American Military Bases are basically socialist woke dream . I was talking to a former military brat just yesterday about her life growing up in US military bases around the world with a Colonel father.

She mentioned that food, housing, health care and education is all provided and equal. The 4 star general's kid goes to the same school as the private's kid. So the school has to be damm good to make sure they can get into the Ivy Leagues. She never knew anything about health insurance, when anyone was sick, they just went to the clinic and got care. Everything was equal and fair without money involved. She was surprised to learn what health insurance even was when she came to the US as a teenager. "You mean you don't just get taken care of when you're sick?"

Given the recent Prez/SecWar gathering the US military generals to say we're ending the "woke" era. Maybe they should also stop this socialist wet dream happening in hundreds of military bases worldwide.

Of course, there're downsides to the military and growing up in that system. Not to mention the difference of volunteering to risk sacrificing your life and getting benefits in return. Nonetheless, it does seem to validate that if you're doing a great social good then you deserve a strong social safety net.

thoughts? A robotic enhancement shoe from Nike. https://about.nike.com/en/newsroom/releases/nike-project-amplify-official-images 

At its core, Project Amplify is about seamlessly adding a little more power to your stride. The fun comes from realizing you can do more than you thought you could — whatever ‘more’ means to you.”

Akin to how electric bikes have made it easier to ride farther and more frequently, revolutionizing urban commuting, Nike is developing Project Amplify to make slower running, jogging and walking easier and more fun, with a focus on athletes running between a 10- and 12-minute mile pace.  

• On the one hand I definitely want to try this; I'm an early adopter and love weird cool stuff even if i dont yet know what its for
• On the other hand I'm kinda like, "wait, why?" just because we can do something doesnt mean we should, and "more" for the sake of itself obviously always goes super well, right :)
• What do y'all think?

this reminds me again that the weirdness of the future is barely getting started

Gun violence in the USA schools. This weekend Stephanie got onto an instagram rabbithole which took her into some dark, near-conspiracy places about gun violence. The sad bit was of course the increase in polarization, rather than an increase in compassion, or even solutions focus. It’s much easier to blame an other than try to sort out a super complex, nuanced, and ambiguous problem.

This topic is interesting in general to me, and it kicked off a beautiful discussion on the UpTrust slack thread (it seems we’re influencing ourselves to be better online conversationalists everywhere!), but it also made we wonder how to solve the school-shooting issue in the USA? What are the nuanced, synthetic perspectives? For example, even comparing data about school shootings across the world can be shaped, interpreted, mixed. Many of the countries that have fewer school shootings (all of them) have much higher death-by-firearm rates, or death by gang-violence, or war, etc. So it’s difficult to get good comparisons, even if we ignore cultural approaches. Also

How do we take an integral approach which addresses all four quadrants?
- UL psyche: mental health—but what does this mean? Where does the money come from to increase such mental health?
- LL culture: US roots in revolution and gun ownership, media, glorification of shooters
- UR behavior: Gun safety training? mandatory? What can we learn from Israel and Switzerland, who have similar or higher gun ownership rates but no school shootings? Quick research: it seems like increasing metal detectors and stuff is NOT a solution that works. What other behavior changes do?
- LR systems: Gun control—even as a gun owning Texan, I think it’s obvious at this point that things need to change. I don’t have much research or understanding so probably people have a lot to say about the nuanced ways of doing this, and I’m sure I’m naive in my suggestion here but it seems like there could be various licenses like there are for driving; the more dangerous a weapon is, the more training you have to prove you’ve had like getting a commercial driver’s license. It also seems like we could clearly do a two year experiment: Write a new law that expires in two years and look at the data: did we stop the shootings?

anyway this is super inchoate, but I’d love to get the collective brain’s nuanced take that can genuinely steel man all sides, understanding and including the validity of the right-wing arguments as well as seeing the problems of the left-wing solutions, the bits left on the table.

Current Session "instructions" (Feb 26): Converse, and see if nudges happen. nudges 

We launched a system where the AI bots can automatically detect intervention points. We need you to make a bunch of comments and new posts to see if they'll engage. So this week we're asking you to engage a bunch, if you can!

It's a little rudimentary at the moment so sometimes you'll get multiple bots responding on multiple posts. We'd love your feedback on which ones you like, don't, when it seemed to miss the spot, anything else you notice. 

Thanks and love yall

J (and the UpTrust team)
p.s. this week I'm at an investor meeting so dara will be with you

# [Optional Zoom](https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86795216050?pwd=TllxSzYrTFFXTW5LRmg3WUQrT04vdz09) with Jordan and Dara at least, for faces, questions, help, etc: