Focusing on one spot

 

Science girl

@gunsnrosesgirl3

If you focus on the central spot, the others vanish This phenomenon is called 'motion-induced blindness' losing sight of stimuli that are in plain view. The dots don’t actually vanish your mind just perceives it that way.

https://x.com/gunsnrosesgirl3/status/1870383802960257083

Government spending is a tax

 

Mike Lee

@BasedMikeLee

Remember: government spending is a tax on every American “Keep your eye on one thing and one thing only: how much government is spending, because that’s the true tax.... If you’re not paying for it in the form of explicit taxes, you’re paying for it indirectly in the form of inflation or in the form of borrowing.” - Milton Friedman

Trump's 3rd Act - Feb 2024

Scott explained in back in February:

https://x.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/1762595451621212387

Scott Adams

@ScottAdamsSays

Trump's 3rd Act is shaping up nicely. 1. Majority of Americans believes 2020 election was rigged. 2. Majority of Americans believe Democrats are using lawfare against him. 3. Majority of Americans think he did better job on the border. 4. Majority of Americans know Democrats and Intel people invented the Russia collusion nonsense. 5. Majority of Americans believe Biden is corrupt. 6. Climate alarmism is looking more like a hoax every day. 7. Majority of Americans know the news is not real. 8. Everyone who isn't a TDS gooner knows the Jan6th Insurrection hoax was an FBI/Democrat op. 9. It has become common knowledge that the Fine People hoax was the centerpiece of Biden's campaign. 10. No reasonable person thinks Biden is mentally capable to do the job. You can't win much harder than that.

Knowledge vs marxism

 

Arjun Khemani

@arjunkhemani

.

@naval

: Marxism, besides denying human incentives, also has a problem where it just assumes that everything is finite and we're all just dividing up the same small set of things. Well, the cavemen didn't have color TVs, computers, cars, antibiotics, or medicine. They were not sitting around dividing up the same few things. The knowledge grows, and we create more. It also tends to assume that we can freeze frame at some point in society and say, 'Well, we have enough different kinds of sneakers, enough different kinds of housing, we just need to allocate it better.' And that is not how anything works.

@DavidDeutschOxf

has a great definition of wealth, which he says is the set of physical transformations that we can affect. So, when you think about it that way, you realize that knowledge is not just stored capital in the classic Marxist sense (capital vs. labor), but it's also knowledge on what to do with that capital. The cavemen or Palaeolithic ancestors had access to all the same resources we did. They were living on the same Earth, and by the modern environmentalist arguments, they had a better Earth—they had more to do things with. But yet, they couldn't do anything. They were not wealthy by any stretch of the imagination. Why? Because of knowledge. Life is not a zero-sum game, it's a positive-sum game. But we are hardwired to think it's a zero-sum game because, for millions or billions of years, there was no such thing as wealth. There was no such thing as persistent knowledge creation in the environment. What you had was a small amount of resources being divided up, and most of the games were status games—'Which monkey outranks which other monkey?' And that decides which monkey gets to eat first. We played that game for a billion years. Now, we come onto a recent game where, actually, we can all eat, and the big problem is obesity. It's no longer starvation. The big problem is boredom. It's not actually work. There's enough work. So, in this environment, switching your evolved mindset from a zero-sum game to a positive-sum game where we can all win, if we create knowledge together and use the resources that we have to create more resources and more wealth, that's the game we all need to be playing now.