domain:nature.com
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
2m 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
5m 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
5m 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
7m 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.
9m 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
10m 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.
JarJarJedi
11m ago
the best private schools, institutions and cultural guidance western civilization could provide.
If he best schools and institutions can provide is something like this - which is the default setting in many elite institutions nowadays - then one shouldn't be surprised about the results of it. If you spent so much effort convincing people Western values are evil and Westen civilization needs to be torn down for its past sins - it wouldn't be too strange for people to internalize it and reject those values?
hydroacetylene
12m ago
It does not hit your credit score.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
13m ago
I have no idea how (other than lifeguarding at pools) kids are supposed to earn money nowadays.
They could get jobs, unemployment rate is very low.
WhiningCoil
16m ago
Man, I sincerely hope you don't strike out on an app for chubby chasers. Because if fat chicks have so much brainrot they are shooting you down 99.99% of the time, I'm not sure I want to see the creature you become.
HMK2
17m ago
In my home area, Northern Virginia, all the jobs that teens used to do - fast food, lawnmowing, child care - are now done by adult Central American immigrants. It's been that way for thirty years or so!
I have no idea how (other than lifeguarding at pools) kids are supposed to earn money nowadays.
WhiningCoil
20m ago
This is a long story, but I'm getting to a point, I swear.
A buddy of mine in college converted to Mormonism to date a girl. He was a character, but this story is going to be winding enough without getting into that. One day we went over to his girlfriend's house to meet before we all left to go see Lord of the Rings in theaters. I forget which one, maybe Fellowship. It doesn't matter.
It's around Christmas time, and this huge Mormon family is bursting at the seems with wholesome energy. Every little girl wants to show you want they've been baking with their mother. Every little boy wants to show you their somersault or some trick. The house is decorated, the Christmas tree is up, good times. So me and a buddy of mine are awkwardly sitting in the living room, not really sure what to do or say because this is not a vibe we grew up with. In addition to our usual awkwardness I might add. And two of these kids are throwing a little toy football closer and closer to the Christmas tree. My buddy and I, we don't say anything, but we're looking at each other with a panicked expression that needs no words. We are both thinking, if that ball actually hits that tree, a kid is gonna die in front of us.
Anyways, ball hits the tree, ornaments fall, train doing loops around the base falls over aaaaaaaand.... nothing. Dad chuckles, asks them to take it outside, life carries on like nothing ever happened. The boys clean up the mess they made and go throw the ball around outside. After my buddy and I piled into the car to go see the movie once everyone had arrived, we talked about how Christmas was at our homes growing up. How the house was transformed into a veritable museum of Christmas, and our mothers would fly into a violent rage if they so much as heard an ornament jingle due to a single heavy step within 20 feet of the tree. And it slowly dawned on us, that we were the fucked up ones. That family we just visited, they were the happy well adjusted ones.
It sucks realizing in your 20's that you were raised wrong. And not just "could have done better, but basically OK", but fundamentally the opposite of how you should have been raised. With all your intuitions about family dynamics and how to view and treat loved ones horrifically and possibly permanently miswired. It sucks watching the increasingly small demographic of well adjusted, family oriented peers you may have politely filtering you out and pairing off. It sucks getting older and realizing, you've been left behind with the other rejects, and now you've got to find the least damaged item in the returns bin to try to build a life with, knowing full well that's all you are to someone else as well.
I have no fucking clue how I did it. I have no fucking clue how anyone else is expected to do it today, except that it seems even more impossible, and the odds even more remote. But it sucks seeing all the "good ones" taken, and it hurts even worse realizing that goes for you too.
gattsuru
21m 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?
Saying one thing, then saying another, does not actually tie these things to each other. There was an entire and recent court case at SCOTUS specifically about how Harvard does not select the makeup of its student body from mere academic records or test scores, and just like New York's carry permit rates post-Bruen, Harvard has been hard and heavy at defying SFFA.
Sending your kid to put eighteen hours a day into study over their summer vacation will not get them to Harvard. Pushing them to have a hundred very marketable extracurriculars, which is another part of the equation here and goes very overlooked by the Compass, also won't. I think you already know that.
John Adams said, "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."
It's a little funny that only 'mathematics' is the only part of that list that overlaps with the modern College Prep Uber Allies approach, and it's becoming an increasingly smaller portion of the focus. That's both the problem, and the kinda damning fault of this sort of rant. There's fair arguments about the tradeoff between the 50% chance of success at a mid-tier college and Mike Roweism, or about tradeoffs between education and work experience (so long as you don't flinch when anyone mentions what post-grad degrees do to total lifetime income). There are some less fair arguments where we compare college grads to non-college graduates and mumble whenever everyone mentions external variables, but are still worth knowing about.
Turning the debate into An Ivy League graduation specifically versus flipping burgers for a summer isn't just putting a thumb on the scales, it's throwing out any pretense of balanced evaluation.
faceh
21m ago
Well, serious question.
How do you make God more interesting than or more impressive than whatever's happening in their smartphone?
You reminded me of that 10 day revival on a Christian College campus over two years back. Which was very interesting to see at the time, but nothing else seems to have come of it? How to maintain such a thing in the current era of extremely short attention spans.
thejdizzler
22m ago
Okay bucko let's look at what Mr. Get Better Soon wrote and see if I really took it out of context.
What is a good job? It’s a job that pays you enough to afford your own apartment, own a car (unless you live in a place like NYC or SF where it’s impractical), and pay for an adult lifestyle—probably $70K at the low end, depending on the city. If you can afford your own place, congrats, you’re an adult man...until you can do this, you’re a boy. Men, as a rule, don’t have roommates.
This is the quote that I refer to and you and I cite. How reasonable is 70k? The median income after tax in 2020 was 64k, and data that I could find from 2016 from the census bureau suggests that cities on average had about a 4% higher household income than rural communities. So let's call the median income 66k in cities, and since men out-earn women, 70k actually does make sense.
The national average for a one bedroom is 1,713 a month, so you are indeed right that this fits with the suggested 70k income, leaving plenty of money for savings, car payments and discretionary spending.
Can you achieve these milestones on a lower salary? The first quintile is pretax earning 45k a year. In this scenario a single apartment is eating up more than 50% of your income, not to mention car payments. So possible, but not financially wise. So maybe we lower the bar and say that these income requirements are locking out around 25-30% of men out of the dating market. Point still stands.
Now what do I actually say about this advice:
Now I'm not saying that the advice I see from this guy is necessarily unhelpful for the individual: you will have more success if you earn more, aren't fat, and can hold a conversation. And historically some self-improvement was necessary to have for example, land to support your wife and future family.
Nowhere do I dismiss this advice as bad or non-actionable. In fact, some amount of wealth generation is and has always been necessary. This is the expectation. What you fail to engage with is my argument that I don't think the average man can meet these standards. It doesn't matter if the number is 70k or slightly lower, more and more men are being priced out of the market.
This also has fuck-all to do with my personal income situation. I don't make 70k now, but I will as soon as I finish my PhD. In terms of his other requirements, I think I'm okay too: certainly below 15% body fat, dress pretty well (although this could be improved easily), am well read, speak multiple languages and am quite social. What I'm critiquing is this attitude that you, Get Better Soon and other posters here that we can solve these issues merely by improving ourselves. I am not saying self-improvement is bad, nor that it won't increase your odds of success, I am saying that it is insufficient to deal with social decline, which is manifested in this issue and the others that I mention.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
26m ago
I sometimes feel like I'm getting too far out there for thinking along these lines, but then I remember this scandal:
State supreme court justice resigns over pornographic email scandal
McCaffery is at least the fifth public employee – and the highest ranking – to lose his job over the email scandal, which grew out of an internal review by the attorney general’s office into how it handled the Jerry Sandusky child molestation investigation. The others, who all resigned, were the secretary of environmental protection, a lawyer in that agency, a state parole board member and a county prosecutor.
2nd Pennsylvania justice to resign over porn email scandal
I remember initial reporting indicating the emails might have had images far beyond simple pornography, but now I can't find sources. Kane also made allegations that US attorneys were involved, but I can't find that charges were ever filed or anyone resigned.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
28m ago
I hate to be pithy, but the problem is that we have forgotten God. I'm serious.
As we lose our connection to the divine and to a personal sense of moral agency, and responsibility, our society can't help but fall apart like this. A religious revival is desperately needed.
The problem with systems is that they can be gamed in a way that takes the joy, the fun, and even the intellectual work out of it for everyone else. One of the reasons new multiplayer games are a lot more fun to play than old ones is that for the first few weeks after a game is released, or while it’s in beta, the nasty people, the min-maxers, the forum theorycrafters, 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, increasingly of course because even the developers now design to it (see World of Warcraft’s designers building raids with the expectation that players will play the most meta builds, with all the most advantageous mods/addons). Why bother experimenting, playing, using your own intelligence when someone else who gamed the system with the ‘meta’ will curbstomp you for 1/10th the effort.
The problem with meritocracy is precisely that everyone except the underclass and the generational super rich is required to participate in it. Don’t, and you will be left behind. If you are a doctor and want your children to be doctors (an ancient professional right, just as the son of a blacksmith might become one), you will probably have to work them to the bone because they will be competing with every son and daughter of every sniveling, striving pauper who harbors the same ambition for their children.
Of course it shouldn’t be so. Let us reserve 75% of medical school places for the children of doctors. Perhaps 85%, even. Of course the child of an accountant should have it easier becoming one than some random person. AI changing all this stuff aside, it’s a perverse system that forces the children of good families into torturous over-education just to maintain their own standard of living.
A big part of the reason Americans voted for Trump is because we were tired of the rotten policies of the meritocracy. I wanted an heir. Those chosen because they tried so very hard at school failed their country.
Yeah.
Its a little less bad if you aren't exclusively staying on the dating apps, which I avoid like the plague now.
Its annoying as hell to strike up a decent convo with a woman you find attractive, only to find out she doesn't do much aside from Netflix, Starbucks, Shopping at Target, and maybe Music Festivals or something, and is generally not in great financial shape to boot. Often times they advertise their mental illness diagnoses.
And if you've gone to the effort of squaring away so many aspects of your life, its actually riskier to try to add someone in who might disrupt all those arrangements!
I genuinely ask myself the question "does adding this person to my life improve it or am I basically just getting an overgrown teenager with a caffeine addiction?" and it kills my interest. "The ick" as they say. The times I've gone on dates with such women hasn't done much to improve that perception.
On the flip side, you get the girlbosses who ARE spending their time at work (so have finances in order), slamming out sets at the gym, and pursuing six different side activities at once. Which is kind of neat, but they don't have time to go on dates.
What you rarely seem to find is women who have their lives generally organized, they don't spend money exorbitantly, they stay in shape through regular but not obsessive exercise and watching their diet, and have moderate ambition but are happy to just relax most nights. Someone who would be a nice supplement/complement to your own life and isn't going to disrupt your own routines.
It seemed like the women doing most/all of those things got married to someone they met in college or grad school.
That seems to be the blunt truth of it. The best women are getting scooped early, and, generally, stay in their relationships.
So the pool is mostly comprised of those who either didn't get scooped or couldn't stay in said relationship for [reasons].
This wouldn't be so bad if there were decent ways to filter for what you're looking for (old OKCupid!).
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
36m ago
I love the earnestness on display here! I think you should have kids, but agree with the thrust of your post that productive members of society is a bigger problem than quantity itself.
A huge issue is that we have lost community, which is a bit of a meme at this point but it's true. We don't have extended family, extended friend networks, etc. I think the most important thing to focus on is improving that social fabric as you can. Joining a religion helps with that too.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
46m ago
This is why people don't want to make top-level comments.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
54m ago
Sorry to break the news, but Eyes Wide Shut was a documentary... except toned down.
kky
55m ago
I did. Everything I wrote was about what you wrote, starting from how you plucked a single word out of context as a launching point for your own hobbyhorse. I oppose that. It’s a sign that the real has been subsumed into the symbol. You know the “everything I see reminds me of her” meme? It’s like that, but with theory, and it’s poison to discourse. You would have written the same post if he’d cited minimum wage numbers.
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.
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