Check it out.

From the point of view of the people providing the maps, of course. Your mileage may differ, depending upon your ideological bent.

Read it. And ponder the picture.

So Burger King is going to acquire the Canadian Tim Horton’s donut chain, in yet another tax inversion that causes so much cranial-rectal inversions among liberals. I sure hope we get a donut Whopper cheeseburger out of this merger. With bacon. That would be more awesome than a deep-fried Twinkie. (Lo and behold, turns out the genera already exist.)

Read it.

The history of telecommunications is a long story of progressives and populists demanding “public interest” regulations that produce and protect monopolies, followed by progressive and populist demands for regulations to fix the problems that their earlier regulations created. At each step, activists were coached and coaxed by the political and business interests in question.

…

Progressives today are traveling the well-worn policy path of trying to fix old mistakes by making new ones. They demand competition while promoting municipal public utility broadband systems. “Open access creates competition,” they claim, never minding that the unbundling requirements that force providers to lease their systems to competitors only create “competition” by turning an existing provider into a de facto monopoly. The goals of the modern net neutrality movement—which in effect seeks to prevent Internet Service Providers from providing anything but lowest-common-denominator service—might as well adopt the same early slogan of monopoly-era AT&T: “One System, One Policy, Universal Service.”

Theodore Dalrymple lays down some inconvenient truth.

Strangely enough, my experience of being a foreign correspondent, if that is what it was, has never caused me to doubt the veracity of what I read in the newspapers, which I swallow as a boa constrictor swallows a goat.

However, I have followed riots around the world vicariously ever since, and it seems to me that the principal precondition of such events in the modern world is clement weather. The association is much stronger than with, say, injustice, partly because there is complete agreement as to what constitutes clement weather, whereas what constitutes justice has been in dispute since at least the time of Plato. We all recognize good rioting weather when we see it, but injustice—well, we could go on arguing about it for days. Everyone can contain his anger in the rain.

…

But to hate injustice is not necessarily to love justice; and one might have supposed that the first duty of those who claim to hate injustice was themselves to act justly. Virtually by definition, those who riot violently (as did a small number of the protesters) do not act justly, for almost always they do damage, sometimes much damage, to the interests of those who have not caused the injustice against which they supposedly protest, and therefore commit an injustice against those who are unknown to them. Such is the case of the crimes against property, or rather, as my friend the economist Peter Bauer used to insist, against the owners of property, in Ferguson (property cannot suffer, but its owners can). Two injustices do not make righteousness.

Read it.

Below is the checklist of rationality habits we have been using in the minicamps’ opening session.  It was co-written by Eliezer, myself, and a number of others at CFAR.  As mentioned below, the goal is not to assess how “rational” you are, but, rather, to develop a personal shopping list of habits to consider developing.  We generated it by asking ourselves, not what rationality content it’s useful to understand, but what rationality-related actions (or thinking habits) it’s useful to actually do.

Sarah Hoyt has some words of wisdom. (Really. They are.)

Look, no humans band up then sit in their clubhouse twirling their moustaches and saying “now we’re going to be evil.” But human organizations often become evil. Partly this is because the people willing to do the donkey work of running a voluntary organization are often – not to say always – the type of mind that seeks power over others. If the charter of the organization allows them to achieve that power by dividing (as it were) the world in two and playing us against them, they will, and they will drive the association down an ever more paranoid path. At the end of which there’s always evil and attack on the “the other.”

Gavin McInnes is caught up in the same old.

It’s not even the real trannies who are mad. They’re on my side. It’s the fake trannies who want my guts for garter belts. You see, the hot thing with the kids today is pretending you’re transgendered. To mock this is to take away their “me snowflake” status and make them admit they’re just like everybody else. Telling normal people they’re normal is now a hate crime. The government was just kicked off Wikipedia for citing my article. A congressional staffer mentioned it and now they’re considering booting all of congress off of Wikipedia for good. Want to update your constituents on a new bill? Sorry, one person in your building exhibited signs of transphobia.

Anyhoozers, this happens to pretty much everyone. If you’re lucky, you get a good payout. If you’re even luckier, they got the story straight. I don’t know how many of my friends have almost lost their minds after being fired for something that never happened. All it takes is one angry coworker and next thing you know a nonexistent “You” said “nigger” or grabbed someone’s ass.

Read it.

Hear, hear.

Read it.

An intuitive code governs the way English speakers order adjectives. The rules come so naturally to us that we rarely learn about them in school, but over the past few decades language nerds have been monitoring modifiers, grouping them into categories, and straining to find logic in how people instinctively rank those categories.

Read it.

Many companies will train employees on the job. Lucas Mund spent a summer in college working at a local burger chain. “My 19 year-old boss was taking home $35,000/year with benefits,” he said. “Plus they train you on the job for free. She told me that she was on track to be a regional manager by the age of 30 and would make 100k by then.”

Working your way up to store manager has its perks. According to Murray Godfrey a Wal-Mart store manager “of a store in a moderate-sized locale can easily make $200k plus bonuses based on sales.”

Katie Nellis said managers of Walgreen’s drugstores in the US “often retire in their 40s.”

Turns out there’s a lot of moola in doing the jobs Americans don’t want to do.

Theodore Dalrymple expresses my sentiments exactly.

I take a small siesta after lunch—I find it revivifies my brain for about half an hour—but each time I wake up I am a little disappointed to be thrust back into the midst of life. Sleep, especially when dreaming, is so much more enjoyable than being awake, with all the petty tasks that consciousness imposes upon one. The process of keeping myself alive bores me terribly; every morning the same thing, shower, shaving, breakfast, how tedious it all seems!

Read it.

How’s that Global Warming coming along?

Ron Radosh looks behind the curtain.

Hillary Clinton’s recent Atlantic interview with Jeffrey Goldberg has produced a storm, both by comments from the usual pundits as well as among the ranks of the left-wing of the already very liberal/left Democratic Party. Many conservatives have responded by calling attention to Hillary’s obvious failures, to write off what she has had to say as of no consequence except for revealing her hypocrisy. No one put it better than Bret Stephens in The Wall Street Journal. He dubs her arguments as nothing but her “self re-invention as a hawk,” made because she “belatedly needs to disavow the consequences of the policies she once advocated,” and possibly because “she believes in whatever she says, at least at the time she’s saying it.”

I fully understand Stephens’ reaction to what Hillary Clinton said in the interview, but I think he neglects to take into consideration evidence that indicates she, while serving as his secretary of State, privately fought him tooth and nail, and presented advice that Obama rejected.

Steve Sailer pulls back the curtain.

Economic theory suggests that the ultimate goal of any monopolist would be “perfect price discrimination” in which each customer is charged the maximum they would possibly pay. To ensure they know exactly how much that is, student by student, colleges require parents of applicants to perform a financial colonoscopy upon themselves via the federal FAFSA form, accompanied by signed 1040 forms. And many require the even more intrusive CSS document.

Of course, colleges aren’t a monopoly, but they appear to be a pretty successful cartel, at least as far as I can tell from noticing their Augusta National-level landscaping budgets. It’s been decades since I’ve seen a college campus that looked as dried out as Pinehurst No. 2 at the U.S. Open last June.

John C. Wright lays out some inconvenient truth.

Originally the word had a very specific meaning. It was coined by Mussolini, a socialist, to describe how his heresy of socialism differed from orthodox Marxist socialism.

The word itself comes from the fasci which is the Roman symbol of a magistrate called a Lictor, that is, the authority of the state to punish dissent and nonconformity. The fasci is a bundle of rods surrounding an ax. You can see it in the architectural decorations of statehouses and courts of law. The bundle of rods represents the truism that any one stick can be broken in isolation, but when gathered together, cannot be broken. If put into words, it is a symbol of the motto that unity is strength.

The two main differences of doctrine are, first, that Mussolini socialism operates factories and large businesses as public utilities, where the owners are allowed to keep their businesses in name only, but in fact are reduced to mere managers under direct state control, or quartermasters. This is distinct from Marxism in that it does not consider businessmen and workingmen to be two separate species of mankind, as Marxism does, locked in a Darwinian struggle to the death for racial survival.

The second difference and related to the first is that Mussolini considered the nation, that is, a racial and cultural group sharing a language, to be the fundamental collective to which the individual was to be subordinated, and the state to be the apotheosis of the collective Will. This is distinguished from Marxism who selected the rather more abstract (and irrational) group of persons engaged in categories of economic activity to be the fundamental collective.

The short answer is that a Fascist is a Nationalist Socialist whereas a Marxist is an International Socialist.

Read it.

Man, I’m telling you, if someone who is both a government employee and a union member can be fired, who is safe?

J. D. Tuccille attempts to be persuasive.

Are libertarians just Ayn Rand-obsessed pot smokers who want to hide their money from the tax man?

Yeah, pretty much — at least the ones who write for tReason magazine. When our civilization is faced with an existential threat from a billion people whose totalitarian ideology was crafted in the 7th century by a mass-murdering brigand, worrying about whether smoking pot is legal is a perspective problem that makes such ‘libertarians’ irrelevant. If ‘libertarian’ means anything, it means a devotion to liberty, and worrying about what people can smoke here rather than spending full time about how basic liberty is being suppressed there (and here as soon as they can make it happen) is impossible to characterize as other than juvenile.

Jim Goad lays out some inconvenient truth.

If you start with the premise that people are equal, then disparities in income and intelligence between groups will be blamed on the phantom demon known as “injustice,” and all your political energies will be spent trying to, as the tiresome saying goes, “level the playing field.”

But if you start with the premise that they aren’t equal, nearly all inequalities can be explained by, well, inequality—in other words, the idea that the playing field started out level, and inequalities began emerging when certain groups and individuals proved more adept than others. You will therefore view any attempt to “level the playing field” as artificial and essentially contradictory—to achieve equal results, one must instead tilt the playing field so that all the players appear to be the same height. The chief goal of “diversity” is, ironically, to make everyone the same.

Read it.

Most people, if offered the alternative between their current job on one hand and, on the other hand, the same salary but no job would choose the latter. Many do make this sort of choice. Casey Mulligan, a University of Chicago economist, calculates that half the depression of the labor market during the recent recession lies in the incentives created by the expansion of the safety net.

And note that anybody who gets bored without a job or needs the sentiment of being useful can do charity work. So why do most of us want to work at paid jobs?

The answer is simple. What people are really after is not jobs, but the incomes that come with them. And people want incomes because they want to consume during their leisure time. Life is not about making useless efforts, but about enjoying things, many of which, alas, only come with some effort. Jobs are the cost; consumption is the benefit.

Read it.

The New York Times ran an op-ed piece that helpfully demonstrated the pitfalls of lifestyle arguments in favor of urbanism, namely that they are annoying to everyone but the people making the argument.

The boys, like their father, are lean, strong and healthy. Their parents chose to live in New York, where their legs and public transit enable them to go from place to place efficiently, at low cost and with little stress (usually). They own a car but use it almost exclusively for vacations.

“Green” commuting is a priority in my family. I use a bicycle for most shopping and errands in the neighborhood, and I just bought my grandsons new bicycles for their trips to and from soccer games, accompanied by their cycling father.

These arguments – whether they’re about physical health, or “diverse” or “vibrant” or “creative” communities, or whatever else – are, at bottom, about telling people that they are lacking, and that in order to improve themselves they should become more like the author. In the 1970s, when city dwellers felt superior mainly because of their supposed cultural capital and were telling middle-class suburbanites to loosen up a little, that might have been obnoxious but harmless. In our current situation – when the city dwellers making these arguments are the economic elite (the author of this particular piece, Jane Brody, lives in gentrified brownstone Brooklyn, I believe) – it’s a lot more sinister. Brody talks about commutes as if their length and form were something that most people could freely choose, rather than something imposed upon them by their wages and the price of housing and form of development of their metropolitan area. She makes this a story about personal morality, rather than the constraints we choose to put on people through public policy.

Read it.

Maybe black women just can’t act. Or perhaps they just aren’t much to look at — I’ve noticed that ‘black’ women who are generally considered good-looking really look like white women with one African great-grandparent. Beyoncé? Yup. Michelle Obama? Not so much.

Bill Reader pulls back the curtain.

Control of the circumstances of a battle is the key to winning, and the proverb reminds us that our ability to control such things is much greater if we do it well in advance… in times of peace… than when they are immediate needs… in times of war.

Commonly in politics, we see it applied when someone (99.99% of the time a Democrat, which is not to our strategic advantage) accuses an opponent of a crime preemptively in order to excuse their own malfeasance later. The crime is often a generalized one that’s difficult to disprove, such as being an -ist. Obama bought practical immunity from questions about his otherwise extremely questionable past in two elections, simply by accusing opponents of being racist. Such general accusations of prejudice are very useful. Any sufficiently well-known public figure will be opposed for reasons both philosophical and prejudicial. The accusation gives followers sanction not to even attempt to differentiate the groups, however prominent the prior and insubstantial the latter. The accusation becomes a kind of magic word, spoken to protect the user from the conflict of ideas.

Read it.

A peek inside the workings of the Crust.

In some senses, this budding blue-collar rebellion exposes the essential contradiction between the party’s now-dominant gentry Left and its much larger and less well-off voting base. For the people who fund the party – public employee unions, Silicon Valley and Hollywood – higher energy prices are more than worth the advantages. Public unions get to administer the program and gain in power and employment while venture capitalists and firms, like Google, get to profit on mandated “green energy” schemes.

What’s in it for Hollywood? Well, entertainment companies are shifting production elsewhere in response to subsidies offered by other states, localities and companies, so high energy costs and growing impoverishment across Southern California doesn’t figure to really hurt their businesses. Furthermore, by embracing “green” policies, the famously narcissistic Hollywood crowd also gets to feel good about themselves, a motivation not to be underestimated.

This upside, however, does not cancel out hoary factors such as geography, race and class. One can expect lock-step support for any proposed shade of green from most coastal Democrats. Among lawmakers, the new Democratic dissenters don’t tend to come from Malibu or Portola Valley. They often represent heavily Latino areas of the Inland Empire and Central Valley, where people tend to have less money, longer drives to work and a harder time affording a decent home. Cap and trade’s impact on gasoline prices – which could approach an additional $2 a gallon by 2020 – is a very big deal in these regions.

…

In Washington, D.C., there is tension between East Coast and West Coast Democrats on one side and representatives from the Plains and the South on the other. Progressives shrug at the loss of these regions and the associated white working-class voters who, as the liberal website Daily Kos contended earlier this year, are just a bunch of racists, anyway.

Steve Sailer brings the fun.

You can see why places like Oklahoma City let themselves get raped by major league sports team owners in order to call themselves major league. Oklahoma City snagged Seattle’s NBA franchise a few years ago and now has a wonderful basketball player in Kevin Durant. The OKC basketball team is currently cool, so OKC gets featured in this article about a broad trend.

Steve Sailer grasps what few see.

If social construction is as powerful as its enthusiasts claim, how could it not affect human beings genetically? If a social group constructs a new ideology about who should marry whom, for instance, how would that not alter future lineages and gene frequencies?

For example, America has witnessed over the last ten generations the socially planned breeding of a new endogamous extended family, a fast-growing proto-race that now numbers over 200,000 and is currently on pace to double every 21 years: the Amish.

And, judging from how spectacularly well the Amish have weathered the last half-century’s fertility-depressing social revolution in the surrounding “English” culture, they seem to have a clear flight path to numbering in the millions before the end of this century.

Read it.

First, catch a rabbit….

Proponents of the Paleo diet follow a nutritional plan based on the eating habits of our ancestors in the Paleolithic period, between 2.5 million and 10,000 years ago. Before agriculture and industry, humans presumably lived as hunter–gatherers: picking berry after berry off of bushes; digging up tumescent tubers; chasing mammals to the point of exhaustion; scavenging meat, fat and organs from animals that larger predators had killed; and eventually learning to fish with lines and hooks and hunt with spears, nets, bows and arrows.

Most Paleo dieters of today do none of this, with the exception of occasional hunting trips or a little urban foraging. Instead, their diet is largely defined by what they do not do: most do not eat dairy or processed grains of any kind, because humans did not invent such foods until after the Paleolithic; peanuts, lentils, beans, peas and other legumes are off the menu, but nuts are okay; meat is consumed in large quantities, often cooked in animal fat of some kind; Paleo dieters sometimes eat fruit and often devour vegetables; and processed sugars are prohibited, but a little honey now and then is fine.

Steve Sailer points out some inconvenient truth.

A general prejudice in health journalism is that everybody is the same, so the reason medical research hasn’t yet come up with definitive answers to questions like what kind of diet should you follow or how much sleep should you get isn’t because different people need different things. Sure, that might make sense, but that’s not Science. Instead, Science is when there’s just one answer.

…

Personally, I’m not sure I believe that “oversleeping” really exists. I hear people all the time say that they feel lousy because they slept too much. If I sleep 10 hours and I’m still tired, it’s not because I slept too much but because I needed to sleep 12. But you may well be different.

Read it.

Presumably this is education against, rather than training for.

Eric S Raymond speaks for all right-thinking people.

When I look at these buildings, and the Tolkien sketches from which they derive, that’s what I see. The timelessness, the organic quality, the rootedness in place. When I look inside them, I see a kind of humane warmth that is all too rare in any building I actually visit. (Curiously, one of the few exceptions is a Wegmans supermarket near me which, for all that it’s a gigantic commercial hulk, makes clever use of stucco and Romanesque stonework to evoke a sense of balance, groundedness, and warmth.)

I want to live in a thing like the Hobbit House – a hummocky fieldstone pile with a red-tiled roof and a chimney, and white plaster and wainscoting and hardwood floors. I want it to look like it grew where it is, half-set in a hillside. I want the mullions and the butterfly windows and the massive roof-beams and the eyebrow gables. Want, want, want!

Read it.

And be sure to read the comments.

Read it.

Once I became an employed educator, the vast majority of what I learned — and used — in the classroom was garnered from other, mostly veteran, teachers. If education schools want to be truly practical, keep the courses like those I noted, and cut (or make optional), classes like “Historical Foundations.” Expand the time undergrads actually spend in schools observing and teaching with an experienced instructor. (I’ve learned that in recent years my alma mater has implemented much of that last recommendation; student teachers’ time and duties in their placement schools have expanded quite a bit.)

John C. Write may or may not be a good science fiction writer (haven’t read any of his stuff, although I plan to) but he’s an excellent social commentator.

The orcs do not merely hate sunlight and happiness and romance, they think the weather is out to get them. They fear policemen and love wild bears. They think Mohammedan terrorists are the good guys and Jews are not an oppressed and hated people. They think two persons of the same sex can have sex and that this requires the sacrament of marriage to sanctify and celebrate their filthy unnatural sodomy.

They think common sense is a hate crime, and therefore they avoid it at all costs. These people LIVE to be offended. They BREATHE being offended. They LOVE being offended. To avoid offending them would leave them with nothing to do.

Merely by writing a story where the hero wedded the heroine, I offended the orcs. Good stories offend them because they are good.

Read it.

I’m a sucker for infographics.

Read it.

Nearly 30% of children in India (ages 6-14) attend private schools and in some states and many urban regions a majority of the students attend private schools. Compared to the government schools, private schools perform modestly better on measures of learning (Muraldiharan and Sundararaman 2013, Tabarrok 2011) and much better on cost-efficiency. Moreover, even though the private schools are low cost and mostly serve very poor students they also have better facilities such as electricity, toilets, blackboards, desks, drinking water etc. than the government schools.

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Caste discrimination in the government schools is also one of the reasons why the private schools focus on teaching English. Among the Dalits, English is understood as the language of liberation not just because it offers greater job prospects but even more because Hindi, Sanskrit and the regional languages are burdened by and interwoven with a history of Dalit oppression. As one Dalit put it, “No one knows how to curse me as well as in Tamil.”

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, wants to sell out, if only he can find a buyer.

I want to believe that diversity is our strength; that Islam is a religion of peace; that the Republican Party is a force for conservatism; that if George thinks he is a woman, then by golly he is a woman—his cock, balls, beard, and 37.2 trillion Y-chromosomes notwithstanding; that my personality will survive when my brain is destroyed; that if not for the cruel legacy of colonialism, black African nations would by now have Mars colonies and world-conquering commercial enterprises; that poverty causes crime; that gay is just as good as straight; that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle; that I have free will; that importing one-quarter of the population of Guyana has been good for the U.S.A., and for Guyana; that IQ tests measure nothing of life-history significance, only the ability to pass IQ tests; that there is no such thing as race; that a loving invisible god is watching over me and listening to my mumbled preferences, when not attending to necessary maintenance chores elsewhere in the Virgo Supercluster; that women’s sports are interesting for non-lesbians to watch even when not conducted in skimpy bikinis; that 10,000 hours of dogged practice will make me a first-class tennis player; that Guatemalan gangbangers will become family-values conservatives once they have touched the magic soil of the U.S.A.; that invoking “culture” (which means: the customary behaviors of a people) as an explanation for the customary behaviors of a people increases our understanding; that black kids will do just as well as white kids academically as soon as we fix the schools; that some person somewhere knows how to fix the schools …

I want to believe the pretty lies. I’ve had enough of depressive realism. I want to take the blue pill. Where’s the nearest retail outlet?

Read it. And watch the video.

This video is a nice, four-minute summary of some of the basics of the global warming debate. It was shot at the Heartland Institute’s 9th International Conference on Climate Change, between July 7 and July 9. If you have followed the science closely, you won’t learn anything you didn’t already know. But it is a good introduction for those who are new to the science, and an enjoyable overview for anyone.

Read it.

For those of ye not of the Crust. You know who you are.

Read it.

As I was cycling home the other night I came across a few of my fellow students from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Several of them asked me: Where is your bike helmet?

I get this question a lot. I have made a careful and conscientious choice to not wear a helmet when I’m cycling in urban areas because I strongly believe that it will help improve the overall safety of cycling in the long run.

It’s an unintuitive position to take. People have tried to reason with me that because I’ve spent so much money and time developing my brain, and the cost of an injury would be so devastating, it’s clearly more important to wear a helmet. But if we start looking into the research, there’s a strong argument to be made that wearing a bike helmet may actually increase your risk of injury, and increase the risk of injury of all the cyclists around you.

Read it.

For whenever you are minded to complain about your day….

Read it.

These enviable youngsters appear to be the winners in the race we have made of childhood. But the reality is very different, as I have witnessed in many of my own students and heard from the hundreds of young people whom I have spoken with on campuses or who have written to me over the last few years. Our system of elite education manufactures young people who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it.

When I speak of elite education, I mean prestigious institutions like Harvard or Stanford or Williams as well as the larger universe of second-tier selective schools, but I also mean everything that leads up to and away from them—the private and affluent public high schools; the ever-growing industry of tutors and consultants and test-prep courses; the admissions process itself, squatting like a dragon at the entrance to adulthood; the brand-name graduate schools and employment opportunities that come after the B.A.; and the parents and communities, largely upper-middle class, who push their children into the maw of this machine. In short, our entire system of elite education.

The Children of the Crust don’t want the competition.

Read it.

A fable for our times.

Read it.

Hint: Obesity is worse. So if you smoke to keep your weight down, you’re ahead of the game.

Read it.

This month marks forty-five years since men first left planet earth and set foot on another world. The last man to walk on the moon did so in December, 1972, over four decades ago. It’s a good moment to ponder what we haven’t done since.

Read it.

Beretta USA, one of the nation’s largest firearms manufacturers, will move its manufacturing and approximately 300 jobs out of Maryland because of the state’s new gun control laws, the company said in a statement Tuesday.

Rick Perry’s phone number is (512) 463-2000. Just sayin’.

Read it.

A wealthy venture capitalist and major Obama donor is fighting tooth-and-nail to prevent others from accessing his private Northern California beach, according to Bloomberg News.

Vinod Khosla’s support for Obama has paid off in the form of millions in taxpayer subsidies for green energy companies in which he has invested.

A prominent environmentalist, Khosla nevertheless cherishes his control over a private beach alongside his 56-acre property near San Francisco—which he bought for $32.5 million—Bloomberg reported on Monday.

Read it.

Every now and again, something in the New York Times is worth reading. This is one of those rare events.

In the last few years, unable to hold a list of just four grocery items in my head, I’d begun to fret a bit over my literal state of mind. So to reassure myself that nothing was amiss, just before tackling French I took a cognitive assessment called CNS Vital Signs, recommended by a psychologist friend. The results were anything but reassuring: I scored below average for my age group in nearly all of the categories, notably landing in the bottom 10th percentile on the composite memory test and in the lowest 5 percent on the visual memory test.

And yet he is paid to write for the New York Times. ’nuff said.

Seriously, this is yet another recommendation for the position staked out by Scott Adams in his life-changing book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. I recommend it wholeheartedly.

Read it.

An odd article that contains a great deal of inconvenient truth. Most people would profit from having this pasted on their bathroom mirror where they would be forced to read it every damned day.

Don’t allow where you work or what you do become who you are.
There’s more to you than your job. There’s more to you than the title on your business card, the name of the corporation that employs you – while we’re at it, there’s more to you than where you live, what you drive or how much you earn. Sure, there may be some prestige associated with a certain employer or type of work, but one thing is certain: at the end of your life, it’s sure as heck not going to be the most important thing you remember or cherish. Who you are is who your family and friends love; who contributes back to society – not what you do or where you work. What are your talents, what do you love to do, what other roles do you play in your life? Father, Mother, Son, Daughter, Friend – WHO are you – not what do you do.