cjet79
Anarcho Capitalist on moral grounds
Libertarian Minarchist on economic grounds
User ID: 124
cjet79
2yr ago
Perhaps therapy for her? Especially if she is spending for social reasons to fit in.
Does she have a specific category where she spends the most? Eating out? Fancy clothes? Etc? Possibly find a way to cut down on specific categories of spending, by not being a miser in the category and spending to be a little fancier, but avoiding the most expensive options. For example rent the runway for clothes, or blue apron for fancier meals. Both are more expensive than the miserly options, but both are cheaper than careless spending.
I probably spend 500-1k a month. My wife probably spends 1k a month. But she also tends to buy all the kids stuff. Our dual incomes are higher than yours so that is still a net positive income. Would it be possible for y'all to earn more money while keeping the spending stable?
Depending on which category of spending your wife is engaged in having kids might actually lower her spending. If it's going out ... She won't be able to for a while. If it's shopping ... Then it might get worse.
cjet79
2yr ago
1 day ban.
Please take a look around at other top level posts. There is an expected minimum level of effort.
Edit- increasing ban to ten days. You have been warned and banned before for this exact thing.
cjet79
2yr ago
"The popular stuff is bad. It is sterile, there is no feel to it, because it lacks all of the interesting rough edges of actual human artistry. The popular stuff is only popular because most people aren't capable of appreciating the art form, so they want the indications of artistry (aka human creation) sanded away."
This is what I call the I'm calling the indie/hipster take.
I've never agreed with the indie/hipster take on music. I like the pop stuff, and much of the indie/hipster stuff sounds like garbage or at best something in need of more work (aka underproduced).
However, my hobbies are defined by me following the indie/hipster take on writing. I engage in amateur political/culture war writing on this website, and read all the other amateur takes. I read fiction and fantasy stories over at royalroad (and wrote my own story for a while), but the books that get published always feel to edited and sterile to me.
I've also tended to follow the indie/hipster take on video games. I sometimes enjoy the silly bugs. I hate the games that have a progression treadmill calculated down to an exact science. I like the modding scene and sometimes breaking games with the bloated ideas of a dozen different nerds thinking "whoa wouldn't it be cool if this game also had X".
I have the indie/hipster take on some artforms and have the pop/mainstream take on other artforms. But even knowing that and trying to hold the idea in my head, I still can't help but sneer when I meet someone with the opposite take as me on an artform. I find it hard not to gloat at people with the indie/hipster take on music "ha, suck it, no one likes your crappy band's sounds. And if your band ever became good enough for most people to like it, then you would stop liking them!" And I find it hard not to gloat at the pop/mainstream take on video games "you rich idiot, you spend so much money on a glorified slot machine with pretty lights and colors." I have at least learned not to speak these thoughts aloud, instead mumbling some platitudes about 'people can enjoy different things, thats fine'.
I should know that I am both of these people, the indie/hipster geek with an eye and appreciation for the rough edges, and the mindless pop/mainstream follower that likes my art sanded down to the most average and palatable of forms. Coincidences of circumstances have led me to the interests I have, and the interests I lack.
Not sure where I was going with this, but that is part of the fun with amateur writing: The meandering of human thought that any good editor will sand away to a proper form of something like 'idea->example->idea->example->synthesis->conclusion'.
cjet79
2yr ago
We are not the first people to think about this topic. I've read lots of hard sci Fi, and they all agree planetary defense is near impossible.
Dodging objects is the only real defense in space battles. Even if you can spot an object it does not mean you can impart enough energy on that object to stop it in time.
If a spaceship is past Jupiter it's about one light hour away. At that distance a 1mph change in a direction means they can dodge a laser by a mile. Lasers aren't particularly effective, but they are the fastest weapon, so if you can't hit something with a laser you can't hit it with a bullet. A 1mph change in velocity is nothing for something capable of crossing interstellar distances.
But all of that is moot. If you can cross interstellar distances you can probably calculate orbital mechanics. The earth has a predictable path through space. There is no need to even enter the solar system. They could lob objects at us from light years away. And they don't have to follow the orbital plane where all the convenient gas and dust is. The north and south pole are valid targets for an object with enough mass or speed.
cjet79
2yr ago
Defending a solar system is far easier than attacking one. Even at relativistic speeds it takes decades to get here. There is no hiding in space, and hitting dust particles with a large ship at 10% of light speed will make the ship glow brightly. Sci-Fi often presents aliens as magical, but they would be bound by the same laws of nature as we are. Slowing down from relativistic speeds requires immense amounts of energy. Hitting a small metal object at relativistic speeds is equivalent to being nuked. At 10% of light speed, a tungsten rod is 30 000 km away one second before impact. Launching swarms of weapons at them would realistically be able to destroy an enemy ship.
I think this is backwards.
Offense is easier than defense in space. A large tungsten rod could be lobbed at earth from outside the solar system going at 10% of the speed of light and we would have almost no chance of seeing it or being able to prevent it from hitting by the time we did see it. The Earth is on a predictable trajectory and cannot dodge. Hell if you don't want to bring your own Tungsten rods you can just use asteroids.
Spaceships do not have to be on a predictable trajectory. They can theoretically dodge lasers traveling at the speed of light.
Space is big and hitting an object that does not have a consistent velocity is basically impossible.
cjet79
2yr ago
I think Islam's success and spread was partly a result of religiously enshrining a tax code. As a merchant back in those times there was a huge amount of uncertainty. Unless you had been somewhere before you had no idea if they were open to trade. A leader or regime might fall, and suddenly a formerly safe port becomes a port where they confiscate everything you own. The locals rarely cared about how foreigners were treated.
Along comes Islam with a religiously enshrined tax code and religiously enshrined rules about how fellow Muslims are to be treated. Being a Muslim in the ancient world was like being an American, you had God-given rights, and if any ruler violated those god-given rights they'd had have hell to pay. And thus all of the Muslim world became a trade zone with itself.
Other empires had accomplished huge internal trade zones, and the Europeans would later achieve the creation of their own massive trade zones (enforced through naval supremacy). But the Islamic trade zone was a huge accomplishment at the time, and united almost the entirety of the Old World equatorial area in a multi-generationally stable trade regime.
This doesn't have as much to say about Immigration. I generally think more open immigration is a good thing. It does say a lot about the long term benefits of open trade.
cjet79
2yr ago
Maybe?
Hasn't been horribly wrong yet. My banana cake did come out a bit closer to a banana bread in taste.
Verifying the instructions would require me to go use the horrible recipe sites I avoid.
cjet79
2yr ago
I tend to find myself implementing my Wikipedia ruleset: trustworthy/useful on things that are not remotely political.
I currently use it for cooking recipes. Since most recipe websites are such garbage experiences that I'd rather trust the AI to slap together a recipe. I made a banana cake from an AI recipe.
I also still use chatgpt 3.5 haven't heard a compelling reason to use 4.
The chat also tends to have an annoying tendency to have a 3 paragraph answer minimum.
cjet79
2yr ago
reversion to the mean
Race is still only a rough proxy on what the "mean" is. There can and have been upper class elite sub groups within a race that consistently produce smarter kids than the rest of the racial group that they belong to.
I guess you can get around this if you're willing to make sterilization a condition of immigration, or deport that portion of the 2nd+ generations who fail to meet your standards, either way committing to perpetually top up your country's population by cream-skimming the developing world. (holy dysgenics, Batman!) But I think either would be generally considered far worse than just prioritizing high-performing immigrant groups along racial lines.
You chose two horrible solutions, of course they sound terrible. And since you don't know what "mean" they are reverting to you could get a good estimate by testing two generations on an IQ test. Test either two parents and a kid, or two kids and a parent. Some set of scores are going to indicate that either the "mean" is very high for those particular people, or that you've got a three or four generations before it actually gets bad. And banning people for a problem they might create 60-90 years from now seems totally unnecessary.
Or if you don't want to do an IQ test. You can pick a set of reputable international and domestic universities, and require that two generations of family have degrees from those universities.
Or don't even set strict limits. Just say "prove to us that bringing your family here will make us better off, here is how some other people have done it".
cjet79
2yr ago
If you have a good relationship with you and your spouses parents they can often give the most relevant advice. By that I mean they raised a kid pretty similar to the one you are having.
cjet79
2yr ago
https://youtube.com/watch?v=wg7iiVKJ2CU
Bud light released a commercial. Subtext: we screwed up.
It gave me a chuckle.
cjet79
2yr ago
I forget the specific details, but we were losing patience with him for multiple reasons. One of which was being a single issue poster.
cjet79
2yr ago
He was perma banned. There was a different guy that I was thinking of that always posted about children's rights. He was either perma banned for always posting about the same thing, or warned enough to stop doing it.
Just because one person causing an issue has been banned does not mean that type of mod situation has been put to bed.
cjet79
2yr ago
Maybe I’m being uncharitable and there are other prominent users who rub people the wrong way by flogging specific hobby-horses, but the fact that I can’t think of any illustrates, in my opinion, that this is not in fact a widespread problem that needs addressing.
Or you are too focused on your particular hobby horse to notice the other ones.
The one that immediately came to mind for me was the guy that kept posting about pedophilia. Marxbro is an example that other people brought up. A decade ago I would have said 9/11 conspiracy theorists often tended to be single track.
cjet79
2yr ago
We have considered requesting people to change their comments in the past. The response has been highly negative by some users. Like on the level where they would rather eat permanent bans than be asked to change what they wrote.
cjet79
2yr ago
Yes there are some men who acquire sex easily. I have known some. But you can't always be sure some of them weren't previously ugly ducklings.
My suspicion has always been that many men see it as an indignity to have to try to get laid, and that’s where the hangup is. Having to pursue feels like an insult. I don’t have any strict evidence of this, it’s just a gut feeling.
Indignity feels like totally the wrong word. It certainly feels like a chore or a useless set of tasks after a while. It's also not much of a challenge after a while.
The requirement of a pursuit is a filter, but it's sometimes a filter that has entirely stopped working for certain men. And why wouldn't those men start to view the filter as a waste of everyone's time?
cjet79
2yr ago
Eh I guess mileage varries.
It was a sudden drop. The more gradual drop from 10 to 9 happened a year before. And now I'd say I'm at like a 5 or 6. So I've seen gradual change.
cjet79
2yr ago
was a waste of your time/actively harming you?
Yes obviously. But jerking off wasn't an alternative.
And the end result has been nice.
cjet79
2yr ago
Out of curiosity, is the picture in your profile you IRL?
Yes, that is me, in India actually. Random museum in Dehli, some back room had that portrait.
I wouldn't wish the curse of male libido on my worst enemy, even if I don't want to remove it (or, I would, if there was an simply, temporary pill without real side effects that did so, instead of the only real options being castration of the physical or chemical nature).
That pill is a low dose SSRI. I've had some mild depression my whole post pubescent life. Never really treated it until I met my wife and was planning to settle down. I thought I always had a low level of background unhappiness because I wasn't getting the amount of sex I wanted, or sex with the type of woman I wanted. Once I had that covered and still felt depressed I realized it was something more. It took me from like 9/10 libido to a 6/10 libido. Which is still higher than my wife who is probably like a 3 or 4. I don't know if it would have been a good idea to take it in highschool.
I still have immense sympathy for incels/average dudes, because I had to deal with raging, all consuming libido for years, and still had dry spells afterwards. I look at the latter, and think "there but for for the grace of God go I". The Chads (and women) simply don't understand what torture that is, how corrosive it can be to your self esteem, even if most of your peers are in similar straits.
I feel the exact same way. By all metrics I am currently successful. But it certainly felt like it took a long ass time to get there and I was pretty miserable that whole time. I think it is quite likely that I was even viewed as one of those "chads" that just effortlessly got women. People mostly stopped saying things like that because I got unexplainably angry at what they thought was a compliment. No! It wasn't effortless, that was a decade of my life I spent getting good at that! And I was miserable the whole time I was learning! (okay that last one is obviously a lie, there were some fun moments of temporary success)
cjet79
2yr ago
Prior to my sexual maturity I would say my main goal in life was sex. Afterwards I would say sex was part of my life but no longer the main goal. I could have other goals. Like having a family, a good career, and a happy life.
I think many men live through the same thing. Either they settle down with one woman and give up on the single minded pursuit of sex (marriage), or they can achieve sex so easily that it ceases to be a meaningful goal (chadhood).
cjet79
2yr ago
I'm not sure where I am in percentile amounts. I know men who had hundreds of partners (and I believe them because I've met dozens of their partners in the short time I knew them). But I probably know way more men who have had fewer partners than I have. Being in the 90th percentile wouldn't surprise me.
Often these are with friends or friends of friends, with classmates and coworkers and fellow students or with friends or siblings of all the above. Most men aren’t cold approaching women and never have
I'm not entirely sure what qualifies as a cold approach. Like I have never met them before? Or they have no social connection to me? I've succeeded with women I've never met before, but it was often in situations where her friends knew my friends and some even knew me as well.
I had some success with okcupid back when Tinder was a new up and coming dating app. I suppose that is sort of a cold approach.
I think if you set yourself a target like, persuade 25 very beautiful women to sleep with you as an average guy, that’s probably a hard goal, and might be the “hardest thing” a man accomplished in his lifetime (I mean I hope not, but it depends on what he’s working with, I guess). But that doesn’t really describe the lives of many men.
I think to be in the position to do that, or to just have one successful relationship with a woman can require a lot of work on the part of a man. It's emotional growth, career growth, physical growth, social growth, and just general personal success. Starting from having only a working dick at puberty and getting to the point of being a mature adult is what it takes.
I've talked about this subject before and compared it to getting a job. To some extent getting a job is easy. Submit a resume, have some job skills, and be able to show up and work. But that requires a whole bunch of assumptions, and you realize just how many assumptions when you give that advice to a three year old. There is a decade of learning and growing they need to do before that advice can apply. The same is true of sex and relationships. You can't just tell a freshly minted sexually active teen boy to go be confident and talk to a bunch of women in order to have sex. That boy needs about a decade of growth before they are good marriage material, or sexual chad material.
What seems to be happening in our society is that we have been pushing the age of early teen sexual dynamics later and later. This is maybe a good thing for young girls. But for young boys it means that the moment of their sexual maturity is also being delayed. They aren't doing the growing and learning soon enough.
To clarify why I think it is the most difficult thing:
I consider the completion of a man's sexual journey to be the difficult thing. That means a successful monogamous marriage, or sexual chadhood. They have done what they need to do to either swear off the pursuit of many women, or they can successfully engage in the sexual pursuit of many women.
When a young person applies to college all they are doing is submitting an application. The process of submitting an application is not very difficult. It takes less than a day. However, they can rightfully say it is the hardest thing they've ever done, especially if that application gives them a good chance of getting into a great college. The pre-requisites are the difficult part. Taking all the standardized tests, completing over a decade of school, the extra curriculars, the essays, etc.
The same is true of men reaching sexual maturity. The final steps are usually easy and straightforward. It's the previous decade of pre-requisites that was the hard part. Learning how to be funny, hold a conversation, learning how to read all the social cues, learning how to be a productive member of society, etc.
cjet79
2yr ago
When did you start pursuing women?
I started basically as soon as puberty hit, when I was about 12. It was another 5 years before I had sex.
Having sex at 17 isn't so bad, certainly felt like forever at the time. It was another 5 years and two girlfriends later before I could reliably have sex with new women after just a few dates. It was about a year of me being a bit of a manwhore before I met my now wife and settled down.
It took me about ten years and usually 40+ hours a week of dedicated practice to get good at it. I broke 6 figures in pay at a job faster than I broke into chadhood (and a very mediocre chadhood too, I've had only 20-30 sexual partners, but I was always a little more interested in long term relationships than just sex).
Being able to have sex with willing women is the most difficult thing most men will accomplish in their lives. And I think most of them have only managed it by sheer dogged determination.
And this is fine. Because on the other side of this endeavor is women, and they have at steak the most difficult thing most women will ever do: raise a kid.
Yes birth control exists, but it hasn't sunk into our evolutionarily thickened skulls. And why should it? Raising a kid is still at stake in the modern world. A woman wasting three years dating a loser might mean some prime fertility years are lost.
Improvement is the only option. The progress won't be fast, and it probably won't even be slow. It will be glacial. Circumstances and luck will always play a role, and the best you will ever do is to tilt luck in your favor. At best you might raise a 1% chance to a 5% chance. So instead of striking out 99 times you only strike out 19.
I'm running out of good advice to give to young men, and coming back to the one thing that I think made me successful: I was relentlessly horny and wanted nothing more than willing sex with attractive women. It was only once I got there that my fog finally cleared from my mind. I realized i wanted more (and needed more) after i obtained the goal.
cjet79
2yr ago
It feels like the people that enjoy twitter are largely unaware of all the people who hate twitter. Maybe because the twitter haters aren't loud enough on twitter.
cjet79
2yr ago
I sort of chase that feeling with the stories I like to read. Big expansive fantasy worlds. There is sometimes a moment when reading where I lose sight of the words in front of me and the specific story, and my mind wanders to other possibilities within the world. I will also chase it at night when I'm trying to fall asleep by conjuring up my own fantasy worlds and cities. Sometimes my dreams will deliver even if my waking mind has been too distracted with the real world.
I also have two young kids, and sometimes I can experience a bit of vicarious child wonder by watching their reactions.
There have also been some video games I've played where I realized early on "oh hell yeah, I'm in for an awesome ride, this game is gonna be awesome!" Usually happens the first time I play a game of a newish genre. Terraria, Factorio, Minecraft, Mount and Blade, Kerbal Space Program, Hardspace: shipbreaker, and Hades were all games I found as an adult, but also instantly knew I'd enjoy them for many hours.
Many companies are built on milking labor from young gullible college graduates.
Also young college graduates can be useless and do a bunch of unnecessary work to prove themselves, while an experienced employee does the right work in half the time.
Hard to know what your situation is. Getting fired or pushed out is a really shitty feeling. It is good to generally be interviewing elsewhere on occasion.
I also think it is good to have an attitude of working for your current salary rather than your theoretical future salary. Don't kill yourself working for peanuts. Even if those peanuts get described as gold nuggets.
Have an exit strategy. Be prepared to trash them for all their worth on Glassdoor if they screw you over. It's not burning a bridge if they already burnt it. However if they give you a nice juicy payment to go away quietly then accept it and do so.
Never burn yourself out while the boss isn't looking. No benefits. Companies should earn loyalty, not expect it.
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