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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   2325 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 2, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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This is frankly Wellness-Wednesday adjacent.

Does anyone else remember when the internet was full of Women (capitalization intentional) complaining that men hit on them? My perception as a guy in the early 2010s was that the list of places/contexts where you weren't "allowed" to speak to a woman was growing every day. It started with the gym/bus/grocery store, but then came to encompass every possible social context where men and women might come into contact with eachother. It reached a point where I was expecting to see an article titled "We Need To Talk About The Serious Problem of Women being Flirted With at Singles Events."

It's just that, now in the current year, I can't seem to actually find any solid examples; aren't all these important feminist essays archived somewhere? I remember them being inescapable.

Here's a pithy summary: When I hear women complaining that men don't approach them in public anymore, I want to link a 2010s feminism article and say "This is why." But...where are the articles? Did I imagine them?

I remember there being a ton of anti-PUA articles in that time period. Here is one about it being problematic to approach women at the mall if you are using 'PUA' tactics:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/a-swarm-of-pick-up-artists-tried-to-invade-torontos-eaton-centre/

In case you missed it, a buzzing, cologne-drenched swarm of pickup artists attempted to take over the Eaton Centre mall in Toronto, Canada. Luckily they were stopped in their tracks by a flurry of Twitter activity that eventually forced the Eaton Centre itself to get involved.

If you imagined them, you and I were part of a shared imagination. I don't recall there being mountains of such articles, but there certainly were a bunch.

Within the new atheist movement, there was a major hubbub where a semi-famous figure in the sphere, Rebecca Watson (a founder of Skepchick, IIRC, and also a then-member of The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe podcast) wrote some essay complaining about being propositioned at some convention by a male attendee at 2AM in a hotel elevator as being something terrible and probably misogynistic and patriarchal or something.

I don't have any links to primary sources off-hand, because these aren't pleasant things that I wanted to remind myself of.

I remember that, I just also remember the vibes coming from normie sources, or as normie as anything on the 2010 internet could be.

I associate Elevatorgate more with the rise of prominent "geek girls" that didn't seem to like geeks or geeky things.

One of the most normie things in that era associated with that is a letter that the Obama administration sent to publicly funded universities telling them that they should use a "preponderance of evidence" standard (generally described as 50.00001% certainty of guilt) to find students guilty of sexual assault in their internal, non-legally-related justice and discipline system. This, combined with the general notion and meme that "false rape accusations are vanishingly rare as measured by court cases and convictions, therefore any verbally stated accusation of any sexual impropriety ought to be considered true by default until proven otherwise" which was never official policy but was certainly the attitude of most of the feminist left that tended to dominate university administration meant that students were aware that if they weren't 100% sure that they'd receive a positive response, hitting on someone carried a real risk of putting their schooling and sunk tuition costs in the hands of a stranger's whims. And, unsurprisingly, people who went to college tended to be overrepresented among the people with power and loudspeakers.

The absence of specific articles is probably due to the effect documented in The Sixth Meditation on Superweapons. You noticed what was Actually Being Said, not the literal words on the screen.

Here is an eleven-year-old reddit thread that mentions the phenomenon (written by a woman asking why men don't give up), so what you're describing is something that definitely existed at the time you're talking about:

However, if women are going to pretty much shut down every avenue for approaching them (bars ["I just want to hang out with my friends"], clubs ["I just want to dance!"], bookstores ["Don't interrupt my reading!"], grocery stores ["I HAVE to go here, don't bother me."], classes/workshops ["I'm here to learn, only!"], etc), what avenues ARE available for meeting women organically (eg. not via dating website/match-makers)?

There's also this classic compare-and-contrast of the headlines of Jessica Valenti's opinion pieces.

Thank you, but I have to say, that second link does not sound like an actual woman, more like a dude making a point.

Try this link.

I don't remember articles about it, but I'm sure there were some (I suspect Marcotte having written a few). My memory is that it was more twitter and reddit commentary of "ugh, don't sexualize my hot amazing body while I wear 1mm spandex don't approach me at the gym, I'm just trying to work out, not meet anyone," "don't approach me at the grocery store, I'm just buying food," etc. A reddit example thread here.

This might have a CW angle, it might not have. But I have to bitch about the Neo robot.

For the uninitiated, the Neo X1 Home Robot is a home assist humanoid meant to perform the daily tasks in the household for people that don't have maids. It is Rosie the Robot of Jetsons fame, except in a deliberately less fuckable package.

And also 100% teleoperated. They claim its only partially teleoperated but we all know its 100% brittle edge shit.

I am deep in the robotics space and one thing repeatedly emphasized in deployments is DO NOT TELEOPERATE IN PRIVATE DOMICILES. Obviously the security and privacy implications are immense and pose incredible liability risk for operators. If robot has a call home check in function like Alexa and is sometimes on and sometimes off how do you prove the negative that the robot was off at the time of any incident happening? Its a minefield.

You know whats a bigger minefield? Sexual harrassment.

The Neo X1 is teleoperated with livestreamed footage to a Quest 3, complete with haptic feedback on the controllers. The Neo X1 is basically a captive Omegle audience, and you can basically torture any operator by strapping a Mr Hands video to the camera field of view and touching the robots hands every few seconds to force the haptic feedback. And while operators are obviously free to terminate a session for harrassment mitigation, you really think someone that shells out 20k for a robot that REQUIRES this type of teleoperation for fulling long tail tasks will accept that his 20k robot can just decide to not work?

The future of general purpose humanoid robotics is really interesting, but Neo X1 is basically a juicero moment for the industry and the longer Boston Dynamics or Tesla fail to come up with something the more fake and gay the entire concept becomes.

Isn't the point of the telepresence operators to help generate training data for complex tasks? Like it's the same idea as autonomous vehicles: first have the human operator in control and record data with sensors, then progressively shift tasks over to an automated system with a human overseeing the task, with the human only intervening where necessary. This works even better with telepresence since the human can just remote into a robot that gets stuck, fix it, and move on to another robot with a different edge case.

This model sounds plausible to me, but I'm not involved in the robotics space, so I'd be curious to know what you think.

In terms of the safety aspect, I'd be much more concerned about the customers than the operators. The human operator can always just take off their headset if they are being harassed, while the customer cannot. And there are pretty obvious issues with having a roving camera controlled by a human operator in someone's home, like the scandal where gig workers for Irobot posted pictures online of customers on the toilet. It turns out that they were shipping images back to a contractor for data labelling. That seems like the much more obvious failure mode for the Neo.

In the long run yes, but I'd argue that you want to start by focusing on making the telepresence operation as good as possible. Mass data collection has serious privacy implications and tempts you to optimise your business model for selfish objectives (data collection) over customer service. This is a hard-sell as it is, you want to put absolutely all your effort on making it as easy and comfortable and good as you can IMO. As the Japanese say, 「お客様は神様です」(The customers are gods.)

Then, once you have your business up and running, and your tech platform and hardware is in a really nice, mature place, you can offer opt-in discount campaigns for data collection or do what iRobot does and allow your employees to take one home for free if they consent to data collection.

The X1 has a bigger problem that I noticed. When watching a video of it, it looks like the center of balance is somewhere completely different than where a human's center of balance is. This made simple things like bending down to close a dishwasher door take forever to figure out.

I can see some kind of justification of an initial "orientation" period that has a human expert on the other side, helping a robot learn where everything is and how to care for the specific appliances in the customer's house. But the problems of the X1 goes beyond that.

I watched a video and I just don't see this catching on. The thing took 5 minutes to load a few items into a dishwasher, and that was with 100% remote operation. You can talk about minefields all you want, but the bigger minefield is that 100% teleoperation is expensive. I'm sure the robot itself costs no small sum, and beyond that a portion of the $20,000 purchase price has to go towards paying someone to do housework more inefficiently than they could in person. And the "housework" they do seems to be limited to light tidying up; you aren't going to get one of these things to clean the bathroom, or dust and vacuum. In other words, it doesn't do anything that you'd actually pay someone to do. It's useless! And the operator needs special training to do things that need no special training, and presumably having an operator actually available is key to the whole thing since you don't want a robot that's an expensive paperweight because there's no one there to remotely operate it. So, unlike an actual maid, you have to pay someone to be on call constantly in case someone wants you to move a book from one table to another. For $20,000 I can hire a cleaning service who will undoubtedly do a better job.

Interesting. My feelings are the opposite of yours: as someone with AI-robotics experience I’ve been thinking just teleoperate the damn thing ever since I saw the Stanford R1 doing housework.

I can see the problems you mention but I don’t think either problem is insurmountable.

  1. Have the robot have a clear kill-switch that physically disables vision (via a shutter), and also cuts off power to the motors and other sensors. This also eases concern over abuse of the customer by the operator.
  2. Lease the robots to the customer rather than selling them. They’ll be cheaper and the entitlement will be less.
  3. Make it clear in the marketing that the robots are 100% remote controlled and and that you are buying competent high-level service, not your own personal machine slave.
  4. Have a proper procedure for recording data in cases of harassment. Recorded data is only saved if an incident is reported (no general archiving so reduced privacy issues).
  5. To the extent economically possible, market at older people who need care rather than at people with a maid or butler fetish.

I get the appeal of teleoperation since it solves 99% of the bullshit edge case tripups that any type of robot runs into, but then the economic proposition dies entirely. Teleoperation performs the low frequency near-regex tasks like dusting tchotckes or fetching packages but it still can't do priority care like flipping grandpa to prevent bedsores or popping dementia grannies pills into her mouth. Once I'm paying for a subscription with another human being accountable I want everything I'm paying for. Users accept the limitations of their roomba, but if its high level its gotta actually be a high level assistant. And given how it took 5 minutes to get a glass of fucking water the assistance quality leaves much to be desired.

To my mind the economic proposition comes from:

  1. the fact that one well-trained worker can cover far more ground when they don't have to worry about transport costs.
  2. they never actually enter your home so you don't have to worry about theft and so on.
  3. related but there's a lot of people who have never had a maid but would use a remote-controlled robot because it feels less invasive.

Much of the market for labour is somewhat patchy - even my relative with severe mobility issues spent most of a decade only needing 90 min in the morning to get dressed, 30 min (most of which is unused) to warm a microwave meal for lunch, the same for dinner, then some care for bed. In practice this ends up looking a lot like full-time care, but it doesn't have to. Likewise dusting once a week or tidying the desk once a day. Possibly you pay for use time not daily (with a minimum spend to make it viable).

And the robot would have to be designed from the ground up for teleoperation. I would give it some sort of wheel / track arrangement for speed and stability (or maybe something more like HUBO) with a torso that can raise and lower to provide a stable basis for manipulation. Then try and optimise the arms for speed and responsiveness, although I appreciate there's only so much you can get here (speed/forward-accuracy/dexterity pick two).

Clearly this isn't what they're going for (and the design looks like a horror-movie where the big twist is there's a person stuffed inside) but that's how I'd try it.

Problem of teleoperation is the same problem of ride hailing services: lumpy demand. Your operator isn't going station to station, he's having to spin up multiple assistants only for them to lay idle later on. It ends up being a permanent remote butler, but without the flexibility of on-demand functionality.

I am also ignoring the basic executive deficiencies of all robots for variable tasks. Rugs and cables are navigation deathtraps, let alone stairs. Grabbing stuff without haptic feedback for edge delineation or roughness is a recipe for overpressure. Even teleoperated robots will struggle, and I would argue struggle even more because humans are too used to our own feedback mechanisms and translating imperfect feedbacks makes things worse - look at how crap we are if we need to do fine work with thick gloves on.

Neo strikes me as using the claim of training data development as an excuse for rolling out a halfbaked teleoperated product in advance of other home assist robots. It stinks of narrative control being favoured over capability readiness, and the only weirdos that will accept a manifestly incapable robot like that are perverts that get off on violating the theoretical operators privacy.

For men: in a relationship, do you ask about your partner's body count? Or perhaps you don't ask about it, but ask certain other questions like attitudes about casual sex? Does asking about it actually help with the preoccupation at all? How do you get over it?

Random question: how would you feel about marrying a widow who's only experience was her previous husband?

Like, is this about sex, is it about loyalty, is it about inferiority, is it about adherence to current morals?

Off the top of my head, for me personally I guess it's about something like dignity? A widow (presumably) expected to be married forever, so she does not lose her dignity by remarrying. An abuse victim did not consent to the interaction as so her dignity remains intact. Both cases involve external forces outside of the woman's control. But a promiscuous woman does things within her control to willingly degrades herself and thus becomes undignified and unworthy of respect.

You get over it by doing all the kinky stuff with HER going forward, and if thats off the table for physiological or psychological reasons then you accept who she used to be is not who she is now. She is not the same person today she was yesterday and will not be the same person tomorrow she was 10 years ago.

If your own personal value matrix emphasizes (parnter.bodycount)<(own.bodycount) then either accept that the partner is lying or buy a mail order bride.

It must be noted that you MUST know at least the vagueness of whatever your partner has gotten up to in the past. Finding old nudes of your partner even if you possess your "own" will still be weird if it was never mentioned even in brief. I don't know how this will ultimately extend to the inevitable of kids finding out what mom and dad were like if social media archives go far back enough.

I can't recall ever explicitly asking. In my experience, women were more likely to proactively offer, or get into details about past-relationships in a way that conveyed a rough idea of body count. They always seem to want to tell me about their awful exes, in detail.

Honestly, I don't particularly care, at least within a reasonable range like 0-10ish. Past that, I gradually raise eyebrows, though it's hardly the defining factor in my decision matrix for would/wouldn't date. It also matters greatly whether they're serious about settling down, or still seem intent on screwing around.

Personality, social status, looks, wealth, signs of poor decision making like ending up a single mom? Those matter far more to me.

This probably doesn't answer your question, since I don't know how to make myself stop caring about a problem I've never really cared about. I suppose it's worth trying to meditate on the difference between serial monogamy and casual sex. Someone in their late 20s or early 30s can have a dozen partners even if each relationship was committed and lasted a meaningful amount of time.

They always seem to want to tell me about their awful exes, in detail.

This is a massive red flag in one or both directions.

It doesn't bother me that much. It used to, but I have mostly gotten over it, I suppose. Both of us were very liberal with our sex lives before we wanted to "settle down," so to speak. I don't really know what to tell you, was never a huge issue for me and I did a lot of other emotional work for other issues and that helped calm things generally.

You know, I have a friend who is a born-again virgin, who was of sometimes questionable sexual morality prior to meeting his now-wife. My understanding from him is that she was similar, though I have never talked to her personally about it. They understand this about each other, but other than that they don't speak about it and operate as though they were each other's firsts.

I wouldn't have guessed that would work, but it seems to for them.

I think if you have the sort of communication environment where your partner (I'm assuming a women, and that you the reader are a man) feels comfortable enough to tell you anything/everything, this will eventually come up, generally in the first year or so. I'm probably not a great person to answer this as I've been with my wife since we were teenagers, about 30 years now.

It did come up with her way back then; we'd both had a handful of less-then-serious highschool relationships, neither were virgins. I'd had a lot more actual sex than she had despite my count of unique partners only being 1 higher as I was pretty active with my HS girlfriends and she actually struggled to get her HS boyfriends to actually have sex with her. I grew up in a large metro and she grew up on a farm in a rural part of the same state probably had a lot to do with the different experiences. If she'd gone to my HS she'd probably have been more experienced than me simply due to more opportunity.

I get the impression that our (romantic) lifestyle is likely pretty unpopular on this board, so the only additional detail I'll add is that we've both slept with way more people after getting married than before, usually the same people, always together.

I get the impression that our (romantic) lifestyle is likely pretty unpopular on this board, so the only additional detail I'll add is that we've both slept with way more people after getting married than before, usually the same people, always together.

While not for me, as I'm far too jealous and insecure for this lifestyle, I am always somewhat in awe of this.

Partially as I deeply respect your strong sense of self and self confidence to be fine with this, and partially because it is kind of a power move.

Props to you and your wife.

I appreciated your advice downthread, but to congratulate him on his way of life is such a different set of values from me that it's completely bizarre to me...

Talking about attitudes about various things, including sex, is important. But I don't see how digging into the past is going to help anything. Usually obsessing over such things is the sign you're not feeling secure in the relationship, and if that's the case, the focus should be on trying to figure out why it is. Digging out more juicy details about the past is not going to help any. I know it's hard to "stop thinking about the white elephant" but realizing no good may come from following that road may help.

For men: in a relationship, do you ask about your partner's body count?

No, but it tends to come up naturally. But also, I and most of the people I've dated didn't really know? Depending how you define body count, I'm probably somewhere between one and three dozen?

Does asking about it actually help with the preoccupation at all? How do you get over it?

What preoccupation? Who cares how many people either of you have slept with? Being preoccupied with exes or their penis size (as described below) just reeks of insecurity. It seems more productive to focus on being a good partner in and out of the bedroom and having confidence in your self-worth.

Depending how you define body count, I'm probably somewhere between one and three dozen?

How many people have you had PiV or PiA sex with?

Don't know. Probably around a dozen, maybe more.

This type of reaction you've shown to me makes me angry. You clearly don't respect my values enough to even ask why before you start telling me how it looks, and ridiculing the thought process right out of the gate. But maybe that was your intention.

I deliberately avoided dating for this long because I only ever wanted to save myself for one special person, to make her my "first" everything, and it's a really bitter pill to swallow that I've waited too long to get my life in order and there is basically nobody left at my age who is relatively normal and also did the same thing as me, so it won't be as special, and I will probably feel permanently bitter about it.

If that seems too romantic for you, fine. The bitter reality that we are all mammals that just have instincts to mate with each other before we die is an extremely uncomfortable thought, and I think society has been harmed by embracing it to the extent that it has. I finally believe that I'm a good person, and there are other good people like me, and the world as it currently is is unfair to them and their values. But there's nothing I can do about it, so it's just about finding the best way to cope.

It's not like they don't exist, but most of them have negative reasons for remaining virgins for so long (like trauma or trust-issues). Some of these reasons aren't too hard to overcome, others are nearly impossible. And there's still many women with low body counts in Asia, but I understand if that doesn't appeal to you.

Personally, I don't mind higher (5-10) body-counts per se, what I mind is the reason behind them, like superficiality, a lack of loyalty, hedonism, etc.

You sound pretty firm that this isn't any kind of inferiority complex. Have you tried unpacking a bit more what it actually is?

For instance, when you think about the body-count disparity, are you angrier that you waited (FOMO) or that she (maybe) didn't?

When you say you wanted it to be "special" and that you feel "bitter" about your first time, are you most upset about the experience getting devalued in itself? Or that she might value it less (giving you feelings of rejection/ being unappreciated)? Or that you are getting someone less pristine? Or just pure anger at the idea of someone preceding you?

For what it's worth, although randy Aellas apparently do exist, a large proportion of most young women's early "body count" outside committed LTRs will have been owing to some combination of: unpleasant direct pressure or manipulation by a date; unpleasant social expectations to seem cool and not like a boring prude; and/or maladaptive coping impulses from some kind of painful trauma or personal issues. Women mostly talk about these youthful encounters as war stories, and while not everyone would admit outright regret, I've never, in my whole life, heard a (non-professional) woman express enjoyment of the sex itself in an early-20s hookup. No icky memory of a casual hookup will make the average woman less appreciative of the deep, intimate sexual connection she's finally found with the love of her life, so if you're at all concerned that she won't find it special... that really really is not an issue. You might as well be jealous that she had some near-miss collisions with drunk drivers before setting out on a road trip with you.

In my experience of both, girls under "unpleasant social expectations" are all giggly and dripping wet, while with "the love of her life" you are grinding your teeth and enduring. Funny how that works.

You seem very confident in your intuitions about your partners' enjoyment during sex, which is not something that men or women are notoriously great at judging. (And for reference, young women mostly giggle when they're nervous or uncomfortable, and vaginal fluid fluctuates with hormones, not necessarily with arousal.) But your experience is your own, and I'm sorry you apparently had some bad sex with a woman who loved you.

I'm a little confused by the wider claim, but if the idea is that women exclusively enjoy casual sex with Chads, hate sex with men they love, and are unaroused by romantic attention, emotional intimacy, care or commitment... well, that's a pretty extraordinary thing to argue, but if true it seems like it should be not "funny" but great? "Bang as many hotties as possible, no uggos, no fats, no true love, lie as much as you can" closely matches various classic evopsych statements about men's preferences and MOs, so if that's really what girls like too, then seems like we should be headed into a golden age of harmonious gender relations.

And if I had said that in the latter case they are closing their eyes and thinking of England, would you have retorted that nobody cares about England anymore, or would you have understood that I was speaking figuratively? For reference, I can't remember a girl literally giggling during sex.

And the picture is far from great, because I'm only growing older and more unattractive while competition is growing more fierce, and also because I'm a romantic at heart, and it chafes that emotional intimacy is a hindrance to good sex, here in the reality and not in the words of somebody who tries to legitimize female dual strategy colloquially known as Alpha Fux Beta Bux.

I don't know, man, I can only speak from my own experience as a happily married person, surrounded by other single-to-low-body-count people in similarly normal marriages, plus several nice, friendly and pretty low-body-count single ladies who I wish would meet these true romantics you say are out there. From where I stand, all that redpill dogma from those ponytailed/overtanned skeezy old influencer dudes is about as close to lived reality as the Flat Earth stuff. Some of it sounds like an elaborate fantasy by people who never moved past high-school resentment of the cheerleaders and football stars; a bit of Heartiste quoted here the other day was so frankly homoerotic (in a masochistic way) that I kinda wanted to tell the guy to just marry Chad since he finds him so fuckable.

Anyway, like I said, I'm sorry you've had some bad experiences so far. Hope you find someone to be happy with.

I respect your commitment man. There are definitely virginal women out there, though finding them outside of a church is going to be an exercise in endless frustration...

I ultimately think there are a lot more important things than virginity, so this is just something I need to decide how to tackle for the reason you said.

Good luck brother. As always, partner dance is the way…. ;)

This type of reaction you've shown to me makes me angry. You clearly don't respect my values enough to even ask why before you start telling me how it looks, and ridiculing the thought process right out of the gate. But maybe that was your intention.

For what it's worth, no, I wasn't trying to troll you or make you angry. I had assumed we were starting from a position that your values or worldview were maladaptive given that you're asking for help in 'getting over it,' and use the word preoccupation which to me at least carries a negative valence.

But if you want to dig in and insist on your values, I wish you luck in your coping.

Speaking of negative valence, "you want to dig in" also has a negative valence, along with the rest of that last sentence. For one, it's not just me, this is an inherent part of the human psyche of many people. For another, I have a hard time thinking that I'm wrong, seeing all the people who cannot handle casual sex or do crazy things like trying to get their hookups or their exes fired because they are too bitter from breaking up.

I haven't been in a new relationship in fifteen years, but I knew my girlfriend's body count and it absolutely mattered to me before committing.

I didn't get over it, it was low enough that I was satisfied. If it were higher, I wouldn't have kept dating her.

If you're already in a relationship, you're probably better off not knowing.

Hell no I don't ask. I have a rough idea and that's bad enough, I know it would destroy me to get more info. I wish I knew how to get over it. I've been struggling with the mental health issues of my wife having had sex with other people (whereas she was my first) for almost 10 years now. Stoicism helps me some (and indeed it's the reason I got into Stoicism), but I'm not always feeling rational enough where appeals to philosophy can convince my brain to quiet down. Therapy didn't help at all. At this point I've given up on fixing it and figure I'll just have to live with the pain until the day I die.

Was this because you weren't trying, or because a lack of success at getting laid despite it? That matters, at least in terms of how you interpret things.

More importantly, it should greatly reassure you that you beat out all those other men in being the one she decided to settle down with. If you've been married for 10 years (and hopefully happily), that's a far more meaningful commitment.

Lack of success despite trying (to a point: at some point one starts to figure "if I've failed every time I'm just going to fail this time too" and gives up, but that took years). One thing that's continually surprising to me is how much those years of rejection still hurt on some level. Logically it makes no sense - I made it. I genuinely love my wife and we have a great relationship, but somehow in defiance of rational thought it's hard to shake the feelings of pain from back then. Thankfully it gets easier year by year - at this point it's mostly gone, but not entirely.

Similarly I think you are completely correct in your analysis of the situation I described with insecurity. We've been together 10 years, married for 8 - I won over all those other dudes, and I have the receipts to show it. Unfortunately (as I'm sure you're well aware, lol), human brains are pretty shit at being rational sometimes. Thankfully that, too, is getting easier year by year - perhaps it's habituation, perhaps something else, but it has gotten easier even if it has never gone away entirely (and I'm doubtful that it'll ever go away entirely).

I've been trying to think on the points that you and @fmac raised, so as to try to give you both a good answer and not just shooting from the hip. I think that ultimately, the reason I feel insecure in the way I do is not because I fear something per se, but because I believe that sex is something very special, almost sacred. And as such I believe that the more it is shared, the less it means to share it. By way of analogy, when a person gets married for the first time, I find that to be a very exciting and meaningful event. When someone gets married for the fifth time, I don't really think it's significant any more. That is roughly how I feel about sex, so basically I have that belief deep in my core values which says "this isn't particularly special between you two, you're just the latest man". Again I know this to not be particularly rational (though to be fair, values often aren't), but it can be difficult to maintain rationality on such an emotionally charged topic. The most helpful thing I've found thus far (as I mentioned in another post) is Stoic practices, where I try to hold the negative feelings at arm's length and remind myself "it doesn't matter, what matters is that I conduct myself well". I'm not always able to do that either, but sometimes I am - and in those moments the practice does help.

Dude, you described my feelings perfectly here. I tried to do it here but didn't expect the pushback. I didn't suspect my views were so alien to a lot of the world. Sex was so synonymous with marriage in my upbringing, so your marriage analogy makes a lot of sense. In the Old Times before everyone was forced to let young people do whatever they want, sex was synonymous with marriage for a lot of people. Modern day relationships are sort of like micro-marriages from this perspective. And yes, it is a bitter pill to swallow that I purposely avoided micro-marriages until I was ready to walk the walk, and very few others even stopped to consider it. I do not like modern society. Maybe I would like it better if my evangelical parents didn't instill these traditionalist values in me, but at least one of them didn't like the way modern society handles relationships, either, so it's hard to blame them. Birth control really must have cheapened sex a lot.

Yes, see, this is why I was so resistant in my previous threads on this subject when some people were like "why do you dislike premarital sex so much? Have you tried just giving up your values?" I think I am pretty similar to you. Yes, I think it's best if I do not know. Thanks for your reply.

You're welcome. For what it's worth, I don't think it's a problem of values per se. I suspect (though I can't prove) that many if not most people are wired to want sexual exclusivity (including past exclusivity) with their partner. I've known plenty of people who don't have traditional values around sexuality, but who say they would rather not know about their partner's body count because it will just bother them. That suggests to me that, despite our culture's attempt to brush promiscuity (or even serial monogamy) off as "it's just sex, who cares", many people are in fact deeply wired to care about sex and to not be able to easily shrug the past off as "well, (s)he's with me now so it doesn't matter".

I agree with the advice of both @yofuckreddit and @ThomasdelVasto - this may be something you have to compromise on due to the nature of the society we live in, but not necessarily so because people waiting for marriage do still exist. Just be aware you're making it harder on yourself to find a partner if you make that a dealbreaker. Nothing wrong with that, one simply has to be aware of what they are setting themselves up for.

For some unsolicited advice of my own:

  • Be prepared that even if you figure you're ok with someone with a sexual past, your feelings might change. I didn't start to suffer from retroactive jealousy until my wife and I had been dating for 9 months.
  • If you think you might struggle with this topic, try to resist the temptation to sleep with a woman before getting married. My wife and I were already sleeping together when I started to struggle with her past, at which point there wasn't anything I could reasonably do about it (besides keep struggling) without being a massive hypocrite and the scum of the earth. What was I going to do, break up with my (then) gf because I felt bad because she had sex with other bfs? We were doing that very thing. Nor could I have tried to then find a woman who was a virgin without being a virgin myself (at least, not write being a massive hypocrite and the scum of the earth). I know how strong the temptation is - firsthand. But I wish I hadn't gone down that road.
  • If you pursue a relationship with a woman who has a past, and you start to struggle with feelings of retroactive jealousy, do not talk to her about it. I did this with my wife (while we were still dating, and once briefly after we got married) and all that it accomplished was that I hurt her deeply. Because what could she do? She couldn't change her past, after all, nor does she have a magic wand to wave to make my brain stop being hung up on this topic. Instead she rather bitterly remarked that she wished I had a gf before her whom I had slept with, that way it wouldn't be a struggle for our relationship. She also lamented that she was going to be a cautionary tale for Christian girls everywhere, that if they had sex with a man they didn't then marry it would ruin their marriage. For my part, all that happened was I got horrible guilt that I get to carry around that I hurt her, and moreover that I continue to have the feelings which hurt her. But I did at least learn to never speak of it again - I would bet dollars to donuts that my wife has no idea that I still struggle with these feelings of jealousy (though thankfully much less often than I used to, probably due to the wonders of habituation).

Regardless, good luck brother. I doubt it'll be easy for you, because it hasn't been for me. I can only hope that some of the advice here (from me but also others) will help to make it a little better. I wish that human psychology wasn't susceptible to this failure mode, but alas it is. I am truly rooting for you though.

I have what I believe to be natural male jealousy and insecurity, probably similar to both of you.

I have a higher body count and volume of experience than my wife. This is something you may not want to do, and statistically it makes your future relationships more likely to fail, but having been around the block at least once will calibrate the value of sex to something less than how you view it now. I won't say what's right or what's wrong on that, but I do believe there's a difference between sex and "lovemaking".

Another reason why having at least some experience is important is that you realize that many women are terrible lays. Given how little they have to actually do, a natural conclusion is that men are pretty fucking bad at sex as well. I historically took some comfort in the fact that even if I was with someone who had been with more people, I was above par.

My biggest concern for you right now is that some of that insecurity - that another dude before you is a better lay and satisfied her more deeply - may be true because you have no experience. It took years to elevate my technique, and sex that felt transcendent in my second year doing it seems like amateur hour in comparison to what I did later. To be clear this isn't anything exotic - even 1-1 monogamous and toy-free sex requires a lot of effort. There's a huge sleight of hand in the US Christian culture, at least, where everyone's pretending they're not having sex when they actually are, and realizing that really pissed my wife off for years. Christian women, IME, aren't interested in virgin men.

I haven't really answered your question yet. First: no, I don't ask about historical body count. It only has the potential to be bad news. I believe you can learn about someone's tastes and preferences effectively without hearing that Joe from Accounting was the first one to put a thumb in her ass. All it would do is make me jealous.

The second thing is that true emotional connection and enthusiasm is a huge force multiplier for high-quality sex. If you are a great partner in all the other ways and love sex with them, you'll be at or near the top of their historical experiences.

Can you name your fear? Is it that you won't be the best? That they'll cheat? Because you do need to suss out the probablity of the latter happening. I don't think going into the gory details helps. If it's the former, you should know that people live with that reality all the time.

There's a huge sleight of hand in the US Christian culture, at least, where everyone's pretending they're not having sex when they actually are, and realizing that really pissed my wife off for years.

Why did that piss her off?

Recognizing that such a huge percentage of your family, friends, schoolmates, etc. that are part of your culture were all lying to you doesn't feel great. I don't think she had sexual FOMO, but who knows, maybe that was part of it too.

Thanks for your reply, you clearly understand how I feel, at least a little. It's not about me not being the best - obviously, if she loves me, she will tolerate me until I get more experience, and you're totally right about sex not being just in the bedroom - and it's not about them cheating, I don't think either of those are things that I fear. It's that I waited for marriage and she didn't, so someone else has experienced such a level of intimacy with her, and intimacy with me will not feel as special as it otherwise would have; being "the first" for everything would have been far more preferable, and the thought of someone else having done it to her besides me is painful. SubstantialFrivolity effectively convinced me that I should try to not learn any more than that, and my brain will probably eventually find a comforting headcanon if left to its own devices. I guess it boils down to just plain jealousy and some sense of purity. But like most of my anxieties, I find that keeping them private and not doing anything about them generally helps them go away without incident.

SubstantialFrivolity effectively convinced me that I should try to not learn any more than that, and my brain will probably eventually find a comforting headcanon if left to its own devices.

I support this and I want to double up on his advice not to talk about it. Probably for different reasons - I think his wife was being a bit unfair by turning it around back on him when he expressed his jealousy. But talking about it is a catch-22. It makes you appear weak to your partner, and will increase the chances of something negative happening as a result, as you can see from his anecdote.

In the modern world I'll throw something out there - a woman who's slept with ~<1 person a year since becoming "active" is probably a good deal on the sexual market. To me that shows a significant amount of personal restraint. I would be pretty happy with that if I were still dating to marry.

Best of luck!

and intimacy with me will not feel as special as it otherwise would have

As somebody who have been in relationships before "settling down", this is not true. I don't feel like my previous experiences - many of which I don't even remember now - diminish my bond to my wife in any way, and I don't think she feels our relationship is less special because she was married in the past too. It's all the past and gone, and the special thing is now.

I guess it boils down to just plain jealousy and some sense of purity.

In marriage, sometimes you need to make sacrifices. I think sacrificing the part of your selfishness that is jealousy to the past is not a bad thing to do. And if you keep in mind why you're doing it and what you're getting in return, you may feel better about it. You can't make yourself not feel things that you feel, but you can conquer those things and not let them make you unhappy. Fortunately, these are things that depend only on you alone - so nothing prevents you from doing that.

Are you practically asking how to gain information about a female partner's sexual past?

No, he's asking whether other people do it.

It's called "retroactive jealousy"

I have another word for it. "Standards." Most women do not hold themselves to a high standard, and society has done its best to lower standards for female behavior, but you can choose to keep your standards high and then retroactive jealousy becomes disgust at disgusting behavior.

So if I can barely remember most of the times I had sex, your girl probably is the same.

Men and women are not the same, they have never been the same, they will never be the same. I don't understand why you would make this assumption, because it seems like wishful thinking. In fact, I would assume the opposite. The reason why you forget is because you are a man, and your reproductive strategy is different than women. I would assume women, who can only reproduce with one man at a time, would be different. I would expect them to get attached, and to think about their partners, and to remember. You even said yourself that it's the orgasm that makes you forget. You then apply this to women, which, LOL. LMAO, even.

So to be clear your stance here is that my statement of "i assume most people don't remember the majority of the sex they've had very well, if at all" is untrue when applied to women, and is in fact the opposite?

So you're saying that women have near-autobiographical memory of every time they've had sex?

I would assume that your experience as a man would be representative of men, and given the differing reproductive strategies of the sexes, it's more likely to be the opposite than the same.

As far as I know, throughout the developed women generally live longer than men on average while also retiring earlier than them on average. In my view, the maximally cynical take on this is that most citizens share the unspoken consensus that 1. old women generally remain socially active and perform socially beneficial tasks in ways that men generally don’t (this mostly entails looking after the children of their daughter especially if she happens to be a single mom and/or divorced; plus being matchmakers for young singles in their social circle) 2. most women don’t focus on their careers as much as men do so we can’t expect the majority or even a significant minority of them to have high-status, well-paying etc. jobs and remain employable at the of 60 or so. Am I correct in this?

The effective retirement age gap between men and women is very small (~1 year) in the developed world, and in France it seems that it's actually women who retire 1 year later than men. Legally speaking it's equal between the sexes in nearly every single developed country, but when it was lower in the past for women, the most sensible explanation I read was that since the norm was single-income households and women tended to marry younger, they timed it so when the husband retired, they would both get their pension at the same time.

Is there any well-established rule of 'controversial topic of mild significance (because there are legitimate arguments on both sides) gets far more attention than uncontroversial disaster of much greater significance which is somehow considered a faux pas to talk about'. I guess it might just be a simple extension of the power media has to determine the discourse. Constant dysfunction is boring vs exciting rocket explosions and dynamic personalities like Musk or Trump.

There is for example a well-established discourse here and elsewhere about whether or not Starship is overhyped, about Elon Musk being too optimistic in his projections. Elsewhere there's a perception that Musk is a scammer who just takes credit for work that his engineers do and somehow bewitches investors into giving him all this money. I'm fairly sympathetic to Musk, building a whole new class of super heavy rocket is difficult, doing things for the first time is difficult, especially in space. Starship is mostly funded by SpaceX too, so it's not like its a big deal if there are delays.

But the non-Musk US spaceflight program seems to be non-controversially a dumpster fire, a complete clownshow, a world-historical money-shredding operation, grifter central. Orion alone (just the capsule) took 19 years and $30 billion. The rocket it's supposed to go with can't actually reach the Moon, it's not technically possible because Orion is too heavy. They unironically proposed building a space station near the moon to make up for this, make the moon mission even more complicated and expensive.

https://idlewords.com/2024/5/the_lunacy_of_artemis.htm

https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2025/10/31/nasas-orion-space-capsule-is-flaming-garbage/

Lockheed had the temerity to charge 2.5 billion for the luxury of adding docking capabilities to their capsule! All the money for this garbage comes from the US public.

NASA and the established spaceflight players like Lockheed or Boeing should be ruthlessly purged IMO, how can you get away with stealing all this money? Find the decisionmakers and bankrupt them, jail them, teach them a lesson. Take a lesson from China's purges, you can't just have important national capabilities turned into slush funds for lazy cabals of contractors and bureaucrats. Only during the Boeing Starliner fiasco where astronauts were left stranded was there much public attention given to the dire state of procurement and even then people mostly seemed to go 'Boeing is a shit company' rather than look at things more broadly.

But the non-Musk US spaceflight program seems to be non-controversially a dumpster fire, a complete clownshow, a world-historical money-shredding operation, grifter central.

This has been the case ever since the US committed to the space shuttle program before the vast majority* of Mottizens was even born. I once read a great series of posts (which a cursory internet search isn't turning up, alas) that criticized the space shuttle program in detail and backed it up with period documentation. It was pretty clear that while there were many who were enthusiastic about a shuttle for the wow! factor, from a simple physical and engineering standpoint it never made sense. Irrespective of the built-in limitations of gravity, space shuttle backers nevertheless pushed, and got, the largest version of the shuttle possible to the Nixon administration, thus wedding NASA to spending the majority of its budget on an ultra-high cost, ultra-low utility space plane. The choice is especially egregious since NASA's budget cuts in the 70s meant that committing to the space shuttle necessarily meant building out expensive new launch capability for the shuttle and abandoning the existing Apollo/Saturn V, which ironically could lift significantly more weight into space than the shuttle ever could. That the US continues to waste billions on launch tech based upon the shuttle's known to be inferior lift capability five decades after its inception and a decade plus after its official retirement, all while SpaceX has already achieved much better results at a fraction of the cost is just... chef's kiss.

NASA and the established spaceflight players like Lockheed or Boeing should be ruthlessly purged IMO, how can you get away with stealing all this money? Find the decisionmakers and bankrupt them, jail them, teach them a lesson. Take a lesson from China's purges, you can't just have important national capabilities turned into slush funds for lazy cabals of contractors and bureaucrats.

You'd think so, but in fact the US has demonstrated that it can and will pursue dodgy technology with only marginally better potential than existing tech, if at all, and do so over and over again. What's especially impressive are the ridiculously wasteful patronage programs "cost saving" programs that are so bad that we vow never to do them again... until generational memory decays enough to begin a fresh round of graft at the expense of the US taxpayer. Where's William Proxmire when we need him?

*ISTR at least one Mottizen claiming to be a Baby Boomer

I agree with the main point and am usually first to criticize cost-inefficient US military procurement, especially in the age of drones. But the F-35 is OK, it is at least better than its 1960s equivalent, you get some more bang for a lot more buck. And there are export orders. The Zumwalt is pretty terrible as a warship but it's better than it's 60s equivalent, if only it weren't so ruinously expensive and they didn't cancel the guns. The LCS is pretty useless, I think it might indeed be worse than its 1960s equivalent, the Charles F. Adams Class. I've heard some defences of the Osprey, it's not like the capabilities it brings are that useful (any serious opponent will shoot them down pretty easily) but there are some capabilities it brings to the table. These are flawed programs and show a reckless disregard for efficient and realistic procurement.

But SLS+Orion is just worse than the Saturn V. Less power, more cost, can't reach the Moon. I think this is just a whole other league of terribleness to the standard story of defence procurement fiascos, on par only with the LCS. Maybe even worse than the LCS because at least there was some kind of idea where it'd be useful, fighting in low intensity wars. Whereas SLS+Orion is supposed to go to the Moon but can't.

If the F-35 was outright worse than an F-4 Phantom then Lockheed executives should be aggressively, intensively bullied. That's the spaceflight equivalent I think.

The thing that I'm trying to point at with the F-35 reference specifically is the lessons learned from the TFX program/F-111 were that trying to save money by making one common multi-role aircraft ultimately netted a thoroughly mediocre end result that was delivered way over time and way over budget, and that sticking with individual designs to fill specific roles was far superior as evidenced by the subsequent fighters. But as sure as Odin made little green apples, the US tried to do it again with the JSF/F-35, harder and longer, as is the custom with military procurement these days, because post cold-war budget cuts, or something.

Rabble.

cost is just... chef's kiss

AI slop detected.

Are we going after ellipses now? Is nothing holy?

It stops being holy if it becomes an LLM-ism. Same with it's not X, it's Y.

The AI is doing us a favor by finding all the vapid, say-something-without-saying-anything phrases in writing and making them feel icky.

You do you, but for me... fuck that noise. I'm not going to change my writing style because LLMs use mannerisms I do, nor because it causes people to falsely think my writing was LLM generated. To me, doing that would be a weakness. IMO it's better to be your own person even if some think less of you for that.

No way! Why should I change? They're the ones that suck!

Be careful that you don't trip on the AIphemism treadmill.

Those hopped-up search engines with extra steps can have my chef's kiss and my em dashes when they pry them from my cold, dead fingers.

Starship is mostly funded by SpaceX too, so it's not like its a big deal if there are delays.

Losing the Space Race Boogaloo to China seems like a fairly big deal.

They unironically proposed building a space station near the moon to make up for this, make the moon mission even more complicated and expensive.

Not a very good argument in terms of "non-Musk space companies being a dumpster fire", as he unironically proposed having a dozen or two of orbital refuellings in order to send a single rocket to the moon, which they don't even know if they can do. Using Starship as a lander doesn't strike me as particularly sane either.

There are definitely people too invested in painting him as a clown, and I will further say they're almost certainly doing so for political reasons, but he's also definitely overhyped.

SpaceX is the only group capable of competing with China in space though? If it weren't for them, China would be ahead in orbital launch and cost-efficiency... If anyone's to blame for losing the Space Race it should be Lockheed and NASA who've blundered billions and billions on rockets that don't work properly. If SpaceX had been given that money they probably would've done a much better job with it.

Most of his launches are in-house for Starlink, and it's not clear Starlink's model is sustainable. His competition is slowly catching up to him, and much like with Tesla, his ideas to stay ahead are not panning out, to put it mildly. I'm pretty sure the trajectory of the two companies will be the same.

Also, you're shifting the goalposts. Your original argument was that it's not a big deal that Starship is delayed, and I gave an argument for why it is. Looping back to "but look at all the cool things that they did with Falcon" is irrelevant. This is the typical cycle of the conversations about Elon: use hype about the future to claim he's amazing, then claim the past should already be enough for you, when someone questions the claims about the future.

I still maintain that it's not a big deal if Starship is delayed, since firstly they're trying something new (reusable superheavy rocket) so there should be allowances for inherent difficulty. Also they're doing it with their own money instead of asking for gazillions from the US govt and then producing something worse than what came out in the 1960s.

I was responding to your point where 'Losing the Space Race Boogaloo to China seems like a fairly big deal.' but I don't see how this could be SpaceX's fault, even if Starship fails, the US is only ahead in space because of SpaceX. My 'goalpost-shifting' is a response to that.

I was responding to your point where 'Losing the Space Race Boogaloo to China seems like a fairly big deal.' but I don't see how this could be SpaceX's fault, even if Starship fails, the US is only ahead in space because of SpaceX.

If the Space Race is about the moon, I'm not even sure the US is ahead of China, and I don't see how you don't see it's SoaceX fault. They were supposed to have a whole bunch of milestones checked off by now, and they didn't make it to orbit yet.

Oh, they're still asking for and getting billions from the US govt; the differences between them (and Blue Origin) vs Boeing or Lockheed are that they're spending way fewer billions (probably over $10B for the whole Starship program R&D before SpaceX is done, but SLS and Orion are over $50B now), a minority of that spending is from the government (SpaceX's two HLS contracts total a bit over $4B, Blue Origin's one a bit under), and the spending disbursement is tied to milestones rather than to "here you go; if stuff's not working come back and ask for more" (though the milestones are way too front-loaded; these are very stringent contracts by NASA R&D standards but they're weak by any non-R&D standard).

I don't see how this could be SpaceX's fault

SpaceX bidding "Elon time" estimates rather than realistic schedule estimates might have been part of how they beat Blue Origin for the original HLS award, and this delayed Blue Origin's award by a couple years of legal/policy wrangling. If SpaceX's delays are more than a few years' worse than China's, and Blue Origin's are less than a couple years' worse, and there aren't any "Artemis II heat shield failure" or "Axiom discovers a huge flaw in its suits" level problems from others, then China will put astronauts on the moon before we return astronauts to the moon and it'll be in part because of that bid+award. Fingers crossed for Blue Origin, though; the New Glenn was supposed to first launch in 2020 and eventually got pushed back to 2025. Fingers crossed for Artemis II, too; it feels insane to launch humans in a reentry vehicle where we haven't yet done an unmanned test of our planned fixes for its chunks-were-breaking-off-the-heat-shield problem.

I disagree that China beating us here is a big deal, because "put a few men on the moon for the first time at $4B+ a pop marginal" (inflation adjusted) was a bad goal in the first place, and changing the goal to "for the seventh time" doesn't make it any better, whereas "plant ISS-scale skyscrapers on the moon for a fraction of the price" (or even "plant 20 tons a pop on the moon via commercial rocket flights") actually has some interesting long-term possibilities.

On the other hand, even my autist-adjacent heart sees some symbolic value to lapping China in the flags-and-footprints race, because: China has just beaten us in the Barbecue-In-Space Race! I reiterate: taikonauts are now enjoying steaks and bone-in wings fresh out of the oven! At least Sputnik had the decency to limit itself to a culturally-neutral "beep beep beep"; China's is driving a stake of shame into the very heart of America!

Most of his launches are in-house for Starlink

So far this year SpaceX has launched forty non-Starlink missions. That is no longer as many launches as the entire country of China, but it is more launches than any other country in the world, including (by a margin over 50%) the combined non-SpaceX remainder of the USA. It is more launches than all non-US non-China countries combined. It is also still more launched payload capacity than the entire country of China.

The fact that he launches even more for Starlink expands this accomplishment; it does not diminish it.

SpaceX is, obviously, empirically, numerically, by hundreds of percent, the only institution currently capable of competing with China in space.

Oh - but I nearly stopped while still just talking about cargo! Last time we talked about the options to launch humans I was hopeful for Starliner, but last year's flight had continuing reaction control system issues that ended up with its two test pilots waiting for extra SpaceX seats to bring them home again, and Boeing and NASA still haven't announced any potential timeline for an upcoming flight. SpaceX are currently still the only ones outside of China and Russia who operate a manned orbital spacecraft; their 4 manned launches in 2025 exceed China's 1 and Russia's 1 (hopefully soon to be 2).

Early next year SpaceX's US competition plan to put Orion in space with people on board for the first time, which is very exciting but terrifying. I want to use a kinder phrase than "flaming garbage", but I do see the photos in that article where literal pyrolysis tore chunks of its heat shield off like literal garbage. Orion's reentry capability is at the same "well, it did survive" stage as the Starship tests' ... or worse, because much of the Starship tests' damage is intentional, and unless you count ablation none of Orion's was. But, Musk will be flying another few dozen or hundred Starships before they dare put a human on board during reentry; NASA's Artemis policy, by contrast, is YOLO.

His competition is slowly catching up to him

Hopefully their future will see a little less gradatim and a little more ferociter.

I am non-ironically excited for the possibility that Blue Origin's upcoming second attempt to accomplish a booster landing is about to succeed. It's unlikely to have any more significant delays (we're just a few days out from the first launch window), and so long as it has no delays worse than have already occurred, their landing attempt will come slightly before the ten year anniversary of SpaceX accomplishing the same. It is awesome (though again I feel I must explicitly state that I'm not being sarcastic) that the leading team among SpaceX's most serious long-term competition may now be less than a decade behind them! But to anyone without a weird grudge against Musk, it's not tempting to overstate the magnitude of that awesomeness.

I am non-ironically excited for the possibility that Blue Origin's upcoming second attempt to accomplish a booster landing is about to succeed. It's unlikely to have any more significant delays (we're just a few days out from the first launch window), and so long as it has no delays worse than have already occurred, their landing attempt will come slightly before the ten year anniversary of SpaceX accomplishing the same. It is awesome that the leading team among SpaceX's most serious long-term competition may now be less than a decade behind them!

Uh-huh. How did the competition "being behind" Tesla detract from Cybertruck, Semi, Robotaxi, FSD, and Optimus being dumpster fires, and the Chinese offering as good or better cars for cheaper? How does "being ahead" supposed to magically help Starship?

Is Cybertruck a dumpster fire? I see quite a few of them driving around, about as many as you'd expect for something as niche as an electric pickup truck. It's pretty nearly the only game in town there AFAIK -- is Rivian more or less of a dumpsterfire than Cybertruck?

If you listen to Tesla's earning's calls prior to it's launch, it was supposed to be their "best product ever", they haven't mentioned them a single time in quite a while, and the last time I remember he referred to it as "digging our own grave" with it.

EDIT: Musk was saying they're aiming for 200K sales annually, it looks like they're at ~60K total.

IDK man -- "not going as well as we'd hoped" with a brand new market segment isn't quite a "dumpster fire" in my book -- especially since it's hard to untangle the... political constraints that have come to the fore since launch. It did sell like twice as many units as the electric F150 in it's launch year; looks like Ford is selling slightly more in 2025, but emphasis there is 'slightly' -- maybe electric pickups are just not hot sellers?

Now (this)[https://www.reuters.com/business/stellantis-recalls-over-320000-us-vehicles-over-battery-fire-risk-says-nhtsa-2025-11-04/] is a (Big 3) dumpster fire!

More comments

When you accused @RandomRanger of "shifting the goalposts", was that an honest concern of yours? I never said a word about Tesla.

I'm curious about when you think Tesla's competition was a decade behind Tesla, but mostly I'm just going to assume that you're shifting to Tesla because, when in the grip of Musk hate, all his companies look alike? They're not. The one building 2.5% of the world's cars and the one launching 85% of the world's spacecraft are in pretty different places.

It's definitely possible that the competition could catch up to SpaceX; I wish there were more even trying to catch up. Blue Origin is trying, though, and they're nearly a decade behind. Not a hyperbole decade, a look-at-the-calendar-and-subtract decade. RocketLab is trying, and with luck they'll succeed with the first Neutron flight next year and they'll only be 11 years behind.

I'm really excited about Stoke trying to surpass SpaceX; their first effort will never carry people but it's the first thing outside of China that could potentially undercut Falcon 9 on light cargo; they're the only serious attempt so far at rapid full reuse other than Starship.

In the context of the "new space race with China", it doesn't bode well that most of SpaceX's prospective competition is in China. LandSpace is probably ahead of Blue Origin, despite being 40% as old. If Starship fails, it's possible that after another ten years we'll be able to say "the Chinese offering as good or better cars launch vehicles for cheaper". Just waiting for that probably wouldn't be good American space policy, though. Ideally we'd have a second homegrown SpaceX, but we don't, and until we do they're both metaphorically and literally carrying us.

When you accused RandomRanger of "shifting the goalposts" was that an honest concern of yours?

Yes.

I never said a word about Tesla.

I know, it's called analogy. It meant to illustrate the fact that just because you reached a milestone before your competitors, doesn't mean you will forever stay ahead of them.

I'm curious about when you think Tesla's competition was a decade behind Tesla,

I dunno, I suppose when BYD first launched and Elon responded by maniacally laughing, but not having much of an argument for why they're bad.

but mostly I'm just going to assume that you're shifting to Tesla because, when in the grip of Musk hate, all his companies look alike?

Well, I do think that different companies managed by the same man are likely to suffer from the same management flaws. I don't think that's unreasonable.

I also don't hate Elon. I told you multiple times that I'd much prefer a world where I'm completely wrong about him. He's supporting most of the causes I support as well, and it would be a lot better fornmenif he proves to be a genius and vindicates ball these causes by proxy, rather than a hype peddler who's about to run out of luck and drag down all these causes with him.

I suppose I do get mildly annoyed that criticizing him inevitably summons fanboys acting like someone just murdered their dog.

Not a hyperbole decade, a look-at-the-calendar-and-subtract decade. RocketLab is trying, and with luck they'll succeed with the first Neutron flight next year and they'll only be 11 years behind.

This argument only makes sense if they managed to maintain the distance over those 11 years, and I'm that instead of doing that, they're sinking their advantage into boondoggle called Starship (which is when comparing SpaceX to Musk's other companies comes in handy, because the man really seems to like boondoggles). Starship is not going to the moon, it's definitely not going to Mars, it might end up doing it's LEO Pez-dispenser bit, but even that is not certain, and it's an open question if it does so in a cost-effective way.

Ideally we'd have a second homegrown SpaceX, but we don't, and until we do they're both metaphorically and literally carrying us.

No amount of SpaceX is going to help you, if what they're doing is retarded. You're not going to the moon with something that requires over a dozen refuellings, a space station that makes you wait a week if you miss a rendezvous, and a lander that is so tall it needs an elevator and lots of prayers to not tip over.

Not all of that is on SpaceX, but if they're so brilliant they should have raise some objections to the idea.

This argument only makes sense if they managed to maintain the distance over those 11 years

Then it's a good thing they've been maintaining some distance! In those years they've:

  • Increased Falcon 9 payload capacity over 50%
  • Added downrange booster recovery options
  • Added booster recovery from and reflight after missions beyond LEO
  • Begun launching national security payloads and NASA flagship payloads
  • Tested and made operational a super-heavy launch vehicle, also partly-reusable, launching it 11 times so far with no failures
  • Began reuse of their unmanned space capsule
  • Had the longest streak in history of successful operational launches of any rocket, then the longest streak of any company, by what is now the most reliable launch vehicle in history
  • Human-rated Falcon 9
  • Tested and made operational a manned space capsule, in the first manned launches from the US since Shuttle, and launched several dozen astronauts to orbit with no failures
  • Surpassed the total on-orbit flight time of any other manned launch vehicle (and of a few space stations)
  • Done launches with GEO insertion
  • Added fairing recovery
  • Added extended fairing options
  • Launched payloads to the Moon (orbit and landing), asteroids, and Jupiter
  • Increased their flight rate 20-fold, flying it far more frequently than any other launch vehicle in history, and more in total than any vehicle save Soyuz
  • Reused recovered boosters, now up to 30 times each, exceeding Shuttle for most-reused orbital rocket stage ever
  • Launched and are now operating enough active satellites to exceed the currently-active total of everyone else in history, by a factor of 2, with several million users and a million more every few months
  • Launched the most powerful rocket in history, nearly by a factor of 2, then recovered three of them and reflew two of them
  • Launched the largest single spacecraft ever (i.e. [edit: not] counting on-orbit assembly) into space
  • Successfully reentered and did a soft splashdown with the largest reentry vehicle ever, with the first live video of reentry ever, then did it again 4 times

Some of those are just firsts for SpaceX, but several are firsts for anybody in history. They are by far the most successful space launch developer in history, and have not been slacking ... and I'm just mentioning their technical achievements, which are secondary to what's actually best about them. The list above is a side effect of the work done lowering the cost of space access.

if what they're doing is retarded

Long ago, you had no idea what you were talking about, but you at least noticed it when I pointed out that SpaceX was indeed already flying astronauts, and you intended to do better. You still have no idea what you're talking about, but now you have no idea that you have no idea - you believe you know so much that you can call the people who are more correct retarded! I don't see how you can come back from that, but you have to try! I know that orbital refueling logistics is a lot more complicated than "look up, SpaceX put that light in the sky and it has people in it", and so I don't think I can get it past your biases this time, but I promise, there is a reason why everybody who hasn't been lobbied by SRB manufacturers is in favor of it, there is a reason why Blue Moon is also planning to do it, and there is a reason why even SLS, the epitome of huge disintegrating-totem-pole rockets, turned out to be unusable for its core mission without it. If we wanted to be the first to get flags and footprints on the moon, we should have canceled Artemis 8 years ago and saved $50B, because it turns out we already did that 50 years ago. If we want to do anything serious on the moon, then doing it 20 tons (Blue Moon Mk2, 4 launches per mission) or 100 tons (Starship HLS, definitely less than 20 per) at a go is the way to do it, but more importantly doing it at a high cadence to help amortize costs and reduce risks is also the way to do it. The marginal cost of a dozen launches even of a fully expended Starship is still cheaper than a single SLS launch.

More comments

Losing the Space Race Boogaloo to China seems like a fairly big deal.

I mean it'd certainly sting pride-wise, but US lost the space race to USSR, and yet USSR was dead within a generation. One can argue that losing the space race had been beneficial, serving as a wake up call that stimulated increased interest in space technology in particular and science and technology in general. Given how senile, inept and infested with grifters US governance structure had become, maybe losing another space race would be the necessary wake up call that produces the necessary change? I'd rather choose the timeline where US loses the race now and China's communism collapses in 30 years, than one where US barely pulls ahead because it can afford to waste trillions, and smugly sleepwalks into the situation where in 30 years it's being eaten alive.

One can argue that losing the space race had been beneficial, serving as a wake up call that stimulated increased interest in space technology in particular and science and technology in general.

If the argument for Elon Musk's brilliance is supposed to be that he will make you lose the space race and serve as a wake up call, then all I have to say is that you're getting ripped off. I can make you lose the space race for a fraction of his price!

I don't think this is an argument for Elon Musk. If anything, Elon Musk is the only person who is preventing this outcome - if not Musk, it would be correct to conclude that the race is definitely lost and it's just a matter of time before the structural collapse reveals itself in a way that is obvious to the public (and if we're very lucky, it would not have a body count attached). As it were with the case of USSR, by that time it would be way too late to do anything - and in fact, it may be already too late to do anything 30 years before that. Not that anybody is inclined to do anything. To start thinking about change, you need to either a strong wake up call - like losing the space race - or have a person that is completely crazy and just decides to do something which had been proven many times it can't be done, and then does it. But we don't know yet which of the ways the future would go. Maybe Musk would lose and we go the wake up call way. A lot of people in the US are certainly rooting for that way, because Musk hurt their feelings and there's nothing more Hitler than that. But I am also afraid that the wake up call may arrive when there's nobody left to be woken up (insert a pun about "woke" here, I'm too lazy to follow through).

If anything, Elon Musk is the only person who is preventing this outcome - if not Musk, it would be correct to conclude that the race is definitely lost and it's just a matter of time before the structural collapse reveals itself in a way that is obvious to the public

Yeah, no that's crazy. Nothing about the mission architecture of going to th moon with Starship can be reasonably described as preventing this outcome. 10 years ago, when nearly everybody thought that Elon can do no wrong, I could at least understand the belief that he'll conjure something out of thin air to solve all the problems that are plain to see right from the drawing board, but nowadays, after seeing how Hyperloop, "Full Self-Driving", Cybercab, Robotaxi, and Optimus are turning out, I'd hope people would be a bit more skeptical of him.

I am not saying "Elon can do no wrong". I am saying "Elon is our only hope". That's quite different. I don't know if Elon can get us to the moon. Maybe yes, maybe not. I know NASA bullshiters can't. And won't be for a while. Yes, Elon has a lot of failures, you don't need to bother listing every one of them, I am fully aware. That doesn't change my point even a little bit - either Elon succeeds, however flawed and problematic his plan is, or nobody does. That's the only two realistic options. I can not influence the outcome in any way of form, but for people who can, I think fighting against Elon is just betting on US losing. Again, maybe it will benefit the US in the long run, but certainly not anytime soon.

I am not saying "Elon can do no wrong". I am saying "Elon is our only hope".

What I said was that there was a time when people were acting like he could do no wrong, and at that time claims like "he's our only hope" would be somewhat understandable, they're not anymore. Not only is he not our only hope, right now he's the limiting factor. Any of the competing landers would have had a better chance of success, and the way things stand right now, they might still succeeding over Starship.

To be fair, it's it's not just Elon's fault, there were very odd things going on at NASA when the decision was made to go with him, but no, "Elon succeeds or nobody does" are not the only two options.

So I think a lot of the anti-Musk sentiment is driven by him humiliating the wrong people. Space-X makes NASA look bad. Tesla made American car companies look bad. The Starlink deployment in Ukraine made a whole lot of defence companies and EU leaders look bad.

A grossly simplified model of progressivism is that it believes all of the worlds problems are fixed by giving more money to progressives.

A lot of modern problems with governance are caused by the fact that they won't be blatant and just say that 30% of funding must be set aside for fake jobs for families of connected people on the left. Instead they mandate that various consultants must be hired or certain companies must get the contracts. As a result the actual work gets affected.

Here's a video from a NASA subcontractor explaining how the minority owned business requirements are affecting projects: https://youtube.com/watch?v=FIONXPbIkVo

are fixed by giving more money to progressives.

Correction: replace "more" with "all the" and "money" with "power". Money is downstream from power. Forcing NASA to do DEI hires is the exercise of pure power, and when the power squeezes, the money flows to the required direction.

https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2025/10/31/nasas-orion-space-capsule-is-flaming-garbage/

Damn, I can't believe I was too lazy to be first to post this. Readers interested in space, don't just keep scrolling past the link here; it's exhaustively but brilliantly devastating.

"I’m a technical manager. I’ve had bad days. Who hasn’t? But I’ve never had a “we forgot to ask about docking for 13 years and now it’s going to cost us $2.5b to correct” day. Has this ever happened to you?"

I recently defended SLS here; I think it's indefensible in an absolute sense, but it at least holds its own in a "relative to Saturn V" sense. Both programs are justifiable answers to policy makers who keep asking the wrong question. But the cost and danger of Orion are just unconscionable.

(and, to be fair, Casey's view of SLS is also harsh: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2024/10/02/sls-is-still-a-national-disgrace/ )

Seems like a cross between The Toxoplasmosa of Rage (Musk is more toxoplasma than man, now), and that quote from The Dark Knight:

Nobody panics when things go "according to plan." Even if the plan is horrifying! If, tomorrow, I tell the press that, like, we'll give Lockheed-Martin another few billion dollars for nothing, or a flight of scientists will be left stranded in orbit by Boeing, nobody panics, because it's all "part of the plan". But when Musk says that his not-so-little rockets will get us to Mars, well then everyone loses their minds.

Thank you, whoever nominated my comment for an AAQC and whoever accepted it, always an honour. I know this is more of a meta-thread question, and has probably been discussed on them before, but since it's fresh in my mind I'd like to ask it here: does anyone else find the wording of the rule against consensus-building to be a little misleading? It was on my mind as something to avoid while writing the comment, and came up in the discussion, and definitely made me think it could be clarified. Here is the full text:

Don't attempt to build consensus or enforce ideological conformity. "As everyone knows . . ." "I'm sure you all agree that . . ." We visit this site specifically because we don't all agree, and regardless of how universal you believe knowledge is, I guarantee someone doesn't know it yet. Humans are bad at disagreeing with each other, and starting out from an assumption of agreement is a great way to quash disagreement. It's a nice rhetorical trick in some situations, but it's against what we're trying to accomplish here.

I think this is a straightforwardly good rule, but the phrasing of the summary appears to confuse a lot of people. "Building consensus" in casual use can cover many kinds of valid arguments ("I think people should believe...", "I think many people believe...", "I observe people acting like...", etc., even bracketing that building a consensus is an inherent side-effect of winning an argument), and the text of the rule doesn't really refer directly to ideological conformity (it sort of reminds me of how people use "begging the question," referring to something very similar, incorrectly because of confusion with ordinary language). It also feels a little ambiguous how much the spirit of the law is violated by people coming in arguing "All good people believe X and only bad people believe Y" as a way to bait out people who believe Y and attack them as Bad. I would suggest something like "Don't assume consensus or enforce what you believe to be consensus." If we want to say something about ideological conformity, maybe an additional sentence explaining that.

I think "consensus building" is not the best term. I'd like everybody to think that the things I think are true and moral and good are indeed true and moral and good. I would argue with people and tell them why I think is is the case, and try to convince them to agree with me. On some, very rare occasions, I would succeed. If I were smarter and better at this, I would succeed a lot, and thus there would be a consensus building around those things. I don't think doing this is bad and the result of it is bad.

And I don't think this is what the rule about "consensus building" is against. I think they target the behavior where you pretend the consensus already exists, and, moreover, if you're not a part of it, it's because there's something fundamentally wrong with you and your position, per se, prior to any argument, is illegitimate. There can be no proper discussion when one of the sides presupposes only their side has a legitimate position.

I think it's legitimate to refuse to argue with a position that one considers utterly ridiculous. Nobody owes anyone else the discussion, it should be a product of mutual engagement. So if I think some person is not worth my time to engage, I would not. I like arguing, but I have my limits. For some positions, I am going to just block that person and ignore them forever (for me, it's antisemites, but everybody may have their preferences). But I also recognize explicitly that this is the opposite of discussion, and try to use this approach only sparingly. If there is a discussion, then presupposing the opponent can not have a legitimate argument should not be a part of it. I think that's what "no consensus building" rule is about, or it should be.

"Don't assume consensus or enforce what you believe to be consensus."

This is basically how the rule is interpreted in practice. Don't assume your controversial, far-from-universal position is universal and then begin reasoning from there.

The examples you listed here:

"I think people should believe...", "I think many people believe...", "I observe people acting like..."

Are all totally fine because they're phrased as beliefs specific to the writer. In general, much more leeway is offered to statements hedged with "I think that..."

I think this is a straightforwardly good rule

Gets a lot of leeway.

This is a straightforwardly good rule

Gets more scrutiny

Given that all sane people know that this is a straightforwardly good rule

Veers into consensus-building.

And worse of all is when you're doing #3, but only by implication because you take consensus as so baked-in that it doesn't even appear to occur to you that some people might disagree.

Yes, I agree with you entirely, that is also how I have always interpreted it. But I think the wording of the rule is such that people who don't read it carefully and/or are less experienced with the forum culture can easily get the wrong impression of what it means. Essentially, we are using "consensus-building" as a technical term removed somewhat from its ordinary use, and people may misunderstand that and try to interpret it based off ordinary use.

I think the wording of the rule is such that people who don't read it carefully and/or are less experienced with the forum culture can easily get the wrong impression of what it means

Not to mention people whose native language isn't English which applies to a fair numbers of commenters here.

So, what are you reading?

I'm reattempting Scruton's Fools, Frauds and Firebrands. Has been collecting dust for far too long.

I tried to read A Tale of Two Cities and I just can't get it. It just bores me so much. It's on practically every list of "best novels ever", and I feel weird about it. And it's not like my tastes are opposed to the general direction - I like historic novels, I've read Dickens before (though a long time ago), and I enjoyed a lot of other "classic" works on the same "best ever" lists - but this one somehow just does not "click" for me. Not sure if I'll try to get through it or just put it aside and try again, maybe in several years.

Close Reads covered A Tale of Two Cities recently. They were similarly not super into it, but I find it easier to get through a book with a group of people, especially people who are able to give good context, background, and additional insights I miss.

For A Tale of Two Cities, they recommend reading the book like a series of vignettes. Dickens layers each scene in imagery and significance. Some scenes are better than others. Ultimately I found it worth it to finish the book, though I have no desire to reread it.

I just finished the last book in the Broken Earth Trilogy by N K Jemisin and feel compelled to ramble about it. The reason why I picked it up in the first place was I have been completely divorced from the state of modern sci fi/fantasy and was still under the impression that a Hugo award is a mark of quality. Each book in the trilogy won a Hugo, which is a first, so I was looking forward to it, and I checked all three from the library before going on a trip I knew would include a lot of downtime I'd rather not spend doomscrolling. It's very mediocre, not bad just kinda whatever, and had I done any digging at all into it or the state of the Hugos I should have known. From Wikipedia:

Jemisin's novel The Fifth Season was published in 2015, the first of the Broken Earth trilogy. The novel was inspired in part from a dream Jemisin had and the protests in Ferguson, Missouri about the death of Michael Brown.[27][28] The Fifth Season won the Hugo Award for Best Novel, making Jemisin the first African-American writer to win a Hugo award in that category.

So a black woman wrote a fantasy book about racism and quite literally black girl magic, and was rewarded handsomely for it by the Hugos (and had it optioned by Sony for 7 figures). In it, some people are gifted in orogeny, allowing them to manipulate the earth, and stop things like volcanoes and earthquakes. Someone who is skilled in this is really quite useful, but also obviously dangerous. As such, there's a class of people called Guardians who find new orogenes, and train them at Hogwarts in order to control them. If they try and run away or can't be controlled, they are killed. Normal people, by and large, hate them, and will try and kill them if discovered even if they have literally saved their communities in one way or another, and even if they are firmly under the yoke of the Guardians. They've even got their own slur. It's a bit... on the nose. Also a lot of characters are bisexual for some reason.

Again it wasn't a bad read. I'm not much of an anti-woke crusader myself; I find it mildly annoying when I realize what is going on, that's about it. But I was shocked it won a Hugo, and apparently they've been like this since like 2010?

Anyway I'm looking to read some dumb male-oriented sci fi if you guys have recommendations.

Anything by Peter F Hamilton, really.

Hell, his first trilogy basically starts off with an artificially-engineered psychic British detective hooking up with a hot, stacked redhead and then going off to have adventures employed by a British megacorp in a post-global warming apocalyptic Briton.

and apparently they've been like this since like 2010?

Yes, as mostly everything else mass-cultural, Hugos are woke now. If you want many sad details, look up "Sad Puppies". Obviously, unless you want the woke side of the story, in places other than Wokepedia. But be warned, it won't make you feel any better.

I liked The Commonwealth Saga quite a bit.

Hammer’s Slammers by David Drake

Anything sci-fi by John Ringo

The Compleate Bolo by Keith Laumer, plus any Bolo anthologies.

And while it’s not sci-fi, it is a pulp short story collection that is all set in vaguely sci-fi situations:

The Eye of Sounnu by Schuyler Hernstrom

Finished Die Staufer. Good read.

Bought and read Astérix en Lusitanie (in German) together with my daughter. She enjoyed it, though I doubt that she understood anything. I thought it was quite decent, though some of the social commentary was tiresome. Yes, "Elonmus" goes to an orgy of rich people, how witty. The multi-page joke where a Garum marketing guy talks to his coporate henchmen using a bunch of latinisms I found comparatively well-done.

Then I picked a book of my shelf at random. It's a maths-physics-chemistry textbook. I open it every evening, read a page, nod sagely, go "yeah, I sure remember that from my studying days and I can still pretend to understand it, with some effort", then close it and immediately forget what I read. Just kidding, I do actually enjoy it and am surprised by how well most of the information sticks. It seems I have not entirely lost my ability to learn. Though of course it's all fairly basic stuff that I have in fact learned before at some point, so the challenge factor is low.

I also picked two other books from my shelf, one about the history of every town, village, hamlet and ruin in the larger region, going back to the earliest records, and the other about local picaresque tales. But I haven't really started on either, preferring for now to subject myself to the aforementioned science textbook.

I didn't realise they were still making new Asterix books.

"Elonmus" goes to an orgy of rich people, how witty

I had a look on Wikipedia, it says the character is called Upwardlimobilus (I assume that's in the English version). Is "Elonmus" your own re-naming? It's hard to tell when apparently there is also a character called Nellia Furtado. Seems odd to put in these kinds of contemporary pop references.

Each localization of the Astérix books uses different naming schemes for the secondary characters.

I get that, I think the successful translation of the character names between languages is pretty essential to its success. But "Elonmus" is so specific and current and implicitly culture-warry. It takes you out of the story. Maybe it works better in German..?

No, it does not. It's just as jarring in German.

FWIW, I don't think we're talking about the same character. Upwardlimobilus, in the German version, is simply named Fetterbonus - "fat bonus". Works, since he's fat. Elonmus is just a name on the guest list for his orgy.

The Game, by the recently departed Ken Dryden. It has a reputation as unquestionably the best hockey book of all time, and possibly the greatest sports book of all time, and while I understand where this comes from, the whole thing comes off as a bit overrated. The first thing you need to know about Ken Dryden is that he isn't a typical athlete. His career was remarkably short for a Hall of Famer. He was 23 when he made his debut in the 1971 playoffs, winning the Conn Smythe Trophy and the Stanley Cup before he was technically even a rookie. He retired at age 31 following the 1978–1979 season. He only played 7 full seasons and the aforementioned playoffs of an eighth, having sat out the 1973–1974 season due to a contract dispute and his desire to finish his legal training, and won Stanley Cups in six of those seasons.

As Dryden didn't have a typical career, it stands to reason that he wouldn't write a typical sports book. Athletes usually write standard memoirs, talking about their childhoods and how they got into sports before spending the bulk of the time on their professional careers, and then a nod towards their personal lives and what they've been up to since retiring. Then there's the tell-all memoir, which is exactly the same as the standard memoir except the athlete has some controversial aspect to his life and there's a chapter that deals with the controversy. The Game touches on some of this but doesn't dwell on it; if you didn't know anything about Dryden's career before reading it the book isn't going to fill in the blanks for you. Instead, he ostensibly focuses on a week in the 1978–1979 season but really uses it as a jumping off point to discuss various subjects related to being a professional athlete.

Well, more like related to be being Ken Dryden, because I don't see most athletes having his level of insight, and, as I said, his experience was atypical. One gets the impression that he didn't particularly want to be a pro athlete and just sort of lucked into the job. Almost every review of this book talks about how it discusses "the pressures of being a pro athlete", and while this is certainly part of it, this aspect is overstated, as the pressure he describes isn't universal. The book's biggest strength is that Dryden is candid to a degree that was unheard of at the time. He talks about how being part of a dynasty directly led to his decision to retire, as the thrill of winning had been replaced by the fear of not living up to expectations. He talks about how players have to push for higher salaries even though it ruins the game. Most importantly, he talks about how being a professional athlete necessarily means peaking early in life and becoming alienated from having any semblance of a normal life progression. As he puts it, you go from extended adolescence to premature middle age. When he retires at 31, he knows that whatever he does with the rest of his life he will always be "former" or "ex". He realized that he didn't even want to be a lawyer but always stuck to the idea so he could pretend that hockey was just what he was doing while he could before he got his real career on track, but as the reality of not having hockey becomes clear he admits that was just an excuse.

And he's aware of all the contradictions. The book's second greatest strength is that he knows how to write, but he's aware that he has the image of an intellectual, so of course this will be expected of him since people have been calling him "articulate" his whole career. And he's aware of how image can be manufactured by both players and the media (at one point he says that if you want to cultivate an image as a theatergoer then go to the theater once after a good game and tell a journalist about it, and people will assume you're really into theater). And he's aware that most NHL players have to work hard to stay on rosters and that the ones who are good, like teammate Guy LaFleur, have a "love of the game" that he simply doesn't.

The reason I say this is overrated is because, for all his insight, there's nothing universal about anything he says. Most athletes are lucky to win one championship and don't have to deal with the expectations that come with having won five. There simply aren't than many dynasties, and even on dynasties, most of the players are only there for a short period. He says early in the book that retirement was a difficult thing to consider because he had always assumed that his playing days would end when a coach told him in the fall that he didn't make the team; but that didn't happen, and now he has to decide how and when to make his exit. Well, the same is true for most pro players; they don't make the team out of camp, or get waived, or don't get signed to new contracts, or whatever. Even the ones lucky enough to announce their retirements have usually played as long as they realistically can. I could go on, but very little of Dryden's concerns would appear to be common to pro athletes as a whole.

The other reason it's overrated is because it just isn't that fun to read. Dryden is a good writer, but he's such a good writer that he's more quotable than readable. When everything a guy says is profound it's hard to just get lost in the book. I think sportswriters overrate this because they're usually nerds who can't play sports at all and spend their careers trying to make sense of guys who live up to "dumb jock" stereotypes, so when a guy like Dryden comes along and shows he's one of them they all start drooling over his profound insights and pretty words. There are also several boring sections where he's not musing on personal stuff and trying to give one the atmosphere of a dressing room by quoting players and narrating the antics and whatnot, and it's pretty boring. Maybe when I'm done with this I'll have rated it higher, but I don't know what this book is supposed to say about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The reason I say this is overrated is because, for all his insight, there's nothing universal about anything he says.

This is not surprising, goaltenders have the reputation of being weirdo loners as far as pro athletes go.

That said, I've already wanted to read that book for a while and none of your caveats seem like deal-breakers to me. I'll probably pick it up soon.

Recently finished: Against the Machine by Paul Kingsnorth. Basically, his thesis is that modern Western society (in its entirety - government, economy, social mores, etc) is destroying the things that enable humanity to thrive - think things like cultural traditions, connection to a particular place going back generations, spiritual practices, and so on. He personifies this as a machine which rips up all in its path, destroying what those things once were and remaking them in a fashion to suit the machine's purpose of expanding without end.

I am not sure what I think of the book. I think at the most basic level, Kingsnorth is right that there's something which has gone wrong with Western society. It hasn't been without benefit (and he himself admits this freely), but we seem to have lost some measure of basic human joy and mental flourishing along the way. I'm not so certain I agree with his framing of the trend as a coherent entity. It's kind of like the idea of Moloch - rhetorically powerful, but also factually inaccurate. And I definitely disagree with some of the author's ideas - at one point he argues that the Machine is quite literally demonic in origin, which I don't believe at all (we humans are quite capable of destroying ourselves without supernatural influence). So I guess I found the book interesting, but not without its flaws (or at least flaws as I see them).

Currently reading the Divine Comedy. I've had a copy of it forever, but am just now getting around to it (mostly because a friend really encouraged me to read it, at least Inferno). It's been interesting. Obviously it's one of the major works of the Western canon, and has had a ton of influence over our culture. So seeing the original first-hand is pretty cool. I think I'm looking forward to Purgatorio and Paradiso more, just because I know absolutely nothing about them, but am enjoying Inferno as well. It's pretty funny the extent to which the work is Dante just showing everyone he dislikes in hell. I can't imagine it made him many friends at all, though perhaps he didn't care because he was exiled anyway. I find poetry kind of a slog to read (even short poems like Robert Frost etc), so it's certainly a challenge to read long-form poetry like this. But hopefully I'm able to stick to it because I do want to finish a classic of this magnitude.

I'm not so certain I agree with his framing of the trend as a coherent entity.

I would frame it as nothing more than the result of imposed religious tolerance. In order to stop the religious persecutions that were commonplace in the second half of the last millenium, Europeans and their descendents, and particularly city-dwellers, had to blunt some of their innate moral instincts: those that would chafe at the presence of heretics and apostates. For a few centuries this gave them a big boost, but long term it turns out some of those moral instincts might have been load bearing to civilisation, as we find ourselves atomizing into individualism under a universalist philosophy that forbids us from creating an exclusive shared identity.

That's an interesting way to look at it. What's kind of ironic is we don't seem to have actually rid ourselves of those instincts, so much as changed what it's acceptable to apply them to. Like, look at how the left treats JK Rowling for example. There's precious little difference (except for no violence) between the way people treat her, and the way someone in the 15th century would've treated a heretic. Perhaps those instincts are too deeply embedded in our genes to be eliminated completely.

The justification for the hatred she gets fits within the restrictive moral framework of the people Jonathan Haidt identified in The Righteous Mind as WEIRD (Western Educated Industrial Rich and Democratic): she's evil because she's harming trans people. WEIRD pretty much only see the care/harm and fairness/unfairness as far as morality go.

Personally I am/was raised WEIRD, and while I cannot express why specifically, some examples Haidt used to test moral foundations outside of harm and fairness still trigger primitive negative emotion in me even if I cannot find a way within myself to condemn it intellectually. The real, original moral instinct as to why JK Rowlings is so hated might still be because she's undermining the consensus (not going along with the group is an affront to the loyalty moral foundation), or from expressing ideas considered sacrilegeous, but having a negative reaction to someone because of that is not allowed by our universalist mindset, so it has to be laundered as her being harmful.

About halfway through The Story of a New Name. The story is starting to pick up now.

Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire by Richard Frank. Thorough research from Both Sides helps the reader better understand the decision to drop The Bomb. It builds on scaffolding that allows the reader to judge how justified the decision was in terms of what relevant actors did know, what they didn't, and some of what they should have. It is a darn convincing defense.

I returned to sci-fi while traveling and on vacation recently. First was Rendevous with Rama which was a quick read and enjoyable. The plot is currently in the news. An object flies into into the solar system hurtling towards the Sun. Except in the book this is a massive 50km x 20km not-comet. The reader goes along with the only team available to check it out.

The second was The Mote in God's Eye which could have cut a bunch. Maybe I am a curmudgeon or I take for granted sci-fi was once new and unrefined. The time it spent thinking about aliens was nice. It has the old school sci-fi autistic charm where the authors forget to include a characters arc then suddenly remember to throw something in. It wasn't a slog, but could've been better.

Finished What Not. Spoiler: The heroine followed her heart and the oiks rose up and bloodlessly unseated the Minister for Brains. Possibly the lowest jeopardy dystopia I've ever read.

Now reading a Christina Rosetti collection, mostly for Goblin Market but it's short enough that I might as well finish it. Recurring themes of nature and the perils of being a sensitive teenage woman (and not a man-stealing whore like that skank bitch Maude).

Dissonance: Unbound Book 1 by Nicoli Gonnella.

The Motte is very, very slow… again.

Anyone know if this is a new problem, or just a recurrence of the old?

The site's been working fine for me.

Not feeling it right now. Either it's sporadic or admins are doing really good job at fixing it.

I was having trouble all day yesterday and part of the day before. It seems to be fixed now.

Hmm, never mind. The site’s still having issues.

In the spring/early summer of 2024 we had similar complaints, with most of the CWR activity being extremely dry (and high-effort) SCOTUS roundups. Then two weeks later Trump came within inches of having his face shot on live tv.

There's ups and downs. Almost like this website is breathing.

I think he was referring to the loading speed of the site. There was a hardware problem a week or two ago that has since been fixed, but some of the lag was back over the weekend.

Oh whoops lol. I have noticed this also! Especially on mobile.

I think they're talking in a technical sense, as a repeat of two weeks ago.

Do you think that the USA would have been in a better shape today if Hilary Clinton had won the Democratic primary in 2008? Whether she wins of loses the election itself is up to you.

I think that probably the social cohesion now would be higher and divisions somewhat lower.

Depends how specific you think a lot of things are to particular presidents and timing.

Does COVID still happen in 2020? Does Russia still invade Ukraine? What happens in Israel, we don't get the Abraham accords because we don't get Trump so we don't get desperate Hamas launching 10/7; but it's not like everyone would have just sat still in the meantime?

Does a more technically competent president ban or regulate Bitcoin in 2011? Does a bloodier minded president get more entangled with ISIS? What happens with Epstein?

Then you get into who follows Clinton. When does Mitt Romney run? When does Barack Obama come off the bench?

Does COVID still happen in 2020?

Yes

Does Russia still invade Ukraine?

Very likely, maybe even sooner as Hilary feels pretty hawkish but I don't know enough White House-ology to know if that is true or if she'd accelerate Maidan type shit or make the CIA go even harder

What happens in Israel, we don't get the Abraham accords because we don't get Trump so we don't get desperate Hamas launching 10/7; but it's not like everyone would have just sat still in the meantime?

Genuinely no idea what her Israel policy stance is but I bet a 10/7 still happens as the underlying trends still hold. The USA'S foreign interests are somewhat party agnostic and also driven a lot by the "deep state"

I think a super interesting question is what happens with China. I know Obama (?) actually started the "pivot east" but one of Trump's greatest accomplishments is single handedly shifting the Overton window of the west to make "Holy fuck China is getting swole and this is not good" acceptable and not "muh racism"

I think by now it's probably all the same, but China gets a few more years of runway

It was almost certainly impossible to make a policy choice that would avoid Covid, certainly in 2017 or whenever.

I'm less sure. Part of me thinks that if a neoliberal ghoul of a Democrat were in the white house, an HRC or a Cuomo, we would have been bullied by the mass media into ignoring all the dead elderly folks as "within natural seasonal variations" and told that everything was perfectly normal and that any other countries behaving otherwise were panicking and overreacting and that even thinking too much about COVID was racist.

The argument against that is that more or less over the weekend lockdowns went from something totally unthinkable to something every governor in America was mandating regardless of ideology. Liberals always took the virus more seriously than conservatives, but the dominant narrative among normal liberals in the wild was that this meant taking relatively conservative approaches to stopping spread, like washing hands more often, staying home if sick, and maybe banning large events at the most drastic. This attitude prevailed as recently as a week before mass lockdown, and there was a sense among a lot of people on the left even after the lockdowns started that the media was being a bit sensationalistic. The idea that businesses would shut down en masse and people would be discouraged from visiting family members was beyond the pale. From conservatives, the dominant narrative ranged from not caring at all to thinking that it was a big scam to make Trump look bad.

In an alternate timeline there could have been a stable equilibrium where things went on like this until either the vaccine came out or people moved on to other concerns, but two things happened in quick succession that I think tipped the scales. The first is what happened in Bergamo; we could write off China as an overenthusiastic authoritarian state, but seeing mass deaths of elderly people in a modern, Western country scared a lot of people, especially local government officials who didn't want their city to be next. The second thing was that we started seeing cases in people who hadn't recently traveled. This may seem like an inevitability in hindsight but remember that COVID had been in the Pacific Northwest for a while without any real community transmission, and a lot of people thought that whatever precautions they were taking there were enough to keep it from spreading.

If the lockdowns were merely a liberal reaction to Trump's apparent apathy then red states wouldn't have been likely to impose them, nor would neoliberal ghouls like Tom Wolf. If they were simply a far-left extravagance they would have been limited to the West Coast and a few large cities.

Lockdowns went from unimaginable to obvious thanks to large efforts from powerful media machines. Without claiming lockdowns were pushed as part of an anti-Trump agenda, or that Covid deaths were fake, we can say in retrospect with certainty that Covid deaths were below the level at which we as a society could have ignored the bodies if media wanted them ignored.

A hypothetical Hillary or Cuomo admin does the math and decides the marginal deaths are no big deal compared to the cost of lockdowns, and they lean on the American media. They tell social media companies that any effort to spread pro-lockdown propaganda will be considered inciting panic and will lead to the government acting against the social media companies in a regulatory capacity. They lean on the news media to keep the story on how we all need to keep going to main street small businesses to keep the economy humming. They focus on masks or ivermectin or some other bullshit to stop the spread.

The fact that no one talks about the dead people anymore indicates that we could have ignored them at the time.

Why? Because she would have likely been less popular than Obama and thus had less ability to pass something not particularly popular like ACA?

Or is it simply timing regarding what would have even been possible in 2016?

Why are wolves, coyotes, and jackals still categorized as separate species? They produce fertile offspring that remain inter fertile at many subsequent generations, and this fact has been known for a while.

This scientific article on wolf species and subspecies spends several paragraphs discussing this issue. tl;dr: In modern taxonomy, ability to interbreed is only one of several factors that inform the definition of a species.

This is an eclectic approach that seeks to identify species as separate lineages supported by concordant data from various classes of genetic markers, morphometric analysis, behavior, and ecology.

Yeah, but the TLDR of that article is that canis lupus is not a grouping of common descent that includes every race of common descent from that particular ancestor. Very literally not a species under linnaean terminology. It's just a scientific name for a common name(wolf means 'big, pack hunting wild canid regardless of genetics' and that's fine, but the entire point of binomial nomenclature is to not do that)- and that genetically some wolves are more closely related to coyotes than to other wolves.

The short answer is probably the biological model of species distinction as "they can breed and make fertile offspring" is out of fashion. There are a few things to consider. For instance jackals and coyotes would never encounter each other in the wild so they don't hybridize. The animals also have pretty different patterns of behavior and ecological niches, at least wolves compared to the other two. Polar bears and Grizzlies can mate and make fertile offspring too, but they also rarely encounter each other in the wild to the point that we didn't know if they even could interbreed until someone saw a weird bear 20 years ago and tested its DNA. There's a bit of "the Categories were made for Man not Man for the Categories" going on here too. If I called a coyote a wolf I'd get called a dumbass in turn; they're obviously very different even just morphologically.

Actually now that I think a bit more about it it's a lot more of a historical inertia kind of thing. We gave them different names hundreds of years ago because they looked different and by the time we figured out they could make babies the names were entrenched.

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