GBRK
9d ago
I don't have any advice, but I do have sympathy, for whatever that's worth. This shit sounds like it really sucks, man. I hope you find your way through it.
GBRK
15d ago
Well the new girl is from a traditional background and is NOT open to the idea of of being intimate with another woman.
The semi-recent news story about the african patriarch with a hundred+ wives mentioned that several of his wives eventually chose to live outside of his property and sustain themselves. But it remains the case that they are still raising his children and unlikely to bear any other man's children. Your friend's exes are wives enough for any sociological purpose. That he has to support them while they no longer have sex with him isn't unimaginable for many married heterosexual couples.
GBRK
15d ago
Apparently "learned his lesson" means "found a THIRD wife" lol. This guy is straight up an african patriarch. His are the genes that will persist through the current demographic collapse.
Are there any particular lessons to learn from the way he grooms himself, acts, treats women, etc.? Or is it all rules 1 and 2? I figure if I can reach a third his power level I'll be batting at-par.
GBRK
16d ago
Shame on him for not pre-emptively sourcing you, but greater shame on you for replying with "nuh uh". @hydroacetylene is in fact correct.
(U shaped marriage age)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_European_marriage_pattern
(Late age of marriage for bothe men and women in europe)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_and_Days
(Late Recommended age of marriage for men)
Lead a wife to your house when you are in good season, neither falling very many years short of thirty nor having added very many: this is a marriage in good season for you. The woman should have reached puberty four years earlier, and in the fifth she should marry.
...
Argue a priori, argue a posteriori, or ask for sources. Don't "nuh uh."
GBRK
18d ago
Thanks for the link! It turns out that I would raise the TFR to 1.89 and drop the deficit to negative 1.8 trillion. (And then I would be assassinated for pissing literally everyone off.)
I wish I could do stuff like model the effects of lower income taxes and a UBI... My ideal is something like, "zero SS, healthcare for all (but with negotiating powers and death panels), substinence-level UBI, virtually no income taxes for most people+much-reduced reporting requirements so willingness to hire-and-work is way more elastic, infant and toddler care subsidized with vouchers... Paid for by pigouvian carbon taxes and a muscular LVT."
GBRK
19d ago
Oof, reducing spending is much harder than reallocating it. my impression of american municipal governments is that they're both fairly efficient and the "waste" that exists is fairly load-bearing. You could cut money from the parks and rec budget, but that will be immediately salient to the people who use those parks. Cancelling a local festival will infuriate more people than it's worth. And anyways, your biggest line items are probably police budgets and road maintenence, and those are a terrible mix of highly salient and very opaque.
The best he can probably do is probably fuck around with your city's zoning/building codes to reduce how hard+expensive it is to get new stuff approved and built. The direct savings will be pretty small or even negative (if you have to hire more bureaucrats to process stuff faster.) But time is money, so a complicated permitting process is effectively a tax on building new things, and therefore a tax that gets spread out over everyone who uses those new things in the subsequent years. Maybe there's some minor occupational licensing stuff your dad can make easier too?
GBRK
19d ago
Probably the most important thing he could do is to pick a single (currently) nonpartisan, nonsalient bugbear that never the less causes unambiguous quantifiable harm and go after it with the fury of a thousand suns. For example, there's been some pretty decent research lately that shows that high CO2 levels reduce educational attainment, so he could make improving school HVAC systems a central priority. Compared to something grand like "fixing immigration" it probably sounds pointless, but remember that expected value is a joint consequence of how effective an intervention is and HOW LIKELY IT IS TO HAPPEN! There is almost certainly tons of low-hanging fruit lying around, because politicians typically prefer to expend all their time on salient and therefore voter-grabbing issues.
GBRK
20d ago
My impression is that he just doesn't have that much interest in writing any kind of romance. Green City Wars (which I just read and loved) had a murderous weasel as classic noir femme fatale, but while the racoon protagonist had a clear aesthetic appreciation for her, it was very explicitly nonsexual (as a result of the species barrier.)
GBRK
22d ago
USA! USA! USA!
US were so dominant the game was actually boring lol. I feel a little bad bringing my soccer-naive friends to a watch party given the total lack of tension. We scored our first goal as me and my buddies were still in line to get it...
I respect the hell out of that fourth goal tho lol.
GBRK
22d ago
I got that "polite right" but I think this quiz is fairly bunk because of the vagueness of the questions and liability for them to be interpreted differently by different culture groups without mapping properly onto discrete political beliefs.
That being said, I do think the polite right being overwhelmingly likely to think that people get too offended AND are too offensive is an insightful result-- I definitely find myself frustrated by how reactive both my "allies" and "enemies" are.
GBRK
26d ago
Point 1 is directionally correct, points 2 and three are completely off.
There is a big risk of ai making individual preparation essentially worthless for everyone or at least everyone aside from a few oligarchs. That covers a variety of apocalyptic and dictatoria scenarios, but as reasoned isn't worth worrying about.
If that turns out to not be the case, then it's going to be because:
- resources are scarce
- Humans still end up being capable of producing some sort of value
Under those conditions, you have to understand that the market not only allocated but reflects how scarce labor and human resources have already been allocated. Even if a company builds GAI, if they ask that GAI something like, "what's the best way to cure mortality and profit?" The answer will likely start with, "well we need infrastructure and testing data, so first buy these existing pharmaceutical companies." That in the end distributes wealth through the broader market. Since in advance it's hard to predict exactly how the wealth will flow, you wnd up back at the time-tested advice to just buy index funds and sit on them instead of trying to pick winners.
AI will change how wealth is distributed. Some classes of people will rise, and others fall. But in general I predict that your social and economic status after ai will remain very correlated with your pre-ai standing.
This is true, and it's a good thing. Multiculturalism elegantly refutes the protestant notion that there can be authority without authorities. Protestants behold the society they created, where each person's own preferred interpretation of "good" are paramount... and weep. They have no ability to argue for the preservation of their culture as such, because their entire culture is founded on rejecting tradition. Appeals to racial solidarity fail because race is transparently a constructed category invented by 19th century aristocrats to convince poor people to be complicit in their own oppression.
If you would only convert to the true church, you would understand that all of culture that is actively worth is propagated not by heritage, language, or skin color, but by priests, monks, and sisters.
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