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Lord, make me an instrument of your peace: where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.
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FiveHourMarathon
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19d ago
I would guess that Iran wanted higher casualties, but also did not want to invite instant retaliation. I guess they might have wanted to achieve a dozen causalities or so. They erred on the side of too few, which is a lot better than erring on the side of too many for everyone. On the plus side, they learned something about Israel's missile defense capabilities.
This assumes that Iranian leaders are constrained to believe in the Israeli government and media's official reports. They are not. Iran is free to spread to its own people that significant damage was done to Israel and that the Jewish world media conspiracy is covering it up.
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23d ago
It sucks, but if you actually try to enforce that balance reduction term he's just gonna split.
Oh, he's already split, I just hope he stays split. I've heard horror stories of guys who "repossess" construction work by destroying it, hence the need to rig up better cameras. The purpose of the balance reduction clause was primarily to motivate him to consistently show up, and secondarily to create a drop-dead date for the contract if he didn't. Once seven days pass where he didn't show up, there is zero remaining balance. On the off chance he tries to waste our time in small-claims.
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23d ago
Very similar! I'm perpetually skeptical of Environmentalists who want to restrict things that they never wanted to do anyway.
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23d ago
The burgeoning tradcath revolt among the Gen Z dissident right smacks of insincerity; they pantomime the words and rituals, but there’s no genuine belief.
I don't remember where I first heard it, but something that stuck with me about a lot of the LARPer wing of TradCaths who are making "endeavoring to be more Catholic than the Pope" a byword instead of a gag, was the observation: if your God hates all the same people you do, you aren't really religious, you just have an imaginary friend.
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24d ago
The best example would be the Congo or Somalia, where we've seen decades of perpetual and miserable disorder.
In a world where the UN did not enforce arbitrary border set on an arbitrary date, Congo and Somalia's better-run neighbors like Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda would have a motivation to conquer, integrate, and administrate regions of those countries. Right now, only altruism can motivate anyone to help organize one of these failed states. We've outlawed any sense of enlightened self-interest.
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24d ago
I thought of the classic bike cuck comic today, because I kinda feel that way in reverse: I'm particularly mad at someone because I know they aren't better off for having fucked me over.
I've had an ongoing nightmare with a contractor working for my father. He's repeatedly shown up juuuuuuust enough that it seemed like a bad idea to fire him and try to find someone else to finish (no one likes to take over a half-finished job), but then would demand a progress payment, and disappear for a few days afterward, with no notice. It took a month to do a week's worth of work, with a million excuses about how this wasn't ready and that wasn't right and this was bad and that was bad and whatever, and it is holding up other aspects of the same project. Last week, I wrote up a new contract to have him sign, indicating that in exchange for a payment on that day, he would come to work every day until the conclusion of the project. For every day he missed we would deduct 1/7 of the remaining balance. He's since missed three days. I didn't mention the balance reduction, somewhat dishonestly, because I didn't want him thinking "Well, is it even worth finishing for 4/7?"
Well today he comes in and demands to get half the remaining balance up front. "I gotta make my car payment or they're gonna repo the car!" I put him off all day then told him, hey, we're going to abide by the payment terms you signed last week, I see no reason to divert from them. Whatever issues there are with the job or with your finances, you knew about them last week when we put that together and you signed it.
Now he's saying he isn't coming back for two days because he needs to do other jobs to make money. I told him we intend to abide by the contract terms, and that he is obligated to come in every day. He said that he would make up any lost money charging us extra to do repairs on work he had already screwed up.
I'm going to need to rig up better security cameras at the property to make sure he doesn't pull some bullshit.
But the thing that galls me the most about the whole process is that he didn't benefit from this either. He's still broke! We paid him his entire initial estimate, and it took four times as long as it should have, so he didn't end up with a big pile of money at the end. It's going to cost us twice as much as it should have by the time we actually get it done, and he's broke.
Maybe I would feel better if he had just stolen my money, at least it would have made him happier.
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24d ago
No, Cuba isn't an argument that centrally planned economies are better than free markets. It is a reasonable argument that Communist totalitarianism is better than the right-wing, kleptocratic authoritarianism present in other small Caribbean statelets. And certainly better than whatever it is that they have in Haiti! There's a certain context dependence: I wouldn't bring up Cuba to argue that the USA should go Communist, but it's reasonable to argue that Cuba (taking into account the embargo) is way better than other countries which were similarly situated circa 1960, even where those countries have been the subject of repeated rounds of IMF Capitalist interventions and FDI. Cuba's murder rate, for example, is less than half that of the DR, and 1/10 that of Jamaica and 1/5 of much wealthier Mexico!
My overall opinion on third world development remains that the 1st world countries need to collectively agree to legalize conquest between third world nations, abolish any international recognition of existing borders, and give it 30 years to sort itself out.
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25d ago
The Pacific War tends to get less interest because there's much less of the X's and O's or Jimmies and Joes to it, after Midway Japan didn't really have a strategic chance it was just a question of how much punishment they would endure before giving in.
The narrative in the West has the Germans winning significant victories and being on the verge of a strategic victory until Stalingrad at the earliest, and they would continue to launch significant counteroffensives until late in the war that it's easy to dream on for counterfactuals.
The narrative in the East gives the Japanese no real shot after Midway, they don't really launch any interesting offensives, it's just a long series of Island Hopping, Kamikaze, bombing of Japanese cities, Atom Bomb, fini.
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Taking Communism on its own terms, historical materialism is refuted by the Soviet Union's failure even if it experienced a period of success. One of Communism's primary doctrines and promises has been the historical inevitability of the Communist form, that Capitalism's contradictions mean that it must inevitably fail, and be supplanted by Communism. This was the official belief of the Soviet Union, and remains afaik the official position of Red China. The failure of the Eastern Bloc and its reversion to Capitalism contradicts the core tenets of Communism as the right side of history. The promise of Communism was never that it could deliver a period of relatively decent development relative to expectations, it was always that it would deliver a permanent world of equality. It had such persuasive power to so many intellectuals in the 20th century because they genuinely found Marx's arguments persuasive, and believed that Communism was inevitable. The failure of the Soviet Union was strong evidence against that belief. It should be noted that the continued existence of Red China should be a riposte, but that still doesn't really fit into a simplistic view of Marx, and few on any side are very pro-China.
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Few people are Utilitarians, such that they'll accept any amount of abridged Human Rights for a % improvement in development. The Soviets had a bad reputation for human rights abuses. There is a point at which many of us would "most respectfully return [our] ticket" for utopia.
That being said, I largely accept that argument as regards, particularly, Castro in Cuba. Mostly because the rest of the Caribbean doesn't offer much else in the way of developmental and human rights success stories compared to Cuba, while Poland and Germany are a pretty clear demonstration that Capitalism delivered better results than Communism. If anything, economic results in the Caribbean seem to show that they should have just stayed colonized.
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26d ago
Just finished Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness but I think I may have hit the limits of my audiobook comprehension because I was left thinking "wait, when does stuff start happening?". Maybe it's just not that type of book, there have been enough potent lines that it may be a book you just have to enjoy the language of.
That's a book I truly never got. I read it and just zero percent got the point.
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26d ago
I just finished The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I have to say it is nearly perfect as a book, for me. It's the perfect mix of literary, philosophical, enough action to keep moving, enough sex to be fun without becoming grating or disgusting. The length is perfect, it doesn't drag beyond the material, and at no point was I reading just to get the book over with, but it's a sufficient length to explore a lot of ideas and really dig into the characters. It's obviously political, but not overbearing. It's about a time and a place but it is timeless, it neither holds your hand explaining things nor requires so much background that you need a history degree to get it.
I'm probably going to go back to Tolstoy for a few hundred more pages. Get at least to the start of the second war.
REQUEST: What are great graphic novels I should read? I've read and enjoyed Watchmen and V for Vendetta in the past, and read Tezuka's Buddha last year and found it to be as such a book goes very fun. I read some manga as a tween, but never got really into it, kinda feel like it's something I should explore, now that I live in a world where I could get that from a library or get it off LibGen.
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27d ago
Hence, a person's motivations cannot ever concern themselves alone, unless you have the strength to withstand spending large parts of your life alone in very bad places. What good is prefixing self to worth if, for a healthy, adjusted human being, worth comes from places other than the self?
The way I see it, having a strong self-worth is a matter of remembering the variety of audiences that provide worth to you, rather than allowing your self-assessment to be constantly buffeted by the last person you talk to or the room you are in.
My major objection to the way a lot of TRPers talk about the concept of someone being "Alpha" or "Beta" is that they fail to talk about context, Alpha and Beta are inherently ordinal rather than absolute concept. Within a closed space, like a wolfpack or a high school, the alpha male is the biggest and toughest male present. He isn't in any absolute sense Big or Tough, he is the biggest and the toughest. The beta is defined by being smaller, and less tough, not absolutely Small or absolute Cowardly. If the Alpha dies, a Beta moves up.
Using the classic fictional stereotype of an American high school as our pet model, the Alpha male is the star quarterback on the high school football team, right? He's the best athlete, the leader, the chosen one. But if the QB dies in a DUI accident, or transfers schools, or breaks his leg, somebody else becomes the QB. A guy who didn't used to be the best athlete on the team, who used to be second best, becomes the best. That's the nature of an ordinal system of worth.
The problem with the modern world is that very few of us live in a closed system, and so it become scrambled, hard to understand. We live in systems way beyond our Dunbar Number, we live in anonymized urban societies where we feel judged by strangers, or in fake online worlds where we never even see our interlocutors.
People with weak self worth are constantly buffeted by the opinions of strangers, by the ordinal rankings in each room they find themselves in, by a vague sense that an indistinct group of people are better than them. They walk into a room with people better than them, they become servile; while if they are around people worse than them they become tyrannical. They rate themselves around the last interaction they had, forgetting all the good things they've done or all the bad things they've done.
A person with a firm sense of self worth remembers, regardless of what room they find themselves in, the people who love and respect them. Yes there are people better than you, but there are also people worse than you, the fact that you are now in a room with someone better than you doesn't mean you are the worst person in the world. The fact that the last thing you did was wrong doesn't erase all the things you've done right. They rate themselves not on the opinion of the audience in front of them, but on the broader audience, all the world, all the universe, and how they should respond.
Realistic self worth is about steadiness, humility, and honor. As Tony Montana told us, "All I've got in this world is my word and my balls, I don't break them for nobody."
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28d ago
My wife and I have to do a forced detox every six months or so, over a few weeks dropping down from double shot of espresso in the morning and an afternoon coffee, to single shot in the morning, to yerba mate light in the morning, to black tea in the morning. Then we start back up at a single espresso shot and the cycle repeats as we drink more and more coffee until we need to detox again.
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29d ago
Is it reasonable of me to assume that any straight man who describes himself as "demisexual" is pulling exactly the same kind of long con, but more subtle?
I would say that the vast majority of people who describe themselves as Asexual but have sex/relationships have simply found an identity-based way to navigate chastity in a sexual world that frightens them (largely based on media). All personal boundaries must be identity based in liberal society, or else they are very difficult to defend. A woman who says she doesn't want to have sex right away is a prude, a woman who says she is asexual is valid. A man who says he doesn't want to have sex all the time is a lying loser, a man who says he is asexual is valid.
I'd compare it in my own life to the years I spent between 13 and 17 listening to a ton of Minor Threat and Youth of Today and Earth Crisis and claiming to be super into Straight Edge punk philosophy. I had an Out of Step poster, and scribbled "I don't drink, I don't smoke, I don't fuck, at least I can fucking think!" on things in Sharpie. I think I even put X's on the back of my hands when I went to concerts a few times.
Not to invalidate anyone who really was Straight Edge, I met some of them, but as a loser teenager it was cowardice. I was afraid of girls, and couldn't get a date anyway; I was afraid of booze and drugs and breaking laws around them, and didn't get invited to parties anyway. Straight Edge was a way to claim I was making a principled stand. I doubt it achieved much, I was an apparent loser, it was mostly something I said to make myself feel better.
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29d ago
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MAGA terrorism. I've spent a lot of time going door to door for candidates. There are a lot of hot-and-cold-running crazies on the R side of the aisle. And while we have seen the odd beheading or guy driving his car at the FBI headquarters, we haven't seen anything big scale. We're going to see some massacre where people are waving Trump and Q flags. The reaction to this will dominate the election coverage. Will it turn off the BlueLivesMatter folks when somebody shoots a cop executing a warrant against some QAnon who takes her child on the run with her?
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Chinese economic collapse. We've been playing China's Final Warning about various property developers in the WSJ and everywhere else for years now. I think a lot of people have started to tune it out, to be honest. But it's increasingly clear that China is cooking its books, with suspicious editing of population figures among the most obvious signs. There is real fear that China might go the way of Japan, getting old and staying important, but ceasing to expand its role in the world. But if we saw a sudden Chinese crisis in the shadow banking sector or who knows where else that we aren't looking yet, the results in the short term would be destructive to the world economy in unpredictable ways. The sudden destruction of the Chinese economy would doom Biden, forcing a sudden recession on him.
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Israel might really cross the line. I'm betting on either a true massacre, that even the best NYT editor can't squeeze into the passive voice, or a truly shocking example of the Hannibal Directive.
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Ukraine is unlikely to lose in a way that seriously impacts the election. At worst you'd see a new, Pro-Russian government installed in Kiev. But...what if Ukraine wins? What if we're treated to Azov death squads in Crimea on TikTok? Don't think these nationalist psychopaths are going to be friendly to Collaborators. What if they're able to terror-bomb enough of Russian oil infrastructure to paralyze Russian oil exports and drive up the price of oil to the point that the global economy is impacted?
FiveHourMarathon
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29d ago
I'm still pessimistic about the use of audiobooks for denser stuff like history and philosophy
It just depends what you are looking to get out of it. I've listened to plenty of non-fiction history audiobooks, and it's entertaining and I learn a lot from it, but the takeaways are going to be narrower than if I really put the effort into a book on paper. I'm not going, to by any means, memorize all the facts in an audiobook. I'm less likely to remember particular facts or names, so it varies by book. Europe's Tragedy was hard to follow on tape, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich was excellent.
I'm a big audiobook guy but that tends to be a different category for me, and I still try to read in print.
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29d ago
and also that DEI programs seem to have providing comfortable employment as a primary goal over actually doing anything.
At law schools specifically, while it is difficult to find data beyond personal anecdotes for a variety of cathedral-related reasons, a lot of what are now called DEI positions have historically been used to improve the "Employment at 9 months post graduation" statistics for URM students.
It's a fun little prestige shell game: elite institutions admit a whole pile of under-qualified students, who even if they do happen to have test scores comparable to their white/asian peers will be branded by their skin color as AA admits, when they have poor results the institutions hire them, and then point to all the great outcomes those students have had like working in academia at elite institutions.
Schools with huge endowments use them to float weaker students for a time to improve their numbers to remain elite schools with huge endowments.
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30d ago
I highly recommend the book. It is extremely light and fun and easy, it's a great beach read kind of book. If you're interested in Bourdain's life and mind, I'd say it's a must, because that is the first work he published that made his name, or the last thing he wrote before becoming famous depending how you look at it. So I think it probably offers more insight, or unique insight, compared to his later works which are going to be influenced by his life.
It is true, you never know, that is one reason a gun in the house ups successful suicide rates so much, for some people it must just be a fleeting moment of "this is all too much", it passes for most but some pull the trigger, and a gun makes that easy (I say this as a gun toting red blooded american). But damn, sober doorknob hanging? That can't be a good way to go.
Fascinating Factoid: a high percentage of people who jumped off the Golden Gate bridge and happened to survive said they regretted jumping immediately as they were falling.
The whole idea of placing blame for someone's suicide on a one-to-one basis is always going to end up hackneyed. At best you're talking about an egg-shell-skull on the part of the victim. Even someone like 2arms1head, who wrote a well-reasoned manifesto for why he killed himself, there are people like that still living.
I'd place suicide in general on a spectrum from self-preservation to self-destruction, shooting oneself in the head is one end of it, but something like heroin addiction is pretty close. You know it will kill you. Probably not today, but the odds of an OD add up until one day you don't make it. Bourdain:
...wrote in Kitchen Confidential of his experience in a SoHo restaurant in 1981, where he and his friends were often high. Bourdain said drugs influenced his decisions, and that he would send a busboy to Alphabet City to obtain cannabis, methaqualone, cocaine, LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, secobarbital, tuinal, amphetamine, codeine, and heroin.
He always had that self-destructive streak in him.
Sure, you quickly get into the Foucault's Pendulum type stuff, and I'm not going to argue for every insane theory. It isn't even necessary to argue for Epstein conspiracy theories truth value. But we're talking about the book here.
When we're studying "Why did QAnon rise right now?" which was the premise of the book, why would we not include this very suspicious and very public thing that happened, widely cited by the primary sources as proof? It seems a very odd omission. The author seems to want to place blame purely on the believers, that they are 100% responsible for choosing to buy into Q, but at that scale we have to look at it in terms of societal causes, and ask how we can prevent it. And part of that should be, hey our institutions need to regain credibility.
As I pointed out, in some ways to the human mind a pedophile cabal is less horrifying. "Lmao you don't know rich people" is a funny gag sure, but which is worse: that the current rich people are pedos and we need to throw them out, or that rich people just don't care that he was a pedo, that they're indifferent to it? An organized moral universe is a comfort, even if it is a dark one.
FiveHourMarathon
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1mo ago
How familiar with his work are you? Did you ever read Kitchen Confidential?
I ask because when you read the book that made Bourdain famous, it rapidly becomes obvious that he was troubled long before he was famous. He was the Samurai Sword kid at a liberal arts college before he dropped out and headed into the world of cooking. Much of the charm of the work comes from Bourdain's hard partying, booze and drug soaked world. He dropped in and out of cooking jobs and drugs over the years. His personality before fame was self-destructive.
The problem with finding causes for suicide is that you can always find someone who suffered something as bad or worse who didn't kill themselves. Some people kill themselves over seemingly minor slights, others suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune well past the point at which I would have cut bait.
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1mo ago
Not only did he apologize, and take a hiatus from public appearances, he met with "Black leaders" and specifically told fans "not to defend me."
I'm surprised that Wallen didn't do a duet with any of the younger black country artists that Nashville is always trying to pump up, that would have seemed like the easiest and most productive way out to me at the time, give some of the star power he has to another artist.
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1mo ago
I took a pause on my War and Peace reread to read some other books. I realize the critique of the "finishing quantity of books" approach to reading, but I stick to it anyway, sometimes I just need the feeling of closure. I decided I wanted to read Tolstoy's Sevastopol Sketches to get more insight into War and Peace and Tolstoy's philosophy, then I saw a review of Day of the Oprichnik and thought it would be fun to dive into some modern Russian Lit, then I was traveling for Easter and wanted a light physical book to read so I grabbed my wife's copy of Trust The Plan a reporting book about the QAnon world. One of the reasons I think both E-Readers and physical print has a place in the world is because of social conventions. At a town meeting where I'm not actually working while they're handling other topics but I have to sit quietly for several hours, I can get away with reading on a tablet and no one will really question it, I can at least pretend I'm working or looking at material related to the meeting; while sitting on a tablet at the beach with my in laws is kinda less social and acceptable than sitting with a book.
All three were around 200 pages, and easy reads. Thoughts on them:
-- Sevastopol Sketches is fascinating, it really is Young Tolstoy. You can feel the immediacy of the work, Tolstoy served there. You can see how the rhythms of Sevastopol, of siege, really played into his portrayal of other military campaigns, and of military life generally. My feeling on this re-read of War and Peace has been that the core theme of the work is questioning what is real. There are all these parallel forms and spheres of life in the book going on at the same time: Russian high society, the Russian peasantry, the soldiers in combat, the General staff and their politics, the intelligentsia and the intellectual world, the Freemasons and other reformists. You can see the germ of this idea forming here, the focus is purely military, but you have the same passage of officers between the town and the batteries, between life in Russia and life at the front, and decisions being made to privilege one version of life or the other, and the work questions which is real. In many ways War and Peace takes that core conflict of Sevastopol and multiplies it in fractals, adding civilian life and intellectual life and politics and secret societies. If you wanted to read Tolstoy but didn't want to tackle 1400 pages, I'd recommend it, it's a quick easy read and the characters don't suffer from being impossible to keep track of, no character-web necessary here, just a quick tight military novella.
--Day of the Oprichnik I didn't really get. It felt a lot like reading bro-lit in 2024, like Christopher Moore whose recent work I got for christmas or Chuck Pahluniuk or (I'm gonna get in trouble here) Cormac McCarthy, with the gross-out aspect of the daisy chain orgy and the rape scenes feeling kinda unnecessary. I kinda rushed through it by the end, I was getting bored by it once I realized nothing was really going to happen. Reading the Wikipedia I guess there's strong elements of satire of other Russian works I hadn't read, and symbolism rooted in Russian literature and history I didn't get. There's an interesting aspect of "was this predicting the future of eg Prighozin?" but I didn't get a ton out of it to be honest.
--Trust The Plan was ok. I'm glad I read it, but it felt so cowardly. It reminds me of how critically I read most media compared to the average person. The book covers Q from birth to present day. I feel like the overview gave me a better understanding of the ecosystem, and the vignettes of some of the criminal shit believers have gotten up to gave me a taste of just how depraved and insane some of this shit is. I came out wondering at what point Q itself comes to court as a criminal conspiracy, what with all the fugitive harboring? But I felt like the author chickened out when it came to asking the Big Questions about conspiracy theorism. Epstein gets only a passing mention, how do you talk about conspiracy theories and not mention that? The orthodox theory of conspiracy theories I remember from a million history channel documentaries growing up was that people believed conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination because they wanted it all to mean something and not just be a coincidence. At the very least, even if you believe the official Epstein story, that theory fits right in: people want to believe in a pedophile cabal because it's actually in some ways less horrifying than a single pedophile conman who could just, you know, do that. Epstein also vastly undermined the arguments against Q: Jewish financial elites aren't abusing children on secret islands, except that one time they did, but it was a one-off. Or the rest of MeToo, while the author tries to both-sides a little on conspiracy stuff, the world was suddenly full of secret-elite rapists, and Q is in many ways just a mass-hallucinatory-expansion of MeToo. Or the War in Iraq, or the Great Recession and the Subprime Crisis, all cases where elites knew something was fake and gay and going to go horribly wrong and sold the American people a line of bullshit about it.
In other personal news, I successfully completed a side-quest new year's resolution: I went swimming in the Long Island Sound in March. Just under the wire. It was so cold at 6am that at first it felt like dying, but then I'd settle in and swim a half mile. On Saturday I was alone except for two golden retrievers and their owner, it took forever to get into the water because the dogs kept looking at me going into the water and going nuts. What the fuck are you doing you idiot, it's cold!
I'm still losing weight, surprisingly Easter at the in-laws didn't derail me. I brought a single 20kg kettlebell, and did a pentathlon Easter morning, I figured the best way to honor the season was to put some holes in my hands. Maybe I'll get back on that for another season, this time last year I really enjoyed it. Hope everyone had a happy Easter.
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1mo ago
I'm going to disagree with you that Huberman did nothing wrong.
I don't really think Huberman did nothing wrong, just nothing worth a magazine article over, and certainly not something I should become aware of on Twitter.
Though to be fair, I put a significant probability on the outcome that, if we had theoretical perfect knowledge of events, Huberman actually didn't do anything wrong by NYMag's own standards of sexual ethics and that the weak accusations against him by ex-girlfriends wouldn't stand up to scrutiny. When you write a hit piece, and the best things you can come up with are pretty soft or vague or rely on personal recollections of interested parties, then I tend to doubt pretty heavily.
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1mo ago
Napoleon wanted to become Alexander, so he lived and breathed strategy. He constantly read, and in conversation he'd ask people to rank generals all the time and compare their merits, memorizing all the famous battles.
We actually have copies of homework assignments from the Roman Republic, including the answers of some Great Men of History, where a standard essay question was "Could Alexander have Conquered Rome?" Which was generally analyzed along the same lines that we see historical comparisons of sports teams or boxers today:
-- Competition analysis. Alexander beat up on Tomato Cans, but was overrated for going undefeated against nobodies. Rome beat real tough guys, over and over. Alexander never faced a Hannibal, or even a Vercingetorix.
-- Stars and Scrubs vs Depth. Roman Republic produced more and better generals, it was a factory for Great Men, where Alexander was a once in a century first draft pick superstar. After Alexander died the Macedonian conquests stopped, after the Romans lost a general, or even an army, it was next man up all the way.
-- Common foes and styles. Rome beat Pyrrhus and other Macedonians who used similar styles and modeled their generalship after Alexander.
All of which is to support your point. Rome got good at this, became a Great Man Factory, by focusing on this. They went out there and built the prospects they needed to keep going out and conquering, until the gravitational pull of the Capital became such that further expansion was too difficult relative to civil war.
So many times in the NBA or MLB draft, there's a story of a player just being obsessed with the game from a young age. Bijan Robinson carried a football around like a security blanket from age 4 or some bullshit. I recall reading about a basketball phenom who walked on his tiptoes from second to fourth grades. Arnold Palmer was the son of a groundskeeper who just played golf obsessively in Latrobe, hitting balls long into the night every night.
Obsession has value.
Automated voices on self-checkout gas pumps and cashier stations must be muted by a single clearly marked button press. If this makes it harder for you to run self-checkout, hire cashiers. Any time a store implements self-checkout, they must have a CostCo style cart-checker on the way out. It is unacceptable to me how easy it is to steal from Grocery stores, and that the grocers have decided that they'll just let dishonest people steal rather than hire someone. It makes me want to steal.
On a related note, create a process by which jobs can be certified as "easy" by OSHA and thus eligible for lower-than-minimum wage. Such as the aforementioned cart checkers. It should be possible to hire someone for a job that isn't worth minimum wage.
Abolish almost all police enforcement personnel. Police should function purely in investigative and administrative roles. Instead, a 2% flat income tax on all citizens will fund both detectives and a public militia consisting of all able-bodied individuals. Every male citizen will be expected to serve 20 hours of militia service per month, patrolling local neighborhoods on call for emergencies. Completing your service hours will entitle you to avoid paying the tax, if you don't serve you do pay the tax. Citizen militias will be on hand at all times, day and night, to respond to crime calls and other emergencies.
Abolish DA and PD offices. Rather, the roles will be combined as State's Lawyers, and the same lawyers will be assigned randomly to prosecute or defend any given defendant. This will mean that defense attorneys and prosecutors will have the same experience, relationships, and access to investigative, police, and judges.
All fitness and sport equipment will be tax-free.
Significant encouragement towards mixed-income and mixed-use housing developments. The ideal layout is the classic American small town, where a series of small row-homes and apartment buildings border large corner homes where the local Doctor/Lawyer/Banker lived. There is significant value in having poor and rich Americans interact and form social bonds.
No product can be marketed using any kind of patriotic or "American" theme unless it is owned, headquartered, and predominantly assembled in America.
Strong encouragement for alternatives to graveyards. Graveyards are becoming increasingly sprawling, depressing eyesores of identikit headstones, poorly maintained because of bad finances, too large because of a system built for a much smaller population. A bitch and a half to move if development becomes necessary. Cremation, mausoleums, Tibetan Sky Funerals, go wild. But graveyards are a problem.
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