Rov_Scam
1mo ago
I think the problem is less centering one's life around politics as it is centering one's life around politics but not going beyond vague, slacktivist methods like calling people out on social media or even attending protests. Actual politicians and people who work for political or community organizations for a living don't seem to have this problem. If she were concerned about the "little people" who Trump was supposedly leaving behind, it might have done her better to do legal work for people who couldn't afford her services, or get involved with a charitable organization, or even picked up litter along the side of the road. It's not like there aren't a lot of people out there looking for volunteers. But I don't think that was ever on the table because I think her political centerdness was downstream of mental health problems, not the other way around.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
The second. I used to work for the Boy Scouts and he would come up during summers and run the business end of things at camp. He was originally from Pittsburgh and came up regularly to visit his parents so we'd all hang out. There's a whole extended friend group of people who worked there at one point or another, and a lot of us still see each other regularly. I haven't seen him in years, because the Principal job keeps him in NC year round and his parents hate his new wife and her parents hate him. But anyway, as I said in my above novel of a post, I don't get involved in other people's drama. I was friends with him and not his ex-wife, and though I agree he's the one who fucked up and she deserved better, I'm not taking sides. He's never done anything to me personally that pissed me off enough to cut him off completely, and if he called me right now to go out for beers I'd go. That being said, I was in North Carolina a few years back with an extra ticket to the ACC Championship game and I didn't call him to see if he wanted it, so there's that.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
It means they serve mediocre wedding-at-a-country club dishes in a venue that has the ambience of a funeral home.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
I don't blame you for this mistake (for lack of a better term), because I didn't notice it until the second time I read your post, but I think our tendency to allow the present to inform out perceptions of the past can lead us toward explanations that don't make sense. At no point in 2015 was any of the smart money convinced that Trump was a viable political candidate. The perception of him before the 2016 primaries was that he was an unserious candidate who tapped into the resentments of a certain kind of person who typically didn't vote. Given the amount of vitriol he received from pretty much everyone in the Republican establishment and his questionable standing among Evangelical Christians, it was assumed that he was good at getting headlines and winning in too-early-to matter polls but as soon as the people who actually mattered started paying attention his standing would drop like a rock.
It seems pretty clear to me that Lana's personal problems have nothing to do with Trump, or the culture war in general. By the time Trump announced his candidacy, her marriage was pretty much over, she was making intimate details of her relationship with her husband semi-public, and she was burning bridges in her social circle—I'm hesitant to conclude that gay marriage disagreements had anything to do with that; if she was oversharing with people such as yourself who barely knew her, you can only imagine what she was telling people from church.
I had a friend in college who grew up relatively poor in a wealthy suburb. He always had this outside fixation on status and success. He majored in business, and read books by Donald Trump and other motivational people that he took literally as business advice. He wanted to go to law school and be a sports agent, and he interned with a sports agency and got to meet Barry Sanders. But his obsession was entirely superficial. For example, he'd read in his popular business books about the importance of budgeting time, so he'd block off time in the evenings to do homework and study. But this consisted of him watching television with a book open, which he'd close at 9pm or whatever and say that he'd already done his studying for the night and was keeping on schedule. When I told him I didn't much like scotch, he told me I should develop a taste for it because that's what the big dogs drank. When his aging Volvo got totaled after a drunk driver rear-ended him at a traffic light, he started test driving cars like the Ford Explorer Eddie Bauer Edition (new, of course) rather than buy whatever the insurance payout would get him.
At some point he got the idea that taking prescription opiates recreationally was a high-status thing to do. When he first mentioned that he liked painkillers, I thought maybe he was just finding a silver lining in dental work or something. When he started talking about it more, I tried to disabuse him of the notion that it was cool by noting its nickname of "hillbilly heroin" and pointing to a bust in West Virginia that had been on the news. He assured me, though, that top businessmen and all the hip young Wall Street traders and attorneys used it to unwind. I never actually saw him take anything, but he came into my dorm room one day junior year asking if I had any painkillers. I pulled a bottle of gin out of my desk and told him that was the only painkiller I needed, and he laughed but said, no, seriously. When I informed him that I didn't (which wasn't entirely true because I had most of a Percocet prescription left over, though I wasn't about to commit a felony for a few bucks), he asked my roommate, who was a bit of a stoner but not a junkie and also someone he barely knew. My roommate seemed taken aback that he would make such a request, and I was inclined to agree.
The problem became more serious later that year, when he started stealing from his roommate. They had been together since Freshman year without incident, and there was enough trust between them that the roommate would leave his wallet out on his desk when in class. This guy would then fill his gas tank and be back before his roommate returned (this was in the days when most credit card purchases required a signature; gas stations didn't if you paid at the pump). After the roommate found out he informed the administration and this guy was banned from the dorms. He still attended the school, though he had huge gaps in his day with nowhere to go, and he was embarrassed for other people to find out what had happened, so he'd hang around the dorm entrance and wait for somebody to go in, and since everyone recognized him as a resident he'd usually be let in, and he'd find a not-too close acquaintance to hang out with until his next class. I let him in once after he supposedly forgot his keys and he decided to hang out in my room for a couple hours, which I thought was odd since that never happened in the preceding two and a half years, but whatever. By this point, my roommate had withdrawn and I had a single room, and a day or so later this guy asked my if I'd mind letting him stay in the extra bed for a couple nights. By this point, I knew what was going on and asked him what was wrong with his own bed down the hall, and he gave me some bullshit answer about not some unspecified problems with his own roommate, and in the spirit of malicious compliance I told him that if it was that bad I'd be happy to have him for the rest of the year so long as he put an official request in, which in my experience would be approved by the end of the day. But if there was something he wasn't telling me then absolutely not or I could get in serious trouble. After I informed the rest of our friends of this exchange it was agreed that the administration had to be informed, and everyone in the dorm had to know that they weren't to let him in under any circumstances. After we reported him, he was expelled.
For a long time, I've had a personal policy of not getting involved in other people's drama, and it's served me well. What I mean by that is that if two people I know are having a dispute and one confides in me I tell them that I can sympathize but since I'm not involved I don't know everything about what's going on and, he (or she) hasn't done anything to me personally, so I'm not going to take sides in a matter that's really none of my business. That being said, if I am involved, and the offense is serious enough, I'm not going to pull any punches, even if it ends up destroying your life. I was friends with this guy, but we weren't exactly close; we hung out a lot, but I primarily was friends with him through other people. As all his other friends dropped off, I tried to remain aloof and neutral. When he asked me to do something that could land me in serious trouble so he could keep up the facade of still living in the dorms, that was the last straw. He seriously thought I didn't know he was a thief and would have no problem letting him live with me; for all I know, he had plans to steal from me had I been sucker enough to let him stay.
I don't know if the drug use was a way for an insecure guy to try to look cool, or if the claims that it was cool were justifications for his using it to cope with insecurity, but I really don't know that it matters. What I did learn from this, as well as from every situation similar to this that I've witnessed, is that people who are intent on destroying their lives aren't going to listen to reason, and are going to continue alienating everyone around them until there's nobody left and they're forced to face God alone. I understand the virtues of loyalty, but it's a two way street, and patience runs out if the other person doesn't show loyalty in return and tries to take advantage of you. To my friend's credit, as far as these things go, he never tried to guilt trip anyone or talk crap about anyone or intentionally create drama. The numerous times we told him that his behavior was unacceptable, that narcotics addiction wasn't cool, and that he'd never achieve his goals by going down this road, he wouldn't get angry but just roll his eyes and tell us we didn't know what we were talking about, or just say "okay" and then keep doing what he was doing.
The good news is that this story at least appears to have a somewhat happy ending. I lost touch with this guy as soon as he was expelled, and haven't talked to him since. A year or two later I heard he had gone to rehab and was back in some kind of school, though this may have been community college. All of this info comes from a friend who was closer to him than I was and who I used to talk to on the phone regularly. When the subject came up, he said he didn't know much but the situation while we were in school was worse than I realized at the time, though he either didn't provide details or I don't remember them. About a decade ago I found out he was selling industrial supplies for some company in the exurbs. More recently, I found out he married a girl who did the kind of low-level bookkeeping someone with an associate's degree in accounting does and they were living in a fairly nice area with a kid or two. The friend didn't know if he worked for the same company or what he was doing now.
It's certainly a decent life, but it's a far cry from what he wanted to be. Sales guys can make more money than I do, but money does not equal status. The best he can hope for on that front, where he is now, is hanging out with local contractors and small-town bank managers at steakhouses housed in strip malls, and a couple times a year taking his wife out to one of the restaurants with dazzling views of the city that attract the kind of people who say "ooh, classy" when they walk inside but that no one with any kind of real status would be caught dead in, not least of which because they serve overpriced "funeral food". Then again, maybe had he been more mature he'd have realized that this was a life worth pursuing, since those of us who ended up working in Downtown offices with floor to ceiling windows and personal secretaries realized that all that gets you is invitations to impossibly boring parties hosted by judges and politicians that everyone attends out of obligation and no one actually enjoys. Then again, maybe the whole status thing was a phase he would have grown out of, or maybe he would have just been to untalented or lazy to ever have a shot at the big leagues to begin with.
Circling back to Lana, I'm guessing that she had a personal crisis that she couldn't handle, and for whatever reason she found herself looking more for validation than practical advice, and when the people in her life started telling her things she didn't want to hear, she lashed out and cut them off. It's not like her family and friends were all Republicans who supported Trump and she couldn't take them anymore; it seems like she alienated people on all sides of the political spectrum. And when you cut yourself off from everyone in your life, what's left? It's not just you and God alone now, because there will always be internet message boards where the friendless will always be able to receive unconditional validation for their poor choices or get endlessly berated, depending on which board it is and who's logged on at the time. Something tells me that neither is what this woman needs. I hope she gets help and can lead a happy, productive life again, but I don't think politics has much to do with it.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
Unless she worked something out with the father, it's doubtful she'd get primary custody after moving to another state. About ten years ago a friend of mine decided to dump his wife after she caught him running around on her. At the time of the divorce, they were both teachers in the same school system who made similar money and lived a couple miles away from each other in the same district in North Carolina, so it was a pretty simple case of shared custody with minimal child support. Around the time the divorce was finalized, he quit his job in North Carolina and accepted a position as an assistant principal at a school in West Virginia. That is, until his attorney found out and informed him that if he moved out of state the custody agreement would disappear.
That much he expected; what he didn't expect his attorney to tell him is that if she ended up with primary custody after him moving out of state, there would be no downside to her moving out of state. His ex was originally from northern Minnesota, and he knew she'd move the kids back home with her if there were no repercussions. He got incredibly lucky and was able to take a different teaching position at the school he had just left, despite his old position having been replaced, and was eventually able to find a principal job down there. That being said, he's still an asshole who got what was coming to him after running around on a perfectly fine wife who desperately tried to keep the marriage together. I can't believe I went to his second wedding.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
As one of those moderates, I don't see the problem here. The rule of law imposes no requirement on the Supreme Court to hear appeals, and doesn't require any justification for a decision to hear or not to hear a case.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
I think the concern is that if they rule on this case while the others are still pending (assuming they strike it down) they get one state law struck down and several others where the courts carefully craft their decision to avoid running afoul of whatever logic the Supreme Court uses to justify their decision, in which case they have to keep hearing the same kinds of cases over and over again. And even when they do rule on it, they're just going to get new legislation that tests the limits of the decision. This is what happens when you have a constitutional right that a sufficient number of states simply choose not to recognize as such; look at how many southern states kept passing more and more onerous abortion restrictions to get around Roe. The court simply doesn't have any interest in turning into the Gun Control Review Board or whatever, so they're just going to keep denying cert. Some people may wonder why they say they're too busy when they still hear tax cases and bankruptcy cases and approximately 16,000 cases per term involving the Uniform Arbitration Act, but it's because those cases involve questions that need answers, and they don't worry about state legislatures and lower courts trying to dodge their rulings.
This may seem like an unfortunate situation to gun rights advocates such as yourself, but it's better than the alternative. The entire reason the court is in this mess is because they want to preserve restrictions that almost everyone agrees are necessary, and while you personally may not care if fully automatic weapons or sawed-off shotguns are legal, as soon as there's a high profile incident with a lot of casualties, the anti-gun protests would make everything we've seen thus far look like a dress rehearsal. There's a reason that most gun-friendly NRA A+ congressmen aren't introducing bills to repeal the FFA, or the Gun Control Act of 1968, or whatever law makes post-1986 guns illegal. This doesn't even get into sales restrictions, or background checks, or any of that. At that point the argument about cosmetic features, or DFUs, or whatever go completely out the window, and whatever rights you think Heller isn't protecting are going to vanish along with Heller itself, and in the ensuing backlash states aren't going to be shy about clamping down the screws.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
I didn't mean zero women in the grand scheme of things, I meant zero women among the 4 or 5 you're trying to simultaneously date.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
Sambas were originally designed as indoor soccer shoes, and they've reached the point of acceptability for casual wear that publications like GQ suggest you can wear them with a suit (not recommended, as most suit pants aren't cut like jeans). It does appear that what he's looking for is available in an indoor model, but one thing I'd caution is that shoes made for soccer might not be the best for wearing around town. I definitely wouldn't wear cleats around town, as, aside from all of the other concerns, they'd be damn uncomfortable.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
I saw this just before I left work yesterday, and it inspired me to look up who the best players for the Pirates were during their memorable 20 years of losing seasons. The Dave Littlefield era (2001–2007) was particularly interesting, because while his predecessor and successor both tore the team completely down for a rebuild (the latter of which was successful), Littlefield seemed convinced that, following a failed rebuild, the team was just one or two tweaks away from success. They had some good players during those years, but also a lot of bad luck, and the whole time was marred by home-grown talent who would have a few good seasons before fizzling (Jason Bay, Oliver Perez), free agent acquisitions or trades who wouldn't live up to expectations (Matt Morris, Sean Casey), and players who were mediocre here but found success on other teams (Aramis Ramirez, Jose Bautista). So even if you went into the season knowing they were going to be bad, there was always something to at least make you think they had an outside shot of having a winning season, or maybe even at least still having a realistic chance at a winning season after the All-Star break.
So going through those old rosters gave me a bittersweet mix of nostalgia and regret, and then I came across a name that got me pissed off heading into the weekend: Cesar Izturis. I had totally forgotten that he had played for the Pirates briefly in 2007, at the tail end of the Littlefield era. But it wasn't what he did (or didn't do) in his 45 games with the Pirates that pissed me off. It's what he did (or didn't do) with the Dodgers in 2004. I have a theory that when it comes to Gold Gloves, unless there's an obvious "defensive wizard" who wins every year, the award is usually given to a good defensive player on a prominent team. In the case of shortstops and catchers, that player' offensive performance usually contributes way more than it should (see Derek Jeter's five Gold Gloves, which he wouldn't have won if he were on any team other than the Yankees, and which he wouldn't have won as a Yankee if he hit like a typical shortstop).
There was no natural Gold Glove shortstop in the National League in the 2000s, so in 2004 they gave it to Izturis because he hit .288 on the first-place Dodgers. Jack Wilson was the Pirates shortstop during that era, and he was one of the best in the game. Accordingly, he had one of the biggest contracts on the notoriously cheap Pirates, and as Littlefield's days were obviously numbered after the Matt Morris debacle (which itself only happened because his days were obviously numbered and he needed to make a big move), they were looking to cut salary. Izturis was a Gold Glove shortstop who was younger than Wilson and had a club option on his contract. He had also played under manager Jim Tracy while in Los Angeles. So they quietly traded for Izturis, the idea apparently being that they could start him and trade Wilson, giving the next GM some salary relief and some prospects. Except Izturis wasn't qualified to hold Wilson's jock strap, and the Bucs kept Wilson and declined the option on Izturis.
To be fair, Izturis's star had started to fade long before he arrived in Pittsburgh, and his Gold Glove season seems like an anomaly. But he hing around the league for over a decade, so he couldn't have been that bad, and would be an every day starter after that, and while his bating average never recovered, I doubt his defense was much worse. Jack Wilson was better in every defensive statistical category in 2004, and everyone who watched the Pirates regularly knew that he would have at least won a few Gold Gloves had he played for a better team. To add insult to injury, he was also much better offensively than Izturis ever was, batting .308 in 2004. He should have easily won the Gold Glove that year, and I'm still pissed off about that one.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
There are a lot of things I dislike about Pennsylvania law, but one thing I do like is that they got rid of the stupid redemption period nonsense. The idea is that after you lose property to tax sale you have a certain period of time to redeem the property by paying the back taxes on it. What this means in practice is that someone buying property at a tax sale has to cut a check now and then wait a year or years before they can actually take possession of the property. PA still technically has a redemption period, it just happens before the actual tax sale. In other words, if your property is put up for tax sale, it was already delinquent for several years and any possible redemption would have happened already. The New Jersey process appears to be even stupider, where you have to buy a certificate that then gives you the right to foreclose, which really means a right to spend even more money on a lawsuit at some point in the future when back taxes will only continue to accumulate. This just goes to show how a lot of aspects of property law exist as relics from the 1800s when everybody lived on farms and courts used complicated common law pleading procedure. And since none of this is a big enough deal for the state legislature to act on, it just keeps rolling along as a rather constipated discipline.
Other than that, I always find it remarkable when people do absolutely nothing for a decade and when something adverse happens they're suddenly motivated to not only file a separate suit but also appeal that suit. The guy doesn't open an estate for his father, doesn't see that the property taxes are paid, doesn't attempt to redeem the property after the auction is announced, doesn't respond to the foreclosure suit, yet immediately before the property is sold to a third party he files suit challenging the default judgment, and is motivated enough to appeal that judgment when he loses. The worst part of this is that he doesn't even attempt to claim some kind of hardship that may excuse him from not responding to the initial suit (other than that he wasn't on the best terms with his brother), but raises the cockamamie defense that service was improper because they served the brother instead of the estate, except they couldn't serve the estate because the estate didn't formally exist. If the court actually bought this argument, then anyone who inherited someone's house could avoid paying taxes on it indefinitely by simply not opening an estate and claiming improper service.
Beyond, that, though, and I don't think this was mentioned in the opinion, whether the estate was properly served is irrelevant, because the action technically isn't against the property owner but the property itself. Since they weren't seeking a judgment against the father but possession of the house, they only have to notify "the house", which they did by mailing notice to the owner of record and by personally serving notice to an adult at the residence, who happened to also be an heir and possible estate representative. It's hard for me to see what the defendant here thinks the reasonable course of action should have been.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
I took fin for a few years a long time ago and I'm convinced that while some people do experience real side effects, it's mostly a psychological thing based on internet message board catastrophizing. I think the biggest part of the problem is that most guys start losing their hair in their 30s and 40s, at a time when sex drive is diminishing anyway. They might not have been paying much attention to it otherwise, but when you start taking a drug that has "sexual side effects" as the number one concern, you're going to be more alert to that sort of thing than usual. I imagine that if the rate of sexual side effects were the same overall but there were a higher rate of gastrointestinal effects, sore throat, knee pain, or something else unrelated, everyone would be getting those and few people would notice any decrease in libido.
And then, of course, there are the people who will blame any and everything on whatever medication they are taking regardless of whether it's a listed side effect or not, and go on these sites to warn people that they will ruin your life, at least until you stop taking it. My favorite of these is the guy who claimed that fin made him depressed to the point that he was borderline suicidal. He also happened to start taking it at a time when his business was failing and he had to lay off a bunch of people, and got so invested in some video game that he rarely left the house. Right around the time he stopped taking it was when business picked up and he started having a normal social life again. Yeah, it was the finesteride.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
Probably nothing, assuming she's allowed in. She has civil judgments against her, but so do a lot of people. Theoretically, if she opened a bank account or bought real property they would be subject to levies/liens from her creditors, and if she were to get a job her paycheck could be garnished if she were in a state that allowed garnishment for normal civil judgments, but any of that would require additional litigation.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
Criminal copyright infringement requires that the infringement be done for purposes of financial gain. The classic case of this would be somebody selling bootleg copies of movies or other copyrighted material. As she's giving the material away for free and has long been outspoken about her ideological motivations, it would be very difficult to prove that Sci-hub exists for commercial purposes.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
If every guy puts in incredible effort to up his game, to make his profile as slick and impressive as possible... then NOBODY actually improves their status relative to the others much. Its a lot of effort burnt for no real improvement in the overall situation.
Maybe in an ideal world where nobody does stupid shit and then complains about the consequences of their actions,but if we ever get there, then the fact that it may make online dating slightly harder would only be a minor downside.
For a woman who already thinks you're unattractive:
Isn't this woman doing exactly what you suggest women should be doing, i.e. settling for men she doesn't find attractive?
As for the second two videos, yeah, some women shallow, self-centered, high maintenance bitches. That isn't exactly a groundbreaking revelation. I don't see the point in cherry-picking the worst of Tik-Tok and acting like its representative of half the population. And as for the second one, when exactly does she suggest that she doesn't find average men attractive. She's obviously high maintenance due to her attitude, but the substance of what she's suggesting isn't even controversial. If you want a world where women settle for you out of necessity, you're going to have to pay for a lot more than flowers and dinner.
This is my point with my earlier post. The Pool of women who are actually appealing to marry is small, compared to the vast number of single guys fighting for their attention.
As @FiveHourMarathon and others pointed out, to which you didn't respond, the vast number of men fighting for their attention is only a problem if you don't apply ridiculous nine-point tests to determine whether any "reasonable" woman would want to date them. It's ridiculous that you're complaining that women won't lower their standards when it comes to looks (which is a dubious assertion to begin with) and with a straight face point to your own set of criteria that excludes 99% of the female population.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
It's supposed to mean that he clerked for a Supreme Court justice, which is a position that only goes to those with the highest academic qualifications, and means that he has actual experience working in constitutional law, which is something that few lawyers possess. He also specializes in appellate Supreme Court work as part of his current practice. I'm not sure what kind of resume you're looking for when it comes to one's qualifications to comment on the judicial system.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
I don't know if you know how Hinge actually works , but you can only send out about five likes a day, so even if I were swiping every day and getting 100% matches I wouldn't be able to get anywhere near a couple thousand. But anyway, I'm not trying to claim I'm exceptionally good looking or exceptionally successful, just that I'm getting enough good matches that I'm getting satisfactory results. Honestly, having more than three active matches is a waste of time, since it's hard to keep up with that many conversations in any meaningful way, let alone schedule dates if you're a reasonably busy person with an actual life. So yeah, I'm sure there's some super users out there with thousands of matches , but it's a pointless comparison. These guys don't "have their pick" because there's no possible way to even make that selection. So fine, I'm probably in the bottom ten percent of users and doing terribly, but if this is what doing terribly is like, then nobody has any reason to complain.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
The point of my post was to point out that there's no statistical basis for believing the 80/20 thing. I'm not saying it isn't true, just that we don't know. Either way, even if I assume that it is true, one of the following things must also be true:
- There's a lot of room for profile optimization to allow men of average looks to get into the top 20% of profiles, or
- Bald guys with salt and pepper beards with a height at the low end of average are now considered top tier in the looks department
Like I said, I've never used Tinder, but I've had no problems on Hinge. And this is with me selecting for attractive, non-obese women with professional jobs that usually involve advanced degrees. I match on about 20–25% of likes, on average, and even then I occasionally get into trouble where I have more matches than I can handle from swiping 4 or 5 days a month. I suspect that I could probably do "better" if I were swiping more and started going after the hairdressers and phlebotomists of the world, but I'm trying to find a girlfriend, not farm matches.
I was around for both eras; when I was in college, online dating had about as much social cachet as taking out personal ads in the paper, and I exclusively dated women I met IRL until relatively recently, but now that it's mainstream, I can confidently say that the women I'm meeting now are in a similar class to those I was meeting before, there's just more of them.
You have to keep in mind that if you set up a dating profile, that's you as far as women on the app are concerned. You know that there's more to you than that, but out there people are dealing with limited information. Too many guys half-ass their profiles and wonder why they aren't getting any attention. You've got one chance to make a good first impression, and so many guys waste it. Either that or they send out likes with messages that don't have any substance to them and don't give the girl much to work with in terms of a response. At worst, they suggest that the guy didn't even bother reading the profile and just clicked on a pretty face. Trust me, if some of my friends can find wives on here anyone can. Nobody wants to hear this because it means ditching the defeatist attitude and requires putting in some actual work, but if you can't put the work in for a fucking dating profile, what does that say about the kind of work you'll put into an actual relationship?
Then again, there's the possibility that you weren't dating much before the whole online thing took off, in which case, you can't expect women who wouldn't date you in real life to suddenly become attracted to your digital persona.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
It's not that bad. People just like to be dramatic and use questionable statistics to explain away their crappy profiles.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
This was originally intended to be a response to a post by @faceh below where he links to an article that contains the oft-quoted statistic that the top 80% of women are contending for the top 20% of men and the bottom 80% of men are contending for the bottom 80% of women, or some similar numbers that are eerily close to the Pareto distribution. I've heard this mentioned a lot, particularly in the context of people complaining about dating apps, but it seemed a bit suspicious since approximately 100% of the friends I've know who have used them with the goal of landing a long-term partner have found one, and several of those friends are nowhere near the to 20% of guys using whatever metric you want to use to rate desirability. Not to mention that the app companies themselves are notoriously tight-lipped about their user data. So I decided to trace the source of this, and post it here so it won't get buried.
It turns out the statistic is incredibly dubious. The quote comes from a [Medium post from 2015] in which a blogger named worst-online-dater attempts to come up with the Gini Coefficient to prove how unfair Tinder is. This blog has 6 total posts, four of which weren't posted until seven years after the initial two posts (which include the post that contains the statistic) and were only created to address the increased attention he had been getting in the wake of his study being quoted online and occasionally in mainstream media. There is no biographical information provided for the author of this "study", so at best it can be said that it comes from the very definition of an "online rando", and at that, one who seems to have an axe to grind.
The actual study the guy conducted was a very informal one where he used pictures of a male model to attract likes from women on Tinder, and used his chatting privileges to ask them questions about their usage. He doesn't say what questions he asked or how many women actually answered, but he says that the women reported, on average, to liking approximately 12% of the profiles they looked at. I could comment on how the sample size is small and the methodology dubious, but that's neither here nor there because the actual research he did doesn't factor at all into the whole 80/20 statement. That seems to just come out of nowhere, without explanation as to how he extrapolated it from data he collected or attribution from another source. It's collateral to the point of the study anyway, as he's trying to calculate a Gini coefficient and uses it as a number he plugs in somewhere along the way.
Of course, that was the takeaway from the article, and not what he was even trying to say, which is that dating inequality on the apps is worse than economic inequality in all but a handful of countries. Years later, after the statistic began to gain traction, he addressed it in a followup post in which he responded to criticism of the original article. Someone sent him a link to an article that pointed out that the whole 80/20 thing was a lie. He responded to the criticisms that were leveled at him in the article, but he never adequately explained where he was getting the whole 80/20 thing from. As far as I can tell, at best he's getting it through an uncertain derivation based on data from a highly flawed study. At worst, he just made it up.
That isn't the end of it, though. Another of the responses to his original post was a separate study of Hinge data based on actual comprehensive data that was conducted by an employee of the company. He doesn't discuss the results of this study in the same terms as the 80/20 thing, but the results are similarly dramatic: Men as a whole only receive 14% of the likes sent out on Hinge. This breaks down further to 9% for the top 20% of men, 4% for men in the 50%–80% range, and just 1% for the bottom 50% of men. By contrast, the bottom 50% of women receive 18% of total likes. He claims that this Hinge data basically confirms the conclusions he drew from his Tinder data. It certainly makes it seem like even attractive guys have no chance if they're not even getting the same amount of action as below-average women.
There's one huge problem here, though, in that it takes two to Tango. I can't comment too much on the Tinder stuff because I never used Tinder and am therefore unfamiliar with its idiosyncrasies. I have used Hinge, however, and basing success on likes received is enough to make me discount the study before I even look at the data. It's my understanding that unless you're in a paid tier, with Tinder you just swipe on profiles you like with limited personal information and match with people who happen to swipe on you as well. In other words, everyone has to swipe, and there's no guarantee that someone you swiped right on will even see your profile. On Hinge, however, you can like a profile and even send a brief message, and you're like will always show up on the person's queue. So there are two ways to match: You can send out a like and hope the other person matches, or you can automatically match with one of your incoming likes.
And, like in the real world, while either sex is free to initiate, the way it usually works is that men get matches by sending out likes and women get matches by choosing from their incoming likes. While the opposite can happen, most women only send out likes because they aren't getting enough incoming likes, so it's rare for men to get likes, and when they do it usually isn't from anyone they're interested in actually dating. Likes received is a bad barometer for determining success on Hinge, and given that the author seems to have no grasp on how Hinge actually works, it leads me to question whether he understands how tinder actually works, and whether the data he is purportedly measuring is actually a reasonable proxy for dating success.
I tried to come up with some ideas on how to accurately measure success on Hinge but I came up short each time. the experience of men and women on these apps seems to be so different that it would be difficult to quantify who has it "easier". Part of the problem is that while the whole thing is seen as a grind, the statistics we use to determine success tend to celebrate the grindy aspects of it. Someone who is on for a month and only matches with one person is seen as a failure compared to someone who matches with a couple dozen people, but if the former finds a long-term partner and the latter goes on a string of boring dates, we all know who was more successful. Until we figure out exactly what we're measuring, these "studies" are all useless. It's all bogus information based on proxies for other proxies, and a set of assumptions that amount to nothing more than a house of cards. And with no shortage of people willing to complain about online dating, I don't think these dubious statistics are going away any time soon.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
Even this assumes a certain amount of stupidity or desperation among all of the women involved. If you want to keep up the pretense of dating someone, you have to at least make an attempt at seeing them a minimum of once a week, and unless you're in a committed relationship, you have to actually date them; that means that inviting them over to your house so they can hang out while you do whatever it is that you normally do on a Tuesday night doesn't count. Simultaneously stringing along 4–6 women thus means committing the bulk of your free time to dating, which seems horrible and expensive. It also means that there's some additional deception being pulled here—in addition to having to pretend you aren't dating four other women, you have to pretend that you have an active social life that keeps you from seeing them. So now if you do decide that one of these girls is the one, she's quickly going to find out that no, you don't ride bikes on Wednesday nights or go to the book club Thursday nights or bowl in a league on Friday nights or have dinner with your family on Sunday nights and even if she doesn't suspect that you were lying because there were other women, the image of yourself that you sold her on will be revealed as a sham, and you're likely to end up with zero women in the end.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
Ten? Hell, I'm trying to juggle five right now and that's only because of a combination of luck and poor judgment on my part. 50 is almost inconceivable. Even if it's clear to both parties from the start that this is only going to be a hookup with zero possibility of a second date, you're still looking at nearly two months of stringing number 50 along before you get to her, and that's assuming you're available every day with no other obligations. In my experience, if you're going to ask a girl out on the apps you'd better do it within the first week or so, depending on message frequency, or they're going to think you're just stringing them along and stop responding. You have a better chance of success if you try to cultivate 2 or 3 at once than if you try to spread the limited amount of time that you have too thin.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
Back when I got the paper every day, I'd always read the op-eds, and there were some writers I agreed with regularly, some I disagreed with regularly, and some where there was no clear tendency. The thing was, though, that I wasn't getting the paper for the op-eds, let alone one person's thrice-weekly column. Substacks are necessarily limited to the kind of people who are not only willing to seek out one columnist but pay money for a subscription to a service that provides nothing but material from that columnist, so the comments sections are going to be hopeless fanboys rather than a broad segment of the public.
Seriously, though, who pays for these things anyway? I mean, I like Matt Taibbi, but if I spent $7/month on every writer I liked as much as Taibbi I'd be shelling out hundreds just for Substack subscriptions.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
If the name had developed organically in the media or whatever and pedantic doctors had insisted calling it by a name that no one was using, I could see the argument. But OP was saying that this name that nobody was using should have been the preferred nomenclature. And while it would hardly be the worst name, given the severity of the disease, it could have led to some bad outcomes caused by people thinking that it could be prevented by a flu shot, or treated with existing antiviral medication.
GamerGate isn't known to as many people as this board thinks it is. People act like it was some watershed moment in the culture war, but I was in my late 20s at the time and couldn't tell you now what it was about without looking it up. I remember hearing a story on NPR about it, and it was presented as some sideshow drama among people who didn't matter, having about s much relevance as an internecine dispute about racism in the stamp collecting community or whatever. Sitting here today, I couldn't tell you what it was about if you put a gun to my head, beyond the fact that some people who played video games made misogynistic comments or something. I doubt most of my IRL friends could tell you any more. I doubt my parents or many people from their generation have even heard of GamerGate. A search of my archives shows that the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ran exactly one article about it, and it was an op-ed that originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times. In the fall of 2014, that paper ran more stories on the coup in Burkina Faso than on GamerGate.
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