This raises the obvious question of whether there are any basic mental operations I still don’t have, how I would recognize them if there were, and how I would learn them once I recognized them.
~ Scott Alexander from, What Developmental Milestones Are You Missing? | Slate Star Codex
slip:4usawa1.
I truly don’t understand how he does this. This is so bootstrap-meta, I’m just left staring at it like a chicken stares right before pecking idiotically at a pebble.
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On the other hand, if you dump your trash in the forest to avoid paying the city’s garbage fees, or haggle endlessly with the manager at big-box store to get things for free, you’re not helping anyone but yourself. Canceling TV service and taking up the more productive hobby of reading library books is Frugal. Saving the same amount of money by voting down property tax funding for your local school system is Cheap.
~ Peter Adeney from, Frugal vs. Cheap
slip:4umofu1.
Even my title.
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Today’s indications seem to suggest that an even more major recession than the Great Recession may strike in the not too distant future. Why should this be the case? Am I imagining problems where none exist? The next ten sections provide an introduction to how the world’s self-organizing economy seems to operate.
~ Gail Tverberg from, The world’s weird self-organizing economy | Our Finite World
slip:4uoute4.
“Ten sections.” “Introduction.” Some thinking and integration of ideas will be required.
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There. That was a mouthful, and it makes you sound like a loser. But all of a sudden, you’re no longer a victim. Suddenly, you’ve framed the problem entirely in terms of things you can control yourself, and thus you can finally make some progress towards solving your problem.
~ Peter Adeney from, To Achieve Greatness, You Must First Acknowledge that You Suck
slip:4umoto1.
In terms of money and fitness— I suck. Yeah, you laugh… it is SO easy to brush this step off.
I brushed it off for about forty years.
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Our difficulties and our dangers will not be removed by closing our eyes to them.
~ Winston Churchill
slip:4a87.
The only practical and lasting solution to global violence is that we must raise the global level of consciousness. Only when that occurs will violence cease to be part of the human experience. Until that happens violence will always be with us.
~ Steve Pavlina from, Ask Steve – How to Resolve Global Conflicts – Steve Pavlina
slip:4usebo23.
This is a beautiful observation. Beautiful in the sense that it let’s me stop fretting over violence and wars, and frees me to think about things like: Can I help [this person / these people]?
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First and obviously, I have precisely the same number of minutes of the day that you have. Second, I am ruthless about spending my time appropriately. An individual practice above might only save me 10 seconds, but that’s 10 seconds multiplied by completing that action a thousand times in the next month. That’s around 160 minutes. That’s just under three hours of my life.
~ Rands from, Rands Information Practices – Rands in Repose
slip:4uraai12.
Sometimes Usually Rands can really wax loquatiously which is a terrible habit for one to indulge in because it wastes one’s readers’ most scarce resource: Time.
Why do you tolerate the thousand paper-cuts that waste your time each day?
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Suffering is nothing more than a lack of consciousness. The more conscious you become, the less you suffer. The act of raising your consciousness is really a process of letting go of every thought that causes you to suffer. This process can take considerable time, but it does work. Every step you take in this direction will yield an improvement.
~ Steve Pavlina from, Ask Steve – Staying Conscious While Under Attack – Steve Pavlina
slip:4usebo24.
Self-improvement is an exercise in lifting oneself up by the bootstraps; Quite impossible and quite necessary.
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But there’s another way to do it, which is to turn down all the short cuts and try honesty instead. The bizarre thing about honesty, is that it actually makes you much richer than sneakiness, even while making you feel better about your work!
~ Peter Adeney from, Get Rich With: Good Old-Fashioned Honesty
slip:4umoge1.
All of my problems stem from over-simplifying things.
But, being honest with myself always cuts through my problems.
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Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear — not absense of fear.
~ Mark Twain
slip:4a82.