Ivy League Universities are becoming in the eyes of the new Asian upper class the status luxury good. Harvard is like a Vuitton bag and a Cartier Watch. It is a huge drag on the middle class who have been plowing an increased share of their savings into educational institutions, transferring their money to bureaucrats, real estate developers, professors, and other parasites. In the United States, we have a buildup of student loans that automatically transfer to these rent extractors. In a way it is no different from racketeering: One needs a decent university “name” to get ahead in life. But we have evidence that collectively society doesn’t advance with organized education, rather the reverse: the level of formal education in a country is the result of wealth.

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In an ancient Mediterranean competition, the Olympic winners should be the most athletic ones. Under globalization and optimization, the winners will be the most abnormal. SCALABILITY

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FROM THE ETHICS CHAPTER
A half-man or, rather, half-person is not someone who does not have an opinion, just someone who does not take risks for it.My greatest lesson in courage came from my father — as a child, I had admired him before for his erudition, but was not overly fazed since erudition on its own does not make a man. He had a large ego, immense dignity, and required respect. But he was once insulted by a militiaman at a road check during the Lebanese war. He refused to comply, and got angry at the militiaman for being disrespectful. As he drove away, the gunman shot him in the back. The bullet stayed in his chest for the rest of his life so he had to carry an X-ray through airport terminals. This set the bar very high for me: dignity is worth nothing unless you earn it, unless you are willing to pay a price for it.
A lesson I learned from this ancient culture is the notion of as Megalopsychon a term expressed in Aristotle’s ethics, a sense of grandeur that got superseded by the Christian values of “humility”. There is no word for it in Romance languages; in Arabic it is called Shhm —best translated as nonsmall. If you take risks and face your fate with dignity, there is nothing you can do that makes you small; if you don’t take risks, there is nothing you can do that makes you grand, nothing. And when you take risks, insults by half-men small men those who don’t risk are similar to barks by nonhuman animals: you can’t feel insulted by a dog.

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Epimetheus is fragile; his brother Prometheus is antifragile.

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