BahRamYou
7mo ago
well yeah I agree that spending $50,000 in an evening is insane. I don't even think it would help. Like, unless you want to meet a working girl, a normal woman would also think spending that much on club service is insane.
Yeah... I don't want to argue with you, since it seems like you've lived there a long time while I was only there a few months. But I was just recently there, and went to all the places you mentioned. Lots of great places to go drinking with the bros, but very few places were any good for meeting women. They seemed to be well aware of what a hot commodity they were, as any young woman could sit in a touristy bar and get swarmed with attention, or open up a dating app and get hundreds of likes, or walk down the street and get hit on/scouted for the adult industry. A lot of the local guys, also, seemed quite handsome and smooth, so there's a high level of competition. If you "open up a conversation" between groups like you described, then you better be fluent enough to keep up with their conversation, which is quite hard when they're drinking and joking around. Unless it's a bar/event specifically targeted at foreigners, but then those were all 90%+ men.
I feel like I heard a lot of stories from guys like you who went there in the 90s and 2000s and had an easy time dating back then. But it's not like that anymore... their aging population has a lot fewer young women, while their culture cachet has increased and America's has decreased so noone is going to be impressed by a random foreigner guy showing up and fumbling with a dictionary or a translation app. I'm sure it's still possible to meet people, either to hook up or start a long-term relationship, but it's not at all an easy game. And this is despite me being frequently complimented on both my appearance and personality.
BahRamYou
7mo ago
Out of curiousity, how would you do that? When I visited Osaka, it seemed completely overrun with western tourists, many of them young men looking for a one night stand. Lots of places were absolute sausage fests, and the local women seemed to have perfected the art of completely ignoring foreign men. I was able to interact by showing them I could speak basic Japanese, but then quickly hit my language limit, and it seemed like they were looking for a long-term relationship with someone that actually lived there. Dance clubs were just as terrible as anywhere else.
And operationally, how does this work; do you just book a table/bottle service and then the employees bring girls to your table? I am totally clueless here.
Doesn't work that way, at least not at any American club I've ever been in (admittedly I've never been in any super expensive/exclusive clubs, but I think those are still the same). You sit at your table, they give you a bottle of ridiculously overpriced liquor, maybe some bad snacks, and nothing else. You still have to get up and go to the dance floor to meet people. I guess the idea is that if you do meet someone, the table gives you a place to go and chat, and maybe impress her a little bit with your money, but mostly it's just a waste of money. I feel like the clubs really use it to take advantage of guys like you.
Now, the system you describe does exist in South Korea. The "booking club", where you go with your male friends, pay for a room, and the staff will bring in girls from the dance floor to come sit and talk with you. I thought that was a way better system, but sadly seems to be dying out. Not sure if there's still any existing in Koreatown, and if there are it might only be for Korean people. If you ever do find a club like that in the US, please let me know!
edit- and like other people said, +1 for lasik/PRK. It was a huge gamechanger for me, not just in looks, but also it made it way easier for me to do cool active hobbies like swimming or diving. That said, it's not a magic bullet that will solve all your dating problems. Also, expect at least 2 days of searing pain.
BahRamYou
7mo ago
True, they're not going to literally hand him a check for a trillion dollars. But he can still ask for an awful lot. Lots of military contractors made bank during WW2.
BahRamYou
7mo ago
In Poker, they'll teach you that it's usually a fool's errand to try to guess exactly which cards another player has or what he's thinking. Instead, you try to put them on a plausable range. So like, anything from "medicore hand played aggressively" to "strong hand played weakly," but ruling out the extremes.
I think we can do the same thing with Elon Musk and SpaceX. Who knows what he's "really" thinking, we can't read his mind, and he probably changes his mind himself from time to time. But he seems consistent enough to rule out the extremes- he's not a conman who's just lying about going to Mars, because he's put so much money and effort into developing Starship. But I also think he's smart enough to realize that it's very unlikely a Martian colony will ever be established during his lifetime, or that it would ever actually be profitable.
I think his play is:
- 10% true believer, he really wants to go down in history as being the guy who established the first off-world colony. He already has an insane amount of money, but he still wants to feed his ego and feel like he's doing something more important than selling cars or cryptocurrency.
- 40% hypeman- he doesn't really care about that, but he's got a lot of super nerdy engineers working for him who care about it a lot. They're willing to work way harder for his companies than they would at a normal job, because they think they're on some sort of grand quest for the human species. I've heard that working for NASA is often like that- everyone is super passionate about what they do, even the most mundane experiments, so they'll work long hours for low pay.
- 50% conman/salesman- he doesn't care about Mars at all, the real play is LEO here on Earth. Data from Starlink, intelligence data from Starshield, or just straight up selling missiles to the military- all of that has the potential to be insanely profitable. If a major war breaks out and he's got a near-monopoly on that technology, he can pretty much name whatever price he wants to the US government.
BahRamYou
7mo ago
No, I don't believe that you have "sat down and done the calculation." It seems like your entire argument is based on a single anecdote of when you went to Germany and got a good deal on healthcare (which was paid for by the government there). You should read more about Baumol's cost disease.
BahRamYou
7mo ago
I feel like you're still missing the key thing? The main reason that prices are lower in Germany is that German salaries are lower. That's true in almost every field, but especially true in the higher-end fields like medicine. Comparing random specific operations doesn't tell much of a story- you have to look at overall healthcare cost. Which is in the same ballpark, just higher in America because we're so much richer than those poor, beknighted Germans. OK that's sarcasm, but still... compare your salary (and take-home pay!) as an American software engineer to a German peer. When I did that, I was almost embarassed by how much more I made than my peers in Euroland.
BahRamYou
7mo ago
Is it more or less than 5%? Is it enough that an average voter would actually get excited by the difference? Is it enough to counter all the meriad other historical, cultural, economica, and geographical differences between those countries?
In general: don't treat social sociences like hard math. Alllow a big margin of error.
BahRamYou
7mo ago
Apparently I was off, it's more like $36 billion (https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10336). It was much higher in 2021, but that was a temporary thing because of Covid. I can't find a definitive source for admin costs, but AI says $5.8 billion. It's not nothing, but it's still far, far smaller than what a UBI costs. I feel like that should be obvious from intuition? Of course a program that only covers a fraction of the population for a temporary period is going to cost less than one that covers everyone forever. It's like comparing the Rhode Island national guard to the US army.
What's your source for thinking that Administration drives costs up by a factor of 10? Doesn't that seem extreme?
I once took a breadth test in Germany, and a breadth test in the US, close in time. The Germany one is 50 EUR, the US one was $1020. That's a 20x difference, and I don't think that this can be explained by salaries alone.
Well, you know what they say about anecdotes and data. Germany spends about 12% of its GDP on healthcare, and that percent has steadily gone up over time. The US spends 17%, which is certainly higher but not massively so. It's roughly what I'd expect from a country that's wealthier, does more research, and lives more unhealthily than Germany. At the best, you could argue that adopting their system would save us 1/3 of health care costs, but certainly not 20x.
Of course our system isn't perfect and has many flaws... but so does every other system on Earth.
I took a while to respond to this because I needed time to think it over. You raise some good points, and I don't have all the answers.
One where university academics infiltrate the academy in the 1960s with the explicit aim of indoctrinating students into socialist ideology, based on the strategy outlined at the Third International; and One where a new generation of university academics take positions in the 1960s, who find ideas of socialism interesting and engaging and cool, and therefore write papers on it and teach it;
There was probably a good mix of both of those sorts as academics in the 1960s. As well as normal people who just liked the job- it was a lot easier to become a professor back then. The universities were massively expanding with all the baby boomers, especially in America.
what I think happened was that, over time, some tactics just worked better than others. Nobody really pays attention to a professor writing papers about socialism. Even if it's very persuasive, we just ignore it. But it's hard to ignore a group of activists chanting slogans at you, and even harder when it's your boss ordering you to follow new policies to be more woke.
I don't think it's just a funding issue, because academia is famously low-paying. And many of the activist groups don't pay at all. In fact, many universities outright ignore areas that could be well funded (like military history or psychometrics) because it goes against their leftist ideology. You see the same thing in movie and game studios- they push for woke stuff despite it completely tanking their profits, over and over again.
It's also worth noting that the left was significantly more violent in the past, especially in the late 60s and 70s. This was a time of things like the Weather Underground planting bombs, environmental groups destroying bulldozers, and "the Troubles" in Northern Ireland. (edit- and the Black Panthers/Black Liberation Army- probably the best example since they were explicitly Marxist while also committing many acts of violence) None of those groups were related, but they seem to follow the same playback of student discussion group -> unreasonable political demands -> resort to force to get what you want. I think nowadays those groups have realized that other forms of force work better than naked violence, but the same playbook is there, looking awfully similar to the Russian Revolution.
It's sort of a joke by now that the environmental groups are usually also socialist. "The watermelon party, green on the outside and red inside" and such. They talk about environmentalism mostly, but if you ask them their economic views they will usually admit to being socialist, at least in their ideal world. And I feel like pretty much all the leftist groups are the same- regardless of their pet policy, they're also mostly socialists or communists.
BahRamYou
7mo ago
Sometimes there's just no other option. An airline can simply delay the flight until a new pilot is available, but you can't always delay a surgery like that, and there might not be any other surgeons available. We have a massive shortage of doctors because of the dumb med school/residency system.
BahRamYou
7mo ago
I don't have the states on me at hand right now but administrative bloat is something absurd, like 1:1 (with physicians) 50 years ago to 1:16 now.
I suspect that, 50 years ago, the physicians were doing a lot of administrative work themselves. Now that's seperated into a separate job. The real problem is that the number of physicians hasn't grown- thanks AMA and limited residency spots.
OK, but you can't just run a large organization with no administration. Some of those administrators do useful work! And this:
Checking unemployment benefits vs universal basic income
Checking unemployment benefits costs way, way less than universal basic income! UBI would be like $4 trillion a year. Total unemployment spending is like $10 billion a year, and that's mostly just benefits.
Likewise, you can't just approve any grant that a scientist asks for. It actually seems reasonable that scientists would spend a lot of time proposing different ideas, and then have a separate agency deciding which ones are worth doing.
most of the countries that do comparable service at lower cost are also countries with much lower salaries overall, so that goes back to the point about "just lower salaries." Generally the countries with more money, like Switzerland, also spend more on healthcare.
Perhaps your description is somewhat exaggerated or simplified for effect, but describing the process as one where socialist leaders are masterminding a strategy to take over universities and then society implies a very high degree of coordination that I just don't see. Who are these leaders? Where do they meet? What's their organisational structure? How do they retain such cohesion over decades?
There's no need for current leaders to meet and mastermind a strategy, because that work has already been done. They met in Moscow in 1919 at the Third International, where they agreed on the basic strategy- only the radical left is allowed (no moderates), constant revolution, cooperate internationally, and use whatever force is necessary to win. This was the end result of a long process starting with the First International in 1864 London, and other groups before that.
College students come in at age 18 and get exposed to this stuff for the first time. They think "wow, what fresh new ideas! I want to be a revolutionary leader too!" But they're not leaders at all, they're just the latest foot soldier for a very old movement where the leaders are long since dead. Nonetheless, it continues because it works. It's like "terrorism" or "guerilla warfare"- you don't need a living general to teach those strategies. But you do need sergeants and lieutenants to teach the new recruits in the basics.
but is simply inaccurate for most countries that have enacted the changes you're talking about. Gay marriage is a recent example
Gay marriage might be an exception since it is broadly popular, at least since after the US enacted it. But what about other woke/leftist cultural programs? Immigration for example seems extremely unpopular, and yet all the European governments keep increasing it anyway.
BahRamYou
8mo ago
I agree it's a different sort of heirarchy. That doesn't make it necessarily incompatible, though. The military, the business world, and the church all have their own weird internal hierarchies that aren't democratic or capitalist, but they still manage to fit into our overall society.
I'd argue that the 50s-70s were simply a different time. The FBI was much more powerful then, a legacy from the war against gangsters in prohibition and spies in WW2. Leftist groups were much weaker. Eventually the Leftist groups won out, and the FBI lost. There might not be one singular "woke pope," but there are plenty of powerful "woke cardinals" advocating for it openly. Just look at all the college professors who openly advocate for communism or other leftist causes- they'd never be allowed to get away with that by the 1950s FBI.
BahRamYou
8mo ago
They could probably rename it to something besides "insurance," because I agree that it functions very differently. The classic insurance is simply a risk pool, helping you pay for rare-but-expensive accidents by having everyone else chip in a little.
Health insurance is more like a real estate agent or full service investment broker. It connects you to a nearby provider, helps you negotiate a fair price from them, but also stops you from getting treatments that you don't really need. Ocassionally this goes wrong (the doctor says you really need a treatment, the insurance company says no, and you're screwed) but it's a reasonable idea. I was on the other end once when I didn't have insurance. The doctor recommended I get an MRI but said it wasn't strictly necessary. I asked how much it would cost and how much it would help. The doctor just kinda shrugged and said she had no idea how to answer either of those questions, she just normally does MRIs for all of her patients with insurance. I feel like an insurance company/medical agent could have helped me there, even if they weren't covering the cost at all.
BahRamYou
8mo ago
It's a truism that if every single person even tangentiallly involved in health care- to not just the doctors and nurses but also the people making the machines and drugs and raw supplies- were to take a 50% pay cut, we could drop prices 50%. You could say the same thing about any industry. But (a) it's not clear, politically, how you'd ever accomplish that and (b) it's a little unfair to tell this one industry to just take it on the chin so the rest of us can live cheaper. Like, you could also bring back the McDonald's dollar menu by forcing all their workers to accept a lower salary (and not allow them to quit), but that would be pretty nuts.
I think we're all hoping that there's some big pot of money being totally wasted. Maybe there's a few people in particular raking it in, or some people doing a completely useless job that can be eliminated. But I'm not sure that's the case. Even if you made all the doctors and administrators take a big pay cut, from what I've seen that still wouldn't cut overall costs all that much. And while you can always debate over which particular treatments and regulations are necessary, nobody can point to any one in particular and say "oh yeah, just stop doing that one, we'll save $100 billion with no downside."
We could perhaps make an argument for cheaper, but worse, health care. Let the people on chronic life support die instead of paying millions to keep them alive. I'd be... open to a discussion about that, but it's ethically queesy.
One of the key points Howard makes is how the transgender agenda would never have gained ground without the groundwork laid by other progressive movements like civil rights, feminism, and gay rights.
It goes deeper than that. It all started with the socialist movement. That had the same sort of goal- radically change the culture of society by convincing people to voluntarily join them. And it made more sense, at least politically- get the 99% of workers to join up and take the wealth from the 1% of rich capital owners. Should be easy to win that vote in a democracy right? Except that the 1% weren't stupid, so they sent in strikebreakers and police to break up the labor movement. And the workers weren't stupid either, so most of them didn't want to risk joining this radical revolutionary movement to overturn society, especially when most of them were too uneducated to understand wtf the socialists were saying.
So the socialist leaders hit on a new tactic. Start with students and intellectuals at universities, who can be easily persuaded by radical arguments and are relatively free from police oversight. From there, you create a revolutiony vanguard, which can be used to gradually take over all the key institutions of society. Then you enact all the reforms you want, and the people can then be re-educated to appreciate the good you've done, without putting it to a vote, since a fair vote would never be allowed by the capitalist elites.
(edit- I wrote "socialist" in this post, when it probably should have been communist. For me as a modern day American those terms are pretty much interchangeable, but I think to the leftists of the past there was a huge split between the two groups, and it was really the communists pushing the radical left, while they saw the democratic socialists as squishy sellouts to capitalism)
For women it's a bit harder, since they only make up 50% of the population, but the basic idea is the same. Racial and sexual groups at ~10% might seem even harder, but it's still the same process. You don't put it to an election because "human rights are too important to be voted on," and because you'd lose. Instead, first identify an oppressed group, then create an intellectual movement to save them, then push your intellectual group through the elite institutions until you have power without an open election. You'll be proven correct in retrospect, as civil rights, women's rights, and gay marriage are now broadly popular even though they weren't when they were first instituted.
Trans is the latest and most extreme, since they're only like 1% of the population. But I guess it doesn't matter. If anything, to a certain sort of intellectual, that makes the moral crusade even more appealing. And all of these groups share a similar worldview that their ultimate goals can only truly be accomplished by ending capitalism.
BahRamYou
8mo ago
could he fight back by charging her with random things? Or does the court only believe women?
BahRamYou
8mo ago
I don't get it. How was she forcing him to pay her money? Was she just making up charges, and the corrupt legal system assumed he was guilty with no evidence?
BahRamYou
8mo ago
Interesting! Thanks for the detailed discription. It sounds fun, and also uniquely German in an interesting way.
So you were mostly drinking outside in the forest? Who bought the drinks, the older teens or the parents?
As an American, the laws for liquor were very strict, so it was hard to get any. We would occasionally have "field parties" where you drive out to some random rural location, sit around a circle, maybe a fire if someone was prepared enough to bring supplies, and pass a bottle around (usually bought by someone with a "fun" older sibling). Really a miserable experience all around I think. The more common way was that we'd go to the house of our friend who had an alcoholic single mom, wait for her to fall asleep, and then raid her liquor cabinet. Yeah... not good times. We'd also have to think of a cover story to tell our parents.
where do kids there go to drink? Do they just openly drink with their parents?
I think the most sketchy thing about it for teenagers in America is there just really isn't a good place to drink. Bars won't serve you of course, or even allow kids to enter. They don't own their own house so they can't host a party. You could maybe drink get away quickly in the car or outside, but that's highly illegal and risky. Going to the house of some strange adult who's willing to host an underage drinking party is... suspicious at best, and can lead to really bad things happening.
this might have been different in the past, when it was more common for parents to work late or go out alone and leave the kids home alone.
BahRamYou
8mo ago
Is it weird that Ted was such a math genius, and a criminal mastermind who avoided getting caught for years, but he still struggled to make a basic bomb? Meanwhile the poorest of poor in Afghanistan with no education were still cranking out IEDs that killed soldiers wearing body armor.
I think I first learned about her when I was about 9 years old (American public school). They present her as fact, just like everything else in history class, so we all just kind of went along with it, which was often um... less than perfectly factual. As I got older I learned a more nuanced/mature view about the other famous American historical figures. But Tubman just sort of... never came up again in school, so I never really thought about her much until recently. Like you said she really isn't a major figure in our history, so there's no reason to think about her much except as an inspirational figure and culture war talking point.
As a long time civ fan I... don't love the choice, but don't hate it either. The problem with a history-themed game is there's only so many famous leaders to choose from, and the obvious ones like Washington/Lincoln have been done to death. If you want non-white woman as an American historical leader you have to really stretch to find someone who counts. I'm just glad they didn't try to shoehorn in a modern figure like Rosa Parks or Kamala Harris.
When they made civ2 back in the 90s, it was a much simpler game, so they could easily add in tons of leaders. They made the decision that every single civ should have 1 male and 1 female leader, which made for some odd inclusions. For America it was Eleanor Roosevelt. For most of the other civs it was either "the male leader's wife" or "a mythological/religious figure who probably never existed in real life."
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