Author: admin

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Oppressed Mentality

thanks to brad delong from his excerpt here:

Though via a paradox: the greater their power, the more they felt oppressed. When the people who felt like losers united around their shared psychological sense of grievance, their enemies felt somehow more overwhelming, not less; even if the Franklins weren’t always really so powerful at all, Franklin “power” often being merely a self-perpetuating effect of an Orthogonian sense of victimization. Martyrs who were not really martyrs, oppressors who were not really oppressors: a class politics for the white middle class. The keynote of the new, Nixonian politics…though we are getting ahead of ourselves. For first we must send Richard Nixon to law school, where he was a monk….

I see this with a lot of my countrymen and women. its like so many people feel that they are so special as to believe that everyone is trying to oppress them. Damn. We are all special that’s why Nobody is special.
What I’d be honest enough to admit is what I continuously see. People are so caught up (except those people whom I know to have so much as to be ble to give so much of themselves, I wouldn’t name names so the few people who read this end up thinking I am referring to them) in the little drama of their own lives that most of the time your boss doesn’t hate you. The jeepney driver who gave you the wrong change didn’t actually try to cheat you. The lady who slightly nudged you while getting off the MRT(like the BART) didn’t really intend to shove you. Get Over Your Cult Of ME!

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One Word Mood Changer Of The Day

A Thank You To Kottke here:

Mamihlapinatapai, a most succinct word.
It describes a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start. This could perhaps be translated more succinctly as “eye-contact implying ‘after you…'”. A more literal approximation is “ending up mutually at a loss as to what to do about each other”.Heartbreaking. I wish we had an English word for that feeling. (via cyn-c)

Hmm damn you could substitute: how I wish this would happen to me!

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Raising The Tide

ht to  Bill Scher
ty Brad Delong here:
This is conservatism. The dismissal of economic burdens from others making less money than you. The belief that an ideal economy can thrive with a small boat of winners and a giant sinking ship of losers. The insistence that your economic dissatisfaction is illegitimate, and can only be explained by a brainwashing from the media or politicians.
I’ve written my belief that the circumstances of one’s life affects the things one achieves  and although I believe that people can break free from the constraints of their environment(this I am trying to prove personally) I will always be thankful for whatever break that comes my way. Always realizing that what often we call hardwork may just be a different sort of luck. This is why the quote resonates with me deeply.
We should not think of ourselves to highly.  Always remember the cognitive biases.

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Why "Wise" Self Made Introspective People Give

from here an article on discussing Nassim Taleb’s book “The Black Swan”:
There are various things you can do. The first is to realize that if you succeed, it’s probably not exclusively due to your brilliant mind. More than anything else it is luck. You still need a brilliant mind of course to help guide you at every step, just don’t pretend that it alone will get you where you want to be.
most self made people realize that there was someone just as smart and just as driven as them that wasn’t as successful as they are. They see people far more intelligent and far more “better” in less enticing situations.  They realize that given how much they know about how precarious their success actually was, a little missed connection here and a little bad timing there and the whole thing collapse like a corrupt politician’s bridge. Because of this Randomness the “Wise” Self Made Introspective person cannot but be the philanthropists who helps less fortunate people at least achieve a decent kind of life.
I hope, I pray, I will become, Someday, Someday!

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Reminder To Start Helping

from here:
The economic growth in a country like South Korea, which has made much more educational progress than the United States, clearly demonstrates this. “If you look across countries,” says Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard, “education is the strongest predictor for how quickly the pie grows.”

Hope I can find the time to contribute in the community with increasing literacy and helping people find a track towards getting educated in my country. I don’t know. I promised myself I’d get more involve a around January next year. Posting this as a reminder.

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Choice and Breaking Free

from here:
In other words, our choices depend upon what’s available, not what’s rational. This is true of even highly intelligent people.
And of course, your neighbourhood, your school influences what seems available to you. This is why peer effects matter.  If you’re surrounded by people who carry knives, you’re more likely to carry one yourself, simply because the option of doing so is more salient. Similarly, if your friends are all studying for Oxbridge, you might be more likely to do so.
My personal history corroborates this. I got into Oxford – from which the rest was straightforward –  not because I was smarter or harder-working than others, but because a teacher told me I could do it. Had he not made the choice available, the thought of going to Oxford would never have occurred to me – ability or not.
Circumstances, then, determine choice.
After office me and a couple of my officemates decided to hang out at a nearby Starbucks, I think we stayed for about 2 hours.  I was telling them that I used to be insecure with my educational background and it hampered me for awhile and a considerably long time. It was only when I was able to study the lives of people whom I admired that I came to the conclusion that:
I control my destiny to a large extent.
That , People cannot say what I can and cannot DO.
My Desire And The HardWork That I muster and put in any endeavor Is my own reward.
This is clarion call to people living within the confines of what our environment has put upon us.
We control our lives. Lives we must learn to live on our terms!

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Oil

from here:
Americans fell in love with vehicles like the Ford pickup trucks in the 1990s, back when gas didn’t cost much more than $1 a gallon. That seemed normal at the time, because gas prices had remained in a narrow range — roughly 90 cents to $1.25 a gallon — going back to the early 1980s.
But this stability was actually a sign of something deeply unusual. The cost of most everything else was rising, as was the size of people’s nominal paychecks. So in practical terms, gas was becoming cheaper. By 1999, it had effectively fallen to its lowest point on record, about 30 percent lower than few people in my country realize this.
The over all sentiment is that we should go back to the regulated oil days. The fact is we have a weak government that can’t seem to reign in the profiteering.

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Norwegian Wood

just finished Murakami’s Norwegian Wood.
I’ve always been something of an outsider, never really fitting in.
And maybe if I wasn’t lucky enough to live in this wildly connected world, where you can find someone not quite but enough like yourself that the world is a little more liveable, I don’t know what my life might have become.
Maybe I’d just live in an island or up in the mountains I don’t know!

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Nice Post on Happiness and Wealth Creation and Success

Once you’ve found your happiness, all that other stuff is just scenery.
from a post by Michael Parkatti title: Happiness, Not Wealth Creation, is the Sole Measure of Success here:

I don’t know I feel that this might be true but with things like this the only way to really know is to experience these things.

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Helping Hand

I recently saw a 3 minute animated short (film).
Wow that made my heart, just wow. I’d embed it here but the embed code is not working.
just click here: