FlailingAce
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User ID: 1084
FlailingAce
10mo ago
Hey friend, just wanted to stop in and say I'm doing the same thing. In my twenties I had the dream of being 'significant', but have realized just how much pride was caught up in that. Much more healthy and virtuous is to be a part of your community first, and then if you do good there perhaps you will have expanding influence as a result. To that end I've abandoned my goal of being some kind of auteur, and instead got married, just become a deacon at my church, and am currently working on starting a local small business.
FlailingAce
10mo ago
As the couch experience improves, marginally introverted people drop out of the community, which reduces the value of the community to everyone else
I don't really buy this. You started the model at 100% participation, and at that level there are a lot of people who are undesirable to the community. I suppose this depends on what community you're talking about, but I'd say in general it's not the 'marginally introverted' who leave first, it's the 'marginally invested' or the 'socially marginal' whose loss is not as important. If I can get the weird guy who shows up but isn't friends with anyone to stay home on his phone, everyone wins.
The bigger issue with the model, I think, is that it doesn't factor in how social activity (and alone time) are limited nees. As in, for a person to be happy, they need a minimum amount of social activity (different per person) and then after that it's diminishing returns. Even if alone-fun approaches infinity it shouldn't override the social need. People don't have fun at social events because more people makes it more fun, they have fun because they are meeting a social interaction quota that can't be met otherwise.
Also, do you prefer comments here or on the blog itself?
FlailingAce
11mo ago
I used to live in Silver Spring, MD, in a decently sized house (it was a group home situation with a bunch of singles). It was 15 minutes drive to Bethesda, which is a fairly metropolitan downtown with everything a young man could desire (even art galleries!), or I could even ride my bicycle to the red line of the DC metro if I wanted to go into the city proper. To be honest I rarely did either because it was more fun and cheaper to spend time with my friends. A 4 bed, 3 bath similar to the one we rented is currently selling for $400K.
FlailingAce
11mo ago
Agree in principle, but 'storing classified information incorrectly' is almost always prosecuted, is relatively simple to understand, and is quite a serious offense (although that part might not be well understood by lay people).
The reason it's always prosecuted is because the seriousness is impossible to determine. The whole point of properly controlling classified information is so that we know who has access to it and are aware when it's lost. But if you store it improperly, even if there's no evidence that a bad actor or foreign state accessed that information, you have to assume that they did access it, because the controls that would tell you it was accessed are not in place. In other words, every piece of information on Hillary's server must be assumed to be in the hands of our enemies. Her case is exceptionally egregious because her team wiped the server, so the nation doesn't even know what information was on there that was potentially leaked.
I think she should have been prosecuted. The violation is clear, significant, and deliberate, making this case far far more severe than the average. She was let off for political reasons, and because she's well connected, and I believe that is morally and also practically wrong, and is a large part of the reason why citizens don't trust the system to protect their interests. It's a clear failure of the system of law in the country when well-connected people are immune from the consequences of their misdeeds.
I'll just say, I've been in for just under eight years now, and never really saw any of this DEI stuff, beyond sometimes giving female officers commands they didn't really deserve (but that was really just down to stupid first-in-first-out policies where BN leadership slotted commanders based on timelines rather than aptitude).
The actual service members I've known are almost all pretty based, but in the cynical way of 'we'll play along with the woke bs because it's lower effort'. When the COVID shot mandates came around, people pushed back pretty hard until their jobs were on the line, and even then I knew a few who quit rather than submit.
The US military, to me, is socialism writ large, and plays out that way - everyone is doing the minimum wherever possible, except in the areas they personally think are important. If the boss says to do DEI, we'll check the required boxes and then move on. If the new boss says to forget DEI, great, it's gone.
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