Dave

The author forgot the low hanging fruit of labor oppression, genocide and outright slavery. We didn't just walk into an empty continent and find a bunch of natural resources ripe for plunder.

I agree with the premise that as we try to do less of that (mostly because there isn't much left to steal anymore) it's going to get harder to get productivity gains. But have we considered hunting the billionaires like dragons? If we slay the dragon, we get to take the dragon hoard for ourselves? It would also be an economic activity that has a lot of usefulness. I think we should consider it.

Anyways, short book kind of meanders along. It's not terribly important to read imo.

While I think it's important to have a no asshole rule, this book is really about relishing saying the word asshole repeatedly in a semi-serious discussion. It is pretty light on ways to actually implement such a policy and/or how to deal with assholes in your midst. It does give about equal time to the idea that sometimes you should be an asshole and people have to put up with it because you're awesome.

IDK, it was a really light read but I don't feel like I picked up anything new to think about. I don't care to deal with assholes and I'm none the wiser on how to practically make less of them be in my life.

I read this overlapping with another book that offers advice on being a better you. I found this book to be superior and re-listened to try and internalize some of the points. I think the guidelines offered are relatively simple to understand and the author provides evidence and data to support the conclusions that following these steps will help you attain a bit more tranquility in your life.

I think there are some good ideas here, but the chapters read like they are individual units. Probably was written as blog posts originally and converted into a book. The upshot is a few times throughout I was told the same meandering story to prove the point of the chapter at hand.

In the end, I appreciated the guide to implement his ideas in your life and the checklists and concrete plans to take action. I dock it from being 5 stars only because of the repeated patriot love and aggrandized stories to prove points.

Overall, I liked this book a lot. I really appreciated thinking and describing ways that you could feel some outrage. I quote the Atlantic:

“That the five most important taste receptors of the moral mind are the following...care/harm, fairness/cheating, group loyalty and betrayal, authority and subversion, sanctity and degradation. And that moral systems are like cuisines that are constructed from local elements to please these receptors.”

So my major challenge with the book is that I want morality to be reason based instead of based on my monkey brain. I have a kind of stoic feel that while our feelings and passions will drive us to do things, we should constantly strive to apply reason to our feelings and live a happier life for it. This means that while I recognize and feel the moral ‘senses' of loyalty, authority and sanctity I often dismiss the feelings as not useful in modern life and a evolutionary dead end in some ways. The book doesn't seem to want to take a stand as to if these moral senses that are ignored by WEIRD people is the right thing to do. Maybe there's some cultural relativism at play here or something, IDK.

Anyways, it gave me lots to think about and was interesting and engaging so it gets full marks.

Perhaps I should tone down my rating a little, but this book was the first one to offer the premise that saving more than you needed to live a fulfilled life is wasteful. I found the concept to this profound and have tried to understand how I can transform stored savings for retirement (someday fun) into some happy event or memory for me when I'm old.

I felt that there wasn't a ton of practical advice on how you can shift your mindset, the author just advocated to do the action no matter how mentally challenging that could be. But overall the concept I found so interesting and well articulated that I had to give it 5 stars.

I recently read How Democracies Die and I found this book to be very similar in its analysis but this is very American specific and makes no bones about hiding it. It looks at how the US federal government is not equipped to handle divisive partisan politics with the checks and balances peculiar to the system of government. It has some recommendations on how the system could be repaired and also some thought experiments on why some of the common ideas on how to reign in government maybe won't work. I found the ideas of how to improve the system to be very impractical in the current environment. I guess it's just a sad time and a sad book.

This book was very meandering and there was a lot of focus on the author's personal experiences that I don't know if they helped. Also, the author is super condescending to all other people, he thinks he is the lone visionary that can see the world as it is. Maybe it's true, who knows.

I give this some stars because it was very interesting to think about different kinds of events and how we don't have the capacity to reason about the impact or chances of rare but catastrophic things happening.

I felt like the book title and opening promise a more generalized view of democracies throughout history and how they in general go but it became fairly US-centric shortly in and uses the world examples only as a cautionary tale for Americans. Other than that minor disappointment, I thought it was a good analysis of how US democracy has managed to succeed so far, how it has handled authoritarian advances in the past and how it is not well-equipped to handle it in the near future.

I didn't really take this as a Trump sucks book, but I am biased. I found it a study of Trump's election and why he succeeded why others have failed in the same kind of attempt.

I really didn't find this too funny. It wasn't really offensive or I wasn't put off but it just didn't strike me as humorous. It's very possible that a book of fake tests and lists really just isn't my bag. I kind of enjoyed this story about God.

This is a deeply upsetting memoir of growing up in the home of a fundamentalist prepper. The numerous tales of abuse and injury inflicted on children made me physically ill.

This book offers the idea that you you should let a group of people literally burn others at the stake because eventually after a couple hundred years they will come around to not thinking that's appropriate. And it is clearly better to do it like that then to institute some kind of governmental control about burning people to death.

I'm not really paraphrasing this was an idea offered by the author towards the end of the book.

This is a whole lot of words to say “I see workers as chattel”

There is so much union-bashing, libertarian assertion going on here I only made it half way through. I have better things to do with my life than here someone be hatefully wrong headed about their fellow human beings.

I don't give it 1 stars because he's not disingenuous with his hatred, he comes right out and tells you who he is.

There are some good points given here about the failings of the American school system. The suggestions given here to fix it are radically unfair to anyone not living a charmed life. He ends up coming across as an entitled jackass.

While I really liked the mood of the house and the terror of the haunting I was put off by the pseudoscience around mediums that was being thrown around. This has been made into at least a movie, the one I've seen is with Roddy McDowall.

This one has a married couple (scientists) and 2 mediums trying to get to the root of a very haunted house. They act as if it's just shenanigans that are going on, but then people are getting injured enough from the ‘ghosts' sexually assaulting them that they really should go to the hospital but they say nah. Then things get serious and there's a showdown with the supernatural. Who wins? You can read it and find out for yourself.

This is an ignorant and simple view of the world. It is blessedly short. Those Tuttle twins read some garbage.

This is the sleazy super hero book you didn't know you wanted. And maybe didn't want, idk.

This book asks the important question “What if the bad guy won, and also was dtf and murderous?”

It is neat to think about how much stuff goes into making something as simple as a pencil. Fellating the market isn't so neat. Thankfully, the truly decadent bowing to the almighty market is kept to a minimum. This passes for a story for children.

This book tries to show how our morality is part innate (nature) and part taught (nurture). It is presumed that most or all of our morality is learned behavior, but the author shows how some basic traits in babies could be the basis of our morality a lot more than we think.

The last chapter tying things together I thought was quite good. The overall concept seemed to feel like in the end even though babies have some built in evolutionary morality, we need to use reason to define us as humans and moral humans at that.

This book documents the difficulties someone trying to look for a job in the corporate world will experience. It shows how impenetrable just getting recognition that you applied for a job, job fairs that are thin covers for religious conversion or MLM hard sells or hawking services in helping you find a job. The author tries for 6 months to get a job, spends thousands paying for seminars, resume counseling and all kinds of services that claim they will help her get a good professional job and are all BS.

I feel like this author really likes uncovering America's various flavors of utter bullshit that we hawk to one another. It's kinda depressing.

Well, at least they aren't breaking the law in this one. Still the naiveté on display here is staggering. I'm checking out the books written by this disgruntled teacher to see what they have to say. But this entitled piece of garbage masquerading as a story is just kinda gross. I'm not going to read any more of these, they are just making me progressively more disgusted.

This is a story where some sheltered kids discover that ACAB (a timeless lesson indeed) and how breaking laws enacted in a democratic society sometimes is necessary to obtain justice.

I give it one star because I've never seen some kids simp so hard for business owners since Rittenhouse murdered some people. It was pretty awful, and it's definitely not something you want to be teaching your kids.

Also those kids charged that lady full price for some lemon water and she gave them food for free. Disgraceful.

I checked out a few of these tuttle twins books, and this was the first one I read. It refers to several other adventures when talking about why government sucks in a way that didn't explain much about why it sucked.

It then suggested that we should be able to shop around for government function, which is all well and good except how do cops or courts work then? These ideas are put out there with no real explanation about what happens when you need to enforce agreements or do something about actual criminals. And I kind of feel like if you're rich enough to live the life depicted in these books, you kind of implicitly can shop around for the government you want. It's called living in a different country.

The book comes across as a bit dated to me and it's hard to engage otherwise. When I read Sherlock Holmes stories I notice the same thing, technology and ideas that were cutting edge at the time just don't have the shock value in modern age. There is a lot of imagining of what living a sub would be like and I feel like a lot of it is plain wrong. Romantic and probably interesting for the time, but wrong and in this day and age noticeably so.

It was shortish, so I appreciate that. I feel like this could get a re-write given the robber barons of today. Jeff Bezos declares a burning hatred of humanity and retreats to the sea. Maybe I'll go write that book....

This was kind of a repeat for me, since I listened to the podcast when it was originally made. I like the recounting of how the empire started to lose its way and how the stage was set for Julius Caesar to make his run at being first amongst equals. The author makes the history very approachable, and hints at some parallels to our current times even as he discounts that the comparisons can be really made.