PRay TeLL, Dr. Hash

We don’t want to review the SHTF concepts but we probably should: 1. Eventually there’ll be so much knowledge that everyone will have to be a scientist. 2. The single most important ingredient for change is complacency. 3. Part of suffering is suffering fools. 4. What you know can corrode your soul. 5. I’m not impressed with anyone but then who is? 6. The only thing worse than working for somebody...

Everyone knows that frequent forest fires are healthy because they keep the dead wood from building up, but politics are such that firefighters prevent them anyway. The analogy applies to almost everything: animal populations, cancer, and certainly economics; if every so often there isn’t a clear out, when the reckoning finally does come, it’s too big & destructive to even do anything about. H...

It’s difficult to play by the rules if everyone else cheats. If you’ve been indoctrinated since youth to truth, justice & the American way, when the opposite is the prevailing game, what do you do? In that environment, honesty is detrimental to your success. Even though it’s difficult because it’s against your nature, you’ve got to grab what you can get because everybody else is. Money is bein...

The common theory of empires is that they have a 250 year life-cycle: pioneers, conquest, commerce, affluence, intellect, and decline due to decadence, defined as a rejection of their traditional values. Though the theory makes for interesting reading, it misses the real reason all societies eventually fail: the weak gain control. Currently, democracy is the culprit: there is simply more weak than...

You shouldn’t volunteer, especially if you don’t want to, which you probably don’t. People who volunteer voluntarily do it for the dopamine from altruism, serotonin from subservience, or the adrenaline from masochism. It’s even insulting to be asked to volunteer for something because it’s quintessential passive aggression: “Your skills aren’t good enough for financial reward but maybe somebody wil...

I know lawyers and I'm not impressed: what’s worse is that lawyers become judges. I know doctors and I'm not impressed: doctors become sanctimonious elitists. I know scientists and I'm not impressed; most are neither creative nor intuitive. Though I know accountants, I don’t know any economists but I don’t know any witches either. From my intimate experience with so many respected professions that...

It’s an age-old question: is it better not to know? Would your relationship be better, would your job be more fulfilling, would your life have more meaning if you knew everything concerning them? The answer is a resounding no! Some things you don’t need and don’t want to hear. Knowing too much about some things is corrosive, so why would knowing too much about things that don’t directly affect you...

I have been a political candidate for various offices, placing as high as 2nd for state House and 3rd for U.S. House. There’s little chance I’ll ever win but I’m tired of suffering the fools who can. It’s not just politicians, fools are everywhere, and they’re always in the way of competent people. Sometimes they get there through nepotism, sometimes it’s affirmative action, often it’s momentum, b...

One of the insidious problems with everyone being the center-of-the-universe is a distorted sense of self-satisfaction that leads to complacency. Martin Luther King said, “our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter” but it assumes things matter. In reality, almost nothing in the world affects you, and people eventual realize that expending emotional energy worryin...

Scientometrics is the measuring & analyzing of science. Since 1947 it’s estimated that knowledge has been steadily growing at 5% a year since the 17th century, meaning scientific data is doubling every 15 years. Obviously, this exponential growth can’t continue forever simply because to continue, everyone on the planet would have to be a scientist to handle their little piece. There’s an ever...

Finance can never get enough review: 1. A psychiatrist could explain economics better than an economist. 2. Imaginary money allows investing for retirement, which is also imaginary. 3. There is so much wealth that it distorts what used to be controlled by markets. 4. Lockdowns don’t affect productivity because those people weren’t productive anyway. 5. Income inequality is good for liberty but wea...

Though it seems reasonable that financial advice is focused on investing money, if you consider the reasons someone wants the advice, the emphasis on money doesn’t make sense. Money is only a means to achieve the things you want to do but you can do those things now with the money you’re told to invest. The simple reason not to postpone your satisfaction & enjoyment to some future date is beca...

When vast amounts of money are swirling around, people get so frantic, they become irrational: Tulip mania in the 17th century collapsed the Dutch empire, or France’s Mississippi Land Scheme in the 18th century that crashed the French empire. The phenomenon this time around is crypto. Crypto perfectly fits the Ponzi scheme mold, except in its case there's no product: nobody is offering a good or s...

The fact that money is imaginary is a hard point to get across because people exchange money every day and it seems real; but anything that appears out of thin air is imaginary: for example, anytime government needs more money to temporarily mask real societal problems, it just imagines it. Every so often, politicians will imagine more money than has ever been imagined before: like now. The questi...

Even fervent Marxists will agree that in most environments, Capitalism is unequaled in its ability to stimulate economic growth and the social benefits that come from it. The argument socialists have with Capitalism is that it inevitably stratifies & concentrates wealth, but that’s not the most dangerous side-effect... The fatal problem with unregulated Capitalism is that everything is for sal...

The reason the egalitarians are always prattling on about “income inequality” rather that “wealth inequality” is that the poster-child income inequality nations, such as Sweden and the Netherlands with high taxation on income, have higher wealth inequality than the U.S. In fact, the Netherlands, normally associated with extensive socialism, is the nation with the most wealth inequality. Interestin...

The world, America specifically, learned that many workers don’t do anything productive enough that it affects the whole economy, especially if the buying power of those people is not diminished. Apparently, millions of restaurant workers don’t provide anything that doing without has the same affect: no servers, no entertainers, no bartenders required, and only enough cooks to meet the diminished...

Modern Monetary Theory is the idea that there can be an unlimited supply of imaginary money, so if the stock market needs money, or businesses, or even everybody, then the government can just print it. This concept solves several problems, one of which is wealth redistribution, at least on the surface: if everyone were given a million dollars, average income would increase. But the nature of Capit...

Capitalism has a little discussed side effect, which is the promotion of the illusion of retirees, supported by their “investments” instead of work, with no contemporary productivity. People’s expectations are that they can live the rest of their lives carefree, producing nothing, in a lifestyle they could only dream about when they were working, and expecting everyone else to fill in on their beh...

Most of the world is productive, the U.S. exceedingly so; we produce far more than we need, we have for at least a century, and it's increasing. Even if only 10% of the population worked, we could continue along as we are indefinitely. This success is the direct result of Capitalism, but that also leads to individuals accumulating way, way more than they could ever need under any circumstances: wh...

Feminism is a tough review but let’s try anyway: 1. Wokeness is to the U.S. as Christianity was to Rome. 2. Those who are not yet Woke are the Walking Woke. 3. The thing Critical Race Theory lacks is critical thinking. 4. Systemic Racism is racists who don't like the system. 5. Equity takes equality to the logical next level of egalitarianism. 6. Feminism doesn’t care if it ends up emasculating bo...

From a male pov, America has become a failed state: government is ineffectual, Capitalism has betrayed them, and the dominance hierarchy is broken. What’s left of their culture, customs & traditions is under attack, and there’s no way to fight back because all the levers of power have been lost. The so-called Patriarchy: liberty, meritocracy & patriotism, are all in steep decline. and the...

Due to hookup apps like Tinder, society is back to the top 20% of the guys getting all the girls multiple times, and the rest getting nothing. Because of this, an alarming number of young men, 28% of ages 18-30, are involuntarily celibate, so-called “incels.” It’s not difficult to see why, the majority of males are immature pre-adolescents even into their late teens: their balls never dropped; the...

If society continues going like it’s going, women will completely dominate, just as men did a century ago. During the 50-year transition, men were indoctrinated into believing that what women wanted was equality but women achieved parity with men decades ago, have surpassed them by most metrics, and have no intention of stopping. Women are well past equal in law, medicine, management, entertainmen...

Women see the world through an authoritarian lens where elites know best and expect their subordinates to respond without question. This is because girls are acclimated to authoritarianism from a young age: as children, they are subject to their parents, then they are overshadowed by the physical & leadership superiority of boys in school, then husband; and certainly, women who raise children...