domain:alakasa.substack.com
oats_son
just now
Hey, I want to say I like your posts a lot and I read all of them. They are well thought out and have the stats to back them up and I agree with them. That said, this comment in particular has struck me: what is anyone here supposed to do about it? Convincing people that you're right is cool and all, but I genuinely don't see any way to work towards the social outcome you want from here. Are there people here in favor of policies that make the problem worse? Do they act on it? This is kind of similar to the problem I see with democracy: the population might want something, but none of the politicians that get elected give the population what they want. Even if you could convince many people, are you seriously suggesting taking off any gimmes for women from the budget? That's not possible even for things that a whole lot more people want gone, like Medicare or food stamps. All that to say, I think you should stop worrying so much and become a doomer, like me! I guess I still worry, anyway, so I'm doing it wrong.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
1m ago
Anyway, my bigger concern in the US is actually having a healthcare crisis with my child and becoming destitute,
How do you envision that happening?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
8m ago
Where's the insanity in trying to marry young? That seems like a normal predilection.
As for partner count, I think those statistics are mostly useless anyway.
But regardless, everyone is welcome to have their preferences. Just be prepared to put in the work to get what you want. If you want one of the top million women, be one of the top million men at least.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
8m ago
Played around some more with physical movement in Unreal. Figured out the algebra for it, wired it all up, and I think it downright works. I am making boxes float and point at each other and jink sideways pretty much as inteded. So long as they don't bang into obstacles and end up going into spins. I'll need to add some kind of self-righting behavior, too.
So I added guns to the boxes, and allowed them to fire those as soon as they're pointing at the enemy box. And that didn't work at all. First off the guns are the wrong size and in the wrong place (some kind of relative transform issue?), they don't follow their parent box (parenting doesn't work like I think it does?), and when they fire the guns, the bullets have the same problems of wrong size, wrong place, and not actually moving. Also, when I attach the same gun to my player character, it just gets catapulted all over the map (collision resolution?).
So, yeah. Not exactly hyperrealistic drone warfare, and not exactly working.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
9m ago
It is indeed a pretty brutal and humbling realization. I knew exactly what you were going to talk about with the Christmas tree!
Having parents explode with anger at children is a terrible thing, and I pray I don't end up doing it if I'm blessed with kids. Except in rare circumstances, of course.
Look a single dude straight in the eye and say "Yeah she's banged 6-12 dudes prior to you, but I'm sure that she won't ever be thinking about any of them or comparing your performance and YOU'RE the one she's going to stick with" with a straight face.
And like with other issues, women now have more premarital sex partners than they've had in the past.
Yet another way in which the average woman is less desirable as a partner than they were before.
Which cannot be fixed by telling men to improve.
Man, we're getting to quite a number of asymmetries that favor women and are mostly controlled by women's behavior, aren't we? The obesity, the heightened expectations, the low childbearing rates while men keep doing the (literal and metaphorical) heavy lifting.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
14m ago
There are 7 billion people on Earth
8 billion, still far below carrying capacity.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
23m ago
I question whether a reasonable person can read about the Epstein case and conclude that it doesn’t demand additional investigation. It wasn’t normal that Epstein’s activities were secretly funded by America’s most important pro-Israel lobbyist. It wasn’t normal that he rigged his rooms with videographic equipment. It wasn’t normal that he went to visit Israeli military bases in 2008 while on trial. It wasn’t normal that Ehud Barak, the former PM of Israel and former head of Israeli military intelligence, visited him 36 times. It’s not normal for former Mossad agent Ari Ben-Menashe to tell journalists that he was told Epstein was military intelligence. It’s not normal that Epstein’s assistant was the daughter of a Mossad spy.
If we’re incapable of protecting the country from this kind of threat then we should just surrender to China. The Chinese will be more a little more reasonable about this thing. They would have already executed dozens of people.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
23m ago
Great write up thanks for pointing all of this out. I didn't grow up with anything like this, and eventually drifted to a more traditional lifestyle after seeing where the atomized liberal worldview led. I wish I had! It's hard for kids to see the benefit though, I'd imagine.
Lizzardspawn
24m ago
This might lead you to wonder if maybe you should learn something from the wealthiest racial group in America. But no, the author doesn't suggest that. Send your kid to work at McDonald's, good for them, builds character. Who cares if Asians take 25% of Ivy League seats and conservatives find themselves increasingly locked out of the American elite?
Modern education is a total waste of life. You spend 17 years to learn something that should take 3-4 at most.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
24m ago
I clicked through and found:
The main issue cited by the court in its decision was that McCaffery exchanged “hundreds” of pornographic emails with lawyers in the Pennsylvania attorney general’s office during the years that Tom Corbett, now the governor, was attorney general.
That's really all. Just like leftists have to invent hate hoaxes because of the shortage of real violent white supremacists, there's a shortage of real elite pedophiles, so they have to make a scandal over some adult men emailing legal porn to other adult men. It's why they're always circling back to Epstein, the kernel of truth they use to support their worldview, even as he recedes further and further into the past.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
26m ago
5 or fewer sex partners (‘bodies’). Under age 30.
Oh come on this is just getting silly now.
People have sex, and age. If that's a dealbreaker then you're basically just looking for an excuse to stay single at that point.
Rov_Scam
26m ago
My take on the whole Epstein thing:
I've posted here on several occasions arguing that anyone who knows anything at all about prisons would know that most of the Epstein murder conspiracies would be impossible without cooperation from practically the entire Department of Corrections. I'm disinclined to make those arguments in detail again, so suffice it to say that I think Epstein's death was clearly a suicide. One other reason for this is that it makes sense: He lived a life of wealth and privilege and was about to spend the rest of his life in prison. He achieved a notoriety that would make it difficult for him to lead a normal life even if eventually released. He had already been on suicide watch. His life was already over, and he finished the job. Even if he had dirt on people it would be pointless to use. No prosecutor could have offered him a reduced sentence for it at that point, and in any event, that's not the way ratting people out works. Epstein was the ringleader; no DA is giving a mob boss a deal to rat out soldiers whom he ordered to murder people, and no US Attorney is pleading down a sex trafficking charge in exchange for uncorroborated information about a rape that happened decades ago, especially considering the source of that information.
That out of the way, it also seems unlikely that Epstein was actively pimping out the girls the way it's has been implied in the media. Over 100 girls have come forward, and only a few have claimed they had sex with anyone other than Epstein. You'd think that with how often Bill Clinton's name has been thrown around at least one person would name him, but no one has. You'd think with how close Trump is to the whole thing someone would have made a credible accusation, but all we have is a Jane Doe lawsuit that nobody took seriously, even in a media environment that would use almost anything as ammunition against Trump. The allegations are so incredible, it's not clear that a real person is behind the anonym. What seems likely is that Epstein was using his wealth to attract underprivileged girls and runaways, and keeping them as a sort of personal harem. It doesn't seem likely that he was running a brothel to hold wild sex parties for the rich and famous.
The upshot is that I think Trump is actually being honest about this. There are no Epstein Files, at least not the kinds of files that the conspiracy theorists assume exist, i.e. unequivocal records of certain powerful people engaging in sex acts with trafficked minors. I do, however, think it's likely that there are some records that don't mean anything that could be seized on by conspiracy theorists as "evidence". Stuff like evidence that Trump visited Epstein's island, or that one of Epstein's girls had appeared in a Trump-related beauty pageant, or something like that that doesn't really mean anything but doesn't require too much of an imagination to lead to the conclusion that Trump was either partaking in sex with Epstein's girls or complicit in some kind of business arrangement. If nothing else, it seems likely that Trump's name came up often enough in the investigation that it will turn into a lot of smoke Trump doesn't want to have to deal with.
So that's my take. The question I have, though, is why Trump proceeded the way he did. He had to have known that either no "Epstein files" existed, or that if they did exist his name was likely to come up a little more often than he'd be comfortable with. I know politicians make campaign promises they can't possibly keep all the time, but why even talk about this? Especially, why talk about it after you've been elected and Epstein is out of the news? Is Pam Bondi really stupid enough that she'd go out on a limb like this before she'd spoken to the president about it and before she had reviewed the files herself? It seems that if a journalist asked about the Epstein files it would be easy for her to say that it wasn't an active investigation and she accordingly didn't know anything about it, or that they'd start looking into it when DOJ priorities allowed, or whatever. Not that that really mattered, because nobody cared at the time. Even after Elon said something about it, it disappeared from the news within days.
The Trump administration could have just let this one die, but instead they had to make the unforced error of issuing an official statement that the files didn't exist. What the hell were they thinking? And now all the boneheaded statements made in the past implying its existence come back to bite them. And Trump keeps making matters worse by making fun of the people who are calling for their release, and saying he may release some of them (i.e. the ones that don't implicate him), and going back to denying their existence. And now Republicans aren't even sure how to handle it.
The other day, Ro Khanna (possibly the slickest Democrat in the House) tried to slip an amendment into the crypto bill calling for a House vote on the release of the files. It was blocked, with only one Republican on the Rules Committee voting for it, but the die is cast. You can bet your bottom dollar that an Epstein Files amendment is going into every piece of GOP-sponsored legislation from now until the end of the term. This is going to keep coming up, at least until the Republicans break ranks from Trump. It's a win-win for Democrats. This is much better than if Biden had just released the files himself. If Trump were in them and Biden released them during the election season, it would have been seen by the Trump base as fake news and more lawfare the Dmocrats are throwing out there to rescue a dying campaign. Now that the onus is on Trump, it looks different. Going into the midterms, every GOP rep in a competitive district is going to have to wonder whether they get primaried for defying Trump or primaried for caving on the Epstein thing. They're going to be getting a lot of calls.
Having had time to think about this, I'm leaning towards nothing existing at all. Even if Trump was somehow implicated, it's hard to see how it could do him real damage considering how eager his base is to buy his explanations. He'd just say that he released it because it didn't implicate him, and that would be it. The story would blow over in a week. But if there's nothing to release, that's a problem. He can't possibly deliver, and all the while it will look like he's hiding something. I don't know how this ends, since we're in uncharted waters here, but I suspect it will be entertaining.
Not even exaggerating, I've strongly considered making up some third-date ideas that require both parties to spend extended time away from their phones, or at least without internet access on them.
Or failing that, just carrying around a signal jammer.
Convincing a woman to give up a their smartphone will probably go as well as asking them to cut off a finger, but maybe one can ween them off the most harmful apps and restrict them to just messaging friends and sharing photos to a site that doesn't allow viewers to interact directly.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
32m ago
any consequences are going to happen even for the most vilest shit imaginable
People will not be punished for imaginary crimes.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
33m ago
Knock your girlfriend out, drag her to a campsite outside cell coverage, tell her it's surrounded with bears (and hope she ends up on the right side of the man/bear question), and after she recovers her focus and executive functions, drag her to church?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
34m ago
To summarize:
@faceh contended that there were about one million women who met the criteria he considered marriagable: Single and looking (of course). Cishet, and thus not LGBT identified. Not ‘obese.’ Not a mother already. No ‘acute’ mental illness. No STI. Less than $50,000 in student loan debt. 5 or fewer sex partners (‘bodies’). Under age 30. Therefore there aren't enough good women for all the men.
I countered that there were approximately 617,000 American men under 40 meet all the specified criteria: Single, Earning at least $65,000 annually, No felony convictions, Exercise at least once a week, Attend religious services at least once a month, Have not used drugs other than marijuana in the past year, Not classified as alcohol dependent. Therefore, there aren't nearly enough good men for even that small number of women.
I picked 65k because it's about what you make as a Cop/Teacher, or a forklift operator at a local warehouse that's always putting up billboards for workers if you pick up a little overtime.
2rafa
37m ago
This is only partially true. Excepting some URM (who are usually still in the 98th+ percentile for their demographic and so usually still would have studied very hard) and some athletes (who again are usually still 95th percentile plus academically), almost everyone who gets into Harvard in 2025 did work to tiger-mom levels. Sure, a few mega-donors’ kids with parents on the board of trustees make it in (although you’d be surprised at how many of them work very hard too), and there might be a handful of geniuses who get to international math olympiad champion status and perfect SAT and GPA without ever trying who make it too, but they’re in the small minority.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
38m ago
And currently the newest Sudanese civil war has displaced around 16 million people and created 4 million refugees, yet I don't see them coming here.
WhiningCoil
40m ago
I don't think you understand. In order to work at a Fairfax, VA McDonalds, you need to speak spanish in order to communicate with the rest of the staff. They literally won't hire you.
Well, that's not 100% true. I saw a single white teenager working at a Burger King around 2009 in Reston, VA. His coworkers were laughing and carrying on during the lunch rush flipping burgers, and he was all alone, head down, working the fry machine. Couldn't understand anything anyone was saying around him. One of the most depressing things I'd ever seen in my life.
Last time I was in Loudoun County, 2015-ish you could still find entry level work as a native English speaker. The Roy Rogers in Leesburg was staffed entirely by very polite local highschoolers. That may have changed in the last 10 years though.
JarJarJedi
40m ago
Or maybe the inferior people just want to know what the frick is going on up there and is there any chance anybody there is listening and any consequences are going to happen even for the most vilest shit imaginable. And Trump isn't very interested in it because he's already up there, and figuring out what was going on when he wasn't is much less interesting than using the time he is for whatever he wants to. You can call it "inferiority complex" but there was a time when it was called "representative democracy". A long time ago, in a place far, far away... Of course, a lot of people - it looks like including you - think that only some people deserve to be represented, smart, reasonable, decent people that agree with you. And all those other people certainly shouldn't get anywhere near it. They are too dumb and wrong for that.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
42m ago
Scott Greer has a good article on this:
This issue is important to much of the Right due to the belief in “Critical Pedo Theory.” This notion imagines that the world is ruled by a pedophile cabal and “systemic pedophilia” is inherent to the current order. These elite pedos are evil by nature, which is why they use space lasers to cause forest fires and wield their weather machine against red states. These right-wingers hoped Trump would battle the cabal as president. QAnoners thought he did so in his first term, clinging to fake news stories about the admin secretly arresting and executing prominent child molesters.
The Epstein announcement came as a shock. Here’s their leader telling them that a core element of their worldview isn’t true. Rather than follow Trump’s advice and move on, they’re up in arms, with some threatening to ditch MAGA altogether. It illustrates how fundamental CPT is to a large cohort of conservatives. Trump bombing Iran and implying he may be open to some form of amnesty didn’t elicit anywhere near this kind of backlash from his base. For a significant number of Trump voters, the pedo cabal matters more than anything else.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
44m ago
have yet to ruin everything by Excel spreadsheeting statistical models of damage and critical chance and elemental resistance until they derive, mechanically, the ‘most efficient’ build, after which everyone adopts the new meta
If a game gets worse when you play the meta then it's just a shallow, badly designed game.
There's been some controversy over how AI has impacted top level Chess and Go, but my impression is that top players of those games still find them enjoyable and worthwhile, even though many hours of AI study are required to succeed at the top professional level in both games now.
I play a lot of fighting games, which for the most part only get better and more fun as you get deeper into the meta. Learning the meta gives you more tools and options to integrate into your gameplay, but because the game has inherently unpredictable elements (twitch reactions, making reads on your opponent, etc), they always stay fresh and it's impossible to fully "solve" them.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
46m ago
Send your kid to work at McDonald's, good for them, builds character. Who cares if Asians take 25% of Ivy League seats and conservatives find themselves increasingly locked out of the American elite?
The things Asians are having their kids do aren't really things that help them grow or learn, they're just a box checking exercise to help them get into college.
The question of how you get into the ivy league is entirely determined by what admissions officers decide gets you into the ivy league. Given that most of the elite colleges have shown themselves vulnerable to political bullying, it would be fairly easy for the government to order them to favor candidates who had part-time or summer jobs over candidates who didn't. This would benefit everyone.
Summer jobs are good for kids. They build independence. They put them into hierarchies that are different from the ones they are used to at home or in school. They get them out of the house and help them meet people. They are capital-G Good.
(almost) Everyone that gets into Harvard works very hard. Not everyone who works very hard gets into Harvard, or even has a 1% chance of getting into Harvard, or even has a 1% chance of getting into an Ivy. In many cases, the various epicycles for politics mean that many people will have a chance closer to zero, no matter where their test scores or GPA end up.
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