Up until last year i was extremely ignorant about how the world works, i still am pretty ignorant. To actually be well informed about the world you need to learn a huge amount of information about history, economics, science. Ect. This usually involves reading a ton of books. This is extremely hard for 99.9% of people to do when we are distracted by 8 hour work days, school, ect. Fortunately for me i play poker and have no job to distract and exhaust me for 8 hours a day, and with this huge amount of privilege i allow a big amount of time towards learning about how the world functions.
Whats the big problem with the world?
The problem is that people who care more about gaining power, and don't care about anyone else are more likely to gain power over someone of the opposite personality.
In the tv show the wire we see that the use of fear in the chain of command system is used to marginalize the people that are trying to change the system: cedric daniels in the police force for example. Cedric daniels refuses to falsify the crime stats for the mayor and is forced to retire. On the other hand you have valcheck who does juke the stats, empowering himself and the mayor becomes a governer because of this.
If we analyze cedric daniels moral choice we can see it has no impact on the power system at all. An infinite number of unscrupulous people could take his place, and valchek is merely the first in line to do it. So in fact, daniels has no effect and valchek makes society worse off. The command system used here is designed to dehumanize the population.
We see lester freemon and mcnulty use the power system against itself to try and catch the drug dealer and murderer marlo. But we can see this also has very little effect long term, as another drug dealer just takes his place. These are isolated struggles.
The wire only shows a small part of the problem of todays power system. it does not show the self-indoctrination of the power system which i might expand on later.
Now, let me talk about something a little different. I want to criticize some poltical/social science beliefs which i think are heavily resulted from the power system( i will possibly expand on this later)
i'll start with an interesting quote from noam chomsky that i found reading his latest book power systems.
'There was a recent study done at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics on attitudes of young people from ages eighteen to twenty-nine. It was pretty striking. There’s a lot of commitment to what in the United States are called libertarian ideas. Libertarian in the United States is pretty close to totalitarian. If you really think through what are called libertarian concepts, they basically say that we’re going to hand over decision making to concentrations of private power and then everybody will be free. I’m not saying the people who advocate it intend that, but if you think it through, that’s the consequence, plus the breaking down of social bonds. A lot of young people are attracted to that. For example, less than half of the people in the Harvard survey felt that the government should provide health insurance or “basic necessities, such as food and shelter” to those in need who cannot afford them'
i'd also like to add that in the survey just 13% of people trust wall street to do the right thing. Yet libertarian ideas of minimal regulation on authoratarian power systems like businesses in wall street would allow wall street complete freedom to do anything they want.
I mean this is so contradictory you could almost compare it with religion.
A lot of economics to me also seems to have extremely faithful tendencies.
Here's a quote from ha joon chang. An economist from south korea and critic on the neo liberal policy.
'Daniel Defoe’s fictional hero, Robinson Crusoe, is often used by economics teachers as the pure example of ‘rational economic man’, the hero of neo-liberal free-market economics. They claim that, even though he lives alone, Crusoe has to make ‘economic’ decisions all the time. He has to decide how much to work in order to satisfy his desire for material consumption and leisure. Being a rational man, he puts in precisely the minimum amount of work to achieve the goal. Suppose Crusoe then discovers another man living alone on a nearby island.How should they trade with each other? The free-market theory says that introducing a market (exchange) does not fundamentally alter the nature of Crusoe’s situation. Life goes on much as before, with the additional consideration that he now needs to establish the rate of exchange between his product and his neighbour’s. Being a rational man, he will continue to make the right decisions. According to free-market economics, it is precisely because we are like Crusoe that free markets work. We know exactly what we want and how best to achieve it. Consequently, leaving people to do what they desire and know to be good for themselves is the best way to run the economy. Government just gets in the way.''
I haven't taken an economics course since high school, but this is completely absurd if it's taught anywhere.
There is a ridiculous assumption here for a free market to work. It requires that humans behave like emotionless pre-programmed beings. No such humans exist.
If you stuck stalin on an island next to Robinson Crusoe would there be a free market? Unlikely, you would have Robinson Crusoe wake up to find all his food stolen.
I saw Croods tonight. There was two women in the row behind me. During the scene, the same time the two characters romantically touched hands, the women kicked my seat. Is this kick unconscious cue for me to fuck her?
Looking for reliable footballstatistics feedby Edjon, April 06
Hi all,
long time I posted somethinh on Liquidpoker, although I frequently visit the website (especially the ROFL topic en spets1's blog).
I quit poker more than a year ago and I am now a kind of entrepreneur and I am in the middle of developing an online football (soccer) game. For this game I need reliable football statistics for the major competitions in Europe.
Of course I already did some internet research and found some interesting websites, like stats.com and soccerway.com, but I was wondering whether you might know some good websites for this info.
the situation im about to talk about is extremely trite and silly.
i was playing dota2, i first picked QoP and went mid. 2nd pick invoker came mid and wanted mid. i already bought my items etc, i usually like to not respond, since all it does is escalate the situation.
i farmed bottle in the first 2 min, standard and he took my bottle of courrier and jacked it.
i asked for it back for about 5 min, before leaving. i never got upset during the game or yelled or capslock etc, but i felt really angry inside.
like EXTREMELY angry.
i tried to logically talk to myself that it was just a game, and that a single game of dota2 has absolutely no meaning/significance etc.
took me like a good 5 minutes to logically regain my cool
but how do i forgo that initial response of anger?
Great new show just finished season one. One of the better shows I've seen recently, something you can watch inbetween GOT episodes. I highly recommend it, it's good straight from the start, hardly any filler
Going to college to become humanby TTomass, April 02
Hi guys this is my first blog post.
I was a mtt pro. I had a 50% roi at the turbo 180 mans in 2010, made so much money that I completely stopped playing poker and just became a lazy slob. I recently went to Rosarito, Mexico where I met 1sickdisease, Jesse James Sylvia, pokerdevil. Anyway I had a -10% roi in the month playing the 180 mans. Decided to call it quits to poker and become a citizen and work a job and I've never worked a job before. ALL I KNOW IS GAMES from the time I was a teenager. I'm going to UNLV to take engineering or actuarial science. Actuarial Science offers a nice cushy job to collect buuko bux for holding a job. I'm scared because in my mental insanity I turned to violent war games. That became my home and from there poker. Poker is insane you literally must become a exploitative and a thief. And I have to give up all this life of sin. The joy of sitting around all day doing nothing. Now I got to go through university learn mathematics and get a job. My younger brother did all that and then final tabled the wsop main event last year to quit his cushy buuko bucks job as an actuary. Now he's a poker player. I feel so disconnected from people and I'm scared. He wanted to be a poker player the whole time he was an actuary. I was a poker player.
Going to college to become humanby TTomass, April 02
Hi guys this is my first blog post.
I was a mtt pro. I had a 50% roi at the turbo 180 mans in 2010, made so much money that I completely stopped playing poker and just became a lazy slob. I recently went to Rosarito, Mexico where I met 1sickdisease, Jesse James Sylvia, pokerdevil. Anyway I had a -10% roi in the month playing the 180 mans. Decided to call it quits to poker and become a citizen and work a job and I've never worked a job before. ALL I KNOW IS GAMES from the time I was a teenager. I'm going to UNLV to take engineering or actuarial science. Actuarial Science offers a nice cushy job to collect buuko bux for holding a job. I'm scared because in my mental insanity I turned to violent war games. That became my home and from there poker. Poker is insane you literally must become a exploitative and a thief. And I have to give up all this life of sin. The joy of sitting around all day doing nothing. Now I got to go through university learn mathematics and get a job. My younger brother did all that and then final tabled the wsop main event last year to quit his cushy buuko bucks job as an actuary. Now he's a poker player. I feel so disconnected from people and I'm scared. He wanted to be a poker player the whole time he was an actuary. I was a poker player.
Feels like I only post blogs when I'm winning so kinda obligated to post ones when I'm losing.
Lost a lot in March. I think around 50k. Definitely my biggest losing month. I was down about 60 but made a bit of it back. Really only played maybe 30-40hrs the whole month because I had a lot of fun going out with friends.
It's really strange. Sometimes I can be having a really awful day but be up like 4 or 5 grand. I can't talk to my everyday friends about those kinds of things and I try my best to hide it because I feel even worse knowing how much it could improve some of their lives if they had earned that kind of money that day and how badly I sometimes feel despite winning. I guess poker has made me really jaded when it comes to money because stupid insignificant issues I'm having in my life often seem to affect me more adversely than the swings do. It's definitely a good thing for me as a poker player, but almost feels like I'm turning into an emotionless robot.
Did drop down and played a little bit of 2/4 and 3/6 for a few sessions. Was really a lot less stressful and took a lot of pressure off me to not need to be dealing with 5 figure swings on a regular basis.
I jumped back up to playing mostly 5/10 and a little bit of 10/20 once I started to win a bit. Still running bad though. Mostly stuff like flopping top set in 3bet pots OOP and chk/calling down only to get stacked by a random backdoored straight or something like that.
So I havn't filed my taxes in about three years, decided to do them all couple of weeks ago. I get a letter in the mail today saying I owe the government 452k in overdue taxes... the fuck. Anyone know what I can do? I'm very nervous.
Just a little late on the March updates... School and stuff is all piling up, still managed to have ok volume for March but didnt play fantastic at the beginning of the month. Towards the end of the month I was playing much better and the results started to turn around as well.
This is 90% 100nl zoom from two different computers
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