Friend, if you're going to write off any woman agéd thirty rounds of the sun as An Hag and Crone and thus not marriageable, you're cutting out a lot of potential spouses given the trends towards late marriage and divorce. Nay nay, I shall only wed with a virgin bride not less than twelve nor more than fourteen years of age, the prime times of a woman's life before she becomes a jade, when I myself am still a sprightly youth of five-and-thirty - the Roman Empire sadly no longer exists to accommodate you.
See 0.15 of this relevant movie.
The figures you quote for competition for mates ("said women will have somewhere upwards of 5 men, possibly near 27 who will be competing for their affections") are in large part because of the limits of male attractedness (not attractiveness but who they are attracted to); whether the man is 18, 28, 48, or 68 he still wants that 18 year old hottie. If thirty to forty year old men are writing off women with "oh my god she's thirty she's got one foot in the grave" then that ratio is not going to improve.
HereAndGone
3mo ago
I stopped taking Impassionata seriously a good while back and now it's very difficult to parse out how much they genuinely mean, how much is a performance, and how much is them caught up in all the alts and clashing viewpoints to the point they can't remember what they mean now.
HereAndGone
3mo ago
To be fair, TheSchism has less commentary overall on everything because they don't seem to have the numbers for people following, joining, or wanting to get involved in discussions. Plus, they have their own different interests and emphases on what they consider worth discussing, and I think they try to avoid anything too Culture Warry. (Impassionata of course is their own unique case).
HereAndGone
3mo ago
Has antibiotic-resistant TB gotten that bad? Do people let TB infections get bad enough to be untreatable before seeking treatment?
These statistics from 2023 indicate that it's mostly among immigrants/non-native born people in the USA. Included with that are the risk factors associated with poverty, homelessness, and unhealthy behaviour. Plus they're including places like Guam and Micronesia, which you'd expect to have much worse outcomes anyway:
As in past years, four U.S. states combined reported half of all U.S. TB cases in 2023: California, Texas, New York (including New York City), and Florida.
...Consistent with previous years, origin of birth was a key risk factor for TB disease in 2023. Most TB cases (75.8%) in 2023 occurred among non-U.S.–born persons
...In the United States, TB disease disproportionately impacts persons who identify as members of racial or ethnic minority groups. In 2023, persons identifying as Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander had the highest TB incidence rate (22.6 per 100,000 persons) among all racial/ethnic groups followed by persons identifying as Asian (14.0 per 100,000 persons).
Likewise, the U.S.-Affiliated Pacific Islands continued to report some of the highest incidence rates in the world. The TB incidence rate in 2023 was 503.7 per 100,000 persons in the Republic of the Marshall Islands and 179.4 per 100,000 persons in the Federated States of Micronesia. TB diagnoses during active case finding efforts in the Federated States of Micronesia during 2023 likely contributed to the high incidence rate there, which represents a 300.5% increase compared with 2022 (44.8 per 100,000 persons).
...TB disease in pregnancy poses a substantial risk of morbidity to both the pregnant woman and the fetus if not diagnosed and treated in a timely manner.
Smoking is associated with increased risk of TB disease.
...Living or working in congregate settings, including homeless shelters, is a risk factor for TB because shared airspace can facilitate TB exposure and transmission.
...For other risk factors, 23.4% of TB cases occurred in persons reported to have diabetes and 4.9% occurred in persons with HIV. Among persons with TB who were at least 15 years of age, social risk factors included excess alcohol use (7.9%), noninjecting drug use (7.8%), and residence within a correctional facility (3.6%) at the time of diagnosis.
...The National Vital Statistics System reported 565 TB-related deaths in 2022, the most recent year for which data are available. The TB mortality rate was 0.2 deaths per 100,000 persons. Using unrounded numbers, this represents a 6.1% decrease in the number of TB-related deaths and 6.5% decrease in the mortality rate compared with 2021.
As regards drug resistance:
...Isoniazid (INH) drug-resistant and multidrug-resistant (MDR) TB disease Organisms resistant to one of the most common anti-TB drugs, isoniazid (INH), cause INH-resistant TB disease. Multidrug-resistant (MDR) TB disease is caused by an organism that is resistant to at least isoniazid and rifampin. In Tables 12–14, INH-resistant and MDR cases are displayed by year and stratified by a patient’s history of previous TB disease.
Starting in 2023, information on drug resistance included results of molecular drug susceptibility testing in addition to growth-based susceptibility testing for isoniazid and rifampin. An isolate was considered resistant to isoniazid or rifampin if either the growth-based test or molecular test detected resistance.
So at a glance it looks like "be immigrant, be poor/in bad circumstances, don't get diagnosed immediately, don't get put on treatment immediately, more likely to contract TB and to die from it". Again, drug-resistant TB seems to be slightly higher amongst non-US born than US natives. And smoking/vaping is the big risk factor.
HereAndGone
3mo ago
It's a tough question. Normally you'd expect to anonymise the student but in this case, in order to avoid "how do you know that's the same person?" or "this is all fake", she did have to show evidence that it was who she said it was.
The timeline does sound skewed to me, though; I note by the PDF the update was that in 2024 John was still competing with the boys which is where he tied for fifth place, then in 2025 Katie won first place with the girls.
So 2023 or 2024 - ties for fifth, 2025 - first place. I think looking at that leap in performance, it's hard to argue "trans girls in sports don't have any advantage over cis girls" at this stage. I've no idea if the kid is on hormones and we'll have to wait a couple of years into the transition to see any real changes, but that is the crux of the argument: while we're waiting those years, Katie formerly John is now beating girls for places on state teams, college sports scholarships, and possibly Olympic places.
(The irony would be if the reason John only made fifth place competing with the boys is because they were secretly transitioning all along for a couple of years, but now they're fully out as Katie).
HereAndGone
3mo ago
Aristotle thought men had more teeth than women
I wonder if part of that was from the old idea that "you lose a tooth for every child". Lack of proper nutrition means the developing foetus leeches nutrients from the mother's body, and if you're an ancient empiricist and you go about counting the teeth of women of child-bearing age versus men in the same age range, it's entirely possible you might end up with "men have more teeth than women".
Childbearing has an impact on the health of women, and the impact grows with the number of times a woman has been pregnant for longer than 24 weeks. Pregnancy and breastfeeding put energy demands on a woman and can cause permanent changes to a mother’s health.
What’s less well known is the relationship between parity and oral health. That’s despite a widespread customary belief that having an increasing number of children results in tooth loss. “Gain a child, lose a tooth”, or “for every child, a tooth is lost” are common proverbs in many societies. The biological basis of these beliefs is still questioned.
There are few studies on parity and tooth loss. In addition, the available results are inconsistent. Nevertheless, increasing number of children in women has been associated with tooth loss in some populations, as seen in studies in Uganda and the US.
HereAndGone
3mo ago
Better be careful it's the right sort of mould; not just useful penicillin grows on stale bread, the wrong species of aspergillus will make you very sorry you tried it. And again, without the theoretical knowledge and tech to identify "is this blackish mould the right one or not?", you're taking a big chance.
Some Aspergillus species cause serious disease in humans and animals. The most common pathogenic species are A. fumigatus and A. flavus, which produces aflatoxin which is both a toxin and a carcinogen, and which can contaminate foods such as nuts. The most common species causing allergic disease are A. fumigatus and A. clavatus. Other species are important as agricultural pathogens. Aspergillus spp. cause disease on many grain crops, especially maize, and some variants synthesize mycotoxins, including aflatoxin. Aspergillus can cause neonatal infections.
HereAndGone
3mo ago
Antibiotics - As far as I know, there is nothing about penicillin as an antibiotic agent that could not have hypothetically been developed and systematized 2000 years ago - this would not have required any modern technology. To be fair, there may have been ancient cultures that had an intricate knowledge of plant-derived drugs and so on that are at least relatively comparable... but to my knowledge, none of them developed something like modern antibiotics, which revolutionized the world and basically immediately did away with the whole literary genre of "lonesome poet dies at 30 from tuberculosis".
They did have something like that; using poultices and the idea that "mouldy bread is a cure" was around for a long time:
Moulds (i.e. filamentous fungi) were widely used as curative agents in all of the world’s cultures well before Fleming’s famous discovery of penicillin in 1928. Imhotep, an ancient Egyptian practitioner, for example, used mouldy bread to treat infections of the face (Wainwright et al., 1992). The literature from more recent folk medicine has documented some other examples of the use of moulds on infections. For example, mouldy jam and mouldy bread were widely used in folk-based therapy in Quebec (Canada), Devon (UK), and Kansas (USA) and poultices made from mouldy chewed barley and apple have long been used in Asia to cure surface wounds. In 1640, one of London apothecaries also advised that moulds have a curative effect when applied to infections (Wainwright, 1989).
What they did not have was Science! Or rather, the development of technology, theory and knowledge that gave us modern science. Fleming's discovery was accidental, but he was looking for it. What the ancients did not have were petri dish cultures or the means to isolate and scale up production of useful fungi and bacteria.
It's the same old story: hindsight is great for telling us how easy it is, once you already know how to do it. But even being very smart two thousand years ago will not get over the gap of "we just don't have the devices, or the tech to make the devices, or the engineering standards to make that tech". You can't speedrun growth from "baby to adult, six weeks", it has to be done incrementally.
HereAndGone
3mo ago
I mean, if you can afford it, go for it. I get the impression that the new babysitters do different times to fill out the childminding over the entire week, not that he has his wife and a nanny and two babysitters all minding the kids at the same time.
It's definitely "yeah this only applies to a few people" but I think the important thing for him and his wife was "we can afford this, so why not? we are not failing as parents if we pay for help" encouragement that Caplan gave him.
HereAndGone
3mo ago
Yes, and your mother took care of you when you were sick. But if you are sick and go to a hospital and have nurses looking after you, they don't do it on the same basis as "well my mom gave me chicken soup and aspirin when I was ill, anyone can do this, why pay the big bucks to have someone just give me soup and aspirin?"
HereAndGone
3mo ago
Recruiting for childcare services, if the service is reputable, means that there are basic qualifications the staff must have. If it's not reputable, they'll hire any warm body. The pitfall for workers in both cases is cost-cutting. Labour is a big cost, so trying to keep wages costs down is important in order to be affordable for parents. But if the wages are too low, it's not worth working there. And if it's a shady operation, it'll pay even worse, have higher child-to-staff ratios (even than legal), and the money goes into the pockets of the owners rather than on the premises and equipment for the kids.
People legitimately complain about the high price of childcare, but it's a job and you have to pay employees a reasonable wage. And just brushing it off as "anyone can do it" - well, there's Scott's entire piece about how he can only handle a couple of hours a day taking care of his own kids.
HereAndGone
3mo ago
The very rich do still have servants, though the job titles may be different. It's just that you need to be (a) extremely rich and (b) accustomed to the notion of having servants (or staff). Gates may be extremely rich, but he did not grow up with servants in the house.
Employment agencies aren't a new thing, they were around in the 19th century where people looking for domestic and service positions would hand in their details and clients would seek servants from such, because the idea was (pace that comment about dishwashers versus maids) they would be pre-vetted and a reputable agency would provide good servants.
HereAndGone
3mo ago
What do they want to exist? Plants? Maybe only rocks, because plants compete with one another for resources and that causes suffering?
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I read these sorts of manifestoes, because they make no sense at all to me. "Suffering is bad, let's kill everything"? "Everything is going to die anyway, it's just not dying fast enough for us"?
HereAndGone
3mo ago
Yeah, if she turned out to be a habitual shoplifter or something I wouldn't be at all surprised, neither would I be surprised if Granny's porcelain figurines end up on eBay after he brings her home for a visit.
HereAndGone
3mo ago
They're one year old now and heading into the Terrible Twos. That is going to be the fun experience!
HereAndGone
3mo ago
Parenting was never meant to be done as "first time dad and mom, mostly mom, handle it all by themselves". The idea was you're grow up around younger siblings/cousins so you saw how it was done, then when you had kids yourself the grandparents, older married sisters with kids, aunts, cousins, etc. would be living not too far away and would give you advice and help. Those kids would grow up around siblings, cousins, and in neighbourhoods where there were plenty of other kids, and it was socially acceptable for any adult to step in and discipline any shenanigans.
That's a long way from the modern state of affairs.
HereAndGone
3mo ago
I give more credit to Scott than to Caplan, who just rubs me up the wrong way. Scott has twins as the first children, which is a big increase in labour all by itself. And I'm old-fashioned enough that I think the majority of child-rearing at that early age will fall on the mother. They have a nanny so that is something a lot of people don't have because they can't afford, but I'm not going to comment too hard on Scott's circumstances.
It does tickle me that the discovery is yes, child rearing is hard and intensive. But Caplan's airy dismissive "oh just hire more nannies" aggravates me way worse. He really is not walking the walk after talking the talk. "Yes, you too can have four kids (if you can afford to hire four nannies so I never have to do more than drop in for ten minutes per day to amuse myself with their little foibles then I can walk away and leave the actual raising to the staff)".
Note: I don't know how many kids Caplan has. But this is the same guy who did the whole "Don't be a feminist" book for his daughter, which even at the time I thought was very dumb advice from a man to a female child, and that was before I found out his version of child raising was "get women in poorer economic circumstances to do it for me".
HereAndGone
3mo ago
For this they have received no credit.
Oh, it's the good old Catch-22. "If you really believed abortion was murder, you'd be out there shutting down clinics by force! Since you're not doing that, then you don't really believe abortion is murder, it's all about hatred of women's free sexuality!"
Then someone does shoot an abortion provider or bomb a clinic, and it's "See, we told you they were all violent murderous brutes!"
HereAndGone
3mo ago
I did. I was surprised to find out the exact ideology, but the first reports I read had some Dark Hinting about "maybe it's one of those crazy bigot pro-lifers, they're against IVF for religious reasons". Being one of those crazy bigots myself, I found it highly unusual that an IVF clinic would be bombed, not unless it was mistaken for an abortion facility.
Well, well. Turns out it was an atheist? Or anyway, not one of the standard Christian pro-lifers. Don't suppose we'll be getting any apology from the news outlets, don't expect one to be honest.
HereAndGone
3mo ago
I have never been convinced by that warning. Did the Egyptian tomb curses stop anyone from digging up the pharaohs? Local tomb robbers were on the job the moment the tombs were sealed, and 19th century archaeologists were not put off by "don't touch this place or bad things will happen".
I imagine if our far descendants are anything like us, their immediate reaction will be "wow, if the ancients went to this much trouble to warn us off, whatever is here must be really good and really valuable!" and they'll start digging.
HereAndGone
3mo ago
It does seem like poor planning if the project is sixty years down the line and nobody figured out "how do we fund this?" though to be fair, it does sound like the usual local government "kick the can down the road" methodology.
HereAndGone
3mo ago
A girl who casually lies and steals for immediate time preference satisfaction (even (maybe espectally) if charitably done by proxy to near empathetic aquaintances) is bad news.
Yeah. For those thinking this is not so bad because she's doing it for his benefit, it was only on a second date. Suppose someone who is a close friend or family member of hers needs something? If she's willing to deceive strangers to get benefit for guy she barely knows, she's equally likely to be willing to deceive guy she barely knows for someone much closer to her. 'Look, that spare two grand was just sitting there in your bank account, you weren't doing anything with it, my sister needed to pay rent after she broke up with her boyfriend so what's the big deal? I should have asked you first? Yeah well you would have given it to me anyway, right? So why did I need to ask?' followed by 'What do you mean you mightn't have given it to me, I'm your girlfriend' argument.
HereAndGone
3mo ago
What next, dumpster diving if she’s or I’m hungry?
More dine and dash, I'd say. Or some kind of food delivery fraud:
First-party fraud
Also known as friendly fraud, this involves a customer using their own details to pay for an order and then claiming the charge was unauthorized after delivery is made. Nearly 1 in 4 (23%) consumers who have filed chargebacks admit the claim was fraudulent.
Promo abuse
Some customers may create fake accounts to exploit special offers, discounts, or free trials multiple times. They can also receive rewards for referrals to fake accounts. Another method of promo abuse involves customers using counterfeit vouchers or working out how to generate promo codes, costing businesses money and blocking trusted customers from using genuine codes.
The fake hotel claim does sound in the general area of "shoplifting is not a crime, businesses expect this kind of stealing, insurance pays for it all" thinking and does indicate a willingness to cheat/scam. Which may be confined to small things, or may lead to more serious crime, or at least scamming/lying in the relationship. "Oh, your mom's antique vase went missing? Gosh, I hope she finds it, I wonder what happened?" checks eBay to see if any buyer has bid yet
HereAndGone
3mo ago
There's the bro wisdom of "if she'd cheat with you she'll cheat on you"
For me, the distaff version of this is all the "other women" and mistresses lamenting that the married guy cheating with them is, in fact, lying about getting that divorce and marrying them because his marriage is a sham and in name only while his wife doesn't understand him and is cold and they're only staying together for the sake of the children.
Wow, you mean someone who has demonstrated he will happily lie and deceive close family in the cause of getting his dick wet is also lying to you in the cause of getting his dick wet? How can this be?
Some of them at least realise how things are and are open-eyed about the affair being an affair and that it'll never be more than that, but a surprising number can't get over "it's been five years, he still isn't divorced, am I wasting my time?"
It's the double standard, though, and it's going to choke relationships if it still is applied. Men want to sleep with as many women as they can, but they want their prospective partner to never have slept with anyone, or at least only one guy before him ("0-1 previous partners is, it seems, the 'ideal' there").
Well, seeing as how the ratio of men: women is about 50:50, that ain't doable. Either a few women are sleeping with all the guys, or a few guys are sleeping with all the women (the latter case not making most men happy at all) or we get Sexual Liberation when women are supposed to be approaching sex with the same kind of mindset as men, wanting casual flings and novel sexual experiences, in which case yeah you're going to get more than 1 previous partner. Men will have to dial down their own body count if they want "women who haven't slept with a lot of guys, but who are still willing to have sex with me while we're dating and before we've fallen in love and before marriage". Or go back to the days of "if you like it then you shoulda put a ring on it" and no sex before marriage, and I think modern men don't want that kind of limitation either.
More options
Context Copy link