faceh
25d ago
At a certain point, this market is not going to clear. We have reached that point.
Yeah.
One thing about the sexual marketplace for women. They're both an inelastic good... AND there's a fixed supply.
The supply can't increase very quickly, and heterosexual men will still have high demand for them even as the price creeps up.
Now we've got a large portion of women who have effectively set a 'price floor' for themselves that is above what many men are able to provide, and in many cases what men are willing to provide, given that many of the options on offer are also 'damaged goods.'
Throw in the evolutionary pressure on men to reproduce and there's just huge amounts of underserved demand.
The market is trying to provide substitute goods like porn, prostitutes, AI girlfriends, but I think the problem is that a good woman is a 'package' or 'bundle' of goods in one.
And most women now want to provide only a couple of those goods/services while still demanding the complete package on the other side.
faceh
25d ago
(~260 feet vs max disclosed bunker depth of 200, though that figure might be misdirection)
Chatter on twitter is that they targeted some existing ventilation shafts (Yes, straight up Star Wars/Top Gun style) to increase the effective depth on the bombs.
Some more speculative chatter is noticing that we allegedly dropped 6 bombs on Fordow... but there are only three (3) visible entry holes. So it is also possible that they dropped a second set of bombs through the first set's entry holes specifically to ensure the kill.
At the risk of sounding, I dunno, petty? Did Fuentes put any money on the line, did he find someone to take the other side of his position, reduce the bet to fairly specific terms, and have someone willing to judge who won by a given deadline?
Bryan Caplan puts money on all of the bets he makes and chronicles them in a wiki he maintains. He's got a great record against some very smart people.
There's specific lose conditions, plus incentives to be accurate/not bullshit.
Fuentes also didn't put any specific confidence estimates on those bets, so he can always walk back the ones that were off base if he wants "oh that was a long shot anyway." Well you never said if you thought it was a 10% chance of a 90% chance, so I guess you can retroactively change that belief.
This is how pundits operate. Throwing a bunch of vague predictions against a wall, phrased to feel specific and of course they never let someone take up the other side of the position who can then call them out later.
Like when I was talking about how Tariffs would play out I really tried to be specific enough that I can be judged wrong and lay out a strict 'I was wrong' scenario.
Speaking of, looks like the time is ticking down for some more 'permanent' deals to be worked out in the next month or I'll have missed the mark on the most recent extension.
Edit: And I'm still confident (80% to be specific) that they get it done soon. 20% is reserved b/c we're in a time where crazy events can happen in short time frames.
EU is allegedly pretty close:
As is India:
faceh
25d ago
I'm wondering if this sort of approach only 'recently' became possible by the advent of, say, AI-enhanced guidance systems that can recognize a target via visual cues alone so doesn't need a human in the loop to, say, lase the target or steer it in.
Yes.
My point is he records everything and has a clear counterparty rather than just spitting predictions with no skin in the game and crowing that he was right when a few of them land.
But Fuentes ain't predicting black swans either. "Israel and Iran will try to hurt each other" is a generally reliable prediction at its base.
And once you've been given the information "Hamas just killed a bunch of Israeli Civilians, in Israel" there's a few straightforward guesses from there RE: Israeli response.
I'll say there's zero chance I would have correctly predicted the Pager operation, even in the broad "Mossad wipes out Hezbollah's entire command in a single attack" strokes.
But "Hezbollah gets decimated by Israeli espionage" is not a wild, out there guess by any means.
If Fuentes was specific enough to say "The U.S. drops bunker busters on Iran's nuclear enrichment facilities" as a likely outcome I'd start to give him credit.
faceh
25d ago
Gambling is very tricky for me because it doesn't usually create obvious externalities.
Other than being stuck in line while someone buys scratchoffs.
Its unclear what interest I have in whether someone is spending their money 'wisely' or not. There's an argument that someone who would gamble money away would probably do something else stupid with it, like play with options on Robinhood or fall for some crypto rugpulls, so really they might be better off giving up control of their money entirely.
But its increasingly clear to me that I don't WANT to live in a society where gambling is everywhere. I don't like the ads, I hate having the odds splayed across the screen constantly, I'm old enough to remember the time before this was ubiquitous, and sports gambling indeed had a sheen of shame on it.
The one time I went gambling in a Casino was a rush. I see why people get really into it, I felt an urge to return and try my luck for months afterwards.
The optimal amount of gambling in a society is (probably) not zero.
The compromise that seemed to mitigate the harms is to keep legal gambling relegated to certain geographical areas. This makes it easier to keep things restrained or dare I say 'regulated.'
Otherwise, every single business out there tries to inject some gambling aspect into their products and services to capture some of those sweet addict dollars.
And all THAT said, I'm also not in favor of having police raids on grandma for running a BINGO game out of her backyard.
faceh
25d ago
Ding ding ding.
If gambling was a "once in a while, for fun" activity, or people smoked weed in their house and NOWHERE else, or people would only eat McDonalds once a week at most, then we absolutely wouldn't need any kind of laws in place, legalize it all.
But our brains didn't evolve that way, we want to gorge on certain things because in the ancestral environment times of true 'abundance' was rare.
My vice is fuckin' sugar. Right now I'm stuffing my face with candy that has 19 grams of it per serving. I work out like crazy to keep it from making me fat, but I'm well aware its just my caveman brain telling me I need to store up fat for the winter or something.
If we could just accept the basic idea that "willpower isn't enough", then perhaps the next discussion is what the appropriate time and place for things are, and how we should intervene to help those who can't control themselves well enough.
faceh
24d ago
Of course, modern pickups are about as fast as sporty cars of the past: a V8 F150 in 2025 gets to 60 in about the same amount of time as a V8 Mustang from 1995. They're not exactly slow, they cruise at highway speeds and pull out no problem.
Can confirm. I've rented pickup trucks for cross-state drives, and when they're hauling nothing and you shift them into "sport" mode, they accelerate effortlessly and will blow doors on most other vehicles that aren't trucks or sports cars.
And since muscle cars are functionally illegal these days, a truck with a giant engine is arguably the only way you can GET that 'performance' for an affordable price.
But you have to be fair and also include repair costs in the delta between owning an efficient sedan vs. a big ol' truck.
That's the big reason I'd prefer to rent them for now rather than own.
faceh
24d ago
High Civilian death tolls according to whom.
I have such a hard time determining anything accurate here b/c both sides have major pressure to lie. And very early on Hamas got caught in an apparently blatant lie about a Rocket hitting a hospital, leading to civilian casualties. Note that Gazan authorities ALSO misstated the number of injured and dead!
So now I have to take all their claims with a veritable pound of salt.
Whoops.
And of course the October 7 event was specifically a bunch of Hamas warriors attacking, massacring and kidnapping civilians. So I'm pretty inclined to say "A pox on both your houses" for the duration of the conflict. Yes, I am aware that U.S. tax dollars and weapons are streaming to the Israeli side of the fight.
Finally, the incidents I CAN generally verify include a dude in the U.S. Setting Jews on Fire and another shooting two unarmed Jewish Embassy staffers.
Don't know of any incidents in the U.S. going the other way.
According.
to.
Whom.
So these Hamas rockets that have barely been able to kill anyone leveled an entire hospital during Israeli bombing. Seems like something AIPAC cooked up.
There were ample photographs of the rocket impact site
It didn't even hit the hospital proper. By most appearances, it landed in a parking lot and set a bunch of cars on fire. Even the trees in the immediate surrounding area are still intact.
It was the Gaza side that was alleging it was a mass casualty event at all.
So yes, this absolutely looks like a Hamas rocket flew off course, set things on fire, and Hamas decided to cast blame away from themselves since this would inevitably make them look like idiots.
but we should vastly expand the legal and social acceptability of mutual combat and "fighting words" defenses to normalize fighting between men.
Same thoughts here. I've defended the concept of dueling in here quite a few times.
“Social media made y'all way too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it.”
― Mike Tyson
And ironically with cell phone cameras everywhere, its actually EASIER to have evidence of whether a given confrontation was in fact 'mutual combat' or not.
We've got a whole generation of kids growing up on the idea that you can antagonize people incessantly and then cry immediate victim if they retaliate... as long as you do it on camera!
I'm reminded of that one guy being let off by a jury after he shot a youtube prankster.
If it were legal to throw hands when confronted like this, you MIGHT avoid it escalating to shooting.
faceh
24d ago
While I think there are real concerns about what happens to the GOP Post-Trump, yeah, the Dem's issues are structural and the alliances they've forged by being maximally divisive on sex, on race, on religion, on class, and on age too, I guess, mean there's no way to please each of these disparate groups.
In fact, the post-Trump era might be harder on the Dems because opposition to Trump was like the one thing that united them!
Dems can't run another stodgy White Guy for President. I mean, they can, Biden proved that the party can get everyone in line and on task if needed, but it is impossible to imagine the guy who has the political juice to win the primaries at this point.
Likewise, Dem leadership is ossified and they've hamstrung any new blood from acquiring much power. AOC is popular but she's also been ground down by the party machine. Pelosi et al. will grip the reins of power right up until their dying breath. Trump, by elevating Vance, is giving the 'new Generation' a generous toehold on power which they can use to climb up.
David Hogg was stupid about it, but he had the right idea that there needs to be enough of a shakeup that young upstarts can compete for influence in the party and identify talented candidates. Kinda how Obama got into power (which, ironically, was probably what prompted the party to lock down that issue so Hillary could win next time).
On top of that, I don't see any possible way the Dems can attract young male voters back. They've gone way too far out on the "men are inherently evil" limb. Can't reel that back in without pissing off the unmarried white female demographic that is their backbone. But any guy who looks and sees how they force any popular young Democrat male through a struggle session, like with Harry Sisson, will balk at anything they say. There's NOTHING to offer them.
Whomever they nominate, it'll either annoy their base, or it'll alienate the median voter.
And all this is before we talk about how the extreme progressive wings are demanding concessions constantly.
faceh
24d ago
There's an inherent problem with the political landscape right now continually asking sacrifices of young men but being very short on the rewards that are promised to them.
Nobody in power seems to want to acknowledge what these men actually want out of society and, by contrast, what they're actually getting.
I think this problem is going to become unavoidably salient as the Boomers die off and a lot of guys enter their 30's unmarried and with few prospects on starting a family.
The side that at least wants the men to stop watching porn and to start a family might come around to realize that this requires addressing those men's concerns and shifting cultural incentives.
The Dems are intrinsically unable to address mens' concerns.
So yeah, maybe they walk away from the Boomer evangelical coalition, but they ain't walking into the arms of the lefties.
faceh
24d ago
Plus, they got their destruction of Roe v. Wade.
What large issue do they have to animate them to action and grant them leverage over the national GOP, after that?
faceh
23d ago
If they can't get bans at the state level when they have control of the governments, it'd be a real tough sell to make it happen Federally.
They can of course push for it, but winning the fight to remove the Constitutional 'right' to abortion was the gift that also made it so the issue doesn't need to be fought at the Federal level.
So I went into the Casino with the commitment to "only" risk $400 at most. That was my whole budget.
I sat down at the Blackjack Table with a $15 minimum bet size. I hit what the gambling community calls a "Hot Streak" and within like 10 minutes I'm up by $500. I pocket $400 worth of chips, Now I'm playing with house money.
After a bit longer, suddenly I'm up like $1500. I'm placing bets worth $500+ per hand. i.e. I'm betting more than the whole budget I had set out on single hands of blackjack. Its feels pretty awesome.
"Why don't you just cash in your chips and take the money?"
Well I wasn't there to make money, i was there to have fun. And its FUN to risk a whole day's salary on the turn of a card, its FUN to have the other players going hype over your success, its FUN to tip the dealer like $10/$20 at a time, its FUN to imagine somehow hitting it huge and walking out with $50k, it is FUN to have drinks delivered to you as you 'lock in' to try to keep the streak going. It is even fun to LOSE a big amount, when you still have a whole stack of chips to burn.
After, I dunno (literally, you lose track of all time), 30-45 minutes total, I force myself to take a break to 'cool off.' About then I notice my pulse racing and hands shaking. Not aggressively, just the little tremor. I've got about $600, plus the chips I stashed earlier. I stash another $400. Now my day is profitable regardless.
I wander for about an hour, then come back to the same table. It feels right. No rational reason for it, but why change? I put down my $200 in chips. And lose it all in, no joke, about 5 minutes.
Just like that.
So I leave with about $800 and one hell of a dopamine rush.
And for weeks I kept thinking back to that rush, and my brain keeps saying "holy cow remember how awesome that hot streak felt? I bet you could hit that again if you went back." My rational brain is able to quell that. "The house wins this is precisely how they get you," but neurochemicals are a helluva drug.
I could see myself doing something like that every week. Go in with $400-500, make it last as long as possible. Some days I'd lose it quick, some days I'd lose it slow, some days I'd double or triple it, and I'd be having tons of fun but it would basically be an addiction at that point, and I'm not sure I could keep myself limited to a small budget once I was hooked.
faceh
23d ago
I only did this once. Been trying not to tempt fate.
But I expect that going in and losing quickly would piss me off and make me want to plunk down more money to "win it back" so I don't have to accept the unpleasant sensation of admitting "defeat."
Since that is about how I felt when I took losses during my brief day-trading phase.
Well just an example:
A set of Tacoma tires will set you back $500-700, compared to a set of Camry Tires being $320 on the high end.
That's pretty marginal though, unless you're getting lots of tire punctures.
This Source puts the maintenance costs for a Tacoma at $6,731 for the first ten years (most of that almost certainly after the first five, and a Camry at $4,455. So you're spending a least a few hundred extra bucks a year on average, on top of the up front costs.
On the full list, large pickups are listed as the most expensive for maintain, almost all of them requiring over $10k over the first 10 years.
Whether that is all worth it for the cargo capacity, towing, or extra performance, well, I dunno.
I think if I had my choice, I'd own both a smaller electric car for local commutes and have a mid-size pickup for long haul drives or moving cargo around.
faceh
23d ago
People buy a car primarily for what they want to look like, not for what they need or want to do.
Probably.
But I'd bet a lot are getting in over their heads on payments up front, which is starting to show up in delinquency rates.
I think some people are just not good with money and they buy cars that make them look good but I really don't know how to translate the status and affirmation points having a really nice car gets you, into a dollar amount.
I've only ever driven Honda or Toyota for the last 15 years since their engines cannot be killed by conventional means and I do NOT like large unexpected expenses from my vehicles.
I definitely don't need to tow or tote stuff around on a regular basis, and its pretty trivial to rent a truck for a while for when I do, so it never made sense for me to buy a truck when I have other things I'd rather do with the spare money.
You have described a reality dating show that I might be willing to watch.
Every single contestant has a glove or gauntlet they carry around to throw down a challenge. There should be a board that tracks challenges made, challenges rejected/accepted, and fights won or lost, but yeah, no other consequences than that.
For additional fun have one of the contestants secretly be a trained MMA fighter.
I'd imagine there'd be alliances formed early with the best fighter, but then later some betrayals as they try to get him removed. Maybe you have 4-5 guys each throwing down challenges to the same dude forcing him to decide if he wants to lose some face or actually fight each of them in a row. I'd bet that under almost ANY circumstances, sleeping 5 dudes in a row buys you immense status points.
(Most TV shows or sports could be improved by allowing contestants to fight it out)
Even if women would prefer a longer “runway” towards consummating a relationship, it’s the men who get to set the timetable, with their implicit threat of walking away otherwise.
Have to snort if THAT is how this is phrased.
The guy gets to "set the timetable" with their "implicit threat of walking away."
That's generally not how negotiations are framed. A woman has just as much power to walk away, and just as much power to define/set a timetable... assuming she's capable of keeping to her own commitments. "Look, I'll have sex with you by the 5th date if and only if we are exclusive and you've spent ~$400 on me by then" is a valid way to filter out fuckboys... if the guy can reasonably expect that she will keep such a promise.
And a guy is going to walk away only when he doesn't value the sex that highly and/or has multiple other women he can try to hook up with, which devalues sex with any given one of them. There really ISN'T an imbalance in bargaining power here! There's just women who aren't able to state their position and then enforce it, so they don't even attempt to bargain.
From the perspective of virtually every guy who ISN'T trying to solely extract sex, the woman is the one setting EVERY timetable, and even if he does have the power to walk away, he knows he can't/won't cajole her into sex unless and until SHE really wants it, he wouldn't even dream of trying to force the issue.
There was a time in my life when I figured that religious rules against premarital sex were at worst arbitrary and at best outdated given modern contraceptives.
Now, I have to accept that they're an ingenious way to create a Schelling Point where both men and women can be truly sure that they'll be getting the thing they're hoping for, and, much like closing on a house, every material part of the transaction will occur at approximately the same time so nobody can duck out of the bargain before coughing up their side of it.
That is, since it is clear many women are susceptible to being manipulated, and some large subset of men are hardcore manipulators, don't set up a complex set of unwritten rules that can be exploited and that women barely understand. Just tell everyone "no sex until marriage" and don't allow any bend whatsoever. That's a rule that everyone CAN follow and can be policed more directly. Men who want sex... get married. Women who want commitment... get married. Don't agonize over how many dates or how long you have to be with them before giving it up, and don't let guys make implicit promises they fully intend to break.
Maybe it is arbitrary, but no less arbitrary than any other boundary you could set, and a hell of a lot easier/more intuitive to enforce.
One of Willy’s more off-putting qualities was his pathological need to gamify sex. On top of the not totally atypical notes app list he kept cataloging every woman he’s ever slept with, fit with a plus or minus sign, Willy had an obsession with using ‘automation’ as a method to get girls. He’d send automated texts, the contents of which ai generated, to thirty something women at a time and kept a spreadsheet of how many responses he’d get in return, how many turned to a follow up date, and how many to sex.
Willy got a similar thrill when girls would send him text-walls expressing their distraught feelings to him, upset with his behavior. He enjoyed defusing them like a bomb, and getting them to be happy with him again, no matter the number of lies necessary and no matter how little he cared about them – he’d laugh at their gullableness.
In a slightly saner world, Willy would probably be dead. One of these girls' fathers or brothers would have confronted him by now and beaten some sense into him or just put him out of our misery.
But noooooooooo instead the sociopaths are allowed free reign so long as they don't run completely afoul of the law because we've left the sexual marketplace to be regulated solely by social shame and rumor-mongering and removed any implicit threat of violence. And Sociopaths aren't effected by social shame.
faceh
22d ago
"the incentives are badly aligned, I am not going to try to participate in this" is something which women can do just as much as men. Just substitute porn with ao4 or something.
Unfortunately, I don't think they can, since they're generally less likely to make that sort of move unless they already believe it to be the consensus position amongst their peers.
faceh
22d ago
Yep. And I've fallen into the trap of staying with someone on the HOPE they grow out of it and try to facilitate that and... nope.
I will go on record as saying that there should both be a pretty high social expectation on women to keep providing regular sex to her husband... AND that a husband should have a little leeway when it comes to extracting that commitment.
And my point is mostly that the guy has been waiting for sex will get some on his wedding night and honeymoon, and if the woman doesn't give it to him in short order I'd say that's grounds for annulment.
Years down the road, well, that's a different situation. But we don't want men to conclude that the only way they can expect regular sex is to keep leading women along for a few months at a time and swap them whenever they get too attached.
Not really looking to reinstate the rule of thumb but if a guy is otherwise upholding his end, he should indeed have some 'remedies' available if the sex dries up.
I'll be careful how I say this, but I've found that womens' desires are often finicky in the sense that they will be completely uninterested on a basic desire level right up until the act is in motion, then it flips like a switch. So a guy should probably be allowed to toss his wife over his shoulder and carry her to the bedroom and engage in some active foreplay, even if he has to stop before penetration.
Yes, its more complex than that, wife stops taking care of herself, guy gets schlubby, kids come in the mix, so not going to pretend there's a panacea, but yes, there should absolutely be a socially acceptable expectation that a wife is having sex with her husband on some regular interval.
On the more wacky front, I've wondered if we should be dosing married couples with Oxytocin since pretty much all the literature available shows that it makes couples more interested in each other (although I'd not be surprised if this would fail to replicate.)
Couple shows up at the doctor's office saying they've not had sex in months, he hands them a spray bottle: "Take two snorts each and call me in the morning."
Can't lie. At least part of my animus is from getting stuck behind people buying like 12 scratch-off tickets at a time, and oftentimes trying to claim winnings at the same time.
In my state you don't even have to scratch them off, the cashier has a machine they can scan the ticket on and tell you if you won or not.
At that point, where's any of the fun?
I know these folks would probably just find a way to get their jollies elsewhere, but seeing how gambling has penetrated every aspect of society now, I really do want to put this genie back in its bottle.
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