daguerrean
4d ago
Another great example! I've heard exactly this lament from vintage resellers I know endlessly and in many ways it mirrors exactly my experience with daguerreotypes and antique shops. Similarly it is hard to blame Goodwill for picking up the fistfulls of dollars they were leaving on the table. But as you said and as I said above, it is a bit sad for people that are broke but with aspirations of higher fashion. In the before time, a bit of effort and fashion-knowledge (as your wife had) could stand-in for money in a way that it can't today. Today if you're broke you're going to look broke.
daguerrean
4d ago
Why do we care about the words? What was he supposed to say in the split second while his adrenaline was pumping after almost being run over “My heart goes out to her friends and family”?
If the shooting was warranted then any nasty words were warranted. If the shooting was unwarranted that is enough grounds to criticize him on, the words are irrelevant. This strikes me exactly as accusing him of murder, arson and jaywalking.
daguerrean
5d ago
I very much like both of these examples. I'll respond to reach.
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On careers. I will attribute to this my inability to find a good plumber. Here is my hypothesis. 70 years ago I imagine that if you were the son of a plumber there was a good chance you ended up a plumber too even if you had an IQ of 130. Today if that's your IQ, all you have to do is do well on the SAT and you'll get whisked away on a scholarship to NYU or something. And after that, well, how you gonna keep em down on the farm? The point being, if you shopped around enough 30 years ago you could probably find a pretty damned intelligent plumber. Sure, even back then most plumbers wouldn't have been the sharpest, but there were at least some. Today with the much more efficient sorting of people, how many common residential plumbers have an IQ of 130, approximately zero?
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The prevalence of metagaming and net decking is a great example. I played Vanilla World of Warcraft and loved it very much at the time, and I remember awaiting the launch of WoW Classic with great hype. Unfortunately I found when they relaunched it, it just wasn't the same. Of course it wasn't the game that had changed, but me, and us and how we approached it. I and other players were no longer content to bumble around in dungeons and group wipe repeatedly all night. We weren't 12 but 30 and we expected dungeons to be a polished and professional experience, and generally at the first sign of a wipe we were abandoning the group and finding something better to do with our time. But in our greater desire for time-efficiency in game we had somehow removed all the magic. My experience in WoW classic lasted a couple months before I gave it up, the magic just wasn't there anymore like it was when I was 12 and naive and just fucking around.
Lately I've been reflecting and I think one of the biggest themes of change in my lifetime is the increasing efficiency of the world, and largely, it sucks. I think different people have described this in ways that suit their own worldview. Like the parable of the blind men and the elephant, Redditors might call this a form of late-stage capitalism, woke people would call a subset of this gentrification, I call it increasing efficiency. Let me give you some examples.
Airplane seats. Thirty years ago, a savvy traveler would know to get exit row seats, for the same price you got extra leg room. Over the course of my life airlines have recognized they had this little luxury and were effectively leaving money on the table by not charging more for it. Over my life they have created sub-designations like economy-plus to extract that little bit of value that they were leaving behind.
Some years ago I went to Kansas City for a conference and I was pretty excited to try the barbecue. I went to a couple places and overall, while it was decent, I'd had better in New York which obviously makes complete sense! If you were a world-class barbecue chef from Kansas City, why would you stay in KC where there isn't much money and the competition is fierce? Bring your talents to New York or San Francisco and you stand to get a much bigger payday and critical recognition that would never be available to you in KC. In some sense, having a great regional cuisine only available in Kansas City is just irrational. If people all over the world would like barbecue, why would it only be available in some relatively poor middle-America city? It should naturally be available the world-over in proportion to the money available in a locality. I think essentially the beautiful diversity of regional cuisines is an inefficiency or an irrationality waiting to be eaten up. At this point the only foods remaining regional are really ones that nobody else wants.. In the world I grew up in my dad would always tell me that you just couldn't get a good cheesesteak outside of Philly, that world doesn't exist anymore.
Or consider my hobby, daguerreotype collecting. When I look at older collections built in the 70s-90s, collections were more haphazard. People would have lots of mundane things I wouldn't look twice at today mixed in with some truly extraordinary things that would be impossible to buy now even if you were a museum. It seems like in the past, before the internet, price discoverability was basically zero, so with enough persistence if you were willing to hit the road and hit up dozens of antique and book stores you could turn up great things for nothing. Today with the availability of eBay, prices are more accurate and as a result collections are much more defined by how much money you have to spend. There is no shortcut, there isn't really a way for effort and luck to substitute for raw dollars today.
I think Tinder and OnlyFans are examples of the same phenomenon. Tinder, for women, is essentially a price discovery tool. If you are a gorgeous girl from some small town you no longer have to settle for some guy from your hometown. You can go on Tinder and find that there are 6'5" med students that do rock climbing a few miles away that are very much in-your-league. Regarding OnlyFans, if you were curious about ho'ing it up 40 years ago what was your option? Mail photos of yourself to Hustler and then potentially move out to LA for a giant question mark of a payday? Today if you are a moderately popular woman on social media you will have a very good idea of exactly how much money you would stand to make the very moment you choose to open an OF, which could be a very large amount indeed.. I think thirty years ago if you were some loser guy working at a small town gas station you could at least have the fantasy of getting the girl, because sometimes the world was just crazy and irrational and nonsensical things happened! Today I think that fantasy feels less realistic as desirable women have far more tools to get a sense of their true worth. Not to say the world is perfectly rational now, but it is more than it used to be. I think the popular SEC couples meme is celebrating exactly the wonderful irrationality of mixed-attractiveness couples that is increasingly rare to see.
I imagine if you are a guy that frequented strip clubs, hooters and escorts you probably view the glory days as behind you. 30 years ago you could probably find some seriously gorgeous girls with enough looking, today I assume any decent looking girl would be leaving those places for OF.
I would say gentrification is a specific subset of this same phenomenon. Essentially it is a majority/privileged/white group recognizing that a minority/marginalized group has something that is 'undervalued' and moving in to exploit that. This undervalued thing could be a food like oxtail, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, a hairstyle, whatever. Either way I think these are both cases of an inefficiency being ironed out, low-hanging fruit being plucked and the world becoming more rational and efficient. After all, shouldn't Williamsburg be expensive? It has a great view of Manhattan and is closer to the Financial District than lots of upscale areas on the Upper West/East Side. The fact that it was ever cheap was just an obvious inefficiency waiting to be corrected.
I think this kind of sucks because the theme across all of these is that the world becomes less irrational and by extension less hopeful. In the past you could dream of getting the girl, or finding that amazing daguerreotype in an antique shop, or coming home to a cheap meal of oxtail in your Williamsburg apartment with a great view of the Manhattan skyline. Today, as with collecting, the quality of your life is much more closely following the amount of money you have to throw around and opportunities for savvy or just plain lucky individuals are disappearing. Kind of sad imo. I think the human spirit and persistence of hope rely to a certain degree on irrationality and chaos to sustain themselves, the idea that anything can happen and it doesn’t have to make sense.
I would be very interested if people have more examples of this because I feel like it has swept across almost everything in the last 30 years
daguerrean
5d ago
About 6 persistently dishonest commenters managed to keep the discussion going by assiduously ignoring every fact that emerged and more or less abusing a loophole in the rules of the site. Users continued giving them (you)s in the naive belief that one more argument could prevail.
daguerrean
5d ago
How do you perceive that W.R.T. NYT? I just went to their homepage and the top 4 stories were in order:
- Noem Says 'Hundreds More' Agents Will Be Sent to Minnesota Over 'Corruption'
- Somalis Fled Civil War and Built a Community. Now They Are a Target.
- After Minnesota Shooting, ICE Again Limits Congressional Visits
- Who Was Renee Good, the Woman Killed by an ICE Agent?
daguerrean
5d ago
Why are we obligated to follow some imagined proportionality of objective importance? You forget, this forum exists for entertainment, no different or more significant than Fortnite. We’re all just shooting the shit for fun and sometimes discussing gender relations in the latest season of Love Island is just plain more fun than some dry geopolitical developments that only nerds care about.
daguerrean
6d ago
I am not pretending to be some above-it-all enlightened centrist but I will happily bite the bullet and assert that both played stupid games and won stupid prizes, as they say, or more succinctly FAFO’d.
If you believe you are engaging in semi-violent civil disobedience against a regime you perceive as brutal/fascist/totalitarian then you should be prepared for and accepting of violent repression in response. Whining about it strikes me as pathetic LARPing to some extent. You want the glory of claiming to be fighting evil murderous fascists while secretly expecting you can endlessly shriek and obstruct and they will treat you with kid gloves. IMO if you want to pretend you are going into battle with the SS then you should be prepared to die and face it with courage.
As leftists are so fond of saying, the Constitution is not a suicide pact
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