domain:bracero.substack.com
oats_son
3d ago
I have been doing some more thinking, and I think the "no sex before marriage" thing was predicated on a lot of things: that people got married really early on, that parents could much more closely watch their kids to ensure nothing bad happened, and that they could not easily get divorced. I think evangelical Christianity misses some of the nuances, and unfortunately, male evolutionary psychology also doesn't appreciate that people tend to have more sexual relationships now, on average.
There are people who don't give a shit about any of this and enjoy sex but experience no real FOMO or distress when they don't have it for long periods of time.
Yeah, that probably describes me. Thanks for writing this, helps me feel more normal. I've been thinking about sex a lot more lately now that getting married seems possible for me, but I do still want it to only happen with someone I'm fairly serious with. I just don't know how long I should wait once the relationship starts, or how long the particular woman will tolerate.
felipec
unbelief
3d ago
Interesting. I tried the same, but the earliest I could find were comments from 2010, and it's the same thing: people were already using as if it was part of the Zeitgeist, but no source.
This reminds me of cargo cults. People suddenly start repeating some dogma with zero understanding why it's there in the first place.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3d ago
I feel pretty darn maskless here. I can talk about Jewish influence on Western politics, and I can talk about my deep abiding desire to become a woman. Rare is the space that tolerates both.
I think what he means is that the place is perfectly open to Google CrawlBot, and how many AGP antisemites can there be in the world? Between your posts here, and the rest of your Internet fingerprint, you might get got like Light Yagami.
Some of us have come to terms with it, even as we maintain a fig leaf of plausible deniability, but he might not be ready for it.
TheDemonRazgriz
3d ago
Completely forgot to respond to this— thanks for the informative reply. Sounds like you have an interesting job! The substantial difference with previous secretaries is definitely concerning, as is the general sense of dysfunction you’re describing. Maybe he was a good politician but a not-so-good administrator, appointed above his level of competence? I’ll certainly keep this in mind about him.
I don't agree with this mistake/conflict categorization, but if you are going to use it, what I'm saying that mistake theorists don't seem particularly interested in understanding what freedom of speech was supposed to be either.
It's not possible to move forward when neither side is interested in reframing freedom of speech to what it was supposed to be.
ControlsFreak
3d ago
I spelled out how exactly you were missing anything approaching a plan, specifically for universities.
I mean, I guess there's a sentence about somehow getting settlement money from them to Elon, but not a single sense of what that sort of thing might actually look like. How the mechanics of it could work. I'm not even looking for a complete strategy, but some sort of something that a person can squint at and say, "Ah yes, I can mayyyybe imagine how that might work." Call it, say, "concepts of a plan".
Indeed, you did not have that. You literally had:
Let Trump's DA start suing universities left and right, and structure the settlements so that they have to give some Elon headed NGO all the money, so he can sue them some more long after Trump is out of office.
That's it. That's all you had. We can just read your comment and see that that's all that you had. How is that supposed to work? Give me an example, an idea, a process, an anything. You claim my ignorance is "tactical". I claim my ignorance is just ignorance. I honestly have no idea how this is supposed to work. I mean, can I just sue you right now in a way that lets my neighbor sue you some more in case I die next year? Just all out of magic or something?
Primaprimaprima
Aliquid stat pro aliquo
3d ago
It does not feel outside the panopticon, it doesn't feel like a place where one can take off their 'mask'.
I feel pretty darn maskless here. I can talk about Jewish influence on Western politics, and I can talk about my deep abiding desire to become a woman. Rare is the space that tolerates both.
For this feeling to go away, every layer of the structure will have to be unrelated to something that I consider hostile to myself
But this is just a phantasm that can never be realized, in particular because people are actually much more hostile to themselves than they realize.
Do you forgive yourself for being an imperfect human? Probably not, to be honest. But then, why would you expect anyone else to do it?
All you can really do at the end of the day is pick your poison.
oats_son
3d ago
Wow, this is good advice! I saw some notifications and thought "damn, the AAQC must have brought more attention to this embarrassing thread", but thanks for the input.
I have had friend groups composed of "losers" with no cross-sex appeal, and I also saw possible friendships locally and watched them go by because they were with "losers". I get along with losers, but if I'm going to be friends with losers, they may as well be the most maximally entertaining to me, and I already have maximally entertaining losers (they're not really losers, they just can't really help me) in my online friend groups.
Turniper
3d ago
I'm gonna necro this a bit (I mean, it's only been a week) to say, as someone in a 10 year relationship getting married in a few months, sexual compatibility is a huge deal. There are people who, after the initial honeymoon phase of a relationship ends (2-8 years or before first kid), will want to have sex 3-5 times a year. There are people who want to have sex once a day. There are people who prefer a more reasonable 3-5 times a week. There are people who are only interested in sex when they are in a good mood and after substantial foreplay. There are people for whom sticking it in is the foreplay. There are people whose sexual interests are dominated by one or more very specific paraphilias. There are people who just don't like sex and are only doing it because they don't want to be alone. There are people who don't give a shit about any of this and enjoy sex but experience no real FOMO or distress when they don't have it for long periods of time.
There are gender distributions to this traits, but none of the groups I mentioned are smaller than 10% of the population. People vary extremely wildly on this dimension. Unless you're one of the take it or leave its, you need to be on the same page about this to have a marriage-length relationship. That doesn't mean having sex before marriage, but it does mean talking about the subject in more detail than a lot of people are comfortable with. "Figure it out with each other" is a strategy that works maybe 50% of the time, and the other 50% either dooms you to eventual divorce or one or both parties perpetually being unsatisfied with whatever compromise you end up with.
I'll pop in a week late to say he's giving excellent advice up there on the general strategic level. And the only way to get better at the tactical level is to do it, over and over again.
The "Get a friend group and stick with them and build until you start running into attractive single women" is a workable strat, and avoids the main miseries of the current dating market. Pre-screening women before actually investing in them saves much grief.
There's a couple failure modes to avoid:
(1) Selection effects rule everything. Notice if the friends you're hanging out with are 'losers.' If your other friends aren't in relationships, or actively and successfully dating, or at least managing to bring women around to your social gatherings, and its usually just you all hanging out with each other... your hunt is not being served by sticking around. Indeed, its pulling you off course, and you'll get into a bad comfort zone that will be harder to leave the longer you stick around. Worst case these guys sabotage your attempts to find a mate out of jealousy or somesuch.
(2) The opposite problem also arises sometimes. If your male friends actually pair off and get married, the friend group will disintegrate. Its just what happens when a guy gets a serious relationship, can't do as much socialization (doesn't need to either). And I can say that being the sole single dude with a bunch of married or seriously dating guys kinda sucks. And unless those guys are still actively trying to get you hooked up, it will again start to run counter to your goals, since those guys aren't aligned with your goal of socializing with single women.
Basically, you may have to remake the social group a couple times as some members pair off and drop out or it becomes clear that they're dead weight. And unfortunately the longer a group persists, it can tend to be the losers who stick around b/c they can't pair off and they don't have much else going for them. You'll notice they're the ones who ALWAYS show up when you suggest something to do, as they don't have anything better going on, ever.
(3) Once you find someone attractive DO try and get a date relatively quickly and then ask for exclusivity relatively quickly after that because holy cow the friendzone does exist, and you can find yourself there without even knowing it happened. I define it mostly as a relationship position where any attempts to advance it romantically and/or sexually is 'awkward' due to the lack of sexual tension and overfamiliarity with the other person, and yet cutting it off feels inappropriate since neither party has done anything 'objectionable.' And then of course the girl in question might show up with a new BF without much warning and now you're in a pretty tight spot, emotionally speaking.
My only advice on that is definitely try to remain 'mysterious' as well as displaying your value and competence. Don't let a girl ever think she can just call you up and ask for favors, or do 'buddy' things with her (go out shopping, do brunch, binge watch shows without intending to bang), or understand your true motives. You want to remain in a superposition of "I could ask you out at any time/but I don't want to" until YOU make the decision to collapse the waveform.
(4) And a parting thought: If you have a good group of friends, don't ever leave them because of a woman. If both you and she are integrated in the friend group, and you break up (for relatively innocuous reasons), don't just let her have the friends and you move on. SHE will have a much easier time plugging into a new social group, so stand your ground to the extent you are able. And if your bros won't back you in that play, they're probably not your bros (or you did something horrible).
If this sounds like a lot of work, yes. It is. But its generally fun and rewarding and the skills are cross-applicable. It won't rip out parts of your soul like online dating or other rote relationship-seeking strategies.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3d ago
This is a great comment and I thank you for it.
Let's be specific about three things, however; 1. LLMs/AI as a broad field. 2. Specific models 3. The commercial marketing of those model.
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LLMs /AI -- Go for it. As something close to a free speech absolutist, I want progress in all directions on this front at this level.
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Specific models. Go for it, again. I don't believe there is such a thing as an inherently "evil" model besides some embarassingly obvious ones (i.e. one trained on pictures of cheese pizza - that's an internet euphemism for the most very bad thing, btw). I have no inherent issue with even "produce marketing slip only!" models. This is where I think your comment operates at -- yes, generativeAI that could make a Shawshank level film would be excellent!
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The commercial marketing. This is the level at which I am raging. Not because I don't want to see more AI-slop. I can already do that, I just turn off my computer monitor and phone. I rage because you have OpenAI, which has tens of billions of dollars to burn, sprinting towards the lowest common denominator use for gen-AI that's made even worse by the fact that it's attempting to replicate the attention capture model of social media. They could be putting infinite Dostoevsky in your pocket but they actively are choosing not to. That's the contemptible feature for me. Like my previous comment stated, even Google is going "hey, maybe let's try to make dense textbooks more accessible?" You can draw a straight line path from that to "I want to read Dostoevsky, but I find it hard, hey RussianNovelistGPT, can you explain Roskolnikov to me?"
But, again, the median appetite seems to be a re-hash of attention economy capture processes. Anthropic I am more optimistic about because they seem to be doubling down on using Claude to build agents and to make coding open to people who don't code. But I also worry that will turn into a bunch of MBA types re-building their own shitty versions of SalesForce and pitching it to their boss as "one man AI project to synergize all of the KPIs!"
This is some perfect world thinking, but I want to see the $100 bn of AI spend go to a company that's trying to develop new materials to help humanity economically escape the gravity well (and, no, this is no Elon an xAI). Or some AI company that actually has a non-vaporware approach to analyzing the big diseases that are responsible for the most suffering and death on earth. I'll stop here before I actually veer into "why can't all the good things be!" territory. My point remains; we're selling out early on AI because the charlatans by the bay captured a bunch of money and are re-plowing it into their business models from the 2000s and 2010s. We could be sprinting towards so much more.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
3d ago
I'm writing one, don't worry. Hopefully it's good. ;D
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
3d ago
Enshittified doesn't mean "is shitty". It means "is shitty because now that you are locked in, they can exploit you". Just being shitty because they're cheapskates that can't spend the money on a good app doesn't count.
I see you are unfamiliar with the Healow app. Yes, it is shitty because they lock you in, and completely stop giving a fuck. It's more or less ubiquitous with Doctors offices, and if your Doctors office uses an app, it's probably Healow. I'm not even aware of another one. I think the Inova hospital system near me doesn't use it... yet. But virtually every other doctors office we had to use in Northern VA used it, although some were better about requiring it than others.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
3d ago
I think that you are spot-on that @2rafa's proposal is exactly affirmative action, and it will work out just as badly, while also destroying any credibility of MAGA as a principled opponent to affirmative action and setting the precedent for the left to do the same when they come back into power.
Nobody gives MAGA any credit for principles anyway, and the precedent is long since set.
If the best anyone can do is balance left-wing wokeys with right-wing Q people, it's STILL better than the status quo ante.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3d ago
Lot's of work at work, so I didn't get a lot done this week. I did manage to chip away a little bit at the refactoring, and I am quite sure this is the right way to go as it will save me some work in the future, but it's still not finished. Until then, no Substack integration, and not much new.
How are you doing @Southkraut? I was planning to respond to your report last week, but never got around to it, so let me say here:
...as it turns out, it's Unreal's fault. Apparently ProjectileMovementComponent doesn't detect collisions if the collider isn't the actor's RootComponent. And I had written a custom RootComponent that I put in charge of situationally instantiating subcomponents, including said collider and the MovementComponent. Sad. So my options now are:
- Always make the collider the root. But that leaves a blank spot for actors that shouldn't have a collider, and they'd have to be treated differently. But I guess I have to do that anyways.
- Let my custom RootComponent inherit from collider. Wait, no, that won't work because there are separate collider classes for each primitive shape. And also doesn't account for acotrs that shouldn't collide.
- Write my own MovementComponent that doesn't require this specific setup.
- Attempt to fix Unreal's MovementComponent and hope they accept my changes, most likely only to learn that it has to be the way it is and I am abjectly ignorant of the many good reasons.
I think every non-game programmer that dabbled in game engines had the brilliant thought of "I'm going to design it in an 'engine agnostic' way, so if I need to switch the engine, it can be done easily"... and then you always run into to this sort of shit. I swear to god, the GameDev people hate us.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
3d ago
It's way more than half. I think they only recently had the first one that wasn't.
Jiro
3d ago
Enshittified doesn't mean "is shitty". It means "is shitty because now that you are locked in, they can exploit you". Just being shitty because they're cheapskates that can't spend the money on a good app doesn't count.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
I think that you are spot-on that @2rafa's proposal is exactly affirmative action, and it will work out just as badly, while also destroying any credibility of MAGA as a principled opponent to affirmative action and setting the precedent for the left to do the same when they come back into power.
I am all for hiring without regard to the applicants political positions, just as I am for hiring color-blind, but I am doubtful if the right has the academic manpower to restore political balance to the academic system with merit-based hiring.
Basically, certain occupations select for certain political leanings. For example, I would expect pacifists to be severely underrepresented in the military.
The road to tenure is long, hard, and not particularly rewarding, financially. While there are some walking it purely for the love of science (or humanities or whatever), most will at least partly have some ideological reason for preferring academics to industry. For the left, there are plenty of reasons to prefer academics:
- A dislike for capitalism and thus industry. A company working to make a profit might be seen as at least evil-adjacent. By contrast, being funded by taxes of people who work for such companies might seem cleaner.
- Academics being somewhat of a lefty echo chamber, which they can feel at home in (and play their stupid status games).
- A genuine desire to make the world better through basic research.
- A belief that education is a bottleneck to human welfare, and a willingness to spread their knowledge to as many people as they can (especially the disadvantaged ones).
By contrast, a conservative researcher will likely believe that earning a lot of money is generally good and will detest the lefty academic environment. If he is doing research, he will be more likely be motivated by the competitive advantage of his country, which makes working in industry or restricted government facilities more attractive.
So if the fallacy of the left is to expect that any inequality of the racial distribution of tenured faculty is proof of unfairness, the fallacy of the right is to believe that any inequality of the political distribution of tenured faculty is proof of unfairness.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
3d ago
That's certainly possible. But that doesn't make it true. To settle the issue with any real certainly one would need to quantity loan reluctance in some way, then show that it is indeed less in those other countries.
BahRamYou
3d ago
That sounds like a nightmare. I've had much better experiences with healthcare in 3rd world countries that don't use apps.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
3d ago
Don't blame him. I already addressed the "sometimes the government is held by my opponents" problem, and when I said Republicans should do exactly what Democrats have done to harden their policy achievements, and listed specific means and methods they did of achieving this, you deployed tactical ignorance and said I hadn't laid out any plan at all, or even the concepts of a plan.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
3d ago
Hah, I'm literally quoting St. Athanasius. This is why I'm Orthodox. ;P
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
3d ago
Why wouldn't income history be enough to build confidence that I can pay shit back? Naturally, someone who gets paid in cash under the table can't provide one, but even in the land of Freedom such inconveniently physical dealings are rare in the year of 2025 on a high enough salary level... right?
I found out in a rather bizarre and mildly alarming way that income doesn't mean shit.
When I bought a house, they went over my finances with a colonoscopy camera. Credit score of course, but they wanted to know all my assets, all my debts, everything. When I cashed out a bunch of CDs to pay the down payment, they wanted to know why there was a $60 and change difference because of the 30 day interest penalty I paid for breaking them. I actually had zero debt, and enough assets to just buy the house outright. That was apparently enough for them to not even bother verifying my income. They just didn't give a fuck. I only know this because my company's accountant was shocked when she found out I bought a house, because she would have been the one to verify my income and they never contacted her.
The underwriter for the loan, Fannie Mae, also waived the appraisal and went "Fuck it, the house is worth whatever you say it's worth". This was a huge relief for us, even as it set off further red flags about the state of the mortgage industry, because if the appraisal didn't come up to the sale price, we'd be on the hook for the difference. Probably would have come out of reducing the 20% down we had.
This was circa 2021. I've heard some people tell me this story is impossible. My realtor had never see Fannie Mae waive an appraisal before. Apparently it was part of some sort of COVID measure if you had good enough credit.
Anyways, the moral of the story is, income means nothing. Everyone has an income, and yet most people struggle to service their debts.
yunyun333
3d ago
The US didn't lose vietnam because of rules of engagement. Americans and their allies killed a shit ton of civilians, most of which was never brought to trial internally or revealed to the public.
There's a distinct asymmetry here, though. In that there are loads of documented recent evidence of people in power explicitly and openly encouraging unfairness of the latter kind, while you have to go back quite a few decades before you encounter anywhere near the same density of such official documentation (well, at least in the direction that is being discussed, anyway; certainly there's no shortage of recent official documentation that explicitly calls for discriminating against members of white/Asian races in academia). Perhaps, more importantly, diversity of political orientation is material to an organization's ability to perform academic research (and more generally to discover truth) in a way that one's race isn't. As such, there's an argument in favor of AA in cases of political orientation that doesn't exist for race or other immutable-characteristic-based ones.
I still think this would cast MAGA as hypocrites and unprincipled, but mainly because (a) they're unprincipled hypocrites anyway for independent reasons and (b) the people who would judge MAGA as unprincipled based on this are motivated to be sloppy in their thinking in order to judge as such no matter what, anyway.
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