#it flows SOWELL

[sungie]

OHMYFUCKING GOD WHAT THE HELL WHAT THE HELL

i just ran out of tags . THE DETAILS IN HERE ARE SO SO SO DIVINE AND IM. like this is ur suna. i love ur suna

ALSO UR DIALOGUE IS ALWAYS SUCH A TREAT. U GET IT SO WELL. ITS SO HUMAN AND SO NATURAL. ABD THE TEXTS SPRINKLED IN TO ADD HUMOR AND THAT YOUTHFULNESS IS SO SO SO GOOD

to be loved is to be known | suna rintarou x reader

you're in love with suna. you think suna's in love with someone else. he's not.

slight angst, happy endings, and miscommunications atsumu is sexy reader is gn wc: 1481

It is dusk and warm and just barely humid when you realize you don’t know Suna Rintarou at all. 

You know that Suna likes chuupets and volleyball and his dingy digital camera with the cracked screen. His left eye twitches slightly when he lies, he always ties his right shoe before his left, and he keeps forgetting to buy pencil lead despite preferring mechanical pencils over traditional. He likes the rain. Can’t bite into ice cream. Wool scarves over fleece, seven followers on his private Twitter, and is always late because he likes feeding the stray cats in the alley next to the Family Mart with the good sausages. 

What you didn’t know is that Suna Rintarou is in love. You find out from Kita Shinsuke, who tells Aran after practice, a conversation not meant for your ears but gracing them nonetheless as you stand before the entrance to the gymnasium. You feel a dryness in your throat and a sting in your eyes as Kita shares that Suna is not only in love but had confessed to someone. Maybe it’s your divine punishment for eavesdropping. Maybe it’s rotten luck. Because, coincidentally, and horribly so, you’ve been in love with Suna Rintarou ever since you met him. 

So when Suna walks up from behind you, back from the vending machine, and asks you why you’re lingering outside and staring at Kita with that look on your face, you lie. 

“I have a crush on Shinsuke.” You blurt out. 

He blinks. Once. Twice. And stares. 

The longer Suna stares at you under the grey, purplish-pinkish sky with his hands shoved into his pockets and his left eye twitching, you realize you don’t know him at all. Because Suna, in all his indifference and nonchalance, looks hurt. You see something flit beneath his eyes, but you’ve never been good at reading people. So you settle on the idea that it’s something less than betrayal but more than indifference, and you don’t know why your heart’s beating so fast and sinking, pitter pattering and twisting in your stomach. 

You feel sick. 

“You like Kita-san,” He says, and it comes out as a statement, not a question. He blinks a third time, and as the look in his eyes disappears as quickly as it came, you decide you much prefer the hurt or the discomfort or the something over the blank apathy that he’s looking you over with now. “You have a crush on Kita… Shinsuke.” He finishes, and you can’t hear the bitterness in his voice over the shrill of your heart. 

You’ve always liked Suna’s eyes but tonight you like the pavement more, and as you stare a hole into the concrete beneath you, you ignore how your feet are fidgeting and your palms are sweaty and how Rintarou is hovering over you. 

“Mhm,” You squeak, tearing your eyes from the asphalt with the cracks and an ugly pill-bug on the ground. As you look up to grey eyes and dark hair, you wish that loving Suna Rintarou was harder. 

“I’m, uh, I’m going to tell Shinsuke tomorrow.” You say, Shinsuke’s name foreign on your tongue compared to the warmth and honey that Rintarou’s tastes like. I’m in love with you and this is a bad idea, you think. I like you, not Kita, is what you don’t say. Instead, and arguably worse, is the mention of Miya Atsumu’s name. “Atsumu gave me the confidence to confess!” 

Suna pauses. 

“Atsumu told you to?” He asks, and it’s the most bewildered you’ve heard him in a while.

A glance at his phone. Hands that emerge from his pockets. If you weren’t so preoccupied with the concrete you would have seen the twitch of his fingers and the tightening of his jaw as he opens Line. You nod dimly. 

“Okay,” is what he says, and you feel your heart in your stomach again. You look up. “Okay.” He repeats again. 

And maybe it’s the hurt that stings in your chest from Rintarou being so okay with you (hypothetically) being in love with Kita Shinsuke that pushes your eyes to water and your mouth to open. 

“Is that it?” You ask. 

A beat of silence. And then, a scoff. 

“Yeah. Congratulations,” Suna says. “Good luck.” 

As dusk turns to nightfall and what was a barely-humid night in July is now overwhelmingly warm and sickly and hot, Rintarou’s gaze is overbearing. And when your eyes start to swim and Suna’s gaze turns to confusion and then realization, you do the only thing you know how to do. You bolt. 

An incessant string of dings. Your lip wobbles under your teeth as you pull out your phone from under your covers. 

from: miya osamu (21:03)  where the fuck did ya go  and whys suna blwoin up my phone

from: amazing perfect miya atsexy (21:03)  WHYYSS SUNARIN BLOWING UOA PP MY PHONE ??!?@@>>!?>??!??! WHYS HE SAYIN U LIKE KITA-SAN

from: you (21:05) its so over i ran home

from: you (21:05)  i told him i like shinsuke and that i am confessing to kita  tomorrow

amazing perfect miya atsexy and miya osamu are typing…

from: amazing perfect miya atsexy (21:06)  WHAT

from: miya osamu (21:06) r u fuckin stupid why would ya do that

from: you (21:07) i heard shinsuke tell aran that suna confessed to someone today and then rin came back so i told him i like kita bcuz i panicked and also he cant know i like him right as he’s ginna get BAGGED wait but idk if he got rejected or not WHO AM I KIDDING suna would NOT get rejected LOLOL but anyways i think he knows i like him bcuz i started cryig and then he had this look on his face like he knew i was bullshittin him now venmo me money before i kil msyelf 

from: miya osamu (21:12) yeah he was gonna confess to YOU today

from: you (21:12) ?

from: amazing perfect miya atsexy (21:12) HOLY MISCOMMUNICATION

from: you (21:18) Wht??

from: miya osamu (21:19) suna was supposed to confess to u today 

from: you (21:21) but shinsuke said rin already confessed

from: amazing perfect miya atsexy (21:22) why wiud u ever think about takin gossip from KITA SHINSUKE AN WHYD YA BRING ME UP IM GNNA BE STONED AT DAWN

from: miya osamu (21:22) HOORAY !

from: amazing perfect miya atsexy (21:22) SHUDDUP  

You bolt, again, but this time it’s out of your bed, down a flight of stairs, and through your front door. You’re halfway down the street near the Family Mart with the Good Sausages™ when you barrell into someone who smells faintly of blackberries and Suna’s laundry detergent. 

“Excuse me,” You blurt, scrambling away, until you feel a grip on your waist and a familiar shape behind you with a familiar smell and a familiar voice, and Ohmygod, you’re out of breath and close to frantic but Suna Rintarou is holding you steady by your waist, warm and tall and here. 

“Rintar-”

“I like you.”

You feel it more than you hear it- Suna is muffled and quiet as he mumbles into the back of your shoulder, tall frame folded into you. 

“Idiot.” He adds, and you don’t have to turn to know the tips of his ears are pink and his eyebrows are furrowed. “You’re an idiot.” 

It’s twilight, and just-barely humid when you realize that Suna Rintarou knows you. 

Suna knows that you ramble when you’re nervous. He knows that you like the rain and you don’t like humidity. You carry extra lead in your pencil pouch and you like volleyball and stray cats. You can bite into your ice cream. You color coordinate your bookshelves. You don’t have a crush on Kita Shinsuke. 

You don’t know that Suna keeps his digital camera with the shitty cracks because you bought it for him from a shop in Akihabara. You don’t know that Suna leaves his packs of pencil lead at home because leaning over your desk in class and seeing that smile on your face is far more fun. You don’t know that he writes with extra pressure on his worksheets to crack his lead and ask for more. 

You didn’t know that Suna Rintarou is in love with you. 

So he grins into your shoulder and tells you.  

amazing perfect miya atsexy (22:14) 1 Attachment GROSS!!!!!! do NOT start making out at practice or i will RESIGN !!!

sunarin (22:14) @ y/n lets start making out at practice

y/n, miya osamu, and 2 others reacted with Thumbs Up! ojiro aran, amazing perfect miya atsexy reacted with Thumbs Down!

from: amazing perfect miya atsexy (22:15)  @ KITA SHINSUKE @ KITA SHINSUKE @ KITA SHINSUKE @ KITA SHINSUKE 

sunarin has removed amazing perfect miya atsexy from the Inarizaki Volleyball Team Chat. 

[walkyjake]

well i don’t like putting up songs against eachother especially inter-albumly (does so anyways) but the random Listening To Hells Itch thought rn is that i think i like Hells Itch more than the longer songs on Petrodragon??..

well maybe that’s a little misleading. however. which is to say that it’s the specific “this song is really long and has multiple parts” but of course there are different approaches to the structures between these songs for they are different genres and processes to construct them and everything. but i guess it’s the more StraightToThePoint listening experience processing of “how fun is it to sit through this song” and “is it catchy in general” and just how satisfying it is really…

i really really love all the intricacies in hells itch in it’s jams and like, specific riffs idk, and how it is such a BUILDUP song. there’s something about the instrumentation that seems so lighthearted but the juxtaposition with the lyrics makes itReally Funny. but even the instrumentation itself is inherently a little anxious and frantic as well (biased). and then you get to that 10:39 mark and Well holy fuck guys ^_^;; (BIASED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

but i mean you can argue some songs on petro are buildup songs too. you can argue anything. music is subjective. Ok but i will still elaborate my perspective. like dragon is definitely Long and Buildup but Lol i think i think it’s not as satisfying a long song like a “there are bits of this i could do without, i’ll still listen to it and enjoy it (because i love every gizzard song at the end of the day for i am just like this), but it’s just not as interesting i guess.”

and idk maybe gizzard long songs aren’t my favorite thing and that’s just how it is. like i’ll listen to henchlock by thee oh sees 3 times in a row and that songs like 22 minutes. this is a needless comparison. so are shorter or medium sized gizz songs my preference? no but castlemania oh sees is my favorite album ever and the incredibly short length of those songs is executed sowell Where am i going with this.

oh my god hells itch. no i think i just wanted to say that like listening to it has the same kinetic feel of like a flowers roots digging and expanding or like a more fitting simile would be like veins under the skin and the constant stream and flow pathway of blood thruout the body and it’s very creepy. Well I don’t know i think i just like it guys.

and i LOVE petrodragon like it’s so fucking cool and i listen to it in full a lot and front to back it’s so like hell yeah coolness. but it’s just different experiences i guess. and there is something significant about hells itch listening experience. but whatever. tomorrow i could wake up and listen to flamethrower and be like Oh Right this is actually the best thing they’ve ever done. itsliterslly just how i am with these things.

yeha but whatever hells itch has the only time in gizz discography where they use “fuck[ing]” as an adjective and Well myGod. it does feels so fucking good doesn’t it? yuo mothercfucker?

[hecallsmehischild]

Recent Media Consumed

Books

The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien. About ten or fifteen years ago, I tried to read this and was totally overwhelmed by it. I kept it around, hoping maybe someday I might be able to read it. I finally have, and here are my impressions: WHY SO MANY NAMES. WHY YOU HAVE TO NAME EVERYBODY, AND EVERY TRIBE OF PEOPLES, AND EVERY INANIMATE OBJECT, AND EVERY LANDSCAPE FEATURE. WHY. *ahem* So. I have a general comprehension of the events of The Silmarillion, but I dealt with it by doing what you do for an impressionist painting. I (mentally) stepped way back and let all the names flow by me, and if there were names that were repeated a lot, then I mentally attached appropriate plot points and character details to those names so I could track with who they were and what they were doing. And, actually, I found myself able to hang on and enjoy the book for the most part. This is going to lead into a re-reading of the Lord of the Rings books, since I haven’t read those in about as long…

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. I haven’t read some of these books since pre-teen years, with one required re-read of The Two Towers in high school (i.e. it’s been many an age since I’ve read these and my memory of the stories has been far more heavily influenced by the movies). In re-reading the first book, I was struck by the extreme tone shift for the Elves and Dwarves. Elves seem much closer to happy, mischievous fairies than these ethereal, solemn pillars of elegance and grace the movies show them to be. And Dwarves are far more bumbling and craftsmanlike than the movies show. Aside from that, The Hobbit was a pretty solid adaptation from the book, and the book also reminded me that this story was the first time I experienced “NO, MAIN CHARACTERS DON’T DIE, HOW DARE YOU,” and probably was the first book to make me cry. I must have been 8 or 10 years old. I FORGOT HOW MUCH THIS STORY INFLUENCED ME.

A Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell. I have a longer-than-usual list of things to say about this book. First is that it was just that level of difficult that I was struggling to understand while reading it (on Audible), but I think I got it. Sowell has several base concepts that I see repeated throughout his books, though he does like to dedicate whole books to specific aspects of the same topic. He is pretty damn thorough that way. So, for example, I would put this book in the middle of a three-book spectrum of similar concepts: Intellectuals and Society (most concrete and easiest to read), A Conflict of Visions (next-level abstraction, a little difficult to read), Knowledge and Decisions (root abstract concept, very difficult, I have not been able to get past chapter 2). The second thing I have to say is about a couple interesting concepts it proposes. Its whole point is to help readers understand the roots of two ways of seeing the world that come into severe conflict politically, and he calls them by their root titles: the constrained and the unconstrained visions. He traces the path of each back through the intellectuals that most spoke of them (tending to contrast Adam Smith with William Godwin and Condorcet). Though he leans heavily toward the constrained vision (based on reading his other works) he does his best to make this book an academic study of both, with both of the visions' strengths and flaws and reasoning and internal consistencies fairly laid out. In doing so, he helped me understand a few things that make this situation really difficult for people on opposing sides to communicate. One of them is that root words and concepts literally mean different things to different people. I had some vague notion of this before, but he laid out three examples in detail: Equality, Power, and Justice. It was kind of astounding to see just how differently these three words can be defined. It makes me think that arguing about any specific issues rooted in these concepts is fruitless until first an understanding has been reached on terms, because otherwise two parties are endlessly talking past each other. Another really interesting idea he brought up is the existence of “hybrid visions” and he named both Marxism and Fascism as hybrid visions. This was especially fascinating to me because I have seen the accusation of “Nazi” flung around ad nauseam and I wondered how it was that both sides were able to fling it at each other so readily. Well, it’s because Fascism is actually a hybrid vision, so both sides have a grain of truth but miss the whole on that particular point. In any case, this was a little difficult to read but had some fascinating information. For people who are wondering what on earth this gap is between political visions, how on earth to bridge the gap, or why the gap even exists in the first place, this is a really informative piece.

Movies

The Hobbit & Fellowship trilogies (movies). I mean, it’s definitely not my first watch, not even my second. But I went through it with Sergey this time and that means the run-time is double because we pause to talk and discuss details. This watch came about partly due to Sergey’s contention that Gandalf’s reputation far outstrips his actual powers, so we ended up noting down every instance of Gandalf’s power to see if that was true. Conclusion: Gandalf is actually a decently powerful wizard, but tends to use the truly kickass powers in less-than-dire circumstances. That aside, this movie series was always a favorite for me. I rated The Hobbit trilogy lower the first time I saw it but, frankly, all together the six movies are fantastic and a great way to sink deep into lore-heavy fantasy for a while. And I’m catching way more easter-egg type details after having read the Silmarillion so it’s even more enjoyable. (finally, after about a week of binge-watching) I forgot how much this story impacted me. I forgot how wrenchingly bittersweet the ending is. I forgot how much of a mark that reading and watching this story left on my writing.

Upside-Down Magic. Effects were good. Actors were clearly having fun and enjoying everything. Story didn’t make enough sense for my taste, but it was a decent way to kill flight time.

Wish Dragon. So, yes, it’s basically an Aladdin rewrite, but it’s genuinely a cheesy good fluff fest that made me grin a whole lot.

Plays

Esther (Sight and Sound Theatres). < background info > This is my third time to this theatre. There are only two of these in existence and they only run productions of stories out of the Bible. The first time I went I saw a production of Noah, the second time I saw a production of Jesus. My middle sister has moved all the way out to Lancaster, PA in hopes of working at this theatre. My husband and I came out to visit her. < /background info > So. Esther. They really pulled out all the stops on the costumes and set. I mean, REALLY pulled out all the stops. And the three-quarters wrap-around stage is used to great effect. I tend to have a general problem of not understanding all the words in the songs, but I understood enough. I highly recommend sitting close to the front for immersive experiences. This theatre puts on incredible productions and if you ever, ever, EVER have the opportunity to go, take it. Even if you think it's nothing but a bunch of fairy tales, STILL GO. I doubt you'll ever see a fairy tale produced on another stage with equal dedication to immersion.

Shows

The Mandalorian (first two seasons). Well. This was pretty thoroughly enjoyable. It felt very Star-Wars, and I’d kind of given up after recent movies. Felt like it slipped into some preaching toward the end? Not sure, I could be overly sensitive about it, but I enjoyed this a lot (though I did need to turn to my housemate and ask where the flip in the timeline we were because I did NOT realize that the little green kid IS NOT ACTUALLY Yoda).

Games

Portal & Portal 2. Portal is probably the first video game I ever tried to play, back when I had no idea what I was doing. Back then, I attempted to play it on my not-for-gaming Mac laptop. Using my trackpad. Once the jumping-for-extra-velocity mechanic came into play, I just about lost my mind trying to do this with a trackpad and gave up. Later I returned to the game and played it with my then-boyfriend on a proper gaming computer. Now, after having played several games and gotten better at "reading the language" of video games, I decided I wanted to see if I could beat the Portal games by myself. Guess what. I BEAT 'EM. Yes, I remembered most of the puzzles in Portal so that's a little bit of a cheat, but I'd say a good 2/3 of Portal 2 was new puzzles to me. It is crazy how proud I feel of myself that I could beat Portal 2, especially. Learning how to play video games at this age has really knocked down the lie, "You can't learn anything." Though I still suck at platformers and games that require precision. Since I find those types frustrating, I probably won't be playing many. Games are about enjoyment, so I'll push myself a little, but not to the point where I can't stand what I'm playing.

The Observer. I like the concept and the art but I don't think I could keep trying to play this game. It's really depressing. My in-game family members all died of illness or accident or committed suicide. I also kept getting executed by the state. In order to keep us all alive I'd have to do pretty terrible things that I have a hard enough time contemplating even in a fictional setting.

Baba Is You. Fun and interesting concept, but I got stuck pretty early on. Don't think I want to push as hard on this one.

[weepingengineerpuppy]

Pallet Racking Market Research Methodology, Structure, Forecast to 2027

Overview

The pallet racking market is anticipated to grow rapidly at a CAGR of 6.8% during the forecast period. The global pallet racking market is driven by the need for a suitable space management system. These factors have helped shape the pallet racking market and are expected to boost the growth. Companies in the pallet racking market could also face challenges such as lack of awareness about automation technology as well as need for infrastructure overhauling. The details covered in the pallet racking market report cover all the aspects of the industry. Analysts studying the pallet racking market have also shared growth projections in the report and have suggested pallet racking market players to plan business strategies accordingly.

Market Segmentation

The global pallet racking market has been segmented based on racking system type, system, rack load capacity, and end-use industry. On the basis of racking system type, the market for pallet racking is segmented based on carton flow racking, drive-in racking, pallet flow racking, push back racking, selective racking, cantilever racking, and others. Additionally, the market on the basis of system, is segmented into mobile racking, shuttle racking and hybrid/customized racking, conventional. The global market for pallet racking is also covered based on rack load capacity segment which is further split into up to 5 ton, 5–15 ton and above 15 ton. On the basis of end-use industry, the market for pallet racking is segmented based on food & beverage, manufacturing, retail, warehouse & logistics, automotive, and others.

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Factors like growing transportation and logistics industries and e-commerce shopping trends support the pallet racking market growth. The performance of the pallet racking market has also been studied for the past and current years. Additionally, the pallet racking market report provides analysis of these segments. The pallet racking market segmental analysis provided in the report offers major details about the pallet racking market based on the data and forecasts till 2025.

Regional Overview

Companies in the pallet racking market are spread across the world. The pallet racking market report provides major information about regional markets of North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific (APAC), and the rest of the world. The North American pallet racking market has many companies across the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The pallet racking market of the Middle East, Africa, and other regions has also been studied by analysts. The regional analysis of the pallet racking market can be found in the market research report. Europe has companies in the pallet racking market across Germany, France, Spain, Italy, and the United Kingdom. A detailed analysis of the pallet racking market across India, China, and Japan in the Asia-Pacific region is also presented in the report.

Competitive Landscape

The pallet racking market is supported by  increasing use of smartphones and ecommerce apps. The population growth around the world and increasing demand of pallet racking market based services and products also support the market growth. However, the pallet racking market growth can be affected due to the slow pace of growth in packaging and TPL industries. The report covers all such details which will help companies in the pallet racking market to strengthen their business plan and improve their product portfolio. The pallet racking market research report also provides company

profiles of major companies. The company profiles of many organizations operating in the pallet racking market report highlights crucial details like company size, revenue growth, and details of mergers and acquisitions taking place in the pallet racking market. New companies and established businesses can plan their strategies based on this data provided in the pallet racking market research report.

Industry News

Stonelake Capital Partners has purchased 6161 Bingle, a 127,513-square-foot commercial property located on 17 acres in the center of northwest Houston. This purchase marks Stonelake's sixth industrial transaction in Houston in 2020 and its 18th industrial transaction in Houston in 2015. The vendor, Graybar Electric Company, had recently vacated the property and decided to sell the building quickly. Graybar was led by Andy Sowell, SIOR with Boyd Industrial, LLC. With Sowell's assistance, Stonelake started to focus on the purchase of this practical, infill storage center near the intersection of Highway 290 and Bingle Lane. Stonelake and Graybar have agreed to the terms.

Get Report Details @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/pallet-racking-market-8332

[imnothinginparticular]

#finishedbooks Economics Facts and Fallacies by Thomas Sowell. Really had little desire to read more from him because right away (again) I am disappointed by his methodology as the book flow sees him stating a fallacy, pulling out an example to support it, and moving on to the next topic...or even worse he will stop in a point he is making because to have gone on would show negative. Here is an example proving my first point, he denies the universal understood fact that US middle class income is diminishing and in fact suggests that it is actually flourishing an argument I have seen no one make. Yet he makes it in just 5 paragraphs suggesting everyone is measuring what constitutes a middle class income incorrectly (no math) and citing one single example "over the decades (not specified) the percentage of American families with incomes over 75,000 has tripled." There is a footnote provided so I checked it and it is for the economist who he was trying contradict in Paul Krugman a paragraph prior, not an actual foot note to support his random example. Depending what decade he is even referring to contradicts his argument, for if those incomes did triple that would put them into the top 10% which was what he was saying was a fallacy as the incomes of the top 10% have soared while everyone else has stagnated or dropped since the 80s. And easily to prove my latter point he speaks of the "chess piece fallacy" which relates to economic policies that arranges members of society like pieces on a chess board, making the correct humanist appeal that people aren't pieces and have individual preferences...but then he sites Boris Yeltsin, the first non-communist leader after the collapse of the USSR, who spoke likewise that such expirments are no good and stopping with that. What he fails to mention is that Yeltsin's people rejected his policies (who like the author's his policies were informed by the Chicago School of Economics) that directly privatized national industries that led to the Russian oligarchy that the new democratic parliament rejected and his reponse was to order tanks to attack his own parliment building plunging Russia into huge disparities. Furthermore economics is a people based study yes, but it requires ongoing trial and error as it is ever evolving. This is especially so in the US where at the state level we see a lot of policies enacted that other states watch and draw lessons (extreme politics aside) where theoretically this "chess experiment" proves valuable moving forward. But overwhelming his point should be chalked up to libertarian conservatism (contradictory to US semantics called neoliberalism) that is the least possible governmental market interference where in some cases he is right and others he is wrong asserting when government does too much. But overall his argument is flawed because it isn't an issue of how much government, there will always be government...the argument of immediate importance is who is the government actually for? My argument would be that it has been for corporate interests directly due to to these economic policies since the 1980s that isn't a right-left argument because Clinton embraced it as well. I will elaborate more on this on the next book post. Going back to the book here, he make good points on university fallacies: the corrupt accreditation process, and had no idea they too hire lobbyists for federal money. Also wasn't aware the NCAA has fewer than ten school athletic departments that run at a surplus or that the teacher incentives from text book companies... but again because of his views he immediately downplays the soaring cost of college tuition and any notion of taxes paying for student debt relief citing a median debt that a quick Google check cross referenced to the time the book was written to be false. In all, reading a black intellectually inclined conservative is amazing becasue of the gymnastics they have to do to try to justify themselves. But to conclude this is a book of assertions not arguments and simply put dogmas don't work in economics.

[loudlytransparenttrash]

The Left’s Groupthink Takes Away Our Individual Rights

The right view people as individuals while those on the left lumps people into categories based usually on race but also often on gender and sexuality. Race and sex are two of the sweetheart pillars of leftist thought, they are fixated on and impose racial and gender based quotas and affirmative action demands at any given chance. When it comes to race, the usual categories are black, white, brown, and Asian. When it comes to sex, women are viewed as a minority group even though women constitute 51% of the population and many women occupy the most privileged positions in society. Refuting and stepping outside of what the left considers to be the only acceptable view which we all must hold, automatically makes you a traitor. 

Talk to a non-white conservative such as Larry Elders, Deneen Borelli, David, Webb, Thomas Sowell, Stacey Washington or Crystal Wright and you will quickly understand the way the left and many blacks banish anyone who wanders beyond the groupthink. They are vilified by everybody, guilt-ridden whites, most blacks, family members, friends and so forth. These black conservatives have committed the most unforgivable crime from a left point of view: they broke ranks with their “group.” Apparently American blacks are supposed to be Democrats so those who are not are called Oreos, race traitors and Uncle Toms and whatever they have to say will always be dismissed and ignored. They are guilty of “thought crimes” by progressive standards, which are in fact incredibly regressive.

Conservatives do not recognize these violations because they view people as individuals rather than their skin color or gender. It’s why conservatives argue against affirmative action and set equal standards for voter ID. Why are we lowering the bar for blacks and women to the point where they no longer need to work for something, they can just be handed it to them based on their race or gender while everyone else is left to get on with it. Why don’t the left hold them to the same standards and expectations as everybody else? How is this equality? I saw a video the other day where an interviewer asked liberal white students if black people should have to have an ID and most of them said, with very sympathetic and respectful intentions, most black people are too poor or don’t even know where their local DMV is. This is what happens when a group of people adopt the victim mentality of another group of people. How can this ever be considered progressive? 

The left endlessly criticize President Trump as being anti-woman because he said mean things to a woman who said mean things to him. If somebody punches you, punch them back. Equality. He also responds to men in the same way, is Trump anti-man? This level of analysis is completely foreign to the left because they see a rude comment made to one woman as a comment made to all women. Women who have worked for the Trump organization and currently work for him say that he promotes women faster than other companies and he pays them as much if not more than men. These women have made it clear there is no glass ceiling in the Trump organization and in fact, the Trump organization has more female CEOs than any other Fortune 500 company. So why does the left not take these individual accounts of women seriously and instead brands them as being lying gender traitors protecting a woman-hater? Because these women have stepped outside of the hivemind.

Obviously, the leftists believe that they have the moral high ground. They truly believe that it is ethical to judge people according to these reductionist categories. What I’d like to know is how the suppression of individuality could ever be justified. They demonize the right with the odious labels racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, etc in order to justify their unconscionable treatment of individuals. Only by painting the right as evil and despicable, or as Hillary said deplorable, can they justify suppressing individual thought when it conflicts with group-think.

All over the country, liberal universities are banning or blocking speakers who do not express the views of status quo liberals. Leading universities have not only banned or uninvited conservatives but also liberals who stray only slightly from the orthodox talking points. The perfect example, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She ran away from Somalia due to forced genital mutilation and an arranged marriage and established herself in Holland where she learned Dutch, earned a college degree and became a Member of Parliament. She is an agnostic, black, female and a woman’s right’s activist. You would think she’d be a honey of the left. In fact, the only minority category she is missing is being a lesbian. 

However, Ayaan Hirsi Ali has spent much of her adult life with security protection due to the amount of death threats she constantly receives. She was also uninvited from Brandeis University where she was scheduled to give the commencement speech and receive an honorary doctorate degree. What happened? The Muslim Student Union and the leftists associated with it protested her upcoming speech because she is an apostate of Islam. In other words, she left Islam.

In America, people are free to join and leave religions. Yet the political left doesn’t seem to recognize this right. Rather, they demonize those who leave Islam and wish to talk about their experience honestly. They side with the radical Islamists who abuse her simply for talking about her views on Islam and her horrific experiences as a Muslim. So despite the fact that Ayaan fell neatly into every minority category trumpeted by the left, she deviated on only one item: she left Islam and no longer is forced to say cute things about Islam. Now she is a pariah and has been since denied many public speaking venues and recently was forced to cancel her visit to Australia after receiving more death threats. An individualist worldview has no problem with Ayaan’s departure from the religion of her birth or what she has to say but a collectivist worldview judges and convicts her.

We must resist this groupthink at every turn. We must continue to speak up for individuals and emphasize our natural rights, especially when it comes to speech. Conservatives understand that we will not always agree with everybody but everybody has a right to express their viewpoints without being attacked or doxxed or kicked out of their jobs or university or have their character assassinated with false claims and slurs. We need to take this even further for the sake of our civilization: push to curtail funding. If UC Berkeley does not wish to honor free speech then all taxpayer dollars need to be extricated from that institution. If Jewish and Israeli speakers are not allowed to speak at UC Davis after being threatened and hissed at by angry mobs of so-called open minded students, then UC Davis needs to have its public funds pulled. 

US Riverside suspended its Conservative Club for over a year and it was reinstated only because conservative students raised money to hire attorneys. Every club on that campus was left-leaning but they closed down the only space for conservative students. If they pull that shit again, we need to pull their funding. It’s this simple: if our public universities will not uphold our natural right to free speech and free association, then they are by definition no longer public but partisan. From a common sense point of view, what is the point of sending our youth to universities to be indoctrinated? Parents and educators send them to university to hear a wide range of viewpoints and to develop critical thinking skills to sift through the free flow of ideas. Clearly shutting down free speech on our campuses is contrary to the purpose of a university education.

The leftist professors and their administrative compadres have also created so-called safe spaces for their adult students who have been ‘harmed’ by triggers and micro-aggressions. This detritus belongs exclusively on the left. Sure, many Democrats in middle America probably opposes the institutionalization of safe spaces, trigger warnings and microagressions, but our universities are dominated by left-wing, regressive professors who train the next generation of leaders to steer the country away from individualism and from our rights.

We must not lose sight of the following. Regardless of your race, gender or sexuality, you are an individual and as such, should be judged by your character. We can criticize ideas and policies but not individual people. Ad hominem attacks like calling people racists, sexists, homophobes, xenophobes etc are useless for two reasons: they are typically false claims used to shut down speech by shaming and it is a lazy person’s way of avoiding the discussion of ideas. When they say that people who are opposed to abortion are anti-woman, that is not an argument, it is an ad hominem, lazy attack.

Learn about your natural and Constitutional rights and make a point to assert them. These are not collective rights but individual rights and any government agencies or political movements that do not respect our rights, especially the right to free expression, needs to be exposed and defunded. 

[topicprinter]

Hey guys, I've built a Hackernews-inspired newsletter containing the top 10 articles relevant to founders that were on the HN front-page last week.Why HackerNews? Because it's one of the last places on the internet with meaningful discussion & quality topics. See for yourself below if you don't believe me. Btw, if you want to get this via email every week, go here.1. Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think (1022 votes)There’s a thrill in finding quiet companies, operating in the background, cashing checks. Software has exploded the number of these businesses. Ten people working remotely can make millions of dollars a year.Austen Allred shared how, when matching Lambda graduates to jobs, he’ll discover software companies he’s never heard of in Oklahoma pocketing $10m/year in profit. Doing things like “making actuarial software for funeral homes.”3It’s not surprising. Of the 3,000+ software companies acquired over the last three years, only 7% got TechCrunch, Recode, HN, or other mainstream tech coverage.4Also, markets like SAP, worth $163B. There is a term for these companies, they're called Hidden Champioons, and you can see a few of them on Wikipedia.Some other useful quotes:I’ve had four jobs in my life and have always been stunned by what is still done by hand. Every company had a task which could be heavily automated but was instead consuming 4-30 people. So if you think the software market is large, consider all the stuff software never reached.I applied for a job at a company in my city, and they told me their product was entirely API connectors for the local banks. In fact all of the companies I've worked for here have been making software for local industries! From solar installers, energy efficient lighting manufacturers, local commerce and POS systems, mechanics software, creative market places, local lead generation.Oh yes, there are tons of giants creating software for health applications you never heard of, defense purposes you cannot hear about, logistic you would never consider (managing competitions, port services, private jet traffic, truck fleets...) and so on. I should know, I make half of my income going from company to company to train their team. They are everywhere. They make billions.Don’t require a user to be interested twice: lessons on reducing signup friction (390 votes)Long story short: A guy made a SaaS prototype and he got a few users by posting on forums. Thing is, his "flow" was to get them to "sign up" to the waitlist and then he manually sent them an invite hours or days later.His success increased when he changed the flow so people get an automatic email to register immediately after they sign up.Kind of obvious, but there's an important principle here:Don't require a user to be motivated twice. Instead, make use and ride of the motivation wide when they sign up. This is pretty obvious if you read BJ Fogg material.Some useful notes from HN comments on users:Treat signups as a leading indicator of success, not the ultimate goal.Asking for an email up front is already too much. Let the user use your service, they'll create some "content" or "configuration" in it. Once they do that, they'll want to preserve / persist it, and then you can ask for an email address. They're much more likely to give you a real email address and validate it, because they're already invested.I'm convinced one of the reasons Zoom is so successful (besides being a great product) is that there is no sign up required at all. Someone invites you to a conference and you just click the link, enter your name and go.Ask HN: What is the best way to target restaurants and small businesses? (28 votes)I really like these threads where you have very bright minds giving advice for a common pain point. Here are some amazing answers:Almost every brick and mortar company’s website includes a phone number. Call 5 of them and order a meal, when you pick it up ask to talk to the manager for a minute. Elevator pitch: you’ve got 5-10 seconds to get them to ask for more time. “When I was ordering food I noticed that I couldn’t prepay online, I almost thought of going somewhere else, how come you don’t have a way to pay before coming in?” “Don’t know how to do that”. “I built a plugin that takes 5-10 mins to set up and people can pay while they order so I don’t have to come inside, can we do a Skype call when you’re not busy to walk through this?”. Once you’ve gotten a handful of trials like this you can start calling but your options with restaurants(especially mom and pop) are to walk in the door or get to them directly on the phone.or this:You can also try to target other companies thay already have large restaurant customer bases, but then you become a SKU in their offerings. It may be more about lead genertion than anything else.​OnlyFans, influencers, and the politics of selling nudes during a pandemic (133 votes)While sites like AirBnb have huge loses, OnlyFans grew 75% during last month. It was launched as a result of platforms like Instagram shutting out adult entertainment workers.I wonder if there is any way to integrate into this platform as a developer and "ride" on its growth :D​The coming disruption of colleges and universities (82 votes)Scott Galloway is a man who predicted a lot of things. He predicted Amazon’s $13.7 billion purchase of Whole Foods a month before it was announced. Last year, he called WeWork on its “seriously loco” $47 billion valuation a month before the company’s IPO imploded.Now, he predicts something happening with universities. . The post-pandemic future, he says, will entail partnerships between the largest tech companies in the world and elite universities. [MIT@Google](mailto:MIT@Google). iStanford. HarvardxFacebook. According to Galloway, these partnerships will allow universities to expand enrollment dramatically by offering hybrid online-offline degrees.How will this disrupt education? Well thousands of brick-and-mortar universties will go out of business.At the same time, more people than ever will have access to a solid education, albeit one that is delivered mostly over the internet.If this is true, it may open a lot of opportunities for makers in the edu space.​Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?Here are some recommendation for "brain expanding" books:"Rework", "Getting Real", the other books by the old 37signals crew, and of course "The Lean Startup" really changed the way I thought about software development and business. I credit them for much of my startup/programming success.Taleb's Incerto series changed how I thought about investing, risk, and life in general. "Fooled by Randomness" and "Antifragile" are especially good."Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy" by Thomas Sowell. I read this as a teenager with only limited exposure to economics and it cleared up many misconceptions I held."Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life" by Rory Sutherland. Explains why we choose brands over cheaper alternatives, why we're willing to pay a lot more to lock in a deal, why we hate registering before buying the thing (but are more than happy to do so right after), why Sony removed the record button from the first Walkman, and much more.Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. This book makes every bit of life advice you receive afterwards feel shallow. It feels like a reference to western thought.​Scraping Recipe Websites (461 votes)Do you do scraping as part of your job? Then you may want to read this how this site scrapes 99% of recipe website using a logical template.An interesting thing they mention is the concept of LCA (lowest common ancestor) and how they use it to identify part of the HTML most likely to contain all of the ingredients/instructions​My blog is now generated by Google Docs (398 votes)Over and over and over again, I see businesses succeeding just because they tap into people existing habits.Most people are familiar with typing in Google Docs. If you can make a tool where they just press a button and 'voila', it turns it itno a blog post, they're way more likely to use you vs. someone who creates a separate interface (see BJ Fogg and his behavioral design theory).US video game sales have record quarter as consumers stay at home (376 votes)Video game sales are at historic hights. Traffic on gaming-related services like Discord, Twitch, Mixer, and others have hit historic highsThe current crisis probably accelerated video games adoption by 10 years.Ask HN: How to stop anxiety from too many choices? (286 votes)The best advice I've seen here is:Stop shopping start doing. All these decisions I call shopping, where you do a lot of research but never commit. At some point you have to start working on something.Have an ideas journal. Write new ideas down there, and don't start with any of them in less than two weeks. This lets you get over the initial enthusiasm - and perhaps new better ideas will push less useful ones out of the way in that time. If something stays at the top of your list for weeks, then perhaps it is useful.My advice is to lower the value of ideas. A lot of time people think, "If only I had a good idea I would be successful". You will see other people saying things like, "Buy my good idea!". But really, good ideas are a dime a dozen. Good ideas, bad ideas... it actually doesn't make much difference. What makes the difference is execution and timing.To be successful, really what you need is execution and to have the patience to wait until what you are doing is relevant. Of course there is the fear that it will never be relevant. However, if you accept the thesis that the good idea is not valuable in itself, then you realise that it is not really valuable to pivot without a really good reason. A good idea that is never relevant is just as worthless as a bad idea that is never relevant. However, even a bad idea that is executed very well and ready when the opportunity arises can be successful.see the first step, the very next step, and that's it. You don't need to know what step 2,748 is about let alone how to solve it to take the next door. (formally: no premature optimization).Make a decision, and stick to it. In other words, be quick to decide but slow to change. The trick in life is not to "do what you love" (or make the decisions you think are right: spoiler, you'll be wrong 50% of the time). The trick is to "love what you do"I have similar problems sometimes- and remind myself the power of "good enough". Striving for "the best" will often leave you unsatisfied. So instead of thinking "which is better?" think "is this one good enough?"If you want to get this via email every week, see http://founderweeklys.com/

[lyndastreaming]

Networking Foundations Protocols and CLI Tools

Title: Networking Foundations Protocols and CLI Tools ID: 9862ba5297d88f59d4782d6ab4fdb55d Original Page: Networking Foundations Protocols and CLI Tools Released: 3/25/2016 Duration: 1h 13m Author: Greg Sowell Level: Beginner Category: IT Subject Tags: Network Administration IT Software Tags: Windows Server Description: As an aspiring IT and networking professional, one of the core responsibilities is troubleshooting network connections: servers, end-user machines, mail services, and websites. This course introduces the main methods for troubleshooting network connectivity issues using different protocols and command-line (CLI) tools. Networking expert Greg Sowell covers HTTP and HTTPS, the protocols that deliver websites; shows how domain names are resolved via DNS; and explains how voice traffic is carried over a network with VoIP. Greg shows how to examine all of these connections and their traffic using CLI tools such as ipconfig, ping, ARP, and Telnet.

Protocols are the lifeblood of modern communication. By the end of this course, you’ll know what you need to troubleshoot any network connection and keep the communication flowing.

Note: This course maps to domain 3 of the MTA Networking Fundamentals exam.

Topics include:

Identify reasons why connectionless transmissions are faster. Determine what type of attack a gratuitous ARP announcing itself as a legitimate host indicates. State what IGMP snooping is useful for. Describe the best approach to use FTP to view and rename files on a server when your client is behind a firewall. Assess whether SSH is natively supported on Windows or not. List good uses for the arp command.

Course Content: (Please leave comment if course url is broken)

Welcome

What you should know

MTA Networking Fundamentals exam

The role of protocols in networking

Connection vs. connectionless

Port addresses

Packets and frames

ARP and InARP

ICMP

IGMP

DNS and NetBIOS

HTTP

HTTPS

Mail services: POP, IMAP, and SMTP

Transfer VOIP: SIP, MGCP, RTP, and H.323

FTP and TFTP

SMB

SSH

RDP

SNMP

DHCP

Ipconfig

Ping, Tracert, PathPing

Arp

Telnet

Netstat

Nbtstat

Next steps

The post Networking Foundations Protocols and CLI Tools appeared first on Lyndastreaming.

source https://www.lyndastreaming.com/networking-foundations-protocols-and-cli-tools/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=networking-foundations-protocols-and-cli-tools

[republicstandard]

Fantasy Revolution: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Democratic Party

By now you’ve no doubt heard the good news from all your blue-pilled left-wing friends: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Our Lady of Democratic Socialism, has defeated 10-term incumbent Representative Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary for New York’s 14th congressional district.

In all fairness, Ocasio-Cortez’s primary victory is something to write home about: 28-year-old who was tending bar months ago defeats 10-term incumbent who out-raised her 10 to 1. To be sure, there is still the actual election, but that pits the progressive rising star against Republican candidate Anthony Pappas in a solidly Democratic district.

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On the issues, Ocasio-Cortez burnishes her credentials as a Democratic Socialist who served as a campaign organizer for Bernie Sanders: Medicare For All, a federal jobs guarantee, higher education for all, 100% renewable energy by 2035, “Immigration Justice/Abolish ICE,” and a free air-castle with pet unicorn. (Okay, perhaps not that last one).

As this column has documented before, this is an unrealistic bag of goodies. The U.S. is already facing an unsustainable situation where Social Security, largest of the entitlements, is concerned: already accounting for $1 trillion in spending, Social Security is projected to get pricier as the Baby Boomers retire, until costs outpace income by 2030.

She is selling adult voters the political equivalent of an air-castle with pet unicorn

The big picture could be fairly described as gruesome: across-the-board benefit cuts of 25% staring in 2034, and a cash-flow deficit over the next 80 years projected to hit $44.2 trillion (that’s an average of $552.5 billion per year). In that same year of 2034, by the way, the national debt is projected to hit $39.1 trillion, which will be 105% of GDP.

That is only one government program, albeit the largest.

Based on these figures for Social Security alone, Medicare For All would be an air-castle. However, even as it stands now Medicare is in deep trouble: facing insolvency in less than 15 years, Medicare will begin to run annual deficits optimistically projected to top $200 billion. That figure is optimistic, because Medicare is already facing a growing problem of physicians refusing to take Medicare patients because of low reimbursement rates, patient privacy issues, and government involvement.

Medicaid, by the way, is in even worse shape, straining state budgets even as its low reimbursement rates leave many who are eligible stranded without a doctor.

As John Q. Publius capably observes: Since the mid-1960s, we’ve spent $22 trillion—trillion—dollars on over eighty different welfare programs, and this does not include Social Security, Medicare, or unemployment. The costs are simply staggering, and all of that spending has done nothing to alleviate poverty in this country; in fact, it’s exacerbated it.

So, Medicare For All is an air-castle. We could end the argument right here: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is peddling a fantasy revolution. She is selling adult voters the political equivalent of an air-castle with pet unicorn.

The dismal state of the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) also raises grave doubts about copying that model.

The real solution to the problem of ruinously expensive healthcare is to switch from an over-reliance on insurance to a market-based approach. This is a model with long-standing historical precedent on its side, not to mention contemporary applications which have been called the “future of healthcare.”

Of course, this solution is bad news for governments and special interests, and is not likely to win many elections.

So much for Medicare For All. What about the next tier of Ocasio-Cortez’s air-castle, the next promise of her fantasy revolution?

Her position here, from her campaign website, is worth reading in full:

“Alexandria endorses a Federal Jobs Guarantee, because anyone who is willing and able to work shouldn’t struggle to find employment.

“A Federal Jobs Guarantee would create a baseline standard for employment that includes a $15 minimum wage (pegged to inflation), full healthcare, and child and sick leave for all. This proposal would dramatically upgrade the quality of employment in the United States, by providing training and experience to workers while bringing much-needed public services to our communities in areas such as parks service, childcare and environmental conservation.

“Furthermore, a federal jobs guarantee program would establish a floor for wages and benefits for the nation’s workforce. This program would provide a baseline minimum wage of $15 an hour and guarantee for public workers a basic benefits package, including healthcare and childcare. By investing in our own workforce, we can lift thousands of American families out of poverty.”

Allow me to play the part of the curmudgeonly conservative and ask, What about people who cannot earn $15.00/hour?

If you’ve read your Thomas Sowell and other conservative commentators, if you have prioritized rational thought over emotion and feelings of self-righteousness, then you know the truth about the minimum wage: it creates a disincentive for employment, meaning job losses and more workers out of work; in short, minimum wage laws price people out of work.

This very dynamic recently played out in Seattle , which has been increasing its minimum wage to $15.00/hour over a number of years.

As usual, liberal “compassion” is long on feeling and short on any consideration of the practical realities and incentives relevant to a situation.

It is perhaps not too difficult to decipher the logic of Ocasio-Cortez’s Fantasy Revolution; and logic there is, albeit of a twisted sort. In fact, a fawning tribute-piece from premier Cathedral outlet CNN’s offers plenty of clues.

Let’s put on our Reactionary Vision Goggles of Cynicism for a moment, and try to sort through all of the Fantasy Revolution dog-whistles and terminology, shall we? This should be a fun exercise in How to Read a Newspaper. We’ll be looking for progressive stack points, essentially reading it to see what is going to appeal to a progressive.

“Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez [Hispanic name: points!], a 28-year-old [she’s young and woke: more points!] Latina [Womxn of Color!] running her first campaign, ousted 10-term incumbent [old fogey Establishment Democrat—minus points] Rep. Joe [male—minus points!] Crowley [this name sounds White—boo!] in New York's 14th congressional district on Tuesday, CNN projects, in the most shocking upset [shockingly fun!] of a rollicking political season. “An activist [so woke!] and member of the Democratic Socialists of America [she’s like a female Bernie!], Ocasio-Cortez won over voters in the minority-majority district [fewer White people!] with a ruthlessly efficient grassroots [yayyy, people power!] bid, even as Crowley -- the fourth-ranking Democrat [she defeated a really high-ranking White man!] in the House -- outraised her by a 10-to-1 [a high-ranking White man with a lot of money] margin...

“She cast her victory [yaayyy, victory!] as the green shoots of triumph [new growth, Womxn of Color over White men!] over the "deep midnight and darkness" [this means President Orange-Hitler Blumpf] of the political moment [still too many White men in power] -- and a message to fellow progressive organizers [fellow Awesome People] that their brand of activism [fight for righteousness] could succeed on a grander scale [handouts for everyone in all 50 states, yayy!].”

Pat Buchanan called it rightly: Ocasio-Cortez ran on her identity, a clear sign that the Democratic Party is turning in the direction of the radical left, the “Maxine Waters wing.” No party for old White men, indeed.

Is this a harbinger of a coming Fantasy Revolution that will sweep across America, bringing a torrent of high taxes and lavish handouts?

Buchanan does not think so. He points to historical precedent, specifically Hubert Humphrey’s narrow defeat in 1968, after which the Left seized control and backed McGovern, who lost to Nixon in a 49-state route. He also argues that fissures and conflicts within the Democratic Party are splitting its diversity coalition elements.

There is already some evidence in favor of Buchanan’s thesis that the Democrats’ Fantasy Revolution is hurting them.

A recent poll found that Democrats have lost nine percentage points of support among millennials since 2016. The shift is most pronounced among White millennial men: in 2016, they favored Democrats over Republicans by 12 percentage points, but now favor Republicans over Democrats by 11 percentage points. (Yes, that is a volte-face amounting to a 23-percentage-point difference).

Another encouraging sign is the #WalkAway movement, a social media campaign fueled by stories of people who have chosen to “walk away” from the Democratic Party. Given how obsessed the Democrats have become with identity, it is surely worth noting that the founder of the grassroots initiative, Brandon Straka, is an openly gay New York-based hair stylist and a hitherto lifelong Democrat.

Writing for PJ Media, Roger L. Simon diagnoses the nervous breakdown of the Left’s Trump Derangement Syndrome as the mere presenting complaint, the symptom that appears to be the problem while the real problem is something else.

In this case, the real problem is that the Left have become irrelevant. They have no good, fresh ideas, only the after-image of socialism and the whole messy business of identity politics. The ongoing meltdown says far more about the mental state of the Left than it does about the character or quality of the administration they rail against. It may even indicate that the Leftists have a death wish.

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Having been denied their rightful destiny in 2016, it does seem to be the case that many on the Left are doubling down on the foolish and unsustainable ideas of Bernie Sanders and the far-left Fantasy Revolution he represents. Many hope for a Blue Wave, but the prospects of this, too, are questionable. If denied a Blue Wave, perhaps they will be left to double down on their failed, dying ideas in the enclaves they still control quite solidly.

The far left lost their bid for power, first to Hillary Clinton and then to Donald Trump. But the spirit of the Fantasy Revolution lives on, the tireless, endless desire of the Left for ever more resources to redistribute to themselves and their fellows, heedless of the consequences and the unintended outcomes. It is a destructive fantasy, to be sure: these air-castles have been known to crush people when they fall to earth.

But, for the Left, why let a little unpleasant reality get in the way?

from Republic Standard | Conservative Thought & Culture Magazine https://ift.tt/2NmQG7n via IFTTT

[investmart007]

BAGHDAD | Iraq's al-Sadr, promising reform, is constrained by Iran

New Post has been published on https://is.gd/e6JsQS

BAGHDAD | Iraq's al-Sadr, promising reform, is constrained by Iran

BAGHDAD  —Iraq’s Muqtada al-Sadr, the maverick Shiite cleric whose political coalition beat out Iran’s favored candidates to come in first in national elections, says he wants to form a government that puts Iraqis first.

The electoral commission announced early Saturday that the militant-turned-populist preacher, who has long spoken out against both Iranian and U.S. influence in Iraq, had defeated his establishment rivals.

Al-Sadr — who is remembered for leading an insurgency against U.S. forces after the 2003 invasion — did not run for a seat himself and is unlikely to become prime minister, but will command a significant number of seats and has already begun informal talks about government formation.

Salah al-Obeidi, a spokesman for al-Sadr’s Sa’eroun political bloc, told The Associated Press that Iraq’s sovereignty was going to be the new government’s “guiding principle.”

“We warn any other country that wants to involve itself in Iraqi politics not to cross the Iraqi people,” he said.

However, even as al-Sadr is in position to nominate a prime minister and set the political agenda for the next four years, he will find his choices limited by Iran.

The Middle East’s pre-eminent Shiite power has a direct line with some of Iraq’s most powerful politicians, and it is trying to rally them as a bloc to undercut al-Sadr.

Al-Sadr’s rise threatens Iran’s claim to speak on behalf of Iraq’s Shiite majority, a precedent that could fuel independent Shiite movements elsewhere. Also at stake are top ministerial posts — political appointments that are a source of patronage and police and military power.

Al-Sadr himself has kept a relatively low public profile. But in a public relations move that appeared to be directed at Iran, he appeared on Thursday with rival cleric Ammar al-Hakim, who has drifted away from Iran’s orbit in recent years, to say the two men share similar visions for the next government.

Tehran has dispatched its top regional military commander, Gen. Qassem Soleimani, to pull together a coalition to counterbalance al-Sadr, according to an Iraqi Shiite militia commander who is familiar with the meetings.

“Iran won’t accept the creation of a Shiite bloc that is a threat to its interests. It’s a red line,” said the commander, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the discussions.

Al-Sadr’s relationship with Iran is a complicated one. Though he has maintained close ties with Iran’s political and religious leadership, in recent years he has denounced the flow of Iranian munitions to Shiite militias in Iraq, all the while maintaining his own so-called Peace Brigades in the holy city of Samarra, north of Baghdad.

Al-Sadr’s former Mehdi Army militia, which spearheaded an insurgency against the U.S., clashed violently with the Iran-backed Badr Organization last decade.

The militias plugged the gaps left by Iraq’s army as soldiers deserted their posts in the face of the Islamic State group’s lightning campaign in the summer of 2014. With direction from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, they turned the tide against the initial advance. In the years that followed, the militias — coordinating with U.S.-backed Iraqi ground forces — slowly pushed IS fighters back. Iraq declared victory over the group last year.

Al-Sadr has said he wants the militias absorbed into the national security forces, a move Iran would find difficult to accept.

Iran is also rankled by al-Sadr’s recent overtures to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which are locked in proxy wars with Tehran in Syria and Yemen. Al-Sadr met with the crown princes of Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi in August, leading Iran’s hard-line Keyhan newspaper to accuse al-Sadr of “selling himself” to the house of Saud.

It is unlikely al-Sadr can pull together a governing coalition without Iran-aligned political groups, which have the votes to form their own alliance that could challenge al-Sadr’s right to name a prime minister.

An electoral alliance of the militias called Fatah, headed by Hadi al-Amiri, the commander of the Badr Organization, won just seven seats fewer than al-Sadr’s bloc. Sa’eroun won 54 seats in Iraq’s 329-seat national assembly, a far cry from the 165 required to claim a majority.

The militias control the powerful Interior Ministry in the outgoing government and will expect a similar position of influence in the new one.

Al-Sadr seems inclined to woo incumbent Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, who is seen as a centrist when it comes to Iranian and U.S. interests, and who appears to be wavering between al-Sadr and al-Amiri.

But Tehran still holds considerable sway with al-Abadi’s al-Nasr bloc, which includes several Iran-aligned figures, including one newly minted deputy who has come under U.S. sanctions for allegedly financing Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

Iran’s political allies in Iraq will try to pressure those figures into deserting al-Abadi and collapsing an al-Sadr alliance if the formulation is not to Tehran’s liking, said a Western diplomat who has been speaking to the sides involved. The diplomat spoke on the condition of anonymity because of media regulations.

That gives Iran — and al-Abadi — leverage over al-Sadr to moderate his positions on the militias and Iran.

Hanging above the talks is the implied threat by all sides to mobilize their followers — and militias — if they feel they are being shortchanged. The collective effect could be to push al-Sadr’s bloc toward a broader governing coalition that would dilute his reform agenda.

His top showing at the ballot box means the next prime minister will have to introduce a civil service law that al-Sadr has championed as an antidote to Iraq’s endemic corruption, said Kirk Sowell, the publisher of Inside Iraqi Politics, a political and security newsletter. But that doesn’t mean the Cabinet or parliament will sign off on it.

“There’s not going to be a functioning majority,” said Sowell. “It’ll be a hodge-podge, coalition government, and it’s not going to be any more stable than the last one.”

__

By QASSIM ABDUL-ZAHRA and PHILIP ISSA,By Associated Press – published on STL.News by St. Louis Media, LLC (Z.S)

___

[topinforma]

New Post has been published on Mortgage News

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6 Answers to Your 401(k) Questions

When working with clients to develop their financial plans, integrating 401(k) accounts into an overall retirement strategy is an important part of the process.

SEE ALSO: Can You Save Too Much in Your 401(k)?

For most people, their 401(k) represents their largest source of funds set aside for retirement. Whether deciding how much to contribute, choosing investments within the 401(k), or wondering if it is the best way to save for retirement, here are six tips to get you started.

1. What do I need to think about during enrollment?

Assuming your company offers a retirement plan — 401(k)s and 403bs are most common — your HR department will address enrollment when you are hired. For existing employees, if the company is rolling out a new 401(k) plan, there will typically be a group meeting where HR and a representative from the plan sponsor — Fidelity Net Benefits, Vanguard and Prudential are a few common providers, but there are MANY more — will summarize the plan and lead you through enrollment. In both circumstances, you will typically receive your login credentials for your online investor portal where you can complete your investment choices and set up your contributions. Two things you need to keep in mind during enrollment:

You must clearly understand the company match. If at all possible, contribute up to the company match to maximize your employer’s contributions.

If there is no company match, it may be better to focus on personal Roth IRA and IRA contributions before considering your employer retirement plan.

2. Should I choose the Roth or Traditional option?

Though not as common, more employer retirement plans are offering Roth options. Choosing between traditional or Roth to save for retirement is an important decision. You must realize that in a traditional 401(k), you are not getting a tax write-off from your pre-tax contributions: You are getting a tax deferral. You will eventually pay taxes on the money in these accounts funded with pre-tax dollars when you take withdrawals in retirement. It is very important to understand that you will pay tax not only on the pre-tax contributions, but on all the gains as well.

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For the Roth option, you pay tax on the dollars going into this account before your contributions are made. In this way they are funded with post-tax dollars, never to be taxed again. The benefit is that your withdrawals in retirement are tax-free for your contributions and your growth. The question to ask is, do you want to pay the taxes now (Roth) or pay taxes during retirement (traditional)? While this topic warrants an entire dedicated post, to be brief, I recommend to my clients that we always maximize Roth and other tax-free options first.

If your plan offers a Roth 401(k) option, it is best to put your contributions here, knowing that this money will be tax-free after you have retired. It also protects your retirement assets from the possibility of income-tax rate increases in the future.

3. How much should I contribute?

There are two sets of guidelines to consider here. There are current IRS contribution limits, and possible additional contribution limits set within your specific company plan. Current IRS contribution limits for employer-sponsored retirement plans in 2017 are as follows: $18,000 for employees under age 50. Those 50 and up are allowed a “catch up provision” giving them an added $6,000 of annual contribution for a total of $24,000 per year. (For more details click here.)

To reiterate a point made above, make it a priority to contribute up to the company match in order to maximize your employer’s contributions to your retirement savings. In addition to contribution limit guidelines, it is also important to consider how much you can afford to contribute based on your monthly budget and cash flow. After contributing up to the match, if you are able to save more for retirement, it is best to look again to your Roth IRA and other tax-free options.

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4. How should I invest?

There are many factors here to consider, and there is no “one-size-fits-all” answer. You will need to consider key factors such as your age, risk tolerance, investment time horizon, other retirement assets available to you, fees, taxes, how much you can afford to contribute, etc. Most employer plans will offer some high-level guidance through the plan sponsor to help you decide based on age and risk tolerance. You will also want to be sensitive to the cost and fees incurred with your different investment choices.

Do not be afraid to get on the phone with your plan’s representative to get some help. This is one of the valuable advantages of working with a financial adviser – getting help to identify proper investment strategies specific to your life and your overall retirement preparation.

5. How often should I change my investments?

The majority of employer sponsored retirement plan participants never make changes to their investment choices after the initial plan enrollment, according to studies, including one by the Invesment Company Institute. While this is not a reliable path to retirement success, checking and changing on a daily basis is not wise either. Broad exposure to low-cost index funds and ETFs across multiple asset classes should help most investors weather the ups and downs of the market, however this is not a license to completely ignore your account for years or decades leading up to retirement.

Your risk tolerance, investment time horizon, goals and even the available investments within your plan will change with time. Major life events like marriage and children, buying a home, etc. can all warrant changes to your investment strategy. While seeking financial advice can be very helpful, a general guideline would be:

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Check on your account quarterly.

Consider making annual adjustments to rebalance your allocations as needed.

What if I change companies?

Job mobility is a modern reality. Gone are the days when people retire from the first company they joined right out of college. While it is possible to roll your funds over to the new employer’s 401(k) plan, I recommend opening a personal IRA to roll these funds into as you move from one employer to the next.

Shifting your retirement funds into personal accounts grants you more control as well as offering you more freedom of choice when it comes to investments. You are no longer limited to the menu of investment choices within your 401(k). It is important to remember that you must roll the 401(k) funds into “like” accounts. Pre-tax 401(k) funds must go into a traditional pre-tax IRA, and Roth 401(k) funds must go into a Roth IRA. It is also important to note that when rolling a Roth 401(k) account over to a personal Roth IRA, you will also need a traditional IRA to complete the transaction. Your employer contributions were likely be pre-tax, while your personal contributions were post-tax, thus requiring both a Roth IRA and a traditional IRA to properly receive the funds.

Again, each of these six points could justify its own independent post, and keep in mind that this is not meant to offer definitive advice on retirement planning nor how to manage your 401(k), as there is no way I can know the financial specifics of anyone reading this. However, I hope you found this general guidance helpful.

When it comes to saving for retirement, start early, be consistent, maximize your Roth options first whenever possible, and do not be afraid to ask for some help.

See Also: Why Wait Until You Retire to Take Control of Your 401(k)?

Ian Maxwell is an independent fee-based fiduciary financial adviser and founder and CEO of Reviresco Wealth Advisory. He is passionate about improving quality of life for clients and developing innovative solutions that help people reconsider how to best achieve their financial goals. Maxwell is a graduate of Williams College, a former Officer in the USMC and holds his Series 6, Series 63, Series 65, and CA Life Insurance licenses. Advisory Services offered through Sowell Management Services, an SEC Registered Investment Adviser.

Comments are suppressed in compliance with industry guidelines. Click here to learn more and read more articles from the author.

This article was written by and presents the views of our contributing adviser, not the Kiplinger editorial staff. You can check adviser records with the SEC or with FINRA.

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[johnjankovic1]

Cartelization of Keyboards

Cyberactivism through social networks of multinationals such as Facebook, Twitter, Google’s Youtube (both subsidiaries of the conglomerate parent Alphabet), or Yahoo’s Flickr disseminates democracy, emancipates the marginalized, and empowers citizens, the inspiration of their publicity for social protests summoned scenes of disaffection with totalitarianism in the streets of Middle Eastern countries during the Arab Spring. A pithy tweet from an Egyptian activist précised the events well: ‘we use Facebook to schedule the protests, Twitter to coordinate, and Youtube to tell the world (Global Voice Advocacy 2010). Broadcasted incidents of a merchant’s self-immolation in Tunisia precipitating the ouster of President Ben Ali, of police brutality in Egypt, or of veiled women driving vehicles in Saudi Arabia mimicked the pitiful state of illiberal policies in the region, and this transmission stimulated civic participation as did print media once, the forerunner agent of change during the fifteenth century of early-modern Europe (Khondker 2011:677). New media demonstrably publishes a collective identity (Eltantawy & Wiest 2011:1207), actually an American one, for instance the wick set alight from a traumatic death of an Egyptian blogger by police spurred the empathy of Google executive Wael Ghonim to create the Facebook page ‘We are all Khaled Said’ prior to the eventual depositions of Egyptian Presidents Hosni Mubarak and Mohamed Morsi - the catchphrase predecessor to ‘Nous sommes tous Charlie’ following the 2015 terrorism attacks in Paris, or the banner headline of ’Nous sommes tous Américains’ first published in Le Monde subsequent to the attacks of 9/11. 

Casting US multinationals since the 1990s under the scaffolding of resource mobilization theory, a framework to explain causes of collective action and social movements, these firms synchronize capital, time, and opportunities with progressivist forces so well they galvanized the fervent loss of patriotism from pan-Middle Eastern mutinies in less than five years which stood aright to denounce food inflation, unemployment, inequality, censorship, graft, repression, and pluralism’s deficit. As US multinationals permeated through the Iron Curtain, so too did digital media firms infiltrate these Arab countries to reach a massive audience. Historically unprecedented, never has a transnational firm single-handedly prosecuted asymmetrical power on this scale, a modern-day atavism of resource power which OPEC cartelized during its oil embargo in the 1970s. Parsing through both watersheds, a comparative analysis of the case studies throws into relief the truly transformative nature of power wielded by multinationals to supplement and complement American hegemony which, acutely beginning in the 1990s, still bestrides the world economy to this day. Whereas countries promoting energy independence may wean off oil consumption, nothing of the sort may be emulated for digital information, limits of the first do not beleaguer the second, consider how soft power of clandestine information percolates into North Korea from smuggled pamphlets, USB drives, and bootleg DVDs (Maslow 2012:274), or how samizdat pamphlets did so past concertina wire of the Berlin Wall.

The divergence of the two stems predominantly from semantics between the words ‘medium’ and ‘means’, unlike OPEC which coercively controlled the means essential to advanced economies, multinationals innocuously supplied the medium to geopolitical regime change. This phantom power evading culpability parrots the same logic in support of the US’ second amendment of how ‘guns do not kill people, people kill people’, or the hackneyed trope of ‘do not shoot the messenger’. Freeware of social media networks facilitates interactions, in this case the spread of democracy in political conversations between a demographically young and urban user base, and analogous to improvised explosive devices (IEDs) redolent of its use by fanatical militants in the Middle East, only here the metaphor is virtual, the smallest and most innocent of US power that is corporate diplomacy disarms obstreperous foes the likes of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi with a simple keyboard, and the power of words, a scant amount at that of merely 140 words per missive under Twitter. Stealth is the operative word, unlike the F-35 fighter boondoggle of military procurement compounded by the program’s steep learning curve, the ‘fifth column’ of US firms specializing either in consumer electronics or social media influences regime change most economically.

New media in this case merely publicized socioeconomic and sociopolitical discontent, in spite of internet blackouts to stymie the message’s transmission, equally self-inflicting economic pain though which it skirted by dint of fibre-optic routes from Europe and Asia, the momentum of revisionists to catalyze the movement was manifestly regime change by non-state actors in the US. Less costly than the Iraq war, its $3tn of deficit spending, and both its negative externalities and opportunity costs, consider the volatility of oil futures at the time, or how the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates to fund the war, allowing for the country to be awash with liquidity and incentivizing bad loans whereafter the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis erupted upon restoration of rates (Sowell 2009:57; Stiglitz 2008:61), or what could have been the multiplier effect of this investment earmarked for domestic programs, transnational firms mobilize inside provocateurs tantamount to the CIA’s 1961 invasion at the Cuban Bay of Pigs. In the midst of the internet blackout, Google partnered with Tweeter to develop an app recording voicemail messages as tweets through a phone, countervailing entirely the cyber disconnection, and remotely coordinating dissidents as the medium through with they connect. 

The extant symbiosis unifying the Arab Spring and information flows from transnational firms, most prominently the coordination of logistics and then realtime cues for professional and mainstream journalists, across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) vindicates how the stockpile of power vested in American internet firms rallies the world economy around liberal values, progressive reforms, and on the whole the social good of peace and democracy. The market power, ecosystem and invisibility of the keyboard cartel by Twitter, a microblogging multinational, or Facebook, a social networking site, or Google’s Youtube, a platform for video content uploaded by users, differs from the OPEC’s cartelization of hydrocarbons although both commercialization of crude and digital resources generates cash flow, the legerdemain strategy of the first, an appendage of the Leviathan but not itself related directly to foreign policy, orchestrates geopolitics incognito. Of the global top ten ranked websites per metric of traffic, according to the web analytics company Alexa (2017), four of them were domiciled in the US, #1 google.com, #2 facebook.com, #3 youtube.com, and #5 yahoo.com, this global oligopoly and monopoly over information for US interests nigh on unrevised since the advent of the internet homogenize politics, economics, and society, literally guiding American soft power to the remotest of places.

The strategic trade policies of the Federal Government, a surety for the internet economy, even transcend the customary realm of commerce to advance interests of transnational firms as proxies in foreign affairs. A bipartisan effort, the State Department under Secretary Hillary Clinton ordained the policy of internet freedom in 2010 declaring how information networks, imbued with higher benchmarks of accountability for authoritarian governments, open closed societies, and cast down censorship which cows citizens into pliancy to its propaganda. Similarly, prescient wordage in Article 19 of the UN’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, recall this token of American postwar hegemony, canonizes the interests of US multinationals stating, ‘Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information through any media and regardless of frontiers.’ The concomitant carte blanche to be subversive heedless of sovereignty, now analogous to the pointed end of the spear, and incidentally of little expense, conduces to US multinationals continuously laying groundwork afar for hegemonic stability.

No facsimile exits in history wherein non-state actors independently and violently deposed the head of state or government. Pressures from the OPEC embargo, instead instrumentalized by state actors, did not depose President Carter, and did not in itself conduce to his 1980 electoral loss, unelectable because of a panoply of variables including stagflation, the Iranian hostage crisis, or passivity of Soviet adventurism into Afghanistan (Yankelovich & Kaagan 1980:696), the landslide victory ending his incumbency in favour of President Reagan cannot compare to, in relation to the Arab Spring, pressures effected by US firms or otherwise the gatekeepers of digital information. The private sector hence universalizes freedom of expression, an American tenet, as well as human rights and democracy, this crowdsourcing of political creed reduces costs and barriers to collective action and inculcates the public beyond the esotericism or discreet actions of government that may impinge on inalienable freedoms. This transparency and full disclosure in the digital age leverages soft power of the US to a gargantuan degree, the appeal of Facebook alone in Q4 2016 prided itself on 1.86bn monthly active users, tripled since 2010, emphatically this multinational informs a quarter of the world’s 7.4bn population, an inestimable amount of influence for one firm to manage and a conduit through which the American identity diffuses.

Privileging development of the information and cyber economy in the 1990s, its legacy finds expression in citizen diplomacy of Facebook, Twitter, or Youtube prior to which mercantilism of strategic trade policies in the 1990s sponsored vested interests with a stake in America’s postindustrialism. These firms consciously, amid the Arab Spring, dislocated first track diplomacy whose function of dispute resolutions through government dialogue showed woefully impotent relative to civil society’s peace-building endeavours. Social media of the aforesaid firms, in essence outsourced American foreign policy, unified activists, journalists, merchants, and scholars across the Middle East to inveigh against the polarization of society by government, the grassroots movement with shallow resources influenced to great effect public opinion whilst organized human abreast of material power in the region. The systemic sharing in this case of victimhood, a de facto force multiplier for conflict resolution at variance with MENA’s apartheid of inequality, proved to be enough of a catalyst for civil disobedience, it was rejection of track I dissent from official opposition against establishmentarians which left no alternative, except for decapitation of the sultanate regimes, other than to coerce the transfer of power by way of track II.

The triumvirate of OPEC’s oil shocks between 1973 and 1981 induced economic contractions, price fatigue in petroleum markets, and political instability from disruptions in supply on each occasion though they did not arouse convulsive regime change. The internal dissent against neopatrimonial states helmed by the triumvirate of American multinationals, on the other hand, ousted Tunisia’s Zine Ben Ali, Libya’s Muammar Gadaffi, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh, and nearly Syria’s Bashar Assad (Comunello & Anzera 2012:455), the ragtag citizenry overcame the malfeasance of these authoritarians, policies of persistent unemployment, and nepotism when coordinated within megalopolises by disaffected proletariats as those in Cairo. Specifically in Libya and Syria, the private sector’s cartelization of digital communication assisted with reification of global norms and rules, legitimating the UN’s ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P) by which civilian protection against government violence legalized outside interference if to avert an intrastate humanitarian crisis (Garwood-Gowers 2013:594). The allure of civil war channelled through US internet firms created the context, as peer-to-peer diplomacy complemented gunboat diplomacy, and without openly assaulting the Westphalian system, in which regime change could incubate.

US firms begot conditions ripe for humanitarianism’s R2P of which three desiderata were sated to vindicate the American-sponsored coup against the forfeited legitimacy of Libyan Prime Minister Gaddafi. First, the dereliction on behalf of a domestic government to guarantee no harm visited upon its citizens from genocide, war crimes, or ethnic cleansing, second, the international community’s charge to intercede should circumstances speak to such a breach, and third, the imperative for expediency in action to circumvent atrocities of this kind should they betide (Bellamy 2010:143), at length these jus ad bellum prerequisites precipitated the removal of Gadaffi. Sequentially US firms fortuitously developed the contagion of social unrest via hashtags in MENA, the spread of which fundamentally countenanced the imperialism of R2P evidencing how  patrons of Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube use the firms as media platforms for democratization, political mobilization, and human rights advocacy. Not liable to contracts and licensing agreements, unlike telecommunication companies (Preston 2011), these multinationals infiltrated countries,  weaponized private correspondence, and overwhelmed degenerate regimes, once again corroborating Francis Fukuyama’s (1992) thesis that democracy is the most lofty and exalted endpoint of the ideological evolution in governance.

[thinkgloriathink]

Should we blame people for their shortcomings, moral slips, and misjudgments, or should we attribute them to bad design?

(note from the future 3/1/17: My goodness-- I just found out today that this very topic I tried to explore in this post has been discussed and debated amongst intellectuals for like... ages. Lots of economists/sociologists/etc. seem to really like exploring this dichotomy between a more “constrained” vs. a more “unconstrained” vision of society. Wanna read more about all of this stuff? Read “A Conflict of Visions” by Thomas Sowell. On my reading list. Yes. Awwwww yea...)

So I've been reading a lot over winter break, and I was half way through the book "The Design of Everyday Things" by Don Norman, when I sort of started thinking about a big central question:

Should we blame people for their shortcomings, moral slips, and misjudgment, or should we attribute it to bad design?

We can't practically change human nature on the large scale— we can’t force or expect people to be highly competent, even-tempered, and morally infallible. Don Norman argues that we could adapt the policies and systems we build to be designed for fault-prone humans. When things go wrong, we should try to get ourselves used to saying that it’s not bad people, but bad design.

His idea is reassuring to us because he reminds us that the blunders and struggles we have with some everyday machines are more likely a result of poor design, rather than a reflection of our incompetence. Take this all too common situation: you’re in a hotel room, go to the shower, and you realize that you have no idea how to operate it. It’s got four knobs, no instructions, and you’re basically left to guess which one controls the heat and which one controls the water flow. You stand there, scratching your head for five minutes or scalding yourself by accident, feeling embarrassed because your half-million dollar investment in an elite education did nothing at all to help you figure out something as “simple” as a shower. Nah man, it’s the shower’s fault. Bad design.

Norman claims that the best sort of design is something that has the right restrictions, guard-rails, and simplifications— basically, HUMAN centered design. As you could probably tell by now, he takes a very practical approach to his design philosophy, and doesn’t really buy into the whole “they should know better” kind of bullshit.

A washing machine with fifty different switches and controls might be able to give you wickedly clean delicates at customizable temperatures and spinning speeds, but it’s not doing its job right if all this makes people skip straight to the default settings every time. He’s making the argument that, more often than not, it’s not always the sole quality of the result that measures a machine’s greatness, but a balance between the overall user experience it provides and that result.

It wasn’t hard for me to absorb and agree with a lot of what he was saying in his book. If you were to boil down his arguments and first principle assumptions about people, you’ll get that he lays down his groundwork by saying that humans are fundamentally prone to making errors, and therefore the oversights and mistakes they make sometimes while using technologies should be blamed more on bad design than bad people.

Why did the plane crash? Because the wing didn’t rotate like it should. Why? Because the pilot lost control of the wing. Why? Because the pilot was unconscious. Why? Because there was a gas tank leak in the back of the plane. Why? Because there was a faulty knob made of cheap metal that split open and broke. THAT is something that can be fixed and can save lives in the future.

SO Don Norman argues that people are meant to mess up, and we need proper design to accommodate for that.

This subtle shifting of blame from individuals to overall system design got me thinking about things like morality and policy. Does this viewpoint also apply to moral infractions?

Have you heard of the quote: “Don’t hate the player, hate the game”? It’s sort of like that.

Why is this important or relevant? Because I think the way people answer this question might be telling of the kinds of policies they might support or even perhaps shine light upon political views.

In The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt, Haidt constructs two hypothetical “ideal societies” based upon the contrasting ideas of John Stuart Mill and Emile Durkheim. They both have two very different starting assumptions about people. Millian assumes people are generally good and should be allowed to maximize their free will. Durkheimian assumes people will tend to misbehave if they aren’t bound by social mores and duty. A Durkheimian world is one that values duty and social contracts, self-control over self-expression, and duty over rights.

You could interpret that like this: A Millian society puts more emphasis on the individual and less on the “design”, while a Durkheimian (and Norman-like) society is all about less individual and more focus on “design.”

In many ways, assuming that people are inherently good, and acting upon that assumption produces a lot of promising perks. Assuming the best about people is what grants us a lot of our luxuries, freedoms, and niceties. This gives you a lot of win-win situations.

We’ll be able to step away from our desk at the library for two minutes to get a coffee without having to chain all of our stuff down with lock and key

If we assume that people are good, and won’t all steal from each other at any open opportunity, and we’re able to enjoy having free toilet paper and soap in our public restrooms (for example). This kind of system benefits everybody, as long as people agree to practice moderation and look down upon those who overuse/abuse the free luxury.

Here is where assuming the best about people goes bad, and where disagreements might occur:

The school system in Rhode Island is sort of messed up: School districts fire teachers in June and rehire them in September so that they can collect unemployment benefits. Unfair, isn’t it? You’re talking entire districts and thousands of people that are entangled in this whole mess of nastiness. Does this mean all the teachers and the people in the board of education are depraved people for benefiting from this loophole? That’s a stretch. It’s a difficult process to stop, as doing “the right thing” means taking away a significant source of income these people may have been depending on.

Take a good look at the folks who frequent all-you-can-eat buffets, and you’ll notice that some people do some really morally questionable things: they starve themselves for two days in preparation before going in, load up their plates with the priciest food items in the buffet line, and gorge themselves so they could get the most bang out of their buck. What they are doing is technically legal, and the “design” of all-you-can-eat buffets permits this behavior. So if this behavior is done so rampantly that these restaurants eventually go bankrupt, what would you say is the problem? Bad people, or bad design?

So I want to tie this back to Don Norman and design. Do you agree with him about assuming the worst about people? And do you think his argument about people’s unavoidable tendencies to mess up have external validity in other things beyond design too?

[websiteflix]

52 Books to Read in 2017

A Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking

Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

War and Peace -Leo Tolstoy

Einstein: His Life and Universe - Walter Isaacson

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig

The Confidence Gap: A Guide to Overcoming Fear and Self-Doubt - Russ Harris

Thinking, Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us - Daniel H. Pink

Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance - Angela Duckworth

The Paradox of Choice - Barry Schwartz

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business - Charles Duhigg

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott FitzgeraldThe Wisdom of Crowds - James Surowiecki

The Power of Vulnerability: Teachings of Authenticity, Connections and Courage - Brene Brown

The Screwtape Letters - C. S. Lewis

1984 - George Orwell

Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth - Brad Blanton

Choose Yourself! - James Altucher

Unlimited Power : The New Science Of Personal Achievement - Anthony Robbins

The Power of Your Subconscious Mind - Joseph Murphy

Ego Is the Enemy - Ryan Holiday

The Gulag Archipelago - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success - Carol S. Dweck

Love and Respect: The Love She Most Desires; The Respect He Desperately Needs - Emerson Eggerichs

Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand

Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future - Peter Thiel

Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea - Barbara Demick

The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference - Malcolm Gladwell

Animal Farm - George Orwell

Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics - Henry Hazlitt

The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Modern Times - Paul Johnson

The Paradox of Choice - Barry Schwartz

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business - Charles Duhigg

Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer - Siddhartha Mukherjee

When Breath Becomes Air - Deckle Edge

Conquests and Cultures: An International History - Thomas Sowell

Migrations And Cultures: A World View - Thomas Sowell

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943 - Antony Beevor

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

Howard Hughes: His Life and Madness - Donald Barlett

Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era - James Barrat

The Better Angels of Our Nature - Steven Pinker

Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka

Ulysses - James Joyce