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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   5023 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 7, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Friends I cannot stress this enough: have kids.

People talk about loss of meaning and loss of rigid rites of passage that take you from being a child to being a man.

It's kids. It's always been kids.

Having kids is really hard (I apparently phrased this poorly since people are responding to it as if I am saying the opposite. My point is that you will find that the following things are the things you end of loving, and you will find the idea that these should ever have prevented you from having kids to be childish): your house will constantly be a filthy mess. They will keep you from sleeping, they will make it impossible to go out to dinner or to go to parties, and they make travel really difficult. Any of the dreams of adventure that you had before you had kids will be pushed back by 10 years.

And NONE of that will matter once you have them. You'll find the idea that you ever cared about any of this stuff laughable.

I counter you with a cold dose of Houllebecq!

“Youth was the time for happiness, its only season; young people, leading a lazy, carefree life, partially occupied by scarcely absorbing studies, were able to devote themselves unlimitedly to the liberated exultation of their bodies. They could play, dance, love, and multiply their pleasures. They could leave a party, in the early hours of the morning, in the company of sexual partners they had chosen, and contemplate the dreary line of employees going to work. They were the salt of the earth, and everything was given to them, everything was permitted for them, everything was possible. Later on, having started a family, having entered the adult world, they would be introduced to worry, work, responsibility, and the difficulties of existence; they would have to pay taxes, submit themselves to administrative formalities while ceaselessly bearing witness--powerless and shame-filled--to the irreversible degradation of their own bodies, which would be slow at first, then increasingly rapid; above all, they would have to look after children, mortal enemies, in their own homes, they would have to pamper them, feed them, worry about their illnesses, provide the means for their education and their pleasure, and unlike in the world of animals, this would last not just for a season, they would remain slaves of their offspring always, the time of joy was well and truly over for them, they would have to continue to suffer until the end, in pain and with increasing health problems, until they were no longer good for anything and were definitively thrown into the rubbish heap, cumbersome and useless. In return, their children would not be at all grateful, on the contrary their efforts, however strenuous, would never be considered enough, they would, until the bitter end, be considered guilty because of the simple fact of being parents. From this sad life, marked by shame, all joy would be pitilessly banished. When they wanted to draw near to young people's bodies, they would be chased away, rejected, ridiculed, insulted, and, more and more often nowadays, imprisoned. The physical bodies of young people, the only desirable possession the world has ever produced, were reserved for the exclusive use of the young, and the fate of the old was to work and to suffer. This was the true meaning of solidarity between generations; it was a pure and simple holocaust of each generation in favor of the one that replaced it, a cruel, prolonged holocaust that brought with it no consolation, no comfort, nor any material or emotional compensation.”

Uh yeah... don't take any of that too seriously, I don't think he does either. Kids are great, keep having them. Just felt like throwing that out there.

When they wanted to draw near to young people's bodies, they would be chased away, rejected, ridiculed, insulted, and, more and more often nowadays, imprisoned

Why don't you have a seat over here, monsieur Houllebecq?

Furthermore, since the idea of time plays such a magic part in the matter, the student should not be surprised to learn that there must be a gap of several years, never less than ten I should say, generally thirty or forty, and as many as ninety in a few known cases, between maiden and man to enable the latter to come under a nymphet's spell. It is a question of focal adjustment, of a certain distance that the inner eye thrills to surmount, and a certain contrast that the mind perceives with a gasp of perverse delight. When I was a child and she was a child, my little Annabel was no nymphet to me; I was her equal, a faunlet in my own right, on that same enchanted island of time; but today, in September 1952, after twenty-nine years have elapsed, I think I can distinguish in her the initial fateful elf in my life. We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives. I was a strong lad and survived; but the poison was in the wound, and the wound remained ever open, and soon I found myself maturing amid a civilization which allows a man of twenty-five to court a girl of sixteen but not a girl of twelve.

from the context he's pretty clearly talking about young adults, not kids.

From the context of the proclivities of French intellectuals, I wouldn't be so sure.

The quote is from a Russian-American.

The Nabokov quote is, but the Houllebecq quote is not. I was using Humbert Humbert's monologue as a companion to Houllebecq thirsting after illegally young people.

I thought that would be obvious without attribution, but many of you guys haven't read Lolita and it shows.

It's not obvious at all to me that Houllebecq was writing about the illegally young, or how quoting another author demonstrates that, or indeed how it demonstrates anything other than that it is, in fact, possible to write about pedophilia without being a pedophile yourself.

Who's getting jailed for hitting on twenty year olds?

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soon I found myself maturing amid a civilization which allows a man of twenty-five to court a girl of sixteen but not a girl of twelve.

idk sounds like he's talking about kids to me. And the age gap of 90+ years which he mentions is imo more likely to be between a 100 year old and a 10 year old than any older combination.

The excerpt you quoted is from Nabokov's Lolita. To compare it to a longing of a 30-year-old salaryman for 20-year-old carefree student is quite far-fetched and symptomatic of the problem described in BahRamYou's excerpt.

30 year old salary men can pretty readily scoop up a 20 year old nymphette if they get past their own shyness. It may be quite different outside Japan.

Bro, nymphettes hit the wall at 14.

The more you know.

Alright, I assumed it was from the same guy.

This guy sounds utterly insufferable. There is more to life than having sex with "young people" (a term deliberately chosen, I am sure, to mean children to friendly audiences and mature adults to others). Judging by this passage, the only thing he cares about is pedophilic sex.

It sure sounds like you aren't a friendly audience, yet you take the term to mean children. Does "leaving a party in the early hours of the morning, in the company of sexual partners they had chosen" evoke a child first and foremost in your mind?

It sure sounds like you aren't a friendly audience, yet you take the term to mean children.

Yes but it can be plausibly defended against my interpretation, as you are doing right now. It's not that the double meaning is entirely invisible but that it signals to those who are In the Know while maintaining strategic ambiguity.

Does "leaving a party in the early hours of the morning, in the company of sexual partners they had chosen" evoke a child first and foremost in your mind?

Does "contemplate the dreary line of employees going to work" evoke someone in their 20's first and foremost in your mind? You start paying taxes in France once you're employed--how many early 20's people do you know who have never been employed?

I for one went to a lot more parties in middle school than high school or college. The latter two were the time to get serious about my studies. My "partying days" were more or less between the ages of 12-14, and that's the age I had in mind for what he's describing. It's also the time I was probably most carefree--I was older and able to understand the world more, yet didn't yet have any real responsibilities.

If France has more of a prolonged adolescence then maybe that explains the difference, but "leading a lazy, carefree life, partially occupied by scarcely absorbing studies, were able to devote themselves unlimitedly to the liberated exultation of their bodies" certainly doesn't sound like my high school experience. I'm lazier and more carefree now than I was then--my software development job is significantly easier than my studies were.

Houllebecq certainly wouldn't exclude 14 year olds at least from the people he describes as having "young bodies."

I think you have had an uncommon experience. Generally high school, college and one's early twenties is the peak of freedom and fucking around. At least, that has been my experience talking to people.

He's French, it's his culture. And also he's right imo.

I hope you are trolling.

While Houellebecq is undoubtedly an inveterate and unrepentant coomer with a possible predilection for hebes, I would say he looks on pedophilia with sort of bemusement more than anything. His characters are consumed by their jealousy for the young (which, as @BahRamYou's quote indicates, is specifically high school/college age), and regrets for what could have been in their own youth. And this ends badly for them. Jumping to your conclusion via this one passage is...well, a jump.

Houllebecq

This is the second place in the last 5 minutes on two different websites that somebody has talked about Houllebecq. So hot right now.

Very default quotable figure across a diverse range of scenes including BAPism/RSP/Dimes Square/nrx/silicon valley edgy/le atheism/neocon, it’s not too surprising.

It was on the RSP sub that I saw it lol

he's not, like, some obscure writer. he's been a best seller for decades. but yes, he's very quotable on all sorts of hot culture war topics.

I have to counter your quote (but agree with your last sentences!) with the following from Serotonin:

Everything was clear, extremely clear from the beginning, but we didn’t realise. Did we yield to the illusion of individual freedom, of an open life, of infinite possibilities? It’s possible; those ideas were part of the spirit of the age; we didn’t formalise them, we didn’t have the taste to do that; we merely conformed and allowed ourselves to be destroyed by them; and then, for a very long time, to suffer as a result.

God takes care of us; he thinks of us every minute, and he gives us instructions that are sometimes very precise. Those surges of love that flow into our chests and take our breath away – those illuminations, those ecstasies, inexplicable if we consider our biological nature, our status as simple primates – are extremely clear signs.

...

Where on earth did you get that figure, presuming you mean they're physically incapable of doing so?

...

It seems more likely that a lot of young men are insecure and want to ‘last longer’ (or lower refractory period etc) and so use the drug even though they don’t have ED. Similarly if there was a drug that increased dick size one would expect that many average and above endowed men would still take it just because.

...

What the hell, dude?

By itself, this post is just bad enough to get a warning. Avoid sarcasm, avoid being an insufferably snide rageposter, avoid personal digs like this.

However, you have a long record of being an unsufferably snide rageposter. (Those links are like half of your record.)

Banned for a week. Get your rage under control or you won't be posting anymore.

This one confuses me. His point seems entirely valid. The last line:

Who am I gonna believe? A rich professional involved with finance, or someone involved in treating sex disorders? Of course, the rich person. No one smart would work in a profession interested in helping people, that doesn't pay.

Seems a little like a non-sequitar. Is that the problem? Japan does produce absolutely bizarre pornography, and supposing that there is a link between this and fertility seems completely reasonable.

  1. Japan as a country seems particularly addicted to porn

  2. The porn that Japanese porn users tend to use is particularly detached from things which would (or even could, legally) happen in real life.

  3. This seems like it could have an effect on Japanese sexual mores

  4. Which seems like it could have an effect on fertility

  5. Japan has a notably low fertility rate

This seems absolutely reasonable, and to say it in a silly way seems completely reasonable in the Friday Fun Thread.

As a guy living in Japan, a few points I will make:

  1. However weird Japan porn may appear to you, it's nevertheless prohibited by law from showing genitalia. I know a guy who did time working for an organization (low level yakuza) that distributed depixellated porn. (This was around 2000). That law is odd, but I assure you it holds. That you can type in "uncensored" online and find such available does not change the fact that most of it is, in fact, censored, particularly in shops, etc. and anything geared mainly to a Japanese market. (I am waiting to be proven wrong )

  2. Organized crime generally has its hand in the porn industry. As it does in the massive sex trade here (that dodges the law which declares prostitution illegal in various creative ways.)

  3. The massive sex trade is available and thrives because...people are having sex. Just not with procreation in mind, and not with their wives or husbands. I'd have said "men" are having sex but they're doing it with women, it's just that the women are getting paid. By said men.

  4. There are probably many variables contributing to what you're calling "Japanese sexual mores." Whether porn is the strongest factor, a contributing factor, a result, or unrelated, is a study that would be difficult to design and as far as I know hasn't been made convincingly.

  5. I wouldn't say at all that "Japan as a country is addicted to porn." Certainly no more than, say "America as a country." It's odd to read that actually. What makes you have that impression?

  6. German porn, in my limited experience, is weirder than Japanese porn (though it's true you can find some pretty disturbing Japanese porn.) That's a rabbit hole that I've never really wanted to spelunk.

  7. The point you make about the fertility issue is as far as I know accepted generally as accurate.

Edit: de-mosaic'd is probably the term I was looking for.

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Many other countries have lower rates without the weird porn. That kinda nukes this whole theory I think.

I don’t think this is banworthy (and to anyone reading I didn’t report it), it was just a little weird.

By itself it wouldn't have been, but as we've pointed out before, when you have a long (and recent) string of comments like this and you won't stop, you start getting less slack.

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Can mods make it possible for us to request our permanent records? Like a FOIA request.

You can ask. We don't have a policy about it one way or the other, but we're certainly not going to indulge people who want to relitigate past offenses or complain about what's in their record.

You have quite a few warnings and two tempbans, if that's what you want to know.

...

I'm assuming he refers to involuntary celibacy which was high for a hot moment but which has now gone down to historic levels.

People say having kids is really hard but i strongly disagree with that. It's pretty easy, your life is just different.

If you're hellbent on travelling and partying then, yes, it's going to be hard, but if you're intending to care for your kids it's pretty easy, especially if your not trying to force them to become something they're not.

I think an issue is that some people don't actually want to have kids and they whine loudly and incessantly, with some other parents jumping on the bandwagon for clout. In my friend group there is one person that's actually had a hard time and a fair bit of that is self inflicted, and none of us were really aiming to have kids. In reality almost every single parent I know (including myself) are very satisfied with being parents.

Don't let the whine brigade fool you into thinking having kids is some kind of herculan endeavour, it's not.

How many do you have?

Not that guy, but I have four, and I more or less agree.

Maybe I’m just in a different phase of it then. I said above but I have 4 kids under the age of 5.

One of them is teething and having a sleep regression, and she wakes up at night quite a bit.

We recently all got norovirus from an indoor playground we went to.

We also recently took a trip to Oregon. Travel is’harder with that many kids.

Finding a babysitter for that many kids at that age is difficult.

I don’t know I guess if somebody tells me that having kids wasn’t difficult, I wonder if we just mean different things. Most meaningful things are difficult.

Having 4 kids in a 5 year time span is pretty hardcore though, you don't have to do it like that.

Well at least my experience was that my wife and I loved having kids so much, that we wanted to have more. Thus: 4 under 5.

My oldest is 8 and my youngest was just born, so ours are little more spread out. I think you're probably in the toughest spot right now. It was most difficult when we had 6/3/0 -- needy 1st grader + potty training rebellious toddler + newborn is really hard because they all demand very different things from you (in our case, mental/emotional engagement, constant attention and discipline, and constant hands-on care and supervision, respectively). I used to say that we were worn out, mind body and soul, by the end of every day.

I guess when I say it's not "difficult" I don't mean that it's not demanding, but that it doesn't require a extreme IQ, physical conditioning, net worth, etc. to accomplish. It also benefits from tapping in to our deepest instincts -- I can easily justify skipping the gym or watching trash TV instead of praying or reading a book, but I don't think I'm capable of just ignoring our screaming newborn, or not feeding the older kids, or ignoring my kids for days on end so I can play my favorite PC game or something. I don't always want to do those thinga but there's some primal drive that makes me get off the couch and do them anyway that I (unfortunately) don't have when it comes to doing squats or ab wheel rollouts.

All that said, the lack of sleep, minimal social life, and all around lack of freedom certainly takes a toll. But (as I'm sure is the case with you) I truly cannot imagine anything more meaningful I could be doing with my life.

Hang in there for the next few years. If there's one bit of advice I could offer, it's to get your kids doing chores as early as possible. All of our kids could shower themselves by age 4, and they could wash their younger siblings by age 6. My two elementary school age kids put away all the clean dishes and clean up the living room nearly 100% of the time, and they fold about 80% of the clean laundry, and they automatically do all their after school chores (putting away books, backpacks, etc) and change clothes after coming home from school. After every meal they all clear the table together and wipe it down. Even my 3 year old is doing small chores here and there (mostly "put this thing over there" type stuff). Kids are capable of a lot more than is typically demanded of them these days. In the meantime, I'd spring for a maid service if you can afford it. Sadly our area doesn't have one, but I would have been willing to pay quite a bit for one a few year ago.

When you have 2 kids you can spoil them, but when you reach 4+ it becomes more like captaining a ship and its crew than what is commonly thought of as "parenting." There's just so much work to be done to keep everyone clean, clothed, and fed that two adults simply can't do it all for more than a year or two without totally burning out.

The hardest part of parenting (in a practical, non-poetical sense) is the sleep deprivation. That will get better with time, but with 4 littles under 5 I imagine it is a struggle to get sleep. But just think of how great it will be when they're all old enough to sleep properly!

And having just traveled with a preschooler and a toddler on a 4 hour plane trip, I concur that travel sucks. They want to run around! They certainly don't want to wear their seatbelts.

Three so far.

The difficulty is pretty variable.

I'm an introvert who loves alone time, and currently 7 months pregnant with two children under 5. I would go on week long silent retreats if I could. My daughter is extremely hyper, showing signs of ADHD. Trying to rest at home with her is awful. Going on adventures with her is pretty fun. I'm reasonably optimistic that her energy levels will pay off in the end, but times were bad when she was a baby in a little apartment. A teacher friend with similarity energetic children is putting them in a bunch of cheap Parks & Rec day camps, and I think I'm going to have to do something like that in the future.

My brother was very challenging for my mom as well. Some parent/child combinations are just really difficult, for personality and energy level reasons.

I agree with the have kids part, but I think you might be exaggerating how necessary the negative parts are.

You can keep your house tidy and you can go to parties and to dinner. Travel is trickier of course but manageable. Sleep is very variable between kids. My first made it tricky, but the rest have been good sleepers since early on and part of that is from lessons learned. Set a feeding schedule and stick to it. Don't always go and immediately respond to a crying baby. Teach them basic signs early on so they can tell you "food, hurts, or nappy". Make them tidy up with you when they are done playing with toys.

Raising babies is work, but it can be organized and minimized.

I have four kids under the age of 5. Maybe I phrased what I meant wrong.

My general point is that the things people who are afraid of having kids worry about end up being irrelevant once the kids are here.

Sure I agree with you there, 100%. People let a lot of things stop them having kids (finances being a big one) but in my experience you really don't need as much as people think.

FWIW, some kids are just different. One of mine could probably be diagnosed with ADHD. Sweet and very intelligent, but very impulsive and hyperactive. He/she has a sibling 3 years younger who is far better behaved and has greater self-control. We could probably have a clean house and travel if it weren't for him/her tbh.

Friends I cannot stress this enough: have kids.

People talk about loss of meaning and loss of rigid rites of passage that take you from being a child to being a man.

It's kids. It's always been kids.

Having kids is really hard (I apparently phrased this poorly since people are responding to it as if I am saying the opposite. My point is that you will find that the following things are the things you end of loving, and you will find the idea that these should ever have prevented you from having kids to be childish): your house will constantly be a filthy mess. They will keep you from sleeping, they will make it impossible to go out to dinner or to go to parties, and they make travel really difficult. Any of the dreams of adventure that you had before you had kids will be pushed back by 10 years.

And NONE of that will matter once you have them. You'll find the idea that you ever cared about any of this stuff laughable.

I remember asking my parents why they had created me when I was about 12. They told me something to the effect of 'You'll get it when you're older and have your own children.'
22 years have passed since and absolutely nothing has changed about my perspective. I see a lot of negatives: less free time, less money, interruptions during sleep, horrible noises and messes to clean up. The potential that I might have to spend the rest of my life as the caretaker for a human with brain damage or some other deformity. And so on and on.

And what are the upsides? I might have some positive experiences at some point? Is that it? I've seen a lot of what I would hesitantly call 'pro-natalism' but I haven't seen any real reasoning or logic. Maybe it's just a hormonal thing and that part of me was damaged or never formed because I legitimately don't understand people who want to be parents.

As far as 'Just trust me, it'll be worth it'. My answer is, sorry but no. I have been guided towards bad decisions far too many times already and this one in particular seems especially horrible in terms of possible consequences.

I might have some positive experiences at some point? Is that it?

Have you ever felt fulfilled, or full of love, or gratitude, or contentment? Have you ever felt hope, or joy, Would you like to experience that, but way more than you thought could be possible?

It's not just some positive experiences. It's more positive than anything else you're ever going to do, probably, and if you can't see that from outside I don't blame you, but I'm telling you anyway. It's just more. That's the best way I can describe it.

Because you haven’t experienced it, you cannot understand the depth of purpose and meaning that children will give your life. Almost every parent is telling you that you’ll get it when the kids are here, and that it’s impossible to explain in words. They’re all saying that because it’s right.

I used to be really into the party/burning man scene and psychonauts would always explain that they couldn’t explain a DMT trip to me. It was just outside of anything I could understand and I would have to see it for myself.

Kids are like that. I can tell you it’s great, but I can’t really explain why. You have to see it yourself.

Someone posted this in ACX comments: https://soupofthenight.substack.com/p/normalize-mediocre-parenting

It's a bit of a hot take, but I agree with the central point: you are not a failure if you don't provide your kids with the best possible childhood that kickstarts their adult life. They'll be fine if they go to a desegregated school and a land grant university. They'll be fine if they browse TikTok instead of reading books. They'll be fine if you spend 15 minutes on them every day instead of 2 hours. They'll be fine if you spend less money on them and they get bullied for "being poor".

They'll be fine if they browse TikTok instead of reading books

Agree with most of it except for this. Tech screwed me up real good as an adult, and I grew up around it's more mundane forms. TikTok feels like techno-crack in comparison. Go outside and play with a stick, kid.

You almost never hear very old people regret having children. I think that’s the only evidence needed.

I'd agree, and it's unfortunate that the ubiquitous trope is that babies are miserable diarrhea factories and being a parent is about sleep deprivation, thankless labor and cutting your wealth in half.

My main regret is not being able to pull degenerate late nights in the lab anymore (I always hated travel), although I still get the odd weekend here and there. It's significantly harder to focus on my career and I expect to be outcompeted by the DINKs who can grind properly or the FOBs who have no qualms with making their wives do 90% of the childcare.

Does anyone here actually consider Western food amongst their favorite cuisines?

Personally, I find American cuisine is downright trash-tier. My city is lauded by many as a "top-tier food city" but the examples people give of great food are pizza, hot dogs, burgers, Italian beef, and cheesesteak. Most of the ones I've tried I would call oil-drenched slop. None were actually delicious enough to justify the health detriments, especially when similarly unhealthy but better tasting options exist like Mexican tacos, Indian curry, Iranian kababs, Japanese ramen, Chinese hot pot, etc.

In my experience, this has applied to Western countries in general. Except for the Mediterranean-adjacent Italian, Spanish, and Greek, I don't think I've ever particularly enjoyed any other Western food. Do Canada, Australia, and New Zealand even have an identifiable cuisine? I don't know of any British, Nordic, or Slavic restaurants in my area. France is stereotyped as the culinary capital, but most of what I've had was overpriced and looked better than it actually tasted.

It may be that most of the hype around Western food is concentrated in fine-dining, in which I'm largely uninterested. When it comes to a more typical meal, I have a hard time putting any country (aside from Italy/Spain/Greece) above bottom tier when comparing to other regional cuisines from East Asia, South Asia, Middle East, Southeast Asia, or Latin America.

So am I eating the wrong things, is my taste atypical for someone raised in the West, or is it relatively common for most Western cuisines to be clustered in the bottom-tier?

Your argument is invalid:

  • Gumbo
  • Crawfish etouffee
  • Muffaletta
  • Nachitoches meat pies
  • Grits and grillades
  • Shrimp and grits
  • Australian meat pies
  • Sunday roast
  • Fish and chips
  • Bangers and mash
  • Belgian waffles/stroopwafels
  • Schnitzel
  • Spatzel
  • Sauerkraut

I could go on. I will concede that generally speaking, American Yankees (here meaning northeastern people of pallor) are indeed doing it wrong and their food should rightfully be shunned and mocked, except for maybe desserts and lobster. Also Old Bay sucks, fight me.

Sauerkraut

I love sauerkraut as much as the next Midwesterner, but even I have to admit it’s an acquired taste. To anyone who didn’t grow up with it, it’s about as appealing as lutefisk.

I didn't grow up with it and I love it. Then again I enjoy most fermentated foods I've tried, so I'm probably not normal in that regard.

Well, then (and I can’t believe I’m actually suggesting this), maybe you should try lutefisk, which is Scandinavian fermented fish. It’s a horrible, foul, gelatinous substance, but if you like fermented food, you may actually enjoy it.

lutefisk

fermented

You are thinking of surströmming, which is fermented herring, acidic and has quite strong smell. It is advised not to open a can indoors. Lutefisk is gelatinous and has mild taste and smell, it is not a fermented product. It is dried, then soaked in godawful amount of lye solution for preservation.

Thanks for the correction. It seems I may be blending the memories of trying two awful Norwegian fish dishes into one.

I've heard of it before, and if I had the chance I would definitely try it! I had fermented skate in Korea once. It had a very unique and pungent taste.

And to add another perspective: I grew up with it (Polish family, we had so much of it) and I don't like it at all.

Spatzel

Spätzle.

Thänk you.

Just doing my ethnic duty.

Old bay was developed for bars giving away crabs to sell more beer. It's salt levels reflect that. It would be far more interesting without the salt.

Non-mediterranean western food sucks. That's well known. The French are single handedly keeping the reputation up, but French lunch/dinner doesn't make it to Tier 1. Amazing desserts and baked items though.

Spanish is honestly quite underrated. Maybe I've just been lucky, but all my best meals have been in Spain. Contemporary Spanish blends Northern African & Latin American with existing Spanish food, to give you the best cuisine. The spanish can do preserved foods, meats, rice dishes, spicy food, everything.

(Note: Must be food food. Breakfast (bakery foods) & Dessert do not count. Alcohol only counts if part of the meal itself. )

My personal ranking goes (in order):

Tier 1

  1. Spanish (Plus colonies which are primarily ethnic Spanish. Ie. If you killed ALL the natives, then you Spanish)
  2. Thai
  3. Indian (South Asian generally. I might be underrating because I want to avoid personal bias)
  4. Chinese (All Ethnic chinese food.)

Tier 1.5

  1. Mexican
  2. Japanese
  3. Korean

Tier 2

  1. French
  2. Vietnamese
  3. Brazil
  4. Peru
  5. Levant / North African
  6. Ethiopian
  7. Italy

Tier dunno much but probably good

  1. Indonesian / Malay (These are probably tier 1.5)
  2. Iranian (Too similar to Levant / Parsi-Indian to differentiate. Same for Afghani)
  3. West African (Maafe and Jollof is good)
  4. Greek / Turkish (I don't like octopus that much. Turkish breakfast is great, but rest is alright)

Tier bad

  1. British
  2. Scandinavian

Everything else is mid.

It seems we have similar tastes. Main differences I'd have are fusing 1/1.5 then bumping up Italy and MENA into Tier 1.

Haha, 1 and 1.5 were fused until I separated them last minute.

Middle east's best dishes are Tier 1. But, I've docked points for lack of variety. I love their mezze spread, but MENA quickly runs out of ideas once you beyond that.

Italy got docked on a technicality. Gelato and Tiramisu were considered desserts. Foccacia & Pizza went to baked goods. And Italian coffees did not feel exclusively Italian. With all of those included, Italy woud rise back up.

A lot of Japanese food is extremely mid and bland, though. Dining in Tokyo is great but that’s because chefs have adopted all the best French methods and cook with rare precision (compared to the rest of the world). The best, most flavorful ramen is available outside of Japan reinvented by others who wanted more from it. Japanese curries are more bland than Currywurst. A lot of bland deep fried food, almost Dutch in character.

Sushi and wagyu are good but stand out because of the ingredients (and the same is true for other Northern Euro cuisines, one could say the same about British wild game or Dover sole or oysters for example). Eating in Japan is great but it is only rarely so because Japanese cuisine is.

I think I have sampled just about every relevant contender in these domains and come to the belief that Germany has the best savoury baked goods (including in particular bread) and Sweden has the best sweet ones.

There's plenty of greatness in the Mediterranean space but maybe we're excluding it. I concur with appreciating English breakfast; there are also some soups in my native cuisine (Russian) that I would be unhappy to do without. In the US, Cajun cuisine is the only regional one that I found worthwhile, and it's hard to count it as non-Mediterranean Western given how it's largely a fusion of French and Afro-Caribbean. Maybe KFC (which nowadays is good everywhere except for the Anglo countries), or Popeye's for a still-okay-in-the-US substitute, would count?

In general it does seem to be true that northern foods are generally less interesting - even the ones that people praise seem to be more in the "lots of high-quality protein, prepared in a way that doesn't ruin the taste" (steaks, good burgers) class than anything that registers as cuisine. This extends to extreme latitudes elsewhere (Mongolian food is legendarily terrible, and I would consider the outer reaches of commoner Northern Chinese food to be bland in the same way cabbage-and-potatoes Eastern European food is. What I've tried of Chilean food gave me similar vibes). It might be tempting to blame this on a lack of aromatic plants (plants don't have the same need to evolve repellent chemicals in areas where insect activity is low?), but many of the flavourful tropical cuisines (Japanese, Indonesian...) rely heavily on fermented products over spices.

Japan is not tropical, and Japanese food is not particularly flavorful, unless you count Japonicized continental foods like ramen and gyoza. As someone mentioned upthread with respect to British cursive, traditional Japanese cuisine is largely about purity and fresh ingredients that stand on their own.

Subtropical, surely; I'd climatically put the heartland at least in the same general class as Louisiana or the Mediterranean (east coast N hemisphere patterns suggest the former). If you go far enough back, every Japanese food of note is continental, but if you are willing to consider miso, soy sauce and fermented fish sufficiently native, those hardly make for bland fare. Generally, pickling and fermentation feature more in the older and lower-class dishes; "purity and fresh ingredients that stand on their own" sounds like copy for indulgences afforded by a modern society that has refrigeration and wants to flex it, not a tradition.

So if you exclude half of western food and squint hard it's not very good outside of fine dining?

3 countries out of 30+ constitutes "half"? If we go by population, that's still <10% of "the West" (by which I mean broadly Europe + USA + Canada + Australia + New Zealand). Additionally, those three one could argue are non-central examples given their geographic location on the Mediterranean, resulting in heavy influence from MENA regions.

Yes, food isn't evenly distributed between population and polities.

If what you really wanted to say was that British food is kind of meh then I'm on board.

I think a lot of this is survivor bias. In order for a food to “make it” in another country, it has to be the top tier of the food in its own country. You aren’t getting trash tier Mediterranean cuisine where nonna opens the fridge and dumps odds and ends into a pot of canned tomato sauce and adds noodles to it. You aren’t getting the Chinese stir fry of chicken feet. What you’re comparing is often Western fast foods to other countries’ higher tier foods.

The other thing is that you likely eat western food daily. You have eaten millions of hot dogs and burgers. You’ve eaten your weight in French fries and Cole slaw. None of the flavors are new or exciting to you because you know what these things taste like. It’s not really a shock to the system to have yet another burger. You aren’t surprised by chicken noodle soup that you’ve been eating forever. Pho is new and interesting. Chinese food is interesting. Feta cheese tastes different than the cheese you grew up on. So you’re biased again, against western food not because it’s bad, but because it’s familiar and thus boring.

These are solid points, but I don't think they apply to my case.

I'm generally comparing popular candidates for "best pizza/burger/etc in the city" to non-Western food options and they still come up far short. On top of that, the burgers/etc. are often times recommended by Americans, whereas most of the time I have foreign cuisines with people from the relevant country they'll tell me it's only bad to average compared to what they'd find back home. Based on my experiences traveling to places like Italy/Japan they were absolutely right and "average" was being generous.

On the second point, my family almost never ate out as a child, so I was mainly introduced to these things simultaneously. The only "burgers" I had were McDonalds or Burger King and I only really think of them as "burgers" in the sense that Taco Bell makes "tacos". They were super health-conscious any wouldn't let me eat many hot dogs and the like, it was mostly lightly seasoned fish/chicken/vegetables/grains. There might be some slight effect in the sense that my average meal may have been closer to the new gourmet burger than to a ramen, but I don't think that effect is particularly large. (Funny enough, someone down-thread suggests the opposite - that early exposure creates a nostalgia effect as opposed to a familiarity-breeds-contempt effect).

Asian food tends to have a big advantage in the west because they bring over relatives with or without working papers to work in their restaurants, while domestic cuisine expects their kitchen workers to have finished cullinary school.

The "best burger" thing is a little different. I think it goes back to Blue Tribe aversions to eating beef. Going to a restaurant to try a "fancy" burger is a loophole in the taboo.

Indian and Italian food are the two greatest cuisines.

Both are definitely in my top tier. My first time in Italy completely changed my perception of so many foods I only thought I knew. I can barely eat pasta or pizza in the US anymore.

I can't tell about the rest of Canada, but Quebec's cuisine is mostly a mix of french, british/irish and italian, with some new world innovations added to it (some unique to us, others we share with the rest of north eastern america).

Northern cuisines are bland in the same way Chinese people look the same: you can argue about the definitions, but there's a grain of truth in there: Northern European cuisines are built around things that keep well: cured meat and fish, fermented vegetables, root vegetables, fruit preserves. Manchurian and Dong Bei cuisines are not exactly explosions of taste either.

A reinvention like the New Nordic cuisine basically goes all in on rare dishes and ingredients that maximize flavor and unusualness.

Stew is pretty good, as are chicken pot pies and similar, I like burgers (especially with bleu cheese), steak is great (if that counts), roasted potatoes are great. Buttered bread can be quite good, depending heavily on the bread. I do like (American) Mexican food a lot, but I would choose Western foods over most of the other things you listed. And I don't know of any rival in desserts, though perhaps I just haven't really looked.

Full English Breakfast is great!

You can make perfectly decent food at home with fish, beef or lamb and vegetables. That's Western style. Steak, sausages, carrots, potatoes, beans... Put some salt and pepper on. Good to go.

I think your taste is atypical for someone raised in the West. For example, I could never agree that tacos are better than burgers. They are both incredibly tasty foods. In general, I think American food is quite good (albeit not always very distinct due to our immigrant culture and the fact we adapt a lot of other cuisine).

How can you think that about cheeseburgers? A great burger is always amazing, or southern BBQ, perfectly smoked brisket is objectively one of the best things you can eat. Maine lobster with potato salad and corn on the cob is quintessentially American fare and also delicious. Who can forget blueberry and apple pie for desert?

If you pick trash food from a lot of cultures it can be kind of gross, while a dry aged ribeye steak and a baked potato can be mind bendingly good. Salmon on cedar planks with fiddleheads is American all the way and very good, Alaskan Crab...Amazing, muscles in white wine and french fries, awesome, raw oysters by the dozen, delicious, crawfish boil, fun as hell.

Fresh caught trout and eggs for breakfast, real maple syrup on some buttered english muffins (invented in america) maybe a sausage on the side with a bit more syrup on it, of course baked beans as well!

Does anyone here actually consider Western food amongst their favorite cuisines?

If were counting French and Italian cuisine as "Western" than yes. And that's not even considering Barbecue/Soul-food which is less "Western" and more "North American" but by my count 3 out of my 5 favorite genres of food are arguably "Western" with Mediterranean and Thai as the outliers.

Your taste is not atypical for someone raised in or around immigrant enclaves where disdain for "white people food" is quite common, but less so for someone that grew up eating and therefore has at least some childhood nostalgia bound up with said food. All the same I think Western food is too broad of a category to dismiss, as even limiting ourselves to the US we have regional cuisines or styles of preparation (Cajun, Southern barbecue, Southwestern) that can put up a decent fight against what China or India has to offer.

As far as explanations for why people prefer the latter, one involves the industrialization of food production, which over time transforms meals from family gatherings where a peasant grandmother slaves for hours over a pot to squeeze every last drop of flavor out of rare and precious ingredients into mass-produced microwaveable slop that people eat by themselves solely for sustenance and not enjoyment (and this is not just in western countries; the food that the typical Japanese person eats every day is also to my eyes bland and unappetizing compared to the Korean or Chinese equivalent, since the latter two developed later), and the second is that you can usually get a better deal eating at a restaurant owned by a poor immigrant than one owned by a local i.e. why would I pay $20 for a craft burger and fries or a single appetizer at a good Italian place when I could get a giant bowl of pho for $12 (your local prices may vary proportionally) instead?

Yes, absolutely.

Eggs Benedict, or biscuits and gravy.

Sandwiches are top-tier, especially with high quality meats and cheeses, and I challenge any cuisine to compete with the PB&J in terms of ease of preparation, portability, and palatability.

Steak and potatoes with a caesar salad.

Beef stew and pot roast. Cottage pie and shephard's pie and chicken pot pie.

Most of the ones I've tried I would call oil-drenched slop.

This is my impression of Indian food. Meat in oily, spicy gravy. Literally slop, incredibly oily. Still tasty, mind you, but the most obvious slop I've ever seen.

Do Canada, Australia, and New Zealand even have an identifiable cuisine?

English Canada has always been extremely culturally interlinked with the US, so the only popular foods in Canada that didn't make it accross the border are from Quebec.

Australia / NZ have some local adjustments to the general Anglo cuisine. Prawns are a lot more common. Vegemite and Fairy Bread failed to become popular elsewhere. Emu and Kangaroo are more common.

British food in general is built around the idea that high quality cuts of meat can stand on their own. If you're spicing roast beef until you can't taste the beef, why are you paying for it?

Also British food has some presentation issues. Mince and tatties would be much more visually appealing if they just served it in a bowl with the potatoes on the bottom.

I find that quality is orthogonal to cuisine. I've had really good and really bad versions of different cuisines.

American cuisine excels at producing and finding uses for preservable sauces and seasonings (S&S). Ketchup, Mustard, BBQ, Mayonaise, Hot Sauces, Old Bay, etc. And it is best at adopting foreign S&S into the cuisine, like Sriracha, Chipotle, Soy, etc. Certain "Americanized" foods like Chinese takeout is basically just heavily sauced versions of easily found American food General Tso's / Orange Chicken / Sweet and Sour / etc. If you don't enjoy the major S&S you won't generally enjoy American cuisine. Just like its hard to enjoy Indian food if you don't like curry.

I think British cuisine is often maligned too for the wrong reasons (I see you @fartVader). Its meant to be had at a pub with beer on a rainy shitty day. Much of it is very dense and thus good at holding in heat as you slowly eat it to warm up while drinking your beer at the same time. The flavor should be coming from the beer, which is why everyone calls most British food flavorless. But its like taking the curry out of Indian food and deciding that its all bland as a result. The food is meant to be bland, because its a vehicle for flavor from another source!

Italian and Parisian food often get lauded as the best food, but I think that is because both of those food traditions are meant to be served in restaurants with fine wines. The word restaurant is French! (also I say Parisian food instead of French food quite intentionally. Paris is a mega city with its own culture and food, and mostly that is what has been exported around the world.)

Street food from various cuisines you should look for foodtrucks that serve them. I've mostly never enjoyed Kabob, but I do usually enjoy it from a food truck. Took me some time before I figured that one out, specifically going to the foodtruck and brick and mortar versions of the same local brand of kabob and realizing that only the food truck one was good.

Asian Hot Pot should be eaten out of a hot pot.

Low and slow smoke or pit BBQ needs to be overseen by a pit master. If they use automated technology it turns to crap for some reason.

Things like a philly cheesesteak should be had at a sports game or during a lunchbreak when you've been doing physical labor.

Sushi should be eaten freshly made.

Korean BBQ should be grilled in front of you and eaten with KPop blaring in the background.

TL;DR: Cuisine has cultural and situational context, and some cuisines really fall apart when you take them out of that context. I think if you don't enjoy "Western" food you possibly just don't like the cultural or situational context necessary to enjoy them.

Foods that are basically a sandwich are mostly junk everywhere. Good western food plays to the strengths of the west - i.e. good protein. American BBQ is great, steaks are good in the west, pork, chicken, fish on the coasts. Even meat loaf is pretty good. Then pair that up with whatever non-fried side - this is where especially the US is bad because you don’t seem to understand what a salad is - and that’s a great meal.

Why don't we have a real competitor to YouTube yet? It has turned to utter shit. Google can eat my ass.

The problem I personally have with YouTube is the awful clickbait content being produced because of the site's incentives, not my inability to download the content.

There's just so much crap and it's impossible to find the gems buried in it. If only there was an addon for that.

It's that which I'm most concerned with. Then there's all the technical (deliberate) hiccups. They added a new premium playback mode and now the regular one buffers all the time. And half of the videos have some different code that makes my browser addon for YT not work correctly. I suspect they're trying to kill off ad-blocking.

I haven't had any buffering at all, except when accidentally running at 4k 2x speed, which is 100% my browser's fault. Isn't the premium just higher bitrate at 1080?

Subscribe liberally and turn on notifications for high-quality channels you really like, and only ever open slop in Incognito. I've got my YouTube algorithm tuned way the fuck in and am generally happy with what it surfaces.

Perhaps I'm just lucky with the kinds of things I'm interested in.

I still get a lot of clickbait thumbnail spam in recommend, but you're right it does get a lot better when you're judicious and slam clickbait channels with "do not recommend"

What are your issues with Youtube? I think it's amazing. There are so many people making so much good, varied content.

Here's my workflow: Daily, my server runs a script that calls yt-dlp to download a text file list of channels and custom searches, strips out the ads and uses SponsorBlock to strip the sponsor segments. Then it repackages it into an XML podcast feed. My phone has an app, Downcast, that pulls these videos like a podcast and plays them offline.

Oh, I'm also running an Invidious instance for one-off searches/views. It also strips ads and sponsor segments, but obviously can't work offline.

  1. Most creators produce trash for clicks, gaming the algo etc. There are some good, serious ones though, not denying that.

  2. All the buffering lately.

  3. My Firefox addon works sporadically now.

Interesting methods... Might try that out later!

Google was able to lose $2 billion a year on YouTube for over a decade. Additionally Google tweaks search results to favour YT over other platforms. Also it's integrated with Google's ad sales so any competitor needs to come up with an entire ad tech stack to compete.

Rumble is an alternative video hosting site but it's clearly behind YT tech wise. They are having success hosing rightish content that YT throttles to hell. Also they have two ongoing lawsuits against Alphabet for their business practices around YT.

It's very obvious that Rumble has to settle for a lower quality of advertiser.

Google was able to lose $2 billion a year on YouTube for over a decade. Additionally Google tweaks search results to favour YT over other platforms. Also it's integrated with Google's ad sales so any competitor needs to come up with an entire ad tech stack to compete.

I would assume those two things are connected. People always point YouTube being run at a loss as a reason why no competitor will appear. But I wouldn't be suprised if it was the case that YouTube is effectively just a loss leader for Google (I mean "Alphabet"). YouTube is such an incredibly effective data harvesting tool that would improve the value dramatically of Google's other services and products.

YouTube also likely has huge administrative bloat, as the Twitter firings demonstrated was the case for Twitter.

Replace YouTube here with any of the major tech platforms; Netflix, Amazon Prime (only their digital catalog. Put aside physical goods from Amazon for a moment), the rest of the Google services (Gmail, Google meet), Zoom etc.

It all comes back to the infrastructure underpinning it and cost. The memory/compute/storage cost alone for these runs into 100s of millions to 10s of billions annually. Add on the management complexity on top and it's not possible for a competitor to emerge. A better investment would literally be a nuclear power station.

This is the problem at the root of decentralized web product ideas. The only way to compete is to actually play a different game; decentralization. We can never "trust" that an infra provider or a platform built on top of it will ever actually play nice indefinitely. Maybe you get an Elon Musk type willing to pony up $10 bn of his or her own money to build the alternative but then - "die a hero or live long enough to become the villain." How long before the management executives of that company decide to start charging or running ads or walling off users own data?

The chicken and egg problem, however, is user adoption and friction. Any actually decentralized web applications (take IPFS for instance) requires technical ability that - while actually pretty simple - only exists in, maybe, 5% of users? Now, add on the fact that for 99.9% of users it isn't actually solving a functional problem, but a half philosophical one. Nobody is complaining that there's "no easy and low cost place to host videos on the internet!" Sure, general homepage YT is dogshit, but people shrug it off because being fed pop culture content (and being happy with it) is as old as the radio.

The internet isn't dead, it's better than it has ever been. But the low-friction, easy to use internet is mindless garbage much like the low-friction, easy to use television was before it. I'll admit that the ubiquity of internet slop is at a whole new level of maddening - the experience of using a cell phone for any sort of activity beyond comms (text, calls) is now a net negative to overall life satisfaction. The browser setup to enjoy surfin' the net! (as the kids say) is non-trivial. Social media is literally brain cancer, and most political news is never ending rage-jaculation. Ours is a culture of hyper-abundance where the key is self-moderation, not maximal self-indulgence.

I guess what I'm saying is the true competitor to YouTube is touching grass and leafing through the pages of a physical book. I'm being like ... fucking deep here, Bro.

I was mainly just yelling at a cloud but I got some informative answers here.

Somehow, it seems like most people like the slop that's produced?

I truly don't understand why one would consume like, 90% of popular YouTube content. To the point where people who extravagantly complain about the ads confuse me, because I'm just like ok stop using it?

But clearly there's a market for Mr Beast to the point where his chocolate bars wind up at the local grocery store? So there must be millions of people out there who like stuff so totally orthogonal to what I consume on YouTube that of course the stuff I consume is going to be kinda hidden.

Somehow, it seems like most people like the slop that's produced?

I think it's less a case of 'this person likes this thing' and more a case of 'This person is used to this thing and not pissed off enough to switch yet'.
And the initial adoption window was because 'everyone is doing it'.

Because YouTube is the default search engine for video and the only competitor is literally Google.

nobody uses vimeo or dailymotion! youtube is the defacto standard!

Hosting billions of videos is expensive. Most companies can't turn that into something actually profitable. It's debatable if Google even is getting anything nearly worth its investment.

Network effects leading to strong winner-take-all dynamics, same as every other social media site. If you want people to see your video you upload it to Youtube because that's where people are looking, and if you want to watch a video chances are it's on Youtube because that's where people upload videos.

Compare to Amazon Web Services - sure AWS is expensive to run and benefits from economies of scale and so on, but there's still plenty of alternatives, especially if you're just planning to host a website. That's because of the far lesser network effects, users don't need to use a new browser or even a new URL if you switch hosting providers. At no point are they having to choose between the Amazon internet and the DigitalOcean internet, HTTP works the same regardless. In a world where discovering and watching videos was site-agnostic it wouldn't matter (perhaps where the dominant way to watch internet videos was a third-party application or a search engine which searched and suggested videos in the same way that Youtube does via some standardized protocol), but in the real world the network effects for a video site are strong. That's why all the big social media sites offer different things, overcoming network effects requires strong differentiation otherwise you're just like the biggest site in your niche but worse because of less content and less audience. Even on the rare occasion where an incumbent is overcome by a newcomer in the same niche (which was probably easier when the sheer number of users was less) they don't evenly divide the market between them, rather the newcomer reaches a tipping point where it benefits from the network effect instead and takes over, like Reddit and Digg or Facebook and MySpace.

I really enjoyed the latest Starship test flight.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=lFkqZF-Ss7o&t=6250s

It's fairly widely accepted that the most difficult and most experimental parts of what SpaceX is hoping to accomplish are the re-entry and landing of the orbital vehicle, so actually demonstrating the ability to complete those tasks (albeit imperfectly) is a big step forward. Also high up on the difficulty scale is a precision landing of the booster, and while we don't know if it landed with the necessary precision, demonstrating the capability to do the soft landing on the booster is also a big step forward.

ETA: Given this is the second flight to put Starship into a suborbital trajectory with orbital velocity, I would recommend @ArjinFerman get his checkbook ready.

I did notice they're making progress between launches a while ago, so the checkbook has long been ready. I doubt I'm wrong about my broader point about SpaceX collapsing, and the revolutionary impact of reusability being a house of cards.

...

how much maintenance was required between those flights, and how much did that maintenance cost?

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The nuclear salt-water rocket propulsion that would give them range to Pluto and back one tank fairly fast are doable

"When Chernobyl reached peak x power during its explosion it was about 350 gigawatts for a fraction of a second. This is 700 gigawatts continuously, right, it's a non-stop Chernobyl going on."

are doable

Well, maybe? For obvious reasons we'll never get the EPA to approve a ground test, and I'd be a bit leery about LEO too, which leaves us just hoping that Zubrin's paper was solid.

Of course, the 66 km/s exhaust version was his conservative design; the really speculative version upgrades the uranium enrichment level from "20%" to "weapons grade" and bumps up the yield, to get the delta-V to a few percent of the speed of light. YOLO, right?

Either way, while I'm generally a big fan of the SpaceX "get hardware flying so if it breaks you learn more faster" strategy, I think I'd be cool with taking things more slowly before assembling a 200,000 megaton hopefully-not-a-bomb in orbit.

...

Musk claims that for them, refurbishment cost is ~10% of mfg cost of a booster. If you have a gigabrain theory how it's actually not cheap and SpaceX is borrowing money to sell launches at an artificially low price, I'd surely love to hear about it.

Naw, just looking for numbers to sanity-check the claim of reusability. 10% refurbishment sounds like extremely good savings.

I think we're going to need to build some things off-planet before battleships are worth having to defend those things, but I'm definately rooting for Musk on this one.

I feel like "Impressive" is a motte-and-bailey. Musk regularly makes entire series of predictions and promises, and people give him an amount of praise I'd consider valid, if he actually managed to fulfill said promises. But since he hasn't we retreat to acting like the things he accomplished are what earned him the amount of praise he's getting. I heard, on several occasions that "rapid reusability" means rockets turned around as fast, and as often as airplanes. When I see that, I'll be writing my apology letter to Daddy Musk.

I guess I fundamentally disagree with this view because it's anti-aspirational. The aspirational goal is aircraft-like rapid reuse, and yes, that goal has not been achieved. But the actual accomplishment of slightly-less-rapidly reusable boosters good for at least tens of flights is still way more than anyone else has achieved, worthy of great praise, and should not be diminished! I'd much rather over-praise a company that delivers on 25% of its extremely aspirational goals than one that delivers 90% of unambitious goals.

What would convince you otherwise? You've already rejected lower prices as evidence in favor of a conspiracy theory about price dumping, and rejected the apparent conclusions of NASA and DOD inspectors who get inside access to the books to verify the business health for government awards eligibility.

Time. If this goes on for the coming years, and investors are satisfied with whatever they're getting out of SpaceX, that will prove me wrong about Elon's unsustainability. If they go on to build a moon base, like they're contracted to, that will BTFO everything I said, and I will write a massive self-flagellating apology. If they pull of Mars, I'll go on one of those Catholic pilgrimage hiking trails, and actually self-flagellate, as an act of contrition for ever doubting daddy Elon.

It went all the way up and down with a soft splash landing, even though the thermal protection failed to the point that the aerodynamic control services were melting.

The video of the melting flaps is wild.

In addition to what @NewCharlesInCharge wrote, both stages made a soft landing despite some of the engines failing to ignite.

Also, I'm old enough to be amazed by a livestream from a bloody rocket blasting into space. The part where it punches through the clouds and Earth is suddenly small and receding is just great.

...

It stood out from the first launch (IFT-1) because that was nearly a total disaster: 3 (out of 33) booster engines failed immediately (then 2 more on the way up), and it practically crawled off the pad, which also failed and flung giant chunks of concrete far enough to hit ocean. If a few more engines had failed sooner we might have seen one of the biggest non-nuclear explosions in history. 4 minutes later (at only 29km up and 2100m/s) we did see a pretty big explosion, when they lost control before stage separation and had to terminate the whole flight, and even the termination didn't work properly, with the termination explosive damage taking half a minute to finish off a vehicle it should have wrecked in seconds.

It stood out from the second launch because it actually got the upper stage and booster into their planned trajectories after separation. In IFT-2, right after separation the booster was supposed to boost back towards a site closer offshore (for a controlled splashdown, practice for future returns to launch site), but LOX filters had some kind of blockage, 6 (out of 11) of the restarted booster engines started rapidly failing, and they had to blow it up instead. The upper stage made it almost to their target trajectory, started dumping excess LOX as planned ... and that interacted with a leak, started an engine bay fire, shut down the engines, and triggered another termination. At least all the explosives worked properly that time.

It stood out from the third launch because it actually brought both stages back to splashdown. In IFT-3 the boostback worked, but then the booster was having trouble with control during the descent and then with propellant for the landing burn, so instead of a controlled "landing" on the ocean they got an explosion half a kilometer up. Then, the "orbital" (actually very slightly suborbital, specifically as a fallback for what happened next) insertion worked ... except that their attitude control thrusters froze up. So they got to do their free fall experiments in space, but when it came time to reenter they were slowly spinning, and entered sideways instead of heat-shield-first.

I'm a die-hard SpaceX fan (for reasons discussed here), so take my opinion with a grain of salt too, but I'm excited about an excellent splashdown this time with the booster, and more importantly IMHO they just passed the hardest test in the whole program: getting the largest reentry vehicle in human history to decelerate from orbital velocity while still intact and (albeit barely, this time!) fully operable.

Hell, in honor of the Starship 29 Flap, let's push that "passed the test" metaphor to work far past the point it should have been expected to give up: SpaceX only passed their Advanced Launch Vehicles test with a low D-minus this time, and also the exam paper is kinda charred from where it accidentally caught fire right as they were finishing it, but that D-minus beats their 40% last time, 20% the time before that, and 5% the time before that, and whereas such failure would make other advanced students drop out, SpaceX seems determined to just keep retaking the damn test until they've got the same "A++ and extra credit and they corrected one of the professor's mistakes" they eventually reached on the Intermediate Launch Vehicles test with Falcon 9. And that's a big deal, because so far they're the only ones yet to even pass the Intermediate Launch Vehicles test. Space Shuttle got a low pass from the Teaching Assistant (NASA) but failed when the professor (physics) checked their work more carefully. Almost everybody else elected to only take Basic Launch Vehicles, on the theory that that was all you needed to earn a living, which was true once but is becoming more obsolete each year. The exceptions were a few poor students long ago who failed to scrape up the tuition, one rich student who is having to repeatedly audit the class until they find enough time to get ready for the preliminary exams, and a couple young students who seem pretty smart but either aren't ready to test quite yet or are still mastering the Basic test.

The reentry of the Starship through Earth's atmosphere was the fun part. Skip to the two hour and thirty minute mark of orthoxerox's linked video.

Opinions on different WW2 era rifles?

I have a vague aspiration to collect bolt actions from each of the major powers. This was derailed recently when I saw a good deal on a Swiss K31. Now I need to find a better limiting principle.

If you don't already have one, CMP Garand, yesterday. Sometimes they have carbines, and you need one of those too.

Other than that, if you're into turn of the century bolt-actions, I'd suggest a P17 Enfield (so you can still get ammunition for it), a Lebel/Berthier (if you feel like hunting down 8 Lebel) or MAS-36 (components for 7.5 French are a lot more available), a K31, a Carcano (they go on sale every President's Day but you need the right .268 projectiles or you'll need a second shooter- get one of the 17.7" barrel ones or even one in 7.35 though ammunition for that is even rarer), a Type 38 Arisaka (but if you get a long Carcano get a Type 44 instead), a K98, and a Mosin. That should cover all of the great powers (cheating a bit with England, but the P17 is just a P14 in a better cartridge anyway; if you need to fill that niche and already have a P17, get a No. 1, as the No. 4 is just a P17 with a 10 round mag and in a worse caliber- conversely, if you already have an '03 Springfield, then you'll want a P14 or No. 4) and also give you some variety in the collection.

For non-US semi-autos, I'd suggest a PPS-43 (or an SKS), an AG-42, and a MAS-49 (yeah, I know, but they would have fielded it if MAS wasn't busy- if that doesn't count, then SVT-40).

After that, as far as I know you're into the 2000+ dollar range with everything else that's interesting (i.e. the German semi-autos, RSC1917, etc.) so at that point it's just going to come down to what you like shooting more at the time. But 2000 dollars could buy a lot of great power pistols, and the order you should collect those is Steyr-Hahn 1912 (or Frommer-Stop), M1935 (A or S), Webley, M1917 (S&W or Colt, pick the one you don't already own), TT-33, Nambu, P38 (mainly because the Beretta 92 is the exact same gun). C96es fetch a really high price so they also don't make this list and you probably have a 1911 already anyway.

I’ve got a handsome (but postwar) Garand and a misbehaving carbine. Love them to death.

My Lee-Enfield is already a No. 4, I’m afraid. PPU makes .303 ammo at tolerable prices, so…I’ll manage. If I ever see a P14/P17 around, I’ll be very tempted.

And you’re of course correct about the 1911. I hadn’t even considered the other mentioned pistols. This will keep me busy for a while.

…are you serious about the President’s Day thing? That’s the kind of humor I can get behind.

Yeah, they did it.

I tried to go for "pistols that are still relatively unique in the grand scheme of things"; the Steyr-Hahn is clip-fed (and the "ejects all the rounds into your face if you press the 'slide release'" one), M1935s (well, one of them, can't remember which) are stupidly-accurate proto-P210s in a caliber that you can actually get/make now, the Webleys are top-break revolvers, the M1917s shoot .45ACP from moon clips, the Tokarev is a Colt 1903 firing lighter projectiles at ~1500 FPS, and Nambus are... uh, pretty weird. It's unfortunate that the weird German designs are as expensive as they are, because the P38 is pedestrian by comparison even though it is the successor to the C96 with that locking block design.

Come to think of it, does the No. 4 still do the thing the No. 1s do where you can slingshot the safety off when the rifle's cocked? I've never seen anyone ever talk about either rifle having that function (which to my knowledge no other rifle does).

Yup, it’s got the cool little lever safety by your thumb. I’m told you can break something in the firing group if you engage it after the bolt has been removed. Maybe that’s why it didn’t catch on?

CMP garands are still available? I thought the whole thing was pretty much done after the Obama regime made a point of not cooperating with them any more.
Didn't they destroy M1s rather than give them to the CMP? There was a huge lawsuit over it.

Yes, they're still available.

...

I agree that WW2 self loaders are amazing. They’re also either more expensive or flooded with Chinese knockoffs.

Though I did see a guy who’d built his own alternate-universe Stg from AR parts. Shit was crazy.

...

That is exactly what it was.

No idea why he wanted to do it, but apparently a lot of the machining was his own work, so I had to give him credit for effort.

If you just extend your grasp to include 'straight pull battle rifles' you just need to add Swiss, Austrian + a Ross as I recall -- Rosses are really neat and go cheap because Bubba was told that they will eject the bolt in your face. (not particularly true)

because Bubba was told that they will eject the bolt in your face

Translation: they will eject the bolt into your face if you're stupid like Bubba.

I have one and Bubba would have to be not only stupid but also extremely strong and violent to get the bolt assembled wrong... so, yeah, possible I guess.

Opinions on different WW2 era rifles?

cackles in way-too-autistic-about-guns

The Garand is neat, the SVT-40 is cooler and I would argue a better rifle (fight me), the G/K.43 is interesting but ultimately a poor design, the G.41 is a terrible design, the No. 1 Mk. 3 is gorgeous but ultimately a mediocre rifle as is the No. 4 Mk. 1, the K.98 is nice but it has been dramatically overhyped by fanboys, the M91/30 Mosin is a piece of shit but I love it dearly, the M1886/M93 Lebel is a very cool rifle that I wish more people didn't know about so I could buy one for less than $1000, the Berthier does not interest me in the slightest, the MAS-36 has ugly metalwork but works like a champ, Arisakas are interesting solely because their action is so unbelievably fucking strong, and I have absolutely no opinion on the million fucking Carcano variants other than to say that Italian WW2 rifles hold absolutely zero interest for me.

If you're interested in starting a collection on the cheap I recommend going back in time to 2004. Otherwise, prepare to spend a lot of money.

the SVT-40 is cooler and I would argue a better rifle (fight me)

Fine: its trigger is significantly worse, its magazines aren't really interchangeable and its stripper clips are slower and more awkward to use, and its sights are far worse. Barrel's also too thin to get good accuracy without upwards pressure at the muzzle (which is also something sporterized No. 1s have problems with: the Garand has stocking problems too, but not to this degree, and there's less of an unsupported hole in the stock due to its internal magazine which would prove to be a problem in M14s) so inferior Soviet worksmanship (and even more inferior refurbishment) has severe consequences. Also, it cracks at the tang unless you have the heavier AVT-40 stock on it.

the G/K.43 is interesting but ultimately a poor design

Well, aside from its gas system, which is totally coincidentally lifted wholesale from the SVT-40. Shame its default settings beat the gun to death, not that it was a concern for the Germans at the time.

Its an absolutely achievable goal. The market for mil surp from that era has not been great over the last 20 years but has improved in the last 5 or so from my observations. A lot of it is boomers dying and none of their kids want dad's arsenal. The big auction sites regularly get estate collections. There have been a few that have been so large they are comprise the entire auctions. The common stuff should be easy to find; prices are a different story but trending in a good direction at the more recent auctions I've browsed. The rare variants and low volume productions runs are where you really start to burn though cash.

Here's a fun video of a popular auction site owner reviewing a particularly juicy estate from a couple of years ago. This is just the handguns too! https://youtube.com/watch?v=JRjB8LA6vMQ

Watching RoaringKitty's livestream right now. This is crazy, on multiple levels. This is his first time ever live streaming, and he's got half a million people watching him, with something like half a billion in potential value open right now (fluctuating wildly by the second).

I think this will be the end of him though. He's out of his element, or at least not ready for this level of exposure. He was brilliant at reddit and twitter, but he looks like a clown on stream. Gamestop is going to tank, and that will tank his reputation along with it.

edit (12:38 EST time): if you're watching this now, my advice is sell sell sell GME. it's at 33 right now, going down as he talks.

For those not following along, we last saw Reddit user deep_fucking_value (hereby referred to as DFV) in 2021, testifying to Congress that he is "not a cat". He came out looking like a boss, and made the geriatrics in Congress look like clowns. Then he rode off into the sunset with a portfolio worth about $30 million. A nice story. They even made a movie about it.

Act II.

"You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain".

Suddenly, a couple weeks ago, there is a spike in options activity. A gamma squeeze is afoot. The price of GME starts to awaken from its slumber. Then, what's this, DFV reappears on Twitter! He posts this.

The market reacts to this hugely bullish sign and the price of Gamestonk doubles nearly instantly. But it gets better. A few days later, DFV comes back to Reddit where he posts his portfolio: $200 million in $GME stock and options.

Wait, you ask. I thought he had $30 million. How'd he get $200 million?

To me, it seems obvious that he bought far out of the money GME calls, then posted on Twitter to pump the stock, then closed those positions for others. The alternative: that he 7x'd his money in 3 years seems unlikely. Naturally, he hasn't posted his trade logs so we can only speculate.

In my opinion, DFV should have stayed out of the spotlight. As a "regular person", not an insider, I think there's a good chance he ends up in jail.

As for $GME, I really hope the stock does get to the moon someday. It's too much fun. Full disclosure: I own 40 shares of $GME. Direct registered of course.

"To me, it seems obvious that he bought far out of the money GME calls, then posted on Twitter to pump the stock, then closed those positions for others. The alternative: that he 7x'd his money in 3 years seems unlikely. Naturally, he hasn't posted his trade logs so we can only speculate.

In my opinion, DFV should have stayed out of the spotlight. As a "regular person", not an insider, I think there's a good chance he ends up in jail."

Agreed. The original boom was a nice story- average* Joe (not really that average, he was a CFA and a registered securities broker, but he wasn't rich) finds a massively undervalued stock, puts all his money into it, tells the world, and a bunch of average people make money. Great story.

This though- this just seems like market manipulation. There's no fundamental analysis going on, it's just pure speculation and market manipulation. People tuned into his live stream hoping to get some transparency, but he didn't give that at all, just some crazy rambling and dumb memes. At this point he's doing market manipulation aimed at teenagers and crazy desparate people.

I've been making a lot of money selling far out of the money calls against it whenever the price bubbles. I'll take the easy money but I feel bad for the idiots losing their life savings in this.

I've been making a lot of money selling far out of the money calls against it whenever the price bubbles.

Don't you have to own (many) shares of GameStonk to do that? (My understanding of options trading is quite limited.)

You would think so! But no. If you have a margin account and enough capital, you can sell them "naked" without owning the shares. Basically the broker just thinks "eh he's good for it" and will let you do whatever you want. In this case it's been eye opening... the shares are "not available to short" but there was no problem selling options. Options really are the tail that wags the dog, in this kind of market.

It's been said a few times that our rejection of supernatural stories has left young people without the kinds of cautionary tales that used to transmit some amount of wisdom.

Maybe Keith Gill can be the modern world's Icarus.

Who?

AKA deep_fucking_value, the guy who started the frenzy on gamestop stock.

He was brilliant at reddit and twitter, but he looks like a clown on stream.

He literally covered himself in bandaids, put on a fake cast, and played a "flatline" sound effect in the background. If he looks like a clown, I think that was on purpose.

I agree that was his goal but... he just wasn't that funny? Like I said before he just lacked any charisma as a live streamer. More importantly: I don't think people were looking to him for jokes. The "joke" is the money involved, particularly for people who have invested their life savings. What they wanted was some confirmation that this is real, some sort of smart financial insight like he had originally. Not just dumb memes- anyone can do that.

Live internet stock trading technology is awesome. When I was a kid this kind of pyramid scheme relied on snail mail, and you couldn't even buy on margin; the only way to cheat even more was to bump your name higher up the chain letter list.

I think some of the downturn was gamestop taking advantage of the high prices to sell some stock themselves and make a few billion.

Aight. I'm moderately serious about getting back into shape before I get shipped out, but also unwilling to fork out the exorbitant rates any of the nearby gyms are asking for a short subscription.

So far, I've been doing push-ups regularly, but I'm on the lookout for other exercises I can do with just my sizeable body weight and random furniture. Also at my disposal, a set of 10 kilo dumbells that have somehow lost the restraining nuts, so they'll have to be taped into place. Anyone got suggestions above and beyond what YT or reddit might throw at me?

Define "in shape" for your purposes.

Beyond bodyweight stuff or improvised equipment; running is free.

The problem is, I'm not fond in the least of running, especially in the tropical heat, and believe me I've given it a very good go in the past.

For me, in shape means having a significantly more defined upper body, with particular emphasis on the shoulders, biceps and forearms, though the last seem to be hard to build from calisthenics alone, not that I'd say it's impossible. My legs are fine, running about in the hospital is good for that much at least.

This advice may not be helpful, but I hated running for decades before a bit of advice got me running daily: go for endurance, not speed or distance. Just set a timer to 9 minutes and commit to running for that 9 minutes, at whatever speed is necessary to make it the full 9. Jog as slow as you need to, just don't stop. Then walk back.

It really worked for me: I'm amazed at how much my endurance has grown. This from a guy who previously labelled running as his least favorite form of exercise.

What you need is some kind of pull up bar. With a place to do pull ups and a place to do dips, download Jeff Cavalier's ab app and you can build a great upper body.

https://www.hybridcalisthenics.com/programs for body weight exercises tailored to what your current level is, from "elderly person recovering from a fall and can barely get off the floor" to "one arm pullups and one leg squats."

Thank you. I'm hopeful I can start of a tad bit ahead of the "I've fallen, and can't get up" stage, but one arm pull-ups are a mile away haha.

https://youtube.com/@bodyweightmuscle

Best gains I had was applying this consistently.

Looks right up my alley, I'll give him a look, thanks!

Beyond what YT and Reddit throw at you? No, the lack of information is not the problem, the overabundance of it is.

Do squats and find a pull-up bar.

No, the lack of information is not the problem, the overabundance of it is.

That and insistence on "You absolutely MUST do these extraneous things in addition to the few exercises required to actually get into better shape".


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