This is just incomprehensible to me. I'll admit that I grew up sheltered and nerdy, but still: none of my friends were having sex or really even close to having sex in middle school. Maybe the 90s were better after all?
Maybe this is difference between Sweden and the US but when I grew up in the 90s in a completely white, affluent suburb my estimation was that some 20-25% had sex before the end of middle school, with women having slightly more sex (due to being able to find marginally older partners). Another 30-40% had sex some time during high school (weighted towards the end) and the remaining 40-50% during university.
The survey reports that 60% of teenagers report using a condom during their last sexual encounter. Is that not kinda low given teenage pregnancy rates? I am a prude in real life who dislikes salacious talk, so I haven't talked about condom usage with my friends. So I don't really have a strong intuition here.
Who the hell uses condoms for anything but one night stands? You might as well not have sex at that point.
It's a bit funny that an industry so dedicated to pumping franchises for money insisting on deconstructing their properties for no apparent reason at all, especially when the deconstructions aren't even good or creative.
Why not just give the audience what it wants? Ie. Another adventure man, rom com, war hero, horror, whatever.
I'm not saying that deconstruction can't be a good idea but why does every franchise have to be deconstructed? Why does almost every movie have to be about deconstruction of narrative tropes or the movie making process?
Ioper
4mo ago
Fucking with condoms is like eating candy with the wrapper on, only worth it if you're starving.
Perhaps it's different if you're circumcised and have somewhat limited sensitivity in the first place.
Ioper
23d ago
I'd argue the same goes for the high quality posters as well, at the very least in terms of engagment.
The quality is just down overall, regardless of topic. Perhaps there are less offensive drive by posters but who cares?
It’s like that funny /r/Europe thing recently where the Scandinavians all said it would be weird to offer your kid’s friends who came to play after school dinner, because the custom is that the child should go home for food.
I thought I could perhaps add some context here because this gets blown out of proportion a bit.
When you go to a friend's house after school you are served food (like sandwiches or yoghurt), just not dinner, unless there is an agreement. The reasons for this are threefold:
On a week night people usually make food just for the amount of people that are expected to eat, and will only have bought enough food for this. There are often literally not enough potatoes available to feed another person.
Secondly, you don't want to deprive the other family of their family dinner without asking first. Serving someone else's kid without asking is impolite.
Thirdly, what usually happens is that a bunch of friends go home to someone, not just one person (because the vast majority live within walking distance to school). So it's often not about feeding a single person but 2-4 extra persons. It's also often the case that it's the same house you go to (the one closest to school or whatever) and you go there after school almost every day. So it's not about occasionally feeding a single person a portion of dinner, it's about regularly feeding a number of extra people. The amount of people supposed to be fed varying by as much as 100% is not a small imposition on working parents.
Despite all this people are regularly fed dinner at other people's houses, you just ask first. In middle school I got an earlu dinner at a friend's house ~2 days a week for 2 years.. but I've also sat and waited while friends have had dinner in cases where they had dinner at 5pm and I'm going to have dinner at 7pm.
I feel like there it is a bit of a mistake to assume that hazing and macho locker room culture necessarily overlap with "rape culture".
I've been part of the former and I saw no indication of that. Guys were borderline raped by their team mates but treated women with a lot of respect and care. It's not in the same mental world and I don't think the guys considered what they did to their team mates sexual, even if it literally was. I'd argue that it's really bad if the hazing goes overboard or just becomes a sustained severe harassment (and given how hard it is to police it might be better to outright ban it), but that doesn't mean that people are more disposed towards sexual assault towards women. I've not been part of one of these youth academies but I've known and played with people who have, and they've not been worse than anyone else.
What I think is going on is that celebrity makes people behave really badly, both the guys being celebs and the women seeking their favour/attention. It seems to me that the same thing happens with all kinds of stars: sports, music, acting. It's not about whether the people involved do (severe)hazing or not, it's that they're idolized stars, allowing them to do whatever and still be rewarded for it. It creates a really fucked up incentive structure for everyone involved. The younger you are and the more isolated from general society you are, the worse it gets, which points in the direction of these academies possibly making things worse.
I understand that there is a desire to put an = between hazing and "rape culture" but I think that is a mistake and obscures what's really going on. Solving hazing is probably desireable, but that won't solve the sexual assaults and pretending it will is counterproductive.
Ioper
4mo ago
The repair stuff could make sense if they are liable for something like catastrophic failures, you really wouldn't want a someone else cheaping our on a repair in that case.
Then they either genuinely forget about this when the maintainance contract goes to someone else or they "forget" about it.
The shutdown after X hours could also make sense as a security measure. IE. It should be impossible to drive the train for that long without mandatory maintenance.
As far as I understand it this is fairly common practice with heavy machinery these days and it isn't secret.
These kinds of things could explain why polish authorities have been so anemic in their response.
It could very well be that all this is nefarious and illegal but it could also be at least partially a mistake or ineptitude on the part of Newag. One shouldn't underestimate the extreme incompetence in IT of the management team in these kinds of companies. There was a major it security scandal in 2019 in Sweden where ~200k recorded calls to the state Health advicory service had been publicly available and the CEO of the company providing the product clearly had no idea how computers worked, never mind his own product. He made some famous statements claiming that someone had connected an "internet cable to the harddrive" (not possible, and it's not called an internet cable), he also said you needed a special "command movement to slip in the back door" (I can not emphasize enough how ridiculous this sounds in Swedish), which you of course didn't.
Some coder at some point might have done this due to some vague instructions from techicnally incompetent managers, it got documented poorly or the management forgot this even existed even if documentation did.
The far more important thing to look at is societies like China and India and South Korea and Singapore and Japan, which mistreat their own women to such an extent that their societies fail to reproduce themselves.
This was and still is a very curious thing to me. I have three friends with east Asian wives, one from Korea, one from China and one from Japan. Their wives are all middle or upper middle class and they have all married either laterally or downwards (especially lookswise), but all seem exceptionally happy with their husbands, who are not really exceptional people.
As I've come to understand it this does not have to do with fetishization as much as with just how badly these women have been treated by their previous Asian boyfriends and the general expectations on them from their prospective in-law families and society in general. From the perspective of a decent Swedish guy, the standards for being a good partner seem astonishingly low – to the point where failure almost seems to require an active effort.
It just seems so unsustainable for them. It's not like we're perfect or giga-cucked over here but it's still a walk-over, at least in the mind of these particular women. They just want to be treated with respect by their partners, be able to work after having children and not be treated as pseudo servants/slaves by their in-laws. I've had a bit of hard time really believing this, could it really be that bad?
Perhaps.
Or perhaps my friends' wives have a overly negative view of their home societies and that's why they ended up with western husbands. Or maybe it's a combination.
I would like a sanity check:
Is ChatGPT4 getting very noticably worse? My impression is that it has gotten much worse since it's release, in most visible areas such as engaging with questions without very elaborate prompting, answering them correctly (again without elaborate prompting), lying about what it knows and doesn't know and how to works, etc.
Questions I would get quick answers to before can barely be answered anymore (not CW stuff). Am I just imagining things or are they RLHFing it into uselessness?
Ioper
5mo ago
I could be because people are poorer in real terms than they used to be.
The inflation that already happened is still here and inflation remains elevated. More than that interest rates are way up which vastly increases people's housing cost (which usually amounts to their primary expense). People have gotten raises but they don't compensate for inflation or the consequences of interest rate hikes.
All taken together people are poorer, more uncertain about the future and a lot of things just feel scary.
Ioper
4mo ago
The issue here is that the low status men aren't dependable, they are losers in every sense of the word, otherwise they wouldn't be low income. Getting a decent income (and keeping it) is piss easy and if you don't then there is something seriously wrong with you, and why would women want to date that? And even in this case you can easily get a mail-order bride, I know people who have. It's not hard and you don't need even a median income.
Moderately successful men on the spectrum with poor social skills that fail in the dating market is an entirely different issue.
Ioper
9mo ago
I somewhat disagree. I find the consumers of "high culture" to be about as boring as the consumers of "low culture" and within the cultural upper middle class I find the consumers of low culture more interesting, at least they made a choice to do something they enjoy. Nerds are of course a whole other matter.
More to the point though I find "consumers" uninteresting. Unless you're producing something, you're probably about as interesting as a snail.
Ioper
2mo ago
Someone here recommend Dungeon crawler Carl a few weeks ago and I really enjoyed listening to it. I have tried other litRPGs/Progression fantasy/cultivation but nothing else I've tried has even come close and are usually very poorly written (maybe the writers are ESL?) and I'm dumbfounded as to why they're popular.
Anyone have any recommendations in this space? Goodreads and Amazon ratings don't seem to mean much.
Ioper
2mo ago
That was me. I didn't do anything, I was just logged in as you when I went to the website.
Maybe shut things down until you figure this out? It doesn't seem like a good idea for people to automatically be logged in as head admin.
Either something really strange is going on behind the scenes (like a pseudo government take over) or the board are complete clowns.
I'm a bit curious, how are the rest of you stacking up against that chart?
I've never been above a 2 and I'm a bit of a slob. I don't even think I've been in a home that's at a 4 and I can count the number of threes on one hand.
Ioper
5mo ago
That doesn't help him since he is complaining about monthly payments as well, which will likely stay the same. When the interest rates go down again then the prices will rise at the same time.
The housing market isn't "improving" unless you're sitting on a bunch of liquid capital, which it kind of sounds like he is but he is going to have to eat the higher monthly payments.
Ioper
11mo ago
Has Facebook radically increased the amount of ads you're exposed to?
I don't really use Facebook anymore, I log in maybe once every other month or so to check it out.
I have blocked the people using it to advertise and those just posting about politics but I still have some 600 "friends" or so there is usually some kind of activity. However, when I logged in yesterday maybe less than 1/20 posts were from my friends and the rest were ads. Most weren't literally ads but rather posts from groups I wasn't a member from, the content usually being some kind of bottom of the barrel pop culture memes feeling like a poorly disguised ad for the subject matter but could just be bad posts I suppose.
I was a bit confused and thought maybe I got some kind of bug or something so I reloaded the site and finally got some posts from people I actually know but it was still only maybe 1/6.
Is Facebook like this nowadays or have almost all of my friends finally stopped using it and Facebook is trying to fill my feed with anything it can find?
Ioper
1mo ago
I don't know man, Sweden does that too and includes things like getting shot and cancer. If you exclude those you get an adjusted rate of <2 deaths per 100k births.
Ioper
6mo ago
Paying a small fee for a service you use a lot doesn't sound like being a sucker.
Ioper
10mo ago
Lots is underselling it. The overwhelming majority, like 90%+, "have to tell their kids" that they're not going to be able to go to any remotely prestigious college and that the upper middleclass is almost certainly out of reach, nevermind things like being an astronaut.
It's boring and stressful. You're essentially an administrator getting yanked in a million directions with little to no power.
Of course this can vary between sectors, organisations and projects but project managment being a kind of shitty gig consistently been my impression from my own career and those of my friends and acquaintances.
This is mostly in the Nordics and UK mind you.
Is there any indication that the opposition is any more competent and less corrupt?
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