deplorable dirtbag

[deplorable dirtbag @dirtbag]

That darn war monger Trump!

[KanekoaTheGreat @KanekoaTheGreat]

JD Vance on Trump: "He was President, and take-home pay was going up faster than it had in 40 years. Inflation was low. The border was secure. And remember, they all said Donald Trump was going to start World War III, and yet we had more peace around the globe than we had had in a generation in this country."

@JDVance
@realDonaldTrump

[Power Beast @powerbeastt]

14 HARVARD TECHNIQUES to be better than 99% of the world

1. The 5 - second rule

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Impressive paper airplane with folding instructions

[Jaynit @jaynitx]

In 2002, Elon Musk flew to Moscow three times to buy a refurbished missile.

He couldn't close the deal.

On the flight home, he asked himself: "When's the last time you bought something Russian that wasn't vodka?"

He started SpaceX instead.

1 year later, he stood in front of Stanford students and spent 45 minutes explaining everything he'd learned about building companies:

On starting Zip2:

This was 1995. Most VCs on Sand Hill Road hadn't even heard of the internet.

"I thought it would be a pretty huge thing. It was one of those things that only came along once in a very long while."

He got a deferment from Stanford to start the company.

"When I talked to my professor and told him this, he said, 'Well, I don't think you'll be coming back.' That was the last conversation I had with him."

The problem: he had no money.

"I couldn't afford a place to stay and an office. So I rented an office instead, because I got a cheaper office than I could get a place to stay."

"I slept on the futon and showered at the YMCA on Page Mill and El Camino."

"I was in the best shape I've ever been. Go to shower, work out, and you're good to go."

There was an ISP on the floor below them.

"We drilled a hole through the floor and connected a null modem cable. That gave us our internet connectivity for like 100 bucks a month."

"We had an absurdly tiny burn rate. And we also had a really tiny revenue stream. But we actually had more revenue than we had expenses."

They sold Zip2 to Compaq in early 1999 for over $300 million.

"In cash. That's a currency I highly recommend."

On starting PayPal:

"I didn't really take any time off."

He was looking for what remained in the internet. Financial services hadn't seen much innovation.

"When you think about it, money is low bandwidth. You don't need some big infrastructure improvement. It's really just an entry in a database."

They built a platform that combined banking, brokerage, and insurance in one place. That took enormous effort.

Then they added a little feature that took one day: the ability to email money from one customer to another.

"Whenever we demonstrated these two sets of features, we'd say, 'Look how you can see your bank statement and your mutual funds and insurance, all on one page. Look how convenient that is.'"

"And people would go, 'Ho hum.'"

"Then we'd say, 'And by the way, we have this feature where you can enter somebody's email address and transfer funds.'"

"And they'd go, 'Wow.'"

"So we focused the company's business on email payments."

On viral growth:

"PayPal is really a perfect case example of viral marketing."

"One customer would essentially act as a salesperson for you. They would send money to a friend and essentially recruit that friend into the network."

"So you had this exponential growth. The more customers you had, the faster it grew."

"It was like bacteria in a Petri dish. It just goes like this S-curve."

The results:

"I ran PayPal for about the first two years of its existence. We launched after year one. By the end of year two, we had a million customers."

"We didn't have a sales force. We didn't have a VP of sales. We didn't have a VP of marketing. And we didn't spend any money on advertising."

On why product matters:

"The essence of viral marketing is: do you have something where one customer is going to sell another customer without you having to do anything?"

"Product matters incredibly. Because if you're going to recommend something to somebody, you've got to really love the product experience. Otherwise you're not going to recommend it."

"You don't want to burn your friend."

On company culture:

"We had a pretty flat hierarchy. Everybody had a roughly similar cube. Anyone could talk to anyone."

"We had a philosophy of best idea wins. As opposed to the person proposing the idea winning because they are who they are."

"Even though there were times when I thought that should have been the way to go."

On decision-making:

"If there were two paths and one wasn't obviously better than the other, rather than spend a lot of time trying to figure out which one was slightly better, we would just pick one and do it."

"Sometimes we'd be wrong and pick the suboptimal path. But often it's better to pick a path and do it than to just vacillate endlessly on a choice."

On focus:

"We didn't worry too much about intellectual property, paperwork, legal stuff."

"We were very focused on building the best product we possibly could."

"We were incredibly obsessive about how to build something that is really going to be the best possible customer experience."

"That was a far more effective selling tool than having a giant sales force or thinking of marketing gimmicks or 12-step processes."

On why he started SpaceX:

"I was trying to figure out why we had not made more progress since Apollo."

"In the 60s, we went from basically nothing to putting people on the moon. Yet in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, we've kind of gone sideways."

"The computer you could have bought in the early 70s would have filled this room and had less computing power than your cell phone. Just about every sector of technology has improved. Why has this not improved?"

He thought maybe public support was the problem. So he planned a privately funded Mars mission: put plants growing on Mars for $15-20 million.

But the cheapest US rocket was $50 million. So he flew to Moscow.

Three trips. Couldn't close the deal.

"When I got back from the third trip, I thought: why is it the Russians can build these low-cost launch vehicles? It's not like we drive Russian cars, fly Russian planes, or have Russian kitchen appliances."

"When's the last time you bought something Russian that wasn't vodka?"

"I think the US is a pretty competitive place. We should be able to build a cost-efficient launch vehicle."

On why rockets are expensive:

"The energy and velocity required to get into orbit is so substantial that you have almost no margin to play with."

"A launch vehicle will get about 2% of its liftoff mass to orbit."

"If you're wrong by 2%, you're not going to get anything to orbit. It'll come crashing down in the Pacific somewhere."

"That means all of your calculations have to be right. If you miscalculate something, it blows up."

On how SpaceX got costs down:

Their rocket: $6 million. Nearest competitor: $25 million for less capability.

"There's no silver bullet. It's been really hundreds of small innovations and improvements."

"We've done improvements in the propulsion system, the structure, the avionics, and the launch operations."

"Our overhead in a 30-person company is an order of magnitude less than Lockheed or Boeing. Just for starters."

"Every decision we've made has been with consideration to simplicity. Because simplicity both improves reliability and reduces cost."

"If you've got fewer components, that's fewer components to go wrong and fewer components to buy."

On being an entrepreneur:

"I think really an obsessive nature with respect to the quality of the product is very important."

"Being obsessive-compulsive is a good thing in this context."

"Really liking what you do is important. If you don't like it, life is too short."

"If you like what you're doing, you think about it even when you're not working. Your mind is drawn to it."

"If you don't like it, you just really can't make it work."

On parallelization:

"Try not to serialize dependencies. Put as many elements in parallel as possible."

"A lot of things have a gestation period. There's really nothing you can do to accelerate that gestation period."

"If you can have all those things gestating in parallel, that is one way to substantially accelerate your timeline."

"People tend to serialize things too much."

On space as a business:

Someone asked if SpaceX was a good first company to start.

"No. I would not recommend it."

"This is advanced entrepreneuring."

"You know how many people have said: the fastest way to make a small fortune in the aerospace industry is to start with a large one."

This 45 minute Stanford lecture will teach you more about building companies than every startup book combined.

Bookmark & give it 45 minutes today, no matter what.

[𝕏 Ghana 🇬🇭 @xghana_]

A mother asked her kids to recreate how all 3 got on top of the wardrobe.

You wouldn’t believe your eyes 😅

[deplorable dirtbag @dirtbag]

https://t.co/ZK6vPaRujn

[Love Music @khnh80044]

This is being a parent ...❤️

[🎼🌺Music Love♥️ @ThoNg676733]

4 Cellists vs 1 Cello : Bolero

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

In 1991, Michael Moschen turned juggling into kinetic poetry, weaving balls and a triangle with rhythm, balance, and physics like never before.

[MAZE @mazemoore]

This is one of the more important videos I’ve made.

Never forget this evil.

[Kyronis @kyronis_talks]

A Soviet psychologist walked into a café in 1927 and watched a waiter do something impossible.

He remembered every open order at every table. Perfectly. Without notes. Without effort.

Then a table paid their bill. She asked him to repeat the order.

He couldn't remember a single item.

She spent the next two years figuring out why. What she found is now the operating system underneath every platform fighting for your attention.

Her name was Bluma Zeigarnik, and she was a graduate student at the time, sitting with her professor Kurt Lewin, watching the waiters work the room. What caught her attention was something so ordinary that it had been happening in restaurants for centuries without anyone asking why.

The waiters could remember every open order with perfect accuracy. Table four wanted the schnitzel with no sauce. Table seven had changed their wine twice. Table twelve owed for three coffees and a dessert. Every detail, held without effort, without notes, without any visible system at all.

But the moment a table paid their bill, the information vanished. Completely. Lewin tested it on the spot. He called a waiter back minutes after a table had settled up and asked him to recite the order. The waiter could not do it. Not partially. Not approximately. The information was simply gone.

Zeigarnik went back to her lab and spent the next two years turning that observation into one of the most replicated findings in the history of psychology.

Here is what she proved, and why it changes how you think about attention, memory, and almost every piece of media you have ever consumed.

She gave participants a series of tasks. Some tasks they were allowed to finish. Others were interrupted before completion. Then she tested recall across both groups.

The unfinished tasks were remembered at nearly twice the rate of the completed ones.

Not slightly better. Nearly twice. The brain was holding the incomplete work in a state of active tension, returning to it, keeping it warm, refusing to file it away. The finished tasks were closed, archived, released. The unfinished ones were still running.

She called it the resumption goal. When the brain commits to a task and cannot complete it, it opens a file that stays open until resolution arrives. That open file consumes a portion of your cognitive bandwidth whether you are thinking about it consciously or not. It surfaces in idle moments. It pulls at the edge of your attention during other work. It is the thing you find yourself thinking about in the shower when you were not trying to think about anything at all.

This is not a flaw in human cognition. It is a feature. The brain evolved to finish things. An open loop is a signal that something important is unresolved. Keeping that signal active increases the probability that you will return to it and complete it. In an environment where most tasks had real survival stakes, this was an extraordinarily useful mechanism.

In the modern world, it is the most exploited vulnerability in human attention.

Netflix did not invent the cliffhanger. But it industrialized it in a way no medium before it ever had. When a show ends on an unresolved question, it does not just create curiosity. It opens a file in your brain that stays active until the next episode closes it. The autoplay countdown that begins at 15 seconds is not a convenience feature. It is a precise calculation about how long the average person can tolerate an open loop before the discomfort of not knowing overrides every other intention they had for the evening. One more episode is not a choice. It is your brain doing exactly what it was designed to do: return to what is unfinished.

The writers who built Lost, Breaking Bad, and Succession understood this intuitively without ever reading a psychology paper. Every episode ended on an open question. Every season finale answered three things and opened five more. The entire architecture of prestige television is a Zeigarnik machine running at industrial scale.

But television is not where this gets dangerous.

Every notification on your phone is an open loop. Every unread email is an open loop. Every task you wrote on a list and have not yet crossed off is an open loop. Each one is consuming a small but real portion of your available attention, pulling fractionally at your focus, degrading your capacity to be fully present in whatever you are actually doing right now. TikTok's algorithm does not just serve you content you like. It serves you content that ends one loop and immediately opens another, keeping the resumption system permanently activated so the cost of stopping always feels higher than the cost of continuing.

The research on this accumulation effect is striking. Psychologists studying cognitive load have found that unfinished tasks do not sit passively in memory. They actively interrupt. They surface at the wrong moments. They are the reason you are reading something and suddenly remember an email you forgot to send. The brain is not malfunctioning. It is running its resumption system exactly as designed. It is just running it across forty open loops simultaneously, in an environment that generates new ones faster than any human nervous system was built to process.

The most important practical implication Zeigarnik's research produced is one that most people use backwards.

David Allen built his entire Getting Things Done system on the insight that the only way to close a cognitive open loop is to either complete the task or make a trusted commitment to complete it later. Writing something down in a system you actually trust has the same effect on the brain as finishing it. The file closes. The bandwidth is released. This is why writing a task down feels like relief even before you have done anything about it. You have not solved the problem. You have simply told your brain that the loop is registered and will be returned to, which is enough for the resumption system to stand down.

The inverse is equally true and far more destructive. Every task that lives only in your head, unwritten and unscheduled, is an open loop burning cognitive resources around the clock. The mental cost is not proportional to the size of the task. A tiny nagging obligation consumes the same active tension as a major project. Your brain does not discriminate by importance. It discriminates by completion.

Zeigarnik published her findings in 1927. The paper sat in academic literature for decades before anyone outside psychology paid attention to it.

Then television got good. Then the smartphone arrived. Then the entire attention economy was engineered, largely by people who understood intuitively what she had proven scientifically: an open loop is the most powerful hook available to anyone who wants to hold human attention.

Netflix knew it. Instagram knew it. Every designer who ever made a notification badge red instead of grey knew it.

The café in Vienna is long gone.

The mechanism she discovered there is now the operating system underneath every platform fighting for your time.

Every "to be continued."

Every unread notification.

Every thread that ends with "part 2 tomorrow."

All of it is the same waiter, the same unpaid bill, the same brain refusing to let go of what it has not yet finished.

Zeigarnik noticed it over coffee in 1927.

A century later, it is the most valuable insight in the history of media.

And nobody taught it to you in school.

[Kyronis @kyronis_talks]

A community college professor named Marty Lobdell taught the same study skills lecture for 30 years. The video quietly became one of the most watched educational recordings online, with over 10 million views.

He spent his career watching students fail not because they were lazy, but because no one had taught them how their brain actually works when learning something difficult.

The lecture, “Study Less Study Smart,” contains a powerful framework.

Your brain cannot sustain focus the way most people believe. Studies show the average learner hits a wall between 25 and 30 minutes. After that, efficiency collapses. You’re still sitting there, but almost nothing is being absorbed.

Lobdell told the story of a student who planned to study 6 hours a night, 5 nights a week. Thirty hours total. She failed every class. She was not lacking effort. She was confusing time near books with actual learning. The fix is simple: when focus drops, stop, take a 5 minute rewarding break, then return. That reset makes a massive difference.
He also destroyed the myth of highlighting and re reading. Recognition is not the same as recall. To prove it, he read 13 random letters. Almost no one remembered them. Then he turned them into “Happy Thursday.” The entire room recalled them instantly. The brain stores meaning, not repetition.

This is why elaborative encoding works so well.

Finally, he shared the most important principle: 80 percent of study time should be active recitation. Close the book and explain the material in your own words. Teach it to someone else or an empty chair. Retrieval is where real learning happens.

His closing line stuck with me: If this information does not change your
behaviour, you have not actually learned it.

The best students do not study more hours. They stop confusing the feeling of studying with the reality of learning.

[Vince Langman @LangmanVince]

Spencer Pratt puts out another banger!

I'm not MAGA or anything 😂

Whoever is putting together his commercials should be hired by every Republican running for office in the midterms!

[Neyazuddin Ansari @riyazz_ai]

This 1-hour Yale lecture will teach you more about options trading than most people learn in an entire Wall Street career.
Most people skip it.

It comes from Robert J. Shiller at Yale University and instead of surface-level tips, it breaks down the exact thinking and models hedge funds rely on.

Watching it feels like unlocking a different level.

You start to see that options aren’t just trades they’re structured bets on probability, time, and behavior. The real edge isn’t guessing direction, it’s understanding how risk is priced and where others are wrong.

He also makes one thing clear: complexity isn’t the advantage clarity is. The people who win aren’t the ones using the most complicated strategies, but the ones who truly understand what they’re doing.

That’s why this lecture stands out.

Because while most people are chasing quick profits…

Very few actually understand the game they’re playing.

Bookmark this and watch it, no matter what. It might be the most productive start to your week.

[Fox News @FoxNews]

PAYING TRIBUTE: A pilot created a flightpath by drawing a service member and three headstones over Ohio to honor the state's Air National Guardsmen who died in an Iraq tanker crash while supporting Operation Epic Fury.

[Enezator @Enezator]

The experienced grandmother steps in and effortlessly shows her class. 👑

[johnny maga @johnnymaga]

Some patriot purchased a pro-ICE billboard in San Francisco ahead of the Super Bowl declaring them the “Defensive player of the year” and it’s triggering all of the libs.

“It made me sick to my stomach.”

This is awesome. 😭

[Camus @newstart_2024]

Helen Andrews drops a provocative thesis: Feminization = wokeness.

Everything we call "woke"—empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition, inclusion over free speech—is just the natural outcome of institutions becoming majority-female since the 1970s.

She points to surveys: ~2/3 men prioritize free speech, ~2/3 women prioritize inclusive society. Men lean "ethics of justice" (rules/facts), women "ethics of caring" (context/relationships/emotions).

Examples: James Damore fired not for facts but because it made women "feel bad." Kavanaugh hearings: masculine side demanded evidence, feminine side focused on "she's crying."

Her take: When women predominate, politics/institutions tilt toward subjective feelings over objective rules—even if many women reject it (e.g., best Kavanaugh books by women critics).

This 2:46 clip is bold, polarizing, and ties demographic shifts to cultural ones.

Agree it's a key driver of wokeness? Or overreach? What's your read on the gender gaps in free speech/inclusion polls?

[🌷🦋 Love Music 🎶 & Dance 💃🏻🕺🏻 @Tiana_Celine_23]

I never thought I would hear beethoven's 5th on a guitar. Bro is talented 🎸🎼💥