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I was watching a video (from a how to learn German YouTube channel). (sometimes I play these in the background while I’m working). The bit is a part where they go out and ask people on the street what they think of things, on this one Capitalism.
The following dialog is well said.
Well, intuitively, when you hear the question then you want to say “no, capitalism is bad,”
but I think “well, Germany definitely benefits from it.”And ultimately we humans are so egotistic,
and that’s exactly why capitalism works,
because we are all just concerned about what we’d like to have and that’s exactly what we follow through with.
Therefore, yeah sure, I’d also intuitively say capitalism destroys us, but essentially we destroy ourselves with our egotism.
Yeah, if you ask me it’s more like (coming away from) egotism and that’s the question, how we manage that.
And actually, I have a relatively simple answer to it, I mean, I’m a Christian and in the bible it says;
“Love thy neighbor as thyself and god is to be loved above everything”
I think if we follow through with that, if we all love other just as much as we do ourselves, then we can come out of this egotism, and then we can go a step in the direction, we (can) end capitalism a bit.

Very good logic to why socialist policies will NOT be successful in our current social environment: egotism and materialism.
It starts at home, and with your tribe (taking care of others). Once we can do this as a society, maybe we can talk about this type of law (though at that point there won’t be a need).

[If you aren’t using your influence in your world and behaving in the way you want the government to behave, I’d claim that you have no business to desire such legislation to be implemented on the masses. “Do as I say and not as I do, government.” (my own bitter commentary on the types that say their way is best, but seldom behave “their way.”)]

The semi-stoic idea that you are born and that birth is a miracle would be beneficial to society if it were more prevalent. Some have said that anything beyond birth is just “icing on the cake.” I’m rather fond of this viewpoint since it allows me and many others to circumvent these entitled feelings of loss.

Felling loss is a negative and often crippling sentiment held by many who feel that they deserve more than what was allotted. In reality, the allotted amount was all that was meant to be had. The allotted amount was indeed miraculous in such a way that the only feelings of gratitude should be elicited. Yet, so often many feel that they did not receive all that was deserved. Sometimes these desires are additional years to the life of a loved one, and other times these desires are answers to questions that are unknown. The latter is commonly referred to as closure.

The idea of closure is a relatively new concept that has been added to long list of crippling entitlements that pop-psychology teaches us that we deserve. We have to stop and ask ourselves why this idea came about in the first place. Why does the human brain struggle in so much discomfort not having the answer? The reality is that if we were convinced that we did have the answer, it probably wouldn’t be the actual answer anyways.

With this notion, I know that I do not know and am quite comfortable freed from believing that I understand more than I do. The false sense of security gained from ideas such as closure would only serve to make me even more vulnerable to the unexpected.

“The quality of your life is in direct proportion to the amount of uncertainty you can comfortably live with” – Tony Robbins

This post will be to the younger generation that plans to attend and/or in the early stages of some form of higher education.

I hear so many young people today stumbling over themselves when asked: “What would you like to do with that degree?”

This saddens me, as I was once in similar shoes. I have a BOS in Mechanical Engineering from Auburn University. This undertaking was accompanied with hefty financing and the subsequent student loan payments. These are quite taxing. With that said, it’s a hell of a lot of time and money to invest and not get what you want out of it.

My experience: I never planned on going to college. I never imagined that it was in the realm of possibility since my social conditioning told me that only the well off attended college. Someone at school told me to fill out the FAFSA and see, so I did. The only reason I applied to Auburn was to see if they would let me in. I was accepted. Figuring that I was smart enough to go to school, I thought that I was cheating myself if I were to turn down the opportunity to go. The FAFSA gave me enough aid, that if I took out the loans and worked full time, I could get out of Enterprise Alabama. Off to Auburn I go.

This was all well and good except the part where I never saw past graduation. I knew that I was going to school for engineering and that engineering jobs paid well enough, but that was all I knew. What do engineers actually do? Could I get a job that I actually wanted with an Engineering degree?

As it turns out, most engineering jobs are not very enjoyable. You can find more on this from YouTube channels such as “Engineered Truth.” Now there are a few “unicorn jobs” that pay well and are highly competitive. Unless you network and do a few things here and there to position yourself as competitive during school, you might not have much of a chance at those jobs. If you aren’t a competitive candidate for the jobs you want, there are plenty of left overs in factories and cube farms to chose from.

Advice: Take steps to discover your purpose and passions early on. Find a job that you think you will love doing and talk to someone in that position, who does that job. Do everything in your power to position yourself as competitive for that position. You usually have to beat class average, which isn’t that difficult with so many of the younger generation being quite lazy. Don’t wait to “discover yourself,” CREATE YOURSELF. College is a means to an ends. FIND THE ENDS early on. So many people graduate only to find out that they don’t want to do what they are doing. Finally, remember college is only one of many avenues to success. So many of my friends enjoy trades while bringing home much more than I do in engineering, with NO DEBT.

Now, go and create yourself.

Kindness is well regarded as virtuous by society. There are some who claim that kindness is strength, and that kindness is not weakness.

Then, there are those who are “kind” out of necessity, fear, or guilt. This display of kindness is disingenuous and weak. Kindness out needing something, kindness out of fear of offending, or kindness out of guilt for some action: these are not strength.

This gives birth to an idea that we shall call the dichotomy of kindness.
You can only make a choice if you have options: the option to chose kindness as opposed to another action that would be categorized as unkind. Having that option and choosing kindness could then be considered strength. One might even go as far as to claim that genuine kindness cannot exist without strength and the ability to live unapologetically.

As a man, one condition to the respect of people is being capable of violence. Though capable, a choice other than violence can then be respected.

“The Warrior Ethos evolved to counter the instinct of self-preservation.”
– Steven Pressfield.

The opposite of fear is love. Kindness is an expression of love; therefore, kindness cannot come from fear or the like.

“And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.” – Corinthians

These ideas are substantiated throughout various translations of the bible, particularly in the gospel. There is no coincidence that such emphasis is placed on the opposite of fear.

“But when the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy.” – Titus.

Beating the system is the name of the game. Unfortunately, the system beat me as much as I beat it. The following is a brief narrative of the thought process behind my decision to attend Auburn University and how I made it work with no money. Hopefully someone can learn from my experience.

At the tail end of high school, I hadn’t quite decided what to do with my life. I applied for Auburn for the sole purpose of seeing whether or not they’d let me in. Never expecting to actually go to college, I always thought it was simply so expensive that it was not even an option. Really wish someone had explained to me what scholarships were and that you could just score high enough on the ACT and the school would pay for it.

Not long after, I received an acceptance letter from Auburn University. This was kind of surprising to me. Just for fun, I filled out the FAFSA. The math told me that the government would loan me just enough money, that if I worked, I could attend. “Hold onto your butts, we’re getting the hell out of Enterprise,” I told myself. A few months later, my best friend from high school and I went halves on a mobile home in Auburn to live in while we attended. I emptied my life savings from working during high school and off we went.

A good friend explained credit scores to me on a very basic level, so I decided to get a credit card. Building credit was passive in the background, never spending more than I paid off from month to month. Three years later, I had a pretty good credit score. This allowed me to get more than the minimal government student loans on my own, without a cosigner.

Once again, the additional loans were a good a thing as a bad a thing. On one hand, they exponentially increased the amount of loans I withdrew my last few years. On the other hand, they allowed me not to work full time while in school. The first three years of school were hell. Working full time while taking full time classes drove me insane and drove my GPA into the ground. Fortunately, right at the time my credit score started to come around, I was also able to get a co-op job (internship). With the co-op program, I was able to alternate work and school per semester. Without this, I’m not sure I would have been able to complete my degree.

The last three years of my 6.5 years at Auburn were much more enjoyable, this was also where I accrued the most debt. With the private loans through Sallie Mae, I took out slightly more than I needed. Saving the excess that I didn’t spend gave me a solid down payment on a house. Without that, there’s no telling how long I would have been saving (which was impossible to save hardly anything with my student loan payment).

Anyhow, that’s one example of attending college and completing a degree from nothing. “Anyone can do it.” Not saying it’s the best way, but it is a way. The following steps are a summary of the process:

1. Work since you’re old enough and save during highschool. (yes this can be argued not everyone CAN but…)
2. Apply for whichever school (gotta do well enough to get in, but community colleges are a cheaper/better option to start anyways).
3. Fill out the FAFSA and get the minimal govt loans they give everyone.
4. Work your ass off while building credit.
5. Take out additional loans and get a paid co-op/internship.
6. Don’t spend the small excess you’ve taken out.
7. Get a job.
8. Buy a house.
9. Pay of loans eternally, but all the bills are paid.
10. Write a blog post about it.

We are constantly bombarded with an incomprehensible stream of information. Media of all forms appears to be the greatest source of noise after human interaction itself. Let’s talk a little about applying a filter to our lives to remove the noise and leave us with a clear signal that we can work with.

Of the immediately observable media, one of the most noisy is politics. From Dale Carnegie’s “How to win friends and influence people.” We can get basic ideas, most of which we already know, of where people derive a sense of importance. Observing the journey of my generation and the one just behind us, I notice strong ties to coming of age to vote and prioritization and allocation of resources towards things political.

Overcoming feelings of civic duty and political obligation: Social conditioning and our desire to matter often cause us to allocate a disproportional amount of mental capacity and material resources to many things that are trivial in our day to day lives. Politics, as it exists in the contemporary United States, is an incomprehensible machine that is so large it is truly impossible to create any kind of relationship between input & output. We are told a great deal of things matter, and on a theoretical level they do. Do our actions influence them and on what level? I’ve have yet to meet someone that can trace the link to their input and the desired results when dealing with the political realm.

Why I don’t participate in anything political: Allocating attention and resources to things that directly impact your day to day life is a much better use. Developing the skill set to exist and prosper in any environment is very beneficial. Beating the system with the current rules in place is much easier and more rewarding when compared to attempting to change the rules to be more conducive to your success or align more closely with your personal beliefs. The constant influx of media combined with our desire to understand everything gives way to backwards rationalization and post explaining things that we really don’t know why or how they happen. The most accurate term that I have found to describe this phenomenon is “the narrative fallacy.” In short, I’m hesitant to say that any time spent on thing political is a waste… but I am quite confident my time and resources are best utilized elsewhere. Where can I trace in my life can I trace the link from input and output?

“The low information diet,” as described by Tim Ferris, is critical to silencing the noise so that you can acquire focus and clarity. One of my favorite illustrations of this idea can be found in books by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan). His character Fat Tony is often more apt to make decisions because he understands that he doesn’t understand. He makes the realization that on these grand scale “issues” you can’t trace the link between our percieved inputs and outputs. In a Brooklyn accent, “It’s not the same ting.” The excess of information that we can’t use and don’t need makes us far less able to make clear decisions with good judgement.

In my first attempt in furniture, I decided to re-purpose this bit of antique garbage that I had laying around. Measuring the overall diameter of the reels arranged in a circular pattern allowed me to select the correct size glass top from Southeaster Salvage. The base of the table is constructed from 1-3/4″ ERW .120 wall tubing scraps from various other projects. I hope
you enjoy.

Well, I finally got around to finish the bumper on my beloved WD21. Check out, like, and subscribe to my youtube channel Jcatzcustoms for more information on the build.

For the past four years, I’ve made it to the tail of the dragon at least once a year. The trips used t0 be a biannual trip with Auburn Rider’s. These days, I travel with a few of the guy with rocket city sportsbike club.
After 4 years, I finally went down on the dragon (no pun intended). It was low speed crash with a new tire with which I was not going slow enough during the break in. It was fundamentally a noob mistake to say the least, but I’ll take it any day over a legit crash. There is a bit of a silver lining in decorating the tree with your broken off frame slider. God bless my guardian angel for guiding me into the ditch and not into the oncoming traffic lane.
Helmet, gloves, race pants, and a mesh jacket. All of which fared quite well minus the jacket.
We quickly fixed the bike and rode the rest of the weekend.