Who cares if it was made in China or Vietnam?

Who made it is more important than where it was made.

The stupidity of shit “made in Italy” or France. Who cares where it’s made.? If that mattered, then there would have to be no variance between different manufacturers in the same country. So it’s more important who made it than where it was made. Maybe we should stop caring about where it was made. Like an Apple phone, it’s made in China but it says designed in California. And to tell you the truth it’s more important who made it not where.

Check for your keys before you close the door.

Never give out personal information on an inbound call, you don’t really know to whom you’re speaking.

Apps are garbage.

Why should you let some company executives run code on your machine and read your messages and location, and betray your friends’ trust by giving a notoriously careless mega-corp. their data? Did you ask your friend if you could tell some company every message you’ve ever had, and their phone number and email address and Facebook name? You know those privacy statements and other nice things that good companies give you, like WhatsApp? Well, when they get bought by other companies, all those bets are off.

Beware of any communication while driving. You have a limited amount of focus, and the more time you spend thinking about anything other than the road, the slower your reactions are to problems, if you react in time at all.

Use the voice note feature of your phone and record yourself a note in a noisy environment. Then play it back. That garbled note you hear sounds better than what the people on the other side of your call hear. Optimize it. Closer to your mouth is better. Set the mic to the side or above or below your breath, as romantically breathing in someone else’s ear is unenjoyable to anyone who’s not your lover.

If men can lift more weight when exposed to sexual images, then it’s obvious, like with color, you can trigger your mind into different states of performance. What would happen if you triggered your subconscious with an image on screen just long enough to activate your subconscious into the behavior you want? If red makes time slow down (increases processing speed), then flash full-screen red every so often. If beautiful men and women or erotic photos increase your heart rate and dilate your pupils, perhaps that can give you a rush too (this trope was in the movie Fight Club). The trick, like flirting, is to keep the heartrate high, but not get distracted from the task at hand. If you become too overly aroused, you will lose the “drive” you might have had.

If you can measure your heart rate and pupil dilation, and you can successfully show your subconscious images that your conscious can’t detect, you should be able to tell if someone is a pedophile, or gay, or sadist, or masochist, by tying their responses to the images that you’re seeing. Now, you could royally screw up, as other body response readers do (lie detectors) and confuse stress with arousal, or you might think an image means X, but in their map of the world it means Y. So you would probably have to focus hard on the difference between the giving and receiving end of things. You could do this by putting the camera in the “eyes” of the person, or by using virtual reality.

Using this response blueprint, you could then tailor an attention-maintaining app, which you place under the work that you want to fall in love with.

Maybe all the small car mechanic shops of the world were on to something when they displayed full-sized magazine centerfolds and posters of erotic women on their walls.

Fighter pilots use subliminal imagery in their cockpits to keep track of altitude. They can see the peripheral vision horizon display (PVHD), in their peripheral vision, but not in their main visual field. The PVHD helps when the real world horizon is blocked by weather or darkness, and the cockpit workload is so high that full attention cannot be given to the standard attitude instrument.

Pull your pants up. If your crotch is too low, you will trip when you need to extend your legs for running up a flight of stairs, or jumping over things. Don’t artificially limit your range of motion unless you have a really good reason to do so.

If you’ve been drinking, or have headphones on, or are otherwise not at your finest, you shouldn’t be doing risky things like running red lights, crossing streets at weird places, or taking other risks.

In Alabama, 38 percent of black men have lost their right to vote because of being criminals.

When you get pulled over:

Turn on the cabin light, get your hands up where they can see them.

Forbid all searches of your vehicle.

Question the bullshit tactics they use.

Never commit more than one crime at a time.

Shut up.

If you tell the truth, it will all be ok. An interrogator may say to someone, “We know you did XYZ exaggerated thing,” which you didn’t do. (They admit the less harmful truth to get back at you for accusing them of the more harmful lie.) The authority figure will say, “XYZ person already told us what you did. I would have done the same thing in your position. We have a three strikes policy, this is only strike one, just come clean so we can get back to work.” Then you get fired.

Have one drawer for casual wear, one drawer for workout clothes, one drawer or section of the closet for going out clothes, and one for work clothes. This makes your outfit options readily available and saves time when selecting clothing every day, which is usually based on activity.

You can also just hang all the hangers backwards and turn them the correct way as you wear items and in [whatever time frame you set] if there are any hangers that are still backwards, then it’s probably time to donate!

Tip for tight closets: whenever you wear something and put it back, place it at one end. Shirts and pants that make it to the other end, you should probably consider getting rid of.

What is a great and productive environment? What does it feel, sound, smell. and look like?

This is your stuff. As many creatures have discovered over time, having things and places that you call your own, and are willing to fight to keep exclusively yours, pays great dividends. If you’re hungry, you can go grab an apple from your apple tree, drink some milk from your cow, or you might go hunting with your family on your land and kill an animal to eat. Having the exclusive right to do those things enhances the chances that you and your family eat, while it decreases the chances for others who aren’t aligned with you.

We didn’t invent territory. Lots and lots of other creatures figured out that idea on their own as well. Property works.

Thus, having the coolest stuff and living amongst it can bring great joy, and make everything in life much more enjoyable. If you’re going to listen to wonderful music late at night in your home, wouldn’t it be great to listen to it on the best speakers, in a beautiful room that worked well with the speakers in delivering that experience directly into your soul? There are some songs so moving and powerful that you can literally have goosebumps on your arms and tears in your eyes.

Thus, let’s have the coolest stuff. Some stuff lets you have magic moments easier. Perhaps you love the sea, then perhaps for you a boat could be wonderful. Some stuff makes you more effective. If you care about what color things are, and you shop on the internet, or like to design things, having a color accurate monitor could enhance your purchasing decisions and your ability to share your creations with the world.

One shouldn’t need much space to explain the virtues of stuff, for it is where we humans spend much of our time when not at home. We frequent the malls and shops of the world, idly shopping for enjoyment. Ask any teenager how few places they are allowed to legally exist in, and you’ll be surprised to discover that within their budget, the only places they can really exist or hang out with friends are malls, or you’re stuck in the cold, the rain and wind of the world, which gets real un-fun real quick.

It would be wonderful if the youth of our world had more empowering and useful places to legally hang out other than shopping malls. Surely the shopping mall is not the highest and best form of leisure activity or location that we can come up with for the most valuable future resource on our planet—our youth. Yourself, too. Wouldn’t you love for someplace to exist worth visiting after hours that wasn’t a pool hall, bowling alley, bar, or nightclub? We can dream. Stuff happens, so they say. Another funny saying is, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Regardless of how forcefully you might command yourself to do a thing, and “yourself” often has its own short term and hedonistic imperatives.

Do you ever look in a window and see eyes staring back at you? What percentage of possible eyes in that room you see could be looking back at you? You will find that unless you live in some type of odd Twilight Zone episode that most people are too busy looking at each other, or books or screens or work, to look outside for too long. Let’s be serious, if you have time to look out the window and stare, you have the same time that you could be out there with those people you’re staring at, and hear, smell, and absorb the experience, instead of being an isolated voyeur.

Perhaps windows are like the beach: if you live near it, you never go, but if you live on it, you go all the time. It’s that magic threshold.

Towels often have a side with more absorption on it and a side with less. If you’re trying to dry yourself off, use the side with more surface area.

Control your phone from computer so you don’t have to move your hands away from the keyboard and mouse, or look at the device, or manage the device. Keep your eyes and hands where they need to be to kick ass. If you’re not in your kick-ass station, you’re probably not kicking ass.

Your monitor will shift right naturally because we justify content left, shifting most of the text and data to the left. If you split a screen into two, your right screen will start in the middle and go right nicely, whereas the left monitor will start far left, far from the center, and will be harder to read. So you can cheat a bit by shifting your monitor a little left. This does potentially screw with posture, and the performance of your audio system (might block a speaker) and with the color and brightness response of your screen depending on how linear your screens performance is off axis.

You want to work at the smallest resolution comfortable, so you can see more data at the same time, so you may have to push your display back, zoom out, get a bigger monitor, and get higher resolution. Do whatever it takes to match the resolving power of your fovea.

There are speed reading programs that move the text without you having to move your eyes, and thus they increase the rate at which you can read. If you subvocalize, it’s said that chewing gum can help, because it keeps your mouth busy and out of the way. If you use that same idea, the fact is that your fovea is the limiting factor; at about two feet, you can only see a quarter-sized space in focus, and everything else is out of focus. What is all the extra screen space for? The same reason your eyes can see out that far in the first place, your subconscious can still keep track of ideas and clues going on around your central focused field of vision.

Because of that, you can keep a movie going, if that keeps you in the zone, or an audio playlist, or a video or image of a beautiful landscape or person, whatever tickles your fancy. This also means that you could get almost as much effectiveness out of keeping what you need to do directly in front of you, never turning your eyes or your head away from it, and when you need to look at something else or be notified of something else, you just keep it all stacked one after the other in front of you.

Instead of organizing all the data and windows on a single screen in front of you up and down, left and right, which will make you have to move your eyes and head around, you can instead just stay looking straight ahead and use alt tab, or the hotkeys and Windows manager of your choice to cycle through them quickly. You can even assign certain Window stop hotkeys, so that you’re no longer even relying on finding a window anymore, you can just pull it up with a bad ass gaming mouse, or hotkey of your choice.

Like many things in the world, you have to practice to get good at them. You may have to find a way to even categorize the million windows that you have open at a time, and it’s difficult to assign them to hotkeys, because they change all the time. Most of it is absorbing content and knowledge that other people have generated and as such, it’s mostly browser windows, and once you have 100 new browser tabs opened up, since they’re all new, you can’t really assign them to crap.

Perhaps you could have your browsers in a group of three; work, play, buy, interesting. But even in that case, you’re still going have like 20 sub tabs under each window, seems like making them numerical isn’t all that easy. Might just be easier to hit alt tab.

A bigger screen is also great for impressing people, allowing others to see what you’re working on, giving yourself a nice wakeup with some super bright light if you wish to crank up the lumens, or heating a room.

It would be better if everyone included a color square teller meter thing that showed all the different colors against their product, so that you can make up for whatever they messed up when they shot it. They should do the same thing for every video that gets broadcast. How do you know what gamma they used? How do you know what your settings should be?

Well, they should tell you.

Multiple screens vs. giant single screen. Multiple screens don’t work well for any games, all games support a single screen, few support multi. What use are big black plastic bezels in the middle of the viewing area? You run out of outputs on the cards to feed all the monitors.

Mounting them all and keeping them aligned is expensive and time consuming.

Projectors are often loud, hot, and when you look near their source, blinding. They also force your environment to be always dark, and they get bumped, screwing up their alignment, and if someone walks near them on a wood floor they can shake, if the music is loud they shake, and if you’re using projectors with Digital Light Processing (DLP) technology in them and you’re sensitive to their rainbows, you can see literal red green and blue rainbows when you quickly shift your eyes left to right.

It’s a great idea to put all the hotkeys for audio and whatever else you will need on a badass mouse, because every time you need to take your hand off that mouse, you are losing time, and if you don’t use the mouse that much, then it’s best that you break out tons of shortcuts on the keyboard. Truth be told, it’s probably best that you do that on both the keyboard and the mouse, so you only need to switch when you must, not ever to just change a song, or move a volume, or mute.

Zero gravity chairs are pretty awesome. Whatever’s the healthiest and most comfortable, and allows you to get in and out of comfortably for you, because you may live in it a while until you achieve your dream.

Mechanical cherry brown keys are quieter and faster for double tapping if you’re doing any type of key spamming. If it needs to rest on your legs, and it slides around when you don’t want it to, Blu-tack it, or grip tape it (like skateboarding).

The keycaps of most keyboards are made of ABS plastic, which is short for “acrylonitrile butadiene styrene.” The problem with ABS keycap is that after years of use, the surface of the keys becomes shiny, and also there's a slight dent by wear.

Keycaps made of polybutylene terephthalate (PBT) are more resilient against heat and chemicals than ABS, but its properties also make it more difficult to mold, which makes it more uncommon.

Polyvinyl chloride (PVC) is a relatively hard, middle-of-the-road plastic used in keycaps. Production of PVC is environmentally undesirable, and it is therefore not manufactured in some parts of the world.

The reason people like just the right texture of PBT keycap over ABS and other types is because the feeling and sound of it seems very similar to skin, and we are programmed to be social. Why not have some social good feeling stuff in the things, which we touch with our hands?

Maybe a heated keyboard would increase the enjoyment of using the keyboard?

Yes, everything has a hotkey, and if you think it should, and it doesn’t, then you can make one

We understand typing as our fingers hitting keys, but our body doesn’t understand it that way. Our body understands that your arms are in this position and when your arms are in this position, when you want certain keys to happen, you move these fingers this way. What happens is if you’re used to typing a particular way and you move the keyword a little bit, it’s still okay. When you move the keyword a little bit more and still okay, but as soon as your hands or your body get into a certain position, all your speed falls off.

A “tuple” is a collection that is ordered and unchangeable. That magic of hitting common two tuples and three tuples they have another name for those. Words in whatever language you speak have those very common patterns. Like in English you have “le,” you’re going to run into that all the time. Or “er,” you’re going to run into that all the time as well. Another example is “ile,” and so with those two and three groups of letters your brain understands how to execute those very quickly. It’s called picking and cording, which is similar to string instruments.

Normally with stringed instruments, you hold your notes with your left hand and you do your plucking and strumming with your right hand. You can do kind of the same thing when you design a new keyboard layout. Some keyboard layouts are optimized for different things. Some keyboard layouts are optimized for using the home row. Some try and minimize your pinky usage because it’s slower and weaker. Some try and maximize alternating left and right hands. Some are for developers which use weird symbols more and so they make these heat maps that you can use to analyze text that you have created and tell you which particular layout will have different strong points for what it is that you have typed. It’s pretty neat. Now, here’s the downside. Learning a new keyboard layout is an absolute nightmare.

There are only four worthwhile keyboard layouts.

QWERTY, which is what we use now which is pretty great because it’s on every device and every keyboard, and if you ever have to travel and use anyone else’s device, God save you if you don’t know how to use QWERTY the right way. It’s called that just because that’s what the first five keys, top row, say.

DVORAK, which is widely regarded to be better, except some people say that it makes your pinkies quite tired, and that’s neat because it’s built into Windows; you can just activate it and there’s a lot of keyboards that have that built in.

COLMAC focuses on getting the minimum number of changes from QWERTY with a maximum amount of benefit, and it reduces the pinky usage a little bit.

Then there’s another one called the “workman” which is more of like a developer system.

Then beyond that, you just program around. The downside that people don’t tell you about using a programmable keyboard is that whatever programming you do on this board will not carry over to any other board.

If you put your function layers and your cursor keys in a software layer on your computer, it’s much more intelligent, because now any other keyboard you plug in is going to have those same shortcuts, macros, and layers. Whereas if you only have the stuff you need in a single board, if that board breaks you’re out of luck. If you use someone else’s computer, you’re screwed. If you plug another computer in to yours, you’re back to square one.

Some much prefer to use a software layer to a hardware layer, and different keyboards that are programmable also have a different controlling firmware. One type of keyboard uses Teensy, a complete USB-based microcontroller development system, in a very small footprint; and there are two common firmwares people use—QMK and TMK, and if you’re not a developer, you’re in a rough spot, because you’re really like you got a lot of code.

Having a little nipple mouse in the middle of your keyboard is faster if you time yourself on tasks, because if you’re doing data entry programming and generating content with your fingers, every time you have to move your hand away to somewhere else and move it back you need to re-center and then restart to get your cording back. It’s the same with the backspace, so on these ergonomic keyboards the first thing they do is they move your space enter and backspace to your thumbs.

Most people only hit the space bar with a single thumb, which leaves the other thumb unused, which is ten percent of your fingers in total. This thumb is totally not utilized for most humans - and when you’re doing those fast courting strokes, if you mistype something, which is pretty common (most people mess up at a rate of 8 percent), depending on what words you’re typing when you stretch your pinky out to get that back space, it kills all the pre-programmed stuff that you were going to execute.

If you’re typing and you’re timing it, whenever you mess up, you may find that if you make one letter mistake it costs you three letters, right? Because you’ve got to do one more entry, and then one return, and then re-execution, and then your timing is off too. It really cost you four characters of speed every time you mistype one character. When you’ve got your backspace closer, your mistakes don’t cost you as much because you don’t have to re-center. You’re already centered. It’s pretty cool. This is actually pretty sweet, the space and enter on the thumbs.

Some love the concept of a left thumb backspace, but once you get used to hitting backspace with your left thumb, if you’re on a normal keyboard and you mess up, you hit the space a bunch, right? The other thing that hinders some people is called ortho-linear, because the keys that are straight on most keyboards are shifted. This is better when you have to pronate your wrists in an awkward direction, but when you’ve got the ability to put the board wherever you want, ortho-linear is a little better. Usually on a normal keyboard you’re hitting “b” with one hand, you have to learn it with your other hand. And then “zxcv” are shifted. On a normal keyboard, you’re going to come down with your left finger to hit “c”, and now you can’t do that.

You have to basically learn even on QWERTY, your “ZX” series or your “zxcv” is wrong, your “b” is wrong, and then you’re screwed on any other keyboard you go to because of the backspace issue. Someone can go from a hundred and ten words a minute, and the change could cause that person to down to about eighty. On a normal keyboard one already knows where all of the letters and numbers are. You wouldn’t think that you enter numbers that much, but you do. It might make one want to switch back and result in being even slower. You may never make the profit back.

In this increasingly digital world, more and more of your time may be spent in front of a screen. Whether that screen is in your phone, or your laptop, or your desktop computer, you might as well make that experience as amazing as possible. If you look at the current numbers regarding how often and for what percentage of the day people are stuck looking at screens, it’s amazingly high.

You should work at the lowest resolution you’re comfortable with, because you can see more. At the same time, by definition if you are comfortable with it, there’s no down side. You only have five main senses, and they’re in different orders for many people. Some people are audiophiles, some video-philes, and some are blind or deaf or both. Five is quite a small number. Being that there’s so few ways to get data into your brain, and the most important ones being your eyes and ears, you really should take the time to optimize those two input channels. The investment will pay dividends for decades, because there are such diminishing returns in the area. Whatever you put into making it great is likely to pay off for a long time. Every year the technology gets better, and the human becomes the limiting factor.

Cameras get better and better, but the camera can’t tell you where to point the camera and how to compose a good photo, yet. Microphones, preamps, and recording hardware get better and better, but it can’t tell you how to write a great song or sing it, yet. Auto-tune software can help a little. Amazing speakers can bring great sound to your ears, but they can’t close your eyes for you and force you to imagine the soundstage in front of you, to separate the different parts of the music in your mind and enjoy each one. The human is becoming more and more the limiting factor of digital enjoyment with every passing year.

Funny side note: Have you noticed that as cameras get better and better and nearly ubiquitous, we have decreasing reports of UFO’s and Bigfoot? Where there should be better and better images and recordings of these phenomena, we have none.

Recliner, 4k monitor, 55-inch (prefer inaccurate and curved because the corners get very hard to see up so close, though for production work, non-curved is more accurate). Mount your monitor / TV high enough and angled down enough so that your view of it is level when reclined comfortably and able to type and use the mouse. Software (Winsplit revolution) to split screen in 6 so the middle screen is 1280 pixels wide and you aren’t stuck looking to a side constantly. Single- or dual-bottle wine cooler for your delicious beverages, pro mic, studio monitors, studio headphones, shortcuts to manage music, 4k webcam, green screen, Pomodoro timer to get through the “uh...zone”. Do the same setup for your cardio bicycle or other if you’ve got money to spare. Black out all the extra LEDs and lights you don’t need bothering you.

Calibrate everything.

Laser point your speakers, string the distances to ears, check your posture, mark on the floor where the chair and speakers are, calibrate your stuff and have a few presets for stuff that’s mastered too hot on the top, or too weak on the bottom. Try with chair in the way, a chair not in the way, make sure to grab measurements from the general space so you don’t over fit the compensation, it sounds better, single point is pretty bad.

Some people waste money on quarter-million-dollar stereo systems while ruining the sound quality with poor practices and overcomplicating the setup. An example of this is when people with audiophile speakers listen to a digital source, then turn it analog in a DAC, then pre-amplify it and run it through a switcher, then run a cable to another larger amplifier, amplify the signal again, then it goes through more wires, to some connectors on the back of a speaker where it usually connects to an analog crossover, which has parts in it with variable tolerances, and likely changes response based on heat, and introduces delay into the signal differently on one end and on the other end, introducing phase problems in the signal represented.

It’s quite stupid when you have a digital source, to really go analog ever if you don’t need to, except for the very last moment that the analog speaker cones bounce the air around that hits your ears. Every single added step along the way in between the digital signal and the analog air hitting your ears adds to the cost, unreliability, and difficulty of setup, signal degradation, distortion, and basically all things that are the opposite of performance.

You read a lot about how certain (usually expensive) playback gear can let you “hear your music the way the artist heard it in the recording studio.” This is ridiculous. A pro recording studio will have several sets of speakers, in addition to the artist’s iPhone and whatever other playback devices are lying around. A good producer will always test the mix on a pair of small, crummy speakers, and even walk out of the control room and listen from the hallway. The artist will often take his or her final mix out to their car for yet another test. A final mix and master is always a compromise between multiple sound delivery systems. So if you really want to hear your music “exactly the way the artist intended,” get yourself a $50 boom box. You’ll be as close as anyone to the “real sound.”

Be careful with headphones and earbuds. All of them “color” the sound in one way or another. Certain trendy brands of expensive headphones are calibrated to deliver more bass, because the headphone marketers think you want a huge bottom end. Avoid the trendy types and go for the boring brands that pro audio engineers use.

If you are going to do phone or radio interviews, why not optimize for a good connection and acoustics? Is not your spoken word and inflection as important as, or more important than, the banal music so often optimized for?

Bass feeling goes up faster than sound feeling, especially if you’re coupled by something other than air. It seems like the tactile sensation increases much more quickly with the bass than the volume, so at low volume you’re not feeling much, and you turn it up a bit and you’re feeling a lot. That makes sense because if you’re physically touching the subwoofer, you would be getting much more energy than your ears, because the more you vibrate the air, the more is wasted in all other directions, but the more you move that sub, the amount hitting you is quite direct, and your ears are exponentially harder to perceive loudness. (10 decibels is twice as loud perceptually, but 3db is actually two times more energy. So what you perceive isn’t oddly tied to the real energy.)

If you really want to feel the bass, see if you can get your sub to rest on your chair. Free tactility without killing your neighbors. Accelerometers are all the rage for making your subwoofers sound good in your listening position.

Absorb primary reflections, and put your subwoofer where your head is and move around free RTA on phone and white noise on YouTube repeater to move phone around and detect where you should put the subwoofer to get good response at your head. (Since they are invertible, you can switch your head and the sub and its amplitude should still be maximized.)

Scivive believes that more things should be made modular. Let’s say you sell a Bluetooth-enabled speaker, and then Bluetooth gets upgraded every year. Well, now that speaker’s an outdated piece and you get to enter the lottery that someone doesn’t buy your version again, they buy someone else’s version. But if you had the one that was easily upgradeable, you lock customers into your ecosystem and you can even charge a slightly higher margin for that single component than you could having to produce all the rest of the components.

Middle mouse button for internet browsing opens new tab, Ctrl tab, Ctrl shift tab for going through the windows. Zoom out really far with Ctrl scroll wheel or Ctrl + or - and it will load the photos faster (because it knows you are ready to see them, and not wait for you to actually scroll to them.

This idiom is used to express the idea that empty or unfilled spaces are unnatural, as they go against the laws of nature and physics.

It’s funny the degree to which people will follow directions, even directions that are just loosely applied. For example, if you’re in line for an ATM, and there’s a little line on the floor that says where you should stand. Some people don’t want to stand so close to other people, because they don’t want them to feel like their ATM PIN is getting stolen. But then other people want you to shove directly up against the butt of the person at the ATM, so that you follow the orders of the line that’s on the floor.

The question then becomes, which one of these people is wrong, if any? Let’s say there are two or three people in the queue. It’s pretty obvious who’s next in line. It’s not necessary in that environment to bunch up so close to the next person, but if enough people show up quickly enough, it could fall apart and people might start trying to jump the queue.

How do you take advantage of that? If it’s true that people just have a natural tendency to follow suggestions or follow orders, whether they really should or really need to or not, let’s give them some good better directions to follow. The point is, people love to find order and follow directions so much that even when they don’t need to, they will.

Scivive is a proponent for putting better little templates and better little lines on the ground for the world.

Why are churches so space inefficient for putting people under their roofs?

It’s amazing how space inefficient giant churches are, if you want to put people inside them. There’s huge cubic feet of space underneath a giant roof, and then when you learn how much of it can contain humans you find out that it’s just a tiny amount at the bottom. So if they had put floors as big as the giant beautiful building, they could fit ten times as many people because it’s ten times taller than it needs to be to provide service to the singular little floor at the bottom.

Deduction is really cool; that’s why maps only show north. If you know north and you have a brain you can figure out where south, east, and west are. You really only need to be obvious at the big end; you don’t need to fill in the rest for an intelligent person. That principle applies to lots of other places in life.

For example, if two people are in a room with a cookie and the cookie gets eaten; well if it was eaten by a human, and you can see all the humans, and the number of those humans is two, it’s very likely one of these two people ate the cookie.

Become a tourist in your home town. It’s very likely Trip Advisor that’s more about the city you live in than you do as far as restaurants and attractions are concerned. Utilize the tools available to you

If you are faced with temptation, or if you have any propensity at all to fall into it, then the more often that temptation is offered to you, the more likely you are to fall for it. If you fall for it once, you’re even more likely to fall for it again. Thus you need to have a couple ways to fight temptation and find freedom.

If you have a problem with alcohol addiction, and your friends are always inviting you drinking with them, do you think that makes it more or less likely that you’ll have “just one drink?” In a perfect and imaginary world, you would just make a decision about what was best for you in your life, and you would just execute it. Life is far from perfect.

Wouldn’t it be great to say, you know what, I’d love some six pack abs, and all around great beach body, learn a few languages, learn to dance, write a book, travel the world, mind as well get rich while I’m at it. Let’s throw some true love in there. Why not?

The things around you will influence your focus, whom you fall in love with, what jobs you have, and what businesses you start. An empowering and enriching environment makes everything in life easier. Do you love a certain kind of people? Do they love you back? If so, shouldn’t you move to where there are more of them?

If you don’t like crime and don’t like high taxes, you can always move! Choose the best place for you! Don’t live and die having never seen this world!

Everyone thinks that the odds don’t apply them. Unfortunately, they do. Put the odds in your favor, move to a safe place, or a place with opportunities you like.

In some Arab countries like Qatar, If you’re a woman, getting raped and then going to jail for adultery seems like a bad deal. Pro tip: avoid crime ridden or politically undesirable countries.

Once your taste in things get advanced enough, you basically save a lot of time shopping because no one has anything you want, anywhere. The item on the shelf is not the right color. It’s not the right texture. It’s not low enough. It’s not rare enough.

That chapter might be called throwing pearls before swine and other acts of ignorance regarding people not being able to appreciate the world that they don’t notice and the ignorance of trying to show people a world that they choose not to notice.

A lot of people are unable to find joy in things. Whereas some people absolutely love the thing. This is true for one’s location, or for material items such as cars or keyboards or pens or collectables. The people who enjoy fine automobiles and see the detail and the nuance love just sitting in a certain car because it gives them a feeling of completion and excellence and fulfillment. As a person that doesn’t know what’s going on they just sit there and think, “Okay, well, where is the video game controller?” or something similar. For them, the people who don’t know what’s going on, they don’t understand the nuance or the detail; it’s almost like being totally blind to that wavelength.

It’s like trying to hear a dog whistle or detect something that’s outside your physical ability to detect it. Except in this case the reason that the art is lost on so many isn’t because of physical deficiency of detection, it’s because of mental deficiency of trends forming in their mind. The sights and sounds and smells of the experience are not converted into meaning for those people.

For instance, if you wanted your kids to actually enjoy going to see a grown-up play in a theater (that is, a non-Disney production), you might tell them what it is about acting that’s difficult or meaningful. Teach them, “Look, this actor’s got to know where to stand. That actor’s got to know when to turn around; and they need to make sure that when this thing drops that it doesn’t drop on anybody.” Once you add all those levels of detail the children watching might actually develop a respect for the performers’ hard work and enjoy the play. (Or they might still think it’s boring, but at least they had a better chance).

It’s not just the swine that is a fool for not seeing the value of pearls, which arguably you could say the swine has the right to do, but it’s also the person who is a fool for trying to convince the swine that the pearls have value. In reality, in the pig’s mind those pearls are just inedible little stones.

When you’re leaving the house, there’s an ever so small statistical probability that you’ll get robbed while you’re out. You should really only bring the necessary wallet, keys, and phone. If you’re trying to impress people, maybe bring a minimum amount of other stuff with you that you don’t mind losing.

I love keeping my keys in my wallet. Makes them much harder to forget.

Group things so that the smallest useful side faces you. This lets you see the greatest number of things at the same time in the same amount of space. This also lets you remove them while disturbing the other items the least. First order retrieve-ability. How to organize wires. Having a “to be sorted” box, for all the areas you organize things, digitally or in the real world.

The reason everyone cares about organization so much is because it literally makes you smarter. If you’re not organized, you can’t find things, and you may not know whether you have them or not. The same goes for ideas; if you don’t know where to find the idea then you don’t know if you have it. You don’t know what you don’t remember, so organization of memory is amazing.

Beauty is a game of millimeters, and perhaps micrometers. Have you ever seen Brad Pitt? Have you ever compared Brad to his brother? Douglas Mitchell Pitt is a very successful businessman, investor, and philanthropist. He’s the founder of Care to Learn, a charity that funds emergent health, hunger, and hygiene needs for children. His business career started with his founding ServiceWorld Computer Center, which merged with TSI Global in 2013. A large focus of his work is in East Africa doing water projects as a Board Member of WorldServe International. He’s the owner of Pitt Development Group, a firm that specializes in the development of medical office space.

By all accounts, he’s a great guy, but in the looks department…. Well, Brad is Brad.

The number of people out there that are pretty unhappy with their lot in life in regards to their looks or abilities compared to their siblings is pretty large. That’s the unfairness of the random change that creates greatness. That same greatness generating chance also generates autism, and death at birth.

Collectors of things seem to serve little use these days, however imagine a time in the distant past where if you were a weapons collector, and an invading force attacked your land, at least you have an armory. Basically by being collectors of things, you can deploy whatever single resource you enjoyed over multiple parties. So if one gun is good for you, now you can do one gun for many, sadly some guy has to get that gun that’s famous for being unreliable but pretty.

If you’re looking for an obviously easy way to improve your life, take a look at through your internet search history, see if there’s any particular type of pretty people that you look at more than others on the internet. Maybe they’re naked, maybe they’re in bikinis, maybe they’re just smiling. Then move to wherever those people come from. Wherever they’re most numerous. Then you’ll be naturally triggered to be happier and hornier. Hell, I can’t see how getting it the natural way is any worse than paying for a bill for brainwashing yourself.

If it is true that the most powerful and complicated processes that we are aware of in the world are those of living things, then it is very tragic that so much of the data that we could capture from the rainforests and other places is becoming permanently extinct. It is robbing us and our future selves from the learning that could be had from the analysis of so many complicated life forms. Because we all came from fish anyway, there is a ton of crossover in biological processes that we would be able to learn from and utilize to make ourselves better that we miss out on from destruction of nature.

You should always use a backpack instead of carrying bags. It’s better for the environment. It’s better for your safety.

If you don’t like all the populations of Africa and the Middle East emptying into Europe, then you’ll probably not like it when flooding drives them there due to climate change. Conversely, perhaps you’ve always longed to see exciting new cultures without having to buy a plane ticket.

One odd side effect of global warming is that we might get sick less because maybe the air is drier.

Because of the sun, the tides go up and down and the earth is warm. The sun is a very beautiful thing that’s willing to give us a lot more than we’re taking. We can absorb a lot more from the sun. The sun has a nearly infinite amount of energy to give us, and as long as we can accept that energy and harness it to do our bidding, then we can have all the delicious food we want, all of the peace that we want, all the travel that we want, all the progress that we want through reformatting and changing that energy source.