domain:acoup.blog
ABigGuy4U
3m ago
I think the risk of political violence is going up, but it no longer has the level of public buy-in you would need for a civil war. Especially for the youth, which is the primary demographic you would need for that. Zoomers are too checked out and there’s not enough of them, Boomers are too old, and Millennials finally managed to grab a small slice of the pie and are now just a bit too comfortable. I think the primary danger zone in the United States was 2014 to 2021. I think the chances of civil war in Europe are higher, but the most likely scenario is the Day of the Shed, when all the native peoples of Europe rise up and viciously cuck themselves to death Michel Houellebecq-style.
Tree
8m ago
No, I want you to be psyched! Life is the ultimate experience, anything can happen! One day you could find yourself in South Africa or Lebanon, without leaving Ohio! Everyone's in trouble. The only question is: are you on top of that trouble or not ?
But in all seriousness, some people literally act like we’ll all be dead in 10 years because of AGI, climate (in Germany they often call them the ‘last generation’ protests ffs), elite mismanagement & evil and what have you. They just throw down their arms: "oh, we’re finished, it's over". The prospect of a civil war, properly considered, should cheer them up. It's not over till the fat lady sings.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9m ago
This week you're all getting a break from all the uninteresting things I'm doing with kettlebells or jiu jitsu to talk about fertility treatments.
I know I'm not supposed to worry about it at all, that anything can happen at this stage, but I have to tell someone and I'll tell y'all because you I can't tell anyone who matters in my real life: after a little over a year of trying, my wife got a positive pregnancy test.
We'll have to confirm it, and hopefully it all works out, but I'm very excited.
We had what our doctor called "unexplained" fertility issues. Which is to say we were making love often enough, and individually our tests were coming back good, but no baby resulted. I guess its good the tests came back clean, but it was a little disappointing, in that when you go in for tests you hope for the doc to say something like "Oh, you actually have a very obvious, simple, and treatable common problem. You aren't doing anything wrong, you just need to do X and then it'll all work out." Sperm testing stressed me out, in that I feel like all versions of that are equivalent to "You're not really much of a man." Where female infertility, while surely bad, is so multifarious and complex, that it seems a little less bad. Like, where male infertility is "your engine doesn't have enough horsepower to move the car;" female infertility is "the wire harness came loose and the starboard vacuum sensor borked itself." Given, I'm sure Mrs. FiveHour felt the opposite way, that have slow sperm is better than being a woman who can't have a baby. At any rate, neither occurred, we were just stuck there with no baby for no particular reason. And hitting the age where while we could probably have a decent chance of getting it done, we might be under pressure pretty quickly.
Our insurance covered IUI, which is basically just optimizing the fertilization process. Mrs. FiveHour took some drugs to precisely trigger and optimize her cycle, then I was to jerk off into a cup, the facility would "clean" the sperm to optimize the sample, and then the nurses insert it directly into her uterus. We elected to give it a try.
This required me, of course, to jerk off into the cup, then immediately drive it across town to meet a very precise appointment time. I have never had a more stressful masturbation in my life. So much pressure! I really put a lot of effort into optimizing the production. I needed a good sample, I needed it to all go into the cup. And it's so weird carrying around a cup of my own splooge. I felt like such a bizarre pervert, in the car, then sitting in the waiting room. Not that I had much odds of getting into such a situation, but I would sooner be searched by a cop and have him find a gun or a half ounce of weed than I would have him find a cup of my own sperm. And the whole time I'm looking at the brown paper bag thinking, well that didn't seem like very much, I bet this was a miss.
I will note that according to my wife, as a personal achievement, that the doctor commented to a visiting med student who joined her for the procedure that the sample was "ridiculous" and that this was "definitely going to work;" they look for 5mm and I managed to hit 29mm. God I hope we don't have to do this again, because I'll have to try to top that. The natural male high-scoring instinct applies to everything with a metric.
I don't know if this will happen or not. We might not get a confirmed positive, it might not make it to term, or who knows.
But I'm praying this is our child. If for no other reason than I don't know how much more I can optimize my jerking off.
oats_son
10m ago
I agree, Western Europe is a disaster. But that is cold comfort, because if anything, I see Europe as just a sneak peak of what America will be someday. That may be backwards. It is Europe that has been aping us, after all. And, as you say, there are important differences, like our immigrants being a better fit.
Sloot
11m ago
Elite-tier colleges often reject Asian applicants with high academic scores due to a lack of "soft skills". In the case that this is true, perhaps those Asian teenagers would have been better served building skills in a summer job than studying to get 50 more points on the SAT.
Something tells me high school Asians working on their “soft skills” more will do little for their college admissions plight, and be negative for their plight if it comes at the opportunity cost of grade-, test-, or extracurricular-grinding.
At least in the case of Harvard, the supposed awful soft skills and personalities of Asian applicants were telepathically observed by members of the admissions committee from afar, sight unseen, and somehow overlooked by the wrong-thinking alumni interviewers who met and interacted with said applicants in person.
It was very odd to me to visit a Costco in Sacramento recently. I saw maybe six white people in the entire store, and no white or even hispanic employees. Shoppers seemed fairly evenly split between Asians (mostly Chinese and Vietnamese) and Arabs, with most women in hijabs and even a few in niqabs. The staff was mostly Vietnamese or something like them. I couldn't understand the English of the person at the checkout.
In fact something I've seen a lot more of in general is immigrants with different strains of unintelligible English trying to communicate with each other only semi-successfully. The other day it was some Sikh guys arguing with a Cambodian proprietor. I could mostly understand each but they couldn't understand each other. Considered offering to translate but decided it would be rude.
Corvos
14m ago
I see, thank you. Would I then be correct in saying your position is broadly that long-term economic growth will eliminate the vast majority of these jobs in a reasonable timeframe (let's say 30 years) so that long-term tradeoffs (demographic change, long-term transfer of whole economic stacks to other countries, overproduction of elites, socioeconomic resentment, etc.) are not really relevant and we can focus purely on short-term plans to minimise immediate (<30 years) disruption whilst maximising economic growth to the levels required?
TitaniumButterfly
15m ago
What do you think it would take for indigenous Europeans to reverse this process, in terms of both will and policy? Is Europe so senescent that it will end with a whimper? The current leaders are a lost cause, but is the younger generation cottoning to what's happening and starting to ask dangerous questions? I have almost no window into this as I don't understand the politics.
Offhand my guess is that, when the welfare states inevitably collapse, the immigrant populations get much more belligerent and manage to provoke even Europeans into self-defense -- first locally, and then increasingly with a resurgent European identity. But again I have no idea how plausible this is.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
17m ago
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.
This struck a little too close to home for me.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
19m ago
If you're a restaurant, why would you take the risk of hiring and training someone for only 2-3 months of labor, individuals that could be lazy or awkward or fickle or more risk oriented on account of them being teenagers, when you can hire older immigrants instead?
Higher IQ, ability to speak English fluently, lack of third-world habbits.
NullHypothesis
26m ago
From the same article:
Surprisingly, teens from high-income households are more likely to have summer jobs than those from low-income households. The Department of Labor found that in 2023 households earning $100,000 to $150,000 per year had teen summer employment rates of 46%. For households earning less than $60,000, it was below 30%.
This might seem counterintuitive. You’d think rich teens would have the luxury to spend their summers traveling or pursuing hobbies, while working-class teens have to work to save for college and other expenses. It turns out that teen jobs are actually the luxury.
Statistically speaking, the households in the middle to upper-middle class are more likely to have teen summer jobs than poor households. Maybe there is something to learn from the wealthiest group in America. Asian kids growing up in households where they have to study all day would probably benefit from having a summer job in a customer facing role since they would learn to interact with larger segments of the population, which would improve social and communication skills. Elite-tier colleges often reject Asian applicants with high academic scores due to a lack of "soft skills". In the case that this is true, perhaps those Asian teenagers would have been better served building skills in a summer job than studying to get 50 more points on the SAT.
Who cares if Asians take 25% of Ivy League seats and conservatives find themselves increasingly locked out of the American elite?
The reason conservatives are not dominating top tier colleges is not because their kids worked a summer job.
There is a significant reason for the drop in teenager summer jobs that the article does not address or mention, which is the increase in the minimum wage. It's simply more expensive to hire people now than in 1950. Wealthy neighborhoods are less impacted because businesses there have more money to be able to afford to hire temporary work. Meanwhile, most businesses in low income neighborhoods are operating on razor-thin margins. They might have been able to afford teenagers to work for $5 an hour, but at $15 or higher they simply cannot afford to anymore. Cheap labor is one of the main reasons to hire a teenager over any other demographic; make all labor more expensive and there is less of a reason to hire teenagers.
One factor is immigration. Many of the jobs formerly held by teens are now held by immigrants, especially in food service, by far the most popular industry for teen workers. High-immigration states have the lowest teen summer employment rates, including California (24%), New York (29%), Nevada (24%), and Texas (29%). The states with the highest teen summer employment rates, at 75% and 67%, are Maine and Vermont.
Factor in immigration, which increases the supply of labor, and it's obvious why teen summer jobs are on the decline. If you're a restaurant, why would you take the risk of hiring and training someone for only 2-3 months of labor, individuals that could be lazy or awkward or fickle or more risk oriented on account of them being teenagers, when you can hire older immigrants instead? It's not Maine and Vermont that's responsible for the drop in the nation-wide teenager employment rate.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
29m ago
monads
That takes an afternoon.
I work with Haskell developers professionally, and none of them would claim you can learn monads in an afternoon - it is considered the hardest topic when teaching Haskell to programmers with experience in other paradigms. FWIW, I don't think you can learn pointers in an afternoon either if the learning goal is being able to debug code that uses them.
kky
30m ago
Did he say that, really? Innocents Abroad is a very funny monologue of an American studiously refining his bigotry and moving his judices from pre- to post- as a factor of travel. The French have terrible barbers, the Catholics are Mary-idolators, the Turks are subhuman, and the Arabs are sub-Turk - is the very clear sentiment arising from that book. And, of course, that Americans (especially the Evangelicals) are greedy, pompous, idiot looters, but at least they’re civilized.
What an unexpected thing for him of all people to say, excepting of course that he may have been saying it with his trademark irony…
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
33m ago
Strong agree with this post.
Some young man sated by porn, twitch, games, TikTok whatever might still want a girlfriend, might still take one if she fell into his lap, but he is often still going to put less effort into looking for her than his father did at his age.
This is basically where I am in my life right now.
It's a combination of how good the expected rewards are, and how much effort would be required to attain it. I could probably get a wife if I expended an enormous amount of effort, but... why bother? I'm happy enough as it is, and living life as a single man in the modern world with all its comforts really isn't a bad deal at all. A highly-compatible girl could improve my life of course, but there are a bunch of very well known failure modes too. Not just divorce, but that kind of empty relationship where the man falls backwards into doing a greater share of the work and doesn't even really like his wife any more, but divorcing is too much of a hassle so he just stays where he's at. My dad fell into this hard.
If I were to put in a lot of effort into my life somewhere, going for a better job to earn more money would almost certainly have a far higher ROI for me.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
34m ago
Intellectually I can't argue against doom, but I have faith in a special Providence that protects folks, children, and the United States of America.
KMC
36m ago
I see so many African Muslims in my area, is distressing. Somalis control large swaths of Minnesota, and Indians are stunningly prominent compared to ten years ago.
It's not just Hispanic.
oats_son
36m ago
Part of this tendency, surely, is that the scale of things is totally incomprehensible to the human brain. I don't know what 50 million dead people at the hands of Vladimir Chudin looks like. I don't know what 700 thousand pounds of steel produced resulting in an ungodly amount of GDP per capita looks like, or how it's even possible at such large quantities. Maybe the rest of society can catch fire but the 700 thousand pounds of steel being produced every year keeps the entire thing afloat. There's just too much of the picture that not only can you not see, but is impossible for you to see.
sohois
37m ago
I've read a few times that hiring has become a mess because loads of applicants are using LLM agents that can apply to jobs and adjust your CV per job, and thus rapidly apply for hundreds of suitable positions with custom applications.
Is this true, do such systems exist? My wife is returning to the job market soon but is a bit lazy when it comes to applications, so this would be a lifesaver for her
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
40m ago
There's a lot of stuff that could have been done with that money. I guess in a Keynesian sense that having that extra economic 'activity' is somehow better overall, maybe. But there's no doubt that we'd both be wealthier and have a better financial future.
This is a silly strawman of what economics says. Economic activity is only useful if people are getting something they want out of it, otherwise economists would advocate for going around breaking random windows to generate "economic activity" by repairing them.
ChickenOverlord
41m ago
I had a friend who straight up quit Dota 2 because of how negatively it affected his mood and mental well being. I never let myself get too frustrated but the tryhards in ranked are obnoxious to play with so I usually just play turbo as mid ogre and hit Q and 4x multicast (multicast is pure skill and zero luck fight me).
campy
42m ago
All these people, and everyone who tolerates these people, are refusing to breed.
But they're recruiting like mad.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
43m ago
The entire point of this site is to allow us to discuss across ideological divides.
And the monkey's paw curled a finger hard on this one.
I've long though that people abuse that Twain quote about travel being fatal to prejudice and bigotry, and that travel- especially if it's only a limited exposure- has about a 50/50 shot of reinforcing it instead. Likewise here; if your exposure across the ideological divide is limited and of... particular quality, it only reinforces just how obnoxious/stupid/evil/whatever "the other" really is.
Sloot
46m ago
(This is one big reason I still live with my mom; if I have to have a roommate anyway, who better than my mother who loves me? What's the point of moving out just to become roommates with a stranger?)
Because living with one’s mother runs a higher risk of ick-induction in potential female partners than living with an unrelated male roommate, which in turn runs a higher risk of female ick-induction than living solo.
Living with an unrelated female roommate can be tingle inducing for potential female partners if she’s attractive, given preselection and female mate choice copying.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
48m ago
Problem 1: God isn't real.
Problem 2: Many societies have done fine enough without God, like East Asia up until a few decades ago. They had watery "spirituality" like Shintoism's ancestor worship or Confucianism's philosophy, but those are very different from God.
You haven't demonstrated that there are "massive differences" on average. What is "massive" anyway?
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