Open Water Swimmer, sometimes runner, sometimes biker. Occasional triathlete.
Southern California
Joined February 2011
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Only someone in the UK would think this was OK. Any police officer should know how to safely handle a firearm.
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The Derek retweeted
What I call “The Candy Bowl Problem” is the reason why Indians, who almost no one in the our country thought about 25 years ago, are increasingly hated.
During Halloween, kiddos go door-to-door saying "trick or treat" and receive candy. Sometimes, a person isn't home and so they leave a bowl of candy on their front porch.
When you come across the porch candy bowl, what do you do? We Americans mostly know the implicit morality to take ONE piece of candy. Some folks will come across the candy bowl and immediately dump the entire bowl into their bag!
Indians keep taking from the candy bowl. They're mistaking a vulnerability for an opportunity. It’s a low trust/scarcity mentality, no doubt.
But… the candy bowl isn't an opportunity. It's a morality test that Indians are currently failing.
All of the diploma mills, scammer job placement firms, and HR kickbacks, and people who max out their credit cards before leaving (never intending to pay it back), are perceived in India as capitalizing on an opportunity but to us, they're exploiting a vulnerability. You're taking the candy bowl and we HATE people who do that.
A lot of Indians are confused and angered by the criticism because they actually expect to be praised for being so clever. They think what they're doing is good and maybe even admirable. To us Americans though, it's immoral.
Vulnerabilities are NOT opportunities. Not in our nation. This is the most important lesson to learn before coming here, or to any high trust society. The new generation of Indians aren't interested in this in part because their entire education system is built for job skills and not life skills. The remnants of this are even visible in Americans of all low trust ancestral cultures.
Morality and ethics occupy less than 2% of the pre-college education in India. This is half of what it is in most of the world and 1/5 what it is in America. Nearly every high school in the country requires a course on civics (how to be a good citizen). In fact, in Gurgaon (India’s Silicon Valley, now white folk are inspiring civic sense and city clean up)!
The only reason India isn't the wealthiest nation on Earth is because its people spend too much time looking to dump the candy bowl into their bag and not enough time trying to build trust.
Anti-Indian sentiment isn't a racism problem. It's not skin color or even religion. It's because instead of learning about and respecting American morality, y’all just keep looking for candy bowls to take from!
The Derek retweeted
A girl just said she tried to get rejected 1000 times in 2025 and ended up being cast in plays, winning pageants, securing hella paid brand deals, and appearing in commercials.This is your sign to chase rejection to the point of "accidental" success. You'll be surprised.
The Derek retweeted
The europoor meme can be funny, but it's also midwit and wrong.
As someone with both EU and US passports who's lived in both sets of elite poles (SF/NYC and BCN/BER/PAR), let me just give you the TLDR:
-The percent of GDP spent on welfare in the US is the about the same as the EU (smidge under).
-The effective tax rate in the coastal US is about the same as the EU (smidge under).
-Both are (former) middle-class societies where much of society feels the social contract is broken. In the US, elites abandoned the middle-class decades ago, and the well-to-do in states like CA/NY have reconciled themselves to paying almost half their paychecks and getting nothing in return, planning to insulate themselves from the suck by paying for private everything: neighborhoods, schools, medical care. If their earnings keep on rising, they're OK with it.
In France, that bourgeoisie hasn't been decimated yet, and they still expect (delusionally perhaps) basic social infra like schools to function (which is what these protests were initially about). The infra in Europe is a lot better than in the US, despite the GDP delta (New Yorkers can only dream of a subway like Madrid's). But that's clearly eroding in time, without the wage growth (or private social infra) to allow for a paid workaround.
-The free healthcare blah blah meme is fake: the public health systems in Europe have collapsed to the point it's mostly a public/private hybrid, for anyone with a solid paycheck, and fuck you if you're poor, go to the public system (which is the ER in the US). Guess what? In Europe you've got deductibles, in/out of network and all the same shit as in the US (though yes, the cost is still lower, though more or less correlated with wages).
-Boomers on both sides of the Atlantic are living in a dated lala land, but they vote to keep the system in place. In Europe it's legislation and printing money to prop up pensions; in the US, it's legislation and printing money to prop up housing prices and the stock market, which is the American 'free market' version of pensions. Rampant inflation and cost-of-living problems in both, with youth locked out of housing and living in precarity.
-Both are struggling with having been historically middle-class societies
US better positioned only because it has more economic growth (hello 80 hour weeks), and (obviously) leadership in critical fields like AI. But the foundational problems of an out-of-touch elite, incoherent immigration policy, and general social malaise that sees no meaning or purpose at the End of History is absolutely the same in both polities.
Americans who mock what's happening in Europe simultaneously believe some X mirage about what Europe is (and have never lived there), as well as don't understand what's going on in their own country. The French Revolution happened a few years after the American one, and once again, the two countries are echoes of each other, as similar countries tend to be. France is probably the most 'American' country in Europe, in all the republican senses of the word (and no the Yookay isn't in Europe).
The Derek retweeted
It’s. Class.
Marriage rates are unchanged among Americans in the top-half of the income and education distribution. The decline is exclusively happening among bottom-half Americans.
A house for $180k! And nice one too.
Whatever you imagine the interior of this home in Urbana looks like, I guarantee you’ll be wrong. zillow.com/homedetails/408-W…
The Derek retweeted
Here's how to meet a woman IRL and not be creepy (yes, this is very important)!
And while we're at it, I'll let you in on another secret: most women haven't decided what they think about you when they first meet you. Or if they did decide, their opinions can be swayed.
Think of this like a lesson in "growth hacking" but for growing attraction. Yes! It's real!
So when you meet a woman, there are a few non-negotiable things you must do to up your chances. 🧵
You tell (men) to delete the apps “but how will we meet women?!!!!” Reading my comments it appears you do not actually care about meeting or dating women so idk I am ~genuinely~ confused.
Dating apps are cooked. No one worth dating is on the apps. Delete them (especially if you don’t care about meeting or talking to or dating women which, trust me, you’ve made it very clear you don’t care).
For those of you who do care, and want to find a wife and raise babies someday. Go figure out how to talk to women irl. If you don’t know how, you need to practice. Ask your girl friends. Take notes. Practice more. You’re not gonna bat 100. You’ll swing and miss. She’s not your girl. Wish her well.
You’re “embarrassed” ? So what. So. What. So many of your “problems” could be solved with those two simple words. Embarrassment is an under explored human emotion. Ask yourself why. Some random girl wasn’t into you? You shoot your shot and get shut down? Okay. So. What.
And also.
Your future wife is going to dig you.
The Derek retweeted
I'm deeply saddened by the memes in this post. But rather than ignoring them or getting defensive, I want to acknowledge what's behind them.
We litter in public and then complain about dirty streets. We spit, honk, jump queues and break traffic rules as if civic sense is someone else's job. Some of us carry the same habits abroad. And every viral video of a rude tourist becomes the world's picture of 1.4 billion people.
Online we make it worse. When someone points out a problem, we flood the replies with abuse, whataboutery and "5000 years of culture." That doesn't change minds. It confirms the stereotype in real time.
And the facts don't care about our pride:
- IQAir's 2025 report ranks India's air as the 6th most polluted in the world.
- 66 of the world's 100 most polluted cities are in India.
- New Delhi was the most polluted capital for the 8th year running, averaging 82.2 µg/m³ against the WHO guideline of 5.
- Even official data shows about 18% of urban solid waste goes unprocessed every day.
Guys, try to understand... The world isn't against us. It judges us by what it sees, and too often, what it sees is what we show it. Also remember, stereotypes aren't built overnight. We built many of these ourselves, one habit at a time.
Ancient greatness won't fix today's problems. Fixing today's problems, starting with our own habits, is what will earn respect.
Jai Hind. ❤️
This is great advice, other than the meet at yoga. But men, take initiative. And if at first you don’t succeed then try again.
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The Derek retweeted
Gen X that grew up on Risk has been waiting 45 years for Irkutsk to reemerge in global significance
Russia's plague outbreak is getting worse, now with 5 hospitals in Irkutsk quarantined, universities canceling classes and accusations from healthcare workers that the government is attempting a media cover-up.
Nearly 200 contacts of a 28-year-old anti-plague laboratory worker who died last week are reportedly under isolation or medical observation.
Irkutsk universities are canceling classes citing a “case of pneumonic plague,” while an aluminum plant introduced mandatory masks. A local government warning advising residents not to travel to Shelekhov was published and later deleted.
Healthcare workers claim doctors are discussing plague internally while avoiding the diagnosis in official documents.
Russian health authorities continue to deny any plague outbreak, attributing the woman's death to “pneumonia of unknown origin.”
Pneumonic plague is far worse that it's Bubonic cousin as its transmitted directly between humans.
