USMC Vet. Retired. Hobbies are history, literature, tech, and hiking. I value intelligent, civil discourse, with a touch of humor and occasional sarcasm.
Joined November 2022
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Ken Cook retweeted
If they can track every dollar you make, you should be able to track every dollar they spend.
Ken Cook retweeted
The Red Barron guy is actually an example of this. Notice how he gave the kid a warm smile in the beginning of the video before he realized he was getting pranked. That was an incredibly significant detail
Have to wonder how the world might have perceived him had he decided to be more dismissive. I mean he's doing what seems to be a thankless job, overworked, etc so it would've made sense to sigh or roll his eyes. Maybe the internet would've laughed at him had he been a dick instead
I'd like to think that he intentionally chooses to be kind and approachable regardless of the situation or circumstance he finds himself in. It paid off here. It won hearts because it showed he was a really good guy who deserves to be helped and backed
Never know what can happen. He totally got "lucky" but in a way that was completely unpredictable. Who would've thought it'd come in the form of getting humiliated on camera, and that was how he'd get his mortgage paid off
But just shows, try to express the "best you" as often as you can. Be conscious of the energy you put out. Even if you're going through the wringer, nothing is in it for you, nobody is watching, etc act in a way that would allow you to still respect and be proud of yourself. The universe will inevitably and eventually reward it
The thing about luck is that it needs a conduit. There's an infinite supply of it in the universe but if you aren't energetically attractive enough then it just continues to sit idle in the air
You're about to do some random errands. "I probably won't see anyone" so you decide to throw on the lazy fit instead of something that could be complimented on. Day off and you're in the house. "I definitely won't see anyone" so you half ass the getting ready process instead of stepping out of the bathroom clean and fresh
Ok so this insinuates that you should always try to come off a certain way. Yes but out of genuine self respect. It's simply the energy that matters. Who cares if someone sees it or not. It's the fact that you're perpetually telling your brain "I love myself so I want to express my best self. I am someone who is always open to receiving abundance. I am someone who actively wants the universe to know that I exist"
You don't discriminate in the way you show up in the world regardless of the situation. The decision to always try to embody the best version of yourself, whether that's through being intentional about your appearance, the way you walk, the facial expressions you carry as you go about your day
All vibrational signals you broadcast into the air that tell luck how to perceive and approach you. You don't go searching for it or else you scare it off. You just have to let it find you on its own by believing that you are actually deserving of it. And you create that belief through your actions
Act abundant and you will feel abundant. Feel abundant and you will want to take more abundant actions, which will give you more abundant feelings. Then before you know it your life changes. Opportunities start falling into your lap. "How did I get so lucky?"
In light of the recent pranking incident involving the Red Baron employee, I got to wondering if it is even feasible to steal money from another phone simply by holding your own phone in proximity to it.
So I researched it and (with assistance from Grok), this is what I found:
- Putting one iPhone near another cannot steal money from another iPhone user. Apple Pay (and similar mobile wallets) does not allow one phone to pull money from another just by being close.
- Standard in-store or contactless payments require explicit authentication on the payer’s device (Face ID, Touch ID, or passcode) before the Secure Element releases a one-time tokenized credential to a payment terminal. Simply holding phones near each other does nothing.
- There is no built-in peer-to-peer “tap to take money from someone else’s iPhone” feature. Apple Cash or similar transfers need deliberate user action on the sender’s side.
Now that said, I am not trying to insinuate that the Red Baron employee overreacted. In fact, had I not just now done the research for myself, I would have fallen for this prank as well.
I post this so that others know not to worry about this if they ever encounter some snot-nosed kid trying to prank them for social media clicks.
Ken Cook retweeted
The year is 1873. Your wife tires easily and reads too much. The doctor prescribes the rest cure: six weeks flat in bed, no books, no visitors, fed on milk, forbidden to sit up without his permission. The man who devised it is the most famous nerve specialist in America, and the women come out of it quieter, which is taken as the cure.
The year is 1915. The hospital has a new way of delivering your child. Morphine, then scopolamine, and the mother wakes two days later with a baby she cannot remember having. They call it twilight sleep. The women are strapped into padded cots so they do not hurt themselves while they scream, and the straps are the modern part. The babies arrive blue and slow to breathe.
The year is 1945. The truck comes down your street fogging DDT, and the children run behind it in the white cloud because the man on the back says it is harmless. At the beach it is sprayed over the bathers on their towels. It goes on the cattle, over the barn, and across the kitchen table.
The year is 1948. Your son has trouble with his ears. The doctor slides a rod tipped with radium up each nostril and holds it there for the best part of ten minutes, and you bring him back three more times. Hundreds of thousands of American children get the same treatment. The cancers arrive in their fifties.
The year is 1962. The health visitor tells you breastfeeding is old-fashioned and the formula is scientific. By 1972 fewer than one American baby in four is breastfed at all. The formula is skimmed milk and sugar, with the milk fat taken out and vegetable oil put in.
The year is 1971. The family planning clinic fits a small plastic crab called the Dalkon Shield. Its tail is a bundle of fibres that wicks bacteria up into the womb. 2.8 million are fitted in America before it is withdrawn, and the company goes bankrupt under the claims. It had been sold as safe and superior.
The year is 1983. The doctor says your arteries are the butter's fault. The dripping tin goes in the bin, the yolks go to the dog, the margarine goes in the fridge, and you have the heart attack anyway, on skimmed milk, having done everything right.
The year is 2001. Your 15-year-old is low, and the doctor prescribes Paxil, because the trial in the journal says it is effective and well tolerated in adolescents. The raw data, reanalysed 14 years later, shows more suicidal thinking on the drug than on the sugar pill. The company pays $3 billion to settle. Nobody rings the house.
The year is 2009. The government has spent around £500 million stockpiling Tamiflu for the pandemic, on the strength of the manufacturer's trials. When the trials are finally prised loose five years later, the drug shortens flu by about half a day and nothing shows it keeps anyone out of hospital. The stockpile goes out of date in a warehouse.
The year is 2026. The doctor has ten minutes and a screen. The number is high, so the tablet is for life. The weight is high, so the injection is for life. The meat is bad for the planet and the oil is good for the heart, and the person in the chair is as certain as everyone who ever sat in it.
Every one of those was settled, by a committee, in a journal, with a doubter somewhere being laughed at. The rest cure, the straps, the fog, the rod, the formula, the crab, the margarine, the trial, the stockpile. All of it certain, all of it printed, all of it done to somebody who had asked for help.
You were never the one who was wrong. You were the one it was done to, and the only person in the story who did as they were told every single time.
The apology comes a generation late, in a footnote, addressed to nobody.
The next one is being drafted now.
Ken Cook retweeted
So, basically, 500 million Europeans expect 300 million Americans to protect them from 120 million Russians who can’t even defeat 40 million Ukrainians while those 500 million Europeans don’t even realize they are being conquered by 2 billion Muslims who claim they are being persecuted by 8 million Israelis. Is that about right?
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While this woman deserves a hard lesson for threatening to shoot President Trump and should have the book thrown at her, it is still sad that she threw her life away because she got caught up in the hate that the Left has been filling her mind with.
During the course of my life, I have had many elections not go my way and so I've had a few presidents get elected that I did not care for. However, I never let myself get consumed with hate for them. I would sulk for a day or two after the election but then I'd get on with my life with a "we'll win it next time" attitude.
But I learned that even when my candidate wins, life does not become hunky-dory. I still face the same struggles and challenges in my personal life and I still need to make my own happiness and my own success - no president is going to do that for me.
For the past 10 years, the Left has been whipping up mindless Trump hate and it is destroying far too many people for no good reason.
Ken Cook retweeted
"Nationalize Starlink." Three words, 142K views. And the entire economic history of the 20th century screaming in the room.
Let me explain what would actually happen.
Start in 1920. Ludwig von Mises publishes an essay that will haunt every central planner: without private property, there are no market prices. Without prices, there is no way to calculate. A bureaucrat cannot know whether a ton of steel is more useful in a satellite or in a bridge. He guesses. He guesses wrong. And nobody pays when he's wrong.
In 1945, Hayek drives the point home. The knowledge needed to run an economy doesn't exist in any single brain or any ministry. It's scattered across millions of people, and prices are the only mechanism that can aggregate it in real time. Centralize the decision and you destroy the information.
This isn't theory. Look at the numbers.
In the US, from 2000 to 2025, overall inflation was about +90%. Now look at the sectors where government subsidizes, regulates, and protects the most: hospital services +271%. College tuition +194%. Textbooks +181%. Childcare +152%. Medical care +144%.
And the sectors exposed to competition? TVs: -97%. Software, toys, cell phone plans: all down in nominal terms over 25 years.
The more the state is involved, the more expensive and scarce things get. The less it's involved, the more abundant they become.
Space is the perfect example. NASA's Space Shuttle cost about $54,500 per kilo to low Earth orbit. Falcon 9: about $2,700. Twenty times cheaper. That's not my number, that's NASA's own study. A private company did in fifteen years what a government agency couldn't do in forty.
Starlink is the logical next step. Thousands of satellites launched on reusable rockets. High-speed internet for a remote village, a ship in the middle of the Pacific, a soldier on the front line. No government built that.
So you nationalize it. What happens?
First, you have to pay. SpaceX is worth somewhere around $1.75 to $2 trillion, and seizing it requires just compensation. That's more than a full year of the US defense budget, to buy something that already works.
Then the machine changes its objective function. Today it optimizes for cost, speed, iteration. Tomorrow it optimizes for budgets, procurement cycles, and subcontractors spread across as many states as possible to lock in congressional votes. We know how that ends: look at SLS, years late and billions over budget. When Starship blows up in a test, SpaceX learns and flies again. When a government agency loses a rocket, you get a commission of inquiry and years of paralysis.
And the power? The argument is "no private individual should have this much power." But nationalization doesn't eliminate power. It hands it to whoever sits in the Oval Office. And one day, that will be the person you hate most.
Here's what I deeply believe: humanity is figuring it out. The 20th century tested the state as the engine of value creation. The result: waiting lines, rents, and debt. The model that works is entrepreneurs with the people. Create value, offer it to people who are free to say no. And tear down everything that protects incumbents: rents, regulations that work as moats, patents that freeze innovation instead of rewarding it.
Elon understood this before anyone else. Tesla opened up its patents in 2014. SpaceX broke ULA's near-monopoly (Boeing + Lockheed) on launches. Starlink is making decades of telecom rents obsolete.
He isn't competing with the old system. He's setting a new standard. And when the new standard is twenty times cheaper, the old system doesn't reform. It disappears.
That's exactly why some people want to nationalize it. When you can't compete, you confiscate.
Nationalizing Starlink isn't taking back control. It's handing the future back to the system that already missed it.
During the early part of Grant's Vicksburg campaign in the spring of 1863, failed canal attempts and the failure of dams flooded much of the forest surrounding Vicksburg, MS.
Grant, along with his naval counterpart Admiral Porter, decided to send a large number of gunboats, transports, and other supporting vessels into these flooded waterways to try and outflank the Confederate troops defending Vicksburg, then a vital fort preventing the Union from having command of the entire Mississippi River.
As the boats progressed through the increasingly tree-choked waterways, they began to ram into trees and low overhanging branches that were loaded with vermin that had taken refuge up in the branches during the flooding.
When the boats struck the trees, causing them to shake, immense amounts of rats, mice, cockroaches, spiders, ticks, snakes, among other pests would rain down on the decks (and sailors) of the boats below.
In order to prevent all this vermin from getting below decks, it was necessary for the crew to man the decks with brooms and sweep them off as they fell.
Just another one of the awful things Civil War soldiers had to content with.
Ken Cook retweeted
5 things that annoy introverts:
1. Uninvited interruptions during their cherished alone time
2. Being pressured to socialize when they need solitude to recharge
3. Overly crowded and noisy environments that overwhelm their senses
4. Constant small talk that lacks depth and authenticity
5. Being misunderstood as shy or anti-social, when they simply enjoy meaningful connections
Ken Cook retweeted
your dostoevsky reading guide, from beginner to final boss:
beginner
- white nights
- the gambler
- notes from underground
intermediate
- crime and punishment
- the idiot
- the eternal husband
advanced
- demons
- the house of the dead
- the adolescent
expert
- the brothers karamazov
- notes from a dead house
- poor folk
final boss
- the brothers karamazov (reread)
- demons (reread)
- trying to decide whether dostoevsky understood human nature or just understood suffering better than anyone else.
disclaimer: the levels are debatable. the idiot can humble you more than crime and punishment, and the brothers karamazov is a whole different commitment.
where would you place the idiot?
The "free breakfasts" offered by most of the hotel chains is just not worth the time or trouble when on vacation.
The scrambled eggs are typically made from a powder which is reason enough to skip the whole thing.
Instead, seek out a local diner when you can. You will get a local flavor. For example during my recent trip, I had scrapple at a Pennsyslvania diner and corned beef hash omelettes at one in Virginia.
A good solid breakfast while on vacation will usually get you to dinner, saving you the time and expense of trying to find something for lunch.
Once I got to the Deep South, there was a Waffle House off just about every highway exit ramp so I went to one of those often during my trip. Now Waffle House tends to get a bad reputation, due mainly to YouTube videos of late night drunken brawls. Since Waffle House is a 24/7 operation, I guess that's where rowdy folks go after the bars close.
I can't speak to that as I typically only go into one for breakfast, which is at that time populated by local families or working people. I have never had a problem in one.
Waffle Houses mainly exist in the Deep South, states like Georgia, South Carolina, and Alabama. They don't seem to have many locations, if any, in the North. I tend to start seeing them once I cross the Mason-Dixon line headed south.
Now there is nothing particularly special about the Waffle House food, which is only just a notch or two above the "free hotel breakfasts" I mentioned earlier but at least the scrambled eggs you get at Waffle House are going to be made from real eggs.
However the service is always friendly, the food is reasonably priced, and they get you in and out of there quick.
Despite the name, I have never gotten a waffle at the Waffle House, as I'm more of an eggs and bacon kind of guy. Also, you can get grits with your breakfast instead of the usual potatoes and since they are a novelty for me (you can't get them up North very easily), I'll get them with a side order of two over easy eggs - which I then dump on top of my grits, enhancing them greatly.
There are some rather charming idosyncracies about the Waffle House. Once receiving an order, the waitstaff will move to a certain tile on the floor and shout out the order in some kind of code. Then another worker will grab a plate and "mark" it with items like condiment packages pointed a certain direction, which tells the cook what items to prepare and how to cook them. For example, over-easy eggs are "marked" by putting a jelly packet on the left side of the plate, and so on for each item. This method seems to greatly reduce the chances of them getting your order wrong.
There is also usually a jukebox in the corner but it does not have the popular songs you might expect. Instead, you get songs that fit a Waffle House theme such as the following examples:
"There are Raisins in My Toast" - Danny Jones
"844,739 Ways to Eat a Hamburger" - Billy Dee Cox
"I'm Going Back to the Waffle House" - Jason Bowen
Just a note, I have never actually played a song from that jukebox. I suspect they are there so that the locals can tell who the tourists are.
Ken Cook retweeted
I’m regularly amazed by the number of people I talk to that have very little knowledge, or even an inkling, of how the lives of billions will soon change with autonomous transportation, Robotaxis and robotics (namely Optimus).
Within 8-10 years, many..then most…will realize there’s no need to own a vehicle (though many will keep one for independence). Car payments, insurance payments and upkeep will largely disappear as household expenses. We’re talking massive monthly savings for most Americans.
With Optimus, households…most powerfully, the elderly…will have a friend, companion, cook, housekeeper and incredibly, the best doctor on the planet, right in their home with them.
GDP growth and productivity will absolutely skyrocket, which will allow for government debt totals to begin moving in the other direction. Slowly at first, and then, really really fast.
These are just a few examples of how the lives of average Americans will radically change for the better, inside of a decade.
When you extrapolate out the other unknown (but coming) advancements from this Innovation Revolution, I’ll just repeat what we’ve been saying for the last 4 years; we’re entering a time frame where there’s never been a better time to be an opportunistic optimist. The pessimists have this entirely wrong. Entirely.
It’s unbelievably exciting.
Ken Cook retweeted
Hopefully this post is understood and sheds light on the way I view the election landscape this year.
I don’t trust polling or media narratives and believe they are used to shape for desired outcomes. They demoralize you, you don’t vote, they win on the margins of a midterm year and its dynamics.
Midterms suck for the party in power, and they have for a century. Reagan lost seats in the House with a 63% approval rating. My skepticism doesn’t mean I see a “red wave” forming in a midterm Dems are supposed to win.
I do believe the GOP is favored to hold the Senate on the fundamentals of the races that will decide it, and believe there is a 1 in 3 shot Republicans hold the House - which is almost 3x better odds than history affords. This is due to redistricting and the fact that Dems have nominated DSA aligned candidates in seats they’d automatically win if not for that. The GOP is also short at least 6 seats they should hold this year for one reason or another.
My mind doesn’t read polling or formulas. It reads trends and sees each county as a unit on the battlefield. Every state has a blue map and red map - I only need to label a few bellwethers to give you a read on what is going on. There are simply races you CAN win (will certainly win, may win, could win in an upset) and then races you CANNOT win (take every House seat in Chicago, for example).
The Texas Senate seats falls into the fringes of that first group for Dems. In a few more years of transplants and Hispanics running right, perhaps more like Florida where there is zero shot. Dems get big vote margins from 4 counties, and modest vote margins in a few others. Those all have to be maxed out, and they need bad GOP county turnout and a full-on reversion of the Latino vote to 2016 splits.
It’s not that it CAN’T happen - it just takes a lot for it to happen and as such you should see a mind that views things at a granular level like an Army intelligence officer veteran.
There are 435 different House races, of which I think perhaps 35-40 are reasonably playable for either side, and 35 Senate seats, of which 12 are interesting this year. Everything else is noise and fluff.
Yes, betting sites are manipulated by campaign money.
This can be an even more effective tactic than campaign advertising.
Some Republicans might see that graph, get discouraged, and sit at home.
This is the intent.
Hello.
This is a betting site.
It does not do polls.
Deep pockets people manipulate the odds on the site by placing very large bets.
All they're telling you is that some deep pockets people who do not identify themselves placed a series of sizeable bets in a PR stunt to sway the odds in their desired direction.
And that is ALL they're telling you.
You've been shown over the past week how fake the polls are. 4 polling outfits were revealed to be seeding fake polls throughout the media.
Because their fake polling is cratering, guess what they're doing NOW?
They're flooding your social media with 'current odds' in betting markets.
Which are even MORE prone to being fake and influenced by billionaires placing bets, chasing the millions of bucks they already invested into certain political campaigns that are falling behind in the early voting.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!