cjet79
Anarcho Capitalist on moral grounds
Libertarian Minarchist on economic grounds
User ID: 124
cjet79
2yr ago
Yes, please use the thread pinned with the "[META]" tag at the front of the title
cjet79
2yr ago
This is a bad top level post. It is low effort, boo outgroup, and lacks evidence. Don't do this.
cjet79
2yr ago
I have two daughters, ages 2 and 4. Reading this was a bit weird. It kinda hit the nose on the love I feel for my daughters. But unlike how the article describes it this love is not strange or new to me at all. In fact, it makes up some of my oldest and most cherished memories. The lack of newness is for a rather simple reason: I have a younger sister.
The protective instincts, the mutual feelings of adoration, and the playfulness that never has to be marred with the taint of sexual desire. Its all something that I've had my entire life. Having daughters has felt weirdly natural to me.
I have an older brother, and I suspect the rougher side of having a boy would also not be a very novel experience. But mentoring and being stronger than any boy I had would be a new experience.
[Sad, Contemplative] Smaller modern family sizes might be depriving a significant portion of the population from understanding different types of familial love relationships.
cjet79
2yr ago
Sharing personal blogs is ok, but you should provide enough quotes or context in your post that someone can participate in the discussion without having to visit your blog.
As you have it now this is a "low effort" post.
cjet79
2yr ago
Its weird I both vehemently disagree with your post, and also generally agree.
When I was 13-17 it was impossible to get sex. When I was 18-22 it was only possible for me to get sex in a dedicated relationship with a woman (usually after a few months of being with them). When I was 23-25 it felt stupidly easy to get sex. I got married after that.
So the majority of my life it was really freaking difficult, and I really started trying to get to know girls and have sex at 13. So it sorta took me a decade to go from "trying" to "this is easy". I have some male friends that were sorta late bloomers and weren't really trying until maybe 17. Those 4 years late still had to be made up.
I agree that it is fully possible to get to a point that it is "easy" to acquire sex, for even not that attractive looking guys. Hell, this comedian is a somewhat known and very successful womanizer.
But I vehemently disagree that getting to this point is at all easy. It took a decade of my life, working approximately 40-60 hours a week at it for me to get to a point where I felt it was easy. I went through a lot of rejection. I went through a lot of soul searching at being basically controlled by my urges. I dealt with depression. I had to fake being an extrovert. I read novels worth of content online to glean some kind of advice. It wasn't just getting sex, I had to learn my whole role in our society as a man.
It feels a bit like telling someone "oh, getting a job is easy, just give a good interview, have some useful skills, and don't expect to be paid millions of dollars". Which is kinda true ... once you already have a job and have been in the job market. But getting to that point can be really difficult. We structure approximately 16 years of a person's life around preparing them for holding down a job.
I do believe that the incel movement is partly a problem of boys just not starting the sexual pursuit young enough. Because all of society is telling them not to start that pursuit. I would stay up to 4am during highschool trying to have sexting chats with girls online. Those chats did not help my grades. I would sometimes spend classes just badly sneaking glances at girls in the classroom, barely paying attention to lessons. I had a 3.2 GPA in highschool. It wasn't terrible, but it wasn't impressive either. However, I did come out of highschool somewhat prepared to date women. Not very well prepared, I still fucked up multiple times in college.
And things have sorta come full circle. I'm not getting much sex these days. I have a wife I love and 2 kids. We are having sex about once a month, I'm trying to time it around her ovulation for another kid. We miss it some months if either of us happen to be sick. But I'm pretty happy with this. If my wife told me tomorrow I could treat it like an open relationship, it wouldn't change the amount of sex I was having (she would also never say that). I just don't ever want to spend the amount of time and effort I spent in my dating years for an ultimately empty experience. Sex was really exciting when I was young, and I was willing to spend lots of time and effort to get it. Now, its not. But that is maybe the heart of what bothers me about what you said, just because a lot of people are willing to spend a ton of time and effort on something, and through that time and effort most of them can acquire it. That doesn't mean that thing is easy.
cjet79
2yr ago
I believe in the squeeze.
I think I'd basically internalized it as a thing that exists, and that this post had more of an effect on making me realize other people don't think it exists. I'd probably end up in arguments with those people and we'd just talk past each other, not realizing that we have a fundamentally different view of reality.
It always felt like there was something in the water ... or in the culture that just didn't want men to have sex. I kind of remember in college the first time I realized that women actually enjoy sex. I was dating my college girlfriend, and a new video game had come out. She was texting me to get me to come over to her place. Normally she only needed a light suggestion and I'd run over to her dorm, we'd pretend like we were hanging out to do something else, and then inevitably fuck like rabbits. But this time I was being reluctant cuz I wanted to play this new video game. For the first time she got more explicit in the text messages saying that she wanted to have sex. My mind was blown that she actually wanted to have sex. This "revelation" continued to repeat itself for just about every girlfriend and one night stand I had after that.
At some point I had a talk with my mother about this. She is a biologist by training and never had the normal awkwardness talking about sex things with her kids. She was flabbergasted that I had this idea about women not enjoying sex, she was adamant that she hadn't taught me that. I still don't really understand where I got the idea from. Culture is what I choose to blame, because no one ever said it explicitly: "Men shouldn't have sex. Its selfish, gross, and just plain wrong."
I was very horny as a young man, so despite being aware of the societal conditioning I just went right through it and kept trying to have sex. Its safe to say that my mid to late teens and early twenties were basically consumed with the pursuit of women and sexual gratification. It probably would have been better and more healthy for me if I spent less time so obsessed with sexual gratification. Society had a set of brakes meant to slow me down, but they failed on me, and they probably failed on every other male that they were meant to be applied to.
Instead those brakes seemed to work really well on the guys that needed a push. Scott Alexander and Scott Aaronson both describe it better than I could, and from an internal viewpoint. I also had plenty of friends that I saw fall into that pattern. Many of them seem to have made it out, but it took a while.
I can't help but feel there are a set of guys out there that really should slow the hell down. They aren't doing themselves any favors, the women they sleep with any favors, or society in general any favors. But there is no easy way of targeting those specific men, so society just kind of targets all men. I knew some of these guys, they'd have sex with a different woman almost every night of the week. I was hanging out with one of these guys and he complained to me that the night before he'd messed up his scheduling and thus ended up having sex with two different women the same night. I was like is that normal? And he responded "no, I'm normally better about that, it only happens once a month or so". That guy needed brakes.
In the end, I don't know if I really see things improving in the future. Society and individuals keep getting pissed off at the men that are the equivalent of 18 wheelers barrelling through the roadblocks they setup. The roadblocks work just fine on all the guys that are the equivalent of ford pintos or mopeds. Its a society wide Chinese finger trap, where the correct solution is to relax and push into the trap, rather than use force and try to pull away. If society made it really easy for guys to have sex and meet women, then they'd all start pairing off together. And their would be fewer targets for the guys just trying to sleep with everything that moves.
cjet79
2yr ago
I assume y'all would have been less upset if the media showed any sign of taking lab leak seriously.
I did just try and roleplay this out in my head.
What if the media had been super gung ho about "China caused the coronavirus, if it wasn't an intentional leak, well it was so grossly negligent that they deserve massive sanctions".
I can be pretty contrarian at times, but I don't think it would have changed my attitude about the likelihood of a lab leak. Various people have been warning about the dangers of unsecured bio labs for a few decades.
My reaction probably would have been a greater level of worry, that the US was trying to set up a proxy war with China for some reason. Or I'd be more worried about China starting a war and invading Taiwan if they determined they were already hated by the entire planet.
I do wonder if we would have had lockdowns if the elites had an anti-China view, or believed that this was China's fault.
cjet79
2yr ago
I had my first experience this week using ChatGPT for my job. I'm a web developer. I manage all of the web properties for a small non-profit.
They have an old wordpress site that is bloated with a lot of plugins. Its often impossible to get support from any plugin developer because they take one look at the mess that I'm managing and nope their way out of helping.
ChatGPT was actually helpful. It helped me diagnose the exact problem. Then it helped me locate an area to implement solutions. Then it gave me a solution. Then it told me how to test the solution. And then the solution failed to do anything. I went through all the steps a few times, and was able to realize it was giving me some bad code. I kept prompting it in different ways and asking for explanations of its code. Eventually I got to a valid solution.
Anyways it was weird as hell. I've worked with junior programmers underneath me before. And I'd be happy to have someone like ChatGPT as a junior programmer beneath me. I'd never recommend they advance past junior programmer. But they basically make for a super googler + semi-dumb code thief.
And I'm not saying that to be like "oh look how crap AI is". Its more like "shit, its too far gone".
I have two young daughters. They are by most standard metrics pretty smart well adjusted little kids. I can say with strong confidence that my wife and I are better at our jobs than the AI. (both our jobs involve a fair bit of text manipulation + talking to people). But in twenty years when my daughters are entering the workforce I don't really have much confidence that they will be better at a text manipulation job than the current generation of AIs.
Forget future advancements, just using the current level of AI will eventually crowd out a bunch of entry level text manipulation jobs.
I look at my daughters playing at night and I think of what world they might grow up in. Right now they love playing a make believe version of day care. They tuck the babies in for nap time, feed them, and then spend an inordinate amount of time giving them diaper changes (including reactions to poopy diapers "eww stinky", or "oh good just pee"). I can't help but think that "daycare professional" might be an oddly resilient career path in the future. Its not like anyone is gonna submit their kids for surveilance in a daycare setting to train up a set of AIs.
Hopefully we'll get to a time where they are wondering about what useful jobs they can have. I was a bit of AI apocalypse skeptic a few years ago. Most of my skepticism is gone.
cjet79
2yr ago
A minimal level of context would have improved things:
-
An explanation of the AI capabilities, or a comparison of its capabilities with other available AI models.
-
A description of how 4chan reacted.
-
A description of how Facebook, or any authoritative figures have reacted.
-
A slight expansion on your thoughts on the downstream effects of this release.
-
Tagging previous users that have discussed this and linking to juicy parts of the previous discussions.
Adding one of these would have probably stopped me from leaving a mod message. Two of these probably would have prevented any reports. And adding all 5 would have made it a good post.
We are not a news aggregator. We are a discussion site. If you don't really want to discuss something and just want to share news, then you are in the wrong place.
If someone else does want to discuss it and is willing to write an effort post, then the low effort post exhausts people's interest in the topic and lowers the reward for making an effort.
Edit also the first response to this post was:
Oh well, another opportunity for an effortpost lost.
Which I think implies that /u/daseindustriesltd would have done a longer post if the topic had been left untouched for longer.
This is not a theoretical crowding out, it happened.
Which is semi proof of how little effort is required to pass the "low effort" threshold.
cjet79
2yr ago
Don't do this as a top level post. Low effort posts like this crowd out effort posts.
cjet79
2yr ago
I think you nailed it with the "fog". It was hard for me to really gauge where my drinking was at for a long time, before I started having frank and honest talks with my doctor. I had friends that could finish a half bottle of whiskey in a night, and this would only result in them a semi functional drunk and a bit hungover the next day. I would look at them and be like 'thats insane, I don't drink that much' and think I'm fine. I don't know many of those friends that continue to do that, so maybe that should have been an answer in itself.
I find myself kinda agreeing with the take of either drink nothing, or drink enough to feel something. I don't like to be drunk, I do like to be a little buzzed. But I can see that the difference between me and a serious alcoholic is in that slight difference in preference. Having a drink without the buzz feels pointless to me. But to maintain that buzzed, or tipsy feeling over multiple hours is where the quantity comes in. Two to three drinks in the first hour to feel tipsy, and then one or two drinks every hour afterwards to maintain. Usually its on the 'more drinks' side of those numbers if I haven't recently gone without drinking for a few weeks, because my tolerance has gone up. So that easily ends up being 10 drinks over the course of 4-5 hours.
I do like the social lubricant aspects of alcohol. There are some sober people I know that don't seem to need any social lubricant, or if anything they get too lubed up from alcohol. To those people I feel like "you don't need to drink, but please let me drink around you so I can be on your level". I don't think I think any better of someone for throwing up from alcohol. If anything it downgrades my opinion of them. When I throw up I consider from alcohol its kind of a failure to me, it means I drank too much. But I'm also not really willing to hangout with people in the first place if I think they are stuckup.
cjet79
2yr ago
Its kind of hard, on paper I really should be a fan of Tom more.
Bert isn't fake though. He is the real life thing that marketing companies try to imitate. And a real life party animal doesn't get that way by being a stable normal human being.
I maybe like something about his energy. "life of the party" is not an exaggeration. He is the embodiment of the energy and excitement of a party. I like that energy.
If I got to hangout with Bert and Tom separately, I'd choose to hangout with Bert for a night of partying, and then hangout with Tom two days later after my hangover. I'd reminisce with Tom about the fun I had during the Bert party.
cjet79
2yr ago
So maybe this is just a dose thing and I'm underestimating how much people are drinking when they say, "quitting drinking made me feel better". If I was slamming ten drinks a day, yeah, I'd be a lot better if I stopped.
I thought this might be the case, which is why I gave my numbers. I drink an unhealthy amount, so when I stop the effects tend to be easily noticeable. I'm also only in my early thirties. From everything I've seen and everyone I know, the effects of drinking get worse with age. I have mild-moderate hangovers these days, a decade ago I didn't really get hangovers at all. My friends that are a decade older get knocked out for a full day.
Quitting my current level of drinking in my forties seems like it would be extremely noticeable.
cjet79
2yr ago
I saw that podcast when it came out! Huge fan of Bert and Tom.
It might be thrown off cuz I've generally switched to low carb beers and hard seltzers that are in the 4-5% alcohol range. Back when I was drinking heavier carb beers in the 8-12% range i was definitely drinking half as many. I do drink hard liquor as well, and maybe that is a better gauge of alcohol consumption. Though its not like I'm measuring out shots, and I usually mix the liquor with the light beers. My numbers might be 20% lower if I assume my liquor consumption is more accurate, and the lower alcohol drinks I normally have aren't a "full" drink per can.
But yeah in general I am aware that I consume an unhealthy amount of alcohol, its something I hope to work on one day. Op seemed to be surprised that people could have drastic improvements in their life by just quitting alcohol. I wanted to let Op know that yes, you can have drastic improvements if you are drinking an unhealthy amount to start. And based on ops response, they aren't quite at the level of an obviously unhealthy amount of drinking, so the effects are probably less noticeable for them.
cjet79
2yr ago
How much are you drinking?
I certainly notice some effects when I stop drinking. I have a sleep and heart rate monitor and it is easily apparent how much alcohol affects my sleep.
Also while some people (like my doctor) consider me a heavy drinker, in some of my social circles I'm a light drinker.
A light night of drinking for me is 4-6 drinks, usually spaced out over 2-3 hours. A standard drinking night is more like 10 drinks, and a heavy drinking day is about 15-20 drinks over the course of an entire day.
I don't notice the effects of just two drinks, enough so that I'd rather just not drink than have only two.
The main benefit of me going sober for a few weeks is that it seems to lower my tolerance back to more normal ranges.
cjet79
2yr ago
I'm not a fan of large social engineering projects, and wasn't one of the people advocating for fertility stuff.
The problem will eventually work itself out. The higher fertility places and cultures will become more dominant. It will just happen on timelines that are too long for people to care about. Probably at least two or three generations 40-60 years.
The scenario you bring up reminded me of something ... people like to start by fixing problems at a societal level. They want the federal government to just step in and wave a magic wand to fix things. But if you are forced to actually solve a problem, this is a backwards way of thinking about things. Instead of thinking at the national level, people should be thinking at the personal and local level. "What would make me have more kids?" and then "What would make my close family and neighbors have more kids?"
Me and my wife have good jobs so I don't really find myself money constrained when thinking about having more kids. We are actively trying to have more kids right now. (which will be number three, but earlier in my life I thought about having four kids, and now I don't think I can do it). I feel kid constrained because of time, stress, and space constraints. The two kids I do have I feel like they require a ton of effort, it feels impossible to just get everything done that needs to get done. The time spent hanging out with my kids is often one of the best times to get a bunch of important tasks done.
I tend to feel more stressed, because there is a local expectation of closely watching your kid. There is a playground right behind my house. I'd be able to see my kids from my house if they went to this playground. I think my parents might have just let me wander off and go play at the playground when I was my kids age, but I feel like if I did that for my kids it would be frowned upon.
Our house is a decent size, but we'd like to expand it if we were having more kids. We can't expand it due to regulatory constraints. We might be able to get around these regulatory constraints, but it will take time and stress (areas where I already feel resource constrained).
When I look around at my family and neighbors, the main additional constraint is medical (some of them have trouble having kids).
Its not that money isn't a true constraint for anyone, its just kinda lower on the list. And maybe if we had enough money some of the other constraints could be handled. I've considered hiring a personal assistant to deal with more of my life problems, but my wife hates that idea.
For me, and maybe some of my family and neighbors, we would be having more kids if the following things happened:
-
Reduced local regulatory constraints on housing expansion.
-
More communal child care opportunities. (things like birthday parties are great, my kids can get in some social time, and so can I). Its a pain for someone to host these, but everyone else usually enjoys coming along.
-
More relaxed social attitudes, aka allow free range kids.
-
Less bullshit bureaucratic things I have to deal with. Car stuff, taxes, and recently the city changed all our street addresses (cuz the old ones were racist or something). Those are annoyances that I wouldn't choose to deal with. But there are also things I choose to deal with that feel like they are made more difficult because of regulatory crap. I am trying to become a wedding officiant for my sister's wedding, trying to get banquet license for a recreational event, trying to setup doctors appointments for myself, trying to apply to some private schools for my daughters, etc. This is just the current stuff that is on my mind, but it feels like I've had a list of things just as long for the last few years even though I keep knocking things off the list every month.
The last one is the real kicker for me. Each one thing is usually no big deal on its own, but there are these constant bureaucratic bullshit things added on top of them that make each item take longer. And the kind of impulse people have that says "the federal government should do a thing to solve some societal issue" is exactly why I think that list of bureaucratic bullshit keeps growing. Everyone always thinks their one issue is so important, and they always think that any minor costs imposed by imposing their top down solution are very minimal. But the shit adds up. I can only imagine the nightmare that a national kids registry might choose to impose. How long before they start tying your kid benefits to other crap they care about. Oh, you can't get your child tax credit unless they have x doctor visits a year, because we need to actually make sure your kid is being taken care of. Submit the reports made by your daycare, or the child visitation officer who comes to inspect your home.
If there is one big societal problem that I want the federal government to fix then it is this one: people having the desire to fix big societal problems all at once via the federal government. I want a federal agency that makes it their goal to determine how much time the average American spends on bureaucracy, and when that number gets too high they have the power to go around axing bureaucratic requirements at other agencies. You think your issue is so important? Too bad, we are gutting your "save everyone at once at the federal level" program that requires hours of every American's time.
That is my little pipe dream. Just writing this should have been a stress reliever. But I feel more stressed now, I could have spent these moments of coffee fueled productivity to slog through another government form. And now I am one day closer to multiple deadlines hanging over my head.
cjet79
2yr ago
I do think we should expand it to allow members of congress to sue.
I don't know why I've never heard of this solution, but it does seem a pretty straightforward solution. Any congressional representative should have standing on issues that effect their constituency as a whole.
In cases like this I see a mod warning as more of a reward than a punishment. What is the OP coming here to do? Argue with a bunch of people. What are you doing? Arguing with them.
If you are willing to write up and say something it's costing you time and mental effort. 1 day bans feel like they should be a standard starting point, rather than what we apply after three warnings
cjet79
2yr ago
I contend that the very topic of «intuition» is already on the verge of what the community intuitively finds not worth discussing,
This was the case with me. I do like writing contests, participating more than judging. But I found I had nothing to say on the topic, and then realized I didn't even care to read anyone else's. Your post here is the most I've read related to the contest.
cjet79
2yr ago
I have a somewhat more pessimistic take on this.
The NYT have often been the defenders of the rich and powerful. They were still publishing pretty nice pieces about SBF right up until he got arrested.
I also don't remember the name of the article, or where I saw it, but it was about how most newspaper articles get written. That there is a marketing agency or PR firm behind so much of the news that we see. And this defense of JK Rowling doesn't come at a random time, it comes during the huge video game release of Hogwarts: Legacy.
I see it less as a shifting in the battle of ideas, and more of a temporary setback to trans activists because they have so clearly gone against large commercial interests.
I am hopeful that this defense of JK Rowling will stick. If I see other active celebrities or actors willing to stick their neck out for JK Rowling I'll believe it has been effective.
Yeah I heard they can just legally require you to keep the canary up: https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/warrant-canary-what-you-need-to-know-about-this-online-privacy-warning-sign/
I'm guessing judges' opinions of legal canaries are only a little above their opinion of sovereign citizens.
It probably really comes down to your willingness to get involved in court cases. If the gubmint comes to you with a warrant, and they also say "don't remove the legal canary" then are you willing to get in legal hotwater to disobey that (potentially unlawful) order? Personally my answer is hell no, but that's one reason why I'd never be a good person to run a site like this. Maybe @ymeskhout would have legally relevant advice?
I think in general the only safe things we can do is make our opinions on legal stuff crystal clear before any legal issues pop up. As powerful as the government is, they are still constrained by physics. So we can't be stopped from saying anything before they talk to us.
More options
Context Copy link