Crowstep
11hr ago
Venezuelan oil isn’t for today, it’s for fifty years from now.
Do you think that oil will really matter that much in 50 years? Solar is outcompeting all other forms of electricity production and electric cars are replacing petrol ones. Oil is useful as a manufacturing material I guess, but in 50 years the global population will be in freefall thanks to low birthrates and the carbon transition will be completed. Surely there will be plenty of oil to go around?
Crowstep
12hr ago
I have little sympathy for Ukraine. If you repeatedly antagonize your neighboring superpower, you get what you get.
For context, Ukraine's 'antagonisation' consisted of existing as a sovereign state that wasn't under the Russian boot.
Personally I have a lot of sympathy for the Venezuelan people. Sure, they elected Chavez, but it's not as if they are the only country in the western hemisphere to elect an erratic, authoritarian populist. I'm glad that Maduro has been deposed, and hopefully the lack of clannishness like in Iraq and Afghanistan means that regime change will be a little more effective this time, although I'm not holding my breath for good governance or anything.
Crowstep
1d ago
This means that roughly one out of three college-educated women who want to marry will basically have to either accept a husband without a college degree or forego marriage. As the former is unlikely in most cases, I very much doubt that the marriage rates quoted in the article will continue.
Actually, we've already seen this exact thing happening. Scott has written about it. Basically graduate women are marrying the higher-earning working class men. Turns out women don't care much about credentials for their own sake, only credentials as a proxy for high potential salaries.
Whenever women engage in transaction sex of any sort with men they aren't attracted to, as opposed to having sex for its own sake, I'd argue that doesn't count as sexual attention.
What percentage of the 90% of young, unmarried men who have had sex do you think visited prostitutes? My bet is a very low number.
Crowstep
2d ago
Women should be forced to settle or starve
I agree with your overall comment, but I've got to jump in here. 'Settle or starve' has never been the choice women had to make in the west. Not when we were hunter-gatherers (meat would shared within the band), not after the shift to agriculture (women can grow crops and make textiles for sale, hence the word 'spinster'), not after the industrial revolution (where there was ample factory and domestic work). Never.
Indeed, 'settle or starve' suggests that widows (who made up a huge percentage of women in societies before modern medicine) would just starve to death, which they didn't. People only starved to death during famines, when everyone was starving to death.
Crowstep
2d ago
And now the girlbosses aren't getting married, because Plain Jane doesn't want to settle for Plain John and is unhappily seeking her spot in Mr. Chad's harem.
That isn't true. The marriage rate for graduate women (a reasonable proxy for 'girlbosses') has been increasing since the 1980s, and has only declined by 10% from 1968 to today (85% to 75%). The collapse in marriage has been among lower class women.
The bottom 80% of the male population isn't getting 80% of the female attention. They're getting ~5% of it.
I'm not sure how you're measuring 'sexual attention' but if we define it as 'having sex' then this obviously isn't true. 20% of men having 95% of sex is an insane figure. According to the GSS, the most promiscuous 20% of sexually-active, never-married young men have about 50-60% of the sex. And more to the point, the figures are the same for women. Basically, there are a subset of promiscuous men and women who have sex with eachother, while the less promiscuous majorities of both sexes have less sex.
Lyman Stone explains what's going on with male sexlessnes:
The rise of young male sexlessness isn’t about Chads and Stacies; it isn’t primarily about Tinder or Bumble; it’s not mostly about attitudinal shifts in what women want from relationships; and it’s not mainly about some new war between the sexes. It’s mostly about people spending more years in school and spending more years living at home. But that’s not actually a story about some change in sexual politics; instead, it’s a story about the modern knowledge economy, and to some extent exorbitant housing costs. As such, it’s no surprise that rising sexlessness is being observed in many countries. This, in turn, suggests that finding a solution to help young people pair up may not be as easy.
Crowstep
2d ago
I could give my long, comprehensive argument (with stats!) showing that men are by and large the same as they've ever been, but women as a group have elevated their expectations while simultaneously becoming less appealing as mates.
Please do, because from what I can see in this comment, and the one you've linked, you haven't presented any actual evidence. Just a just-so story that doesn't match the data at all. To pick out an illustrative sentence:
It is a blackpill, but there is not a single piece of evidence really contradicting it. A man who is the combination of 'average' height, 'average' salary, 'average' talent, fame, renown, and 'average' physical strength will not get female attention under modern circumstances.
Among men between the ages of 22-34, 90% have had sex ever and 75% have had sex in the last year. There has been a big rise in sexlessless starting in 2014*, but even then, the average young man is definitely getting female attention. The article also demonstrates that while there is a gap in male a female rates of sexlessness, this is not driven by promiscuous men hogging all the women.
*Which happens to be the year after smartphone penetration crossed the 50% marker, I think this is related.
Crowstep
2d ago
The risk I see with 'make marriage a much stronger contract' social engineering is that even more people opt out of it. Marriage has already become an elite institution, with the commensurate dysfunction among the lower classes who aren't getting married.
Marriage worked better when everyone did it, because it reinforced the norm. The collapse of that norm is tragic, but making marriage even more exclusive and difficult is going to collapse it further.
Crowstep
3d ago
The supreme Court handles a tiny minority of disputes that are interesting to legal nerds.
Didn't they abolish segregation, mandate the legalisation of gay marriage, mandate the legalisation of abortion (before later returning that power to the states), abolish affirmative action in colleges and mandate that states allow individuals to carry guns? Those seem pretty political and sigificant to me. Certainly they seem like things that should have been decided by elected representatives or by referendum.
Crowstep
4d ago
I think if there's one thing the US constitution doesn't need, it's another veto point. Congress has basically abandoned legislating, leaving actual lawmaking to the Supreme Court and the Presidency. It doesn't need another thing stopping it from doing its job.
Crowstep
5d ago
What boggles my mind about this is the numbers. Minnesota only has about 90,000 Somalis, less than 2% of the state's population. And yet they've seemingly managed to embezzle at least $8 billion. Somalia's GDP is only $12 billion. If we assume that all the fraud was done by Somalis, that's $880,000 dollars per person. Just absolutely industrial levels of fraud.
Crowstep
5d ago
I'm pretty sure that men get specifically respiratory diseases worse than women. Like how women get worse migraines/headaches. This article suggests that men with pneumonia are more likely to die than women with pneumonia, and mentions that it has something to do with the male immune system.
Not there yet, but in fifty years, I'd wager so. They're already in development.
For cargo shipping, there are already electric versions. Of course, cargo shipping doesn't really consume that much fuel relative to how much stuff they transport. Again, in fifty years we can reasonably expect technology to have improved.
These already exist.
Solar and batteries are now cheap enough (and getting cheaper!) that grid-level storage is possible. We don't need any new technological innovations, just to scale today's technology at today's prices, which is exactly what's happening. Combine some overbuilding with solar panels (easy now that they are dirt cheap) along with some wind turbines and you've got yourself constant power, since wind and sunshine are anticorrelated. Not that oil even matters for electricity generation, almost all fossil fuels used to power grids are coal and gas, which are now significantly more expensive than solar panels and wind turbines.
Worrying about oil in 50 years is like worrying about shortages of natural rubber now. Technology has superceded old requirements. The future is now.
More options
Context Copy link