Ekow Ray

God is an infinite song and we are particles in a wave

[Ekow Ray @Epochra]

"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."
Stephen Jay Gould

Why isn't society focused on maximizing human potential?

[Ekow Ray @Epochra]

“Those who have helped the poor the most have not been those who have gone around loudly expressing ‘compassion’ for the poor, but those who found ways to make industry more productive and distribution more efficient, so that the poor of today can afford things that the affluent of yesterday could only dream about.” - #ThomasSowell

[Spencer Pratt @spencerpratt]

Rooting for Hollywood to die is loserthink. The antidote for the woke fever dream that ruined movies for the last few years isn’t to just abandon and destroy film culture entirely…the answer is breaking the fever. Obsession, Project Hail Mary, Top Gun: Maverick…there have been some bangers emerging from the ashes that actually are winning big at the box office again. They don’t have an agenda, and are entertaining as hell. Their insane box office returns should remind all of us that not only is Hollywood still a highly valuable industry, but deep down, we ALL still want to go to the movies. We just want it to be like the good old days in the 90s when movies were just movies, not a UC Santa Cruz lecture.

Culture is America’s #1 global export, and Hollywood is the vanguard for popular culture. Period. Not only is it worth saving, it’s necessary. Not just for California, but for the entire country. We cannot root for California to fail…the success of our country relies on a strong, prosperous, and sane California. We need to nurture this place the way we’d nurture a family member going through a drug crisis. Stern, stable leadership, a full intervention to purge the addiction (to wokeness), and a committed effort to rehabilitate her.

I see people on the right saying "screw Hollywood" like they're scorned ex-girlfriends. And I see people on the left saying "screw the film tax credit" simply because it involves the President. All of you need to grow the fuck up. We are saving America, and that includes California. And California...that includes the President. Get on board or get out, losers.

[Ekow Ray @Epochra]

Why is this about winning, that's what wrong with our political system. This should be about doing what's best for the country, our education system as gone off the rails where our voting population has no idea that our founding principles is about limited government. We should voting for successful people who believe in making the country successful, not freeloading nepo baby activists.

[yannispappas @yannispappas]

We’re living in a childless, extended-adolescence hell, listening to unbearable cunts opine endlessly about theory and trending issues from the comforts of their bubbles, despite having almost no experience of anything beyond running their fucking mouths to people just like them.

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Elon Musk described the government in four sentences and never made a political argument. He read out the schematic.

Musk: "Government is a corporation in the limit. It is the most corporate thing. It is maximum corporation. And it's also a monopoly, and also is the only one that's allowed legally to do violence."

Take the flag off it and look at what's underneath.

It collects revenue. It employs millions. It owns land. It writes the rules it operates under.

That's a corporation. Line for line.

With three edits.

You cannot choose a competitor.

You cannot decline the transaction.

It is the only one on earth permitted to use force to make you pay.

Every other relationship in your life required your consent. This one required your birth.

Musk: "Why would you want to give a corporation with no competition that can't even really go bankrupt more money?"

There is no condition under which it stops. None was ever built in.

Everything that has ever gotten better got better by being allowed to die. Evolution runs on extinction. Science runs on falsification. Markets run on bankruptcy. Your own body runs on cells that kill themselves on schedule.

Failure isn't cruelty. It's information. It's the only mechanism in the universe that tells a system it was wrong.

Take it away and the system doesn't become permanent. It becomes blind.

A company that misreads the world loses customers.

A government that misreads the world receives a larger budget the following year.

It's the only structure we've built where failure is what feeds it.

Musk: "I think the role of government should be that of like a referee, and not a player on the field."

A referee was never supposed to be weak. He was supposed to be outside the outcome.

The moment he starts scoring he isn't corrupt. Corruption would mean he broke a rule. He wrote the rules. He's just playing, and he's the only one allowed to keep score.

A system like that never gets caught. It only gets old.

Every civilization that collapsed did it with its institutions still standing.

The buildings stayed. The titles stayed. The revenue arrived on schedule.

What died was the feedback. The signal telling it that reality had moved and it hadn't.

Rome didn't fall in a day. It stopped listening for a century and called it stability.

That's the actual danger. Not tyranny. Deafness with a budget.

And it runs deeper than politics.

Everything you love is precious because it can be lost. A promise means something because the person making it will die. Your time matters because you don't get more of it.

Mortality isn't the tragedy of being human. It's the only reason anything costs anything.

Then we built one institution exempt from all of it. No death. No scarcity. No consequence. A thing that can never lose anything, deciding what everything is worth.

It bills in dollars. It's paid in hours. And it has never once felt what an hour costs.

It can be wrong for a century and feel nothing. You get eighty years and have to be right the first time.

It doesn't have to win the argument. It only has to outlive the person making it, and it has never lost that one.

It borrows against people who don't exist yet, and they will pay, because it will still be standing when they arrive.

Then we handed it the only gun.

This isn't a conspiracy. Conspiracies need competence and coordination. This is a design flaw, and design flaws only need time.

That's the good news. A conspiracy can't be proven or fixed. A design flaw can be both.

Everything good in your life exists because something was permitted to fail on the way to it. Every medicine. Every machine. Every idea that survived contact with reality.

The one institution that cannot fail is the one holding the gun.

That isn't a warning. It's an engineering problem.

And every permanent thing on earth was designed by people who weren't.

[Konstantin Kisin @KonstantinKisin]

In 2022, I took a lot of shit from people who thought we were allies over opposing progressive insanity by arguing against their conspiratorial nonsense about Ukraine.

Somehow, 4 years later some of those people are starting to wake up to reality. That's fantastic.

I learned a lot from that time. I still remember a TV presenter/influencer calling me up when the war broke out. "I don't know anything about Ukraine," he said. He asked me why it was happening and what's driving it. I spent a good half an hour explaining. He nodded along and said "that makes so much sense".

Then 3 days later, some people on his "team" suddenly decided that the cool kids all think Ukraine = bad.

The guy who had called me immediately began repeating their nonsense on X with the confidence of a career Eastern European military analyst.

A few months later, a British influencer *living in Britain* who knew nothing about the war started tweeting shit like "No more of our dollars for Ukraine, amIrite guys?" with a photo of her in a miniskirt.

My point is, a lot of the things people say have nothing to do with an informed opinion. That's why the bullshit comes in waves. A small number of people start saying something and then a LOT of people realise that's where the addictive combination of money and attention is. So they smash that Ukraine button like a baboon in an experiment where he gets a grape every time.

Then another small group of people start saying the next thing. And the baboons all run over to that button and start smashing it.

It was a big wake-up call for me.

Most of what you watch, read and hear is just people who are good at talking saying shit someone else told them that they think is in their interest to say.

And I'm not even having a go at those people. Honestly, the fact that people are capable of changing their mind eventually is a very good thing.

[Carl White @CarlWhi99454847]

@Bitcoin_Teddy "When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."

-- Jonathan Swift

[Magatte Wade @magattew]

A strange thing happens when people inherit comfort.

They forget comfort was built.

When life works, people start treating abundance like the weather. It is just there.

That is how a generation can grow up inside prosperity and still fall for ideas that punish the very economic freedom that made their normal life feel easy.

[Ekow Ray @Epochra]

Medicare for all and affordable housing are not rights, anything that requires a service from others can't be rights. You are part of the problem, your beliefs are the seed for this non-sense. The reason why education is expensive is because of guaranteed loans and government policies pushing education artificially. It's out of sync with market demand and is literally crating education cost inflation.

[Ekow Ray @Epochra]

@diol2n and the Democrats want free day care. Imagine the quality of government subsidized day care.

[Jaynit @jaynitx]

Jordan Peterson on why you should never sacrifice what you could be for what you are:

1. The deepest lesson under the Buddha's enlightenment is not "deny the world." It is that you should never let what you are stop you from being what you could be. The material world only becomes worth abandoning if your attachment to it is making you less than you could become.

2. What you identify with determines what you become. If you identify with what you already are, clinging to order, you become a tyrant. If you identify with chaos, the opposite of order, you become nihilistic. Both are traps. The way through is to identify with neither.

3. Identify instead with the capacity to continually transcend what you are. Not with any fixed state, but with the process of becoming more. That single shift changes how you relate to everything, including your own failures.

4. Seeking out your own errors on purpose is what humility actually is. You put yourself in situations where you can discover where you are wrong, where your limits are, where there is not yet enough of you, ideally in a way that challenges you without knocking you out of the game.

5. But you can exhaust yourself fighting dragons. Challenge is necessary, but unlimited challenge burns you out. Peterson coached lawyers with infinite workloads who worked flat out and were destroying themselves, because there was always more work to do.

6. The counterintuitive fix was to work less and rest on a schedule. He had them block off four days every three months, planned so far ahead the calendar protected it. They tracked billable hours to test it, and the hours went up. You can have the vacation and the productivity at once.

7. You are not optimizing this week, you are building a 30-year career. The goal is a game you can play today and still play next month and next decade, one that does not make you bitter or worn to a frazzle. burn off a feather at a time instead of letting the whole thing burst into flames.

8. To be renewed, you have to drink the water of life, and water is chaos. It washes away too much order. Staying refreshed means taking on exactly the right amount of chaos to keep your garden nourished, no more and no less.

9. Meaning is the marker that you have the balance right. Peterson calls this one of the only ideas he has ever found that he believes to be rock solid. You can use your own sense of meaning to calibrate your progress through life.

10. It starts with two decisions. The first is a decision of love, that being is worthwhile, and you will work to better it. The second is a decision of truth, that you will play a straight game. Aim at the highest good you can currently conceive, and update it as you learn.

11. It is better to be engaged in a hard problem than to have no problem at all. You do not escape the problem of being. You find one worth solving and become so engaged that the engagement justifies the problem's existence. You get the problem and the solution at the same time.

[Voltaire Archive @VoltaireQuote]

It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

True https://t.co/7fmliNMklw

[Ekow Ray @Epochra]

Many people don't understand insurance and see it as a right. Insurance began over 4,000 years ago as a way to protect merchants from losing everything at sea. If a merchant was deemed a big risk for taking risky routes they were kicked off the insurance. Our expensive health insurance is a reflection of an unhealthy society and should be a canary in the coal mine instead of vilified as an evil entity killing people.

[Elonogy @ElonogyX]

Elon Musk: “People are mistaken when they think that technology just automatically improves. It does not automatically improve. It only improves if a lot of people work very hard to make it better.

If you look at the progress in space, in 1969, we're able to send somebody to the moon. Then we had the space shuttle. The space shuttle could only take people to low Earth orbit. Then the space shuttle retired, and the United States could take no one to orbit. So that's the trend. The trend is like, down to nothing.

You look at great civilizations like ancient Egypt, and they were able to make the pyramids, and they forgot how to do that. And the Romans, they built these incredible aqueducts—they forgot how to do it."

[Mark Cuban @mcuban]

It was a different healthcare world in the 1990s.

The same issues i mentioned apply. Every single one of them.

The processes, care mechanisms and economics for every company and person that touches the HC system we have today, would have to change.

All that you have done is taken a group of people who are more likely to get sick, relative to a younger population, and put that burden on the taxpayers.

What are you going to do for taxes to pay for them? Medicare has a 255b cash reserve. (FYI, non profit hospitals have a 280b cash reserve) and is expected to require a 20pct or more premium and tax increase in 2033, with a most likely reduction in services. And again. Those numbers are always wrong.

Do you plan on saying that when you hit 55 or 60 your taxes go up ? Do you plan on increasing from 2.9 percent for those at the age that qualify. Or increasing the taxes on everyone, to only pay for that age group and losing every younger voter ?

Politicians need to learn that IDEOLOGY IS NOT A STRATEGY
You have to put yourself in the shoes of everyone that is impacted, which for HC is everyone.

Then you have to put together a plan and figure out what needs to be done to get from where we are to where we want to be, and who will do it.

You have to recognize that our culture, politics, size , expectations, costs to educate doctors, desire to extend life as long as we can, our entrepreneurial culture that is always investing in new drugs and technologies to solve what once seemed like unsolveable problems, is unlike every other country in the world.

If you can't recognize our strengths and differences, you won't be able to put together a plan, let alone legislation.

That's where both parties always fail.

They try to use ideology to legislate. Which makes it very easy for money to sway them. Because, when you don't have a plan, and you don't understand the details of what it actually takes to disrupt the status quo and create change , you are willing to defer to the people that give you the most money.

I've been doing nothing but healthcare every day. This shit is opague, convoluted, dominated by huge companies that have no interest in anything but getting bigger, and if they help a few people along the way. So be it

If you think this legislation, in any way shape or form scares them, you are wrong. They are laughing at both sides because they know they can buy them , mislead them, or sue them, so that nothing changes. The same thing they do to their customers

But I will say. I truly do appreciate that you engage with me in an honest fashion.

I know you want to do the right thing. But I can't say it enough times

Ideology is not a strategy.

[Ekow Ray @Epochra]

@BillAckman @BernieSanders @elonmusk @SpaceX .

[Ekow Ray @Epochra]

@BillAckman @BernieSanders @elonmusk @SpaceX T and the

[Ekow Ray @Epochra]

Hubris is the greatest sin of humanity. To fight against this maybe we need to define truth differently. Truth seems best when thinking of it as seeking knowledge of utility. What may be divine is truth maintained through long periods of time.

[La Píldora Roja @LaPildoraRed]

“You’re not virtuous. You’re harmless. You’re like a rabbit. Rabbit isn’t virtuous. It can’t do anything except get eaten. It’s not virtuous. If you’re a monster and you don’t act monstrously, then you’re virtuous. But you also have to be a monster. The hero has to be a monster” – Jordan Peterson