ActuallyATleilaxuGhola

ActuallyATleilaxuGhola Axolotl Tank Class of '24 21hr ago

But it's cruise control for cool.

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ActuallyATleilaxuGhola Axolotl Tank Class of '24 3d ago

I will concede that very dense places are different.

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ActuallyATleilaxuGhola Axolotl Tank Class of '24 3d ago

Bikes are less predictable. They can weave, turn, and change speeds much more suddenly than a car. When I'm walking and I hear a car coming behind me, I glance back once to see its trajectory and adjust my path accordingly. When I hear a bike coming quickly towards me, I usually glance back several times to track it since I can't fully tell where the cyclists plans to go.

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ActuallyATleilaxuGhola Axolotl Tank Class of '24 3d ago

Disclaimer: I don't hate cyclists and have not had many negative experiences with cyclists while driving.

I always find it difficult to find sympaths for cyclists in America. My thinking goes like this.

America is built for cars. Homes and jobs are far apart. Friends and employers expect you to travel distance only reasonably covered with a car.
Thus, cars are a necessary part of life for most Americans. You need a car to get a job to feed your kids. You must buy and drive a car even if you don't really want to.
Biking to work or to the grocery is not feasible for most people for many reasons. Your employer won't think it's cute that you show up sweaty, or drenched in rain, or 30 minutes late due to snow. Your wife won't be amused when you have to bike 30 minutes to Walmart every day to fill your backpack with food for the kids. How do you get to the hospital when someone is sick or injured? How do you take your family anywhere, especially when the kids are small?
Thus, cycling is best thought of as either an elective hobby for those with money and time to burn, or a last resort for truly destitute and/or criminal. The former can afford a car if they want, they just choose not to. The latter have bigger problems than just not having reliable transportation and prioritizing bikes over cars won't fix those.
Thus, I really don't care about cyclists' complaints. I mentally put cyclists in the same bucket as skateboarders, rollerbladers, and Segway riders. If you can do your hobby on public roads safely and without endangering yourself or or car drivers, then fine. If there's any inconvenience or risk to drivers, the just ban everything except cars and call it a day.

tl;dr I need to get to work on time or pick up food for dinner, I'm not interested in being delayed or inconvenienced to accommodate some bum or some stranger's vanity hobby.

An argument I'm somewhat sympathetic to is that if we don't accommodate cyclists, we'll be stuck in our current automobile-centric hellscape forever. That is probably true. However, my preferences go like this:

Cities designed for bikes & public transit, cars rarely needed
Cities designed for cars
Cities designed for cars where cycling is awkwardly retrofitted into existing car infra with significant gaps where there are no provisions for bikes at all

In the U.S., number 3 seems by far the most common, and it sucks for everyone. The car/bike war is one of those problems that IMO can only really be solved by a strong executive power not beholden NIMBYs and lobbyists. Until one materializes, I'm supporting option 2 all the way.

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Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 8, 2025

ActuallyATleilaxuGhola Axolotl Tank Class of '24 3d ago

Thank you. That sounds terrifying.

I think I got the tiniest taste once playing laser tag with my coworkers once. Two of the dozen or so guys were ex military and they were just wiping the floor with everyone. They weren't spec ops or anything, just low ranking army enlisted, but they clearly knew how to move between cover, how to wait patiently for their opponents to move, and how to understand their and their opponents' line of sight. I got tagged a bunch, it was eye opening.

Given the above, it's interesting to me that there are some people who are exhilarated by the experience. I guess some just have a knack for it and are thrill seekers. Definitely not for me.

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Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 8, 2025

ActuallyATleilaxuGhola Axolotl Tank Class of '24 4d ago

The last two are really not games for the faint of heart though, it turns out that in our modern age, real world tactics are actually quite complicated and unintuitive.

I'm interested, tell me more.

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ActuallyATleilaxuGhola Axolotl Tank Class of '24 7d ago

I think OP is agreeing with you about the Republicans. Their reputation is "the fiscally conservative, small government party" despite them actively increasing the debt and expanding government for decades. See also "the party of Christian family values" despite doing little to nothing to oppose the normalization of progressive values.

America is over, and so, okay, then what?

you have the answer already:

be selfish and just try to grab what I can and hope I'm dead before the shit really hits the fan

Hard reforms may have been possible back when America was a nation. Here in Japan, people are just buckling down and weathering the long running currency devaluation because (they believe) the alternative is worse. There's a sense here that everyone is suffering together which makes it bearable. Unfortunately, America is not a nation anymore, it's a multiethnic, multicultural, multi-faith empire that include groups who bitterly hate each other, which means it's nearly impossible to get all the different groups game-theory-cooperate to avoid disaster (barring an existential threat, and even then...). Instead, we will have factional war to the knife as the coffers run dry and systems gradually break down.

I don't expect a collapse that will make good TV, rather it will be a slow version of South Africa where everything gets gradually shittier, punctuated by sudden slips along regional/local political and social fault lines that result in brief but bloody spasms of violence.

So yeah, I think you would be wise to start grabbing what you can now while praying for a unifying moment that will help us avoid that future. I also recommend moving to a place where you're around ideological, religious, and or ethnic allies so that you're not the odd man out when broadcasts from Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines start to reach your neighborhood.

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ActuallyATleilaxuGhola Axolotl Tank Class of '24 9d ago

Supposedly becoming a dad is (used to be?) good for your career because people are (or were?) more generous with raises for a family man.

This sounds to me like something that happened in the 50s and 60s back when ~lifetime employment and "being a company man" were still possible. But I still think there's a weak form that survives. There's a sort of brotherhood of fathers that I've noticed in interviews, both as an interviewer and interviewee. Being a father shows that you've got a definite course plotted out in your life, that you know what you want, that you've got obligations to meet, and that you've got a certain level of resilience. You can append asterisks to all of those qualities because there are of course massive exceptions, but the odds are good. I definitely give fathers a few bonus points during interviews, and I'm closer to my colleagues who have kids.

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ActuallyATleilaxuGhola Axolotl Tank Class of '24 9d ago

As long as the discussion is respectful and aimed at understanding each other’s different views, it should be tolerable.

As I get older, I increasingly find mindkilled flag-waving from my own camp just as distasteful. I don't want to be friends with someone whose Prius sports an "8647" bumper sticker, but nor do I want to be friends with someone with "Liberal Tears are Delicious" on the back of their truck.

I've never dealt with online dating, but I always imagined that the "no MAGA" is a blessing in disguise. It outs people as shallow thinkers or deranged partisans and makes it easier to sift them out of the pool. It would be much worse to go on several dates before finding out the truth.

But after filtering them out, is there much of a pool left? My gut feeling is that the answer might be no, because I'd guess that stable, happy, conservative or grill-pilled single women probably get enough attention IRL that they don't need to use apps. And that any woman who apparently fits that profile might be playing a character (wheat field tradwife) or have some baggage. Is that the case?

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ActuallyATleilaxuGhola Axolotl Tank Class of '24 9d ago

they serve overpriced "funeral food"

What does this mean?

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Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 1, 2025

ActuallyATleilaxuGhola Axolotl Tank Class of '24 10d ago

Reminds me of one of my favorite movie dialogues:

Warden: Did you enjoy God’s latest gift?
Teddy Daniels: What?
Warden: God’s gift. [points to the sky] The violence. When I came downstairs in my home and I saw a tree in my living room, it reached out for me like a divine hand. God loves violence.
Teddy Daniels: I…I hadn’t noticed.
Warden: Sure you have. Why else would there me so much of it? It’s in us. It’s what we are. We wage war, we burn sacrifices and pillage and plunder and tear at the flesh of our brothers. And why? Because God gave us violence to wage in his honor.
Teddy Daniels: I thought God gave us moral order. Warden: There’s no moral order as pure as this storm. There’s no moral order at all. There’s just this; can my violence conquer yours?
Teddy Daniels: I’m not violent.
Warden: Yes, you are. You’re as violent as they come. I know this because I’m as violent as they come. With the constraints of society we’re lifted. And I was all that stood between you and me? You would crack my skull and eat my meaty parts. Wouldn’t you? But Cawley thinks that you’re harmless, that you can be controlled. But I know different.
Teddy Daniels: You don’t know me.
Warden: Oh, but I do.
Teddy Daniels: No, you don’t. You don’t know me at all. Warden: Oh, I know you. We’ve known each other for centuries. If I was to sink my teeth into your eye right now, would you be able to stop me before I blinded you?
Teddy Daniels: Give it a try.
Warden: That’s the spirit.

Always wondered if he wasn't based a little on Judge Holden.

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Wellness Wednesday for May 28, 2025

ActuallyATleilaxuGhola Axolotl Tank Class of '24 15d ago

Called it, you're a Brahmin.

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Wellness Wednesday for May 28, 2025

ActuallyATleilaxuGhola Axolotl Tank Class of '24 15d ago · Edited 12d ago

Are you Indian? I feel like every user on here who is young and doing some startup thing is Indian. I'm not sure why that is but it's an interesting phenomenon.

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Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 25, 2025

ActuallyATleilaxuGhola Axolotl Tank Class of '24 15d ago

I was pretty disappointed by the lack of actual debate as well. Yarvin put forth some assertions that she could have contested, but she instead seemed to be trying to avoid legitimizing his ideas by treating them as beneath her consideration. I wonder if she knows that that cat is already out of the bag. And she seemed to be either be speaking in vague meaningless generalities the whole time, or she was speaking academic/Cathedral jargon (cf. Catholic theological jargon).

Also, maybe just personal taste, but man, her voice and tone were just incredibly grating. She has some sort of West Coast uptalk accent (I kept thinking "ermahgerd") and her constant unprovoked sassy black girl put-downs really dragged the whole thing down and were kind of embarrassing to listen to. Just sounded really arrogant and scolding. Really off-putting.

Yarvin IMO only did "okay" himself. To be fair it was hard to pin down what Allen was saying, but he meandered a lot and his points were probably hard to understand for people unfamiliar with his writing. At one point he tried to make some point about identical twins being equal in moral worth as some sort of gotcha, and the even the moderator was so confused he asked for clarification. Silver lining was that his speaking ability seems to have improved. Last time I heard him on a podcast I had to turn it off because there were so many "ummms" and "uhhhs."

Overall, pretty weak showing for debate between a professor from the World's Greatest Center of Learning and the Prince of Dark Elves. I suspect they chose a black woman to trigger audience programming about race/sexism in order to taint the debate, because she clearly wasn't chosen for debate skill. I'd much rather have watched Yarvin debated some highly competent old white professor but maybe Yarvin doesn't have those anymore.

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Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 25, 2025

ActuallyATleilaxuGhola Axolotl Tank Class of '24 15d ago

Curtis Yarvin debated Danielle Allen, a Harvard professor, last week. Did anyone here listen to the debate? What were your thoughts?

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ActuallyATleilaxuGhola Axolotl Tank Class of '24 17d ago

I'm not sure, but I knew I wasn't imagining it.

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ActuallyATleilaxuGhola Axolotl Tank Class of '24 18d ago

Your okcupid URL links to "nice hat.". I'm having deja vu...

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ActuallyATleilaxuGhola Axolotl Tank Class of '24 18d ago

FWIW, my experience as a man was more of quiet resignation. When I was dating, I was resigned to marrying someone with a "body count" since well-adjusted women who were at least slightly attractive without one were vanishingly rare. If asked I would've said that I was not interested in marrying someone with many previous sex partners, but that wasn't because I was try to flex in front of the boys, it was really how I felt. I have a pretty "conservative" personality though, I have strong feelings on the "Sanctity/Degradation" moral axis and I have strong "disgust" reaction. So I may be an outlier.

In private conversations with very close friends, I would often see a bit of what you're describing though. They didn't care that much about her past. They just didn't want to be seen as a cuck who married a slut, so as long as her past escapades were never revealed, it was more or less okay.

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