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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   3768 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 27, 2023

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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Is the specific version of code-davinci-002 mentioned in this article available to the public yet? Could I pay for access to it?

I'm seeing articles about insurance companies withdrawing from Florida and California because of wild fires. Why are they exiting the market entirely instead of just raising prices to account for the higher risk?

I know that California at least has a state fund that serves as an insurer of last resort, I don't know much about it but I suspect that either there are regulations related to it that prohibit raising prices that much, or that everyone would use it instead of if prices were raised that much.

Also note that there's a lot of overhead involved in calculating what the rates should be and advertising them and offering them, if you expect that no one can afford the rates you would have to charge and you will get very little business, it may save money to shut down rather than pay the overhead to keep offering them.

It’s better PR to leave the market entirely and let the next hurricane ruin people’s lives instead of raising premiums and having an entire class of people who had to sell their family house because Farmers hiked their insurance rates 300%.

In a broader sense than what the commenters below added, there are various scenarios where market failures exist because of information asymmetries. I.e., person A knows about x and person B does not, so they can't come to terms they both find agreeable. In this case there has to be some kind of intervention by the government or another third party for things to work; classic examples for this would be used cars and health insurance.

Insurance companies have a much more sophisticated understanding of wildfire risks than the average person. Throw in some other cognitive biases (humans generally don't organize their finances in 50 year windows), and there are going to be places where insurance companies essentially feel obligated to raise rates to the point where humans will not pay them. Hell, auto insurance is something comparatively much simpler for both issuer and seller and governments generally still have to force drivers to buy it.

The government stops them from raising prices.

Insurance companies are just like us: They buy insurance! When insurance companies buy it, it’s called “reinsurance.”

The cost of reinsurance has risen dramatically, and State Farm cited “a challenging reinsurance market” as one of the reasons it decided to stop selling new home insurance policies in California.

When insurance companies explain their costs to the insurance department as part of the process for justifying their prices, they aren’t allowed to include the cost of reinsurance. The department hasn’t historically permitted it, Soller said, because it doesn’t regulate reinsurance.

“What are insurers supposed to do when, on the one hand, the Department of Insurance is telling them ‘maintain your solvency’ and then, on the other hand, when their costs go up, you can’t charge for it?” said Frazier.

I didn't know that, sounds like a classic case of price controls causing an artificial shortage.

Well just like any business there's a break-even point where their costs will outstrip what people are willing to pay for insurance. With the dramatic rise of housing prices pretty much everywhere in the US especially over the past ~5 years, it makes perfect sense to me.

I figured insurance would be different because most people have mortgages so they are contractually obligated to carry insurance. My understanding is that if I let mine lapse my mortgage company would purchase it and send me the bill. Are people just letting their houses go uninsured because it's too expensive?

Yes. Lots of people do it. They can get in trouble with their mortgage company but not everyone gets caught.

Then they get to learn about the not so wonderful world of force placed insurance. It's, as you can imagine, atrociously expensive and the borrower has to pay for it.

What are some of the best VPN services?

I'd want plenty of speed (live in Europe if that matters), and privacy you might actually trust somewhat.

What are your goals from it, who do you want privacy from?

I'm pretty skeptical on the usefulness of VPNs. Nothing is going to be faster than your bare connection of course. If you want privacy from your parents, local ISP, employer, etc, then any of them will do. If you want privacy from your government, then use Tor from a freshly imaged disposable laptop, and then pray to God because even that probably isn't good enough.

I want to be tracked less by my ISP for torrenting purposes; tracked less by google and others in everything I do online.

I'm becoming more conscious of how thumbprinted I am everywhere by how youtube gives me video recs based on things my android phone has recorded, things said out loud by me or others. Even turning off the mic access on my phone does not stop this. It seems to record all audio at all times anyway. Not sure what to do about that.

I don't think VPNs are a great solution to any of that.

If you want less tracking from the tech majors, it's probably more effective to get adblock and/or pihole and block all traffic to them. After voluntarily switching away from their services of course. Being on a VPN while logged into their accounts and/or still allowing every website that integrates with them to send traffic to them doesn't accomplish anything. And being on a VPN while blocking all traffic to them also doesn't accomplish anything.

For torrents, I've tended to think it's better to use only private trackers locally and use remote seedboxes for any "public" torrents that might be tracked or detected. Why VPN all traffic to and from your home PC just to hide your torrents from your ISP badly (they will still know you're using a lot of upstream bandwidth in patterns typical of torrent servers, if they actually care enough to check), when for a similar price, you can set up a proper seedbox that's always online and your ISP will never know about at all?

I do stick to private trackers exclusively.

I use ublock origin, privacy badger and a couple of other Firefox privacy add-ons.

It would be difficult to fully break off from google. I use youtube every day. And discord, who send all chat data straight to google. Not to mention my expensive Android phone...

What are vpns good for?

IMO, VPNs are good for hiding your traffic and evading blocks from people or organizations that are very close to you, such as family, building, employer, ISP, etc. Still not great - it's better to avoid those types of monitored connections entirely if possible; VPN is just a workaround for when it can't be otherwise avoided. They're also good for corporate/hosting stuff - if you want to set up an intranet somewhere for a group of servers to talk to each other while blocking all outside traffic, and then access them remotely. If you don't do any of that or don't know what it is, don't worry about it.

VPNs are also very cheap to operate and very profitable to run, so lots of companies get started up to run them and spam ads and sponsorships all over the place. It's a nice feel-good talisman for people who are worried about security, but mostly doesn't help much.

Forgot to mention mobile, which is indeed a tough nut to crack to have actual privacy along with the functionality that people expect. Apple and Google both track the shit out of everything on proper devices. There are alternative de-googled Android ROMs you can load, but they're mostly not very good and painful or impossible to get most of the apps you want. Banking/finance apps, mainstream social media apps, Uber and food ordering apps, etc may refuse to run on devices that aren't fully locked down stock devices.

Ideally, we wouldn't use Youtube at all. That can be rather limiting though. Viable alternatives may include creating a new Google account just for it that you only use on devices you watch on. Not sure if you can do that on mobile though. I think there might be alternative mobile youtube apps that don't use the device's main Google account, but I haven't checked that in a while. You could also download everything you want to watch with youtube-dl and send the files around manually, but most people consider that a headache.

Similarly the best you can do with Discord is probably to limit the accounts you connect to your Discord account and the devices you use it on. I've also heard that Discord desktop and mobile apps are very spy-happy, you can limit data collection better by using the web browser version of Discord only. You might need a new account though, since they probably already know everything about your old one, and will probably remember the links even if you remove them now.

There's NewPipe for alternative Android youtubing. It works well. Can't write comments though. Not sure if there's a similar thing for PC.

I've uninstalled the discord apps on my devices.

It is pretty terrifying sometimes. At this point I've pretty much given up any real opsec because I doubt I can defend myself from the spying of major companies, let alone governments, without an inordinate amount of time studying cryptography.

Mullvad is considered the most privacy-conscious.

Looks good. Thank you. :)

I considered installing that one, and apparently one of their payment options is to mail them an envelope full of cash. Can't beat that, I guess.

I chose to send them cash in an envelope, just because I could lol. Got the correct amount of time added to my account a few days later. :) The price is very reasonable.

Hope you used gloves to handle that cash. They can take DNA from it…

With that they can deduce my biological sex (with a karyotype) and my ethnicity (with finer sequencing), but they still couldn't find my specific identity unless my DNA is already in a database somewhere (which is probably the case for people for whom this kind of security is an issue) that they have access to (less likely). Tbc, this is hypothetical, I haven't purchased their services and I probably wouldn't go to these lengths if I did.

They don’t need your DNA. They need your distant relations’ DNA. See how the police caught the Golden State Killer.

I've been casually digging around but I can't find it: does anyone carry crime statistics by education level? What percentage of murderers have college degrees? Masters/professional degrees?

I'd also love to find income, murderers by income level.

Maybe my research is weak but it isn't popping anything up.

The closest thing I found from a quick search was “Education and Correctional Populations.” which gives, in circa approximately 1997, 2.4% of state inmates, 8.1% federal inmates, 22.0% general US population having a college degree or higher. No information on post-graduate degrees or specific crime. Though apparently the Bureau of Justice Statistics conducts regular surveys. Data is supposedly available at the link, but seems to be down.

Isn't the income for most convicted murderers zero? I guess it should be for the years trailing arrest. The Prison Policy Initiative has reports for both education and pre-incarceration incomes, I didn't look at all at the methodology. Median pre-incarceration income of all male 27-42 incarcerated people in 2014 dollars was $19,650 vs $41,250 for non-incarcerated men.

Thanks a bunch! I'll dig into that. I think I was searching primarily for recent years and that might have thrown the search off.

Are gay men actually gay?

What portion of gay men are completely uninterested in women? If there was a highly attractive women who wanted to have sex, what portion of gay men would say no?

Maybe it is my autistic inability to see things from other's perspective but I have a sneaking suspicion that many gay men are gay because grindr is tinder on tutorial mode. I can understand if some of them feel attraction to men but honestly if they had the ability to easily attract high quality women would they really say no?

many gay men are gay because grindr is tinder on tutorial mode

I regret to inform you that a straight man would never speak such a sentence.

You don't put sugar in your food if its missing salt. Unless you irrationally love sugar.

My brother turned down the opportunity to fuck a guy he really wanted because the man's girlfriend wanted to watch, and reading between the lines, that was enough of a turnoff to make the entire process unworkable. That isn't universal, but neither is it unusual or even the most extreme variant. The number that'd turn down direct contact with a woman without another dick in the room is a lot higher.

Conversely, a surprising number of gay men have tried women, despite their best efforts: there was a fun statistic going around in the early 00s that was probably mostly selection effect but ended up with a worrying number of gay men having had their first age of heterosexual intercourse before the average straight man did. Some of that's really sketchy stuff -- Dan Savage's version is worse because he doesn't mention and may not realize it was statutory rape -- but more of it's just that a lot of gay socialization makes dealing with women somewhat easier and a little less 'threatening', along with pressures to appear straight making early relationships (including relationships without a stated interest in sex!) more appealing earlier.

Some of them identify as gay because they tried it and it didn't work: either 'pushing rope', not being able to reach climax even if they could get hard, or they had to lay back and think of England (or their favorite porn star dick). ((If you want a fictional example, look at Meesh's "Passing Love" pages 9-12, cw: het sex, and notice comments empathizing with it.))

But others were physically capable (sometimes with chemical assistance, sometimes not) and it just wasn't enjoyable. They might not turn down a hot woman who wanted sex, but it's not what they'd go with if they had a choice between a hot woman and a hot (or even mediocre) guy, and if the woman was offering for his sake rather than for her's, he might be better entertained with his own hands.

It does seem like there are some truly gay men, but I do worry that a lot of teenage boys who don't have much luck with girls are going to get pressured/persuaded into going gay. I'm not sure to what extent this has already happened.

Indeed men becoming gay/bi/trans will considerably increase given the male dysmorphia dynamic being set by women on the dating scene. However asexuality might increase by just as much, it is still an empirical open question IMO

Anecdata, but the experience gay men have reported to me has ranged from ‘I can recognize when a woman is pretty, but don’t feel attracted to her anymore than to a beautiful sunset’ to ‘I don’t understand what people mean when they refer to an attractive woman’. It has seemed like gay men have tastes in men reasonably close to heterosexual women.

But if so why are so many gays into the twink/femboy aesthethic?

I don’t think they are, actually- I think most gays prefer masculine seeming partners, although not necessarily lumberjacks.

The latter seems very strange to me considering how boy-ish some women can (and sometimes try) to look, and how attractive that boyish look seems to be to gay people.

Femboys get a lot of outsized attention in public awareness, but statistically gay men tend to prefer masculinity, and anecdote suggests that this applies even beyond sex roles (eg, a lot of tops still want a masculine bottom or verse). I think this contradiction arises because a lot of gay men want to themselves been seen as (weakly) feminine more than the general sex role disparity, but that's just a hunch.

On the flip side, even tomboyish women that intentionally bulk up on muscles are pretty fey compared even moderately in-shape men. Often much stronger! But even the bodybuilders are a lot

Beyond that, it's not just (or even mostly) visual appearance. Breasts tend to be a turn-off for gay men, to be fair. But there's differences in texture of skin, of how people sound, and of smell and even warmth. Men are almost always going to be more physically active, even when bottoming, and they're often more vocal. It's... not a small difference.

Femboys get a lot of outsized attention in public awareness, but statistically gay men tend to prefer masculinity

Sure, statistically, but I'm inclined to believe (based on the femboy meme etc.) that gay men are much more likely to be interested in very feminine men than women are.

I think this contradiction arises because a lot of gay men want to themselves been seen as (weakly) feminine more than the general sex role disparity, but that's just a hunch.

I'm not sure about that. In the study you linked, it was the more feminine guys who had a weaker preference for masculine men.

On the flip side, even tomboyish women that intentionally bulk up on muscles are pretty fey compared even moderately in-shape men. Often much stronger! But even the bodybuilders are a lot

Sure, but that's why I was talking about boy-ish women, not manly women. Boys don't have much muscle, they're just not feminine.

TBH your study goes against my expectations so I might have to revisit those.

It’s probably partly just that gay men are inherently a tail population while heterosexual women aren’t.

So, I belong to that portion of gay men who are completely uninterested in women. I have never felt particularly attracted to women in any manner nor feel any desire whatsoever to have sex with them. If a woman propositioned me, I would indeed turn her down. Perhaps it is my autistic inability to see things from others' perspectives, but the idea that women are so impressively attractive to men to the point that men are willing to endure the contradictory and punitive norms around courtship that are placed on them (which is apparent even from an outsider's perspective) is frankly wild to me.

I absolutely think that a portion of people in the rainbow community are reacting to social incentives and there are those who do so in order to extract benefits from the current social environment (non-binary being a popular one in certain circles), but there are people who are exclusively gay.

Maybe it is my autistic inability to see things from other's perspective but I have a sneaking suspicion that many gay men are gay because grindr is tinder on tutorial mode. I can understand if some of them feel attraction to men but honestly if they had the ability to easily attract high quality women would they really say no?

Maybe you are just gay.

Despite all my gripes with dating, the idea of fucking a man, or even a trans man, never occurred to me.

Wh—wha?

Have you ever met a man so hot that you wanted to, say, put his penis in your mouth?

I can say that I haven’t. I’m not rationally opposed to the idea; it seems like something that should be possible. And yet it’s never happened. I have yet to experience sexual attraction to a man.

There are men out there who, feel the same way about women. This shows up in their self-reported experience, in their revealed dating preferences, and also (as @FiveHourMarathon notes) in arousal research.

I've often wondered a similar question: how many gay men are attracted to men but find the idea of having sex with men to be repulsive? Disgust at fecal matter and anything that's touched it or contains it (e.g., rectums) seem to be pretty instinctive and probably evolved because of its association with pathogens. By contrast, vaginas have evolved for penises and, more generally, evolved to be pretty clean despite contact with the external environment (e.g., extreme acidity to combat pathogens; permeable membranes to allow easy access for the woman's white blood cells; constant low-level flushing via cervical fluid, etc.)

I just see no reason to assume that attraction to men needs to come bundled with a desire to... do extremely unhygienic things that go against our instinctive disgust.

Does anyone know gay men who don't want to have sex with men?

There's a decent number who don't want to have penetrative anal sex, although it's a pretty small minority. I don't like considering frottage or intercrural not-sex, and even for people who do anal they're still fun and can be a whole encounter on their own, but some do take to them exclusively. Some of that can reflect health concerns more than preferences -- Crohn's and some related disorders don't play well with bottoming, and not just for the disgust stuff -- but some people just don't like it.

That said, prostate stimulation isn't for everybody, but it's really good if it works for you, and it's not implausible for the how of it working for some men is at least somewhat tied to same-sex attraction.

I was talking about this with friends of mine awhile ago and had an amusing exchange.

Folamh3: You know it's weird, because people act like anal sex is totally unnatural. But no one thinks that oral sex is weird, even though the mouth didn't evolve to be a penis receptacle any more than the anus did. The vagina is the only orifice that actually evolved to be a penis receptacle.

Friend: What do you mean? Why not the anus?

Folamh3: Well, like, the anus isn't self-lubricating, for example.

Friend: Speak for yourself.

(He's straight and was joking, if it wasn't obvious.)

A gay friend once suggested some not-insubstantial minority of gay men only do oral, but I don’t know how common that actually is.

Oral, frottage, intercrural, some fun combinations with sex toys that I don't know have names, there's a lot of options short of penetration. Even for couples that do anal, these play a pretty important role.

As for how prevalent completely avoiding anal is, it depends pretty heavily on how you survey it. I've seen numbers as high as ~30% claimed, but that usually ends up reflecting a survey question like 'recent sexual encounter' or 'in the last x months' that's probably better understood as whether they have regular interest. I'd expect the real number is probably a lot lower: 10% or even 5% seem more realistic.

((There's been an effort to popularize the term "side" for this as a sex role, but a) I've not seen an academic surveys on the identity and b) it's a stupid name.))

Does anyone know gay men who don't want to have sex with men?

I think they're typically referred to as "bottoms".

And... I really don't think it's all bottoms, but from a mechanical standpoint the preparation and cleanup involve dealing with a lot less shit in places shit isn't supposed to be. It's fine for shit to remain in one's ass and it's even designed to expel shit in liquid form (thus can handle other substances reasonably well); said shit is also naturally found around one's ass after shitting and the other fluid typical to sex is more amenable to cleanup. This also applies to straight sex.

Contrast tops; you're going to get shit and maybe blood on and in your dick if you just stick it in without prep on either side, and it's still going to be nasty even if you're wearing that dinky piece of latex (scent still gets through gloves and you're still probably going to get shit on you when you go to take it off regardless of how careful you are). So I really wouldn't blame them for either not wanting to do that, or (and the impression I get from a few other openly-gay posters here) it just takes them a long time to work up to doing it, which, as with straight relationships in general, is probably partially why the average top is a lot older than the average bottom.

(That last dynamic is also probably why you see a lot more "predation"- age gaps just make the tricks work better, and it's not like gay sex has much of a barrier to entry and is likely not, in more of a social vacuum or for higher decouplers- both things men tend to be- as traumatizing or formative as women claim casual sexual activity is. Which is kind of a steelman for double standards and certain kinds of gay culture, but I digress.)

So, a homoromantic asexual? Or a biromantic heterosexual?

I haven’t really chatted about sex preferences with any of the gay or bi men I know. I’m confident they exist, if only because there are plenty of alternate sex acts.

Compare a woman who won’t do anal, even if she’s otherwise pretty kinky.

I'm sure at least one exists, but I haven't heard of anything like that. Gay men generally claim to find vaginas unpleasant disgusting, though.

In my experience, properly gay men don't turn their head at a particularly large pair of tits. They don't proposition women when they get drunk. You don't catch them with straight porn tabs open. If they get crushes or romantic obsessions, they're with other men, not women. They're really just not interested in women. It's not impossible to imagine, women usually aren't that interested in women either.

There are some people who call themselves 'gay' who are attracted to both men and women, but mostly those call themselves bi.

A sexual orientation (of any direction) permeates and forms a lenses for a person's whole human experience. I find myself having a harder time remembering and recognizing people of the gender I'm not principally attracted to, since mentally I'm just not interested. Think of giving a non-football fan Superbowl tickets, if they don't care they might just not want to deal with the traffic. Similarly I could see the 'costs' (emotional, time-sink, etc.) would lead to someone saying no to your proposition.

I'll flip it around. If you're not homosexual, would you refuse a highly attractive same-sex individual who wanted to engage in such activity with you?

Proportions are impossible to speak to, depending on what level of proof you expect to receive. Lab studies show some portion of men are only aroused by images of men. Pornography would be a situation where men have free choice, they can pick a 10/10 woman or a 10/10 man at the same or lesser difficulty, and there's probably a greater proportion of gay porn than gay men. The surveyed proportion of Men who have Sex with Men has held steady over time despite Grindr and a reduction of social stigma.

Anecdotally, I knew a guy who was married, had an affair with a woman, his affair partner arranged a threesome with yet another woman, all three women in this guy's life were fairly attractive. Not long after the threesome he came out as gay, left his wife and ended the affair. He was definitely gay, he have heterosexuality the old college try.

You can play the "but what if an 11/10 asked them" game in your head, but the fact is that there are plenty of gay men who are indeed exclusively gay.

Has anyone here ever purchased a rental property? I'm considering purchasing a single-family home and I'm curious how someone selects a specific property and a specific neighborhood/location.

Selecting the property itself seems fairly straightforward: work with a realtor to find a house within your budget and make sure it doesn't have any major issues. I know what I'm looking for: a house that is move-in ready and doesn't need a whole lot of fixing up. Obviously, there will be upkeep costs and I'm realistic about that. What I really don't want is to purchase a 200k house and find out I need to replace the entire foundation for another 50 grand. This seems like something a realtor can help me with especially if the house has publicly available inspections.

I already have a general idea of the location where I want to buy. I have family who live close by and they would be able to help me manage the property. But even within a 5-10 mile area, I'm thinking there must be criteria for selecting a better neighborhood than others. Obviously cost comes into play here as well, but without spending a lot of time on the ground, I'm unsure how I would select a location where the house *at least *retains its value.

Any input from those with rental properties, especially those who own in a different state, would be appreciated.

I haven’t personally owned a rent house, but I have both gotten fairly far along in the process and had fairly close relatives who owned them. So-

  1. A real estate agent can tell you how much rent you’ll be able to charge in a particular neighborhood. You can use a mortgage calculator(add ten percent for loan fees) plus publicly available data for taxes and insurance to guesstimate costs. Run the numbers, then run them again.

  2. Your tenants will damage your property. Expect to have to repaint and change the carpet before a tenant, and in between tenants at the very least. White collar tenants are hell on the plumbing, blue collar tenants just damage shit(walls and the like), both of them need an exterminator all the time, non-gypsy euro immigrants are the best ones. everyone has HVAC emergencies and service techs are less honest than usual with landlords. No tenant will do maintenance past mowing the lawn. Do not allow your tenants to have male dogs.

  3. Check tenant rights law and what you’re required to provide+what recourse you have for nonpayment. Make tenants undergo a credit check, have renters insurance, and provide a deposit.

  4. Rental agencies can help you find better tenants, but factor in that they’ll take a cut of the profit. If they tell you not to rent to a certain tenant, don’t accept the inevitable sob story.

  5. Home inspections are your friend. Use an inspector, ideally more than one.

And finally, remember that owning a rent house is a job, not a source of passive income like a dividend paying stock. You do have to invest time and work into it.

I've had rental property before. A few notes:

The economics of it are a little tricky and rather different than buying as a personal home. You have to know all of, what you can actually buy the property for, what kind of financing you can get, and what you can actually rent it for, and balance them to make it actually profitable. Specifically, it's not to your benefit to make rental property too nice. In most markets, rent that tenants will actually pay is mostly based on location and bedroom count, most updates and amenities won't get you anything in higher rent. Being truly broken down or a dump won't rent, but it's not to your benefit to buy or make a property significantly nicer than the average rental in the market you're targeting.

You need to be familiar with the landlord-tenant laws in your jurisdiction. Know what's involved in evicting somebody, what obligations you have for security deposits, and any other requirements that might be in place.

You may or may not want a realtor for the property purchase, but you'll need one for the rental. You need somebody who knows how and where to advertise to tenants, screen tenants, and set up rental contracts. You definitely need a standard, good-quality contract, and you definitely need to screen, as a bad tenant can seriously wreck your finances, especially if eviction is difficult in your jurisdiction.

There will be some management work too. You need to know who to call when things break down, and it helps a lot if you are personally handy enough to deal with minor issues without hiring more contractors. Plan on needing to take time off during business hours to meet contractors or delivery people at least once a year. If you can't do it yourself due to your own work obligations or being too far away, you need somebody else who is local and reliably available on call to handle that sort of thing.

I'd think hard about buying multi-family property rather than single family. Or at least be eying the time when you sell your single family properties to buy a small complex. Unless you're in an area where there are permanent reasons why multifamily can't be built (zoning, historic buildings etc). It's more costly to get started, but you can probably invest in public real estate firms while acquiring the capital.

In the US, I think the money in single family housing is in buying a place that needs a little TLC and doing some of the work yourself.

realtor

The word "realtor" is a trademark of a specific organization. In order to avoid encouraging that organization's market dominance, one should instead say "real-estate agent".

Wait, you’re fighting their market dominance by…telling people that they exist and are important?

That seems counterproductive. You should be using the term; if it loses its distinctive character, they lose the legal protection of the trademark.

Imagine a graph with the linguistic dominance of "realtor" vs. "real-estate agent" on the x axis and the enhancement of the market dominance of Realtors vs. real-estate agents (not the market dominance itself) on the y axis.

When x = 0, Realtors are just an eccentric group of real-estate agents that insist on using their trademarked name even though everybody just calls them real-estate agents. y = 0, or even a negative number because people are annoyed by their behavior.

When x = 0.75, most people incorrectly call real-estate agents realtors. The typical person who wants to sell a house will type "realtor" into Google and will hire a Realtor rather than a non-Realtor real-estate agent. Therefore, the market dominance of the Realtors is enhanced by the linguistic situation: y = 0.75.

When x = 1, as you say, the trademark becomes genericized by a court ruling. It now is legitimate for all real-estate agents to call themselves realtors, the official Realtors no longer get extra traffic funneled to them by Google, and y = 0.

If, IRL, x = 0.5, then I think pushing it down to 0.25 is more palatable then pushing it up to 0.75 and hoping that it overshoots to 1.

Y=0.8 currently

Hmm. You make a good point.

I would recommend against working with a realtor. Unless you have a very close relationship with the realtor, they will get you market rate housing. If they had a screaming bargain, they would buy it themselves or flip it to a friend before they show it to a stranger. Market rate houses don't leave meat on the bone for a budding landlord, you will make minimal profit. You need to get something at a below market price, if only by cutting out the realtor's commission and finding a seller who hasn't listed yet to get 5% breathing room.

Working with a realtor will not ensure that you face no upkeep costs. I can share many horror stories. Realtors don't know what they're looking at, or might not tell you if they did. Most cultivate intentional blindness to ensure they don't need to disclose.

Why do women seem to be pursuing the Botox/lip filler/cheek filler look at younger and younger ages? It could just be my perception but I see women doing this in their early and mid 20s, which is bonkers to me. It’s understandable once you hit 35-40, but why do it when you’re young and still in your sexual marketplace prime?

At that age it tends to give your face a very eerie quality and actually make you look older and less attractive. This seems to be the consensus view among men, so presumably high-status men would also overwhelmingly feel this way. Are women doing it for instagram and to compete against other women? If that’s the case it’s counterproductive and actively harming their sexual marketplace value in the large majority of cases.

The other argument that I can buy: maybe I’m just not noticing all the instances of those touch-ups being applied with a milder hand. If done properly, it can increase a woman’s SMV? I don’t necessarily agree with this, I think straight men are extremely fine-tuned by millions of years of evolution to detect unnatural things like this, but I could be wrong. I certainly seem to be able to distinguish the odd and uncanny-valley quality it lends to a woman’s face.

Two years ago I dated an American woman in her late twenties who said she was thinking about getting Botox, under the theory that it's meant to be preemptive/preventative.

It was trendy in some places to start earlier. I remember I first saw it when a friend was showing me clips from "The Hills" and none of the girls could furrow their brows when they were upset.

Gonna take a lot of hate for this. But lip fillers are attractive. *If not overdone.

I always thought the thing with plastic surgery is if you can tell they cheaped out.

Can you link an example of when it's done attractively?

Every part of this debate is confounded by the toupee fallacy. No one notices well-done cosmetic surgery, lip fillers, fake tan etc..

Most cosmetic intervention is preventative. The young man who takes finasteride at the first sign of balding often has a full head of hair well into middle age, the one who only starts taking it when his hair loss is very advanced sees little benefit.

Botox works best as a preventative solution, at very small volumes. I use it and it works, and is mostly unnoticeable. “Botox face” is almost always about old people using it at very high volumes because they didn’t look after themselves when they were younger. Fillers are different and should be used more sparingly, and only in rare cases on the lips (where they most often look terrible).

Agree. I'm seeing a dermatologist soon about preventing aging because I've noticed very faint forehead and nasolabial lines. Best to keep on top of this stuff, especially if you want to maintain twink aesthetic into your 30s.

Mind if I ask your current age?

Not if you have a good reason: so why do you want to know?

I’m thinking about consulting a dermatologist friend about this as well. I suppose I should ask are you starting in your 20s or 30s?

Late 20s.

Because it makes them look slutty. Sluts get attention. Attention is what they want. It's the currency of desire. These women assume that attention will translate into commitment.

While physical beauty in women is pretty objective in terms of physical traits, sexual attractiveness is best modeled as a mix between physical beauty and her signals of availability. Men find women attractive who signal their availability to those men, that they are open to sexual advances. Signals of availability can be cultural, they can be signals of virginity and youth, or of shared interests or cultural compatibility to particular men.

A woman with significant visible work done is signaling that she's available for casual sex to men in the same cultural grouping. Compared to a more natural face, I'd assume the girl with filler is more likely to put out.

It is also signaling. And countersignaling.

  • I care about being fashionable

  • I am willing to spend significant quantities of money on being fashionable

  • I can afford to look somewhat ugly/fake/distasteful and still do well.

It's like a peacock's tail.

While the stereotypical Russian escort type or bottle girl has a botox/filler heavy look, the most ‘ready to put out’ chicks who exist in highly promiscuous subcultures mostly care little about their appearance, girls at anarchist or punk events or your average late-20s or early 30s promiscuous barfly has neither the money for nor the inclination to cosmetic intervention on that level. Promiscuous women don’t need to get filler to signal sexual availability, they can do so on Tinder directly or in real life at a bar or club by their clothing and body language.

The average botox and filler user remains in her late 30s or 40s, probably married with children and - regardless of your own circumstances - is probably monogamous. She isn’t signalling sexual availability to other men, she’s competing with younger women and other women her age for attention and status, from men and from each other.

A woman with significant visible work done is signaling that she's available for casual sex to men

I suppose ‘compared to the average woman with no work done in her social grouping’ might be true, but that’s doing a lot of work. For the most part, she still isn’t signalling that (if say 10% of 40 year old PMC women are ‘signalling’ that they’re ‘available for casual sex’, the proportion with significant visible work done might be 15%).

I believe the thread question is specifically about women in their early 20s. Nor did I say they were the most promiscuous, merely that it was a signal of sexual availability.

As someone with a sister-in-law who married into a higher socio-economic bracket and told stories, my impression is that it's basically a class marker for the people who can afford to get such things casually at a young age, or who can afford to not care about the downsides.

That's in Orange County, at least.

I'm still uncertain of whether this term actually applies to this trend or if there are subtle nuances making it a mismatch, but it might be "Californication", the mechanism by which Hollywood distorts and perverts culture and art and beauty by amplifying its own degenerate tendencies.

People are not actually rational calculating agents, a lot of learning happens implicitly by associations. So suppose Hollywood gathers a bunch of incredibly beautiful people, suppose they have 3 times average beauty. And then they get older which drops their beauty by 20%, and then suppose they get botox which counters 10% from the aging but adds a separate 30% loss multiplicatively. So now you have a bunch of older botox women whose beauty is (3 * 0.9 * 0.7) = 1.89

That is, these botox women are still almost twice as beautiful as a random average person off the street. In reality, this beauty is entirely from genetic and selection effects: Hollywood finding and collecting the most beautiful people it can find. But what people see is really beautiful people with Botox. If enough people do this, then some people may start mentally associating Botox with beauty, implicitly assuming that that's what distinguishes Hollywood women and causes their beauty, rather than it being selection effects. This self-reinforces especially among people who actually live in Hollywood and encounter these people regularly in real life, which is how distorted memes like this spawn and spread. One or two beautiful but psychologically damaged people do X, people in Hollywood falsely associate X with beauty and fame and do it more, people outside Hollywood see them on TV and falsely associate X with beauty and fame and do it more.

This is also essentially the entire theory behind endorsement deals.

Because women don’t have an accountant’s focus on “sexual market value?”

Maybe it’s because we’ve been discussing housing prices in another thread, but that term really bugs me. It’s imputing a model which most people wouldn’t even consider. Women aren’t estimating sexual supply/demand curves or tracing out their depreciation. I suspect the term only sticks around because of the number of disaffected men who would like to believe that women are calculating aliens from the planet Zygax.

If you’re asking why women—or any collective group—do something, you have to frame it as individual incentives. A average woman sees some trend and asks “do I like this?” or even “would that look good on me?” She may be right or wrong about the answer, and she may be able or unable to implement it effectively. That puts a lot of noise into any signal.

As an aside, I really doubt that men are evolved to detect “unnatural” things. Our earliest evidence of cosmetics is, what, the Egyptians? 5,000 years is not an evolutionary timescale. And surgery didn’t approach modern levels until, well, modern times.

As an aside, I really doubt that men are evolved to detect “unnatural” things.

The uncanny valley certainly seems to be innate, and probably explains why people dislike looking at people with extreme cosmetic surgery e.g. the Bogdanoffs.

I should have been more clear—no objection to the premise that we can and do detect “unnatural things.” What I find unlikely is that it’s “straight men” detecting things “like this,” i.e. sexual selection. I’d say it’s an extension of our general pattern-matching skills.

That clearing looks like an ambush, that bush looks like a tiger, that dude looks like a corpse.

that term really bugs me

It makes me feel kind of uneasy using it, but I think it has explanatory and predictive power. An economist knows people don’t view the world the same way they do. However, in order to explain human behavior you need to dig deeper than a person did something because they like it. Sometimes you even need to uncover hidden subconscious motivations. Models and language that view things as an unattached outsider can help achieve truth-seeking goals.

The behavior still exists whether we explain it in politically incorrect terms or in platitudes and flowery language. A woman might say, “I don’t want to be in a relationship with that guy because he is fun but he smokes too much pot and doesn’t have career ambitions”. Saying his relationship market value is not high enough expresses the same sentiment.

I think the real reason SMV and the related terminology became so popular among disaffected men is because it provides a much more direct and actionable explanation for how they can attract women. Instead of things being vague and opaque the language puts things into blunt terms. Women rank their choice of possible mates by some value system and generally traits x/y/z (such as confidence, physical fitness, social skills) are highly valued in their ranking system. The things they value in initial attraction can differ from what they value in a long-term partner. This explains why some men get a lot of attention on dating apps and others get very little/none. If you want more attention then signal more of traits x/y/z.

Also, what’s going on with the tattoos and piercings? Does anyone think that stuff looks attractive? It’s not just women either. Am I getting old? Why are people intentionally discoloring their skin and putting holes in their face?

When I was still dating, I had the impression that certain piercings strongly signalled promiscuity in women. It was usually very accurate.

Also, what’s going on with the tattoos and piercings? Does anyone think that stuff looks attractive?

In short, yes. There is also the Girardian mimetic desire thing going on. If you spend time around people with piercings and tattoos, you will desire them.

I can't stand tattoos on women. I've never seen a woman with them who doesn't look masculine or trampy.

I have a similar (but less intense dislike) for facial piercings.

I keep hoping that the pendulum will swing back and they will become unfashionable, but it doesn't look like that's happening yet.

Most piercings are a miss for me (even many earrings) but for tattoos it is entirely on a case by case basis, with some being awful and some being quite fetching.

Does anyone think that stuff looks attractive?

Yes. I genuinely struggle to be attracted to people without them.

An unadorned body is like never changing your desktop background from the Windows default. It speaks to the lack of a soul. The dreary type of person who keeps their toys meticulously mint-in-box in case they're worth something in many years, instead of playing with them. Someone who thinks a navy blue suit as opposed to a black one is just outlandish.

I'm the other way. To borrow your analogy I see it as more like the person who has a perfectly good computer that they could change the desktop wallpaper on whenever they choose but instead they fire up a hot glue gun and permanently fuse a bunch of sea shells and sequins to their monitor, and they still keep the default wallpaper anyway.

If someone thinks navy blue suits are too boring then get a bespoke mustard yellow suit instead, or just get some garish socks and an ugly tie. Most tattooed people these days wear a boss-friendly uniform over some cliche tattoos and regard themself among the social exiles while dilligently clocking in to yet another regulation 40 hour work week.

There's only one thing about a body that makes it fitting for displaying permanent imagery and that's the person it belongs to. That's why tattoos are used for identification; to tell other people which group a person belongs to and/or to prevent a person from telling other people they don't belong to that group. That's why tattoos are associated with exclusive groups, whether that's outlaw bikers, Maori tribesmen, Jews in Nazi Germany, football hooligans or military veterans. If there's no cause to be permanently identified with a specific group then you can use surface pigments for body-specific 2D decoration and traditional flat surfaces for any other 2D images.

Someone who thinks a navy blue suit as opposed to a black one is just outlandish.

Black? Who the hell wears a black suit willingly other than teenagers that don't know any better?

Huh? Black suits look fine.

Black suits are for mourners, funeral directors, bodyguards, bouncers, waiters and musicians.

The unadorned body is already quite beautiful. No tattoo can match the elegant simplicity of unadorned skin. Changing the windows default is all well and good, but how about graffiti-ing a burbling brook versus leaving it alone in its natural splendor? There is perhaps some work humans can do to improve upon nature, but it generally has more to do with accentuating features already present rather than adding your own touch. Like clearing away the underbrush around the brook, which would be more analogous to a good haircut than a tattoo.

People can create artificial beauty. I find skyscrapers beautiful. But they're their own thing, not a modification of natural beauty. Considered in a vaccuum there's plenty of quite beautiful tattoo art, but paste it onto somebody's skin or onto a rock by a waterfall and it mars the natural beauty more than it adds to it, no matter its quality.

Of course, it's all pretty subjective at the end of the day.

No offence, but that just sounds like received aesthetic indoctrination. Western culture has been historically low on tattoos, probably since Leviticus, which itself likely spawned from local hygienic concerns, like not eating pork. Overall we see that people have been using their body as a canvas since time immemorial. It can look trashy and it can look good (and even, shockingly, better than the unmodded version).

No offence, but that just sounds like received aesthetic indoctrination.

My preference against tattoos arises from deeper preferences. I appreciate elegance, simplicity, and the beauty of fully functioning complex systems. There is something spectacularly beautiful about semiconductors, well-crafted clocks, and ant colonies.

Art is less beautiful when it lacks focus. I don't find the Mona Lisa (or really any portrait) very beautiful, but I certainly wouldn't choose to add some random design to her face, no matter how beautiful the design was, simply because then there would be two competing objects of attention. I wouldn't give a beetle a tattoo, paint a design onto a statue, etch a shape into a nice watch, or arrange ants into geometric patterns, because all of those things are already quite beautiful and don't need to be changed.

You could argue that this broader preference not to tattoo beetles etc. is also culturally engrained, but at that point I think it's both a reach and also pretty irrelevant.

Western culture has been historically low on tattoos, probably since Leviticus, which itself likely spawned from local hygienic concerns, like not eating pork.

All of the most tattooed countries are Western. We are the most accepting cultures towards tattoos in the world. You're inventing a just-so story that isn't just inaccurate, it's the exact opposite of the truth. That's not to say Westerners have always been accepting of tattoos--I have no idea what our history has to say--but rather that we are currently the very most accepting of tattoos.

I don't think tattoos always look bad, but they usually do, and the ones that look good IMO detract from the simple beauty of the human form much more than they enhance it.

but how about graffiti-ing a burbling brook versus leaving it alone in its natural splendor

Would work if we weren't talking about a literal blank canvas. It's nothing special, everyone has one. They are all mostly the same. Probably the most unremarkable thing on the planet. A gallery full of blank cavases would be a boring sight indeed.

Even if our bodies were blank, they are not canvasses. Shape alone is its own art form. I've never seen a statue with tattoos, and those are universally less interesting than actual human bodies. Do you consider all statues, sculptures, etc. unremarkable and boring? I find even simple statues and sculptures more aesthetically interesting than almost any 2d art.

Statues and sculptures are remarkable because they're creations of human talent. Everyone has a body. I can walk outside and see hundreds of them just wandering around my town. They are all broadly the same. Some are nicer than others, like some rocks have a more pleasing shape than others. But a statue is on a level above, and requires that rock to be shaped by human intervention. Meaningful art requires human intervention. Trying to put a stock human body on the level of someone who has turned their body into art is like bringing a nice rock you found as an entry to a sculpture contest.

Meaningful art requires human intervention.

Meaningful beauty does not require human intervention. I agree that the skill required to create statues is very cool, and adds to the beauty, but also the amazingly complex systems which create other things (such as human bodies) are cool too, probably even cooler imo.

Statues and sculptures are remarkable because they're creations of human talent. Everyone has a body. I can walk outside and see hundreds of them just wandering around my town. They are all broadly the same. Some are nicer than others, like some rocks have a more pleasing shape than others. But a statue is on a level above

That's interesting. I generally find statues much less interesting and beautiful than actual people.

Trying to put a stock human body on the level of someone who has turned their body into art is like bringing a nice rock you found as an entry to a sculpture contest.

I'd compare a stock human body to a natural stream. Some streams are more beautiful than others, but nearly all are quite beautiful and nearly all fulfill their purpose in a very aesthetically pleasing way.

Some bodies being much more beautiful than others says nothing about how non-artistic bodies compare to non-bodies.

but also the amazingly complex systems which create other things (such as human bodies) are cool too, probably even cooler imo.

Something which everyone possesses by default has almost no value. If everyone's super, nobody is.

I generally find statues much less interesting and beautiful than actual people.

I find most people to be profoundly boring and lacking in substance, soul and imagination.

Being scared to alter your body in any way immediately marks you to me as being boring, lacking in substance, soul and imagination. You are store-brand Cornflakes in a plain white box.

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I raised cattle in my youth all I can think about when I see those is we use septum piercings on bulls to make a huge bull something easily led by a much weaker man and think it dehumanizes them.

and think it dehumanizes them

It also connects the concept of "cow" (more accurately "angry cow", as bulls are always portrayed as angry in pop culture) with the wearer.

Why anyone, least of all women (for obvious reasons), would adorn themselves with a piece of jewelry that enables observers to make this connection is a complete and utter mystery. That said, people with this piercing tend to cluster, so that might be its function.

Even when you’re in your prime you still have competition. If the competition is wearing more revealing outfits and using filters to improve their photos then you too must do those things to maintain your relative popularity among your competition. Of course, that assumes those preferences are the actual preferences for many men. If men really enjoy more modest women then dressing in a more revealing way would decrease your marketplace competitiveness.

So in the case of the trends you are talking about I think women are perceiving that the behaviors in question improve their sexual marketplace competitiveness. I agree with you that it is totally unnecessary and pointless for young women so maybe women doing this have misjudged the true preferences of the marketplace.

Are women doing it for instagram and to compete against other women?

This is the biggest reason. Also it is emulation of popular (among women!) stars like the Kardashians etc. There is a pretty big disconnect between the female celebrities that women like and those that men like (or lust after). I think that the subconscious thought process is a) these women are awesome/hot/popular, b) if I look like them I will have higher status among women, c) (distant 3rd) since they are hot/popular men will obviously find me hotter.

Speaking personally I vastly prefer the natural look (or "minimal makeup") and find the Botox (also tattoos and piercings) off-putting. But I am a middle-aged man...

I think that lip and cheek filler can improve looks if done correctly. The problem is that women acclimatize to their appearance and star to feel they no longer have the "wow" effect, so they keep pushing farther with the filler.

I'm less sure about the "preventative botox" injections. It's been going on for a while, but I remember back when I first saw an episode of "The Hills" that none of the girls could furrow their brow.

I think the answer is that many young women are horribly insecure because of modern western culture.

So, what are you reading?

Still on a reread of Watts' The Way of Zen. Still in the preliminaries. The books gets interesting after all the historical stuff.

Paper I'm reading: Goldman's A Causal Theory of Knowing.

Just finished Ender's Game last night. Loved it. Much more mature in tone than I was expecting, and rather sad at times, but compulsively readable throughout.

I'm interested in your review of Speaker for the Dead as you mentioned the tone.

I'd like to read it next.

Daniel Ingram's Mastering The Core Teachings of The Buddha, which Scott reviewed a few years ago. I've seen a few interviews with Ingram and he's a fascinating guy. Shamelessly claims to be Enlightened, and can speak in detail about what that entails. He also writes from a secular but not anti-religious perspective.

Still finishing up the essential jung. It’s still good but his later stuff is so dense I’m mostly skimming at this point and will probably go back once I read some more and have more context.

Last week on twitter I went to a website with a huge list of scientific studies that had failed to replicate or had mixed results. Annoyingly, googling "list of studies that failed to replicate" mostly gives me news articles with "5, 10 or 15 studies that failed to replicate!" Did anyone else see this and know what I'm talking about? I just want to bookmark it for future use.

Biggest cause of the replication crisis is that investigating something and finding nothing is very low status in the sciences. Testing a hypothesis and finding nothing is very useful information for future scientists / the field, and people pay lip service to supporting/publishing failure study outcomes. In practice, though, nobody cares and nobody gets promoted for not proving something and so academics are very strongly incentivized to bullshit.

Was it this?

yes, perfect! thanks!

Does anyone know a good book or online resource for learning about the history of modern psychology? I’m especially interested in the time period between the psychoanalysts/Jungisns and around the 90s, when the modern “chemical imbalance” model of mental illness seems to have taken over.

I bought Disco Elysium in 2019, immediately loved it, thought it was the funniest game I've ever played with fantastic writing. After about eight hours, the second area opened up, and I hit a wall. I was very fatigued by all the tangents and inner monologuing and not super interesting politicking, and so I got bored and stopped.

Two weeks ago, I gave DE another shot, and the exact same thing happened. I played slightly longer, but yet again hit a point where it was all too much and felt like a chore.

Is it worth me pushing through? Or should I just read a summary online?

Push through. Finishing the game is worth it. Take breaks when needed.

Same happened to me, is all that I can say.

Push through!!! I had fatigue in some similar areas, but god damn I stuck with it and it was worth it. Some of the scenes in the end that you won't get through any summary brought me to tears. I still think about them often.

It's one of those games that is an absolute work of art. Sometimes true works of art take effort.

It's worth pushing through; but only if you are having a good time. You gotta go to the writing where it is, it has jokes and funny shit in it but designed to be an easily consumed disposable piece of entertainment.

Just put it down and pick it up when you feel like it; there is no hurry.

Is it worth me pushing through? Or should I just read a summary online?

If the tangents aren't fun for you, I'd go for the summary. I ended up finishing it, but the story was so all have over the place, I couldn't summarize it if you put a gun to my head. Also, the ending was a disappointment.

I can't imagine a human being who was disappointed with the ending; did you talk to the bug?

I just finished Disco Elysium. The ending came sooner than I was expecting. Solving the murder by interviewing a lone gunman feels a little anticlimactic. I was expecting another epic showdown after the mercenary tribunal. That's not to say a second showdown would have improved the story. It's just what I was expecting. I believe the storywriters made solving the murder anticlimactic on purpose, because by that point the player has learned there are other things transpiring in the world more important than the murder.

All I think the game needs is an epilogue in the form of video clips that play while the credits are rolling. It would be nice to see a short video epilogue for each character. What I would want to see most is a series of clips with the harbor gate opening, the strike coming to a resolution, and the vehicles parked in the roundabout driving away. Come to think of it, much of this could be done by fans using the Collage Mode included with the game, though unfortunately, there is no way to open the harbor gate or remove the parked vehicles in Collage Mode.

Tagging: @ArjinFerman @Aransentin @TheDag @Lazuli @sansampersamp

I did, that was pretty cool. I was expecting something more from the union showdown, and I definitely thought there'd be a better reason for the main character drinking himself to amnesia.

The biggest disappointment with the ending was not having a scene where you give the photograph of the Insulindian Phasmid the cryptozoologists, proving that it is real.

I actually don't remember if I did... maybe I need to look up a video or two. Or just play it again.

Does anyone else here suffer from chronic pain/tension, especially things like carpal tunnel/repetitive strain injury or TMJ?

I have quite a bit of experience with these issues and have managed pretty much a full recovery over several years. Curious to talk to others about their experiences, or offer guidance if folks are interested.

I started developing weird pains in my right wrist, then read somewhere to pay attention to how you sleep, in particular that you don't have your palm angled at 90 degrees forward from the wrist. Then I discovered that for some reason I did this all the time, made a conscious effort to stop doing that, and had no issues since.

I have terrible form and posture and am sitting at my computer 8+ hours per day. Still young though so maybe it'll catch up to me.

I'd recommend at least starting to work out now! Also Pipersong chairs and kinesis keyboards are the bomb, if you have the money.

Oh for sure, when you mentioned carpal tunnel I thought you meant from a desk job. Working out is definitely indispensable. Will look into the other two--I've got a Branch chair currently and so far it works fine.

Hah I did mean from a desk job, although video games were the real culprit in my situation.

I mean, I occasionally get strain on the lower side of my right middle forearm below the wrist, makes it painful to use a mouse. But this is only maybe a few times a month. Would you consider this a warning sign of something that will get worse and needs correction, or would you say that sounds more like transient overuse that simply being a bit more careful about time management is sufficient to avoid?

I would say it is something to monitor, doesn’t mean imminent carpal tunnel is inevitable. IMO if you’re worried best thing is to really master proper form and learn to build muscles in your back/shoulder.

I’ve been seeing posts on social media about unaffordable the housing market has become (in terms of home price to income ratio). Many people who don’t already own a home are locked out of the home ownership market because the monthly mortgage payment and down payment required has increased a lot faster than the median wage since 2020.

What impacts will unaffordable housing have on politics? Do you think we might see a shift from identity-based politics to politics more focused on economic inequality?

I think people need to stop assuming that conditions that are clearly due to extraordinary circumstances will continue indefinitely. We know why buying a house is difficult now. Mortgage rates are high because the Fed has raised rates to get inflation under control, and home prices are not adjusting downwards because people don't want to move and trade in their 3% mortgages for 7% mortgages.

Sooner or later, one of two things will happen:

  1. The Fed will start lowering rates.
  2. People will start selling houses again because they can't hold on forever.

Ideally we would also build a lot more homes, but that would require better voters, so don't hold your breath.

Also, the home ownership rate is currently 66%. The only time on record when it's been higher is 1997-2011, and even then it was only a little bit higher (the 2020 spike was just an artifact of pandemic-era polling practices). The percentage of people who don't own their own homes is about what it's always been.

One thing with housing is that we have examples of localized unaffordability that are much more extreme than most national housing issues, so the local response should give us an idea of what a nationwide response might be. Think of areas like San Fran, Vancouver, London, or most notably Hong Kong. These are often areas where there is some control over house building rates or other local powers that could swing things.

Hong Kong is both the worst in terms of affordability and the one with more control over local issues, but what have we seen there? The only protests in recent years have been from pro-democracy groups. The residents have just accepted worse and worse housing. Even if you believe the CCP's control is a unique situation, it's not like we've seen differently in other overpriced metros.

San Francisco is among the urban centers that had unprecedented population declines during this time. From 2020 to 2021, the S.F. population fell to its lowest level since 2010, erasing a decade worth of population growth in a single year. Similar changes occurred in large cities across the country. New York, Washington, D.C., and Boston each saw outsize outmigration during this time.

Source: https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2023/maps-migration/

Some people aren't accepting worse housing they just simply move instead of waiting for conditions to improve. This migration then impacts politics because people bring their political beliefs with them, often causing shifts in the political climate of their new location.

Boomers dying, downsizing, moving into nursing homes are one part of things working out, and the geographic preferences of homeschool/work from home families are another, and gentrification of blighted urban areas are another. The economic decline/stagnation of some older working class suburbs won't be great, but the houses will be filled.

The real monthly median mortgage payment has been remarkably stable for decades, so I expect that home ownership will not remain "unaffordable" for long.

That chart is not actually the median mortgage payment, but what a mortgage for the median home sale price at current mortgage rates would be, correct?

Isn’t that just a clearing price? It wouldn’t reflect anyone who can’t get a mortgage. Which, for the last 10 years, has been an unusually high percent.

Combine that with the axis malfeasance on his income and homeownership plots, and I start to distrust the blog.

I am not sure why you say that an unusually high percent of people have been unable to get a mortgage for the last ten years. It seems unlikely, given mortgage rates over the last ten years. Do you have data on that?

I am usually quite critical of not starting the y-axis at zero, but when the point is that numbers have been generally within a narrow band, starting above zero is not misleading.

I’m looking at the homeownership rates in that page and noticing the dip since 2008. Those people are presumably not holding mortgages.

This reprt shows a dip and recovery in new mortgages, but a lasting collapse of refinancing. I’m not sure if I’m reading it right.

Well, of course it is not as high as in 2008 -- The years leading up to 2008 were the subprime years, in which they were giving mortgages to anyone with a pulse. You are looking at an outlier and thinking it is the norm.

My point is that the mortgage rate is confounded by those stats.

A stable median payment doesn’t just mean that the supply and demand curves haven’t moved. It can also mean they both moved up or both moved down. As long as the shifts are similar, the clearing price will stay level, even though the clearing quantity is changing.

Given that we know the supply contracted, and the price didn’t really change, demand must have contracted too. Makes sense, as people lost their jobs or otherwise got booted from the housing market. Fewer people were willing to pay a given price. Isn’t that the definition of “unaffordability?”

In other words, median mortgage rate measures clearing price. OP was instead asking about demand.

First, we dont know that the supply contracted. Certainly not over the last ten years. See data re existing home sales and new home sales

Second, I don’t know what you mean about people losing their jobs. The trend over the last 10 years has been the opposite.

Remember, we are talking about your claim that "for the last 10 years," there has been "an unusually high percent" of people unable to get mortgages.

Right. I was referring to the first graph from that Kevin Drum article: homeownership, ages 25-34. The rate plummets after 2008 for obvious reasons. That’s the unusually high percent who are not holding mortgages.

I’m not arguing against a crash (2008) and recovery (2016). I’m saying that it makes the median mortgage payment a bad indicator of affordability. It’s “remarkably stable” even when we know the housing market is freaking out.

That link shows mortgage rates going from 1500 (approx) in 2020 to 2500+ in 2023, while in the same time frame wages rose from 45k (approx) to 48k (approx). In order to restore affordability some combination of the following would have to happen:

  • Home prices fall
  • Mortgage rates fall
  • Wages rise faster than home prices

So when you say you don't think that home ownership won't remain unaffordable for long how do you think the affordability will be restored and how long will that take to happen?

It depends. If mortgage rates remain high, I expect real home prices to fall eventually, at least relative to income. Because home prices are in part a function of mortgage rates, and we have already seen some evidence of that happening.

What impacts will unaffordable housing have on politics? Do you think we might see a shift from identity-based politics to politics more focused on economic inequality?

Absolutely. The pro-housing political movements like California YIMBY and others are gaining quite a bit of traction as of late. Look at places like Canada to see the foment of pro-housing initiatives (although Canada is sadly quite authoritarian as of late.)

Housing has been growing in importance after the lull since 2008, and I'm convinced come 2028 it will be one of the top three issues politically.

Posted here for new eyeballs:

For the past few months, my pc has been consistently crashing under heavy load, in graphically demanding games like Escape from Tarkov, Warhammer 3 etc. In normal use and less intensive games like Rimworld, no issues.

After about 15-20 min of gameplay, I get a full crash to a black screen with the pc powered off, and it refuses to post for several minutes regardless of what I do, at which point it often restarts on its own. The American Megatrends screen doesn't usually show up unless I cycle power, at which point it doesn't tell me anything useful either. (I had a similar issue around 5 years ago, but that was almost certainly CPU thermals, since the American Megatrends screen called out CPU overheating, and I've changed CPUs since then and don't get the same error)

The crash seems to be so total and abrupt that I can't find any useful logs to figure out wtf is going on.

I've run CPU and GPU stress tests on OCCT and furmark, and they only seem to cause issues unreliably.

It seems thermally related, since the problem is less severe when the AC is running, but unfortunately the AC is currently on the fritz exacerbating the issue, but fixing the AC isnt really a definitive solution is it?

I noticed >85° C temps on my Ryzen 5600x, so I changed the thermal paste just a few days back, and while temps dropped by 5-10 degrees, the crashing hasn't abated.

GPU temps hover in the 50s-60s range in Tarkov, which seems quite reasonable. It's a 3070 for what that's worth.

The other potential culprit is my geriatric 600w power supply, over 10 years old at this point, but why would it be thermally related?

I'm not running any OCs, and I've maxxed out my fan curves to help, not that it's doing much. My case has two extra blowers, and I even took off the sides to help with airflow.

Anyone have any idea as to how I can figure out what exactly is wrong? I can't really afford to replace my GPU, but I could consider buying a new PSU if need be.

This issue didn't plague me when I first built this current setup with the same components, but it's been several months and I'm losing my mind :(

What I've tried:

  1. Switching GPUs with my brother's pc. Couldn't reproduce crashing.

  2. Dusting pc

  3. Repasting thermal paste

  4. Checking for any OC (none)

  5. Stress tests, which are unable to reliably cause crashes while games can.

I'd normally say power supply too, but there's a possibility there's a power-saving setting causing either your psu or mobo to be too slow ramping up supply to sudden demand during games, causing a crash. That would explain why it only happens in games rather than benchmarks. This has been a big problem with the new graphics cards, and I've even had it on my old system.
It's also by far the easiest thing to check, since you just need to google all the different power saving options and disable them.

But imo it's still likely to be your psu, which is good news because they're one of the cheapest and easiest things to buy and replace. And even if it was your mobo, you'd need to buy a new psu for a new rig anyway, so there's no waste in getting one now.

Sorry for the late reply. Ironically couldn't post earlier because I had my PC apart to add some M2 cards and scavenged fans.

No worries, a cursory check doesn't seem to show anything out of the ordinary, but I still suspect it's more likely to be the PSU myself given that the problem was sudden, and I have my power settings to high performance if anything.

I vote power supply. I had a similar issue in terms of crashing and refusing to start up until some time passed, though I didn't have to do as much troubleshooting to determine the source. I'm pretty sure power supplies have some sort of safety thing to shut off if they overheat, but apparently it's not perfect because during some of the crashing and overheating some of the components in my power supply melted which made it rattle even during normal use (and I think made it less efficient and even more prone to overheating), which made it come to my attention as the most likely candidate. When I replaced it all the problems went away. (Also I discovered a massive clog of hair and dust trapped inside the old power supply which I think is what caused it to start overheating in the first place. Oops. Clean the inside of your computers.

Looking at your symptoms and comparing them to mine, that seems like the most likely culprit.

Well at the very least it's the cheapest option to rule out, I'll take a crack at it, thanks!

The other potential culprit is my geriatric 600w power supply, over 10 years old at this point, but why would it be thermally related?

Power supplies are thermal creatures; even high-end modern power supplies will typically lose ~10% of power to heat, and some of that load will actually increase as devices are getting thermally stressed (in addition to obvious power demand increases when ). Usually it's something related to the main switching MOSFET(s) on the high-voltage side from an internal control perspective (and the caps from a practical one), but I strongly discourage trying to repair your own PSU so the matter is kinda academic.

I won't say it's certainly the issue, but it's a very inexpensive one that's a lot more probable than most people expect.

It is worth getting a bigger power supply for sure before doing anything else; every weird computer problem I have ever failed to troubleshoot was resolved by getting a new PSU.

You can get a 750w 80+ gold pus on amazon with free returns; give it a shot and see if you can reproduce the crashes.

+1. You could get a power meter to see if you're near 600w, or use a calculator, but it seems likely. You've clearly put work into having good airflow/thermals, so this is the main thing that's left.

It might be expectedly failing before 600w, too. IIRC that rating is the sum of what can be put out at each voltage, and it's possible to exceed the maximum draw at one voltage without exceeding the total max, and combining newer components with older PSUs makes that imbalance easier to trigger.

it's possible to exceed the maximum draw at one voltage without exceeding the total max

This is also manufacturer-dependent; higher-quality power supplies tend to be able to supply the vast majority or all of its rating on 12V alone, while junk PSUs tend to list "500W" but neglect to mention that it can only output 300W as 12V (so from a modern PC standpoint it's only a 300W PSU- the better CPUs can pull 180W 24/7 and even ancient GPUs need about 200W- so if you try that you're already tripping overcurrent... if it even has one, that is).

Basically nothing uses 3.3 or 5V any more (aside from non-NVMe storage), to the point the new ATX standard removes them entirely (instead relying on the mainboard to downconvert 12V input, something it already does for the CPU to turn an input of 12 volts at 15 amps into 1 volt at 180 amps).

I have the exact same problem with Baldur's Gate 3. Tried to modify the intensity of the fans, but to no avail. It pisses me off that I need to rebuild a computer from the ground because of temperature control. Never seen a problem like this in all my life.

Huh. What program did you try and use? Asus had handy utilities both in Windows and in the Bios that lets me adjust the fan curve, but surely there's something for your setup?

That has all the symptoms of CPU thermal shutdown.

Do you have a program that can measure CPU fan speed? I wonder if your CPU fan has developed a problem and it can't keep up with sustained loads.

It could be the power supply if something warming meant it drew more power, too. I can't think of a reason why this could be but EE classes were a long time ago and I wasn't that good at them.

I'm staring at the fan, and it's spinning just fine. I've tweaked the fan curves to have it go full tilt 24/7, and given it's lived this long, I doubt it's worn out.

I also repasted the cpu, improving temps by 5 degrees easy, but the crashing is persisting.

Further, I did have actual CPU overheating issues several years back, when I had a 1700, and then when it would reboot, the American Megatrends screen would clearly state that the failure was due to CPU overheating, which it doesn't in this case.

Always grateful I buy prebuilt from Dell for expensive gaming PCs. Every four years I go to the Alienware website, get whatever the moderately good spec is (-80/i7 tier rather than -90/i9 tier), and pay the extra $200 for four years of whatever the ultra-premium Dell Support tier is. I also call them and haggle on the phone and can usually get the price down to the cost of parts on popular PC-parts websites, actually last time it was even cheaper because all the parts store were price-gouging on the 3080. So all I'm paying extra for is the warranty.

Whenever there's an issue, they're at my place the same or next day with a truck full of parts (including even replacement motherboards), I let the guy into my office room, go do something else, an hour or two later it's fixed. No endless diagnosis, no scouring hardware forums, no mountain of Indian youtube videos, trawling error messages, trying to resit my RAM, fiddling with the BIOS, downloading furmark, downloading and running memory testing software etc. Most importantly, absolutely zero RMA-ing. GPU fails? He puts a new one in, done, no waiting a month or whatever. The one time the whole PC was apparently FUBAR I got a new one a few days later. Apparently you can even use it abroad so if you move or buy one of their laptops they'll come to your hotel or holiday home and fix it there too.

You may be an exception given your comments on what Indian doctors get paid, but certainly for the average Western PMC unless you enjoy tinkering or building your own PC I can't see a major reason not just to buy the Dell because the hours you spend fixing it (even if breaks down only very occasionally) aren't worth it financially. 100% piece of mind and I never have to think about the Bios ever again.

I think you’re doing the right thing. I poured more time than I wanted to into PC assembly, troubleshooting etc. Too paranoid to let others handle it though.

  1. Why is your PC breaking down that much? I built mine in 2019 and its broken down only once. It also took a transatlantic flight.

  2. You lose a lot of modularity with a prebuilt as restrictive as dells. The last time I checked they use all kinds of proprietary shit, if you build you can replace/upgrade much easier.

  3. No one but the most ardent of overclockers think about the bios even once aftee they navigate the boot drive with it once. You are making the process of building a PC sound like rocket science.

I've built a PC with my dad before, have bought a couple of prebuilts from other brands, my partner built a PC, and I have bought the Alienwares and they all seem to have 'significant' issues every 2-3 years or so. It just feels like a gaming PC thing, although I've had issues with Macs too. Random bluescreens, fans suddenly failing, GPUs artifacting/going faulty after a few months, a water cooler failed, a stick of ram was faulty, whatever.

You lose a lot of modularity with a prebuilt as restrictive as dells. The last time I checked they use all kinds of proprietary shit, if you build you can replace/upgrade much easier.

Sure, but the proprietary shit doesn't matter. At a time when 3080s were selling for 3x MSRP and an RMA took/takes 2 months for most manufacturers, I got a new card the next day after mine got bricked. That's a unique level of service.

But why are your things breaking so often??

I've built well over 20 PC's in the last few years for friends, families and small businesses. It is not nearly as common as its been for you.

PC gaming is the worst form of gaming, except for all the others.

I'm glad to hear you've got a good experience from a name brand, in the future I might not need to pinch pennies and just buy a good pre-built. I'm not overly enamoured by the PC building process, but I do have plenty of parts that might last me a while, so I'm not leaving yet.

In India at the least, I've never heard of any company providing such excellent customer service, but then again PC gaming is a rarety here since we've steadily been priced out of the market. My RTX 3070 was the equivalent of 1.5x my current monthly salary, to put it in perspective. We pay 50% more for comparable electronics on 1/5th the salary compared to the West, which is many Indians resemble a walking Microcenter after a US vacation as they bring as much can fit back home for their friends and family.

My RTX 3070 was the equivalent of 1.5x my current monthly salary

In what unholy universe can one justify spending 1.5x one's salary on a GPU...

With 1.5x my salary I could buy a... used Ford Mustang (currently debating whether to save for a rainy day or blow it all on a Corvette). But I would still flinch when buying a 3070. In fact I won't. My 1070 serves me fine.

Do you just.. not think about the future or retirement or are you just that bullish on AI doom or have an extensive support network? I literally cannot fathom spending that much on a GPU!

Uh, that's more an indictment of my salary being shit than anything else, why do you think I intend to emigrate?

This was in the middle of the pandemic, and I paid 90k INR for that, or about a thousand USD today. In fact, it might have been two months salary at the time, my current job is about a 50% payraise, but after 2 years, so who knows how much inflation ate up.

A Mustang is 90,000 USD equivalent here (!), or about 12-15 years of my current salary lmao, maybe a year or two for my dad, at the peak of his career. Shit is expensive, and we earn less, what do about it?

When you make such a pittance, you have little incentive to save any of it. If I'm making 5 or 6 times more abroad (at a minimum), then the paltry sum I could save here isn't worth the inability to indulge in my only expensive hobby. But yes, I have plenty of familial support right now, so I don't have to worry about that cash not going to rent, fuel or other expenses. That'll change when I'm out of the country of course.

I actually don't care in the least about retiring, at least not voluntarily. I'm not kidding about my AI timelines, if I'm cost competitive with AGI in 10 years I'll eat my hat. To the extent that I want more money and more savings, it's because money can buy security and safety, I'd rather become unemployed with a hundred k in the bank than when I'm broke!

Okay, I think I underestimated a new Mustangs cost, I'm not anywhere near making 60k USD a month. But that was the most absurd comparison that came to mind, albeit a heavily used Mustang. But eh.

Just don't go crazy when you emigrate and end up with not paltry amounts of money on tap on a monthly basis. Hit yourself in the head with a frying pan and tell yourself "This is not India, COL is higher here, and I don't have parents to support me here" because you might feel like a newly minted millionaire as you do a quick currency conversion in your head.

I'll keep that in mind, but gaming and takeout aside, I'm quite frugal, and the former is unlikely to be a proportionally equivalent expense in the West!

Side note, I saw you liked my recommendation about Outer Wilds and Disco Elysium. Any other game recommendations you think are in a similar tier?

For a shorter Outer Wildsesque experience, try The Forgotten City. It has a similar gameplay loop as TOW and you should go in blind.

Looking at it's price I'd consider putting it on the Steam wishlist and waiting for it to go on sale to 50% or so (I have 12 hours playtime in it compared to 45hrs for TOW). Overall, not as good as The Outer Wilds, but then, what is?

I have played that one! It was pretty good, honestly the ending was a bit of a letdown for me. Didn't feel like it was a very tight plot point. But damn I had so much fun playing through it, the one sequence that's... a bit gruesome was incredible.

If we're talking time-loop story games, I'm going to throw in a recommendation for Elsinore. I did enjoy The Forgotten City, too, although both have the problem that unlike Outer Wilds, the explanation for the time loop just feels like bad writing. Although that felt worse in The Forgotten City because that was the end of the game and it felt unsatisfying.

Only Red Dead 2. I had an emotional reaction to Prince of Persia 2008 but the DLC that provides the true ending is inaccessible because it was only released on console and iirc isn't downloadable anymore.

Is it the one with black goop? Loved it, found it fun how people complained about it being too easy even though the mechanic was functionally just a prettier autosave.

Yeah it was. I don’t mind the autosave system, it makes platforming smoother than Uncharted etc (which as you note have the same system). The casting was great, though, Nolan North is such a hit and miss actor but him and Kari Wahlgren have excellent chemistry.

Ugh console and DRM games are the worst. Thanks for the recommendation for Red Dead 2, I kind of forgot about it but it did have a ton of buzz when it came out. It's on my wishlist.

I tried RDR2, enjoyed the game play, but realized i hated an awful lot of the characters (not in terms of bad writing, but as people). Tempted every now and again to fire it up and go bird watching, but I really wish there was some in-game way to learn about where a breed of horse/critter hangs out.

The animals are usually sketched on the map if you’re looking for where they’re most often found. Birds might be harder though.

Just post on Toms Hardware man.

I'll keep that in mind, but I'm sure there are plenty of local nerds here too!

Most of the advice you got here is much worse than what youd get on Toms.

Very different setup, but I've experienced the exact same issue before. Nothing fixed it until I replaced the CPU completely, but YMMV

I see, I think it's unlikely that it's a CPU problem now, but I'll keep that in the back of my head.


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