domain:alexepstein.substack.com
Sloot
1hr ago
I once knew a woman who was sobbing because her boyfriend's family didn't like her- ok, reasonable enough, except the family in this case was his wife and teenaged daughter that she'd insisted on meeting.
:laughingcrying_emoji:
Classic coffee moment and common W for female mate choice copying.
But also, uh, they're looking for guys like their dads, who probably acted like that, because that's their model for how men are. She's probably never gotten to know an upstanding family man. She may not know they exist.
Alternate, but compatible/complementary hypothesis: Single, upstanding men are invisible to her, because they don’t give her the tingles.
Sounds like it could be a Norm McDonald joke: “Women love dating family-oriented men. Sometimes, some of these men aren’t even already married.”
You should invite her here to do one of those user viewpoint series.
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
I think it really depends on how much pain it is to stockpile the goods in question.
For example, assume that when Trump announced his tariffs, market observers agreed that the price of Tamagotchis in the US would increase by 100%. Obviously, this would lead to people starting to hoard Tamagotchis, which in turn would cause the stores to increase the prices on their existing stockpiles, on which they had not paid any tariffs. When a few months later, the next container ship arrives, the prices will stay high even though supply might be far higher than demand, as the owners are just sitting on their supply and waiting for demand to materialize, knowing that more shipments of the goods will not be coming soon.
Now imagine the same situation for bananas. Even anticipating a price hike, customers will not buy their four-year supply of bananas while they are still affordable. While the banana-delivering ships which set sail in the pre-tariff era are still on the ocean, the supermarket price of bananas should mostly stay stable -- some importer is making a loss on them, but still not as much of a loss as if they left them to rot.
Of course, the banana importers will anticipate higher prices and thus lower demands and therefore order a lot less bananas. Unless they are mistaken about the shape of the demand curve, this will lead to a price hike roughly when the ships with the smaller orders come into port.
My estimate is that different factors affect how well you can stockpile a certain trade good. Food will rot. Any resource needs to be stored, many of them in a dry place. Fossil fuels have to be protected from going up in flames or escaping into the atmosphere or the ground, sometimes. Electronics become obsolete, eventually. Consumer taste and fashion changes, who knows if in two years anyone will still be interested in cheap Chinese "Alligator Alcatraz" merchandise.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
the U.S. is more linguistically, religiously, ethnically, and racially diverse than it has ever been.
I don't know about that. In the past there were entire states which mostly didn't speak English(Lousiana and New Mexico have both had governments that did not operate in English).
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
No, Marines have their own special forces and the fallback for that is usually 'normal getting shot at' jobs like machine gunner and infantry grunt. IIRC the most usual path into force recon is to try to transfer from normal light infantry anyways.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Alcoholism forces the lowest social classes to hold a job and then die when they get to be too old to work anymore, which is broadly what society wants from them. Alcohol is an important social lubricant in not-rigorously structured societies like the west.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
I have a theory that college girls sometimes get nose rings to say 'I'm old enough now' when they're not otherwise clearly distinguished from teenagers.
zeke5123a
1hr ago
In moderation, alcohol can create social cohesion. The moderation is the key bit.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
The QoL of agricultural grunt workers has, in every society in history, been pretty bad. Yes, you can entice some college kids to do a bit of it over the summer for unlimited booze and sex, but I am very skeptical they'll do enough of it to replace migrants. 'Picking crops' is just a job that always inherently sucks.
The cost advantage of illegals is also not the only reason that illegals are preferred by lower blue collar employers; I don't know if you've met native white and black trash but they're both just awful. Drugs, dysfunctional relationships, poor communication and attendance, legal issues, poor conflict-management, unreliability, theft and dishonesty, laziness, etc are way worse among our native underclass- and illegals are themselves not necessarily role models with that stuff. Lots of them are essentially unemployable because that's who's left over in a society like the US where huge majorities of functional and capable people 'make it' out of having to do shitty unskilled labor for a living.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1hr ago
It would be, but to try out for the SEALs you've already enlisted in the Navy so that's pretty much the way it goes for many people who turn out to be only 99th percentile athletes rather that 99.9th percentile.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
As I keep saying, the conditions required to 'keep farms running so we can stock the shelves with a variety of produce' are not great, and first worlders will not do it without compulsion(or, I suppose, being deluded into halfway doing this for brief periods of time on partyfarms). Likewise lots of heavy construction labor etc.
Americans should mow their own lawns, watch their own children, etc. But the idea that we can replace illegal migrants and roustabouts with middle class whites is farcical. Manual laborers are by definition not middle class, at least when they're doing temporary grunt work.
No_one
1hr ago
At this point tattoos signal nothing more than conformity or body dysmorphia.
Piercings are more serious, I'm not sure what they say except for 'lower social class' or maybe body dysmorphia.
No_one
1hr ago
fine, but then why did every other Western nation that was looking to change calibers and was capable of indigenous weapons development also reject the idea
They were largely not sovereign nations and forced to do so by Americans due to NATO. I'm sure that e.g. had the Germans been left to their own devices they'd have kept making Stg.44s post war as the rifle's superiority was recognized during the war.
And honestly, no, the other ones don't really matter.
Sure, buddy. Sure. A communist Malaysia is okay, sitting straight on an important trade route and providing oil.
no other military would adopt a smaller cartridge until 5.56 NATO).
Japanese adopted 6.5mm in 1897.
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
I do not know much about international trading contracts either, but I assume that most Chinese companies would not guarantee delivery to your porch at a fixed price. I would guess that in most cases, it is the importer who will have to cough up the unexpected tariffs.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Middle class whites should not plan on doing crappy grunt work for a living. A certain amount of unfair labor practices is necessary to keep a society running and as far as I'm concerned a few Oaxacans and Hondurans are a win-win way to get that done. We don't need to import millions of welfare cases and deliveroo drivers but turning a blind eye to some construction and agriculture workers of questionable legality is better for everyone.
The underclass already lives a very similar lifestyle, just more degenerate. It would be great if they could be forced to do more work and less drugs, I just have little faith in their ability to do so(we're several generations past the point at which people who are willing to do work instead of drugs stop being poor in this country).
White non-underclass youths that want to make something of themselves usually do; they go from digging ditches for a plumber to assisting the plumber laying pipe to being a plumber themselves. I don't see the problem unless it's with 'there are Hispanics in the vicinity'.
No_one
1hr ago
Are you really going to try and insist that not even 10 of their rightwing equivalents would cross the line at a lie?
a) Firstly, most people wouldn't think nobody would break b) there's no guarantee anyone would even care about a false-flag attack (nobody cares about this one)
So no, I don't think you could find ten rightwingers willing to pull a false flag like this.
this would be missing the point, much like firing at full auto at the ranges of this incident.
Effective range of light machineguns fired from a prone position isn't <100 meters.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
No, this was his currently married wife. I don't know if she divorced him or not(I'm happier not being further involved in this woman's life), but the mistress insisted on meeting his family.
It did not go well and he broke up with her. This is the ending of the story as far as I know, and I'm pretty happy with that. I don't know if the wife knew about his cheating but was OK with it being discreet(these women exist), or if she was blindsided. But the mistress was clearly crazy.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
2hr ago
Yeah, but a lot of these women grew up in shitty conditions of broken families, single mothers, drugs and petty crime in the environment. They should know better. They seem not to, and I can't figure it out.
It's the same effect as doctor and lawyer dynasties, but in reverse. If your mom is a single mom with serial deadbeat boyfriends, your aunt is a single mom with serial deadbeat boyfriends, you have to learn to look at people that are not like you and say, "I am going to learn how to be like them and not like everyone else around me". This is a high bar to clear.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2hr ago
Huh, that’s interesting, I totally would have thought that the Marines would be the way more natural fallback but apparently not.
quiet_NaN
2hr ago
Because they're not paying the tariffs.
The tariffs would be paid in the end substantially by the US customers in any case, if for no other reason than the manufacturers being unlikely to have the profit margin to just pay for them.
Also, tariff evasion should be an expected consequence of having tariffs. To be fair, I think for most of the goods imported from China, enforcement is plausible.
Catching one container with cocaine in a harbor which processes hundred thousands of them is hard. Catching a container whose goods are priced to low on the customs declaration is easy if a significant fractions of the containers are undervalued. You just need to set up financial incentives which make it expensive to get caught (perhaps set up requirement that any importer needs to own a defined amount of seize-able assets per container they want to bring through customs per day), and your customs officers will pay for themselves.
shoeonfoot
2hr ago
Further, these people mostly aren't the MAGA right, and the Trump Administration cannot be said to speak for them.
Yeah, that's exactly the crux of the issue. Lots of these people have claimed that some Trump move - bombing Iran, not releasing the Epstein client list, granting amnesty to farmers - will irrevocably sunder the Trump coalition and that their position is the true MAGA position and anything else would be a betrayal to the voters, but I think MAGA is whatever Trump says it is.
If Trump announced some kind of amnesty for farm workers, that would be MAGA. If Trump announced that "mass deportations" never meant every single illegal, that would also be MAGA.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2hr ago
Even if that weren’t true, you still have the knock on social effects— street crime, obviously violence between dealers, property damage, neglect of children and wife, probably can’t keep a job so we’re paying for his survival (and paying more now that he’s in jail), so it’s nothing but negative outcomes and I think even marijuana is a but suspect in this. I can’t think f any drugs (even alcohol) that make things better.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2hr ago
Liz Cheney is an unimportant bit player who hasn't been connected to the movement-right for years and Musk is specifically currently trying to start a party that's "neither left or right" (whether that's true or not, that at least is the self-description), so I'm not sure why these would be the figures for estimating this.
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
2hr ago
Did Rubin or even Clinton speak for the left? US parties are really more like coalitions and even the president shouldn't be thought of as the best representative of all the groups, they're the one whose tolerable to the most groups not usually their favorite.
quiet_NaN
2hr ago
The truth is "American don't want to do those jobs for those wages" and that is what this is (and has always been) about, wages.The Plantation owners don't want to pay the help, and once again the Democrats (who have always been the Party of the Plantation Owners)
I do not think that the democrats are the party of plantation owners these days.
Most D voters are living in urban centers, not on rural plantations. They care about cities, LGBT, social justice and so on. By contrast, I would imagine that most plantations and orchards are in rural states. Any rural states which vote reliably for the GOP -- which I imagine are quite a lot of them might simply not be worth catering to by the Dems on a federal level.
Also, if it was true, then it would have made sense for Trump to go after the illegal immigrants working on farms first, thereby depriving his political enemies of resources. What he did is the opposite: he explicitly spared the farm workers. This suggests to me that he needs the farm and plantation owners, who likely voted for him at least partly.
This is a bit of a quibble, but actually it’s more like voters come in and out of participation, but the numbers usually balance out in such a way so as to appear that the same voters switch every time. Longitudinally, the number of individual voters who regularly change their mind is pretty low. But yes, elections are close, so they can still matter, but overall they aren’t the kingmaker. What IS true is that these movements in and out of participation are still downstream from persuasion, and tend to jive with mind-changers. So the general idea still holds.
In 2020 to 2024, for instance, although the chart doesn’t show candidate breakdowns, you can see Figure 43 from this report that about half of voters are consistent but the other half is made up of about 3 even-ish groups: new entrants, dropouts, and midterm-skippers.
When talking about Biden, this summarization basically says that 2024 Democrats had both a turnout and persuasion problem, but turnout alone wouldn’t have reversed the loss (so functionally it is still persuasion, which is exactly how you want the elections to work)
EDIT: will further point out that reading the second link provides compelling evidence that the pro-Trump shift, 2020 to 2024, was driven more by men than women, although both groups shifted that direction. We're talking 10% and 2% changes, going by Pew numbers.
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