A local friend made the (Dutch) comment above. He urged me to consider this and write about it. His smirky smile suggested that his remark had an ambiguous (eg, sexual) context, which is rather common. Actually, Science (eg, Boston Uni, Physics, TH) agrees with his observation: Yes, friction is necessary for forward motion in many cases. When an object pushes...
Love Knowledge Power
Overestimation (f) and underestimation (m)
Why do we keep on underestimating Donald Trump?? Trump’s behaviour may suggest he is a fool, an idiot, or a moron but Jean-Claude Juncker, former president of the European Commission, claims that Trump is “very smart“ (HFD). Actually, narcissists are often smart (PT-2024). In general, we take ourselves as a reference point, a.k.a. "something that is used to judge or...
Can China solve its unemployment issues? (SCMP)
Introduction LO: China is well-known for its trade-off between (its promise of) economic progress and (the lack of individual) freedom (eg, AEA-2018, HBR-2015). However, that trade-off has been deteriorating ever since its disastrous zero-Covid policy. Unemployment issues have been worsening due to China’s political targeting of its entrepreneurs (eg, disappearance,...
Anything given can be taken away
Several weeks ago, my blog title entered my mind. It refers to all 3 dimensions: Knowledge (eg, health, life), Love (eg, relationships), and Power (eg, leadership). It applies to macro (eg, society) and micro (eg, individual) situations. These macro and micro situations refer to giving and taking. Governments and organisations can give (eg, allowances, benefits,...
Tunnel vision
Recently, I viewed some (police) detective TV show and suddenly wondered if we all suffer from a tunnel vision in our lives: “a tendency to think only about one thing and to ignore everything else”. The aforementioned Brittanica description suggests that we do indeed. Early 2021, I prepared my diagram below. Let’s suppose that we are inside the orange box, called...
Why do we sabotage our own success?
My blog title has been borrowed from a recent article in the online magazine Aeon. I did wonder about this question as well, given some of my actions. In my early 2022 blog Self-sabotaging, I had assumed that self-sabotage was about conscious versus subconscious. The problem is that nobody knows what consciousness is because it remains a scientific mystery. The...
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