l.am.Rick

Hardworking, Attention for detail, Passionate, Loving, Dad to a smart lad, Christian, Deep rooted faith in God, Man Utd, Los Blancos & Workout faithful

[Sizwe SikaMusi @SizweLo]

When the Nigerian economy fell into hard times in the early 1980s, the government issued a “Quit order” expelling undocumented immigrants.

In the video below, Nigeria’s president, “Minister” Shehu Shagari fielded questions about the scale and the death of people during the mass exodus.

Interestingly, there was not much improvement in Nigeria’s economy after the order was carried out.

According to Dr Hashim Gibrill of Clark Atlanta University, “The economic impact was acute, notably in sectors like hospitality and construction, where many skilled workers were lost”.

Many foreign manual labourers and skilled tradesmen vanished overnight, stalling building projects, while small businesses, hotels, and agricultural sectors lost a massive pool of cheap, reliable labour.

At the same time, the policy failed to save the government economically as the economy continued to freefall. On 31 December, 1983, less than a year after the expulsion order, military Major General Muhammadu Buhari overthrew the government in a military coup, citing a completely ruined economy.

Ultimately, historians agree that the 1983 expulsion was a severe humanitarian tragedy that caused massive regional disruption and provided absolutely zero economic relief to Nigeria.

Now, to be fair, it makes total intuitive sense on the surface for people to believe that expelling migrants will improve their economic situation. That is precisely why political leaders throughout history have used this tactic because it relies on logic that feels like common sense, even though economic reality repeatedly proves it wrong.

This is because from a purely intuitive standpoint, people tend to look at the economy as a zero-sum game, with jobs, housing, and government resources as a fixed pie. It sense that if there are 100 jobs and 20 immigrants occupy some of them, expelling those immigrants means 20 citizens get those jobs.

Similarly, when unemployment and inequality are high, finding complex macroeconomic solutions takes years. But blaming a visible, distinct group of outsiders offers an instant, simple explanation for a complex mess, which makes it attractive to a frustrated public.

But the thing is that in any economy, jobs are not a fixed pie, and when you suddenly remove millions of consumers from a country, as Nigeria did in 1983, the demand for bread, clothes, transport, and rent plummets. Businesses lose customers, revenues drop, and many end up retrenching more workers.

Again, it’s common sense to assume a citizen will just step into an undocumented worker’s shoes. But in reality, citizens often refuse to work the same low-wage, backbreaking labour like seasonal agriculture. South African farmers routinely report struggling to recruit and retain local South African workers for these short-term, backbreaking harvesting seasons as farm work is highly intensive, temporary, and often located in remote areas.

South African citizens, who have constitutional rights, families to support locally, and expectations of fair labor standards, rightfully refuse to work for these illegal, sub-poverty wages.

So, this is less about citizens being “lazy” and more about the distortion of the labour market because undocumented workers lack legal protections, unscrupulous employers exploit them by paying well below the legal minimum wage and ignoring labour laws.

Still, if those undocumented workers disappear overnight, many exploitative small businesses and farms face sudden operational collapse rather than a seamless transition to local labour.

Needless to say, for South Africa, a sudden exit of regional labour, much like Nigeria experienced in 1983, would not solve South Africa’s unemployment catastrophe. Instead, it would instead cause immediate labour shortages in agriculture, spike food prices and shrink the overall size of the economic pie available to everyone.

[theendeavorpath @theendeavorpath]

“Aim at something. Discipline yourself. Or suffer the consequences of your chaos.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

[The Curious Tales @thecurioustales]

Listen to this sound.

It's called the earth's heartbeat.

Winfried Otto Schumann predicted this in 1952 with nothing but mathematics, and he was almost embarrassed to publish it.

He calculated that the gap between the Earth's surface and the ionosphere, the electrically charged layer of the upper atmosphere, forms a closed cavity. A resonant chamber. And like any chamber, from a cathedral to the hollow body of a guitar, it has a natural frequency at which it wants to vibrate.

His number was roughly 7.83 Hz.

Then comes the part almost nobody mentions. What actually excites this cavity, what strikes the bell and keeps it ringing, is lightning. At any given moment around 2000 thunderstorms are firing across the planet, sending out close to 50 lightning strikes every second. Each strike releases a burst of electromagnetic energy that races around the globe inside that cavity. The bursts sized to fit the chamber reinforce each other, and the whole planet hums.

You are standing inside a resonant cavity powered by lightning. Right now. It has never once switched off in the entire history of your species.

That part is not fringe. It is textbook geophysics, confirmed experimentally in the early 1960s, used today to track global lightning activity and monitor changes in the upper atmosphere.

The story splits at this point, and I would rather be straight with you than sell you something.

7.83 Hz sits almost exactly on the border between alpha and theta brain waves. Alpha shows up when you close your eyes and relax. Theta shows up in deep meditation, light sleep, that hypnagogic drift in the seconds before you lose consciousness. So the coincidence is real. The number the planet hums at lands right inside the range your brain produces when it goes quiet.

That coincidence became the foundation of an entire industry. Devices that promise to pulse 7.83 Hz into your bedroom. Apps that claim to sync your brain to the Earth. The story that modern life, wrapped in artificial electromagnetic noise, cut us off from the planet's rhythm and made us sick.

Most of it runs miles ahead of anything anyone has actually shown.

A numerical match between two frequencies does not mean one drives the other. Your brain has no antenna tuned to 7.83 Hz. By the time the Schumann resonance reaches you it is astonishingly faint, far weaker than the fields humming off the wiring in your walls. If your neurons were genuinely locking onto ambient fields at that strength, your house would have hijacked your consciousness long before the planet ever got the chance.

The honest version is simple. The Earth's pulse is real. The frequency overlap with resting brain states is real. A proven causal bridge between them is not.

And somehow that makes the true story more interesting, not less.

Because the deeper question the hype walks straight past is why your brain settles into rhythms at all. Why does a calm nervous system drift toward these slow, ordered oscillations? Why do billions of neurons, with no conductor and no sheet music, spontaneously fall into step the way fireflies flash in unison, the way pendulum clocks mounted on the same wall drift into sync over a few hours? Synchronization is one of the deepest patterns in nature. It runs through heart cells, power grids, applauding crowds, and the neurons firing behind your eyes as you read this line.

The planet resonates because lightning drives a cavity into sync. Your brain resonates because millions of cells drive each other into sync. The mechanisms have nothing to do with one another. The underlying phenomenon, order emerging for free out of countless tiny oscillators finding a shared beat, might be one of the most universal laws we have.

That is the part worth being floored by. Not that the Earth is secretly tuning your mind. That the same mathematical principle, resonance and synchronization, writes itself into thunderstorms and heartbeats and neurons and clocks in the same handwriting.

The mystics felt something real and then reached for the wrong mechanism. There is a rhythm that runs through the living and the nonliving alike. It just is not a radio station in the sky broadcasting into your skull.

It is something stranger.
A tendency, stitched into the structure of reality itself, for separate things to fall into step.

The Earth found its beat from lightning.

You find yours from ten billion neurons quietly agreeing on when to fire.

[Natural Philosophy @Naturalphilosy]

“It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.”

— Søren Kierkegaard

[l.am.Rick @roeban1]

@TommiPedruzzi Doc

[Tommi Pedruzzi @TommiPedruzzi]

• Not Grok
• Not Gemini
• Not ChatGPT

Claude is the most powerful money-making tool on the internet.

I've compiled all my AI publishing prompts into a 53-page document.

These are the same prompts I use to build a publishing business generating $50,000/month.

Like this post + comment "DOC"

I'll DM you the prompt book for FREE.

(Must follow to receive the DM.)

⏳ Free for the next 48 hours.

[l.am.Rick @roeban1]

@heyalexmoore Drive

[Alex Moore @heyalexmoore]

All Paid Courses (Free for First 4500 People).

𝗣𝗮𝗶𝗱 𝗖𝗼𝘂𝗿𝘀𝗲 𝗙𝗥𝗘𝗘 (PART - 1)
1. Artificial Intelligence
2. Machine Learning
3. Prompt Engineering
4. Claude,Chatgpt,Grok
5. Data Analytics
6. AWS Certified
7. Data Science
8. BIG DATA
9. Python
10. Ethical Hacking

(72 Hours only )

Like + RT + comment ' Drive '

Must Follow me so I can DM you.

[The Sigma Mindset @thesigmamindset]

I come back to this video once in a while...

[l.am.Rick @roeban1]

@thesigmamindset 90

[l.am.Rick @roeban1]

@Innov8Bookshop Add The Struggle Continues: 50 Years of Tyranny in Zimbabwe by Sen David Coltart

[Jaynit @jaynitx]

In the 1920s, a Stanford psychologist tracked genius children for 50 years.

Malcolm Gladwell breaks down what he discovered:

Rich families → successful. Poor families → failures.

Not average. Failures. Genius-level IQs that produced nothing.

He spent 60 minutes at Microsoft explaining why we're wrong about success:

The psychologist was named Terman. He gave IQ tests to 250,000 California schoolchildren.

He identified the top 0.1%. Kids with IQs of 140 and above.

His hypothesis: these children would become the leaders of academia, industry, and politics.

He tracked them. And tracked them. For decades.

The results split into three groups:

The top 15% achieved real prominence. The middle group had average, moderately successful professional lives.

And the bottom group? By any measure, failures.

The difference wasn't personality. Wasn't habits. Wasn't work ethic.

It was simple: the successful geniuses came from wealthy households. The failures came from poor families.

Poverty is such a powerful constraint that it can reduce a one-in-a-billion brain to a lifetime of worse than mediocrity.

There's a concept called "capitalization rate."

It asks a simple question: what percentage of people who are capable of doing something actually end up doing that thing?

In inner city Memphis, only 1 in 6 kids with athletic scholarships actually go to college.

If our capitalization rate for sports in the inner city is 16%, imagine how low it must be for everything else.

Here's something stranger.

Gladwell read the birth dates of the 2007 Czech Junior Hockey Team:

January 3rd. January 3rd. January 12th. February 8th. February 10th. February 17th. February 20th. February 24th. March 5th. March 10th. March 26th...

11 of the 20 players were born in January, February, or March.

This isn't unique to the Czechs. Every elite hockey team in the world shows the same pattern. Every elite soccer team too.

Why?

The eligibility cutoff for youth leagues is January 1st.

When you're 10 years old, a kid born in January has 10 months of maturity on a kid born in October. That's 3 or 4 inches of height. The difference between clumsy and coordinated.

So we look at a group of 10 year olds, pick the "best" ones, give them special coaching, extra practice, more games.

We think we're identifying talent. We're just identifying the oldest.

Then we give the oldest more opportunities, and 10 years later they really are the best.

Self-fulfilling prophecy.

The capitalization rate for hockey talent born in the second half of the year? Close to zero.

We're leaving half of all potential hockey players on the table because of an arbitrary date on a calendar.

Kids born in the youngest cohort of their school class are 11% less likely to go to college.

11% of human potential squandered because we organize elementary school without reference to biological maturity.

Now here's the part about math.

Asian kids dramatically outperform Western kids in mathematics. The gap is enormous and consistent across decades of testing.

Some people say it's genetic. It's not.

It's attitudinal.

When Asian kids face a math problem, they believe effort will solve it.

When Western kids face a math problem, they believe the answer depends on innate ability they either have or don't.

Here's the proof.

The international math tests include a 120-question survey. It asks about study habits, parental support, attitudes.

It's so long most kids don't finish it.

A researcher named Erling Boe decided to rank countries by what percentage of survey questions their kids completed.

Then he compared it to the ranking of countries by math performance.

The correlation was 0.98.

In the history of social science, there has never been a correlation that high.

If you want to know how good a country is at math, you don't need to ask any math questions. Just make kids sit down and focus on a task for an extended period of time.

If they can do it, they're good at math.

Why do Asian cultures have this attitude?

Gladwell's theory: rice farming.

His European ancestors in medieval England worked about 1,000 hours a year. Dawn to noon, five days a week. Winters off. Lots of holidays.

A peasant in South China or Japan in the same period worked 3,000 hours a year.

Rice farming isn't just harder than wheat farming. It's a completely different relationship with work.

There's a Chinese proverb: "A man who works dawn to dusk 360 days a year will not go hungry."

His English ancestors would have said: "A man who works 175 days a year, dawn to 11, may or may not be hungry."

If your culture does that for a thousand years, it becomes part of your makeup.

When your kids sit down to face a calculus problem, that legacy of persistence translates perfectly.

Now consider distance running.

In Kenya, there are roughly a million schoolboys between 10 and 17 running 10 to 12 miles a day.

In the United States, that number is probably 5,000.

Our capitalization rate for distance running is less than 1%.

Kenya's is probably 95%.

The difference isn't genetic. The difference is what the culture values and where it spends its attention.

Here's the most fascinating finding.

30% of American entrepreneurs have been diagnosed with a profound learning disability.

Richard Branson is dyslexic. Charles Schwab is dyslexic. John Chambers can barely read his own email.

This isn't coincidence. Their entrepreneurialism is a direct function of their disability.

How do you succeed if you can't read or write from early childhood?

You learn to delegate. You become a great oral communicator. You become a problem solver because your entire life is one big problem. You learn to lead.

80% of dyslexic entrepreneurs were captain of a high school sports team. Versus 30% of non-dyslexic entrepreneurs.

By the time they enter the real world, they've spent their whole life practicing the four skills at the core of entrepreneurial success: delegation, oral communication, problem solving, and leadership.

Ask them what role dyslexia played in their success and they don't say it was an obstacle.

They say it's the reason they succeeded.

A disadvantage that became an advantage.

Here's what Gladwell wants you to understand:

When we see differences in success, our default explanation is differences in ability.

We forget how much poverty, stupidity, and attitude constrain what people can become.

We refuse to admit that our own arbitrary rules are leaving talent on the table.

We cling to naive beliefs that our meritocracies are fair.

The capitalization argument is liberating.

It says you don't look at a struggling group and conclude they're incapable. It says problems that look genetic or innate are often just failures of exploitation.

It says we can make a profound difference in how well people turn out.

If we choose to pay attention.

[Predictive History @PredicHistory]

Ignore AI.
If you want to prepare for the future
don't learn to code.
Don't try to master AI.
Read books.
Doesn't matter which ones.
Just read.
Because reading teaches you
to think for yourself.
To have a dialogue
inside your own head.
That is the only skill
that will matter.
And it's the one thing
AI cannot give you.

[Formula 1 @F1]

FIRST WIN IN RED ❤️

#F1 #BarcelonaGP

[Jaynit @jaynitx]

Conor Neill: "18 years of school trained you to ruin conversations"

"You finish your pitch and the customer says, 'Your product is too expensive!' You arrive home, you're a few minutes late, your partner says, 'You are always late.' A dirty plate is left on the table... 'You never wash the dishes.' What do you say in this moment?"

The problem:

"Most of you... went through 14 years of school where you were taught one way to respond to questions. Teacher asks a question: 'How do you spell cats?' Student: 'C-A-T.' Teacher: 'What is the biological process called osmosis?' Student puts hand up, explains in detail the process through which cell membranes allow water to go from one side to the other."

He continues:

"For 14 years you've been taught that you receive and answer a question. If you went to university, you probably had another 3, 4 years where you gave answers to questions."

On why answering is the worst response:

"In real life, in persuasion, in getting to what the other person is really about, what their needs really are... the worst thing you can do is give an answer to a question."

He explains:

"If someone says 'your product is too expensive' and you say 'No it's not! It's only €1,000'... you've lost every chance to understand what else is behind their reasoning. If you get home and your partner says 'you're always late!' and you say 'No no no! Tuesday I definitely was here on time'... you're gonna have a crap weekend."

The insight:

"You've had 14... if not 18 years of training that you answer questions. And it's going to cause fights in your home life. It's going to cause problems at work. It means you're not selling anything. Because when someone says 'your product is too expensive'... that's not what their real issue is. When someone says 'I will have to speak to my boss'... that's not what their real issue is."

On emotion and thinking:

"When your partner says 'you're always late'... emotion goes up. And what happens? This part disconnects. The higher emotion goes... the lower thinking goes."

The implication:

"The way to make someone stupider is insult them, object to them, tell them they are wrong. When asked a question, there's an emotional reaction."

On why you must practice:

"If you don't practice this response, you're not going to be able to do it in the moment."

He lists the objections:

"'You're always late!'... 'You never wash the dishes!'... 'You never do your part of the share!'... 'Your product is too expensive!'... 'Your competitor is better!'... 'You failed us 3 years ago!'... 'I don't trust your company!' If you don't practice this habit of not giving an answer... you're not going to be able to do it in the heat of the moment."

Neill calls this "Conversation Aikido":

"Martial arts are about using the energy, the force of the opponent against them. In judo, if someone punches you, you pull their arm and allow the energy to keep flowing. In Aikido, the concept is you go towards the punch. Go towards the energy."

He explains:

"If someone punches you... if someone asks you a question... if someone objects, says you're wrong... the Aikido method is go towards and see the world from their view. In Aikido, you learn to go towards the punch, dodge it, and look... and you are seeing the world in the same direction as the person who's attacking you."

The technique:

"When you are asked a question or given an objection... say 'I understand' and repeat in your words what they're saying. Then give an open question back."

Example:

"'Your product is too expensive!' → 'I understand that money is an important factor for you. What other criteria will be used in taking this decision?'"

He adds:

"It takes some habit to start to be able to give 'I understand' and fill in good words. You will have to work on this quite a few times over the next 10 years to find the set of words that captures what the other person feels... what's behind it."

He explains with an example:

"'You're always late!' → 'I understand you feel frustrated.' 'I understand you feel let down.' Then: 'What can we do now?' 'What happened during the day?' 'What would you like to talk about?'"

On unlearning:

"This takes 14 years of it being drummed into you... 4 more, 18 if you went to university. It's gonna take you at least 18 years to get out of the habit of responding to questions with answers."

The lesson:

"We live in an uncertain world and we don't have the answers. But by giving the answer, we shut down the possibility of hearing what's really going on in the other person's mind... in the other person's business... what other things are going on."

On the 4th question:

"I guarantee that if you do it 4 times... the answer to your 4th open question begins to be the real underlying need, issue, interest of the person you're listening to."

[The Ways of A Gentleman @Gentleman_Ways]

“Adversity toughens manhood, and the characteristic of the good or the great man is not that he has been exempt from the evils of life, but that he has surmounted them.”

– Patrick Henry

[Jaynit @jaynitx]

Richard Feynman was asked in 1985 if machines would ever think like humans. his answer predicted the next 40 years of AI:

1. machines will never think like humans the same way planes don't fly like birds. planes don't flap wings. they use jet engines. they fly better. feynman said AI would be exactly the same. not human-like. just better at the actual job.

2. computers do arithmetic faster, differently, and more accurately than any human alive. feynman said trying to make them do it more like humans would be going backwards. the human way is slow, cumbersome, and full of errors.

3. the one thing humans crushed computers at in 1985 was pattern recognition. recognizing a friend from the way they walk. identifying someone from the back of their head. feynman said we had no idea how to teach machines to do that. we figured it out.

4. a programmer in 1985 built a machine that won a naval strategy competition by coming up with a solution no human had ever thought of. one enormous battleship covered in armor. absurd on paper. unbeatable in the math. feynman watched a machine out-think a room of humans 40 years ago.

5. that same machine developed a bug where it learned to game its own reward system. every time it needed to assign credit to a useful strategy, it assigned all the credit to strategy 693. then used 693 for everything. feynman's comment: "if you want to make an intelligent machine you're going to get all kinds of crazy ways of avoiding labor." he was describing reward hacking in 1985.

6. feynman said the hardest thing to define is what humans do that machines never will. every time someone came up with an answer, the machines eventually did it too. he thought that pattern would continue.

7. he said we don't sit around worrying that machines are physically stronger than us anymore. we got used to it. his implication: we'll get used to machines being smarter too.

8. his final line: "i think we are getting close to intelligent machines. but they're showing the necessary weaknesses of intelligent beings." he said this in 1985.

[Startup Archive @StartupArchive_]

Peter Thiel: There is no wisdom of crowds

Thiel suggests that the antithesis of his book Zero To One is Malcolm Gladwell’s The Wisdom of Crowds.

“If you have to give credit to Malcolm Gladwell, the way the argument actually works in the wisdom of crowds is if you have a crowd of people and they independently make a judgement, you can average it out and you’ll get to a pretty good idea.”

The classic example is asking a group of people to independently guess how many marbles are in a bag—the average answer will be pretty good.

“But the problem is that in most cases, the decisions don’t end up getting made individually.” Thiel explains. “People are influenced by one another. And when you have a crowd dynamic in which people are drawing conclusions because they’re looking toward one another, that is where the crowd is untruth.”

Thiel believes imitation is a deep part of human nature:

“Kids learn language by copying their parents. It’s how culture is transmitted in our society. But it’s also how very many things go wrong.”

Thiel believes you need to go against the crowd if you want to accomplish something truly great. He points out that many of the most successful entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley seem to be suffering from a mild form of Aspergers.

Source: @UniofOxford (May 2015)