Ami Says

My writings. Thoughts, stories both non-fiction and fiction, rants, experimenting with languages(s) and many a combination of a bit of everything.

Lost in Expression

Who cares to read what I write? Who cares to know my thoughts? Who cares what is with me? Why express myself? Why do we all want to express ourselves. Perhaps life is about perception and not expression. Sitting and taking in. Absorbing. Observing. Trying to understand without judging. But it all looks the same. The same looks. The same clothes. The same talk. Nothing profound? Should I be paying more attention? Or do I accept that what I’m seeking to perceive is not here? That what feelings ar...
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Noise and Solitude

A date with oneself. So crude. So needy. Why with yourself? Doesn’t the spotlight shine on you? Doesn’t the clientele fall into awkward silence? Perhaps in earlier years, but now loneliness or aloneness is no longer a diagnosis. So much discussion, but all it sounds like is noise. I can’t even discern two words. Too much chatter. I can’t discern emotion. Nor language. But surely, if I pay more attention, I can discern something. Yet I have no real desire to do so. What could I learn in a coffe...
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Moments Beyond the Clock

The theory of elasticity is that everything grows and becomes smaller based on need. Meaning time, being elastic, can expand and contract depending on everything that needs to be done. For example, in winter, days are shorter, and there's an understanding that less can be done during daylight hours. However, time being elastic would mean that the same amount of things could be done during these shorter daylight hours as during the daylight hours of summer. Likewise, less can be done during the l...
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The Illusion of Ownership and the Trap of Status

A car has a price—or does it? What if it’s given to you? What if you won it? What if you rented it? What difference does it actually make if it’s in your name or not? When you say I need this amount of money to buy this and that car, aren’t you limiting yourself to one possibility? Ownership is so overrated. Owning a home is status…where and when? Twenty years ago? Having an expensive car is status? Where and when? Every luxury car can be leased for an affordable monthly payment, so it says lit...
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The Quiet Power of Gratitude

If you want something you don't have, gratitude tricks your mind into believing you have it already. "Thank you for this" and "thank you for that." Are we thanking a God, an external force, the universe, or are we thanking our subconscious that helps us bring these things into existence? Does it even matter? With all the uncertainties, isn't it much easier to believe in a God than in a void—or worse yet, only our subconscious? Isn't it easier to converse with a creator than with our own mind? Bu...
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The Unyielding Mind

A world without perception, without paying attention to those around – looks, non-looks, almost bumping into and almost not bumping, too close, not too close – all these things become irrelevant, like the trickle of a wild boar's piss on a thousand-year-old tree. Or perhaps this is wishful thinking. A voice directed toward you is ignored, not out of rudeness but indifference. A complaint, a praise – what does it matter? How does it change your being? Insulted, so what? Praised, so what? Does an...
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The Freedom of Conscious Choice

The strength of the evil is the lack of consciousness, and the weakness of the good is their consciousness. But what if the good could be void of consciousness? What if whether I pursued evil or good would be indifferent to me, and I only chose one or the other because that is what I want to choose? Not because I feel compelled, not because I consider the consequences and the law, but because in this moment, I choose that instead of scheming, I shall create. Instead of making uglier, I shall bea...
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Choices and Competition: It’s All About Perspective

Trump is bad, and Harris is good. Pepsi is good, and Coke is bad. Says who? Dumb people say this, and smart people say that, apparently. Mercedes is better than BMW. Samsung is better than Apple. Apple is better than a PC. The M-16 is better than the AK-47. The SU-57 is better than the F-35. The list goes on. But is it so? Well, it depends on the customer. When I served in the IDF, I was in a West-aligned country close to the U.S., so all our weapons were Western-made. Still, I tried a few time...
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Only You: Strength Beyond Prayers

How hard is it not to call out to a God when in a foxhole? When suffering, when struggling? And then to boil in anger as the answer doesn’t come. As the blade enters your torso, as the warm blood soaks your clothes. As the call for help goes unanswered. How easily do you credit small events as celestial miracles? That car almost hit you, but you were saved by the universe. But then, who gave you the idea to cross the road without looking at that moment, and who put that unusually fast car right...
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Painting the Day

The idea is that you awake from the world of unremembered dreams and create the unfolding day. Most of this day is felt before experienced. Meaning we wake up, and as soon as we open our eyes, we start to feel. What we feel is made of remembering our yesterday and calculating our today. Both are passive and reactive but not proactive. Not realising that today can be seen as a reset, an opportunity to approach life with a fresh perspective—a blank canvas to paint on. And then the brush can use co...
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An Israeli Heartbeat Amidst War

During Russia's invasion of Ukraine, I was in Ukraine. In Kharkiv, 50 km from the border, it is a beautiful city, a remarkable city that is suffering a lot. When the artillery hit the buildings all around, everyone went to the basement. I kept sleeping in my bed, well, because I'm Israeli. I lived in Jerusalem on the 17th floor, and I would watch the rockets from Gaza over the horizon from my balcony as the sirens blared and defence systems engaged while sipping on my coffee or a glass of whisky...
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The Art of Strategic Patience

A key to winning on the battlefield is to give the enemy the illusion that you are everywhere when you are not, to hold back and allow for some losses so that you can strike when the enemy is overextended, tired, too confident, and running out of supplies. There is great strategic benefit in allowing an enemy to enter deep into one’s territory, far away from their border, and keeping them there for a long time as they lose their support lines and confidence. Allowing for this while attacking the...
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Freedom in a World Without Meaning

An obsession that life has meaning. An objective meaning that we can tap into. We can attach ourselves to this meaning or oppose ourselves. There are objective morals, good and bad, and we can choose how much of each we can be part of. And then we can rejoice about luck and shed tears about unfairness. But what if there is no objective meaning or purpose? What if there is no morality? Right or wrong? But what is is only what you choose to be. They'll tell you, but there are consequences for wro...
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The Chain Reaction of Customer Neglect

The customer who no longer feels anyone cares about them is a problem. This customer starts questioning every business relationship. "If so-and-so doesn't care about me, does my bank? Does my ISP? Does my insurance? Does my gym?" And then they look at those relationships: "It takes forever to get through to my Internet Service Provider," "The teller at my bank isn't so friendly," "My gym is overpriced." This spiral commences because one or two companies showed them they don't matter. Quite a rea...
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The True Face of Modernity

What are standards, and who sets them? And why are they important? What is technological advancement without the advancement of the values infrastructure? Why do we mistake “more modern” with “better overall”? Is there perhaps a correlation? Maybe society cannot be more modern without advanced values. One of the symbols of a functional society is a police force. A country without a police force can never be considered modern. Yet does a modern society with Tesla police vehicles signal an advanc...
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The Art of Letting Go: Detachment = Success

There is an important aspect of sales and business that is not discussed or even understood by many: the concept of letting go. If you’re in sales—or forget actual sales—anything that you want to close on. The girl, that car, the deal. You want it so badly, and there’s every reason why you should and will close this deal, whatever it is. Then it just falls apart into tiny little dust particles before your eyes, and you can’t comprehend what’s going on. It’s going against all logic. What the f#ck...
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The Emotional Exchange of Money

In a city of millions, one has but a handful of interactions, usually where some kind of financial transaction takes place. These interactions of few words are filled with silent emotion. It’s rare to exchange money without an exchange of emotions. Depending on who you are, where you come from, how you were raised, and your own insanity, the way you feel about money will vary. The way you feel about earning it will vary, and the way you feel about spending it will vary. I’m not talking about a r...
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Confronting Life's Shadows

What is it that you fear? The dark? Bills? Your spouse? Your boss? The law? The taxman? Dogs? Spiders? I feared sharks for the longest time until I lived in Cape Town, where great whites roamed the beaches. Once they became real, I no longer worried about them as much. To say I no longer feared them would be an exaggeration, because my logic is based on survival chances in an encounter. While a bear, a pack of wolves, or a wild boar I could outrun, outsmart, or perhaps even fight and survive, f...
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The Power of Appreciation: What Customers Truly Want

Growing up, the question that was constant in the mind of young men, teenage boys, and even into adulthood was, "What do women want?" As a teenage boy, it baffles you, but by the time you become a man in his 30s, you just accept the situation of never quite knowing what women want. But lately, I hear the question "What do men want?" a lot, which is an interesting development with a simple answer: to be appreciated. That's all men want. BTW, it's also what women want. Many women think men want ...
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Embracing Aloneness

The more we look for friendships, the lonelier we are. The more we look for family, the lonelier we are. The more we look for success and money, the lonelier we are. These feelings of loneliness that we so define and dread, questioning as part of our inefficiency or lack of value, are only such because of our definition of them. A life without being drained by "friends" and "family" is a better life in every sense. Not having to suffer relatives and their drama, not having to bail out friends f...
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Writing as Solitude: A Creative Journey into Self-Expression

If you're writing for others, it’s no different than taking pictures for others. One might argue: what is writing worth if not for the appreciation of others? But is that what motivated artists to create their great art? Surely, if it was, they failed, as many only reached fame after their deaths. So, is the motivation for posthumous fame? Isn’t that sad? Or what if it’s not about others, but about the self—a desire to express oneself, something to say that must be said for oneself? As an ape t...
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The AI Paradox: Understanding the Hype and Reality

Something to note about technologies that are all the rage is that they're not new technologies. AI has been around since after the Second World War. It was nowhere near as impressive as today, but it was AI. And now it's all the rage because somehow the masses got crazy about it, but also because it's reached an impressive point. However, as with any technology that becomes all the rage, many things that are not AI are attributed to AI. For example, before the AI craze, you'd hear, "It was pho...
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Behind the Mask: The Truth Beneath Existence

There's this expectation to love life. To be positive, grateful no matter what. There's this expectation to be alright and answer with "I'm good," even when you're not. Nobody wants to hear a different story. So then you have this existence where you look around and you're afraid to hate all the things you hate: all the people, all the situations, parts of yourself, the world, and its systems and processes. To be negative is the greatest crime against the shit world we live in, for it's a slap i...
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From Chemicals to Computers

Industry-leading countries in chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and technology were the US, European countries such as Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, and Japan. While Germany and Switzerland were the leaders in the chemicals industry, the US and Japan led in electronics, computers, and the automobile industry. Japan, while not typically the original inventor, had the effective capacity to adapt to US technologies, which Europe mostly did not. Europe tried to be the leader in electronics and computer...
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Comparative Growth: Chemical, Pharmaceutical, and Tech Industries

The chemical and pharmaceutical industries are similar to the tech industry—not so much in when they were formed, but in how they were developed. Chemical and pharmaceutical companies are older and experienced significant growth during the expansion of railroads, canal shipping, and road networks. This growth is particularly evident in Europe, especially in areas like Switzerland (Basel) and Germany (Lörrach) along the Rhine, which witnessed the blossoming of these industries【1】【2】. During the ...
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The Future of Warfare: Navigating the Ethical Landscape of AI

AI is a fascinating topic, creating many new niches in our world, from defence strategy and security AI to business AI, healthcare AI, education AI, financial AI, and ethical AI. The question is not whether future drones will decide on their own to drop a bomb that kills 100 enemies; for sure, these days are coming fast. The question will be who is accountable if these enemies were civilians? If no human action took place, where does the investigation start, and where does the court martial end?...
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Reflections on Life's Path

We know life is finite, but we don't accept it. And if we do accept it, then we don't address it. Many don't have life insurance—then again, why would you? The longer you live, the more expensive it gets, and if you live too long, it expires. We don’t write wills—again, why would we? Who deserves our treasures if we have any? Looking towards future generations like a good Japanese enterprise is rare, especially since we don’t want to look ahead to the next fifty years. Besides, look how much li...
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Living Beyond Boundaries

Sunday is a weekend day or a weekday. For me, being Israeli, it's the first day of the week, especially since I own a business in Israel and the calls and orders start coming in. BUT because I was born in Europe and now live in Europe, it was also always a partial weekend day. So to accept it as a full working day doesn't jive with me. So it ends up being a mixed day of work and pleasure. If you know me, you can argue that every day of the week is a mix of work and pleasure for me, which I guess...
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From Isolation to Intervention

While the US was a neutral and isolationist country during the beginning of WW2, after Great Britain, Germany, and Italy were already at war, but before Russia and Germany were at war, there was already an interest in creating a world free of aggression. This meant the countries that tended to show aggression—such as Germany, Italy, and Japan—would not be allowed to rearm. It was not from a perspective of punishment but more from the perspective that if the world is at peace, it is better for tr...
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Discipline and Freedom

Discipline sounds so brutal and violent. Sounds like a father who beat his kids too hard. Perhaps with his belt or a stick. It sounds like disciplinary action and getting into trouble. It sounds like an insult: "You're so not disciplined, you worthless piece of shit." Then, if you served in the military, it sounds like the military. So freedom sounds like the opposite of discipline—doing what you want whenever you want. Yet, as long as we live in society, we never truly do what we want and are ...
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