stuckinbathroom
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User ID: 903
stuckinbathroom
8mo ago
Where can I find this mystical Colombian connection?
stuckinbathroom
8mo ago
Gentlemen (and ladies), it is with great pleasure to inform you that it is Wellness Wednesday, and with mild displeasure to inform you that I am once again asking for your dating/romance advice.
I previously asked for suggestions on how to deal with being banned from Hinge. Quick recap of my situation:
- Early 30s American male of South Asian descent, living in the NYC area
- Looks are not great, not terrible (
3.6 roentgenexactly average height for an American male, somewhat nebbish-looking due to glasses) - Elite undergrad and grad degrees
- Making very good money (low 7 figures) in finance
- Interested in mid-late 20s Anglophones of East Asian descent, of similar class and educational background
Since my previous post, I have started going to the gym 3 times a week. I can already see some improvements in my physique. On the social side, I've started reconnecting with friends more, going to more parties, karaoke nights, etc. and I've become a "regular" at a couple of good date spots. I've been off dating apps the whole time. In the past 6 months, I met 2 prospects IRL and got 1-2 dates with each, but was rejected both times thereafter.
Honestly, I want to try meeting folks IRL for a little while longer. I've forgotten how interesting "day game" can be, since I've been using dating apps for so many years. If nothing materializes by March or so, I might go back to using apps.
To that end, there are 4 things I'm curious about:
Location, Location, Location
I lived in Manhattan for 5-10 years but moved out of the city for tax reasons around the time of the pandemic. It's still a convenient 20 minute commute to get to Lower Manhattan, but perhaps I'd be more attractive to women, or have more opportunities to meet them, if I actually lived in (a desirable neighborhood of) Manhattan.
I really don't have a great sense of how important this is; as I said, I left Manhattan around the pandemic, so it's not clear whether my relative lack of success in meeting women IRL is due to leaving the city, pandemic-era cultural shifts, becoming less attractive, or something else entirely.
Clubs
I know nothing about the nightclub scene in NYC and to be honest I don't really see the appeal of being surrounded by strangers in a dark, sweaty room where it's too loud to even have a decent conversation. But there is one aspect of clubbing that, in theory, intrigues me: a literal market where dollars can be exchanged for status and sex. To what extent is that a thing?
My career is going well enough that I would definitely be willing to spend ~$50,000 in a single night if it would guarantee me sex and/or a 50+% shot at a long-term relationship with an attractive woman who is my type (see above). My gut sense is that it can't just be as simple as spending a ton of money at a club, at least not with my average-to-below average looks. I am also aware that the kind of women who would make a good long-term partners are, shall we say, unlikely to be hanging around clubs and putting out for anyone who spends enough dough; however, I would be fine settling for hookups/casual sex with good-looking women whom I encounter in such situations while I search for a higher-quality partner elsewhere.
How much benefit in terms of sex, dates, and relationships can be purchased in the NYC club scene? And operationally, how does this work; do you just book a table/bottle service and then the employees bring girls to your table? I am totally clueless here.
Drugs and Augmentation
I cannot in good conscience write a post in a rat-adjacent community without throwing a bone to the transhumanist crowd:
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Testosterone/anabolic steroids. I don't believe I have a testosterone deficiency or anything, but T or steroids could give a boost to my physique, height (slightly), and confidence. Has anyone completely turned their dating life around using these? Curious to hear about your experiences.
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Laser eye surgery. As mentioned above, I wear glasses. Probably this detracts from my attractiveness somewhat, though it's hard to tell how much (FWIW, multiple women have told me [during glasses-off pillow talk] that I have beautiful eyes and eyelashes). There's also the benefit of having better vision than I currently do, and without the mild inconvenience of carrying glasses everywhere to boot.
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Limb-lengthening surgery. Could make me a couple inches taller, but I'd still be under 6'. Worse, I think my friends and family would find it really weird if I did this. Honestly I am just including this one for the sake of completeness; there is very little chance that I'd actually go through with it, unless someone can convince me that the results are so life-changingly good that the expense, loss of QoL during the long recovery period, risk of complications, and mild social stigma are all worth it.
Matchmakers/Outsourcing
I am aware that soliciting a matchmaker rather contravenes my stated preference to swear off dating apps for a little while longer. Nonetheless, I am fascinated by the ads I sometimes see for so-called "elite" matchmaking services. They always set off my bullshit detector, but I suppose there is a chance that they really do work as advertised. Do quality women actually use these services? What's their success rate like?
In all honesty, though, more than a matchmaker, I would be perfectly happy to pay for a service that constructs profiles for me on all the major dating apps, takes my preferences into account, and then goes through the long grind of swiping for me so that I don't have to. Literally just an API where my photos go in, and matches with attractive women come out. How is this not a startup yet? Call it "Cyrano", slap a cool logo on it, and you'll be rolling in VC cash.
stuckinbathroom
8mo ago
Stanford
Uh, how exactly is Stanford un-woke? They have the full slate of grievance studies departments, plus a DEI commissariate installed in all the real departments (read: the School of Engineering, basically) providing mandatory political reeducation and enforcing the party line. Perhaps they’re un-woke in comparison to their rivals across the Bay, but the same could be said of virtually every university in the Western world.
stuckinbathroom
8mo ago
At least we got this banger of a tweet out of the incident (movie title: New Yorkshire)
stuckinbathroom
8mo ago
It’s intended as written: the claim is that Japanese in Japan have lower life expectancy than Japanese-Americans, despite Japan having nominally better healthcare than the US (n.b.: I have not verified whether this is actually true)
stuckinbathroom
8mo ago
sceptic systems
Surely a true sceptic system would require RCTs to determine the efficacy of dowsing?
Alternatively, 'It may or may not work, but I'm still gonna use it'.
I am reminded of the apocryphal tale of Niels Bohr’s horseshoe
stuckinbathroom
8mo ago
My semi-educated guess as a non-Christian is that they would draw a distinction between divine forgiveness and temporal forgiveness. “Kony embraces God and he’s alright” is the wrong framing: he may be forgiven by God (though of course we humans can never truly know that), but we are under no obligation to forgive him for his heinous acts as a matter of Earthly law. At least not forgive him immediately and unconditionally.
See also: rendering unto Caesar
stuckinbathroom
8mo ago
Hear, hear. US health “insurance” is really a kludgey hodge-podge of at least 3 things that can and should be completely independent of one another:
- True insurance (for catastrophic events that are costly, rare, and difficult to foresee in individual cases, but follow a well-known statistical distribution)
- Health savings scheme (for medical expenses that will very predictably affect ~everyone who lives long enough)
- Welfare
stuckinbathroom
8mo ago
A consistent harm reduction-ist would say yes_chad.jpg; if a junkie robs a convenience store to get his fix, the crime is the robbery, and the drug addiction is irrelevant.
stuckinbathroom
8mo ago
Arguments that taxation is not theft generally advance the view that the “harm” caused by taxation is, in some sense, consensual*, and therefore not evil per the definition above. So, my imagined “harm reduction”-ist would say, we face a tradeoff between two personally risky things (namely, drug users using drugs and taxpayers having to pay taxes—both of these are consensual, but have their downsides). How we optimize between both sides of this tradeoff is a matter of administration, an implementation detail; there’s no fundamental inconsistency here.
Look, this is all my attempt to pass an ITT, to steelman a view that I don’t even hold. I just happen to think that this particular case is a values difference, not an instance of one side or the other being irrational/inconsistent.
*There are better and worse arguments out there for the “implicit consent”/“social contract” views of taxation, and I agree with you that the Rawlsian one is not without its shortcomings. FWIW I am in reality much more libertarian than the median American, so it’s hard for me to give more than a halfhearted defense of this take.
stuckinbathroom
8mo ago
The Mishima-pilled American, truly a rare phenomenon
stuckinbathroom
8mo ago
I’m not a “harm reduction”-ist myself, but if I had to provide a steelman here I would point out the various arguments for why taxation is not theft (the Rawlsian veil of ignorance, for example).
stuckinbathroom
8mo ago
OK, I guess we have two different notions of “harm reduction”-ism in mind.
The one I was thinking of is internally consistent, because it is as follows: Call an act personally risky if it is performed with the consent of its actor, and poses a risk to life or limb of that actor, but not to any other party. Call an act evil if it harms (or threatens to harm) another party without that party’s consent. We should endeavor to reduce the harm/risk of harm faced by people who engage in personally risky activity, without requiring them to refrain from the act entirely, but we should not tolerate evil activity.
Drug use should be made safer by safe needle sites and the like because it is personally risky. Domestic violence must be cracked down on with the full force of the law because it is evil.
In other words, my imagined “harm reduction”-ist is not a pure utilitarian/consequentialist. His consequentialism is conditional on the acts in question not nonconsensually harming anyone.
stuckinbathroom
8mo ago
Well, that and his skin color means that he can pursue (relatively) “tough on crime” policies without being tarred as a racist
Ehhh… I see the point you’re trying to make with this, and in one sense it is valid (namely, that “harm reduction”-ists don’t see drug use as an inherent evil), but I also don’t think “safe DV sites” are equivalent. One could, with perfect moral consistency, be in favor of safe needle sites and against “safe DV sites” on the grounds that using drugs does not intrinsically and non-consensually harm anyone else, while DV definitionally does.
Of course, one can object to the framing that drug use only affects/harms the user, but that’s a difference of values, or of how you define “harm”, not a matter of moral or logical inconsistency.
stuckinbathroom
8mo ago
An underdiscussed downside of the renaming of Twitter to X is the added mental difficulty of interpreting sentences where “X” is used as a variable, like this one
stuckinbathroom
8mo ago
Huh, I didn’t know that, but it makes geographic sense. Thanks for explaining
stuckinbathroom
8mo ago
What’s Turkey’s beef that led to them playing chicken (by proxy) against the SAA? Pure Sunni vs. Shi’a/Alawite sectarianism, or does it go deeper than that?
stuckinbathroom
8mo ago
They want anyone but Assad and thus Iran. And they mean anyone.
The monkey’s paw, the devil you know, etc. etc. Though since we’re talking about Israel, perhaps the parable of the golem is more apropos.
stuckinbathroom
8mo ago
Assad is friendly with Iran and he has allowed Iran’s paramilitary proxies to roam free throughout the country.
This is true, but AFAIK no Iranian proxies have staged attacks on Israel from within Syria, right?
stuckinbathroom
8mo ago
What are the likely consequences re: Israel should the Assad regime collapse?
For all his faults, at least Assad has refrained from mounting direct military attacks against Israel; moreover, unlike Lebanon, Syria TTBOMK does not harbor quasi-state paramilitaries that attack Israel. And all this is despite the cozy relationship between Assad and Iran, and the Golan Heights hatchet remaining pointedly un-buried!
Do we know anything about which rebel group is likely to end up on top if Assad gets the boot? I could imagine the US foreign policy blob backing “moderate rebels” in order to win some leverage over them and their Israel policy if and when they take control of Syria (because that’s worked out so well for us before). But I am extremely skeptical that any new regime can keep as tight a lid on anti-Israel kinetic actions as Assad has.
stuckinbathroom
8mo ago
As a wise man once said: if they don’t want to be seen as an international conspiracy to subvert and destroy anything that goes against their ethno-religious interests, then they should probably stop conspiring internationally to subvert and destroy anything that goes against their ethno-religious interests
stuckinbathroom
8mo ago
Taiwan considers themselves to be Chinese (and the legitimate Chinese government at that), but nobody else does. Possession matters.
I’m not sure this supports the point you’re trying to make.
It is obviously true that (modulo a small population of foreigners and Taiwanese aboriginals) virtually all inhabitants of Taiwan today are descended from people who came from China. And if you’ve ever paid a visit to the National Palace Museum in Taipei, you’d know that there’s a very real sense in which the people of present-day Taiwan are the heirs to, and the custodians of, the Chinese civilizational patrimony. Perhaps not uniquely so—the overseas Chinese of Malaysia and Singapore, and of course the mainland Chinese, have similar claims, with varying degrees of plausibility—but then again, no one said that the Romanians or the inhabitants of minor outlying islands in the Aegean were the only surviving Sons of Romulus, either.
stuckinbathroom
8mo ago
Is the Fed not required to disclose its asset holdings on a regular basis? If so, wouldn’t we find out soon if they were hodling BTC
Computer science/machine learning
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