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Notes -
Let’s assume you’re a car mechanic. You love your job, even though it is dirty, hot and physically straining. You go through a bookshop, and stumble over one book in particular: “Why being a car mechanic is great”. It explains the importance of the job for society, it talks about the perks, and so on. You look up the guy who wrote it and yep, he runs a car shop. You buy the book and recommend it to many of your friends, maybe even some teens who might consider the path.
Fast forward, the writer is on some talkshow. Somebody asks him how he handles all the grease. He reacts, uh no, of course he doesn’t get greasy, that’s his staff. He just really likes talking with customers. Maybe he does one car once in a while, if the work isn’t too hard and the car is really nice.
I can’t help but think this after reading Scott’s latest book review of “Selfish reasons to have more kids”. No, we don’t have nannies and housekeepers. In fact, almost nobody we know has them. Some have a cleaning lady coming … once per week, for an hour or so. Tbh, this significantly lowered my opinion of both Scott and Caplan. If you want a vision of a more fertile, sustainable future for the general population, it should not involve having your own personal staff. Two hours is nothing.
And I find this especially frustrating since I think it’s really not necessary; Yes having small kids is really exhausting - after putting the kids to bed around 8-9, my personal routine is to clean the house for two hours until 10-11 every day, and then directly go to bed with maybe an audiobook on (but often I’m too tired for even that, and enjoy falling to sleep directly) - but it’s doable, and the older the kids are, the less work they are, at least in terms of man-hours. The worst is usually over after around 3 yo. And the time before that in the afternoon can be a lot of fun.
At least for me, one of the biggest draws of kids is that it’s, to use poetic terms, “a glimpse of the infinite” that is available for everyone. Everyone wants to leave something behind, political activism is sold on making a change, careers are sold on becoming a (girl-)boss managing others. Yet, the perceptive (or, less charitably, those capable of basic arithmetic) will notice that only a tiny sliver of the population can ever cause the kind of innovation that really changes culture, or who can come into positions of substantial power over others.
Kids, however, everyone can have them. And they really are their own little person (especially my stubborn little bastards). And they will have kids as well, who will also carry forward some part of yourself. I’m not just talking genetics here, though that is a large part, the same will go for how you raise them. Unless you leave that to the nannies, I guess, but that’s your own fault.
I wouldn’t have written this since it’s mostly venting tbh, but I’ve seen some here mentioning wanting to discuss it, so I thought may as well start. What do you think?
Thanks for linking the article, it was largely a good review of a book I'd otherwise not have read anyways.
While Scott is a bit out of touch here, I can't say it really affects my opinion of him all that much. While most folks don't have nannies, many definitely do, and I think you'll find that most people with nannies are upper quartile income but not necessarily swimming in money. I'm close with someone who nannied all through her master's program, and so far as I've heard, nannying mostly selects for dual income families that value their free time more than savings and early retirement (same folks also seem to go on multiple vacations a year, sometimes with kids, sometimes without).
As far as commonality, it seems to be about 1 in 8 households with under 3's in California: https://cscce.berkeley.edu/publications/report/parent-preferences-in-family-friend-neighbor-and-nanny-care/
I'd imagine the rates are lower elsewhere in the US.
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Just a heads up, there's a new thread. You should post over there ;D
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If you're asking about the legacy of having children, then it seems like
is hopelessly diluted somewhere after your grandchildren. How many people today remember seeing their great-grandfather, or at least hearing anecdotes and stories about him from their parents and grandparents that stuck? As for genetics, even if we assume that each person's genetic code is one of a kind and unique, that's only half of what makes you unique in your son, 1/4th in your grandson, 1/8th in your great-grandson and so on, on average. As it stands, the parts of the genome that make your great-grandson like you are entirely indistinguishable from the same parts that millions others have.
Compare that with numerous small things that someone with an audience of 10 to 100 said or made at some point of your life that you still remember. Those are people who had more impact on your life than your genetic progenitor.
If objective, lasting legacy is the goal, I find having children to be one of the least efficient ways to do it, for a commoner. As for biological drives, those are equally satisfied whether you hire a nanny or not.
Having 4 people with 1/4 of your genome is objectively better than just being one person because of the risk dilution (Nevermind that I don't plan to have so few grandkids).
On the second, my experience has been the opposite. A few big actors - often rather general memes than really the particular mouthpieces making the actual statements - are imo the winners on the cultural influence market. By far one of the worst places to invest in unless you're extremely confident.
That's assuming I consider my genome myself in terms of risks. If you could fill a sector of the universe with indestructible inscriptions of your full genome, memories, personality etc., would you consider your life immortalized enough to keel over and die immediately after? I would not.
And sure, the top 100 recommended channels on youtube or tiktok dominate most of memespace of most people, but not all of it.
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Same as you: https://www.themotte.org/post/1913/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/327871?context=8#context
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Bryan Caplan is a name I've heard off and on in rationalist adjacent spaces and with Scott's recent review of one of Caplan’s books, I decided to actually take a look at his blog.
I was very surprised to see that he is an anarcho-capitalist: something that is very much unexpected in an academic economist. He acknowledges this in his blog, where he bemoans the left-wing focus on market failures rather than on market achievement. I probably agree with him on 90-95% of his positions, though I would have a different relative rank in the importance of those positions.
Of course, this being the internet, I won't spend any time on our many agreements but will instead focus on what I perceive to be his biggest shortcoming. Despite his expertise in a social science, he seems to think of society in abstractions: certainly a requirement for good economic modeling, but one that should always be grounded in reality. While possibly tongue in cheek, his statement that "it is humanity, not my arguments, that is flawed" does seem to reflect his mentality.
Exhibit A: Immigration and UAE
Caplan extols the virtues of the UAE, calling their mass-immigration a model for Western nations. And indeed, millions of Indians and billions of oil dollars have created a gleaming technical paradise. But as Caplan notes, UAE "immigration" is not the same as Western immigration. Only native Arabs have citizenship and enjoy the (extensive) welfare that oil money can afford.
The UAE understands that you can have mass immigration or a welfare state, but you cannot have both. They also are not squeamish about transactional relationships with imported labor, which makes the UAE's approach a complete non-starter in the West. No Western nation could import hundreds of millions of (mostly brown) labor, pay them "market wages", and refuse to provide citizenship and a social safety net. Even hard-core anarcho-libertarians would find the parallels with slavery uncomfortable.
The irony is that while the UAE does not have the human capital in either its native or foreign population as most Western countries, the West wastes its superior human capital on regulations, bureaucracy, and virtue signaling while the UAE just builds. Perhaps it is not "humanity" that is flawed, but just Western elites.
Regardless, the UAE's path is not sustainable. The native elite live off natural resources and imported labor rather than their own ingenuity and effort. There is no improvement in human capital, only a descent (slowed perhaps by the prohibitions of Islam) into hedonism. Copying their approach will neuter the unique ambition of the American spirit and accelerate our destruction.
Exhibit B: Immigration and Culture
Caplan implicitly downplays the negative aspect of migration on culture and social cohesion. Most immigrants will look, smell, act, and often vote differently than the "native" population. At scale, assimilation simply won't happen. Even with current immigration in the US there are sufficient numbers of Indians and Chinese to create clannish sub-cultures within the US. Caplan clearly thinks that we can still retain (and even improve) our high standard of living despite mass immigration, but this begs the question why high living standards don't already exist in India or China. Is it lack of physical capital? Is it human capital? Or could it be culture? (Obviously, all three have some impact). Given that capital is attracted towards the highest returns, it seems likely that a lack of human capital or a culture not conducive towards economic flourishing has to be a major cause for the lower living standard. If this is the case, there would be a decrease in the quality of life for the typical resident if third-worlders are imported en-masse.
At one point Caplan hints that indeed that may be the case when he points out that the fictional dystopia of Blade Runner is actually an improvement on modern-day India. This may not be the rock-solid argument he thinks it is. I want my children to enjoy a better life than I have today, not a better life than what a typical Indian has today.
In a guest post (which does not imply Caplan's endorsement), the "worst" neighborhood in Japan is visited. It is still safe and relatively clean. The writer implies that the US can model urban policy off Japan’s success. But again, this ignores the cultural aspect. Japan has a culture of order and cleanliness (and xenophobia). If Japan imported even 5 million Brazilians the "worst" neighborhood in Japan would look quite different.
Again, Caplan misses the "human" aspect of economics.
Exhibit C: Trade Deficit and Geopolitics
Caplan is either ambivalent or in favor of a trade deficit. Caplan posits the idea that the trade deficit could be the result, not the cause, of financial inflows. Rather than a trade deficit resulting in foreign nations having excess dollars that they then spend on US investment, US securities are in such high demand that foreign nations raise the value of the dollar, causing foreign goods to be relatively cheap and leading to a trade deficit. If this argument is correct, then one would expect any economically vibrant and pro-growth country to have a trade deficit. The trade deficit indicates that the US economy and regulatory regime is more conducive to growth.
Yet much like with the UAE, Caplan doesn't seem to grasp the human side of this equation. He assumes economic output is "value free". A service-oriented economy begets a pampered paper-pusher bureaucracy, while the relocation of former blue-collar work to "higher-value" labor hasn't happened at scale. The service economy erodes the will and ability to actually build in the physical world, while the dearth of blue-collar work has led to zombie communities addicted to handouts and opiates. A country should choose to focus industrial policy on broad outcomes including domestic production. Any economy needs direction lest it degenerate. The invisible hand of the market finds local maxima, but it takes vision to push the hand towards a global maxima.
Since Caplan has a tendency to see everything through the lens of economics, he minimizes the geopolitical implications of US policy. We are in the middle of a great geopolitical reset in which protectionist policy plays a key part. The Trump administration has given up Europe as lost. The US is now competing for influence in areas where China has traditionally dominated (including the Arab states that Caplan extols). The remnants of the Bretton-woods post-war international order is being shattered. This is the main takeaway from tariff and trade policy, not the myopic economic impact.
A recommendation
Despite my criticisms, I'm glad that there is an anarcho-capitalist whose ideas have purchase in the rationalist community. A very positive change I've observed over the last decade is the steady increase in liberals acknowledging the benefit of the market and the harm of overregulation, and Caplan’s work has contributed to this change. I would like to see Caplan have even more impact.
Caplan correctly notes that the market forces good policy even where that policy has bad optics, while politicians pursue bad policy that has good optics. This provides a potential key to seeing his (good) economic ideas actually gain purchase: fight the battles that you can actually win. There is much political will to create energy abundance (natural gas and nuclear in particular) and to address NIMBYist red tape; once we are allowed to build, other "good" policies (such as mass labor importation) may become more politically viable. Indeed, even in the UAE plentiful energy preceded plentiful immigration.
I think Caplan's biggest miss is actually on theory of mind. He is a very conscientious and non-neurotic individual. The idea of mental illness seems basically incomprehensible to him. He accepts that these people exist, but his personal interactions with them are heavily minimized because he is good at cutting them out of his life.
He lives in immigrant heavy Northern Virginia. He is aware of and happy with many cultural changes that happen due to immigration. He can go in depth on crime statistics with people, and the take-away is that immigrants are relatively low-crime compared to native born Americans. They sometimes look high crime because young men are high crime, and immigrants also skew towards young men. Any objection you think you have about immigration that Caplan has not answered, he has certainly heard and answered.
One last thing I'd add, he is much more of a microeconomics professor than a macro one. I consider that a huge plus, because macro is voodoo stats BS.
I wonder if he's ever ridden the Fairfax Connector buses and found himself the only English-speaking person there. I suppose he would not feel, as I do, like an outsider - an endangered species - in what was once my own country.
I guess I'm just a xenophobe by nature. Whether this qualifies as a mental illness, a personality defect, or just a neutral personality trait depends on your outlook. The Redditors of /r/nova would certainly consider it either of the first two.
I had a chance to go and get lunch with him one time. The spot he picked was inside an Asian grocery store at a food court with multiple different Asian restaurants. We were the only white people. He is also a passable Spanish speaker, his twin sons are fluent. So I don't think the experience would particularly bother him.
As Owlify points out, humans are tribal. So I don't think you are particularly unique or different in having that outlook. Its just that once tribes get big enough you have to choose where to draw your tribal lines. Race is a common thing to pick. Others pick based on country affiliation. Some pick on state or city. Some still stick to what is literally their tribe, like close family and or neighbors (this is how I pick). Some pick along ideological lines, like "all communists are my tribe". Others pick religion. Etc etc.
I don't think most people reason themselves into the tribal lines they choose, so they often can't be reasoned out of them either. I'm certainly that way.
There's also the factor that I'm old enough to remember when Fairfax County was 98% native-English-speaking white, and I've always possessed the ingrained mindset that "the way things were as I first remember them, is the way they ought to be forever."
Maybe it's a form of autism; I don't know.
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Humans are tribalist by nature.
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Asserting he has heard and answered every critique on immigration is not accurate so long as he is not distinguishing between population groups within the US. Further than that, there's a good reason why he and those like him focus on immigration into the US and not immigration into the EU.
Contrary to the lies of convenience told by Caplan, there is plenty of high quality data in the EU on immigration that could certainly have made it into his many articles and book. It's only that the alleged immigration benefits do not live up to the hype and can only be maintained through statistical sleight of hand, like counting the children of immigrants as native and playing fast and loose with population groups. And even then there are OECD countries that post flat out negative numbers.
Caplan is not a serious person.
He has published a regular book, a comic book, multiple blog posts, done multiple podcasts on the topic, been in multiple public debates, and has lectured on this topic in his University classes for two decades.
I think you just disagree with him so you want to call him non-serious.
And I think you just agree with him so you want to venerate him.
A serious person would contend with the obvious and hard objections to the proposed policy. Caplan has never done that. In fact, his advocacy is a perfect example of non-serious thinking. Divorced from reality and extrapolated from fiction. A fiction partially maintained by institutions that you allege lend Caplan credibility.
I mean, you're not going to debate anyone in a public setting that points out that, outside of East-Asia and Europe, almost every single immigrant population group that moves into EU countries is a net negative. That seems like kind of a big deal. But no, Caplan is a serious thinker who writes books, blogs, does podcasts, has lectured at a university for 20 years and never interacts with any of it. Just create a magic category called 'Immigrant' and compare it to a magic category called 'American Native' and voila.
I'd acknowledge any of the people that caplan has debated with on immigration as "serious". I'd acknowledge anyone that has written a book or academic paper on the subject as "serious". Regardless of their viewpoints.
Are you "serious" about immigration? Is anyone by your standards?
When people curtail their viewpoint diversity to be within the Overton Window and then ignore obvious blindspots to legitimate contradiction then no, they are not serious. Regardless of how much they work and waffle within those parameters.
There is an entire cottage industry of academics and media that exists for little other than venerating immigration. There can exist no serious thought within that sphere when alternatives are functionally verboten. The people who exist within this sphere without acknowledging just how ridiculous the entire thing is are not serious.
Are you "serious" about immigration?
Is anyone by your standards? Is Emil Kirkegaard serious?
I honestly don't even know what you mean by the word anymore other than "if they acknowledge my objections are correct and completely agree with me". Now that I know that is what you meant, I withdraw any objections to calling Caplan "not serious".
I've spent a few paragraphs voicing exactly what my problems are. Whatever it is you are doing now, including antagonistically mischaracterizing what I write, should be beneath you. I can just as well assert that the only reason you are here is because you agree with Caplan and that your fixation on the word "serious" is the only in you have to play defense, irrelevant though it might be. But that would be a tad low brow and fruitless.
To answer your question about who is serious:
Insofar as people present reasons for why they believe things, they can be held to that standard. I gave examples where Caplan is actively ignoring contradictory information. Be that human differences between population groups or economic data from outside the US. Because Caplan is ignoring information pertinent to his own standard he can not be considered serious.
By the same token a leftist open borders moralizer is serious. They don't need to pretend that their advocacy has any locally positive economic benefits based on statistical extrapolations and human behavior. They just assert that people fleeing a country need refuge and that there is a moral duty to provide shelter. They can volunteer their time and effort to solidify the fact they actually believe this, but the argument is ultimately just moral.
I wrote this for you, but to me, these distinctions are largely irrelevant to the topic at hand. My point was about Caplan. He was presented by you and others as being something he is not. I did not argue that point by asserting that he is not serious so I don't see the relevance about some universally applicable definition of the word.
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Quite revelant is his official position for mental illness. I don't even entirely disagree with it - I think some people definitely actually just prefer some really odd things - but as someone who does struggle with addictive behaviour somewhat, I think he is missing a large part of the picture. The mind imo should not be modelled as a singular thing, and just because one part of you wants to compel you to do specific things, that does not mean that the rest really wants that. For a trivial example, if you have some malfunction that makes your stomach constantly sent extreme, starving hunger signals, so that you can't think straight unless you eat constantly in a way that is very unhealthy, it is not at all unlike being forced to do someones bidding through painful beatings. Your consciousness is certainly very strongly influenced, but not identical, with your body and it turns out your own body can violate the NAP if it wants to.
On immigration, he is probably right in aggregate for the US, especially since you don't have such a generous welfare system. But the situation is quite different in the EU, and my experience is that furthermore there is often a pick and choose attitude for academics on immigration - it's easy for them to insulate themselves from negative externalities in a way that is not possible for the average citizen, while enjoying the benefits.
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I'm also a Bryan Caplan fan. I really like his arguments against education, his arguments for having more kids, and, more recently, his arguments against feminism. I also like his thoughts on living as a contrarian in a conformist world; I would have benefited A LOT from reading those when I was younger, and it makes me feel a deep sense of kinship with him. And I enjoy the way he applies economic reasoning everywhere. He's a must-read for any rationalist, in the same tier as Richard Feynman, Carl Sagan, or Richard Dawkins.
The biggest disagreement I have with him is open borders. I mean, I can kind of see it if you are an universalist utilitarian who thinks everyone has equal value, but I still can't understand how he possibly thinks norms and institutions like strong property rights, non-nepotism, etc. would survive. But that's OK, every great thinker is guaranteed to have at least one idea you strongly disagree with, because the kind of mind that looks for heresies in one area looks for heresies everywhere. I can disagree with Caplan about immigration just like I disagree with Scott about polyamory or disagree with the Dreaded Jim about anime. Rule thinkers in, not out.
I like Caplan, but I also detest him. For Caplan, all the soft glue that holds a polity together are mostly irrational, tribal instincts. I strongly disagree with this.
"I don’t love you, Nationalism. I don’t even like you. I don’t want 'patriotic solidarity' with you. I want you to leave me alone." - Caplan, 2014
What would be the fair wage to risk your life for Billion Man USA Inc. in a time of mobilization? War is a contingency, not a state of being, but it's a major contingency that blobs of organized territory filled with people need to plan for. It'd be one thing if this was just a blind spot, but from what I gather Caplan sees limited value in most things that make a blob of territory a nation with civilization to be called home. He is mostly happy he doesn't have to be around the people that fill the nation he shares his ideas in.
I'm not in love with nationalism either, but one doesn't need to be in love with it to understand its place. It's not only
being wrongdisagreeing about open borders that makes me write that I detest him a little. I get the sense that if shit hit the fan, for whatever reason, then Caplan would plainly buy the first ticket out. Why stay in a place on a downturn? Why not be selfish?Even, or especially, Billion Man USA Inc. would require more from its populous than productivity. That's not something Caplan is prepared to share despite advocating for it. Noblesse oblige is not optional, Dr. Caplan!
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I think he is sort of viewing everything from 500 feet as though every person acts a as a perfect automaton blindly acting exactly like every other person as a perfectly rational being. TBH I find the same flaws in most theoretical constructions— they ignore that humans are not little Spock’s running about perfectly enacting logical self interest. It also tends to elide the degree to which relationships between people and groups of people tends to totally change how people perceive their self interest and make choices.
The entire conversation about feminism and anti-feminism falls apart if you introduced a single wrinkle— humans tend to form these crazy things called families. And thus a lot of “rights” type arguments don’t work because every right asserted on one member of a family without imposing either a constriction or duty on someone else in that family. So if you say “well, women shouldn’t have to do all the housework, the cooking, the cleaning, the child care, because she is equal to the man,” you immediately have a problem because somebody has to do that stuff. So now you’re putting this on the other adult in the relationship— the man. But then he claps back with his own rights claims “why should I have to do all this? Why is it my job to do the laundry?” She wants to have a career, but someone else has to support her to make that happen. If one person could get a huge promotion by uprooting and moving to New York, you either move everyone or you don’t.
These simple mistakes always floor me because they’re pretty obvious. It’s not possible to ignore the individual choices, nor possible to ignore the relationships between people that inform those choices. The entire edifice is built on two lies — first the notion of an individual without tastes and preferences that don’t lead directly to maximizing utility on every axis, and second the idea that every man exists by himself with no relation to others around him. They’re both absurd. Humans have cultures that shape their preferences, and they have relationships with other people, not just families, but communities, cultures, political systems, and so on.
Even with regard to education, I think he’s right — in America especially, because the expense of college has made it that way. We have a fairly unique relationship with college. I’d argue we’ve basically turned it into a very expensive career casino in which you bet 4-5 years of your life and hundreds of thousands of dollars (over the course of the loan) on the chance that a given combination of the right school, major, activities, internships, and GPA will grant you a middle class career. And really a lot of his (correct) understanding of education works best in the American system where the entire point of our college system is to get a credential, get a job, and never think about that stuff again. In that context, attending Yale courses, but not getting the credentials is a waste of time and money. But if we’re talking about aristocratic students who for various reasons don’t need college specifically to get a job after college, they aren’t looking at college in the same way. They’d see the education part as more important as a way to impress people, as a sign of prestige, or a way to find a spouse. They would read the readings they are interested in, and maybe wouldn’t care as much about the diploma. Attending a lecture at Yale is much more intrinsically valuable when the diploma doesn’t matter.
Again, the context matters in how this stuff happens in the real world. If you want people to choose the education over the diploma, you need to make the education cheap and the diploma matter less.
This no longer works, and has not for generations. A man making such a complaint -- or worse, pointing out that as the main (or sole) source of external income, he's doing a lot for the household already -- by doing so proves himself a boor and probably a wifebeater. That has been part of the influence of feminism on culture; a man is obligated to do his share of everything, and his share is whatever the woman says it is.
Oh hey, yet another opportunity to make a "my wife" post. Here I go.
My wife, who naturally is a feminist, is occasionally reasonable, but often keeps snapping back to this position. Subsequently, anything that I do not do, whether it involves parenting, household, paperwork or "mental work" or "emotional labor" or whatever the latest pop-sci terminology is, is a failing on my part. I should be doing everything, so that she is free to pursue her dreams and therapies so that she can become the breadwinner by becoming a well-selling author of books or some other pipe-dream. My working a decently-paying white-collar job while expecting her to pull her weight is me chaining us to a less-than-perfect state in which we cannot fulfill our true potential. As long as she is not given a little paradise to exist in, free of cares, anything is an imposition upon her and I am falling short.
Doesn't matter whether I do all the earning, all the driving, any task that involves leaving the house, part-time parenting on regular days and full-day parenting on weekends (if I fall asleep by mid-Sunday, she graciously takes over by plopping our daughter down in front of the TV). That's par for the course. That's just taken for granted. What kind of man would I be to do any less, or to expect gratitude for this? OTOH, if she can't be assed to set an alarm clock and considers playing video games for a full day adequate compensation for having cooked a meal, then well, she's just aware of her needs and limitations, I cannot possibly demand more of her, don't I know she has anxieties and panic attacks and slept poorly and had a bellyache from eating a full meal and sweets at midnight. By the way, I didn't remember to do the laundry yesterday and went to bed immediately after our daughter fell asleep instead of being available for couple time, so I am the asshole.
Disclaimer: My wife also has her good days sometimes, but those would get in the way of a good wifepost rant. Maybe I should try to quantify this kind of stuff.
was she like that when you married her?
I guess so.
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I think there's a growing, albeit loose, awareness that's slowly spreading leftward that to a considerable extent, some of these "female burdens" are actually self-imposed rather than a systemic plot against them. I'd tentatively call it fifth-wave feminism, but I don't know if it would develop enough to earn the title. There would be a kind of interesting circular symmetry, though. I personally think it makes more sense to shift the waves a little earlier than they are traditionally defined, which defines the "4th wave" as distinct from the 3rd, starting maybe 2010? This is all US-specific:
Proto-feminism (1700s-1850): The sphere of influence of the woman expands within the home and traditional spaces, gaining greater influence over education and child-rearing, but also moral leadership
First Wave feminism (1850-1920): Suffrage and expanding political and legal rights as people, fuller participants across society, and increasing job access
Second Wave feminism (1943-1980): "women's liberation", sexual revolution, pushback against gender roles especially traditional ones, equal legal rights across the system
Third Wave feminism (1990-2010): push for full equality in more than name only, less sexism and harassment at all society levels, more individualistic expression, greater job access, and intersectionality with race
Fourth Wave feminism (2010-present): push for absolute parity in all fronts, more full integration of LGBTQ issues, focus on smaller but systemic oppressions, #MeToo, and consent.
Fifth Wave feminism (2030-45?): re-claiming of certain traditional feminist roles and preferences, more private and interpersonally oriented, praise of archetypes, and conscious rejection of parity goals
As to how that would affect men, hard to say. I am skeptical that outright men's rights movements would meaningfully develop, but there could be a traditionalist faction that grows alongside fifth-wave feminism. Think the growth of less politically active men-only clubs and associations as social media reaches epidemic/oversaturation levels and people look for a counter-movement. Like, both genders playing up their traditional strengths rather than trying to make up for their own weaknesses, which seems to be the fourth-wave attitude. I'd note that the fourth wave somewhat devalues gender entirely, ironically, partly due to the incorporation of nonbinary and trans stuff - and I think that's what might set the stage for a fifth wave that kind of echoes the proto-feminist Wave Zero.
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I tried this one weird trick called "going to church" and through that met a hot girl in her 20s (I was mid-late 30s) who was excited about homemaking and being a mother. Rolls her eyes at the word 'feminism'. More people should try it.
Her take is that I'm already working hard to support us and she's obviously biologically/psychologically better-suited to making babies and cleaning the house. Why would she expect that of me?
My mom taught me to never buy a household/kitchen appliance as a gift for a woman, as that would somehow be denigrating. But for Christmas I bought my wife the snazzy new vacuum cleaner she'd had her eye on and she just loves the thing to pieces. Vacuums the house twice a day.
Turns out women can be really happy to be women, and act as the natural compliment to men, when no one raises them to hate the idea. Our next baby is due any day now and I'm working hard to expand my business to more than cover all the new expenses that will bring. I can do this because she supports me as I support her. I come home to a clean (and pleasant-smelling) house, good food, thriving children, and usually a decent massage before bed. Really takes the stress of the day out of me before I fall asleep. Getting up the next day and rocking hard comes easy.
Meanwhile, last night, I was hanging out with a mixed crowd when a lonely, bitter, circa 35-year old woman I've been acquainted with for several years -- has a professional career and a house -- was crowing about some article she'd read regarding how men are feeling bad about 'falling behind' economically. The satisfaction in her voice was palpable.
Teach your children well.
Just saying, look! Turning away from Christianity has been a social disaster on a scale previously impossible to imagine. I'd rather be single than try to date a secular woman. Meanwhile the landscape is dotted with little islands of sanity where men, women, and families are still quietly humming along in harmony and deep cohesion. Isn't the protocol obvious?
........nice.
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How does it work for those who don't have a business?
Don't want to be glib here. It's a serious question, I have a lot of sympathy, and wish to treat it (and you) with respect.
I can't imagine not having a business. When I was younger I worked some corporate jobs and found them soul-crushing. Not just for all the obvious reasons, but also because of the total disconnect between effort and reward. Working for myself I never know how much I'll make in a year -- and that's a good thing!
I know exceedingly few people who are making 'real' money (>$200k/year) except that they have their own businesses. Those few tend to be high-level FAANG engineers. The rest are tradesmen or some other kind of independent contractor. This makes sense. The purpose of a company is to generate profit for the owners. Ergo, unless you're an owner, you will be paid the precise minimum amount the management thinks possible, and will always be vulnerable to getting replaced or otherwise eliminated. The people paying you have many incentives to do that. Never mind the psychic burden of constantly having to play their asinine games to try to avoid the chopping block.
"Just go start a business lol" isn't helpful advice. But the fact remains that small (even personal) businesses have comparatively massive potential upside. If you find the right niche for yourself, every day is suddenly a golden opportunity for advancement. It's a much better way to live, at least IME. I recall reading somewhere that self-employed people are 1) much more stressed and 2) much happier.
Especially in the coming era of AI agents, finding any skill that you can sell independently is going to be worth looking into.
Beyond that it's hard to give advice. There are already many people in my life, whom I know well and care about, for whom I'm always trying to solve this problem. Brothers, friends, etc. Owning my business is high-status but working for me isn't, so I get in a weird bind with trying to give them a leg up. My profit margins are insane and I can generally pay favored people several times the going rate, but am reluctant to do so because that just gets them stuck in a position of dependence upon me which is not the goal.
Perhaps the only real encouragement I can offer is that I've never known anyone who was set on going independent who didn't ultimately make it one way or another. In many ways it feels to me like becoming an adult, striking out on your own, learning hard lessons, and ultimately reaching a sort of maturity.
This was certainly the case for me. I'm the typical 'dropped out of school to start a business' bro, and as is typical that business burned down, fell over, and sank into the swamp. But, yes, the fourth one stayed up.
If you want to pursue it, there are plenty of resources for small business education and usually some pretty good local networks. Online 'entrepreneurial' spaces are generally full of blowhards and grifters but sometimes yield good information.
I wish you all the best.
Thanks for the well wishes, but my question was not a veiled request for personal life advice, as I've already noted downthread. I'm meant it quite literally: you must be aware that even if all people were capable, they could not all have businesses. (Disregarding weird economical models where everyone is their own boss but also has a side job where they work for someone else). So, how does your advice to go full Christian provider husband for a homemaker 10 years your junior work for those who are not so financially independent and stable? How much credit can those "little islands of sanity" really give to Christianity, and how much do they owe to being, simply put, rich?
There's a separate question of the self-honesty of converting, but that's a separate question.
The idea that both parents working makes a huge financial difference is overblown IMO. I read somewhere that something like 80% of the 'extra' income a second working spouse brings gets lost amidst taxes, additional expenses related to commuting, outsourcing domestic labor, and so on. Is the remainder really worth giving up all the wonderful things that come with having a stay at home spouse? We get to raise our own kids, eat fresh, healthy meals, live in a clean house, and so on. What's that worth?
To your point, most of the families in our parish (which is heavily blue collar) seem to struggle financially to maintain this lifestyle. In some cases mom works part or even full-time, but especially given the exorbitant cost of childcare (and the deplorable state of the schools) this is generally seen as something to be avoided if possible. It's simply a question of priorities. And, since the women are generally not working, they help each other out a lot with childcare and so on. It's truly a joy to walk into a home and find women sitting around a table chattering and having fun while preparing a meal, while kids zip in and out.
Almost every (secular) couple I can think of where both partners work full-time could easily downsize a bit and be much happier, imo. The main hangup is often (as in the case of my sister) that women have been so psy-opped into thinking this is low-status that they can't be at peace with it. This is monstrous and the people responsible should pay. As to my sister, she openly complains about how much she hates her job, misses her kids, and pays for daycare, but explicitly refuses to quit because she wants to set a 'good feminist example' for her daughters, who seem to spend most of their time on iPads and in front of the TV while eating junk food because both parents are so burned out all the time.
One I'd be really happy to field.
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Start one.
100% dead serious.
Plenty of good info on the written internet (not YouTube) about starting a side hustle, gradually growing it, and then taking plunge while also managing your primary career for the few years you need to incubate.
With LLMs, it's never been easier to rapidly experiment with digital products and software.
You misunderstand. I'm not asking for advice on my own life. I'm asking how TitaniumButterfly's picture of idyllic newly-converted affluent Christian life translates to those who are not already ahead in life.
This reminds me of the instagram Orthodox who are selling a picture of "harmony" in their country villa with their handmade cheese or whatever.
But if you do want to talk about me, then I'll tell you I don't see myself experiencing a genuine retvrn to faith any time soon, whether I become a stable business owner or not, and even if I went to church to pick me up a homely wife, I would still not call myself a Christian in the privacy of my own mind.
I think @TitaniumButterfly's post covers all the important points for people who don't have a business as well.
I dont understand your middle paragraph about the Orthodox and handmade cheese?
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Except for the babies part, sounds like a just-so-story that is perhaps applicable to some couples but is not generally applicable and probably not majority. The higher-IQ shape-rotator is better at most of the activities involved in organizing and cleaning the house than the wordcel. To the extent it is true that males have better spatial IQ or are successful males from the male longer right high-Q tail, they are also better at cleaning the house (unless they are from low-IQ tail that goes lower than women, but who brags about that?).
If dad is better compensated at work, stay-at-home mom has kinda the comparative advantage at division of labor, doing larger share of housework as she is staying-at-home. However, it is arrangement very specific to time and place and income distributions, and the evospych explanations are not super believable. The arrangement "the ancients" were most psychologically suited for according to their revealed preferences was "servants do it" when they were rich enough to obtain servants -- this evohistorical imperative would guide that wife should enough to earn income if you can get more servants, with preference for work she can do working at home watching over the servants and kids (until you have enough reliable servants who can take care of kids full time).
It is worth noting that in the specific context of current day and time 21st century West, men who claim they are not "psychologically suited" to pick after themselves are overrepresented among undesirable demographics. Making it a rule that everyone in the house participates in homemaking is a good way to countersignal membership in the conscientious, desirable parts of Western culture, including teaching the sons that Mom (and any sisters) are not their servants.
Shape-rotator vs wordcel is not the relevant comparison here. You can make a living as either one (e.g. engineer vs lawyer) and while women are almost never shape-rotators, all the top wordcels are men as well.
The biggest difference is thing-oriented vs people-oriented. Remember, "Kinder, Küche, Kirche". Keeping house by cooking and cleaning is only about a third of what a housewife is supposed to do. She is also supposed to raise the children, which is something women are much more suited to as they are naturally much more soft and nurturing. And she is expected to be in charge of managing the family's social life, which is again very likely her comparative advantage because women are much more people-oriented than men.
Men who will effortlessly memorize every detail of the Roman empire will struggle to remember their friends' birthdays. Housewives are the social glue that holds communities together. They are the ones who send greetings, schedule visits, organize parties, matchmake singles. Little wonder we are so atomized, with their numbers thinning.
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Is your wife's role in the family actually complimentary to you or simply a lower station? Because it seems to me like if you swapped positions, you could do her job perfectly well (minus the pregnancy bit), but she'd have no idea how to run your business.
I suppose that your relationship might be described as harmonious compared to alternatives, but you and other trad types have to own the fact that (edit: modern) homemaking is a low status occupation and that many women won't be happy with that.
Both.
I don't want to divulge too much personal info here but she was making six figures in finance when I met her and graduated very high in her class from a fairly prestigious school (for the West Coast). She does help run my business. Personally I don't have much patience for jumping through hoops but she loves it and can do it all day. Also handles a lot of the bookkeeping.
It is honestly adorable to me that you think this is a problem for us. We're not watching mainstream TV (which is blatantly satanic), we're not listening to mainstream music (which is blatantly satanic), our kids don't get phones until they're basically adults, and most importantly of all, the women in our parish do not care in the slightest what mainstream culture considers low-status. Have you seen mainstream culture? Everyone there is miserable. They think 'community' means fandom. They have kids out of wedlock, don't get married, and when they do, they get divorced. The men and women are utter failures as men and women and don't seem to have a single clue as to what either of those words even means. They murder babies and mutilate their children into grim parodies of the opposite sex. Why on earth would we care about their opinions? Who takes life advice from someone who's climbing into a suicide pod? And you think we look silly, backwards, and ignorant.
Magic happens when young people grow up worried about what Christ thinks instead of what the imaginary people on TV might think.
Where would one find this ”blatantly satanic” mainstream music?
Asking for a friend,
Lil Nas X slides down a stripper pole to hell and gives the devil a lapdance. And somehow that's not the weirdest part of the music video
[Edited and expanded below]
You could make an argument that the above Lil Nas X reference is just this generations version of freaking out the squares. Didn't Black Sabbath do that back in the 60s and 70s? But they didn't mean it. Hell, IIRC, Alice Cooper is a notorious evangelical but was still performing stage shows that featured simulated decapitation. What's all the fuss about?
The level one reply is that, as the Lil Nas X video shows, there's this weird hyper-fetish-sexualization present that wasn't before. Multiple grammy performances in the past ten years can be legitimately called non-nude strip shows. Kaye pulled that weird stunt earlier this year with his ... wife?
But that's level one stuff. Let's go deeper.
Here are some of the lyrics to a song entitled "Kill Yourself (Part III)" by a group calling themselves "SuicideBoys":
(Are you sensing a theme already?)
This is profound nihlism and misanthropy.
SuicideBoys are most popular with younger Gen-Z. These people are essentially still in childhood and they're listening to triple-dense messages of "kill yourself." That's the satanism - creating such a feeling of despair precisely in the group of people who should be the most energetically hopeful.
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Great for you, legitimately. It sounds like you have a good thing going for both of you, and I don't mean to denigrate your particular situation, whatever it may be. I was more trying to use your framing to make a broader point.
Mainstream culture has nothing to do with the point I'm making here.
Some things are more or less valuable by their very nature, including labor roles. Hard work and simple living will always have its place, but the moneychangers will have theirs too, and they'll always be more individually valuable and materially better off than the salt of the earth types. When status corresponds with practical value (as it has to greater or lesser degrees in every society on Earth), more valuable work = more status.
I posit that modern housewives are less essential to the functioning of the household than they've ever been, and that this reduction in utility has resulted in a concomitant reduction in status. Women's work has been declining in utility ever since the transition to agriculture, but the trend became turbocharged with the Industrial Revolution; it's no coincidence that feminism began in earnest in the mid-1800s. This status reduction can be moderated with religiosity (as in your case), but not negated. This is why we cannot simply "RETVRN" — not without adaptation, anyways. I have my own ideas about how to manage this on a societal scale, but I'm glad that you've made it work for you.
Thanks, yes, it's a happy way to be. (Also props for preserving the formatting in the quote.)
Right, yes, I see your point now. One of the great, uh, anti-innovations of trad life is that women aren't competing with men for status. They certainly wish to display their worth before marriage, which is why mine has a degree, but after that she gets to check out of the status wars except in that we're functioning as a unit and rise together. The whole concept of women competing with men is toxic and imo a losing game for all involved.
Disagree with the first part and will break it down into a few subsections.
Modern education is generally garbage and homeschooling is king. Exceedingly difficult to accomplish without one stay at home parent. Men are almost always better-suited to earn, so it makes sense for this to be the woman.
Modern childcare is also about as bad as it is unaffordable. Especially if you have multiple small children. My wife takes the kids to the park, does projects with them, reads, etc. This is vastly better than sitting in front of a TV all day eating processed snacks, which seems to be the norm in daycares.
For food, you can pick any two of 'healthy, delicious, both people have jobs'. I'd like to put 'affordable' in there but we spend >$2k/month on expensive hippy foods so I'm really not one to talk. But for example as I type this she's bringing me water, making tea the way I like, and then will make a green smoothie for both of us. I could pay for the latter two, but they wouldn't be as good and they'd probably be shockingly expensive if there are even comparable options out there.
Maintaining a household doesn't take anywhere near as much labor as it used to but this just enables maintaining much higher standards of cleanliness and pleasantness. Especially when we add in the gardening, animals, etc. Again all this could be outsourced but probably would cost a great deal for much less impressive results.
In summary, there's a whole level of lifestyle available with a non-working wife that simply can't be attained any other way. This lifestyle is high-status. When women living this way are concerned about status, they're comparing themselves to their counterparts, not to men. Who's house is better put-together? Whose kids are excelling? What do meals and family time look like? Much healthier.
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What people value is culture specific in many cases. Jobs didn’t really become aspirational until the median white male was working an office job. Women didn’t clamor to work in factories, they were quite content with minor teaching and nursing roles and being the occasional secretary. At this point they chose to work. Having a wife who didn’t work up to that point was a status symbol as it meant you earned enough to not need a second income.
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While it's true that he could almost certainly do all the actual tasks, it's very likely that he couldn't do it happily, without becoming bored and alienated, which is actually quite rare and valuable. Assuming, of course, that his description is accurate.
Have you read the recent ACX post about Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids? I want to have a top level post about it, but haven't thought of anything interesting to say for that. I enjoy Scott's honesty about being an introverted professional writer with twin babies and a wife who's probably something like him, and very much not a Christian twenty-something who's happy about vacuuming. His wife is apparently staying with the kids, but he feels guilty (presumably she's overwhelmed, not happily keeping a clean house and warm meals), and hires a nanny. Even with the nanny and wife at home, they are still overwhelmed.
Scott:
Which is just such a funny exchange.
Neither Scott nor Caplan sound like they could successfully do the non childbearing parts of Mrs. TitaniumButterfly's work.
Yeah. I read it and my reaction was pretty much the same kind of loss-for-words exasperation I feel when my wife tells me that I cannot possibly have expectations of her, don't I know she has excuses? Why, Scott, you have a stay-at-home wife, two kids, a nanny, several friendly families living in the same block, and then you feel a need to also hire two babysitters on top of all that? Yeah, taking care of kids is exhausting. No shit, Scott - did you think getting kids at age 40 wouldn't be taxing? Two of them at the same time to boot. And still, his complaints in the face of that many resources thrown at the problem smells of...I don't know what to call it without throwing out schoolyard insults like "sissy" or "pussy". Methinks Scott complaineth overmuch. Or maybe I'm just jealous of his "privilege", be that wealth or whatnot, regardless of whether it's earned or otherwise.
Man, I work full-time and then I parent all the rest of the time except for maybe about two hours after getting my daughter to sleep. If Scott's numbers are correct, then I put in more parenting time than his stay-at-home wife. Which isn't to say that I'm the better man; far from it, my life is a mess. But seriously. They're doing something very wrong if the two of them can't hack it without hiring an entire fireteam of helpers.
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That was truly ridiculous. Scott makes enough money that his wife can afford to stay at home and be a homemaker, plus he works from home himself so he is available to help out when necessary, and he still feels the need to hire her a nanny. What exactly is she bringing to the marriage besides her uterus? It can't be pussy, because Scott is asexual. At this rate, he would have been better off just paying a surrogate and going at it as a single father.
Many people don't have such a transactional view of marriage, and are happy to do their best to make each other comfortable and happy. It makes a lot of sense to me to have boring household chores be delegated to someone else rather than waste your life doing them if you can afford to do so.
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I don't suppose you think he wants the child to have a mother?
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I spend a lot of time around hippies where the women are into archaic revival stuff. They love to pick fruit and can it, do sewing and quilts, cook every meal at home, make candles, split firewood, stoke the fire in the wood stove, let a man slaughter but then pluck and butcher chickens, tend hens for eggs, pick up raw milk, worry 100x too much about recycling, run a homebrew kit, etc
(Ironically, the only thing that they don't bring back is washboard laundry. Washing machines are totally cool with hippies)
Anyway, housewifery was actually really fucking hard? Pretty sure the average modern man would have a nervous breakdown if they had to be a 17th century housewife.
It's a lot easier than it used to be but the level that women think on if they own housewifing is certainly something I feel like a tourist in and would be shitty at no matter how much a feminist dad I wanted to be.
I suppose average modern anybody who has not the habit doing it and everyone's life truly would depend on it. Agriculture tasks that requires upper body strength are equally* hard and nervewracking, which is what the men would have been doing. On the other hand, house that would do well enough would employ servants.
Also, near all the the stuff you list sounds secondary. I remember reading that majority of 17th century woman's time would have gone to clothes and textiles, and not the "fun crafts" parts like quilting. Spinning is boring, and you'd have to do it for all textiles in the household.
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It was. Let's assume you're still a farmer's wife with livestock and a gaggle of children to care for. The big changes are:
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I know some women who are like that as well, and can see the appeal. You can use the greywater from the washing machine for the orchard, if you're into that kind of thing.
Those are mostly creative, social kinds of hobbies that are fun to do with children once they aren't absolute babies. I was homeschooled, and basically did 4-H instead of middle school, so we were always keeping animals, sewing, quilting, making fancy leather projects, and so on. My family uses a wood stove for heat, and we have a dead fruit tree that at some point we need to chop and split for firewood, which we plan to do ourselves. My housemate used to do home-brew stuff, and it looked like fun, I would definitely consider it.
But also, those are things men also participate in, more than cleaning, probably because they're more interesting than cleaning. It's extremely hard to keep things clean in a truly equal house with children, where nobody is extremely conscientious. My parents' house is very bad in that way, but many home crafts have been made there.
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That's true, a lot of archaic household tasks require true skill and specialization such that they're legitimately complimentary to men's work; I don't mean to diss actual traditional housekeeping. The problem is that we're living in the 21st century, and you can't meaningfully specialize into vacuuming and Crock-Pot operation.
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Sure, it's possible that women have some temperamental lean towards homemaking, but I haven't seen any rigorous establishment of that premise. By my informal observation, you don't see a broad movement of stay-at-home dads complaining about having to be around their kids and do chores all day, and in any case the actual complexity of the work (and thus its associated status) is still low.
They don't, necessarily. But if TitaniumButterfly says he found one who does, and is excited to get a vacuum for Christmas, I guess I'll go with that story for her, specifically. I do not personally know any women like that. I've known several with mothers who drilled the necessity of housekeeping into them and are neurotic and angry but effective about household things, but that isn't the same thing.
Yeah, because people would tell them to get a job and put their kids in childcare. Which is also what they mostly say to women who complain about it. Or get a nanny, in some social circles.
In the sense that she's doing the job of one and a half nannies plus a maid, that is correct, that is lower social status than running a business.
But plenty of higher status people would suck doing lower status work. It is complementary but unequal.
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My point is that it like a lot of things are often the result of sloppy thinking. Yes in today’s culture it’s boorish to bring up the unequal division of labor, however humans have lived for thousands of years with numerous such relationships and duties often explicitly defined for each role. They tended to be at least theoretically reciprocal I owe my husband a clean house and a hot meal, he owes me money for the house, protection, and so on. The same would be true of lord and peasant. You work, I will protect the realm and see to the stability of the fiefdom. Or teacher to student, boss to worker. This worked up until we decided that individuals could assert rights without any context of place in wider society. I think it’s a wrong framework because it ignores all the ways we are not atomized individuals without context in wider society.
Your wife isn’t just any old woman, she’s your particular wife with whom you have a long relationship and possibly children. Those children are not random children, they are your children. So when she doesn’t want to do laundry, it’s in the context of your personal relationship, not any other relationship. Naked assertions of rights don’t make sense in that context and it’s really only thought of this way in the modern era.
I think that there's this ahistorical idea floating around about history that the norm is a massively unequal division of labor in one direction or another (either women are overworked and saddled with all sorts of extra stuff due to oppression, or they are locked away and unable to do meaningful work due to oppression), but I think part of this is largely an artifact of how history is largely written by some kind of "noble" class. For the vast majority of people in history, both men and women work very very hard at a wide variety of tasks, because frankly, life has been tough for humans for virtually all of recorded history. You can't afford to be idle, man or woman. There was, like, one weird period in American history in the decades after WW2 where prosperity was weirdly high, tech developments made a noticeable dent in work levels, and so work responsibilities along with labor demand got kind of out of whack. Along with bad history, this had a massive and outsized impact on how people think about division of labor, with some second wave feminist influence mixed in there too. So yes, sloppy thinking to put it bluntly, but also a real and understandable phenomenon. As just one example, the invention of the washing machine and even the vacuum had an absolutely massive impact on housework. I'm not exaggerating - there are only so many hours in the week, and all clothes then and now need to be washed so often; the washing machine alone saved they estimate like 8 or more hours per week, by itself. All this to say that while I wouldn't quite go so far as to call caring about housework division of labor a luxury belief, the fundamental calculus behind division of labor is in a historically weird spot in current-day developed nations even before you get into the belief systems involved.
It wasn’t much of a secret. They wrote it all down. You can read all kinds of writings about various divisions of labor and social roles. We no longer read the stuff but it’s not hard to find. Confucius is pretty specific about the five relationships, and what the role is supposed to be doing. So is the Bible.
I still hold that decontextualizing relationships creates a lot of the problems. It’s weird to think of actual human relationships as though there’s an underlying contract and someone is getting a bad deal. A relationship is between people, and if both do as they are supposed to do, it works even if it looks unequal on paper.
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Note also that, as far as the 20th (and so far, the 21st) century is concerned, I believe there's a strong argument to be made that that noble class is women in general.
Oppression is their origin myth, much like defeating Hitler was for Western powers in general.
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I always see this line of thinking being bandied about, often about Dubai in particular, but it just isn't my experience.
I see an elite that's desperately trying everything they can to not rely on oil revenue, making massive bordering on insane investments in technology and infrastructure.
You could say this line about the Saudis, but the Emiratis? They've purposely build the most diversified economy of the region. They've been reaching for literally every single trick they can use to not rely on oil, from banking, to gaming, to diplomacy, to even colonization.
Oil is still a fourth of the GDP at the end of the day (down from a third in 06), but man I wish my elites were lazy like that.
The simplest way I can describe the problem is that they're elites trying to build the roof of a great house before the foundation and the walls: creating a future of which their own descendents will not be able to sustain. They're trying to move forward while looking back, trapped in islamist trappings: wealth without modernity. Impossible, like driving a car by looking through the rearview window. Regression to the mean is inevitable.
No middle eastern countries except perhaps Iran and Turkey have the native human capital to sustain a competitive modern economy. If I were them I would rather copy the Emiratis and bootstrap my development by importing foreign talent and becoming a financial hub than simply coasting on oil money until it runs out. At least the former would have a slightly higher chance of durably improving the living standards of my people.
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Is your contention that one needs a native erudite population that's somewhat locked to the land to have a sustainable industrial economy?
(not OP but)
In a nutshell, yes, this is my understanding.
An initially-poor but erudite population—or more precisely, one with bourgeois values and at least enough erudition to succeed in the world of commerce—without any particular ties to the land can pick up stakes and succeed as a “market-dominant minority” somewhere less shithole-y so long as that place has a semblance of property rights and rule of law (cf. assimilated Ashkenazim in Europe before the Holocaust and in the northeastern US for most of the 20th century; Lebanese in Mexico; Indians in East Africa; Chinese in Southeast Asia)
But these peoples are middlemen, arbitrageurs, rootless symbol-manipulators par excellence. I say this as someone whose own parents immigrated to the West from South Asia in pursuit of precisely this sort of opportunity. That’s not to say these peoples provide no economic value—they obviously do, else they wouldn’t get rich under mercantile capitalism—but you don’t see advanced manufacturing or even agriculture above subsistence level coming from a people who lack a deep, abiding attachment to the very soil where their fathers died, or the soil for which they shed blood in the hopes of securing its bounty to their kinfolk and their descendants, forever and ever.
How would you then compare the UAE to, say, Singapore?
I am no expert on Singapore in particular, but the vibe I get is that most of Singapore’s success comes from its position as Southeast Asia’s financial hub, which itself is partly a gift of geography (much like the UAE’s oil, really) and partly due to the aforementioned property rights, rule of law, and Sinosphere-descended culture of hard work and education.
I am not aware that Singapore is at all a hotspot of advanced indigenous industry/manufacturing. A decent number of multinationals have a Singapore office, typically for Asia-Pacific sales or finance—as I said, Singapore is the financial hub of Southeast Asia—but I’m only aware of a couple with any engineering or product development presence in Singapore. Both are FAANGs/software shops (software being a perfect fit for symbol-manipulator types, naturally) which are (in)famous for using the Singapore office as a staging area for Indian and Chinese engineers while finessing the American immigration system for H-1B visas.
Nor do I know of any homegrown Singaporean companies that have become globe-striding household names, a la Samsung, Sony, or TSMC (the latter, I suppose, being a household name only in the nerdiest of houses)
They do all kinds of things, plus there's Singapore Airlines like how the UAE has Emirates as their airline.
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I think expecting a city-state to have the same sort of industrial manufacturing capacity as nations 4 to 20 times its size is a bit unfair. It's precisely for this reason that Singapore, and Hong Kong before it, intentionally specialized in finance and not in building cars or integrated circuits. The UAE is in a similar position and has chosen the same path. Perhaps being a bank is in some moral sense inferior to being a factory, but if the choices are between that and remaining poor I know what I'd pick.
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Singapore has a pretty large chemical refinery business, although the plants are operated by multinationals.
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Let me state the contrapositive: no nation has ever succeeded by being built and operated by foreigners. Those foreigners either become like you (ideally) or your country collapses from the contradiction of misaligned interests. The Emiratis are aristocrats playing at being a nation-state, with a economy of servants to work its trappings. They have no interest in investing into a native workforce and neither do the natives have an interest in doing hard work.
So everything is done by outsiders: either at the high end (foreign expat technocrats) or at the low (Indian slave labor.)
Having a workforce that has no stake in the long-term venture of a nation-state is bad, obviously bad. There is probably no solution to it.
I see what you mean, but just for the sake of argument can you actually substantiate how that's bad? A more aristocratically minded analyst, like, say, Richelieu, might not be that keen on the virtues of education and instead argue that it destabilizes states and hands them to "quibblers".
The West has massively materially benefited from local bourgeois rule, but if we look at history, it's not that obvious to me that it is a necessary or beneficial inherently.
A lot of even Western nations have had long periods of their history being operated by foreigners actually. Periods so long those people even stopped being foreigners.
The big contention here seems to be that of industry, which makes those older kinds of customs presumably obsolete, but I'd like to see someone actually make that case if you don't mind.
You get the foederati problem in that a majority of the population is only loyal to money: they have no love of your nation and will betray it if it is in their self interest.
Now, the Qatari and UAE may not be as stupid as to man their armed forces with foreigners, but having an entirely foreign proletariat begs the question. If they strike... what are you going to do about it? Factory workers are not easily cowed like domestic servants. You can't appeal to them for love of country or a shared religion.
You can only maintain such a state of affairs through authoritarian force, which will lead to abuse... industrialization will create a class of workers that has power that the state can't easily crush. It's why it's a dead end. Miserable slaves that will never rebel are not productive workers, not for the kind of industry that matters in the modern world.
The secret to deportation is to register every single migrant entrant and have strong relationships with the origin countries of these migrants. Remittances incentivize India to cooperate with UAE in cataloging and receiving deportees so that surplus labor can continue to be exported from India. The imbalanced power dynamic is a feature, not a bug, that the domestic population actively supports.
The only breaking point is if there are illegal migrants, but the secret the UAE has is strong border agreements with neighbors who are equally if not more hostile to migrants than they are. No Ethiopian is crossing into the UAE when the Saudis shoot them on the border first. What few ever make it there have no reason to stay because imported labor keeps demand for illegal low wage labor low.
The imports will immediately overthrow the UAE rulers if they could. The calculus for the UAE is that the imports are disincentivized from doing so because the only value the UAE provides, stability (tax safety income or other), is precisely what the imports lack in the lives they came from.
Oh, the final secret: citizenship is restricted. The great mistake the Europeans and Americans made was giving citizenship and family reunification to what should have been temporary imports. The khaleeji get to be stupid and decadent, and all they have to do is endure the disrespect of seething activists.
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I must again remond everyone that UAE is a hellhole full of snakes. Their system selects for third worldsrs who are in it for the money, meaning they will scam and cheat as much as possible for a quick buck. They are only held back by draconian rules and a police state that will see them in the least charitable light. But rest assured any loophole in the rules will be exploited.
Unlike even some shitty counties, where travel influencers will say the locals are kind, polite, helpful, and generous, they people in UAE are nothing of the sort. Nobody will go even a millimeter past what they're paid to do to help you. Good luck even getting directions if there isn't someone whos job it is to give them standing around.
This is far from my experience of the place and I used to live there and do business locally for many years. But I believe you saw what you saw and I can explain it.
The UAE is a two tier system (well three if we count Emiratis, but i mean for guests).
You have the pleasant world of premium stuff for rich people, where you get your money's worth and then some and the people are nice, competent and helpful to the highest standards in the world.
And then you have the world of discount or cheap anything which operates on margins so thin that you're borderline getting scammed if not actually getting scammed all the time.
One good example that set the tone for me was getting a visa. When I did the discount one for poor people, I had to wait a long time, weeks longer than advertised, drive around a whole lot and pay people some money to enter information into a website that's purposely designed so I can't do it myself to maintain their racket. When I did the rich people option, it took a day and I was immediately done with it, and spent more time getting free refreshments in the air conditioned waiting room than doing the whole process.
And everything's like this. Want to get around? Either you take the official taxis where everything is regulated and the credit card machine always works, or you take a chance on the apps and the guy will try to scam you out of some cash and may or may not take you to your destination.
The one thing that is true for both sides and not compromised on is violence. You won't see much of it or of the related crimes because people are immediately kicked out or severely punished for that sort of thing. So petty crime is non-violent and takes the form of scams.
But this is all to say that there are plenty of generous, kind and helpful people in that country. but as befits an aristocratic society, they just don't hang around with the help.
You get what you pay for, nothing more, nothing less. Paying for five star service is possible in UAE, but it's also possible inost every country in the world.
When I went half the official taxis tried to scam me by pretending their credit card reader was broken. I had to threaten to call the cops and suddenly it was working again.
You're better off just taking uber
Sure, if you count the other rich foreigners. But when it comes to the actual people living there and not vacationing, there are none.
Not when there's a quality cliff. In a developed country, your quality of life per dollars spent is a mostly convex function. Yes, there might be significant bumps in experience, like going from first class to chartering a business jet, but they are exceptions. It sounds like it's a steep sigmoid function in UAE instead, you can't get a four-star service for half the money.
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I guess it must depend on what kind of business you're doing, I thought quite well of some of the industry people I dealt with and they were infinitely more accommodating than some of their Chinese or Central European counterparts I usually deal with. And yet somehow even more openly racist, which is pretty amazing if you've dealt with some Chinese folks.
I take it you didn't notice the large mandatory RTA sticker that says the ride is free if the machine is broken? Or maybe they tried to get one over on you as a tourist or something.
A significant amount of the people who live there are rich foreigners though, especially in Dubai. There's entire neighborhoods worth of these in major cities, I've seen them. I swear you could never speak a word of English or Arabic in that country if you're Russian or Ukrainian. But yeah you're not going to get free courtesy out of the Asian foreign workers unless you're a coethnic, they're there for business and nothing else.
Yeah I noticed it in the fine print so I didn't end up getting scammed. But the fact is that the notice is there precisely because the scam is so common.
I suppose that's true, but from where I stand I've had American cabbies try to pull that scam on me and they didn't have a notice in there, whilst nobody I know fell prey to it in the UAE. Anecdotes and all that.
One thing you're certainly right about is that, the UAE way of solving those problems is the stick: to increase control and surveillance to a degree that Westerners wouldn't necessarily be happy with.
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Interesting. How much time have you spent there? Any good stories to share?
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I was at my local organic co-op today, and I discovered that they have, as is typical of hippy-dippy stores, a reusable bag policy. In this case, every reusable bag I use, up to four total bags, gets me a small discount.
Being the sort of person who posts on the Motte, I immediately thought of gaming this system by putting as few items as possible in each bag. Preferably, I would buy four items, put one item in each bag, walk the bags out to my car, deposit the items in a separate container, then go back inside and repeat the cycle as often as necessary to get everything I want and maximize the discount.
This is, of course, both strictly legal under the store’s very poorly written policy, and also going to get me banned in no time.
But it led me to think of the deeper issue. Many, perhaps all, policies and laws are prone to extreme lawyer-brain galactic thinking like this. Imagine that the store couldn’t just ban me, because I am a member of the store and they can’t just get rid of me, and they must also put in place a policy that is fair to every member of the store. So they start trying to specify the volume of bag that must be filled, the types and sizes of bags that are allowed, minimum item counts in each bag. Soon, cashiers are bogged down in the minutiae of various arcane bag to discount ratios, rather than just scanning items and making pleasant small talk. Everyone is worse off, and the only plausible escape is to eliminate the discount itself, thus taking away a benefit of being a store member and reducing the overall value of that status, causing long-term harm to the store’s “health,” as it were.
Fortunately for my local Hippy Mart, they can still keep a FAFO policy in place for the chronically politically diseased such as myself. Anyways, I was just thinking about this and the contrast with the American legal system, which would be obviously incapable of maintaining such a simple and poorly written policy for longer than a nanosecond or two.
I have a strange bourgeois paralysis towards these kinds of small money-saving schemes. I engage in similar lines of thought as you, reading store policies and thinking of how to game their system, but the idea of turning these thoughts into practice repels me - I picture my grandfather, neatly dressed, sitting at the head of his dark wood dining table, drinking his choice glass of wine as he always did, witnessing me run back and forth between my car and the co-op, filling 4 individual tote bags with single items in order to save maybe 20 euros once the whole deed is done. Even though he was a businessman I'm certain he would have found the whole concept utterly indecent and verging on con-man behaviour, not fit for someone from a good family whose material needs are met.
It's not even that I think these schemes are morally bankrupt. Saving money without sacrificing your consumer habits sounds smart and desirable. It's more the implied dishonesty (and I guess some sort of "loss of face" since I immediately think of my family's reaction to it?) and a certain shamelessness that stops me in my tracks every time.
Perhaps places like your local co-op have a large enough customer base with a similar class profile to mine (or one that doesn't even consider gaming the policy to begin with) that it doesn't matter if a very small minority do actually exploit their discount system.
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I suspect that the discount is so small that it wouldn't be worth the time for 99%+ of their shoppers.
However, you are correct that, on occasion, businesses don't think their promos through.
My brother was buying an expensive pair of shoes (over $100), when the sales guy pointed to their special of Buy-One-Get-50%-Off-Second. My brother asked if he gets to choose which pair of shoes counted as second, and the sales guy agreed. My brother then asked for the cheapest pair of shoes in the store, which turned out to be women's $10 house slippers. So he bought those first, and then got 50% off for his expensive pair of shoes.
Ironically, the expensive pair of shoes wore out in a year, but my sister-in-law still wears the slippers.
Sometimes even for permanent ones. An example I ran into yesterday was that the Steinberg Cubase Pro DAW costs 575e to buy. However the combination of their cheapest audio interface (IXO12 at 49e) that comes with the lite version Cubase AI and upgrade from AI to Pro (279e) ends up costing barely over half that and you get an audio interface you can give to a friend. Those deals have been in effect for over a year or longer.
For some reason this reminds me of this joke but inverted. The day they think trough the promotion their sales will plumet.
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I have never seen a store that didn't make the less expensive item the discounted one in a BOGO sale.
Its a fairly common thing with glasses due to the very large per unit margins for the frames. There might be some restrictions but you can often get a much more expensive item discounted.
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I think that in this particular instance, it is simply that the rules as written are bad. If you want to incentivize people avoiding single-use bags, then the following should work out fine:
The cashier would simply have a line item "all-reusable discount", and the computer would calculate the discount. Sure, you could still have discussions about what counts as a "reusable bag". Is any bag which was not provided by the store for free ok? What if someone buys a roll of garbage bags and then proceeds to use them to transport the groceries? But you would at least no longer be vulnerable to the exploit you describe.
Meanwhile in Germany, the thin plastic bags for loose fruits and vegetables are free, but every other bag will cost you. Nor will most supermarkets sell you shitty single-use plastic bags. Your options are to either spend half a Euro on a shitty paper bag which will probably fail if you fill it up, or pay a Euro (or two?) for a robust reusable plastic bag. I own perhaps eight of the latter and they can be reused for dozens of shopping trips easily.
Removing the discount for not having enough reuseable bags is a bad system. First, you are still saving the store money/reducing waste by bringing your own bag, so there is not a good financial/environmental reason. Second, this creates an incentive for buyers to limit the size pf their purchases to the bags they brought, which means more trips (bad environmentally) and smaller orders (bad financially).
The per bag system is basically fine. People hate the penalty of having to buy bags, so inplementing this without a legal mandate is very risky for the business. The amount of people who would spend the time to maximize the per bag discount is very very small, and the loss from this is also very small.
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Do you get an even bigger discount if you hold them in your arms using no bags at all? I'm guessing not, but I feel like you should since that's even more environmentally friendly than the reusable bags.
I feel like the "type of person who is happy to use a reusable bag and make small talk with the cashier" and "type of person who rules-lawyers these policies to save a few cents" are just fundamentally different types of people who will never understand each other.
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As I said recently, rules-lawyering is one of the main reasons why any functioning society needs to allow for 'spirit of the law' interpretations. Strict textualism just gets you extremely dumb stuff like this, where you redefine the whole neighborhood as a collective private house so you don't have to follow the rules of the sabbath; both shameless and clearly against the spirit of the whole thing, the adult equivalent of signing a contract and going a tiny bit outside the box or making a spelling mistake or getting the date wrong because that means you didn't actually sign it HAHA, suckers, it's not valid!!
In a wider way, this is a bigger problem with the modern justice system. A hundred years ago, a lot of low-level justice was dispensed by police directly. Some youths being annoying just got the shit beaten out of them with truncheons, and they learned their lesson. Today the cops aren't allowed to do that any more, and the justice system is incapable of anything like that kind of rapid, effective lesson.
If you want to have those, you need trustworthy interpreters. We don't have those. They'll do crap like give you shit for your cheeseburger when you know damn well none of the dairy cows were in any way, shape, or form the mothers of the beef cattle. And anyway they're cattle, not goats.
Dairy cows are the main source of hamburger, as far as I know. Your statement holds for almost any other beef + dairy combo however.
I think kosher is as much a jobs program as it is a religious practice. As it stands, it creates two cottage industries, one specifically for certification, and another for creating kosher goods. Labelling goods as kosher without official certification will result in fines and lawsuits. In contrast, halal food operates on the principle of "trust me bro", and everyone seems more-or-less fine with it.
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But was "you can't flip a light switch" really against the spirit of Shabbat? Or carrying an object from one particularly subjectively defined area to another, for that matter.
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This is a "scrivener's error". "I spelled my middle name wrong on page 3, so I exempt myself from our agreement" isn't allowed.
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I wonder if there is some merit to the absurd rules-lawyering that you see in Orthodox Judaism. Clearly, sticking a wire around Brooklyn doesn't make it a 'household' but I can see a more 'spirit of the law' ethos moving the borders of the rules one stage at a time until you're at Reform Judaism and nobody believes in God any more.
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Something similar is the reason why in many modern democracies we use shitty FPTP instead of enlightened Approval Voting. The story is that back in ancient Greece they voted by placing stones in jars so when their democracies tried to do Approval voting some unscrupulous voters would put all their pebbles in the jar of their favourite candidate instead of putting no more than one in each. This being the time before cheap paper the only real solution they had was to give each voter only 1 pebble, and hey shitty FPTP was born...
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Any decent store just has to accept that a small subset of customers are going to go hardcore and maximize value. They just have to make sure they can eat the losses and not end up making a Hoover Free Flights promotion.
When I shop at the local Safeway-Albertsons land it's not unusual to get over 50% savings over list price, and when going to McDonalds as a family we each need to order separately so we can all get a daily deal.
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EDIT: I no longer endorse this post. USA Today and NPR for Northern, Central and Eastern Kentucky have both run stories that confirm that the Jackson, Kentucky NWS office was staffed the night of the tornado:
I still believe it is irresponsible to leave offices unstaffed, even if there is some ability to move neighboring employees around when they're expecting storms, but this is much less bad than I initially believed. I think I'm going to take a break from the Motte for a bit. I do love this community, but I have not been doing a very good job contributing to it.
On May 15th, the New York Times ran a story about how DOGE cuts had left parts of Eastern Kentucky vulnerable while it was under moderate threats for extreme weather:This morning, May 17th, it became apparent that eastern Kentucky had been hit by an overnight tornado that killed dozens.I was honestly speechless when I read that.This is what London, Kentucky looks like after the tornado. To quote someone who put it much more eloquently than I can:My political stance has been evolving, but I'd describe myself as a state capacity libertarian.To me disaster preparedness and relief are obvious, bread and butter, parts of the federal government. Sure we do stupid, wasteful things like give people flood insurance that lets them build and rebuild houses in the same vulnerable spot over and over again, when we should probably just heavily incentivize them to rebuild in a less risky area. Sure, with any given disaster there's going to be criticisms about how Biden did this or Bush did that. But I've always felt mostly positive about my tax dollars that go to disaster relief and preparedness.I've had a growing sense of unease over the last few months as I saw reports of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announcing Trump administration plans to end FEMA, and reports about National Weather Service cuts back in April. I'm gutted that the easy predictions of these moves leading to unnecessary deaths has come true.A part of me had hoped that Trump and Musk's Department of Government Efficiency would cut a lot of genuinely unnecessary spending from the government. When it was drag shows in Ecuador, even I as a rather Trump-skeptical person could admit that even a broken clock is right twice a day. But it was also clear to me that they were cutting with a chainsaw, not a scalpel. The images of Elon waving a chainsaw at CPAC feel a lot more hollow now. The man has blood on his hands. 27 people are dead in Kentucky because DOGE and Trump thought that it was "more efficient" to just let people die, instead of keeping overnight forecasters on staff.Back in 2020, FEMA estimated the value of a statistical life at $7,500,000. By that standard, when doing the cost-benefit analysis the government bean counters are supposed to value 27 deaths as a loss of $202.5 million. I wonder how much it costs the government to staff permanent overnight forecasters in eastern Kentucky?To be clear, I do applaud you for writing this. It takes some genuinely uncommon courage to admit to a mistake, and it speaks well of your character to do so. No one's immune to being mislead or making error, and I've personally made worse (and dumber) mistakes, including in this forum.
So to the extent I'm making commentary, this is to comment on the Mescales News et all, with an emphasis on the et all. This isn't even the first time people have accused DOGE of killing people via tornado, falsely. Lest I be called out for nutpicking, today, a sitting federal senator accused Trump and DOGE of killing at least two sailors; accusations that DOGE cuts and the Shelton Snowlikes were the real cause of AA5342 or MedJets 056 were endemic even as it became clearer and clearer that it wasn't and couldn't have been. Nor is this specific to Trump: Abbott murdered migrants [even if]https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/13/us/us-mexico-border-drowned-migrants) he needed a time machine to do it, and that's just the one that's been discussed here.
It's clear that they don't really 'believe' it, to the extent someone who worked for Vox can be said to 'believe' anything, but I think that's besides the point. They don't believe the truth, either! That's not what their job is, and even if they're lying because their mouths are moving, you can't assume that anything bad is literally always wrong.
((Going back to the question of Being Wrong, I nearly started writing a bit on the Qatar AF1 donation, and while some of the initial reporting was wrong, not enough of it was for what I wrote to be worth posting.))
There's a bigger question of how we got here, to this. I'm tempted, as always, to point to Palin, where between actions and lawsuits the punchline was written years before Very Rarely Lies was -- Trump or DOGE might well try to sue here, but everyone and their dog (and insurance company) knows that they won't and can't win. Maybe I'm just drawing too big a contrast from previous variants, either on the right or left, where there was at least some motion around hyperbole or figure of speech or schizophrenia, maybe I just missed some of the more clear examples back then.
((Something something USS Maine?))
But this should matter! It's a problem for people like you or I that we have to dig twenty layers deep to find any discussion of Noem's quote that doesn't bury the actual lead -- that the Trump admin is considering whether FEMA's cause could be better served by state-operated grants, rather than just burning the entire concept of disaster response like an ostrich. It's not our fault if we can't tell a hundred percent of the time when facing off against an entire industry that has optimized itself to be persuasive.
But fault's got nothing to do with it.
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Best of luck with your siesta!
Don't be ashamed of it in the least. It truly can be for the best. Focus on your family, friends, or just take the opportunity to do some half-days of volunteer work improving your community. Even if it's as simply as helping clean up a graveyard with others, it can really help get one's head out of all-politics-all-the-time mindsets.
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The fallacy here is the assumption that in the counterfactual world where DOGE didn't cut these positions, the death toll would be (greatly?) reduced. The very blurb you quote suggests that in the best case a full time overnight forecaster provides a few minutes of heads-up via the emergency alert system. NOAA reports around 50-100 fatalities from tornados per year, with some outliers during extreme weather conditions. If we see an enduring spike in fatalities through 2025 and into 2026 and 2027, that would be evidence for your hypothesis. As of now, I'd say it's too early to tell.
How many deaths would there have been in Kentucky if there weren't Weather Service cuts? It seems impossible to know for sure. I couldn't find any information on whether an emergency alert was sent out in Kentucky (though I didn't look very hard) but if one wanted to make a case for these cut positions being important (rather than just accepting a statement from the Weather Service union) you'd want to dig up some data regarding how many tornados are "typically" caught -- and how quickly -- pre and post cuts to quantify the effectiveness of these local overnight forecaster positions.
I'm strongly anti-safetyist. The optimal number of yearly tornado deaths is not zero. The government could obviously reduce tornado deaths to zero if this outcome was prioritized at all costs. We acknowledge that there are diminishing returns and don't invest the resources to drive tornado deaths to zero. It seems extremely unlikely to me that the current resource distribution is optimal, though plausibly it's in a local minimum and moving out of it will cause some amount of pain.
I'm in agreement with you here. That's why I brought up the Value of a Statistical Life (VSL) calculations that the government uses. They're not beyond debate - I could certainly see arguments for raising or lowering the value from the $7.5 million it is set at, or using different statistics like Quality Adjusted Life-Years (QALYs) that might come to different results. But they are a reasonable starting point for cost-benefit trade-off discussions, and they set a limit to how much money we're willing to throw at saving a life through government policies around things like disaster preparedness and response, healthcare, road safety, etc.
Even if the optimal number of yearly tornado deaths is not zero - if we were successfully reducing tornado deaths with advanced warnings at a reasonable cost tradeoff, and we just stopped doing that earlier this year, then I think there is a fair case to make for us going back to the way things were on this particular front. I recognize that I have not yet conclusively made the case for this, and I'm trying to take a step back and do a more thorough investigation of the trends and causes in tornado deaths to get a better handle on what is going on here.
Your point about my pronouncements being somewhat premature is well taken. I certainly agree that an enduring spike in tornado deaths through to 2027 would be better evidence of the position I have staked out. Though I think setting up the "natural experiment" in a way that we can be sure it is due to staffing cuts and not something else is kind of tricky. Probably, you would look at all tornado prone areas of the United States, see which ones had staffing cuts and which ones did not over a relevant time period and then look at the long run trends going back well before and well after the DOGE cuts. Once the data was in, you could make suggestive correlational arguments that wouldn't be the end of the discussion, but might be enough to convince someone that it was indeed a mistake.
All good points, and I have started to do some digging into the data.
I'm sure more information will emerge on this particular disaster, and I'm certainly willing to eat crow if more information emerges and I jumped the gun too early here.
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A: What evidence is there that any/some/all of the dead died because there was no overnight forecaster? I checked the stats for 2023, a good Biden year, and there were 87 dead from tornadoes that year, including 23 from a single storm. 27 doesn’t seem wildly out of line with those numbers.
B: Was the NWS mandated to cut permanent overnight forecasters, or did they choose to cut that position to save other preferred bureaucratic spending priorities, or did they just go straight to malicious compliance and make the worst possible cuts?
C: Did the former overnight forecaster just take a buyout, possibly? You can’t force people to stick around on the job, and I wouldn’t be surprised if NWS offices have gone without permanent forecasters for a while in the past.
D: How many NWS offices surround the Jackson office’s area of responsibility? While tornadoes are notoriously localized and unpredictable, if the permanent forecaster has been gone for longer than a week or so, it seems like any serious agency would have taken steps to get as much forecasting ability as possible from other supporting offices.
E: At a minimum, the following:
Does not strike me as the sort of phrasing used by someone who is simply expressing scientific concerns without fear or favor.
This is a fair question, and the same basic point was raised by /u/meduka. I agree that one storm is not conclusive. We will need to see the long run trends before my pronouncement is rigorously defensible.
Your other questions are ones I do not currently have an answer for. I am trying to see what data is available on this topic.
I don't fully endorse what Rebekah Jones of Mesoscale News said in the full piece I linked. I just thought that the part I quoted did a better job than I could have laying things out, and I didn't see the point in reinventing the wheel.
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Relatedly, the site rewrite's been put on ice: https://beta.weather.gov/
For anyone who used it, was it any good, or was it just the usual heavy-ass create-react-app mess that required a modern browser and broadband connection to even run?
Edit: Interestingly it seems to be open source, and also seems to have been kind inactive since late 2024 even before any Dogeing may have taken place. I could imagine that this project was already on the way out since then. https://github.com/weather-gov/weather.gov/graphs/contributors
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There's a fun dramatic little scissor statement happening in the rationalist / post rationalist corner of twitter at the moment. Started by @_brentbaum talking about his girlfriend's high agency:
I, and many others, chimed in saying hey wait a second... this is actually kind of concerning! Some of the negative responses:
and my personal favorite:
As I said though, this is apparently a scissor statement because a ton of people also had the OPPOSITE reaction. Some examples:
etc etc.
Now the reason I find this fascinating is that it's one of the clearest breakdowns between consequentialists and virtue ethicists I've yet seen in the wild. Most people defending the girl of 'scarfgate' are basically just saying "what's the harm? nobody ever goes back for those scarfs. besides they're like $20 most of the time anyway."
Unfortunately a lot of folks get drawn into this argument, and start saying things like well, what if somebody comes back for it later and it's gone? Or what if someone's grandma knitted them that scarf?
To me, going down the consequentialist route is doomed to fail. You can justify all sorts of horrible things in the name of consequentialist morality. (Same with deontology, to be fair.) My take is that this is wrong because she directly lied to someone's face, and then proceeded to steal someone else's property. The fact that most people think it's cute and quirky is probably down to a sort of Women are Wonderful effect, imo, and then they use consequentialism to defend their default programming that women can't be bad.
Either way, curious what the Motte thinks? Is scarfgate just salty sour pusses hating on a highly agentic women? Or are there deeper issues here?
It just occurred to me - isn't this exactly what Marla Singer does in Fight Club? Steals clothes out of a laundrette and then sells them to a vintage shop?
I was torn between that and the bike cuck meme, glad to hear I'm not the only one!
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Hah brutal. I don't remember but wouldn't be surprised.
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One instance is not enough to go by, but I certainly hope he's keeping their finances separate. That's a woman who operates by "what's yours is mine and what's mine is my own", and one morning he may wake up with his bank account emptied (and maybe a kidney sold, as well) if she decides "now we're a couple, your money is my money and I need this money for my dream" 😁
For what it's worth, I'm a woman so I'm not going off "Women Are Wonderful" here.
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Why not both? She rapidly solved a local problem and may have had some adverse effects on the commons. She's practical and pragmatic but also a liar and a thief. Fuck, but don't marry. Possibly kill if you're some avatar of zero-tolerance law and order.
And try to go back to her place rather than inviting her back to yours.
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Not a fan of this, the taking of a scarf that isn't yours is bad enough but the lying is the real red flag. Smash and pass, if you are inclined that way.
I mean, it's clever, I can't deny that. But it's also very much a confidence trick kind of move, and I have to wonder if she has a vibrant career in social engineering to part fools and their money?
She could slickly lie to his face and be cheating on him and get away with it. Not saying she is or would do so, but that's someone who is not afraid to seize the day, as it were.
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People do know that this stuff will often get taken by the employees if it isn't collected, or even donated, right? So even on consequentialist grounds she is quite likely to be stealing from someone poorer than her for small immediate gratification. It's pretty minor as things go, but I agree with others that I wouldn't perceive this as positive. Also, if everyone was like this, lost and founds would literally not exist.
It's like returning the shopping cart. The consequences are so minute that it actually exposes one's compunction to follow the rules when there is no consequence for defection.
This woman is probably a nice and loving person, but I wouldn't put my life in her hands.
Leaving shopping carts strewn about the parking lot is (mild) destruction of the commons. While it may not have any personal consquences, it worsens the world and does so exponentially - each additional parking space blocked or walkway impeded makes it increasingly difficult to navigate.
I think he meant the average punishment for the defector.
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If a tree falls and nobody hears it, does it still make a sound? If you steal something from someone and he doesn't notice and he doesn't need it, is it still stealing?
Stealing from the commons is a great life hack until everyone does it. Then you just end up living in a low trust society. The tragedy of the commons is an interesting concept precisely because high trust society created social rules that allowed the commons to exist in the first place.
If you kill someone but nobody misses the victim, is it still murder?
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This only sounds plausible because we don't have a good intuition about how it works. Taking the scarf is going to affect things on the margin. There's some probability that someone will come looking for the scarf and not find it. If you steal it they won't be able to. But since this is only a probability, it's easy to say "they probably won't return for the scarf" and mentally round the probablity to zero.
Likewise, if you stole a hotel towel, that's going to marginally use up the hotel towels and slightly push forward when the hotel needs to buy towels--even if nobody points at the particular towel and notices its absence, and even if the advance in when the hotel runs out of towels is within the normal variation in towel wear.
So yes, if nobody notices it, it's still stealing. It can affect people on a statistical level, in a way which averages out to the harm in being one item poorer, even if nobody actually notices the effect.
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Yes.
The Blue Cross, G.K. Chesterton:
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The whole thing seems very weird, probably fake, and not primarily about "agency." What kind of weather situation were they in where he was actually cold, not just making idle chatter, and a "nice scarf" was going to fix that? And then he just went around wearing some random woman's scarf the rest of the evening? It sounds funny, I guess they could have a good laugh over it? Definitely manic pixie dream girl vibes.
But, also, I've been confused about how "agency" is being used lately. Assertiveness? Willingness to take action? It seems kind of new to hear that discussed in terms of agency, but seems to have become a thing lately.
Agency is literally "you just do things", as opposed to standing around like a deer in headlights, waiting for others to solve your problems, or sitting on your ass making excuses.
I wouldn't describe myself as highly agentic, but I have acquired the superpower (thanks Grandpa for being a role model here) of just talking to strangers in order to get things done, when my friends would rather shrink into themselves than talk to someone they have no mandate to establish contact with. Or just calling a restaurant to find out whether it's open, instead of a full commitment to whatever google says. Or walking into an office and loudly (though politely!) asking whether anyone has some particular bit of infornation. All of this seems exceptional around here because people in general seem to have developed an extremely atrophied sense of their own agency. You can in fact just go and talk to people.
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Modal men don't do that. If we're making idle chatter it's usually about shoes and ships and sealing-wax and cabbages and kings. "It's cold today" is idle chatter, "I am cold" means the dude is freezing.
One has to wonder if he was hoping she'd offer to warm him up by cuddling. Instead she got him a free scarf. 😀
>be me
>on second date with qt3.14
>flirty and even sometimes sexual banter all night
>bros... we're so going to make it
>walking outside when she complains how cold it is
>I say "haha yeah even my cock could use some warmth"
>nooo got overconfident and went too far
>why am I such a cringe retard?!
>she smiles and says "follow me"
>we start walking toward the nearest hotel
>what no way no way ron_paul_its_happening.jpg
>she's talking to the receptionist at the lobby desk
>check-in and girltalk and stuff amirite
>I hover behind her awkwardly
>so nervous I can hardly breath
>vision blurry and ringing sound in my ears
>looking around trying to find the elevators so I can at least lead us there
>she suddenly turns around
>I hear a muffled "teehee this is for you" as she throws something to me
>something soft lands in my hands
>mfw my bare hands get rawdogged by some random guy's dirty compression shorts
Between this and the Bateman pasta, the Motte is becoming a real cultural juggernaut!
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It is being used to describe out of the box thinking in this case, as most people wouldn't consider stealing a scarf from a hotel in that manner.
Is it out of the box, or is her box just one filled with low status grifting? Even if I valued out of the box thinking, I wouldn't value the kind of thinking I associate with the underclass or sociopaths.
Yeah, I hate when people use "out of the box thinking" to refer to "strategies that have occurred to normal people, but the normal people didn't use them because they're morally objectionable".
You remind me of the ending of Scott's post on Orban.
I prefer the way Scott puts it in "Book Review: Age of Em":
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The thing is, the "test for psychopaths" thing is an example of both: it's a legitimately creative solution, but also a solution that no decent person would consider.
"Steal scarves from hotels rather than paying for them yourself" is only an example of the latter. It's not a creative solution: it's just banal theft. Creativity, bravery and lack of scruples are not synonymous.
The "pretend to have lost one" part is non-salient enough to deserve the label "creative" about as much as the "murder your dad" one, IMO (though certainly "go up to somebody and steal one off her neck" wouldn't).
I mean, is it? Everyone's familiar with the concept of a lost and found box. Surely everyone with IQ 100 with an average level of Machiavellianism could independently arrive at the idea of gaming this system (insofar as it's a "system") by falsely claiming to have lost something they haven't.
"I came up with this outside-the-box tactic called 'lying'." Woah, get a load of this guy.
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Same, I also despise the complementary idea that refusing to engage in such behavior makes you soft, naive and stupid.
I used to often commute to work by cycling, and I scrupulously observed all relevant traffic regulations. When I came to a red light, I would stop and wait for it, but my fellow cyclists would often ignore it. There are few more satisfying feelings in the world than waiting for the red light to turn green, then overtaking a cyclist who ignored the red light. The thought going through my mind is "look at me - I'm so much better than you at this that, unlike you, I don't even need to break the rules".
I get the same feeling when I hear someone bragging about how they've lied on their CV in order to make it look more impressive - and I realise that I make more money than them.
Wouldn't it be even better to watch the cyclist running a red get justifiably mowed down by a car taking its rightful green?
Steady on, Dirty Harry.
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I don't consider it a good thing to do either, I was just describing why @_brentbaum called it agentic in the first place. I presume he was ok with the status quo (feeling cold), and hadn't considered doing something to feel less cold (problem solving is agentic), let alone deceiving a hotel and taking other people's stuff.
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Is that how it's usually meant?
It seems like I've mostly heard it applied to women in a context I assumed was criticizing the tendency to want a man to take initiative, but maybe that's just my interpretation, and not the actual intent.
It's not usually meant like that, but sometimes people do consider doing things others wouldn't as more agentic.
I haven't noticed any gendered patterns of how the word is used yet. I have mostly heard it in context of it being promoted as a virtuous trait, for self-improvement and to improve society by believing you can do it (especially in tech-adjacent discussions).
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If you're prepared to go in and steal scarves, why not steal from a self-checkout machine? The corporation is not going to miss the $20. But when everyone does it, stores close and we have to go back to cashiers rather than an efficient, human-free experience.
Why not just torrent games for free or get repacks? I'm not totally innocent on this but it's still bad to do even if I'm tempted to say 'oh well the marginal cost of distribution is zero and i probably wasn't going to buy it anyway'. When everyone does it, all we get is AAA slop catering to people too stupid to torrent.
Consequentialism should consider the long-term consequences of behaviours.
What kind of machines do they have where you live?
They replace one checkout worker manning a single line with that worker overseeing half a dozen self checkout lines.
It is enormously more efficient.
Enormously more efficient for the store, maybe. As a customer my perspective is that they just moved the cashier's job to you and gave you a shittier and slower interface to do it with.
The local self-checkout I'm familiar with requires you to scan items one at a time, takes a second to check the change in weight after you put each item in your bag, and if anything goes slightly wrong in this process you need the cashier's manual intervention which takes at least a minute. I'll usually take waiting for a couple people in line over that awful experience.
This whole thing only looks more efficient because the store isn't having to pay the customers to do this.
In terms of my time: self checkout is so clearly faster. I can wait in line a long time, or do it myself real quick.
Years ago self checkout machines were terrible about weight checking. Now they are very forgiving. I assume they made them very numb to decrease their false positive rate.
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It's true that the actual act of scanning items and paying for them takes longer, but with one nominal cashier thus overseeing "half a dozen" self-checkout lines (not an unrealistic number) also spreads the customers that would normally wait in line for one cashier over six lines, which should cut waiting times by a lot more than the time lost to slower scanning.
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The self-checkout stations that I've used (at Costco, Target, and Home Depot) do not have this problem.
Yes, because this process is the source of 90% of the problems self checkout machines create (the other 10% are alcohol purchases), and an employee has to come and fix those problems.
In my casual survey of self checkout machines across cities and countries, I've come to the conclusion that only supermarkets in extremely low-trust cities use the scales. For everybody else, it's just not worth it, since you can literally increase the machines/employee ratio by 10 if you don't need to use the scale functionality.
My local supermarket doesn't sell alcohol ind is in a high trust region. Tens of self checkout machines are running without employee oversight, if there's a problem the store manager comes to deal with it.
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I think copyright is state enabled thievery, actually. Art existed before it, and it will exist after it. In fact it is scandalous that I can't freely make, modify and distribute the myths of my people because they have been monopolized by a corporation using the State, or that I can't mod my games without people trying to stop me, all because of this farce.
I think you'll find that even under rule utilitarianism, it isn't justifiable in its current form.
Preach, brother!
(Low effort contribution, I know, I know 😛)
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AO3 and FFN are a thing... though I do agree the whole GW/Nintendo 'Total Fanwork Death' policy is unacceptable.
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Corporations do not own the copyrights for old works such as myths, traditional stories or even modern 19th century works.
You can make your own Little Mermaid story. Just don't copy Disney's distinctive cartoon styling. Don't draw her with red hair and a seashell bra, or the Disney corporation's lawyers will go after you. Just make up any other possible look and styling.
What stories did you grow up telling and being told? What characters did you and your friends pretend to be when they played? Sure some did come from the old books that have been elevated in the public domain. But most of them were not, were they?
I claim that you're being robbed of a natural part of the human experience in this way, and mostly to support rent seekers rather than the people who originated those stories.
It's been 50 years, you and I should be able to make our own Star Wars if we want, and it is insane that we can not. At the least it is insane that we won't be able to once Lucas is dead + 70 years because somebody paid money to buy an exclusive license to our collective experience.
Owning a 150 year old story is absurd. It's an unnatural privilege borne of proximity to power with not a shred of legitimacy, not to mention a State established monopoly. Whatever minute rules it administers itself with does not change this.
Actually, the original Star Wars movie was published in 1977, just seven months before the Copyright Act of 1976 went into effect. So it falls under the 95 years from publication rule and will enter the public domain on January 1st, 2073.
Only 48 more years to go!
(The sequels are more complicated; do they count as works for hire, in which case they also fall under date of publication + 95, or are they the personal creation of George Lucas, falling under death + 70?)
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I took "myths of our people" a bit too literally. Sure, copyright lasts too long. As best I know partially the fault of the Disney Corporation. Death of author plus 70 years is excessive.
I mean, Disney was part of it, but the underlying problem is that it was cheaper to bribe politicians to extend copyright than it is to continuously make good new works. Disney wasn't the only rent-seeker there, after all; it's a constant temptation to all copyright holders. The only way to not have copyright holders be continuously working to extend copyright for rent-seeking purposes is to have no copyright holders.
Patents serve an important-enough function that they're probably worth keeping around despite this problem, although patenting questions needs to be obliterated from the face of the Earth. Copyright, no. We have Kickstarter now to make patronage easier, and we have more media than we can use. Burn it down.
(NB, @RandomRanger: I actually have an ethical policy of never paying for softcopy anything. If you're not selling a physical object, I don't recognise it as something sellable. I'll buy a physical book because there's at least an object there, you're not just buying a copyright licence. But I don't have Steam/Kindle/etc. Only time I ever got something from Steam was when they had free Portal, and even then I wound up deleting it and pirating it instead for portability.)
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Which is why you torrent triple a slop and pay for indies that deserve it. You shouldn't be pirating because you are poor, you can get games cheap easy enough, you should pirate because FUCK THE VIDEO GAMES INDUSTRY. Burn that fucker to the ground and salt the earth behind you. Then Nintendo or whoever can start again, again.
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Physical good differ from digital goods that (barring Star Trek tech), you cannot multiply physical goods. If you take a scarf, the total number of scarf stays the same and somebody is short a scarf. With digital good, magical act of multiplication happens and there are more of them than before. Therefore, digital copyright infringement is never equal to stealing. It may still be wrong but it is definitely significantly less wrong than stealing.
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Someone who'll cheat with you will also cheat on you.
Someone who'll steal for you will also steal from you.
The second sentence doesn't strictly follow the first. Stealing from an out-group (e.g. the faceless forgetful hotel patron) is not an indication they'll do the same to an in-group. On the other hand, cheating is necessarily harming an in-group person (the romantic partner), and as the current romantic partner you should be worried.
Think of the "I against my brother; I and my brother against my cousin; I, my brother, and my cousin against the world" proverb.
I have to disagree. "One who is faithful in a very little is also faithful in much, and one who is dishonest in a very little is also dishonest in much." She has demonstrated that she has no problem taking advantage of third parties, so if a situation arises where it benefits her to take things from him, why should I believe she will hesitate to do so out of outmoded scruples about trust and intimacy?
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I think it's presumptuous to assume that a girl considers you part of her in-group just because she agreed to go on a second date with you.
My girlfriend is currently trying to persuade a close friend of hers (I'll call her D) to cut ties with one of her friends (A). I disliked A literally from the moment I met her, as not only do I find her vapid and annoying, she also seems like a legitimately shitty person. (It was a relief to find out that my girlfriend dislikes A just as much as I do). A openly announced that she goes on dates with guys from Tinder, goes back to their houses, then steals shit before leaving. Of course D laughed it off like "oh yeah, she's just being a girlboss" and insisted that she'd never steal from one of her friends. Mais quelle surprise when A starts borrowing clothes and other items from D and never returns them (or loses them and doesn't offer to replace them); or when D invited A to stay in D's parents' house, and various expensive items mysteriously went missing while she was staying there. D's parents now despise A, understandably enough.
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But this is cheating for you, which is a little different. I can totally see the appeal of a Bonnie & Clyde romantic partnership where you places your mutual interest above other moral concerns. “Felt cute, might violate the Geneva convention later.”
I know this is going far afield based on one instance, but do we know that the girlfriend feels the same way about OP as he does about her? She might be in a relationship with him because it's currently beneficial for her but she is not in love with him or deeply attached, and would dump him if a better opportunity came along. And possibly empty out his bank account on the way out the door, to boot (well after all she needs to be recompensed for all the time she wasted on him).
Someone who demonstrates on a
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I believe Jimmy from South Park had a relevant angle on this.
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Yo I'm just gonna speak my deepest monkeybrain here and tell you that this little story about stealing a scarf is either gross or adorable depending upon how hot the girl was and what the vibe felt like. Like imagine it twice, once with like peak Wynona Ryder getting her crazy stealies on, and then once again with some ugly broad. Yeah you know what's up.
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My first thought when I saw that was, “wouldn’t the higher-agency thing be not forgetting your scarf in a hotel room in the first place?” My brain couldn’t comprehend the concept of portraying dishonesty like this as a positive attribute.
What if there was no scarf? What if the cleaning lady was already on thin ice and then had to answer for allegedly stealing a scarf?
What if it wasn't a $20 scarf but a Hermès scarf? There would indeed be consequences for hotel staff handing over something that easily to a stranger.
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I wouldn't trust anything I read from an account on X, especially a high-profile account on X, to be real. Most high-profile X accounts who were not already famous before joining X are engagement bait grifters, and some of these grifters are precisely in the business of crafting scissor statements to get maximum engagement. Even if the genesis of this particular story is a real-life situation, I wouldn't trust a high-profile X account to convey it accurately instead of conveying it in order to mine maximum engagement. The entire nature of the medium, with its short clippy posts (yeah you can pay to write long ones, but this comes off as geeky so is not used as much as one might think) and its monetization, makes it a melting pot of scammers, grifters, and con artists. I have tried many times to start genuine political/cultural discussion on X, and 95% of the time it doesn't work. X rewards cheap engagement bait vastly more than it rewards serious conversation. It is a brutal Darwinian power struggle in which masters of scissor statements, controversy bait, and so on rise to the top.
OP posted bait on X but all the stealing-defenders appear to be real people defending that position. I don't think they're all just trolls.
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Which social media do you trust, and for god's sake why?
That's not really an effective disarmament tactic for scissor statements anyway (which is another reason they're so effective), because it doesn't matter whether the story happened or not - nobody really gives a shit about that scarf or the hotel or whoever really owned the scarf, they care that there are other people talking about it who don't share their values and have the audacity to judge them despite being sick, perverted scarf stealers/opposed to manic pixie dream girls/insert-your-own-description,-I-can't-take-this-seriously.
I'll tell you what the real scissor statement part of that story is - I can't possibly have been the only guy to read this guy explain how he told his girlfriend he was cold and immediately think 'cuck' can I? Aww is the widdle man cold? Does he want some mittens for his fingies too? If it was really that cold you would only have to wait a few minutes for hypothermia to kick in, and then you'll feel warm again you bitch! It's a damn sight better than letting a woman see you being weak when you haven't even jizzed. That's the only time you should ever show a woman weakness - only after she's seen you bang can you let her see you whimper.
That's how it always starts, by the way, first they steal a scarf for you, next thing you are walking funny and telling people pegging can increase a couple's intimacy.
If it was me on an imaginary date with Agent Scarf Stealer I'd have autistically insisted on trying to get the exact scarf she left at the hotel, and thought the genius part was her suggestion that one scarf is much the same as another. I'm very used to quirky nonsense though, in my defence.
Edit: iprayiam, I should have guessed you'd tackle the real issue, high five! I swear your post wasn't there when I read this thread earlier though.
Nominating for an AAQC based on this clause alone.
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Cuck might be an overstatement, but yeah. That definitely had me raise an eyebrow. At least, the way the story is told, it sounds like something he volunteered. I'm not sure I would admit it to my wife if I were cold and she asked, but I am certain I would not bring it up myself, and if I were on a second date I would marshall all my self-control to suppress any possible tell that I am cold.
It might be terribly old-fashioned of me to say, but men don't bring up their personal problems for their SO (and even less a date!) to resolve.
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I wouldn't take it that far, but do also feel that stealing a scarf because your man is cold seems more snarky than caring. Could be in a fun, flirty way, it would depend on specifics.
If it's actually cold, because it's cold out and he isn't dressed warmly enough, go into the hotel and drink a coffee with him. A scarf won't help all that much. What, the hotel happened to have one of those enormous chunky knit wool scarves on hand that's kind of a long blanket? Really? If he's not particularly cold and is just saying stuff, the way everyone in Phoenix mentions that it's hot every day, then a scarf will also not help, there's nothing to be helped. I have a lot of scarves, and do like wearing them as wraps, but no man would be willing to do anything like that unironically.
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If you forgot a scarf at a hotel, would you really go back to the hotel, presumably in another city, to get it?
If I forget a scarf in a hotel, that scarf is community property now. I hope it gets used for something useful instead of just getting thrown away.
I call and have it mailed to me.
Do you tip them for that?
If by any means possible, yeah, on top of paying for the shipping.
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How is this different from the bike cuck meme?
People don’t hate bike cuck because he is using a defective utilitarian moral heuristic. They hate him because it’s his bike, and the way he immediately rolls over and justifies his own victimization reeks of weakness.
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My power bank was lost near a lake in the wilderness (not by me) and I would prefer someone finding & using it compared to "my property" junking up the environment.
I'd still prefer a dishonest finder that could have returned it ( = pretty much stealing, except that the alternative would have been that it's lost instead of "it stays in my wife's pocket") it and kept it compared to the thing going to a landfill/staying at the lake.
I would argue that's slightly different, since there's no centralized place for you to retrieve your lost item, nor has the finder going there specifically to impersonate you to take your item.
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The bike cuck meme is kind of a brain worm in that while that example is egregious, there are plenty of ways in which reframing a loss as at least helping someone else or something else can by psychologically beneficial. I didn’t get the promotion, my friend did, framing that in your own mind as ‘well, at least I’m happy for them’ is better than stewing in resentment.
That depends a lot on whether your friend was actually more qualified for the promotion.
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Lax morals are not a good thing. Trying to feel good to paper over what is right gives people a sense that small transgressions aren't really that important, but that same perverse toleration simply leads to larger transgressions.
Sure, wallowing in resentment isn't useful, but rationalizing you getting fucked over is learned helplessness. That guy should get appropriately mad and adjust his local politics to give greater consideration to the maintenance of public order. And if he doesn't, he's just on a merry journey to his town becoming a crime den because he's too nice to get upset when he is wronged.
Bike cuck is chanelling the spirit of the Last Man.
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Because the scarf wasn't stolen from me. I lost it.
If I lost something useful, I would prefer that somebody find it and uses it rather than it going to waste completely.
Here's a slight rotation of this: if I buy something online and don't end up needing it, instead of throwing it away I usually post it on a "buy nothing" group, or put it in the alley so that somebody who wants it can take it. It feels like less of a waste than if I throw it in the trash.
This seems rather different from raiding a lost-and-found while pretending to be the rightful owner.
The people at the hotel know what's going on. She knows what's going on. The guy knows whats going on, and even the person who lost the scarf all know what's going on and if anybody in this chain of people cared, then it would break the chain and the behavior wouldn't happen.
This is just a totally different thing than stealing and the fact that so many people can't understand this is illuminating.
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You can't make a display of enlightened magnanimity out of shitting in your own pants.
Challenge accepted.
"I shat my pants recently. I was pretty bummed about it. But after reflecting I realised that the need to buy a tub of White'n'Brite Max Stain Remover provided an infinitesimal benefit to the institutional shareholders of Big Chem Industrial Synthesis Corp, and by losing control of my bowels I'd helped contribute to a faceless pension fund supporting wealthy retirees and their fund managers. The total happiness in the world increased, so whatever!"
"I have a tiny excuse for a penis and I get off by pressuring my wife into having unprotected sex with other men, but even I wouldn't violate by proxy the sanctity of a hotel's lost property cupboard. What if that scarf belonged to a real man with a raging trouser truncheon? OP should have waited until half a dozen virile rugby players could watch him shivering outside his own bedroom window, begging them to let him rent his date's panties to wear as a comically ineffective neck warmer. It's pathetic."
"My ADHD made me so late that I ended up taking a bike I'd found dumped in the canal because keeping my date waiting was giving me unmedicated anxiousness. When I arrived he'd been waiting for me outside getting cold so quick as a flash I went into a hotel reception and pretended to be the purse inspector. When I came out to give him the £400 I'd conned out of some woman's husband he was gone, and so was my bike! Twitter, AITA?"
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I think that a lot depends on the goals of the guy on the date. If he is looking to get laid, or for an accomplice in a bank robbery, her showing risk-taking behavior and a disregard for conventional morality is certainly increasing her value.
If he is looking for a long term relationship as a well-regarded member of society, that would indeed be a red flag. On the second date, people (I think) still bother to try to hide their flaws. If it does not occur that "I have a very loose morality around the subjects of property and (more importantly) truth" might be worth hiding, one might start to wonder what kind of flaws she might actually be hiding on top of that. Perhaps she is in a marriage she has not told you about, or works as a con artist or pickpocket.
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A) I don't think the impact is going to be very large. Scarfs are a commodity. Harm is small. Arguably it was going to get thrown out anyway. Maybe there's a small net benefit in the world where that scarf helps bolster a relationship.
B) That said... scarfs are a commodity. Wouldn't it be just as thoughtful/romantic to pop into the nearest store and buy one? Does the fact that she broke a mild social taboo make it a more meaningful act? Either one demonstrates 'agency.'
C) Its surely less bad than something like going around to all the hotels in the area and collecting nice scarfs to resell on Ebay, since she can at least claim altruistic motives. But then there's the question: if we 'approve' of her doing this one thing in this one instance, what precisely lets us object when someone else exploits this for more direct personal gain.
At any rate, my COMPLETELY UNWARRANTED speculation is that this is Manic Pixie Dream Girl territory. It was so TOTALLY RANDOM and it introduced some harmless spontaneous fun into his life which means he'll overlook the more troubling implications.
Oh my darling velvet hippo may bite other dogs and people, but they'd never turn on me!
Next thing the owner is in the news about how their sweet cuddlebug chewed their face off. Someone shows you who they are by their actions, believe them.
Now you're making me wonder, because if I believe the account as-is, that sounds a bit too confident and practiced for something she just thought up on the spur of the moment. Maybe she does make a habit of false claims about lost-and-found property like this, and uses it or resells it on!
It actually sounds like it would be a viable business model for a side hustle.
It looks like Gucci scarfs can sell for $60-$150(!) on ebay. Spend two hours hotel hopping and that's a pretty good return if you find some good ones.
Yeah, if she turned out to be a habitual shoplifter or something I wouldn't be at all surprised, neither would I be surprised if Granny's porcelain figurines end up on eBay after he brings her home for a visit.
It's a 'yellow flag' at the very least.
It also occurs to me that she could 'return' the scarf to the hotel at the end of the night, thereby mitigating the possible harms.
I guess I'm trying too hard to read motives, but this is not what I would say a high conscientiousness person acts like.
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If my date steals someone's scarf for me, I give it about 1% chance of "she's a master consequentialist who has calculated the utilons of someone potentially coming back for the scarf and finding it gone vs. the utilons of me being comforted" and 99% of "she's from casual petty crime culture and on top of that is 'agentic' enough to participate in it even as a woman".
The latter category isn't someone whose company I want to keep. There's the bro wisdom of "if she'd cheat with you she'll cheat on you" and while "if she'd act like a low trust society specimen for your benefit she'll act like a low trust society specimen at your expense" doesn't roll off the tongue quite as well, it feels plausible enough.
I came up with a suitably pithy wording before I read your comment.
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For me, the distaff version of this is all the "other women" and mistresses lamenting that the married guy cheating with them is, in fact, lying about getting that divorce and marrying them because his marriage is a sham and in name only while his wife doesn't understand him and is cold and they're only staying together for the sake of the children.
Wow, you mean someone who has demonstrated he will happily lie and deceive close family in the cause of getting his dick wet is also lying to you in the cause of getting his dick wet? How can this be?
Some of them at least realise how things are and are open-eyed about the affair being an affair and that it'll never be more than that, but a surprising number can't get over "it's been five years, he still isn't divorced, am I wasting my time?"
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I've read such a tip before, but with phone chargers instead of scarves. That if you're in need of a phone charger, to approach the nearest hotel lobby and tell the receptionist you left yours there, and you'll have a mountain of chargers to choose from.
I'd be impressed with her agency (far right tail for young women, who are generally incredibly passive) and find it endearing that a chick would take action to increase my comfort level instead of getting the ick from and penalizing me for my unforced error of expressing vulnerability in front of her.
However, at the same time, her acquiring the scarf like that would give me the ick—the nonchalance in handling some stranger's article of clothing and having someone she presumably cares about (e.g., me) wear it. Especially if that article of clothing is from a hotel. Do you want bedbugs? Because that's how you get bedbugs. This ick is just instinctual, but to rationalize something deeper it could also suggest that, for even a short-term relationship, we're incompatible with regard to conscientiousness, hygiene, and/or cleanliness. What next, dumpster diving if she’s or I’m hungry?
The lying and stealing or "stealing" aspect is actually secondary to me. We could have a fundamental difference in values/etiquette, as it's ingrained for me not to lie and not to take other people's belongings (especially in front of a date), even if they otherwise would have been unlikely to recover them.
On one hand, it's worrisome if a chick is so blasé about lying—if she so casually lies to a hotel receptionist in a low stakes situation, what if she's similarly down to lie to me in a higher stakes situation? On the other hand, a chick who's down to lie to others for my benefit could mean she's ride-or-die for me. Similarly, a chick who's down to take from others and give to me is based and good. Far better than the opposite, a chick who's down to take from me and give to others out of chronic pathological altruism.
Overall, things wash out in both directions, but I'd say it's a net-negative. It pains me to say it, because otherwise it'd be such a pleasant surprise for a girl to take the initiative to increase my comfort level instead of penalizing me for the gaffe of bringing it up, especially if I haven't banged her yet.
More dine and dash, I'd say. Or some kind of food delivery fraud:
The fake hotel claim does sound in the general area of "shoplifting is not a crime, businesses expect this kind of stealing, insurance pays for it all" thinking and does indicate a willingness to cheat/scam. Which may be confined to small things, or may lead to more serious crime, or at least scamming/lying in the relationship. "Oh, your mom's antique vase went missing? Gosh, I hope she finds it, I wonder what happened?" checks eBay to see if any buyer has bid yet
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I mean sure in theory, yes. People don’t need to stick exactingly to red pill gender roles, but this anecdotes is so on the nose as a gender bent reversal of the cliche of all cliche examples of the ‘female comfort test’ with an outcome that digs into the gender reversal (he ends up with not just a scarf, but the “nicest” scarf), it has to be made up.
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For a lost item, the lying part is weighting much heavier than the stealing part.
Now don't get me wrong, I lie. Not for profit, and generally not to people close to me, but certainly to authorities to make interactions go smoothly. If I get into a traffic stop and I am asked if I take any medication, then I could be truthful and give them a list of drugs, and hope that they will eventually figure out that these drugs do not impair the ability to drive a car. Instead, I will simply lie to their face that I do not take any medication. But I generally do not seek out situations where I will lie.
Happily lying to a receptionist for shit and giggles and because you want a scarf is a whole other ballpark. Dark triad territory.
I used to self-report my tiny keychain swiss army knife at land border crossings. I don't bother anymore, and I think the border guards are happier for it, because ultimately when they ask, "do you have any knives", we both know that isn't what they're referring to and isn't what the actual question is.
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I agree with this. It would be far less troubling to just slide the hotel clerk a few bucks and ask if they have any scarves that haven't been claimed for a long time.
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Its on a second date. Unless youre a gigachad, you should assume she does this for people shes second-date-familiar with, possibly less. (A similar logic applies to early sex)
Second, while "willing to lie for you" is a benefit, its also important to be wise about it. I wouldnt go do this myself if you brought it up to me, and Im similarly not excited about her thinking its a good idea.
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This is a microcosm of the problem with the agency people. “High agency” often just means “putting all cognition energy into obsessive self-gain”. AI that lies to people about dieting? High agency. Made something addicting with little social benefit? High agency. Foregoing relationships and social identity in order to be like the dude from Whiplash with low mood and a TFR of 0.50? High agency.
When all of your elites become high agency, the culture is ruined. No one will have the desire or the ability to solve collective action problems. Something wrong with crime? Sorry, all the high agency people have simply moved to a higher income area. Cheating scandals? All the high agency people know to use chat AI to scaffold their essays. Obesity? No one is there to consider longterm causes, because that’s not high agency. And when America is finally ruined, all the high agency will be on the first flight out of the country.
Great comment.
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I (we) cannot fix crime. We can flee it though. I do what I am capable of, not what is hypothetically possible if hard coordination problems were solved.
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As @quiet_NaN said below, agency (that is, the ability to be an independent agent) is not necessarily correlated with asociality (that is, the tendency to devalue/neglect the collective good). While there's a degree of social conformity that's required to maintain the commons, a dearth of distributed agency/agentic elite causes a society to follow the path of least resistance, usually to its detriment. Some(well, most) societies are built to require less distributed agency/more social conformity (e.g. East Asia), but they tend to be outcompeted by more individualistic but still commonwealth-respecting societies (e.g. the West).
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I think that agency is somewhat orthogonal to morality.
Low agency people (like myself, TBH) who do what all the others around them are doing are unlikely to stand out in either a good or bad way much. (They will still have a large overall impact which could be good or bad, though.)
Some high agency found EAs and try very hard to make the world a better place. Some high agency people try to rip off people to fund their underage sex islands. Some build successful companies producing dental drills. There is a much larger variety of ethical impact per person, but one can hardly say that they are all bad.
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Couldn't agree more. High agency is often just a code wood for tearing down mores and norms for personal gain. I said something similar in a tweet myself.
Are you on twitter? DM me I'd love to follow you hah. Your writing is solid.
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This really is one of those cases where 'imagine if the genders were reversed' actually tells us something- and that something is not positive. There are definitely things that are less bad when a woman does it, but this really doesn't seem like one.
It doesn't necessarily ring that way for me. The kind of guy that will break into a campus building so you two can... "watch the stars" on the roof. Or the type of guy that goes backpacking for a few months in developing countries, street smart can adapt. Lying your way into a club or fancy party. All sorts of things that happen in rom-coms. There's a spectrum between goodie two shoes and felony lowlife.
You're changing too many variables, I'm afraid. None of those involve irreversably claiming someone else's possession.
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Before getting to the stealing, I'm more stuck on my aesthetic distaste to the vignette of a man on an early date telling the woman he's cold, and her giving him an article of clothing to comfort him (among the more feminine articles to boot). It's too perfectly set up as a subverted cliche, that I am 50-50 (edit on reflection, 70:30) that it's made up. I suspect many if not most of the people defending it are doing so on those very aesthetic grounds, and it's not remotely about agency, morals, or consequentialism. This is basically a manic pixie dream girl scene that crossed with light 'gender swapped' tittilation.
There's a very real trope about a certain kind of proclivity toward strong female to femdom fantasies, that is disproportionately represented in ratty kind of spaces, and people who like this stuff are likely to make up, hyperbolize, or latch onto real anecdotes online as a substitute for the actual paucity of it in the real world. The high agency stuff is just a laundering of a titilating fantasy about a strong female, playing provider to a meek guy with 'low agency', aka the sub.
OK
Regarding the lying and stealing, yeah morals aside, there's a russell's congugation here: My: high agency, your: unscrupulousness , their: low impulse control
To the extent that this is a real story, yeah run buddy. A girl who casually lies and steals for immediate time preference satisfaction (even (maybe espectally) if charitably done by proxy to near empathetic aquaintances) is bad news.
Yeah. For those thinking this is not so bad because she's doing it for his benefit, it was only on a second date. Suppose someone who is a close friend or family member of hers needs something? If she's willing to deceive strangers to get benefit for guy she barely knows, she's equally likely to be willing to deceive guy she barely knows for someone much closer to her. 'Look, that spare two grand was just sitting there in your bank account, you weren't doing anything with it, my sister needed to pay rent after she broke up with her boyfriend so what's the big deal? I should have asked you first? Yeah well you would have given it to me anyway, right? So why did I need to ask?' followed by 'What do you mean you mightn't have given it to me, I'm your girlfriend' argument.
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I also am struggling to get past the cold man part of the story.
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Personally I think it's extremely poor form for a man to expose a vulnerability on the second date. I also don't think I'd wear someone else's scarf, that seems like a pretty personal object. I've heard of people doing this with phone chargers and I know I'd never go back for a lost charger, so that hasn't bothered me vis a vis the other people's stuff angle.
Depends a lot on the aims for the date, imho. If the main goal is to have sex with her, then being the perfect and tough guy who is of course not whining about the cold and will in fact lend miss little princess his jacket if she should feel cold could be the winning strategy.
On the other hand, if you are looking for a long term relationship and don't want to keep the princess/servant dynamic in the long term, you might want to show a bit of imperfection and vulnerability just to see how she will react. Will she ignore your plight? Will she be willing to go into a clothing store with you and let you pay for a scarf? Will she gift you a scarf? Will she do something completely unexpected, like conning a receptionist? Will she dump you on the spot?
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Why is it extremely poor form?
There is little to be gained by a man expressing transient physical discomfort. If you have a reputation for toughness, you can express mild preferences in limited circumstances - rarely in the moment - and it must always be clear that you can perform when needed.
Why do you accept such a strict gender role?
I prefer women who hold themselves to similar standards. I would recommend other men follow it for the reason Throwaway05 states, the downside is virtually none existent compared to the upside.
Hmm. I see. I don't like "quick complainers" either. Gotta have some stoicism and standards, regardless of gender. I just don't want it divided into strict gender roles. That's too superficial. Individuals differ widely within groups.
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This kind of ‘holding frame’ game seems pretty exhausting, I really don’t think most women don’t care if a man says fuck it just got cold, as long as he isn’t whining about it for the rest of the day and just goes into a store to buy a sweater.
Some women insist that the man pay for things on a date, some women legitimately don't care and some women lie about which category they are in.
Nobody is penalizing you if you just pay so that is the best strategy, especially since nobody knows the ratios of the above.
Same thing goes for a lot of dating norms.
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Addendum: You never sit in the car because it’s too hot or too cold if a tire needs changing. But you also don't want to be a tough guy to the point of becoming a liability. Being prepared is a finer line, and you can definitely cross into being an overly equipped “EDC Boy Scout” dork.
A story: Late this winter, we went to a cabin with a group of friends. An admittedly complicated snowfall occurred the night before we were set to leave. A friend ended up putting his car in a ditch. Trying to be a “tough guy” (in reality, embarrassed and rushing), he refused to wear a jacket, attempting to dig out the car, hook up pull straps, and put on chains in just a t-shirt. He started shaking uncontrollably, his hands stopped working, and I had to yell at him to get back in his car to warm up. He then sat there as my wife and I did the grunt work to get his car to the highway.
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Because it seems like weakness or poor planning, to me, nother of which are attractive in men?
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While cute it's a bit concerning
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