100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
No bio...
User ID: 2039
I've played a vanishingly small amount of poker in my life
It shows!
the people who are trying to track your strategy think of you as more volatile.
If they're actually "tracking your strategy" this will have the opposite of the intended effect. They will simply not play when you are in a hand because the variance is too high. Happens all the time with newer players playing at a casino. They come in, sit down all fast and loose, every veteran at the table can see it a mile a while. What happens on every hand? If the new guy leads a bet ... fold,fold,fold,fold,fold. You just wait them out. Eventually, they get bored (quite quickly, actually) because there is "no action at this table!"
Then the adults can get back to grown folks style poker.
Edit:
The scene in Rounders where all of them gang up on the tourists is fairly accurate. It's not that they actually conspire with gestures or what have you, it is just that they are signalling really obviously what they have, letting the tourists chase them, and using the other (pro) players as enablers. They take turns with who gets the pot - again, informally and spontaneously - so that everyone walks away with cash.
Poker is an information game. You not only have to but want to give away some information in order to effect the betting and play of other players. This gets fucked up when a drumb / new / and or drunk player stops rationally reacting to information.
The most exciting hands are when both players have strong hands, try their best to signal it just right, both do but then both have a fundamental inability to accurately model the board and it comes down to the 4th and 5th cards being turned over. This is so fun because its actually where the limits to information theory are touched.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
19hr ago
It'll be apparent that you're holding out for the best cards
Casual poker players are perhaps the best example of Dunning-Kruger. There will be nothing obvious or apparent about the cards he is holding.
It'll be obvious that everyone else should fold unless they hold an amazing hand.
This is ~95% of winning in poker. Position play with the nuts. Actual gambling is a very bad idea.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
hotside restaurant equipment focused job
I'm guessing this means doing HVAC work for / in restaurants and - "hotside" - venting out the, well, hot air from ovens, stoves, hoods etc?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
Favorite example of this is Jack Donovan. To his credit, he doesn't call himself "gay" because he hates the modern Gay/LGBTQ culture. He calls himself "androphyllic."
That Wiki photo. God bless.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
What's your plan ... E? Maybe F. Yeah, F is better.
Whats your Plan F?
By Plan F, I mean the Plan you have for your life if everything goes to shit, but not by some horrible tragedy outside of your control. A house-fire, a weird accident -- these things you recover from with some combination of insurance, help from friends and family, and outright charity.
Plan F is closer to; "My ice cream business was going great! But then my business partner - who I knew used to deal a little coke - decided to commit insurance fraud and I'm broke."
For me, I think I'm on the periphery of a semi-hostile / hazardous area that has some sort of amazing natural resource. There's always work for a western / American "fixer" here. Logisics middle man. Plausible deniability bro. Even just a scout for hyper-aggressive capital deployment.
So, what's your Plan F?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
it's buying me time to get to 40 and just shave it all off
Did it at 28. Zero regret.
I rock a Johnny Sins Jason Statham look. "Bald + beard" is a little overplayed, I think. Plus, if you have a jawline, show it off.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
Fold on everything that isn't at least ${face card} + {ten or higher}.
They will think you're a poker GOD.
Most "bro basement" casual games devolve into wild risk taking within 30 minutes. Playing tight will be a contrast and you'll look amazing.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
Means I don't trust trans-Mississippi uplanders.
Y'all are just some hippy-dippy Horse Mormons as far as I'm concerned.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
or even the opinions from those outside of Pennsylvania.
You stay on yours side of the Mason-Dixon IHOP-Waffle House line, and I'll stay on mine, you damn Yankee.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3d ago
If you can find the link, I'd love to watch this. 2012 is right on the edge of full on surveillance state, especially in NYC.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4d ago
Mostly this falls into the category of "You can't hate journalists enough."
Jared Polis Promotes White Supremacist and Child Porn Defender as “Intellectuals”
Bruh.
There's plenty to disagree with with Hanania, but jumping straight to "literal [kid fucker] hitler!" isn't a bad faith argument, it's a ham fisted way to brute force The Narrative (TM).
Things like this blackpill me a little. I have a bunch of blogs and twitter feeds bookmarked of people and ideas I don't agree with at all, agree with somewhat but with hard barriers, or simply find the ideas wacky but interesting. This is the "drafts" section of some of my online information diet. I know some of it is Totally-Not-Ok. I also have enough confidence in my own epistemic health that I won't turn into "literally hitler" just by reading it. But can I even try to discuss and play with any of these ideas outside of a totally anonymous forum? The answer is probably no specifically because the actually intellectually bankrupt (the journalists above) would simply outright lie to cancel me -- if I was anyone of note. Which I, thankfully, am not.
It really is a new puritanism. It's the midwest mom finding a hidden KISS or Judas Priest vinyl in her son's bedroom and then calling the priest to perform an exorcism. And all it does is breed brittleness in thinking and truth seeking. They're optimizing for a system that will lead to their own demise, and taking a lot of bystanders down with them.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4d ago
I'll respond in more detail later
I await your thoughts, not a copypasta of a chinese forum.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4d ago
Okay, so we actually agree on more than we disagree on. And we're probably 99.9999% aligned on the current state of affairs.
The difference is just in the prognosis of the outcome.
I'll combine these three things from your last post:
Yes, that's why I said it's the "training montage" part. They're not there yet, but they're fucking grinding to get there. They have a CATOBAR carrier to git gud on, they'll soon have more. Eventually they'll have nuclear powered ones so they can learn that too. There in the middle of the "decades of trial and error" part,
while the Chinese are hitting new deadlift PRs every month (still smaller than us, but growing!) and drinking a river of creatine.
They're slowly expanding their global base network. Their recent "totally not practicing to cut Taiwan off" drills continue to expand.
Time and timing are the big issues here. We've all heard the 2027 deadline / prediction for shit popping off. I don't really think it matters if that's actually 2026, 2028, 2030. But I think it's true that the CCP has a closing window of opportunity before (a) They experience something live COVID again (b) Power struggle at the top after Xi dies or (c) The demographic wave breaks and they actually HARD lose for another century. Truly, I think it's no later than 2035 (that's stretching it) before CCP has to shit or get off the planet.
Will their eye of the tiger training montage be complete in that amount of time? I'd argue no. Again, multiple decades of naval experience really are necessary. Maybe you can shave it down to 20 years starting from .... 2009? 2013? But I don't think you can just fuck around and find out how to do large scale amphibious work in 5 - 10 years.
Note to the Mods (@amadan, just tagging you off the top of my head) -- can we self-submit this as a "understanding actually developed out of some initial rounds of shouting" award?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5d ago
There's a pretty large difference between production of new combat systems and experiencing in highly complex naval operations in combat.
China hasn't done the latter since 1979. Even basic seamanship atrophies quickly without constant training and re-training. Ask the U.S. Navy's 7th fleet.
Put another way, why do you think basically every INDOPACOM leader sounds like they're shitting their pants in interviews and press releases?
Aquilino and Paparo - both aviators, by the way - mostly make noise about the issues of sustainment in the event of a crisis with taiwan. Amateurs talk about strategy, professional talk about logistics. The biggest issue is that China is like, really far away and shit. Our sealift capabilities plus ammunition, refit, maintenance, repair in theatre isn't enough to keep pace when PLAN has all of their naval industry right there. In strict force-on-force, the US is still winning, hands down. The problem, again, is when timetables stretch.
But that's just talking about a hypothetical right off the coast of mainland China. In terms of true ocean going naval fore projection, what has China done more than park a flotilla in the Gulf of Aden (after getting lost one time, lol) and then doing weird joint floats with the Russians sorta-kinda near Japan?
Running a truly global Naval force is shit crazy expensive, hyper complex, and requires a training pipeline and practice that you have to develop through decades of trial and error. Human capital, culture, and experience still matter far more than sleek new hulls and neato weapons.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5d ago
Yeah, I'm not going to bite.
"But muh state capacity!" is just another variety of cope that technocrat loving Lee Kuan Yew fanboys use to hand wave away pesky little things like civil liberties, the concept of federalism, and actual free markets. "State direct capitalism can totally work, man." There's a joke in here about how just a little, teeny bit of authoritarianism will be really good for us, like a teaspoon of arsenic to boost the immune system.
Even when the government directly orders something, it's just broadcasting goals which many smaller governments try to reach in many different ways. Once an effective method is found, the people behind the effective method are promoted to try to implement it elsewhere while new competitions are started.
I wonder if this leads to gamification of easy to quantify objectives like GDP, but fails for other things, like, I don't know, food safety.
From this article and interview:
Tension between central and local governments always exists, and there’s really never been a coherent plan to address these issues. In that sense, food safety is a bellwether for policy in China: If they can solve the coordination issues there, they’ll be able to deal with other problems like environmental protection, because they all boil down to this central/local divide and how to bridge it.
Coordination problems! Ah, so easy to fix, those.
Chinese demographics don't matter
All lives demographics matter. As does geography. My geopolitical worldview and formula is pretty much demographics + geographic determinism / naval warfighting and sustainment ability. China's prospects in all three of those are ... suboptimal.
Also from the article I linked to above:
That comes down to how food is produced in China. You have somewhere between 200 million and 300 million farmers, each operating on small farms, say half a hectare. By the time a food gets to a processing center, or by the time of its manufacture, it’s already gone through multiple levels: from farm to trader, from small trader to a larger firm with complicated logistics, up to major provincial wholesale markets, and from there across the entire country.
200 to 300 million small scale farmers who haven't leveled up meaningfully since maybe the 1950s.
Hey, but they do have cool lookin' EVs.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5d ago
An addendum:
White, appalachian young men and women date, have children, and even sometimes marry latino / black spouses with enough regularity that nobody outside of the deepest hollers really cares (although, strangely, they'll still use racial slurs).
This is not the case with Indians. Furthermore, this isn't just an availability bias. The small cities on the edges of Appalachia are starting to see Indian transplants.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5d ago
They have a much more potent economic model
Define "potent"? GDP growth? Per Capita / PPP? If we're talking economics, your terms should be defined and quantitative.
They then hyper focus that pooled capital towards very unprofitable ventures
So they're more "potent" (however that is defined) by generating a negative return on investment? That doesn't make any sense. To be as charitable as possible, perhaps you mean the investments are high CAPEX and have long cycles towards net ROI benefit? If they are by definition unprofitable, they are by definition bad investments that will guarantee that the given industry fails.
While this model is not particularly pleasant for the individuals involved, it is highly competitive on the national scale.
You have to mean international scale, right?
This post is so poorly written and argument by assertion that I debated even posting a reply. But, I think the spirit of the Motte is often best exemplified by being hyper charitable to the other side, steelmaning poor arguments, and then presenting the opposite view.
My argument against China is the theses in The Great Demographic Reversal combined with an obvious failure mode of the Chinese tech innovation system.
The TLDR, for brevity:
-
China's demographics SUCK. They're going to have more olds than they know what to do with. The one child policy was a disaster. People aren't having children together now. And there's a semi-nomadic horde of about 50 - 100 million men who work seasonal migrant jobs from place to place. Their middle class isn't nearly large enough.
-
This means that China has no choice but to rigidly control their population. But at their scale, that's incredibly expensive to do. The social credit score system is an experiment; can we pay one half of our population to spy on the other half, and then use computers to spy on the first half? In a perverse irony, China, that does not have nearly the same social security safety net that the US does, is perhaps (the budgets are secret) spending more to not have one!
-
Technology wise, the Chinese model has been to find / steal western tech, reverse engineer it to the best of their ability, and re-deploy. People can quibble over if this is real innovation or not, the extent to which China has produced any new and meaningful "inventions" but it doesn't matter. This style of technological management eschews what has been the real engine of tech development over millenia; lots of compounding, happy accidents shared across a large population. An interesting quirk of history is that from about 800 - 1200, the Muslim world of MENA was the most scientifically advanced on the planet. But they fell behind technologically; they knew how stuffed worked and were very smart, but lacked the infrastructure to actually build and disperse scientific knowledge into material things that normies could use to improve their life. Starting at about 1200, Europe starts to overtake in both science and tech because they deploy tech more broadly, and science and tech have a mutually re-inforcing feedback structure.
-
Chinese GDP per capita is about $15k. Even with the CCP trying to shit out new tech as fast as it can, most of their own people can't really afford it. Secondly, most of their people don't have a cultural aptitude for tinkering, exploring, developing in a truly creative sense. When the high esteem strategy in life is to grind 996, be an excellent bureaucrat, and a cold bug person, you're not going to get weirdo genius inventors and you're especially not going to get weird genuis asshole corporate leaders --- Jobs, Musk, Bezos, Gates et al would've been hammered into shit in childhood in China because they're non-conformity is off the charts. Jack Ma is the only homegrown Chinese "visionary" who didn't leave, and he was either some sort of plant by the CCP or became a permanent political prisoner because he did a good job and built a compelling tech company.
The tension at the core of all Chinese history is balancing a pathological need for control of a giant population and a giant geography against the economic growth potential of ceding some control. If the CCP let their people just do their thing, I would be a lot more worried about a Chinese Century because of the sheer numbers. But the CCP has not only chosen, but accelerated toward clamping down harder and "controlling" more.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
7d ago
haven't seen either, but even watching this clip from the latter
Whoa! Yeah. I can't exactly put it into words but it's very palpable. I feel like I'm watching something that hasn't been fully mastered or edited yet. There isn't that Cinema "filter" on it that makes my brain go "Oh, cool, movies!"
It's a good culture war post because it demands a better answer than "This is why we need shame back in society!"
First, let's look at the opposite side of the coin; Men. The equivalent of sex work for men is violence. The Bonnie Blue equivalent is probably a professional athlete but, as many posters downthread pointed out, Bonnie Blue is the top 0.0001%. The median is truck stop stripper, part-times OnlyFans'er, club bottle girl who gets groped every weekend. For men? That's something like strip club bouncer, semipro MMA fighter, and Marine Corps Infantry Lance Corporal (no I am not joking). They're paid something like 40% of the median wage (often less) to risk maiming and death. Society views them mostly as disposable and, in cases like the MMA fighter, perhaps, kind of a weirdo. The USMC infantry vet gets some "thank you for your service!" awkwardness at times, the free breakfasts on veterans day, and a good rate from USAA, but then has to deal with the VA for his horrible migraines, busted knees and hips, and/or panic attacks.
And yet I, and many others like me, absolutely still see military service as a great job choice, be it temporary or career. And I see being a semi-pro MMA fighter as probably not something you should bank on working out (like NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB) but, if you want to do it for some time because you love it, go right ahead. Strip club bouncer, eh, I've got some personal issues with that (related: Today is a Holy Day of Obligation, everyone make to get to mass). But let's just smooth out that rough edge and say bouncer at a nightclub. From me, you get a shrug - probably not a career, but if the cash is good for now, take it. Work on a plan to build a different and better career.
The point is is that male violence as a "method of employ" is absolutely permissible (so long as the employ itself isn't illegal; gangs, mafia, etc.) And sex work as a method of employ is not. Because sex is a special category of activity that is 1) at the core of the basic political unit, the family and b) the only thing (for now, sigh) that results in the continuation of the species. It's too socially valuable to be commoditized. That's my argument against sex work. You, a young woman, are selling yourself short and also engaging in some seriously anti-social and socially damaging activities even if it's just pictures of your unclad self on OnlyFans. And this is, in no small part, because of the power law issue other commentators posted.
If Bonnie Blue wants to go out do all of these disgusting things for money, that's really up to her. She isn't forcing these men to do it with (to?) her. They are also making their own slimeball choices. But then you have the literally millions of young girls who get into stripping, porn (traditional), and onlyfans. They do it because "sex is fun!" (TM) and "no one should judge you!" It's a bill of goods underneath a bridge I have for sale. Soon enough, these totally normal girls realize holy shit this is not for me, and nope out of there. But there's a long distance between how those girls are going to feel versus how the guy who got into his first bouncer-fight at the club felt. To me, there is an intrinsic, basic human reason for that (see above). And those that promote "sexual self-expression" (what in the hell is even that?) are promoting a kind of spirital semi-suicide under the satanic word -"fun."
Addendum - to close the loop on male violence jobs.
These kind of jobs aren't good for the long term. Even the most badass Navy SEAL is retired by 45 at the latest, and that's an outlier. Unlike sex work, as well, they can all be done - even as a FULL career - without getting to the point of interpersonal violence. A lot of bouncing is standing around looking intimidating (and vomiting girls). If you joined the military in 1980, there was a not so bad shot you could've done 20 years without ever actually being in combat (deploying is different than combat, remember).
Sports, especially MMA, I will admit, are a little different. The NFL CTE "scandal" revealed how a lot of guys were actually destroying themselves, unknowingly, for decades. I suppose my argument might fall down a little here but I'll weasel out of it a little by saying that in sports no one is actually trying to kill the other person.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
7d ago
The original "fake flub" was the infamous Janet Jackson boob slip at the superbowl.
- Timberlake very clearly is on a cue to reach-over-and-pull. There's no other action (he wasn't turning to, like, dip her or something).
- She had on nipple jewelry so that it wasn't too much as literally millions of children would be watching.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
7d ago
-
It is wild that vinyl, tapes, and CDs were physical artifacts that still had "git branching hell" syndrome. The more things change, the more they stay the same, I suppose.
-
I have a 4k TV and sometimes "4k" really does look better, and other times it doesn't. For a while, I was assuming that some sort of compression algorithm behind YouTube was the culprit. A friend suggests that the 60 FPS versions are what I see as better, not the resolution. I am not an A/V-phile. What's "real" 4k versus not? Do I really get more if its 60 FPS. Are there .... more FPS out there?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
10d ago
How much, and I'm requesting you express it quantitatively, more happy does this make you in terms of whole of life satisfaction than an ipod with an aux cord, or a collection of CDs?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
10d ago
I think you're right.
This sets up a whole other piece about how they were hoodwinked into it. Probably something about the false promises being hard to see before 2008, as well as a lot more social pressure from Boomers to conform.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
10d ago
The entire idea of "disposable" income is, to me, the biggest mismatch between Boomers and today. We all agree on the "necessary" expenditures; housing, food, basic clothing, and utilities. Then, we have the modern additions to utilities; internet and cell service. It is not even possible for me to even search for a job if I don't have one or both of these things. Yes, yes, economists will tell you that the relative value or marginal utility or whatever of a cell phone is so much better than land line service in the 1970s. But I'm paying for it because I have to.
Then, however, we have things like clothing, consumer electronics, restaurants, and "cheap" entertainment (subscriptions). These seem basic but stack up and stack up in recursive ways (like I mentioned above) that aren't captured in traditional methods of inflation. Are these truly optional goods that I am choosing to spend on?
"Well sorry, snowflake" Bruno the Boomer says, "Maybe in stead of watching your TikyToks and Netflixes, you should just read a book!"
And Bruno the Boomer is right in that specific circumstance. These are, purely speaking, "optional" purchases. But it leads to much trickier problem: What am I supposed to do with my time if the jump between "basic" living and comfortable spending is so high? Incentives matter. You can find many interesting graphs out there that show how, in some cities in the US and many countries in Europe, there exist harsh tax cliffs that _DIS_incentivize making more money. If I lose $10,000 in benefits after increasing my income by less than $10,000, I've given myself a pay cut by earning more (yes that sentence is valid).
This same logic applies to marginal consumption and disposable income. If I can pay for all of my basic necessities, but leveling up to dinner out once or twice a week, guilt free streaming service subscriptions, a new-ish but not top of the line car, and a couple home goods (big couch, whatever) necessitates another $15,000k in annual income (on which I will be taxed substantially) .... then why even bother? Cheap beer, free or pirated porn movies and YouTube clips can sustain my entertainment needs and living in a shitty apartment is .... what all of my friends do. People are being asked not to take the next step on a steep trail, but to leap across a valley of income for ... marginal benefit.
And I think this is the common cause behind things like quiet quitting, the massive rise in the permanently non-working (disabled and NEETs etc.), inceldom, and the various flavors of nomadic forever-festival going weirdos, permanent expats, and semi-grifter YouTubers. It's interesting that I posted a top level comment on Shagbark earlier this week. Being a semi-bum in 2025 does seem to have roughly the same life satisfaction of every group up to about the top 20% income. And this is because we've eliminated real poverty -- not having enough to eat, being so unstable in housing that death from exposure might actually be on the menu.
Was consumerism really so different in years past? YesChad.jpeg. People forget that real, true poverty did exist, at least in pockets of the US, well into the 1970s. In extremely infrastructure-isolated places, it persisted even longer. After WW2, the consumer economy actually functioned as a compounding system for people to get out of poverty. Buying an electric oven meant a household was saving meaningful time and effort. The ever increasing reliability of cars (while maintaining price relative to inflation) meant people could get to and from work with high confidence - and, therefore, earn more. A television meant actual awareness of the outside world and a source of information that could lead to better decision making. A telephone allowed for the creation and sustainment of social relationships and communities outside of face to face interaction, which also meant the ability to generate more business relationships (i.e. find new jobs, find local customers etc.).
Today, my new oven has fun little chimes when it pre-heats. It's also more energy efficient (so I am told). New trucks are less reliable because of fuel emission fuckery and mostly cost more because the seats are heated and my phone connects to the radio for some fucking reason. My TV has a resolution I can't comprehend, with unlimited semi-AI slop available for consumption. It stays off unless sports are on. And my telephone, which lives in my pocket, mostly harasses me with beeps and dings to remind me to interact with apps so that my data can be sold to hedge funds.
Consumerism, today, has inverted its relationship with consumers. Before, consumer level products really did make your life better. Today, consumer products are like carnival rides; it's fun for a while and only costs a few dollars. It doesn't improve my life.
The Vibecession, to me, is a reaction to some harsh nonlinearities that have developed over the past 40 years. Before, you might never get into the upper class, but you could see your life improve just a bit almost every year. Now, we're asking kids exiting college (which didn't teach them anything and saddled them with debt) to live like a monk for 10 - 15 years so that, on the other side, they can move into a home they still can't afford. In the interim, they can enjoy consumer products that help dull this drudgery, but don't act as compounders. Who in the hell would take this deal?
Best YouTube resource for the basics of boxing "movement." ?? I have zero boxing experience and whenever I stumble onto a bout on late night ESPN, it looks to me like they're just kind of lazily circling each other, but I know there's a lot more going on.
More options
Context Copy link