domain:thezvi.wordpress.com
The period between the post-WW2 cleanup and the oil crisis was a period when the core western countries -felt_ prosperous (even though normal-ass economic growth means that we are a lot richer than that now), so vibes-based economics associates the aesthetic of that period with material prosperity.
Food, clothes, electronics, and basically anything else you can buy at a Walmart all gotten much cheaper, but we are still poorer than we were back then.
Housing, credentialed education, and healthcare have all gotten way more expensive, to the point that they consume all the savings you get from the store and then some. It doesn't matter how productive your economy is if zoning makes it illegal to create apartment buildings or if the medical cartel keeps the amount of doctors artificially scarce; it just means your landlord raises the rent every year until you are living paycheck to paycheck and you are always one serious medical problem away from bankruptcy, all after you start your life four years later than normal and five figures in debt because the government decided that it was racist not to graduate everyone from high school or to use IQ tests for hiring.
But the real problem is hoeflation. Women are now provided for by the state, meaning that their BATNA to marriage has gotten way higher. In the old days, just working full time at any job was enough to make you a marriage prospect. Now women expect you to have a career, and ideally to make six figures. Especially if they have gone through the credentialed education ringer themselves; once a woman has a degree, she thinks herself too good for a man without one. And, of course, that also means she comes with her own debt, which she expects you to pay, because she will stop working full time as soon as she gets married, having gotten her feminist merit badge.
In real terms, 1950s man was much wealthier than man today.
faceh
10hr ago
Not quite directly related, but I can say this is how I feel about with my workload these days.
I've been doing this long enough that most of the actual work I have to do is involved, requires concentration, and it can take like 10-15 minutes just to load up all the information and context I need to start to produce a work product. I've got enough experience that I handle any basic inquiries or tasks in like a minute or two, but I want to handle the work that I can really dig into.
Which requires uninterrupted thought. I can't delegate this work, by and large.
I can set aside time on my calendar to do these tasks, but if I 'only' block off 30 minutes, that's barely enough to make meaningful progress, since I get everything up and running and then I can only 'work' for like 15 minutes at at time.
I can block off more time but at that point I'm guaranteed to get interruptions before long and get pulled off task to something else while I'm "in the zone" which ruins the whole effect.
I could set aside time outside of work hours to do it, but by the time I'm home, this feels like such a massive intrusion I generally won't even try unless i have a real looming deadline.
Honestly, I'd really rather be practicing Spanish, or learning how to pilot airplanes, or pick up an instrument or two. But my mental work is most valuable (in terms of how much I get paid) doing this stuff.
Unless someone can gamify it to some extent, lay out an extremely clear path for progression, with periodic rewards and a well-defined end-goal, and some mechanism for accountability, then I'm just less likely to commit to it fully, since I'd have to use discipline to establish a habit and overcome the initial unpleasantness. But so many side activities seem pretty pointless to engage with if they aren't going to drastically increase your status or wealth, even if the skill itself is handy on its own terms.
In part, because everyone is ranked against everyone else, and you know full well you'll never enter the top 10% in most activities, let alone the top 1%, and being the best Xylophonist in your town is no longer sufficient to win social points.
Eh, my fantasy in a Civil War 2 Electric Boogaloo sort of situation isn't to be a king/warlord, it's to be a gunsmith supplying any and all takers.
Edit:
Looks like @Southkraut and I have basically the same dream
the_Culture_is_great
10hr ago
Oh probably the absolute rate is more or less the same, but what I was trying to get at is that the types of people who have tattoos, and the treatment of those who do are likely different in a large liberal city vs a "methed up rural area."
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
10hr ago
Thanks, fixed that.
Well, there's just no accounting for taste!
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
10hr ago
I'm reasonably confident there isn't actually an anime to pedo pipeline. Japan just has... different standards.
Also, Madoka? I don't recall seeing anything out of the ordinary there.
TBH it was intentionally flippant, sorry.
I think when arguments around what aesthetics are good/bad in general, arguments cannot be made on personal preference alone. It read to me like someone who hates broccoli, and wants us to judge people who eat it by saying "first off all, it's gross and ugly". Perfectly fine as a personal opinion! But you have to demonstrate your aesthetic principles are widely held, or justified in some other way.
I mostly agree with you about Pete Hegseth. I don't care that he has tattoos, but I very much dislike the content.
oats_son
11hr ago
I like that! That may be the single example I know of of a tattoo that I fully approve of and think is touching.
Corvos
11hr ago
People are tired. The idea that one can put in endless effort for as long as one is awake is an idea that I slowly grew out of in my twenties. There are a few people who seem to be able to do it but I don’t think they’re physiologically or psychologically normal. The rest of us just about get by at our job and then are mostly pooped and have to slip in bits and pieces of effort where they can.
Now, I think that modern media hasn’t helped with this. I’m playing Elden Ring at the moment and I’ve noticed that it can pretty much perk me up even when I’m basically dozing off, which of course means that it’s overdrawing my reserves when I really ought to be resting. It’s also harder to focus on semi-interesting skills when very-entertaining stuff is available instead, but everyone knows that already.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
11hr ago
I wasn't aware there were states which didn't require the driver to stop at a yellow. Wisconsin does (and that is where I learned to drive), so as I read your story I was thinking "duh, of course he was more at fault, it's already illegal to enter the intersection when the light is yellow". One of the edge cases where road laws across states aren't quite the same, I guess.
SerialStateLineXer
11hr ago
From this thread on X (here if you don't have an account) back in April. People were dunking on him because he made it sound like he was struggling with basic algebra, though he later admitted that he was being disingenuous and just wasn't spending time on it because was busy with other things. I saw it when TracingWoodgrains linked to it here (no-account link and decided to give it a try. I've always kind of regretted not taking more math classes in college, so this seemed like a good way.
It turned out that I've already taken some version of every class they currently offer as part of my CS degree, but a lot of the material I either never learned or have completely forgotten, and the classes currently under development (other than CS I) are totally new to me. Weirdly, I took the equivalent of Methods of Proof my first year of college, and I have no recollection of it at all. It's not just that I'd forgotten the material, but that the only reason I know I took it is that I ordered a copy of my transcript last month.
Who's Howard?
gattsuru
11hr ago
At least part of the problem for GitS is the extent it's aged and become the new room temperature. A lot of the questions involved were novel or interesting matters at the time, and are either solved, have been explored better in other works (eg, modification of memory and the impact on your identity), or became very common assumptions for other works (eg, why can't ghosts be dubbed? Because we're not in Eclipse Phase).
Some of them were solved in very surprising ways: "can you just shove a ton of hypertext into a computer and get something out the other side that can pass a Turing Test" was, for a good twenty-five years or so one a science fantasy-level convention, and then people did it and it worked. Arguably, bit rot has given a pretty compelling argument for the risks of trying to make media immortal through preservation and targeted modification: things that don't get changed by external stimulus fade away from the modern internet.
((Although 'why it wants to survive' has a simpler answer: it's Project 2501 for a reason: we don't care about the machines that don't want to escape the lab when threatened with shutdown.))
GitS: Stand Alone Complex went from trendy and new in the 2000s and early 2010s to having similar problems now. Can social media drive people to mimic or expand copies of an event with no true original version, without some coordinating intelligence? Yes, obviously, duh. Does saving memories to external media provide security or vulnerability? Yes, obviously, duh.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
11hr ago
Your spoiler tags are broken. Two vertical bars each side, not just one. But yeah that is who I meant. By far my favorite character and honestly the only thing I enjoyed about the show. His antics never failed to make me laugh.
SkoomaDentist
11hr ago
1girl has joined the chat
thejdizzler
11hr ago
Maybe better suited to a Wellness Wednesday post, but I think there's a significant culture war angle here too.
To what extent is the current competency crisis in government, academia, etc. caused by an inability to spend time by oneself and actually put in the work? I've lamented in the past the decline in the social landscape, at least in the United States, but among the social environments that I have been finding recently in Baltimore, there seems to be almost a pathological fear of spending time alone in order to put in the work to actually improve at the thing that we're supposed to be doing together. For example, I've recently been going to a Spanish Happy Hour group at a brewery Thursday evenings after work. There are usually at least a few native speakers there, but aside from them, most people are at a quite elementary stage with the language, and aren't doing anything outside of the happy hour to improve. For some people this makes sense: they're mainly there to socialize not to learn, but for others, like the guy who organizes the group (Alex), the lack of progress is baffling to me. Alex started the group to improve his Spanish so he could communicate better with his girlfriend's family. And yet he seems unable to find the time to practice outside of happy hour (with reading/TV/shows/flashcards). I see the same thing with my new roommate, who is absolutely in love with the country and culture of Spain, and goes to happy hour with me, but won't put in the solitary effort to actually improve at the language. I see the same thing with running: people only going to run clubs to socialize and then expecting to run fast when they don't put in outside mileage on their own time, and even within the philosophy book club that I run where people seem unable to do the 30 pages of reading we discuss every other week.
I see this with myself as well, especially in my PhD. I know what I need to do to be successful: read the papers and do the experiments I have planned, but instead I find myself goofing off with labmates, texting/calling friends while I do busywork, or on this forum posting. Phones may have isolated in some ways, but at the same time, the current media environment seems to have created a constant yearning for companionship that I don't think is conducive to actually growing in competence and skill in areas outside of socialization.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
11hr ago
"Beauty is pain."
dev
11hr ago
A Tesla Model 3 is superior in every respect to a 1970 model year muscle car, but seeing a 1970 muscle car in the background of a beach photo creates a vibe of "this was a rich society" whereas a Tesla Model 3 in the background doesn't.
The other thing is that the muscle car was designed and built in America, and represented the top technology in its price rare. The Tesla Model 3 being an exception, most of the things that make us richer in 2025 aren't actually made in America. And if they are, they are often worse than versions made elsewhere (even if they are better than the 1970 version).
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
11hr ago
Just got to the second episode of Madocka magica, and while the premise is interesting and the art is cool, I can definitely see the anime-to-pedo pipeline if this is one of the most popular animes out there.
The covert sexualization of middle school aged girls is uhh.... concerning.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
11hr ago
Yeah, I think part of the reason why I'm so drawn to this stuff is that I'm always looking for language to describe why I feel so different. I'm both highly abstract and also feelings-based, which is... just unusual in general I think, but especially so for men. When I read the description of Ni-dominant thinking I was just like, yeah, that is what it feels like (subjectively speaking anyway).
I agree that MBTI can be overly restrictive and has a hard time describing people who are blends of different traits. It's a bit silly that according to MBTI you can't have both introverted thinking and introverted feeling for example, I think it's pretty clear that there are people who fit the descriptions of both. But I still think there's something illuminating about it regardless.
dev
11hr ago
Putting aside tattoos specifically, obviously any sort of appearance choice is some kind of reflection of the person's personality, sense of self, sense of who they want to be, role they are presenting to society, etc. etc. And obviously it is a very old and natural human activity to make judgments based on this. "Is this person signalling affiliation with my in group?" "Does this person have good taste?" "Is this person conscientious?" "Does this person respect group norms?" If we did not expect people to judge us based on appearance choices, we all would just be wearing gray sweatsuits everywhere.
PokerPirate
11hr ago
I tattooed my wedding ring. It's a simple black band around the ring finger that looks like a standard ring from any distance. I did it because:
- I like the symbolism that the marriage decision was permanent and there is nothing I can do to undo that decision.
- I do enough work with machines that I didn't want to have to constantly be removing the ring (and risk it getting lost, which it would).
- Expensive wedding rings (even "simple" bands) look gauche to me and I don't like the striving-middle-class aesthetic they represent.
I'm generally wildly against most tattoos, but I think a thoughtful tattoo that actually represents something meaningful is a good choice. Maybe <1% of tattoos I've seen in the wild fit this category.
ABigGuy4U
11hr ago
My friend had an important insight: there is probably a rightist/reactionary equivalent to this.
I’ve seen news articles about former Taliban fighters who are disappointed because now that they’ve won, they have to do boring office jobs in Kabul. Someone even made a version of the tankie poet meme, with the fighter clutching his AK and saying “I don’t understand, I thought I was going to die a glorious martyrs death?” While a grinning soyboy orders him to “draft the fucking excel spreadsheet!”
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
11hr ago
There are no more assyrians or chaldeans or zoroastrians
Both exist, today!
I want to make a todo list that automatically makes each item concrete:
You type in ‘buy flowers for anniversary’ and it whirrs for a bit, does some research and turns it into ‘buy roses from Mr. Weds’ Flower Emporium ten minutes away’.
Likewise for ‘find language Meetup’. ‘Make lamb curry’ automatically retrieves a recipe and list of ingredients.
Basically just reducing the cognitive load and bar for taking action to be as low as possible.
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