if there’s any medical conspiracy going on, it’s that the effort to destroy trust in the medical establishment is a ploy to promote eugenics and survival of the fittest by modern day Nazis.

Any time there’s a ready meal from the supermarket and for some reason the adhesive is way stronger than the plastic film. You end up with loads of bits of film just sort of stuck to the rim of it. Super annoying.

We’re just smelly sacks of biology like a rat or a lizard who happen to have developed higher reasoning capacity for whatever reason.

As an exercise, try to be conscious about your thought process, write stuff down. When your thought process leads to an action with a consequence or verifiable prediction, consider: did it pan out? Was that because of your thought process or a fluke? If something went wrong then what about your thought process didn’t help you?

This can help you to narrow down stuff like: did a possibility not arise to you, were you biased/overly dogmatic in some way, did you just not know some relevant information or a particular technique that could have helped you? Have you gotten out of practice with something? Was the situation even in your control?

And like wise if it’s good, what can you repeat? Did you apply some good critical thinking rule or something you learned? Are there situations where this wouldn’t have happened this way?

I find it’s impractical to do this for everything but worthwhile doing every so often and sometimes this can call out patterns in your cognitive processes.

Another one on mental clarity: do the apple test. Try to visualise an apple. At some point I struggled with this and got mediocre results but I was able to improve it by doing some visualisation based “meditation”/exercises and employing some techniques like verbally saying or thinking the word “apple” or a description of one and/or focusing on parts of it before attempting to call the whole apple into view. This had some carry over benefits like being able to visualise things in blender in my head better.

It’s still March… 2020

Too real. Not just holidays, weeks and months go by and it’s like “shit when did it get to 2025??”

I no longer feel a sense of unrealised potential for myself I guess. That’s it, I’ve got what I’ve got.

Died eating sea urchins… Yeah that kind of tracks actually.

Not a hamster but when I had gerbils, one had eaten half of the other. Not long afterwards the cannibal developed a severe middle ear infection which killed her even during treatment.

Yep, it makes sense when you consider the real nature of management and why it actually exists.

A rich man starts a company. He hires 12 people under him. He’s working a bit harder than he’d hoped, he’s constantly fielding questions and such but all is well. He needs to hire two more people. This is too many for him to manage directly, so he appoints two people to manage the other twelve as two teams of 6. All is well again.

They expand up to 30 people and suddenly they find the two managers are too stretched again! So another manager has to be introduced. When the company is over about 150 people, we even need multiple layers of management to keep this whole thing afloat as suddenly there are too many managers reporting to the founder or to the managers.

Yet at no point does the person who owns the company agree to give up any real control. If someone sets a budget he doesn’t like, he gives that control of the budget to someone else. Everyone in that hierarchy is acting on behalf of the owners under this arrangement.

The managers are just sat there with the mandate to make employees do more work under ever-increasing resource constraints, in the name of profit maximisation.

The management hierarchy functions as little more than a way of getting the owner’s instructions down to the employees by people who can interpret them as such, and to feed issues back to whatever level has the ability to deal with them (or declare them not an issue, as is often the case).

Oh great, let’s just give Farage and co. a big old back door to spy on us when he inevitably stumbles into power. Can’t see that being abused in any way.

I think there’s a balance, in that if everybody suppressed that speech and refused to take that risk of criticising then those corrupt and powerful state actors would be unchallenged.

They can then become even more powerful and may continue to encroach into private life and speech. While it may be necessary to defend yourself on the one hand, hiding entirely may also present additional dangers.

I’m very much so on this team. Single digit hours are too early, frankly.

Hanlon’s razor. It’s pretty clear some people can be stupid and malicious simultaneously, or will even feign stupidity to hide malice.

A good way is to find a meetup group with some shared interest. It doesn’t really matter what so long as the crowd is good and you know enough to hold a conversation in the subject.