FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
And every gimmick hungry yob
Digging gold from rock n roll
Grabs the mic to tell us
he'll die before he's sold
But I believe in this
And it's been tested by research
He who fucks nuns
Will later join the church
User ID: 195
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1hr ago
I thought about that, but I too felt like it was a bit of a reach!
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1hr ago
Is it just me or is this scale a bit tilted?
There seems to be a slippery equivalence being drawn between a market being tilted, and it theoretically being easier to do abc than to do xyz. Strictly speaking, these things are unrelated. We have had this discussion before
To summarize:
@faceh contended that there were about one million American women who met the criteria he considered marriageable: Single and looking (of course). Cishet, and thus not LGBT identified. Not ‘obese.’ Not a mother already. No ‘acute’ mental illness. No STI. Less than $50,000 in student loan debt. 5 or fewer sex partners (‘bodies’). Under age 30. Therefore there aren't enough good women for all the men.
I countered that there were approximately 617,000 American men under 40 meet all these specified criteria: Single, Earning at least $65,000 annually, No felony convictions, Exercise at least once a week, Attend religious services at least once a month, Have not used drugs other than marijuana in the past year, Not classified as alcohol dependent. Therefore, there aren't nearly enough good men for even that small number of women.
I picked 65k because it's about what you could make as a Cop/Teacher, or a forklift operator at a local warehouse that's always putting up billboards for workers if you pick up a little overtime. Quite simply, I have trouble caring about the sexual outcomes of men who fall below the standard where they could reasonably become a cop, teacher, or forklift operator. Those are people who are always, throughout history, going to have to accept substandard outcomes.
Now you can look at it in terms of ease of doing ABC vs XYZ, and say that women don't have to do anything to achieve most of their standards. The female standards Faceh set were mostly of the negative variety. Don't sleep with anyone, don't eat too much, don't get into debt, don't get too old before you find a man. While the male standards I set were mostly active and positive: go to church, workout, get a decent full time job. So it is reasonable to argue that women have it easier in a sense. But frankly, I find it easier to lift weights than I find it not to eat Oreos. And I would find it infinitely easier to get a job at the local PD than I would to be "agreeable and submissive" to some of you chuckleheads.
Regardless of the overall market, it's not actually hard for an individual man to tilt the market in his favor. The vast majority of people might be unfuckable, but you don't have to fuck them. If you get your life together as a young man, you will be fine in the dating market, it will very quickly be tilted in your favor and not hers.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1hr ago
This is a terrible, infantile idea.
The idea feels like sci-fi because you're so used to it, imagining ads gone feels like asking to outlaw gravity. But humanity had been free of current forms of advertising for 99.9% of its existence. Word-of-mouth and community networks worked just fine. First-party websites and online communities would now improve on that.
This is so blatantly untrue that it's hard to take the rest of the essay seriously. Advertising appears with the newspaper. The first paid newspaper advertisement in American history was in 1704 in Boston, it is literally older than the United States of America. Zero research was done going into this, just a whiny infant complaining about advertising that could be easily avoided.
Why do I want this? ... The obvious reasons: ads are annoying and obnoxious and degrade the general experience of the web.
There's not going to BE any general experience of the web you stupid slut.
The entire general experience of the web is built around advertising. An entirely paid model of web usage is not something we've ever really seen. Note that I don't include a model that is built primarily around free-riding on government/university research dollars, like the early internet. Nor a model that is built around the millennial lifestyle subsidy like current Substack or ChatGPT, where the free infrastructure is funded by VC money with the expectation of later exploitation. All that's left after you remove those are hobbies or charity, like TheMotte or Wikipedia, which probably can't exist without the infrastructure built by the advertising-funded products anyway.
Moreover, on the web or not, you are asking for every ad you are ever shown, other than billboards I guess. Libraries exist! Physical media can be borrowed from them, and you would have more media than you would ever be able to consume in fifteen lifetimes, and never see a single ad beyond a flier for the knitting circle. Yet nobody who complains about advertising does that. If ads on youtube offended people, they could pay for youtube premium, but they mostly don't. If ads on twitter offended people, they could pay for whatever it is Elon is calling it now. They mostly don't. Why not? The ad-supported Kindle is $20 cheaper than the ad free one, the ad-supported model outsells the ad-free version. And, of course, physical media exists, you could purchase movies on DVD and books at bookstores and you would have more than enough content for the rest of your life, but people don't do that. Because people are more than willing to accept the cost of advertising to get free-to-them, or even just reduced price, content. There is no circumstance in which you are forced to watch ads, in every case you are choosing to consume content that would not be available without advertising to support it, or you are choosing to consume it through a medium that is supported by ads. The revealed preference is that people don't care about ads.
The only real exception that occurs to me is sports, which are impossible to watch without seeing ads. American sports like the NFL and MLB are shown with ads in the broadcast, while racecars and MMA fighters and soccer teams give no option to skip ads as they are on the competitors themselves! But, of course, without those ads we wouldn't have those competitions at those levels. Without advertising, I wouldn't be able to get the game on the radio or OTA TV, I'd have to go PPV, which I would not do. Without sponsor dollars, MMA fighters wouldn't be able to train to the level that they have pushed the sport. The ecosystem would be impossible. The same, of course, applies to things like local radio news: no traffic on the twos without Chevy dealers BLOWING OUT THEIR INVENTORY. Well, I guess we'd still have NPR, that bastion of politically neutral fact-finding...
Which is the real point, advertising in media is a good thing because it supports neutral media motivated purely by capitalism. When we mourn the decline of the politically-neutral American local newspaper, we are too stupid to realize what we are mourning is mostly the decline of newspaper advertising. Time was, you needed the newspaper to find out basic facts about the world. Movie times, church schedules, the weather. Every responsible American needed access to a newspaper, which drove mass subscriptions, which made advertising in the newspaper profitable, which funded investigative journalism and reporting. And because the goal was to sell ads, newspapers wanted the broadest reach possible, Republicans buy sneakers too. Once the advertising model breaks down, you get the modern newspaper industry. Local papers lack any but the most rudimentary reporting, while national papers like the New York Times cater to subscriber biases and lose even the pretense of neutrality. Substack, again, suffers from this: while an occasional gem might appear in the muck, almost every substack author becomes captured by his audience, forced to cater to their whims. So many interesting bloggers or writers become increasingly less interesting as they cater to their audiences' whims. In a world without advertising, we are at the mercy of subscribers and their biases.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
16hr ago
I question the degree to which Trump has the ability to bequeath his support to a chosen successor. He's had mixed success as an endorser of candidates. Especially if he is himself diminished in any way.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
16hr ago
The two flavors of senility: fading into the background, and using anger to cover up not really understanding what's going on. Avoid saying anything coherent so nobody can tell that you couldn't hear what anyone said, or insist angrily that you are correct and force everyone around you to accommodate because it's awkward to tell grandpa he's wrong.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
16hr ago
With most rules of sportsmanship or unwritten rules, the question is who has escalation dominance on the field. People rarely ask this question well.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
19hr ago
Embarrassing is embarrassing for me to spell.
This effects? affects? effects? IMPACTS my willingness to use the word in writing.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
19hr ago
Just seems like my desire to put away money for 35 years from now versus making memories with family and friends now has started to decline.
I think to answer this question would require significantly more information regarding what the concrete choices you are thinking about are.
My life is set up in such a way that there is very little that I would spend significantly more money on were I spending freely or if I came into a windfall. Like Hercule Poirot, I have enough money for both my needs and my caprices. I don't particularly want anything I can't afford, the odd luxury goods that I theoretically could purchase vaguely disgust me as too extravagant anyway. I have trouble identifying a marginal "live for today" spend I would make if I valued today higher than 30 years from now. If anything I could imagine putting in less time on earning money, but I like my work and wouldn't reduce it given the option.
So like, what are we talking about here? Flying out to visit family more? Going on a vacation? Buying a boat? I don't think the decision is meaningful in the abstract, only in concrete details.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
19hr ago
The devil is in the enforcement, as ever.
If there's a huge problem with outsourcing illegal-intensive labor to Dodgy Contractor Inc, it's making things fairly simple: target all the dodgy staffing agencies. In theory like 99% of the work is already done to make it impossible to earn an income in this country without the government being aware of it. And that's what frustrates a lot of people about illegal immigration, even those who are pro-immigration: that the government doesn't use the information and powers that it has to enforce the laws that are on the books.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
23hr ago
The contractor. This isn't a hard question.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Definitely pretty bad. In WWII, US Submarines were by far the worst deal in the US military for KIA. Worse than infantry, worse than bomber crews.
But in terms of the bravery required, it feels like it would be different and probably easier (for me) in nature. You get on the sub, and that's it, relatively little personal courage required after that. You'll have to act under pressure, of course, but no moreso than anywhere else in combat. Compared to sleeping in a foxhole under fire, day after day, seeing your friends wounded and killed and knowing you might be next. Jumping up to run into a bullet, over and over, seems much harder than "hope the ship doesn't sink."
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
The difference between Star Wars and Dracula is partly that Dracula long ago passed through the public domain middle ground, where Dracula fans have to be able to distinguish what they think of as "Dracula" from what they ignore. There is no canonical Dracula lore. Or consider the Trojan War: Homer is pretty much required, but the vast amount of material in the Matter of Troy isn't considered equal, or even sorted through. Every author and every reader picks and chooses how they want the story to go.
Star Wars has for a long time maintained that everything that appeared on screen is the business of Star Wars fans. Sure the novellas or the comics or whatever might be iffy or unimportant, but if it was on the big screen it was legit. Now we're breaking that boundary, you can be a "real" star wars fan without caring about any of that.
This in turn leaves the fan to build their own universe. Which is rapidly going to become the case for everything as AI makes it increasingly possible to churn out infinite content.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
This Christmas marked a sad milestone in AI for me: I heard a Frank Sinatra song on youtube (I Guess I'll Have to Change My Plan ) and I'd never heard it before and got suspicious that it was some kind of AI fake in the style of Sinatra. The lyrics to the song are just odd enough that I thought it must be an LLM attempt to combine concepts from the American Songbook genre to produce something that sounded like it if you didn't look hard enough. "I've lost the only girl that I've found" is sort of odd, and what's with the blue pajamas?
But no, it's a totally legit songbook work from an Adirondacks campfire song to a broadway show in 1927 to a Fred Astaire film. But the joy of discovering that was ruined, because I was too busy worrying if I was a dope falling for AI slop.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
Start doing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. It's got everything for the midlife crisis male:
-- You, too, can be 34 in a karate class. Takes you back to being a kid, with coaches to yell at you for doing things wrong, bullies who you resent for being dumber yet bigger and meaner than you, meaningless make work that you put yourself through because you are a teacher's pet, and the joy of actually getting good at something meaningful. You'll never want to tell anyone about it, for fear of seeming lame, so it's a fun personal secret.
-- Much like being a sports fan is gambling a bit of your happiness on the birds every weekend, BJJ is gambling a bit of your happiness on your own performance every week on the mat. Every round is a little stake of a little bit of my sense of self worth, and when it goes badly I'm down about it; but when it goes well I'm up like nothing else, the feeling of defeating a resisting man in the most clear way possible. The midlife crisis corporate job blues are, largely, about the lack of highs and lows, the feeling that one's life is flattening out. BJJ will, especially in the first year or so, deliver big wins and big losses. I can't tell anyone about the wins and losses, outside of my anonymous internet friends, because I'm 34 in a karate class and I'm just a new guy in some strip mall gym in small town PA, it would be uncouth to talk about. But man, the first time I tapped an opponent, it carried me through another month of training. Same when I started beating my best friend who started at the same time, the first time I tapped a blue belt, the first time I tapped my coach. I can remember distinctly things like hitting a shoulder crunch and the coach saying "wow that was a beautiful sweep," or just the first time I really nailed an arm drag; and embarrassing things like the first time I rolled with The Spider and he dominated me so badly I cardio tapped, or when the Gorilla mother's milked me and I wanted to ragequit on the day. BJJ provides you with something to make the days seem less same-y.
-- It gives you an aesthetic excuse for why you shave your head. Or, if your midlife crisis rolls in that direction, why you get tattoos.
-- It can be done with kids, as they grow up. My coach basically started the gym because his son came up in the hobby to the point where he was competing nationally constantly, and if it was already taking over their lives he might as well make a little money. It ages well, until your kid is full grown, you can play a tricky old-man-strength bottom half game against him even if he is better than you pound-for-pound.
-- It's relatively low cost, as good midlife crisis hobbies go. Classes where I am run $120/month for unlimited attendance, if I had the time and didn't injure myself I could go every day, even multiple times a day. The equipment is basically just the clothing, and even if you buy all specialized stuff you're only talking about maybe $300 to start and another $100 a year. You can, of course, spend a ton of money on ugly rashguards, competition entry fees, seminars, instructionals, private lessons. But the cost of the classes and equipment is the tires for a sports car or a good road bike or a set of golf clubs, so as midlife crises go you're getting off cheap.
-- Injuries. You'll come to a meeting with a black eye, or mysterious forearm bruises, or eight stitches on your lip which leave a permanent Mensur scar. Actually, some of that's just me, I have a very punchable face. But yesterday I got slammed at the end of a wrestling class and tweaked my neck badly, and for a day or two I'm going to feel like a complete idiot for getting involved in this, but Monday I'll probably feel good enough to go back to class and I'll want revenge, that fucking beardo wrestler is getting triangled and kimura'd all round. Another way to add drama to your life.
-- Community. I'm not going to sit here and write a bit about it, but you'll make friends instantly. And in all likelihood you'll get to be The Nerd again, not a nerd but The Nerd.
Other than that. Road bicycling is popular around me, my wife joked that last summer I just hit the middle-age curve and needed to ride my bike 100 miles, it combines a smaller part of the equipment consciousness of car racing with the cardio of jogging. Hunting is good down by you, right? Another primal feeling of killing and skinning your own, and you get the freezer full of venison out of it. Whitewater depends heavily on your access, but of all the XTREME sports it probably delivers the best thrills:training/fitness ratio. Powerlifting probably has the oldest guys setting PRs and world records, so for longevity it can't be beat.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
Scott used to write posts about how to positively manage the seething jealousy one feels while one's poly partner is out on a date. He's post-shame on personal topics.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
This is tremendously quality content.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
Well, figure if you were top 5% in size/muscle when you were 15, then there were nineteen other fifteen year olds in Finland who looked at you and thought to themselves "Wow, that guy is bigger and stronger than me, I'm scrawny and weak!" It's an ordinal value, not an absolute one, so people are comparing themselves to others, and disproportionately everyone will compare themselves to the apex.
People tend to form durable internal identities during their youth, I would say 15 years old is pretty typical. Almost every male, whether you work out during that time or not, is smaller and scrawnier and weaker than he will be later, so at the time he is forming his internal sense of himself, he perceives the world that way. The typical fifteen year old boy compares himself to his father, he is smaller and weaker than his father. If he's not on a sports team, he is likely smaller and weaker than the kids who are on a sports team; if he is on a sports team, at 15 he is likely smaller and weaker than the older kids he plays with on the same team or at the same club. If a teenage boy has a job, he is likely working with adult men who are bigger and stronger than he is.
People don't tend to update those internal identities over time as quickly or as thoroughly as we ought to. For me, I went from rowing at 155# freshman year of college to getting into lifting and weighing around 195-205# every year since graduation, but my identity formed when I still thought of myself as smaller than that, and it takes conscious effort to think of myself as a heavyweight.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
Why can Hispanics do it but whites can't? I'm trying to parse what this even means.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
Without even going into the whole 'the parents were born into more typical households in a better socialized environment whilst the children got born into the internet era with permissive enlightened avant garde parents' aspect.
That's the core thing to go into though. My grandmother was left handed, until the nuns beat it out of her.
A weirdo kid who is taught to not-be-weird and raised in a culture where weirdness is punished might not turn out "normal" but will just be a little weird. A weirdo kid who is raised in a cultural setting that doesn't just allow him to be weird, but actively honors the weirdos around him as the highest examples of humanity, will cultivate his weirdness and become even weirder.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
When do you think we should start taking the news coming out of Iran seriously? What likely leading indicators will we see when things start getting serious for the regime?
I feel like we get the "Iranian protests threaten regime" news cycle periodically, but I have trouble trying to figure out what to trust. We'll of course get biased interpretations, but what concrete facts will tell us when to start thinking big?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
Absolutely. It's the elephant and the stake in the ground. It's hard for people to understand that they've grown and changed since high school.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
My impression is that historical nobility had a lot of status anxiety too! Not just status, but plain finances to boot.
Our impression of historical stability for noble families is also heavily influenced by lying. Dishonesty and outright fraud have always been key elements of creating lineage stories. Cutting both ways!
The ancient frequency of Moses/Oedipus/Cyrus (Herodotus rather than Xenophon)/Arthur sword-in-the-stone myths likely reflects a way to incorporate peasant "risers" into existing lineages. The Hapsburgs were notorious for inventing spurious links to Caesar or Charlemagne. This occurred at lower, and less notable, levels of nobility all the time. A sufficiently rich peasant found a way to claim descent from so and so, and with the right palms greased the write documents were "verified" and no more peasant. I similarly roll my eyes at the western credulity given to claims by Oriental families to have lineages dating back before our earliest written documents, but without evidence to back it up. Accounts of nobility were always historically shaky in poorly documented societies with weak record keeping.
We now, of course, are so often treated to the opposite in America, false middle class consciousness. Republican family origin stories where dad was a "small business owner" (third generation multi-millionaire) and I worked my way through college (interned with a family friend's finance company); or the international student version where my parents were refugees (oligarchs who fled when their patron was ousted in a coup).
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
You see the same dynamic in fitness hobbies. Genetic advantages are obvious to everyone, for the other guys who are bigger and stronger, but most guys will tell you that they themselves have mediocre genetics and that all their accomplishments are the result of hard work. Related, I suppose, to the Fundamental Attribution Error: actions by others reflect innate traits, actions we take reflect contingent situations and decisions. I'm in good shape because I put in so much work, fat people and weak people and slow people just need to put the work in.
In my BJJ gym, I've noticed it extends to the point that guys nearly all perceive themselves to be smaller than they really are. The big guys think they are closer to normal, the median guys think they are small, the little guys think they are tiny. When a bigger guy, often the same size, wins the smaller guy, often the same size, he writes it off as "He's bigger than me I never stood a chance" and doesn't think the bigger guy worked harder than him at training. When a bigger guy beats a smaller guy, he thinks of it as his hard work and skill that made him better.
I'm vulnerable to this error myself, I think of myself as an average size guy, then I'm reading boxing history and most of the Heavyweight Champions before the 60s were my size or smaller, hell even Tyson in his prime was just a few pounds heavier and an inch shorter. At my whiniest, I've been known to complain that weight classes are stupid and it should be height classes, weight is a decision only height is innate. Why should the purple belt benefit from years of experience and that's ok, but years of hard work in the weight room are an unfair advantage?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
My mother and I recently visited a memorial to WWII submariners, and my mother looked at the list of lost ships and their crew numbers and said wow how on earth did you convince anyone to get on a submarine? And I pointed out that submarine service isn't SO bad, because for the most part you either sink or you don't.
You're much less likely to get grievously wounded, disfigured, crippled than you would be in the infantry. You aren't crouching in a trench in perpetual terror for months. Your moments of danger are intense but they last mere hours, and then generally you're dead or you aren't. Not a bad deal as war goes.
Yeah I can sit and puzzle it out, but when I'm writing quickly I stall thinking about it and then just use a different word entirely to keep momentum going.
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