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
4d ago
It won't last forever, but it'll reset the clock for a while. Every empire will fall, every monument crumble, but the next one will last a while, and so on and so forth. Gibbon wrote a long book. If the reborn United States II lasts a hundred more years instead of twenty, is that such a bad thing to fight for because it falls after that? Impermanence is the simple fact of human events.
One of the things people miss in secular society about Gandhi and MLK for example, is their deep and sincere religiosity. They truly believed that non-violence was sacred, that it was more important than worldly success. When Gandhi told the Jews of Europe to offer themselves to the butcher's knives, he wasn't saying it would work he was saying it was required. That religious duty was more important than success. MLK believed earnestly that the ultimate reward of his efforts would be in heaven, not on earth. Process, not results. THere's no other way for humans to behave.
okay, if we take away women’s right to vote, what will be different this time around? We already had that in 1900 and where did it lead us? Here.
I'm starting to see more people push back to universal male suffrage. Which seems obvious: it's impossible to argue coherently that every man is more capable of voting than every woman. Gender is a bad Schelling point. The problem for much of the right is that any actually good Schelling Point is quite likely to doom the right wing electorally.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
That said, if you look the part, probably moving to California and pretending to be illegal immigrant would also work. You may get yourself an entirely new identity eventually, get a bank account and even vote (which ironically wouldn't be illegal if you were a citizen before).
If I claimed to be from South America, the "when exactly did your grandparents leave Germany?" jokes would write themselves.
RE: Debanking
I mean we don't know what debanking will look like when it happens, because it hasn't really happened yet, but it's not all that uncommon to see accounts frozen but not closed or confiscated as the result of lawsuits. Particularly against businesses, in cases involving tax debts, where the funds are frozen and can't be accessed until the lawsuit is concluded. This is where half the traditional folk-wisdom of keeping some money in precious metals comes from in my family: among small business owners it's a sort of common sense theory that if you have some non-banked assets you can cover bills enough to keep in business for a while and stay afloat. The other half comes from the refugee corners of my family, who figure you're better off fleeing with a bit of gold than without it.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
I highly doubt this. Gold has always had value, and in any future primitive society would retain that value.
I find de-banking to be a significant enough risk to outweigh the downsides of physical gold. Not enough to build a bunker, or to put my entire net worth in physical gold, but enough to have a few thousand dollars in solid assets that can't be frozen or confiscated with a few keystrokes. The functioning US legal system is the risk that physical gold hedges against, it could be targeted against you for a variety of reasons.
I do find it funny when my father asks how we would prove his stocks belonged to him if Fidelity's "computers crashed." Dude, if Fidelity suddenly and irrecoverably lost all its data, a little stock certificate isn't going to save you, ammunition will be the new currency.
FWIW: I think a big part of this disagreement likely goes back to living situation. If I lived in an apartment and worked in an office building I would probably feel differently.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
I remember when Subway used to call their employees Sandwich Artists.
The cultural impact of Subway restaurants is massively forgotten and underrated. Without Subway there is no Chipotle, no Cava, no Sweetgreen.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
I don't disagree, in the year of our lord 2026. But 20 years ago, everyone would have commented on an engineer with hair like that, and it would have impacted his credibility in that room. 50 or 60 years ago, they might not have even let him talk. Find me the engineer with hair long enough to bun in this photo. Long hair on men was a serious, serious CW issue for like a good thirty years! It would have been considered wildly strange and unmanly, let alone unprofessional, for a man to have hair long enough to bun in America before the 60s. And until pretty recently, you could with workable accuracy judge that a guy with long hair did not have a good professional job. Now, you can't, that guy might be your traffic engineer. He might even be a good traffic engineer!
Other "weird" and "alt" aesthetics have developed similarly.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
I use my costco rewards credit card for 2% cash back, and my costco membership gives me 2% cash back. The markup over spot is typically 1%, and I typically just don't buy it when the markup is higher, but the highest I've seen is 4% over spot which is effectively nothing with the cash back and membership.
Frankly, I don't see the point of gold-linked assets outside of short term gambling. Half the point of goldbugging is what if civilization collapses. I want to have my gold, not a piece of paper that tells someone else that I have the rights to a piece of gold, in that case I'd rather have other assets anyway. My safe is protected from fraud, embezzlement, mismanagement on the part of the asset managers. It is protected from a hostile banking system or government entity freezing my access to it. It is fairly opaque to outsiders how much I have at any given time, it can quite easily be given to someone or spirited away with minimal paper trail.
There are, obviously, risks. Theft, fire, loss. These can be minimized but never eliminated. What I think still makes physical gold appealing is that those risks are uncorrelated with the risks tied to other assets, other than I guess a fire at the property. I'm not advocating for keeping all your assets in your home or office, but I find it gives me peace of mind knowing that I have negotiable assets on hand that don't depend on a financial system that is rapidly turning into a cross between a casino and a social credit panopticon. Much like with crypto, if you don't have the wallet it's not really yours.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
I agree that subcultural aesthetics are kind of pointless now, but it's not so much that Spotify made them pointless, it's that alt aesthetics have gone mainstream, or at least aren't really judged anymore, and hence there is no sacrifice and no meaning in dressing for a subculture. It doesn't tell you anything about the person.
The other day I was at a zoning meeting, the engineer came in to present and he was a youngish white kid with a man-bun. There was a time, and not all that long ago, when at a formal meeting no one would take a guy with a bun seriously. You just wouldn't. Everyone would comment on the guy's fuckin' hair.
Similarly, we've had the conversation on if tattoos are attractive or cool many times over, but one thing that is beyond dispute: they are so normal that you can't really judge based on them and achieve much of anything. In 1960, if my grandmother went to the hospital, she would have pretty much refused service from a nurse with a visible tattoo. In 2026, if you refused service from any nurse with a tattoo, you'd just die in the lobby.
A punk or goth in the 80s got bullied in school. In my high school years they got mocked as emo kids a little ("remember to cut down the road not across the street!") but could fit in as skaters or whatever. In 2026, a goth or emo or punk kid is dressing like and listening to bands that his teachers and parents listened to. He fits in, more or less, the same as he would if he dressed in polo shirts and khakis.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
Costco sells about $200mm of gold every month. I think it comes from catering to Asian customers, who love Costco almost as much as they love buying gold.
For the most part, it just matches what Costco likes in a product: it's easy to beat other retailers on service (costco has a minimal markup over spot price compared to a local pawn shop), there's value in reliability and credibility, and it's a simple business as they do it. Costco's philosophy is built around trying to find things they can do better than other retailers, this is a good example.
Now, you can only buy 2 ounces a day, so you can't necessarily launder a drug business through costco. But it's just kind of a simple investment plan that fits into my standard week.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
CHH argues that we gotta stop upping the ante on gift-giving, else the reasonable people among us will be either forced in or unable to say no because it will make them look like assholes. I agree! What happened to simple gift giving? Why must everything be extravagant? If anything, we should be going the opposite way to save money!
I've been slowly adjusting my family to the expectation that I'm good for one really good gift across the whole family per year, and that the rest are going to be phoned in books or something. One year I'm just like, oh I found a tuxedo for dad, mom you got a book about the guy who inspired Charlie Chan. Next year it's, oh mom you got a Barbour coat, dad you got Andrew Ross Sorkin's new book.
"You're single because... [insert a bunch of reasons in a bulleted list format]".
Steve Stewart-Williams: As shown in the graph below, the sweet spot was two to four past partners; fewer or more reduced attractiveness. In effect, people wanted someone with a bit of a past, but not too much (which was the title of our paper describing the research).
Is there a link to the study he's talking about anywhere? It seems like there's a lot of confounders here, like age. An 18 year old with 10 sexual partners is different from a 32 year old with 10 sexual partners. That said I found it hilarious how angry Zvi was that the study supposedly found:
Intriguingly, we found no evidence for a sexual double standard: none, zilch, nada. Contrary to what’s often claimed, women weren’t judged any more harshly than men for having a high body count. That’s not to say they weren’t judged for it, but only that men were judged too.
Also, I flat out defy the data on there being no double standard? No way. Even if on some abstract 1-9 scale it looks similar, the practical impact is very obviously totally different. Yes, a male body count of 60+ is functionally a negative, but not at the same level.
Man, people just fucking hate their revealed preferences when it comes to dating. I'm not going to argue for the virtue of sluts, {I'll leave that to the Jaime} but I've literally never met a woman who was single because of her bodycount. I don't even really think it happened historically.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
It's an inconsistency with almost every other use of the suffix -ology in the everyday use of the English language. Biology, Sociology, Zoology, Geology, Virology. The only other common use of -ology to refer to something other than a science is Scientology, which is kind of a special case. As a child I recall being offended by this, that Astronomy ought to be Astrology, and Astrology ought to be something else entirely.
It's unfortunately unfixable.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
Periodically when I have the extra cash in the bank and the extra room on my credit card, I buy an ounce of gold at Costco on my way out. I wouldn't want to buy gold futures, as the value of the gold to me as an inflation/TEOTWAWKI hedge is minimized by having intermediaries between me and the gold.
If you have significantly higher value assets than I do, that probably becomes impractical for storage reasons.
I live in the sticks, even moreso twenty years ago. "Leather boots are still in style for manly footwear, Beads and Roman sandals won't be seen." It would have been highly unusual and mockable to see a professional engineer with hair long enough to bun in our town.
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