100ProofTollBooth
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User ID: 2039
100ProofTollBooth
8mo ago
Why should smart people move away from small towns, especially now that the Internet has come?
That's a fair enough point for the current generation. I have no idea how you would mean to apply that to the generations that grew up in rural America (especially Appalachia) before .... 2000? "Go get an education and come back" was also not reasonable because local economies often lacked the professional infrastructure to support (let alone attract) degree holders.
As for geographic consistency, their kin died for that ground within two or three centuries of folk memory.
Quiet part out loud, bro. You emphasized "died" instead of "fought for." Fatalism.
And what's the salience of the piece of land on which the dying occurred? Before the Civil War, a lot of sons of Appalachia died in all kinds of strange spots west of the Ohio, South of the Rio Grande, and elsewhere. Grandpa lost friends in France and Germany ... not a whole lot of country songs about the Ardennes. World War 2 veterans are remembered for the dedication to American values and a conflict against evil, imperialism, subjugation. That promotes a more generative outlook on the possibilities post-combat than the immutable fact of location and time of death.
I can, however, sympathize with Barney Google and Snuffy Smith over in the holler by the crick.
I don't know if this is an attempt at humor or not.
(Some of the other comments in this thread are straight wild. I can't tell if they're LARPing, triple-nested irony or finewine shitposting, or just ChatGPT hallucinations.)
TLDR on how heterosexual women choose mates can be reduced to "social proof." This isn't all encompassing, but it's the single most important factor. The more you can put yourself in an environment with demonstrable social proof the better. I've written about this before, sorry for the self-link.
I think a lot of guys screw up the first date by making it far too 1-on-1 and not somehow building in that social proof. In my experience, there is a very simple way to get reliable massive social proof without having to stress on logistics or complex arrangements:
Become a regular at a bar.
A couple ground rules. 1. The bar has to be a pretty fancy cocktail bar or hipster style joint. Think rough wood paneling, low lighting, and a bearded gent who knows too much about agave plants behind the bar. 2. You don't become a regular by showing up a few times on your own and getting hammered and tipping heavy.
Here's how you become a regular:
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You have to spend time (and money) going in on off hours and figuring out which bartender works on core date nights (Thur, Fri, Sat). The economics of bars being what they are, it's pretty rare for even the "Prime Time" bartenders to not work at least one afternoon shift. I find luck on Sundays and Tuesdays the most. You go in right after work (or as early as about 4pm if you can work remote or have the flexibility). Sit at the bar, get the menu etc. etc.
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Have a personality and interesting things to talk about. I know this can be very difficult. Here are some tips - start out by asking their recommendation for a drink / cocktail. They're going to recommend something that's pretty inoffensive (usually a slight modification to a basic manhattan, martini, or old fashioned and their various tequila cousins). If they ask what you like, have an answer ready. When they make it, compliment it and find a road to go down. What does that mean? Don't say "oh, it's fruity!" or "oh, yeah, I like that!" Those are dead ends. Make an observation, and then make an extending comment on that observation; "There's some smokiness in there ... what's another drink where there's more of that (or) what can complement smokiness (or) do people like that smokiness." Oh, goodness, you've just started a conversation. Remember when I said that you should look for a fancy spot where the guy behind the bar knows a lot about agave / bourbon or whatever? This is because if you can differentiate your comment on the drink enough, you can get that guy to shoulder the conversation for the next 30 minutes by letting him go on and on about .... whatever. Listen, ask leading questions, offer light opinions ("I never really liked whiskey because I think it has a bad aftertaste" is fine "GIN IS FOR PUSSIES" is not). Just ... talk.
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Ask the guy when he's on again (meaning, when he's working again). Show back up, do the same thing. You'll know you've made a (good) impression if they start saying "What's up, dude?" after you've walked in but before you've sat down. You'll know you're really in if they start to make you custom drinks without prompting to see what your reaction is.
3a. I wouldn't recommend this step if you haven't done this kind of thing before, but I just recently did it at a new bar I've been checking out and it was a lot of fun. If the bartender works an off evening (Tuesday/Wednesday night for instance) and you can afford the day off / hangover the next day - go in and just get hammered. Because it's an off night, it should be slow and they're likely to drink a little bit with you, comp a couple rounds, and open up the conversation topics a little more. This is kind of a "stars have to align" move, but, if you can pull it off, it's awesome.
After regularly (you know, like a regular) showing up to this bartenders shifts for three - four weeks, AND maintaining a good rolling conversation, you're set. Now back to dates and where the fun comes in.
You setup the date to meet at the bar for casual drinks. That's not hard and it's seems a little basic however She'll do the research on the bar and find out that, at the least, it's a trendy cocktail bar and she's not going to some horrible sports / dive bar with awful bathrooms and warm beer. But the magic happens when the two of you walk in and your partner in crime, the bartender, says, "What's up, TollBooth?!" and means it. You'll probably get a better seat at the bar than what the host/hostess would default to. Bartenders interact with and watch people for a living so he'll understand it's a date right off the bat. You're golden. From here, just have a normal conversation with your date and enjoy things like the following, ranked in order of most to least likely:
- Off menu drinks (that aren't anything special, but the "off menu"-ness makes them appear so)
- Unordered (but free) appetizers or deserts
- Unsolicited comments about how funny / wild / smart / "different" you are from the bartender to your date
- Totally made up stories the bartender tells to wingman you
- Even more outlandish lies like "Yeah, last time TollBooth was in here, I ended up serving him like four drinks that these girls were buying him, it was crazy."
You have to remember that at these craft cocktail places, the over-knowledgeable bartender is running the show in the eyes of the patrons (it's actually still probably either the head chef or just the GM who's really doing it, but, whatever). So, in the eyes of your date, the most "important dude" in the building is now pumping you up like a hype man. Your date will feel like she's in the center of the attention of the place without feeling like there's a spotlight on her. She gets to feel self-satisfied that she's snagged the most popular dude. What's more, because the bartender is going to make sure service is snappy, it can even come across like you've got some sort of special pull and the dinner is somehow just better than it could be anywhere else. She'll be telling her friends about it and just drink in their envy. Your friendly bartender will also act as a constant refrain point for the conversation if you hit a weird silent phase and run out of things to say. "Rodrigo is such a cool dude," can be said again and again to restart the conversation, and it's also a subtle cue of "remember my social proof."
After the date, you do what you want. After many years of operating out of the cut-and-dry bachelor dating playbook, I don't try to move towards sex. I don't care. I want to see if I've actually captured durable attention (which is the most fought over commodity nowadays, right?) and, more importantly, if I enjoyed the conversation, feel some chemistry and compatibility, and genuinely want to see her again. Maybe a quick kiss or something and then it's part ways / separate Ubers.
Even more than dates, this works well for (casual) work dinners or happy hours. Although I'm a little hesitant to recommend it for client / sales meetings because some people get the wrong idea and think you're an alcoholic who shows up there everyday.
Some closing thoughts:
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Why is the bartender actually doing this for you? One, by showing up regularly for a few weeks and many shifts before the date, you are spending some money and signalling you'll probably keep doing it. This is a transaction to an extent. The larger point, however, is that you made good conversation. 80% of bartender conversation is them listening to people talk about themselves and their own lives, or having to navigate petty small talk on sports, politics, and pop culture. And they're on their feet for 8 - 10 (or more hours). If you can break that monotony, they're going to love you.
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Tip heavy always. This is a business.
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Throughout this write-up, I've used "he" as the pronoun for the bartender and obviously assumed the bartender is male. That's the harder scenario.
You can do all of this with a female bartender too and, if you do, your date is guaranteed to end in fireworks.
100ProofTollBooth
7mo ago
The fundamental issue is that all forms of training for how people should behave, what is expected and norms for sex has been replaced with do what you feel like. This is going to lead to a greater than 0.1% instance of someone clearly not getting what they bargained for. By replacing norms with do what you feel like we have entered a behavioural sink.
Great post overall, and I have to especially double down on this section.
Uncertainty, in any context, is hard for humans to deal with. Cultural rituals and norms exist in some part to reduce uncertainty so people can be more confident in the situations they find themselves in and be prepared to make decisions.
An interest counter-intuitive reality in the sex-culture-wars; the BDSM community is full of pretty elaborate and almost legalistic consent procedures with very little room for interpretation. Nothing gets you exiled faster than even a rumor of coercion. In many ways, it is pretty close to literally exchanging grocery lists of sexual acts with one another (or more!) and then going line by line through them with "yes", "no", "maybe - and here's my stop word." For more extreme acts, written documents aren't at all unheard of. This is all in the context of a community that is unrelentingly sex positive. Suffice it to say, even the real freaks understand the importance of rituals and norms.
The sexual revolution of the 1960s drafted on its own acceleration through the 1970s into the present and is now something more like sexual nihilism. Nothing matters (besides consent, of course), a monstrous appetite isn't something to be worried about, and partners can be as temporary as tee-shirts. When you allow that kind of madness to flow over a fundamental human activity that is also core to societal functioning, you're going to get alarming results.
100ProofTollBooth
7mo ago
Agree, but the punishment is only the first half of the re-calibration. You can point to something and say "That's bad, don't do that," but people will naturally respond, "Well, fine, what's good?"
And then society, culture, and all of the relevant institutions are going to have to start really getting behind the idea of stable nuclear families, courtship rituals that are defined (heavily) by gender roles, and explicit pro-natalism. Personally, I think of these are stellar ideas. But there are some absolutely bananas divergences in opinios on that. This is why, I think, the trashfire that is contemporary dating endures - there isn't a well articulated alternative and even vague attempts to develop one are only at the margins and oriented around fine-tuning and optimization. The recent article-and-comments on "Date Me" docs over at Scott's Blog is case in point.
Then again, what's old is new. People really like to fuck. Like, a lot a lot. Society has been dealing with this with great difficulty forever. At the societal, pro-social level,packing away women in burlap bags probably isn't a good move, but neither is broadcasting luxury strip clubs as empowering art. I'm not going to weasel out and say "it's a balancing act." No, the assertion that ought to be made is "sex is one of the most basic social contracts you engage in. Yes, it's personal and fun, but it isn't something to be taken lightly." Then, taking the next step up in the responsibility chain, "you should have sex in an already stable pair bonded relationship with an eye towards longevity." No, don't criminalize one-night stands and don't jail the town harlot or village lothario - but hold them up as examples of what not to do.
100ProofTollBooth
7mo ago
I would love to hear your thoughts on the College Football realignment.
100ProofTollBooth
7mo ago
I'm a Big Man.
I don't mean fat. I'm 6'8" and go about 245. Through almost all of my 20s, I was maybe 200-210. In college and before I was below that and so noticeably in the "bean pole" range of skinny. A late 20s dive into lifting paired with finally hitting the big metabolical downshift means I'm no longer "potentially a basketball player" but firmly in the land of "hey, that's a Big Dude!" No tattoos, but do have a trimmed beard and close shaved head. I've been called Nordic-looking often (I'm not).
Question is; what are some things I should be aware of in terms of perceptions by other people. I don't want to come across as utterly clueless - I already go out of my way to be a little goofy / ice-breaker-y when meeting new people. I smile (and am concious of it) a lot when dealing with bartenders / cafe people / passers by on a day to day basis. Still, I think I may be oblivious to some things. I'm especially worried about professional context. COVID had me fully remote for two years and Zoom meetings take a lot out of relative physical size awareness. New job (as of the summer) has me in a suit 4 days a week in a more conservative / traditional setting and I'm wondering if that's modulated my smiley/goofiness. FWIW, I don't think I perceive much hesitation from coworkers, and I'm getting a normal level of invitation to informal drinks after work etc.
Would also appreciate any insight on NON-romantic male/female dynamics. On the dating side of things, there is a consistent volume of women who straight up tractor-beam to Big Dudes. (Yes, it's Daddy issues and Lumberjack fantasies as far as the eye can see. SNL had a skit about it with dudes from the Chiefs after the won the Superbowl).
100ProofTollBooth
7mo ago
Fortune 500 CEOs aren't working bone crushing hours the way a small biz CEO might. (More on that second part later).
But, being an F500 CEO is incredibly hard.
I had the opportunity to meet and interact with one at the F500 I worked for in my mid 20s. This was a non-trivial interaction that occurred because a series of events led me to being on this big strategic thrust planning team that the CEO was half-personally overseeing. Another series of events led to a bunch of us being at the HQ on a Saturday. Right before lunch, the CEO walks into the main "war room" and literally rolls up his sleeves to help out. He was there all day. In that setting, everyone was talking with everyone at some point or another and the various "ranks" that usually created some deferential distance were not as palpable. It was easy to talk to the Big Guns, so I just sat down and started talking with the CEO.
The conversation can pretty much be summed up like this:
TollBooth: "So .... what do you actually do?"
F500 CEO: Chuckling, "I make about four decisions per year and, the rest of the time, am on call to answer questions that the board and wall street investors have. That's the easy part. I'm basically a financial psychotherapist. The first part is way harder."
TollBooth: "Why?"
F500 CEO: "Because those four decisions dictate the 16 - 20 decisions I can possibly make for the next 4 to 5 years. If I make the wrong ones this year, we, as a company, have fundamentally worse options in the out years."
TollBooth: "So, just make good decisions this year"
F500 CEO: "Well, yeah, that's the goal. But these 4 or so decisions I make rely on, without exception, massively incomplete information that I then have to use as part of a decision making model that incorporates what I think our competitors are going to do, what the market will support, and what won't cost us customers. All of those things are interdependent and you can't really say which one comes "first" in the decision making chain. It's like hitting a half dozen moving targets that are all moving in random directions - if you time it right, you can blast three of them at once, and that's a really great year. If you don't, you miss everything and it looks to outsiders like you were shooting randomly."
TollBooth: "Why are we doing this strategic thrust thingy right now?"
F500 CEO: "Because I screwed up one decision two years ago and I think I can salvage it with this. If I can't, I probably am gone 2 years from now."
I'd add one personal/emotional level consideration to this; you have to live with the uncertainty and lack of control leading up to and following making these four big decisions each year. One thing I learned in my first technical sales engineering team was that a sales process might be long, but you can sort of see it developing day to day and week to week. So, you can reduce your overall anxiety by just doing the next obvious thing in the process, even if that thing is banal (scheduling a follow up meeting, asking for a how-to guide review, whatever). A good analogy is training for a sports meet. You put in the work day in and day out, and then, all of a sudden, it's the big payoff day / week and you go out and get it (or don't). All your nervous energy along the way, however, you can divert into the training (or the development of a sales cycle in this case).
The CEO can't do that. There's no training cycle that builds up to something. It's literally four decisions made on four different days across a year. I think he could, and did, think about the decisions a lot before he made them. And I also think he probably had a team of smart people digging through a mountain of data and projections. But, like he said / I wrote above, these decisions had really incomplete information - you can't brute force your way through them even with a million spreadsheet runs. And, there isn't really a way to test and the iterate - you're calling out a new direction for the Battleship and you have to live with it until you hit the iceberg or don't. (Sorry for throwing in another unrelated metaphor)
I think the personality type that ends up as an F500 CEO definitely isn't "work like a dog 16 hours a day" but is, instead, "Be comfortable with weeks and months of utterly not knowing. Then pull the trigger." Is that hard work? You tell me.
Returning to small/medium CEOs working crazy hours. In my experience, that's 90% of the time a failure mode of a founder type CEO who can't give up micro levels of control and build the durable systems you need to scale. I've been in tech startups where the founder was very much the engineering genius type but then there came a time where the best answer was to "hire the MBAs." Everyone's life got better. Everyone made more money. The founder saw their big dream flourishing, albeit without direct control.
100ProofTollBooth
7mo ago
Tangential nitpick because this always really grinds my gears when I see it...
The index funds versus hedge funds comparison is insanely dishonest. Warren Buffett started it decades ago and it's an argumentative sleight-of-hand.
Broad market index funds (anywhere from 100% equity allocation to the 60/40-bond mix) pretty much track "the economy" as a whole. You're betting on all of the horses. Across cap size, across sectors. If you're including bonds, then you're covering the two largest asset classes on earth. If you can stay in the market long enough and tolerate bouts of down years, you're going to do just fine because the "oh shit" scenario is literally a 20-40 year sustained depression for the United States and very probably the rest of the world. Which, if it happens, fucks everyone including hedge funds and techBros. For generations.
Hedge funds are always much more narrowly constrained in what they invest in, and they often target very specific return profiles. "We long/short large cap non-financial equities and forecast capturing 80% of broad market upside in outperformance years while avoiding draw downs of over 20% in down years, with high annual liquidity but low turnover." That's contraint-on-constraint-on-constraint that index funds don't have to deal with at all. And hedge funds call their shots in that they predict a return profile within a given timeframe and aren't allowed to take excessive risk or leverage to get there. They actually can't "bet it all on black" again and again. Simply allocating to a portfolio with too elevated risk metrics constitutes something close to a breach of contract.
Why do hedge funds do this? Because most of them are trying to appeal to institutional investors (retirement funds, university endowments, etc.) that have really specific needs for performance, risk management, and cash disbursements for every single year. If you're CALPERS and you need to - every single year - push out $10 billion of retirement cash to your members to avoid a massive class action lawsuit, you need to find a hedge fund that has a reasonable chance of delivering part of that return profile. And they have to (try to) guarantee (part) of that return no matter what the rest of the market does. If there's a bad year, neither the hedge fund nor CALPERS can say, "Hey, sorry, we'll just wait a couple years to get back even." Nope, those retirees want their cash on the first of the month no matter what - and they probably have the legal language to back it up.
Why only part of the total return? Because no large institutional investor is allowed to give all of its money to a single fund / general partner. Diversification is always (nowadays) written into their charters. So, maybe the first chunk of money goes to the hypothetical fund above. That means that anybody else who's doing long/short in large cap non-fin equities is automatically off the list to receive another chunk of the institution's money - there's too much correlated risk. Pretty soon, you're investing in ARK Innovation because it's the only fund left who can take $100m - $1bn [:1] of capital that doesn't look like it's correlated to the rest of your portfolio.
Hedge funds are providing a very precise service at scale to a clientele that needs that precision within a time bound box. Index funds are providing general returns that track an economy over large cycles. It's pretty close to the difference between looking for a general practitioner doctor for health advice ("diet, exercise") and looking for a brain surgeon with tumor removal expertise that can also guarantee your blood pressure won't spike and your body temp won't fall too low during the surgery. Yep, that second guy probably has more dead patients on him, but that first guy has mustard on his shirt and likes to watch Mad Money in the afternoons.
[:1] Another thing people like to point to is that smaller funds often outperform their larger peers. That's because you have way more flexibility as a smaller fund and it's easier to deploy smaller amounts of capital. Big funds are a special monster because there are only so many things you can plow $1bn into and NOT move the market on your own.
100ProofTollBooth
7mo ago
The core of this is a concept called "Mark to Market." The Enron documentary (The Smartest Guys in the Room. 10/10 would recommend) spends some time on it.
It's also the same core mechanism that fucked the whole mortgaged-backed securities market in 2008-2009.
Mark to Market was never really intended for intermediate goods with weird cashflow and long-term appreciation dynamics (like houses). It definitely was never intended for use with Magic Internet Money.
Mark to Market was originally conjured up as a way for oil extraction companies to better value their inventory (oil) as daily markets could fluctuate pretty wildly. The thing there, however, is that that oil was both (a) a thing you had on hand that had a long established market and (b) a commodity that functioned ... like a commodity! There was a spot price and ... that was kind of it. Yeah, there are futures markets, but it's not like a house that has a monthly cashflow (rent or mortgage) but also an asset appreciation profile determined by all sorts of things (mainly location, but also real improvements and hyper local supply/demand profiles). There's just so much more inherent complexity in things like houses that Mark to Market can't really be a stable valuation scheme. [:1]
For a digital currency with zero non-digital assets backing it you're marking-to-a-made-up-market with a formless thought experiment of an asset. Yes ... that's really, really, really obvious dumb as shit.
[:1] To be fair, there are people who will disagree with this and make a (good) point that as long as markets stay liquid enough, they can perform accurate price discovery. I actually think 2008-2009 strongly supports that argument. The crisis point wasn't mortgages going down in value per se, it was in the lack of overnight and short term cash to help firms shift their positions and recapitalize. Firefighting by Bernanke et al. goes into the (quite technical) details of this. To "yes, but," one last time, there are also those who would say that the sheer size of the MBS market and all of the related assets and liabilities made it impossible to "soft land", regardless of any amount of short term credit and liquidity. I can't really refute that because we decided not to test it out back in '09. If we had, and gotten in wrong, we'd be having this conversation in person beneath the rubble of Midgar.
100ProofTollBooth
7mo ago
You are correct!
I had an EPIC brain snap and swapped the Mark to Market for Master Limited Partnerships in discussing their original application to Oil and Gas. Wow, yeah, my mistake. Thanks for correction.
100ProofTollBooth
7mo ago
Agree. Two additions.
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This is kind of what's going on with Tuberville's hold. He's holding DoD senior officer promotions until the Dems give him a floor vote on the DoD abortion policy. He's stated he'll abide whatever the result of that vote is and lift the hold. The goal, for Tuberville, is to either get the DoD abortion policy changed or, at least, get a bunch of Dems to vote explicitly in favor of keeping it. The one wrinkle is that, to my knowledge, he hasn't offered anything to vote on and has asked the Dems to bring their own policy package, which is kind of weird. The headlines always stop short at, "Republican Senator holds all DoD promotions because he doesn't like abortion." He just want's a vote.
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I'd eagerly wager that 99% of Americans cannot accurately describe regular order in either chamber of Congress. Fewer still can give a good outline of the bill-to-law pathway through committee, amendment processes, markups, etc. The procedural realities of Congress make time the precious commodity. There just isn't enough time to do everything. Worse, when you have goofy distractions all of the time, there's frequently not enough remaining to do even the important things correctly (like passing a budget on time). So, you end up with omnibuses,CRs, and generally slipshod work for literally the last 27 years.
But reporting on the complexity of Congressional process doesn't get viewership, and "political reporters" can be technically true in writing headlines like "X opposed Y resulting in Z." I can't begin to enumerate the ways the media has failed since about the 1970s onward, but especially after the internet became ubiquitous. One of the chief failings, however, is in the media's ongoing failure to simply report on the mechanics of government (or, for that matter, economics and business cycles). The default is such overly simplified narratives that they cease to be functionally useful or even complete. What's a narrative structure without functional use? It's a story. It evokes emotion, it pastes a concise arc over a complex situation. Satisfying, but useless and incomplete. If you repeat that for years and years, eventually the audience can only conceive of "information" and "news" within the structure of emotional narrative arcs. Anything outside of that format may serve some other niche purpose, but isn't "news." Reporters have ceased to know what they're talking about, focusing, instead, on knowing what has already been said (knowledge v. narrative). It's a self reinforcing feedback cycle. Today's "news" is an expansion and commentary on yesterday's "news" and an easy to follow narrative line is important.
I like to imagine a headline on NYT/WaPO the reads "Here is a guide to how committee markups work" and then imagine the first comment being "What does this have to do with Congress?"
100ProofTollBooth
7mo ago
"The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." That's LTCM in a nutshell.
There's no such thing as an omni-safe investment. What you have in the strategies employed by firms like LTCM are situations that, when identified, have a very high if not perfect chance of doing exactly one thing eventually.
LTCM modeled spread convergences. You can look up the mechanics on your own. The problem is that in order to take advantage of this strategy, LTCM had to pay what amounted to insurance payments until the spread did, in fact, converge. The longer that doesn't happen, the more you pay. And if you're liquid capital dries up, sucks to be you - even if you turn out to be right! Additionally, LTCM eventually succumbed to the attraction of using leverage when the spreads themselves started too narrow. Leverage amplifes both returns and losses so if the spreads stopped narrowing and widened, even just a bit, LTCM would potentially be blown up - which is what happened during the 90s Russian debt crisis.
All of this is to say that even the risk-free rate of return (most often 10yr or longer Treasury Bonds) isn't static and isn't actually risk free if you layer it with leverage, derivatives, etc.
In terms of hedge funds "calling their shots" - I didn't mean to imply hedge funds sell "safe" strategies or that they always hit their anticipated performance. This is actually one of the brutal realities of the industry - if you're a senior analyst or a portfolio manager and you miss your targets even for one year, there's a really, really good chance you will get fired and, at best, only be able to find a new job a step down from where you were. While hedge fund compensation is pretty insane, it's a lot like professional sports in that you might only make it for 3,5,10 years before being close to unemployable. A lot of blowout types tumble down to financial consulting or fair valuation opinions or just market analysis and equity research. Still (mid to high) six figure jobs, but a far cry from some of the 7/8/9 (it happens) figure payouts people see in single years.
100ProofTollBooth
7mo ago
Three points worth considering.
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"Speed of Money" - It's hard to overstate how fast moving the 2008 financial crisis was. It wasn't hour to hour, it was minute to minute. We actually got lucky that some of the critical events took place late in the week so that there was a weekend (markets not open) to stop, think, and re-orient. The government paying back all of the mortgages directly would've taken too long. Remember during COVID how everyone got checks? How long did it take between announcement and the check arriving. IIRC, a couple weeks (at best). Even when Congress faces a crisis and passes a bill, the machinery of government can only go so fast. The best thing to do is what they did - telling the market to help itself out as much as possible while also passing TARP and constantly repeating "the full faith and credit of the USA is behind this."
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Because everything was moving so fast and the scale of the collapse was unprecedented, Congress, the Fed, and the Treasury didn't exactly know if what they were planning on doing was legal. This is also in Firefighting. It wasn't just saying, "have general counsel look at this" it was literally unknown constitutional waters with (allegedly) the potential for personal liability. You can have differences of opinion with Bernanke et al., but those guys had to make some Big Time decisions under massive stress that could've (maybe) landed them in jail no matter how noble their intent.
All of this is to say, the government blanket paying mortgages might have some legal traps within it. Even if it did come back "clean" the time taken to review it would've been catastrophic (see point number 1)
- Organizations don't have all of the information and sometimes getting it is illegal. Remember AIG? They were an insurance giant who collapsed in 2008. This was (to oversimplify) because they wrote a bunch of insurance policies to other financial entities that went really bad really fast. Well, why didn't AIG just do better diligence? (1) There were layers and layers of counter parties, derivatives, and reinsurance. Impossible to trace through all of it (2) In some cases, getting a complete picture of a counter-party's risk or exposure is illegal as it would involve revealing trade secrets. How do mortgages fit into this? At the time, I'm not sure it was readily apparent that mortgages were the root cause of all of this. The crisis itself was on liquidity and short term financing for big financial instiutions, everyone could see that. What caused that may have been more mysterious, so I don't think the Gov't was in a position to quickly say "let's get these mortgages figured out." And, to beat the dead horse, taking the time to figure it out would've been the wrong move.
2008 is fascinating to me for tons of reasons. People experienced a lot of pain in the years following and it has a non-trivial part in the political situation we have today. But it could've been so, so, much worse, and I think we avoided it just barely.
100ProofTollBooth
7mo ago
I think you're broadly correct, but that you come down too hard on the hardcore analytical philosophy, especially philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics. While all of these are some of my longest standing side pursuits, I do admit that they have little to say about how humans out to conduct their lives. But they are not merely parlor games. I subscribe to the idea of quietism.
I've been fascinated with finding ways to improve my own thinking not in terms of knowing more about a subject, but in improving the lowest level functions of thought. The rough analogy is I want my engine to run more efficiently, not to be bigger or use higher octane fuel. I think the Big 3 lines of philosophy I listed above help me do that. Do they directly make my life better? Probably not, but maybe discovering Popper's theory of falsifiability has made me better at spotting bullshit "analysis" and "data science" in journalism, business, and the utter non-field of "popular science."
Beyond that, I think that some of the really esoteric pathways are just fun. I've been reading recently about the eliminative materialism. It's wild. "Turns out, if you're really smart, you'll realize you don't even exist!"
Skookum doing Skookum things.
But I'm going to salvage this as an antidote to what I believe to be layer nineteen recursion trolling.
"The pain of regret is far greater than the pain of rejection." I may have messed up the exact wording here, but this is a common old-school PUA / red (but not black) pill / modern male self-improvement scene saying. It's aimed at the early stage guys who still get so worked up about a woman turning down a request for a number, an invitation to a date, or even just an engagement in conversation. The slogan implores young single guys to go up to their paramour, give it a shot, and take the rejection with grace if it occurs. You'll spend a lot more time being in pain thinking "what if!" as opposed to the sharp but short pain of "Oh, no thanks."
I think it's not only useful advice within and without a dating context, I'd say it's close to necessary for the progression of stable dating norms. I've written before on here about how things as innocuous / innocent as High School dances (at least as they were up until maybe the 2010s) are really models for acceptable social interaction and dress rehearsals for unsupervised courtship. Asking a girl or guy (sadie hawkins style) to a dance is a very binary yes/no situation without any ambiguity and you, the asker, are socially pressured to accept the response. Maybe you pair it with some pre-messaging and try to get a feel for what the likely outcome is, but you still abide by that final outcome. Now, in your mid 20s, you can pattern match well enough that when you're chatting with someone at a bar, you can read the mood well enough to see a yes or no coming. Maybe you think there's a shot worth taking and escalate to a firm yes/no inquiry. "Take you out for a drink sometime?" A little heartache is the risk, but everyone goes home, sometimes together.
The loss of these progressively more ambiguous, complex, and unsupervised rituals is, I think, part (though far from the whole or even primary) cause of some of the hyperventilation over ambiguous sexual encounters in the popular mind. In the infamous Aziz Ansari piece, the author's primary contention was that Ansari should've sensed her discomfort and terminated the encounter. (Nevermind that this was after she had willingly performed oral sex on him. Hmmm, maybe she likes me?) Leaving that particular case, mixed messaging and hypoagency aside, there is something to the idea that both parties in a romantic situation ought to have some ability and experience with gauging mood / human emotion / etc. Normal caveats apply to issues with autism, drunkenness, sociopathy.
Returning to "The pain of regret is far greater than the pain of rejection," a massive pillar of old-school PUA was learning from even the worst of encounters. It's actually basic hypothesis testing and iterative development. The more times you do something, the more information and patterns you have on which to base your decision making. If you want to get good at talking to girls, go talk to a lot of girls about anything you want. More importantly for society; this will probably mean that all parties involved start to become far more aware of the intentions, feelings, and boundaries of all other parties involved. Part of me gets really nervous thinking about some PMC marriages I've seen where I know the wife is the first person the husband had sex with. Does he have any ability to understand subtle communication? Does she feel like she has to be 10/10 overt at all times to prevent misunderstandings? How many of their sexual encounters end with a raised-voice "No!" from her that is genuinely surprising and unexpected to him?
I'm not calling for all young men to be Don Juans or young women to be ultra-flirt coquettes. In fact, I'm calling for a lot more social pressure (read: shame) and additionally a lot more social interaction practice.
If you fail to provide models of adulthood and pro-social behavior, don't be surprised when you're dealing with anti-social children in 25 year old bodies with 25 year old hormones, 25 year old rights (alcohol, drugs, firearms) and a creeping chaos in society. Yet this is now close to the norm, and I say that because of the far less dramatic but far more insidious ways it has manifested itself. "You can be anything you want when you grow up!" Cool, thanks, but what is something good to shoot for? Is fireman better or worse than lawyer, or boy-robot who can turn into a jet? Please just give me a shove in the right direction. "Never let anyone say you can't do something!" That cop said I can't shit right here in front of the Apple Store. Am I being oppressed? "You're perfect just the way you are!" Good, because I wasn't planning on showering today anyway.
100ProofTollBooth
6mo ago
I've been following this, and it's US Military cousin, for years.
In fact, we've a fresh article on it.
There are two groups of analysis here; individual performance and unit culture.
On individual performance, female combat soldiers, at the median, are far, far worse than their male counterparts. This is to the surprise of no one. In the general population, bone density, upper body strength, and grip strength don't overlap more than 1- 2 % (meaning the bottom 1-2% of males with the top 1-2% of females). Even if a female is very motivated and hits the gym, the amount of room she has to make up is nigh on impossible.
Where this gets compounded is over time and with compounding adversity. What I mean here is that a Superwoman might be able to pass things the a PFT (physical fitness test), marksmanship test, and things like obstacle courses and land nav over a single day on a U.S. base. In the field (and field exercises) however, the compounding of sleep deprivation and multiple days of moving combat loads and speed catches up. I couldn't find the article with quick Googling (I might later), but there was a report in the 2018 range of female US Marines admitting "we can hump the weight of a combat load for a long time, but we just can't move as fast from objective to objective." There's a saying in the SOF community that "selection is everyday." Just because you passed the test that first time and became an infantryman / ranger / SEAL / etc. doesn't mean that you're automatically a super solider for life. You have to work everyday and you have to perform everyday. In Ranger Battalion in the U.S. Army, there's something called RFS or Released For Standards. This means that you get kicked out for not being good enough in one way or another. Often times its leadership related (to keep guys from just making rank by hanging out forever) but it also isn't uncommon for a Ranger to all of a sudden fuck up a PFT because they had been slacking off and drinking every weekend. Back to Superwoman - she might be able to get through an indoc and selection, but I would put the odds of her maintaining those standards in a unit over time to be effectively zero.
Unit culture is the next layer. Every person in a unit is a mix of talents. One guy is a really great shot, and kind of OK at PT. Another guy is a PT stud, but isn't so great at land nav. The unit commander (say at the platoon level) is above average at PT and shooting, but isn't an all around badass, but he does get a bunch of gucci gear because he knows how to do acquisition voodoo. A female (especially enlisted) will, probably, be at the bottom of all of these categories. Her treatment will be no different than a male who is at the bottom of all of those categories; "you're last on the run, you can't shoot straight, you fell asleep on patrol, you can't carry the 240B with a full complement of ammo." It singles you out for extra ridicule and scrutiny. Sure, you're passing all of the minimums and standards, but you aren't great or even good at any one thing. It means the unit has to plan contingency around you always instead of slotting you into things you're good at to compensate for the things you're worse at.
I'll leave it there for now because I think those are the two main and enduring cases against women in combat. There are some edge things that also raise questions; what happens when (and it will happen) a female gets pregnant in combat? Will females potentially use sex to curry favor from peers and superiors (of course not, it's a professional force! that would never happen.
As far as Israeli female combat soldiers go; First, the definition of "combat" is a little stretched. Border guards are one thing (as are pilots), but a maneuver unit (infantry, armor, artillery) is another. Second, the Israeli model is still built heavily on conscripts and reservists supporting the active duty while not being anywhere near the latter's standards. I think the unfortunately reality is that many female Israeli "combat" soldiers didn't quite get into combat by choice.
100ProofTollBooth
6mo ago
I'll accept the nonchalance of gun rights folks over the bad faith, willingly under-informed righteousness of the gun control people. When you haven't done the basic homework to know that saying "thirty magazine clip" is nonsense, I can't respect your credibility or good faith in the argument. Much less when you start extending squishy gun aesthetic terminology to other weapons (what the hell is a military style knife?)
The emotional-memetic takeover of the firearm debate is pretty much complete. It's actually a non-issue in the popular consciousness. When it does matter, in SCOTUS rulings, the court is moving ever towards more permissive gun laws because it's literally the second amendment to the Constitution. It's a bit paranoid and jaded, but I have the thought that when your average twitter warrior launches something like "another mass shooting in the U.S., when will we learn?" their fatalism is actually a tacit admission that they don't want to push the issue because they know where that ends up in the judiciary. Phrased differently; they don't want to legally fuck around and find out.
Plus one to @2rafa's support for re-institutionalization. It's yet another bizarre walking contradiction on the left; "Everyone needs therapy. You should go to a therapist!" only applies to PMC pseudo-depression and anxiety. When you're so schizophrenic that you can't see, on the other hand, it's "people have the right to be unhoused on their own terms!"
100ProofTollBooth
6mo ago
They should pair you with a functional expert who knows about Revenue Management. Even if they don't I wouldn't worry too much. Revenue is pretty cut and dry quantitative, so you're probably going to have straightforward requests without much room for interpretation.
The upside for all data roles -- forget having to write real tests! Just run the damn pipeline / model / whatever. There is no integration, everything is a one-off.
Until you get a VP-level (or higher) who builds their promotion case on creating the Integrated Data Infrastructure Omniscient Technology and starts to require really strict sprints and CI/CD pipelines ... for building reports.
But, for the time being, if you've actually written code in a real SWE environment, data work will be technically less rigorous, but with the potential for more back and forth with human principals.
100ProofTollBooth
6mo ago
Strong first.
That's a particular program, but it's also a general philosophy.
The rep range you're talking about (12-15 or higher) is undoubtedly in the hypertrophy or endurance strikezone. You're building muscle mass (but not strength) or building your body's ability to process lactic acid efficiently (endurance).
A better strategy, especially if longevity is even a tertiary goal, is to build overall strength first. Strength is built in the 3-6 rep range, with 5 (or "fahve" according to Saint. Mark) being a generally agreed upon gold spot. Sets also fall into 3-5 for most of the big compounds, with a major exception being deadlifts which should be done for only 1 - 2 sets if at all. Some folks completely replace deadlifts with cleans or power cleans.
Why "Strong First"? Because it's the most "convertible" to other fitness goals; endurance, hypertrophy, or a mixture of the two that is often called "toning" (which isn't, strictly speaking, a thing). If you can squat, bench, press, clean / deadlift, and row heavy, you can then start to manipulate the weight-reps-sets schemes for your specific goals. Going the other way doesn't work. I've seen badass PT Marines who can do 20 pullups fail to deadlift their own bodyweight.
Additionally, there seems to be a growing amount of research indicating that resistance training is the best exercise form for longevity.
Here's the good news: Unless you already have been lifting serious for some time, your first six months of going to the gym will yield noticeable and impressive results. "n00b gainz" are real regardless of specific weight/sets/reps combos. This is also good because it frees you from the mental stress of really caring about hyper-optimization of your routines. One note, however - please, please, please do compound lifts with free weights (unless you have some prior injury where this would be a real safety hazard). Isolated lifts are pointless for anyone who isn't a bodybuilder and if they're really over-worked, can result in such proportional imbalance that they increase the likelihood of injury. Machines are ok if your gym is a typical corporate gym that skimps on squat racks. Stay away from nonsense like band work (there are applications for this, but not general fitness).
100ProofTollBooth
6mo ago
I apologize if this is better suited to a Sunday thread, but it's top of mind for me right now.
Any recommendations for reactionary reading? I want to be specific that I have no interest in the "Dark Enlightenment" Yarvin/Land side of things as I've read enough of that to know it really is permanently-online neo-reddit-Edge-Lord content.
To maybe give a bit of a Customers Also Liked vibe; I'm moving through the works of James Burnham and have read a lot of Russell Kirk and Willmoore Kendall. I know these folks would be more in the traditionalist conservative camp, which I have enjoyed. Wondering if there's anything beyond them that doesn't actually drop into out-and-proud monarchism / theocracy.
100ProofTollBooth
6mo ago
entering the shadow realm
Peace be upon you, fellow gym-meme brother/sister.
Re: "20 pullups, but no deadlift?" The case that comes to mind was a long distance runner who I saw doing a PFT. Rail skinny, but did kill his pullups. By sheer insane coincidence, ran into him at the post gym later that day. 2 plate deadlift, had to cat-back it by the third rep. My theory is that the hyper-specifically trained for his pullups on the PFT by doing .... a shit ton of pullups for several months. I can see how that would over emphasize biceps-to-lats but not actually develop the full posterior chain through the glutes and hamstrings. I think you're also probably correct in the "form" argument - he had no conception of how to use his legs to start the rep.
Now, would've been able to rack pull 225? Hey, maybe.
100ProofTollBooth
6mo ago
If you're in a powerlifting cycle of any sort, you've already move past the beginner lifter phase which, I believe, was OP's situation. We're talking about two different things.
100ProofTollBooth
6mo ago
He's also an 'androphile', which is totally different to being gay because he's bald and muscular and wears lots of leather and sunglasses, or something.
Rob Halford would like to see you in the hall.
Credit where it's due; Donovan has stated that he uses the term androphile mostly as a way to distinguish himself from mainstream 'gay.' It's a cultural distinction which I find fairly common amongst gay men who fall outside of the bi-coast metropolitan social sphere.
I think Donovan fell off because his brand of manly men doing man men things got its doors blown off by the likes of Jocko Wilink and other Professional Veterans who not only tell the same style of stories, but have the personal experience and street cred to back it up.
100ProofTollBooth
6mo ago
Anecdote for further illustration.
A buddy was a contractor in Kabul. Late 00's - early 10's timeframe. Had local Afghan police / mil in the compound all the time, they even had their own bank of desks. One day, by buddy is walking through there and catches one of the Afghan's looking at gay porn. He tells him to cut it out. Bit of a facepalm, whatever. Plenty of American soldiers would trade porno DVDs back and forth. A few days later, it happens again, but not with by buddy as the witness. Instead, a military police type (I'm forgetting exact details here) saw it. He (the MP) decides to strictly follow protocol and report it to the Afghan porn watcher's local chain of command. My buddy hears about this as literally drops his lunch to sprint down to the Afghan commander's office. He assures / pleads with the commander that it's really not that big of a deal and they can set up his computer so that porno sites of any kind won't load.
Why would my buddy do this? Why did he sprint to do it? Because the next day, base security found that original Afghan (he of the gay porn) shot dead in a ditch at the edge of the base. The Afghan commander had considered it embarrassing and dishonorable for the dude to have been watching that in a setting where foreigners could (and did) catch him. When my buddy told this story, he got more emotional than when he told his story about seeing one of his best friends take a direct mortar hit and getting vaporized. To him, it was just the mindless and totally preventable cruelty of it (compared to the random chance of warfare that did in his friend).
"Oh, we have to be tolerant of the cultural differences."
Silvering lining concluding tangent: Afghanistan, way more than Iraq, really did see the development of meaningful and long-lasting partnerships between Afghan and American forces. During the hasty withdrawal in 2021, I knew a bunch of MAGA types (and others, to be sure) with multiple combat tours who took extended time off of work to help find ways to get their interpreters / local ANA / ANP buddies out of the country before Taliban could clip them.
My family's background is roughly speaking confederate descendants who roamed around after the war with about three separate main branches settling between Appalachia and Texas.
As other comments have pointed out "whiny"-ness, let me double down that - this song continues a long tradition of folk/country/bluegrass fatalism that I have little tolerance for. "My daddy grew up here and lived as a poor man, and so did my grandaddy, and so did his daddy...but we all grew up right, and I'm gonna stay here and be just like them!" .... Why / how is inter-generational poverty a virtue? If it's the case that your in such an awful economic situation that you can't advance your lot in life more than several generations before you, you have all of my sympathy. And that same sympathy disappears the second you turn that situation into some sort of battle cry of authenticity or moral superiority.
There's something to be said here about crabs in a bucket, and how it seems like - for more than a few cultures inspired by Southern Clanish / Honor cultures - the only way to prove authenticity and adherence to "traditional" (and, therefore, right) cultural norms is through demonstrated poverty and dysfunction.
Why is that the goal? Sure, I have a deep appreciation for stories about the dust bowl I heard growing up, but I have more appreciation that my Dad and Uncles used the G.I. bill to get STEM degrees and were also willing to move the family around for job opportunities. Law obeying, studious, industrious, and economically astute seems like a good rubric for "Rasied 'Em Right!" when compared with impulsive, prone to violence, substance abuse, obsessed with vague notions of honor but .... geographically consistent?
The unfortunate fact is that your suffering alone yields no accolade or social currency. No one cares. The best you can do, as this song tries to, is whip up some strong emotionalism and try to trade-the-currency for moral deference. But that exchange rate is never strong and that commodity expiry is measured in hours.
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