One of the greatest qualities of Homo-sapiens is empathy for human gloom;
Commiseration: sympathy for the devil, darkness and doom.

If you gave 10 dollars to someone deserving—good for you; you are as “Good as Gold”—they get $10 of your kindness, you get a warm feeling of doing well by the world. If you gave someone a Freedom 251 smart phone, it would cost you four dollars US, a savings of six dollars. If you gave 10 dollars to the state, to help someone in need, you are a fool and you wouldn’t do it that way anyway. Picture This: how a state would actually get your 10 dollars for charity is by stealing it through taxation; forcing you to pay. Would any one deserving of it—in other words, someone who is not a free-rider—see any of that 10 dollars? Absolutely no way: you have to be connected to (small-l) liberal governments and be part of the-something for nothing, hooked with identity politics or some other political-prosthetic to get the resource; otherwise, shut up and get another job you over-achieving immigrant! It’s Catch 22; the worthy are ignored and the users—the unionized political-class bureaucracy—get served half of it, if not most of it. The liberal orthodoxy of self-ordained collectivism, especially around race, cancels individual initiative inside the group, which socializes victimhood and scorns individual effort as futile.

The most unworthy, yet tenured and state-protected professors who preach this false morality are completely supported and subsidized by neoliberal political class. They believe in much of this nonsense, all evidence to the contrary and many are outright neo-Marxists. This massive miscarriage of love, justice and charity, actively exploits the working poor and middle class workers to create an immense group of elite political hustlers in our modern democracies. This group are their benefactors—their political bases as it were—and ignoring inconvenient facts is their first order of business. Remember these intellectuals—this large corrupt special interest group—have no skin in the game and pay no price when they are wrong, which is exceedingly often. They defy the universal wisdom of the ages: “No one is to be completely trusted with power!” If their enemies get market funds/wages/research-grants, they are tweeting all over it; however, if they get government money—shush, not a word on any platform—“Be quiet!” Primarily they deny human progress, market innovation and human happiness. Conceptual hypothesis is of no use if it cannot survive facts-on-the-ground analysis. As true believers, they do not care to examine these essential Popperian tools. They are way bigger idiots (in a fundamentalist sense) than you think and they believe in this socialist’s conceit: that the state is more efficient than the market even though it has been tirelessly and easily refuted by so many market economists.
Sowell: “The first rule of economics is scarcity
—there’s never enough of anything to placate all those who want it—
And the first rule of politics is to ignore the first rule of economics.”
 Humans evolved (and died young in the hundreds of millions of lives through the tens of thousands of millenniums) in the dark shadowy forests of the world and for this reason we have evolved an innate Negativity Bias which now works against us — push back — a spider or lion won’t likely kill you. In 2020, accidents worldwide (about five million fatalities; a quarter of them traffic deaths), killed more than Covid (about 2 to 3 million died in 2020 of the pandemic most all of them over 65 years of age, unvaccinated and overweight), (the over all morbidity rate globally was .2 percent, not even a pandemic really). but the world was united to fight a epidemic, that’s amazing, if not completely a well-organized event in its application. Global empathy and universal human rights is a conception worth pursuing—we can work together to achieve it. In our innate hunter-gatherer frame of mind, we lost for a moment in 2020/21 our default “Us-Them” biases, especially the evil socialist one, “us(poor) them(rich)” which the Marxists and other totalitarians in the recent past have used to murder so many innocents and commit so many genocides.
Likewise, evolution endowed us with The Comfort Gene to reduce starvation. When our tribe came to a ripened fig tree, we stripped it bare; now this endowment is a constant danger to our wellness because of over-eating — push back. In the time of our becoming self-aware some 30,000 to 40,000 years ago, (or even earlier), our tribe (maybe 40 to 100 strong or sometimes a little larger) had all the information anyone wanted; DNA had its way with us and as human beings, like the other creatures of the world, we were ignorant slaves of DNA replication. Much of the information hunter-gatherers knew was shallow, violent, prone to crazy-subjectivity and often outright wrong (but it kept us alive in our thorny harsh environments).
The mind is a simulation machine which haphazardly but creatively fills in the gaps in our knowledge; we need civilization to apply reason, economic innovation and scientific-knowledge to actually correct its many illusions and biases; we can’t figure this all out on our own. We need philosophers of reason, skeptical scientists and independent journalists working together.
Now the facts you need to help you understand modern life comes from an internet algorithm and it is exceedingly inaccurate. In fact, large media corporations no longer hire real journalists to double-triple-check truth—the Walter Cronkites are actually the new Glenn Greenwalds, outcasts from the day to day big news organizations, demonized by all the compromised Anderson Coopers and Bill O’Reillys of the world and lied about by the 'Microsoft/Google/Apple/ Amazon/Facebook' irrational media mob. These are cowardly elitist companies who lacked the courage to fight the agencies of the Deep State to spy illegally and indiscriminately on their customers and who now should be broken up with antitrust as they are the actual existential threat to democracy and not Donald Trump, RFK Jr., Libertarians or whomever. And don't forget, these giant corrupt corporations committed this illegal and unwarranted attack on free speech and warrantless surveillance, and were later, after Edward Snowden exposed their crimes, retroactively given immunity by the US government so we couldn't sue them for selling us out to the state. 
You must now seek independent journalists out on your own and they will give you the reasoned and scientific valid information you need to make informed political decisions as conscientious citizens. Much of media is steeped in The Availability Bias — push back — read, and get at least 50 percent of your input from books, either from proponents of reason, masters of science and honest fearless journalists. You think terrorism, gun violence, rape, hatred toward transgender peoples and school shootings represent a real danger to us existentially, but statistically they’re insignificant if you take in the whole population of the world. In reality it is death by automobile accident, overeating, consuming too much nutrition-free foods, a lack of rigorous exercise and wars. That’s what kills us in huge numbers, and of course growing old. However, to corporate media, concepts like facts, objective truth, skepticism and boring double-blind studies that dispute all their easily refutable assumptions like Critical Race Theory or that the cause of global poverty is capitalism and imperialism means nothing. Beware; almost all the stuff you absorb from the social-sciences on the internet platforms is no more than modern myth. When facts over surmount intuitive certainty, intellectuals, and even some scientists, are lured by their inner-subjectivity to repress the evidence and to halt the argument, ignore the proofs and demonized those who would hold such traitorous judgment.
While you learn and grow independently by reading various books of your own individual choices, fight your Confirmation Bias by reading the “other’s” Point Of View. If you’re an atheist read the believers, and vice-versa, if you’re Left, read Right, and the other way around: so Sowell versus Chomsky, Churchill vs Solzhenitsyn, Feynman vs Dyson, Mises vs Marx, Keynes vs Hayek, Russell vs Blanshard, Freud vs Szasz, Popper vs Wittgenstein, Snowden vs Obama, Hitchens vs Kissinger, Gates vs Jobs, Pinker vs Taleb and Santayana vs Nietzsche. If you are into reason, read the Aristotelians vs the Declinists. If you’re into science, then read the people who bring shame upon it like the existentialists or phenomenalists such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche or Heidegger.
Many biases distract us, but the one of the worst ones is our natural (nearly universal), attraction to altruistic Platonism. Life can be unkind to anyone who has taken this counterfeit and debilitating approach to life on earth as a living-breathing person who is trying to find human goodness; what the Platonists love is an unattainable romantic illusion about human nature and its inherent unattainable egalitarian ideals. Almost always it is attached to moral totalitarianism. Its utopian vision is unrestrained by the violence of our tragic history and our long brutal evolution. It has brought to humanity much grief and that is the main reason that I always (perhaps even an annoying amount of times), point out that a belief in any form of supernaturalism is the one of the worst, most dangerous illusion of them all for humankind. What knowledge is available is tentative and must always be pinned to falsifiability.
You are grumbling, “Sure, I get it, that Karl not the other fascist Karl, but what does this have to do with the 10 dollar rule?” Okay then, let me explain it in brief because charity is of primary importance for your life as a rational individual; NOT public charity forced on us all by welfare-democratic-autocracy or by any mythical religion, as they all are, but personal charity as a private daily habit—human kindness as incorporated into your very fibre—as a day by day event. I am going to show you how to do it.
Firstly, I need you to understand that if you wanted to walk every day to be healthy (hunter-gatherers walked on average 10 to 12 miles a day) but just couldn’t get going with your plan, then do this: walk the length of your street or around your apartment building or condominium every day, one minute-two, three tops, but you must do it every single day unless you are hospitalized and dying (if you are not dying get up and walk a minute or two inside the hospital—every day; no excuse and no self-pity). In no time you will acquire the daily habit of walking and like brushing your teeth every morning you will no longer feel anxiety about it and quite possibly not even reflect on it anymore; you will just do it as habit. Over time your walks will get much longer as though a magic event occurred with no sacrifice or frustration; a good habit out of nothing. Instead of eating lunch which you likely don’t need if you’ve already had breakfast, you’ll walk for an hour every day during that timeframe.
Secondly, let us say that you are the opposite of me and instead of reading three or four books every week, you never read except on the devices you own and try to twitter and YouTube your way into wisdom—it can’t happen—it’s a mental impossibility. Try this instead, read one page from a book every day (be it a book in hardcover, paperback or an epub, pdf or mobi file on one of your devices), but you have to regiment it: like with breakfast, lunch, supper, bedtime or whatever, but unless you are blinded by a sudden urge to be stupid, you have to read one page every single day—one single page. Come on, it is painless if you stick to it for 50 days, and again a new habit will magically emerge; you’ll start a life-long practice of reading books in one form or another. Believe me when I assure you it will come in handy whether you are a janitor, a cashier or like me a stock-clerk—to be a good citizen you must have authentic knowledge. Reading, Blue Ocean Strategy, Creative Destruction, Built to Last, The Wealthy Barber, The Latte Factor or Rich Dad Poor Dad for instance could easily make you a millionaire if you lived for 30 to 50 years after you had read and applied certain methods explained well enough in the books.
Let me tell you a little story about the 10 dollar rule: there’s this fellow worker who I had always disliked. I first met him in the 1990s. He was, I thought, challenged, special needs, often unproductive, mismanaged and constantly talking about the most mundane cliché drivel of which I was completely not interested. For whatever reason—perhaps simply trying to be a better person—one day some years ago I decided to apply atomic habit methods when I saw him, which was almost daily at work; so four times a week –just to see if I could reverse my natural disdain and try to show an interest in his life. One day at a time I started to address him with a different attitude and tone of voice. I used a sincere “hello” instead of my usual heartless nod. In a few weeks after this conscious effect I upped the ante with “How are you doing?” or “How was your weekend?”
I soon found out that although he was thirty and still lived with his parents, he ran a repair business on the side. Not a complicated one but a small service I could use now and then. I began bringing to him anything I possessed he could repair. Usually the repair was 10 dollars. At this time, we started real-life conversations and his repair-work was always spot on and if it wasn’t I’d returned it and he would fix it without further charge. This long ago used to be called, “fair-trading”.
The months turned into years and he slowly began showing me his life via pictures on his phone: his family, his home in Toronto, his mom and dad, his home back in Korea and (even into the future, an arranged) Korean bride he would return home to marry some day. I showed him my daughter’s climb in the academic world, my teenage son’s progress at school and the splendid life my wife and I have built in Toronto—our many friends and relatives.
A few years later, he was leaving for Korea to collect his wife. Before he left for his wedding, I gave him $100 cash as a gift to help with his plans. Though he never thanked me outright for this, (to this day he is inhibited by such things), when he returned with his new wife, his whole attitude toward me changed. He followed me on Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram and other platforms. He now started to ask advice about being a good husband, about saving, earning more money, even about his new romantic relationship and the biggest shocker of all: about reading; saying this would help him appear smart like me so his in-laws would be nicer to him. The first book I gave him was Call of the Wild which he loved. He is now an avid reader always asking for another recommendation such as The Moon is a Harsh Mistress or The Hound of the Baskervilles.
So, if there’s a lesson in there, (for my sake I hope there is), I think it is this: I was transformed far more than him and he did me a hell of a favor even though I was just trying to be a better person at his expense in 10 dollar instalments—if that makes any sense. I learned a new habit and I started applying it all over with people I already knew and fresh faces I was meeting every day. The way I am feeling now about me versus the universe is a sensation of connectivity. The rewards have been amazing and it was like finding a new inner serenity, listening harder and finding more kindness for people than I knew I had. I became much more tolerant of the people’s views and started to see politics as a form of religion. This free-floating charity is natural to humans if all the right conditions are applied such as democracy, a liberated market economy where people can freely, fairly trade and where there are universal human rights applied; however, charity is only ever ethical if it is not enforced by the state otherwise it is a form of bullying.
China for instance tries to promote kindness and charity to its dystopian denizens through its oppressive totalitarian Social Credit System. A Thousand Years of Joys and Sorrows by Ai Weiwei, the real leader of China is a book worth your time. The USSR was as terrified of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn as the Chinese Communists are now of Ai Weiwei. Believe when I say, anything connected to Marxism, Communism, Platonism, and Socialism (or Christianity/Islam), is a form of intellectual colonialism which can only end badly for human beings. If Canada in my youth had had a social credit system like China, I would have long ago perished; indeed, I wouldn’t have made it out of high-school. The thousands and thousands of books I have read to try and solve the problems of human reason and individual liberty would never be measured against my crass-humour and my open contempt of authority, and especially the Catholic progressives; they are intellectually and psychologically a fraudulent lot who would kill the good in all people to get to the perfect. This is a thing that is forbidden us; it is verboten in every reasonable society at all times and absolutely crazy to try: for those who want to try anyway: for them reality is optional.
There’s your $10 worth. I hope it helps and if it does don’t pay me; pass it along to someone in need who deserves it. To give in the most efficient manner go here.