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Your Key Survival Skill for 2026: Critical Ignoring
A pioneering 2021 study found that just 30 minutes of phone scrolling tires us out psychologically, actually reducing our ability to exercise. One 2022 paper concluded that a half-hour of social-media use before training caused enough mental fatigue to affect the hand-eye coordination of elite volleyball players.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/critical-ignoring-social-media-7e236f52
TIL: терпение в сказках
Jan. 3rd, 2026 01:21 pmВ западных сказках терпение как черта характера или линия поведения чаще всего принадлежит женщинам/девочкам. По-моему, это противоречит Библии, где Ева, не в состоянии терпеть искушение, срывает запретный плод. С другой стороны, это хорошо согласуется с Одиссеей.
“Propaganda does not provide information that is meant to be believed by the people it is addressing. Propaganda mostly provides signals of in-group loyalty.
To be effective at this, propaganda often has to be implausible. Information that is true is believable on its own. But propaganda has to be so patently false and far-fetched, so exaggerated and misleading, that repeating it sends the right signal to other people: the signal that one feels committed to a certain group.
Propaganda provides the masses with traits that allow them to recognise each other. But beyond this, fighting propagandistic falsehoods with the truth actually reinforces the signal’s reliability by implicitly telling people who want to prove themselves faithful precisely what not to say. Propaganda acts as a badge to express which group we belong to.
”
--- Hanno Sauer. “The Invention of Good and Evil”, 2024.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/08/headway/how-an-american-dream-of-housing-became-a-reality-in-sweden.html
This is mostly due to regulations.
If I were the president...
While nearly every other industry has become more productive since 1968, productivity in home-building — the amount of work done by one worker in one hour, essentially — has declined by half. The country is barely building enough to maintain the status quo, which is some four million units short of need, according to Freddie Mac.
This is mostly due to regulations.
The barriers to building housing fast... weren’t technological, but institutional.
If I were the president...
TIL: Surveillance society
Jan. 19th, 2024 08:39 pm- Cities of China* — 626m cameras to 1.43bn people = 439.07 cameras per 1,000 people
- Hyderabad, India — 900,000 cameras for 10,801,163 people = 83.32 cameras per 1,000 people
- Indore, India – 200,000 cameras per 3,302,077 people = 60.57 cameras per 1,000 people
- Delhi, India — 449,934 cameras for 22,547,000 people = 19.96 cameras per 1,000 people
- Singapore, Singapore — 109,072 cameras for 6,080,859 people = 17.94 cameras per 1,000 people
- Moscow, Russia — 214,000 cameras for 12,680,389 people = 16.88 cameras per 1,000 people
- Baghdad, Iraq — 120,000 cameras for 7,711,305 people = 15.56 cameras per 1,000 people
- Seoul, South Korea — 144,513 cameras for 9,988,049 people = 14.47 cameras per 1,000 people
- St. Petersburg, Russia — 75,000 cameras for 5,561,294 people = 13.49 cameras per 1,000 people
- London, England (UK) — 127,423 cameras for 9,648,110 people = 13.21 cameras per 1,000 people.
TIL: people vs sharks
Feb. 20th, 2023 02:45 pmAs of 9 years ago, on average sharks kill four people a year. At the same time, people kill 70 million sharks a year.
https://youtu.be/fbm6Y42vcqI?t=77
https://youtu.be/fbm6Y42vcqI?t=77
is Milan. London is #2, Paris is #3.
https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/s-pore-loses-top-instagrammable-spot-in-the-world-now-ranked-13th
https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/s-pore-loses-top-instagrammable-spot-in-the-world-now-ranked-13th
Putin delenda est
Jan. 8th, 2023 08:15 pmDER SPIEGEL: The war itself isn’t being questioned.
Gudkov: No, the attacks on Ukraine and the massacres play no role. The Russians have little compassion for the Ukrainians. Almost no one here talks about the fact that people are being killed in Ukraine.
DER SPIEGEL: Can you quantify that?
Gudkov: The share is just 1.5 to 2 percent of respondents. And only an average of 10 percent of the population feels guilt and shows empathy – Russian society is amoral. Of course, they don’t want war, but people behave submissively, passively and don’t want to engage in open conflict with the state.
....
Despite all the fear, the Homo Putinus hopes that Putin will protect the country from the West and lead it out of the economic crisis, as he did during the first years of his presidency.
https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/opinion-researcher-lev-gudkov-russians-have-little-compassion-for-the-ukrainians-a-066c08c6-60f4-48e1-853a-d2b3d67bd6b8
I've played with ChatGPT a bit and find it to be a useful writing/editing assistant. It definitely helps generate various versions of paragraphs that would've been difficult for me to produce on my own.
In the meantime, the bot has a limitation that Google or somebody's got to exploit for business.
In the meantime, the bot has a limitation that Google or somebody's got to exploit for business.
"I'm sorry, but I am unable to provide information about events that occurred after my knowledge cutoff in 2021. As a language model, I do not have the ability to browse the internet or access current events. My responses are based solely on the information and knowledge that I possess at the time of my creation."
Доля россиян, которые считают, что донбасские сепаратисты или российские военные сбили малайский Боинг рейс MH17, равна доле пакистанцев, которые считают, что теракт 11 сентября 2001 года в Нью Йорке совершили арабские террористы.
На этом вопрос современной российской культуры можно считать закрытым.
На этом вопрос современной российской культуры можно считать закрытым.
TIL: 听其言而观其行
Oct. 9th, 2022 01:57 am"Listen to what he says and watch what he does."
via https://twitter.com/AlexGabuev/status/1578830173767888896
via https://twitter.com/AlexGabuev/status/1578830173767888896
