as with his band and my friend Dustin has also made some music of his own. Why shouldn’t I support my friends over listening to the music of people who are already famous? Fame doesn’t equal quality, I hope I’ve woken you up to that reality if you weren’t already.

Anyways I’m starting to ramble which probably means I’ve run out of useful things to say so I should probably wrap this up. Don’t seek to fill your time simply consuming content, look for actual art, don’t waste your time with things that have no value.

More specifically Brandon is running as a Republican in Texas’ 23^rd congressional district challenging Republican incumbent Tony Gonzales. This is interesting because traditionally it is uncommon for an incumbent to be challenged from within his own party and yet Brandon isn’t even the only Republican challenging Gonzales and he isn’t doing it for his own gain.

In the video Herrera put out just after announcing his run, he explained that Gonzales has failed his constituents by voting for gun control and against tighter border security. These are two issues very close to the people who voted for Gonzales and he voted against their interests despite having a sacred red R next to his name. Brandon Herrera is running for congress because he wants the people living in his district to have a representative who actually represents them rather than Washington.

The sad reality is that many Americans don’t have an actual representative in congress. Mitch McConnell is a perfect example of this. A few weeks ago a video of him speaking in his home state of Kentucky was making its way around because a good chunk of the crowd was chanting “Retire!” Of course the people chanting were mostly Democrat activists so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that they were protesting the old Republican turtle but the interesting thing was that Republican voters weren’t mad, they agreed. I have a friend from Kentucky and it frustrates him that his state keeps electing McConnell. You shouldn’t have to be from Kentucky to understand that, Rand Paul is Kentucky’s other senator; these two men have entirely different agendas despite being from the same party, they can’t possibly both represent the average Kentucky voter.

Many might argue that Mitch McConnell is a product of our flawed two party system, and it is hard to argue against that. Herrera addressed the two party system in his video saying:

Lots of people … will complain about the two-party system, that Republicans and Democrats will just hand you a garbage candidate that you feel the need to support because you have no other alternative. That is only half true, the real truth is that you get to choose who those candidates are in the primary election and your vote and your efforts go a lot farther in that primary election because it’s so often overlooked.

I’d love it if someone like Thomas Massie would primary Mitch McConnell, and I feel like that sort of thing might start happening more often. People are getting tired of being ruled by rich men north of Richmond who don’t care about them, where is the Biden administration’s response to the fires in Hawaii? The fact that Trump won is proof that people are tired of the political establishment in this country as is the fact that Robert F Kennedy Jr. and Vivek Ramaswamy are both doing well in the polls. More people like Brandon Herrera need to jump in the fight and give us regular people a voice.

Now, the next thing I want to talk about regarding Brandon Herrera’s announcement is a bit less revolutionary but perhaps more important. Again he is running because he is unhappy with the way that is representative has been voting, this of course requires him to know who his representative is and how he is voting. Do you know those things? I’ll be honest, I can’t name either of my senators and I’m only 75% confident that I know who my congressman is and of course I have no idea how they are voting. These are things that I should be paying attention to, as should you, but I’m not and I bet you aren’t either. It is our job as voters to hold our representatives accountable but how are we supposed to do that if we don’t know who they are or what they are doing? How are we supposed to know if we need to vote for someone else in the primaries?

Of course there are still times when there might not be someone in running in the primary election that is any good. This happened to me in the last governor’s election in my state, I didn’t vote in the primaries because they all sucked. I of course voted in the general election and I’m glad the guy I voted for won and I don’t have any major complaints about him but I wish he was better than he is.

When people who actually have potential to enact good change come along and run for office it is important for us to support them. There is a part of me that is tempted to register as a Democrat just so I can vote for RFK Jr. in their primary election. Of course the establishment would never let him win but putting someone like him who puts the needs of the people over those of the elite at the head of that party would be great for the country. Of course there is another part of me who isn’t sure if I could live with myself if I registered as a Democrat so I’ll probably be voting in the Republican primary and while I am undecided on who to support there (since I have plenty of time to make that decision) the non-Trump candidate I’d be most likely to vote for is Vivek Ramaswamy simply because he is an outsider.

It is time we started taking power away from the people who have been misusing it. The internet has enabled us to see who those people are and we should use it to support people who won’t. Then if we don’t see anyone worthy stepping up to the plate we could consider running for office ourselves, I doubt I’ll ever do it but it isn’t something I’m unwilling to do if it becomes necessary. And in the case of Texas’ 23^rd district, let’s go Brandon.

The study looked at employee data from Denmark and examined the what happened when a person showing signs of a potentially work caused mental disorder (depression, anxiety, and stress related stuff) when they left one bad work environment and entered another. The thing that everyone would expect to happen as a distressed person leaves a “bad work environment” would be that the individual’s mental health would improve. It is quite plausible that they do expireince a temporary boost when they get to their new workplace, but I don’t think the data the study was working with was detailed enough to prove with. What the study did find was that when the distressed worker entered a new workplace the mental health of the individuals new coworkers would decline. The researchers compared this phenomenon to actual pandemics showing how dangerous it can be to a business.

Of course the research was business focused so it didn’t really provide us any information on what we should do about the information, and I didn’t read deep enough to see if it even gave businesses any useful advice, that simply isn’t in the nature of scientific studies these days, as one points out, “There has been more research on the negative (psychological) disease-based outcomes (such as depression and anxiety) than for the positive well-being outcomes (such as happiness or subjective well-being).” It is up to us to decide how we will adjust our lives with this new information and I do have a few suggestions.

First we should seek to mentally healthy ourselves. Plenty of people have plenty of opinions on how to do this and I’m skeptical of the mainstream advice. Drugs and therapy don’t seem like the best idea to me. What is the financial incentive for a doctor or therapist to fix your problems if you are no longer their customer once you are better? If the amount of people going to therapy in America has increased over the past twenty years why has the country’s overall mental health decreased over the same period of time? This just doesn’t make sense to me, and you should be incredibly worried if a doctor puts you on a drug or treatment without discussing a point where you can get off of it.

Mental health advice that does make sense to me is to improve your physical health by eating healthy and exercising. It is hard to be mentally healthy if our bodies feel like crap all the time, sugary foods are fun when we eat them but the effects they have on our bodies afterwards are far from desirable. Buy a turtle pie and eat the whole thing in less than 24 hours then see how you feel afterwards. I doubt you’ll ever want to do that again. Eating healthy real food does not have this effect. It satisfies more than just our taste buds but our entire body and it gives our mind the stuff it needs to function properly. Remember it is impossible to be mentally healthy if we are not getting the vitamins we need and the best way to get those vitamins is through the foods we have evolved to digest, not lab made chemicals that have been pressed into a cherry flavored pill.

Exercise is also something that our bodies were designed to do. We weren’t meant to sit in a cubicle with artificial light staring at screens all day. Our bodies were made to move, and we are happier when we move them and fulfilled when we push them to greater strengths. Due to a recent accident I am unable to exercise much for the time being and that thought drives me crazy.

Along with trying to be healthy we should also seek to do things that fulfill us. Strangely enough this includes jobs that are now rarely considered by kids growing up but incredibly necessary to society. This also includes things like growing a family and striving to live closer to God, two more things that mainstream culture is trying to push us away from.

In a world where conditions like depression and anxiety are contagious it is important for us to stay mentally healthy to avoid bringing others down. If you constantly have a bad attitude or a bad outlook on the world change, it will make your life as well as that of those around you much better.

This brings me to my next point. We should try to avoid mentally unhealthy people where we can. I was probably only thirteen when I first realized that I didn’t like being around my friends when they were sad or angry, I’m sure you’ve noticed this as well and I hope that you’ve made an effort not to let your attitude affect that of others.

I have decided that I will never go to a protest of any sort, not because I think the government or big corporations never do anything wrong, but because I don’t want to be around angry people. Why would I willingly put myself in that kind of a situation? Why would you?

The media we consume also has a huge impact on our mental health. Don’t waste too much time listening to sad and angry people on the internet, and avoid movies and music with a negative message. For a long time I exclusively listened to metal and I didn’t realize how it was impacting me until I started branching out to other music genres. A heavy music fueled careless drive nearly sent me off the road when I hit a patch of ice that caused me to loose control of my vehicle. Luckily I didn’t hit anything and I didn’t get stuck but that was a wake up call for me to consider how that music was affecting me. I stopped listening to metal for a few months and when I did I found myself much more calm and easygoing. I’ve gotten back to listening to it on occasion but I’m much more careful about how I let it affect my mood and actions as we should be with all the media around us because in this internet age the people we listen to online have a similar psycological effect on us as the people we physically spend time with do.

But of course we aren’t always in control of who we are around. There are very few of us who have the luxury of choosing our coworkers. If we find ourselves working around people who have a negative impact on our lives it probably is a good idea to seek different employment. But keep in mind the findings of this study, you don’t want to be the mental health contagion to a new workplace. Either leave your bad job before it drags you too far down or seek to make more improvements in your life than just changing jobs. Remember our mental health is our responsibility, we can’t expect it to fix itself with just a simple change in scenery.

Then of course there are the times where it is wrong for us to abandon people who may be struggling in the mental health department at a level where they could bring us down. Friends and family are never people we should abandon. We should always seek to lift them up. Now how to do that I’m not sure, you’d know better than me but remember the things that make you healthy, and even more importantly help them seek truth, wickedness never was happiness. Don’t let them fall into wickedness and don’t follow them down a bad path if they do. Lifting others up does not require us to fall down.

Anyways I’ve ranted on this long enough. Nothing I’ve said here should really be new information, hopefully I connected some dots that you haven’t before but again this shouldn’t be new info. Always seek to improve yourself and your mind and always seek to lift others up. Never become a reason for someone else to fall down.

I’ve only recently begun using AI, just for thumbnail images for the articles I post on Substack and I do it because I suck at drawing. If I want a unique image I don’t possess the skills necessary to make a good one, I’m better off just having AI do it over and over again until it comes up with one I like. This does not mean that AI is better at making art than humans are, it means that it is better than me, a human who lacks artistic skill. Is it better at art than the best artists of our time? No. Of course a computer will always be able to do things faster than a human but that doesn’t mean that a computer is better, it is more economical but speed does not equal quality.

Of course art has always been a fairly uncommon skill, there have never been a significant number of people great at it, and more importantly making a living off of it. This is not the case for writing, it is a skill that everyone is made to develop in school and is a part of virtually every office job there is. It is something that we should all seek to get good at and if a computer is better at writing than you are you should be concerned.

Take a look around the internet and see how people are suggesting we use Chat GPT to aide in productivity when it comes to writing. I have yet to see anyone suggest using a fully AI generated piece of content for anything important (because they don’t want you to think or admit it can replace you) but it is quite common for people to suggest using AI to write an outline or even a rough draft for you to start the writing process. Of course you’ll then spend time adjusting that to look how you want it to but I feel like doing that will take the same amount of effort as simply writing an outline. Writing an outline is not that hard, and offloading that work to a computer is an act of laziness rather than productivity.

Now I do recognize that because writing is my hobby I could be a bit out of touch here, but writing, along with reading, is a basic skill we should all have and seek to improve. Assuming you have already done your research and have an idea of the points you want to argue you should be able to throw together an outline for a three to five page essay in less than twenty minutes. We should all be able to do this, not because writing is something that we are all doing all the time but because reading should be. If we are regularly reading thought provoking things then we should be able to mimic that in our own writing, at least at a low level. This is essentially how AI learned how to write, it just analyzed a large amount of writing and is trying to copy it.

The reason that AI is able to write things that look like a human could have written them is that we have gotten worse at both writing and reading. To quote the podcast episode that got me thinking about this topic, “When AI is getting smart at the same speed people are getting dumb that [is a problem.]” AI is good at content generation because it is better at it than the average human but that isn’t a high bar, it never has been but it is even lower today. Compare the average person of today’s writing skill to that of the supposedly uneducated soldiers sending letters home during wars fought one and two hundred years ago.

Honestly I don’t really find AI all that interesting, it isn’t doing anything that I’ve ever really thought would be impossible and I don’t think we’ve even hit the ceiling of AI’s capabilities yet. What I do find interesting is peoples’ reaction to to AI. Hollywood’s writers have all gone on strike and a part of their motivation for this is to protest the fear of AI taking their jobs, this is the wrong reaction. When we see that AI could be doing things better than we are we shouldn’t go out and try to ban the use of AI, that just proves the enemy’s point. Instead we should seek to prove that human abilities are still worth investing in, we should seek to be better than the machines and perfect our craft. This may end up being a loosing battle, the self checkout is much more efficient than a human cashier at any grocery store, but that doesn’t mean that we should put up the white flag without a fight.

Remember there are still things that AI can’t do of course it will never become sentient, but probably the most important of these things it can’t replicate is your unique skills, your unique perspective and your unique human instinct. Increase your skills so AI can’t replace you, so your life won’t become meaningless, and so we won’t loose your natural intelligence in a world filled with artificial dumbness.

On a winter night in 1974 Arthur Laffer found himself at dinner with Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, two men quite high up in President Ford’s administration. At the time the Ford administration was planning to increase taxes and Arthur Laffer was there to persuade them not to. Legend has it that Laffer took a napkin and drew what came to be known as the Laffer curve on it to convince the two men of his argument.

Whenever the government raises taxes their purpose in doing so is to increase tax revenue (the total amount of money they steal from everyone). They may try to guilt you into thinking otherwise but this is their true goal. Anyways, back to the story, Laffer drew a simple graph with a bell curve with one axis representing tax revenue and the other representing the tax rate. He explained to Rumsfeld and Cheney that if the tax rate was zero then tax revenue would obviously be zero and if the tax rate was one hundred then tax revenue would also be zero because nobody would have the incentive to work if the government took everything. Of course as the tax rate rose from zero the tax revenue would rise but Laffer pointed out that there must be some point between the tax rates of zero and one hundred where raising the tax rate would cause overall tax revenue to go down because it would be harming the economy, companies and individuals become less motivated to grow the economy as the government takes bigger pieces of their pay checks.

To understand this let’s think up a simple example with some unrealistic yet easy to understand numbers. Imagine a company, we’ll call it Simple Co., that has a gross income of ten billion dollars per year and their tax rate is 20%. Let’s also assume that they are running on fairly tight margins so they can’t really grow with the other eight billion dollars they aren’t forced to hand over to the government because it is all going towards manufacturing their product. In this scenario Simple Co. can’t really grow because they don’t have any funds left to invest in new equipment or innovation. Now let’s say the government decides to cut taxes and Simple Co. now only has to pay 10% of their gross income in taxes. This frees up a billion dollars for Simple Co. and they can now invest that money into new production techniques and products. Let’s say this investment ends up being successful and they figure out a new manufacturing technique that allows them to triple their output with the same cost, so the next year they make thirty billion dollars and with just a ten percent tax rate the government takes tree billion dollars rather than the two billion dollars they were getting before when Simple Co. was making less money.

Now let’s fastforward a few years and see that Simple Co.’s income settles around forty billion dollars a year with tight margins and we get new people in government that decide they want to raise taxes and they begin taxing Simple Co. twenty-five percent. Now all of a sudden Simple Co. has to cut six billion dollars out of their budget, this forces them to cut back on product development and maybe even shut down a factory. Without this extra cash Simple Co. falls behind on innovation over the next year or two and all of a sudden Complex Co. from overseas comes in with a better product than the one Simple Co. sells and Simple Co. is unable to compete because the higher tax rate crippled them and over the next year their income drops to just twelve billion dollars and the government went from collecting four billion dollars from Simple Co. with a ten percent tax rate to just three billion dollars with a twenty-five percent tax rate.

Again this is of course an oversimplified example with unrealistic numbers, I’m sure if an economist read this they would have plenty to critique since the real world is much more complex, but I trust that you understand the concept. Increased tax rates do not always cause increased tax revenue, the results of America’s 20th century tax cuts support this claim, and of course this principle applies to lower and middle class tax rates as well.

Now of course we as citizens shouldn’t care too much about tax revenue, our individual tax rate is much more important to us than the country’s tax revenue. But, as I said before, economics is not the only place where we can learn from the Laffer Curve, especially when it comes to public policy.

Since this article was inspired by Open Source Defense, let’s take a look at gun control first. The more well intentioned and naive supporters of gun control believe that the main objective of gun control is to protect people, (rather than disarm the population) in their eyes more gun control should leave to less violent crime. But how much gun control is too much?

The most popular form of gun control is conducting background checks, background checks are conducted in every state for every legal gun sale, I believe this has been the case since the 90s and any politician who claims otherwise is lying to you. Now, you could probably make an argument against the constitutionality of background checks, but from a public safety perspective it’s hard to claim that background checks are a bad idea assuming they’re carried out in a speedy fashion (meaning in less than an hour). Everybody agrees that people with a recent history of violent crime or a drug addiction shouldn’t be allowed to buy a gun. Of course criminals will always manage to get their hands on guns through illegal means but as long as it is easier for a law abiding citizen to legally acquire a gun than it is for a criminal to to get one then the inconvenience of a background check shouldn’t be too big of a problem.

Now I haven’t looked at any numbers on this, but for the sake of discussion lets assume that background checks are effective in reducing violent crime, we haven’t gone over the peak of the Laffer Curve with just implementing background checks. So what happens if we start conducting them retroactively? That is essentially what red flag laws are (although the criteria for getting flagged by one of these laws is much looser than that for failing a background check). Twenty-seven states have a red flag law of some sort, and I have seen data on how that turned out, researchers have concluded that red flag laws have failed to reduce violent crime, in fact you can argue that they have been detrimental to public safety because they’ve disarmed innocent people who are now powerless to protect themselves from violent criminals. Red flag laws push us over the gun control Laffer Curve.

Let’s take a look at a different form of gun control. The National Firearms Act was passed in the early 20th century. It’s original purpose was to make it incredibly difficult for people to buy pistols and machine guns because those were the guns being used in crime most often. Lobbyists were successful in getting the restrictions on pistols out of the bill but restrictions on short barreled rifles and shotguns (which was wording added to prevent people from converting normal rifles and shotguns into pistols) were overlooked by the lobbyists and were left in the bill when it was passed.

So where does that leave us now? For the sake of discussion let’s assume that a civilian having possession of a machine gun is incredibly bad for public safety. In the 60s the federal government passed a law which prohibited civilians from buying any machine guns newer than whatever date that bill was passed which means these days a civilian can still legally own a machine gun but they either have to be a firearm manufacturer or pay tens of thousands of dollars for one, so for common folk like you and me owning a machine gun legally isn’t very attainable.

Short barreled rifles are much easier to get legally, because they are not as expensive, except there is a waiting period to get them and it typically takes over a year to get approval to buy one. But up until recently one could buy an AR pistol with a pistol brace attachment and those would function good enough for the people who didn’t want to jump through those hoops and that is what millions of people did. (I am not one of these people)

Within this past year the ATF has decided to unconstitutionally classify AR pistols with a pistol brace attachment as short barreled rifles (something only congress can do). This turned millions of people into felons in possession of illegal SBRs overnight. Now, what I’m about to say is not legal advice, nothing in this blog is but especially this next point because it is obviously illegal and not something that I’d ever do. Looking around online you see a lot of people coming to the conclusion that possessing an illegal SBR and an illegal machine gun are identical crimes with the same punishment. So if these people who the ATF decided were felons overnight are already guilty of that crime, what is the legal incentive for these people not to produce an illegal machine gun? It doesn’t really exist. Of course people online who would encourage you to do such a thing are probably feds trying to get you in trouble so don’t start making illegal machine guns but I have a feeling that a lot of people are going to look at this logic and start doing it. Banning pistol braces in the way that the ATF has will likely result in more illegal machine guns out in the wild, they’ve clearly gone beyond the peak of the Laffer Curve with this decision, they changed the laws drastically enough that people who would have previously complied now may not.

Now let’s step away from gun control and talk about education. We should all of course know that increased spending on education does not produce better education results and in some cases will cause worse outcomes so the Laffer Curve definitely applies there but let’s take a step further and get ourselves away from public policy and talk about grading scales and homework policies instead.

The math department at my high school was fairly centralized in the sense that every math class had the same grading scale and every teacher assigned homework every night, homework also never accounted for a large portion of one’s grade, in fact there was one year where it was only worth five percent of a student’s final grade. Homework assignments would typically take thirty minutes a night and were often incredibly repetitive filled with simple problems that didn’t challenge the mind too much. When I got into high school I quickly realized that math homework was not worth my time, I was gifted at math so I didn’t have to worry about failing tests and enough extra credit was offered that doing the extra credit assignments more than covered for the homework that I didn’t do.

Now not everyone was as gifted as I was with math but there were plenty of people who came to the same conclusion that I did regarding homework and also chose not to do it. These people suffered when tests came around because they wouldn’t have a good grasp on the principles being tested due to their lack of practice. The teachers would of course blame the failures of the students on the students but I don’t think it was entirely their fault, the teachers pushed their homework assignments beyond the peak of the Laffer Curve because they demanded too much. Had they been more careful with their homework policy they would have had better results.

I don’t have to look very far to prove this point either. The calculus teacher at my high school was the black sheep of the math department, he had a PhD and mostly just taught the smart kids so the department let him do what he wanted with his grading scale. If I remember correctly homework in his class was worth thirty percent of your grade (so skipping all of it wasn’t an option) but it wasn’t assigned daily, I don’t remember how often it was assigned but I don’t think we ever had more than three in a week, two might have been the average. His homework assignments were also much better designed, they respected our intelligence, rather than taking ten simple questions out of a book the government wasted money on where you basically did the same thing ten times in a row with different numbers he wrote his own assignments. They had fewer questions but the questions were a bit harder, they didn’t waste your time by drilling the same thing into you over and over, they were enough for you to know you knew what you were doing and once that happened they moved on. I did my homework in this class as did everyone else and there were much less people who struggled when test time rolled around. Less homework in this case resulted in better student performance, had the entire math department adopted this approach it would have been much more effective.

The Laffer Curve demonstrates a principle we should all be aware of, there are a lot of situations where less is more. A part of the mystery of the Laffer curve is that we will never actually know where its peak is nor how steep the slope is, we will never know what the optimum tax rate to produce the best tax revenue is, but we can see that if we set the bar too high we will end up hurting our chances of getting our desired outcome.

I have opened up an account on Substack and will be publishing articles there. I have already put my last article up there and I plan to post most (but not all) of my future articles there as well. I also plan on revising some of my older content and posting it there as well so that new readers can have a chance to see some of my best work. Some of those revisions may be combining articles, others may just be some edits made while I proofread (which I really have never done for anything on this site) and other articles may not get changed at all (likely the more recent ones, I’ll probably just copy and paste my Fluoride article right in there within the next week). Ultimately I want my Substack page to be a more modern, accessible and polished version of what I have here.

Now this site will not change, I still plan on posting all of my new articles here and they will probably still end up here first. Really the only things that my Substack will have that you won’t find here will be the ability to comment, a thumbnail for posts (which will likely all be AI generated), and the ability to subscribe via email. If you’ve been reading my stuff here and you like how you’ve been able to do it then you won’t have to change anything to be able to see all of my new ideas, however the revised versions of my older articles will be exclusive to Substack, having two different versions of the same article on the same platform doesn’t make sense to me.

Of course the question you are probably asking is why am I doing this and I’ve already touched on the main reason. I want my content to be more accessible and I also want people to have a legitimate way to subscribe to my content.

In web design classes they teach you to have a mobile first attitude towards development because these days the vast majority of internet traffic comes from smartphones. My site was not designed with that philosophy in mind and I don’t intend to change it. Of course my site still works on a phone but it is not the best, I don’t think I should have to explain why. There are three different ways that you can read a Substack article on your phone and all of them have a good mobile experience.

Subscription is another issue. Of course I know RSS exists, I have it on this website and I’ve written articles about it trying to get people to use it. The problem is normies don’t use RSS, in fact I don’t even use RSS anymore; I’d much rather go to someone’s actual website than read an article on an RSS reader. The only times I have used my RSS reader in the past several months were just to make sure I didn’t break my RSS feed when updating it with a new post (and I haven’t even been doing that lately). Windows is the most popular desktop operating system and the iPhone is the most popular phone in America, good RSS readers don’t exist for either of these operating systems and even if they did subscribing to an RSS feed is not an easy task, people have become accustomed to being able to do that sort of thing with a single click, Substack allows people to do that and for the people who want to subscribe privately RSS is still an option all one has to do is slap a /feed to the end of a person’s Substack homepage URL, I was even kind enough to provide that link to it on my Substack page.

But the biggest appeal of Substack to me is feels familiar and friendly to the average 2023 internet user, it has a modern design, a mobile app, and most importantly an actual user base. There are lots of independent journalists and other prominent figures who use Substack and have already attracted people to the platform. I’ve been familiar with what Substack was just from hearing people bring it up on podcasts and whatnot probably for over a year now but it wasn’t until recently that I decided to look into it and realize that it was for me. If I want new readers I can’t expect to lure them to my corner of the internet rather I need to go to them, Substack may be the best place to read and write on the internet these days because it is where people already are, it is a place that I can send a normie that won’t make them feel out of place.

Of course there are other benefits to Substack as well, the option for monetization is another one. I’ve been considering monetizing my writing for a long time now. Putting ads on this website has always been an option but it just feels wrong on a personal site so I will never do it. I’ve known about Medium for a long time and I’ve considered writing articles there to try to make a few bucks but I never got around to it because I didn’t feel like I could be myself on Medium. In many ways Medium is the YouTube of blogging, your monetary success depends on your ability to get picked up by an algorithm and on a platform where Obama is one of the most popular writers I didn’t feel like I fit in.

Medium is also a paid service, there is a limited number of articles one can read per month for free so if I wanted to bring new people there I wouldn’t only have to convince readers to read my stuff but also to pay for Medium. With Substack I am in complete control of what is and isn’t free regarding my content. I can paywall everything, I can leave everything free, I can paywall the ability to comment I can just paywall a few articles, it is up to me to decide what I think is fair. Currently I don’t have monetization set up at all so everything is free and I don’t think I will ever paywall any content (although that is not a promise) although I may paywall the ability to comment in the future. Within the next week I’ll probably enable a paid subscription option there without any perks, I don’t feel fully comfortable with the idea of pressuring people to pay me for the kind of thing I’ve been doing for free for years now but it is important to remember that there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.

Joining Substack now is also an insurance policy for me. It has always been a possibility that someone could take my writing and throw it up there trying to profit off of it pretending to be me. This has of course been unlikely but by establishing my presence there I make it more difficult for bad actors to impersonate me there. That’s a practice we can all adopt, I have advocated for quitting social media but I have come to believe that while we shouldn’t use social media we should all have accounts on the major social media platforms (protected with a good password and two-factor authentication) and follow our close friends and family there. Doing this prevents people who seek to harm you from impersonating you on social media. Once you have everything set up on these platforms you can log out and never touch it again so you aren’t poisoned by the social media mind virus but you need to be aware and in control of who uses your name and face there.

Now I’m getting off on a tangent so I should probably wrap this up. For my regular readers this change will only affect you if you chose to let it affect you, this site isn’t going anywhere so if you’ve enjoyed visiting it please continue to do so but consider subscribing on Substack to support me there. This will always be the home of my writing, not everything here will make it to Substack (for example this article won’t) so don’t think I’m abandoning my little corner of the internet, I’m expanding so I can bring more people to it.

Now I’m not sure if I am fully convinced by this theory or not but I don’t think you or I have to be to still learn from it. The pseudo-scientific community also isn’t fully convinced by it, in fact there are some pseudo-scientists who believe this theory to be problematic because they think it provides legitimacy to wrongthink. These people are stupid, don’t listen to them and don’t be like them. The whole point of this theory is to try to make sense of what priorities people have that would lead them to something someone might classify as wrongthink, because contrary to what some people may say, wrongthinkers don’t view their wrongthink as wrongthink it is perfectly rational in their minds. Understanding the rationale of a wrongthinker should be of great interest to the people interested in correcting wrongthink, while I’d probably explain this in less Orwellian terms when answering the question directly this is a large part of the reason that I find this theory interesting.

The theory identifies a number of foundations on which cultures and individuals build their moral principles. Different cultures and individuals will, for lack of a better word, assign different weights to each of the different foundations and they will also have differing ideas on what adhering to the principles of each foundation looks like, but for the most part each culture or individual will hold moral ideas that stem from each of the foundations.

The Six Moral Foundations

Originally the theory identified five moral foundations but since then a sixth has been generally accepted and the leaves room for the possibility for more to exist. We’ll take a look at each of them here.

Care/Harm

In today’s age this is probably the easiest foundation to understand, it is moral to care for others and immoral to harm them. I’d say the majority of arguments we hear in the culture war today come from this angle. The left will claim that what they do in their bedroom, how they identify, or what they smoke doesn’t harm anyone else so why should those things be regulated? The caring thing to do would be to let people do whatever they want in these circumstances.

The idea of political correctness is also deeply tied to this foundation. They say that if we care for someone we mustn’t say anything that would offend them, we must affirm their lifestyle and beliefs. The concept of gender affirming care for minors would be taking this sort of thing to the extreme.

But these are not the only perspectives that people view to be caring ones. If you are not on the left you may see these methods of caring for people as harmful. Marijuana is harmful, so banning it is an act of care. Obesity is harmful so suggesting to an obese person that they should eat healthy and exercise is an act of care even if they don’t want to hear it. A little girl cannot be trapped in a little boy’s body so giving that child unnatural hormones and mutilating their genitals is harmful to them no matter what they might say.

We see here that both the left and right are morally concerned with caring for people, they just have differing ways of expressing that care. Their different forms of care can likely be rationalized by understanding how much they value the other moral foundations.

Fairness/Cheating

I might struggle to explain this foundation as well, the researchers who proposed this theory seem to have struggled with it as well because they have changed how they see it over time.

The concept of equal rights falls under the foundation of fairness, this shouldn’t be to hard to understand, we don’t live in a fair world if this is not the case. Of course different groups of people have different ideas of what these rights should be, I trust I don’t have to give you any examples.

The communism vs. capitalism debate revolves a lot around different understandings of the concept of fairness. A communist would believe that society is only fair if everyone is equally compensated for playing their role in society. The doctor and the garbage collector should live in the same sized house because they are both required for society to function.A capitalist would believe it is fair that people should be proportionately compensated for the value they provide to society. If the doctor lives in a bigger house than the garbage collector this is fair because the doctor’s skills and contributions to society are more valuable. Both ideologies value fairness but they define it differently.

Loyalty/Betrayal

Loyalty is something that we all understand, nobody likes a traitor and most people, treason is universally considered one of the worst crimes a person can commit and most people find it difficult to forgive someone who has broken their trust. Friends are expected to be loyal to eachother and there are many people who are highly driven by loyalty. Patriotism is a form of loyalty.

The degree to which a person is loyal to their group or another person can affect the places where they are willing to compromise on other moral foundations. Let’s take a look at the Biden administration’s current persecution of Donald Trump as an example of this.

Donald Trump has been accused of similar, if not the exact same, crimes that there was evidence Hillary Clinton committed while she was Secretary of State. During his 2016 campaign Trump promised to put Clinton in jail for these crimes but when he was in office he never went after Clinton for these crimes. Fairness would dictate that the Biden administration should either let Trump go unpunished as Clinton was or prosecute Clinton as well as Trump. Loyalty, however, demands otherwise. Biden is following the demands of loyalty and we can see in this instance that the political establishment in this country values loyalty over fairness. We should take note of this as we should whenever we see a group or person place one moral foundation over another.

Authority/Subversion

Traditionally has been considered the highest authority of course throughout time and even now people have held different understandings of God but up until recent centuries leaders of countries and tribes were believed to be ordained by God in some way. Kings in medieval Europe sought the blessing of the Pope to rule and going back to Pharohs were believed to be gods themselves. This attitude is not as common these days but respect for authority is still a moral foundation that many people hold.

Respect for our elders and tradition is another way in which authority shapes one’s morals. It requires humility to keep traditions that we don’t fully understand. A prideful person has little respect for authority and will do things their own way rather than the way they were told, sometimes their way is better sometimes it isn’t but societies with high respect towards authority are more conservative than those that aren’t.

It is important to what, if any, authorities a person respects if you want to persuade them of anything. For example, many gun control advocates will argue that because we register cars we should also register guns, this argument could work on people who respect the government’s claimed authority over cars but it won’t work on me because I don’t necessarily believe that we should be registering cars either. It also won’t work for people who have a correct understanding of and respect for the authority of the constitution, a person’s right to own a gun is constitutionally protected while their right to drive a car is not.

The respect for truth also falls under this moral foundation. I’d argue that truth should be considered a seventh moral foundation but I’m not in the position to do that but we can see how it affects other foundations. For some people caring for an obese person means giving them cake and for others it means giving them a salad, this is dependent on their respect for authority and truth. Both of these groups see their stance as moral because they understand authority differently.

There has probably never been a time where truth and authority have been as widely disregarded as they are now, it is important to take this into consideration when debating people.

Sanctity/Degradation

This moral foundation recognizes the idea that there are certain things which cultures and people recognize to be clean and unclean. The Jewish tradition of only eating foods which are Kosher is a perfect example of this but it of course is not the only one. Vegans view meat to be unclean. Most traditionally minded people view things like pornography, masturbation and sex outside of marriage to be unclean. Free software fanatics believe a Windows computer to be unclean. Environmentalists believe fossil fuels are unclean. The media has conditioned many people to believe that guns are unclean without them even realizing it. Drugs and alcohol are also widely considered to be unclean.

It is important to recognize the things which those you associate with view as unclean. If you partake in those things it is likely (though not always just) that they will look down on you. You will also have a difficult time convincing them that they are not unclean because these beliefs are woven deep into their moral fabric.

Liberty/Oppression

This foundation was not a part of the original theory and thus isn’t discussed by everyone who does work relating to the moral foundations theory but it is still significant and worth discussing.

People like to be free and they don’t like to be oppressed, Americans understand this quite well because it is woven into our national identity. The confusion arises when people don’t agree on what is liberty and what is oppression. Slavery is obviously oppression and has been eliminated from American life but not everything is that clear.

Many people view marijuana to be unclean and it can oppress you if you become addicted to it so liberty would require it to be banned so that it doesn’t have the chance to oppress you. Others do not see marijuana this way and instead view the act of banning marijuana as one of oppression.

Most people believe that they should be free to make their own medical decisions, forcing someone to undergo a medical procedure is by definition an act of oppression. But what happens in the case of a pandemic? Is someone’s loyalty to those around them more important than their freedom to choose what is done to their body? Some say yes, others say no, both groups consider their point of view to be moral and changing the mind of someone from either group is difficult because there are moral arguments for both sides.

Final Thoughts

After reading this some of you may believe that I’m advocating for some form of moral relativism where we should all live and let live or whatever. I’m not, I believe that morality is absolute and defined by God, but this is not relevant to this theory. Not everyone recognizes God’s authority nor do they all agree on what he says. I don’t claim to fully understand God’s morality and neither should you. My purpose in exploring this theory was not to excuse sin.

My purpose was to give us all more tools in understanding people who don’t see things the same way we do. Take a look at these foundations and see how different people prioritize them. Generally the American left will only take a few of these foundations into consideration while the right will usually make arguments that take all six into consideration, does that prove that one side is better than the other? No, but it shows how they think differently.

Take the time to understand how others think, you will find it easier to love and help them if you do so.

I began thinking about this because T-Rex Arms recently announced that they have open sourced all of their 3D gun scans and I listened to their two podcast episodes where they explained why they did it and the value of archiving information. T-Rex Arms’ main product is their holsters, and they spent a lot of time and money scanning guns and stuff so that they could make better holsters. You’d think that they’d be shooting themselves in the foot by releasing this data to their competitors who could then go on and possibly make a better holster, but they don’t necessarily see it that way, or at least they don’t see that possibility as a downside.

In their YouTube video announcing this they talked about how the golden age of aviation innovation took place at a time when things were much more open between the 40s and the 60s. A big motivation for this openness was the fact that we were trying to build the best plane to beat the Nazis. In this kind of scenario if you have a dozen companies working on the same problem and one makes a breakthrough it is a waste of time for that company not to share that breakthrough with others. If company A invents the jet engine and company B has people who would know how to improve that engine then company B needs to know how company A’s engine works. Innovation happens faster when information is shared, this was T Rex Arms’ motivation for making their files open source.

This principle of course applies to software, the world has greatly benefited from open source code, in fact I’d be willing to be that there is not a single major piece of software out there that does not take advantage of an open source library of some sort. If you are in the middle of a software project you’d be wasting your time if you were to spend it on writing a sorting algorithm, that innovation has already been done by someone else, either use a library with an appropriate sorting solution or copy and paste some code from Stack Overflow, focus your efforts on stuff that other people haven’t already done.

The problem with the free software people is that they take the open source idea to an extreme where it just doesn’t work. Let’s look back at T Rex Arms, this isn’t the first time that they’ve open sourced stuff, a while back they open sourced their designs for their sidecar holsters (which is an inside the waistband holster that could accept attachments for other things). Doing this not only opened the door for more innovation but it expanded the market availability of that style of holster. T Rex Arms did not have the ability to produce the amount of sidecar holsters and sidecar holster accessories that the market demanded, making that product open source was a pro-consumer move that lessened the product’s scarcity. This principle doesn’t apply to software, as with any digital information, has no real scarcity. T Rex Arms didn’t have to lay off any employees when they open sourced their stuff, if Microsoft open sourced their word processor then they would have entire teams of developers looking for new employment.

Back when I was studying to become a software developer this idea presented a serious moral dilemma for me. How could I expect to get paid by a software company to write software if I held the belief that all software should be free and open source? I couldn’t because unlike almost every other industry the source of software is the product. You can open source a car and still make money because very few people have the tools to build a car from scratch, you can’t open source software and expect to make money because everyone has a computer that can compile the source code. And contrary to what the communists would have you believe there is nothing immoral about making money, it is a sign that you are providing value to the world and essential to providing for a family in the modern age.

And now that we’re on the topic of money an interesting question to ask is if something’s source is paywalled is it still open source? The free software people would probably argue “No” but in practice this question doesn’t apply to software because once the wrong (or right, depending on whose side you’re on) people get their hands on the code it will become free regardless of the will of the original developer.

Let’s take a look at Joel Salatin’s book Polyface Designs. It is a large book containing plans for just about all of the custom animal shelters and whatnot that he uses on his farm along with some reasoning as to why he made things the way he did. With the plans in this book you have the information to build a farm just like Joel’s. The book is $95, is the information in it open source? I’d say yes, the important part of open source information and ideas is that it is shared with the public in some way not that it is free. You are not entitled to another person’s labor. Besides if you actually intend to use the information in Polyface Designs then a $95 expense is the least of your concerns.

I invite you all to take some time to examine and possibly reconsider your understanding and stance on the concept of open source information. I think the free software people have done a lot of damage to this idea, examine for yourself what they get right and what I might be getting wrong. What should be open source? Should people be forced to make their work open source? If so who should do that? What does open source really mean? Is it a sin to use proprietary software? Is it a sin to keep secrets? How can one take advantage of open source information? These are all questions you should seek to answer yourself, as you should with just about every question in your life. Don’t adopt a belief or practice just because some “based” person on the internet says you should, rationalize your own beliefs and when appropriate seek God’s help in doing so.

But the more important thing to realize is something I heard during my research for these other tools which is that for hundreds, if not thousands of years, blacksmiths have gotten by without a lot of the stuff that us modern folk couldn’t imagine engaging in the trade without. The coal powered hand forge that I have is vastly inferior to the propane forges that are common today but it is still much better than the stuff being used five hundred years ago. The people who went before us did a lot more than us with a lot less.

Notice how I didn’t include a chisel or punch in my list of tools that I lack above, they are essential blacksmithing tools since there is a lot that you can’t do without them and I don’t have them, but through my research I’ve learned that I can easily make them out of common materials once I have the other tools listed, it would be a good first project. I’d be willing to bet that back in the day an apprentice blacksmith’s first project would have been to make his own tools with his master’s equipment, first chisels and punches and soon later tongs and a hammer. I’d bet that the blacksmiths of old would have had great pride in the fact that they themselves crafted their own tools with limited resources.

This general principle can be applied to a lot in life. Of course blacksmithing is rather unique since it might be the only trade where you can craft almost all of your tools simply practicing the skills of the trade; a software developer can’t type better computer hardware into existence but the barrier to entry isn’t all that high. If you have access to a computer you can learn to code. If you are reading this article you have all the tools necessary to start a website, I’m writing this article on my phone.

Fitness is another area where people often think they need more stuff than they really do to get started. I was stuck in that trap for a while, I’ve been meaning to get into better shape for a while now but I don’t have any exercise equipment and I don’t live near a gym. I was trapped in the modern mindset that so many others find themselves in of thinking that if I wanted to work out every day I’d have to get a gym membership then drive to the gym, likely change clothes at the gym, figure out what I want to do once I’m at the gym, wait around for equipment at the gym, then shower either at the gym or at home. When all of that is over a simple thirty minute work out could have easily cost an hour and a half of time which isn’t something everyone can manage every day.

But of course gym equipment is not necessary to get in better shape. Running, walking, and body weight exercises are all common options that people know but chose to ignore. Rucking is something I decided I should get into since walking around with a heavy backpack is a simple yet effective form of exercise, and yet I still find ways to over-complicate it.

If you look around the internet for rucking information you’ll find plenty of people with fancy backpacks and fancy weights and you start thinking you can’t do it because you don’t have all that fancy stuff, but that just isn’t true. One day I got tired of thinking like that and realized I already have plenty of backpacks and I looked around at all the junk I had lying around and found an old brake caliper and wrapped it in foam so I could use that as a weight.

But even then I still found ways to complicate things, where would I walk? Walking around my neighborhood wouldn’t be fun or ideal but going to a trial would also take time and put me in the same sort of situation that going to the gym would. I decided to lower my barrier of entry to getting in shape even further and got two five gallon buckets. Carrying things is an incredibly effective yet forgotten form of exercise, one can burn a lot of calories and build a lot of strength and stamina by simply filling two five gallon buckets with water and walking back and forth in their yard with them.

Contrary to popular belief you don’t need a lot of stuff to learn new skills, start new projects or improve your life in other ways. Tools aren’t that hard to come by and entry level equipment comes with entry level prices, you can get a decent welder, forge, or vehicle lift for cheaper than you think. If you want to start a new coding or writing project you probably already have a computer, just get started. If you need to start eating healthier, exercising, or growing closer to God there is nothing stopping you from doing it. There may come a time when you need to get fancy stuff to progress in these things but if you are just starting out that time is not now. You don’t need a whole bunch of fancy stuff before you can start something new most of the time you just need drive and desire, things which modern culture is taking from us.

That guy obviously enjoys writhing, as to I, it was probably a talent that he recognized he had, as have I. God gives us talents for us to use them; use them for good and there aren’t that many, if any, better ways to use your talents than to support a family and these days that most often looks like making money. When you recognize your talents this is something worth considering, I’m not saying this is always a good idea, in many cases it’s not, there are plenty of talents like cooking or music where if turned into a career success would be unlikely and could lead wouldn’t be the best for raising a family, it is perfectly fine to leave your talents as hobbies but finding a way to profit off of them is something worth considering.

Now when it comes to my talent for writing it wasn’t something I recognized as a talent or passion when I was picking a college major and considering careers. Writing really wasn’t a part of the major I chose nor is it a big part of the job I have now. I often wonder what my life would look like had I majored in English. This site is really the only place I engage in writing and I enjoy it, I don’t plan on stopping anytime soon, it has been a good way for me to develop this talent, but it isn’t making me any money, nor is it something I pretend ever will, but is it time for me to turn my writing skill into money?

I could go out and try to find a writing job but I probably won’t find a company that would hire me as a full-time writer because on paper I’m not qualified, I don’t have a relevant degree. Plus, as I predicted years ago AI has screwed up that industry quite a bit. I could become a freelance writer, a few years ago there was a freelancing agency that brought me on as a freelance writer (I gave them a link to one of my articles here as a sample of my work) but I looked through the topics they needed articles written on and nothing interested me and the pay (which was actually generous for the freelance world) wasn’t worth it. And again AI either has or will make freelance writing obsolete. I could write a book, I’ve always wanted to do that. Well I started writing a book about a year ago and soon realized that I didn’t have that much to say so I scrapped that project, I’ll do it when I have something to say, not anytime soon.

So I guess if I want to use my writing in something where I could make money I guess I could trick people into reading my stuff with their ears by making videos. Now if I were to start a YouTube channel or something do I think I’d start making money right away? No, of course not if I made any money in a year of doing it I’d be surprised, even if it were to gain traction I don’t expect I’d ever be quitting my day job for it. But after realizing that making a video is just writing with a few more steps I’ve wondered if it would be something I’d enjoy doing.

Some of you have been following me for quite a while now and might remember that I actually did make a few videos years ago and I’m not proud of them, I never was and I shouldn’t have posted them (I’m going to delete them if I haven’t already) I also didn’t really enjoy making them either. Looking back on that experience I’ve learned that I should go about making videos differently if I did do it again. The most important change would to be involving writing in the process, I was just rambling in the videos I made back then and it turns out I’m not a good rambler. I’d be much better off with a script because writing is where I shine and it is what I enjoy.

Now, I don’t know if this article was helpful to you or not, I wrote it for myself more than anyone so that I could get these thoughts off my chest. Feel free to tell me what you think, just don’t think this article is me telling you to follow your passions or something like that, because that’s bad advice. But it is something worth considering and the internet has enabled a lot of people to do just that.

But first let’s look at why I switched to Linux in the first place. For some reason YouTube started feeding me Luke Smith videos and back then almost all of his content were Linux tutorials. His tutorials are quite good because rather than doing something boring like show you how to install Python then write a Hello World program Luke would take a problem that we might encounter in our time using a computer and show people how to efficiently solve it using the tools a Linux based operating system provided. I switched to Linux because it could do things that I wanted to do, there were other benefits but none of those were the reason that I switched and none were ever a dealbreaker.

Since that time my life has changed quite a bit, and my computer usage and computing needs are among the things that have changed the most. These days all I do on my computer is browse the web, edit text documents in Vim and SSH into the server this website is hosted on. I don’t need Linux to do that, really I don’t even need a laptop to do that, I’m writing this article with a bluetooth keyboard connected to my iPhone, but of course a laptop is better than a phone for all of those things.

Realizing this, and knowing that since they came out with their own processors they now make arguably the best hardware, I really didn’t have much of a reason not to buy an Apple laptop.

The first complaint you might throw at me is that MacOs is proprietary garbage which is true but after disconnecting myself from Linux culture I’ve come to realize that I don’t care. Like we did with my switch to Linux let’s go back to the beginning of the free software movement which contained what I’ve always found to be the most compelling argument.

Legend has it that Richard Stallman was working at some computer related job and their office printer had some strange issue with it that Stallman was able to fix by hacking into the software and correcting whatever faulty line of code that had caused the problem. Later Stallman’s office upgraded their printer to a more recent one from the same company and it had the same problem that Stallman already knew how to fix but in the newer model the printer manufacturer locked consumers out of the software and this frustrated Stallman so much that he started the free software movement.

The birth of the free software movement had nothing to do with things like privacy, customizability, communism or anything like that, these things didn’t become core tenants of the philosophy until later. In the beginning it was all about having the ability to fix your software like you can fix your car and this was what appealed most to me. The idea that if I had some problem with software that I could just fix it or whatever sounded amazing to me.

But that was only ever an idea because it was never something that I did and you’ve probably never done it either. In the real world if I didn’t like a certain piece of software I’d just try a different software until I found one that I liked, this is what you do to. Since I’ve already found all the software I like and it is all available on MacOs I’m not losing anything by switching.

In fact I’m actually gaining some things by buying a MacBook Air. Battery life and processing power are two obvious things along with being deeper in the Apple ecosystem than I already am which has its benefits but ever since I’ve switched to Linux my software has felt like it has been held together with duct tape and baling wire and I’ve gotten tired of dealing with that.

One issue I’ve had was that I was never able to connect to public WiFi. Does everyone who uses Linux have this problem? No, but I did and I spent several hours trying to fix it with no success. So back when I was in college if I wanted to go on campus with a computer I’d either have to make sure I had everything I needed already downloaded or just bring my Windows laptop.

Another issue came one day when I was trying to SSH into my server and couldn’t for some strange reason. I was connected to the internet, my web browser worked just fine, my website was up so my server was clearly working, but even if I tried pinging my domain nothing would come up. This was the same with other websites that I tried, I eventually figured out that there was something wrong with my terminal accessing domain name services since when I substituted my domain name for my server’s IP address it worked. But what was even stranger was that there was no reason for that to have stopped working in the first place, I hadn’t made any changes to my operating system in a long time and when I went into my config files to change DNS servers in case that is what went down and that didn’t work, I tried updating everything but was unable to because of the DNS issue. I was able to work around the issue until a week or two later everything started to randomly work again. This would not happen in an operating system that is not held together with duct tape and baling wire.

It has been said that “Linux is only free if your time isn’t worth anything,” and while the reasoning that the guy who said it was flawed (there is nothing wrong with learning new things) I’ve found that the statement is true in other ways. If your operating system randomly forgets how to connect to DNS servers then it is wasting your time. If your operating system refuses to connect to public WiFi or mobile hotspots it is wasting your time. If you cannot connect your computer to the average printer and you have to research what peripherals are compatible with your operating system then your operating system is wasting your time. Linux is just fine to mess around with as a hobby but if your livelihood depends on you using a computer then you need a reliable desktop operating system and in my experience Linux has not proven reliable.

Then there are the people who Linux attracts, there’s plenty of people like me who are alright, I’m cool with the people I’ve interacted with because I’ve had this site but we’re the type of folk who mostly keep to ourselves so we’re not really participants in the greater Linux community. (I hate using the word community in contexts like this) Then there are the privacy focused people whose paranoia I don’t share (because I don’t believe it is healthy) but I can appreciate and the smart ones keep to themselves as well so I don’t have a problem with them either. It is the digital SJW types that I can’t stand in the Linux community and they are of course the most common to see online and of course the most vocal, there are very few people who make Linux content on YouTube and stuff who don’t fall into this category and it is the YouTubers who have the most influence.

How many times have you seen someone complain that some piece of software (usually a video game) doesn’t run (or doesn’t run well) on Linux then say that the developers have to make stuff for them too? Have you ever done it? This is tranny behavior, stop it. Linux users are the transgenders of the tech world, they have their special needs that they want people to meet that 99% of the population doesn’t have and they complain when they are forced to use software at work or something that everyone else has no problem with. Nobody cares what software you run just like nobody cares what you do in your bedroom, stop forcing it on people. Again if you don’t do this and understand that by committing to using desktop Linux you are making sacrifices and work to not make your voluntary sacrifices be a burden on others then I’m cool with you. But if I were ever to see someone in real life say something along the lines of “It’s not called Linux it’s actually GNU+Linux,” there would be a part of me who’d want to punch that person in the face because since when did software have preferred pronouns?

I remember a few years ago there was a big controversy in the Linux world where the head of the Linux foundation (or something like that) was caught using a Mac, there were PDFs on the organization’s website whose metadata indicated they were created on a Mac. I saw Linux YouTubers who were expressing the outrage of the community over this. But looking back on this I honestly can’t understand why these people even cared. Why do you care that I use a Mac now? Shouldn’t the idea that people are free to use whatever software they feel best fits their needs be included in the “free software movemnet” or are you only free to use software that is approved by some committee? Linux is not a religion, it is a computer program, you need to stop pretending otherwise.

Now what other Macbook related complaints might you have? They aren’t very repairable and Apple is an opponent of the right to repair movement. I respect this argument because I am a believer in right to repair, it was a part of the reason I fell for the Thinkpad meme. But let’s take a step back from ideology for a moment. Have you ever met someone who has had to get their Macbook repaired because of a hardware failure? I haven’t, and I’ve known lots of people who have used the same Mac for years. Repairablity is not something I should have to worry about.

Macbooks also aren’t upgradable, but the same can be said of most other laptops on the market. I got the base model M2 Macbook Air, when it came out it was popular for tech reviewers to hate that one because the hardware was not as good as it could have been, would it be nice if I could switch out the RAM and SSD for something better? Yeah, but am I realistically going to do stuff that will push the hardware to its limits? Probably not, and if I do I probably won’t even notice the dip in performance because I’m coming from a computer made over ten years ago.

Are Apple products overpriced? That’s for you to decide I can spend my money however I want. When you use the basic version of Windows there are ads built right into your operating system because Microsoft is trying to make you the product, Amazon does the same thing with their hardware and I’ve even seen it on some Android phones. You don’t see that happen on an Apple product. It of course doesn’t happen on Linux either but Linux has a time cost instead of a money cost.

So far I have been happy with my Macbook purchase. I switched to Linux for the Unix tools that Luke Smith used to show off. MacOs is Unix based, it has the same stuff, I’ve been able to install wget and rsync, and of course pandoc is even avalible on Windows so I didn’t loose that either. There is a MacOs version of Neovim so I’ll be able to move my configuration file for that right over and feel at home. I get the feeling that around 80% of the stuff Luke showed off in his old videos can be done on a Mac, because why wouldn’t the most useful and popular Unix tools be available on the most popular Unix based operating system?

I was a Glock hater until recently, I still don’t think I’d spend five or six hundred bucks for a brand new one, and I still think that the people that claim that Glock is the only company that makes reliable handguns are talking about their rear end but I’ve also seen the light when it comes to Glocks. Their reliability and performance are unquestionable. You can pick up a used Glock from the 80s at a gun store for like $250 and you’ll have no problem finding holsters, magazines, and accessories for it and you can reasonably expect it to perform just as good as any similar handgun made today, there is no other gun that can match that. The only good reason to hate a Glock is if its grip angle is bad for you, and that isn’t something that applies to everyone. Ignoring the benefits of a Glock, and the reasons why it is the most popular handgun brand is stupid, I’m a little ashamed that I once was a Glock hater, and frankly I might start recommending them to people because for people that aren’t gun people (who would be the ones asking for a recommendation anyways) there isn’t a good reason not to.

But this isn’t meant to be an article all about Glocks, its about popular brands that are popular for people to hate. Apple, Toyota, Milwaukee, Snap-on, the stuff that is just seen as the default for plenty of people and activities. I’m sure many of you have hobbies and interests that I don’t share (or at least don’t know as much about) and you can think of brands that have similar reputations in those. There is often a reason why things are popular.

Let’s take a look at computers. When I started this website that was something that was important to me. I bought this domain soon after getting my first useable Thinkpad, it was a T420 and I later swithced to an X220. At the time I believed (ignoring their dated processors) that they were the best laptops you could get (if you didn’t care about video games of course). They had plenty of ports, they were durable, repairable, upgradable, had a removable battery, had a good keyboard all the things that modern laptops aren’t. But let’s take a look at it from a different angle.

The Lenovo Thinkpad X220 and the original Macbook Air came out in the same year, they had the same sized screen, had similar internal hardware, and a similar price. Which one of these laptops has stood the test of time? It wasn’t the Thinkpad. When was the last time you used a you ever had to repair or upgrade your laptop while it was still fairly young? Have you ever even needed to? Now have you ever felt burdened by the size and weight of your laptop? If you use something other than a Macbook Air or something that has tried to emulate it in some way the answer is probably yes. I spent years years judging people who used Macbook Airs and yet, looking at the practicality, I was the one with the inferior laptop. I didn’t have a real good reason to dislike Apple laptops (aside from software freedom which is not something I value as highly as I once did) I just blindly hated them because it was the popular thing to do. And now Apple makes arguably the best laptops on the market. If you asked me for a laptop recommendation your use case didn’t require something other than MacOs I’d tell you to get a new Macbook, and to be honest if I could do college over again one of the things I would do differently is use a Mac.

And take a look back at other Apple products. I have never seen someone honestly say that iPods were terrible, they were the best MP3 players on the market that’s just a fact nothing else came close. iPhones are undeniably the best smartphones for the tech illiterate, which is the majority of the population, that, along with the fact that they are well built luxurious phones, is why they are popular. I’m sure many of you could make the argument that some particular Android phones are better but would the average iPhone user care? No. Look at the Glock 19. Is it the world’s best handgun? Probably not, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a really good one. There is nothing wrong with owning an iPhone, and sure Apple does make some dumb and overpriced products like the nerd goggles but hating everything with an Apple logo on it is stupid, there is no good reason for it and you should stop doing it. (And if you are going to email me with some rant about digital privacy, save your time, that is not a criticism exclusive to Apple it is a criticism of the entire industry and thus doesn’t apply here, it would be like trying to say that Burger King is better than MacDonald’s because MacDonald’s uses seed oils, Burger King does too).

Now Toyota is popular for quite a different reason than Apple and Glock. Toyota is not a premium brand, almost all of their cars are cheap and boring, that is the reason that back when I was a teenager I vowed never to drive one (along with the fact that they’re Japanese) and there are plenty of people who think the same way that teenage me did. But fast forward to today and I own what I believe to be one of the greatest cars ever made, the third generation Toyota 4Runner. What changed?

I drove a 1992 Cadillac Eldorado for quite a while, I enjoyed it, it was comfortable, had a V8, turned heads and what-not but it had its downsides too. It couldn’t really go off road, and I couldn’t fit big things in it. If I wanted to go skiing I needed to get someone else to give me a ride. But the biggest issue was that it broke down fairly often, especially in my last year of driving it. I was able to fix it each time but I got tired of doing it. What’s the point of owning a car if it doesn’t always run? I decided I needed a reliable car so I looked to Toyota, the gold standard of reliability.

Younger me didn’t understand the importance of reliability and that that was what Toyota was known for. If I hadn’t opened my mind to the idea of a Toyota and instead stayed a blind hater I’d probably still be driving something dumb and unreliable like a Jeep instead of something that I can count on.

I hope you see where I’m going with this by now, I mentioned brands like Milwaukee and Snap-On, I’ve never seen anyone try to argue that they are bad in any way but I have seen plenty of people complain about how expensive they are. Milwaukee is considered by many to be the Apple of the trades world because it is expensive and it seems like there is a negative connotation whenever something is the Apple of any world. But with the price comes quality, if the price offends you then odds are you don’t need a tool that high quality, I have cheaper tools because I don’t use them enough to justify the high cost, but I know plenty who do and they almost always swear by brands like Milwaukee (Makita and Dewalt are of a similar price and quality) and I can’t argue with that because it would be foolish to tell someone they’d be better off with a lower quality tool.

You really shouldn’t hate popular brands that offer functional products, these brands are often popular for a reason and you are not better than the millions of people who love them and nothing you say is going to change the fact that they are quality products.

Some of you may have read this and concluded that I am a shill or a sell-out because I’ve defended and/or promoted these brands now, a younger me would think this was all sacrilege. I haven’t sold out, that would require these companies to have paid me, I’ve matured and realized that it does not matter what computer a person uses, what car they drive, what gun they shoot, or what tools they use as long as they are happy with them without feeling like they are lacking. If you unconditionally hate any of these brands, or similar ones that offer popular quality products, then you are in a cult deeper than the people who use those Apple mice that charge from the bottom.

For years now I’ve been resistant to backpacks, they unprofessional so if you had an office job where you need to look nice you wouldn’t want to wear one, especially with a suit. And on top of that I loose stuff in backpacks all the time, plus it is often inconvenient to get stuff in and out of them at times. During my last portion of college I avoided using a backpack opting instead for a leather satchel whenever it made sense.

But over the past month or two I’ve been opening up to the idea of using a backpack again. You’ll remember a few months ago I wrote an article on fanny packs and since then I’ve been taking one just about everywhere I go but recently I haven’t been satisfied with it and the reasoning behind that was actually my fault, I overstuffed it. Looking back I remembered that my reason for getting that fanny pack was not for me to have a bunch of extra stuff (but it was of course a benefit) but for it to be a temporary home to the important things in my pockets, namely my phone, wallet, keys and gun, when for whatever reason I couldn’t keep them there; a fanny pack is great for that but an overstuffed one is useless and on top of that a pain to carry.

So when the inspiration came I was already prepared to suck up my pride and start using a backpack and I was instantly glad that I did. I was able to take the less essential things out of my fanny pack making it usable again, and I went from awkwardly having to carry four or five things between my car and work truck (sometimes in multiple trips) to just one easy to carry bag. I can’t imagine how silly I would have looked trying to carry all that stuff around an office if I worked in one.

I now think a backpack, or at least some large bag, should be a part of everybody’s daily life, and you should try to keep it filled under 50% capacity (ideally under 40) as much as possible so that you have room to temporarily stuff it with random things whenever the need arises. I’d be willing to bet that all of you have things that you keep in your home, car or office that you’d want to take with you if you had to leave any of those places for an abnormal length of time and a backpack is a great way to transport those things.

As for things that you keep in your backpack at all times that is up to you to decide, I don’t know your unique needs and if you search the term “EDC Backpack” on YouTube you’ll see lots of different loadouts that people go with. (Many of them overstuff their bags which is a mistake) However there are a few universally useful things you should keep in a backpack, something to write with, something to write on, something that can open a box, and something that can charge your phone. There are of course many other useful things that you could choose to carry, first-aid stuff, gloves, digital storage, bluetooth keyboards, headphones, a towel, snacks, a water bottle, a multi-tool, flashlight, plenty of things, but decide what actually makes sense for you and periodically reconsider what you keep with you.

The scout motto is “Be Prepared” and it is one you should live by. Keeping a backpack close to you filled with practical items for your life and space for whatever need you may find is a great way to stay prepared.

The eocovado is an imitation avocado made from mung beans, hazelnuts, apple juice, and rapeseed oil (commonly known ad canola oil). The theory behind it is that it uses products commonly grown in England so that it can be completely grown, processed, and distributed there so British vegans don’t have to live with the guilt of the carbon emissions associated with transporting fruit halfway across the world. The even more interesting thing about this theory is that the recipes for the ecovado are meant to be localized to different areas. So far there is only the English version but a Polish evocado would have ingredients commonly grown in Poland which would of course be different from the English evocado, the Mongolian evocado, and the Pennsylvanian evocado. The goal of the evocado is not to have a perfect tasting avocado replacement but to quote its creator, “Evocado is an imitation that tries to improve on reality, not merely reproduce it.”

Now the question to ask is if the ecovado is really an improvement on reality and when it comes to reducing carbon emissions the ecovado probably is an improvement, but when it comes to our food, just like everything else, carbon emissions are far from the only thing or most important thing that matters, even if we are only judging the environmental impact.

But first lets take a look at this from the health side of things. The most important thing to look at in any food is how healthy it is and there is no way that you can convince me that a combination of lectins, glorified sugar water, and Canada’s failed engine lubricant can have anywhere near the health benefit that a plain old avocado can. If anyone suggests otherwise you should feel offended because you’d have to be dumb to believe that nonsense, especially since avocados are one of the only sources of plant based “fats” that aren’t completely terrible for you. And I haven’t dug deep enough to find this but I’d be willing to bet that the rapeseed oil in ecovados is hydrogenated making it even worse for you than normal seed oils. Even if switching to evocados would magically cure global warming or whatever you shouldn’t do it because it is unhealthy. If you feel that avocados are so bad for the environment then simply abstain from eating them or any avocado-like thing, this is a much healthier and more meaningful sacrifice.

But of course the ecovado lady does try to that farming avocados is something that is uniquely bad for the environment because it contributes to deforestation. The deforestation argument is one that I have almost no sympathy for, well I guess that’s not quite the right way to put it. I don’t take the deforestation argument seriously because the people who typically make that argument don’t take it seriously because they are a bunch of plant racists.

The problem with deforestation is not just cutting down trees, it is the destruction of natural habitats and ecosystems. I’ve lived most of my life in the desert and I’ve grown to love the desert, a part of my job is to be an eyewitness to deforestation. Sure it is rare for me to see a tree get cut down but every day I see wild horses, coyotes, and rabbits looking sad as the land where they used to feed gets torn apart. There are plenty of other smaller critters like snakes, mice, and insects which are harder to see that feel the same, and there are herds of mountain goats and sheep that have already retreated far away. I once listened to a podcast where the guest was someone very concerned with the environment and he somewhat jokingly suggested that if we took the entire state of Utah (which is mostly desert) and covered it with solar panels we’d be able to power the entire world. He justified this by saying, “there isn’t much going on there,” which is simply not true, despite not having many trees in most areas Utah is a beautiful state and it would be a shame if it were lost to “green energy” production through deforestation.

All farming is a result of deforestation, sure it may not have been an actual forest that was cleared in most cases, there are lots of farms that lie in natural plains, swamps and deserts but there isn’t a single place on earth where God left a perfectly square piece of land with fertile soil, good irrigation and no wildlife ready for man to plant crops there. Every farm displaces natural plants and wildlife.

And of course not all farming is created equal, everyone should understand what modern farming looks like and should be aware of Monsanto’s line of Roundup Ready crops. And understand that when I am talking about farming I’m not just parroting stuff I’ve heard on the internet, this is stuff I have personal experience with.

The simplest way that I can describe modern farming is sometime in the early spring when things are growing the most quickly you take a piece of land and you kill everything on it using heavy machinery, plants, birds, rodents, everything, this is something I’ve done. You then spray that land with a bunch of strange chemicals to make sure all the stuff you just killed stays dead. You then plant a whole bunch of seeds for a genetically modified crop that is likely not native to the place you live. You’ll then spray some fertilizer on it but this, along with your watering, will cause undesired plants to grow up alongside your crops so you’ll periodically have to go through and kill all of those while this entire time you are maintaining fences and setting traps to keep the native wildlife out. Then at the end of the season you hope your harvest was worth all that effort.

Now if your happens to be roundup ready then you have the opportunity to spray even more chemicals on your field. In the 90s Monsanto came out with a line of genetically modified crops that were resistant to their popular herbicide glyphosate, commonly known as roundup. You could spray as much of this poison on these crops and they wouldn’t die while everything else around them would, as you could imagine this is incredibly destructive to the local environment. In the early spring you can tell which fields had roundup ready crops grown on them the year before and which ones didn’t, fields with normal crops will be full of life while fields that had roundup ready crops will have almost nothing growing, they feel alien, having more in common with Mars than Earth. Soybean and corn were the first crops that Monsanto was able to make roundup resistant, these are the most common crops in the United States and virtually all corn and soy grown in the developed world is roundup resistant meaning all of those fields are contaminated with those toxins (the effects of ingesting glyphosate, which we all do, is another topic you should look into, I have a draft of an article about that somewhere). Nowdays there are plenty more roundup ready crops that Monsanto sells including sugar beets, cotton, alfalfa, and evocado ingredient rapeseed. Sure an avocado orchard displaces some plants and wildlife and uses quite a bit of water but it doesn’t chemically scar the soil it is planted on like popular Monsanto crops do.

Now with all that being said the underlying goal that the evocado seeks to achieve is actually a good one, it just goes about it in the wrong way. We should be sourcing our food from places as close to us as we can and ideally growing as much of it as would be reasonable for us to do. If you can have chickens you should, their eggs will taste better and be healthier than anything you can buy in a store. If you live in an area where growing a garden isn’t too hard you should, everyone should understand that things like beekeeping or raising something like a pig or goat are realistic options in many situations. And where you can’t do these things you should try to buy from local farmers as much as possible, preferably ones that grow their crops in a manner that puts minimal impact on the environment. This is the way people lived for thousands of years and it is the way that we should try to return to living, this is far more virtuous than enriching some mega-corporation by buying some plant-based sludge as a replacement for meat or trying to reinvent the delicious avocado.

But first lets have a little chemistry lesson. The way in which the periodic table is organized lets us easily see some similarities between different elements, elements in the same column have similar properties, some of these columns have special classifications, the noble gasses on the far right side of the table are the most well known of these groups, known for their unlikeliness to react with anything. Right next to the noble gasses is a less commonly recognized group of elements called halogens known for being the most reactive group of group of elements.

Another thing we can observe through looking at the periodic table is how reactive any element probably is. Generally speaking the higher up an element appears in the periodic table the more reactive it is. Theoretically speaking carbon and silicon can form the same kind of atomic structures, (this is why an episode of classic Star Trek features silicon based life) but if you were to throw a bunch of oxygen and hydrogen atoms in with some carbon and silicon you’re going to have a lot more stuff bond with the carbon than the silicon because carbon is more reactive than silicon.

Fluoride comes from the element flurine which is placed at the top of the halogens in the periodic table, meaning it is the most reactive of the most reactive elements, in fact it is the most reactive of all elements. Based purely on that logic it is safe to assume that fluorine is not something that you want in your body free to react with whatever random thing it comes in contact with like hydrogenated oils can, this is enough information for us to be at least a bit skeptical of the supposed health benefits and safety of putting fluoride in our bodies, so let’s dig a bit deeper. (Although it is worth noting that fluorides are not as reactive as fluorine since they are always already bonded with something else)

Other halogens include chlorine and iodine which are both commonly used to purify water by killing the bacteria and parasites in it, again we should be skeptical of putting things used to kill stuff in our bodies but the amount of either of these things used to purify water isn’t enough to really harm us (or at least whatever harm it might do is not nearly as bad as the harm of drinking bad water). If you have the ability to choose how your water is purified you should opt for filtration rather than chemical treatment but that is a whole other topic. Another thing that most people understand about iodine and chlorine is that they taste nasty and our taste buds are rather smart because they have evolved in such a way that if something tastes nasty it is probably not something that we should be putting into our bodies, fairly common sense. And of course we should all know that if you drink a bunch of pool water, which is heavily chlorinated, you’re going to get a stomach ache, a lot of us probably did that as a kid and have first-hand experience with that. So halogens look more and more like things we shouldn’t be ingesting.

Now where did the government and all the massive corporations that are pumping fluoride into our water get all that fluoride in the first place? It isn’t something that we find abundant in nature. The first people to ever have their hands on a substantial quantity of fluoride were the scientists in the Manhattan Project as it was a byproduct of uranium manufacturing. So if you ever want to turn some heads at a party you can say that the government is taking the waste material they have from making nuclear weapons and intentionally putting it into our water supply and you wouldn’t be wrong. Nowdays there are a lot of things that we manufacture that have some form of fluoride as a waste product, the silo I saw leaking the yellow gas was at a facility which I believe recycles car batteries.

But then why did it end up being put in our water? For quite a while now dentists have known that fluoride is rather good at cleaning teeth, virtually all toothpaste has fluoride in it and dental hygienists will use stuff that has a quite high concentration to fluoride to give our teeth an even deeper clean (notice how these things taste bad). The fact that the base element fluorine is highly reactive is probably a part of the reason why it is good at cleaning teeth. From my research I’ve found nothing wrong with this so you don’t have to go out and buy new toothpaste to avoid fluoride poisoning, just don’t swallow it.

In 1939 a dentist named H. Trendley Dean was paid by the government to do some research on the possible effects of putting fluoride in drinking water. He collected data which included the varying fluoride levels in the water of over three hundred Texas communities along with the dental records of their populations. Dean published a paper suggesting that there was a correlation between fluoride in drinking water and good teeth and he suggested to the government an optimum level of fluoride that should be present in drinking water so that everyone in the population, rich or poor, could have beautiful white teeth free of cavities. Now the government has been putting fluoride in our water as per Dr. Dean’s recommendation for decades and this obviously didn’t happen.

So what was wrong with Dr. Dean’s study? Researchers have since reviewed the study and found that, much like in the infamous seven countries study, Dean cherry picked the data that he used to come up with his conclusion. Dean had data from over three hundred Texas communities and yet he really only took into account the data from 21 of these communities which showed the correlation he was hoping to find, when taking all of the data Dean had access to into account there was no correlation between the levels of fluoride in the water and the dental health of a population. Dean was taken to court over this and admitted under oath that his findings were not valid.

Dean was not practicing real science he was practicing the corrupt science that is all too present in today’s age. The question the government paid him to answer was not, “How does the level of fluoride in the water affect dental health?” it was, “How can we get rid of all the excess fluoride we suddenly have in a cheap and/or profitable manner?” Finding truth was not the motivation of his study, money was. It is rather foolish to think that ingesting fluoride would give people similar benefits as applying it topically does, it’s like saying that drinking a sunscreen smoothie will keep you from getting sunburned.

So what does ingesting fluoride do? Well since it tastes nasty, is an industrial waste product not typically found in nature and is made with a highly reactive element so we can assume that bad things will happen, and bad things do indeed happen when we ingest too much fluoride. Fluoride intake is linked to things like bone decay and thyroid issues among other things. It is considered to be more toxic than lead and yet we put fluoride in our water that is 250 times over the level that we would consider a safe amount of lead. (Interestingly enough when it comes to lead contaminated water there are people who speculate that the high lead levels in the water of Flint Michigan when they had a big crisis with that were partially caused by high levels of fluoride in the water accelerating the decay of the old lead pipes, however I haven’t dug into that claim deep enough to determine if it could be true.)

Once a lot of people started figuring this out activists began lobbying local governments to stop putting fluoride in the water, the biggest success story of these groups was probably getting fluoride out of Portland’s water* around twenty to thirty years ago but there aren’t many other places where they’ve found success and the type of people who had that did that activism back then are now the same type of people who would argue that questioning science is politically incorrect so further activism would require the education and mobilization of a completely different subset of the population. So I guess I’m doing my part here.

If you live in an area where fluoride is in the water there sadly isn’t much you can do to avoid it. You could start buying spring water to drink but that is expensive and comes in plastic bottles. You should avoid drinking water from plastic bottles since estrogen-like chemicals from the plastic seep into the water and mess with your hormones. Is that worse than drinking fluoride contaminated water? I don’t know but I’m inclined to think it might be, unless you have your own natural water source with good filtration there is really no way to get perfect drinking water, it is an area where we have to pick our battles and work to educate enough people that some political change will eventually take place for governments to actually give us good water.

When I was in the Philippines people there thought it was crazy that you could drink water straight out of the tap in America. It turns out that more Americans should start to think of it as crazy as well. The government is pumping known toxins into it, all the old pipes are made out of lead and asbestos, harmful chemicals from industrial fertilizers and pharmaceuticals our bodies don’t absorb aren’t being filtered out, and on top of all that we have things like train derailments to worry about. Alex Jones was right when he famously claimed that the water was “turning the frickin frogs gay.” Our water is far from safe but there is nothing we can do about it as individuals but educate those around us.

For more information on flouride I reccomend this article from the Weston A Price Foundation.

* - If you’d like to try to debunk my claim that fluoride being present in drinking water makes no difference in dental health compare the average dental health of people in Portland to that of people in any similarly sized city in America that put fluoride in their water.

Let's examine that idea in his societal collapse/civil war type scenario. Learning about, acquiring, and practicing with guns, other weapons, and tactical gear is fun and exciting; on the other hand learning about, acquiring, and practicing with HAM radio equipment is really boring to most people and yet having a good way to communicate and gather information when you can't rely on phones or the internet is probably more important than being prepared for a gunfight. Having a reliable off-grid power solution is quite interesting and useful for a lot of people, while gardening has fallen out of popularity these days but humans have lived for thousands of years without electricity but you you won't last more than a few months without food. It is fun to modify a truck or SUV to be capable off road so it can be used as a bug-out rig, but how many people are training themselves to be able to walk long distances carrying heavy packs once they run out of gas? If you say you are prepping for societal collapse or something but you are only doing the fun things then you're setting yourself up for failure, if society actually did collapse you'd die.

Now let's step away from the whole societal collapse thing, although the recent terrorist attacks in Atlanta show that it is not impossible in America, and it happens all the time around the world (Ukraine being the most prominent recent example) societal collapse is not something that I spend a lot of time stressing about because it is not healthy to do so. And more importantly, you should be striving to master the boring things in all areas of life.

In the software development world writing code to make ideas come to life is probably the most fun an fulfilling thing to do, and if you are only writing software for yourself, or at least software that nobody else will ever work on, you can get away with spending almost all of your time doing just that. But in a collaborative environment you can't, you need to document your code because it sucks to work with code that someone else wrote that has no good documentation. I had to do it in school all the time with code that professors gave me to build off of, I eventually gained the habit of going through the code I was provided at the beginning of every assignment and creating my own documentation for it so that I could have something to easily reference to aid me in completing my assignment. I'd find it refreshing to be able to visit cplusplus.com to find good documentation there and wished all code could be documented like that, but it of course isn't because writing documentation for code is really boring. Eventually I got over how boring it was and I started documenting my own code, nobody told me to and nobody other than me ever saw my documentation, but when I did I became much more effective. Doing that boring task made me, and will make you a much better software developer, in fact I'd argue that no matter how good the code you write is you can't call yourself a good software developer if you aren't documenting your code.

There are plenty of other places where doing the boring stuff is essential. Lifting weights is much more exciting than running but you need to do both to be well rounded in your fitness. Writing can be fun but proofreading is boring which is why I don't do it but I'd have a better quality website if I did proofread. Watching a video is much more entertaining than reading but reading is a much more effective learning method. Then there are all the other boring chores that you just have to do no matter what, the dishes have to get done, your clothes have to get washed, and the trash has to be taken out none of these things are going to happen on their own. I used to work on a farm so I am no stranger to boring repetitive tasks, life is better off if you just learn them and get them done.

I've been living with this problem for a while but it wasn't until I went skiing again that I decided it was time for me to solve it. When I ski I only have one pocket that I trust to keep things in and I have a minimum of three things that I need to have on me, my phone, keys and wallet. But my phone is the only thing that I actually need to use while on the slope, my keys are just so I can get back in the car and I just have my wallet in case I need to buy anything or if I die in an avalanche my body can be easily identified. I'll use my phone throughout the day to listen to music and do normal phone things. Keeping all these things in the same pocket means that when ever I access my phone I run the risk of my wallet or keys falling out of my pocket, which under normal circumstances isn't a big deal but when you're suspended in the air on a chairlift thirty feet above a creek covered in five feet of powder you realize that anything that you drop is never going to be seen again. That is not a good risk to take.

So I decided that I needed to solve this problem and I began looking for a bag that I could securely wear on my chest that I could take skiing to safely store my phone, keys, wallet, a knife and some snacks (most of the other things I usually carry aren't needed or legal to carry where I ski so they could be left out). After a month or so of looking in stores around town for something that could fill this role I decided to break down and order the Fieldcraft Survival fanny pack (whose product page does a terrible job showing off its features). At first I was looking for something that would have exclusively been a chest pack, but with the exception of a 511 bag announced at Shot Show (which they foolishly didn't have available at the time of their announcement, when I might have actually bought it) I couldn't find anything that fit what I thought I wanted and thankfully my focus shifted towards fanny packs that could be worn on the chest.

In the past few years fanny packs have come back into style as men have realized how useful a purse is for women but don't want to be caught dead with anything that resembles a purse. I'm not entirely sure what prompted this realization, maybe because they've been popular in Asia longer than they've been back in style here it could be a product of K-pop, maybe it is a product of the lockdowns that tricked many into believing they needed to have fancy fabric over their faces and constantly sanitize their hands so the fanny pack became a good place to keep that stuff, it could have come from people who served in the military and have become accustomed to chest rigs, or maybe it came from guys wanting to conceal a gun at the beach. However they came back and it isn't all that important how they came back but the important thing is that they are a great tool that more and more people are starting to use these days and you've probably seen someone wearing one within the last few days (although a lot of people wear them like slings rather than around the waist).

Like I've already demonstrated fanny packs are great for situations where you don't have all the pockets you are used to having, like when you are skiing or at the beach; working out is another great example for this, if you're running you probably want your phone and keys with you but having them dangling in the terrible pockets of your shorts is a bad idea, and if you're at the gym you shouldn't trust valuables like your keys or wallet in a gym locker plus to maximize the long-term effectiveness of your workouts you should be keeping a workout journal to track how much weight you're lifting for how many reps so that you can see your progress and make sure that you're actually pushing yourself to do better over time rather than just doing the same thing every week.

Sure you could keep your stuff in a normal backpack that you use for all sorts of things in situations like this but that's how you loose your stuff, I've lost a couple flashlights, a knife and my movie flash drive that way. They could either fall out while you're accessing something else in there or you could simply forget that you put them there and simply leave it in the bag for months. When you put something somewhere that you don't usually put it don't trust yourself to remember that it is there. A fanny pack whose main purpose it to temporarily house things that usually belong in your pockets is a great way to prevent this from happening.

As I started thinking about using a fanny pack more I began to realize that it would allow me to easily carry more things that I don't usually have with me but need to have on occasion. I obviously carry a gun with me and some extra ammunition would be nice but another thing that a lot of people in the concealed carry space advocate for is carrying first aid equipment like tourniquets and stuff like that. If one carries the tools to end a life it only makes sense that they should carry the tools to save a life as well. I don't currently carry any first aid equipment with me but now that I have something that I could use for that it is something that I can consider. Multitools are another thing that a lot of people carry that I don't, there have been times where I would have used one but not enough for me to justify going out of my way to get one. My main complaint with carrying a multitool is that they are typically too big to keep in your pockets without compromising something. Having a bag that I can carry a multitool in eliminates that problem and makes it another thing that I can consider. There are plenty of other tools like permanent markers, bit drivers, lighters, tape, fixed blade knives, and random lengths of paracord that lots of people like to always have on them that I don't but now have the option to because I have a good fanny pack.

But something that may be more important to consider having with you than traditional tools are charging devices. People these days have become incredibly reliant on their phones and they often forget how easily it could be drained of battery and useless. Regardless on your stance of how big of a role a smartphone should play in someone's life you have to agree that the ability to make a phone call in an emergency and have reliable communication throughout an emergency is essential. I once had to help out some family members with a disabled car on the side of the highway, when I got there one of their phones was at about 4% battery and the other was at 2% and they couldn't charge them with the car because the car couldn't run. You should keep a small battery bank that you can charge your phone with in your car and if you have something like a fanny pack that you can easily take a lot of places then you should keep one in there as well along with a charging chord for your phone and a wall adapter. If you are reliant on technology you should be concerned about how you are going to charge your devices when you aren't at home in a self reliant way.

And there are more tech things you could carry with you with a fanny pack. I used to always have a pair of wired headphones in my pocket but I stopped because they kept wearing out in my pockets so now I only take them when I know I'm going to use them, but they are also something that I can forget. In a bag they are safe. Flash drives and other portable storage devices can also have a safe place to live in a fanny pack and those can be used for all sorts of things. Then if you really wanted to you could fit a small hand radio in one of those things.

Now after reading all of this you may think that I'd advocate for having a small bag with all of this stuff in it with you at all times. I don't. The stuff in your bag should not be things that you need to access within seconds at any random but frequent moment, in most cases it would be perfectly acceptable to keep it in your car and only take it out when you anticipate needing something out of it or are doing something where you can't reasonably keep the things that you usually keep in your pockets in their normal place. On top of that if you spend most of your time in cities you have to realize that bags are often searched and in many places it is just a normal part of life that you can't argue with. Of course nothing I've mentioned here should be something that shouldn't be permitted in any building given you're a trustworthy person, but we live in a trustless society now, you can't even bring toothpaste onto a plane without a government agency thinking you're a terrorist. You never know what an unarmed security guard is going to want to confiscate, and you never know what an armed police officer is going to mistake for something illegal. If you have a bag of any size it is best only to take it into familiar buildings, you should always avoid having your property searched by people who have no reason or right to do so.

In my research of fanny packs I found that the one place you should always have one with you is not in the city but in the wilderness where I have come to believe that you should always have a fanny pack on your person. Imagine this: You're on the Pacific Crest Trail traveling from Mexico to Canada and as you're going along you need to poop so you drop your pack and find a good place to do it one or two hundred feet off trail, then once you're done taking care of your business you aren't 100% sure where you came from, you're suddenly in a survival situation with no tools, no food, and no shelter. If you have a well prepared fanny pack on you then you should get out of it fine, you'd have a map and a compass with you and you'd be able to figure out that you were traveling north before going off trail where you took a right so if you just follow your compass west you should run into the trail again and be able to find your stuff. Then if you couldn't find your way back for some reason you should still have a decent knife, lighter, headlamp, compact emergency blanket, and maybe even some snacks on you to help you survive the night or nights until you get yourself back to safety.

You may find this story unrealistic but it is far from that; hundreds, if not thousands, of people are reported missing in national parks every year and not all of them get found. People underestimate how easily you can get lost in the wild. There was one time where I was camping as a kid and after getting camp set up a friend and I went probably only 200 feet west to check something out. It was incredibly dark and when we were done checking out whatever it was we'd walked over there for we couldn't see our campsite, not even the light from the fire. To walk back to camp we ended up going north northeast rather than straight back east because we couldn't tell where we'd came from and we ended up finding other campers 100 yards north of our group. Everything turned out fine for us but it very easily could have been much worse if circumstances were different. When it is so easy to find yourself in a survival situation you should never go anywhere without the minimum tools necessary to help you survive, those all can fit in a fanny pack so you have no excuse not to have them with you at all times in the wilderness.

A lot of backpackers are beginning to adopt fanny packs these days. For a long time they've struggled to find a good place for small but important things in their backpack like knives, maps, compasses, lights, snacks, and ponchos, I've had this struggle as well no backpack has a good pocket to keep a variety of small things like that but a fanny pack is perfect for it because that is what it is built for. Plus when you go to sleep at night you can unload your pockets into it so that you know where they are in the morning which can be a big problem if you sleep without a tent like I often do.

Anyways, I think I've done enough rambling on about fanny packs by now, in fact I'm getting a bit tired of calling them fanny packs but there is really nothing better that I can call them. Mine came in the mail the other day and I'm still in the process of getting it set up the way I want it but I think for now I'll be keeping a notepad, permanent marker, extra pen, a general purpose knife, lighter, multitool, headlamp, and some phone charging stuff in there while being sure to leave room for other things like my phone and wallet and other random stuff that may need to live in there temporarily for various reasons. I plan to keep it in my car when I'm out and about and I'll also make sure I have it with me at work and whatnot. If you're curious on how it works out for me then feel free to shoot me an email in a couple weeks or months to ask about it, or if you have any thoughts on what else should be kept in a fanny pack then feel free to tell me as well.

The scout motto is "Be Prepared" and it is a good motto to live by, a well equipped fanny pack is a great way to be and stay prepared in today's crazy world and I hope it is a tool that you consider utilizing in your life.

But joking aside my prediction coming true is not something that we should celebrate, not just because a bunch of Buzzfeed employees will soon be looking for a new job in a market where they've been deemed obsolete but because this marks the next step in the decline of, for lack of a better term, quality internet content. For years now humans have not been the target audience of the internet, Google has been and for the most part always will be. Search engine optimization means that people writing online articles are no longer writing to entertain humans but to please a machine, imagine how much better a machine can be at gaining favor with another machine than a human could ever be able to. Then if we stack on top of that the fact that the first few paragraphs of articles that a search engine would give us are filled with fluff to boost SEO and force us to scroll down so that we see at least one more advertisement (this is why recipe sites always put a story before the recipe) we see that the internet is becoming more and more useless and inconvenient for finding information, the thing which is supposed to make it most worthwhile.

So how do we fix this problem? Using alternate search engines is one idea. Marginalia is an interesting one that I recently discovered, it recently reached the milestone 100,000,000 indexed documents but due to hardware limitations it doesn't make sense for its creator to push for quantity, in the post announcing this achievement it was said that "Focus should instead be on improving the quality of what is indexed, on making it better, faster, more relevant." This is a noble goal, filter out the junk and give people relevant quality information, is there a good way to do that? Well if somebody had already found one I wouldn't have to write this article.

Wiby is another niche search engine that focuses on indexing simple non-commercial sites like mine. Most of what it has indexed are human submitted pages which makes it a fun tool for discovering sites you wouldn't find elsewhere but rather terrible at reliably finding specific information, which is the whole point of a search engine. If today you used Wiby to search the term "Ford Lightning" the first and only relevant result that comes up is my article titled "The Ford F150 Lightning" and when I say that is a relevant result I am using the term quite loosely because that article is more of a rant on electric vehicles than an informational piece on Ford's electric truck. There are a few results relevant to other Fords and if you scroll down even a little bit you find my cryptocurrency article which has nothing to do with electric trucks or even the original truck that the name Ford Lightning came from. Marginalia doesn't do much better on the Ford Lightning test, these search engines are cool in theory but in practice you are better off reading whatever AI generated content Google feeds you when you need specific information or recommendations, occasionally you get lucky with them and stumble upon an artisanal webpage but the odds of it having precisely what you need are slim.

There are of course other ideas people across the internet have had to make it more useful for storing and finding information. Personal wikis are an interesting idea and have the potential to be of great use but mostly only to their creators. Saving everything is of course another option for people seeking to keep hold of the stuff on the internet they find useful but then indexing becomes a problem again. Exclusively using quality specialized websites, like based.cooking, is probably your best use of the internet for information gathering but sites like these are hard to find for many topics if they exist at all. Where am I supposed to find a similar online resource for beekeeping advice, car repair, or carpentry? And would such a site even be that useful for those kinds of topics?

Because of the recent advances of AI and the degradation of the internet many people have been talking about this same topic and many of these same solutions along with others but all of the people I've seen talking about this problem have neglected the most time-tested solution to storing and accessing information, books. If you really want to learn something buy a book about it.

This was the topic of one of my earliest blog posts (back before I was all that great at writing these). I went to school for computer science and while I was there I didn't learn to program by attending class, I learned it by reading books (which the classes were based off of). I'd read the textbook then when I'd get to a part in my assignments that I had trouble with I wouldn't look for the solution online, I'd reference the book. I kept those books throughout my time as a student and I'd go back to them from time to time because looking there was better than looking online. My dad and I learned beekeeping by reading a book and when we were starting out we'd reference that book often and my dad has bought more beekeeping books since then, I don't think there has been a time where either of us have felt the need to look up a beekeeping issue online. I have watched a few beekeeping introduction and tutorial videos online out of boredom and curiosity and I have never seen one that was as helpful as having read a book. When I have to repair something on my car I don't go to the internet anymore, I've invested in service manuals for my cars because the relevant information within them is easier to find and more accurate than what a search engine would give me. Why would I endanger my life by doing something to my car that someone, or something with unknown credentials on the internet says is the right thing to do?

Books are written by human experts, not artificial intelligences; their goal in writing is to help you become an expert as well, not sell adspace. And of course books are much less convenient than the internet, you can't carry your entire library in your pocket wherever you go and more importantly you can't effectively get information from a book that you have not read which requires an up-front time commitment. If you are picking up a new skill, learning as you go through the internet, when an unforeseen problem comes up you'll be frustrated as you spend way too long searching the internet for the solution to your problem, and you'd consider yourself lucky if you even knew what to type into Google to get you on the right path to your solution. If instead you had read a book about your new skill, when you inevitably encounter a new problem you would at least have an idea of what the solution to the problem could be because you had already read about it and you would know exactly where in your book to look for more information and what kind of things to Google for more information. The up-front time cost of reading a book to help you become an expert vastly outweighs the frustration to be had while amateurishly scouring the internet for clues that you might not even have the patience to properly apply.

I've been collecting books off and on for years now and in the past few months I've found that I've shifted from mainly buying books that that I think would be entertaining to looking at books I think would be useful. I recently bought a book on emergency care and rescue, a few weeks ago I almost walked out of the store with a book about food preservation methods, survival books are always fun to look through, Polyface Designs is a book I'll eventually pick up, and books on metalworking, carpentry and gardening are also ones that I should add to my collection. What books should you buy and read? Definitely ones related to your job, then ones related to your hobbies as well. Beyond that get books on skills you'd like to develop or may just find useful to have in the future, think of the skills that matter and give yourself the resources to properly develop them, starting with a reliable source of knowledge. And remember when doing so you don't have to get the most serious or fancy books, books written for beginners, like the for dummies style of book, are perfectly fine because odds are you are a beginner at most things and a book written for you will be much better than a book written for someone who already has background knowledge.

Now of course books can't offer you everything that the internet can, I've already mentioned that you can't have your entire library in your pocket so when you are in the store trying to figure out what kind of nails to buy your books won't help you. Books probably wouldn't do too well in the Ford Lightning test I made up above either. And most notably, books also can't connect you to other ideas as well as the internet can. Just while writing this post I've given you links to several other sites filled with interesting thoughts and ideas that may give you something that I never could. The internet is a great place for discovering new ideas when those ideas are allowed to flourish, but the internet is shifting away from that because it is so easy for corporations to profit off of AI generated content. And a focus on trying to discover new things on the internet can shift to a focus on discovering new people on the internet which we shouldn't be doing, internet people are not healthy.

Now of course books aren't going to magically give you new skills you still have to practice and experience the things books teach in order to gain any new skill, but the same can be said of internet content. You can read a book on welding or you can watch a video about it either way you won't be any good at it until you've had hours of practice under your belt. Then once you've reached some level of expertise at whatever you've been learning you can put together an artisinal webpage to combat the AI dominated future our internet is doomed to have.

Can we save the internet from AI? I don't know. Is it even worth saving? I'm not sure. Would we be better off if we simply turned our backs to it and embraced books as our primary method for storing, sharing, and learning information? Yes. We should use the internet to support our learning and growth, not as its primary source.

Because we don't have free speech on big tech platforms the business model of many political commentators has been to produce YouTube permissible content that is free on YouTube and then sell memberships or subscriptions or whatever to their own website where they publish things that would have gotten them banned from YouTube. It has been this way for years and the other day I decided to pay for a month subscription to one of these commentators and after watching a bit of the members only content I can say that it is refreshing to hear truly free speech. When all you watch is stuff on YouTube then you get used to hearing phrases like "YouTube won't let us talk about that," and "We'll talk about that behind the paywall," or you hear people use words and phrases that don't specifically refer to the thing that is actually being talked about or the opinion that is actually held by the person speaking you don't realize how much you are really being controlled, it is absolutely ridiculous that people have to call guns pew pews on some YouTube videos. Seeing people online say what they really want to say without any sort of filter other than their own decency is just plain refreshing and I highly recommend seeking that out.

This experience has also gotten me to think about the true purpose of censorship. Again all the time on YouTube you hear people saying "I'm not allowed to say this." but that isn't what it is about. Let's say you're an "anti-vaxer" and you make a video going in-depth about vaccine injuries, YouTube is not going to let you post that, is that going to change your stance on vaccines? No, in fact it may even validate it. That censorship does nothing to change the views of the censored restricting what you say only demoralizes you which is not its true purpose. Censorship is not about what you aren't allowed to say, it is about what you are not allowed to hear, and ultimately what you are not allowed to think.

Let's consider a different scenario, we'll stick on the topic of vaccines, you know nothing about them other than what public education and the mainstream media has told you about them so you don't see anything wrong with vaccines and you don't have a reason to look into them either, in fact you are so tuned into the mainstream narrative that you can't even comprehend why someone wouldn't trust the nice man in the labcoat. A random video looking into vaccine injuries could change your mind about that, or at least give you motivation to research the topic. However, if you never hear anything that goes against the mainstream narrative you never have a reason to doubt it. This is the goal of censorship, to keep you ignorant, whether the mainstream narrative is right or wrong. It is not about what you can't say it is about what you can't hear.

This is a perspective on censorship that we don't often hear, because the people who complain about censorship are in the business of saying things rather than the business of hearing things like you and I are. I wish people would start talking about censorship this way because I think it would trigger more of a response in the masses whose actions have the power to change the market. Hearing the term "You're not allowed to hear this," hits people a lot differently than hearing "I'm not allowed to say this," one applies to the person being influenced while the other only applies to the influencer.

And of course I'm not sitting here wearing a tin foil hat suggesting that every censored opinion is correct, maybe Jeffrey Epstien really did kill himself, maybe there is nothing wrong with ingesting industrial waste, and maybe the Earth really is round, what I am saying is that if we are never given information, either true or false, to challenge our beliefs then we never have a reason to solidify them. We should seek out places where people are allowed to speak freely so that our views can be challenged and so that we can remind ourselves that big-tech and the government don't have the amount of control over us that many people think they do. It is refreshing to see and remember that we are free.

But this phenomenon isn't exclusive to the food industry it is everywhere, especially within entertainment. It is why popular movies suck, it is why everything seems to have a sequel, it is why an old roommate of mine told everyone that his favorite movie was Big Trouble in Little China after I first showed it to him. Because he, like so many people these days, was generally unwilling to spend two hours of his time on something unfamiliar, but when he did finally do it he was greatly rewarded.

It is why the audiovisual entertainment industry is filled with almost nothing but remakes, reboots, and spin-offs, and almost all of them suck. Take the state of the Star Wars franchise as an example. A few years ago Disney announced a bunch of new Star Wars shows (notice no movies) that they were planning on releasing over the next few years. Kenobi was the show that everyone was most excited for but at the time I told my friends that it was probably going to suck and the show that I was most excited to see was Andor. My prediction was incredibly unpopular and hated by everyone I told it to, people thought Obi-Wan was such a great character so a show focusing on him couldn't possibly be bad while nobody wanted to watch a show about Cassian Andor would be boring because who would want to watch a show about a character who wasn't a big part of the greater Star Wars universe. The reasoning behind my prediction was that Kenobi would suck because it had expectations that were impossible to meet while Andor would do good because he was an interesting yet minor character with no expectations tied to him so the writers had the freedom to do something unique with him.

Fast-forward to the present and look at the Star Wars shows that have come out. The Bad Batch was alright but not for everyone, the Boba Fett show was dissapointing, and Kenobi was terrible, but Andor is considered by many to be the best Star Wars content to come out since Disney took over and possibly even the best Star Wars since the original trilogy. Andor was able to do this because it was about someone unfamiliar enough to the people who never venture away from the familiar that they could do something unfamiliar to those people, namely create something actually good. When you are dealing with beloved characters like Obi-Wan and Boba Fett it is nearly impossible to please fans but because that is all most people want to watch these days it is the characters that studios are forced to use.

This brings us to Velma, a Scooby-Doo spin-off, or reboot, or something, to be honest I'm not entirely sure what to call it because it doesn't have Scooby-Doo in it. Anyways it uses characters from Scooby-Doo. The show is terrible, it makes everyone angry, Scooby-Doo fans, Conservatives, Liberals, white people, potheads, feminists, Christians, and everyone else have something in this show to be angry about. I haven't watched it because I have too much self respect to waste time on that garbage but I have seen a few reviews and everyone reviewing it has said that it is the worst piece of media they have ever watched. It is so bad that many people believe, myself included, that it was made bad on purpose, not bad as in woke on purpose, because woke people hate it too, but genuinely bad on purpose.

My reasoning for believing this doesn't come from me (I generally don't care about niche things like Velma to think about them on my own), it comes from an Upper Echelon video. He spends a bunch of time talking about why Velma is so hated by everyone then he explains that intentionally making a terrible show for everyone to hate watch was safer than trying to make a good show. Of course Scooby-Doo is not a hard franchise to faithfully add on to. If you gave a high school creative writing class an assignment to write a Scooby-Doo story I'd bet almost all of the students would turn in a story that fit right in with the hundreds of other traditional Scooby-Doo stories out there. If HBO made a faithful Scooby-Doo reboot nobody would watch it because it wouldn't stand out and Scooby-Doo doesn't have the draw that things like Star Wars and Marvel have. Velma has gone viral because it is so hateable, you are supposed to watch it so that you can hate it, you are supposed to talk about it because you hate it like I am doing right now. I've fallen into HBO's trap by writing this and so have you for reading it, hopefully neither of us waste our time watching the show.

To quote Upper Echelon, "this feels like a pilot program for purely malicious reboots with the only definable intention being maximized anger through the destruction of existing brand goodwill." Of course we've had malicious spin-offs and reboots before, that is nothing new and they've all flopped, but those malicious shows' malice was only targeted towards fans of the original properties, Captain Marvel, She-Hulk, and that new Lord of the Rings spin off are prime examples of this. Velma is the only one of these shows that seems to have been designed to anger everybody. Fans of big nerdy franchises are hard to please, it takes talented and intelligent writing which is difficult to produce, the last time Star Trek fans were universally pleased with a new Star Trek show or movie was probably the 90s. If fans of these standing franchises are going to hate what you make anyways why not just lean into it and make something that everyone will hate too? It is much easier, and if it ends up working for Velma it might end up working for other things as well.

Velma is clearly a train wreck, but it is an experimental train wreck and I hope the experiment fails. But if the experiment turns out to be successful and we start to see more shows based on popular IPs made to be intentionally terrible then there would be a bright side to it: people might begin to turn away from the Red Robins of the film industry and start enjoying actual cinema. Maybe it is a psyop by the big players in the film industry to get the public to pay for actual art again, and if that is the case I can't say I'm opposed to it.

A few people raised their hands and gave nebulous answers like pride, or fear, or laziness along with an obvious description of those things and all those answers were correct but they were also too broad and inoffensive to really be of much value. After being a bit tired of hearing these sort of responses I looked around, saw that at least a third of the room was on their phone not paying attention and raised my hand to say, "Being on our phone in church is a way that we pollute our sacrifice to the Lord."

Everyone knows that they shouldn't be prideful, or fearful, or lazy, but when you just talk about pride as a general concept you're not helping people realize when and how they are being prideful you're not really helping them conquer the issue of pride, you're just boring them to death by telling them something they already know. Everyone should also know that they shouldn't be on their phone at church but they do it anyways and by bringing something specific like that up in a discussion about polluted sacrifices it causes people to look inward and give them an opportunity to correct that bad behavior that they've let slip into their life. I feel like that discussion would have been much more interesting and impactful if we had spent time talking about specific issues like being on your phone at church, paying tithing late, listening to scriptures vs reading them, and doing work on the Sabbath, rather than general concepts like pride, fear, and laziness. If somebody walks out of a class without at least one specific thing that they can apply to benefit themself or their work was the class (or anything else meant to be instructional) worth their time?

I recently went to a class about setting and achieving goals, I was of course hoping to walk out of that class with some new strategies on goals and to be able to share my insights with other people to help them with their goals. In the beginning of the class we talked about reasons that setting and achieving goals is hard and the teacher wrote a big list of the struggles people in the class had on the board, then we talked about areas of our lives where we should set goals and by the time that discussion was done we were almost out of time. We never looked back at that list of obstacles that was written on the board to discuss strategies to overcome them. I left that class empty because the only things we talked about were the facts that goals are hard and we should set goals, things I and every other person in that class already knew. The class would have been much better had we taken a look at some of the obstacles, for example not holding yourself accountable to your goals, then talked about solutions, like keeping a journal where you write about your progress on your goals.

It is easy to talk about things in the abstract because it shields us from accusing someone of being wrong, or worse confronting the reality that we aren't perfect. It is also easy to vent about problems without brainstorming solutions because it validates our choice to not take action in solving them. Both of these things are symptoms of the same disease in today's culture: an inability to apply things to our own lives.

I partially blame the education system for this issue. I'm sure everyone who has ever sat in a math class and heard someone ask the teacher, "When are we going to use this in our life?" Maybe you were even the one who asked it all the time, and while learning basic arithmetic, algebra, and geometry the teacher could usually come up with a real world example of a time when whatever concept the student was struggling with may apply what was being taught. But in more advanced classes there will inevitably come a point where the teacher is looking into the face of some student whose dream is to be a choir teacher and the only truthful answer to the question of when they'd need trigonometry in their life is never. At that moment the student realizes (assuming they hadn't already) that what they're being taught is useless to them and they can dump whatever they are being taught as soon as the semester is over. As students become accustomed to learning things they know they'll never have to apply to their own lives they loose the ability to apply the things they learn which they should to their lives.

This only gets worse when someone goes to college having decided on a major. I "studied" computer science in college but a considerable chunk of my academic efforts were spent elsewhere because every university has a certain set of classes that they want all of their students to take regardless of what the student plans to do with their life. I had to waste time in various humanities and science classes that I knew I would never actually need to apply to my career rather than spending time becoming more expert in my chosen field. Sure, I enjoyed some of these classes, but if given the choice I would have replaced them with a more relevant experience any day of the week. Every student feels this way, you'll never find a business major excited to be in a biology class of a psychology major who walks into a calculus class with a smile on their face and yet you'll still find them in those classes and you'll see them a month after the semester ends having forgotten everything taught in that class. Forcing people to learn things which they plan to forget only makes them more practiced when it comes to forgetting things which they mean to remember. I honestly think college made me stupider.

Political correctness is another thing that prevents people from applying various concepts to their lives or helping others do the same. We live in a culture where there are certain lifestyles which are not allowed to be criticized even though many of those lifestyles are dangerous and wrong. Take the body positivity movement as an example, many people involved in and sympathetic to the movement claim that sharing facts and advice about health is offensive, this causes a certain subset of the population reluctant to learn and apply such "problematic" concepts, and it makes all but the brave reluctant to bring up these kind of things in a classroom (or similar setting) where people are there because they supposedly want to learn useful things to apply to their lives.

But of course the biggest cause of this problem is also the root cause of political correctness, pride. Before you have to apply a new concept to your life in a beneficial way one first has to admit to themself that they are not perfect. Of course in theory everyone knows that they aren't perfect but in practice they don't. If people where people truly acted as if they understood they weren't perfect we'd see a lot more people actively trying to make changes in their lives to become better. Instead we live in a world where people are filled with self righteousness while engaging in things as relatively harmless as spending all day watching Netflix to committing sins against other people. People hate having to admit that they are wrong about something.

For a vegan to take the knowledge that every healthy culture in the history of mankind had meat in their diet and apply it to their life they'd first have to admit to themself that their worldview is flawed, nobody wants to do that. For an environmentalist to take the knowledge that lithium, cobalt, and mercury are essential components to electric car batteries but are also extremely destructive to the environment to mine and apply it to their life they'd first have to admit to themself that their worldview is flawed, nobody wants to do that. For an abortion activist to take the knowledge that life begins at conception and apply it to their life they'd first have to admit that their worldview is wrong, nobody wants to do that. Pride is what is preventing these people from applying these things.

But of course these are rather extreme examples. What knowledge and wisdom is your pride preventing you from applying to your life? Learning is a truly rewarding activity that we should seek to be doing as much as we can throughout our lives, but if we are not seeking to apply the things we learn to our lives then we aren't getting the most out of it and we may have to ask ourselves if the effort spent learning things was really worth our time. Don't fill your brain with useless facts, fill your life with useful habits.

I'll also admit that this is not a practice that I've been all to good at. There was a short period of my life when I kept up with journaling fairly well but that time has past and I could count on my fingers the number of journal entries I've written in the last four years. I guess you could say my new year's resolution is to change that. Growing up in church I was always told that it was a good idea to keep a journal but I don't remember ever being told why which is probably the reason I never seriously committed to doing it. Now I see that there are powerful benefits directly related to keeping a journal so I've committed to it and you should too.

The first benefit of journaling is for productivity. According to this video, Marcus Aurelius did most of his journaling in the morning. I found this interesting because whenever I've journaled it has always been at night. The more I think about it the more potential benefit I see in writing in your journal the first thing in the morning.

Writing in the morning forces you to think of the things that you plan to accomplish throughout your day. All those motivational speakers that talk about setting goals say that goals are much more powerful once you write them down. I've of course listened to enough of Scott Adams to know that goals are for losers and developing systems is the true path to success, and I can think of no better way to get yourself to get things done than to write down what you plan to do then do it. If you are familiar with Agile software development it is like holding a daily stand up meeting with yourself. I can't give you a personal testimony of a long term benefit to doing this because I only started today but I can say that when I got out of bed today I wrote in my journal that I planned on finishing this article then I got right to work doing just that without wasting any time on any other distractions. It just makes sense that if you start your day thinking of the things you mean to accomplish then you will put forth a better effort to actually accomplish those things.

Then of course at the end of the day you can look back at what you planned to do and report to yourself how things went. It gives you the opportunity to track your successes and evaluate your failures, if you aren't doing these things then you are making it quite hard to improve yourself.

Another benefit of keeping a journal is that it gives you a place to vent your emotions. Anne Frank, whose diary we read to understand the horrors of the Holocaust, said, "paper has more patience than people." There are times in our lives where we need to voice our feelings and frustrations just so we can get them off of our chests and move on. We don't always have people in our life who we feel comfortable doing that with but we always have access to paper. Remember, your journal is for you, nobody else has to read it, you don't even have to read it if you don't want to, but when words need to come out it is best to let them out.

Of the few random times where I wrote something in a journal I think all of them were times when I was simply getting things out that needed to come out. It was therapeutic, I felt better each time. I also remember a time back when I was journaling more regularly when I wrote a rather long poem in my journal about how I felt. I was in a tough place at the time and things weren't going how I wanted them to no matter what I did. When I was done with that poem I read it back to myself and saw how I felt, realized that I didn't want to feel that way, then made the decision to look at things differently and change the way I felt about things. This didn't change my circumstances but it helped me to realize that my circumstances didn't have to define my level of happiness.

The next benefit of journaling is of course the fact that it helps you remember things. Looking back at Meditations by Marcus Aurelius there are many people who criticize the book for being too repetitive but these people forget that the book is not a book it is a journal and Aurelius had principles that were important to him which he needed to constantly remind himself of and it appears that his journal was a way for him to do that. I am not a believer in repeating written prayers because prayer is our opportunity to speak with our Heavenly Father in our own words about our own needs not reciting a nice poem, but there are many people of all sorts of faiths which do this and I can see the benefit of having a daily reminder of the things taught in these prayers. Journaling gives you a similar opportunity to remind yourself of important principles in your life, I'm of course not saying that you should write down the same things every day but do as Aurelius did and write these things down when they come up in your life, explain to yourself why you do the things that you do so that you remember why and don't lose purpose in your life.

And of course a journal also records a history of your life so that you can better remember the things that happened and the things you did. That journal will also be of great value to your posterity as they can use it to learn from your example, either good or bad. It can also be a great value to history, I happen to have an ancestor who was on the Lewis and Clark Expedition and while Meriwether Lewis's writings on their scientific findings may have been of more value at the time the personal account of Patrick Gass is arguably more important to historians today because it gives us a glimpse into what life was like for the explorers. We all of course recently lived through an event that future generations will learn about in their history classes, for many of us the mainstream narrative does not align with our views and experiences, we should be the authors of our own history, not simply characters in that of somebody else, or worse, pawns either used or destroyed in the recorded actions of large organizations.

Now I hope I've convinced you of the benefits of journaling, a part of my purpose in writing this was to convince myself. At first I wanted to wait until I had gotten myself back into the habit of doing it before I wrote this article so that I could report my successes and what not and provide you with the sort of thing that those clickbaity I did x for y amount of days videos would give you. But I realized that convincing myself of the benefits beforehand would make it more likely that I'd actually follow through with my commitment to journaling than treating it as an experiment would.

Anyways I can't tell you how to journal, I'll be doing it in a physical journal with my own terrible handwriting in both the mornings and the evenings so I guess I could recommend trying to do the same, but ultimately you should find the method that works the best for you. There are plenty of people on the internet that will tell you about all the different ways they journal and you can of course look at those but don't overcomplicate something that can be done simply. Although I will recommend using a physical journal because there is something more personal and meaningful about using pen and paper that words simply can't explain, just like the true benefit of journaling can't be fully explained but only experienced. Experience it.

But more importantly that page is severely outdated and bloated. I should realy try to feature my top ten articles and update the list every couple of months, but I've written too many things and don't remember all of my best articles. I've come across links out in the wild that people have put out there to posts that I don't even remember writing so I clearly have forgotten even some of my best posts so I need your help in identifying what my top ten posts are so if you've read a lot of my stuff please email me and tell me what your favorite articles have been.

I also plan to reformat my poorly named page to be more readible and helpful, I hope to only feature ten (or fewer) aricles to make that easier Ideally your favorite articles will represent several topics as I tend to write about several topics and hopefully I can fit all the best ones in those ten.

Anyways thanks for reading and for those of you who will help me out with this task I've given myself I thank you in advance.

NOTE - This post esists only in this RSS feed and was written entirely without spell check.

I've been carrying a gun on me for quite a while now and I have become quite comfortable in doing so because I know that there is nothing illegal or immoral about the way in which I carry a gun, I have a permit and training to do so and I know the relevant laws in my state and the states that I visit. I'm not worried about what might happen if I'm out in public and a stranger notices that I have a gun hiding under my shirt because I know I'm not doing anything wrong because I don't take guns anywhere that I'm not supposed to have them. The worst case scenario in such a circumstance would be me getting kicked out of some business where I would simply comply because not doing so is not worth the trouble, but I don't think that will ever actually happen to me because really the only people who will actually notice that you have a gun on you are the people you'd want to know anyways, namely law enforcement, criminals, and other citizens who are carrying a concealed weapon, regular people don't pay attention and are too busy focusing on their own problems to pay any attention to you.

It actually surprises me that the people I'm around often don't notice that I have a gun on me. Keep in mind I'm 6'1" with a beard, wear flannel shirts and cowboy boots nine months out of the year, I have the pocket clip to a knife visible in my back pocket, the clip to a powerful flashlight in my front pocket, and I am almost always wearing a baseball cap and up until recently that hat would almost always have the logo to a gun company on it. I look like the type of guy who you'd expect to have a gun on him and yet my friends don't notice that I do. You could be printing like crazy and people who don't know what to look for won't see anything.

That being said most of my friends know that I carry because I've told them, I don't see a point in keeping that a secret from people that I trust like many people do. I'm not a secret agent or something stupid like that, I'm just a regular responsible guy exercising my God given rights. There should be nothing abnormal about that but because we live in a culture where for whatever reason such a practice is perceived as uncommon people don't think it is normal. If you carry, don't be afraid to tell people that you carry and the rational reason why you do. The media tries to paint gun owners as something they are not, don't let them do that, show people who we really are.

The point of concealed carry is not to hide a gun from people but to be able to use that gun to protect people if the need arises. Never forget that and never preach otherwise.

If I wanted the title of this article to be more clickbaity I could have titled it "Coming out of the Closet as an iPhone User" because in the two and a half years that I've had this site I've hid that fact from you, I'm sure there are many of you who have been following me for a while who assumed that I used Android simply because of the corner of the internet that my site resides in, but the truth is I don't. I use an iPhone for the same reason that I use a Thinkpad X220 with a hipster install of Arch Linux on it, it is the best tool to accomplish what I want to do with it, and really that is the core of my software philosophy, using the best tool for the job.

My first main computer that I chose for myself was a Razer Blade 15 back around 2019. I got that because I thought it was something that it was not, a durable and capable programming machine. I soon realized that programming on Windows is one of the most painful things imaginable and a fully aluminum laptop is not as durable as one would expect it to be. Then on top of that I realized that I wanted to be able to repair my machines if necessary and while the Razer Blade is not terribly unfriendly to that I realized that (at least at the time) I was not comfortable opening a $1400 laptop. Around a year after getting that Razer laptop I bought a Thinkpad T420 off of Ebay and installed Arch Linux on it because I'd been watching Luke Smith videos and was impressed at the things Linux could do that simply couldn't be done on Windows. The T420 did just about everything I wanted it to do at the time (although Zoom was a problem when that was forced into our lives) and I've since switched to an X220 because I wanted something more portable and because my current computing needs are much smaller than they once were (I don't do much more than edit text files and browse the web these days) an X220 is perfect for my needs and could easily do more if I needed it to. However an antique laptop running niche software is not perfect and definitely not for everyone, it fits my needs but it may not fit yours.

I don't run Linux because I'm trying to hide from the FBI or something because my life liberty and pursuit of happiness are protected by the constitution of the country which I live. I don't fear my government because they have no justified reason to fear me and I have no plans to give them one. I also don't fear big tech tracking either because I know their biggest goal in tracking me is to serve me ads for products that they think I'm likely to buy, but I've grown up using an ad filled internet so I've grown accustomed to ignoring them. Then on top of that I use an ad blocker because everyone should. Other companies also track you so that they can keep you trapped using their services for longer periods of time, and they are quite effective at this if you don't have a strategy to keep you from wasting your time on them. Social media platforms are designed to get you addicted but that doesn't mean you have to fall into their trap.

This of course doesn't mean that I fully to consent to having my every keystroke tracked by big tech and the government, I don't like it the government certainly shouldn't be doing it but I can't change that and living in constant paranoia of it is not a healthy way to live. But when it comes to big tech I'd argue that they have a right to a bit of our "data". I'm not a communist, I've read Atlas Shrugged so I know what the value of money is and I don't view the act of making money necessarily immoral. Many tech companies provide cervices to us like search engines, email accounts, social media, and video hosting at no cost to us, they have to make money somehow they are not obligated to give us anything without taking anything from us in return so if they aren't going to force us to pay then tracking is what we have to settle for. If you want an email account or whatever that is free from tracking then buy a domain name, rent a server and host it yourself, that's what I do. These services take resources to run you can't expect any company to simply give them to you without any strings attached, that'd be like walking into a restaurant expecting them to give you a free meal, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

And I guess that brings me to a problem that I have with the free and open source software (FOSS) movement, there is nothing wrong with paying for software. Of course the free in free and open source doesn't necessarily mean free as in "free beer" and in theory there is nothing in the FOSS ideology that prohibits a developer from charging users money for their software, but in practice no user actually pays for FOSS software and the majority of people within the FOSS community are openly opposed to the idea of paying for software. That being said I do use FOSS software wherever I can because it is the only way I can assure that I actually have ownership over the software I use, every year big software companies tend to get more and more anti-consumer and supporting these business practices is not something we should do. Years ago I shared a story of me installing LibreOffice on my Grandpa's computer because Microsoft would no longer allow him to run his copy of Microsoft Work 2010 which he purchased. The idea that Microsoft would stop him from using a tool that he paid for was and is absolutely absurd and not something that would have ever happened if he had been using FOSS software. I'm not necessarily saying that Microsoft Word should be FOSS but it should at least be more consumer friendly.

And it is important to remember that FOSS software can't be relied upon for everything. I had a professor in college who would laugh at the idea of anyone using Linux as a desktop operating system, despite having dozens of students (including me) who did it. I never witnessed him fully debate the subject but his main argument against it was the fact that desktop Linux doesn't have a serious company behind it dedicated to supporting it and its users, in his eyes a piece of software is not worth using unless you are supporting a large company like Apple that is filled with thousands of skilled engineers dedicated to making the best user experience possible. I don't necessarily agree with his argument when it comes to the operating system itself or its core utilities but when it comes to Linux's compatibility with other things we start to see major issues. Printers are of course the classic example, if I want to print something off of my computer I have to email it to myself then open the email on my phone to print it from there because my printer simply does not play nice with Linux. Wi-Fi is another one, the way I currently have my computer set up I can't connect it to a mobile hotspot or most public Wi-Fi networks, this isn't the end of the world for me but if I had a different lifestyle it would be quite a big problem.

What got me thinking about this recently was actually a video about GPSs, by the end of the video I was becoming quite convinced that a traditional handheld Garmin GPS was something that I should look into getting within the next few years. But one thing that the video featured was the ability to pair a GPS with Garmin's desktop software. I haven't actually looked if Garmin has a Linux version of their software but in the unlikely case that it does I'd guarantee you that it would be inferior to its Windows counterpart. In that moment I realized that it probably wouldn't be a bad idea for me to look into getting a Microsoft Surface tablet for the times when using Linux would just not make sense. Linux gamers are the worst computer users because they don't understand this idea, Linux users represent less than one percent of the market and yet many of them expect to have a flawless experience with software that isn't Linux exclusive. The expectation that developers would spend a whole bunch of extra time an money catering to the needs of such a small portion of their potential customer base is completely asinine. If compatibility with other devices is something important to you then Linux likely isn't a good choice for you.

And this brings me to my iPhone, there was a while where I would say that when it was time to replace my phone I'd get an Android phone and maybe even mess around with it and put some other borderline unusable operating system on it but I matured past the point of wanting to do that because if I'm going to rely on a phone to do phone things then I need it to work reliably. Then more recently I decided that I'd probably stick with an iPhone for my next phone for two reasons. First, and most important, is that is what I'm familiar with, I've never had an Android phone so I'm not terribly familiar with it, sure I could learn to use it but frankly I have better things to do than learning to use new software that isn't significantly better than the software I'm already using. The other reason ties back in with the reason I decided that a secondary Windows machine might be in my future, third party apps will always be a better experience on iOS than on any Android phone. The reasoning behind this is simple, every year hundreds of phones are released which all run Android made by dozens of manufacturers all over the world all with different shapes, sizes, features, and architecture. If we take into consideration the fact that most people will use the same phone for three to four years then there are at least a thousand unique models of Android phones in active use by people around the world today, the odds that the developers of your Bible app took special care to make sure that you would have a good experience on your Oppo X3 are zero. Because Apple doesn't let other people make phones that run iOS, Apple might release five phones a year and they'll all be incredibly similar. So while Android developers have to account for phones with screens that wrap around the sides of the device, and phones with screens that fold in half, and phones with a hidden compartment for ninja stars and whatever, iOS developers only have to worry about twenty or so very similar phones so no matter what currently supported iPhone you have you'll have a good user experience with whatever app you use (assuming the developers were competent).

Now I'm sure there are some FOSS people out there who have gotten their panties in a bundle after reading that I try to use FOSS software but then spent an entire paragraph rationalizing my decision to use an iPhone and my response to that is simple, "I don't care." My phone and my computer have two different purposes. My computer is for productivity so I use FOSS software where I can to ensure that the programs that I like to use to be most productive function the way I want them to. My phone is used for phone things, listening to music, and playing solitaire while I'm on the toilet, none of those functions are in danger of disappearing at the whim of Tim Cook, Joe Biden, or Xi Jinping. Sure Apple may threaten to take away Twitter but frankly my life would probably be better without it anyways. Yes, Apple is tracking me, but I'm not going to use a FOSS phone so whatever I do I'll have an "evil megacorporation" tracking me and at the end of the day it doesn't really matter which one it is. Sure I can't download apps outside of the app store but I also have no reason to, that is a non-issue for me and almost everyone else. And besides when it come to having ownership over your software which of these business practices seems more consumer friendly to you, allowing users to update their phone whenever they feel like it, or letting the users' cell phone service provider decide if they can update their phone? Unless you have an iPhone or a Google Pixel the second option is the reality you live in. Your phone may be perfectly capable of running the newest version of Android but if Verizon would rather sell you a new phone you're not getting that new update without buying a new phone from Verizon.

Now if you feel betrayed or offended by anything I said here remember you don't have to agree with any of the specic "hot takes" I made. My philosophy on software is that you should use the best tool for you to accomplish whatever job you neen to do. When it comes to text editors I use Vim, you might use Emacs, plenty of "soydevs" use VS code and the vast majority of the population don't even know what a text editor is. Are any of us wrong? No, as long as all of us are efficiently getting our job done with our chosen software none of us are wrong. If you are incapable of realizing that the software that works best for you may not be someone else's preference then I suggest removing your head from your rear end, but again I'm just a random guy on the internet who doesn't proofread his blog posts, you don't have to listen to me.

It is important to have an open mind when it comes to software. For years I would listen to music on an iPod shuffle despite it being severely outdated, then I put some music files that I had acquired onto my phone so that I could listen to it on my phone instead because I was of the belief that having files locally on your device not locked behind some other service was the way to go. But one day I realized that it is 2022 and there are better ways to listen to music so I started paying for Spotify. Now if my friend releases new music I don't have to jump through a bunch of hoops to get his music onto my phone, I can just click a link and it will be there, and if I want to listen to his band I can do that too, or if I want to listen to music from a different friend that isn't a problem either. Then Spotify recommends other songs to me that I may like and listening to good music becomes easy.

Modern software is great when you actually use it, make sure the software that you use is the best for what you need to use it for, don't sacrifice utility and practicality for some value that doesn't matter in the long run, and don't let your software use you. At the end of the day I don't care what software you use and you shouldn't care what I use, just don't waste time with software that doesn't do what you want it to do.

I first began to realize the utility of small notepads like this during my time as a computer science student. Instructions and requirements for assignments would always be on webpages and I got tired of disrupting my workflow by constantly having to switch between my text editor and browser to make sure I was doing everything right. So one day I walked over to the store on campus and spent sixty cents on a little notepad and from then on whenever I'd get a new assignment the first thing I'd do would be to transfer the requirements from the assignment's webpage into a simple list in my notepad and any classes and data structures that were necessary for that assignment could also be easily worked out on that notepad. Then since I physically wrote out the requirements I could remember them much better and reference them much easier because they were in a format that worked for me. Then because it was on paper in front of me, rather than on a webpage I couldn't edit, I could also use that notepad as a checklist so I knew I wasn't forgetting anything before submitting that assignment.

The notepad was also great for drawing things out. When engineering software it is often helpful to draw out how things interact with each other to either explain it to someone or to make sure the idea that is in your head is actually feasible. Of course software exists that does this exact thing but paper and pen will always be more accessible for drawing than software ever will be since you don't have to spend time figuring out how it works, most of us have been using a pen and paper longer than we can remember as they are among the first non-toys that parents let children play with.

When I left the world of software development I also left behind my trusty notepad for a season because I never used it in the real world. But in the last few years I've gained the habit of always having a variety of useful things in my pockets and through researching preparedness and survival I decided that I should bring notepads back into my life. My work notepad is of course used for jotting down data I use for work but the one in my back pocket has filled many roles. I use it to write down addresses of places I need to go and directions to them, I've written down bolt sizes for car parts in it before I go to a junkyard to pull those parts so I don't have to lug around more tools than I need to, it fills in for my work notepad when the wind makes using something spiral bound too difficult to use, I've written down names of talks or verses of scripture that come up in church that I've wanted to look into at home, you can tear out a page to leave someone a note or mark a path. The utility of always having a small notebook with you (much like a dedicated flashlight) is something that you will never fully realize until you've come to rely on it.

Now can your phone do most of these things? Yes. But can it do these things as well? Not really. I'm sure there is at least one of you out there reading this who has a good note taking system on their phone that works for them but for most of us the process of taking out your phone, unlocking it, opening the notes app, starting a new note, and finally typing something in it is something that we rarely do and almost never actually refer to. Try replacing that function of your smartphone with a pocket notebook. You don't have to get fancy Rite in the Rain stuff like I did, you will be more effective at many things if you take the time to put the things you need on paper and you can't do that if you don't have a quality pen and paper with you.

When I started this site I was a computer science student but unlike your stereotypical computer science student I really hadn't done much tinkering around with computers, programming, or websites outside of school. I wasn't really a computer nerd (even now despite owning multiple thinkpads and using Arch Linux daily I still don't consider myself a computer nerd, which is why I rarely write about tech). Because of my inexperience, and the lack of good tutorials on how to make an RSS feed from scratch (which still don't seem to exist), I naively assumed that using the correct date format in an RSS feed was not that important and I could just shortcut it by using a simpler format. (Keep in mind I update my RSS feed by hand even to this day) Because of this RSS readers weren't able to correctly read the date I posted things.

In most software related projects an error like this is easy to find, or at least easy to make itself known; this is not the case when you have the wrong date format in your RSS feed. When refreshing a feed an RSS feed reader will assume that a new RSS item that does not have a date attached to it (or in my case an improperly formatted date) was published on the day the feed was being updated. This was always the case for me, because every time I put something new on my RSS feed I'd immediately update my RSS feed reader (to make sure I didn't mess up a link or something) my RSS feed reader would always show me the correct date so I had no idea that that bug was even there until I'd gained a bit of a following and people began to email me about it.

Now of course because it worked for me I assumed that the problems these people were emailing me about were their fault and not mine so I didn't do anything for a long time (also getting an emails about broken RSS feeds is a sign that your following is growing so I didn't have a strong incentive to fix it anyways). But at one point I decided it was finally time to look into this whole RSS date issue and I began using the correct date format. I don't remember if that was a correction I had decided to make completely on my own or if one of you out there told me that was the issue, but if it was one of you who told me thank you.

So for a while I thought I had fixed things but another week or two later the RSS emails started to come back again, this time I was sure it wasn't my fault because I thought I'd already fixed the problem and maybe these people were complaining about the old posts with the wrong format or something. I'd respond to these people saying that the error only affected past posts and new ones going forward should be fine.

I'd do this until one of you managed to find my other syntax error and point it out to me. The pubDate element in RSS, which is where you put the date, has a capital D and I had always typed it with a lowercase d so nobody's RSS reader even recognized the date. To the guy who pointed this out to me: thank you, I would have never found this if you hadn't pointed it out to me.

Because I use Vim this was an easy fix to make so I did, but that caused new problems. First it duplicated every post I'd ever made in my RSS reader (which happens to other feeds I follow every once in a while) which wasn't too big of a deal, but the other problem was that it put all of my posts with the improper date format (which were several months old at this point) in front of my more recent, and better quality, posts. This was unacceptable and there were two ways to fix it. My first option was to simply take all the old posts with the wrong format off of my RSS feed but I didn't want to do that so I decided I'd stick to using the wrong syntax until I had fixed the format on all those dates which I would have had to do by hand. Fixing the format on those 100 posts is something I never found the motivation to do because it was boring and tedious so eventually I made the decision to just not care that my RSS feed was messed up.

Today I decided to fix it (through the easy method of just deleting the old stuff) because I saw something cool on Tom Fasano's site. He recently added a page where he uses openring to feature content from other peoples' websites on his own which is really cool and something 2021 Jacob would have probably put in his website but 2022 Jacob might not have the time to figure out. Openring uses RSS feeds to generate a page showcasing posts from various places but of course for this to work properly the RSS feed has to have proper syntax which my old feed of course never had. I of course wanted to have an RSS feed compatible with this cool piece of software so I fixed it and I hope you all move over to my proper RSS feed.

James 2:20 reads, "Faith without works is dead." This is a verse familiar to many as it is used to demonstrate how faith is a hope which pushes us towards action, that action of course being to keep the commandments of God and to serve Him (often through serving others), but today I'd like to take a look at this verse in a slightly different light, or at least different from what I am accustomed to.

If faith without works is dead then it requires works to keep our faith alive. In other words, if you want to keep your faith you have to do something. Attending church weekly is a great first step, but in a world with 24/7 stimulation from all kinds of distractions it is simply not enough. We should be conversing with the Lord in prayer and studying His word daily. As you do this there may be other things that you feel inspired to do to come closer to Christ, do those as well. I can testify that daily prayer and scripture study will strengthen your faith and it will rescue you from temptation. Set aside time in your day to feast on the words of Christ and make a habit of praying when you wake up and before you go to sleep. We cannot rely on the faith of others to get us through these trying latter days, we have to do something to keep our own faith alive.

[1] - James 1:5

Long since then I've fallen out of the habit of buying books but after watching this video I think I may have to start buying books again. The video is short and worth a watch, he might communicate the point I'm making here better than I am, it is simply a man showing what is in a modern chain bookstore here in America, and more notably what isn't. If your shelves are not filled with books that contain knowledge, wisdom, and stories that provoke thought and inspiration then pretty soon you aren't going to have access to such books because we live in a world where big chain American bookstores don't carry American classics like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. We need to stock up on the books that woke bookstores refuse to carry.

It is our responsibility, not schools', to pass down wisdom and history to the next generation, schools have failed at this and many people in our culture want to rewrite history, this is dangerous. The world is making real knowledge and wisdom harder to find at a time when we are told that everything we could ever want is at our fingertips. Of course there are plenty of places online where you can acquire digital copies of just about any book but that would just be a file on your computer. Nothing beats having a tangible book that you can wrestle with yourself, that your kids can look at and wonder about, and that you can loan out to friends in need. Go to the store and buy some worthwhile books, that's what I'm going to do now.

Think about it, what would happen if we got rid of entire industries?

What would happen if we got rid of law enforcement? We'd probably have a fairly violent few months of adjustment but ultimately I believe society would learn to self regulate, it probably wouldn't be too pretty and society would look different from what it does today but society would function.

What would happen if we got rid of the healthcare industry? Again we'd have an ugly few months as several people who are directly dependent on that industry would die or have a dramatically lowered quality of life, but the rest of us would be forced to look at our health much more seriously as we would realize that there is no plan B to save us, and again society would look a bit different, but it would function.

What would happen if we got rid of the banking/finance industry? People would learn to look after their own money and would possibly make the switch to cryptocurrency for online transactions, so society would function.

What would happen if we got rid of the software industry? Society would learn to be content with the technology we have now so it would continue to function in the same way it does now.

What would happen if we got rid of the lower education industry? Kids wouldn't have anywhere to go so many mothers would probably be forced back into the home and fathers would be forced to stay with their families which would actually be really great for society, unfortunately the family is too far gone in many communities in our modern world for this fantasy to ever become a reality though.

What would happen if we got rid of higher education? We'd have a lot less entitled, self-righteous people with useless degrees running around.

Things begin to change when we start to hit the industries where build fix or grow things. What happens if we get rid of the construction industry? We wouldn't be able to build new buildings to accommodate our growing population. What happens if we get rid of mechanics? Everyone's car would eventually break down along with buses, planes, heavy machinery, and everything else that runs off of an engine so we wouldn't be able to get anyone or anything where they needed to be. What happens if we get rid of farmers? We run out of food and everyone dies.

The only industry I can think of that doesn't directly involve building, fixing, or growing things whose absence would result in society collapsing is the transportation industry, but is this because truckers themselves are essential to society? No, they exist to support the people who build, fix, or grow things by giving them the materials they need to do their jobs and distribute their products. They're like guards on a football team, do they score points? No. But would the people responsible for scoring points be able to do that if they weren't there? Also no.

Pondering on these things has reshaped my view of the world a little bit and was a small factor in me making the decision to turn my back on the world of software development. It is crazy to me that we live in a world where people can work for Buzzfeed making over 60k a year writing dumb personality quizzes while having over one hundred thousand dollars in student loan debt and these people look down on "uneducated" mechanics who aren't in debt, probably make more money, and provide a service on which the world actually relies. As a joke I once wrote a program that does a Buzzfeed employee's job but no mechanic can be so easily replaced.

I spent two years of my life interacting with people in rural areas of the Philippines and over 90% of the men I met there worked in either the food, farming, fishing, construction, or transportation industry and many of them would work in all of these industries at some point in their life all while being the ones who fixed anything that broke in their own home. Most boys grow up to do the same thing their father did and live happier lives than many of us in developed nations do. The reason that I felt comfortable saying that society could function without the healthcare industry earlier is because I've seen communities that go without it. People living in extreme poverty in countries like the Philippines simply don't have access to much that modern medicine has to offer and yet their lives go on.

And really this is how society ran from the dawn of civilization up until the conclusion of the industrial revolution at the earliest and probably after World War II at the latest, nearly everyone's job revolved around either building, fixing, or growing things. Of course there were still a number of scientists, philosophers and mathematicians around but their main concerns were mostly about how to more efficiently build, fix, and grow things, the engineering behind Roman aqueducts serve as a great example of this. There were also still entertainers and artists but in western culture their work was less available to the masses and in tribal cultures the entire community would often participate in the work of entertaining. And there were of course people who worked in the church and nobility, these would have been the equivalent of white collar workers today compared to the rest of their society but, unlike today, these people made up an extreme minority of the population. For most of human history the average person's job revolved around physically building, fixing, or growing things.

I won't go so far as to say that jobs that don't deal with these kinds of things are non-essential because every job is essential to the person who holds it, but I will say that some activities are more naturally fulfilling than others. I used to drive an unreliable car and whenever I'd be fixing something on it things just felt right. Now that I own a reliable car I have to make up excuses to work on it to be able to feel that feeling again. Working with wood is satisfying, replacing a roof is satisfying, building a sturdy fence is satisfying, helping a building go up is satisfying, feeding farm animals is satisfying, planting, watering, and harvesting fields are all naturally satisfying activities. Of course I can't speak for everyone but it makes sense that the kinds of activities that man has been doing for thousands of years are the kinds of activities that would give him fulfillment, especially when compared to having to deal with TPS reports.

I can't tell you what to do with your life, I don't know what the best path for you is because I hardly know my own best path, it is up to you to do what you want with your life and to what level you consider anything that I say. But I will say that time spent learning to build, fix and grow things is worthwhile even if you never use them professionally, you should learn these skills and seek to surround yourself with people who possess them because these are the skills that were and are exercised by others which make your modern life possible. And as Joel Salatin said, "Those [skills] represent independence and true wealth."

In the game I was observing the word millionaire was on the board and the clue "work" was given and the team decided that millionaire couldn't have been the word that was being referred to because millionaires don't work and as someone who has crossed paths with some of the world's poorest people along with people who have done quite well for themselves, better than I probably will, and I can say that with that perspective the statement "millionaires don't work" is not representative of reality.

Probably the best way for you to understand this without having my lived experience would be to read Atlas Shrugged (which should be required reading for people wishing to know how the world works). But I recognize that you probably aren't going to read a 1200 page book just because I told you to so I'll simply point you to Francisco D'Anconia's monologue on the meaning of money (I'd quote the whole thing here but it is like twenty pages) where we learn that money is a representation of value gained by providing value to society through industry, or in other words work. In a healthy capitalist society it is to gain money outside of work.

Unfortunately we don't live in a healthy society of any sort so there are plenty of looters who gain money by, as D'Anconia puts it, exercising pull, profiting off of the work of others through manipulating people in backroom deals and other things like that. This is where people like Nancy Pelosi, Hunter Biden, Dick Cheney, and Jeffrey Epstein (who did not kill himself) amassed their fortunes. Then there are also people who get rich doing things other people don't see as real work like playing music or streaming video games, the Dire Straits song Money for Nothing communicates this quite well.

It is people like these that are most often pictured when the word millionaire is said because they are the ones who are the most visible. These millionaires who don't work are the ones who gave the rest of them a bad reputation, it is because of these looters that so many people in my generation believe that the rich don't contribute their mythical fair share to society. But these looters probably only represent less than one percent of millionaires, the rest of them gained their wealth the right way.

The richest man I know told me that he was able to do so well for himself because when it was a workday he got out of bed, put his pants on and went to work. In nearly all circumstances this simple habit is the most important part of being successful. Of course if you want to become wealthy you'll also have to take some risks, but in most cases risk taking is not necessary to live a good middle class life as long as you are willing to work.

I feel like the world would be a better place if more people had the opportunity to socially interact with the wealthy. If this were the case more people would understand that money comes from work and that there is no reason to vilify people that work.

Semiautomatic* .22 Caliber Rifle

A decent .22 caliber rifle is cheap to buy, cheap to shoot, fun to use, have almost no recoil, and they are the perfect first gun for anyone because they are easy to learn to shoot with. Your first .22 should also be simple, it should have open sights so that you don't train yourself to be reliant on a scope or a red-dot optic and it should be semiautomatic so that when you are trying to master the art of a controlled trigger pull without having to fumble around with any other controls between shots, and then once you have mastered that art you can have fun shooting things fast.

Many gun enthusiasts today dismiss the .22 and forget their importance and utility. My dad once went into a gun store and described the benefits of a .22 to the salesman there to see if he would point him to a .22 rifle but the salesman failed to do that because he'd forgotten the glory of a .22. Is this the most boring gun on my list? Yes, but I do believe it is the most important and despite there being cooler guns out there it is still fun, a couple weeks ago I was using it to shoot a 6 inch plate at 50 yards and it was great fun to hit something that appeared smaller than my front sight.

12 Gauge Shotgun

Now after you've mastered the slow controlled trigger pull necessary to accurately shoot a rifle you'll want to forget that because shotguns are completely different animals. Shotguns are designed for shooting small fast-moving targets at close range with the most common practical use being bird hunting. Of course you could use a shotgun to shoot at stationary targets but unless you are just doing it to see a watermelon explode shooting them at stationary targets is pretty lame because it requires no actual skill. You could also load a shotgun up with a slug and shoot something 100 yards with questionable accuracy but why would you do that when you could use a gun that's actually designed to do that?

Anyways I'm starting to get off topic there, so why own a shotgun? Because they're fun. Skeet shooting is fun. Get a shotgun with a bead sight and find a friend with a clay pigeon thrower, find a good teacher, and get shooting. I'd recommend a pump action shotgun just because they're cool and I don't see much of a benefit to a semiautomatic shotgun and I recommend 12 gauge because it is the most common (and because I think 20 guages are dumb) but at the end of the day a shotgun is a shotgun so just get a reliable one like a Mossberg 500, or a Remington 870.

Carry Gun

The right to keep and bear arms includes actually bearing arms, and in other words carrying a gun and these days you don't want it to be obvious to people that you have a gun on you so if you do carry you should carry concealed. In the last decade or so several great concealed carry oriented guns have come out, the Smith & Wesson M&P Shield, the Sig P365, and the Springfield Armory Hellcat are just a few of the notable ones, and you should have a handgun that you feel comfortable carrying.

That being said I don't think everyone should carry, drawing a gun on someone should be the last thing you'd ever want to do and if you don't understand that then you have no business carrying a gun. However I do believe that everyone should take a concealed carry class at some point in their life because those classes teach the laws and ethics behind carrying a gun which everyone should be aware of and consider. Such a class also teaches gun safety which is something that everyone should be familiar with regardless of whether or not they own a gun.

Hunting/Precision Rifle

This is probably the easiest gun to explain on the list, you want a rifle that is designed for long range shots and surprisingly you don't have to pay too much money these days for a gun that can shoot 1,000 yards. Now are you or I ever going to shoot at targets that far away? Probably not, that takes a lot of practice, skill, and access to a range not many people are blessed with but a gun that can shoot 1,000 yards can easily shoot one or two hundred yards which is a much more reasonable distance for the average person and still quite rewarding, plus you can take it hunting.

Full-Sized Handgun

What I mean by a full-sized handgun is something like a Glock 19, a handgun the size that most cops carry and that typically have standard magazines with a capacity of 15 rounds or more. Many gun enthusiasts will that guns like these are great because you can slap a flashlight on them, an optic, and even a suppressor (if you're willing to jump through those hoops) and they can be a great home defense gun, or truck gun, or all-around gun, or whatever, heck some people are even crazy enough to concealed carry massive guns like that, and while I'm not going to argue that those can be good reasons but they're not all that appealing to people outside the gun world and are very different from my simple reason to own one.

I believe that if you own guns you should get good at shooting them and the best type of handgun to get good with is a full-sized one chambered in 9mm or something similar. Because these guns are big their recoil is easier to control than the recoil of a smaller gun. You could of course get a handgun chambered in .22 that would recoil much less but recoil control is a very important part of pistol shooting so by practicing with a low recoil handgun you'd probably be doing yourself a disservice in the long run (plus .22 caliber handguns are usually unreliable). By practicing with a full-sized handgun you are setting yourself up for success.

Now I did mention the Glock 19 here but that was only to get you to understand what I was talking about. While Glocks have become the gun that every other handgun is compared to these days and are the most popular handgun I wouldn't recommend buying one. Glocks have bad ergonomics, terrible sights, an average trigger, and a slide that isn't the easiest to grip; it is not uncommon for a gun enthusiast to spend $600 on a new Glock then spend at least another three to four hundred dollars modifying their Glock to get rid of all of those shortcomings, the better thing to do would be to buy a Walther or an M&P, there are plenty of great alternatives. But the biggest reason why I wouldn't recommend a Glock to a new shooter is the fact that they lack a manual safety, this really isn't that big of a deal to people comfortable with guns but using a manual safety is something that can help keep you safe, Glocks may be the highest sold handgun but they are also the highest returned handgun because of their lack of a manual safety so that is something that you may want to consider.

AR-15

There is a lot of stigma around the AR-15 that has been caused by people seeking to take your rights away and you shouldn't pay attention to it. Really the only differences between an AR-15 and the cheap .22 I recommended first are the caliber (obviously), the fact that AR-15s are easy to mount things to, and the fact that AR-15s take easily found 30 round magazines. Sure AR-15s look different but they are functionally the same as any other semiautomatic rifle, the AR-15 isn't even the most powerful gun on this list, it's number three.

The AR-15 is the modern American musket, I stated in an article a few months ago they are a symbol of independence, if things started to go south and you found yourself in danger of conflict and responsible for your own protection this is the gun you'd want to have with you. But more importantly, they're fun. Powerful rifles are fun to shoot things with and the 5.56 and .223** rounds that are typically shot by AR-15s are inexpensive and with a simple 1x6 optic you can have a lot of fun at both close and relatively far distances. Just make sure that you get a good AR from a reputable company, you don't want to pay less than $800.

The AR-15 is not an assault weapon but it is (as DistroTube puts it) a freedom rifle. There is no real definition of an assault weapon or assault rifle, these terms really just mean any gun that corrupt government bureaucrats don't want you to own which could change at any moment and it is important to remember that the true purpose of the second amendment is not for self defense, hunting, or sport shooting, it is for protection against corrupt government bureaucrats. However I do hope that there is never a point in which violence needs to occur in order to protect our freedoms.

Other guns

Are these the only six kinds of guns you should own? No. Lever actions are cool, revolvers are cool, AKs are cool, AR pistols chambered in 300 blackout with integrated suppressors are cool, muzzle loaders are cool, 1911s are cool, historic guns are cool, all guns are cool and I'm not saying these are the only six guns you should buy. These six guns are what you need and have practice with in order to be a well rounded gun owner. Get training, be safe, and don't do anything stupid.

* - semiautomatic: a term used to describe any gun which fires one bullet per trigger pull and automatically chambers the next round so that the user of that gun does not need to perform any action other than pulling the trigger to operate that gun assuming the gun is loaded and operating properly

** - The 5.56 and .223 have identical dimensions and it is not uncommon to find ARs chambered in either one of these but you should get one chambered in 5.56 because that round generates a bit more pressure so guns built for that are more versatile, a gun chambered in 5.56 can safely shoot both a 5.56 and .223 cartridge although it is best just to stick with one as the ballistics of the two rounds differ slightly.

In Congress, July 4, 1776

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.-That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, -That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.-Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

246 years ago today this document was signed marking the birth of the greatest nation ever to be founded upon the Earth, it is important to remember the circumstances of the founding of this great country and to uphold the principles it was founded on. This declaration of independence is one of the most important documents ever written.

Unlike last year I don't have too much to say other than the fact that I am grateful to have been born and to live in a country founded on the principle of upholding everyone's rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I am proud to be an American and God bless the USA.

Headlines which read "Supreme Court Expands Gun Rights" appeared all over the place once this decision was released, even many right-wing outlets were publishing this lie.

The case revolved around New York's method of issuing concealed weapons permits. In most states this is a rather straightforward process, you complete a class that is legally required to take four times as long as it needs to, prove that you can hit the broad side of a barn, have your fingerprints taken at your local sheriff's office then wait a month or two for them to get around to completing a background check on you that probably takes them less than an hour to actually do. This process is not hard and it is also fair because in most states the sheriff's department will be legally required to issue you a concealed weapons permit if you pass the background check or if they don't complete it in a reasonable amount of time, there is no room for corruption or prejudice within such a system, gun rights advocates classify these normal states as "shall issue states".

In New York and a few other states things were different prior to this court ruling. John Stossel made a good video on New York's process a few years ago but the main difference was that in New York you had to prove that you had a good reason to need to carry a concealed firearm in order to be allowed to do so then if law enforcement thought your reasoning was good enough and that you were of good character then they would issue a permit, but the law had no clear statement on what qualified as a good reason to bear arms or a way to prove that a person was of good character, I'm not sure how well the system worked 100 years ago when it was put in place but in recent years only the elites would be able to get permits in most cases. Gun rights activists called states like New York "may issue states" because your ability to exercise your right to bear arms was dependent on the whim of some bureaucrat rather than a set process.

The supreme court struck down these unreasonable regulations in New York which also set a precedent for other states to end similar practices. In the majority opinion Justice Clarence Thomas wrote, "We know of no other constitutional right that an individual may exercise only after demonstrating to government officers some special need. That is not how the First Amendment works when it comes to unpopular speech or the free exercise of religion. It is not how the Sixth Amendment works when it comes to a defendant’s right to confront the witnesses against him. And it is not how the Second Amendment works when it comes to public carry for self-defense."

At this point you may be wondering why I made the claim that the media was lying when it published headlines stating that the supreme court had expanded gun rights because it sure sounds like it just did, but the writers of those headlines are manipulating you (either knowingly or unknowingly) to believe falsehoods about gun rights, the origin of rights in general, and a government's relation to your rights. Sadly some of you may already believe these falsehoods or have never been taught the truth so it is my job to correct that.

American Gun Rights

The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution reads:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

The second half of this is of course where the meat of the amendment is, we have the right to own and carry modern weapons and the government does not have the power to stop us from doing that. Just as freedom of the press extends to the internet and not just the printing press the right to keep and bear arms extends beyond 18th century firearms. There is nothing there stating you can't own a cannon, there is nothing stating you can't own a gun that takes eleven round magazines, there is nothing there stating that you can't own a gun designed to take down a helicopter, and there is nothing there stating you can't own a military helicopter, any such rule would be an infringement on one's right to keep and bear arms.

Now it is almost as important to understand the reasoning behind this amendment's inclusion in the Bill of Rights as it is to understand the right it upholds. The right to keep and bear arms is solidified in the United States Constitution not so that citizens could use guns for sport, it is not for hunting, and it is not even for self defense (although the use of arms for self defense is of course still protected) the reasoning is spelled out right there in the amendment itself, for "the security of a free State," or in other words, protection against a tyrannical government. America was founded by men who declared their independence from a tyrannical government and fought a war using the modern weapons of the time to gain said independence, these same founders wanted future generations to share the same right they claimed to do that if it became necessary as it was for them.

The Origin of Rights and Government Responsibility

The day that the Declaration of Independence was signed is the day that we Americans designate as our country's birthday and I find this to be quite fitting because the Declaration of Independence teaches what I believe to be two of the most fundamental principles which the American system of government is based off of, a principle that many in power have forgotten and want you to forget. The second paragraph of the declaration begins:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

This text clearly states that we all have rights which cannot be taken from us and those rights come from God. The government does not have the power to grant us rights and it does not have the power to take those rights away. This passage from the Declaration of Independence also states that a government's purpose is to protect the God given rights of its people, a government should serve no other purpose and the rest of that paragraph (which I won't get into) describes that a government which fails this responsibility is deserving of change.

The Supreme Court did not Expand Gun Rights

Hopefully it is now clear to you how the media was lying about the ruling on that recent Supreme Court case. The Supreme Court did not "expand" gun rights because it (along with every other branch of government) does not have the power to do so. Rather the Supreme Court recognized the gun rights which we already had by striking down a law that infringed upon them. Any politician who claims that your rights are theirs to give or take is not deserving of power, and anyone who even accidentally infers such an idea, like the media did here, should be corrected.

So if this is something we will have to live with then we need to learn how to best live with it and I've heard the myth that if you make a habit of filling your tank when it is half empty you will be saving money over always filling it when it is almost completely empty. Of course if you're always filling at half a tank each trip to the gas station will be less painful than ones where you fill your full tank but this strategy doesn't change the amount of gas you use over a long period of time so using data from the last year (found here and graphed below) I put the myth to the test.

The Test

The data shows the average price for a gallon of regular gas each Monday morning from June 7, 2021 to June 6, 2022 during which period of time that price nearly doubled from $2.36 to $4.70. The test I ran simulated a driver with a twenty gallon tank who used ten gallons of gas per week, in one instance the driver would buy 20 gallons of gas every two weeks simulating waiting until the tank is empty to fill up, and in the other instance the driver would buy 10 gallons of gas every week simulating always filling up when the tank is half empty. In both of these scenarios a total of 520 gallons of gas was bought. I picked these numbers because they are comparable to the rate at which I consume gas.

The Results

The strategy in the first instance resulted in a total of $1792.38 being spent on gas over the course of a year while in the second $1782.90 was spent, so a driver who always filled their tank when it was only half empty would have saved $9.48 over that year by doing that rather than waiting till their tank was empty.

Why Fill when You're Half Full?

So do you save money by filling your car when it is half full rather than waiting till it's empty? Yes. But is taking twice as many trips to the gas station really worth saving an extra ten bucks a year? Not really. However there is still value in never letting your tank get anywhere near empty. The scout motto is "Be Prepared" and it is a good one to live by, in some sort of crisis where you need to get somewhere fast you don't want to be delayed by a trip to the gas station. By keeping your tank half full you are always ready to move. This kind of advice can be applied into other areas of life as well because we should strive to always have the energy to help those who need us.

Now of course it was only a few months ago that I published an article titles Twitter Was a Bad Idea and I still stand by most of the claims I made there and probably the most important claim that I made there was in the section where I was explaining that Twitter is not social media and said:

People go to Twitter either to throw poo at the wall to see if it sticks or to look at the poo that managed to stick, 90% of Twitter users never write a tweet, there is nothing social about that.

The question I failed to consider until now was "If Twitter isn't social media then what is it?" that is the question we have to look at now.

I've heard that among certain groups of journalists Twitter is compared to a fire hose because whenever news breaks there are thousands of tweets about it, a volume that can definatly drown a person. Entire news articles can be and are written with only a handful of tweets as a reference and really that's not as bad as it sounds, it's not all covfefe tweets, plenty of important information and perspectives are shared on Twitter. Twitter is a very important tool for journalists to find information about what is going on.

But of course you're not a journalist and while I pretend to be one here on occasion I'm not either, despite that there have been times where I was able to take advantage of Twitter in the same way a journalist would. I live in a city large enough for things to happen but small enough to slip under the radar of news organizations and also small enough that there isn't really any sort of independent journalist scene like you'd see in cities like Portland or Seattle which also tend to be looked over by mainstream news, so when the criminal riots in the summer of 2020 swept the nation there was stuff happening only a few miles from me but there wasn't any traditional way for me to know what was actually happening at the moment or really at any time after. So during those few days I frequently searched Twitter to see what was happening in my area and I found people complaining about how the police had used tear gas on a "peaceful protest" and of course this was the narrative that the media ran with and a lot of people fell for but because I was equipped with Twitter I was able to scroll down and see that a fire had been set on the ground floor of city hall* and the ugly truth is that when there is three blocks worth of NPCs who refuse to move between a burning skyscraper and emergency services things justifiably get messy. But of course if you can't see the full picture it is hard to understand the justification, and in this case that would have been impossible without Twitter.

Now of course Twitter is not only useful in these sorts of situations but it is also useful in diagnosing the health of our culture. Boomers love to rant about the evils of violent video games, there was a season where video games were said to be the cause of so many terrible things in the world and while those claims have mostly been debunked you still see them pop up from time to time. Of course video games are not the best thing about our modern culture, but they are far from the worst.

Where is the boomer outrage over the fact that Netflix distributed a movie featuring child strippers and critics liked it? Where is the boomer outrage over the fact that in public schools across the country males and females are permitted to share the same bathrooms, changing rooms, and even bedrooms on field trips? Where is the boomer outrage over the fact that we now have a judge sitting on the United States Supreme Court who refuses to define the word "woman" despite being one?

There is no boomer outrage over these things because they can't see them. There is no boomer outrage over these things because they are not on Twitter. We're in a culture war and these video game hating boomers are trying to participate in it, they have their guns pointed in the right direction but they are aiming at targets a mile from where they should be, but at least they are willing to fight unlike a lot of us. Today's culture is in the terrible state it is in because, up until recently, only one side has been fighting in this culture war. When a traditionally minded or conservative person sees, for example, a tweet that they fundamentally disagree with they either ignore it or they chose to leave Twitter, when a progressive person sees a tweet they fundamentally disagree with they demand Twitter remove the person who made that tweet. You can't win a war when you refuse to step on the battlefield. We live in a world that has regressed to a point where reasonable people should feel uncomfortable sending their kids to public school because they have failed to fight back against unreasonable people.

Whether you like it or not Twitter has become the "modern public square", it is the place where the most vocal among us go to make their voices heard the same can't be said of any other platform (of course whether or not they actually are is a different question). This public square has been described as a cesspool of vice and degeneracy and while this isn't wrong (although it is a more fitting description of Tick Tock) it also isn't a reason for us to avoid it. A man of truth does not let false ideas run through his community, a man of truth jumps into the public square to clean it from lies. There are people we can save from the world's lies on Twitter but we can't do it if we aren't there.

I'm glad that Musk bought Twitter, from what I can see he is a man who truly wants to do his best to make the world a better place. Of course I don't agree with a lot of his proposals but this is one that I trust him with. Besides it is foolish to think that someone has to perfectly align with your worldview in order for you to be happy about them doing what will likely be a good thing, of course only time will tell how things will work out especially since he won't have any real control over the company for several months. But with that being said I'm optimistic about Twitter's future and I've put myself back on it, luckily as a former Twitter addict I've learned from my past mistakes and understand how to avoid that happening again.

Twitter matters because it is a tool for us to see what is going on in our communities and in our world. Twitter matters because it is the modern public square where we can spread truth. Twitter matters because it has potential to be great.

* - Thankfully whoever started that fire wasn't very good at committing arson and there was no major damage to the building.

A car is something whose primary purpose is to get people from point A to point B, a truck also fulfills that purpose but that is not its primary purpose. A truck's purpose is to work. For a fat cowboy that work could be to haul a trailer full of cattle along with a pallet of feed in the bed. For others that might be to tow a boat from one lake to another so that that boat can be used as a base of operations for workers contracted to repair said docks. For others the work of a truck could be to venture out in the mountains to recover lost souls, or to find wood to heat a home with, or meat to feed a family. Trucks serve a higher purpose than simply taking you from point A to B. The marketing for the Ford F150 Lightning was perfect marketing for a truck because it highlighted the fact that it was a truck built for work, supposedly more capable than any other truck, and I must admit that if it weren't electric and was reliable enough to easily survive a million miles it would be the perfect truck.

In many places in the United States, especially in places where we have mountains, you'll find a lot of fat cowboy trucks. You'll find more people with trucks than people whose livelihood relies on the use of a truck. That is because there is something about being an American over time warms one up to picking up hobbies that require a truck. Fishing, camping and hunting are of course classic examples of this, all these things can of course be done without a truck but as time progresses one realizes that it is foolish to destroy transmissions that aren't built to haul large boats. Off-roading is another example, many people use and build their trucks for the purpose of off-roading while wiser people recognize that trucks are for hauling off-road equipment. Shooting is another American hobby that is often made harder to do without a truck simply because a Cadillac can rarely get to the best places for it. Trucks are often great for less adventurous hobbies as well simply because it is much easier to fit woodworking and gardening supplies in the bed of a truck than it is to put them into the trunk of a Volvo. Even people who hate trucks end up finding a need for them. I was talking to a mechanic friend of mine who spends his spare time and money modifying his cars to race and he said he was looking into buying a truck because he didn't like the idea of putting a grimy transmission in the back of his Subaru. And of course trucks always come in handy when you have to move a friend's couch.

The other interesting thing about American truck owners is their tendency to modify them, of course some of these modifications are more useful than others but most are not without reason. There was a time when I believed that modifying a car was foolish because the engineers who designed them are smarter than we are, but I've now come to realize that we as the actual owners and users of the car have a higher reliability and utility standard than the engineers do. And besides, trucks aren't cars. I recently bought a Toyota 4Runner and while that isn't a truck it is the ultimate representation of an SUV which like a truck is a purpose built vehicle. In the time I've owned it I've come to the realization that if I am to get everything that I want out of it I will have to make up for the engineers' poor design choices through modifications and other improvements, I've already cut the wire to the flawed and primitive traction control system that was trying to kill me and I've had to tighten up the throttle cable that for whatever reason is prone to giving itself slack on those engines. When I realized my brake calipers were on their way out I bought larger brakes off of a Tundra to improve brake performance and lifespan, I've also decided that I need to get my lower ball joints examined. I've been slacking when it comes to ordering LED interior lights and I've recognize that upgraded headlights and overpowered fog lights are probably in my future along with a modernized stereo head unit. If my tires weren't essentially brand new I'd probably be looking into upgrading those as well. I'd also be looking into power inverters and dual battery setups if a portable battery pack like a Jackery wasn't a more practical modern option. None of these modifications are necessary on a car whose simple purpose is to bring me from point A to B but as something built for a bit more I expect a bit more than the bare minimum that automotive engineers provide these days, and I didn't even get into the planned obsolescence of expensive proprietary electronics or the cheap plastic engine components that could have been made with better material had cost-cutting not been a priority. A wisely modified truck is a machine built for purpose.

So while fat cowboy trucks aren't really fun to drive, are a pain to park and are generally impractical for many things I can't think of many things more American than a good reliable truck. Trucks are as much a symbol of independence as an AR-15, backyard chickens, and the American flag itself.

The Positive Test Strategy Making You Gullible

For some reason at some point in his life Cialdini learned how to read palms, he was impressed at how it always seemed to work. But Cialdini was also skeptical of the paranormal explanations of how palm reading supposedly worked so he began experimenting and started to intentionally go against whatever the pseudoscience of palm reading would have taught him, and Cialdini found that whether he did it right or wrong people always responded to whatever he told them by saying something along the lines of, "Yeah, that sounds right." There was even one instance where Cialdini read one man's palm twice (there was much time and drinking between the two times) and the first time around Cialdini told the man that he could see that he was a very stubborn man while the second time he told him that he was very flexible and even though these two traits contradicted each other, both times the man agreed with Cialdini's assessment.

This happened because when putting Cialdini's claim to the test the man was subconsciously using what psychologists call the positive test strategy. Basically when Cialdini told him that he was stubborn the man scanned through his memory looking for all the times he was stubborn and ignored everything else, then later when Cialdini told him that he was flexible the man once again scanned through his memory looking for all the times he was flexible ignoring everything else. Had he looked for all the times he was stubborn after being called flexible then he would have seen right through the palm reading scam. Now we shouldn't blame the guy for falling for this because the positive test strategy is the default strategy our brains use in situations like this, if this were not the case then things like palm reading would never work.

The Positive Test Strategy Causing FOMO

What Cialdini didn't talk about was how the positive test strategy affects us in scenarios outside of cheap tricks, situations where we'd probably act differently if we understood what our brains were doing. The world has become filled with people who spend too much of their time scrolling through various websites and social media services, for many it is Instagram or Tick Tock, for others it could be 4Chan or Reddit, for people with a bit more time on their hands it could be YouTube or Twitch, for me it was Twitter that I knowingly spent too much time on. Of course the sad thing about this is that every mature person stuck in one of these traps has the desire within them to quit.

The reason people don't quit is that they have a fear of missing out on something if they do quit and it is a completely valid fear especially when you're subconsciously using the positive test strategy to validate your fear. Whenever you think of quitting one of these stupid websites you quickly scan your memory looking for all the good things that came about from you using that website, and because the internet is full of hidden gems you'll always find something then latch onto it and use it as a reason to stay against your better judgment. You may only be reading my site after being led here from some site you want to quit, don't use that as an excuse not to quit.

The great benefit of reading books like Pre-Suasion is that you learn about the funny ways in which our brain work and when we know these things we can be more resistant to the tricks that rely upon those tricks. Learn to resist the urge not to quit bad habits that the positive test strategy tricks you into keeping.

Shub, Metanoeo, and Poenitere, one thing is not like the others

The Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew. The word used in the original Hebrew text which was used to refer to the concept which we now call repentance was shub. Shub means "to turn from" so a more literal translation of an Old Testament passage telling us to "repent of our sins" would be "turn from our sins." This is beautiful imagery because as we turn away from our sins we are turning towards God, so the act of repentance is an act of turning towards God.

The New Testament was originally written in Greek. The Greek word we replaced with repentance is metanoeo. The Greek prefix meta- means to change, and the suffix -noeo refers to words and concepts like mind, knowledge, spirit, and breath, so, to quote President Nelson, "when Jesus asks you and me to 'repent,' He is inviting us to change our mind, our knowledge, our spirit—even the way we breathe." So a more literal interpretation of the Greek text of the New Testament would teach us that the act of repentance is an act of change, changing ourselves from the natural man to being more like God.

So up until this point there hasn't been much conflict between the languages, turning towards God and changing ourselves to be more like God are ideas which compliment each other so metanoeo and shub work well as synonyms. The problem arose when the Greek word metanoeo was translated into the Latin poenitere. Poenitere relates to terms such as punish, penance, penitent, and of course the English word it turned into repentance. This tragic translation caused a dramatic shift in the concept of repentance being the act of turning from sin into it being wrongfully understood as punishment, or even payment for sin.

The Impact

This translation changed the Christian world's attitude towards repentance, when Christ was on the earth teaching this principle repentance was meant to be seen as a noble act, but now throughout most of the Christian world it is seen as shameful (at least in how people feel about it before going about it, not in how it is always taught). People now often avoid repenting of their sins because they see it as punishment, and taking things one step further many peoples' main incentive for following God's commandments is that by doing so they are avoiding punishment which while a true and decent incentive it is not a long lasting one, the best incentive to follow is not a fear of punishment or a hope of reward but rather a true love of God (of course if one of the former incentives is yours don't stop following, learn to do it out of love).

The false doctrine that repentance is punishment also morphed into much worse things. One of the major sparks that began the Protestant Reformation was Martin Luther's 95 Thesis which, if you read, is almost entirely a critique of the church's practice of selling indulgences, which to oversimplify was a practice that, at the time, substituted repentance for payment. (I'm unaware of indulgences currently being taught in this way) The Protestant Reformation happened in part because the doctrine of repentance was being mistaught, because the Latin mistranslation of metanoeo to poenitere caused people to see repentance as something it was not. Repentance is not punishment or payment for sin, punishment for sin is what you get if you fail to repent.

Repentance, becoming more like Christ

Now I could have ended this all there but it would have been wrong of me to talk about what repentance is and isn't without clarifying how to repent, especially as it is Easter the season when we celebrate the event which makes repentance possible. To repent of a sin we must of course first recognize that we did sin, we must feel remorse for our sin, confess our sin to God and ask Him for forgiveness, we must also ask forgiveness from others from others we may have wronged with our sin and make restitution by trying to correct any problems we may have caused. Hopefully as we continually repent we will learn to stop making the same mistakes again and again as we all do.

But of course repentance is not just a principle that we must remember when we are seeking forgiveness for our sins, the word repentance is just something that we use to sum up concepts that our language had no better word for. Remember shub and metanoeo, we must turn from the sinful tendencies of the natural man and change ourselves to be more like Christ. There are a lot of misconceptions people hold about what it means to be a Christian, coming both from those who don't claim to be and do, of course the simplest definition of a Christian would be one who has faith in Christ, and I guess I won't disagree with that definition, but what should that faith lead one to do, seeing as faith without works is dead. The way I see it the ultimate goal of every Christian should be to live like Christ, who lived a perfect life, a life without sin, a life devoted to the service of others enabled by His perfect love for all of us righteous and wicked, the only life worthy to be sacrificed to make up for all of our sins making forgiveness possible and Heaven obtainable. In other words our lives should be defined by daily repentance, turning from sin and changing ourselves to be more like Christ.

But of course that's not all, depending on what airport you are going into and the time of year you go you could spend hours just waiting for your personal belongings to be searched and for you to be patted down by someone who is in a job with a higher turnover rate than just about every other occupation in the country, nobody likes the TSA including the TSA. Of course this hours long wait in line is not a problem in most airports but the fear exists for all of them so even when your better judgment tells you it is unnecessary you try to get there two hours before your flight boards so that you can spend an hour and a half sitting in a waiting area that does not have nearly enough seats for the number of people that it is meant to hold. (That's one thing the Chinese did better than us at when they designed the Hong Kong airport)

This is of course assuming that you can actually find the gate where your plane is supposed to be, I have vowed never to fly through LAX again because when I was there my ticket didn't show what gate my flight boarded at and back in 2016 the international section did not have one of those boards that showed the status of all the flights and their gate. Had I not been lucky enough to hear the announcement that my flight had begun boarding we would have had no idea where our plane was and would have been stranded in that terribly thought out airport.

Then of course the airlines make you board the plane in the least efficient way possible, there was a brief time while most people were still afraid of the air that they breathed where this was not the case and planes were loaded from back to front as they should be but for some inexplicable reason they've returned to the practice of loading front to back causing everyone to have to trip over everyone else in order to get to the chair they will be confined to for at least the next hour of their life, being forced to wear a seat belt even as the plane is stationary on the runway stuck in a traffic jam as the control tower figures out how to sort everything out as the fire department cleans up a plane that caught fire on the runway.

In the past flying was a more pleasant experience, cabins were well lit allowing you to comfortably read a book to productively pass the time as you were being shipped from point A to point B and you were usually free to take the occasional peak our the window to see what life was like above the clouds. But those times are now over as even small planes now are expected to have screens that are at a perfectly ergonomic height that you can do almost nothing with. Because everyone is expected to be on either one of these screens or one of the other three that they likely brought, airplane cabins are almost always dark making it difficult and in a way socially unacceptable to read a book.

Then of course there is the whole mask charade going on on planes these days, thankfully the government seems to have finally run out of excuses to not please airline CEOs by removing the dumb regulation and masks on planes (at least in the US) shouldn't be a thing in a few days, but it is still quite ridiculous that it wasn't that long ago when the policy was that if mid flight one were to insist on breathing freely the plane would have to be grounded* while an instance of a masturbating four times on a flight, putting him on the sex offender registry, doesn't warrant such an urgent response. We live in a strange world, one I'm not excited to fly in.

* - I don't have a documented example of this actually happening bur I have been on a flight where the pilot implied that this was standard procedure.

The most concerning thing about this war, as it pertains to things that directly can or do affect me as someone living in the west, is the amount of Ukrainian propaganda we are getting here. Many of the crazy stories that we should have never believed have proven to be fake, and the more credible sounding ones have proven to be exaggerated at best. I'll be honest, the stories are entertaining, I've been entertained by them, but the stories are propaganda designed to manipulate us. Now, don't go out suggesting that I'm pro-Putin or anything like that, it is possible to be against the Russian invasion but also recognize that the reaction that people are having due to the propaganda that people don't recognize as such is not natural.

I hope it is already clear to you why this sort of propaganda is dangerous. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is being propped up as an international hero in this conflict, if he were to be assassinated don't you think that people would compare his killing to that of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand which sparked the first world war? Would people not try to justify this as reason to jump into another? Is Russia's invasion of Ukraine not dissimilar to Germany's invasion of Poland which was one of the major events that pushed Europe into a second world war? Are people not already drawing that comparison possibly with the hidden motive of justifying getting into another? I'm no historian, but it doesn't take one to see these dangerous parallels. Don't let yourself and those around you be manipulated by propaganda.

The fact that we have this propaganda in the first place is puzzling. As far as I understand, Ukrainian internet is mostly provided by Russian companies, shouldn't the Russian government ordered those companies to turn their internet off so that Ukrainians wouldn't be able to communicate effectively? The fact that we are getting Ukrainian propaganda at all from the internet suggests at least one of four things:

Anyone suggesting the first of these things should be dismissed as a spreader of propaganda, the next two would of course classify as conspiracy theories which many people would have easily dismissed in times past, but of course the last few years have proved the difference between the truth and a conspiracy theory to be three to six months so really we can't throw those options out.

The most important thing for those of us wishing to follow the conflict is to make sure that you are verifying that your information is factual and that you are viewing it through a contextual lens. Understanding of the context is probably most important and hardest to come by, I am not an expert on modern military operations and I'd be willing to bet that you aren't either, but in the past week I have found a few people more qualified than I am contextualizing things for us on the internet. For example, reports have come in that Russia has suffered much more casualties than Ukraine has, this is to be expected for an attacking force, in fact we should expect to see a lot more Russian casualties as they enter cities as military commanders should expect a 70% casualty rate when attacking an urban environment, stack on top of that the fact that historically the Russian military has been accepting of large casualties and the numbers that we are seeing (which still may or may not be real) should not be surprising. Another example of the importance of context would be in the speed of Russia's invasion many people, myself included, expected them to be able to take Kiev much faster, partially because the fall of Afghanistan is fresh in our minds but also because we lack Ukrainian context. Ukraine is a huge country and it takes a lot of time to cross it, the initial advances of Russian troops were also twice as fast as military experts would have expected them to be. There is of course now the incredibly long Russian convoy north of Kiev that hasn't been making much progress and I have seen multiple explanations as to why that may be, failures due to lack of maintenance on the equipment and logistics planning are probable but those reports could also be propaganda trying to paint the Russian army as weaker than it is, we do know that the Ukrainians have blown up several bridges in that area making the Russian advance much harder and the Ukrainians have supposedly ambushed the front of the convoy creating a roadblock of broken Russian equipment, but again we really can't know that for sure.

The war and propaganda are interesting and in a strange way fun to watch but the most important thing for those of us living in countries generally unaffected by it is to not let yourself get emotionally attached. The propaganda authors are trying to rile us up for war when war should be the last thing we ever want, especially the type that this one has the potential to become. That being said, western culture could definitely use the sort of re-prioritization of values that would come from a world war but that is still not a price worth paying. Ultimately my prediction for the remainder of the Ukraine conflict is that NATO will selfishly but wisely continue to do almost nothing, Ukraine will continue to hold the line as long as they can but Russia will ultimately win this war the same way they won World War II, standing in puddles of their own blood. Is that the outcome I really want? No, but I'm a realist and I have no influence over the outcome of the war, the influence I do have is what I've used here to encourage you to have a level head when thinking of this conflict and to keep your focus on the things in your life which matter most.

At this point I'm not sure if I'll make a place for it or any others on my site but the button is of course free for any of you to take and use.

Also this update exists only in this RSS feed since I don't feel like it is important or interesting enough to show to people who aren't following me through RSS.

Now I guess that I have to clarify that statement a bit. Twitter is of course a multi-billion dollar company so if we judge its merit based off of how much money it made it wasn't just a good idea it was a great idea, probably better than any idea I'll ever have since its founders and early investors are now obscenely wealthy from it. I'm also not talking about the implementation of Twitter, nobody does Twitter better than Twitter does, in fact I'd argue Twitter's mobile app has the best UI of any app I've ever used. When I say that Twitter is a bad idea I mean that the concept of sending out random tweets to the world about absolutely random things is a bad idea. I guess I could have made that sentence a bit less clunky by simply saying that microblogging is a bad idea, but Twitter was not invented for microblogging, microblogging was a word invented to make Twitter sound like a good idea.

Also since I'm arguing that the sole concept behind Twitter wasn't a good idea my criticism isn't exclusive to Twitter, it applies to every alternative service that tries to do the same thing Twitter does. Parler was just echo chamber Twitter with bad UI and no porn. Gettr (which apparently is the hot new alternative platform) is just Parler but secretly funded by China. Mastodon is just federated Twitter with bad UI and no normal people. And Gab is basically just a fork of Mastodon (I'm sure there is someone out there who wanted me to phrase that differently but I don't care). All of these different services do things slightly different but they are all still doing the same thing so you shouldn't use any of them. A bad idea doesn't turn into a good idea when you change management.

Friend Dispatch System

To fully understand why Twitter is a bad idea it is important to look at its origin story. When I was in high school I watched a really good documentary about this but unfortunately I have no idea what it was called and haven't been able to find it since, but I did find this video that does a good job with it. Before Twitter Jack Dorsey was interested and working on dispatch systems for emergency vehicles, honestly that would have probably been a fun challenge back in the early 2000s because the infrastructure back then was much more limited than it is now, messages had to be informative yet concise like, "Ambulance A534 has arrived at Destination X366" or something like that. Dorsey's idea back then was to create the same sort of thing for friends, in fact before the name Twitter had come to be they were calling it a friend dispatch system.

The scope of what they thought Twitter would be was a place for people to announce to the world that you were watching the waves on a beach somewhere, although why anyone would care is beyond me, the whole concept of it was not thought through. I distinctly remember a story from the documentary I can't find where the Twitter founders were at a tech conference somewhere way back when Twitter only had a few thousand users and many if not most of those users were also at there (not really because of Twitter but because the early adopters of any technology are the type of people who go to tech conferences). At some point during the conference one of the Twitter developers, maybe Jack himself I don't remember, tweeted something along the lines of, "Lets meet at Jimbob's Ice Cream Shop at 8:00" (intending just for his close friends to be there) then when 8:00 rolled around there was eight hundred people at Jimbob's Ice Cream Shop. This showed that a friend dispatch system, at least at that scale, wasn't a good idea.

Microblogging

Luckily (for Twitter's founders, not the rest of us) Twitter found its place in the world. I think Jeremy Clarkson describes it best as, "an opportunity for very left-wing people to express increasingly left-wing views to other left-wing people." Now I will admit that that statement only 85% true, but Twitter really isn't good for much else. Because much of Twitter's early functionality was tied to SMS, tweets could only be 140 characters. 140 characters would be fine for a friend dispatch system but that is not what Twitter became, Twitter became a place for people to share opinions and ideas and unless those are simple statements like, "All steak should be eaten rare," then 140 characters is not enough.

Eventually Twitter was able to cut its dependency on SMS and allow tweets to have an arbitrary maximum length of 280 characters but it is still impossible to fully present and contextualize any view with that sort of a limit. Almost by design Twitter became a place where everybody was talking but nobody could understand what anyone else was really saying, but of course it wasn't by design because Twitter wasn't meant to become what it has turned into. The most common difference between Twitter and its clones is that the clones almost always increase the character limit, despite this the benefit of the increased character limit is rarely seen because users have become accustomed to the short bursts of garbage Twitter is famous for so that is all that they post and when they do find someone who actually puts in the effort to write something half the length of this paragraph they are too lazy to read it. Twitter made us dumber by making us accustomed to reading less. Twitter has primed us to make judgments based off of very little information rather than to wait to learn the whole story.

There is also the problem that there aren't that many unique ways that you can string 280 characters together. Sure there are some people who can come up with clever ways to put things but really everyone seems to tweet about the same things and they all do so in similar predictable ways, it's boring, especially now when Twitter is governing speech.

Twitter is not social media

People consider the three big social media platforms to be Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, but why is it that Twitter is the only one with actual alternatives? People go to Facebook to connect with friends and family, that's what makes it social media and in order to replace it someone would have to bring all of their friends and family over to the new platform which would prove to be impossible. Instagram these days is really just Facebook for people who can't read and yet manage to operate a smartphone, most people go there for the same reason they go to Facebook and it can't be replaced for the same reason either. People go to Twitter either to throw poo at the wall to see if it sticks or to look at the poo that managed to stick, 90% of Twitter users never write a tweet, there is nothing social about that and because of that its functionality can be replaced by crappier alternatives.

There is no reason to use Twitter or any other service like it, there is almost nothing interesting or uplifting posted on these sites, each good tweet is not worth the thousand garbage ones you had to tread through to find it. If for some reason you do feel inclined to throw poo at the wall on the internet you should start your own site to do that on, but once you've gone through the effort of doing that, and especially if you've attached your name to it (which is something everyone should do), you'll realize that you don't want to be putting crap up on there and instead you'll start to create something great, something that can't be done in 280 characters destined to only be read by an army of sheep.

Sadly, due to propaganda, a considerable chunk of Americans, including those in power, don't see that and do believe that vaccinating more Americans is our country's biggest priority so they're trying to figure out how to force the unvaccinated to get the injection while the sane people in the country are fighting these peoples' mandates (as they should). Things have gotten crazy, the definition of anti-vaxxer has changed in the latest version of Orwellian newspeak, people are losing their jobs for no good reason, and the whole country is being torn apart.

But you already knew this, and I don't really like making you read about things that you already know, so instead I'm going to take this discussion somewhere I haven't seen a single American take it, and as someone who consumes much more anti-vax and anti-mandate content than the average person, and as someone who wants those other people to finally feel comfortable going outside again, it is quite saddening that we aren't talking about this in America. Since we have gotten to the point where everyone here who wanted the injection have gotten it then we should be focusing on vaccinating the rest of the world.* (Thanks to the Hated One for bringing a thought that has popped into my mind a few times into a more prominent spot)

Where do new variants come from?

The Omicron variant is the most unique of the corona variants, not only because it is significantly more mild than the others and poses little threat to nearly everyone, but because it is the first variant that has come about since the vaccines have been widely available.** If the theory that mass vaccination prevents the development of new variants is correct then how could this have happened?

The Omicron variant was discovered in South Africa on November 24, 2021. What percentage of people in South Africa had gotten at least one dose of a corona virus vaccine on November 24, 2021? 28%. Do you see the problem? At the same time that Americans and people from other rich nations were celebrating their own high vaccination rates, a new variant came out of a place that they completely ignored.

Today Americans are freaking out about states with low vaccination rates. When it comes to vaccination Idaho is the worst in the United States where 45% of people are fully vaccinated (whatever that means). South Africa, the place it appears we should have been worried about, currently has only 33% of its population partially vaccinated. And looking at the map above we see that South Africa is one of the better injected countries on its massive continent.

Now look at the map below. The man in the White House campaigned on the promise that he would shut down the virus, and if it weren't for Omicron, our government and media would be celebrating herd immunity within the United States right now. But this virus is not local to the United States, it is of course a worldwide pandemic, and at the current rate we are still years away from when the rest of the world will reach the level of protection that we enjoy here, that is if they ever reach it. That means more years where a potentially dangerous new variant could come out of some poor country and once again scare people back into their homes. If the president wants to shut down the virus then he should not be going along with big pharma by encouraging people to get twice the injections that they should logically need, instead he should be fighting big pharma by demanding that they better allocate their resources for the good of the world rather than the good of their wallets by sending those extra shots to the countries that actually need them, the countries were new, potentially vaccine resistant, variants actually come from.

Don't Panic

This article would have probably been more persuasive had I stopped right there, but I've been fearmongering and I don't want to encourage fear. If you don't want a covid injection then don't get one (assuming you still have that choice), as long as you have a healthy lifestyle and are free of comorbidities then this virus poses no real threat to you and if you aren't among the healthiest people out there realize that doctors and hospitals have gotten much better at treating this sickness over the past two years so your chance of having a good outcome is ten, if not one hundred times better than it would have been had you gotten the virus back when we knew almost nothing about it. And when it comes to new variants remember that Omicron is now the most dominant strain, but also the most mild, and it is incredibly unlikely for a new variant to evolve to be more deadly. Viruses, like everything else, evolve to have a better chance at survival and a virus that kills its host will die as well, the virus wants us to live so it can live.

We are nearing the end of this pandemic, in fact many of us (myself included) already live as if it is over because we are at a pretty good spot with it now and things will only get better (as long as the government doesn't mess things up). Covid-19 is no longer something that is worth thinking about on a daily basis for people who aren't in the health care industry, if you find yourself constantly stressing about it I encourage you to calm down about it, seek help if necessary, because constantly stressing about something like that which is out of your control is not healthy for you and those around you. Despite all the turmoil in the world, it is still a great time to be alive.

Farnsworth was a twentieth century inventor, and you could argue that his biggest invention is in the top five most important and influential inventions from the twentieth century, it was the television. The interesting thing about Farnsworth's story is that, unlike Edison, he did not solve the TV problem by working in a lab all day and failing a thousand times before finally coming out with a successful prototype. Instead the inspiration came to him when he was a boy working on a farm in Rigby Idaho. To quote the Smithsonian Magazine:

Farnsworth dreamed up his own idea for electronic-rather than mechanical-television while driving a horse-drawn harrow at the family's new farm in Idaho. As he plowed a potato field in straight, parallel lines, he saw television in the furrows. He envisioned a system that would break an image into horizontal lines and reassemble those lines into a picture at the other end. Only electrons could capture, transmit and reproduce a clear moving figure. This eureka experience happened at the age of 14.

I've been to Rigby Idaho, and there really isn't much there, I've probably driven through without stopping over a hundred times, so if there isn't much there now there would have really been nothing there in the early 1920s when Farnsworth lived there, and yet out of a town with nothing came such a complex invention.

But while we can say that it came out of a town with nothing, the inspiration itself didn't come out of nothing. Living in a time before TV, Farnsworth's early life was one almost entirely void of modern distractions which, as I've written about, is something incredibly valuable, but what is even more notable about this part of Farnsworth's story is that the inspiration didn't come to him as he was lying in bed waiting for time to pass or something like that, he was out plowing a field. He was out working when the idea that put him in the history books came to him, and had he not been out working like that all the time I don't think the idea would have ever come to him, it makes sense that the act of being productive leads to the inspiration to solve the world's problems.

As I was thinking about that, my mind went back to many of the worlds classical thinkers, people like Socrates and Aristotle, Newton, Da Vinci and Galileo, then up to people like America's founding fathers. I thought of these people because life back then was significantly harder and everyday tasks involved much more work than life today does. Sure many of these men had servants, but servants can't do everything as even the simple act of writing things down was a much more involved process 200 years ago than it is today. How many of the great ideas these men had came to them while they were doing something like gathering water from a well, gathering wood for a fire, or riding their horse on a week-long journey to the next big city over? I believe that the combination of boredom and productivity is quite powerful, how else could a 14 year old boy come up with such an idea?

I feel like we should learn from these people and this idea and not be afraid of simple work that strains the body rather than the mind, doing the work probably won't change the world, but the things that go through your mind while you do it just might.

But of course I recognize that similar things happen to people that actually have put money into one system or another and do loose that money when they miss an opportunity like I did. Recently I've been enjoying listening to Joel Salatin's podcast, Beyond Labels, and at least once he's shared the story of his father who went into the stock market when trading first made easier for the general public who one afternoon received the call from his stock guy who said that he had sold his stuff that morning he would have made a $10,000 profit but by that afternoon things had changed and at that point he had lost $15,000. From that point on the Salatins didn't invest money into anything they didn't understand which is probably wise for most people.

But what if there was a way to profit form investing in cryptocurrencies or stocks without the level of risk normally associated with it? The other day I came up with an investment strategy that had the goal of not missing an opportunity for profit, then curious about how it would work I designed a simulation that would put my strategy to the test.

The Strategy

A strategy where the goal is to not miss out on an opportunity for profit is one that must take advantage of all opportunities for profit so my strategy does exactly that. The most simple way to describe it would be to say that an investor using this strategy would sell off excess shares each time his investment's worth became larger than its original worth. For example, if the initial investment was $100 and its value rose to $101 then the investor would sell off the extra $1 worth of his investment leaving the original, but now smaller, $100 worth left, if the value of the investment dropped then the investor would simply wait for the value to grow again and withdraw later.

We'll see how this strategy does.

The Test

Of course to test this I could have written a program to monitor the price of something then thrown some money at it so it could play with it but I don't have that kind of money or patience and it also turns out that letting a computer make a bunch of trades involves jumping through a few hoops, so instead I reminded myself how to use pandas then spent an hour writing a program that would simulate investing using that strategy on historical data.

The data I used was bitcoin prices from around March 2020 through March 2021. Why bitcoin? That's what I felt like using. Why March 2020 thru March 2021? I wanted a year of recent data and March 2021 was when the dataset I used ended (for those of you reading this in the future after that dataset is updated again I used version 7). Why can't I say the exact dates I tested? I didn't care enough to convert Unix time to human time.

The dataset recorded the price of bitcoin every minute, so my simulation analyzes the price at each minute and will simulate selling small amounts of bitcoin each minute that the price is right. The simulation started out with $100 worth of bitcoin (however much that happened to be at the chosen start time) and determines what kind of profit would be seen if the strategy were carried out, it also reports what the profit would have been had the investor simply let the money sit then withdrew it at the time that the simulation ended. I ran two main tests, one where the strategy was tested over multiple short intervals of time (1 month) and another where it tracks how well it would do over longer periods of time (1 month to 1 year).

Test Results

One Month Simulations

If I were publishing this somewhere important then I would have put it all into a nice easy to read table, but this is my website and I can put as much effort as I want into things here.

Each of the months in these results represents an individual month where the strategy was carried out independent of each other. "BTC sold for" represents the amount of money that the simulated investor sold the bitcoin they sold for. "Sold BTC value" is the value that the bitcoin the investor sold is worth at the end of the simulated period. "Initial investment value" represents what the $100 worth of bitcoin from the beginning of the simulation is worth at the end of the simulation, while "Value left invested" represents the value of bitcoin left unsold at the end of the simulated period. "Profit from new method" represents the profit that the simulated investor made from the investment strategy I came up with while "Profit from traditional method" represents the profit the investor would have had had he simply left the investment alone then withdrew everything at the end of the simulated period.

As we see in the above results, my strategy isn't terrible over short periods of time like these. The traditional way of investing is still almost always better but the results are still comparable so it isn't too bad. Interestingly the two months where there was a loss rather than a gain my method would have saved you more money than the traditional one would have.

Long term results

In these results each month builds after the last, ultimately it is one test simulated over a one year period that we pause to analyze each month.

In this test we see that my strategy is terrible for investing long-term. Yes the investor did still profit using my method, but by the end of the year that profit was around a quarter of what it could have been using a traditional investment method and using my method would clearly be a mistake.

Conclusion

So the question to ask now is what is my strategy good for? The short and simple answer is nothing, and that shouldn't surprise anyone, I have no experience in investing, no education in finance and spent very little time thinking this through so the odds of me coming up with something that would beat what the people who have made their living off of this do are microscopic.

But there is one scenario where my strategy has an advantage and it is exactly the scenario it was designed for since it is what happened to me with LBC. Look back up at month twelve of the last simulation, imagine you're the investor (using a traditional method) looking at your $100 investment that has turned into over $900, you'd be pretty happy with that but you'd also think to yourself that if it has gotten that high surely it will get higher so you decide to leave your money in a little longer and plan to take it out once it hits $1,000. What if that day never comes? What if the value of your investment drops to virtually zero? You would have lost your $800 profit as well as your $100 investment. Had you used the strategy I came up with instead you'd still have $200 to show for it all after the price drop, it won't make you rich, but it will protect you from losing out due to your own greed.

You could say that my strategy would be great for people who are afraid of sudden price drops like that but really those people shouldn't be investing at all. Single stock (or in this case coin) investments are virtually gambling, in fact your money would be safer spent at a casino since there you are at least guaranteed to get some sort of a return. Why would any sane person invest in something they expect to lose value?

If you want to gamble then go all in with a full understanding of what you may loose. If you want a more stable investment then diversify your assets, do what the wealthy do to stay wealthy, there is no need to reinvent the wheel.

* I no longer endorse Odysee/LBRY for the same reason that Bryan Lunduke condemned them back in August.

So then I got to thinking, if I can go into any parts store in the country and ask for an alternator for a 2022 Ford F150 and leave that store with a part should it break ten years from now I'd be able to take that alternator back to the store and leave with a new one for free, why is it that if I walked into the Ford dealership and bought a brand new F150 (the practical kind of course, not the stupid kind) I'd have to pay for a new alternator if the alternator in that truck broke ten years from now? Of course new cars do come with warranties but none last as long as the warranties on individual parts, when you think about this it shouldn't make any sense. How is it that the warranty on an alternator installed by skilled technicians and precision robots in a billion dollar factory does not last as long as the one that I installed in a MacDonald's parking lot with thirty dollars worth of Harbor Freight tools? (And yes that is something I've done)

The only explanation for this that I can think of (other than the fact that car manufacturers probably can't afford to have lifetime warranties on things) is that the parts you get at the parts store are better than the parts that come into the factory. In the case of performance parts this is obviously true since those are different parts but I think that it may also be the case for regular parts as well because those aren't quite the same either. When you buy from a parts store you will almost always have the option to buy a remanufactured part (and if your car is even half as old as mine that will likely be your only option). The term "remanufactured" has a negative connotation to it because it is related to the word "used" but if we think about it that negative connotation is not deserved. Let's say you have a 2010 Dodge Charger, Dodge was in a pretty rough spot during this period so let's assume that one in ten alternators put into Chargers that year had a particular defect and end up breaking sooner than they should. Broken car parts aren't thrown away, they are sold to remanufacturers who are experts in fixing parts, and when they see a ton of the same part coming in they'll figure out what is wrong with that part pretty quick and become quite good at correcting factory defects, so while the factory has no idea that they're pumping out bad parts, the remanufacturers see the problems the factory has and will practice much better quality control making their parts more reliable.

Now that scenario was completely hypothetical and I have no actual data to back my claims there, but, oddly enough, the term "tractor mechanic" is something I could get away with putting on my resume (although it wouldn't be useful) and a few times I've visited a shop where they remanufacture parts and the guys at that shop are the sort of guys you'd trust to do a good job, you can't say the same about a large factory that doesn't even let their employees breathe freely because they can't trust them not to come to work sick. And again, is there any other reasonable explanation as to why an alternator I install in a MacDonald's parking lot with cheap tools has a better warranty than an alternator installed by a technician in a billion dollar factory?

Now it is important to mention that the style of podcast that Justin and I are talking about are conversational/interview podcasts, podcasts that are more of an audio essay (such as Not Related) of course have their benefits as well, but those benefits are a bit more obvious to us and likely require more effort to come by. Conversational podcasts open the doors for opportunities.

We live in a world where people don't often have long conversations with their peers, and while I feel like the world has always been like this to some extent I think social media has accelerated our social de-evolution to a point where we are surrounded by NPCs who don't know how to carry a conversation longer than five minutes. It is rare, especially within younger generations such as mine, to find someone capable of having an interesting hour long conversation and even when you are with somebody who can it is hard to actually have it because of things such as the time or setting. A conversational podcast provides the time and setting for you to have a long interesting conversation with another person so that you can learn from each other, opportunities like that rarely come up organically but as long as you invite the right people you can have these great conversations with people virtually on demand.

Another insight Justin had on the benefit of having a podcast is that it can be used as a networking tool. If you were to send an email to a stranger on the internet saying that you wanted to have a conversation to learn something from them then you probably won't get a response, but if you were to invite that same person onto a podcast you may actually get a chance to talk to that person. Justin Rhodes is quite well known and respected in the homesteading/regenerative farming community so already he could easily get people that do that kind of stuff onto a podcast with him, but he figures that if he had an established podcast he could get the opportunity to talk to and develop friendships with people who do other things (health and business gurus were his examples) that would otherwise be outside his reach.

Of course those of us who don't have hundreds of thousands of YouTube subscribers don't have nearly the same reach as Justin and wouldn't immediately have access to the kind of people he does, but we still have some sort of a reach and we all know interesting people, and when you do interesting things like starting a podcast you eventually attract more interesting people to you. By having this website I've been contacted by people I would have never known existed.

But even if you don't want to reach out to other people a conversational podcast can still be rewarding if you do it right. A number of months ago a childhood friend of mine started a podcast with another one of his friends and I watched part of an episode or two and all it is is the two of them just sitting and chatting about whatever they feel like for an hour or two and since they are still doing it they obviously enjoy it. I don't know how many of their videos have more than six views on YouTube and I'm not sure how much they actually care about that but the question to consider is would those two be able to talk to each other like that for as long and as frequently as they do if they didn't have that podcast together? Maybe, but probably not. Podcasts give people the opportunity to have long interesting and rewarding conversations that they otherwise may have never had with both people they know and people they've never met.

Now after reading all that you might be expecting me to announce that I'm going to start a podcast, but I don't have much interest in doing that right now so I'm not. I guess I have a few friends who if they were to approach me wanting to start one together I might hop onboard, but I have no plans to start one on my own and no plans to approach anyone to start one, but I'd likely be willing to be a guest on one if I ever got the opportunity. My reason for writing this was really just to get this idea out there because it is something I'd never considered before and it has opened my mind to some things and I feel like it may open yours a bit as well, so I guess for anyone out there wanting to start a podcast I wish you good luck, be interesting and I hope you find some interesting people.

It is not uncommon for me to see people who have put themselves in the same, or a similar mental box that my coworker has. I know a lot of people who have had the idea to create designs for calendars, or stickers, or shirts, or custom prints with artwork they've made (or plan to make) or with their own photography (because nearly everyone with an Instagram account thinks they're a photographer) but of all those people who I've known who have had the idea to do this I don't think any of them have actually done it, some of these people have even invested in equipment of some form for the purpose of using to create designs or pictures to put on things to sell but still none of these people have ever put a product up for sale. I got a bit tired of seeing people who don't act on those ideas and I guess that conversation with my coworker pushed me over the line, so, to prove a point, I put a design of my own up for sale.

The simplicity of making a product

I decided to make a calendar because that was what my coworker talked about making, so I went on lulu.com to create one. There were a few reasons that I chose Lulu, it is a print on demand service so in order for me to sell a product I don't have to pay for a hundred to be printed then loose money after only ever selling three, I can sell the product directly through Lulu for free so I don't need to set up a Shopify site or something like that (although if you do plan on being serious about selling a lot of things it would be best to set up your own site, but if you are just starting out or just testing the waters it is fine not to have it), and most importantly I had already heard of Lulu. Are there better services for making calendars? Probably, but remember I'm mainly doing this to prove a point and Lulu is sufficient for that.

Once I was on Lulu, all I had to do was make an account, select what I wanted to make, upload some pictures, write a description, and determine the pricing. The whole process took me less than a half hour and that included the time it took me to generate the images and mess around a bit in gimp to put text on the cover. It wasn't hard, I considered writing out a tutorial for it but after doing it I realized that a tutorial would be boring and insulting to your intelligence because the entire process is self-explanatory. The process is free and it is simple, there is no reason that you can't do this.

And the nice thing about it being a calendar is that I pretty much already had the images to put in it, I wrote a program to make them six months ago. Odds are you do to. If you are an artist you most likely already have twelve pictures you could put into a calendar. If you are a photographer you most likely already have a hundred and twelve pictures that you could put into a whole bunch of calendars. In fact if you are an artist or photographer with some sort of following than it would probably be a good idea for you to make a calendar and put it up for sale since it is the time of year where people buy those and it is an inexpensive yet rewarding way for your friends to support your work. And you have nothing to loose, it is free and takes less than a half hour so if you end up selling nothing you still wasted less time than you would have watching a single episode of a TV show. And if you only sell five, so what? You'll be like thirty bucks richer than you were before, and that's great, nobody is going to get rich off of a calendar so you shouldn't expect to.

Why don't people do it

The point I am trying to prove by making this is that it is not hard to create products like this and put them up for sale, because most people aren't familiar with services like Lulu they think that making and selling these products is a lot harder than it actually is and they choose not to actually do it. That should have already been clear and was unnecessary to say, but I do feel like this article would be incomplete without mentioning a few more reasons that people may be hesitant to start doing something like this. One is marketing and I don't really have anything to say about that, but the other thing is a challenge that many people have that spans beyond this specific application, and that is anxiety related to perfectionism.

I wrote an article several months ago titled perfectionism hinders progress (whose link is ironically one of the only file names I've accidentilay mispelled) and right now I'm considering writing more about perfectionism because I know so many people who struggle with it. We all know that none of us are perfect, therefore nothing any of us ever create will be perfect, this is simple reality. Of course this does not mean that perfection is not an admirable goal, during the sermon on the mount the Savior told us to be perfect, but we don't become perfect instantly. Obtaining perfection in anything, a craft or in life, is a long journey but we won't get anywhere on that journey if we don't take our first step. So if you have been wanting to start an online business selling anything really (it doesn't have to be something this simple), or if you've been wanting to start a podcast, or learn a new skill, or just try anything new, don't be afraid to do it because your first step doesn't look like someone else's 1,000th step, you will get better with time unless you never start.

But that's enough of my perfectionism speech for now, I should probably get back on topic before I end this.

If for whatever reason you want to sell things like stickers or shirts or whatever online, there is no reason for you to hesitate any longer, it is simple, free to start, and if you do sell something it will be rewarding in more ways than one. You have nothing to loose. But before you do that I'd be a bad internet salesperson (or whatever I'm supposed to call it) if I didn't encourage you to buy my product, even though I made it to prove a point rather than as a serious product I'd be very grateful if you did buy one as having at least one sale would strengthen my point quite a bit and, unlike creating that product, keeping this website up is not free. So, here is that link again, and I'll talk to you later.

After that experience I wondered why anyone would want to block their thoughts out like that, but really that is the reason they do it, too many people these days are not comfortable with their own thoughts. This reminds me of a scene from Fahrenheit 451 where Montag was riding on a train with loud music playing, the substanceless noise drove him mad as he was trying to think deeper thoughts but he was surrounded by people who weren't bothered by it. These days there are less and less people like Montag who want to be left alone with their thoughts and more people who are tuning out their thoughts by playing music in the shower, looking at memes on the toilet, and doing whatever else they can to avoid actually thinking for themselves. This why I titled the article where I encouraged you all to read Fahrenheit 451 The Dystopia We Live in.

And things really only seem to be getting worse. Recently I read an article that compared modern music to junk food and it was completely right. (Thanks Arjun, I forgot I was going to write on this topic) Modern music, if we can even be generous enough to call it music, has lost all substance, much of it is just simple repeated beats paired with lyrics that are meaningless at best and degenerate and pitiful at worst. Much of it is not an art worth consuming, that is, again, if we are even going to be generous enough to call it art.

Of course this is not to say that I think we shouldn't listen to music, we should seek after things which are virtuous, lovely, of good report, or praiseworthy, and there exists plenty of music that fits those qualifiers. But we should be conscience of how we use music, we should never use it to drown out our thoughts like one would do with drugs or alcohol, in fact we should be aware that in some cases music can have the same effect on us as drugs or alcohol. If you are to listen to music, listen to uplifting music that stimulates good thought rather than suppresses it, and listen to it at appropriate times, don't deprive yourself of precious quiet time where you can be alone with your thoughts. I realize that this may be hard for some of you, there was a time in my life where I struggled to think deeply without music playing in my ears, that time has passed and I am much happier now than I was then.

Give yourself more time where you are free from distractions and outside stipulation so that you are able to think clearly and gain the inspiration necessary to make corrections in your life and produce creations that will make this world a better place.

Now if you went out to answer these questions you'd probably find yourself quite surprised as you learned that Andy Grove was a co-founder of Intel, he had no medical degrees and never even worked in the field of medicine as his expertise was in the world of semiconductors, he was CEO of Intel when he wrote this article, and his wikipedia article doesn't even mention that he is the author of some of the best information on prostate cancer there is. In a world where we are constantly told that we should listen to the experts we often don't realize who all the experts are, or at least who can become an expert.

I learned about this article from Andy Grove by listening to Scott Adams the other day, Grove's story is an interesting one, he ends his article with a quote from something in his research that said, "when faced with a serious illness beyond our comprehension, [each of us] becomes childlike, afraid, and looking for someone to tell us what to do." He was first told that he may have prostate cancer in '94 and that, along with a bit of denial, was a fairly accurate description of his initial reaction. He eventually came to the conclusion that he would have to treat it somehow but he didn't like what he'd learned about the traditional surgery and its life-ruining side effects, so he dedicated the better part of a year to researching for himself what the best option for him was and ended up completely ridding himself of the cancer by getting treatment which was (at least at the time) quite unorthodox and suffered no side effects once recovered. Again, Andy Grove was not a doctor but he chose to become one of the world's top experts on prostate cancer so that he could get results better than what he would have gotten otherwise.

To paraphrase the point that Scott Adams was making by bringing this up: Through focused narrow research, a smart non-expert can come to understand an issue much better than the experts can. Scott Adams himself has experience with this himself, he developed a rare condition that made it basically impossible for him to talk and he visited specialist after specialist who all couldn't figure out what the problem was and that it was impossible to cure, so, not wanting to live the rest of his life without being able to speak, Adams conducted his own research and realized he likely had something called spasmodic dysphonia then found the one doctor in the world who knew most about that rare condition who confirmed that diagnosis and gave Adams hope which he then used to encourage his further research and Adams ended up teaching his doctors how to cure him of his pasmodic dysphonia. Remember, Scott Adams is not a doctor, he is a cartoonist, and yet he knows more about pasmodic dysphonia and how to treat it than almost every doctor on the planet. Non-experts can become more knowledgeable than the "experts" if they put their minds to it.

And, after thinking about it a bit, one realizes that it is probably a much better idea to follow the conclusions of a well-researched "non-expert" like Grove or Adams than it would be to follow those of a traditional expert. The procedure that Andy Grove got that cured his prostate cancer was a sort of targeted high radiation treatment, one of the things he did to learn about this procedure was speak with the oncologist who was among the (if not the) world's leading experts on such a procedure. In Grove's first conversation with this doctor he asked him if he was in Grove's position what he'd do, the oncologist responded by saying that he wouldn't get his own treatment but instead get the traditional surgery with the terrible side effects Grove was trying to avoid. Some time later, after learning more about both procedures, Grove called up that doctor again and by the end of the conversation it was becoming clear to the both of them that the high radiation treatment was the best option. The last thing Grove asked that oncologist before ending the call was that if the high radiation treatment was so good, why did he say that he'd opt to have the traditional surgery instead. The oncologist responded, "You know, all through medical training, they drummed into us that the gold standard for prostate cancer is surgery. I guess that still shapes my thinking."

When it comes to finding the best solutions to things orthodox experts will always be biased towards orthodox solutions, most of the time this is just fine but sometimes this is not the case like with Grove's and Adam's circumstances. We shouldn't just blindly trust the experts, we should research for ourselves what the experts are saying and come to our own conclusion on whether or not the experts are right and what the best thing for us to do is, and if that requires us to become experts ourselves than that is what we need to do.

But while that whole thing does sound a bit unfair you can make an argument because while you own the car you don't own the charging stations so it isn't completely unjust, the thing that with Teslas these days that makes no sense is charging extra to unlock extra performance on them, Tesla makes some of the fastest production cars on the market but in order to unlock sport mode, or whatever they call it, you have to pay a monthly subscription (I don't have internet right now to fact check this) and when you get this subscription nothing changes about your car, it still has the same motors, the same battery, the same aerodynamics, the same weight, etc. the car, the object you supposedly own, undergoes no change, but all of a sudden the software that owns the car lets you drive faster. This issue goes beyond the things commonly argued when talking about right to repair, this is a right to own issue.

But me complaining here about Teslas is not all that important, I of course don't own one and I doubt many of you out there reading this do either, but something I do own, along with nearly all of you, is a smartphone, which is where the most issues that relate to what I'm choosing to call the right to use happen (although that term already exists and relates to something else so somebody who isn't in a car typing on their Thinkpad in the middle of nowhere like I am will have to come up with a new term). The way I see it, if you own a device then you should have access to all the features built into that device, if your car it capable of going from zero to sixty in one second then you shouldn't have to pay an extra fee to make it do that.

But again lets get away from cars and talk about the mobile operating system that has the biggest right to own issue, and contrary to what most of you think I'm about to say it is Android. When Apple releases a new version of iOS it is immediately available to all users of phones which have good enough hardware to run them which will usually include iPhone models that are five years old (of course updating isn't always a good idea but that's a different conversation). For Androids this is not the case (although Google Pixels may be an exception to this, I'm not really sure and I don't care to look it up), when Google releases an Android update there are of course hardware requirements for said updates and while many five year old Android phones won't meet those requirements (because unlike iPhones, every Android phone is not a flagship) the older flagship phones that would have cost more than anyone should actually pay for a phone should often meet those requirements. But it is not Google, the maker of the software, who determines whether or not you can get the update, neither it is the manufacturer of your phone who decides, and neither it is you, the owner of your phone, who decides but it is your cell phone provider, a company that has nothing to do with the programming of your phone's software or the engineering of its hardware, that can decide whether or not you can get the update that your phone is more than likely able to run, it is within their power to withhold a software update from you in order to push you into buying a new phone, that you don't need, from them.

But this is something that most people can live with, it is my belief that you should only update software when a new update contains features that you actually want or need, so if I had a phone I wasn't allowed to update I probably wouldn't care too much and neither would most people since they don't like having to re-learn how to use software once it is updated. But what I don't like is when I get features that my phone is capable of taken away. Today I was in a car wanting to type up an article that I'll probably get around to tomorrow and needed to look something up on my computer to do it so I went into the settings of my phone to set up a mobile hotspot to connect my computer to the internet. When I found the right part of the settings menu it wanted me to log into the account for my cell phone service provider to activate it. This is something that I've done on an occasion before without having to do that so I was surprised when I had to do this but I realized that my phone plan got switched up which may be the reason for that. But when my phone plan switched a Verizon technician didn't come to my house to remove whatever chip from my phone that allows it to be used as a hotspot, it still has that capability and I should be able to use it. We pay cell phone companies for internet, it should not matter how we use it, if I'm allowed to watch Baby Shark in 4K on YouTube on cellular data I should be able to use that same cellular data to browse the internet on my laptop, it's the same data and browsing the internet on one device puts no more strain on the cellular network than browsing on another does.

Not being able to use devices that you own the way that they are capable of being used is ridiculous and we should avoid doing business with companies that cripple our hardware with software.

But, due to the events of 2020, we no longer live under normal circumstances which caused the government to finally realize that the internet exists and I was able to get my license renewed online. Of course the system is not perfect, I have no idea why they can only have the systems for that open during working hours on business days rather than 24/7 like literally every website run by people with a brain is, and I also don't understand why they don't trust us to take our own picture when the advent of social media has caused half the population to think that they are a professional photographer, but they are taking baby steps into the 21st century and we should appreciate that. There are very few reasons why somebody should need to physically go into a DMV these days and I'm glad they've figured it out, but there is something a bit less obvious, but much more important that should be changed about our relationship with our local department of motor vehicles.

The DMV should be free

Inside the envelope that my new license came in was a sheet of paper that gave a bit of instruction about the new license, most of what was on there was obvious to anyone who has a brain but there was one statement on there that made less and less sense to me the more I thought about it, it read, "Review the information on your new card. If there are any errors, please visit your local DMV office. Fees may apply to any changes." (emphasis added)

I found this statement to be quite strange, the standard practice for literally every company who wants to keep its customers is that if they mess something up they will correct the mistakes with no charge to the customer, but the DMV wants you to pay for their mistakes here (of course if the mistake is yours this wouldn't apply but it is pretty hard for someone to mess up their own license). If the DMV were a business nobody would chose to do business with them because this is not how you keep customers. The DMV isn't a business with customers to serve, it is a government agency with citizens to protect, but with practices like this the better description would be a government agency with subjects to rule over. I don't call myself a libertarian and you definitely shouldn't have to be one to realize that the abuse that we've tolerated agencies like the DMV have put us under should be unacceptable and we should be urging our elected officials to have the agencies which they have control over to treat us with respect.

But my thought process didn't end there because I soon realized that taxes were a thing that we're all forced to pay and if the DMV were to mess up my license but correct the problem without charging me any extra I'd still be paying it because the money used to correct the problem would come from taxes anyways, or in other words still out of my pocket. We shouldn't have to pay extra to the DMV when they mess up because we fund them anyways, but if we take that thought even further we realize that we should never have to pay the DMV for anything. The DMV should be free. As long as taxes exist there should be no government service that we have to pay for, the government's incompetence towards how it manages the money it takes from us should have no relation to how much of our money it feels the right to take from us.

Since then I've found myself occasionally trying to find what other things I eat are made out of. Mayonnaise is almost entirely soybean oil, margarine (which I don't eat) is almost always made from soybean oil, and of course almost all restaurants that serve fried food fry their food in soybean oil. Soybean oil has been the most used edible oil in the United States since 1945 and yet when I was noticing all of the things that had soybean oil I realized that I don't think I'd ever seen soybean oil in a grocery store, so the last time I went to one I made a trip to the oil section and found that the only soybean oil there was in the specialty turkey frying oil that is only around for Thanksgiving but that is a soybean and corn oil mix so really you can't go to a typical grocery store and buy a bottle of the most popular oil in the country. (However the restaurant supply store I went to the other day had multiple pallets of it) The most used edible oil in the country is one that most stores don't carry because nobody will buy it. What would cause a product to be so gross that it has to be hidden from us to buy it?

When I was learning the tings that led me to write Margarine is from the Devil I heard Sally Fallon Morell mention that the oils that are being put in our foods were industrial waste products, I believed her but for whatever reason my brain also treated that statement as an exaggeration because that is exactly what an exaggeration would sound like so I chose not to worry about it. But after deciding that I wanted to write this article I decided to see how soybean oil was made and I came across this video showing what happens when soy is processed and the main product focused on here is not the oil but what they call oil cake which is the dry substance left after the oil is pressed out and is used in animal feed, no more emphasis is given on the actual oil after we see it pressed out of the animal feed. This proves Sally's claim, soybean oil is a byproduct of animal feed production, we are being fed industrial waste at a massive scale.

Things get even scarier when you know a thing or two about oil. Oxidation is the chemical process that causes metal to rust but oxidation effects oils as well. As oil molecules break down they become more prone to oxidation, they break down naturally over time but things like light and heat speed up this process (this is why olive oil is sold in green containers and you are told to store it in a cool dark place). Once an oil has oxidized it is considered rancid since at this point it will smell bad and be incredibly toxic because its chemical makeup has been altered. Oils also have different smoke points which is the temperature where they will begin to burn, and while the food industry claims that the smoke point is unrelated to oxidation I find such a claim hard to believe since oxidation occurs as the molecules break down and burning is a process where molecules break down.

So lets take a look back at this video keeping in mind that heating oil causes it to go bad and the specific smoke point of unrefined soybean oil is 160°C. First they take dried soybeans and extract the shells by crushing them up a bit, this is fine. Next they run the crushed soy through a device called an extruder where it is exposed to high heat and pressure, the exact heat is not specified but we can make a fairly good guess that it was far too high once we see that after the third step where the oil is pressed out that the solid oil cake comes out between 120°C and 130°C, this is after a trip through a long corkscrew and certainly a few minutes of waiting in the press for enough stuff to accumulate where it certainly cooled a bit. Based on this we can safely assume that the oil came dangerously close to, if not above its smoke point just when it was being extracted, and it is important to remember that oil doesn't have to get all the way up to its smoke point before it starts to oxidize, I looked at studies where researchers got soybean oil to oxedize at temperatures as low as 90°C. Soybean oil is compromised just through the process of extracting it. If we look deeper into the oil production process we see that there are several more points in that process where the oil is heated and given opportunity to oxidize, and by the time it is bottled it is almost certainly rancid and unsafe for consumption. And it is important to remember that this is not unique to soybean oil, this happens to nearly every edible oil on the grocery store shelf.

But what are the specific risks of soybean oil? Soybean oil is notably high in omega-6 polyunsaturated fatty acids and a diet high in omega-6s has been linked to diseases like nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, cardiovascular disease, obesity, inflammatory bowel disease, rheumatoid arthritis, and Alzheimer's disease. [1] Soybean oil is dangerous and feeding large amounts of it to people frankly is unethical. We should not eat it and we should seek to avoid it whenever we can along with nearly every other contemporary oil.

It is important to remember that prior to the early 1900s, with the exception of places like the Philippines, everyone on the planet cooked with animal fats like butter, lard, ghee, and tallow, Filipinos, because they didn't have the same access to livestock, used coconut oil which is the only plant based oil high in saturated fat (fats solid at room temperature) making it just as safe and stable for cooking as animal fats. The transition from animal fat to processed oils was by far the biggest dietary shift in the history of mankind and it has undoubtably brought the world terrible health challenges more severe and widespread than ever before. We should never cook with anything other than animal fats or coconut oil, olive oil dates back to biblical times and is safe to eat in moderation as long as we don't eat it, the same can be said of avocado oil which of course comes from an oily fruit the Aztecs began cultivating over five thousand years ago. All other oils should be avoided, soybean oil of course being the worst of these. Be sure to check the ingredients of the products you buy, you will of course have to pay a bit more for avocado oil based mayonnaise but, as you live a life free from ingesting industrial waste like soybean oil, you will find yourself much healthier and spending much less time and money at doctors' offices. The health of you and your family should be one of your biggest priorities.

Of all the bad movies remakes are the worst, they are almost never any better than the originals and I've never understood why someone would want to watch a different version of a movie they've already seen, but remakes and things based on things which are already popular are the ones that end up being the most successful no matter how hard a studio tries. Ten years ago Disney hadn't quite figured this out yet and in 2012 they released John Carter which was based on a quite old series of books. I've never actually seen a single John Carter of Mars book nor have I ever heard anyone other than my dad talk about the books, he was quite excited for the film since he had read them growing up and I remember him taking me to the theater to see it and the movie turned out to be really good, I rewatched it a few years ago and I will still say that it is a good movie, but when we saw it in the theater there was almost nobody there. John Carter flopped, Disney lost a few hundred million dollars on it because it was not a movie based on something that was already popular.

All the movies that people talk about today are either remakes, sequels, or parts of bloated cinematic universes and all of the exceptions to that rule spawn at least one of those three things, the same is even beginning to become true of TV serieses. But what about the books that people talk about these days? And I'm not talking about books book nerds talk about (since film nerds also talk about different things) I'm talking about the books that people reference these days when they are having a typical conversation or they are presenting some sort of information or opinion. George Orwell's 1984 is the book I hear talked about most often these days, of course there is good reason to talk about it these days, but 1984 is over seventy years old, is there not anything more recent than 1949 that compares to it? We can of course look at other books too, Brave New World, which is often discussed in the same way 1984 is, was first published all the way back in 1932. Fahrenheit 451, which I recently recommended to you all, was published in 1953. Why is it that the books we talk most about are this old? Are there no new books being written that are comparably insightful?

Fortunately the answer to that question is yes but sadly few people take the time to realize it. In an earlier post I briefly mentioned the philosophical value of the Hunger Games books. Hiding underneath the teenage drama and the absurd practice of forcing children to fight each other to the death for entertainment are clear political messages that are incredibly relevant to our modern culture, messages everyone should hear. The Hunger Games series is incredibly political especially the third book but it seems that nobody has noticed, this was an incredibly popular series of books just ten years ago I knew several people who read them and yet my dad is the only person I've ever seen point out and discuss the actual message of the series' conclusion and, while I'm not actually talking about that message now, for many of you I am likely the first person to point out the true value of this series. There were several times within the last two years where events from the Hunger Games were directly analogous to current events and nobody brought it up. What use is art if we fail to learn from it?

And what use is making art if all the stuff that gets attention are remakes and sequels? Is it worth the effort to make good art in a time when there is little to distinguish the work of a human and the work of a machine? What is the benefit of creating something that may never gain widespread praise even if it is worthy of it?

We should always remember that making good art is always useful, worth the effort, and beneficial to society. A good indicator of a healthy culture is the quality of its art, if the art sucks then the culture sucks and I hope we can all see that most of today's art simply sucks, a thriving culture produces original and praiseworthy art and we don't have much of that now, we are not a thriving culture.

But we should not loose hope and we should not discourage others either, if we want to live in a culture with good art then we should work to create good art, or at least support people who are, this is a part of the reason I joined a webring, so that I could support others who are doing their small part in, at least trying, to improve our culture through creating their own content, I of course don't 100% agree with everything that everyone there makes and I don't expect they all agree with everything that I post, but such is the nature of the world, the goal of getting everyone to agree on everything is what has given us such terrible art these days, art that is void of new ideas.

And I guess that's what I started this whole rant with, a lack of new ideas in popular culture. (You can probably tell this has taken me a week to write, usually I write everything in one sitting which helps everything stay coherent) Books like 1984 were great, the original Star Wars movies were great, The Lord of the Rings was great, we don't need copies and knock offs of the great art of the past, we need new art, art that is just as great and insightful, art that has the potential to be greater than the great works of art we talk about now, art like the John Carter movie, art like the Hunger Games but instead actually gets discussed for what it is, we don't need to see Home Alone but British and with cell phones.

At Epik, we take security and the privacy of your information very seriously. Therefore as a precautionary measure, I am writing to inform you of an alleged security incident involving Epik.

Our internal team, working with external experts, have been working diligently to address the situation. We are taking proactive steps to resolve the issue. We will update you on our progress. In the meantime please let us know if you detect any unusual account activity. I am proud of our team’s efforts as we do our part to empower a thriving internet for the benefit of our customers around the world.

You are in our prayers today. We are grateful for your support and prayer. When situations arise where individuals might not have honorable intentions, I pray for them. I believe that what the enemy intends for evil, God invariably transforms into good.

Blessings to you all.
Regards,

Rob Monster
Founder and CEO
Epik Holdings Inc

When I first read the email I didn't think much of it (although at first I thought it was from Vultr and I panicked a bit) and I just went about my day. Then I saw this video and realized there was a lot that Epik didn't tell me.

Apparently Epik got hacked by somebody claiming to be the hacktivist group Anonymous and they leaked ten years worth of the company's records including all purchases made through Epik and the emails and passwords of all of the people with an account with Epik, and not only that they managed to get a hold of the home and rood directories of one of Epik's servers (which they also leaked) and they even had enough access to post a fake update on Epik's website. To sum everything up this is was something quite a bit more serious than "an alleged security incident" this was a complete and utter failure on the part of Epik since they didn't even make things difficult for the hackers.

A few months ago Facebook was hacked and the personal data of over 500 million people was leaked (including things like addresses, phone numbers, emails, and employers). At the time I was quite tempted to download the data myself so that I could check and see if any of my data had been compromised and to check to see if any of my friends or family (especially those who may be more susceptible to scams) had also been compromised. This time I'd quite like to download the data because I know that they have data about me on there and I'd like to know exactly what the hackers know about me so that I can better guard myself against any sort of scams or other shenanigans that may come my way.

I never did download the leaked Facebook data and while I'd love to have access to the Epik data thats been leaked about me I don't have 170 gigs extra of hard drive space lying around that can be used for that purpose. But more importantly I haven't done that because by doing so I'd be stepping into a bit of a legal grey area. Of course stealing data is illegal but what are the laws regarding taking leaked data, as far as I know there is nothing illegal contained in either of these leaks, as far as I know it is not illegal to look through leaked data but I'm not really all that sure about that. And then of course how much are we actually willing to trust criminals when it comes to this leaked data? These criminals say that they don't have anything illegal in their leaks but remember these are masked criminals, you can never fully trust someone who doesn't give you their real name.

Really the issue I have with this is that there is no safe way of knowing if any data about me or those I love is contained in leaks of all sorts, and if so exactly what that data is. Today's failure from Epik is just one of many examples of companies failing to protect their customers' data. This can happen to any company or piece of software, if you've ever read the change log to a program after it updates you'll realize that it almost always says something like "security improvements," instead of "we patched the hole that allowed hackers to easily steal all of your banking information," when the latter of those two statements is more representative of what they actually did. And when important data is leaked like this the company has a responsibility to tell its customers exactly what happened. Several months ago my university was hacked and their systems were down for the better part of a week, preventing students and teachers from accessing assignments, the school never told us they were hacked (although it was obvious), I only became sure of it because I had connections to the people who worked in IT, all the school did was make us change our passwords a month after it happened.

Anyways I'm starting to ramble so I better wrap things up. All companies and government agencies that handle any sort of customer or citizen data should be legally required to undergo a cybersecurity audit annually and have the results of that audit made accessible to the people who would want to know (although a background check would probably be necessary to obtain that information since we wouldn't want to give hackers a free list of vulnerable websites). Companies and government agencies should also be legally required to tell their customers when their systems are breached and if any data is leaked they should tell their customers exactly what was leaked and if they fail to do this customers should have the right to download and look through the leaked data themselves, because while things like haveibeenpwned.com do exist they don't provide nearly enough data to people whose data has been leaked and when it comes to dealing with the potential scams and blackmail that may come after the wrong people have gotten ahold of your data it is important for you to know exactly what these people have and exactly where they got it from.

Luke's problem and solution

Now to get back on topic, the problem Luke was grappling with was the fact that normal people seem to refuse to use RSS. RSS is of course great, Luke has done many videos on it, I've written about it multiple times, other Linux YouTubers have made videos about it, and various other people with websites like mine have also written about it, RSS is great for consumers because it puts all the content they're interested in in one spot and it is great for creators because they only have to update one file to push things out to their subscribers. But despite its merits and people trying to push it normal people still don't use it. I've actually thought about writing about RSS again but decided against it because I feel like I'd be participating in an echo chamber by doing so since so many people are doing the same thing without changing very many minds. It is very hard to get people who aren't computer nerds to do unusual things with their computer like download an RSS reader (especially when Windows doesn't have any good ones).

The solution that Luke thought of to this was to create a program that take an RSS feed as a parameter and produce what would essentially act as a mobile app that would just hold the contents of that RSS feed and present it in a format that normal people are already comfortable with. For example if you open a tweet on a mobile browser Twitter will recognize that you are using a mobile browser and give you a prompt asking if you want to download the app for a better experience, despite what people who are disciplined with their computer use might think this is actually an incredibly effective way to get people to download an app because most people will think "ehh, why not?" when faced with this prompt. A program like Luke described would bring RSS feeds to normal people without them doing anything that they aren't used to doing.

The response

Complications of making an app

In a perfect world this sort of thing would be completely doable, but this isn't a perfect world and this video shows how unfamiliar Luke is with the mobile development landscape, the worlds of iOS and Android are walled gardens and one only has slightly less security than the other. I saw a few people mention the $100 a year price tag Apple had on publishing an app and then you also have to consider the hoops that you have to jump through. Many people don't realize that you have to register a bunch of stuff with Google just to get a prototype app to give notifications in a virtual machine, and I'm sure that some person out there would argue that if you root your phone and modify your installation of Android you could bypass some of that but that person would be forgetting that the app we want is targeted towards normal people who probably still have the junk apps their phone came with installed on their phone despite never using them.

But that type of doomer response is one that a person should expect from a video like that, and anyone seeking to succeed in life should overcome that mindset and ignore people who shut down good ideas that easily. What I really wanted to talk about was the other response I saw in the comments of the video on Luke's Peertube.

ActivityPub

The majority of the comments on this video on Peertube talk about a technology called ActivityPub and how it is a much better solution to the problem that Luke was describing and none of the people making those comments actually understood the problem Luke was describing or the way that normal people interact with technology. But before I get into that I guess I should tell those who don't already know that ActivityPub is the protocol that most federated internet services are built off of, things like Peertube, Mastadon, and Gab which are all things that normal people have never heard of, or, in the case of Gab, already have a negative opinion of.

Now the problem that Luke was actually describing has two parts.

Easy management for creators

Luke didn't mention the first part of the problem until the end of the video but I'll mention it first because he said that it was what got him thinking about this in the first place. He mentioned that whenever he makes a podcast episode he has to do a bunch of stuff on Apple and Google and Spotify and whatever and he doesn't really want to have to go through all those sites not just because he doesn't like using those sites but also because doing all that is a lot of work compared to just updating an RSS feed. Using fediverse stuff isn't any easier than going through Google or something, in fact you could argue that it is harder since you either have to find someone you trust running the right software on their server who will let you use it, or you have to set up the software to run on your own server which may not be all that straightforward and may even require you to start paying for a larger or more powerful server. I find that people who don't actually publish things on the internet underestimate the amount of work it actually is at times and that for us updating a single RSS file is all we really want to deal with after finishing something.

Finding something that normal people would actually use

Now of course this was the less important part of the problem he talked about, in fact I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't notice it, the more important part of the problem is where the skewed worldview of the fediverse nerds starts to mess them up, normal people don't care about federated software. The world of software is much larger than many people realize and, from the point of view of a developer, it is filled with many interesting and exciting things, more things than are really useful. A mistake that many developers are tempted to make is to add a particular new technology to a project to satisfy the developer's desire to try out the new technology rather than to satisfy the needs of the project. As one is trained to become a professional software developer they are taught that they should never do this because it often wastes time and produces a sub-par final product. We see this a lot these days with people putting things like machine learning and blockchain technology being pushed into areas where they have no business. These fediverse people are looking at this problem with a similar mindset.

The thing that bugs me the most about these people is that they don't realize that the solution they are proposing is already in use and it isn't working. This one guy pretentiously commented something that when translated into normal person sounds like, "ActivityPub is great I'm watching this video because I got a notification on my such-and-such phone from such-and-such app with my account I registered on such-and-such website that lets me subscribe to your peertube and comment in a federated way." These people acknowledge that Luke is already using the thing which they claim to be the solution to his problem yet they don't stop and ask themselves why Luke is still having the problem. Clearly it isn't working despite Luke telling his audience multiple times over the past year to start watching his videos on peertupe instead of YouTube. Compare the amount of views Luke gets on YouTube to what he gets on PeerTube, in two days this video has gotten a thousand views while in less than half that time the same video has gotten over eight times that many on YouTube. The last video he uploaded on YouTube has twenty thousand views there but it hasn't even broken one thousand views on peertube during the entire month that it has been out. ActivityPub is not working.

The reason for this is that normal people don't look at technology the same way that we do. I was in a mobile development class a while ago and the professor asked the class what makes a good app then my classmates started saying things like having a dark mode and being able to customize things and even change the colors of certain things, after this the professor stopped that discussion and told us that normal people don't care about that sort of things, most normal people leave their phones and computers on their default settings, they just want things to be simple and work right. If normal people can't be bothered to set up an RSS reader, they definitely won't want to take the time to jump into the complex world of ActivityPub, the solution to the problem of people not wanting to do something slightly complex is never to give them something harder to do.

So there is my wake-up call to all of you who have traveled too far down the fediverse rabbit hole, I don't really have anything against the technology and I'm definitely not trying to offend anyone who uses it, I'm just here to remind you that normal people see and approach technology differently than we do, and that if the only tool you have is a hammer that doesn't mean that everything you see is a nail, eventually you have to realize that pounding your flat tire with it isn't helping. Nerds don't think like everyone else. This isn't a solution for this problem for the same reason that the year of the Linux desktop will never come.

George Orwell's 1984 depicts a world where everyone lives under constant surveillance, fear is a main motivator as anyone could suddenly be found guilty of thought crime, and censorship thrives as the past is constantly being rewritten. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World shows us a world where everyone is genetically engineered to fit perfectly into a class system, where nobody can last long without taking drugs to cheer them up, and where children are encouraged to spend their free time having meaningless sex rather than doing something productive. Lois Lowry's The Giver takes place in a world void of color, individualism, and real families, where everyone's actions and responsibilities are planned from birth, a society where people are given an injection before they can leave their house each morning. And while its setting is rather unrealistic, Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games series contains important warnings about rebellions and revolutionaries, and how when power shifts those who were formerly oppressed often prove themselves to be just as evil as the oppressors because they seek revenge rather than a fair society.

We see that just in these four examples there are several things worth reflecting on and remembering, and many people do people these days often use the term Orwellian to (often rightfully) compare things going on now to things that would have taken place in his book 1984, Brave New World is also constantly referenced. But there is another book that is already just as well known as these two classics but is not given the attention that it deserves, in fact I believe that Fahrenheit 451 should be given more attention than the works of Orwell and Huxley because, unlike their books, Fahrenheit 451 doesn't show a dystopia that society may fall into, instead it is a dystopia that we are already in. In the 1950s Ray Bradbury painted an almost perfect picture of what life 70 years later would be.

Now I'll be honest, if you had told me what I just said I probably wouldn't believe you, how could a book where firefighters go around setting books on fire rather than putting out fires be so representative of today's culture? When I was a sophomore in high school my class was assigned to read it and I didn't really get it back then and it didn't really inspire me. Looking back that probably had more to do with the fact that it was a book I was assigned to read rather than chose to read and, unlike most books these days, Fahrenheit 451 is a bit lacking in natural stopping points and it is best consumed within a couple days rather than the few weeks schools will drag it out through. After seeing the book pop up in various top ten lists for not only dystopian books but also science fiction books in general I decided that I needed to give it another try and after two short nights of reading I'm glad I did.

This is a book that knows where it is going and doesn't waste any time getting there, it is a book that shows rather than tells. For example we are introduced to the main character's wife when she is unconscious after attempting suicide by ingesting an entire bottle of sleeping pills, Montag (the main character) calls the equivalent of 911 to come and save her, then the men who come to revive her by hooking her up to a machine that replaces all of her blood with new blood aren't even doctors, they say that the procedure is so easy that no doctors are needed and that they get several of those calls a day. In the morning Ms. Montag wakes up not knowing why she was so tired and hungry, she doesn't acknowledge the fact that she downed an entire bottle of pills the night before and instead talks about what she plans on watching on TV that day all while expressing that she is perfectly happy. This short engaging scene shows us that this is a society filled with people who fill their lives with distractions so that they don't have to think about the fact that they are depressed, much like today's society.

There are of course many more scenes which seem as if they could have taken place with people from today. A conversation about the looks of two presidential candidates shows that this is a society where, much like many people today, people care more about the optics of a politician than they do their policies. A noisy train ride shows us that this is a world where people are constantly bombarded with content to consoom giving them no time to actually think deeply about anything, this is a concept that is all too familiar to most of us now. And a broadcast of an innocent man being arrested shows a media that is more interested in upholding a narrative than it is in sharing the truth, something that today's media can no longer believably deny.

Of course Bradbury didn't quite get everything right here, of course the technology is off but that is of course to be expected in a book written in the 50s, but the main thing that Bradbury got wrong was the alienation of people with liberal arts degrees. Fahrenheit 451 was written as a reaction to what came to be known as McCarthyism in American history, this was essentially a series of witch hunts carried out against Americans who were suspected of holding Communist views or being sympathetic to Communism and (as is even more true today) many of these people were liberal arts professors from various universities. These days which hunts have come back in style but now it is the liberal arts degree holding Communists who are carrying them out.

Although he wasn't completely wrong with that, the liberal arts people in Fahrenheit 451 differ from the ones we have today, Bradbury's praise went to those who still had respect for the Bible and for classic literature, things which are ignored by the liberal arts community of today. Today it is the meaningless modern art that is being praised while things resembling the classics, things that require talent and skill, are frowned upon. The works of children and machines are nearly indistinguishable from the works of a modern artist.

Really modern art is a great symbol for the future that Bradbury wrote of, it is empty and meaningless like the endless amounts of TV and radio content the people in Fahrenheit 451 consoom. This is a book where people refer to TV characters as their friends and family, but of course TV characters can't be your friend, they don't know you and they aren't even real. This past week millions of people have had an emotional reaction to a video of Steve from Blues Clues, a character who was in a kids show 20 years ago, giving them a motivational talk, this is something that would have felt entirely in place within the dystopian society Bradbury warned us about, the one we now live in.

But the most interesting thing about the society in Fahrenheit 451 is that it evolved into what it became naturally, there was no Big Brother imposing his rules onto people, there were no perfect babies born in test tubes, there was no catastrophe that fractured society as we know it, instead the change was gradual over a number of decades until the culture of the past bares no resemblance to the culture of the present. There is a whole monologue from this book which I'd love to include here but it would be too difficult to bring completely into context and you should really go out and read the book yourself to get the full experience, so instead I'll end by quoting these two paragraphs:

"With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word `intellectual,' of course, became the swear word it deserved to be. You always dread the unfamiliar. Surely you remember the boy in your own school class who was exceptionally 'bright,' did most of the reciting and answering while the others sat like so many leaden idols, hating him. And wasn't it this bright boy you selected for beatings and tortures after hours? Of course it was. We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man's mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man? Me? I won't stomach them for a minute. And so when houses were finally fireproofed completely, all over the world (you were correct in your assumption the other night) there was no longer need of firemen for the old purposes. They were given the new job, as custodians of our peace of mind, the focus of our understandable and rightful dread of being inferior; official censors, judges, and executors. …

"You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can't have our minorities upset and stirred. Ask yourself, What do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy, isn't that right? Haven't you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren't they? Don't we keep them moving, don't we give them fun? That's all we live for, isn't it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these."

This is the dystopia that we live in, one void of creativity, one where no one is given time to think for themselves, one that only an outside observer can easily recognize as a dystopia.

I honestly forgot that they were making a fourth movie until I noticed that they released the trailer for it today. Now I already realize that most trailers are lame but this one was especially dull because it felt like it was a trailer for a movie that I've already seen. The trailer featured subtle nods to small details in the original movie like the white rabbit tattoo and Alice in Wonderland, but it also featured things like jumping off a building, training in a dojo, and a choice between a red and blue pill, these aren't the kind of subtle nods we'd expect from something like this, these are instead a collection of some of the most iconic scenes from the first movie shamelessly redone. Really the only thing I can tell that has been added to the new movie is political correctness, which almost always causes movies to become more dull.

Now I could keep going on talking about how strange the new Matrix trailer feels and how odd it is to be shown towers of human bodies hooked up to machines that are sucking the energy out of them while listening to music that puts you in a state of wonder rather than dread, but Hollywood's lack of new ideas and misunderstanding of the past span farther than just one movie. Consider the trailer for the new Ghostbusters movie, it isn't a bad trailer until you remember that Ghostbusters was a comedy movie, sure it isn't like most other comedy movies because it was also quite deep in the science fiction genre and its humor was much different than that of most comedy movies but a movie where you have a giant Stay Puft Marshmallow Man terrorizing the city of New York is not a movie that you are supposed to take completely seriously, and yet the trailer for the new one doesn't have a single joke. I'm not sure the new Ghostbusters will even be the same genre as the original.

And we haven't even started talking about movies that are already out (although I've written about this before so I won't dwell on it too long) and when talking about popular movies these days you can't ignore Marvel because they have taken over much of pop culture while most of their movies are mediocre at best and can hardly be considered art. I realize that most people aren't film critics but it still baffles me that people haven't realized that all have the same plot. Take the first Iron Man for example, it was the first Marvel movie and honestly one of the best ones (it's definitely the best one with Robert Downy Jr. in it), it starts out with a rich guy who is a bit of a self-absorbed jerk who gets into an accident then motivated by that accident turns himself into a superhero and saves the world or whatever, it's a fairly decent movie. Now look at Dr. Strange which a lot of people like, it starts out with a rich guy who is a bit of a self-absorbed jerk who gets into an accident then motivated by that accident turns himself into a superhero and saves the world or whatever, it's the same movie except this time there is more CGI and in the case of Iron Man they guy who started the movie as a self-absorbed jerk is still a bit of a self-absorbed jerk while in Dr. Strange he turns into a selfless benevolent protector of the universe or something without there really being any scenes showing him transitioning from one type of character to another, pretty much all the character development happens at once, basically every Adam Sandler movie handles character development more realistically than this.

How it got this way

When we see that Hollywood lacks creativity these days it is important to ask ourselves how it got like this. The way I see it there are two main answers to this question. The first is a cultural reason which I'm not going to go into right now because it is beyond the scope of just the film industry (I recommend reading Fahrenheit 451 for some insight on that). The second reason is a market reason and it is a rather interesting one that I only recently realized and I haven't seen anyone talk about before.

Take a look at the Russian car manufacturer Lada, it's most iconic model was the VAZ-2105 (or Riva) which came out in 1980, was produced clear into the 2000s and wasn't terribly different from its predecessor the VAZ-2101 that was introduced in 1970. Compare that to American cars of roughly the same period, (let's just say from the 70s to 90s to be more fair) during this time cars were constantly changing, part of the reason for that was new safety and fuel efficiency requirements, but the biggest reason for change and innovation was competition, if Cadillac wanted people to buy their cars they had to make sure that it was a better value than the cars Lincoln was making and vice versa. Capitalist economies drive innovation through competition, Lada had no need to improve their cars because they were a product of a communist economy where competition doesn't exist and, for the most part, innovation dies.

There is a sense in which large film companies are in a similar position that Lada was during the cold war. Of course modern film companies aren't in a communist economy but they don't really have competition like most other companies do. Car companies have to compete because cars are serious investments for people who want to be sure that their investment is worth it. Restaurants have to compete because people can only eat lunch so many times a day. Phone companies have to compete because most people only have one phone. Movie companies don't really have to compete because there is nothing really stopping anyone from consooming a large quantity of movies. Back before the world was shut down most people went to the movie theater multiple times a year, many people would go once a month, and there was a collection of people out there who would even try to go once a week. Watching a movie is not a big investment for the consumer and with the advent of streaming services it isn't even an inconvenience.

As long as a movie is somewhat well advertised and it isn't complete garbage (most of them aren't) it will make a profit. Hollywood isn't creative anymore because it has no reason to be, if the film industry keeps pumping out the same sort of junk that it has been then it will continue to be doing just fine ten years from now. Sure movie companies have to react to their customers but their reactions are different from how other types of companies react to things. If customers at a restaurant react negatively to a dish on the menu then the restaurant works to improve it, if the audience of a Star Trek movie react poorly to a bad Star Trek movie then the film company doesn't work to improve Star Trek movies, it just stops making them.

I've come to the conclusion that most of the future movies that will actually be worth watching will be ones that are based off of books, not because Hollywood is any good at adapting books into movies, but because the books that do end up getting adapted into movies have to be popular which means that they expressed the sort of creativity that Hollywood lacks. Of course there will be outliers but for the most part modern Hollywood is void of creativity and has to borrow it from somewhere else to express it.

Seeing that this was good news that was worth sharing I decided to look it up. Like any normal person I started by using my default search engine which gave me a few things that reported on that study but there wasn't anything coming from a news outlet that people have actually heard of. I then decided to search on Google which reminded me how bad Google is after it showed me articles claiming that herd immunity is impossible alongside only two articles containing what I was looking for. So unsatisfied with those results I did something that I don't recommend doing and went to cnn.com, and when I got to their health section this is what I saw:

Hardly a single Corona related headline that people coming from all rational viewpoints would agree is positive, and of course no sign of the day old article containing the good news.

So I did what no person should ever have to do and went back to the video I watched, paused it and typed in the URL from the video. Once I hit enter this is the headline I was greeted with, "US states that had some of the worst Covid-19 case rates in past week also reported the highest rates of new vaccinations". I was a bit surprised and for a second wondered if CNN had taken the article down, but then I scrolled down and after passing three small articles I finally found the headline I was looking for. CNN managed to report on good news and hide it at the same time, if we look back at the screenshot I took the article I was looking for was technically there but it really wasn't.

At this point it is quite easy to push all the blame regarding this onto CNN (and the news media as a whole) and how they are pushing certain narratives onto people to get us to think a certain way, but while that is of course true it is unfair to blame all of this on that, there are other factors in play. Take a look at all the headlines on that page, they are all somewhat noteworthy but all quite boring and unimportant but because CNN is the world's largest news company it is expected to report on these small things so what it did was put all of these related small things that all came up on the same day in the same page, this makes sense because it would be hard to fit all those unimportant headlines on their page of more interesting things. Of course it would be more honest of them to be more up-front about what they are doing there by titling the page something like "September 2 Corona Virus Updates" but if they did that nobody would click on it so instead their editor picks the headline that would generate clicks. So then as we see here the editor picks the headline that best fits their narrative and, if possible, is most likely to make people angry since hate gets more views than love, here the chosen headline served more to justify previous anger in some people than to generate new anger but it was the best they had to work with yesterday, the main headline for today's similar page is "Three doses of Covid-19 vaccine are likely needed for full protection, Fauci says" which they also reported on yesterday so they seem to be scraping the bottom of the barrel for content today.

And this whole process is also not CNN trying to shape modern culture by making them always angry or something, it is the result of CNN adapting to the fact that people living in today's culture want to be angry, they don't really want good news. I don't think that society has always been like this but it is certainly like this now. Is social media completely to blame for this problem? Probably not, but it is undoubtably a large factor of whatever the cause of this popular mindset is. But regardless of whatever caused this flaw in modern culture we have to do what we can to fix it because if hate and anger is what is selling our culture is not progressing in the right direction. Find positive media to consume and find ways to produce and promote positive media.

But the thing from that film that is most inspiring is how he got involved in politics. In my mind the word politician is synonymous with the word liar because doing so is the only way to make sense of what goes on in government. But, despite the fact that Thomas Massie started his fifth term in Washington this year, I don't think its fair to call Thomas Massie a politician.

Massie didn't start out life wanting to be a politician, he stated in the film that it was never his intention to lord over people. Instead he first got involved in politics in a very small way at the local level. He saw that his county or something was about to enact some sort of zoning laws that would greatly hinder his ability to operate his farm sustainably and affordably, so he wrote a letter to the editor (I assume to his local newspaper) which must have gotten published then he went to the public meeting where the county officials had allotted time for citizens to make their voice heard before they enacted their new regulation. Massie was one of only thirty people to go to that meeting and he was the first person to speak to the county officials, after five minutes had passed they told him that his time was up and he had to let someone else speak, but Massie was not done and one of the other thirty people there said that Massie could have his time, then as the meeting progressed all of the other thirty people gave their time to him as well because his letter to the editor of the newspaper was the reason they had come. At the end of the meeting the county chose not to pass whatever regulation they were going to because Thomas Massie told them not to, the most amazing thing to consider from this story is the fact that at that time Massie wasn't a Congressman, nor was he a lobbyist, nor was he a representative from some large corporation, he was just an average citizen seeking to protect his livelihood to ensure that he could provide for his family. Thomas Massie was the exact kind of person that government officials today seem to want to think have no power, regular people like you and me.

And of course this is not the only story of something like this happening. Because I am not a farmer, the part of Joel Salatin's book Everything I Want to Do is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front which I find most relatable was a story like this one. He was reading in the newspaper one morning and saw that the county had proposed some sort of ridiculous regulation or tax on lumbermills. Salatin and his wife had recently made plans to purchase a small lumbermill because they saw that it was an asset that could save them tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars but if that legislation were to pass it would make it so they couldn't do that. Like Massie, Joel Salatin went to the public meeting where they were going to vote on the legislation and ended up being the only person to show up. Before the committee had the opportunity to unanimously vote to enact the legislation Salatin was given the time to speak which allowed him to help the committee realize that the bill they had written would not only effect the handful of multi-million dollar logging companies they were targeting but it would screw over the dozens of regular people like Joel Salatin with small mills that only cost a few thousand dollars and could easily be towed behind any pickup truck. Unlike Massie, Salatin wasn't able to block the legislation completely but he was able to get the county to rewrite it so that he would still be allowed to do the things he planned to do with his lumbermill.

I often like to reference Isaac Asimov's book Foundation to compare the children of Trantor to people who don't understand the way that people different from them live, and often times this applies best when we look at how those who govern often don't understand those they govern, Joel Salatin's lumbermill story is a perfect example of this. But if we think about this it is a bit unfair to make this comparison because it is impossible for politicians to understand the needs, goals and viewpoints of all the people they have power over unless those people make those things known to them. Most systems and levels of government have some way for this to happen, of course some of these methods are better than others but it is important to remember that there is no such thing as a perfect government.

Normal people these days finally seem to be waking up to the fact that they aren't powerless. The American news industry keeps talking about violent angry mobs of people all over the country demanding that their children not be required to wear masks in school. And while (just like most things the media talks about) this claim is not true it is true that in recent months thousands of concerned parents and taxpayers have attended school board meetings to express their concerns about the policies that are being put in place. Unfortunately this is an example of an issue that has become so politicized that it is unlikely any of these policies will be reversed of revised, but it is good to see people trying to make their voices heard in a constructive manner.

But in order for people to be able to do this they have to be informed on what is going on in their communities. The American media spends a lot of time focusing on issues in places like New York, Texas, Florida, and California (although they're ignoring the recall election going on there right now). These are four of the most populated states in the country but I don't live in any of these states and odds are you don't either. I'm sure this sort of things happens in other parts of the world as well, while I was in the Philippines I never saw the Filipino news cover things that were going on around the areas I was at (although I wasn't spending much time watching the news).

There are several reasons that you shouldn't watch national news, I've written about a few of them before, but one that I don't think I touched on was that it seems as if national news programs exist to distract you from what is going on in their communities. Think about it, with the exception of a natural disaster have you ever seen issues specific to the city you live in the national news? I haven't and I bet most of you would say the same. This is a problem, most people only watch national news because they have been conditioned to believe that it is more important than local news because national news is more profitable for news companies (think about it, if you're selling a product do you want an audience of three hundred thousand or three hundred million), but your priorities are not the same as those of news companies. If you only have a half hour a day to catch up on the news it should be spent seeing what is going on around you or you will miss out on the same kinds of things that Thomas Massie and Joel Salatin caught and be unable to stop those things from screwing you over.

A few months ago the state where I reside voted on a bill that if passed would make it illegal for people to carry a concealed firearm. I'm glad it didn't pass and that I and those around me can still carry the tools they need to protect themselves and those around them in these troubling times, but I didn't hear about this bill until weeks after it had been voted on. I missed the opportunity to write to my representative to make sure that I did my part in ensuring my rights and the rights of others. Luckily things went the right way without my help, but what if they hadn't? I would have felt cheated and powerless just as Thomas Massie would have had he not stepped in to ensure he was able to do what he wanted with his property and just like Joel Salatin would have if he had bought his small lumbermill then found out that he'd have to pay more in taxes than he paid for his lumbermill.

We are not powerless, it is important for us to remember that and it is important for us to exercise our power whenever we see it necessary. Whether that be through set channels making sure government officials know how you see things and that they understand how to best serve you, or when that fails if it be through Thoreau-like Civil Dissobedience you can and should, in fact you need to exercise that power. We cannot sit and watch the world fall apart and do nothing to try to stop it we have to do something, even if that something may ultimately amount to nothing.

Now before I dig deeper into Grundy's diet it is only fair to discuss what my idea of a healthy diet is. My diet beliefs line up with those of the Weston A Price Foundation which has a focus on traditional diets. Dr. Price (who I've written about before) was an early 20th century dentist who found that the healthiest people on earth were not people in modern industrialized societies but instead it was the people living in much more primitive cultures and he found that this was due to the fact that they were eating traditional diets that greatly differed from the foods that the modern people of his time were eating and differed even more from the junk that modern people today eat. It makes the most sense to me that the same foods that humans thrived off of for thousands of years before anything resembling modern medicine and technology could save them from the consequences of eating a bad diet are the same foods that we should be eating today to be healthy and thrive independent from modern medicine.

And coming from that standpoint there are a lot of things that Dr. Grundy gets right, he tells people to eliminate vegetable oils, he advises people to buy the right kinds of meat and dairy (although I find his recommendation on how much meat to eat a bit low), and he of course says to avoid all the junk foods everyone already knows are bad. The part of his diet where I begin to have problems is on the topic of grains.

Grains are high in lectins, this should not be a surprise to us since grains are seeds, the part of the plant we expect to see the most lectins, so Dr. Grundy naturally tells us to avoid eating grains. But humans have been eating grains since the dawn of civilization, in fact most historians agree that the farming of grains was the main factor that enabled the dawn of civilization to happen. We see constant references to bread throughout the Bible, and if we read in the Doctrine and Covenants it is clearly stated that, "All grain is ordained for the use of man  , to be the staff of life". [1] Grains have clearly been a part of the human diet for thousands of years and they are clearly something that is meant to be in our diet.

But Grundy puts all of this historical context aside and, as I said before, advises against the eating of grains. And he even goes so far as to say that if for some reason we had to eat bread we should opt for white bread made with highly processed white flour rather than whole wheat flour because that will have more lectins. And when he tries to convince people of this he does manage to bring in a historical argument stating that white bread was first adopted by royalty so it must be better than the wheat bread peasants ate. Of course this argument falls apart once you realize that the same can be said for foods like ice cream. The wealthy of the past were almost certainly not the healthiest people of their time.

But however counterintuitive his arguments may be, Dr. Grundy is right when it comes to the question of white vs wheat bread, whole wheat and grains are filled with multiple types of anti-nutrients, phytic acid is another one of these whose purpose is to prevent premature germination in seeds, and it is damaging to our digestive system the in the same way that lectins are. Today's methods of bread making do nothing to neutralize anti-nutrients such like lectins and phytic acid found in wheat, so if we are strictly looking at bread baked with today's methods white bread will be the superior choice because processing grain into white flour removes the parts of the grain with the highest concentration of anti-nutrients.

But that of course only applies to breads baked with today's methods, white flour is severely lacking in nutrients when compared to whole wheat flour which has been prepared in a way that neutralizes the anti-nutrients. Historically a lot of the bread humans ate was sourdough, the proper preparation of sourdough bread is a process which provides a lot of time for fermentation where micro-organisms break down all the things like lectins and phytic acid, they predigest the food so that by the time we eat it it is in a state that is friendly to our digestive system. And bread is not the only thing that received this treatment, all over the world we can find history of all sorts of fermented grains.

And fermentation was not the only process which was used to make grains more digestible. Take a look at oatmeal, traditionally oats were soaked overnight in warm slightly acidic water. Warm slightly acidic water mimics the ideal conditions for seeds to sprout, so as they soaked they'd begin the sprouting process which starts with the all of the phydic acid and many of the lectins breaking down. By the time morning comes around the oats will be in a much more digestible state.

Of course grains are not the only things which were traditionally prepared differently than they are today. Beans are another thing high in anti-nutrients that Dr. Grundy tells us to avoid despite being an important part of many traditional diets around the globe. Thinking about this reminded me of a boring documentary I watched years ago titled Living on One Dollar where four young filmmakers went out to live in a remote area of South America and live off of a dollar a day for a period of time. During their first week or two all they really ate was plain rice and whole beans and they were constantly low on energy and hungry. Eventually a number of charitable women in the village they lived around decided to help them out by teaching them some skills and among the first things they taught them was how to make refried beans. Once the filmmakers transitioned to eating refried beans rather than whole beans they felt a lot better and had much more energy. And while I don't know the science behind refried beans like I do with sourdough bread and oatmeal, it is clear from this example that the traditional wisdom that these women held did a lot to combat the anti-nutrients that modern science has discovered.

Dr. Grundy is of course right about lectins I am not trying to disprove that, nor am I trying to discredit the experiences of all the people who have benefited from following his diet plan since it is undoubtably better than the average person's diet (although that isn't saying much). The point I'm making here is that the problems with our modern diet are unique to our time and while there are many modern solutions (like Dr. Grundy's) out there it makes a lot more sense to move to a time tested traditional diet rather than one of those. Sure our ancestors wouldn't have a clue what a lectin is, but it wasn't important to them because their food preparation techniques eliminated the threats that they didn't even have the technology to find. And in the case of grains it makes much more sense to prepare them properly than it does to avoid them altogether.

[1] D&C 89:14

Right now there are three things in the dropdown. The link that goes to my library page (which I really put there for my own reference so that I don't accidentally buy a book twice), a links page which I made but had no good place to put until now (it was previously only accessible through the library page), and a link to the circumpunct webring which I joined a month or two ago again that was another link that I had no good place to put until now (it was previously only on that links page which was also hard to find).

And while we're on that topic I don't think I ever really announced that I had joined that webring. I believe I was among the first to be invited to join, I didn't join then but I joined once I felt like it was moving in the right direction, and I'm glad I did because it now has sites with some interesting content and good potential, so feel free to poke around those sites and see just to see what is out there. The purpose of a webring is to allow sites that are hard to find through traditional means to be found, my site has been around enough and grown enough that when I google my own name my site comes up (which is not something I ever thought I'd be able to say) at least when you scroll down a bit, but the same cannot be said for most of these other sites which are worth checking out. I apologize to the other people there for not having my link in a more accessible location until now.

I also removed the donation stuff from the bottom of my homepage, all the stuff on my new donation page used to be down there and I really regret ever putting it there. Donation information anywhere other than on a donation page is trashy, I think the excuse I had for putting it there was that I felt like there needed to be more on my homepage after I shrunk it considerably, but I wish I had stuck to my principle of keeping that stuff out of places it doesn't belong.

Anyways that's all I have for now, you'll probably notice that older articles on my website don't have the new toolbar, this is because I didn't set up my site to be at all modular which is a mistake that I hope those of you starting your own websites don't make, if I want to change stuff like that I have to do it by hand which is not a fun thing to do when you have over 100 unique pages. I may of course also add more to that dropdown menu in the future, I've thought up some more styles randomly generated art to make, maybe I'll end up showcasing some of that there, who knows?

We like to believe that whenever some sort of transaction takes place there are only two parties involved, the producer who makes the product and the consumer who buys the product. With few exceptions this is how things worked for most of human history, but readers of Salatin's book Everything I Want to Do is Illegal will recognize that this is not the case for most of us anymore, along with anyone who has bought a gun recently. These days there are at least three parties involved in every transaction, the produce who makes the product, the consumer who buys the product and the government who says that that particular producer is allowed to sell that particular product to consumers or in some cases even just that particular consumer.

As I alluded to before this reality is most apparent in the case of buying a gun in the United States where no matter where you buy a gun you will have to fill out legal paperwork and pay for a state background check which both must be processed before you can be sold a firearm. But in just about any other circumstance the government is an invisible third party to the consumer, but, as Salatin's book makes clear, the producer is constantly aware of the government looming over them. I know someone who plans to sell various products made with foods from her productive garden at farmers' markets and things like that. In the state I reside this requires a cottage food licence. With a cottage food licence she is allowed to sell things like jams and jellies, which she makes, but not pickles, which she also makes. This annoyance is just one example of the many annoyances that millions of producers around the world (without access to lobbyists) have to deal with to legally sell their products.

But then of course things get much more complicated when the products are more complex than food and guns. Things like drugs, injections and pesticides often contain dangerous chemicals which require the government to conduct tests on before the producer is allowed to sell something to a consumer. For example if a pharmaceutical company has a new drug they want to start selling they must take that drug to the government and present the data from the tests they themselves conducted which the government will analyze while also conducting their own tests and if the government determines that the drug is okay they will tell the pharmaceutical company that they will be allowed to sell that drug under a certain set of circumstances.

Joel Salatin's blog post talks about a court case where this process failed. A weed killer that a company took to the government for approval, which the government determined was safe turned out to not be safe at all. This particular weed killer (which is still being sold) gave multiple people cancer.

Now the question we must answer is who is liable for the damages that occur when this sort of thing happens? Is the consumer liable for damages upon themself when they use a dangerous product they were told was safe? Is the producer of the dangerous product liable? Or is the government who said it was okay to sell the dangerous product liable? The court case Salatin is talking about seems to partially revolve around this issue, and there are also laws which will answer this for certain types of products, but disregard all of these when engaging in this thought experiment. If you were harmed by the correct use of a product you bought are you the one who should be liable because it was you who used it? Should the producer be liable because they made a dangerous product? Or should the government because they let it all happen?

So, if I remember correctly, this all started by me making a comment on some post somewhere where I made the claim that the standard American diet (both as the USDA teaches it, and as people pretend to practice it) is not a healthy diet. Some NPC responded to my comment and put up the strawman that I was supporter of some stupid meme diet and that there was nothing wrong with the scientist recommended diet. I don't remember exactly what I said in response but I somehow informed him that I was not the strawman he thought I was and I then mentioned something about the food pyramid being terrible (because most people understand that the food pyramid sucks). The guy responded to me by saying that the government stopped pushing the food pyramid years ago and claimed that I was dumber than a fourth grader or something like that, in a desperate attempt to earn upcummies.

At this point I stopped talking to the guy because when you are in a debate and your opponent starts spewing insults that is a sign that they recognize that their previous arguments have failed to change your mind and they have no new points present that they believe can accomplish that goal which means that you have either already won the debate, or (as it is in this case) you could very easily win the debate but doing so would be a waste of your time because your opponent doesn't respect you enough to learn from you and continuing the debate is a waste of your time.

But that is not that is not why this event stuck in my mind and not why I'm telling you about it today. I may have laughed out loud when this guy said that the food pyramid was irrelevant now because it proved that he is an NPC who has never looked critically (and possibly wasn't even aware of) the government's replacement for the food pyramid. Yes it is true that the food pyramid is no longer used to teach people about diet, but the food pyramid is not dead, it simply changed shape. Take a look, here is the version of the food pyramid that I always found to be the most effective along with the My Plate diagram that it was replaced with:

I was in middle school when they came out with the My Plate thing (although I may have been a freshman in high school by the time I learned about it because public school is so great) And I remember when it first was presented to me (or really the only time it was) the question I asked myself was "What's the difference?" So before I go on I invite you to see if you can see a difference (ignoring the top section of the pyramid since that had already been removed by the time My Plate came out).

At the time I didn't have the two graphics laid out side-by-side, but now that I do I can see that there are two major difference. First My Plate put a smaller emphasis on grains, this could be seen as an improvement but if we look into the numbers on the food pyramid we see that it already supported a diet balanced how My Plate was. Then second, and more importantly, My Plate is more visually appealing than the food pyramid, it looks modern and sophisticated and is a great logo. But really there is no actually significant difference between the guidance given by the food pyramid and by My Plate, and this is especially apparent when you break everything down into macronutrients like this guy did:

But of course we are not supposed to see that there are no substantial differences between the content of the old food pyramid and My Plate, we are only supposed to see the rebrand, or at least just the fact that they abandoned the food pyramid that so many people had criticized. Even ten years ago the geniuses behind the food pyramid rebrand knew that it didn't matter what the content of a report said, only the headline. And when I say that these people were geniuses I mean it, the food pyramid was taught in schools for almost twenty years, an entire generation of Americans were forced to become familiar with it, and yet by simply changing its shape and directing attention away from the old material they these people were able to convince almost everyone that the same flawed science they'd been teaching for decades was new and revolutionary and almost nobody noticed. I've never seen something like this pulled off nearly as well as the My Plate people did. I bet if you were to ask someone who was taught the food pyramid they'd probably know that it is "gone" now but if you asked them to say what was different about they new thing they probably wouldn't be able to tell you but they would assume that there was something they were missing and they'd be a bit shocked to find out that they've been tricked into thinking that.

Rebranding a product is something that happens all the time and by the time someone reaches adulthood they can see right through it (unless pandering is involved). But rebranding information is something entirely different, most people lack, or are too lazy to practice the critical thinking skills necessary to see through rebranded information, especially when it comes from the right sources. Rebranding (without acknowledging the changes) is a powerful persuasion tool when applied to information, it is one that we should be aware of and one that we should learn to practice ourselves.

In his article Eric talks about how back in the day car manufacturers purposely made many of their engines interesting to look at, when they produced a car they showed off the engine as much as they did the car engines would have decals on them and be painted defining colors. Car manufacturers would pay special attention to making the engines of performance cars look even more interesting by making things chrome when possible. Contrast this with this meme I found today:

There is absolutely nothing interesting under that hood and I agree that that hood serves absolutely no purpose with everything covered like that. And it is completely uninteresting, and this trend is present in performance cars today as well. A few months ago I went to a car show with my grandpa, he had a car he wanted in the show so I helped him get it there. The majority of the cars there were classic American cars, many of them in perfect condition (cosmetically at least) and many of them were displayed with their hood up showing off the interesting engines underneath. Sadly this picture of a boat with a massive engine on it is the only picture of an engine I have from that event, but this engine is engine is of course fun to look at as well since you see more of it (it just lacks the polish of the other engines on show there).

But the car next to us was one of the other odd things out in that show, it was a fairly new (2017 at the oldest) convertible Corvette that was a special edition or something. For some reason the owner chose to have the hood up on it for a period of time and under the hood all that could be seen was a plastic box. Granted the plastic box was prettier than the plastic box in the meme above, but it was still just a plastic box. In fact the underside of the hood was more interesting than what could be seen under the hood since it had a big shiny Corvette logo on it. I don't understand what was going through the head of the guy working for Chevy who decided to hide the most powerful engine they make inside a plastic box.

But of course Eric Peters' point when talking about this went further than simply hiding something interesting, he talked about the effect that growing up around interesting looking engines had on him, and it is an opportunity for us to see what happens in our heads when we see something interesting. When people see an interesting building, they become curious to what goes on inside. When people see a picture of a beautiful landscape, they imagine themselves there. When I see a painting of the sermon on the mount, I wonder what it would have been like to be at the Savior's feet and hear the words from His mouth. And when people see an interesting piece of machinery, like a well presented engine, they start trying to figure out how it might work. That is how Eric Peters says he found his interest in cars, through seeing interesting engines and learning how each part worked which led to him having a career centered around cars and engines. His life would be different today if he had grown up during a time where engines are hidden from people like they are now.

It is dangerous to hide how things work from people, especially when things go wrong. Last month I found myself on the side of the highway rescuing my sister whose car had broke down. Her car isn't new at all being only a few years younger than she is, but I still found myself having to remove three layers of plastic covers to realize that there was a hole in the radiator, had the engine been open she might have been able to spot that herself.

And, as I implied earlier, knowing how things work and what parts go into those things is important for more than just cars. Compare a typical laptop from today to a typical laptop from ten years ago. My main computer is a Thinkpad T420 which was designed and sold back in 2011 and all around it you can see places to get inside. The hard drive and one of the RAM slots are both only a screw away, the CD drive is easily removable (one of these days I need to get rid of that), the battery is mounted on the outside so it is easy to take off when servicing the hardware, and you can tell that even the keyboard is designed to be taken out if necessary. Old Thinkpads are welcoming to anyone who wants or needs to have a look inside. Contrast this with the Razer Blade laptop that I own, it is a featureless black slab which hides its internals with screws that the average person doesn't own the right tool for that are set in flush with the uninteresting bottom of the device. Sadly I've been needing to get inside that computer to fix an issue for over a year now but it is so unwelcoming that I've been afraid to dive inside, despite the fact that I've opened up several other computers without having any problems. At least it wasn't a Microsoft product, they've made laptops with no way in.

While it is less important for people to know the intricacies of how each part on a computer works than it is for parts on a car it is still important for people to know how to access parts on their computer that can be replaced, or even just the things that could get knocked out of place, and of course the things that need cleaned on occasion. But now we live in a world where computer manufacturers make products that are not designed to have parts replaced, upgraded, repaired or even cleaned. These manufacturers are ripping us off more often than they are giving us a good deal, and because the internals of computers have become so hidden and locked away people aren't realizing the extent to which they are being ripped off.

But probably the most important thing where we've lost interest in the details of is in our diets, especially here in America the world's fattest country. And people are generally aware that the stuff they are eating is bad but until they take the time to actually learn how bad the stuff they eat is they can ignore it. Take soda as one example, caffeinated soda in particular, several months ago I learned the true impact of its three main ingredients and ever since then I haven't been able to look at soda the same, and I try to give people the red pill on soda whenever I can. I wrote about it back then but I might as well repeat that the three main ingredients are salt which makes us thirsty, caffeine which is addictive but also makes us have to pee, and high-fructose corn syrup which makes it all taste good but also slowly kills us (or some alternative artificial sweetener which probably kills us faster). If everyone were to understand that soda is a poison that has been chemically designed for us to become addicted to and drink in large quantities soda companies would loose a lot of business and the world would be a better place for it. (Interestingly these companies seem to have realized that such an event is inevitable so they've begun looking into drugs that they could push on people that would supposedly act as an antidote to their poison rather than making something that isn't poison, but that's another story)

But of course soda is just one problem, do we really understand the dangers of things like vegetable oil, soy, lectins, fructose, and all sorts of other dangerous things in modern food? We should know what is in the food that we buy before we buy even buy it so that we can know whether it is worth buying. We should know what kind of oil the restaurants we go to use to cook with (although they shouldn't be using oil at all) so that we know how dangerous their food is. We should also know what nutrients our bodies actually need and where those nutrients come from. Veganism has become the popular politically correct diet and yet it not at all healthy, as many vegans are ignorant of where nutrients come from and they are even ignorant of where the food they actually do eat comes from.

But of course even if you aren't a vegan and are properly educated on at least what general types of foods you can expect to get good and bad things from, when was the last time you stood in a grocery store looking over the ingredients of a food item you were looking to buy? You've probably never done this because everything at the grocery store is competing for your attention (unlike what's under the hood of a modern car), this distracts you from where you should be putting your attention: the small print ingredients list that is legally required to be on every piece of packaged food you buy. Ingredients lists are boring, oreos with glitter in them are interesting. Nutritional facts tables are boring, cereal with rainbow marshmallows is interesting. Being healthy is boring, eating whatever you want is interesting.

What I think to be the biggest missed opportunity with the stupid pandemic we all went through was the health community's failure to encourage people to get healthy and their complete lack of effort to teach people how to do it during their time in the spotlight. Instead they focused on convincing everyone to lock themselves in their home and to hide their faces everywhere they went, which may have fulfilled their original goal of slowing the spread of one sickness, but it accelerated the spread of others like anxiety and depression. Getting healthy on the other hand combats against all sicknesses now that things have calmed down that is what the "health" community should be encouraging people to do, but instead they fearmonger and point fingers. But of course most people don't want to be healthy anyways. But I'm getting off topic again.

There are many things that have been made boring and inaccessible in our world today. We should not be afraid to open up the boxes under our cars' hoods, nor to open up the computers we rely on, and we definitely shouldn't be uninterested in maintaining a healthy lifestyle like so many companies seem to want us to be. I encourage you to look for other things in the world that have been made boring, especially those things that once weren't, because there is no good reason that when you open the hood of a car that you should be greeted by black plastic instead of a beautifully crafted machine. What is being hidden from us?

And while fixing this sounds like it would only require a simple Vim command I also didn't start formatting dates here correctly until a few months ago which complicates things further because it would cause over 100 old posts to appear before the most recent ones for newcomers. For that reason I have chosen not to fix this problem right now because retroactively fixing all those dates retroactively sounds tedious. (Although putting them all as the same date, but just a few months ago, does sound tempting and would probably slip under the radar of most newcomers)

This is a problem that I will eventually fix, and when I do those of you who have been following me for a while may want to unsubscribe then resubscribe because it will be a bit messy after I do fix it (everything will be duplicated). In fact those of you unlucky enough to have updated my RSS feed while I was foolishly messing with it on this file rather than a copy may want to do that now.

Anyways always remember that I do keep a list of all my posts on my website that while less convenient is more reliably than this RSS feed that I foolishly update by hand.

Also when you do see a problem with my RSS feed please tell my about it, because I've been following my own feed since I started it I will not be able to see the same errors you will when it comes to dates and other errors. This fix (or in this case plan to fix), along with others I have done, only happen because someone told me about a problem I couldn't see or easily replicate for myself. Thank you to those of you who have helped me with those issues and I hope this one will be the last (once I actually do fix it of course).

Beewise is an Israel based company which has created what they have called a BeeHome which is basically a structure the size of a large portable outhouse which can house 24 colonies of bees, cameras and sensors to monitor them, and a robotic mechanism capable of performing various tasks such as treat hives for mites, regulate temperature, split and combine hives and even harvest honey. On top of that there is some sort of "AI system" (because what's a tech startup without Ai these days?) which can reportedly tell whenever anything starts to go wrong in a hive and will take actions to mitigate the threat making manual hive inspections completely unnecessary. I first found out about this after noticing an article with a title slightly more click-baity than mine here and after looking into this intriguing concept a bit it almost made sense.

But only almost.

At four hundred dollars a month, a BeeHome seems to be reasonably priced for the right crowd of people, you can certainly get a traditional beekeeper to take care of some hives on your property for that price, but I doubt you could convince one to let you have twenty four for that price. Beewise has begun to make their product available to commercial beekeepers, but unfortunately for Beewise this is the wrong crowd of people for their BeeHomes.

Who this isn't for

Now before I go into detail about this it is only fair that we remember that Beewise is an Israel based company and that I only have an understanding of commercial beekeeping in America. Israel is of course has much different geography, climate, and agricultural practices than we have here in the United States, so while I don't think a BeeHome (at least in its current state) makes much sense for most American commercial beekeepers it may make sense for an Israeli beekeeper, besides one of Beewise's founders is a beekeeper so at least one of them seems to think it is a good idea. Regardless of whether or not it makes sense Beewise is beginning to operate in the United States so it is necessary to talk about whether or not their product is compatible with American commercial beekeeping.

When asked where beekeepers make most of their money many people would assume that honey would be their main product because that is what they are most used to seeing in the stores, but in reality it is pollination that pays the bills for beekeepers, many of them don't even bother harvesting honey to sell, instead they truck their bees all over America to pollinate various crops and because different types of crops bloom at different small windows throughout the year bees are constantly being moved to pollinate new fields and orchards. The first crop to bloom in the country are almonds and I've seen people estimate that during the late weeks of January 80% of the bees in the country are on or near almond orchards in California where 90% of the world's almonds are grown. After those short weeks the bees are taken elsewhere to pollinate other types of crops.

During the crucial pollinating season it is rare for beekeepers to keep their hives in the same spot for more than a month and even after that time has passed they tend to move them around. During the summer there is a beekeeper who leaves several hives on my grandparents' property because they live in an area with cool summers which is nice for the bees, but when the season starts to change the bees will be moved south to an area with a much less harsh fall and winter where they will be much more likely to survive. From what I can tell portability was not a concern when Beewise were designing their BeeHome. Sure the BeeHomes are climate controlled so it shouldn't need to be moved for hives to survive the summer and winter (assuming the solar panels draw enough power for that) but those are not the important times that a commercial beekeeper in America needs their hives moved, if a hive can't be easily moved around to pollinate different crops then it is not a profitable hive.

Who this is for

The market that Beewise should be targeting (at least in America) are people and organizations interested in beautifying their properties and communities. While I absolutely despise home owners' associations, I'd definitely support the idea of an HOA spending money on a BeeHome, since the bees would do a great job at keeping the neighborhood plants healthy and it would be great for any gardeners in the neighborhood. I'd also be in support of city governments placing them near parks and universities and large corporations could also benefit from having a healthy supply of bees keeping things green. And of course this may also appealing to people living on large plots of land they want to keep healthy (farmers or not). All of these people and groups could also offset the cost of a their BeeHomes by selling they honey they produce, they may even be able to turn a small profit since the hundreds of pounds of raw local honey 24 hives can produce in a year is worth a good chunk of money (although I wouldn't put a guarantee on that since the $400 monthly bill isn't the only expense, at the very least selling honey would offset a good portion of the cost).

If BeeHomes being used in this way would certainly have a positive effect on communities and it would also bee good for the environment, and for these reasons it would be quite easy to market to the people and groups I think BeeHomes should be targeted towards. Beewise already spends time withing their marketing talking about how their product is saving the environment even though that sort of message is not as appealing and important to the people they are currently selling their product to since commercial beekeepers are already saving the bees. However, target this messaging to upper middle class liberal white women on HOA comities, candidates for positions in local government looking for something to make them stand out, and University faculty afraid to say no to anything that sounds politically correct, then they'd eat it up and start looking for ways to get a BeeHome in their community or campus.

Of course these BeeHomes would need someone to manage them, and this gives us a scenario where adding robotics and AI to an industry would create rather than destroy jobs. I can imagine dozens of small companies emerging in cities all over the world ran by people contracted to manage several BeeHomes across a city providing the service of urban pollination. I'm sure this would not be nearly as profitable as traditional pollination but it would involve much less risk and, assuming the BeeHomes work as well as Beewise claims they do, much less effort. The contracted beekeeper may only have to physically attend to one of the BeeHomes they manage once a week after installation. I'd definitely try to start a company like this if I had the resources.

But of course nine out of ten startups fail, and I predict that Beewise won't be around in a few years time. I do think that they have a good idea and have developed quite the interesting product, but we don't live in a utopia where all good ideas automatically thrive, instead we live in a world riddled with regulation and red tape. A world where innovation can't succeed without both inspiring and educating the public. And, sadly for Beewise, a world where products pushed towards the wrong market are destined to fail. Of course the market I propose for BeeHomes will be rightfully skeptical as well but skepticism goes away with proper teaching. I do of course hope that Beewise does manage to succeed, and I do home that urban pollination will become a thing, but I don't really think it will because I may be the only person who has ever thought of connecting these two ideas and I don't imagine very many of my regular readers here get as inspired by beekeeping as I do. (Although I have managed to get an email from a company trying to sell my beekeeping equipment and I have no idea how they would have found me) Maybe I'll write something to submit to Bee Culture maybe I won't, either way it is always fun to come up with ideas like this and try to think of how they could work, I guess that's why I love science fiction books, why I chose to go into programing, and why I chose to start this site, they are all environments that welcome this sort of creativity. I encourage you to seek out things and news that will let you escape the world through your own creativity as I have while writing this article.

At the moment this RSS item is the only place on my site where I have put a link to it, I plan to reference it in an article at some point in the near future, and some future point I will figure out a good place for links to stuff like this on here, but I'm going to be fishing for the next few days and won't have much time to do anything here. (I also probably won't have access to a network where I will feel comfortabel SSHing into my servr)

Anyways please enjoy this important piece of American Literature.

Let's take a look at one instance of this. For the past several years people have taken for granted the "fact" that bumblebees are an endangered species and that steps needed to be taken in order to save them. This "fact" was so widespread that they even made a children's movie to spread awareness on the topic (although it is probably the most scientifically inaccurate movie I've ever seen), Minecraft, the world's most popular video game, also added bees to spread awareness about their possible extinction to encourage some sort of action to save the bees.

But in order to tell if bumblebees really are going extinct you have to be able to track them all over the world, this requires cooperation from hundreds or maybe even thousands of people who all take their job of tracking bumblebees seriously. Right now there is a group of researchers who have been going through the data about the supposed bumblebee decline and they are starting to believe that the data that the bumblebee's endangerment is based off of is faulty and incomplete research and they are beginning to suspect that bumblebees may not actually be in decline.

One example that proves the data is faulty and incomplete is in the fact that no bumblebees were recorded in certain areas of North Dakota during a certain time period. A lazy researcher would look at this and cite it as evidence of bumblebees being in decline, but a researcher who actually wants to find the truth would have to ask themself if the data was really accurate. Were there in fact no bumblebees there? Or did the people who went out there to observe them just not manage to find any? Did they go on a day where the weather was bad and bumblebee sightings would be unlikely? Or did they even go at all? These are all questions that would have to be asked before the data is accepted, but in a lot of cases this data is inanswerable so it would not be ethical for a researcher to include the data in these cases. Unfortunately the current nature of the scientific community (and academic community as a whole in that matter) discourages this sort of critical look into difficult to obtain data like this, scientists are not paid to conduct science in this way, they are paid to publish papers and often times to confirm biases so often times getting a pay-check finds itself at a higher priority than finding the truth.

Claims about animals being endangered are the easiest for us to cast a critical eye on, relative to other insects bumblebees are fat, slow and noisy, but they are still often hard for us humans to spot, especially in the wild where there are plenty of places for them to hide. Then consider other species of animals, most animals have evolved over time to camouflage into their surroundings so that they could be hard for their predators or prey to spot, and anyone who has gone hunting can confirm that animals are quite good at hiding as well, they often know where we are before we know they are there so if they don't want to be seen they won't let us see them. Tracking animals is quite difficult. Of course I'm not denying the fact that there are species of animals which are endangered but I don't think that everything that they claim is endangered actually is. Do you even know how an animals qualifies for being endangered?

Of course zoology is not the only (or most important) field of science that falls victim to the possibility for lazy data collection, a rush for a paycheck, and biased conclusions. The fields of sociology, psycology, ecology, and medicine are being publicized in a way that aims to influence us to change how we live, some of these changes may be important but others may turn out to be dangerous, we can't trust "science" without scrutinizing it first. If the "science" holds up under our scrutiny then it is solid, but if it falls apart (like the whole bumblebee extinction thing seems to be) then it can't be trusted. The phrases "trust the science" or "follow the science" are baseless appeals to authority which is a useless logical fallacy when it is put forth without good evidence as it so often is these days. Science gets things wrong, (some publishers don't even seem to care that they publish nonsense) that is how it works, it is not religious doctrine that cannot change, it is a field where things change all the time as new discoveries are made, and it is a field which requires humility to practice, a trait that seems to be lacking in in much of today's scientific community.

Of course I can't completely automate the process of making a quilt because I don't have access to robots that can cut and sew fabric. I also haven't figured out a way to generate unique patterns (maybe one day I will), my program as it sits now works with preexisting quilt patterns, so I can't say that I've created a program that comes up with computer generated quilts. Really all that I have accomplished up to this point is a rough prototype of a piece of software that could help quilters visualize what their quilt will look like before they put it together, but since that is likely how it will stay I feel as if I should show it off a bit.

A different approach to masking

In the realm of, uhm computer graphics? image processing? image manipulation? (I took a class on this and still don't know what to call this). Anyways in this area of computer science the term masking refers to the process of replacing certain pixels in am image with another set of pixels with the use of a mask which is an image that is the same size as the image being manipulated but only has two colors white and black. A program would loop through each pixel in the mask and for each white pixel it will leave the corresponding pixel of the image being edited alone and it will manipulate the pixel corresponding to each black pixel in the mask (or it could be done the other way around, the concept is more important than the implementation). Think of a stencil that you would use when spray-painting lettering into something, it is the same concept. Green screens in film making are also processed this way.

In most circumstances this approach is perfectly fine because a mask is only trying to do one thing at a time, but there is a better way to do it when we are writing a program like this quilt design one because using the traditional masking approach multiple masks would have to be used, one for each different fabric that would be present in the final quilt which would mean that we'd have to loop through every pixel of the image once for each fabric, and looping through every pixel like that is quite an expensive operation when it comes to computer resources. Masking like this is an O(n) algorithm where n represents the number of masks necessary to finish the job and looping through every pixel of the image is what we are trying to minimize, again this is usually fine because in most circumstances n will only be one but in this case n is greater than one so I developed an approach with an optimal O(1) time complexity.

Above is my solution to this masking problem, each color represents a different fabric within a quilt block and as each pixel of this image is looped through something different is done to the image being manipulated (or in this case created). To make things work even smoother I used the HSV color format rather than the usual RGB format (or in the case of openCV BGR) so that in order to tell what color each pixel is only one value needed checked rather than three. (I could have also just used RGB and manipulated only one of the three values in it and only checked that one but that would have produced a template that wouldn't have been as friendly to the human eye.)

Putting everything together

With the masking issue solved everything went quite smoothly, for much of the testing I used colors that work together as placeholders for fabric textures.

First I made a block.

Then I made an image that consisted of each possible variation of that block using those four colors.

Above you see the first test quilt, it wasn't perfect because the order of the blocks was not randomized (notice how the lighter orange appears in the same place on all of the blocks in the first column), so my next move was to randomize the order.

The next thing to do of course was to make it so the program used fabric textures rather than plain old colors and all of a sudden we have a quilt, its as simple as that.

Adding more features

The above image was produced by a Python program with less than 60 lines of code (most of those not even able to be considered as effective lines of code). So, with an understanding of how it works, it is quite easy to modify it to do different things.

For example, quilters often like to include more fabrics in a quilt than will be in a singe block and to do this (I'm going to do a horrible job explaining this) they will cut out all the pieces and stack them all up so that each piece of the same fabric is on the same level then they will offset some of the stacks so by different amounts to produce something like this:

That wasn't a hard feature to implement (or really just prototype) and others like that wouldn't be hard either.

Of course at this point there is absolutely no form of UI as everything is just hard coded into a variety of different files, so if I were to continue this project that would be the first priority since I've already proved that a quilt design software like this is possible, but as that is all I really set out to do I probably won't for a while (although I probably should do it regardless).

Anyways I just wanted to show off another cool thing you could do with programming.

If you were to google* something like "Does God exist?" you will more than likely be presented with a wide list of webpages, some of these pages will support the fact that God exists and others will claim that He doesn't. If you believe in God you will simply ignore all of the pages that claim that He doesn't exist and if you don't believe in God you will simply ignore all of the pages that testify that God is in fact real. Assuming nothing is being suppressed this will be the case with every topic you could ever think of debating. No debate can be settled with a Google search because the results of the search will contain arguments for both sides, nobody enters the internet a believer in something then leaves a skeptic. (And skeptics rarely leave believers but that's another topic)

We all need to recognize that we all cherrypick search results to find the stuff that fits our narrative so that we can support our points, I know I've done it and I can sometimes tell when other people do it as well. I'm not asking anyone to stop doing this, since everyone has a right to find support for their opinions as long as they've already fulfilled their responsibility to become familiar with the other side's point of view.

I wish I had realized the fact that search engines exist as confirmation bias generators much sooner, I'm sure all of us have at some point been in a conversation (or at least observed a conversation) where someone will attempt use the logical fallacy of appealing to authority by saying that a simple Google search proves their point, I found myself in one of these conversations within the last month. Now that you are equipped with this wisdom, next time this happens to you you will be able to discredit your opponent's lazy attempt at an argument by stating that Google is nothing more than a confirmation bias generator and if necessary you can even demonstrate it by pulling out your phone, typing in the topic of your debate, showing the person that it does have results which support their claim then scrolling down to show them results that support your claim.

As Scott Adams would likely say, search engines exist to give people the illusion that they can do their own research when in reality they are just used to find support for positions you already hold. True research requires humility, something that is nowhere to be found within a debate.

The fact that search engines are confirmation bias generators should be common knowledge, kids should be taught this in schools just like they are taught not to use Wikipedia as a source. Of course we shouldn't teach people that only one type of source is credible, but we should equip people to be able to judge for themselves the credibility of all kinds of sources so that they can properly use confirmation bias generators without looking like a fool.

* When I (or any other normal person) say "google" in this context it does not mean one has to use Google.com, it applies to all search engines.

Now don't get me wrong, in many cases self hosting is great as it helps to decentralize our ever shrinking internet, but from a privacy perspective hosting your own instance of Searx is not a good idea. So which of these two things would you rather do, enter a search into one search engine allowing it to take record of your search linked to your IP address, or enter that same search into a dozen search engines letting them all take record of that search linked to your IP address? Obviously if you're trying to protect your privacy you'd prefer the first option, but when you self-host an instance of Searx (which is being touted as the best thing for privacy) the latter option is what you are doing, sure your server is not located where you live so all those search engines won't be able to track your location but they can still profile you based off of your searches that came from your server which is still an IP address that belongs to you. A self-hosted Searx instance is terrible for privacy, from a privacy perspective you're probably better off just using DuckDuckGo or maybe even Google (although any search engine which shows ads before they show search results is unethical and should never be used), even without a VPN.

Now I imagine that I will get a bit of hate for making this observation, understand I am not bashing on Searx as a technology I think that it is absolutely great for many reasons, I've used it in the past and I will likely start using it again soon, I just find that it is important for people to critically think about programs that they may ever consider running, especially if you want them to run 24/7 on your server. If you want to use Searx find an instance that someone you trust is hosting, and if you do feel like you need to host a Searx instance yourself convince a few dozen people to use your instance as well, by drastically multiplying the number of diverse searches your Searx instance is handling, real search engines will probably mark your server's IP address as one belonging to a bot and chose not to profile it as it would to one that was only handling the searches of a single person. Searx is a great tool for privacy, but as with all tools it must be used correctly in order to be effective.

But of course I have to first explain what Medium is so that you're not lost. To put it simply Medium is the YouTube of blogging, it is a centralized platform with a huge audience where thousands of "creators" post "content" and people who make good posts can be paid and, much like YouTube, there are a few people who make almost their entire living off of Medium. But other than the type of content hosted there are two other important differences between YouTube and Medium, first Medium is not free a subscription costs like five bucks a month (well you can read a few articles for free but not very many) and second Medium has a much lower standard for monetization, if the first thing you ever post on Medium is good then they will pay you for it right away while with YouTube there is an ever shifting tide of requirements that have to be met before they send you a check and it can take the average person years to achieve this.

Criticisms of Medium.com

Medium is Bloated

I first ran across this article a number of weeks ago and it is what really inspired me to write this article, although I will admit that I didn't actually read the whole thing when I first found it because it doesn't do much more than point out the obvious, Medium, like most modern sites serving text based content, uses up way more bandwidth than it should because it fills itself with tons of unnecessary JavaScript junk, trackers, images that take up way to much space and who knows what else. The guy who wrote that article tested a few Medium articles to see how much data was being sent to his computer by medium.com while loading a single page, two of the Medium articles he tested sent more data to his computer than my entire website takes up, I have over a hundred articles written here and just as many pictures and yet a single page on medium.com is fatter than all of that. Web bloat is a serious problem for the world wide web as a whole, I wrote about it nearly a year ago and I still get amazed at how bad it is. But, as I'll explain, Medium's bloat doesn't matter.

Medium has Terrible UI

Like I said I first saw the article from the last section a number of weeks ago, but I quickly forgot where I found it and while looking for it as I prepared to write this I came across this article written by a guy named Nikita which criticizes Medium's user interface. I'm not going to go into too much detail on it since Nikita did a great job at it but from toolbars that take up 25% of your valuable vertical space, frequent pop-ups that cover the whole screen, and systems in place that won't even let you properly copy and paste plain text, there is no way to deny that Medium has a history of terrible UI. (It is worth noting that Nikita's article was written in 2018 so some of the things he criticized have changed and the UI isn't as bad, but it is still not great.) The terrible UI is of course among the main causes of Medium's bloat, but just like its bloat, Medium's terrible user interface doesn't matter.

Medium is Greedy

As I said in my description of medium.com, Medium will pay people who post content on their site with a number of people who have been able to completely replace their day jobs by writing on Medium, and since actually getting paid doesn't require a high number of subscribers or a crazy amount of views like it does on YouTube, many moochers will lazily spend an hour writing up something to post on Medium then complain that Medium never paid them for it, or in some cases they will be lucky enough to get paid but they would have only been paid a discouragingly small amount of money at first. In either of these cases these moochers will go onto some terrible place like Twitter and complain about how terrible and greedy Medium is because they didn't give them the money they thought they deserved, but as I will explain, Medium's greed (if we can even call it that) is justified.

Debunking Medium's Criticisms

Medium's Audience doesn't Care about Web Bloat

The article I mentioned above that talked about Medium's bloat problem was heavily inspired by Luke Smith who in a video demonstrated bloat in other websites. Luke Smith has terribly slow internet at his house and it would probably take an entire minute to completely load one of the bloated medium.com pages and like everyone Luke has better things to do than to sit around waiting to learn what Barack Obama plans to read this summer (this article was number three on Medium's trending list today). While for many of us this pointless article will load up nearly instantaneously because we have good internet, Luke argues that when we look at the entire world his slow internet is what is normal around the world, rather than our fast internet. Luke is completely right when he says this, I know this from personal experience having spent two years living in remote areas of the Philippines where I'd have to spend multiple hours traveling just to get somewhere with good enough internet to do something as simple as checking my email and it would still often be painfully slow. Billions of people around the world do not have access to fast internet so in order to be inclusive of them we have to make our websites as minimalist as possible, this is why web bloat is a problem.

But as I've said, in the case of medium.com bloat doesn't matter, to understand this let's take a look at Medium's business model. Medium charges members five dollars a month to read an unlimited number of curated blog posts. Now ask yourself, "What sort of person would be most likely to spend five dollars a month to read curated blog posts?" The answer to this question that I've come up with is well educated millennials with high paying jobs, and if we look at Mediums marketing we can see that that is also who they seem to be targeting. So now the question is what proportion of well educated millennials with high paying jobs have internet good enough to use medium.com in its current state? The answer to that would be virtually all of them, so we see that even though Medium is undeniably bloated its bloat doesn't matter because Medium's target audience is equipped to handle the bloat.

Medium's Audience Puts Up with Bad UI

Now let's take a look at how Medium's audience reacts to bad UI, of course the fact that Medium has survived and thrived almost nine years already is the best proof that the poor UI decisions they've made over the years haven't mattered to their main audience. In fact bad UI has become the norm across the internet, and while people who prefer sites like this one will always complain we are in the minority. Take a look at Apple, their homepage isn't too bad but for and article I wrote back in January I found myself looking at the page they have advertising their Mac-Pro is awful, with my browser set to full-screen there are still pictures on that page that require me to scroll just to see since they are taller than my viewport. Ten years ago this would have been unacceptable, and yet we now have Apple, one of the world's largest and most influential tech companies doing it.

It is also important to realize that the people responsible for the bad UI across the internet are the same people using Medium. If we use the US Census's definition of a millennial and take a look at Stack Overflow's 2020 Developer Survey we see that over 70% of professional software developers fall into Medium's target audience, and it turns out that Medium is in fact incredibly popular among software developers, there are probably a hundred articles saying what the top ten VS Code extensions are on Medium. Pretty much every video or article that I've seen with a title along the lines of "Ten ways to make money as a programmer without a job" has writing for Medium in one of the top three slots on the list, and many of the people making these sorts of videos along with other people making "programming content" often talk about how reading articles on medium.com is one of the things they do to be "continuously learning". Medium's bad UI doesn't matter because many of their users are the ones responsible for it and the rest have become accustomed to it because it is all over the place.

Medium and its Audience Want Quality Content

If we look around the world we'll find too many people who view too many things as charities, Medium seems to be one of the things that people mistake for a charity because for some reason many people believe that they can submit a sub-par article and get paid, this is not the case. Like everything in life, if one wants to be paid by Medium they have to put in some actual effort and work for it, nobody is going to pay you for nothing, not enough people are taught that these days.

Of course this is not terribly surprising, not enough people really understand what money is work by itself does not equate to money, producing value does, if you give Medium something that they find valuable then they will reward you with money, but if they find no value in your work then you will receive no value in return. Many people make a living off of medium.com, or many other similar things on the internet, but these things are not anything like jobs where you are paid by the hour, they are more akin to owning a business where often times your profit varies depending on a multitude of factors.

It is also important to take into consideration the nature of how Medium pays people. In the last section I mentioned the fact that writing for Medium often shows up on videos and articles for people looking to make a quick buck these videos will almost always mention a guy (and it is always the same one) who made over $3,000 off of one article but they almost always fail to tell people how long it took for him to get that $3,000. That guy did not write his article on a Tuesday then have a $3,000 check in the mail on Friday, the $3,000 was accumulated over multiple years of traffic to his article. It is quite likely that that article only made around ten bucks its first month then maybe fifty the next month, maybe the next month it picked up and got one or two hundred dollars and peaked one month getting three hundred then over the next several months sustained a consistent level of traffic to earn fifty bucks a month or something until now, years later, the writer can say that that one article made him $3,000. And this of course was his best article, I am almost certain that none of his other ones earned nearly as much money.

As I mentioned before it is possible for people to make a living off of this website but it cannot be done without time and hard work, it would take a person years to replace their day job with this or any other "side-hustle".

Will I Use Medium?

Now of course the natural question for me to ask myself at the end of all of this is whether or not I should start using Medium, and I really don't see any reason why I shouldn't start writing there (I don't have much interest in reading the crap there). I've spent the last year improving my writing skills and it only makes sense for me to take those skills somewhere where I can make some money. If I were to start writing on Medium I'd try to treat it like a part-time job where I'd set myself up for success by giving myself the time to post an article there at least three times a week which is a level of consistency that I haven't achieved on this site.

Medium would also never replace this site, here I have the freedom to talk about whatever I want however I want and I can even do stupid things like this if I want to. I don't have that freedom on any other site, on Medium I'd be limited on what I could talk about since I'd have to write what other people want to read rather than simply write whatever I want, and I'd have to change up my writing style quite a bit to target a wider audience. These are things that I'm capable of doing but they are of course boring, this site exists because I think it is fun and for that reason it, or new content on it, would not be going anywhere if I ever do decide to start writing on medium.com.

I'd imagine that right now the online course is the only option available but when I took it I was blessed to do it in person so when I was 15 I spent a week of my summer in a classroom sitting through one hour of learning road signs, an hour of learning car functionality, an hour of tricks to pass the state driving test, and twenty seven hours of pro-seatbelt propaganda. Luckily the teacher was quite entertaining and as I mentioned before there was no actual work we had to do in the class, most of the time was spent listening to his stories or watching videos that may have been on actual video cassettes.

I think there was only two pieces of paper that we even touched during that week, one was the certificate of completion and the other was what we wrote the answers to a quiz he gave out on. He gave the quiz on the second or third day of the class before lunch and he "graded" them while we ate and we went over the answers after lunch. One of the questions on the quiz he asked was, "Should the government require us to wear a seatbelt?" I guess it is also worth pointing out that I took this class within six months of my state requiring seatbelts (although if it was six months before or six months after I can't say). When he got to this question while reviewing the quiz with the class the teacher asked everyone who said no to raise their hand, nobody did. Upon seeing this he told us that one person in the class had answered no and kept waiting, shyly I then rose my hand and to my surprise the teacher told the class that I was the only person who had gotten that question right. But of course the law paid no attention to this teacher's or my opinion and it is illegal to drive without a seatbelt in almost all of the United States and much of the world.

The world has changed a lot since then, I doubt you'll find anyone who will be asking that question these days since many Americans have likely forgotten that there was a time not long ago when it was perfectly legal to drive without a seatbelt (of course it still wasn't the best idea). Now we all remember that we can be pulled over for not wearing our seat belt and newer cars often annoyingly beep at you until you put it on and some even newer cars have settings that won't let you shift out of park until you are wearing a seatbelt. So if we if we think about that a bit, your car knows when you are breaking the law.

But what else does your car know? You're not really endangering anyone else when you drive without a seatbelt (which is why it shouldn't be a crime) but you are when you're speeding, or when you're driving the wrong way on a one-way street or highway, and you especially are when you are driving under the influence. If your car is equipped with a navigation system it can tell when you're doing those first two things (your phone can too) and if you have a new car that can tell you things like when you are drifting out of your lane then those same sensors can be used to determine if you are driving drunk (or at least driving as bad as a drunk person). If your car has a dash-cam (which are uncommon here in the States but required in other parts of the world) then that video feed could be hooked up to a machine learning program that could read other traffic signs and determine when you are violating the regulations of those signs as well; in fact we no longer live in a world where this is all that far fetched, this software is already built into every Tesla and probably some other cars and frankly image recognition software like that isn't all that hard to make these days, I had an assignment to do this exact thing a few semesters ago. If you have a relatively modern car it knows (or at least has the ability to know) when you are breaking almost every traffic law on the books.

Now you could read all of this and be perfectly okay with it since your car isn't snitching on you or anything which is true now, but how long will it stay true? Every year auto manufacturers add more and more unnecessary features and among the most recent of these is the ability to connect to wifi. It is entirely possible that laws could be passed requiring car manufacturers to include RFID scanners in their cars which would scan your driver's license which would have an RFID chip built into it so that the car could record all your traffic violations and upload them to some server to be processed whenever you go home and your car connects to your home network, and even if you can't regularly park your car somewhere where it gets signal most states in the US and I'd imagine plenty of other places across the globe require cars to pass some sort of a smog check or other form of inspection, the data could be uploaded then. Such laws would make it impossible to avoid being fined for traffic violations of any kind since our driving would be tracked 1984 style.

Now of course while these sorts of things are interesting to think about it is important to realize that often times they will never happen. The possibilities I've talked about in this article are closer to science fiction than they are to ever becoming true. Putting this into law would be bad for the economy because all the people making payments on cars that became illegal would not want to pay them causing car dealerships and maybe even a few banks to go out of business, bad for the environment because it would sentence nearly every perfectly functional car on the road to the junkyard, and bad for politics because absolutely no middle or lower class citizen in their right mind would vote to reelect a politician who forced them to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a new car they didn't need. Plus it is a miracle that many "leaders" in governments all over the world even know how to use an iPhone so there are not enough of them who are familiar enough with technology to recognize that such a surveillance system is already possible. However the idea of self policing cars is still quite interesting and scary to think about, I would never be in favor of it as freedom should never be traded for safety.

A long time ago I'd spend time scrolling through parts of the internet where individuals would share programming memes, of course none of the stuff there was actually funny and it got quite repetitive as I realized that half the memes were about people's inability to type the sequence :wq while in normal mode in Vim, copying and pasting things from Stack Overflow, or it was people screeching about how HTML isn't a programming language and then probably not knowing how to correct people on that misconception by saying it is a markup language despite "Markup Language" being what the ML in HTML stands for. These are uninteresting people who were taught the difference between Git and Github through a meme comparing it to Pornhub and while we already know they don't use Vim they probably don't even use ctrl-z to undo their mistakes and instead use their mouse to open a menu to find the undo button (yes, I have seen people who call themselves programmers do this). The people creating and consooming this sort of content are a plague to the industry, they are not professionals they are meme loving posers.

That last paragraph may sound a bit harsh until you realize the severity of the problem, as Bob Martin points out in the talk I referenced in an earlier article it is only a matter of time before some lazy soydev is tasked with writing software that runs on a large commercial airplane and their lack of discipline causes them to miss a bug that causes the plane to malfunction, crash and kill hundreds of people. As the modern world becomes more reliant on software it seeps into areas where bugs and glitches have much worse consequences than dead links and corrupted files.

Python Worship

In my opinion, one of the most dangerous soydev tendencies is the worship of Python as if it is the only language needed for anything. Of course I don't see Python as worthless, the last few projects I've showcased here were written in Python, it is a great language to use while exploring new areas of computer science because it allows programmers to focus on the new concepts they are exploring rather than syntax, but Python is not really suitable for much beyond that since it is slow due to the fact that it is an interpreted language.

But that fact doesn't prevent these people schilling it and producing graphics like the one below that I'd like to discuss.

This graphic is clearly meant to persuade people of Python's superiority over C++ as it shows that the same thing can be written in Python with less lines of code than it can be in C++, emphasizing ease of programming over actual performance of the program being written (in other words these people put their convenience before that of their customer). But I'm not going to spend time talking about that, you can find that sort of commentary all over the place, instead I'm going to analyze this as a graph because that is what it is trying to mimic and with all graphs floating around on the internet it needs to be properly analyzed before it is taken seriously.

Looking at the Code

Effective Lines of Code

When trying to figure out how much effort is necessary to write a program, or how difficult an already written program was simple lines of code aren't a good metric because all lines of code are not created equal. I've had to write a program that takes a month number and a year as inputs and needed to correctly display the calendar for that month at least three times and I'm sure there are some of you who have had to write this kind of a program in a beginning level class as well. This program would have many different parts in order to function properly, an example of one of these parts would be the part that takes the month number and figures out which month it actually is since the actual word would need to be displayed rather than the number, another example would be the part that has to determine what day of the week the first day of the month lands on.

Which of those two parts of that calendar program is harder to make? Obviously it is the part that determines what day of the week to put the first on since that's not something that is at the top of our head unlike translating numbers to month names which we were taught to do in kindergarten. Now which of these two tasks takes more lines of code? While it is harder to place the first day of the month it is also possible to be done in a very small number of lines because there exist handy formulas to do that (I might have done it with just one once but I can't remember), while translating a month number to name will take at least 24 lines of code no matter how you do it. Pure length of code is not a measure of difficulty, instead software is often measured in what is called effective lines of code.

An effective line of code is one that does something non-trivial, within the 24 lines that pick out month names not one can really be considered an effective line of code (the hardest part about it is spelling February right) while just about all the lines associated with placing the first day on the right day of the week can be considered an effective line of code, proving that this measurement is much more effective at measuring difficulty.

Now let's look at our graphic through that lens rather than the lens that our brains default to, in this scenario we could consider both of the lines of Python to be effective, but looking at the C++ program we don't have an effective line until the first for loop and we can really only call the two for loop declarations and two cout statements as effective lines of code. This graphic is making something that is 2 to 4 look like it is 2 to 16, 2 against 4 is a lot more fair of a comparison.

Unnecessary Lines

But even if we ignore the whole concept of effective lines of code it is still quite clear to anyone familiar with C++ that the C++ program the graphic presented is designed to lengthen out the program. The innermost pair of curly braces are completely unnecessary because the for loop it belongs to only has one instruction, single line loops don't need curly braces, so that takes off two whole lines. Then of course there is the issue of formatting the curly braces, most people do put them on separate lines when writing C++ but if you are worried about total lines of code then there is nothing wrong with putting the opening brace on the line above like is conventional with Java, so that would take off another two lines.

But those of course are forgivable sins, the first two lines within the function are not at all represented in the Python program. If the Python program uses a constant rather than a variable in the for loop then the C++ program should be able to use a constant as well so we can get rid of that first line. Then there is the cin statement, if the Python program isn't asking for any user input then neither should the C++ program. (Plus what kind of moron expects the user to give them good input without prompting them?)

Then if we really want to start cutting lines you don't need to have "using namespace std" in there, I went a whole semester not being allowed to use that, and the main function doesn't actually need a return statement. So with that we've determined that half of the C++ lines are completely unnecessary and I've still let two lines with only a closing curly brace slide.

Why would anyone trust a graph that shows one thing twice as large as it should be, or looking back at the last section four times as large?

Overriding Operators

Now if I were to be in some sort of a debate with a soydev about this they'd try to brush off the severity of the bad graphic and claim that the real point of it was to take a look at how great it is that you can multiply a string by an integer to get that behavior. In this hypothetical debate I'd have two things to say, first I'd ask when else this sort of thing actually comes in handy since I've never found myself needing this functionality, but the more productive of my arguments would be to point out that if you really need that functionality in C++ (and with many other languages that don't offer it by default) you can just code it in yourself.

Overriding operators is not that hard, here I've rewritten the C++ program from the graphic where the main part of it functions just like the Python one does by multiplying a string by an integer to duplicate it:

#include 
#include 
using namespace std;

string operator * (string const &lhs, int const &rhs)
{
    string result;
    for (int i = 0; i < rhs; ++i)
        result += lhs;
    return result;
}

int main()
{
    string brick = "* ";
    for(int i = 1; i <= 5; ++i)
        cout << (brick * i) << endl;
    return 0;
}
    

With this we have two effective lines of C++ code compared to two effective lines of Python code (and I didn't even use an efficient algorithm to override the * operator). Of course overriding the * operator is quite overkill for this scenario but if there was actually some sort of use case where you'd have to be using this functionality it is always important to remember that overriding operators is an option no matter how dumb it seems.

Conclusion

But back to the graphic, we can see that it is clearly soydev propaganda and we should pay little attention to it and there is no reason for us to take it seriously. The fact that we shouldn't take this seriously is made even more clear when you look closely at the Python code and realize that it isn't even correct as it is missing a pair of parentheses so the last line should be print((i + 1) + "* ") for it to actually work. That was one of the first things I noticed when analyzing this graphic but I chose not to point that out so that it wouldn't distract from my more important points, but still, why would you trust a graphic that doesn't even get the thing it is promoting right?

Now of course Chromebooks aren't the only type of computer and Google Chrome certainly isn't the only browser every program that can run within Google Chrome can run on any relevant browser. Word processors run in the browser, so does Zoom, and even VS Code can run within a web browser, of course doing this is almost never better than running these same programs outside your browser, but you can do it if you want to. You can almost think of your browser as an operating system built on top of your existing operating system (although that's not quite the case).

This is all thanks to something called ECMAScript, or as it is really known JavaScript. All usable browsers come equipped with JavaScript support and it is quite difficult these days to find websites that don't use it, I've even used it once (you can read about that here). If you want to use the modern internet you cannot avoid JavaScript.

But of course this wasn't always the case, and JavaScript programs weren't the only ones to have ever been supported within web browsers. Adobe Flash programs used to be quite common and if I remember correctly Adobe Flash support only ended as recently as the beginning of this year. Now I'm not going to use this time to reminisce about the old internet because I don't believe I'm terribly qualified for that, instead I intend to look back at history so we can be wary of the future.

Why Adobe Flash Failed

Flash is probably best remembered for the games that it allowed people to play, there were lots of sites hosting them and while most were garbage and all of them were a waste of time but there were a few that were fun, plus when you consider the fact that the target demographic for these things was children under the age of ten you realize that quality was never a big concern anyways, many of these kids were completely satisfied as long as they could attribute their button pressing to something "productive" and vaguely interesting.

I don't think there ever was a Flash program not only because they never really needed to be perfect but also because Flash was far from a perfect technology. April 2010 could probably be marked as the beginning of the end of Adobe Flash, in this month Steve Jobs wrote an open letter to Adobe addressing the fact that iPods, iPhones, and iPads did not support Flash. In this letter Jobs spent some time correcting some of Adobe's false claims, pointing out Flash's obvious lack of touch support, and of course there was, what is probably Flash's most well known flaw, its security and performance issues, which combined with the fact that the typical Flash user was a child with no sense of computer security meant that Flash was a terrible idea. Within his letter Jobs reported that Adobe Flash was the number one cause of a crash on a Mac computer. Steve Jobs successfully made the case as to why Adobe Flash was not fit for today's internet, and Adobe Flash has been fully replaced with HTML5 and JavaScript.

JavaScript's Fate

Now whenever we look at history, especially recent history, we have to pick out any patterns in it and see where they might be repeated so that we can either put the pattern into use or take steps to avoid that pattern, in the case of Adobe Flash we'd want to avoid that pattern. Can JavaScript suffer the same fate that Adobe Flash did? Well JavaScript performs much better than Flash ever did and it is touch compatible so it is free of those issues, but what about its security? Is it possible for JavaScript to degrade to a point where its security is as bad as Adobe Flash's was?

Well being a computer science major I found myself in a web development class where we were assigned to ask questions in online discussion boards (which is no substitute for in-person classes). So on the week where we were first learning about JavaScript I asked that question. Discussion boards are of course supposed to encourage discussion (they never do) and I figured that this question had potential to spark some sort of a discussion, but instead the teacher answered it with an authoritative no and lazily talked about how JavaScript is incorporated into the web's standards proving that he really didn't spend any time entertaining the possibility.

This response shocked me a bit, not because I was offended that I didn't start some meaningful discussion (because everyone whose used a discussion board knows that never happens), but because nobody else even seemed concerned about that possibility. Now this one incident is not the end of the world since my former teacher has no influence over the development of JavaScript or web standards and it is unlikely that any of my classmates (if you could even call them that if you never went to class) ever will either. But is it just one incident? There are not very many students like me who would ask a question like that, and there are even fewer professors that would (frankly waste time) entertaining that question, and the odds of the perfect student being paired with the perfect teacher are way to low for the average computer science student to be able to hear a conversation where the future of JavaScript (or any other technology for that matter) is discussed critically. Then when we take into account Bob Martin's speculation that half of the software engineering industry always has less than five years of experience, we see that there is much to fear in the future of software.

The funny thing with JavaScript is that there is already a group of people who don't trust it, and even among the people who aren't that crazy it is becoming more and more normal to run programs that disable certain pieces of JavaScript, in fact I'd argue that you'd be pretty dumb not to use an ad blocker. Strictly as a technology JavaScript's security isn't compromised in the same way that Adobe Flash's was but the use of a technology is just as important as the quality of a technology is and in the case of JavaScript developers don't have the discipline to refuse to use it in insecure and bloated ways.

Of course we shouldn't completely abandon JavaScript, there are plenty of things that are essential to the modern internet that are impossible without it, but we should make sure that we are avoiding it on sites where it has no place.

I've also made a links page where I've listed a few sites that I find to be worthwhile, I've resisted making one of these pages for a while and on that page I explained why I chose to make one. The page is accessible through a link in my Library page. If I ever join a webring that is also where I will put a link to it.

A question I anticipate getting after this anouncement is "Why don't I have some sort of a tagging system?" If I could start everything over I would have built this website with one in mind, but right now I feel like adding that would take more time and effort than I have time for at the moment, maybe I'll get around to that in a few months.

This post exists exclusively as an RSS entity

A year ago on the third of July I saw something that disturbed me, the next day I posted this to Facebook:

I was saddened yesterday as I drove home from work. I saw a flagpole, one of the giant ones made to fly 50 foot flags, standing bare on the 3rd of July. It was under a star spangled banner that we gained our independence from a tyrant nation following our declaration in 1776. It was by soldiers under that flag that millions were freed from bondage around 90 years later. And it was by soldiers waving that flag that many thousands around the world were freed from unjust imprisonment around 80 years after that.

Unfortunately today many are trying to turn the American flag into a symbol of something it never stood for. Sure our history is not perfect, nothing is, but the bad things of our past should not negate the good. We need to remember and learn from all of our history, both the good and bad so that we can strive to be better.

Unfortunately today the loudest voices are those pushing for division rather than unity. We cannot overcome any problem by grouping people and judging them based on the groups they belong to rather than by their individual character as Dr. King dreamt. Not everyone fits the label you, or others, initially give them, in fact they rarely do. Labels are dangerous.

If we are going to fix the world’s problems we need to strive for unity and understanding rather than division and hate. If you are unwilling to find the facts on issues, or look at the perspectives of those who don’t share your worldview then you are a part of the problem no matter where you stand. You have to respect the views, ideas and experiences of others if you want them to respect yours.

Let us strive to be understanding and loving of one another, look for reasons to love rather than reasons to hate, because united we stand and divided we fall. Be brave, and think free. God bless the USA, we need it.

A year later I still stand by every word of that post, and I don't know of any true American who wouldn't. But interestingly I lost a few friends on Facebook because of that post, now of course this didn't bother me too much I've never cared about having a ton of friends on social media and frankly I was tired of seeing some of the stuff those friends were posting so I guess I was happy that I offended them.

This year I'm having a much better Independence Day, unlike last year I'm not in a city which has been shut down and insists that nobody shows their face, instead I'm in a place where we are actually free and where patriots can celebrate their country.

We Should All be Patriots

One of the biggest problems I see with America right now is a lack of patriotism. Patriotism is really the only thing with the potential to unite people of different backgrounds, races, and religions. If you love your country you will love your neighbor, this is how strong communities are built.

Unfortunately many Americans these days are being taught to hate our country, this is something that we cannot accept. When people look for things to hate they will always find something, and of course that something will never be happiness because you cannot live a happy life while focusing on hate. Of course it is still important to recognize that America is not perfect and neither were the men who founded it and have led it throughout the years, Jesus was the only perfect man to walk this Earth. But we should never define people by the worst things they've ever done, instead we should judge people by their values and how well they live up to them, and when it comes to America and its founders and leaders there is plenty to be proud of.

Patriotism is also something that people are being taught to unjustly frown upon because people are being led to believe that it is something that it is not. Patriotism is not nationalism, a patriot does not believe that their culture needs to be practiced by everyone in the world like a nationalist does, and when a patriot says that their country is the best in the world they do not mean that it should be the only country in the world. Patriots respect other countries and cultures, especially in America because the United States is a nation of immigrants. I have several friends whose parents are immigrants or who are immigrants themselves, and I really don't have to go back very many generations to see which of my ancestors brought me here. An American patriot knows that this country is nothing without immigrants and they should be welcome to anyone willing to go through the steps necessary to become an American.

As I watched fireworks last night I was proud to be in a crowd of patriots.

The Greatest Nation

I am proud to be an American, and I truly do believe that this is the greatest nation on Earth. I am happy that I live somewhere where I am free to say what I want, believe what I think is best, free to live by those beliefs, and free to protect myself and others. I am grateful to live here and happy to celebrate that gratitude. I've been planning this post for quite a while and I've had multiple ideas of what I would write today and while I could ramble on about American history or something (as it is something that we all should reread rather than rewrite) I think it is better if I leave you the text of the document which this day is the anniversary of and then a few songs celebrating the United States of America.

The Declaration of Independence

        WHEN in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation.
          We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—-That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security. Such has been the patient Sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the Necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The History of the present King of Great-Britain is a History of repeated Injuries and Usurpations, all having in direct Object the Establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid World.
          He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public Good.
          He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing Importance, unless suspended in their Operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them. 
          He has refused to pass other Laws for the Accommodation of large Districts of People, unless those People would relinquish the Right of Representation in the Legislature, a Right inestimable to them, and formidable to Tyrants only.
          He has called together Legislative Bodies at Places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the Depository of their public Records, for the sole Purpose of fatiguing them into Compliance with his Measures.
          He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly Firmness his Invasions on the Rights of the People.
          He has refused for a long Time, after such Dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the Dangers of Invasion from without, and Convulsions within. 
          He has endeavoured to prevent the Population of these States; for that Purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their Migrations hither, and raising the Conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
          He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.
          He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the Tenure of their Offices, and the Amount and Payment of their Salaries.
          He has erected a Multitude of new Offices, and sent hither Swarms of Officers to harrass our People, and eat out their Substance.
          He has kept among us, in Times of Peace, Standing Armies, without the consent of our Legislatures.
          He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.
          He has combined with others to subject us to a Jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution, and unacknowledged by our Laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
          For quartering large Bodies of Armed Troops among us:
          For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from Punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
          For cutting off our Trade with all Parts of the World:
          For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
          For depriving us, in many Cases, of the Benefits of Trial by Jury:
          For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended Offences:
          For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an arbitrary Government, and enlarging its Boundaries, so as to render it at once an Example and fit Instrument for introducing the same absolute Rule into these Colonies:
          For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
          For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with Power to legislate for us in all Cases whatsoever.
          He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
          He has plundered our Seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our Towns, and destroyed the Lives of our People.
          He is, at this Time, transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the Works of Death, Desolation, and Tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and Perfidy, scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous Ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized Nation.
          He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the Executioners of their Friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
          He has excited domestic Insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the Inhabitants of our Frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known Rule of Warfare, is an undistinguished Destruction, of all Ages, Sexes and Conditions.
          In every stage of these Oppressions we have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble Terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated Injury. A Prince, whose Character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the Ruler of a free People.
          Nor have we been wanting in Attentions to our British Brethren. We have warned them from Time to Time of Attempts by their Legislature to extend an unwarrantable Jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the Circumstances of our Emigration and Settlement here. We have appealed to their native Justice and Magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the Ties of our common Kindred to disavow these Usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our Connections and Correspondence. They too have been deaf to the Voice of Justice and of Consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the Necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of Mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace, Friends.
          We, therefore, the Representatives of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the World for the Rectitude of our Intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly Publish and Declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be, Free and Independent States; that they are absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political Connection between them and the State of Great-Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm Reliance on the Protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

America the Beautiful

Oh, beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea.

Oh, beautiful for pilgrim feet,
Whose stern, impassioned stress
A thoroughfare of freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America!
God mend thine ev’ry flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law.

Oh, beautiful for heroes proved
In liberating strife,
Who more than self their country loved,
And mercy more than life!
America! America!
May God thy gold refine,
Till all success be nobleness,
And ev’ry gain divine.

Oh, beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam,
Undimmed by human tears!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea.

The Star Spangled Banner

Oh say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof thru the night that our flag was still there.
Oh say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

On the shore, dimly seen thru the mists of the deep,
Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines on the stream;
’Tis the star-spangled banner! Oh, long may it wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

Oh, thus be it ever, when free men shall stand
Between their loved homes and the war’s desolation!
Blest with vict’ry and peace, may the heav’n-rescued land
Praise the Pow’r that hath made and preserved us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: “In God is our trust!”
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

As someone who runs a site like this I enjoy finding other people with websites similar to mine, within the past month I've found a few more and have enjoyed seeing the thoughts and creativity of others. But as I have done so I've noticed something quite dangerous, people tend to write about things they hate more than things that they love. Now I'm not surprised by this, I've written before about the fact that hate sells and anyone who has spent any amount of time on Twitter will already know that the internet is already filled with hate for all sorts of things. As internet landlords we should not mimic the rest of the internet, instead we should be seeking to stand out and be an example to the rest of it.

It is easy, natural, and sometimes even fun to write an article where we complain about some problem in the world, or roasting some terrible idea or some person you don't agree with, but is it really a good use of your time to do this? Yes, I do recognize that it is sometimes necessary to do these things (I'm sure I've written articles like this before and I'm sure I'll do it again) but it is not necessary very often. If you constantly find yourself needing to fight things then you might want to reevaluate your priorities in life, happiness and hate are not compatible with each other, it is not possible to live a happy life while your mind is constantly thinking of everything wrong with the world. It is of course important to know what is wrong with the world, but it is more important to focus on what is right.

But as I've said, I've written about this before so I don't want to ramble on with this topic too much longer, just remember that if you spend time dwelling on things you hate you will become a hateful person that nobody wants to be around, but if you spend time dwelling on the good things of the world you will be helping to make it a better place.

I believe I've written before about Wikipedia's bias, although I can't find where. The unfortunate thing about that is that something with a structure like Wikipedia should have the best chance of having no bias, it is theoretically open for anyone to write in, if people of all biases contribute then they should all work to cancel each other out, or if not it could at least be a place for all points of view to be heard. Larry Sanger, Wikipedia's ex-founder, has written about the poor state of the site multiple times, this article is probably the most well known of these instances (and I'm pretty sure I've pointed you to it before as well). Yesterday Sanger published what is likely his most in depth article on this, no reader of this article should honestly be able to deny Wikipedia's bias.

I don't mean to ramble on for too long here, there isn't much for me to say on this topic that hasn't already been said. I just want to make sure you recognize that if you want to know what's going on you can't trust just one source because you can't trust any source. Probably the best practice to find the truth from worldly sources on worldly topics is to research multiple sources coming from multiple points of view written by people who are up front about their biases and honest about their expertise. Once you've done that you might be able to find some ounce of truth.

You'll notice that this process is not easy and takes time, you probably think that you'd be better off using that time doing something else and I'd agree with you. There are very few instances where this kind of a search is actually worth your time, you almost always have more important things to worry about such as your job, health, family, or God. If issues coming up in the news have an impact on those first three things then you should take the time to figure out the truth so that you can navigate those issues with wisdom. But of course when trying to find the truth about God, don't even bother with worldly sources, go straight to the source and consult Him directly through prayer and scripture study.

The news is almost always a waste of your time don't pay much attention to it and certainly don't trust it.

Once search engines actually became effective search engine optimization (SEO) became the best way for people to have their websites discovered, to this day search engine optimization has great potential, but it also has downsides. Have you ever noticed that every news article from just about every news source sounds the same? Sure some of them might have a slightly different political spin, but they are all mostly bland and uninspired. I'd be willing to bet that if you read articles from three different news sources reporting on the same mild and uncontroversial story you'd probably have a hard time spotting the difference between the three. Of course this should be the case if everyone has the same facts to report and I'm sure that things like the Murray Gell-Mann amnesia effect have a role in that as well, but the biggest reason that all these articles sound the same is because we are not their target audience, we haven't been for some time, Google is.

Search engine optimization consists of adding a series of key-words into various tags throughout your HTML document, but also throughout your actual content. Let's say I wanted to write about something like the Dilbert Principle, if I were trying to get to the top of the search results for anyone who would be looking for that sort of an article I'd probably need to use the term "Dilbert Principle" multiple times per paragraph, but not only that I'd probably also want it to show up when people search for things similar to the Dilbert Principle. I'd probably want to use the term "Perter Principle" several times and I'd probably have to name drop Scott Adams more times than may actually be necessary to get the point across, and it may also even be a good idea to throw around the term "newspaper comic strip" a few times to try to catch people just searching for Dilbert and this is where things start to get out of hand because the Dilbert Principle has nothing to do with comics other than its name. When you focus on search engine optimization you find yourself caring more about what a computer thinks about your work than about how enjoyable it will be for humans to read. I'm positive that my article on the Dilbert Principle would have been worse had I done this.

It also makes things much more boring to write, the main reason that I have this site is because I enjoy writing and I happen to be naturally good at it. A number of years before starting this site I thought it would be a good idea to harness those things on a sort of freelancing site. It wasn't one like Fiver where I would have been hired directly by clients who I could get requirements from, rather it was a site where people order an article or a description on something and the site puts up the available jobs up for whatever poor soul would take them. I'd often see jobs requesting 250 word pieces where you'd have to use one term ten times and another three terms five times each, these of course would be relatively easy jobs but you also had to factor in the fact that you don't get paid if the client doesn't think the writing is good, but of course every one should know that no piece of writing will be any good if 10% of it is spent on the same four words and the other 90% is spent trying to fit them in. I never took a job on one of these sites because it is simply not worth $2 for me to write garbage like that.

But even if you managed to write something that is somewhat enjoyable to read and search engine optimized, you'd also have to consider the chance of your optimizations even paying off. Lets say you write about some sort of news like the Ford F150 Lightning or Windows 11, when things like these come around there are hundreds, possibly thousands, of other people writing about these same things. Let's be conservative and say that there are 1000 articles on the internet with the same subject as the article you want to promote. Google reports that only about 1% of users venture to the second page of the search results so in order for you to be found you'll have to be put on the first page. How many links get put on the first page, like ten? So if all 1000 of you had equally as good SEO work done there would only be a 1% chance of your optimizations actually paying off. This of course is ignoring all other factors, we all know that Google prefers certain sites over others, unless I am literally the only person ever to talk about something there is no way they will put something from my random .xyz domain that virtually no one has heard of on the first page, for a site like mine search engine optimization is a waste of time.

Now of course if I'm not concerned about search engine optimization how am I supposed to grow my audience? Social media is of course one way to do that, but you know my opinion on that, and even if I had a more favorable view of social media I wouldn't want to be a self shill there because I wouldn't want everyone to cringe when seeing my posts. When it comes to growing my audience I'm not really doing anything because I didn't start this site to make money, I had probably put 80 posts up here before I ever set up a donation link and it was only a couple weeks ago that I started accepting monero. I started this site instead as a creative outlet and to anyone looking into starting a site similar to this that is what your main intention should be as well, this site definitely isn't paying any bills. Of course when I do start a site whose purpose is to make money I will approach it with a much different strategy.

Frankly I get a bit surprised when people do manage to find me, I do do a bit to put myself out there based.cooking benefited me a bit, and a good portion of my site is indexed on wiby.me then I occasionally throw a link out on a comment somewhere on the internet. I guess I was also invited to join a webring but I'm not quite ready for that yet.

Anyways I'm starting to veer too far off topic. There are several pieces of science fiction that depict a future where humans are ruled my machines, we are living in that future. The videos we watch are suggested to us by a machine, the posts we see on social media are served to us by a machine, the articles we read are selected my a machine. A good friend of mine has managed to become mildly famous on TickTock to the point were he is getting money from it, his fame was gained through a bit of hard work but it was ultimately given to him by a machine that could have chosen to ignore him.

This is not the future that I signed up for. I really think that people should shift away from the practice of search engine optimization and seek to become more of a hidden gem rather than just another pebble at the top of the pile. We should work to entertain and provide value to people and then convince machines how to recognize what we see as quality rather than working to please a machine and trying to convince people that our work is worthwhile, because if we work to please machines it won't be long before our job is taken by one, but if we know how to make things that other people truly find valuable then there will be no way to replace us.

Blow's talk reminded me of another tech conference talk that I came across before I'd even started this website titled "The Future of Programming" which was given by a guy named Robert C Martin. Bob Martin is fairly well respected in the world of software because he was among the fathers of the Agile movement which is something which competent software developers should at least be aware of (although whether or not they are a disciple of it is another discussion). I don't remember if I've ever talked about it here, but Martin's talk is one that I've thought about several times since first hearing it.

Both of these talks are worth a listen although Blow's talk is much more entertaining and effective for people outside the software development world (Martin takes quite a while to get to his point since before he gets there he has to give a retelling of the history of software development to an audience already familiar with much of it, you'll be bored if you've never heard the term Waterfall Method) The point that these two speakers share in common is that software development is in a state of decline and has been for quite some time.

Blow spends a lot of time debunking the idea of constant technological progression. If we are supposed to be constantly advancing why is it that a country who claims to have won the space race would find itself hiring the people they say they lost to to launch their stuff into space only a few decades later? Why did napalm have to be invented in the 1900s when the Byzantine Empire equipped their warships with a similar substance hundreds of years before? Why is it that innovations of people like Joel Salatin are ignored in favor of less practical solutions? Any student of history should know that thousands of inventions, crafts, and trades have simply been lost to time, and any intelligent person should recognize that history repeats itself, no technology is safe from becoming lost and in many ways software is in a dangerous spot.

In his talk, Bob Martin quoted Alan Turning, whom many consider to be the father of computing (or at least computer science), I don't remember the exact quote, and I can't be bothered to look it up, but it went something along the lines of, "The world is going to need a lot of disciplined mathematicians to run computers." Turning was right but disciplined mathematicians was not what the world got, instead my favorite was a group of guys in their early 20s in a smelly office and no plan. We can of course make fun of this all we want but it is also important to realize their accomplishment, they did something that today's developers couldn't, they built their own engine and tools which, as Blow points out, are skills that almost nobody in the field today posses, and they were able to make a better game because of those skills. This is proved not only by the excellence of Homeworld, the game they made, but also by the fact that the 2015 remake of it is vastly inferior to the 1999 original (unless of course you are dumb enough to judge games by their graphics).

In many ways things have become easier to program, developers don't have to build a lot of the stuff they used to anymore which is good in the sense that it cuts down on development time but it is bad because it produces developers who no longer know how to. While Blow never directly said it this it is clear that this was something that he wanted us to take away from the talk. Unfortunately not everyone is self-aware enough to come to that conclusion. After he spoke a few people in the audience were given the opportunity to ask questions, one guy asked something like, "I want to be able to do X but in order to do that I have to look into some crazy complex C and C++ code." I guess that was a statement rather than a question but if there was a question in there somewhere it didn't amount to much since Blow didn't have much to say other than a confirmation of the guy's statement. An equally experienced developer from ten years ago could have likely understood and worked with the C code that this guy couldn't because it was probably an equally experienced developer who wrote it. As developers use more and more things written by others they will lose more skill unless they take the time to understand the things they are using.

Let's take a look at the current state of computer science education, most universities have transitioned to teaching most of their curriculum using Python because it is easy to learn and relatively easy to work with. If you are going to pick up programming as a hobby or as something to assist you in your work in a different field Python is a great language to start with and in many cases even stick with, but if you want to become a serious software developer you are going to want to know more things than what Python can offer you. For example because Python is an interpreted language rather than a compiled one there is no way to do a switch statement in Python. People like me who were formally taught about switch statements feel hindered when they are forced to use long inefficient blocks of if else statements while people who were really only trained in Python won't know the things that they don't know.

But switch statements are a relatively minor thing, especially when we recognize that a good compiler will probably optimize if else statements to function like the superior switch statements. But what about things that are harder to replace? What about pointers? While pointers are not all that useful by themselves they are a fundamental part to many essential data structures like stacks, queues, trees, graphs and even blockchains, then of course the entire concept of passing values by reference and by value is entirely dependent on the functionality of pointers. And yet pointers can never be discussed in a class that isn't teaching C or C++ because they are pretty much absent from most other languages. Developers, like the ones coming in having primarily only worked in Python, who didn't learn about pointers early enough will not have the skills necessary to create unique data structures when the need arises, and people like me who did learn about pointers but then use other languages are left untrusting of libraries where the documentation doesn't tell you if function inputs are pass by value or reference.

Bob Martin estimates that the world's population of software developers doubles every five years, this is how he rationalizes the fact that the software industry has grown to be one of the largest in the world in only a small number of decades. If his assumption is true and if we were to say that nearly all new software developers entering the field from here on out aren't well educated in a particular skill then in five years half the industry won't be very good with that skill, in ten years only about a quarter of the industry will be any good at in and in twenty years the skill will virtually be gone.

Think of all the skills that have already gone extinct from the industry already. Blow spends a good portion of his talk discussing this, we already mentioned that video game developers no longer make engines and tools, but it is even crazier to realize that the Unix operating system was made by one guy over a span of three weeks, programmers don't do this anymore. Martin pointed out the fact that basically all the innovation in the software space took place in the 70s, people are only just now starting to realize the shortcomings of object oriented design. Virtually all of the innovation in the computer world happened in the hardware world, ever since programmers haven't had to constantly think about memory and time constraints they've forgotten how to make code efficient. Computers were faster when they were slow.

Is there a solution to this problem? I'm not sure. Bob Martin suggests the formation of some sort of board to let the software industry self regulate themselves much like doctors and lawyers will. I'm skeptical of this and I think Martin himself would soon become hesitant of giving such an organization power, Martin joined the industry very young with little to no formal training, thousands of people do this same thing every year it is quite likely that the board that Martin is suggesting would make it so people wouldn't be able to have the same opportunity he did.

Johnathan Blow spent a good deal of time discussing innovations that have been lost to time. These innovations became lost after cultural shifts, Bob Martin spent a lot of time discussing the cultural shifts that happened in the software development world. We put emphasis on studying history to prevent ourselves from repeating it but we aren't very good at correcting history. If it is cultural shifts that cause us to loose innovation then it is a cultural shift that is needed to bring innovation back. ]]> https://jacobwsmith.xyz/stories/windows_11.html Thu, 17 Jun 2021 09:00:00 -0400 So Windows 11 leaked which is interesting because Microsoft said that there wouldn't be a Windows 11 and the conference where they will likely formally announce it hasn't even happened yet. But of course with 4chan being 4chan it surfaced. A past version of me may have been excited about such a thing, in fact a past version of me may have even gone and obtained the ISO and installed it on one of the extra computers lying around then bragged to people about how I have Windows 11. But current me doesn't really care at all.

Ever since I fully dove into Linux I've been happy that I haven't had to deal with Windows, I still have a Windows computer but I only use it for a handful of things because it is a terrible operating system and I have no control over it. Proprietary software terrifies me I can't trust a program that is likely to be spying on me and I definitely can't trust a program that could update to a state where I get lost using it or have to fix things, and trusting an operating system that does these things is absolutely foolish.

Updates

The last time I intentionally updated Windows was probably around two years ago, it of course occasionally forces me to update it without my permission because apparently Microsoft doesn't trust me to manage my own computer, but I believe the version of Windows 10 I have running on my computer is still a 2019 release. I stopped updating Windows because it seems like every time I do things break, and keep in mind that I use Arch Linux a Linux distro allegedly famous for breaking on updates (in my experience this has not been the case). Things break in Windows 10 more often than they do in Arch Linux, isn't that amazing? The common programmer joke that goes along the lines of starting out with seven bugs fixing one and then having seventeen bugs is not something that should apply to product releases.

My phone is several months out of date as well, neither of the main phone operating systems are nearly as bad as Windows but I still don't like updating them. The reason that phones and computers should be kept up to date is that the most up to date versions should be the most secure, and if you are running a business this would be essential for all of your company's hardware, but if you aren't doing that and you aren't doing many sketchy things with your phone or computer then this is not as big of a priority. When given the choice between a less than 1% chance of a hacker spying on me and a 100% chance of whatever company makes my software having an easier time spying on me I'll take the hacker anytime. I'm reminded of this every time I go to a new state and my phone gives me a notification about COVID-19 information in the area and asks me if I want to opt-in to contact tracing, I wish I could downgrade my phone so that this would not happen. I only upgrade fixed release operating systems when the new release contains a useful feature that I want, I shouldn't be forced to update when I don't want to.

Viruses

While we're on the topic of hackers let's talk about another thing that can compromise your computer, viruses. Now I'm not a moron and I know that Windows is not the only operating system with viruses and that it has the most because that is what 90% of desktop users are running, but it is incredibly easy to get a virus on Windows while in the case of other operating systems you actually have to try to get one.

It is so easy to get a virus on Windows because the way that you install a program onto a Windows machine is absolutely stupid. Does anyone who knows anything about computers honestly think that downloading code from some random website then running that code on your computer is a good idea? I don't understand how anyone could possibly think that this is a good idea because it is just asking for trouble how can anyone do this and not expect to get a virus, but since the death of CDs this has become the standard method of installing a program on Windows. Of course the Microsoft Store exists now and, while it pains my free software using soul to say it, the Microsoft Store should be how people install programs on Windows. But of course the Microsoft Store was so poorly implemented and launched that it is an even bigger joke than Microsoft Edge, so now we live in a world where hundreds of millions of people believe that running code downloaded from random websites is a good idea, this is why getting a virus on Windows is easy.

New Windows

But enough about old Windows problems, what's new with Windows 11? Well from what I can tell nothing revolutionary, mostly just aesthetic changes. Now those of you who have spent time watching soyboy Linux content on YouTube might be expecting me, as a Linux user, to go on some rant about how there are so many Linux desktop environments that look so much better and they are so much more customizable than Windows and you can do more with them and bla bla bla, such a rant would be pointless. I of course like to have my computer look a certain way but I recognize that I am in the minority, normal people don't care and the most customization they will ever do is change their wallpaper. (This is the reason that Linux will never dominate, normal people don't care enough to switch)

There are of course a few other observable changes but nothing game changing, I could of course be wrong since we are talking about an operating system that hasn't even been announced but even if there is something new the aesthetic changes and higher number will be all that normal people actually care about. Microsoft could introduce some revolutionary new feature and nobody would use it, normal people are set in how they use a computer and they don't want to change, Windows 8 was hated because it took away features that people had become used to using, Windows 8.1 exists because people wanted them back. Tech journalists will likely all talk about how great Windows 11 is but the switch will likely cause more complaints from actual users than praise, normal people don't like change.

But with that being said Windows 11 is a great move for Microsoft even if it doesn't change much, it is a great way for them to generate publicity that they haven't had in a long time and a great excuse for them to ask for your money. I won't be buying a new computer with Windows 11 and I probably won't upgrade my Windows 10 computer to it, even if it is free, I have no use for an operating system as bad as Windows, I'm sure I'll be forced to use it at some point but I could really care less about Windows 11 or Windows 12 or Windows 20, there are much more important things in the world to concern ourselves with.

Breaking down a problem

Recently I had an assignment to create an application that would allow two people to play a simple game of rock paper scissors over a TCP connection. When you fail to break this problem down it can seem quite complex and it can be hard to know where to start but when you do break the problem down it becomes quite simple. First you realize that you need to write two programs, one to act as a server and the other as a client. You then figure out how to connect the server and clients to each other and how to tell the client programs that two of them are connected and ready to play. Then you have to figure out the game logic which can be done on either clientside or serverside. When you break the problem down like that your large problem becomes a series of simple problems.

I'm sure programming is not the only thing where breaking down a problem like this is a key to success, I'm sure that this is a large part of most engineering fields, but programming is what I have experience with so that is what I will talk about.

In the realm of software engineering there are many concepts which help you break problems down functions, objects, loops, threading, and boolean logic are just a few of these. I could spend some time explaining some of these in more detail but I'm not in the mood to think of an engaging way to do that right now and I don't want to bore you.

Bugfixing

Another thing essential to any sort of programming is the art of bugfixing. No matter how hard a software development team tries to escape them bugs and other undesirable features make their way into every project. Since no two bugs are alike the process of finding and fixing a bug is always unique, programmers are often forced to humble themselves as they spend time looking for their mistakes.

All of us, no matter our profession, will find ourselves having to troubleshoot all sorts of things in our lifetime. Computers, engines, TVs, and kitchen appliances are just a few examples of things that I've had to troubleshoot or had to help others troubleshoot. I often find myself confused when I come across people who seem to refuse to put any effort into solving a problem of course many companies are making their products hard to fix but that time has not come yet.

Bugfixing is an important skill for everyone to practice because we all need to know how to find and mitigate problems in our life. Multiple times in my life I've found myself trying to get an engine started by checking spark plugs and being sure to prime carburetors or even cylinders themselves when the real reason the engine wouldn't start was because it had an empty gas tank.

Too often we find ourselves trying to solve a problem without breaking it down, and too often we find ourselves trying to fix a problem by checking all the wrong places. Programming is something that helps us break these bad habits and lets us form new ones that can be applied to all aspects of life.

I decided to take the time to read the article and it I do think it is worth reading but I do not fully endorse it because it works under the assumption that the scientific method is the only method for which a person can learn truth even when applied correctly (it is good for many things but not all things). I'm not going to spend the time to summarize the article and comment on everything about it because It isn't interesting enough for me to do that. Instead I just want to want to focus in on one point, one that I meant to write about a few months ago.

In Lett's last section before he makes his conclusion he states that when it comes to any claim, especially crazy ones, that the burden of proof lies upon the one making the claim. People and concepts are to be treated innocent until proven guilty. You should not find yourself playing defense until you have failed at playing offense. When debating people it is often incredibly tempting to disprove every point your opponent makes but if you do that before they've given their proof then you've already lost, it is quite possible that they had no good proof at all and by failing to grill them on that you lose your golden opportunity to show that your opponent is a fool.

This is a strategy that I learned from Louis Rossmann who owns and runs a computer repair shop in New York City and has become heavily involved in the right to repair movement. A few months ago he made a video that taught this same point. He talked about how probably dozens of times throughout his career he has found himself in front of a group of policymakers at a hearing and been asked by an opposing lobbyist to prove that repairing a cell phone is safe and almost every time that is exactly what he'd do, heck he'd even show videos of children doing repairs on phones and that the work of an independent repair shop posed almost no danger to a consumer.

After years of doing it Rossmann realized that his strategy was wrong and he was falling into a trap. The point that his opponents were trying to make was that we should not be allowed to have unauthorized persons (including ourselves) repair our devices because making those repairs are dangerous to you and the person making the repair. What Rossmann should be doing is asking them to provide evidence of that. Do they have a case of a phone blowing up in the hand of a consumer after having it repaired at an independent shop? Can they argue that repairing your own phone is unsafe when compared to jumping a car? We live in a world where it is perfectly legal for the average person with no training can walk into an auto parts store, buy brake calipers and put them on their own car where a failure in that system could cause a 50 car pile up killing 100 people, how is this okay but replacing the battery on your own phone isn't?

Another claim that is made by anti-right to repair lobbyists like to make is that unauthorized repair people could steal your data and leak your private information to the world yet they can provide no instance of this happening while there are multiple account's of Apple's own authorized technicians doing this.

Whenever we enter a debate we should always be prepared to show others how researched and smart we are, but we can't jump on our first opportunity to do that. We have to let our opponents have the opportunity to make a fool of themselves first, if they have no good arguments you might not even need to try that hard. Never accept claims without evidence and don't let other people do it either.

Now whether or not more people should care what the Linux Foundation actually does is another discussion entirely but anyone who has ever donated to it certainly should and while I don't recall him admitting to ever doing it in that video but I'm sure he has in the past. When someone donates to the Linux Foundation they probably expect that money only to go towards maintaining the Linux kernel and promoting the use of Linux. Linux Foundation donors are also highly likely to be supporters of the free software movement so they'd probably want the Linux Foundation to promote freedom as well, but instead of promoting freedom the Linux Foundation is actively contributing to a project which is designed to restrict peoples' freedoms and Bryan Lunduke is rightfully outraged.

Now why am I talking about this? Despite being a Linux user I've never cared about anything that the Linux Foundation has done and I've never even considered donating to it (I'm sure I may have offended someone by saying that but this is a free operating system and I can do what I want, if you want to be telling people what they can and can't do go buy a Mac). I'm talking about this because there is potential for this sort of thing to happen an any sort of organization. As non-profits grow and age their focus expands and changes, as they win battles they find new ones, as they loose battles they find new fronts, and when they hit walls they find new projects to work on and the danger is that these new battles, fronts, and projects may be incompatible with the organization's original vision.

Greenpeace is a great example of this. When Greenpeace was founded its focuses were on promoting the welfare of both humans and the environment, its founders' first big action together was protesting nuclear bomb testing which is something that benefited both the green and the peace. But as time went by they began advocating for things that had much more to do with green than peace and now they actively advocate for things which would harm humans in the name of protecting the environment. We should be in harmony with our environment, this was a part of Greenpeace's original message, we should not be sacrificing ourselves for it.

The NRA is another organization that millions of people donate to so that they can advocate for the protection of our God given right to bear arms. But people who actually pay attention to gun laws in America will realize that despite all its money and support the NRA has not been effective at all and it is smaller organizations like the FPC who are actually putting forth the work to get results. The larger an organization becomes the harder it is for it to get stuff done. You wouldn't want to donate to an organization which doesn't seem to do anything productive with your money.

There is also of course the issue of where you shop. You wouldn't want to spend thousands of dollars shopping at a store only to see that store turn around and donate millions of dollars to some cause that you don't support. Of course we occasionally put into situations where we have no choice but it is important to exercise our choice when we have one.

A few years ago a guy I knew decided he wanted to join the union that most of his coworkers were a part of so he submitted whatever paperwork he needed to but the union didn't seem to be in any rush to actually make him a member. A few weeks later he received something in the mail saying something along the lines of: "The such and such union supports Joebob Dingleberry for State Senate". My friend didn't support Joebob Dingleberry and was outraged that some of his union dues would have been sent to support this candidate. He got himself out of that union as quickly as he could.

We live in a world filled with people fighting for good and for evil, it is of course up to you to find out what that good and evil is but we need to make sure that we are not unintentionally support those who fight for evil. I advise against donating to any non-profit organization which is not a religious organization or a political candidate you plan on voting for, but if you do do it make sure that you understand where your money is actually going first. We'd hate to see our money fighting on the side of evil when we sent it out to do good.

There was one day while I was in high school where everyone showed up to school and the school had no power, lightning had struck a part of the school's system severely damaging it. The building still had emergency power so there was still enough light to see and if I remember correctly teachers were still able to turn on their computers to access any lesson plans they had saved on there. But of course projectors weren't an option, nothing could be printed and the only way to access the internet was through mobile data which was still slow and expensive back then. This all was laid on top of the fact that everyone was stuck in a building of smelly whiny teenagers with no air conditioning.

We endured our first period classes but midway through our second class everyone was sent home. We never really were given a good reason as to why it took administration so long to make the decision to send us home, some people speculated that it was because teachers couldn't take attendance without their computers, others think they may have been forced to by the district, or maybe they had to convince the district to let them, and a few others were convinced that they sent everyone home because they were sick of complaints about there bing no air conditioning.

And while I don't like being out of the loop I guess it really doesn't matter what the actual reason for the delay or decision was because the fact that the decision was made is the interesting thing. With the exception of computer based classes there is noting taught within a high school that should require the internet or even electricity, but yet my school's instruction was brought to a halt by a simple lightning strike. I was in classrooms that had fifteen hundred dollars worth of textbooks laying in them which sat untouched as teachers couldn't take out a piece of paper to write down who showed up to class that day. Sure teaching without electricity is undesirable but it is certainly not impossible, the single room log cabin schoolhouse still stands in my mom's hometown which stands as a testament to this fact.

It was not that long ago when electricity was considered a luxury, it didn't reach the town that my grandma grew up in until she was eleven (and she's still alive), there are also many parts of the world where electricity is a luxury. Contrary to popular belief it is popular to live without electricity people did it for thousands of years and there are millions of people around the world who still do, and it is especially possible to live without the internet, sometimes I wish I did.

This is not the first time I've written on this topic and I wouldn't be surprised if it is not the last either. The reason I write about this is to that we can try to humble ourselves. Most of us live in an environment filled with first world problems and a lot of us seem to have forgotten how insignificant those problems are in the grand scheme of things. Having lived in a third world country I get tired of hearing people whine endlessly about simple things like flight delays, spotty wifi, and an hour or two without power, all of these things are insignificant in the grand scheme of things and complaining about them changes nothing and only makes you a less enjoyable person to be around. Things like these are not the end of the world and are often times great opportunities to reflect on things.

Over the past year or two I have slowly accumulated a bit of knowledge on this topic although I do not claim to be an expert. In fact I've been a skeptic of crypto for a long time and I have never directly invested in any form of cryptocurrency. I have however accumulated small amounts of LBC and BAT through my use of Odysee and Brave and I have recently set up a Monero wallet so that I can start accepting donations in that form. I have yet to be completely cured of my skepticism but as I learn more about it and as I watch the world seem to get worse I get more and more convinced that seriously getting into cryptocurrency may be a good idea, but that is of course a decision that we all must come to ourselves after we have educated ourselves on the topic. I plan to tell you what I know so that you can start that education process.

Blockchain Technology

Blockchain is one of those words that gets thrown around a lot but it very rarely defined, to really understand what the big deal is with cryptocurrency it is important to understand what a blockchain is. To oversimplify it at first a blockchain is a data structure quite similar to the basic linked list data structure. In programming a linked list is made up of individual nodes which contain a piece of data and the address of the next node in the list (called a pointer), searching for items in a linked list is quite slow since each node must be visited individually and in order to progress through it. I guess it can be compared to an episode of Blue's Clues where each clue there gives you information regarding whatever you are trying to figure out that episode and information regarding the location of the next clue.

Blockchains have the same basic functionality as a linked list but they accomplish it in a much more secure and inefficient way. Unlike nodes in a linked list, blocks in a blockchain contain three things, a piece of data, a hash which is based off of that data, and the hash of th previous block on the chain. Hashes are another relatively basic computer science concept. A hashing algorithm takes in a piece of data and assigns a hash to it (usually a number). For example if we were to take my first name and plug it into a simple hashing algorithm which generated a hash by assigning each letter a number between 1 and 26 then adding them up we would get the number 31 as our hash. Hashes are generally used to make things easy to search for but blockchains use them in a different manner. Blockchains use hashes as a security mechanism, if a piece of data is changed on a particular block its hash will change and will no longer match the hash stored on its adjacent block so it will be clear that that the data on that block had been tampered with. Once a piece within a block in a blockchain it cannot be altered or deleted.

Interestingly the idea of a blockchain came about in 1991 but it was not until the emergence of Bitcoin in 2009 when anyone actually realized a use for it. When all transactions of a currency are stored on a blockchain it is impossible for any of that currency to be forged or stolen, making a blockchain based currency (which all cryptocurrencies are) more secure than any other form of exchange in history.

Decentralization

Another vital part of what makes most cryptocurrencies superior to traditional forms of currency is the fact that they are not governed by a single entity. After the first world war the German government foolishly thought that it could solve its problems by printing money but instead this only caused inflation to the point where it was more economical for a family to burn money for warmth than it was to them to use an entire stack of it to buy a loaf of bread, this same thing has happened in dozens of countries since then Venezuela being among the most recent. Unfortunately not everyone has been very good at learning from history, not even America seeing that a quarter of all dollars printed in US history were printed in 2020. If governments are going to keep making these same mistakes we cannot trust them to look over something as important as our means of exchange.

Anyone can download the full blockchain of any good cryptocurreny and work to verify it and many thousands (possibly millions) of people around the globe already have. In most cases this is what crypto mining is, the repeated verification of the blockchain, in order to ensure security the hashes for cryptocurrency blockchains are deliberately hard to calculate, this is why beefy hardware is a requirement for mining.

Of course because anyone can download a currency's blockchain anyone can also edit it and if they are careful with it they can do it in such a way that it wouldn't be noticeable if you are only looking at that version of the blockchain. This would make this version of the blockchain different from others and when two blockchains are in conflict they must be compared to see which of the two is correct, this this comparison is judged through a process (in most cases) is judged through a process known as proof of work which will basically just give priority to whichever version of the blockchain has been mined on the most.

Now I am aware that I am no expert on this topic, I know the workings of a blockchain quite well but when it comes to achieving decentralization no two coins are completely alike, for example some use proof of stake rather than proof of work and then there is chia which is a whole different thing and there is probably something in here that I got wrong that will cause some nerd to send me an email nitpicking all the things I got wrong. Unless you plan on developing a cryptocurrency it is not as important for us to understand how different coins achieve decentralization as it is for us to understand how blockchains ensure security.

With a centralized currency like the US Dollar, if the government were to send you a check of $1400 then you would have no way of knowing weather or not it was printed yesterday, with a decentralized blockchain based currency you can be sure that whatever money is sent to you is real.

The Value of Currency

The main reason that crypto has become popular is that several currencies have been going to the moon lately. If I had a time machine I'd certainly go back a year and tell myself to dump everything I could into DOGE or something stupid like that, I'd be rolling in money right now had I done that back then, but as it is with all investments of that nature we can't see into the future and juggling money back and forth between different currencies is akin to gambling just like putting it on the stock market is. In most cases it is safer than throwing your money into a slot machine but just like a slot machine you're not guaranteed to get your money back.

The value of anything is really only what someone else is willing to give you for it. Sure you could claim that your 1996 Ford Ranger with faded paint is worth $3000 and you may see others with the same price tag, but it is not worth $3000 if nobody actually buys it from you for $3000. The day when nobody is willing to give you money in exchange for your Bitcoin then it is worthless. The day when you will no longer be able to buy a loaf of bread without a backpack full of $100 bills the dollar is worthless. The day when gold is only viewed as a shiny rock is the day that it is worthless.

All forms of money have the potential to become worthless. We all need money in some form if we are going to be able to provide for our needs, but as we seek to get money we must seek to also understand the root of money so that we will know how to meet our needs when money fails. If you plan to get into cryptocurrency I hope you do it because you are investing in the technology and truly believe in the future that it could provide rather than to make a quick buck.

Investing in the right coin

There are hundreds of different coins and currencies that one can chose to invest in but there is really only one that matters because it is the only one actually usable as a currency and the only one that is actually being used as a currency and El Salvador got it wrong because it's not Bitcoin, it's not Etherium either, and it certainly isn't DOGE. Monero is the only one that matters because it is the only one that is actually private.

This statement comes at a surprise to many people, maybe they thought the term crypto in cryptocurrency meant that it was encrypted, or maybe they remember that for years Bitcoin was only used by criminals buying drugs on the dark web, but in reality (and as we've already discussed) every Bitcoin transaction is stored on the blockchain and can be viewed by anyone, the same is true of every other currency save Monero and a few others. Monero is the only coin which we should even consider using because of it's inbuilt privacy through the use of ring signatures and because of its lack of large transaction fees which plague other coins. I won't go too in depth on it (you can look here if that is what you want) but I'll briefly elaborate on these two points.

Privacy is Important

Many people today have willingly forfeited their privacy to a number of companies and governments and have been completely desensitized to the loss of their privacy. This is not the time and place for me to convince them to undo that I am here today to make sure they don't make their situation worse.

Imagine a world where everyone could see everyone else's transactions, there is no end to the terrible things that could happen:

• When you are looking for a new job your potential employer could look at your transaction history and see what churches and political organizations you donate to and they can discriminate against you based off of that information.
• A stalker could lookup any transactions you make and figure out what stores you shop at and when so that they can find you there and try to hurt or kidnap you or your children.
• A psychopath looking to commit a mass shooting could simply lookup the transactions that have recently taken place at the local gun store and determine who has recently bought guns and ammo so they will know where to steal those things from.

Yes we already live in a world where so much of what we do is being tracked, but for the most part that data is inaccessible to the general public, the world would be a much worse place if a non-private currency like Bitcoin was adopted. There are of course ways to use Bitcoin privately but most people will not put in the work to go this route and will stick with the default settings on life. With Monero privacy is the default option so the world will not be put into this kind of danger.

Transaction Fees

Transaction fees are things that most normal people rarely have a reason to think about until they get into crypto but transaction fees have been around us our whole lives. If you run a business and accept debit and credit card payments then you'll already know that about 3% of the money in those transactions are taken by whatever company is processing your payments (and you should also know that it is illegal to try and compensate for this in any way) because it takes resources to process transactions.

The same is true of processing cryptocurrency transactions except rather than being a fee taken out of the money the person at the receiving end of the transaction gets it is a fee placed on top of the spender and this fee is not based off of how much money is being processed rather it is based off of how much data is being put onto the blockchain by the transaction which relatively constant for any amount of money being spent. (In most cases the money in these fees are how crypto-miners get paid) Because of the way the Bitcoin, Etherium, and many other blockchains are built and managed, it often costs $10 just to spend $5 and because of this many people believe that these currencies are not suitable for transactions under $1000. Monero's blockchain is managed in a way that makes transaction fees this large unnecessary.

The people who actually use cryptocurrency as a currency use Monero, a lot of people will have large amounts saved up in other coins like Bitcion and Etherium since these coins do hold value, but when they want to spend it they either convert it into cash or Monero because their developers have failed at making their currency actually usable as a currency, these now act more like stocks than anything else.

Creating a Wallet

The biggest mistake that people make when getting into crypto is not generating their own wallet and instead relying on crypto exchange services like Binance, or worse a stock exchange service like Robinhood which won't even let you spend your currency as a currency. Of course crypto exchange services are necessary for purchasing crypto and exchanging it with other forms of it but you shouldn't use them for any other purpose since you don't really have complete control over that wallet. Remember how Robinhood prevented users from buying Game Stop stock back in January? Crypto exchange services have the potential to do the same sort of thing with your money, you should minimize the amount of time your money spends within these kinds of wallets. (Plus if you are using Monero these services completely contradict the whole idea of a private coin)

Generate your own wallets on your own hardware for all different currencies that you plan on holding, this is a quite simple thing to do, here is a video on how to generate a Monero wallet and making wallets for other types of cryptocurrencies follow a similarly simple process, just make sure you understand what you are doing and that your computer hasn't been compromised while you do it.

Addressing my Skepticism

As I mentioned at the beginning of this article I've been skeptical of cryptocurrency for a long time. If you had missed that part and read the rest of this that statement may have come as a surprise since I seemed to write this from the point of view of someone more excited about this topic, and maybe that's true I may not yet be willing to admit that my opinion on crypto has changed but regardless of my or your opinion is it is important for us to know about crypto and for us to hear some arguments against it.

My main concern when it comes to the adoption of crypto is that it signals the abolishment of cash. Cash is the currency of the poor, and when I say this I'm not talking about the poor as in families on welfare, I'm talking about people with nowhere to sleep but the street and I'm talking about people who live in countries where children have to hold on to their pencils because their parents can't afford to buy them a new one and go home to have only rice to eat for dinner. Because of their extreme poverty these people barely contribute to the global economy but this does not discount them from being people. Adopting Monero over traditional currency might benefit you and me but I'm not sure how such a thing would affect these people. Of course it is important to remember that these are among the most versatile people on the planet, and at the end of the day we all have to try to do what is best for us, but it is still something worth thinking about.

Of course Boomers are another issue, these are people who could definitely benefit from using crypto but they would refuse to learn. None of my grandparents ever learned how to use a credit card (I have to swipe or insert it for them when I'm with them) and none of them can bother to remember a good password. Of course these things are not unique to my grandparents, remember Donald Trump's Twitter password was "MAGA2020!" while he was the President of the United States. And when we look at the average age of America's congress (as well as the governing bodies of many other countries) we see that a lot of powerful people fall into the demographic of people who barely know how to use an iPhone.

Then of course there is the question regarding power outages. We've seen over the past year or so that even the great state of California, whose economy is larger than that of all but a handful of countries, struggles to keep the lights on, and in states like Texas which provide the majority of the country with oil, the grid is not built to withstand all types of weather. How can a currency reliant on electricity function when electricity is hard to find? And what about internet access? I've lived in cities that didn't have internet, and I'm not talking about the 90s because I'm not old enough to remember that. Cryptocurrency is undoubtably more secure than cash but it is not as versatile.

Of course these sorts of situations are ones where figuring out how to spend money may not be as important as saving it, we have to have our priorities straight especially in these times as do those of us to whom crypto may not be accessible have to all the time. The future may prove me a fool for being a crypto skeptic for as long as I have been and it seems like subconsciously I'm no skeptic at all. With the current state of the economy I'd probably be throwing some money into crypto if I had the money to do it, the people who are doing that right now aren't doing it because they anticipate the value crypto to go up, but rather the dollar to go down. But of course these are all decisions for you to make, I'm just here to help you learn what you need to learn to make those decisions and to point you to the things that you need to consider more.

So the question becomes "What are we supposed to do about this?" There is really noting we can do to fight these hackers but there are things which we can do to make sure that hacks like these and other unforeseen events don't terribly disrupt our lives. Preparedness is of course the most important thing we can strive for when major utilities are knocked out or at least become hard to obtain, we should have enough food, water, and fuel stored to last us in an emergency. But of course not every disaster will be a crisis at that scale. The meat hack really didn't threaten anyone's life but it still proved to be an inconvenience to many people.

Shopping Local

With the system as fragile as it is we need to strive to become less reliant on it. I've talked in the past about avoiding popular software and the same concepts I talked about there apply to supply chains as well, as they grow to be used by more and more people they become a bigger target for disaster. When it comes to power and fuel we have little choice in who we get it from, but when it comes to things like food there is really no reason for us to be reliant on a large corporation because they are the ones who are vulnerable.

We all should shop local when possible, a local supply chain is much more robust and environmentally sustainable than one that stretches a continent is. The grocery store that I buy most things at is a local one, they usually sell three or four different types of onions I used to always buy red onions which were about 70 cents a pound a year and a half ago back when the world was normal but now that gas is 30 to 60 percent more expensive around the country (when there isn't a shortage) the price of red onions has risen to $1.75 a pound two and a half times what it used to be, and the onions that used to be 60 cents a pound are now about $1.60 a pound, but interestingly the onions that used to be 50 cents a pound have only risen to 60 cents a pound. I haven't verified this but I think it is safe to assume that the onions which stayed cheap were the onions which were sourced locally since these are by far the cheapest onions in town and the fact that they are at the local grocery store.

Milk is another interesting thing here. There is a dairy headquartered about 45 minutes from where I live and it has a decent number of cows. If we lived in a world that made sense this dairy would be the main provider of milk and cheese in the area with a bit of competition from smaller ones in the area. But of course we don't live in a world that makes sense, if I walk into the Walmart here I will see a few hundred gallons of milk for sale but not one gallon that was sourced from the local dairy, instead they sell milk that was trucked in from the other side of the country. All the local stores and gas stations carry their milk, but in the best case it only accounts for 15% of what is on the shelf and this is sad, we should have pride in the places that we live and feel obligated to help our neighbors succeed.

There is no reason for us to be reliant on people hundreds or even thousands of miles away from us for our basic needs. The people who run the global economy seem to be discouraging self-reliant communities this is a mistake and we should resist it where we can. Shop local by going to locally owned stores and make excuses to go to farmers markets whenever you can. Every dollar you spend locally is a dollar spent strengthening your community rather than being thrown away to some corporation who doesn't care about you.

There are a handful of things I could do to fix this issue. The simplest option for me would be to simply move my RSS feed to the directory that all my posts are in but that would cause quite a bit of confusion and inconvenience on your end since you probably don't want to have to go through the work of changing my link in your RSS reader. Another similar option for you would be to move all of my posts into the directory where my RSS feed is, but while that does sound easy it would create quite a big mess since I'd probably have to edit every page on my website to make sure all the relative links were updated.

The best solution that I could find is to change all the links within the content portions of my RSS feed, of course using vim this is not that hard of a task, I have already fixed past posts and will try to remember to make this edit to future posts before putting them on my RSS feed. However it is important to realize that I may forget to do this sometimes and that the most accurate and up-to-date versions of my content (this is obviously also the only version I remember to test the links on) will be the version you see through your web browser rather than your RSS reader so if you find broken links here in the future I will apreciate it if you let me know but it is also not the end of the world, just open the post in your broswser to find the working links.

This post however is only viewable here since it does not apply to people not following this RSS feed.

Death is of course a reality that we all must face we cannot avoid it, but with that being said we should not give ourselves or others countdowns towards it. Consider the actor Chadwick Boseman, in 2016 he was diagnosed with colon cancer but he only told his close friends and family about the diagnosis, so when the cancer finally took him in 2020, when he was only 43, the world was shocked. Boseman did many great things in his last four years of life, he appeared in great movies, gained fans, raised money for cancer research, and even won a few awards. Because his cancer diagnosis was kept private Chadwick Boseman was given many great opportunities which he took advantage of, I am nearly positive that he would have gotten none of those opportunities had people seen him as someone marked for death rather than an ordinary man.

Going back to Joel Salatin, I find a choice he made as a result of reflecting on his father's last years of life quite interesting and something worth thinking about. With the exception of the occasional need for stitches and dental work, Joel Salatin has not visited a doctor since his father's diagnosis. Salatin does not want to be marked for death like his father was, nor does he want the burden of having to hide it like Boseman did.

Of course Salatin lives an incredibly healthy lifestyle filled with a good diet and plenty of exercise and void of processed food and laziness, frankly there is really no reason for Salatin to go to the doctor. The same cannot be said for most of us, it is disgusting that we call things like soda, margarine, fake meat, and high-fructose corn syrup food, the word garbage is a better word for these things. If we don't eat garbage we shouldn't have to go to the doctor because we'll be eating the food that our bodies were designed to eat.

In this article Salatin points out that, "'I'm sick and I can't help it' is more common than 'I'm sick and it's my fault so let's make the changes necessary for me to get well.'" I know several people who claim to be concerned about their future health because some bad disease runs in their family but they'll go ahead and drink 32 ounces of soda every day anyways then be surprised when a doctor tells them they have cancer or heart disease or diabetes or something like that. Yes, I know that genetics often plays a role in these sorts of diseases so it is possible for them to run in the family independent of diet but I'd be willing to bet that poor health decisions are really what runs in the family. Unfortunately the food and drug industries seem to be spending more time enabling poor health decisions than they are discouraging them. The burden falls on us to make sure our friends and family are making good decisions when it comes to their health.

Nobody likes going to the doctor, and nobody likes being the recipient of a death sentence from a doctor. All of us should already know what we need to do do avoid these things, the hard part is actually doing it. And of course if you've already received a death sentence, don't act like it, don't be a pessimist, don't let people treat you differently, and don't give up on trying to be healthier, there are plenty of people who have lived much longer than any doctor thinks they should have.

But what is Ford really giving you for $40,000 here? What is Ford hiding? They were so busy showing off how many different things the Lightning could, that it could have been easy for someone not to realize that they never bothered to mention how long the Lightning's battery would last doing these things. If I were to be driving along with a trailer and a violent bump were to come along and cause the contents of the trailer to hit the wall of the trailer hard enough to crack the steel cage that held the trailer's walls in place, would I be able to abandon my trailer and drive my F150 Lightning 50 miles home to pick up my welder and then drive back to the damaged trailer and weld in some more steel to fix the cracked part then haul my trailer back home just in time to save the contents of my fridge by plugging it into my truck right as an earthquake knocks out power for half a week? While the marketing may make you believe that this truck could easily pull off this miracle, this is simply an impossible feat. If you were to try this there is a very good chance that you would end up stranded because the Ford's battery is not infinite, with an range of only 230 miles the F150 Lightning is incredibly limited in what it can actually accomplish. It is far from the miracle truck that Ford and the whole EV movement would want you to think it is.

It is important to put into perspective how bad that range really is. A base model gas powered F150 costs about $29,000 but on a full tank it can drive over 430 miles, nearly twice the range of the theoretically superior Lightning. It is also important to remember that the 230 mile range of the Lightning is really only achieved when it is under ideal conditions. Ford hasn't given us any data on how far you can haul a trailer with it, how long it can power your welder or keep your food cold, and it hasn't said anything about how extreme weather affects the Lightning's range. The 300 mile range of the upgraded $50,000 is still shorter than the range of my thirty year old Cadillac with a thirsty V8.

In fact talking about the range of an electric car is almost always dishonest. Sure one of these trucks can probably go 230 miles on a single charge but they never will, it is too risky to get the batteries close to dying because a dead battery means calling a tow truck rather than buying a gas can. And even if that weren't the case your range is limited to charging locations rather than actual range. Lets say you have an electric truck with a range of 200 miles and you are taking a 350 mile trip, it takes your truck a half hour to charge and you can average fifty miles an hour while driving, how long should your trip take? Seven hours for driving and thirty minutes for charging, seven and a half hours right? Wrong, the amount of time it takes you to travel 350 miles is dependent on where you can stop to charge, if you are lucky and there is a charging station between mile 150 and 200 then you'd only need to stop once, but if the charging stations are at mile 100 and mile 300 then you will be forced to stop at both making your total trip time eight hours, and thats if you get lucky, it is possible that there aren't any charging stations along the shortest path to your destination so you may be forced to take a 400 mile route rather than the shorter 350 mile route, or what if fast charging is not available at one of the charging stations, a half hour pit stop could turn into a three hour one.

Gas cars don't have this problem because it only takes a few minutes to fill them up and it is hard to find a 50 mile stretch of road that does not have a gas station. Interestingly in California one out of five electric car owners have either replaced their electric car, or plan to replace their electric cars with regular gas powered ones. These people have found that they do not like the added inconvenience of constantly having to find a place to charge and wait rather than being able to fill up and go. And remember, electric cars have yet to become mainstream and affordable, that statistic is not one in five average people, that statistic is one in five early adopters of electric vehicles, these are people who went out of their way to get an electric car, imagine how high that ratio would be if it were regular people being forced to deal with these inconveniences, I wouldn't be surprised if it became nine out of ten. Think about it, the American government gives people who buy electric cars $7,500 via a kickback, and many other countries do the same, why should any logical person expect a product which the government pays them to buy to be any good?

If you'd like to read more about the Ford F150 Lightning ridiculousness then I recommend this article. The guy who wrote that came to conclusions similar to mine plus he did more research (so I got to steal some numbers from him). Anyways I hope you never fall for the scam of an electric car, they are practical for only a very small number of use cases, and especially don't buy a Ford F150 Lightning.

The good feeling that came from getting everything done in the morning did not surprise me, I've been exposed to the benefits of being a morning person my entire life since my dad is one. Although he doesn't have to, he will often go to work at seven in the morning, and when he has a lot more work to do than usual he'll chose to go into the office around four in the morning rather than staying late. It makes a lot of sense to do this, your brain is much more ready to work in the morning than it is at night and when you are working late at night all your body wants is to go to bed so you won't be nearly as productive regardless of how determined you are to get your work done, the project I did this morning only took me an hour but had I done it at night instead it is quite possible that it could have taken me two hours like I had expected. Sure it may be a bit harder to get started when you do things in the morning, but once you are up you are up, the same cannot be said for working at night where you run the risk of falling asleep at your desk.

And really the best benefit of having things done in the morning is that once you finish you have the day to do whatever you want, you don't have the work you need to do looming over you as you go throughout your day. Over the past few months I have been making an effort to eat healthier I think it may be time for me to make an effort to wake up at a healthier, more productive time as well, I already sleep with my blinds open, it is time to start rising with the sun, or even before it.

I live in a state where there are no longer any government mask mandates but of course most businesses have a sign at the door stating that you can't come in without a mask. Very few people in my town actually care about wearing a mask, those people will of course comply with these rules and there are also many more people who will comply just because they have gotten used to it, however a large portion of the population of my town don't care and will walk into these businesses without a mask on (I am one of these people) and most businesses here don't do anything about it since a business would certainly loose a significant amount of money if they were to kick out (or even just inconvenience) half of their customers.

A few days ago a deplorable individual on the local confessions page I follow stated that they work at a particular type of restaurant in town and they are mad that people ignore the sign on the door that says masks are required so this person spits into the drinks of all the people who come in without a mask on. A few days later (after being told that they were destined to get fired) they posted another confession claiming that they have yet to be caught and they do it about ten times a day. A drink with an employee's spit in it obviously fits the United States legal definition of an adulterated food and within my state adulterating food in this way is a misdemeanor crime punishable with up to six months in prison or a $500 fine. While this individual's second post shows that they are quite clever, they are not very good at being anonymous, anyone can be found if you have the right people looking, and since there are only four or five of the particular type of restaurant I am seriously considering notifying the owners of each of these restaurants so that this deplorable individual can be found, fired, and criminally prosecuted. And I definitely won't be buying anything from any of these businesses ever again. I'm no germaphobe, but I don't take the idea of adulterated food lightly.

The Issue

Now I'm sure that this deplorable and dumb individual would say something along the lines of, "well you won't have to worry about me spitting in your drink if you'd just wear a mask," and while this would technically be true with the case of this individual, it is not the case everywhere. There is no way of knowing when you will end up at a restaurant where one of the workers may intentionally spit in your drink and you will never know why they did it. They could spit in your drink if they are offended by you not wearing a mask or they could spit in it if they're offended that you're wearing one. They could spit in it if they don't like your Trump hat, or maybe the Bernie Sanders button on your backpack. Maybe they don't like you because you're white, or maybe because you're black, or maybe because you're straight, or maybe not straight, or maybe it is because you look like their neighbor, or maybe it is because you're their neighbor. We live in a world of hate and while we all should try our best to make our world one filled with love it is important to recognize where we are. We live in a world where large corporations are working to keep us fearful, and angry, and hateful towards one another ans we have no way of knowing when we will end up in a restaurant where the server or the cashier or the cook has been motivated to believe that we are their enemy and will end up spitting in our drink. I realize that fear is the mind killer, but with the state the world is in today I believe that this may be a healthy paranoia.

In fact I really don't trust any sort of food that I don't cook myself, even if I may never have someone spit in my drink there are plenty of other ways that my food can become contaminated. Masks of course are a big issue, we exhale lots of germs all the time, and while the corona virus has been proven to not spread easily on surfaces there are plenty of other germs and other things that we exhale that do, I do not understand why anyone would want something that collects all of these germs on their face (this is one of the reasons I don't wear them when I can avoid it), and the thought of someone wearing one of these while preparing my food makes me feel uncomfortable especially considering the fact that people touch their germ covered masks all the time because they constantly have to adjust it, or scratch their cheek, or brush their beard underneath it to make it more comfortable. Masks are fine for doctors and nurses to use because they are disciplined in not touching their face while wearing them and they change them regularly. The same cannot be said about the pot smoking MacDonald's worker who drives to work in their Dorito stained car and pulls out the mask they've never washed from the glove compartment they've never cleaned before walking into work fifteen minutes late. And then there's the people at restaurants who wear gloves, someone working in a kitchen will touch gross things all the time and they will feel it if they have bare hands so they will wash their hands often, someone wearing gloves may take a half hour to realize that their gloves are dirty and think to wash their hands and replace them. (I went out to eat with family last night and I seriously considered asking the waitress who refilled my water to take her gloves off)

Again I am not a germaphobe but I've spent a lot of time around them, the concerns I have about masks and gloves were concerns brought up by Donald Trump who is enough of a germaphobe to stop an interview so that he can kick his own chief of staff out of the room for coughing (and realize that this was pre-covid). There are of course several other places that food can be contaminated and, while that is a topic for another day, I will say that I've read enough Joel Salatin to have to put myself into a state of cognitive dissonance whenever I buy meat (since I can't afford grass fed meat from local farms).

In fact I may have distracted from my point by ranting about other ways that our food can be contaminated, I'm not even afraid that virus that is floating around and you shouldn't be either. The sad reality that I'm trying to communicate here is that we live in a world where we cannot walk into a random restaurant and fully trust that we will be given an unadulterated product. The hate present in today's society has become prevalent enough that any average person could be harmed by it. We should not participate in this sort of hate, instead we should follow the teachings of our Savior and learn to love our enemies and to do good to those who may seek to hurt us.

But with my interest in computer generated art I've wondered how to craft color schemes, or rather how I could teach a computer to generate one. So I went and researched a bit of color theory to find a mathematical approach to this problem. Keeping in mind Galileo's quote, "Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so," I was sure that there was some good way to measure color and some way to manipulate those measurements to craft pleasing color schemes out of any color.

HSV Color

There are actually several ways to measure color, RGB is probably the most common because it is how most image files store the data of each individual color and it is quite convenient for computers since that is the format most similar to how computer monitors actually display images (and some say that that is how our eyes pick up color as well, I haven't put enough research into that claim though) but it is hard for us to manipulate easily. Hexadecimal colors are also quite nice for computers since it is really just a different format for RGB that is even harder for us humans to manipulate.

I found that when it comes to mathematically manipulating color to find colors that work well together, HSV is the best form of measurement (HSL is also incredibly similar to HSV and is just as useful). The H stands for the hue, S for saturation, and V for lightness value (or something like that). When we are looking to find colors that work well with each other the hue is our main concern, and in this format it is very workable, imagine a color wheel, with a standard HSV or HSL format H is a value between 0 and 360 which represents the degree on the color wheel where that particular hue appears (red being at 0, green at 120, and blue at 240). When we know the position where a hue lies on a color wheel we can easily do some calculations with that to find other colors that work well with that particular color.

Types of Color Combinations

I first came across the following concepts in a user interface textbook and I looked further into these as I researched how to manipulate color. I found that all of these things are things that artists talk about, and while artists aren't known to be fans of math the following color combinations are completely based in math and artists are completely oblivious to it, everything I read that was written by an artist didn't mention the math at all (and as a result their explanations were incredibly vague) while everything I read written by an engineer or scientist had understandable explanations based in simple math. If any artists are reading this I suggest you spend some time learning the math that will help you in your field.

Monochrome

A monochrome color palette is the easiest to explain, it is simply a palette that consists of multiple tints and shades of a single hue. In the HSV format the only parts that need be manipulated are the saturation and light values. (Note that in the above example, along with all the other ones I will show here, I only changed the light values and left everything at full saturation).

Analagous Colors

Analagous color palettes consist of colors of similar hues, the simple way of creating analagous color palettes is to take one hue as a base then move 30 degrees in either direction, those three hues will then be what you use as you can be free as always to manipulate the saturation and light.

Complimentary Colors

Complimentary colors are colors which lie opposite each other on the color wheel, meaning that you just need to go 180 degrees around the wheel from the hue that you started with to get your compliment hue. It is important to note that the color wheel we are working with here is not the same as the color wheel you may have learned about in grade school, it is based off of red, green, and blue, rather than red, yellow, and blue. This is why (as we see above) yellow is considered the opposite of blue here rather than orange.

With a complimentary color palette it is best to have one of the two hues be dominant by taking up around 80% of the content.

Triadic Colors

A triadic color palette consists of hues which all lie an equal 120 degrees from each other, splitting the color wheel into thirds. Artists will explain this concept by saying it's like drawing a triangle on the color wheel, this is a terribly imprecise way of explaining this process.

Tetradic Colors

Tetradic color palettes are conceptually similar to triadic ones, only here the hues are separated by 90 degrees splitting the wheel into fourths. Again, artists would say this is like drawing a square on the color wheel which again is a terrible explanation.

Split Complimentary Colors

Of these examples I find split complimentary palettes the most interesting. To get one of these palettes take your base hue and go 150 degrees around the wheel in either direction. This will give you two hues that are 30 degrees off from the hue that is complimentary to your starting hue.

Combining Color Palettes

Now of course we would rarely want to limit ourselves to only a three or four hues, often times we need more options than that, especially when doing something like designing a website. Luckily you can combine concepts from these six styles of color palettes to make a palette that is large enough for your needs without spending hours of trial and error trying to find more colors that fit just right. And like any good programmer I wrote a program that does this automatically. Here are some examples of results from my program:

All of the S and V values of these colors are completely random, but the hues are based off of each other. The second and third hues are the split compliments of the first, the fourth and fifth hues are analagous to the second one and the sixth hue is analagous to the first, then the last hue is the same as the third but the saturation and lightness are different. It's all math, not wizardry, and I'm sure there exists a multitude of similar applications of this that will make similarly coherent color palettes, the above examples are of course ones that were among my favorite but every palette that my program has output is a combination of colors that work well together. (It is important to note that I didn't come up with this particular way to combine the different types of palettes, I copied it from here I just did it with python and random colors rather than photoshop and hand-picked ones)

The code that I used to randomly generate the above palettes along with the code for the examples above can be found here feel free to play around with it or just see what other palettes it spits out.

Computers are going to replace people in a lot of fields, don't become obsolete.

The Colonial Pipeline Hack

I figure one of the best ways to demonstrate this would be by looking at a current event. A few nights ago a rather excitable friend of mine suggested that I top off the gas in my car because he'd heard that gas prices were going to go up, although he didn't really understand why. Before he had told me this I, through my casual browsing of the internet, had already come across the news that Colonial, which is an American oil company, had had a part of their business data hacked and had shut down their pipeline out of caution. I had also already learned that Colonial's pipeline went from Texas and provided gas to much of the East coast so supply of gas on the East coast would be much lower so the price of gas was going to spike up (simple supply and demand).

Now did I rush to go fill up my car with gas that night? No I didn't because I don't live in the Eastern United States, I told my friend that all of that stuff was happening on the East coast and that those events should have absolutely no impact on gas prices here on the other side of the country, I don't even think the gas here comes from Texas. (Also when you start to hear that the price of gas or something is going up it is already too late) I told him that I didn't expect gas prices here would change at all, and while I was of course prepared to be wrong I didn't worry and a few days later I was proven right as gas prices have continued to remain stagnant after stabilizing back in mid-February.

I was able to see this and predict that the Colonial hack wouldn't affect me because I came across all my information without the influence and theater of the news. My fact's weren't polluted with the opinions and narrative of the media, instead I was able to form an educated, rational and calm opinion on the hack despite not being informed through watching the news. Even now the media continues to talk about the hack and from what it seems 90% of what is being said about it is useless speculation and fearmongering, we already know the everything that we really need to know or ever actually know about it, I could spend some time debunking stuff but that would frankly be a waste of my time.

Focusing on what matters

Ignoring corona virus the three dangers that the news spends the most time talking about are terrorist attacks, hate crimes, and police encounters, but really the top three killers in the world are heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. Why doesn't the media focus on promoting a healthy lifestyle to help prevent these things that kill millions every year rather than focusing on things that only kill a few hundred? Only a small fraction of their time is spent encouraging people to get better physical health and almost no time is spent on things that build our spiritual health. Instead they focus on anger, division and hate.

The stuff the news covers is rarely, if ever, important to your individual life, and that's assuming it's even true. Does it make sense to panic buy gas when the shortage is over a thousand miles away? No. Does is make sense for me to get an experimental shot for a disease I've already had which I have almost no chance of actually dying from? Not really. Does it make sense to pay attention to people who spend more time trying to look smart rather than actually trying to be smart? Not at all.

Watching the news doesn't make you any more informed than the average person, it just tricks you into thinking you are informed through the use of authoritative language, a professional wardrobe, and fancy visuals. Don't fall for that. It takes just as much time to do your own research on a topic to gain an educated opinion on it as it does for you to sit down and mindlessly consoom the news, in fact if you factor in the time you will have to spend figuring out what parts of the news should even be believed then the time investment of doing your own research when necessary is probably smaller.

Shown above is a piece by the early 20th century Dutch painter Piet Mondrian. Mondrian is among the fathers of abstract art along with cubism and his inspirational paintings, like the one above, continue to be studied by aspiring artists and historians to this day as his minimalist paintings marked a turning point in art. The question that many connoisseurs of art began to ask was, "How much can be expressed with little detail?" rather than, "How much detail can we express?" Mondrian must have spent hours making sure he had precisely the right shades of blue, yellow, and red and that he chose exactly the right squares to fill with the given colors so that gallery visitors would be filled with awe and wonder as they interpreted the emotions that he had laid out on that canvas. As we can tell from the sample above, Mondrian was truly a master at his craft.

Wait no, the picture above is not a famous Mondrian piece, it was generated by a computer in under a second using a program that I spent an hour and a half writing for fun the other day. Here are a few more:

In fact here are 100 more, and here's another bunch more set to some music by Bach in a video I made for no reason other than the fact that I could, heck I could write a program to completely automate making videos like that too. (I'd probably only need ten more lines of code)

Computer Generated Art

I'm sure it would not be terribly hard to find someone gullible enough to believe that these are actually genuine Mondrian paintings, all you'd need is someone to claim they have a PHD that speak authoritatively and uses big words and you're set. In fact you'd probably have a harder time finding skeptics these days than believers. Heck you could probably even find people with actual PHDs to play along. I remember either watching a video or reading an article (I wish I could actually find the source to link here and so I could use actual names) where an art professor at a well respected college explained that on the first day of class he would put an image up on the projector and he'd tell them that it was a picture of a painting by one of the famous abstract painters who worked around the same time Mondrian did. He would then give his students a few minutes to analyze the painting and he'd let them explain the emotions and ideas that they felt the artist was trying to convey. After giving his students time to think and time for a few of them to speak, he'd pull out his smock to show his students that the painting they were putting so much effort into analyzing was not a painting at all, but rather it was a picture of his dirty smock.

I don't entirely remember what lesson that professor wanted people to get out of that, but the lesson I got from it was that you can convince just about anyone that just about anything is art. Artists are beginning to become obsolete, this is a topic that I've touched on in the past. It took me less than two hours to write a program that could make more Mondrian imitations in a few minutes than Mondrian himself could have made in his life. And while nobody has invented an oil painting robot yet, it is only a matter of time before some random professor decides to spend the taxpayer dollars he was allocated on building one.

Computer generated art is not the future, it is already here. Minecraft is the world's most popular video game, and while it is still actively being developed it barely employs any artists because the bulk of Minecraft's beautification of it is done with an algorithm. There exist entire Reddit threads dedicated to showing off the beautiful "naturally generated landscapes" of Minecraft. These people are looking at art that was made by a computer rather than a human. Minecraft isn't the only game like this. Several video game developers have ditched the concept of level design and map making and opted to have a computer do it for them, often times procedurally generating a unique world for each individual player to explore.

Unfortunately the fine art community has yet to embrace this, many of these people view Mondrian's work as sacred and the png files that my program outputs as abominations (I wonder what Mondrian himself would think of my program). Their culture, in fact their entire system, is not equipped to handle the future that is already here. Computer generated worlds, images, and personalities are already here, it is only a matter of time before we have good computer generated film and music. The idea that the world's entire entertainment industry could fall into the hands of a few AI overlords doesn't sound all that far fetched. And most people won't even care since they can't tell the difference between a Mondrian painting and a random collage of shapes a computer spat out.

Most people assumed that what he meant by this was that he was going to start his own full blown social media site (and this may have been his original intention). The reaction that many normal people had to this was "Why doesn't he just join Parler?" since Parler is run by conservatives who wouldn't deplatrom him. There were also many less normal people who had a reaction that sounded like, "Why doesn't he just run an instance of some decent federated social media software?" since it is nearly impossible for anyone to be deplatfromed if they do that. Many of these people are confused since they haven't been told the answer to these questions, in case you're one of these people I'll tell you, both of these options suck. Sure Parler is morally superior to Twitter (fun fact: pornography is not a violation of Twitter's rules) and provides the same functionality but it lacks Twitter's ease of use, I know because I used to have a Parler account I barely used it because its UI was terrible. Then federated software wasn't an option because it is too niche, remember we are talking about a man in his 70s whose Twitter password was MAGA2020! and had no two factor authentication, getting Trump to use any sort of federated software is simply out of the question since it is a miracle that he knows how to use his iPhone.

So because Trump was not going to use anything that already existed there were lots of people who were (and still are) quite exited to join Trump's social media platform. It was only a few weeks ago when I was talking to one of these people who refused to believe me when I said that a social media site founded by Trump would inevitably suck. Think about it, Twitter and Facebook have billions of dollars and years of experience, a newcomer is not going to do something better, and this is of course assuming that you see any any value in social media. A Trump social media site was, and always will be, destined to fail.

Now what I, nor the person I was talking to at the time, hadn't realizes was that Trump had already started his own platform, it just wasn't a social media platform like everyone had expected it to be, instead he put a page on his website titled From the Desk of Donald J. Trump where he now posts all of the things that he would have formally tweeted. The first post on this page happened in late March and now that I think about it I was aware of it at the time, but like everyone else I didn't recognize it for what it actually was because it was not the social media platform that everyone expected, instead it was just a platform that Trump needed.

President Trump recognized that free speech doesn't really exist on the internet and that replacing social media with social media doesn't fix the problem so he solved the problem by creating a platform for himself that wasn't trying to act like social media, a platform that was completely his own. He did it right, and while I doubt that anyone connected to Trump has ever visited my website I am quite impressed that the solution they found was the solution to replacing social media that I suggested here months ago. There is really no reason why anyone should be on social media, especially controversial public figures and politicians. Social media, Twitter especially, amplifies hate, we've all heard of a Twitter hate mob but I don't think there has ever been a Twitter love mob. Social media is a place where public figures go to get attacked, no minds are ever changed on social media and no battles are ever won.

I'm glad that Trump now has his own platform, I hope more people start their own as well, I've done it and you should too.