Some ahistorical dumbass is going to read this and say "well what about kings?"
You didn't pledge loyalty directly to the king (unless you were important, like nobility.) You pledged to your local Baron; he pledged to the king or to a Duke, who then pledged to the king.
May 29, 2021 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
So Ramit is now arguing with the @B_REInvest@capital_sb crowd about accredited investor status not being worth anything?
I get that he has a book he wants to sell, but man... Talk about taking advantage of the common man's confusion on #investment.
Let me break this down for people.
Accredited investor status is basically "I'm a millionaire, so let me invest in seed round/pre IPO companies like a big boy, with minimal paperwork*."
*You can also qualify by making six figures a year; the exact amount is on the SEC website.
May 28, 2021 • 18 tweets • 2 min read
Let me do an @eigenrobot-style poll thread about feminism and Levirate marriage.
So, is it possible to appropriate Western culture?
Assuming Western #culture exists, it's basically:
May 27, 2021 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Someone tweeted about #dating and reminded me of an utterly weird experience I had several years ago.
I talked to someone who just... didn't make sense.
I would say "give me the confidence of a first year med student who doesn't think anything exists if they can't picture it in their minds" but this was "break from reality" levels of confusion.
Apr 15, 2021 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
The @eigenrobot threadwar about a Chinese girl in Germany saying she's German and Americans who are 1/32 German are not is dumb.
Almost everyone is making comments that make sense to them but they have different ideas of "German."
1. The OP
If you're Chinese and grew up in Germany then when you encounter other Chinese they're consistently going to react with "wow, you're really European!"
So of course, relative to the baseline of an ethnic Han growing up in Shanghai, she thinks "I'm German."
Apr 15, 2021 • 13 tweets • 4 min read
Good thought, doesn't really apply to lifestyle entrepreneurship though.
(Well, it can for the owner - it won't for the COO.)
And it's difficult getting compensated what you're worth by someone on their first venture.
Lichtenstein was extremely responsive to the needs of international corporations and presumably would have been eager to have a world reserve currency if it were not running on Swiss francs. But it had no capacity to do so.
Apr 7, 2021 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
It always intrigues me when people who have discovered that modernity is bad still use "feudal" pejoratively. That is how complete the modernist brainwashing is.
Nope. This is a combination of propaganda and the known psychological effect where the more time you spend on something the more confident you are about it, even when your actual skill level doesn't change.
Teaching as a skill is CAPPED by your social skills.
Most people have ABYSMAL social skills and #mindset: their fundamental approach is geared towards passing as "normal."
Consequently, most teachers, having low social skill, cannot achieve high levels of teaching skill.
Apr 6, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Imagine:
Your ancestors took a massive L and got chased out of their land
You fully feel that pain, that anguish
And instead of working hard to become a badass corporate raider and taking back everything
You whine on video game topics about fantasy worlds.
🤔
#politics
This isn't limited to indigenous people.
Romney would have garnered a lot more respect if, when called out on the depredations of Bain Capital, he had hit back with stories of Mormons getting slaughtered and chased out of places, and said that he wanted to take back everything.
Apr 6, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
I'm not saying it's ALWAYS the case, but most of the time people who post like this simply hate success.
"This new way of making more money than I touch in a year is definitely wrong somehow. I did my 5 minutes of research and it looks like it uses electricity? So it's definitely bad for the environment. Now that I found a reason to reject it I can go back to doing what I'm doing."
Apr 5, 2021 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
"The fact that dating apps are giving alphas a larger share of matings does not bode well for society."
In the short term, no. On the 10,000+ year horizon, occasional bottlenecks where only 10% of the men manage to reproduce are necessary and probably healthy.
1. What truly matters is offspring produced (and raised to adulthood.) Those figures are catastrophically low, to the point where officially encouraging all billionaires to form harems of 500 each would not be enough to turn our abysmal birth - death rates around.
Apr 4, 2021 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
1. Have social skills
A huge part of having social skills is having positive #mindset (and no, that does not mean positive only when nothing goes wrong.)
An expert marksman is to be respected with or without a rifle in his hands, but he sure is immediately useful and more obviously to be respected if he has the rifle.
The same goes for status and social skills.
Mar 28, 2021 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Whatever else may be said of China, I do not think they would station 25,000 troops in a city only to have taxi drivers murdered in broad daylight.
There was a town in China famous for its beautiful lakes, which drew a lot of tourists. This inspired a local gang leader to try to kidnap some foreigners for ransom.
As happens sometimes when conducting international negotiations for large sums of money, the deal fell through.
Mar 28, 2021 • 17 tweets • 4 min read
This kind of thing is honestly why I don't think Chinese dissidents will succeed.
It's not a moral statement. I'm coming at it from a #marketing point of view.
1. You have an EXTREMELY narrow window of attention from the average person and must make a memorable, coherent statement in that time.
What's it gonna be?
"China bad"?
"Don't trust the CCP but trust us, we're not like those other Chinese"?
"Human rights good"?
Mar 28, 2021 • 16 tweets • 4 min read
Rags to riches is nice for status but not power.
In China if you're a bureaucrat long enough you become a Party member, and if you do that well for a decade you become inner circle, and then you can order people killed.
Same guy later in that thread claimed that the Kennedys (who ordered lobotomies and had them covered up) and Clintons (who may or may not have a 50+ body count) don't have REAL aristocratic power.
Sounds to me like they got away with way more than the average feudal lord 🤔
Mar 26, 2021 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
The Ever Given is 200,000 tons of mostly steel. Steel takes 1.4×10^9 J per ton to melt.
The MOAB is 21,000 lbs, containing 18,500 lbs of explosive, with a reported cost of $170k. It has a yield of 4.6 x 10^10 joules.
Theoretically the explosive contents of 2 MOABs could be placed as charges, enabling the military to blast most of the ship up into the air. The wreckage would then rain down outside the canal.
This would cost only $300,000 for materials, and maybe $3 million in labor.
However!
Oct 6, 2020 • 13 tweets • 4 min read
High stakes means people are on the lookout for anything bad.
And honestly, if you get vetoed by one interviewer, you probably didn't vibe with them. That may or may not be "your fault" but you CAN work on being positive and high-energy.
In #biology, anything that increases your odds of offspring is beneficial and anything that decreases it is maladaptive.
The paradigm of "not settling for less" means that most women high earners have a substantially decreased chance of getting married and having kids.
Oct 5, 2020 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
I sometimes wonder if people who rant about "artificial scarcity" were dropped on their heads as children.
SCARCITY IS THE POINT OF SOCIETY.
#statusmatters
Every functional society since the dawn of time has had winners and losers, because a society that cannot assign resources and determine winners and losers is one that doesn't have to be obeyed at all, or in other words, one that is extremely likely to fall apart.
