I guess there’s two ways this post could have gone, and it went the way of “you know that sinking feeling that you’re not good enough, you’re right!”
I wrote a book last year for my family. Very few people outside my family will ever read it, but I wrote a book! I’m learning to be my best mediocre self and in so many ways I couldn’t be happier. In fact, thinking about my various personality traits, I think mediocrity is sort of my ideal state. I would probably be less happy/fulfilled if I was more successful.
I’m not sure what the world gets out of it, maybe it keeps you on Tik Tok watching hustle porn? But the ultimate modern counter-cultural fuck you to the system I think is to just be happy without worrying what the world cares about it. And then strive for incremental improvements rather than like dream about that one externally validated accomplishment that will make you happy.
That’s an interesting take, and honestly, there’s a lot of truth to it. The idea that happiness doesn’t have to come from relentless striving is something we don’t hear enough. Finding peace in ‘being your best mediocre self’ is probably healthier than chasing some external validation that never really satisfies.
It’s very confusing me to try and remember which numbers are measured in years vs decades. “Cost of 5 to 11 trillion dollars” without context is confusing.
Also lol good thing he found $100 billion in savings.
Tax bills are usually measured in costs to the debt (the whole lifetime of the law) rather than the deficit (one year). Dunno why; that's just how they do it.
It's especially misleading because the only reason it's not infinite is that the tax cut has a sunset. Nobody thinks of a tax cut as temporary. The cuts in this article are about taxes from his last term which are expiring now.
(By coincidence it would have fallen to his successor if he'd won reelection. It's only because of the split terms that he has to make the case for this tax break again.)
I seem to recall a lot of expectation that Trump would usher in the era of post-neoliberalism and we would be focusing more on improving the lives of everyday Americans and not fighting foreign wars.
But then it seems like there’s a lot of talk of violence and sort of neo-colonialism lately. What’s the dissonance, did I miss this in the zeitgeist or campaigning of the last few years?
He's not trying to stop a war, he's trying to continue one by overtly engaging in ethnic cleansing, and is threatening to start a couple of others with allies. That's the charitable explanation for his actions, anyway. The uncharitable explanation is that he's an idiot.
It’s funny I know two people who did startups, I think I think most fail the way one did, failed to get traction, slowly dissipated and after closing up shop, ended with an offer to joy another company as principal engineer.
As opposed to the other who was largely self funded, had a start of like 8 people who relied on him, kept getting enticed with exits that fell through, that grinded away at his mental health over multiple years until he went full on right wing conspiracy theorist prepper and moved his family to an off grid homestead.
Trump’s funny in that he has a habit of advocating for fairly progressive things and then being corrected by the Republicans around him. I’m pretty sure he ran on universal healthcare in the first election for a short time.
Either way I’m not going to decry a good idea just because of the source but I’m skeptical.
This surprises me. It seems like there’s some level of acknowledgement that this may get in the way of the government being effective, but didn’t Musk sort of literally take a stand that anyone fired for an X post should sue their employer and X would pay for it?
I love this question, but the unfortunate sort of boring answer is that the internet sort of granulized culture so much. This is in general like the shared culture debate of why don’t we talk about tv shows at the water cooler anymore.
I think the 20th century will have a unique significance throughout history because it was a time of such dramatic design / social / economic change, _and_ that that change was documented, by documentation technology that was also sort of signicantly changing by decade. There’s a chance that in 2450AD “eighties music” still refers to music from the 1980’s.
After watching his whole video, I don’t agree with his conclusion but do agree with some of the problems caused by referring to things by generation or based on shared trauma.
Just to play devil’s advocate because why the heck not lol, isn’t the theory here that people are tired of waiting for all the analysis of every chesterton’s fence and we should just act?
I don’t understand your argument, isn’t the whole point of electing an outsider like Musk or Trump that they won’t ask why the fence is there, they’ll just remove it?
First, nobody elected Musk. Second, many of the voters which selected Trump this cycle did so out of frustration with their current situation, primarily the cost of living. Those people didn't want chaos or disregard for the rule of law, they wanted more affordable groceries, rent, and increased wages. They were either uninformed or deliberately misinformed, and we all now have to suffer for their choices. They were imaging that things would go back to how they were during Trump's first term (ignoring the mishandling of the pandemic entirely), not understanding that there is no going back. You can't just reverse prices without causing a deflationary spiral, you don't even want to stop the desired level of inflation (2-3%), because doing so will also damage the economy. You want wages to increase faster to inflation, and over time it will even out. The government could pass regulations which eliminated illegal coordination and price fixing in the rental market, but you can bet every Trump Coin you have that this administration won't do that. They could also pass legislation to incentivize corporations from gobbling up houses all over the country, but again, this administration won't help with that either.
These voters, plain and simple, ignorantly voted against their best interests, and we may never recover from that mistake.
No, we still want the laws to be followed, not blatantly broken and ignored. I don't want millions of people to suffer because these fools have no clue how to run a government, which is very different from a company. Beyond their incompetence, they are raiding the government for their own benefit. It's the doing of Heritage Foundation, trying to replicate what Orban has done in and to Hungary. The oligarchs want things to operate like Russia, they don't care about us. Enough of culture wars, we need class warfare
This guy says he works remotely from a van, who can gets me back to a previous question, are there any concrete case studies of companies that are actually using AI to replace swaths of employees?
There’s a movement in the tech industry which basically is layoffs now, figure out how to replace those with AI shortly after. It’s happening across many/most companies and it’s being done quietly.
I wrote a book last year for my family. Very few people outside my family will ever read it, but I wrote a book! I’m learning to be my best mediocre self and in so many ways I couldn’t be happier. In fact, thinking about my various personality traits, I think mediocrity is sort of my ideal state. I would probably be less happy/fulfilled if I was more successful.
I’m not sure what the world gets out of it, maybe it keeps you on Tik Tok watching hustle porn? But the ultimate modern counter-cultural fuck you to the system I think is to just be happy without worrying what the world cares about it. And then strive for incremental improvements rather than like dream about that one externally validated accomplishment that will make you happy.