octopus_eats_platypus
No bio...
User ID: 334
octopus_eats_platypus
9mo ago
Absurd. Insane. Spectacular.
I didn't expect them to catch the booster at all on this attempt, but I'm so glad to be wrong.
octopus_eats_platypus
8mo ago
Being taller is one of those things I'd basically take 100% of the time up to probably 6'4-5 or so. It's not a cure-all, but it's like being richer in the sense that it's virtually all upside. That's not to say you can't or don't have other downsides that vastly outweigh it; I wouldn't take being incredibly rich if I were also a paraplegic. Nor would I be made incredibly handsome if I gained agoraphobia as a result.
But if I could get a height boost, a handsomeness boost, or a big pile of money for free I'd take it without reservation.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
I think the question needs to be backed up. Dating platforms are like nightclubs - getting women to sign on is the hard part. Once you get women to your club, the men come and they spend money on the women. Likewise if you could guarantee that every single woman in the world would get on and look at your iteration of Tinder, it would be a multi-billion dollar app even if you require men verify themselves by writing their username on their dicks and sending photos in before getting online.
The network effects here are huge and real, getting people onto your dating app is hard. It's the Facebook problem all over again, except this time you need to convince women to come get hit on by men. You might be able to do that with BillionaireDating.com or your new trendy SixFootAndOver app, but absent that sort of filtering that's a tough call to begin with. Starting a new dating app isn't just like opening a nightclub where you can trend some loss leaders, spend more on live music, etc, and try and burn some cash to get people coming to where you are.
Still, just like any fine drinking establishment you either need a niche or a hook (Bumble - guys can't message you weirdo shit initially, Grindr - should be obvious) that's strong enough to get people off the default option. Once you've done that you can be a local institution and coast, but initially you need to wow people and move them to your nightclub for more than one rare step in the bar crawl.
Men are already predominant on dating apps. There's no dancing on Tinder, no girls out for a night of fun that doesn't plan on meeting men but still might if they're a good-looking good dancer. Roughly 2/3s-3/4s of everyone on a dating app is a man. Fantastic if you're gay or a woman, but for single straight guys this is a difficult environment. So if you're a guy you might have a Hinge, Tinder, OkCupid, Match.com, etc, etc, account because why not? Why not try Conservadate? Why not hit up O'Malleys? Yeah, I know it's an Irish pub, but there is that one cute girl there who plays in the band there occasionally. This place sucks anyway, let's go somewhere else. We can always come back.
Why would single conservative women move to the new nightclub? They already have plenty of conservative men around them as men are more conservative than women in every age bracket. They're already in a good spot. The drinks are already free, the DJ is pumping out some great beats. And you want them to go and move over to Thiel's new weird club? Why? What do they have to gain? Men are buying them drinks, they're dancing, having fun, and your query is 'why not go to the new empty club that nobody but a bunch of weird dudes are in?
Sure, two-thirds of single women who voted didn't vote Trump. That's got to be a factor, in the sense that you've lost two-thirds of your market already. Polarization and the like are real, and anyone who demands to date solely on political factors is much more likely to end up alone, but... I think the answer isn't 'women hate conservative men', it's 'Thiel couldn't even move the conservative women over'.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
I'm not American, but I do see this as a reasonable set of actions. In fact, it's almost what the right should've been doing from day one.
If someone else is saying 'we need to let in the migrants/refugees and care for them', but the burden of doing so falls entirely on you, it's more than reasonable to simply start moving them elsewhere. I think doing so makes you look unreasonable and unpleasant, but it's an unreasonableness and unpleasantness that forces the right people to put skin in the game.
I'm not sure about this particular move, to be fair, but overall? I think relocating migrants is fair and appropriate to the point of being effectively a win-win. If New York or Boston or wherever wants to functionally allow illegal immigration and Texas doesn't, New York and Boston should bear more of the costs associated.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
I downvoted because it seems like a gross denial of reality.
"I can't see why a political leader who had every chance to flee his country while his city was being attacked and live in comfort at the head of a government-in-exile as opposed to staying and risking very real death might be heroic" seems like someone deliberately failing to understand something very obvious.
Imagine if I came in and said "I'm unsure why abortions are considered evil by some people.". The answer is very obvious, oft-repeated and you have to work very hard to avoid hearing it. The same is true for Zelensky not fleeing Ukraine.
On a personal level, has anyone else noticed just how much Covid broke people's brains?
I don't mean this in a cruel or offensive way, but the usual way things go is that people simply don't care about the thing that happened a year or two ago. We move on, we change focus, and we find new things to be offended or enraged (or perhaps happy) about.
I know a couple of people who would likely be avid users of r/MasksforAll, and a higher number of people who are perpetually incensed about vaccines and vaccine mandates. Oddly enough lockdowns are a huge thing here (I have never met a single person angry about lockdowns in real life, but here the number of people persistently furious about lockdowns is pretty large), but in my personal life there are still people utterly incensed that other people are no longer taking safety measures - I wear a mask on the train nowadays after A/B testing it in Excel for the better part of a year and finding I was drastically more likely to get a cold when not masking, but not anywhere else.
Ordinarily even the most politically vehement people I know really do shut up about politics, but two of my friends will no longer shut up about Covid. We catch up for a phone call (we live a few thousand kilometres apart each), and it invariably turns back to vaccines or Covid and so on. One of my aunts is frustrated that she can't get people to reliably mask when catching up with her (she's not immunocompromised or anything along those lines, and she's in her late 40s) without asking them beforehand.
I feel like being, well, a normie throughout this has inoculated me to these feelings. I never really got mad at people not wearing masks or taking vaccines (largely because by that point it was pretty clear Covid was far less dangerous than initially thought), except to note that the people who generally didn't mask back when mask mandates were a thing tended to be the sort of people who committed publically antisocial behaviour to begin with (playing loud music on the train, harrassing people for smokes, etc). Likewise, the more worried people seemed similar to me - I was happy to take a RAT test or whatever to see someone if it assuaged their anxiety.
It's not everyone, and the majority of people seem to have returned to normal. I guess this is a culture war issue in general which is why I'm posting here, but I can't help but feel a large number of people will be relitigating Covid for years, whether it's their anger at authoritarian monsters trying to destroy their lives and enforce the injection of experimental biological matter into their veins, or their fury at antisocial plague rats who were unwilling to take even the slightest measure to try and keep people safe.
I'm not trying to judge these people or look down on them, we all have our issues and our pain points. I'm not going to pretend I don't have mine. But it just strikes me as noticeable that there's a substantial chunk of the population now seemingly stuck on Covid issues.
Does this gel with anyone else?
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
My wife and I are looking to start having children shortly. As you might imagine being dual-income professionals, we left it to somewhat later in life (32 for me, 30 for her). I was diagnosed as a child with Asperger's Syndrome (now high-functioning or Level 3 autism, I believe), and her brother is severely disabled with low-functioning autism (she also has a lot of the classical traits, but was never diagnosed).
I've been scouring the internet for the last few hours but haven't found anything useful in terms of research - is there anything out there talking about the chance of having low-functioning autistic kids if you're high-functioning yourself?
We're tossing up going down the IVF route, maybe taking a trip to Greece and getting female embryos implanted to avoid the worse outcome, but it's difficult to make that call without knowing the odds.
The voting on the Holocaust threads has me substantially downgrade my opinion of the voting habits of the average mottizen, I have to say. The bizarre nitpicking arguments followed by the complete failure to answer the simple question of 'well, where did all the Jews go?' makes me suspect our 'simply upvote long tracts of text' culture would see us upvote creationism in fairly short order if faced down by Duane Gish.
octopus_eats_platypus
9mo ago
I appreciate you writing this. My grandfather is rotting away due to Alzheimers - the last time I saw him was three years ago, after which his health rarely allowed visitors and flying down to see him was nearly impossible plan due to personal health issues. When I was a little boy, he was the strongest man I knew. I love my grandmother as well, but going down to see him was a special joy.
I never knew my father, but my grandfather would toss me up in his arms and get me to feel his sweat 'any sweat?' and then whiskers 'any whiskers?'. He'd always be in from a hard day's work (after retiring he renovated houses and repaired cars until his health no longer allowed it, after which he went from a joyful strong man to perpetually grouchy and frustrated) and there'd always be sweat on his brow. Whiskers sometimes. He'd laugh and he'd put me down and make me lemon cordial with milk, a combination I've never seen anyone else like. You had to drink it quick to stop it curdling, and I'd always have my own milk whiskers afterwards.
All throughout my life he was taciturn and showed his love physically or by building or fixing something. He fixed cars of mine a few times when I couldn't afford a mechanic, and loaned me his ute when my car broke down and I couldn't afford a new one for some months. But he had a biting sense of wit as well, and loved to tease. I once found a giant novelty wooden spoon at a car boot sale, and painstakingly carved the words 'biggest shit-stirrer' into it for a Christmas present. He laughed at the time - but later I found out he hated it and felt put on the spot, only keeping it because he appreciated a gift from his grandson more than his own pride.
Now the only thing he can remember about me is that I owe him fifty dollars. It makes him apoplectic with rage that I haven't paid him back for the money, and if I were to go visit him in hospice all I could bring what remains of him is grief and rage. I'm his favorite grandson (I was given his name which I think gave me an unfair head start) and now all I do is ring my grandmother once a week and hear about how he's degrading, how another little piece of him is being taken away. How his legs and fingers are rotting and he only recognises my grandmother sometimes.
Nobody in my family has ever died since I was four years old and too young to remember it, but every time I think of him I hope it comes soon.
I tried to sit down with him and record something when I last saw him, but he hated the notion of his life being recorded, as his own father was an undisputed monster and I think he wants the man to go unlamented and unremembered. I thought foolishly I had time to convince him, time to sit down and talk and record and write so I'd get some record of his life and the man he was.
I didn't, and there's not enough of him left to piece it together.
Thank you for writing this. I'm going to find a time later this year, take a week off work, sit down with my grandmother and record whatever she'll give me.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
While I find the subject a little outside of my wheelhouse and not interesting enough to spend time and effort to decipher, "guy obsesses over something for a long time and writes a lot about it" is pretty much the core of what made /r/themotte fun to be in. While writing twenty (!) essays in a row on the topic is definitely weird, it's not as though Alexandros is chasing Scott around or constantly emailing him (to my knowledge). And, well, that sort of weird is almost what this space is for.
If someone here dedicated themselves to a massive personal research project to disprove statements that they figured to be harmful from someone they saw to be an influential public figure and wrote essay after essay on it I think the reception would be somewhat less cold if the figure weren't Scott.
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
This is a category where the conventional wisdom fits really well in that opposite spending styles cause a lot of marriage woes.
My experience with this across quite a few friends and their partners is that with this sort of coupling is that it invariably ends in one of roughly three (I'll outline four but two are variations on a theme) stable ways.
The first is the end of the relationship - there's not too much to be said here. I don't think this is a huge risk for you personally, as this is a more lower-income sort of end. If she's not outspending your actual income then the chances are much-reduced.
The second is that she gets what she wants, which is license to spend what she wants. For some spenders this has an inherent limit and will be satisfied, at which point this largely resolves itself. If her spending is more social - lunch with the girls, keeping with fashions with her friends, etc, etc, this isn't too uncommon. Lots of people feel the urge to spend more to keep up with the Joneses, but many simply want to keep up and don't feel the need to spend incessantly. Lunch, dinners, hairdos, makeup - a lot of women just need these things covered for social reasons which to me is very fair. If she has a compulsion to spend her money no matter how much she has... well, GOTO 1 or 4.
The next two are very similar and differ mainly by degrees but because they play out so differently psychologically I've listed them separately.
The third is when you have auto-payments deducted out of your accounts into non-spending accounts that are hard to access. Savings accounts with no cards attached, 401ks, etc. These automatic debits come out on payday. Once that's done, what remains is spending money. Usually this means the two of you separate out, say, grocery money (a buddy of mine used store gift cards to manage his grocery budget with his girlfriend which meant any further spending had to happen from her spending money) and such, and potentially have a third account for other automated spending like bills and such. In short, making as much of the process as automatic as possible so any spending blowouts are constrained.
The fourth is very similar - money goes into a central bank account under the control of the 'saver' spouse and the 'spender' is given their allowance automatically once a month/fortnight/week. They can still log into it and transfer money, but there's an understanding nobody is going to do that. This is more extreme than 3 and is more when someone has a spending problem, can't control it and needs just to have a card with limits. I have seen this work well with my grandparents - my grandfather always spent money like it was going out of style so my grandmother would always give him a cash allowance for the week to spend and managed the household herself with the rest.
The theoretical fifth is that she just starts budgeting well by herself, falls in line with your spending philosophy and all is well. I have never seen this happen but have included for completeness' sake.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
Really what we need is an anthropomorphised castle
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
Every woman I've ever met who claimed this has been young without exception. I think it's just a filter you pass through as a woman - you're young, reasonably attractive, men want to impress you and using force on you that might make you feel unsafe or even inferior is verboten, even in a situation like sports where you might expect it. If you're middle class or higher, men using any sort of force is socially unacceptable so you can pass your entire life without realising how much stronger men are.
Eventually you hit the filter - hopefully in the 'my brother/cousin/friend showed me how easily he can manhandle me while wrestling' and nothing worse, and you realise the truth. I have a lot of sympathy for women who believe this and then discover it. I can't imagine finding out that you're almost completely vulnerable half of society is a pleasant feeling.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
You wrote all of this on an election thread to say someone else is wrong?
This is a discussion forum. Writing something large and detailed to disagree with someone else is our bread and butter.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
Hollywood hates Slavery, not slavery. The latter, 'slavery' is the institution that probably precedes writing and came into existence with agriculture. The 'Slavery' Hollywood cares about is specifically the portion of the transatlantic slave trade that ended up enslaved in America.
There's no big movies about slavery in Brazil from Hollywood, and that's because Americans care about American slavery, not Roman or Brazilian or even Australian blackbirding overmuch. They don't openly support it or anything, but there's one big key thing that's cared about, and the others have only have salience insofar as they're linked to American slavery.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
I think failed second-sons might also tell themselves that growth mindset is false, but that doesn't make it true. Sometimes the grapes really are sour.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
I think you're being somewhat deceitful, I'm sorry. It's quite clear the revisionist poster is arguing their case more successfully because of Motte norms, not because of some inherent virtue in their argument. The line in question was asked several times and notably never answered, and yes, the other side eventually acted offended and signalled disbelief - this is the point of a Gish Gallop, to induce a failure state on the other side. The goal is never to prove anything, merely to clog the argument with so many extraneous facts (or simply introducing doubt into facts somewhat removed from the central point) that they cannot be all effectively refuted, leaving you the 'winner' in the debate.
If the original poster asking the question ended up being downvoted, why do you think I would fare any better?
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
Karl Marx had the advantage of positioning his potential society as an inherent outcome of impersonal forces. He believed it would be a good society, but the inherent virtue of the average prole had nothing to do with it. To Marx - and to Marxists I've known - his own personal virtue or even his own personal dedication to labouring had nothing to do with the truth-value of his ideology because Marxism (qua Marx, not, uh, the new kind) doesn't demand personal virtue as a prerequisite to its outcomes.
Modern conservatives often do, which is why the "homophobic Republican politician fucks men" headline is so particularly juicy.
I think there's a difficulty to preaching "we should do X" and then not doing X, whether it's conservatives living in what they should consider sin or socialists in mansions. It's why I find it difficult to take either ideology seriously much of the time.
The obvious answer is that ad-block block already exists. There are plenty of sites that simply do not work if you have an adblocker on, and you can't access them at all. I have no objection to adblocker-blocker - if you don't want me to consume your content on your terms, you can exclude the vast majority of adblock users (there are a small minority of a minority looking at things like adblocker-blocker-blocker but this is not a large number), and most people do not. Attention is still worth something even if it doesn't come with advertising attached, as it happens. That probably wouldn't be true if everyone used adblock, of course, but I'm not a Kantian to begin with. Your behaviour is worth examining in the context exists in more than it's worth examining under some hypothetical categorical imperative.
I accept this has vibes of 'well just because I'm not paying for security doesn't mean I can be stolen from', but I think it does reveal something about the victims of adblock. Most of them don't care enough to invest in anti-adblock technology, which makes me wonder how much harm is done, if any.
The other side of this is that why should it be up to me to examine every single content provider's advertisement policy and decide whether or not I'll read this piece of news based on whether Channel 5 in bumfuck Ohio has pop-unders? It's an unreasonable expectation in a world of content, especially in one where ads are sometimes malicious and often bloated to the point where they slow down my (admittedly older) laptop to a crawl. Why is it incumbent on me to wait for horrifically bloated ads to load and slow my computer down?
I think this argument proves too much. Imagine a counterfactual where some sites maxed out your computer mining bitcoin (wave away the technical problems for the moment) whenever you went onto them, lowering the lifespan of your machine and costing you some tiny amount more on your energy bill. Would that still be incumbent as a moral price of doing business for our hypothetical mining-supported sites? Would MineBlocker also be a moral negative? I feel intuitively that it wouldn't be and that impositions on your time and energy can be intuitively rejected (you have the right to request my browser load the ad, you don't have the right to make it actually load it) where this is no prior or implicit agreement between people.
Excellent discussion-provoking post by the way, it's frustrating to see it downvoted.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
Savages in the hills last for decades, but the important thing is that Zelensky isn't one of the savages! He's one of the important people Russia would very much like to get their hands on. The obvious parallel is Saddam Hussein. America wanted Saddam dead and got it, even though the insurgency went in a completely different direction. That insurgencies last for decades doesn't mean the state does. Iraq took less than a month to be knocked out, Saddam went into hiding and was captured a couple of months later.
Again, right now all the things you're saying seem obvious because they're being said with the benefit of hindsight. Of course the Ukrainians would hold the line (no matter that virtually nobody believed this six months ago), and of course the Russians wouldn't be able to land a knockout blow, but given that the entire world seemed blindsided by this, why should have it been obvious to Zelensky that it was true? It's one thing to assume someone will notice the very obvious, but if everyone misses it, perhaps it wasn't as obvious as all that?
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
I just didn't finish it. Maybe it drastically improved after the first few episodes, but those were so painfully cringe-inducing I just couldn't continue. Nice that they had a go at making it, I suppose.
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
Autism is ~4x more prevalent in boys than in girls. This is true for a lot of genetic diseases due to the relative size of the X chromosome meaning girls can have one copy of a allele that causes issues and have it 'error-checked' so to speak by the other.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
I managed to make it to the troll fight the first time I tried watching it which made me cringe so hard I turned it off. I gave it another go and got a few episodes in, but sits firmly in the 'wavers from making me cringe to making me bored' territory.
I think part of the disappointment with Rings of Power is... well, take me. I read Lord of the Rings, which is a fantastic series of books. I actually read it when staying on a friend's property, so far out in the bush they only ran the generator for part of the day. I had a lantern in a bedroom I lit with a match and I read the Lord of the Rings by the light of that lantern, staying up later than I had before in my eight years of life to devour these novels. Absolutely enthralling stuff, and just a really good series of books. I reread them at twenty, and then at thirty-one. They're still great.
Then I watched the movies, which were by no means perfect adaptions but were just amazing movies. The sorts that you look back on and quote and talk about again and again. They hold up to the test of time well (crazy that Fellowship is now over twenty years old!), and even if you weren't a Lord of the Rings fan, the movies were just superb. At eleven I complained about them because they didn't seem to emphasise what the books did, but I think as a production designed to capture the magic of the books and make an entertaining spectacle to watch on-screen they hit the mark as well as was actually possible.
The Rings of Powers just aren't very good. Part of the problem with grand, sweeping declarations and weird philosophy and so on is that there's not a huge amount of middle ground. If these things aren't good, they're cringe. Mediocre fantasy is just cringe fantasy. You can have mediocre comedy where the occasional good joke saves the boring ones, mediocre action films where the gunfights save the awful dialogue, but mediocre fantasy is in the same unfortunately realm as mediocre sci-fi. You're not just trying to sell a story, you're trying to sell a world, and if you can't do that the story falls apart. If you fuck it up enough the whole world falls apart and you're done. It's weird and stupid and feels like someone's 16-year old fanfic. It's cringe.
Conversely, if my friends drag me out to see the latest Marvelman movie, the premise is I'm here to see some explosions, some witty one-liners, some scenes that just look amazing on the big screen, and if I happen to miss or just not care about what's actually happening I'm not going to be too disadvantaged. You can fuck those up some, deliver a mediocre product and it's still fine. It's not great, but eh. It's not particularly good, but I can chew on my popcorn, see the explosions and the punches, snooze through the exposition and still have a fine dinner afterwards where I mention how cool the fire god fighting the evil prison lady was at the end.
It's not great, but I don't feel the need to cringe away from it. Rings of Power (and Wheel of Time as a side note) is cringe. The 'rock or boat', the troll fight, the 'tek our jerbs' moments, it's just a bad TV show. Sure, it does the standard 'wheel out the five most racist trolls, imply these are representative of the entire criticism of the show and then suppress any thoughts that you might be making a hunk of crap with the sweet knowledge that only bigots hate you' move every sub-par show does nowadays, but this is just people who can't make a good show shoehorning their politics in clumsily which annoys people, but people always want to put their worldview in their creations. It's just these people are making bad television to begun with, so why would you expect them to be good at adding in politics subtly?
I don't doubt the showrunners/writers/etc are huge Tolkien fans. Nothing about the Rings of Powers says 'we hate Tolkien and want to make him spin in his grave', it just says 'we're not very good at making television and so we keep fucking it up and creating cringeworthy moment after cringeworthy moment'.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
I think it's fair to say there's no anti-left mod bias, but it's certainly a very right-coded space in terms of the culture war.
I think part of what makes it seem more leftist in polls than it actually is is the fact that there are quite a few older former leftists who believe in things like socialised healthcare, a cradle-to-grave welfare state, etc, etc, but have cultural views formed in the 90s or 00s and consequently oppose modern identitarianism very, very strongly.
That's roughly where I identify, but the thing about the Motte is that it's a cultural war space, not a policy discussion space. I suspect on policy issues the membership skews a fair bit more left. We definitely have some very strong libertarians who are all for as few taxes and as few government services as possible, but I think there's a reasonably large population of 'I like my healthcare free, just like my speech' Mottizens who would argue for single-payer healthcare, higher welfare payments, etc, etc. Of course, the reality I might be fired from my job for refusing to call someone 'ze' (thankfully not in our office as of yet, but we've had a helpful instructional email from corporate HQ over in the US about neopronouns from a middle-aged white HR lady) is also something I'm very much against, so if we only ever talk about the latter I find myself in the same place as reactionaries in opposing it.
If this was a forum about how to deal with monopolies or on the virtues of re-zoning low-density areas in the inner city I think I'd find myself very strongly on the other side of the debate much more often. It's just that we don't really talk about those things here.
It's a pretty clear metaphor.
'Dropped a bomb' is an idiom that means delivering bad news. 'Dropped a nuke' is the former but much more impactful.
More options
Context Copy link