Drew Yates

Do it. To be fair, I donated $50. Don’t be a cheap piece of shit.

By the way: Google Trends for top candidates

I bought a new car. It was a used 2006 gray Mini Cooper which I bought from Enterprise Car Sales with 18k miles.

Not exactly my car, but close enough

I planned buy a Corolla, but then after talking to the car salesman, I learned that every make and model of every car after about 2005 was above average as stated by the dealer’s Consumer Report magazine, and who am I to argue with empirical data and bona fide statistics? Since the car salesman couldn’t tell me which cars I shouldn’t buy (I asked), and since I had no want to buy all cars (just one), I deduced that all cars were essentially the same except for brand and style. As a gainfully employed, red-blooded American, I am keenly aware of the value of brand as it is our top export, and who am I to decide that our national vitality depends on a collective delusion?

So I bought something that said “I am still sexual virile and occasionally a rambunctious sort, yet as you see from this practical gray shade, I am plausibly responsible enough fiscally to buy you a wardrobe of shoes should the need arise —despite my youthful exuberance.”

I have included a commemorative anthem to recognize this notable purchase and credit history opportunity.

I’m at a new job that lets me build my companies I’ll introduce perhaps in a month or so.

What stuns is me is how oblivious many people are about basic business communication.

When I see a document, especially a Microsoft Word document, and there are obvious grammar or spelling mistakes… THEY ARE HIGHLIGHTED IN RED. Why should I bother to read your documents if you don’t even care to correct simple errors? I understand that people are busy and that people make mistakes, but DO NOT SEND ME DOCUMENTS WITH ERRORS HIGHLIGHTED BY MS WORD! (especially if you’re sending me a template document and you’re bidding on programming work)

NEVER send me an email with slang. For every “z” in your email, you’re fired —or at least, I don’t want to do business with you. “Dude” is cool. “Cool” is cool. “kewl” is not cool, dude. Hey, when I send you an email to buy a pair of “pawned” $200 basketball shoes, I’ll respect your operating culture, too. Promise.

Second, when you want to schedule somebody’s time, ALWAYS suggest a time, place, and duration. THEN, you may suggest an alternative block of time if you feel that the other person may not be available (for example, if within one/two days notice). Given your single email, include enough information such that all people can meet without additional clarification. Also, please be considerate when choosing a time to meet. I’m 23. I’m usually not awake at 8am.

This isn’t necessarily business specific, but if you need to drive to someplace unfamiliar, ALWAY PRINT A MAP. Google maps are ridiculously good and free. It only takes a few minutes and it will save you and others much time and aggravation. If I need to be somewhere in SF, I even scout the street-view quickly so I know what the building looks like when I drive by to avoid the “oh crap there goes the address and I didn’t turn and now I have to meander around the block for five minutes.”

It’s like when Bowman goes through that portal and immediately the rest of his life, including his epic struggle with HAL, become irrelevant.

I wonder what life would be like if you knew such a gate existed, yet had not nor likely never would traverse it.

The middle class breeds bad people.

Neighbors, friends, and family, a pyramid of people perpetually sieged by the sucking maw below and above the mocking sky.

And you’re born in the middle.

Better start to seethe.

EDIT: Yes, I’m being sarcastic.

Since the dawn of civilization, man has relied on nature to preserve and protect not only his own health, but the far greater health of his society and species.

Yet in the same way that greedy men have wrested away our economic media from nature to engorge themselves with duplicitous fiat currency, our very lives have been entrusted to the mercy of men, who cannot be trusted with such power, rather than nature itself, where it belongs.

Observe: our health care is turgid with bureaucratic waste. We are ignored in our times of distress. Our food is industrial corn paste and syrup doped with color and stamped into shape. We are obese yet malnourished. We buy drugs we don’t need, and we take drugs we don’t understand. We now lean across the cusp of pandemic plague as grave consequence of our gross abuse of antibiotics.

How can we trust any system of man to preserve our system of life —our health?

The powers of life and death are far greater than any human capacity to understand or wield. Nature knows it; we know it; God knows it.

By the reasoning that man cannot be trusted with the power to understand and govern complex systems, I propose —no, I demand— a return to the Natural Standard of Human Health.

Yes, we seem to have enjoyed unprecedented global prosperity by our false fiat health these past dozen decades. But this prosperity is an illusion: it’s not sustainable, and it’s subject to gross abuse.

After all, what happens when powerful people can arbitrarily produce food and drugs? Beware: the spectre of HUMAN INFLATION. Biological fitness has become not a function of social value, but mass consumption. Like a blasphemous cancer, the humans that merely spawn at least cost inherit and overwhelm the Earth, consuming all and leaving nothing. This bubble of health cannot, will not last forever: starvation, disease, depression, death. These are the terrible costs of entrusting a human system where only nature belongs.

By the same logic that we must wrest away man’s responsibility to nurture his economy, we must wrest away his responsibility to nurture his own body.

It’s the Gold Standard of reason: if the system is flawed, man must abdicate the system to nature. It’s the only way.

We’re at the breaking point. Drastic, immediate action is needed to wrest away the power of health production from greedy oligarchs and restore ourselves to the known, historical, trusted Natural Standard of Health. We must act now to save ourselves from inflation and global doom. We can not afford to be so arrogant such that we stand to think that man can conceive his own destiny. That is sin. Blasphemy.

Economics Health is religion; Nature is God. Wreathe and be enraptured, foolish mortals.

After much experimentation:

Caffeine

Lowers urgency threshold, no direct cost

Procrastination is when something is before the importance threshold to merit attention yet beyond the threshold of urgency to merit action. Perpetually toeing this precipice is mentally uncomfortable, sustained discomfort is stressful, and stress further inflates urgency threshold creating a dangerous feedback loop. Caffeine lowers the threshold of urgency, thus potentially relieving the mental stress like a spillway.

Caffeine is best for performing linear, well-defined tasks like office chores and implementation / execution work. For most people, linear work is the only work expected, so caffeine seems like a miracle drug. The problem with lowering the urgency threshold is that limits focus and can perpetually keep you in an acting state of “first distraction.” Again, this is perfect for controlling grunt office workers who shouldn’t be thinking too far or too deep in an office environment. For thinkers of a higher rank, the extra alertness can be enjoyed without focus cost if all distractions are proactively avoided. This is why hackers are most productive super caffeinated in a dark room at middle of the night with the Internet blocked. Creative ability may be somewhat diminished since creativity is holistic and alertness mostly boosts linear thought.

The costs of caffeine are negligible beyond what’s stated. Drink plenty of water and don’t drink caffeine before bed. Detox every several days to prevent stress headaches. Get plenty of sleep or you’ll lose your holistic thinking abilities and go into Drone Mode.

Music

Buffers working memory, costs 1-2 working memory slots

By “locking” working memory slots to music, you can limit task cycling that causes mental thrashing and distraction at the cost of less mental processing ability. The vast majority of work is far below mental capacity limits, so this is usually a good trade. Because task-switching is reduced, listening to music helps stabilize working memory, and so is good when first settling into office work at the beginning of the day or after running errands. After working memory is stabilized, if you can limit environmental distractions, music should be turned off. Otherwise, music will help mask all these obnoxious environmental distractions like coworker conversations and help you focus at diminished capacity.

Alcohol

Lowers importance threshold, costs comprehension

Alcohol is underrated for work because of its bad reputation as a goof-off party drug. In moderation, alcohol lowers the importance threshold, so it helps for seriously considering ideas that otherwise would have been too unfamiliar or uncomfortable. This makes alcohol good for creative, holistic thinking and especially useful in causal conversation. Further, most smart people don’t have problems with thinking, they have problems with over-processing thoughts which can be paralyzing. Alcohol diminishes your ability to self-process. A sloppy and potentially dangerous tool, but I’m not aware of another drug that does this as well as alcohol.

Obviously, alcohol can severely limit comprehension and eventually all mental function.

1. Make some mental commitment to “write something”
2. While mentally idling (usually in transit during the day or between chores), some idea mentally composes itself
3. Ping! When the idea is “baked” enough for writing, a little alarm periodically reminds me to consciously address the idea. The alarm is usually enough to bump me out of thinking deeply or accomplishing anything of effort at my desk in the same way that an alarm clock is enough to keep you from falling into deep sleep but not necessarily to get you out of bed. Like you can stay in bed all day never refreshed by hitting the snooze, keeping an idea perpetually behind the “do something” urgency threshold is stressful and unhealthy… yet feels so good… zzzz
4. “When I get Around To It(tm),” I try to sketch the idea on the site. Interestingly, the idea when sketched may be quite different than what I thought it was in my own mind.
5. Repeat

From Wikipedia’s Ron Paul’s article:

Paul says he “wouldn’t exactly go back on the gold standard”[178], but would push to legalize gold and silver as legal tender and remove the sales tax on them so that gold-backed notes (or other types of hard money) can compete on a level playing field with fiat Federal Reserve notes, allowing individuals a choice whether to use “sound money” to protect their purchasing power or to continue using fiat money.

That’s reasonable. DDP in the comments brought that to my attention —thanks.

I don’t understand the difference between printing dollars and mining gold. Money is an idea, not the physical token that represents that idea.

Yes, hypothetically, forcing a currency to the value of gold (or any other natural resource) could limit some irresponsible fiscal policies that lead to inflation. But why gold? Why not moon rocks or any other item? And what’s the difference between owning a gold mine and owning a mint? Further, why tie your economy (arguably important) to a mineral that could be found anywhere? At least with idea-currency, humans are solely responsible for the supply. With gold, its possible entry to market is subject to the capricious laws of nature. Further, what if you need more currency, but you don’t have enough gold?

Yes, inflation is a serious problem. No, I don’t think that the gold standard or any other standard is the solution.

I think that every government expense should be publicly reported on a website that a layman could use and understand. I think that the U.S. tax law should be rewritten from scratch. And I think that the entire world banking network should be replaced with a system that less resembles carting tokens between a patchwork of fiefdoms to more resembles the Internet.

That would be a start.

EDIT:

I’ve seen accusations of blog spam helping spread Ron Paul’s campaign… and they’re true. Moments after posting this, I got this comment:

Author : David M (IP: 71.212.66.149 , 71-212-66-149.tukw.qwest.net)
E-mail : dpmcclain@msn.com
URI : http://republicanrenaissance.blogspot.com
Whois : http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl?queryinput=71.212.66.149
Comment:
Complicated but worthwhile questions.

Start with one of the best and most concise discussions of money around: http://www.mises.org/rothbard/rothmoney.pdf

Then read Ron Paul’s argument for gold: http://www.mises.org/books/caseforgold.pdf

Or try Rothbard’s: http://www.mises.org/rothbard/100percent.pdf

Listen: I’m right. Unless somebody can explain why it’s better to abdicate our social responsibility to maintain our economic media to piles of dirt scattered randomly across the Earth rather than accept that responsibility ourselves as rational human beings, I will continue to be right. We don’t abdicate health care to “nature” because our health care is flawed. So why abdicate our economy to “nature” because our banks are flawed? Why not, say, FIX THE PROBLEM by CREATING A BETTER SYSTEM rather than throwing up our hands like scared idiots and clinging to some old, dead abstraction like the gold standard?

Do NOT try and snow me and do NOT spam my blog. I ALREADY support Ron Paul EVEN THOUGH I disagree with his gold standard ideas. That’s just how awesome I am.