Victor Rodriguez San

Ubicuo....

[Per Bylund @PerBylund]

What causes #poverty? Nothing. It's the original state, the default and starting point. The real question is, What causes #prosperity?

[Akhilesh Mishra @livingdevops]

Vibe coders everyday struggle in 15 seconds.

[Agustín scorolli @Agusscorolli]

Ayer conocí un edificio que siempre me llamó la atención y es una fantasía absoluta

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Mexico paid $20 million for eight minutes in this movie. Then those eight minutes forced them to invent an entire cultural tradition.

Before Spectre, Mexico City had no Day of the Dead parade. The holiday was celebrated at home, at cemeteries, with family altars. Quiet, intimate, centuries old. Sam Mendes fabricated a massive street parade for the opening sequence, shot it with 1,500 extras in skeleton costumes across the Zócalo, and audiences worldwide assumed they were watching a real annual event.

Mexico's government had negotiated hard for the placement. Leaked Sony hack emails showed officials offered up to $20 million in tax incentives for four minutes of positive portrayal. Sony was drowning in a $300 million budget. The deal included script changes: the Bond girl had to be a Mexican actress, the villain could not be Mexican, and the city's modern skyline had to appear on screen.

Then the movie opened in 182 countries and tourists started booking flights to Mexico City for the parade.

The parade that did not exist.

Tourism authorities panicked. Visitors were arriving expecting the spectacle they saw in the film and finding nothing. So in October 2016, the government spent $500,000, hired 650 volunteers, built dozens of floats and giant skeleton marionettes, and staged the first real Día de los Muertos parade in Mexico City's history. 250,000 people showed up. They openly called it a "Spectre-style parade" in press materials.

Ten years later, the parade draws millions. Anthropologists call it the "pizza effect," where a cultural element gets exported, transformed abroad, and reimported as authentic. Mexico's most famous public celebration of its most sacred holiday was invented by a British director shooting a $300 million spy movie.

That tracking shot is doing more for Mexico City's economy every November than the $20 million they paid for it.

[Dr. Julie Gurner @drgurner]

"Until death, all defeat is psychological." - Marcus Aurelius

Refuse everything that would lead most people to give up.

Refuse it.
Rise from the dead 1000 times.
Commit to never stay down & never give up.
Everything you want is on the other side of struggle.

[Imtiaz Mahmood @ImtiazMadmood]

At this U.S. visit to China dinner banquet, the most eye-catching figure in the prime center seat between Musk and Cook was Lansi Technology founder Zhou Qunfei—from a rural factory girl to China's richest woman, with absolutely no background to rely on, building everything from scratch through her own grit. She was born in a small village in Hunan Province. At age 5, her mother passed away, and her father became disabled and blind from a work injury, leaving the family in dire poverty with nothing to their name. At 16, unable to afford school fees, she was forced to drop out and head to Guangdong to work in a factory, grinding glass on the assembly line—working days away during the day and furiously self-studying at night, earning certifications in accounting, computer operations, and other skills. That's how she spent a few years, until she scraped together 20,000 yuan from her wages, rallied eight relatives including her brother, sister, sister-in-law, and brother-in-law, and started a small workshop in Shenzhen doing watch glass processing. She handled machine repairs and sales runs single-handedly, grinding away like that for another four years.

By the 2000s, the mobile phone industry began booming on a massive scale. By a stroke of luck, her watch glass factory landed an order for TCL phone screens. She spotted the huge potential in the phone glass market and quickly founded Lansi Technology, specializing in the production, R&D, and sales of phone glass. At first, they only handled domestic phones and knockoffs, but everything changed when she went after a Motorola order—foreign companies had insanely strict quality standards. She bet nearly all her resources to meet Motorola's demands and snagged the V3 order, which sold over 100 million units worldwide, catapulting Lansi Technology straight to industry leadership. From there, she smoothly secured deals with Nokia, Samsung, and other foreign giants.

The pivotal turning point hit again in 2007, when Jobs unveiled the first iPhone, revolutionizing phones toward full-glass touchscreens. Jobs' obsessive craftsmanship demands left the whole world scrambling for a supplier that could meet them. Zhou Qunfei keenly sensed this was another massive opportunity, so she led her team in a three-month joint push with Apple engineers, breaking through key processes to mass-produce the first-generation iPhone glass panels. That locked in a long-term Apple contract, and soon after, nearly all Apple gear—from iPads to MacBooks—went to Lansi Technology for production. It also propelled Lansi to become the world's top player in touch glass panels.

That's why she got to sit next to Cook. But why was Musk right there beside her too?

After dominating global glass panels, Lansi Technology branched into more diverse smart devices, including car cockpits and robots. In autos, they've already locked in deals with 30 carmakers like Tesla, BMW, Mercedes, and Li Auto for windows, center consoles, and more. In robotics, they handle joints, sensors, and other components—areas with deep overlap in Musk's businesses.

A girl who dropped out at 15 with just a junior high diploma, emerging from rural Hunan to build an empire from nothing and become China's richest woman—forty years later, stepping into U.S.-China talks, seated between Musk and Cook. That's Zhou Qunfei's story.

- @hihongjie

[Bryan Johnson @bryan_johnson]

This is it.
Everything learned spending millions on longevity.

From: Your Immortal Unc and Auntie.
To: Our Immortal nieces and nephews.

0. Sleep is the world's most powerful drug.
1. Be in your bed for 8 hours
2. Same bedtime every night, any time before midnight
3. Don’t eat right before bed
4. Calm foods for dinner
5. No screens 1 hour before bed
6. Avoid added sugar (be aware it’s in everything)
7. Avoid all things in an American convenience store
8. Avoid fried foods
9. Shoes off at the door
10. Eat whole foods, particularly veggies fruits nuts legumes berries
11. Walk a little after meals or air squats
12. Get your heart rate high routinely
13. Lift heavy things
14. Stretch daily
15. Water pik, floss, brush, tongue scrape, morning and night
16. Make an effort to drink water
17. Get sunlight when you wake up (UV is low)
18. Protect skin in midday sun
19. Stand up straight
20. See at least one friend once a week
21. Avoid plastic where you can (in all things)
22. Circulate air in rooms
23. When stressed, breathe, learn to calm your body
24. Go to the dentist
25. Avoid sitting for long times
26. Protect your hearing, the world is too loud
27. Alcohol is bad for you
28. Finish coffee before noon
29. Avoid bright lights after sunset
30. If obese, look into a GLP
31. Sleep in a cold room
32. Texting while driving is dangerous
33. Turn off all notifications
34. Limit social media use
35. Don’t smoke anything
36. If you struggle to sleep, read a physical book before bed
37. 1 hour before bed have a calm wind down routine: bath, read, light walk, listen to music
38. The body is a clock and loves routine. Have a daily morning and evening schedule.
39. Avoid long distance travel where you can
40. Baby steps first: incorporate new things slowly
41. Do less… most things don’t work.

Bonus points if you get your blood checked.

Start here, it will change your life.

[Rafa Nosti ®™ @rafanosti]

Gran experiencia jugar el Club de GOLF Chapultepec el día después del LIV México.

Los tees de salida, las distancias, los greens y las banderas que juegan los Pros son completamente otro deporte.

Un digno 87 con mi compadre @sicttor

[Jim Beattie @JimBeattie18]

Sonoran Magnetism
Oil on canvas
Mark Maggiori.

[BOSS @thebeautyofsaas]

https://t.co/9rOTItoSUu

[Organizermemes @OrganizerMemes]

I love this video

[Darshak Rana ⚡️ @thedarshakrana]

https://t.co/MR6xBJJ9BB

[Eduardo Arcos @earcos]

Absolutamente impresionante y al mismo tiempo de locos. Esta catapulta lanza a una persona a 82 km/h desde un camión que circula a 82 km/h.

El resultado: 🤯🤯🤯🤯

[Prof.Grant Schofield @grantsnz]

https://t.co/3zjo7EGXBp

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

While you slept last night, completely still in your bed, our galaxy moved millions of kilometers through the cosmos. You woke up in the same room, on the same planet, yet unimaginably far from where you were the night before.

The Milky Way is not drifting quietly through the universe. It is racing through space at around 600 kilometers per second, carrying billions of stars, planets, and everything on them along for the ride.

It is a good reminder that even when life feels motionless, you are always in motion.

Stay connected,
Follow Gandalv @Microinteracti1

[Super 70s Sports @Super70sSports]

We don’t have any footage of Beethoven or Mozart writing their masterpieces. We do, however, have Paul McCartney writing Get Back. And that’s even better.

[Anders K. Hvelplund @Falliblemusings]

I used to think Sapiens was a great book. Sweeping, provocative, the kind of book that makes you feel like you finally understand the big picture of human history. It's on every CEO's bookshelf, assigned in universities, praised as a masterwork of synthesis. Yuval Noah Harari is treated as one of the serious thinkers of our time.

But something nagged at me. Some passages felt off. Claims that human rights are just figments of our collective imagination, not real things, just stories we tell ourselves. That nations, laws, money, justice, doesn't exist outside our heads. That meaning itself is a delusion we've invented to cope. That we're far more powerful than ever before but not happier. That hunter-gatherers had it better because they had no dishes to wash, no carpets to vacuum, no nappies to change, no bills to pay.

That sounded depressing to me, but was perhaps just the realistic scientific worldview? What it meant to see the world clearly, without comforting illusions.

Then I read The Beginning of Infinity by @DavidDeutschOxf. Deutsch has a concept he calls 'bad philosophy.' Not philosophy that's merely false, but philosophy that actively prevents the growth of knowledge. Ideas that close doors rather than open them. That makes problems seem unsolvable by design.
After soaking in Deutsch's framework (it's dense, a bit like digesting a delicious whale), it becomes clear: Harari's books are riddled with bad philosophy. They're smuggling nihilism in under the guise of scientific objectivity. Some examples:

On meaning: "Human life has absolutely no meaning. Humans are the outcome of blind evolutionary processes that operate without goal or purpose... any meaning that people inscribe to their lives is just a delusion."

On human rights: "There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings."

On free will: "Humans are now hackable animals. The idea that humans have this soul or spirit and they have free will, that's over."

On progress: "We thought we were saving time; instead we revved up the treadmill of life to ten times its former speed." The Agricultural Revolution? "History's biggest fraud." We didn't domesticate wheat, "it domesticated us."

On our cosmic significance: "If planet Earth were to blow up tomorrow morning, the universe would probably keep going about its business as usual. Human subjectivity would not be missed."

On the future: "Those who fail in the struggle against irrelevance would constitute a new 'useless class.'" Homo sapiens will likely "disappear in a century or two."

This is bad philosophy. It tells us our problems are cosmically insignificant, our solutions are illusions, and that progress is neither desirable nor within our control. It's also perfect nonsense. No one would ever go back to being hunter-gatherers. Would you rather worry about your kid spending too much time on Roblox, or face the 50% chance she won't reach puberty?

And our so-called "fictions"? They ended slavery. They gave women equal rights. They solved hunger. They eradicated smallpox. They turned sand into computer chips. They got us to the moon, and hopefully soon, to Mars and beyond. These "fictions" are already reshaping the universe, and over time they may become the most potent force in it.

Now compare Deutsch:
"Humans, people and knowledge are not only objectively significant: they are by far the most significant phenomena in nature."

"Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow."

"Problems are soluble, and each particular evil is a problem that can be solved."

"We are only just scratching the surface, and shall never be doing anything else. If unlimited progress really is going to happen, not only are we now at almost the very beginning of it, we always shall be."

Where Harari sees a species of deluded apes stumbling toward obsolescence, Deutsch sees universal explainers, the only entities we know of capable of creating explanatory knowledge, solving problems, and potentially seeding the universe with intelligence.

The difference isn't academic. Ideas shape action. If you believe life is meaningless, progress is a trap, and humans are hackable animals with no free will, how does that affect what you build? What you fight for? What you teach your children?

Harari's books sell because they flatter a fashionable pessimism. They let readers feel sophisticated for seeing through the "delusions" everyone else lives by. That smug cynicism is corrosive. And it's everywhere: in schools, in media, in bestselling books. More than half of young adults now say they feel little to no purpose or meaning in life. This is what happens when you teach an entire generation bad philosophy. Less progress, less health, less wealth. Less flourishing. And ultimately, a higher chance that civilization and consciousness go extinct.

Fortunately, there's another equally well-written, but much truer, account of homo sapiens, appropriately titled 'The Beginning of Infinity'. And this one smuggles no despair in by the backdoor. But let's give Harari credit where it's due. He is right about one thing: if planet Earth blew up tomorrow, we wouldn't be missed. Because there'd be no one left to miss us, just a careless universe, blindly obeying physical laws. We are the only ones who can miss, but we're not going to. We're going to aim, hit, and keep going.

Full credit for the amazing meme to @Ben__Jeff