domain:worksinprogress.co
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
1d ago
Huh. Now that I think about it, I'm even more surprised that there isn't a greater amount of scandal surrounding the magazine or Hefner. It all sounds like prime Me Too material, but either it was too early, or the literal playboy billionaire was squeaky clean(-ish).
The Playboy magazine had near mythical status in India in the early 2000s when I was a young boy. Everyone had heard about it, some boasted and claimed to own one, but I'll be damned if I ever saw one in the flesh. A few years later, with the increasing spread of the internet and mobile phones, nobody cared about porno mags any more.
waffles
breakfast food
1d ago
Your #5 makes me think that you might've stumbled on some serious alpha here. You might be getting private-school quality peers for your children at discounted prices (assuming that immersion language school is cheaper than full-on private school).
I think you, and most other reasonable folks can see as plain as day how the demographics of your child's friends will influence educational and, consequently, life outcomes, so there's nothing racist about that.
As an east asian myself, the only caution is that a lot of Chinese families treat education as an arms race and a zero-sum game. And in certain ways, they are correct, there are only so many spots at top colleges/companies/positions of power. But I feel like this optimizes for some local minima, and one can get swept up in this whole competition for an unclear objective.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
1970s-2023, I'd say. Your safe and prosperous world is a product of an overall competent policy. Just continuing and improving on Biden's program could have been enough. See the success of CHIPS act, for example.
I'm in a funny position where I mostly agree with you on China, but it's precisely because I mostly disagree with you about the competence of the previous regime (which hasn't even been soundly defeated yet). The period in question seems to be that of an obvious decline, the CHIPS act has a cool name, but much like it's European counterparts, I haven't really seen many tangible results of it. Quite frankly, to the extent the American economy is any good, it seems like the only reason for that is that the supposedly competent regime did not have total control, and had it's initiatives constantly frustrated, otherwise the US would look like Canada.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
Yeah, you may have a better chance of getting that cute girl to talk to you if you ask her in the real world rather than like her profile on a dating app, but in the real world chances are you aren't going to cross paths.
I don't see how this makes any other point than that the apps spoiled you as much as the women.
In the real world there isn't a seemingly bottomless well of single women advertising their availability
Single women absolutely were advertising their availability. There not being a "bottomless well" effect is exactly what made it better than today.
I doubt there are many people who had a ton of game pre-app and are now getting nothing but crickets.
Do you think the complaints are about the top 1% with a ton of game?
Playboy magazine’s path to profit wasn’t selling subscriptions, it was setting the organization as a prestige knower of what made a hot woman hot, which it then as an organization certified and sold.
Sadly, this is where Hef is directly complicit in one of the great crimes against an entire generation: the promulgation of bolt-on tits — volleyball-sized, perfectly spherical breast implants — as the beauty standard preferred by the great unwashed mass of late Boomer and Gen X men. All three of the women featured on The Girl Next Door had them, and of course Hef’s greatest victim (though he was far from her only victimizer) was Pamela Anderson, who was turned from a girl-next-door with a gorgeous face and a natural figure into a dead-eyed plastic simulacrum of a woman. I thank God every day that we are finally free from the volleyball-titty, Living Barbie Doll era of female sex symbols — the specters of Jenna Jameson, Carmen Electra, and Anna Nicole Smith no longer haunting the boners of virile young Americans — and can, instead, just appreciate a tasteful set of naturals, like Hef could in the 70’s.
anti_dan
1d ago
I suggest you go to the local courthouse and observe the number of women in felony rooms waiting for a man they are not married to to have his case called.
No_one
1d ago
..were you even alive back then? People went drinking and to clubs and hit on girls there. Most everyone was paired up. I recall reading fucking complaints about how 'everyone is dating someone' in mid sized towns in Germany, by some clueless feminist.
aiislove
1d ago
Why are there no direct flights from Alaska to Asia? There are tons of airports in Alaska (lots of places are only reachable by plane from what I understand) and a lot of people who live in Alaska are there from maritime or military/Navy connections and they're part of the Pacific rim where lots of US military bases are. There are tons of flights between Japan and Hawaii, and Alaska and Hawaii, but none from Alaska to Japan. You can fly from Fairbanks to Frankfurt Germany. There are flights to various places in Canada from Alaska and seasonally, to Reykjavik. But not to Russia, Korea, Taiwan, Japan, China, or Mongolia. Wikipedia says that 6% of Alaskans are Asian (as of 2020, a number that has increased steadily since 1970.) It seems like there should be enough demand for at least one route between Alaska and Asia.
ABigGuy4U
1d ago
If I recall correctly, Pakistan’s nuclear doctrine involves using a lot more tactical warheads to offset Indian conventional superiority in the event of an invasion, so their warheads are a lot more widespread and forward deployed. Which would make the possibility of accidentally striking warheads a lot more likely. 4Chan found evidence of US Department of Energy personnel getting flown into Pakistan shortly after the strike. The DoE build’s American nuclear weapons so they would be the type of people you would ask to get cleanup advice.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Average American worker earns $1000/week for forty hours work, or $25/hr, which makes a restaurant meal for four priced out at average American wages under your numbers ~$90. Equivalent to raising the price of chilis to a steakhouse price.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
I don't think SF nerds are thrilled about:
an overweight, chain-smoking phlebotomy school dropout
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Women tend to take after their male partners; if you're dating a marriageable woman and the two of you know you're compatible then don't worry about divorce, just pop the question, because she'll copy your 'just make it work, no matter the cost' mentality.
phailyoor
1d ago
She directed me to the corporate number.
She's probably been explicitly told by corporate not to comment on the matter.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
1d ago
Well, that's how much the supervisor takes home - what are salary overheads in the UK like? Continental European countries tend to have between 1.5x and 2.5x.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Have you considered that she may have simply not wanted to talk about it, or known much about it, and been leaning on approved phrasing from corporate to avoid having to talk about something she didn't want to?
Gaashk
1d ago
I worked at a large corporate coffee chain for a while, and the entire charm of the job was a series of short, easy, straightforward interactions. Someone wanted a mediocre but predictable latte and a smile. I would smile and make them a latte. It was positive and predictable for all concerned. Everyone was happiest during the rush phase of the day, when these small positive interactions happened in quick succession. Everyone was least happy during the slow part, when we had to engage in daily cleaning tasks like restrooms, mopping, drains, and sometimes odd customers who would try to chat about my ethnic background or something.
The interaction described above sounds quite unpleasant from the perspective of the worker, more than remaking a coffee. But, yeah, mostly it's because he isn't actually a customer.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
I was happy to buy a coffee and buy one for the employee, or one of her colleagues, for their candid take on current events.
But... you didn't?
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Your "just for fun" is her job, and for a working class person can be very precarious. Retail workers are not dancing monkeys, especially when you weren't even going to buy anything or tip her!
In this economy? She can get a new, equivalent job tomorrow. Not a great job, but she already didn't have that.
There is simply a shortage of customer service workers compared to people wanting customer service. Yes, this means standards for friendliness to customers have declined. I'm personally ok with that and would rather the 'all business' model of customer service become standard(I have requested new waiters for being overly personal with the friendliness before), but lots of Americans aren't used to that.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Starbucks is not a business I frequent- I'm a tea drinker and also can't bring myself to pay $3 for a drink and also just don't care for big globs of sugar that have some coffee added to them, maybe with a healthy dose of artificial colors and flavors. But they are, literally, everywhere. I can't avoid seeing starbuckses. And it seems like it varies- some of them have cute young women working there being friendly to customers, some of them have trannies being curt.
I am, however, very surprised that you expected much comment from a counter employee about something political involving the company. There's a decent chance she could be disciplined for speaking about it to a customer. There's also a good chance she'd been being bothered for months about it and thought the whole thing was stupid and was sick of hearing about it.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1d ago
I'll wager that if we're still here in 3-5 years, you'll be saying the same thing about underestimating the Chinese capacity for self-sabotage.
I have never underestimated their capacity for self-sabotage.
Your complaints about GWOT are motivated reasoning, GWOT was quite successful for Israel at least.
The US has been able to grow its economy extremely rapidly through Chinese industrialization, without that your, as marxists say, Internal Contradictions would have likely brought about a protracted recession already. Don't forget that in 2008, it was China that bailed you out. Those aren't so much major errors as conflicts of priority between sectors of American elite.
where's the golden era in American foreign and domestic policy mediated by these people?
1970s-2023, I'd say. Your safe and prosperous world is a product of an overall competent policy. Just continuing and improving on Biden's program could have been enough. See the success of CHIPS act, for example.
Like what, the financial system that proved utterly incapable of regime change in Iran or hindering Russia's ability to wage war?
Like owning the biggest consumer market in the world, most of the world's most prized IP, having military presence in all corners of the world. It's not the UN, it's the ability to spit at UN decisions and opinion of all UN members individually when needed, and not suffer economic consequences like Russia.
You bring up Russia and Ukraine - in March 2022, was there anyone (including what we can guess the US state department thought at the time!) who confidently predicted the outcome would be >= 3 year grinding war with little movement on the front, dominated by drone warfare?
I recall I did predict a long grinding war after like a week of it. Failure of the brazen paratrooper operation at Hostomel suggested that no quick resolution is likely; Ukrainians recognize it was a pivotal point, and if better executed (and less competently opposed), would have likely allowed Russia to settle the war on preferred terms. There have been a few others who thought likewise. I did miss drones, and predicted more WWII style mass mobilization with heavy artillery and aviation use and millions dead. We got some WWII features but not that. What did you say at the time?
If Americans were truly hegemonic and held that as their goal, the world would look very different.
Sorry, this sounds very much like Russian “we haven't even started yet” narrative to me.
Jiro
1d ago
Or are you perhaps confusing the Dean quoted by Pasha here to be referring to me, the user who goes by Dean
You did say this in response to Pasha saying that ethics courses are in his experience useless:
If you ever get a chance, do a self-driven review a compare / contrast of ethic courses and frameworks for different professional groups with different stakes in human harm. Even if it's just regulators who enforce safety standards, medical policymakers that shape the standards, and state prosecutors who's job it is to give the people who violated the standards a bad day in court, the overlaps and distinctions in what they base their professional-ethic frameworks upon can be enlightening.
This sounds like you were saying "no, ethics courses aren't useless, go research them yourself to find out".
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d ago
I think to be honest most Americans are, to borrow a phrase from the Chinese, unserious as a people. Their need for an easy life and for getting exactly what they want exactly how and when they want it. It’s the mentality of a child. And I think this harms dating and marriage because being in a relationship with another living person requires work and compromise and commitment that more often than not people are less willing to accept.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
I mean, to start with the obvious, the things that past generations would have considered important are just present at a lower rate. Stable full time employment is down among men(and this is the rough equivalent of 'access to farmland' that would have been very important in ~1850, don't @ me about how way back when jobs weren't important because they weren't really a thing). Women are fatter, more mentally ill, less religious, worse at home ec, and, yes, higher body count(not as high as redpillbros and incels seem to believe, but higher than in 1950). Pot in the fifties was fairly rare, and regardless of your opinions on its effects for the median user, it does seem to turn at least a substantial minority into giant losers when they weren't previously. Gambling addicts back in the day before draftkings were obvious. And it was just understood that if you were seeing a girl you proposed in a matter of weeks, maybe months on the high end(I'm not exaggerating the timeframe), making commitment up front more of a thing on offer from the average guy.
Now some of that is feminism(let's not kid ourselves about first wave-second wave-third wave- it all bears some responsibility, even with delayed impacts). Some of it is new technology(vape pens, gambling websites, gig work). Some of it is other societal trends, such as lengthy education and glorifying mental illness. Feminism definitely bears the blame for societal unwillingness to even talk about the problem; most people actually want a relationship in accord with fairly conventional gender roles and feminism at every stage has invested itself in abolishing gender roles, even in little stuff(women wearing pants may not, at the end of the day, matter very much, but it was a controversy in its day).
Gender roles are important, at the end of the day, this just basic set of expectations that each spouse has their job which comes before anything else. But at the end of the day, a 'just get rid of x' solution is almost always woefully insufficient. At a guess if we just threw feminism out we'd be wanting it back- probably because Andrew Tate would be the replacement. The structures which made a nonfeminist society- the strong gender roles- have to come back first.
the_others
1d ago
My (admittedly clumsily made) point was more that rich women's male peers, including their matches on the apps, are almost universally employed and non-criminal, so such verification would be mostly useless. The distinction would be more useful for underclass women, for whom the verification system would reveal actual information about their potential male partners.
Hef really dodged a bullet considering the stories I heard about what he got up to.
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