immutable

In general you can’t be responsible for someone else’s emotions.

If you were having a casual relationship and the other person has big feelings you don’t reciprocate, that sucks but it’s not your fault.

If, however, you reciprocate those feelings, or pretended to and led them on, then you do bear some responsibility.

The actual salient question though is if you love this person that loves you. If not, you aren’t doing them any favors stringing them along. That person deserves to be loved like anyone else and you will be causing them more harm than good if you pretend you love them just to save them some heartbreak.

The correct course of action is to be honest about how you feel and also recognize how your partner feels. Whether or not you intended them to fall in love with you, recognize that that is significant and your loss in their life will be painful. There’s no two ways about that, so be kind and compassionate to your partner.

But do not fool yourself into thinking that what’s right is to just keep them around because you don’t want to break their hearts. If they love you, they want to be loved back, and if you can’t do that that’s fine.

Pretending you love them so you won’t hurt them will cause the greatest pain of all.

Was going on tv and desperately pleading with Americans to pretty please buy something not an effective strategy?

Did people immediately wonder, “if this is so good why do all these politicians have to keep hawking this stuff?”

Tesla, much like Elon, is giving big divorced middle aged man energy right now. Like me, I’m cool, see I got this 78 year old orange dude to stand out on the White House lawn and say “hey kids, this guy is cool” so why won’t you believe me!!

Ok I got another one of my paunchy middle aged friends to go on tv and tell everyone how cool I am, did that work? What?! People think that’s cringe… oh boy, why won’t anyone think I’m cool anymore.

Remember like 10 years ago? I was Tony Stark! I don’t know why everyone thought I was so cool back then, but I would give anything literally anything to be cool again. Why don’t people like my shitty cars that I haven’t updated in over a decade. I mean they looked cool and futuristic in 2015, what do you mean they looked dated now?!

Did you see we made some gold, and I pinky swear that in 12 to 18 months, this time they will super seriously be self driving and you can just sit at home and earn money by turning your car into a taxi. It’s so cool!! I mean I know I’ve been saying for a decade now that this super cool thing is 12 to 18 months away, but this time I’m really serious.

Wait? Is that why you don’t think I’m cool, because I stopped doing cool things like make affordable stylish vehicles people want and I spend all day tweeting and making overpriced pieces of shit? I make promise after promise after promise and never keep it? You are sick of waiting around for the super cool things I say I’m going to give you that never materialize? I mean sure it’s not a hyper loop, but I have like 20 teslas slowly driving a mile long loop under Las Vegas. It gets rid of traffic jams for like 200 people per day, unless there’s a traffic jam in the one lane tunnel I dug.

Has everyone gotten sick of my schtick of promising the future only to deliver a wet fart and even the amazing star power of sex symbol commerce secretary Howard Lutnick can’t turn this around?!

Fine, I’m going to go dismantle social security and your grandma can eat cat food until she dies in the gutter. Maybe then you’ll think I’m cool. Now where’s that Ketamine at…

Brand that old uncool politicians go on tv and beg people to buy.

Good thing American consumers love desperation.

Is this those famed family values I keep hearing conservative whine about?

Headline makes it sound like they just plan to stab people.

I’m neurodivergent, let me take a crack at this.

First off, disclaimer, autism is a massive spectrum so this whole thing is a gross generalization.

Neurodivergent people act differently than neurotypical people for 3 broad categories of reasons

• different stimuli processing
• different thinking patterns
• different skills

First, is stimuli processing. Have you ever been in a crowded room and there’s lots of people talking but your brain does you a cool favor and ignores all that noise so you can focus on the person in front of you? Did you do anything to make that happen, probably not. It’s just a thing your brain did for you when processing all that stimuli, you placed your focus on the speaker in front of you and your brain filtered the rest. What if you couldn’t do that?

Stimuli processing issues can present in both dimensions, both over processing and under processing. Neurodivergent people are often placed into situations that are relatively easy for neurotypical people to process but can be very challenging for neurodivergent people to process. If you want to do a thought experiment (or actual experiment) select a stimuli you can’t ignore, pinch yourself hard every few seconds and try to carry on a conversation. You will notice it takes a lot more energy to focus on your tasks and ignore this unwanted stimuli.

Second, different thinking patterns. We all process the world differently. Neurodivergent people can have very different ways of processing information, I know first hand of three patterns that are common and that I exhibit.

• Perseveration. Perseveration is when you can’t stop thinking about a topic. Kinda like getting a song stuck in your head, but for me it’s having a difficult technical problem and literally being unable to carry out other functions because I can’t keep my brain from working on it. I wake up at 4am thinking about technical problems and then can’t go back to sleep. A puzzle might be a fun diversion for you, it can be a dangerous trap for me where I know my brain will continually turn it over again and again no matter what I want.
• Hyper literal thinking. I think about things in very black and white terms. It can be very frustrating for things to happen outside of the rules I’ve established. There are rules that make obvious sense and the contravention of those rules is distressing. For example, you aren’t supposed to hurt people’s feeling but you also aren’t supposed to lie, this makes white lies distressing (I find all kinds of deception distressing, and it’s amazing how much you are just supposed to lie to people in many social situations).
• Hyper focus. Neurodivergent people often have special interests that they can focus on for extended periods of time. If people were to leave me alone, I could write code for days, only stopping when hunger or some other undeniable physical pain occurs.

Third, different skills. Frequently neurodivergent people find social skills difficult. I said to someone recently that neurotypical people seem completely insane to me. The complex web of contradicting rules make little sense. On top of this, rules are often predicated on being able to ascertain the feelings of the person you are interacting with. Many neurodivergent people find this difficult to impossible.

The best I’ve been able to come up with is it’s like being color blind. I struggle with understanding facial expressions, body language, tone, etc. I also have problem displaying the correct things in kind. To operate in the world, many neurodivergent people adopt a system of “masking” where we learn what we are “supposed to do” and carefully study people and make sure to make our faces look right and make our bodies look correct. This is extremely taxing even if you get it right, so neurodivergent people end up sometimes getting it wrong and also spending a huge amount of energy doing this.

So to sum up. Neurodivergent people are asked to operate in a world that is constantly bombarding us with negative stimuli, spending extra energy trying to understand social signals that come naturally to others but our brains don’t pick up. Following these weird scripts requires a ton of energy and it’s easy to mess it up and then someone wonders “why are autistic people so weird?”

Democracy is not a given.

The framers of the constitution were always concerned about a new autocrat taking root in America. Their solution was to divide power up into 3 co-equal branches. The idea being that if any one branch attempted to subvert the constitution, the other two branches could check their power.

The executive branch is saying loudly “we will not abide by the rulings of the judicial branch, they can not check our power.”

Here are some contemporary examples

• White House ignores court and invokes Alien Enemies Act to deport hundreds of Venezuelans
• Deported Ivy League doctor Rasha Alawieh will remain in Lebanon as judge hears arguments over Trump ignoring court order

The executive branch is also ignoring the legislative branch (not that the current office holders seem to mind much)

• US Institute of Peace says DOGE broke into its building

The US Institute of Peace is established by black letter law, passed the democratically elected congress. It has been dissolved, not because the law our representatives passed has been rescinded by the legislative branch, not because it was found unconstitutional by the judicial branch, but because the executive branch just said “we are doing this and we have the guns.”

It existing is the democratic will of the people made manifest through our representatives, and now because trump signed an executive order, it’s gone.

They broke into private property and removed people that do not work for the executive branch because the president said so.

Is the red on the left should and lower back a skin condition or more shitty tattoo? I legitimately can’t tell.

It’s the problem that reality is more complicated than the simplified version trump gives his followers.

If you don’t know how something works and someone very confidently tells you how it works and it sorta maps onto familiar concepts, boy is that catnip.

Maybe all the countries are just sitting around like people and Canada is like a guy buying our stuff and we are just making that guy pay a tax. I’m a guy, I pay taxes, sucks to be that guy but probably rules to be the guy getting the tax revenue, and now trump made that us, awesome!!!

Transmitting this wrong idea is fast because it maps onto their lived experiences. It’s easy for them to conceptualize Canada as a single monolithic entity that is buying shit and having to pay a tax. So in one stroke they get a double dopamine hit.

• I’m not dumb, I get how this all works, and it was pretty easy!
• we get to collect these taxes instead of having to pay them, awesome!!!

So here you come to explain, “that’s not how any of this works” Canada isn’t one entity, it’s many. Sure the tariff is on their stuff, but it’s paid by the person buying it, us. And you can go on about all the ways they are wrong but you are threatening the fact that they are not dumb and they already understand this and their understanding means they are winning. So you want them to admit they are dumb and getting fucked and that’s a hard sale.

This is the real danger of hypernormalization, it allows people like trump to replace the complexity of reality with a fake but simpler version. And it’s so dangerous because the people that buy in to that fake but simpler version have this weird insane incentive to defend it.

It depends.

When the group hurts you through its own incompetence, you can land in hard times and still believe the ideals of that group. The ability for people to rationalize things is incredibly powerful.

Now let’s say that the trump supporter is ready to no longer support trump now that they’ve been personally victimized. Where they end up can be a massive spectrum. Cult followers tend to idolize and forge parasocial relationships with their cult leader.

You might think that you are seeing them reject trumpism and all it stands for, when in reality it’s much closer to someone feeling betrayed by someone they believed they had a close personal relationship with. Their rejection of the cult has nothing to do with what the cult believes, but comes from a reaction to a feeling of betrayal by the beloved cult figure.

In that case the fertile ground to win hearts and minds isn't there. There are excellent case studies of this “embrace to change minds” strategy working.Daryl Davis converting 200 Ku klux klanmen is an inspiring story, and one that many point to to support the idea of embracing people instead of punishing them.

The problem is that this isn’t the same situation. Daryl Davis was willing to spend years talking with, and building relationships with people that actively hated him. He didn’t go to people who had a tiff with their local klan leader and tell them “it’s ok buddy, let’s be friends now, I forgive you.” Instead he put in a tremendous amount of effort to build relationships which made it impossible for these guys to continue to hold on to their bigoted beliefs

So what’s the danger in not treating these people like shit? Even if it were ineffective, isn’t it better to just be nice to them anyways? We have a contemporary example to draw from, reconstruction.

After the us civil war there was a difference of opinion much the same as the one we argue today. And we tried the gentler approach

As it became clear that the war would end in a Union victory, Congress debated the process for the readmission of the seceded states. Radicaland moderate Republicans disagreed over the nature of secession, the conditions for readmission, and the desirability of social reforms as a consequence of the Confederate defeat. Lincoln favored the "ten percent plan" and vetoed the radical Wade–Davis Bill, which proposed strict conditions for readmission.

Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865, just as fighting was drawing to a close. He was replaced by President Andrew Johnson. Johnson vetoed numerous Radical Republican bills, he pardoned thousands of Confederate leaders, and he allowed Southern states to pass draconian Black Codesthat restricted the rights of freedmen. His actions outraged many Northerners and stoked fears that the Southern elite would regain its political power. Radical Republican candidates swept to power in the 1866 midterm elections, gaining large majorities in both houses of Congress.

Many argue that the confederacy and its ideals never truly died. The light touch, left many holding regressive ideals in places of power. They had not given up their ideals, they just couldn’t be a part of the group anymore.

In most cases the argument is somewhat moot. The most likely scenario is that my relationship (and most peoples relationship) with some random trump supporter that gets kicked in the nuts by trump will be the same as before, no relationship at all. In the rare situation that this person is someone you do plan to forge a relationship with (either net new or reestablishing some previous relationship) I think it is neither wise to “treat them like shit” nor “let them off the hook”

Instead it should be a careful assessment of what they actually believe. Do they still blame immigrants and trans people for everything that’s wrong in their life but just don’t like that trump fired then, then they can kindly go fuck themselves. They haven’t learned any lesson, they just don’t like that they had something bad happen to them. Sure give them a chance, don’t immediately piss all over them, but if the only problem they have is that it finally directly impacted them, they are no ally.

If it’s a catalyst for true and lasting change, sure nurture that.

Doddering old man telling Americans the government really wants you to buy a thing didn’t help… shocking.

Desperation is not something people normally look for in the outfits they plan to spend a lot of money with for a purchase they hope to keep for a long time, and I literally couldn’t think of anything that looks more desperate.

It’s impossible to time the dip, for most people, for long term investments, best advice is to just execute dollar cost averaging.

Invest small amounts of money regularly and let it sit.

This is all predicated on the historical trend that, while the market fluctuates up and down over the short term, over the long term the economy grows and the market grows.

Buying in a down market on a long term investment is just capturing assets on sale. You wouldn’t normally avoid getting something at 10% off on the chance that it might be 30% off.

The only thing that should really send you away from the market for long term investing is if you think the system will collapse entirely or if you think this market is at the peak for between now and when you want to use that money.