aiislove
2mo ago
I think 135 is really good for verbal if English is your second language so I'm impressed personally. I did the same technique with the shape rotation that you described (identify the one plane then the other sticking out part.) I honestly already forget what the CP part of the test was so I can't comment on your questions at the end
aiislove
9mo ago
This seems to me a somewhat narrow view of gay sex.
These men were seeking a mechanical sort of gratification
On the contrary I think that to imagine sex between two human beings as "mechanical gratification" is the narrow view of sex. I personally don't mind being fingered or having small toys up my butt, I do think they feel good, but at the same time this is essentially a degrading act that you must accept or reject. A finger or object is entering your body, this can be violating, or if you have a respect for your partner it can be a positive experience.
Your last paragraph is interesting to me. In my opinion homosexuality is less egalitarian because when you are both the same thing you are inevitably hierarchically compared. One is bigger, one is smaller. With heterosexuality you have greater balance because you are both looking for something different and can offer your unique strengths to the other in a more naturally equal way.
aiislove
9mo ago
Yes, the Japanese perspective on the Chinese and Koreans is poor which is why it would be all the more irritating to see their rise while your own society stagnates. Imagine if the Swiss economy had been stagnating for the past 40 years, the value of the Swiss Franc falling to 1/3 of its former power against the USD and conditions stagnating so much that Switzerland became a viable manufacturing base of low cost workers (all of which describe Japan today) while, let's say, Greece grew to be the second largest economy in the world exporting high tech electronics and a good portion of the world's pop culture during the same time period. (Messy metaphor trying to tie together China and South Korea but you see where I'm going.) Surely the Swiss would be embarrassed on some level to be falling behind the historically dysfunctional country of Greece and begin to regret their situation or rethink foreign alliances at some point, no?
aiislove
11d ago
I agree with you with regards to just LLMs, but I was imagining more of a general AI in the future which would be fed infinite streams of data in every language and place on earth that would lead to some singularity or consolidation of worldviews and perspectives impossible to individual humans.
The joke is that the real punishment is that he has to be with a partner who has loved and will love a man other than himself. Men are extremely jealous, we can cope when we see someone with our partner who is clearly more deserving than we are, but we don’t like it.
You are also making the very female mistake of imagining that men with higher status have higher self esteem than men with lower status. This is probably broadly true for women but is very inaccurate for men. Male self esteem correlates almost entirely on how much sex he’s getting and how gratifying the sex is to his ego. Money doesn’t matter, buying prostitution doesn’t boost the ego, having a partner who respects him does. Having a hot wife he can imagine is actually devoted to him is the best thing he can have in terms of self esteem. I’d be so much happier poor with one moderately attractive partner I feel trust and respect from than being rich with someone I know is sleeping around with other men.
Edit:
men (gay and straight, which make me think this is even deeper than just sexuality) love sluts
No we don’t (as a gay man.) We do like other men who are mature and able to be comfortable with a lot of other men and respectful toward them. Nobody really likes the depraved bottom who is a slut for his own gratification. We don’t respect bottoms who immediately drop to their knees in front of any man. Even when you get head from a man who you do respect you will have your opinion diminished slightly toward him, just as you have your opinion toward yourself slightly diminished if you perform a bottom act with even a man you respect.
aiislove
1mo ago
Why are there no direct flights from Alaska to Asia? There are tons of airports in Alaska (lots of places are only reachable by plane from what I understand) and a lot of people who live in Alaska are there from maritime or military/Navy connections and they're part of the Pacific rim where lots of US military bases are. There are tons of flights between Japan and Hawaii, and Alaska and Hawaii, but none from Alaska to Japan. You can fly from Fairbanks to Frankfurt Germany. There are flights to various places in Canada from Alaska and seasonally, to Reykjavik. But not to Russia, Korea, Taiwan, Japan, China, or Mongolia. Wikipedia says that 6% of Alaskans are Asian (as of 2020, a number that has increased steadily since 1970.) It seems like there should be enough demand for at least one route between Alaska and Asia.
aiislove
2mo ago
Thanks to whoever nominated my post as an AAQC! I appreciate it.
Do all posts that get recommended by anyone get approved as an AAQC or are they selected by mods or something?
aiislove
2mo ago
Wow, you went through all this media in 40 days? This is more than I've consumed in the past 3 years, haha. Thanks for sharing.
aiislove
2mo ago
Thanks for posting. Fan of fragrances here myself. I can second Philosykos by Diptyque, I actually prefer the solid of this one. A beautiful waxy fig fragrance. You mentioned Secretions Magnifiques- I still get random whiffs of things that remind me of this occasionally, so terrible haha.
I have to shout out the podcast The Perfume Nationalist- strong recommendation if you're interested in fragrance and/or media and culture from a right wing perspective. Especially fond of the earliest episodes but I still listen to his new episodes as well.
aiislove
6mo ago
Well the problem is that it isn't just cheap plastic crap that's going to get more expensive... All the food you eat in the US relies on Chinese produced knives and forks and cutting boards, the farmers in america harvesting the food rely on Chinese produced shirts and jeans. And so on. When the Chinese inevitably impose counter tariffs the food they used to import from the US will stop being bought disrupting the agriculture industry, the knock on effects will be on everyone not just people you're characterizing as brainless consoomers
aiislove
9mo ago
interracial relationships are overwhelmingly white man/nonwhite woman
I originally had a short paragraph about how the sexual graph for men is an inversion of the sexual graph for women- basically Asian and Latina women would easily outcompete white and black women which would explain this.
(and the one exception is there are more black men in relationships with white women than white men in relationships with black women, but this is probably just obesity on the part of black women making them undesirable)
I doubt it's just obesity making black women undesirable but rather their more masculine traits generally (Michelle Obama is a man, anecdotally, according to white men) and fewer desirable female traits
outside of the NFL and NBA American sports are dominated by white men
Because white men have the money and time to commit to sports
aiislove
9mo ago
I don't doubt that China today still lags behind most of the first world in terms of cleanliness and modernization. But more importantly, how does China today compare with China 30 years ago? If the average 30 year old in China is living a much better life than the one they were born into, that is more important in terms of outlook than most of the first world where conditions have stagnated or declined in the past few decades. I see this as similar to the boom of postwar USA and Japan compared to the stagnating powers of England and much of western Europe during the same time period.
aiislove
9mo ago
Thank you for the link, I read the intro but the rest is paywalled and archive.ph isn't helping out. The point he makes about a weak currency possibly being an asset in manufacturing is something I hadn't thought of but in the next paragraph he says that a weak currency would impoverish the nation and create problems for the west as well. I guess I am less interested in the economics of the situation and more interested in the social/cultural implications on the issue: are the Japanese blaming Americans/western powers for their financial situation, what are the Japanese going to do in response, etc.
aiislove
2mo ago
Your results are going to depend on two things: What your detailed line chart images look like (including how detailed they are and the resolution) and what ai you use to analyze the images.
I quickly googled "detailed line chart images" and picked a line chart from the results (the second one on this page: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/linechart.asp ) and fed the image to both Gemini and ChatGPT. If the charts you need to analyze are harder to read than this (for example something with many lines in different colors that overlap) ai is going to have a harder time. I don't know what kind of data extraction you're looking to do specifically so the prompt I added with each image was just "Please extract the data from this line chart."
ChatGPT (OpenAI’s GPT-4-turbo model): The initial response was just telling me the labels of the X and Y axis with upper and lower bounds. It then asked I wanted it to digitize the file and extract approximate data points from it and I said yes. It then ran the chart through an edge detection algo and started to run another process on the image but I only have the free version so it said it couldn't complete the task. I then asked it to just do it without the advanced process and it gave me data points but they were completely inaccurate.
Gemini 2.5 Flash Preview: It gave me a table but it made some strange errors, like giving random amounts of days between dates and some inaccurate data. I would not trust it without checking it closely or re-prompting it with more specific directions after making mistakes.
For fun, I also pulled up the chart with the screen streaming on Gemini 2.0 Flash 001. It correctly read the x and y axis information. I then asked it to give me a weekly approximate value based on the chart and it started out accurate but started giving random numbers after that.
With most AI things, it takes quite a bit of trial and error to find the right model that does what you want it to do.
Since you're asking for an explanation like you're truly stupid I will also explain some things I didn't mention earlier below.
ChatGPT is accessed at ChatGPT.com . I just used the free base model that is default on the site now (OpenAI’s GPT-4-turbo model.) Gemini flash models are accessed at aistudio.google.com and they have a bunch of different models (change under "Run Settings" at the right.) If you want to stream from your webcam or stream your desktop (so the ai is actually looking at your webcam image or your desktop itself) use "Stream" from the menu on the left. Different models have different abilities (Gemini 2.0 Flash is the only one with image generation for example) so just play with them to find one that works best for the task you're doing. There are other chat bots available (I used to use llama at huggingface.co/chat/ but the site isn't loading for me today so idk.)
I know I have ai in my username but I am not a developer or advanced technician at all, I use it mainly for creative/art purposes so I'm interested to hear other people's responses as well. If anyone knows better ais to use for tasks like this I'd like to know.
Let me know if this all makes sense or you want me to explain anything better. Your best bet is just going straight to gemini or chatgpt and feeding it images of your charts and see what works for yourself with trial and error.
I. How does straight sex work?
Evolutionary psychology* tells us that women want to reproduce with the most fit man that she can find. This creates a situation where most men are outcompeted for reproduction by fitter men. For simplicity’s sake, from here on out I will refer to any male who is more fit as “alpha” and any less fit male as “beta.”** Non-monogamous societies are nearly always polygynous (one male with multiple wives) rather than polyandrous (one woman with multiple husbands.) Polyandry doesn’t generally happen because women simply choose the most fit male and the other men don’t really want to stick around having dick measuring contests with each other all day. Women are rewarded by going after higher quality mates while men are rewarded by going after a larger quantity of mates.***
Whenever more than one man is present, you can rank each man’s fitness as a sexual partner. The only thing that matters in this hierarchy is physical dominance. When judging the hierarchy between men, imagine them fighting. The one who would likely win in a physical fight is the alpha. To judge this we look at physical characteristics: Height, weight, muscularity, dick size, waist/hip ratio, meanness or neotony of face, baldness, and so on. Traits like intelligence, kindness, virtuosity, and so on, are important in other situations but not in sex. This hierarchy of men is so ingrained that we don’t realize it. When you walk around in crowds, smaller men move to the side for larger men. If you don’t, larger men get irritated at you. Smaller men often subtly bow and fawn to larger men. Once you notice this you won’t stop noticing it.
II. How does gay sex work?
Gay sex is downstream of straight sex. People imagine gay men to have a “female” and a “male” partner but that isn’t really accurate. When two men have sex, they are two men having sex. They are competing for the same roles. Most gay sex acts have a dominant and submissive position: In anal sex the bottom is submissive and the top is dominant, in oral sex the dick sucker is submissive and the oral top is dominant and so on. During gay sex you must sort out who is going to do what. Here are the ways that gay sex can happen, in order from most positive to least positive.
Positive gay sex experiences from your perspective:
- You are both acting as alphas. You may not be perfectly matched on the hierarchy, but you both believe you are strong powerful men who are good choices for sexual mates. You lift each other up, the real alpha feels secure in his position lifting up the lesser alpha who feels like he is able to learn from and enjoy the other alpha’s sex. It is equally positive for both of you.
- You’re the alpha and he’s the beta. You both know that you are a bit better than he is, but he accepts the role. You feel good because your dominance is respected and he helps support your ego.
Neutral gay sex experiences:
- You’re the beta and he’s the alpha. This can be positive as well but is definitely ranked below the first scenario in that category. I rank this as neutral because if you aren’t trying to be the top you will feel on some level slightly melancholic about the experience afterwards, that you should have tried harder to push your desires further during sex. But it can also be positive especially if he is so attractive to you that you don’t mind playing the beta role. Many, many gay men seem stuck in this beta dynamic, it seems very stable but creates problems I’ll describe below.
- You’re both acting as betas. Sometimes no sex will happen at all, it is the most neutral. As an aside, in prison dynamics, alphas will allow their betas to play with each other but not share betas with other alphas. I suspect it’s because the alphas imagine the betas to be having this sort of sex with each other, which is plausible but also may be more of an alpha/beta dynamic between the two betas (but the power dynamic is narrower than between the original prison alpha and beta.)
Negative gay sex experiences:
- You’re the beta and he’s the alpha but you take advantage of him. Controversially, this could include rape or situations where you’re doing something he doesn’t like. This is neutral for you, because you don’t have the satisfaction of knowing you’re his superior which simultaneously makes him look weak and also makes you feel bad for taking advantage of him. I would not rank it as fully negative because you may get some pleasure believing you were his alpha in some way but you can’t fully convince yourself of it.
- You’re the beta and he’s the alpha but he takes advantage of you. Of course no one likes to be raped or forced to do something you don’t want but it is still slightly less bad than if…
- You’re the alpha and he’s the beta and he takes advantage of you. This is the perspective of your partner in scenario 1 under “Negative gay sex experiences” above. This is the worst situation because you will have to live with knowing that you didn’t defend yourself from someone smaller than you and were hurt because of it.
In the positive experiences, the most important aspect is respect, and mutual understanding. You both have to understand where the other person is in the hierarchy. The worst experiences are when one or both of you misjudge the situation and do something to upset the natural order. The best experiences are when you both see each other for who the other is and can have sex together while comforting the insecurities of the other and celebrating the others’ strengths as well. It is similar to a well played game of strategy or wrestling.
III. What makes a man gay?
I don’t know what makes a man gay. It has been shown that statistically a man is more likely to be gay if he has more older brothers. The cause of this is unknown but I wonder if part of it is a socialization, wherein younger boys surrounded by more dominant/aggressive males can not as easily adopt heterosexuality as the more alpha males around them. Speaking personally, I was raised by a rageful father and had a bullying brother and another older brother who was more neutral and an abusive stepfather all while I was young. It’s easy to imagine that these frightening males caused a fawning response in my adolescent brain that developed into homosexuality as I aged. Indeed I see a lot of fawning from gay men, especially younger gay men toward older gay men. I even catch myself fawning at stronger more dominant men though I feel some shade of disgust toward myself when I do this as it triggers memories of earlier years when I felt stuck as only a beta and primarily tried fawning at older men for affection/sex. That said it’s an effective strategy when a beta man fawns to you it’s very attractive but when an alpha fawns at you it’s rather irritating and awkward.
When analyzing why a man is gay we usually focus on the attraction to men but I think just as important is the lack of attraction to women. When I see women I imagine that they won’t love me. I find their ability to discriminate between men irritating and feel that it points to my lack of physical appeal and don’t want to suffer the indignity of not being attractive to them. I strangely have a habit of watching straight porn but I only look at the men who mostly behave confidently as alphas in straight porn, whereas in gay porn there is usually the alpha/beta dynamic and sometimes the real hierarchy is reversed (especially in commercial porn) which I find irritating and unrealistic. Relatedly, I once dated a bisexual man who said that he used to only be interested in women, and imagined that men would never be interested in him. But his male friend confessed his attraction to him, they started having sex and now he’s bisexual. I can imagine situations where if a woman was attracted to me and I really believed it, I could have sex with her, but it is basically not something I want to seek out because my attraction to men is so much greater.
IV. How does culture affect all this?
The Middle East is very interesting to me. Muslim countries have the reputation of being the most homophobic countries on earth. But in my (admittedly very short) experience in the Middle East, my experiences were very different. In fact I was hit on by men there constantly, and I am never hit on anywhere else. Never in the USA, once I was catcalled in Europe but I suspect they were making fun of me, and never in Asia. But in the Middle East I was overtly hit on by men everywhere I went. I don’t know if it’s because they see white men with blue eyes as so beta that they aren’t practically considered male, or that they believe every rich western country person is completely LGBT globohomo, or if they are all really horny all the time with each other and their homophobia is a ruse that they put up to keep everyone else from thinking they’re gay, but I suspect the truth lies somewhere in the middle. The Middle East is the most polygynous culture that I’m aware of- centuries of harems would naturally produce tons of alpha male offspring from relatively few men. In my opinion Middle Eastern men are very masculine, handsome, and alpha, more so than anywhere else in the world.
Speaking of the Middle East, most of the homosexual relationships between men that you’ll find there are intergenerational. It is nearly always an older man with a younger male. Anecdotally I think these are the strongest types of gay relationships that there can be. Increasingly as the older I get, the less I want to be with someone my own age. What would I as a full grown man want to do with another full grown man living in my house? It really doesn’t sound great, even as a homosexual. When I was young, under 25, I dated almost exclusively men in their 40s and 50s. I drew the line at a man who reminded me too much of my grandfather, but otherwise was happy to date men my father’s age. I suspect this also reflects some resentment toward my father which I didn’t recognize until after his passing as well but it’s hard to say.
Now, speaking on East Asia. I have spent at least a few months each in Thailand, South Korea and Japan. From my perspective, these cultures are very hierarchical. These countries are so ethnically homogeneous that everyone seems to be completely aware of their hierarchy and since social order and harmony are valued no one seems to step out of line or be uncomfortable with their place in the hierarchy. In Japan, the gay bathhouses have huge rooms full of mattresses where men sleep naked. Alphas approach betas and betas rarely ever refuse the alpha. I have seen betas sleeping or pretending to sleep be approached by alphas who have anal sex with the beta, all while the beta doesn’t open his eyes or move. This is not done outside of Asia. Men in Japan tend to be bottoms compared to South Korea where they are more conformist and competitive and have a more pressing military threat to the north. South Korean men seem more likely to try to be alphas than Japanese men, though they will still generally fawn to white men.
Gay dating today in America is pretty frustrating because the vast majority of men do not see themselves as alpha. It does not bother me just when American men are my alpha, it bothers me when they are my alpha but see themselves as not an alpha at all. This is really the worst because it puts us in the “neutral” or “negative” sex experience categories above. If you have sex with a man who is your superior but doesn’t act like it, you are either going to come away feeling like you’re taking advantage of him or no sex is going to happen at all. Imagine a younger boy who wants to play a game with a bigger boy, but the bigger boy is depressed or doesn’t feel like playing, either the younger boy irritates the bigger boy or they just don’t play a game at all and both parties are sad. This is what it’s like to try dating among men with low self esteem who don’t realize the position they hold. This is so common in America and Western Europe but so uncommon in the Middle East and Asia where men seem to be much more self aware of their masculine traits and comfortable with it and respect others’ traits as well.
V. Race and sex
So, if all men are judged on their physical characteristics and sexual fitness, how does this extend to race? Basically, some races are more physically dominant than others. If you charted all men, with physically dominant traits on the Y axis and nonphysically positive traits on the X axis, you would have most black men in the upper left and most East Asian men on the bottom right. (For example, black men are generally taller and more muscular and better at sports than other races- see NFL roster stats if you don’t believe me. Asian men are better at certain types of intelligence but are smaller and less physically aggressive than blacks. I realize this is a controversial portion of my thinking and can provide further evidence if needed.) White men would probably be broadly in the middle of the graph, with Latino men and Indian/South Asian men being somewhat closer to the origin of the graph, with Latino men being closer to white/black/ or Asian men depending on their specific admixture of white/black/native blood. (Mexicans/Peruvians are closer to Asians, while Cubans/Dominicans can be closer to whites/blacks etc.) Of course there are countless exceptions to all of this- a black midget would be to the bottom right of an Asian linebacker, and so on.
This graph would be a sort of reversal of the hierarchy of race in society today. Statistically blacks are the poorest and least educated, whites are richer and more educated while Asians are the richest and most educated populations in the USA. In this way I envision mainstream society as a sort of “losers hierarchy” situation wherein the sexual losers become society’s champions in a sort of David & Goliath inversion of base reality.
I should note that age somewhat complicates the entire hierarchy. Older men, up to around age 55, are perceived as more attractive to women and other younger men. It’s not hard to imagine that age can be an indicator of status and fertility among preindustrial societies and we seem to have kept the instinct today.
VI. Conclusions
Am I racist? I am making broad classifications of people based on their physical characteristics and their ancestry so I would probably fit someone’s definition of racist. But I do not see myself as racist. I love traveling abroad and do it every chance I get. I am genuinely repulsed when I see people treating other people poorly based on their race. I am not racist, really what I want is to harbor mutual respect between people, and immutably, race is one aspect of their person that can’t be avoided. When I am in Asia, people see me one way, because of their own experiences and backgrounds. When I am in the Middle East, people see me a totally different way because of their own experiences as well. And I see Asian people differently from Middle Eastern people, because we relate to each other in a different way. We are not all blank slate interchangeable human beings, and we should steer ourselves from thinking that way. Really what I want to propose is mutual respect, seeing each other for who we are as we are, and understanding that about each other. I think so much of modern society is dysfunctional because we are encouraged to ignore the physical characteristics of each other for the sake of social harmony, but it’s impossible because our physical characteristics are so much of who we are.
Relatedly, physical power is essential to understanding relationships between people. As I’ve grown older, my parents have naturally waned in their power over me and among the entire family. Of course when I was a child they were able to make all my decisions, and my independence grew over time. At some time in my early 30s, my father had a health problem, he became quite weak and frail, and I was his caretaker for a few months. He continued to treat me like I was a child, not respecting my adulthood and the power I held in the situation. I put up with it out of respect for him as my father, but at some point it became so degrading that I had to assert my power over him. He didn’t like it but after I stood up for myself he had more of a respect for me that I hadn’t been given previously. I had a similar experience with my mother a few years later. Relationships where someone is abusing the power of a stronger person really are toxic and it is up to the stronger person to assert their power in the situation if both parties want to come out with dignity. Similarly, men need to assert their power and strength, see themselves for who they are, respect themselves in their position in the world and respect those around them for who they are too.
I wanted to start my post with an introduction about who I am (a white American gay male in my mid 30s, average height, a bit overweight, and so on) but it’s rare on themotte and may have felt a bit too identity driven. I dislike identity politics as it’s defined by the left but on some level I find it to have a redeeming quality if it can enable mutual respect between people and understanding of where we fit with each other. I don’t need to be the most powerful strongest hottest person, I am happy being grateful for what power and strength and hotness I do have, and to have the opportunity to see others for the strengths and weaknesses that they have as well.
*Everything I know about evolutionary psychology I learned from Satoshi Kanazawa’s blog [ https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist?page=11 ] and otherwise assumed from my experiences with real people and watching straight porn. Feel free to tell me I’ve got it all wrong.
** I know these are loaded terms and probably carry connotations in the meme world that I’m unaware of but I think it is effective at illustrating my point.
*** Further reading: https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/200802/the-paradox-of-polygamy-i-why-most-americans-are
Edit: Formatting
aiislove
7mo ago
I occasionally use an LLM (LLaMA) as a therapist. If I’m feeling upset or have a specific psychological issue I want to get a better perspective on I will just go on there and explain my situation and ask for answers in a style I like (usually just asking them to respond as a therapist or an evo psych perspective or something like that.) When it gives me an answer that is too woke I will just say that the answer sounds ideologically motivated and I’d rather it would tell me the hard truth or a different perspective and 90% of the time it will give me a less annoying answer. I have done real therapy a handful of times in my life and the experiences have ranged from very annoying to somewhat helpful, I don’t like speaking honestly about myself to other people and especially not professional strangers. So I prefer to speak to an ai who can’t judge me and which doesn’t make me feel like I have to judge myself when sharing as well.
I can be creative with the prompting as well which I like, like I can think of whatever character or personality I’d want to get advice from and with a short prompt the ai can mimic whatever perspective I want.
I see it as useful for me, as a grown man who understands how ai and therapy are meant to work broadly, but I don’t think it should replace real therapy for most people (like children or the elderly or normal people who are fine with talking to human beings.)
Tequilamockingbird’s point below about the ai providing validation seems valid though. I could easily prompt the ai to just agree with whatever I’m saying and always tell me I’m right and everyone else is wrong so I try to avoid that failure mode, rather seeking more objective views or explanations of my issues rather than just what would make me feel more right.
aiislove
9mo ago
China doesn’t really have the ability to offer much prosperity
What do you mean? Much of America's prosperity of the past few decades has been thanks to the low cost of labor in China. There are 1.4 billion consumers in China today, surely they have plenty of prosperity to offer in theory. Whether they'd be willing to give it to Japan or whether Japan is interested is another question.
Japans [...] public mood aligns with the USA.
Does it? Japan is an insular, isolationist, pacifist country deeply anxious of foreigners with an extreme respect for tradition (manifesting in everything from shrines that haven't changed in centuries to cafes that haven't changed since the early 60s.) This is so far from the US today that the alignment almost seems incoherent. The influence of Confucianism on Japanese society is so great that they are culturally closer to China than the USA on the global scale of things. Though I suppose it is common throughout history for national neighbors to be similar while hating each other and fawning to foreign allies for sympathy.
aiislove
1mo ago
I'm considering selling a bunch of stock tomorrow. The tariffs appear to be real and not going away super soon. Tensions tend to build and reach a fever pitch in the summer and judging by the Karmelo Anthony/Shiloh Hendrix stuff and Trump in the White House I'm expecting this summer to be a mess. My intuition is telling me things are only going down from here. Markets in Asia have already opened way down for Monday. Sell in May sounds like a great idea.
Will definitely dump my share of Amazon. Apple got an exemption from tariffs and I'm sure they make enough of their revenue from non-hardware that I'm thinking of staying with Apple and the rest of the tech companies. Kind of tempted to just dump everything else honestly because I have such a sour outlook on the economy in the short term but I'm also up so much that I don't want to pay a ton in taxes. I might hedge my bets and sell half or less of whatever I'm worried about and then try and buy once markets have crashed. I planned to keep 10% of my portfolio in cash (earning interest) but my 10% has shrunk as the rest of the portfolio has grown around it so I could always use a bit more cash.
I guess my small-scale question is how bad of an idea would it be to liquidate everything I own tomorrow?
aiislove
2mo ago
I have spent a lot of time in Europe and to this day I find European social class completely opaque and confusing. The "poor/sketchy" people in most of Europe dress more nicely than the "rich/respectable" people in America, for starters. There are so many specifics of etiquette that fly over my head as an American. That is why traveling in Asia is easier than in Europe in some ways- no one expects you to speak the language or know what's going on if you're white in Asia. If you're white in Europe they don't understand why you don't get the vibe/speak the language/whatever and you make them uncomfortable.
Iranian Agents Plotted to Kill Donald Trump, Justice Department Says (non-paywalled link here)
Curious to know what people think of this. My initial cynical reaction was that the plot seems too convenient and that the US government is just trying to drum up support from the right wing young men who would be tasked with fighting a war against Israel in the future. I also am suspicious of why they would release the information about it so soon after it has been found out. I imagine the justice department could just bury the story or not report on it if they don't want people to know about it but it's headline news on WSJ and the NYT right now.
Why would Iran be more interested in killing Trump than Kamala or Biden? Does Iran see Trump as a massive threat? Is Iran just trying to sow chaos in the US?
aiislove
2mo ago
Thanks for your kind words at the top! I appreciate it.
Your post is really interesting to me too. I've never encountered the term "New South" before and I tried googling it and only really found this wiki page about the Old South. So I assume the New South would be the states from Texas to Florida, excluding most of the East Coast states? Or is "New South" more of a cultural designation that encompasses rising areas of the entire south as contrasting with more stagnant areas of the entire south?
The population and enrollment statistics you call out are really interesting too. I knew there has been a migration into "the sun belt" out of the northeast but didn't realize it was so influential as to constitute 10 house seats switching hands. Only 15% of school children being in the north east is fascinating but makes sense.
American university systems are saturated with a very specific North East (and later California) derived progress narrative in which Southerners are the ultimate evil
This is really true and so crazy... I am from the midwest but let me try to empathize. I tried watching the movie Sarah Plain and Tall recently (we read the book in third or fourth grade) and was pretty shocked by how the entire plot is that an arrogant East Coast woman comes to the countryside and just tells everybody what to do like she's god's gift to the poor rural people. If she was doing it to Native American people the book would have been canceled a hundred years ago but the woman from the east can correct the behaviors of the poor white middle americans all she wants. I can imagine the arrogance toward the south from these people to be about a hundred times worse than this. (Correct me if I'm wrong.)
I think it's interesting that someone could have such uneven results... Do you think you could like, practice and train at the memory and spatial tasks and get better at them over time if you tried? Are you just apathetic to those sorts of tasks compared with verbal skills? Did you excel at, say, english and history classes in school and do worse in other subjects?
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