domain:jessesingal.substack.com
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
10m ago
Texans and Coloradans are annoyed by the influx of Commiefornians, is there a part of the country that actually likes its neighbors? Haha
MollieTheMare
10m ago
I’m finally on ‘The Far Side of the World’
Give you joy on reaching the antipodal point on your circumnavigation of the series. I think The Far Side of the World is where O'Brian was at the height of his powers. The five novel sequence from The Thirteen-Gun Salute through the The Commodore is where I most like to get lost in though. One just flows into the the next.
junkie Maturin
To be fair to Maturin its clear he deals with chronic pain from his
It's quite clear his physical recovery was very slow from the bowling-green scene in The Commodore.
Even though the film could never live up to the novels, I have mixed feelings about a sequel. I think they still did a beautiful job, especially with the sound stage. I wish we could have had more of at least the same quality, but I'm afraid that any sequel moves would be a shameless cash grab at far lower quality.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
13m ago
Don't we all regard those examples as moral failures though?
I've yet to see anybody seriously take the position that grooming gangs were okay, I've only seen shameful denial.
hydroacetylene
16m ago
Propane runs fine in a system designed for R-12. The issue with it is flammability.
While propane's flammability makes repairing systems using it more dangerous, it doesn't make much difference in running the system. It's a significantly better refrigerant than r-134a(the main thing it's replacing now) or r-410a(which, along with 404, it's likely to displace a lot of in the coming years) but a slightly worse one with similar drawbacks to r22(which has been banned/in phaseout for a while).
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
18m ago
Rather, that we are not living up to much of our ideals.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
20m ago
the fact that all movements have leaders makes those leaders by definition "elevated factions" renders the possibility of an "uprising of the masses" defnitionally impossible
This is correct. Masses are categorically incapable of mounting any deliberate action. All they can muster is panic and senseless violence. Any direction is given by leadership, which is incompatible with being a mass.
The elite do not enforce their will by their own hand; that is done by the security state, whose ranks are filled from the very masses whose necks they are stepping on
The necks of the baton wielders are not stepped on, or at least not enough as to make them ineffective. When that happens, they tend to turn the batons against their commanders in military coups, and become new elites; or break ranks and fail to defend their commanders against competitors.
No amount of in-group cohesion will save the ruling elite if [...] incompetence erodes the security apparatus' faith in the elite.
What you are describing is quite exactly the higher level of in-group cohesion of a counter-elite producing a circulation.
A gang of colonels decides they trust each other more than their commanders, and performs a military coup. A common story.
But a more common if less dramatic story is that the colonel is the friend of the general is the friend of the politician and that they all have more to lose by breaking ranks, so they all agree to preserve the system and keep their mouths shut.
I don't think that's true Bah on either account and I'm glad you posted it, I think many people here would deliver the same advice and tough love to a friend of theirs.
Have you ever had a friend who is smitten with someone and not thinking clearly? Every post I've seen in this thread comes off to me as people who are trying to knock a friend out of their lovestruck perception of reality. Some of them are a bit harsh, but mostly in response to you fighting being knocked out of this lovestruck state.
What would you tell a friend if they came to you with a question, "Hey, so I may have impregnated a single-mother Philippine prostitute I picked up at a strip-club and I'm thinking about moving there and starting a family with her"?
What would you say to your friend if you think the above decision was a really bad decision? Your responses in thread come off that you kinda want this fantasy to be true and that you found love and a family. If you choose not to do the above, I think you should spend a lot of your effort to find a woman in the US and start an American family. Something is clearly missing from your life you really desire and I want you to satisfy it, just not in a way which I think will lead you to disaster.
TowardsPanna
24m ago
How difficult would it be to set up a company that actually buys the data on either a major country, anonymized, or specific smaller groups or individuals, not anonymized? What are the rules for who they are allowed to sell to, and in what form?
I don't necessarily believe this to be the case, but an amusing thought: What if the feminist hoe-maddening over IQ is not because they believe such a concept could be used to incorrectly characterize men as smarter than women, but because they already do (at least subconsciously) believe men are smarter than women. And where IQ research, or the IQ concept, is only further pouring fuel on the fire in legitimizing this belief and spreading awareness of it.
Three potential non-mutually exclusive drivers come to mind that could lead to the female belief that men are smarter than women:
- Lived ExperienceTM. Women—with their allegedly greater Empathy, Social Intelligence, and Emotional Intelligence that they love gassing themselves up about—have cultivated a sense of the Hanania-pill (posted below by @FtttG) through their lifetimes of interacting with men and women.
- A mild case of the Apex Fallacy. If when considering the distribution of men in some trait, women automatically focus on some top quantile of men. If one only mentally compares some top quantile of men against the same quantile of women in IQ—in the presence of greater male variability—one could conclude that men are smarter than women.
- A less mild case of the Apex Fallacy. Similar to 2), but greater male variability is no longer a necessary condition. If one only mentally compares some top quantile of men against a less restrictive quantile of women (such as women as a whole) in IQ, one could conclude that men are smarter than women.
hydroacetylene
29m ago
My impression is that Epstein's clients were not particularly requesting for underage, that was Epstein himself, and that he deliberately recruited teenaged girls who were vulnerable because they did not have great lives with bright futures ahead. 100% of these girls understood when getting on the plane that 'I need you to work a high end party' meant 'have sex with the guests'- especially because my impression is that, like most pimps, Epstein himself was having sex with them.
It seems likely to me that many of Epstein's guests were getting off on the taboo aspect of having sex with minors. I doubt that 'power differentials' are a big part of the explanation for the simple reason that his guests already have a very high power differential compared to the vast majority of possible partners. Epstein wasn't offering anything special enough there to make committing crimes appealing.
faceh
32m ago
but I think as you say even if women make equally good or even better (as I think some research suggests) decisions, time is money, faster can be better, and sometimes forcefully imposing decisions on others can also be more effective than we give it credit for.
From an evolutionary standpoint, yeah. Men in a hunting band have to respond a lot quicker to a changing environment than women gathering berries, in general. Slow decisionmaking kills, or lets the prey escape, which is also bad.
So women might have a decent structure for reaching consensus on important matters (do these fruits look ripe? Are these berries poisonous? which section of the forest shall we forage in today?) It will necessarily be more slow and 'sensitive' to feedback from the group members, whereas for men, if the guy leading the hunt screams "GRUG! THROW SPEAR NOW!" better to not talk back and just DO IT.
celluloid_dream
37m ago
To take this on a slight tangent - at least for phone/tech companies, they're not keeping nearly enough data about me.
I bought a new flagship Samsung phone this year, billed as having all the AI bells and whistles. It was supposed to work magic with its cloud access, integration with all the built-in apps, on-device processing, and smart assist / suggestion features.
What Samsung AI actually does is sit around offering an inferior version of my SOTA-subs (Claude,Gemini,ChatGPT) and I basically never touch any of its features. It's the brand-new-but-already-outdated-car-touchscreen of AI tech. Also, a few times a day it annoys me with an unnecessary pop-up saying "Good afternoon! Here's a random news article based on your location. The current weather is overcast. Have a great day!". I hope to god no inference cycles were wasted generating these turds that wouldn't have passed muster as a feature in 2015, let alone 2025.
I want to be able to sell my soul to the machine. I want it to spy on me every second I use it. I want it to already know that I've been pulling up my topo map every time I have a spare minute, see that I've been looking at such and such an area, know that I usually do hikes of this distance and that elevation gain, and go have a think about that in the background and come back to me with something useful that I would actually want to know, and haven't seen yet - that "there's low cloud forecast for that area on Saturday, just FYI", and "trip report from 2 days ago mentioned an active bear in the area".
and to head off objections, Yes I want it reading my texts. Yes, I want it looking at my photos. Yes, I want it to be my Whispering Earring. "Better for you if you don't hit send on that reply. She'll likely think you're being flippant even though you're being sincere".. and so on.
obviously not with that kind of sharing enabled by default, but it should be available!
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
37m ago
Dude.
Others have pretty much covered it. This is like textbook Filipina scamming 101. Your post reads like a white guy reading a list of "Dos and Don'ts in the Philippines" and carefully checking off every single Don't. I almost don't believe it's real because it's so on the nose and it's hard to believe anyone is this naive. I don't mean that to be insulting, honestly I don't, but... man.
So realtalk, you sound kind of like you are desperate for this to be real, she really is pregnant with your child and she really does love you. And no one can say that is 100% impossible. Maybe you are the one guy in a hundred (or more) who gets told this story and she's sincere. But do you really want to let yourself get milked on those odds?
Look, even if you did go back, demanded a paternity test, and it turned out to be yours, how does this end? I have known guys who married former bar girls there. It just... doesn't turn out well. Almost never. Those girls are damaged and they have already been steeped in a way of life that makes them cynical, mercenary, and not well suited for stable monogamous relationships. I am not even condemning them for it; it's a survival strategy for desperately poor women who have few other options. You can feel sorry for them, but you have to be realistic about them.
That said, on the remote chance that you really did get her pregnant, and she decides to keep it, and you can verify this, do the right thing and provide for your damn kid.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
38m ago
I also think there’s something to be said for how large male-dominated orgs have chosen a decision structure or maybe also a leadership structure that suits their strengths. I don’t think it makes sense to make this out to be more powerful than it is, but I think as you say even if women make equally good or even better (as I think some research suggests) decisions, time is money, faster can be better, and sometimes forcefully imposing decisions on others can also be more effective than we give it credit for. It does make me wonder is sociologists could invent a managerial structure that improves performance across several axes. However I think research on this also attracts hucksters and bad science, so it’s hard to tell a legit management consultant (assuming they exist) from a bad one.
BahRamYou
48m ago
I'm being curt because for me this isn't just shitposting on the internet or idle speculation about something abstract, and I have to actually figure out what to do about it. Most of the replies I've seen are people like you who just want to tell me what a horrible person I am, or others who just googled "philippines scam" as if I'm not aware of the possibility. Believe it or not, I'm not a complete idiot, although I freely admit that I have many personal problems. But dealing with this situation is just more important to me than sparing the feelings of anonymous strangers who are trying to take a dig at me.
Anyway she sent me photos of her at the hospital today, recovering from the abortion. So it wasn't a scam. (yeah yeah I hear you thinking "but what if the hospital photos were also fake!" she's not some expert photo editor or stage magician). Turns out I actually know more about my personal life than random people on the internet.
It was a mistake for me to post this here, I know. People on this site just want to speculate about abstact issues, not deal with anything real.
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
I would argue that Epstein and his guests are different from random truckers in that they purposefully selected for underage. If Epstein had hired 18yo's from escort websites only, this thing would be an absolute non-story, and nobody except a few prudes and feminists would get upset.
Being a sex worker at a truck stop is very likely not a great job. I would expect that the pay is lousy (because your clients do not have a lot of disposable income), it is rather dangerous (because "trucker", unlike "bank executive" does not filter for "intelligent person with an appropriate discounting function who will avoid any homicides they will not get away with") and that the clients are not particularly hot or skilled at sex. If you can make ends meet using OnlyFans or doing escort work, that seems much preferable. So I can totally see that this job selects for 16yo runaways who need to pay for their next meal or their next dose, and have neither the wardrobe nor the age to make it in the more respectable branches of sex work (where underage is likely a hard no, because it attracts the eye of Sauron like little else except murder).
Unlike the US, I have no problem with prostitution per se. I certainly do not think minors should be prostitutes, but also admit that I have no good way to align the incentives of a 16yo drug addict to that end. Still, I think informed consent is as important for sex work as for any sex act.
Some time ago, there was a scandal where some porn company would hire women for what they claimed to be modelling (or something similarly tame), then get into a plane to some other city, and suddenly be confronted with the fact that they would be shooting hardcore porn instead. This put the women in a position where they could either walk out, and find themselves in a city which they knew nothing about without a return ticket home, or they could conform with the expressed opinion of the set crew that shooting porn was not a big deal and believe their lies that their video would only be sold to foreign collectors and not be put on the internet. Eventually, the company got sued and is out of business now, and good riddance. By contrast, no hooker who climbs into a truck is under any illusion that the truck driver is going to do a photo shoot to kick off her modelling career. She might still get raped when the trucker violates the agreed boundaries, but that would then at least be a criminal matter (not that this would buy her anything, realistically).
Now, in theory, it could be that Epstein recruited his victims by driving to local truck stops and telling the sex workers: "I am currently recruiting underage prostitutes for a sex party. Here is a brief detailing transportation, accommodations, sex acts, payment, and safe words. Please read it, think about it for a week and then mail me what sex acts you feel comfortable with and I will get back to you."
However, in my world model, this is exceedingly unlikely. It is seems far more likely that the girls travelling on the Lolita express had at best a vague idea what would be required of them, and then were coerced in pretty much the same way as the victims of that unethical porn company were, except worse, because they were underage and actually trapped on an island.
I base this on my general impression of Epstein's MO wrt consent and also one major thing which I think is appealing in men about young partners, which is sexual inexperience. If you want an eager escort who has a great technique in oral sex, your ideal woman is likely a 25-30yo who has given head a few thousand times in her life and perfected her game, not a 16yo hooker. On priors, I don't think that Epstein specifically recruited virgins for his guests, because most of his guests would not appreciate a woman who curls down on the floor and starts crying when she is told what is expected of her, but I think that the whole setup was pretty much build around maximizing the power difference, his guests were probably into making their victims submit to sex acts which were way out of their comfort zone.
Sloot
1hr ago
Yeah I have that impression too, primarily based on the fact that every progressive woman I have talked about it with in person, upon explaining the iq variance situation, immediately scoffed "Oh so men are smarter than women are they?"
Which is actually funnier than it sounds at first. It suggests either A) a conflation of average and variance, even after an explanation of variance or B) the apex fallacy, where in a discussion on the distributions of men and women in some trait, women automatically jump to focusing on the right side of the distribution for men. Or both A and B. Ironically enough, either would provide mild Bayesian evidence for updating one's priors in favor of men being smarter than women.
stuckinbathroom
1hr ago
The only people getting screwed are
Hmm I can think of at least 2 other people getting screwed…
Where to look for what? Interesting artists?
On the one hand, that's likely to be true, like the interesting music coming out of various subcultures in the 90s.
On the other hand, I'm not sure how one would go about looking for that. They have an "artist studio tour" in my area, and although there are something like 40 artists, I didn't find anything I felt any energy from. They were mostly boomers painting hills, or sometimes textural abstract sorts of things.
Have to also account for how that brain is wired up and, maybe most critically, how it responds to stressors and setbacks.
Having two people of equal (and relatively high) IQ but with different neurochemistry you can still find one a neurotic wreck who can nonetheless make good contributions to a group, and the other can be calm and decisive and able to actually take responsibility for the group's actions and inspire the group to follow him.
I'm never going to say ONE factor determines all observed differences, but a brain awash in testosterone will produce far more behaviors we expect as 'leaderly' than one awash in estrogen.
And on the other hand, cortisol is the stress hormone, (see the previous links) which can trigger cognitive disruptions... but also lead someone to be decisive out of pure survival instinct.
I can say that my perception is that women that attain leadership position read to me as high-cortisol style leaders. Constantly stressed, constantly making decisions because they have to and are basically in continual fight-or-flight mode. And if they're high-IQ enough, they are able to navigate those decisions well, but they're never emotionally comfortable with it.
If cortisol is too low, of course, then the response to dangers/threats is delayed so even if they make good decisions, they might come too late to make a difference.
If the majority of women at all IQ levels fall into the low-T/High-C quadrant, it would explain why there's just fewer female leaders overall.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
1hr ago
1797 score, which put me in the top 55% for today. I got several incredibly tricky ones (ended up being greater Indonesia) which tanked my average. Other than those, I was generally remarkably close.
FtttG
1hr ago
cost Larry Summers his position as President of Harvard.
It frustrates me that whenever his name is mentioned, I picture Douglas Urbanski.
What's currently the most cost-effective and practical method of getting ahold of Ozempic/whatever weight-loss drug in the US without a diabetes diagnosis?
You should learn how to buy the freeze-dried peptides directly from gray market sources and constitute them yourself in vials with bacteriostatic water and use an insulin syringe to inject it. There are Telegram groups where people get together and test the gray market sources, usually organized by the gray market source itself.
Most cost-effective: this comes to about $60/month if you buy a one year supply of the drug and related materials.
Most practical: because you can just get everything delivered and don't need to manage a prescription via a doctor, though it takes a bit of research. It's not as idiot-proof though so you could mis-dose yourself, but if you're sane and can do basic math and trust a friend to double-check your work you should be 100% fine.
If you don't have a diabetes diagnosis but can convince your doctor to write you a prescription for it anyway (since it is approved for weight loss as "Wegovy"), you can expect to pay about $350-500/month by buying it ("Zepbound") from Eli Lily direct. You still have to fill and inject yourself with syringes though.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
1hr ago
I was informed, with mock-seriousness, that confusing a denizen of Colorado with a Texan was a Capital Crime.
Accurate. Texas has annexed large amounts of Colorado, and many locals are less than pleased. In part, it goes back to this observation:
Our taxi driver continued complaining that the tourists who appear to be Dover’s primary fuel source were a nuisance who clogged the roads. This seems to be a common paradox in tourist economies.
However, many of the Texans have moved from the category of "tourist" to "occupying force," hence the less-than-fond attitude by many Coloradans towards Texans.
The Hundred Years' War on Palestine, by Rashid Khalidi.
Unapologetic Palestinian perspective. Khalidi is highly educated and Westernized, so occasionally makes some obligatory noises about how terrorism is bad and it's unfortunate that Israeli civilians have been killed, but this is pretty clearly performative throat-clearing before getting into how everything is always Israel's fault (or the US's). That said, makes a good case for where Israel has gone wrong (and admits some of the areas where the Palestinians have). It won't change any minds but if you want the best-articulated Palestinian perspective you can get without academic faffing about "subaltern identities" and "Zionist colonial-settler projects" (e.g., Nur Masalha and Edward Said) this is probably it.
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