The best solution I found for increasing alertness is also the hardest, but it works for me: go to sleep at the same time every day, don't linger in bed after waking up, and exercise in the morning.
It's all about periodization. You want bright in the day, and dark in the night. Most places are too dim for me in the day, and too bright in the night.
There's also the color temperature of the light, which I definitely notice. I use f.lux/redshift as well as red light bulbs at night, and sleep with blackout curtains. On the flip side, I find it hard to wake up in a pitch black room, so I set two clip lamps aimed at me on a timer instead of an alarm.
What would be really nice is to have light bulbs that adjust both brightness and color temperature to mimic the sun. It would be interesting if mimicking a tropical sun cycle would help with seasonal affective disorder.
I've heard good things about bright lighting too. Unfortunately, my apartment's wiring can't support multiple 100W bulbs. Anyone have any tips on super-bright LED lightbulbs (that don't cost a fortune)?
I switched to 8 100W equivalent LED bulbs from Cree. They were expensive, but they'll last forever. I recommend mixing spectrums. I went with 3 bright white, 3 soft white, and 2 of the warm. It seems to give the best mix. I've definitely noticed that the whiter the light, the faster you wake up in the morning, and the better everything feels.
I work in a home office though, and do have a window.
Its worth noting that GE now makes some fluorescent tube replacements with LED that have a much more complete spectrum. For those with Fluorescent fixtures above your desks, they will help improve the quality of the light you have. I've put them in my woodshop with great success.
Yeah - I'll be honest, a big reason I went for it was that they are MUCH less fragile. It used to be a fairly common occurrence that I'd hit a board into the fixtures on my ceiling. With the LEDs, I no longer get covered in broken glass a mercury powder. Instead, the bulb just flexes.
I don't think that this comment was meant to signal approval of the strict/oppressive speech and press rights in Singapore, but it unfortunately reads as such. If I am misinterpreting your comment, how do you reconcile the apparent "if and only if" relationship you're positing, with countries like South Africa, Czech Republic, Slovakia, etc., that while not strictly third world, have seen increasing economic successes come in conjunction with increasingly free policies over the past 30 years? Superficially, Singapore appears to be the exception and not the rule: Myanmar, Indonesia, Philippines all have seen greater growth as liberalization progresses, as well.
It's an old argument. A statist (a polite word for fascist) regime can quickly correct obvious inefficiencies leading to a quick and easy boost in productivity. Hayek argues that the jolt is temporary and, in so far that nothing creative seems to come out from Singapore, he seems be at least partially correct.
The question is, however, if this is a regime we'd like to live in. A regime where dissent is closely regulated and suppressed (including through canning). A friend's father, formerly an editor of the WSJ, is banned from Singapore for writing an article critical of the boss.
I don't think it's a coincidence that Silicon Valley is in CA and has attracted millions throughout the world, to program. People take risks and failure is a badge of honor - not a stain on your family's honor.
Meanwhile Singapore has someone who was, according to his ex-adviser, a great mathematician/programer. But then he joined the consultant/political class.
The argument put forward by Lee Kuan Yew (RIP) for exiling communists was that Maoist China was aggressively attempting to expand into the region. For example, see the Hong Kong bombing campaign of 1967 [1]. According to, amongst others, "The Singapore Story" [2], he was initially contacted by the Communists to represent them as a "moderate" leftist. His manoeuvering to win the 1959 election (scaring many businesses away to KL, thinking communism had won) and kick them out relatively bloodlessly thereafter has become legendary in Singapore, and is I think unparalleled anywhere else in the world. Part of winning included controlling the press and winning the PR battle. Whether it was justified depends on your stance on communism (and therefore if you consider the country to have been at war, suspending individual rights).
The second is that the island is racially very diverse, with a majority Chinese when both neighbours - who were also aggressive at the time - were of a different race and religion. Independence came a couple years too early due to Malaysian worries that LKY was not cooperating with their policies (Singapore was openly advocating racial equality amongst other things, against the pro-Malay discriminative policies from KL). Still in the 1960s, there was an explosion of anti-Chinese minority riots in neighbouring countries which involved some lynchings, and some Chinese had the idea of doing the same to Malays in Singapore (e.g. [3]). LKY's response was prompt: he pushed for the Chinese rioters to be made an example of. Restrictions on hate speech grew from a need to quell these tensions. There were no more race riots until the recent incident where a drunk construction worker was run over by a bus and the mob got angry.
It's important to view his actions not as if you lived in the prosperous United States, surrounded by a large ocean and coming out victorious from the largest war known to mankind but as the leader of a tiny island surrounded by enemies big and small, open and insidious. I ask his critics what they would have done differently; I personally agree with those who consider LKY one of the greatest politicians that ever lived, and I admire the Singaporeans for electing him year after year.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_1967_Leftist_riots: "Bomb disposal experts from the police and the British military defused as many as 8,000 home-made bombs. Statistics showed that one in every eight bombs was genuine."
It worked for South Korea and Taiwan. They were both ruled by strongmen on the fence between dictatorship and autoritarian democracy. Park Chung-hee industrialized S Korea in 20 years by ruling with a rubber-stamp parliament and a disregard for human rights. The country emerged stronger and gave way to a true democracy with 20 years of his death.
USA is built on human Rights abuses first of native Americans then African Americans today you might talk about how free speech got USa where it is. But that is not true is it if you look at your history same is for most of the western world.
Today US consumerism is built on human rights abuses of people in other countries but free speech whatever. Forget people of other countries many of your local goverments and corporations are being run on human rights abuses of people of color and Hispanics. Either by incarceration or being used almost like slave labor in your large farms.
Hopefully OP will elaborate on his thinking, but I'd hazard the thoughts were something along the lines of "sectarian violence in Iraq needs to be controlled to let it become a modern country."
I.e. democracy is a fairly terrible vehicle for progressive change, as by definition you're going to be fighting against inherent conservativism (both terms used with social rather than political definitions) in a majority of your population. I know nothing on the history of Singapore, but /hazardGuess.
(Whether or not you agree with that perspective is a valid question, ofc)
The problem with Iraq wasn't "democracy" but colonialism (which created a faux country out of nowhere with problematic arbitrary and non-historical borders) and invasion.
Iraq has a lot of problems. Historical and modern.
And you never really commented on the original point: (given Iraq's, or any other similar state's, current state and status) is democracy and free speech the quickest path towards a more modern state?
I don't think the citizens of a state are pawns or little children, so that we can ask "what restrictions on them would be the quickest path towards a more modern state".
That's the "You can't handle the truth" approach, which I abhor.
Now, if (for the purposes of discussion) say that we value having a "modern state" (which is vague in itself) over freedom, democracy, free expression, etc, then, OK, what you write might be a quicker path to it. And Iraq, Libya, etc was indeed more stable under their previous regimes than they are now (of course for those, foreign interests have a lot to gain if they are unstable, and will "help" them be unstable by playing all sides against each other).
It also raises the question what kind of "modern state" would that be, that was created with restrictions in democracy and free speech?
Historically people have shown (expressed but also proved with their actions) that they can value freedom (as they see it) over convenience and even over their lives (from Spartacus to numerous examples to many to mention). If for a state the kind of people want to be established there needs to be tension and people fighting over the outcome they want, then so be it (even if the final positive outcome is not guaranteed).
Just like France had to have the bloody revolution to become a modern state, the US had to have a revolution and a civil war, etc.
Nor do I, but I allow for the possibility of the ends justifying the means still being a moral path in some circumstances. I also purposely tried to leave out "stable" as a goal adjective, as I agree that's an entirely too amorphous term.
I think Turkey is an interesting, if heavily cult-of-personality, example.
In essence, the US Supreme Court is a very real check on democracy and free speech. The former in that it can override democratic decisions, and the latter in that it has decided in several judgements that the right to free speech is not absolute (that it has not done so more frequently is kind of immaterial to the ideals of the state).
I would argue as a that historically people have show that they value personal gain more than either freedom or convenience, particularly in exactly the kind of government-today-gone-tomorrow states we're talking about.
As soon as you involve people with guns, then the person with the biggest gun starts having a better argument. Which is how you get central African transitions as opposed to South Africa.
A new state is only one of the potential outcomes of revolution. Endemic violence is another (Somalia, Congo, Afghanistan, Iraq).
The right wing news sources I read made it look bulletproof that she was manipulating things and would lose. I didn't even read the tech news as SV has a crazy liberal bias. Steve sailer had nailed a good analysis right from the start I believe
Thanks for all your insight here in this thread. I went through all this myself and haven't really been able to talk about it. Its reassuring to see others have been through the same. My psychopath convinced everyone I had psychosis when I questioned her once. I refused to believe something that I saw her do was a 'hallucination'. For months I was gaslighted by everyone I knew. I would think I was in the clear and then a friend would call me up at work out of the blue, asking if they can take me to accident and emergency. I had 9 months depression and am only now getting out of it.
It is insane how memories can be overwritten. I can write at length on this, I learnt it from videoing her talking to me. They have total frame control and will keep switching subjects away from facts.
I never confronted her to tell her that I knew who she was, but she did warn me indirectly. She showed the 'psychopath face', if that means anything to anyone...
I actually made a bookmarklet with the following pasted into the URL, so you can do it in a single click:
javascript:void(open('https://archive.is/?run=1&url='+encodeURIComponent(document....)