GreenEggsAndJam
No bio...
User ID: 2256
I'm not TracingWoodgrains but I'm very very sympathetic to his point, and my personal limit would be text describing the product, and images of the product.
You're allowed a professional photoshoot of your product, even though I give this allowance very reluctantly (black and white text, no images would be preferred), because I grudgingly admit people prefer to see the thing they're deciding to buy. Absolutely no videos. I don't see a realistic way to get rid of endorsements, unfortunately, but they should be strictly regulated.
Culture building around a product should be banned — no dove beauty campaigns, no mulvaney beer bottles, none of that. "This skin product will do this for your skin, and you can buy it for this price, here". Information sharing between seller and buyer only. The mind of very basic ads you see in local newsletters.
As a side effect this means corporations will effectively be banned from expressing any political, cultural, or controversial opinions publicly (since that is also an advertising campaign, building tribe loyalty to a product) which is wonderful and should be pursued to the extreme— in my ideal universe corporations are essentially politically gagged. Talk about your product alone, or shut up.
Basically, rewinding back as much as possible to the kinds of ads they had back in the very, very early days of advertising before they realized people buy based on emotions not based on facts, with as many emotional factors removed as possible. There's no sticking the genie all the way back into the bottle but cutting off as much of its limbs as possible is still a worthy goal.
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
The feminist solution is obvious.
Women having one night stands and/or affairs are self-harming. The article you quoted acknowledges as much. Statistics on female orgasm in one night stands are consistent on this point, one night stands suck for women.
They are also harming women as a class. Even if you are a rare extreme outlier who regularly has satisfying ONS sex, you are normalizing the cultural pressure on other women to do the same.
As feminism is about improving the condition of women as a class, promiscuity is anti-feminist. Having an affair with a married man is anti-feminist (this should be obvious with even two seconds of thought - it is by definition betraying class solidarity)
Promiscuity is bad for the woman engaging in it, and bad for women as a whole.
But third wave feminism is all about empowering women to make whatever stupid self harming choices they want! Well, that's a very specific sub brand of "feminism" that frankly is not convincingly feminism at all, given it's other attempts to make obvious disempowerment of women "empowering". No, you can't have eyeliner sharp enough to kill the patriarchy, permanently deforming your feet with high heels isn't liberation, and having meaningless, orgasmless sex with men who have no respect for you will never be feminist.
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
Given the big reveal is that she's married to a man, it seems like the character is never actually a lesbian.
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
If anyone has suggestions for other things worth doing or being, or that satisfy that "check my phone while waiting in the line to pickup the kids" nudge that avoids my new no-nos, I'm all ears.
Duolingo is addictive, and while not especially useful (it won't get you to fluency) it seems harmless enough. Memrise is actually better, but less addictive.
For intelligent low-glitter puzzle games, I like (free, no ads, no garbage):
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=name.boyle.chris.sgtpuzzles
Poetry a day style blogs could be nice, I just tend to binge and forget them, but could follow an actively updating one to check it once a day.
Ebooks can also help. Check if your library lets you borrow them via Libby/similar.
Good luck! I've never succeeded at maintaining my own breaks very long. Sticking time limits on the browser never helps. Deleting the browser helps for a week or two, then inevitably I simply need to Google some medical question or whatever and then I'm back at my bullshit.
I am perfectly well aware this is probably my biggest self-development problem and I'd be a much better person if I did break free, but I've gotten so bad at managing boredom without internet it's kind of pathetic, and every so often I encounter something cool and interesting and worthwhile and it's like the damn rat with the intermittent pellets all over again.
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
The accountant is assumed to be man because he has a pregnant wife. Unless it's a lesbian whose wife conceived via sperm donor, which is not "assumption of details", it's actively violating Occam's razor.
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
I'm making the (ludicrous*) assumption that all relevant information for the decision is included in the descriptions, so anyone not specified female is male, and if the gay athlete isn't mentioned to have AIDS he doesn't.
Whereas the cop being armed and with an existing history of excessive force is explicitly mentioned. I still think he probably will be okay, but having someone with a gun and already established violence and low agreeableness is definitely a big gamble. The odds of his losing his temper and killing someone may not be high, but the the degree to which we'd be fucked if he does it is high. Now I can't remember if risk is the word I'm looking for or if risk includes probability, but what I meant was the word for "how bad the bad thing is", not "probability of the bad thing happening".
*Ludicrous because this question sucks, but without the assumption there's just no point playing at all.
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
their urge to put makeup and nail polish on me (!) and do my hair,
I've seen girls do this to brothers, especially younger brothers, but I've never seen or heard of this being done to dads. Also don't get why you'd care, just say no. Get them one of those giant groomable barbie heads if they really want.
Do you have unusually long hair? If not, doing your hair wouldn't be appealing anyway.
Girls get plenty of opportunities to practice grooming activities with friends, and don't seem to see fathers as a particularly relevant vector for it anyway.
Can't argue with the teen drama concerns. The stereotype is that girls are much much easier before puberty, less likely to be hyperactive or violent (...I'm talking normal schoolyard violence), and then after puberty the boys hopefully already have some self control and/or people have given up on hoping for it from them, while the girls go mad on hormones for a few years and have tons of power struggles with their parents.
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
Population bottleneck is not necessarily killer, depends on what bad genes the bottleneck has. There are many cases of bottlenecks ending up fine, it greatly increases but does not 100% guarantee the chance of bad genetic outcomes, and we're already starting with what looks like a very diverse gene pool in the sample. Nonetheless, I agree that basic due diligence would require a genetic screening of anyone being sent to at least avoid the obvious known pitfalls.
-
Male accountant. No idea if the substance abuse problem will be specifically relevant once on a different planet. Substance abuse negative sign of self control, holding it together enough to hold down job and family potentially promising if he doesn't keep the problem. Known to not be impotent.
-
I agree that the medical student is an obvious choice. Young, decent odds of intelligence and relevant knowledge.
-
No relevant skills, short fertility horizon, communication problems, a very middle tier pick, basically just if we need to fill out a spot.
-
It's an entire extra person as long as the pregnancy survives! As obvious as the doctor. (also, if we're going for "demonic" it seems fairly obvious we should be asking the remaining women on this trip to also get pregnant, ASAP, from some of the four billion men not being taken who have also passed genefic screening problems)
-
Nothing in this entry suggests any advantage of this person of unknown age and gender over our standard for "filler", number 3. Cut.
-
Agree that this is a great pick. International, so again more genetic diversity, and young and female.
-
Nothing in this entry suggests any advantage for this person of unknown Abe and gender over our standard for "filler", number 3. cut.
-
Unlike you, I don't see any reason to believe she's probably older. Female movie stars skew young, only a handful stay famous once older. She presumably speaks English, has decent odds of being younger than 33 (our standard for filler), almost certainly has good soft skills if she's made it to star level in a cutthroat industry. Keep.
-
Racist cop. I am concerned about the low agreeability and the part where he's armed. High risk, if he ends up killing anyone on the trip. On the other hand, if he's not killing anyone else would be a good choice. Personally I suspect a survival situation with only 8 people depending on each other should be enough to trigger a "my tribe" attitude towards them, but I don't know. Tentative keep.
-
Professional athlete excellent, rest only helps if he'll compromise as needed (gay is easily solved if he'll donate sperm, he doesn't need to actually have sex with the women and could be a stabilizing factor). Keep.
-
Orphaned 12yo boy - I like this for the tiny bit of age diversity (otherwise it's all 20+ and the fetus, this gives us a bit of a bridge). 11 is already old enough to be able to be given responsibility quickly. Inclined to keep.
-
If this was a university professor I'd say it could maybe be salvaged depending on the field of knowledge, but it's a university administrator and that's not even close to valuable enough a skillset to justify choosing a 60 year old. Obvious cut.
That gives us 3 people to obviously cut, with our remaining choice of who to cut the accountant, the manager, the cop. We've only got three women so the manager is an obvious keep. Need to figure out odds of cop killing his team members and on that basis make the final cut, but overall, it probably needs to be the accountant unless the cop is judged too high risk.
Final cull: accountant, disabled novelist, homephobic clergyman, 60yo.
The actual question is how the fuck we ended up with such a terrible roster for final 12 humans to begin with. Ending up with 50/50 on gender is bad but there were only 4 likely to be fertile women in the original set! An 8:4 man to woman ratio is insane for this scenario! And the men in question aren't even all physically fit, let alone passing basic screenings for mental health! If these were the last humans left alive and viable after some catastrophe that's one thing, but the question says they're "selected". In which case the person selecting is so incompetent I'm now left to assume my chosen 8 all have something terribly wrong with them because someone is deadset on sabotaging our last chance.
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
Standard caveat re replication crisis, bad science reporting, etc.
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
This website (that I found via Google and don't know anything else about, so no clue re reliability) claims childless rate in Israeli Jewish women is only 6.4% (in a sample of women aged 45-60)
https://www.taubcenter.org.il/en/research/israels-exceptional-fertility/
That only gets us from 3 to 2.8 or so
But for example if 44% of women have 3 kids, 30% have 2, and the remaining non-childless have 1, we'd get reasonably close to 2.1, while still having 3 kids be the plurality most common number. (in practice I'm cheating since I'm excluding 3+, which obviously also exists although IME is pretty rare in secular circles. Whatever, it's just a general example.)
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
But we see that, eg, religious women who are highly educated still have more kids. So there are clearly some things that can at least ameliorate the trend.
(I'm also not entirely convinced the problem is education qua education and not the incredibly delayed entry into adulthood. What I see a lot of is women feeling like they are finally "ready"/at a socially acceptable stage to have kids, and then starting to have kids - ie, wanting to reproduce - and continuing to want to have kids, but running out of time to have more of them. This is entirely anecdotal, of course, but I see this pattern incredibly frequently, where women describe badly wanting N+1 kids where N is the current number they have, and they'll iterate on this until eventually they have to give up on it because they're too old, their husband is opposed, etc. That's not "women don't want kids", its "women make decisions, especially when young, that aren't conducive to having more kids, and end up bearing the consequence via having fewer kids than they would have otherwise chosen to have")
Anyway. It's not as if we need to get back to fifties level reproduction, nudging things upwards a bit would already help.
(Actually, in that vein, what are the differences between low fertility and extremely low fertility countries? Are there any trends there?)
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
I agree with all of this comment and hence don't have anything useful to add, except idly wondering if pushing strongly for people to think of dating as barter, not sales, would have any positive effect on the discourse.
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
I would have thought so, but I get a lot of side-eye for it.
I believe you, I just also find that very strange (and sad, I guess). And if it was your friend who thought it was ugly, would you also be judged for not keeping it? Or is it only your husband's aesthetic opinions you're supposed to ignore?
To be clear, I don't wear things I actively dislike, just things I wouldn't buy for myself - e.g. I get no thrill out of activewear. I own more yoga pants than I need, purely because he has a thing for them. And hey, they're comfortable and practical, so why not? If you buy more, darling, please avoid black and capri lengths.
Oh okay that makes much more sense. (Although I personally love black and capri length 😅)
The women I know often seem anxious that, by taking on more around the house to support their husband's career, or by making sacrifices or compromises in their own aspirations in order to be with someone, they're doing something terribly retrograde.
I think with my husband and I, we simply accepted that at different points in time one or the other of us would be making the bigger sacrifices, but that overall it would balance out. It doesn't seem to me to be realistic to have a family without ever making any sacrifices. Maybe for DINKs it's possible?
In any case it feels really unhealthy to call compromise and balancing each other's needs "degrading", unless only one side is doing all the compromising. Again, I trust you're describing things accurately, it just sounds incredibly sad :(
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
Even though you claim you didn't mean to reply to this comment, you quoted the question I asked in this comment, not in my original comment.
And it felt like a very obvious attempt at a derail, hence my lack of patience with it. I have, nonetheless, deleted my comment, and we can continue the discussion where you say you intended it to be.
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
So in short: you find the premise of the question inherently flawed, and if given the option to implement a policy but with the requirement that it be even-handed, would have absolutely none to suggest?
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
Right, and viewing crying as a lack of self control and a lack of emotional maturity would be something I'd want to run away from. Someone who lets himself cry is strongly signalling that he does not believe crying is a lack of control and a lack of emotional maturity.
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
Getting rid of a dress my husband doesn't like seems obvious to me.
But wearing a dress he got me that I don't like seems a bit much. Why not just... Tell him what style you like instead? Especially because I'd assume that, for example, the concept is "you'd look hot in red lace" and then I could be like "great, gonna get myself something in red lace but {a different shade of red that doesn't clash with my skin tone/a different cut/whatever}". I mean presumably he's buying the dress to make both of us happy so why would I hide not liking it? Anything he wants I can probably find a way of accommodating that I also like.
If he wants something incredibly specific and irredeemable (I don't know, ten inch leopard print diamond studded stilettos?) Then it would need to be an inside the house only deal, I'm not wearing clothing I feel ugly and uncomfortable in outside the house, he can come up with a counteroffer.
As for the rest, he does all the same for me, I'd be a huge hypocrite to not reciprocate.
(And I do buy him clothing I think he'd look hot in, and he does either wear it or tell me it's not his taste, so I guess not being a hypocrite applies there as well. I also 100% expect him to get rid of clothing I find ugly, unless it's something with sentimental value or whatever. But basically we're obviously getting dressed with our number one target audience being each other...)
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
I mean, I assume the men and women I know who never, ever cry — my grandfather was noted as having cried a total of three times in his entire adult life, my aunts/uncles do not cry at funerals or weddings— have plenty of emotions. It's nonetheless also obvious they are uncomfortable with expressing said emotions in a lot of contexts, not just crying. The ability and willingness to cry is a symptom of being more emotionally open, not more emotionally feeling.
It's fine for you if you don't cry, it's not like it even would have been a deal breaker for me, given how used to it I already am. But that doesn't change that it's a relief to me that my husband does cry, and that I appreciate that about him.
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
There is definitely policy-level pressure to reduce c-section rates/hospitals proudly citing their low C-section rates/other things going in with the C-section rate aside from younger mothers. And lots of support for VBAC and even for VBA2C
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
...So, does she pick her nose in front of you?
(Fwiw my husband's ability to cry from sheer emotion is something I cherish about him, coming from a family that has all the emotional range of a shriveled peanut. He cries whenever he's feeling really deeply and just thinking about it makes my heart go all melty. He's just so emotionally well adjusted and not fucked up and repressed! I thought that kind of thing was a myth!)
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
I simply don't feel that "interesting ways to solve energy output problems from solar cells" can be described as "in depth discussion, introspection, navel-gazing".
If you think that any contemplation of a complex problem is "in depth discussion, introspection, navel-gazing", then sure, a total lack of desire to interact with complex problems is not well correlated with intelligence.
But if people are inclined to "live life and vibe" outside their professional fields + areas of special interest, that doesn't intrinsically reflect on their intelligence.
(I think this whole comment thread kicked off with someone dropping in to say prioritizing a smart mate is important, which I interpreted as a response to my claim that constant in-depth quality discussion turned out to not be nearly as meaningful to me as I'd imagined when I started dating. Hence my initial response resisting conflating the two. I really believe it has much more to do with personality than intelligence)
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
Divorces being initiated by women would support the claim that it's not men who need to be convinced to be married. The benefits I was referring to was married men living longer, reporting higher life satisfaction, etc, than single men (the opposite direction was true of married women)
Being screwed over by family courts is only relevant if you're having kids with someone, and in that case being married/not married is irrelevant, as not being married to the mother of the child you are claiming paternity for doesn't release you from child support payments or grant you more visitation rights.
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
Need more evidence/citations that they are same.
Anecdotally, using proxies for intelligence like vast breadth of knowledge, grasping new material extremely quickly, getting good grades in very challenging programs, and creative problem solving, I can think of a number of very smart people I know who don't do much in the way of in depth discussion, introspection, or navel-gazing. It doesn't interest or excite them the way, say, a cool engineering problem does. Their approach to their inner selves is -shrug-, to interpersonal politics is "well, it all works out in the end", etc. These things simply don't bother or preoccupy them, they find them tedious and a waste of time better spent on cool problems.
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
Smart ≠ highly analytical and inclined to in depth discussion, introspection, navel-gazing.
To repeat what others have already said.
If this friends of yours is transing their kid, this letter is the worst, most insane way to go about convincing him otherwise and will permanently burn your chances of finding a more sane way
This was way too long even before I hit the "continued in a reply".
You're clearly so culturally different from him you don't even have perspective on how what you're saying would be perceived by someone outside your bubble, like a very poorly trained missionary who didn't get the basic missionary 101 memo about how to do effective missionary work and is instead standing raving on the street corner.
Focus on there being no rush to decide, that it's kind of sexist to assume feeling like a girl is something only girls can do, that a boy can have girly interests. Stick in some testimonies from detransitioners, point out that transitioning to a girl creates much more pressure on him to not detransition than transitioning to "nonbinary" does, that there's no rush for him to commit to anything. If your goal is to save this kid, your goal is anything that keeps them off puberty blockers, off hormones, and away from surgery, and anything that leaves them as much space as possible to safely grow out of the phase without crushing their parents.
I do also think you have a completely delusional view of how women experience the world, but that's not the point here so I'm not even going to bother arguing it, except to say that it's part of the general pattern of this letter being way too long, way too distant from the actual point, and way too online-incel speak to be effective. The point here is helping this kid away from a life path that ends in being Jazz Jennings with all the horror that entails. You exclusively need to focus on the dangers of medicalizing a totally normal appropriate exploratory developmental stage, and how the parents, by rushing to be too supportive, can in fact smother the kid, making it harder for them explore without it being a huge dramatic life-upturning event, thereby trapping them. Tell the dad that labeling Skylar a she is myopic and limiting, not that Skylar is defined by his lack of a pussy pass.
More options
Context Copy link