faceh
2d ago
Yeah. Not to get into the weeds of the evolutionary biology of it, but
"The way I dress/makeup is solely to feel good about myself! That it happens to 90% coincide with what makes men lust after me is completely irrelevant, its not about men's desires!" is the purest cope imaginable.
I've now seen it countless times, women who abjectly refuse to leave the house without putting together a cute outfit and doing at least minimal makeup. And when pressed (politely) its usually waved off as a matter of self-confidence or personal preference, and I just want to whisper "from whence does the preference come? Self-confident in whose eyes?"
Going to the gym, going to the store, going to grab takeout Chinese food, can't risk you might be seen in a state that might cause a man to overlook you. Especially if other women might put in 10% more effort than you and win the status game.
If it 'died' it is in large part because it wasn't fit for the new environment and DEFINITELY wasn't fit to battle its major competitor.
I'd view this as more of an adaptation than anything else.
faceh
9mo ago
I'm really not convinced we'd be noticeably safer all told.
I still remember The Waukesha Christmas Parade Attack which killed 6 and injured 62. Trucks are relatively cheap, at least to rent, and can rack up a body count. If shootings get supplanted by trucks running down parades as the preferred modus operandi, I don't know that the death toll from the mass killings would be substantially less.
And I will consistently remind people that Guns can be 3D printed, so a sufficiently motivated psycho or criminal is going to be able to procure a weapon if they really want to. This will only get easier going forward.
And try estimating of the number of casualties that would be sustained in the process of confiscating firearms! If even 1% of firearms owners choose to resist, and 10% of those incidents result in at least one officer being injured or killed, we're talking somewhere on the order of 80,000 - 100,000 casualties over however many years. Compared to 21k homicides per year.
Is that reallllly worth the tradeoff, if we don't believe we can confiscate every firearm without incident?
Anyhow, I would redirect you to my recent policy proposal about banning and confiscating guns for Democrats only,, as my proposed compromise on this topic.
I have received a job offer in a republican-run city in a blood-red state, and while I don't know if I'll be moving there, I will certainly be moving away from here.
As someone who lives in a particularly red area of an already red state, I'd say go ahead and do it... unless you're still angling to find a suitable life partner, then you might need to optimize for that first and foremost.
I read your entire post with a certain amount of bemusement, because while these problems aren't totally absent from this area, they're treated as an aberration, rather than a baked-in feature. The politicians and law enforcement talk a big game about fighting crime, and to a large extent actually follow through. I think the literal ONLY extant organized criminal gang active in the whole Tri-county area was rolled up and shut down the year after I moved here.
There was a single homeless man who used to post up outside my (very small) office building a couple years back. One day I came by and saw a Sheriff's deputy having a conversation with him. He hasn't been seen since, and no new vagrant has stepped in to take his place.
The town is miles and miles of suburbs, with one increasingly dense downtown area, and one long major 'strip' of road that has most of the local mainstay restaurants and amusements. That strip in particular is kept as clean and nice as possible because that's what drives most of the commerce for the surrounding area, although there are other developed areas that offer alternative, more walkable amenities.
On one occasion I was out with a date in the downtown area and a shooting occurred right outside the bar we were in. I didn't notice anything had happened until I walked outside and there were easily a dozen police cars with officers on the scene locking things down and questioning witnesses. These guys KNOW that keeping the area's reputation for safety intact is necessary to keep the money flowing here. So I dislike that there was in fact a shooting, but there is a certain comfort from knowing the local constabulary is actually focused on catching the guy and preventing it occurring again.
EDIT: I did a quick search of news articles, and there hasn't been a shooting incident in the downtown area since that one I happened be present for, over a year ago. And I laugh hard because it also dredged up news stories saying the perp of the previous shooting turned himself in (it was a white guy in case that matters), so the case wrapped up nigh-instantly rather than dragging out and people worrying about the guy resurfacing to do it again.
Much I could complain about, the local government has its corrupt and inefficient elements. But there's no sense in which I feel at risk, either my person or my property, when going about daily activities. Corrupt, inefficient, but RESPONSIVE and mostly competent governance is acceptable enough for me. I may at some point try to run for local office.
Also, there is a variety of great pizza places all around. Most of them are expensive though.
Yes, there's less 'culture' in the strict sense. I'd have to drive hours to go to a major concert or event. Although occasionally larger country music acts (the modern examples of the genre though, blech) do shows here. There are barely any 'tech jobs' to speak of, you're definitely not getting hired by one of the big players if you're here. There's something to the strategy of putting in 5 years with a giant company at high salary to save, then moving to a cheaper COL location with your nest egg.
Yeah the people are pretty fucking bland. The LGBTQ presence is limited overall, most restaurants close at 10, most bars around midnight. If you're in your twenties, the dating pool is limited and if you don't find a solid group of friends quickly, it can be very boring since most of the 'fun' stuff is geared for an older generation. Golf courses, tiki bars, nature trails. There IS a decent-sized university nearby where you could look for parties. But that is the tradeoff, because the more 'vibrant' the populace, the more likely you're getting all the attendant problems and risks, and the people around here just don't want to deal with that.
I understand why some people would accept the risks, the constant anxiety that is induced by living in a dense city with an apathetic (at best) government and frayed social fabric. I simply could never reach that sort of mindset myself. I like having a few local haunts that I can visit without fear of mugging, being shot at, or seeing a guy walking around naked and/or drugged out of his gourd. I like being able to have friends over without, as you have seen, having to warn them about the local wildlife. I like that what relatively low taxes I pay do actually go towards keeping the town nice and that the cops try their damndest to keep the undesirable elements on the fringes of society at bay.
And I feel like people who live in the cities long-term forget that all of this is EASILY possible if your citizens and your government just GIVE A DAMN, and that you don't have to believe that fixing things is futile.
faceh
18d ago
Yes, black bag the illegals in the dead of night and try to suppress news coverage of the "dissappearances."
Quiet, stealthy operation.
Do you believe the left would sit quietly by for such tactics?
faceh
1mo ago
I'd say "cishet" and "no college debt"
Now now, I specifically gave them a $50k ceiling. "NO" College debt is a pipe dream, I know it.
This ceiling is safe for like 95% of women, according to the LLMs.
And women are less likely to pay off their debt than men are and so be carrying it years later. So its kind of an important factor, men will have to absorb this 'bride price' when he marries her.
when your post is primarily on how the average woman is apparently unmarriable.
Well, I can add in my point that THE SOLUTION HERE IS TO PUT PRESSURE ON WOMEN to actually choose a guy relatively early, and offer some guidance on choosing one that will stick around. And, presumably, disincentivizing those who delay.
Because You also have to increase the pool of desirable, wiling women for this to play out favorably.
But I felt that would distract from the more neutral data I provided.
Also, not sure what criteria is "acute" mental illness judged by.
In my mind it would be less than a "severe" mental illness that is actually debilitating, but still serious enough that it impacts their daily behavior. You can peek and see how the LLMs chose to interpret it.
In either case, you can look at the raw numbers and see young women are showing INCREASING prevalence of mentall illness. Something around 30% for the under 30s.
Its fair to say things have gotten 'worse.'
And suppose that we agree on a final set of reasonable criteria - how many men, of those who are looking to marry and restrict the search set in such a way, meet a similar set of reasonable criteria? (I'll let women of themotte decide what that would be).
Sure.
But I will go ahead and place my bet that the number of men who meet this has probably been steady for the last couple decades, whereas the ratio of women who are marriagable has been decreasing.
See my point above about the pressure being on the wrong gender.
faceh
18d ago
And I'm suggesting that it wouldn't really matter.
The riots in 2020 were triggered by one guy dying under sketchy circumstances.
If Trump didn't give them am impetus, I think they'd find one.
It's not particularly surprising for Trump to run on a mass deportation platform... then make a big deal about fulfilling that promise.
faceh
22d ago
And the spot that has bugged me for a while now: how much AI/digital assistance is really crossing the arbitrary line you've drawn?
Can you use AI to generate the original concept and then spend a couple hours touching up from there, so the final result is just as much your effort as anything?
Can you sketch out the basic details and then feed it to the AI and basically have it 'paint by numbers' to complete the project?
Can you have the AI spit out 50 separate images, and YOU spend the time cropping, superimposing, rotating, adjusting and compositing them all together for the end result?
Make the rule on what is 'unacceptable' AI art and the tech can run RIGHT up to that line precisely to the pixel... then stick a single tiny digital toe over it, daring your to complain.
That is what makes the tech amazing/dangerous: whatever rules you make for it, the AI itself can be used to circumvent said rules.
Its funny, I'm an elder millennial, so I can remember a childhood without phones (and, barely, one without computers or internet), so I actually balk from blaming 'the phones' in the abstract. I was able to adapt from the old nokias to the slick flipphones to several different form factors for 'smartphones' and I think this gave me a practical view of the phone as a tool for organizing IRL activities and keeping in touch with distant friends. That's what we used it for originally.
BUT, I work with 20-21 year old Zoomers, and holy COW they treat their phones like an inseparable appendage, and you can catch them doomscrolling constantly. I can SEE that growing up with this influence leads to a qualitatively different relationship to/dependence on the gadget, which could be source of the other observable problems. Oh, and now they're used to having a semi-reliable AI assistant in their pocket at all times, so now they can use this machine to do a lot of their literal thinking.
And now there's been a couple decades of engineering and testing to optimize the apps for taking your money and sucking up your attention and otherwise making you dependent on various digital services that we previously lived without.
Tiktok being banned won't solve much, there are 50 other apps ready to jump in and replace it, but maybe, just maybe someone will produce reliable research to measure the impact of these apps and finally get towards some policy proposals aimed at cutting out the most harmful elements while retaining the benefits. I can dream, right?
There are similar vibes in many of the other hobbies I take part in: gardening, swing dancing, reading: a trend towards pick-and-choose attendence of events, rather than attendence out of any sense of obligation to a particular community.
Seen this issue a lot. You can't build a community without a core of dedicated people constantly showing up and doing the work to put together events, and that core of people will get frustrated and burn out or give up if there's too much turnover in membership or members are extremely flaky and unreliable. So hard to even get one off the ground.
My martial arts gym, which HAS an extremely dedicated core tries to hold social events every so often, with plenty of advance notice, and it still a crapshoot as to who will show up outside of that core group.
I've spent the past two years holding regular social gatherings at my house, which is cheap, low-pressure, and I can control the environment to 'guarantee' a pleasant experience. Wrangling adults to hang out together is HARD. Some can't find a babysitter, this one's busy with work or school, that one's just tired and wants to go to bed at 9. So you invite people on the assumption that there'll be a number of last minute dropouts.
Everyone has like 15 different commitments going on at any one time, so getting them to TRULY prioritize a commitment to one group over the other is nigh-impossible. And this also seems to have shifted how humans value individual relationships. There's billions of humans you can potential interact with, and if you aren't satisfied with the ones in your circle of friends, discarding them for new ones is easy. Even if you can't find local friends, your phone offers the potential to make 'infinite' friends! Parasocial relationships! You can spend all day chatting with an AI version of Hitler or Tony the Tiger if it strikes your fancy! Why value real-life relationships at all?
This becomes especially stark on the dating apps. Human connection is immensely devalued.
As somebody whose preferred method of making friends is to identify good people and then forge a deep, long-lasting bond with them (my best friend, whom I still talk to regularly, has been in my life since Kindergarden, literally 30 years), this world of ephemeral connections where people flit in and out of your life on a whim is a bit of a waking nightmare.
but people my age aren't interested in the other ministries that the church offers: working with soup kitchen, church garden, and food pantry to help feed the homeless, book clubs, or even social events, many of which take place right after mass
I can say for myself, I used to attend the soup kitchens, food pantries, and service to shut-in elderly folks to mow their lawns and such. It was fulfilling in its way.
But what I concluded is that this was basically burning up the manhours of competent people to provide modest benefits to people who simply aren't able to produce value on their own. It is literally more efficient to donate money to some professional org that will pay to provide these services than for me to go out and spend hours on a weekend mowing a lawn myself, and I could do something more enjoyable, to boot. I guess I was engaging in prototype effective altruist logic.
But I do think that engaging in activities that constantly expose you to the 'dregs' of humanity, and seeing that no matter how much money and effort is poured into these folks, at best you're basically just raising their standard of living by 2-3% temporarily, not dragging them permanently out of destitution and fixing the problems that put them there. If you're not a certain type of person, the futility of it probably burns you out. I even tried volunteering at a dog shelter, but that burned me out EVEN QUICKER because holy cow the problem of stray and abandoned dogs is intractable, and there will never be enough funds to shelter all those poor animals, just the few that we can locate, rehabilitate, and get adopted. Volunteering your time for such a sisysphean endeavor seems irrational unless you honestly do have a deep and abiding love for animals. Which some do.
Now, I'm not denying that engaging in acts of service is enriching, and exposing yourself to that side of humanity probably makes you a better-informed person. But its also easy to do it just for the virtue-signal points.
That might be another part of the equation. Sympathy for strangers seems to be on the wane, and this has pushed us ever deeper into our chosen ingroups, and built up a wall of suspicion against all outsiders who might want to forge a connection with us.
Has anyone else noticed a clear "vibe shift" on trans issues recently?
I think Trans issues have been the 'high water mark' for Social Justice, and the tide may not be receding but people are not going to let this particular dam actually break. It feels like we're in a 'bargaining' stage where we are trying figure out how to slot Trans people into society in a way that doesn't reject their existence but also doesn't sacrifice, e.g. women's sports, childrens' puberty, and Religious freedom in the process.
JK Rowling probably deserves some sort of credit for giving otherwise progressive women a rallying point on this matter that doesn't require directly cooperating with the right.
Is it going to go all the way? Will trans issues be seen as the weird 2010s, early 2020s political project that had ardent supporters, but eventually withered away and died like the desegregation bussing movement?
I've made this point before. There was a time when State-Enforced eugenics was a progressive policy goal. (that thread was on the same topic as this one, funny enough)
THAT got completely abandoned. Alcohol Prohibition was also a progressive goal too (crossover with evangelicals, though). I bet the 'healthy at any size' movement goes the same way now that Ozempic is making it much easier to not be obese.
When progressives fail in their goals, they don't admit defeat. They write it off, avoid mentioning it again and may even pretend it was never their idea... unless they hold onto it and try to bring it up again later on. When they win, they just write the history to make it seem inevitable.
So to me, the question becomes, if they 'lose' now, will they try again in 10 years? Or is this project be utterly abandoned.
faceh
11mo ago
I mean, yes, but also no, a person wielding a weapon can charge in and close distance before the bullets put them down.
If she was holding a kitchen knife it would still be dangerous at that range.
I've known a decent number of girls who were disordered in this particular way, but maybe not to that degree.
Like, they can do the basics of holding down a job, maybe even one with actual responsibilities, keep an apartment, MAYBE keep a pet alive. But their personal and social lives are complete shitshows because they can't keep social commitments, they will lie about things with reckless abandon, and view other people as amusements as best or instruments of their own desires at worst. That is, they care about another person only to the precise extent they can get something fun or useful out of them.
Girls whose aging cars are constantly breaking down or running out of gas but have like a half dozen guys who will show up to bail them out on short notice, and MAYBE get rewarded with sexual contact or at least some drugs.
And sometimes the right kind of broken person can play into that and you can get a codependent relationship that persists for 6 months to a year, then usually ends in spectacular fashion, but the girl, she does everything she can to put up the facade that she has no emotional reaction. And maybe she doesn't, who knows.
USUALLY its downstream of absentee (possibly dead) parents, then the spiral of drugs and self-sabotaging behavior that reinforces itself over the years.
The spooky part is that they're capable of dressing well, speaking well, behaving well in contexts where it is needed, and thus the true extent of the antisocial impulses is simply not clear until you've gotten to know them, then maybe you're a teeny bit infatuated with them and learning how bad things are under the hood simply elicits sympathy, which is something she can use to again extract fun or use out of you.
Apparently the part of the brain used to regulate emotional responses and guide 'constructive' behavior is not tied in tightly with the one that produces social cues and the presentation one gives to others.
I think this is leaving out another viable life path that satisfies all the criteria you're ascribing to women:
Have a kid with a man who has proven wealth/means, then demonstrate his paternity or marry him. Then have a court of law require him to pay for the child's upbringing until age 18. If married then you can get some alimony too out of the divorce. And a bonus there is you can then find another man who might be willing to pitch in some support too and 'double dip'. For some reason the term 'divorce' doesn't appear anywhere in your original post.
And from the man's perspective, either of those is probably a worst case scenario.
Either the man is a cad who doesn't WANT to support kids and is now tied to them for years on end.
Or it was a man who really wanted to have a family for the long term, would have supported them anyway, and yet gets them ripped away on the say of the woman he trusted, with no real recourse.
Woman gets her support and control, man gets...
And we're seeing the emergence of a strange additional option as well:
Pop out a billionaire's kid on the downlow and he pays a very generous amount to keep you and the child in comfort even if he's not particularly involved, as long as he thinks it is actually his kid. I won't pretend this path is all that common, though.
This really goes AGAINST your point here, though:
If you want to fix this on a personal level, as a man, be trustworthy and the whole reproduction thing will come pretty easily.
The 'reproduction thing' seems to come easiest to men who are the least trustworthy, most ruthless, most wealthy, and generally most 'aggressive' about what they want. Yes, some of them can ACT like they're trustworthy, but only as a means to get what they want. And this works about as well as being 'actually' trustworthy.
Being 'trustworthy' just makes you an easier mark. You'll accept a woman you believe is committed to you, do EVERYTHING you can to prove your commitment, and she can still leave on a comparative whim and hang support obligations around your neck on the way out.
The game theory here is not favorable to being the guy who truly commits, when the risk is the woman has no reciprocal investment and can defect at will, and 'retaliating' against her is legally forbidden.
In short, I think you're arguing as though women shoulder most of the risks in the current romantic equation.
When there's a serious argument that it works the opposite way. Society is built around protecting women from any and all threats.
This includes the threat of homelessness and poverty. Men, generally, foot the bill for all this protection, and yet are also forced to pay out to the particular woman who defects from them on top of that.
And so the man is risking HUGE sums of his personal wealth (bought by his own time, efforts, sweat, etc.) to TRY to keep the woman around.
And men have to offer some extreme value ON TOP of that protection (because the protection is provided as a baseline by society) to acquire a woman's commitment, and even then he has no recourse if she decides she doesn't want to stay anymore. And if he married her, she gets to siphon off resources from him to support herself and her kids ANYWAY.
Leaving out this side of the equation makes your overall argument here more dubious, in my opinion.
(and I will surely admit that women DO risk being severely injured or killed by their partner, but this is strongly mediated by factors that she can also control).
faceh
4mo ago
There is a genuine "they have made their ruling, now let them enforce it" aspect here.
Okay so a judge says you can't fire them without process. Doesn't stop you from disposing of their work equipment, repurposing their buildings, and basically proceeding along as if they've already been fired.
Okay so the judge doesn't let you freeze their funds. But you can slow walk the distributions, or turn them over to friendly elements within the departments, or earmark them for long term spending goals so they're still sitting there.
For better or worse, Judges have a limited toolbox to impose their will on other branches, and it is thus sort of easy to guess which ones they'll use and route around those.
IF the legislature decides to play along (big IF) then they can also start defunding courts or reshuffling them and making Judges themselves decide its a good time to retire.
faceh
5mo ago
Days like this I kinda wish I was still on Reddit because I couldn't resist telling them how badly they screwed up for things to get this far and reminding them how utterly powerless they are to stop what is coming (whatever that is, I can't even say for sure), and if they had an ounce of self-awareness and the ability to reflect, this might cause them to change some of their beliefs about the world but no, they will be stuck in a cycle of learned helplessness because they can't even exit the echo chamber that has rendered them completely incapable of interfacing with the reality on the ground, and the beliefs 'normal' people hold anymore.
And also Sotomayor has a decent chance of dying or retiring in the next 3 years so lol enjoy having that shoe waiting to drop the entire time.
I'm not really sadistic, but that site has really become a pustulent sore on the Internet's face. I want to keep poking it until it pops. At least 4chan has the decency to stay hidden on the internet's ass.
Good post.
The absolute apotheosis of these kinds of fictional examples has to be Ian Banks' "Culture" series. The Culture, being a post-scarcity society that is run by nigh-omniscient AI, approaches every single potential conflict with outsiders with the idea that any rational society would inevitably prefer to join the culture and all it should take to convince them is to show off how perfect life is when you remove all hierarchies and social restrictions and accept the post-singularity as your lord and savior.
And when they encounter outsiders who resist, normally its just a matter of identifying which of the leaders are 'irrationally' opposed to joining the culture, and supplanting them through various means. In short, the culture has mathematically proven that the only reason someone would resist the culture is they're 'mistaken' in some way, and once you correct them, the conflict evaporates.
Or so that's my take on the philosophical underpinnings of the books.
I think that there's something to be said for writing your antagonists with serious nuance, or even taking a character that was described as 'pure evil,' and even having them act in line with that description, but then get into an explanation for why they are the way they are, and perhaps even write your story so to make them subtly heroic.
It can be a demonstration of skilled writing to flip the audience's emotional valence towards a character without technically changing anything about their basic traits and characterization. Perhaps not the most skilled or best example, but Snape from Harry Potter is one that every Millennial will think towards.
Disney, for example, has gone back and created origin stories for two of their outright evil villains, Cruella De Ville and Maleficent, and from what I gather (I haven't watched the films) they do manage to 'humanize' them and even maybe vindicate them?
I would say that making a character ontologically evil as a simple fact of your fictional world is a bit lazy and can work for the story but becomes unsatisfying if it really does seem like the conflict wouldn't exist but for them being evil. That is, there are obvious routes that the parties could take that would leave everyone better off but these are ignored or refused by the villain without explanation so the story can happen.
Side note, I also think this is why "revenge" stories are so popular. When one party has been wronged in an irreparable way, it makes perfect sense that the only thing they could want, their sole motivation, is to inflict harm on the one who wronged them. And that's a motivation that can work for both heroes and villains! Although you can also write in 'mistakes' to explain why the harm occurred at all, or give the offending party some solid justification for why they did it.
I also think that writing with the assumption that even the most heinous and gleefully malevolent beings are really just mind controlled or misinformed or are perpetuating a cycle of abuse or otherwise can be 'persuaded' of the error of their ways is pretty lazy, you inherently lower the stakes since now there is always an 'out' that the protagonist just has to find the correct words or a particular piece of information that brings the villain around and defuses the situation without forcing a final confrontation and, you know, making the Protag actually risk his life to save the day.
One thing I liked about the early seasons of Sherlock (RIGHT before it goes off the rails) is Moriarty literally just wants to fuck with Sherlock and will go to his grave to achieve it. There was never any outcome where Moriarty was convinced into joining the side of the angels, and if there was, it was because he wanted to be and presumably had some other plan involved.
I like my bad guys to have agency, to be aware, on some level, that they're hurting others and making the world worse, but choosing to do that anyway and being intelligent about how they do it!
I think I myself am a bit of a 'hybrid' theorist. That is, I mostly believe that most conflicts could be resolved by talking it out, recognizing which 'mistakes' each side has made, identifying a more peaceful option that benefits both parties, and avoiding the costs of a drawn out fight. Even if neither party changes their mind, they can probably find a way to peacefully co-exist rather than fight an existential battle that can end up killing both of them.
But... we live in a world of scarcity, and people can have utility functions that diverge enough that they can't easily be resolved without a LOT of effort. Sometimes, there are not enough seats on the lifeboat, everyone has strong reasons to want to live, and there is objectively not enough time to debate and discuss things such that one of the parties could be persuaded to sacrifice themselves. And thus things default to good old fashioned violence.
I believe that there are natural forces out there that don't care about your utility function. A tsunami can't be talked out of carrying your home and family away. There are creatures (mostly the parasitic kind) whose whole existence and reproductive cycle is based on making some other creature's life miserable. There are likely alien utility functions that value things that, if not quite the opposite of what you value, are so orthogonal that even learning of their existence might make you significantly worse off!
And perhaps most importantly, I believe there is a 'sanity water line' for humans, and only those above the line are truly capable of recognizing when a mistake has likely occurred, and that taking some time to discuss the matter will probably lead to a better outcome than immediately fighting. For those below that line, such negotiations and discussions probably won't bear fruit, and conflict may inevitably result.
And lets be clear, even those above the line can drop down below it under the right conditions or when confronting a particular sort of issue, and thus there is no real guarantee that a conflict can be averted if the otherwise rational participants are sufficiently aggrieved.
Now, all this is just to say, my general approach to people I seem to vehemently disagree with is "Assume mistake (either mine or theirs) until the conflict appears inevitable, then CONFLICT THE SHIT OUT OF THEM."
I suspect that the 'rational' calculus that leads to situations like Israel-Palestine is both parties determining that under foreseeable conditions conflict is unavoidable in the long run, and the other party believes this too, and thus they both have to avoid allowing the other party to gain an irretrievable upper hand. Even if they try to signal willingness to discuss mistakes, the core disagreement is unlikely to be solved before the conflict, so each side operates under the assumption that there will be conflict.
At that point, I think the main debate is not 'conflict vs. mistake,' but literally whether one should accelerate the conflict and get it over with or try to delay it as long as possible and hope for a miraculous intervention.
Which is actually 'proving too much' because you've just demonstrated that you have to use a physical intervention to make the thing happen.
If you don't control your body, then how could you use a taser in the first place?
Same logic if you, for example, pull out a gun and threaten me to make me close my hand.
Or tell your buddy to come over and force my hand closed.
It all presumes your own control over your body. You might be able use 'your' body to exert control over mine or someone else's, but only by actively maintaining control over your own. Demonstrating control of your own body doesn't refute "everyone has control of their own body."
By comparison, I just have my brain send a signal down my arm and the fingers start moving. Its the simplest existence proof possible.
faceh
3mo ago
We don’t even have self driving cars yet!
We absolutely, 100% have self driving cars that are accessible to consumers.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Go6Syv8xNMA?si=esnCdfNdiVCH1OCv
https://youtube.com/watch?v=92aBMTpeQB8?si=sj4QHy8uDLDLLitW
Just not everywhere just yet. Maybe you can even say the technology isn't "mature," but it is absolutely here.
I went out with some male friends last night, hit up several (PRICEY!) bars in our downtown area.
Saw some small groups of ladies out. A few times I watched a random guy approach and engage in conversation, but they usually disengaged and left after a couple minutes, with no apparent exchange of numbers or anything. So not an obvious or dramatic rejection, but not a success either.
Question: Is "buy those ladies a drink" even a viable tactic anymore?
And if drinks are super fucking expensive ($14+ for a cocktail these days, so buying 3 would run you $50) how could you possibly justify the cost unless you had a legitimately decent odds of success?
Its a point I've made before.
Power law distributions rule EVERYTHING around you if you're younger and haven't had decades of time to cement your status and build a pile of wealth. And yes, this has almost always been true, but now its simply a known fact of life for the Zoomers. Its the air they breathe, the water they swim in. Every activity they could possibly participate in is subject to a panopticon of algorithms that will rank their performance and often publish it for easy observation, and they are surrounded by peers who are competing as hard as possible to not be left behind.
Algorithms have ruled everything the Gen Zers have done since they were young, from Video Games to Dating to School to Jobs.
And this means they're pretty much attuned to the Molochian incentives over their entire lives, and this thus sets their expectations for how the rest of their lives will turn out (spoiler: not great unless they get rich enough to just opt out of the race).
Yes, Algorithms have always been there, but now its more legible than ever. Or, ironically, less legible since most places keep their algos as black boxes. Its not like you can just ask "Why didn't you hire me?" "Oh, I don't like your tattoos/lack of experience/general attitude." Its always a nonspecific dismissal that even they can't explain.
So they're told to suck it up and try harder, keep going until they get a yes, etc. etc., but they're missing the 'feedback' part that might help them zero in on why they're failing and getting rejected. And I think the hard truth is just that everyone is TRYING to capture the top 20% performers across the board, so anyone not in the top 20% performance bracket for any given category is going to be left out, and very confused as to what their real options are.
One hopeful use case for AI if it does not end all our problems at once (we're all dead, or its utopia) is it should be extremely good at helping match people with positions that work best for them given their preferences and the other party's needs. An effective 'job hunt' AI could check all available jobs against all available applicants and sort out which are best suited to which, AND given constructive feedback as to why certain applicants aren't suitable or what they can do to improve. Same for dating, in theory, although the thought of AI mediated dating/mating disgusts me on a visceral level. Hmm.
As a rentcel, I'm extremely disincentivized from improving anything about the unit I live in because I don't want to put money and effort into improving someone else's asset.
I like this argument, although I prefer the inverse "I may be more neglectful and cause more damage because it doesn't belong to me." There's a reason its generally not advisable to buy a used car that was previously a lease or a rental.
But I begin to think that the average person isn't really going to do much with a place they own that would 'justify' having them own it themselves.
And why not just have them subscribe to a service that will do the interior decorating for them? Similar to those companies that do house staging for real estate sales, you could pay for subscription that lets you swap out your decor every 6 months.
Likewise, many people who own their homes nonetheless pay someone else to mow their lawn, and they rent e.g. their modem and router from Comcast, since its really a hassle to maintain your own hardware.
Seems like its not so far removed to just rent... everything in your home and then you can also outsource annoying maintenance and repairs.
Yes I am hardcore doing Devil's advocate here.
faceh
28d ago
Sounds like textbook Borderline Personality Disorder.
I've dated girls like that on VERY short timeframes, but enough to see the switch flip.
And yeah, it is disconcerting. Yeah you can expect emotional outbursts on occasion, but the literal "I love you more than anything" one day to "You mean nothing to me whatsoever" the next 180 turn feels like something humans SHOULDN'T be capable of doing.
Good on you for actually ending it. I kept a friend around with those tendencies at extra long distance for a few years and she had a habit of calling me at random to expound on all the drama that had unfolded in her life for the past few months. What eventually made me cut it off was her tendency to just dredge up and mention every mistake she knew of that I had made, or every way I had allegedly wronged her to hold it over my head for... no apparent reason. I eventually said "look, since I apologized, you either forgive and forget and stop bringing it up, or I stop answering your call every time."
This was a girl I knew from college, who I knew was smart, and had her academic life in order, but otherwise was a disaster.
where she got really into some weird cult and stopped doing drugs all the time and seemed to be improving, but then she started doing hurtful things to me again and I ended it.
Oof. The half-assed commitment to improvement that gives you false hope but ultimately everything returns to baseline because of course it does.
Familiar with that too.
faceh
1mo ago
Unless China is absolutely fudging their population numbers to UNDERCOUNT their population drastically (which would be a galaxy-brained move) then they are absolutely fucked in the medium term. There is no way to counterbalance a population where there's a massive class of consumers (the old and decrepit) and not nearly enough producers (young-middle aged workers) to keep everyone at a reasonable standard of living.
Its baked in. The collapse will come, Wile-E-Coyote already ran off the cliff, but they may be able to keep him from looking down for a while with propaganda and manipulation, or manage the fall down better than expected.
Yup.
He's got a microniche where he sides with conservatives/righties 95% of the time, but makes a huge deal out of the points on which he disagrees, and implies or outright says that they only disagree with him because they're hopelessly stupid and misguided, and thus he is appalled by 'his own side's' ignorance that he absolute must spend most of his time calling them out.
Lets him get more attention by pissing off the people he nominally sides with, but he also deflects or ignores any direct criticism.
Hanania is very much a right-leaning mirror of Yglesias. He has high verbal IQ and is versed in the esoteric and counterintuitive arguments that were born from the neoreactionary movement, but makes himself out to be the moderate and rational alternative to said neoreactionaries.
If anything, he's taking advantage of the fact that the majority of any ideology's adherents are pretty stupid, so its trivial to nutpick your way to prominence.. Well not 'prominence' but something.
This old post of his that claims Walz is clearly better liked and more likeable than Vance looks ESPECIALLY misguided, in retrospect.
Basically, he does micro-motte-and-bailey so he is never really caught in an out-and-out false or fallacious position.
Because the odds are much higher that they divorce you and take your wealth and lower YOUR status.
Downside risk is serious, upside benefits are usually small.
McKenzie Bezos and Melinda Gates became billionaires... by divorcing billionaires.
What man would want that particular risk AFTER he went to the trouble of accumulating the wealth in order to be able to get the woman in the first place.
A woman would have to be worth that risk.
The absurdity of the situation is that men are told to accumulate more skills, wealth, and VALUE, for women who are less valuable and more likely to defect from the marriage, and thus to take much of the value the man worked so hard to acquire.
And literally EVERY SINGLE LEGAL CHANGE IN THE PAST 50+ YEARS HAS FAVORED WOMEN'S ABILITY TO DEFECT.
Why is it so impossible to suggest that women should settle earlier?
The stats are showing that:
Conclusion: MEN SHOULD IMPROVE THEMSELVES.
Hilarious.
It ain't working. the women ain't happy, the men are lonely, when do we admit that current advice is insufficient?
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