Rex
1yr ago
Are unmarried men taken seriously in business and life?
I listened to Charles Haywood’s latest essay on entrepreneurship and he bluntly suggested that single men are not taken seriously in business. This is something I’ve long suspected, but rarely heard articulated. The only other time I can think of hearing this in media is Alec Baldwins character in The Departed saying something to the effect that you need to be married to: “let your bosses know your not a fag and that at least one woman can tolerate you”.
It seems completely obvious to me and was a source of anxiety for many years. I married in my mid 30s. It’s also completely antithetical to the dominant narrative and I reckon you’d find countless news and opinion articles arguing the opposite.
I also wonder how kids factor into this. I recall reading an analysis of honor culture and the three Ps: provide, protect, and procreate. I don’t have enough background to fully explain this theory but the just of it is that in order to be a man that is fully accepted in a honor culture, you must be competent to excel in one or multiple Ps. I suspect that this is linked to my original question and that having a wife and kids demonstrates competence in all of these dimensions.
Rex
1yr ago
The election was 100% rigged. It’s a real shame that we’re even talking about dominion machines changing votes and I don’t even know who to blame.
It was rigged because of widespread voting rules being changed unilaterally immediately prior to the election to facilitate mail in voting. I have no doubt that votes were harvested and the spirit of the law behind how voting works was violated in mass.
It was rigged because the media “fortified the election” with a deluge of lies and messaging about trump, as per the Time Magazine article.
It was rigged because intelligence community and deep state spent years lying about Russiagate and using every lever they have to oust trump.
It was rigged because Twitter and Facebook and nearly every other tech company used all of their institutional power to actively influence voters minds and hide relevant information such as the Biden laptop. They don’t even have plausible deniability on this. They actively mislead and lied to people.
Maybe there is no proof that election administrators in deep blue territory like Atlanta and Philadelphai were changing or finding votes at the last minute. And that’s a big maybe because I do believe that these administrators are both curruport and capable of actively rigging the results in their counties. These are true believer Democrats that have been told Trump is an existential threat to democracy and the free world. They have the means, motive, and incentive.
The fact that we’re talking about the dominion machines is a shame.
Rex
1yr ago
I agree. And i think more men in my age cohort need to hear this. I know a number of single men in their 30s. I cant point to any character defects, but I agree that there must be something there.
Rex
3mo ago
After occasionally reading NHI/UAP posts on X and 4chan, and of course in here when it comes up, I’ve had a thought that I’ve not seen expressed.
The conventional take is that any disclosure will have earth shattering ramifications for the religions of the world. That evidence of NHI would result in people doubting their faith, their religious leaders, and their belief that humans have some primacy in the universe. Basically that it would have catastrophic results for religion.
I expect the exact opposite would happen. I expect that materialists, “Scientists”, the “IFL Science” crowd, debunkers, and Atheists would be the ones that will be least likely at accept a new paradigm.
Religious people by definition are more open to metaphysics and they’re also quite used to a world where we have beliefs in opposition to the mainstream. I have no doubt that any NHI as a concept would be integrated into existing religion without all that much trouble.
As for the Science crowd, the existence of NHI would necessarily mean that the story they’ve defended for their entire lives is either wrong or incomplete. We’ve seen how that’s worked out on other topics recently. I expect no amount of evidence presented would ever be enough. I supposed that this would depend on exactly what is being disclosed and what beliefs are violated. Learning that FTL travel is possible would be quite different from the inter dimensional travel that’s been suggested lately. It would also depend on the exact mechanism of disclosure. If TPTB were to get the prestigious journals and community influencers on board first and in a systematic way, people would just get their normal software update so that’s they’re on the right side of The Current Thing. No different than if the Pope told us Catholics that NHI were fully in communion with the Church.
Long story short: I believe the conventional thinking that NHI would kill religion is severely outdated. Perhaps this was true at one time when religion was the dominant societal meme. No longer.
Rex
1yr ago
Regardless of whether or not this particular group or ad worked, there does appear to be a wide scale attempt to infiltrate and subvert Christianity. It’s been around for a long time, but it seems like it’s been more intense over the last couple years.
On a unrelated note, I’ve recently learned a bit more about the Vatican II changes. I’ve been aware of VII for a long time, but after getting into it in more depth, the actual implantation of the counsel was worse than the suggestions. I only bring this up because it seems quite clear to me that loosening up doctrine is what is killing these regions. Perhaps someone should try going the other direction.
Rex
10mo ago
The almost inescapable conclusion is that if you're an American guy who is entering his thirties and is single, if you limit your dating options to women who are in your peer group in terms of age, nationality, and education you'll find exceedingly slim pickings. The best partners will have been snagged early and those that remain will have high standards and shitty attitudes to go with it. So finding a woman who isn't a ticking divorce bomb almost certainly does require broadening the search.
Well said. This was the conclusion that I came to. You should re-post this next time we have a thread on relationships.
Rex
5mo ago
First, there are reports that certain Republican orgs have been doing the work to assemble a large list of mid level staffers to install in the federal government for the next president. See NYT article. https://archive.ph/0uVQq
This should have existed in 2016, but clearly that was not the case.
Second, trump has an EO ready to go to reclass a huge percentage of federal enployees as contractors, making them much easier to fire. https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2022/07/trump-reelected-aides-plan-purge-civil-service/374842/
Third, a trump term would distract my political enemies and forestall whatever terrible agenda they are planning to implement. The dystopian liberal democratic order is coming for all of us in the west no matter what at this point. I’ll take four more years of wailing and grinding of teeth from the establishment as a nice sideshow in the meantime.
Rex
11mo ago
Yes. Out of habit sometimes I log in to read movie reviews. The last few weeks I would check out the Succession sub to see what people are saying. The comments are the absolute lowest tier garbage of any platform. Messages are typically under 200 characters, repeating lines of dialogue, cheering on a character, or the most basic observations you could imagine. Zero insightful or thoughtful replies. Twitter and YouTube comments are significantly more interesting.
It’s sad how far the internet has fallen.
Rex
10mo ago
I had a baby last year. Within hours of birth the medical team tries to get you to give a baby a Hep B vaccine. I’d love to hear someone explain to me why this is necessary. A vaccine for a virus that has no plausible mechanism for infecting the vast majority of newborns in general and my child specifically. A virus that is almost exclusively found in homosexuals, prostitutes, and IV drug users. My wife had multiple STD tests during pregnancy, as do all pregnant women in under medical care. There is zero immediate risk of being infected. Negligible short to medium term risk.
Even if one were to make the case that this Hep B vaccine safe, so just go along to get along, I think we all have enough experience to know that many people feel lousy after a vaccine. I’d love to hear why it’s necessary within 12 hours of a baby’s life outside the uterus to trigger their immune system. Why do they insist on doing this immediately?
It’s really ludicrous.
Rex
26d ago
I just bought a new PC after not having one for nearly 10 years. I went sort of nuts getting games: Total War: Rome; Dyson Sphere; Ultrakill; Satisfactory, Elden Ring, EU4, Monster Hunter World; Trails of Cold Steel 3 (difficulty mod); Cyberpunk; Witcher 3; and a few others I cant even remember. Kerbal space program too. Its my first go round with that and its not too bad. I wish the career mode had just a little bit more...production? I dont know, it seems like the edges are unsanded.
Noting has really drawn me in. My go to at the moment is Elden Ring, im maybe half way through a replay on that in advance of the DLC coming. I was really hoping Dragons Dogma 2 was going to be good since I really loved DDDA, but it seems to be a bust. I;ll wait till the DLC comes out and hopefully they get a hard mode.
As an adult, I really need complexity or extreme difficulty in games. Stellaris is really evergreen for me and I havent done a campaign in a while. I might download a new version with all the DLCs and give it another go. That game can really suck me in.
Rex
10mo ago
Try the developing world. India, Philippines, Laos. And get out of the capitals. I hear Africa is still pretty wild.
I think your thesis is largely correct. I used to to travel for work extensively before Covid and was noticing the same thing. There are still parts of the world that are not completely homogenized, but their days are numbered. This might be your last chance if it’s not already gone.
I knew it was final call when I met a Bulgarian hipster that was indistinguishable from my local variety 5 miles away.
Rex
1yr ago
I have a difficult question that you don’t have to respond to if that’s your choice. And I ask this sincerely. How does a trans woman plan for middle age and thereafter? As challenging as it must be for a young person to be trans, it strikes me that biological male bodies age very distinctly. It must be a whole different set of challenges. I know I have a bit of a beer belly myself. And while I’m fortunate to have my hair, I suspect most males have to worry about going bald. Ear hair was nonexistent until I hit 40. It seems like a something that is challenging under the best of conditions becomes completely insurmountable.
Rex
10mo ago
I tend to agree with you. The entire internment camp story appeared out of no where 5ish years ago and was convieniently timed with chilling western-Chinese relations.
The Muslim groups in western China that are oppressed used to be on the US list of terrorist organizations. They were quietly removed from that list a few years ago.
I imagine the Chinese apologist line is that these are Islamist extremists that have executed terroist attacks in the past. They’re surpressing them not unlike how Israel deals with Palestinians.
It’s not at all surprising that western liberals would be up in arms about this. Islamophobia is one of their pet issues.
I have no idea what really goes on in western china. But I certainly don’t think that the state department, cia, ngos, and media are telling me the whole truth. In fact we’ve seen them make up lies out of whole cloth many many times when it serves their strategic interest.
Rex
9mo ago
It's more than litigation issues in the U.S. The EPC (general contractors) that build nuclear power plants in the U.S. have generally lost the technical ability to build such complex engineering projects. The major contractors and subcontractors (CB&I, S&W, Westinghouse, etc) have all gone bankrupt and the people who built our original fleet never properly transferred their knowledge to the next generation of workers. We should all be embarrassed by this. We likely would be bot embarrassed and angry if it was even acknowledged as a problem. Instead we hear about nebulous "legislation and regulation". Those are certainly part of the problem, but only one part.
I wonder if Canada fares better. I kind of doubt it. It seems like the Chinese and maybe the French are the only ones left who can handle these types of projects.
Rex
1yr ago
I say rigged quite specifically. A game can be rigged without secretly changing the score.
Suggesting that the massive changes to mail in voting is just par for the course is intellectually dishonest. The total vote increasing something like 20 million is evidence that something significant changed in how elections were operated. The fact these were pushed through so quickly is another major problem even if in principle the concept is sound (in opinion, it is not sound).
I strongly disagree that all of my points are just a continuation the same old gaming of the system. But perhaps you are right and I am wrong. If that’s the case, perhaps democracy has always and will always be total bullshit.
Either way, they may have gotten rid of trump, but at what cost. This is not an ingediant for a stable political system.
Rex
1yr ago
One follow up question. Do you expect that Ukraine will take back Russian controlled territory in Donbas and Crimea? That seems to be the objective I hear these days, admittedly, from online people, rather than anything official. So I don’t k ow the stated Ukrainian objectives.
If the answer is no, and the war ends with the lines as drawn today. Who has won?
Rex
8mo ago
What exactly is a superstar researcher? What kind of deliverable or output do they produce?
The cynical side of me is thinking that there really is nothing of value being generated here. That it’s just another mechanism to funnel more tuition, endowment, and federal funny money into the hands of friends and allies.
Rex
1yr ago
I work in the energy industry, specifically around deploying new power plants. The latest round of nuclear renaissance talk has been quite annoying to read about. I can say with certainty that the utilities and power generation companies have zero interest in this stuff for a few reasons. One, its way more expensive than wind, solar, and gas. Like north of $5/watt. The other tech is about $1 to $2/watt. Conventional nuclear is also big, so your talking tens of billions of capital on a single project. Second, its incredibly risky. And not just risky for a nuclear disaster, I'm talking risk of failure to even build. Something like 2 of the 6(?) nuclear units the US has tried to build in the last 10 years have failed and left the owners with $30 billion in sunk costs. Noone wants to make that bet.
Maybe SMRs change the equation if the total cost to deploy a few is cheap enough that some companies give it a try, but im skeptical. The industry has zero appetite for this stuff. They've decided to invest their capital in wind and solar. All this nuclear talk is exclusively coming from the media and academia. SMR might work on paper, but noone has commercialized it yet. Plus the fact that 15 years ago we went through this same nuclear renaissance talk, the industry bought in and was subsequently burned badly.
I have a lot more to say but ill stop here. Things like how the U.S. has pretty much lost the industrial capacity to even build nuclear anymore. How wind and solar is actually the right choice for investment dollars rather than nuclear. Etc.
I'll leave you with one thing. On Friday i was watching Bill Maher (who i do actually like) and he had a bit on how the country hasn't really done shit to solve the climate crisis yet. He showed a stat that in 1979 we got around 40% of energy from coal and in 2019 we got around 39% of our energy from coal. Implying that we've made no progress. That seemed wrong to me, so i looked up the 2022 stats from DOE. Coal as a percentage of total generation is down to the low 20% range. A ridiculous number of coal plants have been turned off over the last 4 years. And almost every remaining plant is set to be retired in the next 5 years. I wouldn't be surprised if were well under 10% by 2030.
Rex
3mo ago
I’m suggesting something beyond the status quo. A continuation of more videos being released, more government officials making statements, perhaps a formal declaration by states.
That’s my whole point. I suspect that there is perhaps no sequence of events that could happen that would convince the Science crowd that NHI exists.
Rex
10mo ago
What’s the proper etiquette for Juneteenth? I work with a black guy. Am I supposed to say “Happy Juneteenth!!!” going into the weekend?
Is it a happy holiday or a solome one?
Is there a political valence to wishing someone happy Juneteenth? We all avoid politics we’re possible.
I think lots of people have this question because I hear a hell of a lot of “enjoy the three day weekend” this week.
Rex
11mo ago
I should have noted that I’m mainly curious about the meta commentary on normies changing opinion on piracy.
Commercial interests seemed to have convinced the median online person that piracy is not ethical. Given that pirating media is quite easy to do and quite easy to rationalize, how were they so successful? We’re they successful, or is it just that social media moderation is so tight that any pro piracy voices are silenced.
Rex
1yr ago
Climate seems to have an impact. When you have long winters, you need to plan ahead and develope large ag or industrial capacity.
If you can just pick fruit off a tree all year. No need.
It’s pretty hard to find any warm
Climate country that produces cars. Though I imagine there’s local South American brands I don’t know if perhaps.
I’d like to solicit themotte’s thoughts on the ethics of piracy. Specificlly movies, software, and music.
Sharing copyrighted data has been a part of the internet landscape for as long as there has been networked computers. I know it traces back to the bbs days and likely even earlier than that.
Back in the early aughts I was involved in a forum where we would scan for unsecured FTP servers and then fill them with the latest movie music and software releases straight from the groups who actually created and distributed the files. The beauty of this is that you were transferring between commercial networks so the speeds were ludicrous.
This was not long after Napster popularized file sharing and typical online user was very much of the opinion that copying data and sharing it was not equivalent to stealing. Maybe it was the circles I traveled in and my age at the time, but nearly everyone was ethically fine with downloading media. The only reason one wouldn’t do it was that there you needed some minimal level of technical know how to find more than just music on p2p networks. The only folks opposed to it were media corporations, some artists, and a small amount of corporate shills.
Once iTunes, steam, Netflix’s, Spotify, and other commercial options became available, most people stopped file sharing and simply bought media. It was a common to hear the refrain that piracy was a result of lack of access to media online. If there was ease of access and a fair price, most people would be happy to purchase software. This sentiment is still common but I sense it’s become less prominent over the last few years. The streaming environment has become quite fracutured and has impaired both the ease of access and price point for legally consuming media online.
The point of this post is to suggest that people’s opinion on the ethics of media piracy is diametrically opposed to where it was for most of the internets history. The median online opinion that I see is that piracy = theft. Many of these people are young and have been thought from an early age that piracy is not ethical. I suspect that many have also changed their opinion as they age and perhaps are not working at software/medi companies where piracy not affects them directly.
From a personal perspective, I stopped pirating media when iTunes and steam hit the market because it was in fact easier to obtain things legally and I was happy to pay.
That changed about 4 years ago when I realized that I could not in good conscience pay money to Hollywood and leftist game developers. I am happy to pirate their software and steal their movies because the alternative is so distasteful to me. I will occasionally really enjoy something and find the creators to be acceptable enough to support. In those cases I will purchase something after the fact to support people that I agree with. I encourage everyone to do the same. Enforcement of file sharing these days is non-existent. You can pretty much use the the pirate bay without worry and ignore the occasional email from you isp asking you to stop. Though there are many other alternatives out there that don’t take long to find.
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