FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
And every gimmick hungry yob
Digging gold from rock n roll
Grabs the mic to tell us
he'll die before he's sold
But I believe in this
And it's been tested by research
He who fucks nuns
Will later join the church
User ID: 195
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
Are you really comparing becoming president to getting a job as a cop, teacher, or forklift operator?
It absolutely matters for people to have decent lives, but I'm not sure what that has to do with who gets access to the best million women in the country.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
I mean the difference is that the standard you were looking to reach (impress girls at parties, maybe play in a rock band) is very different from the standard of virtuosity that is required to play violin at a level that an ivy league school cares about. The former can be self-taught as a teenager, the latter pretty much requires that one begin formal instruction as a child. The average concert violinist begins instruction between four and six years of age, and by 14 the wheat has been thoroughly separated from the chaff in terms of those with the talent to take it anywhere interesting.
Tiger Moms aren't pressuring their teenage success-daughters to learn guitar so they can found a local version of the Linda Lindas. Though, maybe they should.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
I don't care if all men can do it, I care if any man can do it.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
I'm thinking in terms of various camps, fake "research opportunities" to pretend your kid is doing science and shit, expensive non credit non graded college summer programs that pretend to be classes at a school, travel programs abroad that masquerade as charity work programs with no deliverables to help you write a college essay. That's more the kind of stuff gunner kids do in high school rather than get a job.
I don't think the time when Asian kids are made to learn violin overlaps much, if at all, with the time kids get summer jobs in high school. If you haven't learned the violin by 12, you probably aren't going to learn it very well if at all.
And for that matter, while I agree that music is a good thing to do with one's time, I genuinely think having a job is a better more enriching experience. I think a warehouse job will teach a kid more than a summer biology program at Brown will.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
By 30 one can absolutely be a teacher, forklift operator, or cop. In fact I think in most places you can't become a cop much after 30. 18-30, which I guess is what you mean by under 30?, captures a huge number of men (about 16%) who are in college, and effectively earn nothing.
Yes these men are single for any number of reasons. Do we ask the same question about your million good women? ((I should note that my age range for the men was under 40, as it seems like more of a match))
If a lot of these men were gay, it would just make my point even better, there would be even fewer straight men competing for those good women. I don't think women care about past divorces in a man.
None of your objections answers the questions raised: what part of this do you think is either not a thing your hypothetical good woman would look for, or not a thing under the control of the men? Sure most men don't meet these standards, THAT'S THE POINT. And you can do it easily!
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
Where's the insanity in trying to marry young? That seems like a normal predilection.
As for partner count, I think those statistics are mostly useless anyway.
But regardless, everyone is welcome to have their preferences. Just be prepared to put in the work to get what you want. If you want one of the top million women, be one of the top million men at least.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
To summarize:
@faceh contended that there were about one million women who met the criteria he considered marriagable: Single and looking (of course). Cishet, and thus not LGBT identified. Not ‘obese.’ Not a mother already. No ‘acute’ mental illness. No STI. Less than $50,000 in student loan debt. 5 or fewer sex partners (‘bodies’). Under age 30. Therefore there aren't enough good women for all the men.
I countered that there were approximately 617,000 American men under 40 meet all the specified criteria: Single, Earning at least $65,000 annually, No felony convictions, Exercise at least once a week, Attend religious services at least once a month, Have not used drugs other than marijuana in the past year, Not classified as alcohol dependent. Therefore, there aren't nearly enough good men for even that small number of women.
I picked 65k because it's about what you make as a Cop/Teacher, or a forklift operator at a local warehouse that's always putting up billboards for workers if you pick up a little overtime.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
Send your kid to work at McDonald's, good for them, builds character. Who cares if Asians take 25% of Ivy League seats and conservatives find themselves increasingly locked out of the American elite?
The things Asians are having their kids do aren't really things that help them grow or learn, they're just a box checking exercise to help them get into college.
The question of how you get into the ivy league is entirely determined by what admissions officers decide gets you into the ivy league. Given that most of the elite colleges have shown themselves vulnerable to political bullying, it would be fairly easy for the government to order them to favor candidates who had part-time or summer jobs over candidates who didn't. This would benefit everyone.
Summer jobs are good for kids. They build independence. They put them into hierarchies that are different from the ones they are used to at home or in school. They get them out of the house and help them meet people. They are capital-G Good.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
This is true, and it's also important to remember that this is happening on the margins, not to everyone. It's not that NO ONE is getting laid. It's that a few percentage fewer people are. But in the same way that an economy with 5% unemployment is radically different than one with 15% unemployment even if the majority of people have a job under either condition, a world where 25% of people are unwilling virgins at 30 is vastly stuff from one with 5%.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
This may be due to my lack of familiarity with gaming, my last real experience with anything close to high end gaming was WoW circa 2010. My impression was always that a player who bought equipment but didn't have the talent would be shown out fairly quickly, similar to a player with a great racket but no skill, difference between the games I guess.
But ultimately I find this to be pretty standard rich dude behavior. Like buying a race car: you can hack it in some SCCA local stuff but not in the pros. And ultimately, by pretending to be a top gamer, Elon reifies the idea that being a top gamer is something to be aspired to, in the same way that rich people climbing mount everest reifies alpinism as something to aspire to.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
See in my mind, I think the Ackman thing is great. (Note that I hate Ackman's cultural presence in general and find him an utterly despicable person politically and culture war wise)
<1% of the people complaining about this on the internet were aware of the Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, RI; fewer still were otherwise aware there was a tennis tournament in Newport last weekend; fewer still regularly follow the minor leagues of professional tennis. Ackman, in faking his way into a wild card spot and getting murdered, affirmed just how good the pros are, even on the minor league circuit, and just how cool it is to be professional tennis player, even on the minor league circuit. Ackman, in buying the status of a minor league tennis pro, affirmed that being a minor league tennis pro is high status.
When tech billionaires get into rock climbing or BJJ, it raises the status of pro rock climbers and BJJ instructors. They're richer, they're cooler, they're more respected.
Now there comes a point at which you've sold too much, where the status becomes worthless when everyone can buy it. A lot of fashion items that were once rare and hard to acquire and required one to travel to certain places, be "in the know" or connected, or were simply expensive, are now no longer the same signal of status.
So, in some ways, gamers should be flattered that Elon wanted to pretend to be them. The important thing is that he ultimately be forced to prove it, like Ackman, out on the court.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
So you believe that the differential in reproduction is entirely attributable to genetics, rather than to cultural programming?
That seems unlikely, given that all those gay atheists came from long lines of heterosexual religious parents. Pew in 2019 found that among Evangelicals, only 65% of kids raised evangelical continued to identify as evangelical as adults. The cultural pull of secular society is still going to keep those numbers down.
Now you can assume that over time the forces of selection will optimize those genetics, until those numbers are pushed up further. But I'm not sure that's going to be the case. Particularly, it's likely that young people will be getting a better deal from the "worldly" once they are rare enough to be worth bribing. This can balance out the genetic drift over time.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
I'm going to see a performance of Hamlet next week. What are the best essays or YouTube lectures to help me understand the play or take an alternate view of it?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
Query: do you think current atheists were born of atheist ancestors?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
It depends if you think the typical consumer consider it positive or negative value that lives are ruined by the production of pornography.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
Out of curiosity, what was your opinion on similarly extremely online and extremely vain billionaire Bill Ackman buying his way into a tennis tournament, playing doubles with a guy he hired against real pros.
He got murdered and people were upset about it.
I thought it was great. The tennis tour get money, the guys playing got attention, and nobody got hurt.
Buying your way into being cool, whether by playing the impressario to a sports team or arts scene, or you build a submarine or a rocket ship to make yourself into an explorer; sometimes you win tournaments by paying everyone to pretend you're good at things.
Hell, in BJJ we have goofy-ass categories in tournaments, where they have such narrow weightclasses and belt levels and age ranges where guys get "medals" because there are only 3 people competing. (Anthony Bourdain won "silver" in a BJJ tournament, which sounds really cool if you don't realize this)
This is just a new version of that, isn't it?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
Great work! I've included some real lightweight shit in there this year so it's been easy.
This week I finished Anthony Doerr's All The Light We Cannot See, which a friend had suggested we read together, I hated it, spoilers ahead.
For most of the book, Doerr adopts a tone that felt very Scholastic Book Fair. The two kids existing in parallel, the Marie-Laure blind French girl, and Werner the German radio nerd who ends up in the wehrmacht despite not being all that enthusiastic about Naziism, bumble along through WWII running into mild oppression along the way. No concentration camps, just trains running through. We get wartime privation, but not starvation, and it impacts Germans as much as the French. Werner does go around killing partisans by tracking their radios, but they were partisans. Marie-Laure's father is taken prisoner, but he was concealing a priceless diamond. It's constantly hinted that the German soldiers will do bad things, but they mostly don't. Then we get to the end of the book and there's a fairly explicit gang rape scene when the Red Army gets to Germany.
And it was a real tone shift, and I'm left kind of stumped as to why the author made that choice. The book as a whole is too anti-German to be trying to smuggle in that Stalin was the real villain here and Hitler did nothing wrong, and it's not anti-German enough to be cheering on the vengeful rape of German shiksas like the Hebrew edition of Night. It just felt gratuitous.
Though I disliked the book as a whole, it was well written so I see why it got a Pullitzer, but there was nothing much going on for too much of the book, just not my thing. He does a decent shift at creating a blind protagonist without making her completely useless, but at some level I was still like "Ok, she's blind, the bombs are falling, there's no way out of this that isn't Deus Ex Machina." But the ending fell flat for me.
I also read the novella Fat City by Leonard Gardner after seeing it recommended as a classic boxing book. It's a picaresque of mid-century Stockton, through two struggling bums vaguely trying to make it as professional boxers. It did a good job of capturing the feeling of training and competing in fight sports, and a general sort of struggle of masculinity in the main characters, who have big dreams and minimal capability to reach them. Also a lot of long scenes of farmwork for those of you thinking about illegal immigrant labor jobs. Highly recommend this one, it's very short and tightly written, no extraneous pages.
I've now finished 18 books this year out of a goal of 26. My wife getting me a kindle, combined with LibGen, has been a huge improvement in reading for me. I still love physical books, but I also love the infinite access to a huge number of books. On a trip I'm not limited to what I brought with me if it turns out it sucked, if I finish a book at 9pm I can start the next one without even getting up. I'm ahead of my targets, so maybe I can afford to get stuck in on Infinite Jest soon, though I'm now onto On the Marble Cliffs by Junger which is another short one, I'm curious to get more into his mature work after how amazing Storm of Steel felt.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
The richest man in the world posts constantly. He liked it so much he bought the company so he could post more to his liking! Rich people do like posting. I don't think in a world where Elon and Ackman and Kevin Durant exist we can say "why would anyone shitpost if they had an otherwise busy life?"
Moreover, I've gone into this in more detail in the past, but Ghislaine could have used a powerful Reddit account to recruit teenage girls. In this case having her identity tied directly to the account (Maxwellhill) would have helped her credibility when she reached out.
Which would also explain why Reddit wants to bury the story rather than try to keep the account alive.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
7d ago
If you want something Americans would actually agree on,
I think this is where we're not connecting: I don't think most Americans would support permanent lifetime contracts.
But I think 15% might. Which is better than the maybe 2% that would support Slavery. Which is my point.
"Slave" is at some level a mistranslation in Aristotle because the Slavery he's talking about isn't the Slavery most Americans think of. One could probably just as well translate the idea as some people are natural employees and some people are natural bosses.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
7d ago
You've got the point, Tattoos are nothing but a fashion trend. Nothing more, but also nothing less. So
If all the cops, SEALs and BJJ guys have tattoos, what might you surmise about the ones that have resisted the trend and don't have any?
That they don't like tattoos. That's it. We're not morally superior beings.
Anything else is cope. Like most of the stories told about fashion trends.
Except, of course, for the ones I tell about why boat shoes and OCBDs are the proper way for an American man to dress.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
7d ago
It would be, but to try out for the SEALs you've already enlisted in the Navy so that's pretty much the way it goes for many people who turn out to be only 99th percentile athletes rather that 99.9th percentile.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
7d ago
Stolen valor available for a couple Benjamins at any strip mall is pretty much the story of tattoos.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
7d ago
Who knows?
It also probably correlates with sleeping with sluttier women, against religiosity, and with a lot of other things.
But it seems like the best way to assess a metric by revealed preference vs survey design.
That's not my primary aim, though it may be a secondary benefit. I think the major benefit of working a job is developing independence early on in teenagers. They get money of their own, they have obligations outside the home, they have the necessity (and therefore the right) to travel outside the home.
Below, and always, we are talking about the problems of young people dating. Summer jobs are the number one solution! Give them money, get them out of the house, encourage them to have independence from their parents outside of structured and scheduled "day cares." Give them the means and the reason to get a cheap used car. Give them the ability to take someone on a date without asking mom for the money.
That said:
I don't think a part time summer job excludes hobbies and interests outside of work. Spending part of your day stacking boxes, or mowing grass, or hanging drywall doesn't exclude going home and playing the violin for an hour. The tiny, hyper-talented fringe minority of 14 year olds who have the kind of talent that has been identified for nurture by that time, sure, give them a scholarship to some music program. But that's maybe a few dozen kids across the country that we're talking about, they're completely irrelevant to the question of "should kids get summer jobs?"
So I guess my question is, how large should that class be? Because it seems intuitively obvious that it should max out at the 2-5% of the population easily identified by standardized testing regimes.
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