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Education and Certificates

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Investing Rules

Political Views

Favorite

Music

Consumer Goods

• AccuCheck Digital Body Weight Scale (Measure daily to avoid surprises.)
• Alera High Performance Task Chair (My spine’s best friend.)
• Asus VS228H-P 21.5” 1080p Monitor (Ideal resolution and size for extended use.)
• Bowflex SelectTech Adjustable Dumbbells (Doubles as a conversation starter.)
• iBUYPOWER Pre-Built Gaming PC (For work and play.)
• Redify Jump Rope (Rainy-day cardio.)
• StriveZen 2-Month View Wall Calendar (Record weight, reps/sets, diet, important dates, etc.)
• TeamMe Computer Desk (Maximum productivity.)
• Vive Wrist Brace (Type for ten hours a day.)
• YouTen Adjustable Weight Bench (Who needs a gym membership?)

Desktop Software

• “NoVote” by Dan Lovelace (Makes Reddit usable.)
• “OBS Studio” by Hugh Bailey (Screen recording tool.)
• “Scoop” by Luke Sampson (Windows command-line installer.)
• “ScreenToGif” by Nicke Manarin (Animated screenshots.)
• “Video Screenshot” by Martin Strauss (Generate desktop wallpapers from streaming sites.)
• “Vimium” by Phil Crosby (Mouse-less browsing.)
• “youtube-dl” by Ricardo García (Download YouTube videos.)

Blog Posts

• “A Bollywood Movie Doesn’t Need a Hollywood Director” by Xin Ping (The future beckons!)
• “Generation X Faces a Bleak Old Age” by Ted Rall (My parents’ generation really got shafted.)
• “The Gervais Principle” by Venkatesh Rao (Organizational politics demystified.)
• “Has China Turned to Capitalism?” by Domenico Losurdo (Understanding modern China.)
• “How to Send and Reply to Email” by Matt Might (Professional etiquette.)
• “A Mathematician’s Lament” by Paul Lockhart (All children should read this.)
• “Russian Defenses in the SMO” by Andrei Martyanov (Why this may be a long war.)
• “The Stack Overflow Age” by Joel Spolsky (Recollections of the Internet gold rush.)
• “Stevey’s Google Platforms Rant” by Steve Yegge (Amazon’s secret to world domination.)
• “Story Structure 101” by Dan Harmon (Narrative-writing for humans.)
• “The Taiwan Strait Joint Exercise” by Chen Feng (How the next big war will likely start.)
• “Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years” by Peter Norvig (No royal road to geometry.)
• “Welcome to the Ruzzkiy Mir” by Evgenia Korda (Understanding modern Russia.)
• “What if You Only Invested at Market Peaks?” by Ben Carlson (Slow and steady.)

Programming Books

• Coders at Work by Peter Seibel (Giants to walk in the footsteps of.)
• Game Programming Patterns by Bob Nystrom (Notes on building maintainable software.)
• Learn OpenGL by Joey de Vries (Graphics from scratch.)
• Microserfs by Douglas Coupland (Understand working programmers.)

(For more fun, check out this list by the Free Ebook Foundation.)

Hobbyist Books

• Les Halles Cookbook by Anthony Bourdain (Anyone can cook!)
• Logical Chess by Irving Chenev (Teaches the consequences of small changes.)
• Practical Programming for Strength Training by Mark Rippetoe (Diet is half the battle.)
• Starting Strength by Mark Rippetoe (Form is the other half. Pair with the DVD for best results.)

Economics Books

• The Case Against Education by Bryan Caplan (We waste a third of our lives social signaling.)
• The India Way by Subrahmanyam Jaishankar (Moving up in the world as a middle power.)
• Open Borders by Bryan Caplan (Immigration restrictions make no economic sense.)
• River Out of Eden by Richard Dawkins (Suffering and scarcity are built into the system.)
• Untrue: Women, Lust, and Infidelity by Wednesday Martin (Primate sexual market dynamics.)

Philosophy Books

• The Analects of Confucius by Kong Fuzi (Building a society that works starts from the bottom.)
• The Complete Works by Arthur Schopenhauer (Ancient wisdom in a modern context.)
• Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali by B.K.S. Iyengar (Exerting control over the mind.)
• Straw Dogs by John Gray (Breaking free of monotheistic orthodoxy.)

History Books

• The Book of Islamic Dynasties by Luqman Nagy (Eurasia’s past, present, and future.)
• Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber (Modern finance is rooted in medieval Europe.)
• Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis (50 million forgotten murders.)
• A Most Holy War by Mark Pegg (Western civilization’s roots.)
• Reconstruction by Eric Foner (Ongoing ripples of Lincoln’s murder.)
• Settlers by J. Sakai (Actual American history.)
• Stalin by Domenico Losurdo (Perhaps the 20th century’s most influential person.)
• The Struggle for the Eurasian Borderlands by Alfred Rieber (As relevant now as ever.)
• Vladimir Putin and Russian Statecraft by Allen Lynch (From failed state to world power.)

(For more, check out the World History Association’s list of Bentley Book Prize winners.)

Historical Documents

• “The ABC of Communism” by Nikolai Bukharin (Primer on what tens of millions died for.)
• “From a China Traveler” by David Rockefeller (Neoliberal honeymoon.)
• “Modernize and Never Seek Hegemony” by Deng Xiaoping (Father of globalization.)
• “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” by Vladimir Putin (Tsardom reborn.)
• “The Social Responsibility of Business” by Milton Friedman (Death knell for the welfare state.)
• “We Don’t Want to Decouple From China” by Olaf Scholz (Game over for Germany.)
• “Why I’m Leading a Congressional Delegation to Taiwan” by Nancy Pelosi (Why, indeed.)

Autobiographies

• Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman (Hollywood at its zenith.)
• Championship Fighting by Jack Dempsey (Learning to throw a punch takes a lifetime.)
• Disciplined Minds by Jeff Schmidt (Thriving in the white-collar workplace.)
• Four Star Reviews, 1967-2007 by Roger Ebert (Forty years at the movies.)
• The Governance of China by Xi Jinping (Perhaps the 21st century’s most influential person.)
• Live Young Forever by Jack LaLanne (Maintained vehicles last twice as long.)
• Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich (Poverty is expensive.)
• Revolutionary Suicide by Huey Newton (Effective activists are doomed men.)
• What Happened by Hillary Clinton (Her electoral losses defined the 21st century.)

Novels

• A Clash of Kings by George R. R. Martin (Living history is written in blood.)
• The Long Walk by Stephen King (Masculinity in a nutshell.)
• Pet Sematary by Stephen King (Death makes a mockery of everything.)
• Submission by Michel Houellebecq (Prescient satire of the “end of history”.)
• Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (Surreal reflections on Western imperialism.)
• The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (Required reading for the Indian diaspora.)

Short Stories

• “Coding Machines” by Lawrence Kesteloot (Debugging meets cosmic horror.)
• “The Cold Equations” by Tom Godwin (Haunting metaphor for peak oil.)
• “Frost and Fire” by Ray Bradbury (Man that is born of a woman is of few days.)
• “A Full Life” by Paolo Bacigalupi (Enjoy it while you can.)
• “Golden” by Nick Bostrom (Animals are trapped in a real-life horror movie.)
• “A Hunger Artist” by Franz Kafka (The best gifts find the fewest admirers.)
• “To Build a Fire” by Jack London (To ignore reality is to court death.)
• “Yossel: April 19, 1943” by Joe Kubert (Long live the Jewish people.)

Movies

• Black Panther: Wakanda Forever by Ryan Coogler (Modern myth-making.)
• Get Out by Jordan Peele (Every non-white can relate.)
• Gisaengchung by Bong Joon-ho (Plan carefully, or things can spiral out of control quickly.)
• The Green Knight by David Lowery (Beautifully illustrates the importance of character.)
• Ikiru by Kurosawa Akira (The world is a museum of passion projects.)
• Jiro Dreams of Sushi by Ono Jiro (There is bliss in doing any job well.)
• Kaze Tachinu by Miyazaki Hayao (You can do everything right and still fail.)
• Nope by Jordan Peele (Resurrects and deconstructs the classic blockbuster.)
• Oldboy by Park Chan-wook (Intensely, painfully relatable.)
• Schindler’s List by Steven Spielberg (Still the best film ever made about racism.)
• Shot Caller by Ric Waugh (Watching this made me stop driving.)
• Squid Game by Hwang Dong-hyuk (Thinly-veiled allegory for corporate life.)
• Sweeney Todd by Tim Burton (Peak of film musicals.)
• Synecdoche, New York by Charlie Kaufman (Your life, and mine, and everybody’s.)
• Turning Red by Domee Shi (Written by women for women.)
• The White Tiger by Ramin Bahrani (Required viewing for the Indian diaspora.)
• World’s Greatest Dad by Bobcat Goldthwait (Lampoons the superficiality of American life.)
• Zhang Jin Hu by Wu Jing (Resist U.S. aggression and aid Korea!)

Comic Books

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