Just like our ability to see colors in specific ways evolved as a survival mechanism, so did many of the associations we make with specific colors. Universally, brown is seen as an “ugly” color. When you think of what’s brown in nature, it makes sense — rotting food, feces and mud are all brown. Brown is also the “reliable” color, perhaps because so many things in the environment, like tree bark, dirt and lots of different animals are brown. Similarly, green is the color of vitality and freshness because it’s the color of fresh, healthy vegetation.
A lot of anime protagonist are written to be dumb for a similar reason. It gives the writers an excuse to explain things to the audience constantly.
My experience is the time equivalent of a high-interest loan cycle, except instead of money, I borrow time. But this kind of borrowing comes with an interest rate of its own: By focusing on one immediate deadline, I neglect not only future deadlines but the mundane tasks of daily life that would normally take up next to no time or mental energy. It’s the same type of problem poor people encounter every day, multiple times: The demands of the moment override the demands of the future, making that future harder to reach.
There are three types of poverty: money poverty, time poverty, and bandwidth poverty.
The third type is fed by the other two: If I’m focused on the immediate deadline, I don’t have the cognitive resources to spend on mundane tasks or later deadlines. If I’m short on money, I can’t stop thinking about today’s expenses — never mind those in the future. In both cases, I end up making decisions that leave me worse off because I lack the ability to focus properly on anything other than what’s staring me in the face right now, at this exact moment.
It’s a fine balancing act: Overabundance makes us less efficient, but we need to reach a certain threshold of sufficiency before that effect kicks in.
If you have a small suitcase, you have to be efficient when you pack, but with a big one, you can afford to leave some slack. True, it takes you less time (and fewer cognitive resources) to pack it, but as a result you may end up not packing it nearly as well.
Reflection is a luxury good.
Efficiency is always the more exhausting and demanding alternative. Attention is finite. If I’m forced to operate under constraint all the time, my performance will suffer — and I may not even be capable of recognizing the deficit.
Abundant time can make us procrastinate. Deadline pressure makes us more efficient. What scarcity does is make you focus. When there’s no scarcity, you relax, you take it easy, and then you wonder, what happened to the day? You’re treating time the way the rich treat money.
They were so focused on operating under scarcity that they couldn’t think their way through to a strategy — or, indeed, even realize that an opportunity to do so was available. “Scarcity, of any kind, will create a tendency to borrow.”
When you get overloaded and you feel this deadline is overwhelming, you can say, I’ll take a vacation, I’ll focus on work-life balance. Poor people can’t say, “I’ll take a vacation from being poor.” It’s the same mental process, but a different feedback loop.
The poor are under a deadline that never lifts, pressure that can’t be relieved. The poor are so taxed they don’t even realize they have a problem.
They know it’s short term and they don’t care. Because the only real option for true long term happiness is building real, deep relationships with other people. But other people tend to let you down in way that a phone can never do. The phone doesn’t one day just decide it’s in a shitty mood and unload their stress on you or lie to you or simply stop giving a shit about you for some arbitrary reason. Material things are short lived but more reliable than people.
This is about power and feeling important. It’s rooted in low self-esteem but presents as hyper-confidence and “standing up for what’s right.” Sit down and ask her what is going on in her life where her self-esteem is so low that she has to yell at store clerks to feel good about herself.
Yelling at sales people is when you see a lot of people who feels nobody cares about their voice finally have a recognized voice.
A lot of the more violent/aggressive things people do are out of fear of something happening to themselves. Think about it: Why would anyone who is secure in their life need to attack another human being? Sure, the obvious argument is that there is some kind of moral imperative, like to help others in the future or set some high ethical standard, but this is usually coming from people who are and actions that are inherently unethical in it of themselves. When people fear something, this fear manifests. It’s kinda like fight or flight.
When my dad got divorced, he found a lot of his friends were really just my mom’s friends. He had exactly one friend who helped him pack up and move. His joke after this was if you win the lottery, you’ll find out real quick how big your family apparently is. But if you wanna find out how many friends you have, get a divorce. The lesson here is that a true friend will stand by you even in a really dark place where they have absolutely nothing to benefit from standing by your side, and even in some cases, something to lose.
Especially when you’re in a dark place.
Come to think of it, victory can never come without defeat. You can’t win every single time. I feel that the more important thing is for you to pick yourself up and think about how you can improve yourself. Before, I used to only care about winning and not losing. Now, it’s become a habit of mine to focus more on how to improve myself by looking at wins and losses.
One of the things I like to keep in the back of my mind is that I feel that marriage is like a business. You need to spend time and energy on it for it to grow. If you neglect it then it will break down. It’s very easy to become complacent in life.
I only accepted that treatment from her because I didn’t value myself.
That’s a common problem in analysis of competitive games. A team will look way worse when they’re up against a better opponent.
They make far more mistakes because they are getting pressured or feel the need to do unusual things since their normal strategies don’t work.
Power is better than money for as long as it lasts… but it never lasts.
Power is simply control, money is just a form of control. Control over anything, be it external control like people, resources, land, etc. or internal control such as self-control (emotional, will, etc…) is power. Anything that involves control is power.
Also, abuse of power, or corruption would be in my opinion losing control. Next time you see a corrupt man, or anyone that abuses their power, just know that they lost control over themselves.
With power comes responsibility. And in a democratic environment with stubborn and judgmental citizens, power is more like a hand grenade. Unstable, liable to combust at any second.
In the stone age, power was being physically bigger than the next guy.
After that, power meant loyalties and betrayals to gain the largest armies.
In today’s world, power’s most basic form is money, but it might change in the future.
Money is a means to and end, but power is the end. At the root of it, power is people. We build civilizations around people and true power comes from understanding people well enough to understand what form of power will take in your current setting (be it money or else).
Although disclaiming a crusade for global government, the Co-Chairmen’s phrases have a distinctly statist tilt: “organize life on the planet,” “management of global affairs,” and “global organization” are not phrases generally used in libertarian circles. Moreover, the Co-Chairmen not only make no effort to hide what they think is necessary, they proudly emphasize it as “a pre-eminent strand in the thinking of the Commission: the world’s need for enlightened leadership that can inspire people to acknowledge their responsibilities to each other, and to future generations.” If this assertion sounds chilling, it may be that you are edging toward the Americanist camp.
At a time when “hegemony,” whether used in Beijing, Moscow or Paris (or even by well-meaning Americans) is a code word for the US, the animus is clear. The Co-Chairmen pose as alternatives: (1) “going forward to a new era of security that responds to law and collective will and common responsibility”; or (2) “going backward to the spirit and methods of what one of our members described as the ’sheriff’s posse’ — dressed up to masquerade as global action.” Leaving aside apparently trivial problems such as how to measure the international “common will,” the Co-Chairmen have taken direct aim at what the US did in the Gulf War, and at what was broadly believed by many Americans to be an accurate description of America’s role int he post-Cold War world.
Since decisions to use military force are the most important that any nation-state faces, limiting their decisions or transferring them to another source of authority is ultimately central to the diminution of sovereignty and the advance of global governance.
One little noticed effect of this development has been to impair severely the concept of “the sovereign equality of states,” much beloved by third-world governments in defending the one-nation-one-vote principle of the UN General Assembly. It was, of course, at best only a useful fiction for their purposes in any event, but is now also conceptually in disarray.
Negotiation of both of these measures had commenced with the strong support of President Clinton, whose Administration has consistently been the most Globalist of this century. Ironically, however, the Clinton Administration has not yet sign either of the two treaties, perhaps reflecting why President Clinton has also been one of the most successful American politicians of this century.
Impatient with democratic inefficiency and what are perceived to be faulty decisions, human rights groups seek to use universal jurisdiction and related concepts to advance their own value preferences.
Yet it is precisely the detachment from governments that make international civil society so troubling, at least for democracies. Within each democratic nation-state, political interests compete for governmental power — in other words, the legitimate authority that flows from victory to implement their preferred policies. In the international context, that includes the authority to negotiate on behalf of the entire nation, including opposing political forces that were defeated in democratic elections. Civl society, by contrast, provides a second opportunity for intrastate advocates to reargue their positions, thus advantaging them over their opponents who are either unwilling or unable to reargue their cases in international fora. It also provides them at least the possibility of external lobbying leverage, to force domestic policy results they could not have otherwise achieved.
Even the geography of international conferences reinforces the point, as NGOs increasingly crowd the meeting halls, participating as functional equals to nation-states. In this parallel universe, governments see political factions that are obscure minorities within their own countries emerging as powerful actors in complex global negotiations.
Consistent with their often Marxist philosophical inclinations, and stemming in no small measure from active Soviet measures, “Third World” governments eagerly embraced the “North-South” conflict, with its promise of increased flows of concessional assistance, the free transfer of technology form developed countries, and “codes of conduct” for international businesses.
Convention on the Law of the Sea entered into force, its underlying theory that the seabed was a part of “the common heritage of mankind,” became fixed in the Globalist mindset, and spread to many other fields. For example, the ever-creative Group of 77 decided that “technology” was “part of the universal human heritage,” thus ensuring that all nations “have the right of access” to it.
When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory.
Kissinger himself puts it in this book: “In the past the major problem for strategists was to assemble superior strength; in the contemporary period the problem more frequently is how to make the available power relevant to objectives likely to be in dispute.”
Others, however, may enjoy a comparable access and even linguistic skill, but few others have the remaining necessary equipment. There is simply no substitute for insight, perception, sensitivity, and what simply has to be called “political sense.” These Kissinger has in abundance, and in this field the combination is rare. It is really hard to understand why they should be so rare. So many articulate people study international politics; so few of them grasp so well its essence — especially where issues of military significance are involved. The latter is indeed a most complicating factor, and Kissinger no doubt owes something to pure luck that he happened at the beginning of his academic career to turn his attention seriously and deeply to military problems. With his knowledge of military affairs goes, however, an even rarer thing, a sense for the implication of power — its potentialities and its limitations. He can speak of military force and its use without inducing a reviewer to remark, as one British reviewer once did in reviewing, on the whole favorably, Herman Kahn’s Thinking about the Unthinkable: “One sometimes wonders what has happened to Mr. Kahn’s sense of anguish.”
Nothing illustrates better the collapse of the Westphalian notion of noninterference than the proposition that freedom of speech and the press, which has never existed in the five millennia of Chinese history, could be brought about through legislation by the American Congress.
I don’t know if I’m scarred emotionally I would say it. But I would say this, that if you are in high office you have an obligation to the public and to your subordinates not to exhibit whatever doubts you have. Because the most important quality you can impart is confidence that the problem is solvable. If the man who is in charge shows uncertainty then all of his subordinates and all of those whose future depends on them will also panic or withdraw into a shell.
Churchill once even commented on one of Eden’s speeches that the latter had used every cliche except “God is love.”
Rothwell wrote that although Eden was capable of acting with ruthlessness, his main concern was to avoid being seen as “an appeaser.” Like many people, Eden convinced himself that his past actions were more consistent than they had in fact been.
Crisis is often linked to the concept of psychological stress and used to suggest a frightening or fraught experience. In general, crisis is the situation of a “complex system” (family, economy, society. Note that simple systems do not enter crises. We can speak about a crisis of moral values, and economical or political crisis, but not a motor crisis).
- Unexpected
- Creates uncertainty
- Is seen as a threat to important goals
Venette argues that “crisis is a process of transformation where the old system can no longer be maintained.”
Someone once told me “maturity is knowing when to be immature” and for some reason it really stuck with me. In my experience, it’s the goofiest people who others turn to for the most serious things in their lives.
Many people say that I’m a hard worker, but I wouldn’t be able to catch up with the younger players otherwise. When I first started my pro-gaming career, I was like 16-17. I was the youngest player on the team, but now I’m the oldest. It feels that I should lead the team both in and out of the game, so I tend to work harder.
Thankfully, the results correspond to my practice. If I don’t practice, I’m really bad. I’m so bad that the performance isn’t becoming of a pro gamer. But if I do practice hard, I get repaid for all the hard work. How much I’m proud of and respect myself depends on how much I practice. That’s one of the reasons why I keep trying hard.
I can’t sleep until I’m satisfied. You know, there’s that expression, “riding a bus” (to get carried). I can’t understand that. Maybe it’s because of my position. It doesn’t feel like winning if I “ride a bus.” This might be one of the reasons that I’ve been able to be active this long. Sometimes people say that I’m really strong; if I’m not, I wouldn’t be able to be in this spot today.
The way he was so utterly focused before a fight. Stares daggers into the opponent. Not emotional, not excitable, calm, collected, picturing how he is going to murder the man in the opposite corner.
Many of the wisest political scientists of this and previous centuries agree that democratic institutions are especially difficult to establish and maintain — because they make heavy demands on all portions of a population and because they depend on complex social, cultural, and economic conditions…
In the relatively few places where they exist, democratic governments have come into being slowly, after extended prior experience with more limited forms of participation during which leaders have reluctantly grown accustomed to tolerating dissent and opposition, opponents have accepted the notion that they may defeat but not destroy incumbents, and people have become aware of government’s effects on their lives and of their own possible effects on government…
In neither Nicaragua nor Iran did they realize that the only likely result of an effort to replace an incumbent autocrat with one of his moderate critics or a “broad-based coalition” would be to sap the foundations of the existing regime without moving the nation any closer to democracy. The fabric of authority unravels quickly when the power and status of the man at the top are undermined or eliminated.
Vietnam presumably taught us that the US could not serve as the world’s policeman: it should also taught us the dangers of trying to be the world’s midwife to democracy when the birth is scheduled to take place under conditions of guerrilla war.
Stage 1: It’s OK to do it if you don’t get caught. “It depends on who he knows on the police force.”
Stage 2: If it feels good, do it. “If his wife is nice and pretty, he should do it.”
Stage 3: Do it for me. “He should do it because he loves his wife.”
Stage 4: Do your duty. “Saving a human life is more important than protecting property.”
Stage 5: It’s the consensus of thoughtful men. “Society has a right to insure its own survival. I couldn’t hold my head up in public if I let her die.”
Stage 6: What if everybody did that? “Human life has supreme inherent value. I couldn’t live with myself if I let her die.”
A lot of you guys might think that physical setup doesn’t matter much, but that’s because you haven’t found the perfect setup for your body yet. This is connect to the Attention theory. There are some days when you play well, and others when you play badly. I won’t deny that form changes from day to day, but it’s not that important. The important thing is who you play against. When I play against gold or platinum players, I don’t need to obsessively fix my setup. Even if I only use 30 percent of my attention, and leave the other 70 alone, I can still win easily. But when I match up against opponents like Showmaker, I need all the attention I can muster. And if my mouse feels slightly off, that takes away some of my attention, which I need to play the game. However, if my setup is perfect, I can focus on the game. The stronger the opponent, the more attention I need, and that makes every last bit of it matter. That’s why I’m so obsessive over my setup.
Always look at the other player’s nickname. There are lots of youtube channels that show master tier players dueling it out in a flashy manner, but those montages are all meaningless. Against better players, that duel wouldn’t have happened in the first place.
At that level, I think that the difference in execution becomes somewhat minimal, as all players are of a certain caliber. The much bigger difference is in how they understand the game.
I suppose one of the good things about the royal family is that they are self-aware about their own intellectual mediocrity. How many people in the public eye can you say that about? Most successful politicians, artists, and media types, are so arrogant that it’s like they live on a different planet. Meritocracy doesn’t get rid of elitism, it just creates elitists of a different type.
Patton was particularly upset when learning of the end of the war against Japan, writing in his diary, “Yet another war has come to and end, and with it my usefulness to the world.”
In the end, the king had no clothes, and the sycophants wouldn’t say a fucking word.
When you look around and realize that every single person around you is on your payroll, then you are in trouble.