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I've never experienced this directly, but it was depressing as hell watching a friend of mine trying to find someone to marry; here was a guy extremely fit, handsome, very well off, retired before 40, with a hobby list as long as my arm, and he still struggled to find a long-term partner.

I couldn't help but watch all this in action and left helplessly thinking, 'Christ, if HE'S having problems, what chance do I have?'

He did eventually get married to a wonderful woman, however, but he's still had to make a number of quiet sacrifices. Nothing technically major, but still...

I do not see a scenario where men continue to just keep eating the shit sandwich AND contributing to the society that is force feeding it to them.

I do. If they didn't lash out while they were younger and hot-blooded, why would they do it in older, lower-T age? And it's not like all of them are going to have the fuck you money to just drop out of productive labor.

would be impossible without cooperation from practically the entire Department of Corrections

One of the parties implicated in this affair recently blew the dicks, assholes, and/or parinea clean off 3,000 people in multiple countries with devices the targets willingly put on their own bodies.

Given that display of competence and coordination, it feels like your assessment of what is or is not possible in this case may be overly conservative.

What you rarely seem to find is women who have their lives generally organized, they don't spend money exorbitantly, they stay in shape through regular but not obsessive exercise and watching their diet, and have moderate ambition but are happy to just relax most nights. Someone who would be a nice supplement/complement to your own life and isn't going to disrupt your own routines.

See it sounds to me like you are trying to treat men and women as the exact same and getting frustrated that they aren't. Women are not and shouldn't be as hardcore about discipline and working out etc. as a man. That's ok.

I'm strongly suspect that Obama claimed to be foreign born in his application to Columbia, and I would guess he was accepted in part because of that status. I'm quite certain that Liz Warren got significant advantages in her school and early career because of her claimed native heritage, and we know Mondani claimed African heritage in his own school career.

For me burtherism was making the people who cheated the system eat the consequences of their claimed advantages from being anything other than their actual heritage to disqualify them from anything later. I'd still like to see all the fruit of their lies taken away.

Not sure if you're being serious but if you are, it's kind of funny to see a Jewish person like you advocate in favor of just the sort of anti-meritocratic policies that would have locked many of your European ancestors out of social advancement 200 years ago.

Probably. I have noticed that whites in certain fields(especially restaurant trades- cook, manager, stuff like that. Not the jobs students/kids do.) have mostly learnt Spanish, that there are self-segregated mostly-black kitchens and groceries, and that bosses expect to have to translate between different kinds of entry-level workers in certain places- construction in particular, but also sometimes warehouses.

I knew plenty of people at elite colleges who didn't do anything near tiger mom workloads in high school. There are some seats open for ultra-grinders, but really not all that many (and you have to compete with Asians). Contrary to some stereotypes, admissions officers at top schools are looking for a mix of types, and being a tiger child grinder is boxing yourself into one of the most competitive. I don't know your educational history, but I'd imagine those types are overrepresented in the finance/consulting rat race, which may give you that impression, though. Much more common archetypes:

  • von Hammerstein-Equord's "smart but lazy" type, running off natural firepower and intellectual charisma, very good at playing the system to get better results for themselves than the grinders.
  • The ultra-passionate about a particular topic, who don't grind for it tiger mom style but are thinking about their subject all the time and treat it as a hobby as well as work (this represented most math majors I knew, and 100% of those who stayed math majors)
  • The "underrepresented major" type, think arch and anth at Oxbridge (iirc) or music at MIT (I'm guessing), who was essentially recruited to fill out a less-desired department. You can get into the best colleges in the world while being an absolute fuck-up that way, and the most elite private schools will steer their fuck-ups in that direction.
  • The "little grad student" type, who is not necessarily a crazy grinder (could be a variation of any of these archetypes) but has internalized the lingo and style of academics in such a way as to present as advanced on the academic track.

If you've got a kid with the requisite IQ, I'd maintain that the best way to get them into an elite college is not to grind them as hard as possible at the same metrics everybody else is trying to fulfil, but to let them freely explore their own academic and other high-status interests and put the work into them (i.e. basically anything a smart kid wants to do except vidya and scrolling). That's what gets you the kind of intellectual individuality that stands out to admissions officers. If they haven't got the requisite IQ, start thinking about what weird major they can take, or send them to State.

Well broadly if you ask them, they can't find men that meet their standards.

Maybe its politics.

Maybe its the money.

Maybe its about the weight

But its broadly women who are passing on men, not the other way around. Which explains both the large number of single women AND the fact that apparently desirable men remain single.

And the fact that half of Gen Z men are just giving up.

And young women are significantly less likely to report being single.

For those that are:

Close to half (45 percent) of college-educated women say not being able to find someone who meets their expectations is a major factor, while only 28 percent of women without a college education feel the same. This education gap is slightly smaller among men. One-third (33 percent) of college-educated men claim not finding someone who meets their standards is a major factor for them, compared to 19 percent of noncollege-educated men.

DESPITE this, young single men report greater interest in dating than young single women:

There is a significant disparity in dating interest between single men and women. Nearly half (47 percent) of single men report being open to dating, compared to only 36 percent of single women. The gender gap in dating is even wider among young singles. More than half (52 percent) of young single men say they are open to dating, compared to only 36 percent of young single women.

This doesn't make sense if MEN are the ones passing on women.

So yeah.

That's been my point all along and I haven't seen a single piece of data that would refute it, yet.

I am spitballing here but I have definitely wondered if places with longstanding minority groups just are able to handle integration much better than places where the very same groups are new. In other words, in this scenario, possibly you are both right and it's just that DFW, which has ~always had a significant Hispanic presence compared to Fairfax, Virginia, is much better culturally at handling the situation.

It would be odd if it were not at least somewhat that way, imho.

Well, "we as a culture" don't ever fully agree on anything. A hundred voices are screaming a hundred different things, and the truth is lost in the noise.

Some people are telling the truth, and some people are not. But these signals are not all received equaly. But collectively, the average socially acceptable advice given by the mainstream media and by middle aged women to their younger colleagues tends to be feminist nonsense. And then a lot of young men, seeking not to give good long term advice but instead to get an easy lay, are giving the advice that they want women who are easy and sleep with them immediately. And the women believe them and become "popular", but nobody wants to marry them and the men get bored and leave. This in turn causes them to doubt advice from me and listen more to the feminists.

The problem isn't quite as simple as men saying what they want and women spitting in their faces. The scenario is older men saying what they want, younger men saying what they want short term and pretending it's long term too, older women who've been burned by this spitting in the faces of both, and then younger women watching this exchange and then eventually following the older women, possibly after getting burned once or twice themselves.

Why are these million women single if they're desirable? Clearly men are passing on them for some reason.

The women are videotaping themselves ranting on TikTok about how they can't get out of "situationships" and into decent relationships.

I think a lot about gambling apps in this context. There has been a lot of talk about them, how frictionless they make it to part with literally all your money. How if you actually do make money off them, they ban you. How, against the law, they personally call their worst addicts and entice them to gamble more. There is an argument I've seen made that if we are going to allow gambling, we need to add as much friction as possible to the experience to try to save people from themselves.

Similar care needs to be taken with those of us who end up in the returned goods bin. We don't need tiktok gassing us up about our worth, or dating apps dangling imaginary chads or stacies in front of our noses. We need examples of how non-broken people act in healthy, fruitful monogamous relationships treat one another, and maybe even the fear of god to scare us straight. Or something, anything. Just not this. Anything but this.

I like this post because it can be interpreted two ways- in the 'fuck covid, the virus is so deadly it doesn't affect those who don't give a shit, I'ma do what I want' platform or BLM.

Eh, it's entirely possible to adopt some 85 IQ child and raise them to be a perfectly productive truck driver or whatever, and it doesn't destroy your life. At a certain point society needs bricklayers- rather more than it needs more sysadmins.

would be impossible without cooperation from practically the entire Department of Corrections

Why would we rule this out? Prison guards are notorious for accepting bribes and the typical theory names the Clintons, who have rather more connections than the average person. Ditto for the royal family, the mossad, and other commonly-pointed-to culprits.

The prison system is not very invested in enforcing the formal 'rules' of the system when it involves protecting criminals.

I would counter that lots of games are not meant to be played for mastery. They’re meant to be played for fun

Well, they're the same thing for me (and a lot of other people too). I'm not having fun if I'm not trying to attain mastery, so I pick games where playing them at a high level of mastery is also fun.

I’ve had this problem in real life too - often your friend group picks up something like table tennis or a new fps and it’s great fun but after a few weeks one or two people have knuckled down and got good, and now it’s no fun for anybody else because you have to play 1v2 or 1v3 even to have a chance.

Yeah, if you're playing in a social setting you want to pick games that will work well for everyone obviously.

It sucks getting older and realizing, you've been left behind with the other rejects, and now you've got to find the least damaged item in the returns bin to try to build a life with, knowing full well that's all you are to someone else as well.

I have no fucking clue how I did it. I have no fucking clue how anyone else is expected to do it today, except that it seems even more impossible, and the odds even more remote. But it sucks seeing all the "good ones" taken, and it hurts even worse realizing that goes for you too.

Yeah. And it's hard because so many damaged items in the return bin are still convinced they're the well-adjusted ones.

And that one is particularly salient insofar as an otherwise mostly stable and fit person can become more unstable and then lose their minds due to effects of smartphone usage. (open question as to whether they'd lose their mind anyway.)

At least, that's what happens with young people.

Sure, but the vast majority of tiger-mom scoremax grinders make it into 0 ivy league schools. I'll wager that the median outcome is that they get an education of equivalent prestige to their state flagship, just more expensive and requiring more scoremaxxing to get their, from someplace like Boston College or whatever. Hell there are probably more that burn out and wind up at community college than there are who actually get into the Ivies/Stanford/MIT- and I'm not claiming the former are a majority.

My gut tells me that effort put in past getting a 4.0 is essentially wasted. The supply of parents willing to push their kids to succeed academically at the expense of all else simply exceeds the demand by orders of magnitude.

OK, fair enough, I guess a lot of people die before losing their teeth. Although I would argue that death means losing your whole body, including your teeth.

Being exempt from taxes is small beans compared to having the right to divert tax revenue to yourself, which is the real prize.

And a huge (and growing) portion of them aren't using it.

Whose fault is that.

Convincing a woman to give up a their smartphone will probably go as well as asking them to cut off a finger, but maybe one can ween them off the most harmful apps and restrict them to just messaging friends and sharing photos to a site that doesn't allow viewers to interact directly.

Yeah, as if finding fit, financially responsible, and mentally stable wasn't hard enough, then add in "not addicted to their phone/social media."