faceh
8hr ago
That's like saying I'd have lost money betting on electric cars because most of them have been massive failures.
But if you put $10,000 in Tesla stock at its high in 2016, it'd be worth (approximately) $250,000 today. Not bad ten year turnaround, and probably a big enough win to make up for a dozen other losses.
Granted, a lot of that is due to Quantitative easing pumping ALL stocks like crazy in that time.
One of the biggest 'regrets' I carry is NOT putting at least a few thousand dollars worth of excess student loan money into Tesla circa 2013, actually.
My point is that as soon as it became clear that AI was now becoming a serious field with possible industrial application, I should have started looking at companies that would stand to be lead players.
But lo, I tried being financially responsible.
faceh
8hr ago
The night Trump won his election is indelibly engraved in my head. Driving home from work expecting to wake up in Hillary land, then suddenly driving over to my buddy's house to drink and laugh at the intrinsic ridiculousness of what we were observing. The moment he won Florida was when it kicked in as "wow this is real."
This video encompasses the feeling well.
The night he won it a second time is also burned in there but not quite as deeply.
I don't even remember what I was doing the night Biden 'won.'
Now President Trump is just a facet of reality. I can't imagine the timeline without him.
Wild ride indeed.
faceh
8hr ago
The idea of "otherwise unremarkable thing that we'd have no reason to consider anomalous was actually vitally important to the sanctity of our entire planet" is always a funny trope to me when it surfaces in fiction.
Harambe is definitely a real 'canon event' for a certain generation of people.
All major events after that point have felt very 'unreal' and usually gets twisted to someone's agenda right away.
It is also one of the last times we had a major cultural event that virtually everyone, of every ideology, agreed on the valence of, and didn't turn political. Everyone agreed the death of the gorilla was tragic and likely unneeded, a result of human irresponsibility.
It didn't trigger a gender discourse (although the "dicks out for Harambe" meme got people some errant looks), it wasn't co-opted as a weapon against political opponents, there were no racial undertones, it was just half-sincere meming about a low-level tragedy. I can't off the top of my head think of any recent events like this which weren't immediately converted to culture war fodder.
I dunno if that gorilla was cosmically important, but as a marker of the boundary between one cultural era into another, it works extremely well.
The only other event I'd offer as a marker of passing from one epoch to the other, also from 2016, was Alphago beating Lee Sedol. That one actually DID portend a massive sea change, and if I had been a bit smarter/braver/wealthier around that time, I could have made a lot of money placing bets on future AI development.
By comparison, there is no way I know of anyone could have traded on the death of Harambe to make a real profit.
faceh
5d ago
How are most super-rich guys even meeting unattended barely-legal women and getting into a realistic trajectory to form a relationship?
As far as I understand it, they can literally just message them on Instagram.
Likewise, yacht girls are a thing.
Ironically, I think one reason Epstein fell out of favor was... his services became way less valuable as the internet made it way simpler to find young girls to date and predate.
Part of the value of such a guy was simply being the Schelling point before the internet created new ones.
faceh
5d ago
See,
last time I discussed this point, I mentioned that the data mostly relies on age gaps of MARRIED couples.
I made this point:
Bill Belichik is not married.
Leonardo Dicaprio is not married.
Nor Tobey Macguire.
Nor Anthony Keidis
Nor Scooter Braun, who gets to motorboat Sydney Sweeney.
Nicholas Cage is if we want a minor counterexample.
This is actually what I mean when I say the institution that expects everyone to be monogamous has been hollowed out.
There is zero impetus for a high status male to get married if he doesn't want to.
That's my take on it.
There are MANY, MANY things that someone who is top 1% in status (by whatever means they came into it) can just 'get away' with that is likely to wreck someone who attempts it while even slightly outside that top tier.
Bill Belichek can date a woman who could be his granddaughter (Hugh Hefner also got away with this). Elon can sire kids with multiple women he is not married to.
I mentioned a while back that there seem to be two main stable social norms around human mating.
Either everyone is held to monogamous standards (but we expect people to fail), or nobody is... but this means top tier guys collect a harem and lower tier guys duke it out over the remains.
We're in a very uncomfortable transitory period where both sort of exist simultaneously but the exceptions that have been carved out are causing the foundations of the former to crumble in a way that may take it out entirely. Maybe already has.
This can indeed apply to women too. Madonna gets a boy toy. Beyonce sings a ballad for single ladies the same year she got married to an extremely wealthy man herself. Alex Cooper gets celebrity ladies to admit to ridiculous beliefs and behaviors that, were it a (lower status) male were saying it would sound almost psychopathic. Which, it turns out, is basically what the Fresh and Fit Podcast gets tarred with, rightly or wrongly.
Alex Cooper also gets her happy marriage regardless since she's attractive, wealthy, and now a celebrity in her own right.
This whole topic gets perilously close to my rant on elite accountability. Elites face few consequences for encouraging behaviors in the lower classes that lead to horrific outcomes, and use their status to achieve the outcomes they want regardless of their own misdeeds.
faceh
11d ago
I mean, you just said it. "Peacetime may turn into war quite suddenly."
You don't know precisely when you might need your standing army. So the threat is also uncertain, but when it arrives, it is immediate.
I can't easily imagine a scenario where there's some clear and present need to start pumping out kids to deal with population shortfall. Its always going to be some abstract risk in the future... there's no enemy that can choose to attack at any time that you're hedging against.
Its specifically this factor that makes the problem pernicious.
Note, I'm not ethically in favor of conscription, either.
faceh
11d ago
And therein lies the rub.
We used to have semi-distributed reputation/surveillance networks that could monitor behavior and punish egregious instances of it. It was clearly less than perfect, yet whisper networks and informal ostracizing miscreants was able to police both genders' behavior without needing a central arbiter to make these determinations.
Phones took a lot of these things out of the public eye and then dating apps made it much simpler to pick up people outside your social network thus not subject to the reprisals for bad behavior.
faceh
11d ago
Yes, but take that argument to its logical conclusion, I'd say that the people who seek out matchmaker assistance are likely the most desperate and thus more susceptible to being manipulated.
Which is to say, they're a ripe target for scamming. So I suspect matchmakers are dependent on such folks for maintaining business.
faceh
11d ago
Yes there's mandatory military service in a number of countries, some of whom haven't been to war in a long time.
But I note that "service during peacetime", BY DEFINITION, has far lower risk of death, so the costs/consequences are much less severe for the males involved anyway.
faceh
11d ago
I'm not sure what you're saying.
Society doesn't condone them? It surely doesn't condone Clavicular either at this juncture.
There's certainly subcultures that push each of the practices.
The majority of women's looksmaxxing attempts do not extend to the kind of dangerous practices that Clav encourages men to do.
Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
Anorexia Nervosa is often brought up as a result of body dysphoria and mostly impacts women.
A lady in my local area got arrested and made international headlines for Injecting fix-a-flat into womens' buttocks 15 years ago.
The popular "Brazillian Butt Lift" procedure can lead to literal fat necrosis and associated smell. In fact, in searching up that article I just learned that they're allegedly one of the most dangerous procedures around, death rates around 1 in 4000 or worse????
Probably an honorable mention about tanning beds and skin cancer.
There was in fact a recent, award winning horror film about the implications of womens' constant drive for maintaining beauty. The titular substance is a dangerous drug.
But if you want max irony, the 'Body Positivity/fat acceptance' trend, which results from the insistence that you can be beautiful at any size (but only if you're a woman) has seen quite a number of its top advocates die while arguing against the need to pursue standard beauty practices. So in a way, failure to push women to pursue beauty is also getting them killed.
Steroid and other drug use has been offing bodybuilders for decades now (RIP Zyzz), so its a bit hard for me to see Clavicular's regimen as anything but a tiny iteration off pre-existing practices, and ironically probably more practical for the average guy.
faceh
11d ago
The main ethical difference I can see between conscription and 'forced' childrearing is the immediacy of the consequences and the duration of the commitment.
If a nation is faced with an invading force or a war over critical resources and can't front enough manpower into the fight, they will very likely cease to exist. So the country, or perhaps the state the governs it, if it considers preservation of its people a priority, has a strong basis for forcibly recruiting men if there's insufficient volunteers. "If we don't make you fight, then we're all going to die."
By comparison, if women start abandoning or delaying the childbearing role, there's no immediate danger, you won't even feel the pinch for decades. There's no enemy that will march over you in the end. And likewise, conscripting them doesn't mean sending them to a distant battlefield to fight on a frontline. They would continue to exist in your society, living fairly normal lives for the 20+ years it takes to raise all those kids.
Plus, the Faustian bargain it presents has some upsides: more women in the workforce means more economic productivity, and more money to spend on luxuries. And hell, fold sexual revolution into the deal and you get more sex for pleasure, with fewer duties tied to it, and able to optimize the activity for things other than procreation.
By the time anyone asks "wait, who is raising the next generation to carry us into the future" you've already reconfigured your whole economy around other pursuits.
So there's a legitimate question: if the threat is not immediate, at what point are you actually justified in pressing women into service? How dire must things appear? How much foresight are you allowed to use?
And something small to consider: if some men will go to pretty serious lengths to get out of a draft, what might women do to render themselves ineligible as brood mares?
faceh
12d ago
I think it is at least fair to define "corruption" as something that explicitly involves using one's political authority, which the people 'entrusted' to you, for personal enrichment in a way that is actively detrimental to your constituency. Which differentiates it from 'merely' "shady business practices" that one would find in the private sector.
I don't think anyone can truly level 'corruption' charges at politicians or government officials who publish tell-all books. But there are clearly ways to use that as an avenue for corruption.
And when it comes to the insider trading, I'm not sure I'd call it 'corrupt' to make trades on your own investment account when you know legislation has passed that will likely cause market movements in a certain direction. I WOULD call it corrupt to influence the passage of legislation specifically to improve your own portfolio.
Maybe we can't disentangle those enough to matter.
Now, I'm less tolerant of the practice of "hey donate X million dollars to my family's non-profit org and I'll make some solid efforts to get that favorable bill passed."
Trump sort of skirts this definition at times because he clearly has his personal/business identity... which is 'separate' from his political identity. But he certainly borrows the aura from his political authority as a means of boosting his business interests.
Here's a few actions of his that I could consider corrupt:
- Accepting funds or favors, even indirectly, in exchange for handing out Pardons.
(But I remember Biden's pardon and commutation spree in his last weeks in office, so there's some broader context to consider)
-
Directing government contracts to Friends or family members in a way that explicitly skips the normal process and/or inflates the costs.
-
Using Governmental agencies to prosecute business rivals or silence otherwise lawful critics.
What's kind of funny is that Trump does like to initiate lawfare against his opponents, but he more often just sues them like any private citizen would instead of getting some random gov't agency to go after the targets of his ire.
What sort of actions has he taken that might fit well with such a list?
faceh
12d ago
The lack of ANY kind of reputation system built into the apps... and the ad hoc attempts to create one anyway (remember the Tea app?) gives away problem, yeah.
The app companies don't want to spend money to build up the whole system that would be required to litigate whether someone who didn't show up for a date had a valid excuse or whether this guy was stringing multiple women along with no intent to commit.
And they probably correctly presume that such a system would, itself, get gamed by certain parties to gain advantages in the app. But they do not admit that people are already gaming the hell out of the existing structure of the apps to everyone's detriment.
faceh
12d ago
Yep.
I optimized for a world where you generally had pre-selection of the people you dated because you knew them via your own social circles already.
Then I adjusted for the world where, okay, you don't know them, but you can at least consciously target your efforts towards people you expect you'd get along with and ignore the rest.
But the current world there's no way to optimize when all the information/feedback you'd need to actually adjust your approach is locked in the black box of the app, and you absolutely CANNOT trust women to accurately explain what appeals to them.
faceh
12d ago
The fact is that almost every matchmaker I can find with a public-facing profile isn't trumpeting their success rate from the rooftops. And that is a strong signal. Or anti-signal.
If you were able to get even 50% of your clients married within a year of working with you, that would be FANTASTIC. I'd write a check for $10k on the spot.
There's no possible excuse for:
A) not tracking that stat
B) Not disclosing it (it certainly isn't hurting your clients' interests)
Strangely, they never respond when I point out this lack of transparency.
the girl essentially broke it off saying that this was their last rodeo before they finally went monogamous with a guy they'd been seeing for 2-3 months and that situation is unnavigable without somebody getting blindsided.
Relatively recently I hit it off with a girl I met in person. Got her number, exchanged texts, had a good rapport going which included her sending 'good morning' messages. Which I personally thought was a little forward, but I could roll with it.
Just shy of three weeks into the conversation, on Valentines Day, she just drops, out of nowhere, that she has a boyfriend who was taking her out and had got her flowers, the whole shebang. Not a word of this breathed beforehand.
This is the sort of thing that would have spun me for a massive loop a few years ago. Now, as you say, its sort of unsurprising to find out that you were being held in the back pocket while some other player was being auditioned. Even so, this one felt very '0 to 100 in 5 seconds' in terms of reveals. I can't compete effectively if I don't have any idea what the competition even is.
People using others as instruments for their own emotional fulfillment whilst knowing there's no intent to proceed further is hands-down the worst behavior one encounters regularly out there these days.
As of about two weeks ago they broke up and she's giving off signs of spiraling.
Not too sure what to make of that.
faceh
12d ago
Several of my good friends have recently landed LTRs via friend-of-friends or, in one case, a former co-worker.
But it is indeed a risk that can blow up the larger friend group.
There's still the salient issue of actually catching one of these people when they're actually single, the window is still rather small.
And that guy who hangs around the friend group, pining after one of the other members, lying in wait for her current relationship to fail is kind of a wretched state of being.
faceh
12d ago
Add on that these guys get the most practice at identifying the women who are vulnerable to this approach and thus the most skill at correctly timing and exploiting the opening.
They become adept at hunting a particularized type of prey, and as long as that prey is around in sufficient numbers, will find regular success, even if they'd strike out with 90% of other women 99% of the time.
faceh
12d ago
It'd be trivially easy to provide some links so we can make an objective comparison over some directly comparable figures for the 'corruption' that has occurred 'in our lifetime.'
I bet an LLM could put together the data in <5 minutes.
Is there a reason you don't even do that sort of effort when you seemingly have such a passionate belief in the claim?
Just wondering.
There are First Amendment issues, but they are GREATLY reduced in the Business sphere.
If banning the apps is off the table, my proposal would be to force every app to disclose their 'success rates.' In bold print. Every time you click into the app.
"Here's the % of our male users who get matches. Here's the % who actually get dates. Here's the % who ended up in relationships with people they met on the app."
This should really be a basic consumer protection practice. If you're paying for some special membership or feature that is alleged to increase your chances, you should be entitled to know what your baseline chances are.
I laugh every time I read Hinge saying "Sending a rose is 2x more likely to result in a date!"
TWO TIMES WHAT? 2 x 1% is not a good deal. You are denying me relevant information in order to fool me into parting with my money.
With Casino games, there's at least the requirement that the games be 'fair' and post their objective odds so players can know what they're getting into.
If you're gamifying the dating game, posting odds seems like the least you can do.
faceh
12d ago
I'm sorry to hear that you're struggling. Dating is genuinely hard these days, and I'm not denying that -- I just think that the imputation of active malice to women is factually incorrect.
hahaha I don't impute malice, honestly.
But it seems objectively undeniable that women are not great at selecting for men who will commit to them long term, and many of them are ignorant of their own role in their repeated failures to secure commitment (e.g. fleeing the moment a guy seems to be willing to commit).
The whole thing about anxious, avoidant, dismissive, its usually based in some psychological issues that have gone uncorrected. By and large I sympathize with women who are struggling due to these mental illnesses after we've torn down the framework that might have guided them to either get the help they need or at least manage to find a man who can tolerate their eccentricity and encourage healing.
I think the average woman really needs some external pressure to actually pick and 'settle' on a guy and someone who can help her effectively vet and filter the guys.
Normally this would be her family, esp. her father.
The apps usurped this role... while not actually fulfilling the aforementioned requirement. They do NOT pressure women to settle (the opposite: "your next swipe might reveal prince charming! keep trying!") and they do a horrendous job filtering, and honestly give more advantages to the sociopathic males than the normal ones.
I happily and squarely blame those who maintain these apps for the conditions we find ourselves in, but I do point out that our unwillingness to do anything that might upset or displease women as a class as to why we're stuck here.
In Lilo and Stitch the only reason they can't gas the whole planet to get at Stitch is because they consider Mosquitos an endangered species.
It'd be absolutely MASSIVE irony IRL if we manage to genocide mosquitos and in turn this gives aliens the clearance to finally genocide us.
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