sharing my progress in life, and connecting with others along the way
West Virginia, USA
Joined July 2023
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- Following196
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Ex-Underachiever retweeted
The welfare cliff does not trap poor families by accident.
Congress engineered a benefits system where earning one additional dollar can trigger simultaneous cuts to Medicaid, SNAP, housing vouchers, and childcare subsidies, collapsing your effective income by $5 or more. The government built a cage, and somehow we call it a safety net.
Take a single mother in Houston. She earns $22,000 annually and qualifies for $35,000 in combined federal and state benefits. She gets a raise to $25,000. That $3,000 in new wages costs her $18,000 in benefits. Her employer rewarded her productivity; the state punished her for it. No rational actor climbs that wall.
This is price control, but applied to human ambition. Every welfare threshold functions as a marginal tax rate that would make a Scandinavian bureaucrat jealous, often exceeding 80 or even 100 percent on the next dollar earned. This disincentive is the system's core mechanism.
Dependency concentrates political power. Families tethered to benefit rolls vote to protect those rolls, and the politicians who administer the programs vote to expand them. The cliff self-perpetuates. Free market economists have traced this perverse incentive structure for decades, but the administrative state expands regardless, because a bureaucracy that manages poverty also survives by it.
Genuine exit from poverty requires accumulating capital, building skills, and taking calculated risks. The welfare cliff taxes all three.
Ex-Underachiever retweeted
This pDST talk is absolutely nuts. I can't believe how stupid people are.
Well OK, I guess I can.
Let me solve this riddle for you:
We have a clock. It's called the mother fucking SUN.
When the sun is AT THE TOP, it's called NOON.
You will NEVER be able to add daylight hours.
You will NEVER be able to add "more sunlight in the evening".
The only thing you will ever be able to do is look like an absolute fucking FOOL by trying to convince everyone that we should offset the clocks from real solar time by one hour.
"Yeah and so that's why we should just rotate our clock one hour forward so that its permanently out of sync with the Sun, because I prefer if the clock says 6:00 when the sun goes down instead of 5:00, I have a 6:00 sunset fetish."
YOU'RE A FUCKING MORON.
Ex-Underachiever retweeted
Archaeologists discovered a 2,000 year old giant cat geoglyph among Peru’s famous Nazca Lines
The 37 metre long figure was found on a hillside during conservation work and is believed to date to the Late Paracas period, predating many of the better known Nazca geoglyphs
Ex-Underachiever retweeted
if the highest goal of mathematics was to achieve clear conceptual understanding of deep ideas, rather than solving important problems, then why is the fields medal the highest award? why is it that good expositors/writers are often considered "not serious"?
Ex-Underachiever retweeted
This is how you know the game is rigged.
There are 100s of studies, including 20-30 RCTs & 20-30 long term studies that show low carb diets can reverse obesity & chronic disease.
So why will the govt pay for overpriced Ozempic but not steak & eggs?
There are 116 side effects for Ozempic but only 1 debatable side effect for low carb.
Ex-Underachiever retweeted
On this day in 1966, just weeks into the Cultural Revolution, Bian Zhongyun—principal of Beijing’s most elite girls’ school—was beaten to death by her own students.
Leading the mob was Song Binbin, daughter of top CCP official Song Renqiong. As a reward, she represented the Red Guards to put their armband on Mao on the Tiananmen tower where Mao famously suggested she change her name from “Binbin” (gentle) to “Yaowu” (militant/violent).
Like countless other crimes of the Cultural Revolution, this one was never prosecuted.
What happened to Song Binbin? She moved to the U.S., earned a Ph.D. from MIT, and lived out her American dream as a MA state employee. She died last year, peacefully and surrounded by family—all U.S. citizens.
Thanks to our broken immigration system, up to 95% of CCP elite officials have children or grandchildren who are American citizens. Think about that.
Ex-Underachiever retweeted
The anti-white bias in faculty hiring is pervasive.
I spent way too much time in academia, and ended up getting to know many tenured professors who were grandfathered in long before the DEI madness.
Many were serving on hiring committees where their job was to interview potential candidates for entry-level faculty jobs; some also served on tenure committees.
At first it was a slow drip. Every now and then, a candidate would be denied purely because the administration prioritized a woman or a person of color for that position.
By 2018, it was pretty much the conventional norm. Professor friends told me “I don’t even know why we are going through this show trial.”
A candidate with a stellar research and publishing record, an entrepreneurial streak and tons of charisma would easily be overlooked because he was a white male (being gay didn’t help).
It is not just the white male candidate that suffers from being denied a cushy university job.
It’s also the students who are paying what, $80,000 a year to go to college or graduate students who have applied themselves to work under the tutelage and mentorship of a great research scientist. We are depriving all these students the opportunity to learn from and work with the best.
The costs to this disastrous policy is a race to bottom. @SwipeWright, I hope you win, but even if you do it’s not enough.
The culture must change. This must stop.
🚨ANNOUNCEMENT: I’ve taken legal action against Cornell University for racial discrimination.
Represented by @A1Policy, I’ve filed an EEOC complaint after leaked internal emails revealed Cornell secretly ran a faculty search in my exact field (evolutionary biology) specifically to make a “diversity hire.”
The committee privately reached out to pre-selected "diverse" candidates, one at a time, to bypass open competition. Qualified white applicants like myself were excluded from even applying.
This is a direct and egregious violation of my civil rights under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
Imagine if the races were reversed:
- A secret search designed to hire only white candidates
- Qualified Black applicants deliberately excluded
- Internal emails spelling it all out
It would be a national scandal. That’s exactly what happened—except I’m white.
I spent 12+ years building my career. None of that mattered because of my skin color.
This isn’t just about me. Race-based hiring erodes trust in science, undermines excellence, and has demoralized a generation of qualified scholars.
This must end.
Let my case serve as a warning that there is a price for violating civil rights.
Read my full announcement in the @WSJ:
🔗wsj.com/opinion/cornell-univ…
Ex-Underachiever retweeted
people who keep tweeting for 0 likes and 50 views are the ones who will eventually win
Ex-Underachiever retweeted
China has so much potential if they'd stop doing dumb shit like this, give locals and foreigners actually fair trials and stop messing with the market
Also make the stock markets actually function because right now they're rigged too and you can't ACTUALLY benefit much from investing in China like you can investing in the US
Ex-Underachiever retweeted
In 18th-century Britain and Ireland, some affluent landowners employed ornamental hermits to reside on their estates, serving as living garden features and subjects of intrigue for visiting guests.
Ex-Underachiever retweeted
People think it’s weird to care about your genetic line, but it’s much weirder NOT to care. It’s unprecedented in the history of life itself. No other lifeform—not even an amoeba—is so casual about total annihilation, the erasure of billions of years of stories in an instant
Ex-Underachiever retweeted
We need to break the cycle of young men thinking that they need to be accomplished versions of themselves just to date women who barely have a plan for their own lives.
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Ex-Underachiever retweeted
if you are a deeply romantic person, i think it’s important to love a similarly deeply romantic person. it will only hurt your soul to date someone who does not perceive love with the same reverence and importance as you. lovers must love other lovers, lest the flame die
Ex-Underachiever retweeted
The goal of education should not be to achieve a certain population average on standardized tests, it should be to unlock the highest total individual potential out of students
Ex-Underachiever retweeted
The world's oldest known Asiatic elephant, lived an extraordinary 109 years before passing away on July 8, 2025 🐘♥️🙏
Ex-Underachiever retweeted
“Kids are only traumatized at bad daycares, not the really good ones! The solution is finding a better daycare”
Unfortunately, no.
Daycare is not healthy for young children, especially between ages 0 and 3. Even the best daycares are harmful because prolonged separation at that age disrupts the vital bond between mother and child.
We have so much research on this.
“Longer hours in nonmaternal care were associated with higher cortisol levels, indicating higher stress.” || NICHD Early Child Care Research Network
Infants in full-time daycare are more likely to develop insecure or disorganized attachments compared to those with consistent maternal care, especially when entering daycare before 12 months of age || Belsky & Rovine
Children who spent more hours in daycare (particularly in infancy) showed more behavioral problems - aggression, defiance, and attention issues - by kindergarten, regardless of daycare quality. || NICHD Early Child Care Research Network
Consistent maternal presence in early years is crucial for emotional security. Long-term separation (e.g., full-time daycare) can lead to detachment, anxiety, and trust issues later in life. || John Bowlby
As the child grows, there are healthy doses of separation between them and their parents. But when it comes to young children and babies, this abrupt daily split is damaging.
Daycares are a necessity for many families but in general, it should be a last resort and we shouldn’t pretend that it’s good or healthy just to appease those who have to use it.
Ex-Underachiever retweeted
I remember seeing a TikTok about a year ago where a daycare worker admitted they regularly lie to parents.
They’ll pretend they didn’t see a child’s first steps or hear their first words, so the parents can believe they experienced those moments first.
They’ll say a child only cried for a few minutes after drop-off when that child may have actually cried for hours.
They’ll tell parents the kids had a great day, even if it was chaotic or distressing.
Sometimes it’s to spare the parents’ feelings. But it’s also about business. If parents knew the full truth, they might not come back.
I’m not denying that daycare is sometimes necessary in difficult situations, but that doesn’t mean we should pretend it’s actually good for young children.