Rex
11mo ago
This is one of the more ridiculous articles I’ve ever read. Thank you. This journalist and her friend are the future. Post-wall women with no families, aged out of Twitter and Hinge, racking up body count with “open minded” men, nonbinaries, couples, and other people that are similarly alone.
They sound like big kids. The journalist loses her apartment suddenly and has to throw her stuff in a storage unit and her dad’s car (that she’s presumably using). She’s 39!!! And random hookup sex was her answer to this!
She talks about a friend who was “house sitting” for her parents. I’m guessing this friend is about her age, has a shitty apartment in Brooklyn, and is crashing at her parents house while her parents are at their vacation home. This is the kind of shit I did when I was 24.
I tend to enjoy the schadenfreude of hearing these types of stories and wondering what the future holds for this cohort. I think this is the answer. As much as people look down on tinder and hookup culture - this is worse. The young people on tinder at least have have hope. I met my wife on hinge. These women will be racking up enormous body counts. It won’t be normal sex. It will be strange kink. People using sex to fill the hole in their lives. Like an old alcoholic alone at a bar getting shitfaced each night.
Everyone should read this article. What a world.
Rex
1yr ago
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.
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
10mo ago
It was created by a very interesting person: Mike White. He first came on my radar as a contestant on Survivor and I found him extremely annoying, if not a good character for the show. Very gay. Very catty. Very California. He was a minor celebrity, with a few big Hollywood writing credits under his belt. Best known for School of Rock.
I stumbled across first season of WL by accident and was completely hooked. I’ve watched some of Mike Whites back catalogue and I now think he’s a complete genius. He created an old HBO show, Englightened, starring Laura Dern. I loathe Laura Dern but found the show terrific. MW has this ability to take the piss out of the mainstream American leftists, while having just enough plausible deniability to not get himself in trouble. His whole look and style probabaly help with it since on the surface he fits right in.
He was recently a guest on the Perfume Nationalist podcast and basically confirmed my whole theory here. He seems to really dislike the culture he writes about and has some very controversial takes on orthodox California liberal thinking. It’s also like the only Perfume Nationalist show that’s paywalled and I imagine that was a MW request to limit listeners and keep a low profile.
If youre a mike white fan and want to watch a really weird indie movie go rent Chuck and Buck on Amazon. It’s his first movie credit. I can’t believe he got another job after that.
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
7mo ago
No. But it allows the NYT, “the paper of record”, to publish:
The guilty plea entered by Mr. Epps showed that he was being held accountable for his crimes and undercut the narrative that he was being protected by the federal government.
No doubt the DoJ or some other government organ explicitly directed them to publish this. We just saw last week that this is exactly how it works. No doubt some federal official will now quote the NYT saying that this clears up the Epps saga. It’s the same playbook from the Iraq War, Russiagate, and I’m sure many other examples.
Rex
1yr ago
This is as good a time as any to think about what the following statement means in practice.
By 2025, we aim to achieve parity at the VP+ level for U.S. minorities by increasing our minority representation from 19% to 32% and doubling the underrepresented population of African Americans/Blacks and Hispanics/Latinos
The reality of this is that there are many likely hundreds if not thousand's of staff or managers going up for a limited number of promotion spots who will likely get deferred in favor of the minority groups. I dont really feel bad for Phiser employees, however this exact type of 2025 mission seems to exist at most professional companies. Its likely going to directly affect tens of thousand or hundreds of thousands of people over the next few years.
That does however assume there are tens or hundreds of thousands of black/hispanic/latino candidates who even exist at these companies. I suspect anyone with a pulse is going to be promoted given the numbers here.
Rex
8mo ago
This is okay with me. A motivated fight against the deep state, even if it’s fruitless, is what I want. Trump had some plan late in his presidency to reclassify thousands if not tens of thousands of government employees to contractors so that they could be more easily separated. If this is the only thing he accomplishes the whole thing will be worth it. Fighting traditional conservative battles is not going to change the direction of this country.
Rex
1yr ago
The interesting part of this to me more so than the loss f humanities a the surge of STEM majors. I guess students got the memo. I highly doubt this will work out like they planned. We will just turn STEM into what a college degree became. A bunch of middling graduates that are for the most part, not particularly useful to business and certainly not future members of the PMC.
Rex
11mo ago
As an aside, this kind of aloofness in matters of sex necessary to use an app like this strikes me as the opposite of emotional maturity...it's just emotionally avoidant, no?
Yea. They’re dressing up post-wall hookup culture with a lot of modern psychology. They’re lying to themselves. No normal men their age want a 39 year old poor journalist. They just acquiesced to the fact that their only options at this point for easy sex are people with abnormal sexual preferences
Rex
5mo ago
You are right about the Republican Party and perhaps even the Republican base (depending on how you define that). It would have described me 10 years ago when I considered myself a republican.
I don’t know if that is true of Republican voters though. I vote Republican out of necessity but loathe the party. I suspect you comments do not ring true to a significant portion of the MAGA voters out there. My parents will never give up on loving Israel. 60 years of propaganda is extremely sticky. Myself, my peers. There is no mystical allegiance there. They’re shitty allies and a waste of money.
Rex
8mo ago
Is it the Atlantic that first published his identity and ethnicity? There seems to be a trend of mainstream legacy media outting public personalities that publish under a pen name. BAP, Libsoftictock, Scott. They clearly have an axe to grind here, even though they hide behind the some notion of journalism and a fig leaf of newsworthiness. What is there to be done? Nothing. Its asymetrical. Add it the list of reasons I find journalists lower than lawyers and slightly higher than pedophiles. I hope to one day be introduced to a journalist so that I can laugh in their face when they tell me their profession.
Rex
8mo ago
I had a very different take on this. Oppenheimer from almost the first minute is shown as murderous, arrogant, a philanderer, and ethically questionable if not an outright monster that is more focused on his own accomplishments than the the implications of his project. I dont know how anyone could leave the movie thinking he was a good man. There were no good men or women in the entire movie.
Rex
2mo ago
I've seen people make the argument that the liberal ideology is universalist. Its not enough for California to totally conform to leftist ideology - the whole country must conform. Better yet, the whole world. I dont know how to square this with cultural relativism, but now that I think about it, that's not something you hear a whole lot about these days despite the fact that I recall it being a big part of the political conversation from the left about 20 years ago. The universalism of the left does ring true to me. It seems to me that they cannot tolerate pockets of red tribe anywhere they might exist.
Rex
1yr ago
For games, major publishers like Ubisoft and Epic have created competing storefronts and pulled software from Steam. At one point, Netflix was a one stop shop. Now there are dozens of competing services. Prices are increasing. Catalogs are thin. Give it some more time for music.
To your other point. I don’t think it’s strictly a matter of rationalization or low iq. Though that is the case for many. There is a sincere group of people that believe data should be free and shared are widely as possible Almost as a terminal goal in and of itself. It may seem ridiculous to us who are steeped in capitalism, but this mindset exists.
And finally, I’ve read plausible explanations that privacy has minimal effect on sales. In most cases, if piracy were off the table, the person would simply just not consume the media. With zero marginal cost to produce an additional product, there is no economic loss.
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
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
11mo ago
I’m in the same position. I have a plan to flee my blue state early if I get a hint of anything like this. Florida is one option. International is another. I don’t know if Florida can and will protect me, I haven’t done the research yet. Immediately removing the kid from local environment and basically putting them in short term social confinement seems like it would work. Damaging, sure, but better than the alternative.
I’m lucky to have a job that would likely accommodate me.
Rex
1yr ago
The only thing I have to add here is that Matt Taibbi mentioned something on his premium podcast that I haven’t heard elsewhere.
He said he believe this is a DNC opp to sideline Biden in ‘24. He implied that he believes this is the case based on certain unreported facts about the source of this brouhaha. He didn’t elaborate. More of a passing comment to his cohost.
Rex
5mo ago
He’s been allegedly walking around NYC for the past 6 months harassing Russians as well. This dude literally lost his mind over The Current Thing. I wonder if we’ll be having a conversation about how the MSM encourages stochastic hate crimes?
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
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
1yr ago
Thanks for the review. I follow video game news more than I play video games these days, but the Last of Us game and sequel are a particularly hot culture war flashpoint in the video game world.
The developers and creators of the game are some of the most subversive, degenerate, and outspoken culture warriors in the entire industry. I don’t think I can support the show based on what I know about the series.
The narrative of the first game (season 1) was well liked and hit on some timeless themes and archetypes. the sequel to the game has one of the most controversial narratives and is extremely heavy handed on culture war issues. Even beyond the CW issues, some of the choices seem to be optimized for shitting on certain types of people, as opposed to telling a good story.
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link