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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23561 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026

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People on here have been commenting a lot about women not showing up for dates, which does sound frustrating, but apparently they're not showing up for each other either. I was reminded of this phenomenon by this Substack post, about women preparing home cooked meals for each other in their homes, then having people not show up last second. So my initial theory that maybe young women are scared of men from outside their social circle is not the main thing going on.

One woman described her bridal shower, where a friend's grandmother prepared an elaborate celebration, but 19 guests cancelled the day of. Only one showed up. The woman said it was embarrassing and dehumanizing.

What's going on?

I tried going to a local ACX meetup, and it was fine, but after six people initially wanted to do it, only two besides myself ended up coming. Meanwhile, my daughter's pre-K teacher has invited herself to my house. She called today, and went on about a "mandatory home visit", next week, with highly inflexible weekday hours. I did not like it. She said she was going to drop off paperwork and meet my daughter. I said that I would rather bring my daughter to pick up the paperwork. We fought about it. I was perhaps more prickly than is altogether advisable when speaking to a child's teacher. I tried researching how this could be considered an appropriate thing to, not offer, not ask, but mandate. Something, something, building trust, Head Start, maybe the norms of black Americans? Clearly, they have the wrong order of things. If I trust you, I will invite you over. If I don't trust you, I will want to meet at your office. Even social workers know this. Is this related to parents not actually coming to their appointments somehow? It's juxtaposed in literature withattendance, more than understanding.

Also, meanwhile, my older daughter hasn't been invited to anyone's house. We haven't managed to invite anyone to our house. It seems terribly fraught somehow. I mostly do things with one or occasionally two other families with a stay at home mom and a mom who works two mornings a week, respectively.

Also, just because I found it odd, here's Keturah complaining about a situation where someone invited her into the hostess's home, and Keturah came, and then they judged each other for their stance on shoes, that Keturah wanted to keep them on, and the hostess wanted her to take them off.

I liked the culture of Georgians (Kartveli) and Albanians that homes are sacred, guests are from God, and that guests and hosts have important mutual roles and responsibilities.

What's the sociology here? Why are Americans like this, despite seeming deeply unhappy about it?

This is very confusing, I’ve never experienced or heard of a woman not showing up for a date? What’s the context here, it just sounds fake.

Maybe it's in the category of fake things people complain about online, then. I can't say I've ever heard about it in real life, but I don't know anyone who used modern dating apps.

It’s not fake, although there’s a spectrum. Outright ghostings do happen (even in people who’ve met IRL), although I have no idea how someone gets to a point where this describes almost all potential dates.

As I’ve speculated before, it might be generational.

I doubt the fear of men is the main factor here.

The pre-K thing is probably about address verification. Some parents will use a relative's apartment as their address to get their kid into a more desirable school.

mandatory home visit

I'm an American with kids. I have never heard of this. Maybe complain to school administrators.

My private school teachers did home visits in the summers before 1st and 2nd grade. I’ve never heard of a public school doing it though.

I (American) have never had trouble getting people to show up at my home. I suppose more than 0% of all arrangements have fallen through for various reasons, but people flaking regularly isn't a thing.

It is somewhat fraught, in the sense that when people are coming over you want to make sure you have enough time to prepare food and clean the house and do whatever else it is that you needed to get done that day.

American culture is not monolithic, and my guess is that I'm in a different bubble than the people who have this problem.

Also, just because I found it odd, here's Keturah complaining about a situation where someone invited her into the hostess's home, and Keturah came, and then they judged each other for their stance on shoes, that Keturah wanted to keep them on, and the hostess wanted her to take them off.

Keeping your shoes on in my house after I have asked you to remove them is so incredibly rude that I have trouble taking this seriously.

As a Canadian reading this thread I find people's reluctance to remove shoes hilarious.

If you live in a place that gets frequent snow, and the associated grimey, salty slush as it melts, removing boots/shoes when coming inside is so obviously the correct action.

And then because everyone is used to removing shoes, in the warmer dryer seasons people still do, even though the benefits are more marginal.

The only real exceptions to the "shoes off" rule are things like more formal events, where people are wearing nicer footwear, taking pains to avoid getting them dirty at all, and where extra cleaning by the host is going to be required anyways.

Shoes in the house was thé norm in America until recently, even in upstate New York(with some of the snowiest winters anywhere). But it’s still very rude to refuse to remove them when asked by the host; this is the hicks being, as usual, deliberately strange.

In the USSR/Russia the switch happened when rubber soles became the norm in the middle of the last century. With leather-soled shoes everyone had to wear galoshes to protect the shoes from rain and snow and mud, so the shoes themselves were clean and dry. But rubber soles killed off galoshes, and people started taking off their shoes indoors.

I think New York is seeing sense more and more now though - and bet they're switching to no shoes faster than Texas is (though I have few friends I'm the hotter areas of the US to confirm).

I do think it's been a big change over the past twenty or thirty years among American whites, and that it has a lot to do with the changing role of women and men in the household. Historically, women did all the cleaning/vacuuming/sweeping. So men were unconcerned with making a mess of the floors, it wasn't their problem, and men being dominant in the household they didn't worry about it. Now men share in housework and they're not going to make a mess that they themselves expect to clean up.

I dunno. Both my working-class grandfathers (WW2 vet and Korean vet) were "no outdoor shoes in the house" guys. Adults had house shoes or slippers they changed into and kids ran around in sock feet.

One could just as easily say that women used to stay home and so had plenty of time to clean. Now that they work too, they’re more concerned about preventing messes. That also tracks with who usually seems more worried about people wearing shoes in the house. In my experience, it’s rarely the men.

I might just be overmapping to myself, where i became a strict no-shoes guy once I started vacuuming.

I find it (1) odd for anyone to ask you to remove your shoes and (2) incredibly uncouth to put up any pushback about removing shoes if asked.

(1) odd for anyone to ask you to remove your shoes

I would imagine in most of Europe people remove their shoes so as to not carry around dirt and filth from the outside. I don't think I have ever in my life lounged around someone's home with our shoes on, it's only happens in very brief 'get in, get out' instances.

If you come to someone’s house for a nice dinner party, you take your shoes off? That’s so foreign to me.

Yes, almost always. I think shoes inside was more common in the UK back when I was a kid, but I haven't been to any shoe-wearing homes for a long while. We have dinner parties in socks.

So you wear a dress shirt with dress pants in socks?

No, you bring a shoe bag with a separate pair of shoes if you don't want to look ridiculous.

I honestly can't recall the last time I was at a house party and looked at someone's feet.

The dinner parties I'm invited to don't have quite that formal a dress code, but very possibly yes. There's a line to do with formality and number of people I guess so for something like a pre wedding gathering where everyone is fully dressed up, we would wear shoes.

You put on your smoking jacket and slippers, obviously.

Yes, and put your (inside) dress shoes on.

Tbh I generally just go with whether there's a visible pile of shoes by the door and/or whether my host is deshoeing which is easy enough to calibrate

(1) is more and more popular, I think primarily coming from Asian-American cultures? It makes a lot of sense to me, after a little thought. My kids don't think twice about putting their hands on the carpet while playing. Even my nicest shoes walk outside on sidewalks where birds often poop. "Wash your hands before eating" is the obvious first line of defense here, but "don't touch the carpet with the same surface that touched the bird poop" isn't a bad backup. It's just the same thing everybody who does outdoor work/gardening/etc does with work boots and "mud room" areas for them, but for other outer footwear in foyer/entry areas.

In my culture when I was a kid it would have been rude to remove your shoes in someone else's house without asking, because don't feet smell and don't we need shoes to help cover that up, but it turns out "make sure your feet don't smell" is an acceptable alternative solution for that. The level of work and exercise that can make your feet too sweaty and smelly to walk around in bare socks is the kind that probably already merits a shower for your whole body before lounging around the house, much less social events.

I’m coming from the perspective of footwear as being formal. So I wouldn’t still expect your footwear when coming over for a social call to be muddy or dirty in the first place.

Unless a guest is coming over from an attached house or another apartment unit with direct access to your own, or unless the guest is strictly carried on something where his shoes don't touch the ground, I'm not sure it's possible for the footwear that someone wore while traversing to your house not to be dirty. Even if, e.g. this friend was your neighbor across the hall in your apartment building, he's going to take at least one step in the shared hallway, which will inevitably have some grime from neighbors stepping on it with outdoors shoes, some of which will get on his shoes before entering your home. And someone walking on the sidewalk or on the driveway to/from their car is going to expose their footwear to even more grime than that.

That level of aversion to any dirt seems wild to me. What about socks? How do I as a guest know your floors are to that level of clean?

How do I as a guest know your floors are to that level of clean?

The pile of shoes by the door, probably?

If someone's floors clearly doesn't meet the standard that you find acceptable to walk on with socks, it seems reasonable to refuse to enter without shoes, even if you otherwise find it reasonable to take off your shoes indoors. Much like how if someone's shoes are clearly very muddy or dirty, it seems reasonable to refuse entry to them without taking off their shoes, even if you otherwise find it reasonable to allow people to keep their shoes on in your home.

In typical cases, though, I'd say the dirtiness of shoes that have been worn outside is far beyond the dirtiness of the floor of a household where everyone takes off their shoes in a way that the dirtiness of such a floor isn't far beyond the dirtiness of the socks of a typical person. The former involves bringing dirt from foreign/outdoors/public sources into a private/personal space, whereas the latter is just private/personal dirt being swapped around. Personal dirt can certainly be dirtier/more mysterious than public ones, but in typical cases where people put in effort to taking care of their homes, it tends to be the opposite.

I just think in the main where it isn’t obviously dirty one way or the other, fretting about dirtiness is obsessive.

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Meanwhile, my daughter's pre-K teacher has invited herself to my house. She called today, and went on about a "mandatory home visit", next week, with highly inflexible weekday hours.

The operative question would be mandated by whom? State legislature could do that (and states have certainly passed stupider legislation than that). Still, if it is about child welfare, I would rather let CPS handle it. On the other hand, I would be surprised if any courts found that individual schools had the right to mandate home visits.

Also, having a teacher visit every kid at home seems really personnel intensive. Back when I was a kid, if a teacher wanted to speak to the parents of an individual kid, she would tell them to come to her office (but also had no mandate to make them come, though my parents certainly did).

If this is head start, it’s a special program to provide preschool for the children of low income ‘families’(more often single mothers) in ‘disadvanted’(read desperately poor)locales, and is likely to have lots of special rules because it serves the underclass in already quite rough areas on the explicit logic that those people are shitty parents and preschool is less likely to abuse the kid than the (often drug addicted and dating criminals)mother. No idea how Gaashk is qualifying for it(it’s pretty much impossible with a full time male wage earner in the house- and that’s part of the program design), but theres all kinds of other programs that might apply and which might mindlessly ape head start.

New Mexico has been phasing in welfare for all over the past decade or so, so that perfectly ordinary intact median income families qualify for pregnancy and children's medicaid, for instance. As of last year, all state inspected childcare and pre-K is also state funded. So it's basically normal public school, except with some Head Start appendages attached.

It appears to be part of the program design, AI search says they have 90 hours (!) of contract time devoted to this kind of thing, and ten children, so I guess she can put up to nine hours into trying to connect with me this year.

In this case, you always need to remember that the internet and substack is a selected microcosm of especially neurotic and oversocialised people. I am very sociable, with several big groups of friends and acquaintances made of middle-upper classed Europeans, and I have never seen all of this, in particular regarding to women. Everyone loves to show up, especially if is a situation with strangers or not very well know people.

Thank you.

It’s amazing how many things are explained by sampling bias.

Maybe that is the answer.

On Substack, especially, people choose to write about things they want to put several hours into thinking about at one go, so I write about art, but not about parenting or socializing, because my deficiencies are practical, not intellectual. I know what to do, just sometimes I'm frustrated depressed about it.

I've had no such issues or even heard of people having them more frequently IRL. We meet people frequently, our sons go to friends houses all the time and bring home friends. People show up to events no problem, etc.

Have you considered that this is a very unusual community with strange people? The guy who initiated this discussion has a long history of extremely bizarre interactions with other people and women in particular. There is something that isn't being communicated by text here.

People show up to events no problem,

It's possible it's a generational thing, but I remember the era of Facebook event invites where everyone seemed to come to the consensus that "RSVP maybe means no, and yes means maybe". My wife was once particularly frustrated trying to host a small social shindig more than ten years ago where a dozen people (coworkers) said yes, but none showed.

On one hand sure, but for anything even pseudo public people very quickly realised that the events weren't RSVPs, they were advertisements. Engagement was interest, not promises. This was obvious in like '07.

If you want people to show up you ask them directly. If you use a Facebook event you later confirm with people directly.

I think ease of communication and an abundance of competing home entertainment has definitely increased flakiness versus prior eras but also the examples provided seem indicative of very extreme dysfunctional clusters

This person Keturah knows a lot less about the east than she thinks she does, and less about the aristocracy too.

In Japan you are expected not to wear your shoes indoors because they’re unclean (I suspect a callback to when most people lived in the countryside and wore sandals made of straw) and also because they will damage tatami grass mats. You might get offered slippers or you might not, it depends on the place. Certainly nobody is going to wash your feet!

As for aristocrats, they/we don’t go on about taking your shoes off, not because people are expected to want to show off their expensive shoes, but because being fussy about hygiene is considered middle-class and gauche. Like having lace doilies or little silver tongs for the sugar or that little tray for the salt and pepper shaker, or pronouncing valet as if it were French. It’s just a barber pole thing.

I’m reminded of the incident where the Clegg family (Lib Dems, middle class with delusions of grandeur) visited the Cameron’s (PM, Conservative, genuine Scottish aristocracy). Mrs. Clegg was horrified to be given a bottle of Heinz ketchup; she gave an interview later saying as much and talking about how at home they make all the condiments themselves. The Camerons were of course silently contemptuous that Mrs. Clegg expected them to earn her approval by hand-making ketchup. Very much a ‘two worlds collide’ scenario.

Aristocrats also have a large degree of separation in their actual living space for hosting guests and parties/events in their mansions compared to your typical home. When your entire hallway is marble flooring and your mansion is capable of hosting 100s of guests and you actually live in an upper floor and you have servants to clean your home and your events likely have dress codes that's completely different from having guests in your home where your carpeted bedroom is right next to your likely carpeted living room. Do you really need to "signal status" if you're just hanging out with your friends?

What's with the entitlement of "being the guest" anyways? Both the host and the guest should try to be respectful of each other. Frankly speaking, if someone is going to get offended when they're asked to remove their shoes, I don't want them in my home. If you think your shoes are cleaner than my floor then you're delusional. In my home we offer slippers for guests.

Easy thing to do is just copy what the home owner does. They keep shoes on, you keep shoes on. They take shoes off, you take shoes off.

Honestly seems to me that Keturah has an ick against taking shoes off for whatever reason and so wrote an entire article trying to justify that.

As an American: we all pronounce valet as French.

I hadn't realized there's another option.

Yeah, if you watch British shows they pronounce the word rhyming with "mallet". I can only guess that early Americans were trying to be fancy and the pronunciation diverged.

I think early America having a substantial French influence is the more likely culprit.

France was one of the Fledgling US's first allies/trading partners and a good portion of the gulf coast and southern Mississippi watershed had been already been settled by French speakers before being incorporated into the Union.

Ahh it depends. Your man-servant is valet (rhyming with mallet), when it is to do with cars it is valet (rhyming with ballet).

Oh, interesting. Americans don't have mallet valets, they hire out services, so maybe that's why I haven't heart it.

Interesting, I hadn't seen the latter case. Thanks for the correction!

France did help us with that war of independence.

I feel like I've seen similar phenomena with "guillotine" and "niche." I tried for a while in high school to get people to pronounce the "ll" in "guillotine" like in English instead of like in French, but I gave up because the French pronunciation was too popular. With "niche," that word is niche enough that during the rare occasions it's used, I'm still holding fast to the proper pronunciation of "nitch" instead of "neesch." I recall that, when I was young, "neesch" was kind of a marker of someone trying too hard to sound fancy while actually exposing their own ignorance, but now it seems like "nitch" is becoming a marker an ignoramus philistine who doesn't know that the proper way to pronounce "niche" is "neesch."

Meanwhile, my daughter's pre-K teacher has invited herself to my house. She called today, and went on about a "mandatory home visit", next week, with highly inflexible weekday hours. I did not like it. She said she was going to drop off paperwork and meet my daughter.

What the hell? No one gets to enter your home without an invitation (except maybe rent inspections that are highly regulated with advance notice or police with probable cause). Has this teacher appointed themselves as a child protection officer that MUST inspect the living conditions of each and every child? I'd tell them to go pound sand.

We fought about it. I was perhaps more prickly than is altogether advisable when speaking to a child's teacher. I tried researching how this could be considered an appropriate thing to, not offer, not ask, but mandate.

I'd frankly report her to the principal. This is completely unacceptable.

I read the public message from the state program, and it does indeed say there's a mandatory home visit, though I think in this teacher's case she was not delivering the news as intended, because the material goes on about cultural responsiveness and learning about the home culture of the child and building family connections and whatnot. She offered to have me talk to her "manager," whoever that is (she is the only licensed teacher, working in a daycare that is not like that), but I said to just send me an email for now while I consult about our schedule.

I could sort of imagine why it might be a thing, but, also, it is absolutely not culturally responsive to... American culture. And I am in America.

I’m with CertainlyWorse here — is this a mandatory program you have to send your children to for public education, or is this like a preschool with public subsidy or something?

I was in preschool before kindergarten, it was a white house run by a religious group. We played with blocks and there was naptime. No one did a welfare check on my parents’ house. Or if they did, my parents never mentioned it.

Edit: I looked it up, I guess this is a Head Start thing, and it’s mandatory for receiving the funding. It’s true that in America a teacher coming to your house is considered impolite, but the other thing about America is that surveillance of welfare recipients is normalized. There’s no “manager” who can override the home visit requirements. The Head Start program absolutely insists on it.

All the nonsense, as CertainlyWorse puts it, is obviously a welfare check figleaf, it’s transparently so. This isn’t a “black culture” difference thing, unless you count “being a recipient of federal social program funding” as a part of black culture.

What this particular thing sounds like is you’re accepting subsidized pre-K, which is oriented towards low-income families and designed to get children who might not make it to school at all to attend.

You don’t have to explain your financial situation, and I don’t judge anyone for taking advantage of resources in place. But I guess I’m a little surprised that you’re putting your kids in a program that my immediate mental association with, even before looking it up, was poor families while balking at the hoops that US welfare programs put poor families through, which suggests an unfamiliarity with the welfare system that Head Start hews close to. Is choosing a private program for pre-K not an option for you?

Edit 2: Is this actually a private pre-K after all? I’ve read some more and it’s possible that the pre-K you’re applying to also takes money from Head Start, and for reasons that I can presume rhyme with “equity” and “we did research on poor families and it helped”, some pre-Ks apply the same home visit rules to private pay families as to ones receiving the subsidy. That would explain the faintly ridiculous situation. But I don’t know that they’re going to bend it for you, even if that is the case.

It might be worthwhile to find another program, but I know childcare is scarce.

Is choosing a private program for pre-K not an option for you?

No, not really.

For context, I live in New Mexico, which is full of poor people and oil revenue. I had forgotten until I looked it up just now that it produces more than four times as much oil as Alaska, though still half as much as Texas. Unlike Alaska, which gives people money directly, New Mexico invests in various forms of welfare for all, so median income families qualify for pregnancy and early childhood medicaid with no fuss (I was shocked, this is worth tens of thousands of dollars per baby, and I just uploaded a couple of forms, and in the cases of the babies, the hospital uploaded the forms for me). They have a bunch of nice hispanic American ladies (many from the days when the territory literally belonged to Spain) who run nice warm daycares. All the normal daycares are now state funded (with no copay as of a year or so ago), and they have the pre-K program as an optional add-on with more curriculum, or they'll instead pay for regular daycare for four year olds, whatever the individual place decides on doing, which has also been, in my experience, fine. Finding daycare for a 1 year old and a 4 year old at the same time and the same establishment is the main impediment, which has worked out surprisingly well.

This situation has resulted in having a third child, where in another state we probably wouldn't have. As a member of the lower middle class, I like it a lot. If someone institutes low fuss UBI, it will probably be here. And it's democratic without being all that progressive, on account of all the influential people who's parents or grandparents were ranchers, so in general I like it. Also, I didn't save for a house at all, or even think of owning a house, and then a nice local organization said that, yes, we can buy a house, and just led us through exactly how to do that, then sent a non-commissioned realtor who also got up on our roof to show us how to fix the swamp cooler and stuck his hand down the food processor to fish out some broken glass that was inside.

I was more caught off guard by being called up suddenly, out of the blue.

People do often seem to say that crime is pretty high in New Mexico, though, especially around the large towns and cities (and especially around Albuquerque). Are you very rural?

Crime varies a lot from place to place even within Albuquerque. It is relatively bad as a whole, but apparently these days it's not as bad as Gallup (which doesn't surprise me) or Santa Fe (which does). Check out the interactive map here, bearing in mind that lower-population-area results are pretty noisy.

The neighborhood where I grew up gets an "F" today, though StreetView says the only neighbor with bars on their windows is the one who installed them after a break-in decades ago. The worst areas are around the airport, probably because anybody who could afford to live somewhere with less airplane noise did and then the selection effects snowballed from there. There are some high speed roads to get through those areas to the national labs where all the PhDs work, but I know one ex-Albuquerque scientist who left the state after his wife got carjacked, so "just drive past the crime" isn't a foolproof option.

I still have family there, at least in the better areas of town. I don't worry too much about them being victimized and I'd bet @Gaashk will be fine too. Albuquerque's homicide rate is atrocious but it's still better than around 3 dozen other large US cities, the ones you'd expect but also a bunch you wouldn't think twice about unless/until the Eye Of Vince Gilligan turns its pitiless gaze their way.

These charts comparing cities in the Southwest are the ones that stuck in my mind. 2023-24 data, so things might have changed since then, but ABQ is pretty bad. I'd note, though, that the comparison doesn't include Bakersfield, which ABQ recently surpassed for most car thefts per capita and is by all accounts a dreadful place.

Edit: and I'll have to look on a computer later, but everything I'm finding on a quick phone search is saying ABQ still has almost double the crime rates of SF.

I wonder how much that is influenced by locality / microenvironmental factors that aren't shown in the statistics. Eg. Finland used to have a fairly high homicide rate (compared to peer countries) while actually being a very safe place to live as long as you weren't a middle aged unemployed alcoholic male drinking with your buddies.

It's not completely random that Breaking Bad took place there, I will be very concerned and possibly move if my kids seem interested in drugs.

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There's a lot of variance from year to year, especially since Covid (Wiki's list is mostly 2021 data, in which Las Vegas "beat" Albuquerque by a couple homicides-per-100k, but both rates have dropped drastically since), but the Southwest is pretty free from the worst violence hotspots on the whole. After Vegas and Albuquerque the worst time-averaged homicide rate might be Denver, and it's way down the list for cities of its size.

ABQ still has almost double the crime rates of SF.

I wouldn't be surprised. SF has had some really high-profile but limited problems (We stopped bothering to prosecute car break-ins and for some inexplicable reason there was a long rash of car break-ins! After we figured out that crime is just caused by poverty, did anyone remember to tell the criminals?) but even bad enforcement has to do a lot of work to cancel out a selection effect as strong as "being able to afford to live in SF".

Yeah, I've heard that. I've heard it about parts of Chicago as well, and in both places, I don't drive with the windows down or leave my car for large stretches of time or walk alone, and so on.

Accidental double post

I've heard it about parts of Chicago as well

Chicago was strongly affected by red-lining. Anecdotally, most of the non-petty crime is strictly limited to the south and west sides of the city. There is very little chance you will just "wander" into the bad neighborhoods unless you are completely oblivious, deliberately or otherwise, to the changing neighborhood affluence markers. It's literally a gradient from good -> bad. The only real exception to this rule is the area around Hyde Park, which is the purview of the University of Chicago. It's smack dab deep in the ghetto, the metra stop for Hyde Park is very rough, but the actual neighborhood itself is super nice, until you cross the street boundary.

I was living on the South Side, and kept going to places like the DMV, or the grocery store, or some cool little fried shrimp place on a bridge, or a nature preserve, and my father in law kept giving me startling strong opinions about the places I had to drive through to get to them.

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One of my swim coaches was stabbed to death in West Mesa. For some reason, despite being a not great neighborhood, West Mesa also had the best pool complex in Albuquerque.

Worst that happened to my family directly I think was a tandem bike getting stolen.

I think the real trouble is in most cities the crime is segregated by neighborhood much more clearly than in Albuquerque, where you can have really great and well-kept infrastructure in an area of town who's name gets Google Autocompleted to "West Mesa Murders."

I'm sorry to hear that! There are occasionally people murdering each other in my area (village/exurb), but only if they get involved in some kind of family feud, or possibly drugs. Drugs are bad in general, but the entire Southwest has bad cartel activity and car thieves.

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Things must be pretty bad for them to mandate something like that. I'd be curious to investigate how this mandatory visit came to be. Is the state program voluntary?

the material goes on about cultural responsiveness and learning about the home culture of the child and building family connections and whatnot.

This sounds like complete nonsense made to be a figleaf for a welfare check. I can't see a teacher flipping out over the importance of 'learning about the home culture of the child' and deciding to die on that hill. They could figure that out over a half hour parent and teacher discussion in their office.

I don't clearly remember how things went down with my previous child, but I think they suggested meeting at my house, I suggested meeting at the school, and she pretty much immediately agreed.

The program itself is voluntary, and my older daughter liked it, so I figured to do it again. They have a bit more curriculum than the regular preschool, which is also completely state funded and exists in the same building. I'm not sure how much more, actually, since the regular program is also run by a large national daycare chain and has official stations and activities. I think it's somewhat based on Head Start, which specialized in teaching poor children with parents who would give excuses about not having transportation to parent teacher conferences or something. I'm not sure about the welfare check side of things, I think it's illegal to enter a home under false pretenses, but maybe they do try to get more district resources by finding all the potential IEP kids or families who want extra services or something. The public pre-Ks here do turn some families away, but are explicitly required to accept all children with disabilities.

Perhaps I'll make the appointment. I was mostly put off by how she kept arguing with me about how extremely REQUIRED it was in an annoying and unwelcoming way, and the short notice.

Yeah, it sounds like it was how the approach was made, which I completely understand. This reminds me of something that happened to me recently. Weird slice of life story incoming..

I rent and had the real estate agent ring me midweek at 5pm saying that the owner wanted to come over to fix a light at 9am the next day. I obviously denied that request, but knowing the owner is literally probably around 60-70 IQ and wasn't being malicious (I've met him before and he basically needs his wife to manage his life for him) I agreed to allow him over the day after.

The Real Estate Agent apologised and we had a bit of a chuckle over it in the end. We've both had to deal with all sorts of strange antics from the owner in the past (not helped by the fact that his Filipino wife is a financially ruthless would-be slumlord and has to be reminded of the tenant laws in our first world country), and they're more on my side rather than the owner's. They consider the couple more trouble than they're worth as clients and have threatened to drop them more than once.

The owner did actually come over to fix the light, but he came with a middle aged friend (which is his usual modus operandi; I've never seen him unescorted). They had to go to the hardware store to get the supplies they needed and the whole drama took up more of my time than I would have liked, as I wasn't going to let them wander around my home without keeping an eye on them.

At the end of the whole thing, the friend asked me how I was at home on a weekday and what I did for a living. My first instinct was to tell him it was none of his fucking business how I spend my time, as he seemed to have presumed that I was unemployed (probably because I hadn't mowed the front lawn in a while). I told him I worked from home in a professional role and he seemed genuinely surprised.

Anyway, I was glad to see the back of them. I was a bit cranky until my girlfriend calmed me down, pointing out the guy's age. I just didn't like people coming into my home and making judgments on how I live my life, no matter how old they are. The PTSD from this incident probably makes me upset on your behalf haha.

I'm a zoomer.

I've had a lot of trouble getting friends to hang out and keep to a set time and place to meet up. Actually, as I think about it, women I've gone on dates with have been better at showing up than my male friends have been at keeping to a hangout time. That said, when friends don't show up, they generally call or text and have an excuse (sometimes a good one, sometimes something you can tell they made up off the cuff), while when dates don't show up, they ghost about half the time, and the other half is split between "has a good excuse and agrees to reschedule" and "has a good-sounding excuse and never indicates a desire to reschedule," with the latter presumably indicating a lack of desire to move forward with the connection.

I had some friends in the neighborhood when I was growing but none of them were good people -- my parents are white-collar professionals but the neighborhood is on the wrong side of town and very working-class, though there isn't violent crime and I never felt unsafe. The neighbor kids to the left tried to steal from me, the girl across the street nearly got away with stealing from me, and the neighbor down the street gave me the sense of a schoolyard bully. I consider that it may not be a good idea to be above the socioeconomic average of the neighborhood, much less to be seen as such.

The kinds of things you see depicted in old movies and TV shows -- meeting friends from the neighborhood, schoolyard playmates, sleepovers, friends calling each other for hours in a night and taking up the phone line, knocking on your friend's door and showing up unannounced, coming over for tea a drink, neighborhood barbeques... none of these really reflect any of my life experience. It seems nice to have that kind of thick social community.

I guess it's a combination of two things. First, Anglo culture in general is more reserved about hospitality than Southern European, Latin, Middle Eastern, Eastern European, Asian cultures in general. I can't speak to the careful divisions in Europe, but what I see online suggests the English are more hospitable than the Danish, but less so than the Spanish.

But the English at least have a tradition of having someone for tea, whereas in the US someone comes over and unless a party was prepared for the standard beverage is "uh, I think I have like a flat 2-liter of Diet Coke in the fridge." Americans pour a lot of social emphasis into the event, the party, the special occasion, and there are high expectations indeed for cleanliness, decor, even theme -- the neurotic curse of the middle class. I presume that poorer or more socially transparent cultures are more comfortable with a relaxed attitude towards socializing and entertaining, without the expectations of having a tip-top living space. "Keeping up with the Joneses" runs deep in the American consciousness.

Of course, it's regional, and temperament-based. My aunt from Oklahoma has a large family room and a dining room with many tables, and she has cousins and neighbors and church members and people I don't even recognize coming in and out of her house every time I visit her. She's gregarious, and socially transparent, and you go to her house, and you're family.

She's also a landlady, and most of her work is maintaining her properties (she's a landlady who cleans and maintains the properties herself, sometimes enlisting my cousins to help), so she's home much of the time, and can be socially transparent because she invests much of her time into cleaning and maintaining her home as much as her rentals.

That's probably the biggest explanatory factor -- people's homes and entertaining have traditionally been the provenance of the homemaker, and contributing to third spaces, leading private societies, entertaining guests, and general hospitality were the recognized space for women to hold up the social order. With the entrance of women into the workplace and the two-income trap that makes this a requirement instead of an option, the intertia of middle class entertaining expectations on top of working feels to many like exhaustion rather than pleasure.

"I'm working a 40-hour job, caring for the children, and maintaining the home all at once and my husband doesn't help" (the "double burden") is almost a stock phrase in "why I divorced" stories, and to stack the expectations that people feel about properly entertaining guests on top of those tasks means they're the first to get cut. Not to mention the tension that men and women working 40+ hours a week leaves very little time for anyone to socialize, stacking children on top makes that harder, and then everyone is exhausted and who wants to go do a thing when you could not do a thing, or catch up on sleep over the weekend?

Women from cultures where there is a greater division between men's and women's roles, even if the women in question work or live in a western country, tend to follow that blueprint, and so entertaining and maintaining social connections are higher on the priority list. It isn't irrational the patterns that have occurred, and most people are cutting what I also would cut given the constraints people have been handed, but there are knock-on effects like the decline in entertaining and hospitality.

Mass media also contributes significantly: first radio, then television, then video gaming, now the internet. I'm sure some critics of mass entertainment (which were probably women's groups -- women have been talking about social issues much longer than they've been voting) at the introduction of each of these technologies were sounding alarms about how in the future people wouldn't talk to each other any more, and society would degrade as a result. Cyberpunk as a genre is partially a sustained criticism of the concept of being 'jacked-in' to media at the expense of flesh and blood.

And while the warnings of critics are often overblown or exaggerated, they often have a seed of prescience, even one that is never realized or acknowledged until the time is far too late.

It's easier to entertain yourself now than at any point in history, and when people can entertain themselves, 'entertaining' others feels like effort unnecessarily expended. And given the crunch on time I explained above, why would anyone expend effort unnecessarily?

When the magic internet rectangle supplies nearly endless content, literature, social concepts, news, and parasocial connections with people far brighter, more gregarious, and more attractive than anyone in your immediate social circle, why would anyone go outside and touch grass, or stop to chat with the neighbor? What do I, an introverted Catholic-lite who quotes internet memes the way my forefathers quoted the Bible, who's more familiar with esoteric technical specifications than local restaurants, and whose opinions are so far outside the Overton window they might as well be called defenestrated... well, what do I have in common with my fundamentalist Pentecostal neighbors who hate the Catholics nearly as much as the gays? About what am I supposed to talk to them? The weather? That sounds far less pleasurable than throwing internet comments out into the void at all of you.

meeting friends from the neighborhood, schoolyard playmates, sleepovers, friends calling each other for hours in a night and taking up the phone line, knocking on your friend's door and showing up unannounced, coming over for tea a drink, neighborhood barbeques

Same here, as a Millennial, except - sleepovers were a huge part of my childhood! The best part really. Did you not have sleepovers?

I'm a zoomer.

Wait, how does a zoomer end up referencing a game from 1992 (and one of the best games of all time) in their nickname?

In addition to being one of the best games of all time, Star Control 2 also has the unique honor of having been released under the GPL in the early 2000s, under the name "The Ur-Quan Masters" (due to the trademark belonging to the publisher, not the developer, a fact which produced absolutely no problems and embittered legal disputes whatsoever). I encountered it through the open source community where it's talked about as one of the best open-source games. The game is even packaged in debian contrib! UQM may be old, but Linux is taking off among zoomers, and the game has a second life within those circles.

You may or may not have heard that a sequel is coming out, under the new series name "Free Stars." This makes it the third sequel to SC2 to be developed in the past 30 years, but we don't talk about the others. This one is the first sequel by Fred Ford and Paul Reiche, although Paul has since retired.

I've been following the Free Stars development for a while. First there was that huge legal drama with Stardock that got resolved in a really weird way. Now (and admittedly this is much less eventful) every blogpost has some political crap buried within it. I'm not sure if the two original Toys for Bobs devs are super progressive, or their staffers developers are the super progressive ones, but it's kind of funny to have a giant dev progress update and then have a picture of you protesting fascism in front of the Washington Monument and talking about what a shocking year it's been politically.

I hope it gets out of Kickstarter Development Hell. The Escape Velocity Override remake, "Cosmic Frontier Override", was not so lucky. The devs wasted a bunch of time poorly rewriting everything and then apparently Peter Cartwright, the original creator, died while this all was going on. Maybe it'll keep going. The remaining dev is incentivized to keep going, because he somehow made a Patreon account a year or two after the kickstarter to get even more free money to develop freelance.

Or maybe I don't hope it gets out of Kickstarter Development Hell. How can I hope to defeat leftism if I play every game and watch every movie that leftists make? Maybe it's better if they just waste the money of other leftists and desperate 40 year olds. I am also a zoomer who played Ur Quan Masters, by the way. It was really good.

I hope it gets out of Kickstarter Development Hell. The Escape Velocity Override remake, "Cosmic Frontier Override", was not so lucky. The devs wasted a bunch of time poorly rewriting everything and then apparently Peter Cartwright, the original creator, died while this all was going on. Maybe it'll keep going. The remaining dev is incentivized to keep going, because he somehow made a Patreon account a year or two after the kickstarter to get even more free money to develop freelance.

Relatedly, we've been toying with maybe doing a Kickstarter for hw device with a friend and very fast came to the conclusion that the only way we would ever do is if we have a production ready prototype and need upfront capital just to order a limited batch from a contract manufacturer as well as a known set of guaranteed buyers. Otherwise there's far too high risk of ending up at /r/shittykickstarters.

Linux is taking off among zoomers

Seriously? I'd love evidence to that effect.

Depending on your definition of "zoomer" it's possible I've been a Linux fan since before you were born, but it's almost as likely that I've been hearing "This is going to be the Year of the Linux Desktop!", in decreasing ratios of sincerity to irony, since before you were born. I want to say that the increasing irony doesn't feel like as big a deal as it used to. Maybe that's because these days you can use VS Code on Linux to write Linux software and Windows Subsystem for Linux to run it on Windows, maybe it's because Steam has gifted us with more top-notch Linux games (especially if you include top-notch emulatable-on-Linux games) than I'll ever be able to play, or maybe none of that's my true reasoning there.

There was a bit of a bump in the Steam Hardware Survey, but it's held in the 3.5%-4% range, and there's no real breakdown of how and what demographics.

That said, Linus's "linux challenge" this year went from the normal joke where it seemed like he was intentionally trying to fuck things up, to a pretty serious effort where a handful of the people stuck with it at the end, and I have had actual students actually interested in trying it out.

As a consumer of the tech YouTube space - you see the YouTubers and the viewers really pushing into Linux hard this year, with an uptick in the previous few years.

It's not taking off in the sense that everyone and their cousin are using it, but among the tech-oriented it's become aspirational. Bazzite has generated some interest. The big mover has been Steam and Proton improving the gaming experience, combined with Windows continuing to anger tech-literate users with increasing telemetry and AI features that make people feel like they're the product. At the very least, Linux is often in the air as an option for young techy people, in a way that simply wasn't the case 10, 15 years ago. It's also riding the wave of PC building as a culture, which is dramatically taking off among zoomers, so much so that my sheltered rural cousin constantly bugs me for advice on what kind of PC he should build. In the same way PC building is "take charge of your computer hardware and do it up custom!", Linux for young tech-oriented people is "take charge of your computer software and do it up custom!", with stuff like Arch having an aura of technology empowerment that zoomers of this type find refreshing compared to the app-and-platform 'enshittification' culture of technology right now.

But I'm also in IT, so I see very tech-oriented people all the time. But it's striking that IT (especially in comparison to software engineering) used to be "All Hail Microsoft!" territory, and now, using Windows is considered the "basic bitch" option for personal use even as AD and whatever Microsoft wants to call cloud directory services/Entra this month remains the enterprise backbone.

Bazzite has generated some interest. The big mover has been Steam and Proton improving the gaming experience, combined with Windows continuing to anger tech-literate users with increasing telemetry and AI features that make people feel like they're the product.

I mean, old enough to have Zoomers as children, had I any children, but the first thing I did with my new rig was copy off the default Windoze install and then nuke the drive with a fresh Bazzite install. It's been a ton of fun to play with, and the best part about it is that it's way more trustworthy to me RN than the unholy mess that is Windows 11 and patch Tuesdays randomly breaking $Important_Thing because all M$ cares about is growing its 365 empire, old and decaying x86-based OS monopoly notwithstanding.

but the first thing I did with my new rig was copy off the default Windoze install

Last time I changed laptop, I went to great lengths to avoid getting OEM Windows to specifically avoid paying Microsoft, so the first thing I did was plug in a Mint USB.

(The previous time, I'd looked for a no-OS laptop to avoid Win10's anti-user features, but I wasn't willing to go the full order route and the transition costs were enough that if I was paying for Windows anyway I was willing to put up with it. But by the last time, Microsoft had started bankrolling OpenAI, so they're on the hatelist now and I'm willing to pay more to avoid paying them.)

There's a lot to like about Mint, to me it's always been one of the better Ubuntu-based distros! Coming back to a Fedora-based distro after about a decade plus on the other side of that software divide has been an interesting experience, and I've stubbed my toes on various things several different times, but I'm finding that I really dig the underpinnings of Bazzite much more than I expected to. But anyway, IMO Windoze will continue to rule the corporate roost for the foreseeable future since Office is still the de facto standard, but if you don't need that particular ecosystem and are relatively comfortable running a flavor or Linux, then outside of $specific_thing that can't be run/emulated in Linux land, there's absolutely no reason to suffer with M$ any longer.

You're a Zoomer?! I had you pegged as older than me (late millennial).

I'm very close to the border between the two, and in some ways my personality and temperament is closer to a mid-millennial than my birth cohort. A friend once described me as "an old man in a young man's body."

There's also the complicating fact that for various reasons my parents were relatively late in life when I was born, so both of my parents are very clearly baby boomers. So I had similar parentage to many early-to-mid-millennials, and I'm sure that had an effect on me.

I think a lot of people are basically pretending they have social lives now but in fact spend all the time they can bedrotting with a screen. The men you just don't hear about, they drop out of the offline world completely, but many women still accept invitations from friends, go on dating apps, etc. when they're as stuck inside as a junkie in a traphouse.

my older daughter hasn't been invited to anyone's house.

How old is she? If she has friends she should be getting invited, if not then you have bigger problems.

When it comes to flaking, apparently that's just bay area things. People have to cancel when things come up but in general if somone saw the time and place, and said they're coming, then they put it on the calendar, don't double book something else, and show up. Never been anywhere where this isn't the case.

She just turned seven, so I think it's the age where the protocol was for me to exchange numbers with her parents, they don't do things directly yet, but also I don't want to invite her and her parents, because that gets into awkward adults failing to get to know each other while their kids come over to have something solved every five minutes, which is probably why they also didn't.

But you must! It's not like anyone else magically avoids this initial awkwardness.

How can I? My work schedule completely overlaps with her school schedule. Should I send an invitation card? I don't want people to think it's an event, though.

She called today, and went on about a "mandatory home visit", next week, with highly inflexible weekday hours. I did not like it. She said she was going to drop off paperwork and meet my daughter.

Presumably you want your daughter in pre-k more than the teacher does. What's with the high pressure sales tactics?

Also, just because I found it odd, here's Keturah complaining about a situation where someone invited her into the hostess's home, and Keturah came, and then they judged each other for their stance on shoes, that Keturah wanted to keep them on, and the hostess wanted her to take them off.

[In the East, guests] are greeted by the host who bends down to remove their guest’s shoes (sandals or slippers), wash their feet, and then offer them a pair of house slippers. The atmosphere is peaceful and clean, a sanctuary from the road — nothing in an eastern home will offend or frighten the guest. This ritual considers the comfort of guests — after a long, dusty walk it feels good to have your feet scrubbed and a fresh pair of slippers to wear.

It's not often you get to see orientalism in the wild in AD 2026. I suppose she has never actually met an individual of the oriental persuasion, much less visited their house, much less visited a house in the orient, and might actually believe that when you attend a party in Shanghai the host will take your shoes off and wash your feet (happy ending presumably not included).

Presumably you want your daughter in pre-k more than the teacher does. What's with the high pressure sales tactics?

I've already signed her up for the Pre-K program six months ago, and would be happy to bring her in without siblings to introduce her to the teacher. It's the local public school, not like the bespoke private ones that are trying to keep the riff-raff out, it seems to be based in some idea from the legislators that it's easier for parents and less intimidating for the child for the teacher to come to them, and with all the language around cultural responsiveness, I want to say that this is not my culture.

Haha, yeah, it sounds more like what a pastor would say about Jesus washing his disciples feet.

Something, something, building trust, Head Start, maybe the norms of black Americans?

Entirely possible. Publicly funded preschool is dealing with a different crowd- and unlike many crowds, this is one where the institution often knows better than the parent(s)(and this is a very different thing from knowing best).

And a reason why one should do as much as one can to keep your kid away from that crowd.

People on here have been commenting a lot about women not showing up for dates

I'll just say that I have never once had a woman not show up for a date after agreeing to a time and a place. Every other popular complaint seems valid, but this one is fake as far as I can tell.

I haven't dated since meeting my wife on the apps (for obvious reasons) but did a lot in the period leading up to that meeting. I only got stood up once that I can remember, maybe twice, in the sense of 'arrive to the location after sending a confirmation text 24 hours before and receiving a positive response' which was then rescheduled for the next day since she overslept or something (It's been a few years, my memories are blurry). I went on approximately 50 first dates in a year, and found that 'girl ghosts/cancels on the 24-hour confirmation text and never meets after setting a time and a date' was maybe 10-20% of the time? It's been years and I did actually have a spreadsheet a few laptops ago, so all numbers are rough

Admittedly after a few months I feel like I got pretty good at filtering for the obviously flaky/difficult, and I was generally pretty fast to offer an in-person meeting upon matching which in my experience tended to scare off the ditherers and completely meeting-adverse. There's a lot of people on Online Dating who are looking for a forever penpal and/or are absurdly fussy about deigning to meet people in the flesh, and I'd say back before I figured out the signs of them/got attractive enough to graduate from 'maybe' to 'yes' for a lot of those women that a 50%+ Flake/Ghost/dither forever rate on date requests was typical.

I only got stood up once that I can remember, maybe twice, in the sense of 'arrive to the location after sending a confirmation text 24 hours before and receiving a positive response' which was then rescheduled for the next day since she overslept or something (It's been a few years, my memories are blurry). I went on approximately 50 first dates in a year, and found that 'girl ghosts/cancels on the 24-hour confirmation text and never meets after setting a time and a date' was maybe 10-20% of the time?

I think some level of this debate has to do with what people count as "flakiness." I've absolutely had "girl cancels on the day before confirmation text," and even "girl ghosts and blocks almost immediately after the day before confirmation text." I have had "cancels immediately before the date with reasonable-sounding excuse," which could turn either into ghosting or a rescheduled date, depending on many factors. I have, however, never been left genuinely stood up at a meeting location, but I also, when I dated, would never go to the meeting location unless I got day-of confirmation.

I also think there might be an element of age and/or attractiveness match level involved here. The men I most associate with making the "women be flakin'" complaints are also, often, the men I associate with "I like 'em young and hot," and, yeah, I'll readily agree that "young and hot" is a walking red flag for flakiness, because such individuals who are also eager to settle down and have a well-adjusted personality often end up in a relationship quickly, and long-term presence in dating indicates pickiness, chaos, or lack of serious desire to practically date. A 22 year old is dramatically more likely to flake, and to do it poorly, than a 29 year old. Men have similar dynamics, and young men are fickle as all heck.

There's also the "what does she think the date is" element. A woman who thinks the date is a hookup or a plausibly-deniable hookup is going to be more likely to flake, because that's a high stakes meeting, and "I'm not feeling it" can override any level of "keep to your plans." A woman who thinks it's low-intensity coffee will be less likely to flake.

All research and talk about online dating for men in the past couple decades has indicated that there's a very skewed bimodal distribution, where the vast majority have little-to-no luck, and a small minority have very good luck. If your experience with online dating is significantly more positive than what is generally perceived by men, then the most parsimonious explanation is that you are in or at least near that small minority.

I stopped doing online dating about 8 years ago, but I had been doing it before that for over a decade and I had normal luck, which would invalidate the theory of a bimodal distribution. If I really wanted, I could get, if I used the online dating sites regularly, a date every couple of weeks and the girl would always actually show up. It didn't usually amount to anything, but that was more due to me than the girls or the dating sites.

This broadly used to be my experience before 2020. It radically changed for the worse after COVID, despite me becoming way more attractive.

Yeah I've been out of the market for a few years now on account of meeting my wife on Hinge, but I did a solid 18 month of Hinge-grinding along the way to meeting her. I've got a decent amount of things going for me in that I'm tall, educated, have a reasonable job, white etcetera but I started the 18 month period as borderline obese and not well-presented and got to being a 7.5/10 or so by the end of it after weight loss, improving my gamesmanship and getting more experience.

I had to deal with way more flakiness and chronic go-nowhere experiences at the start, both since I had way fewer matches initially so I'd tolerate a lot more mixed signals and since frankly I was more interchangeable for the women. By the time I found my wife I was getting frequent matches, plus due to a combination of experience and abundance was way happier to just bail out of a match the second I started getting vibes that I was about to embark on a wild goose chase. If you're a less attractive guy, you're probably going to have to tolerate a lot more nonsense to get anywhere.

I've had it happen to me. Only with girls from dating apps though. Girls I met through any other context would show up 100% of the time.

I'll just say that I have never once had a woman not show up for a date after agreeing to a time and a place.

If you are saying you've never been out and out stood up, my experience tracks with yours. But are you including late cancellations?

There's a gradient that goes from

1 Cancelling the day of, with apologies and immediate rescheduling

2 Cancelling the day of, with a noted drop in enthusiasm in subsequent messaging and a vagueness about rescheduling that seems to be a hint you should stop bothering them.

3 Cancelling the day of, followed by ghosting

4 Ghosting the day of the date (no reply to the "hey, see you tonight at 7" text)

5 Getting stood up, which means her confirming the date then not turning up, leaving you sitting there like a jackass (a): apologies after, sometimes with a dramatic story about a sudden medical crisis, with hospital bed selfies, or (b): full ghosting with blocking/unmatching

2 and 4 are the most common variations. 0 (the date actually happening) happens slightly more often than 5, but less than 1-4. 1 sometimes later results in 0, but more often leads to 2 or 3.

At this point, I am forced to assume that 2, 3, and 4 are her double-booking and going on a date with a hotter guy, or having met a hotter guy in the interim. 5a is anxiety, 5b is, I can only assume, some kind of vindictive game.

Regarding 5, one of my stranger dating experiences was the sole time I was truly stood up. She confirmed an hour beforehand, I arrived at the bar, and she failed to show. No excuses or apologies or claims of a medical crisis, just silence. No response to a "are you on your way" text. I had my beer and left.

Later that day, I texted something along the lines of "wtf happened? Did you die in a car wreck?" She actually responded and said that meeting me at the bar felt too high pressure and she felt uncomfortable. I (flippantly) asked if meeting me the next night at a house I was housesitting would be more comfortable, and she responded yes. As planned, the next night she showed up at a total stranger's house to meet a second total stranger who didn't even own the house.

Baffling.

Can confirm I’ve experienced all of these multiple times as well, although I don’t think I’ve ever been left hanging at an outside venue like a bar or restaurant, since my strategy for most my adult life has been having chicks meet me outside my building or in its lobby (or me picking her up for something like a pool date).

Given increased tiresomeness with female flakiness overtime, I’ve only gotten more ardent about sticking to the strategy. If I’m going to get left sitting there like a jackass, it at least better be in the comfort of my home/hotel/AirBnB.

5a is anxiety, 5b is, I can only assume, some kind of vindictive game.

5a and 5b may be more similar than you think. Girls keep hospital selfies in their photo roll in case they need to bust them out for an alibi such as flaking/ghosting. The outcome of both is the same, wasting as much of your time as possible and leaving you twisting in the wind, making it maximally difficult for you to make other plans at the last minute. It’s a form of merriment for them. Some of them will even brag about it in their profiles: “just here to waste your time.”

Most “amusing” version of this is when it’s near the time of your date or already past it, a girl tells you she’s getting ready and for you to keep an eye out for when she is so you can call her a rideshare. She gives you status updates throughout before finally disappearing. Like an NFL team trying to chew up the clock in the 4th quarter to protect a lead, or a soccer team faking injuries and moving as slowly as possible during stoppage time:

You: let me know when you’re ready so I can send you that Uber at [agreed upon time for date]

*delay*

Girl: hey im getting ready i’ll lyk when I am ☺️

You: cool

*an hour passes*

You: how’s it coming along

*twenty minutes pass*

Girl: great! just had to do my hair, almost ready!

You: sounds good

*thirty minutes pass*

You: almost done?

*twenty minutes pass*

Her: yes! just putting the final touches on my makeup 😘

You: great

*fifteen minutes pass*

You: ready for that uber?

*SHE GONE*

However, sometimes after lengthy delays girls do still follow-through and show-up, so it can be hard to tell ex-ante with certainty if you have a 5b on your hands or not. Gotta play it cool the whole time, lest she gets the ick.

You send ubers to women? I'll offer to pick someone up, I'll split food and drinks but cover the whole tip, or cover the first round or two myself, or some combination of paying for 55 to 80% of costs incurred. Sending cars for them seems like playing into a gross fantasy.

Also, odd that women are so willing to give out their addresses on a first date when 9 out of 7 of them will be date-raped at a frat party while make 70¢ on the dollar.

My wife's sister flakes on dating app guys a lot, which I see as a spectator since I'm living next door to her. Generally more out of pure flakiness, hypochondria and being loathe to leave her K-Dramas than due to swapping to chads or whatever. From what I've seen she's a chronic #2er, but I feel that the more time I've spent with female friends and/or involved tangentially in my Wife's social circle talking about online dating there's just a ton of genuine flakiness and people massively overrate the whole double-booking thing. Maybe I'm overindexing for Asian, non-promiscuous girls who trend a lot more KHHV than serial daters but I know a lot of very timid, passive girls towards dating who'll psych themselves for essentially no reason.

A few times women have been honest and said it was because there was another guy they were more interested in, "sorry, I don't know how online dating works."

I told them it works exactly how they're doing it, just typically with less honesty.

I'm sure that happens but it's more that people have a ton of parallel threads and might be on date 5 with Guy A and Date 1 with Guy B as opposed to straight up double booking individual slots, IMO.

Ah, the selective disappearance of women’s supposedly superior communication and social skills, and ability to read the room.

They know how online dating works, all right. It’s just that a lot of how it works is women jerking men around and wasting men’s time and energy.

This showed up in my jannie queue and before I even opened the context to see what the conversation was about I knew it was gonna be @Sloot.

"A real man doesn't complain."

I swear almost all Zoomer women have debilitating anxiety. When my department used to go out to lunch every week, I had multiple female Zoomer coworkers ask me to order for them, because they had too much anxiety to order from a stranger. They eventually began to complain if we went anywhere that wouldn’t let you order from a kiosk or iPad, since I and my other older coworkers refused to coddle them in that way. Even the ones who could handle ordering their own food couldn’t handle phone calls. They’d all, without exception, rather cancel an event than spend five minutes trying to work out the details over the phone. And this is even with their friends and coworkers, not people they don’t know. If they can’t figure everything out via text and email, they’d rather skip and stay home. It’s insane.

I think there's a combination of increased anxiety, and also the realization that it's really conversational checkmate for avoiding anything you don't want to do. Once you've declared anxiety it means that whatever's annoying you is a bully who isn't taking into account your situation of need, essentially.

Its common if you date using the apps, which is what I assume is going on.

For what it's worth I've gotten plenty of dates via app and never had anybody say they would go to a date and then cancel at the last minute.

Everyone uses the apps now. Are y'all only swiping right on Flakedy Ann or something?

I think we've literally just had it too good for too long and people have gotten soft. You'd need WW2-style mass mobilization conditions to knock some sense into people.

I guess that tracks with community in former Yugoslavia and the former USSR areas staying intact better.

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