domain:mattlakeman.org
I note that Bezos had a noted aversion to helicopter flight (perhaps a part a fear of flight, a part knowing the horrible safety record of personal helicopters) that he seems to have gotten over, just for this woman. To the point where he would go on longer helicopter rides just to hang out with her.
Placing your life in the hands of a woman is rare enough: placing it under IFR flight rules is singularly rare.
I don't know if you've ever been in a helicopter, but it's like putting your head next to a concert amp playing the sound of a chainsaw. No amount of plastic titties can overcome that. There are easier ways to get with a chick then that. I am inclined to believe that he is genuinely infatuated with her.
Perhaps the next rich, famous man will update his priors accordingly:
“What’s the reaction from women for dating a fresh, childless young woman in her late teens or twenties?”
“Seethe, rage, accusations of you being a groomer pedophile who’s exploiting power dynamics and taking advantage of someone whose brain hasn’t even developed yet because you can’t handle a woman your own age.”
“What’s the reaction from women for marrying a middle-aged divorced woman who’s already been around the block and had her fun?”
“Seethe, rage, accusations of you being a trashy, shallow, classless bimbo-fetishist who’s too insecure to handle an intellectual woman.”
“Well then…”
A driver of the hate is that she presents as younger than she is, possibly passing as a thotmaxxing woman in her mid-to-late 40s and maybe even pre-menopausal (at least from afar). Thus, she isn’t decrepit-looking enough and is younger-looking than Bezos “deserves.” If she looks like she still might have eggs, she’s too young for the seggs.
I suppose, in general, progressive hate is likely to result whenever, wherever there’s a successful white man enjoying himself—from other tech bosses like Zuckerberg and Musk (including pre-Trump associations) to athletes like Kelce and Bauer. Modern progressivism: The haunting fear that some white man, somewhere, might be happy without benefiting women, racial and sexual minorities.
HighResolutionSleep
2hr ago
It's not much good to criticise women for being shallow in the dating market when the fruits of success are to dress like this and hook your own billionaire.
I'm all for giving up, but this seems like a silly reason for doing it. Should we stop telling men to grow up and work hard because lottery winners exist?
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
56m ago
· Edited 49m ago
I think this is actually sort of analogous to women allegedly preferring "dad bods". I don't think any woman genuinely finds a dad bod more sexually thrilling in isolation, but for a woman self-conscious about her own weight the idea of a man that lives at the gym and eats a stricter diet than a supermodel just sounds intimidating and miserable. I think 4chan NEETs are not necessarily attracted to a NEET girl so much as they just imagine that she will be attainable and have low standards in men and make their own failure less humiliating.
Why is whatever this boils down to as a notion of attraction less legitimate than the "in isolation" notion, though? People choose partners on complex criteria, which tend to include some reflexive components like "can I convince myself that the other person in fact desires me" and "how will society judge us as a pair". This is not just a strategic cope to make up for an organic preference that can not be realised - as I see it, for most people, the realisation where you see a happy future for yourself with another is attraction, butterflies and everything! (No judgement intended about respectability - the happy-future fantasy could be anything from "we'll fuck like rabbits in a public toilet" to "we will grow old discussing philosophy until one of us closes their eyes, never to complete their final thought")
I don't see why attraction based on this compound metric should be written off as less legitimate than attraction based on what the man might choose to beat his meat to while completely derealised at the tail end of a gooning all-nighter, or the woman's equally derealised fantasies after drifting off to trashy romance novel la-la land. In fact there seems to be a certain kind of essentialism that bitter people in all sorts of domains converge upon, where some very specific and often even irrelevant metric is elevated to Ground Biological Truth and everything else is ultimately seen as fakery and pretense - "he might say he likes me but Science says that he ultimately would prefer someone with balloon tits and a hourglass figure. We don't make the rules", or "she might claim to like nice guys but Science says that women only really get off on rape and dominance, she may deny it but I'm sure it will come out eventually", or "I might seemingly be performing about as well as everyone else, but Science says that people of my sex/ethnicity are not good at my research area". Every such belief conveniently has the nature of those delusional parasite infections which compel the patient to scratch at them until they actually bleed and get infected.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
1hr ago
I used to accept this opinionoid, but I've come to believe that shared experience matters much more than age. Sure, if you're 40, your 18 year old gf might be a bit boring at first, but after you've been together 5 years, experienced the ups and downs of marriage, and maybe had a kid or two, there will be plenty to talk about and bond over.
ThisIsSin
Cainanites and Abelists
1hr ago
But as an adult I'm wondering how on earth you'd clean and maintain such a system.
It is self-cleaning.
While it is inevitable that some dirt settles at seldom-used outlets (especially those at lower points in the plumbing run), that problem tends to solve itself as soon as you connect a hose to that port by consequence of what the system does. And since when you're vacuuming an entire floor you'll use (almost) every port at least once, the remediation for ports seldom-used is "connect the vacuum line and run the system briefly".
Additionally, the hose opening tends to be a smaller diameter than the vacuum lines. So if you suck up something absurd, like a plastic bag, if it'll fit through the hose, it'll fit through the lines just fine. It would be wise to leave a couple of access ports, though.
The only real fail points are:
- the central unit itself (generally quite reliable, it's just a nicer Shop-Vac- solution: replace unit if it burns out somehow, hookup is standard)
- the hose between the vacuum head and wall (generally, electrical outlets are installed right next to the vacuum ports so you can run the vacuum's power head; the cord for that is embedded in the hose and will degrade with use- solution: replace hose, they're all standard)
- the access ports (just a sufficiently-airtight door with 2 low-voltage electrical contacts, both properties can degrade over time; when you connect the hose, the circuit is bridged by the metal and the vacuum starts up- solution: replace door)
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
1hr ago
I was gonna say, if you have a kids a wife is essential (so is a husband, tbh). With more than 1-2 kids, you no longer have a "relationship," you now have a "small business" that requires more than one employee to smoothly operate.
hydroacetylene
7hr ago
Have we considered that he's in love? IDK, seems like the most plausible reason to me.
In general men on the internet have this level of paranoia about marriage that needs to be pushed back on as much as the 'OMG all men are rapists and abusers' tiktok feminism demoralizing women.
2rafa
6hr ago
My guess is that he just fell in love with her. If he wanted to fuck 18 year olds he could have divorced his wife 20 years ago (or come to an arrangement, like Eric Schmidt, or done that classic rockstar / Larry Ellison / Henry VIII thing and just had a succession of younger wives). It seems more likely that he was relatively happy or at least comfortable in his marriage and was then seduced by Sanchez, who is no doubt a skilled and immensely ambitious operator, and then divorced his wife (likely at Sanchez’ request, and certainly as a consequence of her will given she gave her own texts to her brother who then sold them on to a tabloid) so he could marry her. There was no buffet of 20 year olds to pick from, it wasn’t like that, and the billionaires who do live that lifestyle are essentially plugged into the party circuit, big time nightclub promoters, model / escort agents and so on on the Cannes/Miami/LA/Mykonos circuit with which Bezos was not really familiar pre-Sanchez given he was a nerd who mainly attended sober economics conferences.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1hr ago
It’s stupid because nobody really bothers to argue policy (and probably never really did, unless you’re a policy nerd), they’re arguing on the basis of propaganda and vibes. Tge West and especially America are absolutely soaked in propaganda all day everyday and don’t even realize it. Name any issue, and people will be able to quote various talking points for what they want to be true, but won’t understand it. Get them off into the woods where there are no talking points or standard arguments available and people will absolutely sputter trying to come up with any sort of argument or explanation of what they actually want or how the policies they say they want will get them there.
But until people actually see themselves as embedded in the machine they won’t even understand that they understand nothing about the world. So they argue about it and spend a lot of time trying to convince others they’re right. And each set of propaganda has the same feel good stuff in them. My side is the educated side and if the other side wasn’t so uneducated and stupid, they’d agree. My side is the moral side, they’re evil.
You would better serve yourself and your arguments by affirming rather than downplaying their leftism. I'll also here not take the euphemism, socialism is communism's beachhead in capitalism.
Redistribution of wealth is communist. It cuts both ways, your list includes instances where the primary beneficiaries are corporations, the policies remain communist.
I guess this is the issue lol. Point-by-point, why none of this is particularly radical in most societies that people don't consider "socialist":
Communists, as masters of duplicitous rhetoric, have done an expectedly superb job propagandizing leftist policy objectives as "common sense" and especially as "not communist" or "not socialist." They are not considered radical today because it is the way of things, but those fears named in opposition to, e.g. compulsory education, have been justified. We can't go back, so there's not a real use in invoking either their past appraisal as radical or their current view as normal.
But also not specifically socialist, at all. Very much no means of production being seized.
I would agree directionally, in very strict terms. The concept of regulation is not inherently redistributive, and even in practice I don't know that many examples are redistributive, but they do often impair the market from competition and there corporations benefit.
Another exaggeration. The free part is for buses only. As someone who's taken a lot of public transit in many different cities, buses are frequently used by more blue collar / "barista" type workers, whereas light rail is more often used by professionals. It's a pragmatically progressive (in the sense of: tax those who can afford it) solution to the problem of rising fare prices, imo.
Strictly redistributive. Communist.
Obviously an experimental / pilot project. Curious to see if there's a nice food distribution middle ground between "soup kitchen" and "Whole Foods" that a city government can occupy. An ideal implementation of this looks more like a 7-days-a-week farmer's market to me than a crumbling Aldi with yellowed fluorescent lights and grimey 90s tiles.
The experiment was run for decades and it failed. Communist.
Are grade school, middle school, and high school not "free childcare"?
Compulsory education is indeed free childcare, and it is the perfect example of the myriad failures of ideology in communism:
- That inequality in outcome can be solved through money; here school funding
- That effective systems create effective people; here that good schools make good students
- That a bureaucracy can be trusted with considerable power; here that teachers are broadly competent and judicious
- That the system will fulfill its primary objective rather than be co-opted or brought to heel by superior agents; here a minor rehashing of #2, but specifically that the school exists to educate
Compulsory education as the public school doesn't actually exist to educate. It educates incidentally, just as a little less incidentally it incorporates students into the cult of the state. Its function is redistributing wealth to the bourgeoise so they don't have to either pay for childcare, accommodate flexible hours for their laborers, or worst of all, have to deal with a 50% smaller workforce and the massive leverage the laborers would gain in negotiations. All to say, the classic example of bad actors prospering from exploiting the system, here capitalism's maybe third-worst practice.
Where I would say today communist ideology has strength is cynicism toward the bourgeoise, where it fails is not showing enough, as even with the means of production seized, the bourgeoise are not made but born, agnostic to actually being of class "bourgeoise," and a communist system will inevitably be controlled by them. The best system accounts for their chronic existence and allows them to flourish in dozens of lanes of competition with each other, while exerting just enough regulation to prevent their exploitation of the commons. Communism reduces that competition to a single lane, and for that it will necessarily and always fail.
Nothing would help the working class more than our economy returning to one where only a single parent needs to draw a salary to support their spouse and children. To that end, anything Mamdani does that increases or keeps static the supply of labor will have harms outweighing all other benefits, and that's even granting that all of his other policies achieve their stated goals.
daguerrean
7hr ago
There's an active 4chan thread right now where guys are swapping stories about how much they love NEET girls. As in, "whoa, you're telling me she hasn't had a job since college, AND she never leaves her room, AND she has severe social anxiety? Now that's what I'm talkin' about, I want that". You'll have to take my word for it that they really are fetishizing the status of NEET-ness itself. And they can do this with anything, rich or poor women, fat or skinny, smart or dumb, socially successful or an anxious wreck, it don't matter. Could you imagine any woman saying "you know I really just want an unemployed loser, that's what really gets me going"? If there are any such women, they're a rare breed indeed.
I think this is actually sort of analogous to women allegedly preferring "dad bods". I don't think any woman genuinely finds a dad bod more sexually thrilling in isolation, but for a woman self-conscious about her own weight the idea of a man that lives at the gym and eats a stricter diet than a supermodel just sounds intimidating and miserable. I think 4chan NEETs are not necessarily attracted to a NEET girl so much as they just imagine that she will be attainable and have low standards in men and make their own failure less humiliating.
My understanding is that women are in more unanimous agreement about the attractiveness of various features. For example, tall is considered more attractive than short by probably 99% of women. It's just that women place less emphasis on attractiveness relative to social status/dominance, confidence and so forth. Men are more varied in their physical tastes, a nontrivial percentage of men seem to genuinely prefer mega-obese women not merely as a compromise of necessity but as their first choice. But irrespective of their physical preferences, physical looks are regarded as much more important.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
25m ago
We've picked a plan off of a builder's site that we liked.
Note that architectural plans are copyrighted, so if you want to use that plan you have to also use that builder, unless the same plan has been licensed by multiple builders from a separate architect.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
38m ago
Having big muscles does change people's perceptions of you. I doubt he would've gotten this banger song made about him if he looked like a nerd: https://youtube.com/watch?v=vTyeZjo7n_M
No_one
3hr ago
Christ, women must hate her with a burning passion. @Sloot is hitting the nail on the head there. They envy her because she, despite her manifest flaws, age, and rough looks, she locked down the second richest guy in the world. Who is, by most accounts of people who reported to him, one of the most terrifying, ruthless and capable nerds out there. No doubt he smells fakers and gold-diggers before they round the corner. Yet this plastic bimbo somehow got him.
least comfortable in his marriage
Going by the charities his ex-wife keeps donating to, she must be either trying to get back at Bezos or is a liberal NPC. I'm not sure how happy one might be with
grognard
Intel Pentium III 450 / Nvidia Riva TNT2 Ultra / Corsair 128MB PC133 / ABIT BH6
58m ago
Always Windows 98 of course. Check my flare.
jkf
59m ago
I can fit your stated requirements into 1301 ft2. Use your imagination!
Congratulations, you just invented the double-wide trailer!
We could all technically live, Gilded Age–style, in a single room, but I don't want that. I'd want a living room and a space for a dinner table.
Clarification: That big central room is a combination living/dining room, as permitted under IPMC § 404.5.2. (I was just too lazy to label it.) A width of 7 feet may seem small, but under IRC § R312.2 it is permissible, and Architectural Graphic Standards for Residential Construction fig. 2.24 indicates that it is sufficient for a dining table to fit, as long as everybody sits on the same side. (If I'd had the book in front of me when I made the drawing, I would have made the living/dining room 8 feet wide, so that people could face each other across the dining table. With that mild augmentation, the area rises to 1347 ft2 + 94.5 in2.)
I'm also trying to do a 2-floor build.
Note that the IRC's prescriptive design assumes that the second floor will contain only bedrooms and implicitly bathrooms. (Compare table R403.1(1) note b with table R301.5.) If you ignore that assumption, you may have to pay extra for an engineer's services, since the architect will not be able to just copy-and-paste from the IRC's tables.
Here's a design that meets your new criteria. (I'm assuming a detached garage, and not bothering to draw it.) (Whoops—swap the office and the kitchen.)
After this thread I think I need to hire an architect.
Come up with your own original design first, before letting an architect mess stuff up. Doodling random floor plans is fun!
Also, I think you should go straight to a homebuilder (which will have an in-house architect), not to an architect. I tried hiring several architects, and did manage to get one to help me pick a lot, but they generally didn't seem very interested in me. Presumably they have bigger fish to fry, such as designing larger commercial, industrial, and apartment buildings.
DradisPing
1hr ago
I see it more as a rejection of Cuomo than any great socialist uprising.
My takeaway is that it's just over for white boomer Democrats. They can keep their current jobs but won't be able to win nominations for any new office.
Ezra Klein had some good articles talking about the progressive theory of power and how it causes problems for city administration.
These are more for background than supporting my argument.
Basically the problem is that progressives are completely dedicated to the idea that billionaires and greedy corporations are the ones causing all of the problems.
However at the city level the problems tend to stem from:
-
Disorderly elements. eg low level criminals like shoplifters, people with sever substance abuse problems, or severe mental illness.
-
Left wing organizations trying to tack on fees to everything to get paid.
Progressives are completely unable to acknowledge that either of those groups cause problems. The idea that left wing groups are just being greedy rent seekers goes against their whole world view.
So you get ideas like government owned grocery stores. During a past attempt to tackle "food deserts", in I think Detroit, a grocery store complained that shoplifting was putting them out of business. A city councillor told them that lossage was just part of the price of doing business in Detroit. So the grocery store shut down the location.
I don't think the solution is really any fundamental social change. The issue is that people on the center left like to play defence for the farther left and hide the crazier elements of their philosophy from the general public. The progressives think that the media hides their beliefs out of some conspiracy against them instead of an attempt to protect them.
There needs to be a documentary series on a major streaming service that, as fairly and calmly as possible, shows what progressive populists believe and what the problems with it are. Right now it's being taught in colleges as the absolute truth with no analysis.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
7hr ago
Male sexuality is a lot simpler than female sexuality. Jeff could have destroyed his marriage for a nubile twenty-something with naturally big assets, but he went for tawdry 'sexy' with the trout pout and plastic boobs
I have to be careful to distinguish here between how much of my experience is idiosyncratic and how much of it can generalize, because I find the Sanchez woman to be rather repulsive, but evidently there are many men who do not.
If you listen to TRP/manosphere content, you'll frequently here them say "men have the biggest variety of preferences, men can fall in love with anything, but women only want one thing (and that thing is Chad)". This is one of their favorite talking points, they repeat it quite often. And women often react with incredulity when they hear this, and they claim that reality is in fact that exact opposite. "What? All men just want a 'hot' woman. But my hubby, he's got a bit of a potbelly and he isn't the tallest, but he's got a great smile and a heart of gold, so I love him all the same. Obviously women's preferences are more varied and less superficial."
I think the key to resolving the dilemma is that, although the secondary and tertiary traits can vary greatly, there are certain key traits that, if absent in a man, will make it very hard for a woman to be romantically attracted to him. As far as my observations can confirm anyway. Although, pinning down exactly what these traits are is a bit difficult. It's not stability per se, nor is it social dominance per se, nor is it social adeptness per se, but rather it's more like an abstract distilled commonality that forms a part of all these traits. We might call it "agency", or projecting a sense of "in-control-ness", if not over his external environment then at least over himself. If a man can't demonstrate at least a minimal amount of "put-together-ness", then he's not going to have much luck with women.
What the TRP guys are correctly intuiting is that men have no such minimal criteria. In spite of the fact that there are clear patterns, at the end of the day they really can go for absolutely anything. There's an active 4chan thread right now where guys are swapping stories about how much they love NEET girls. As in, "whoa, you're telling me she hasn't had a job since college, AND she never leaves her room, AND she has severe social anxiety? Now that's what I'm talkin' about, I want that". You'll have to take my word for it that they really are fetishizing the status of NEET-ness itself. And they can do this with anything, rich or poor women, fat or skinny, smart or dumb, socially successful or an anxious wreck, it don't matter. Could you imagine any woman saying "you know I really just want an unemployed loser, that's what really gets me going"? If there are any such women, they're a rare breed indeed.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
5hr ago
This is exactly it. They often mean "guy who looks like he can deadlift and bench a VW Beetle, but has some softness around the midsection (so he's probably not insane about tracking his diet, but also so him having too-defined abs doesn't make me feel insecure about my own body)."
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
11hr ago
socialism seems like a fair response to the complete ineptitude of our political class.
It's bizarre to me that you think the political class is inept, and you think the best response is to give them more power to screw things up in the economy.
Socialism at the federal level mostly means endlessly bloating the elder care apparatus, whereas socialism at the state + local level mostly means bribing connected nonprofits and unions to provide various crappy services that don't really work. Zohran's idea for city-run grocery stores is very dumb and will probably be dropped or completely overhauled after a few pilot programs demonstrate how silly it is.
hydroacetylene
5hr ago
Very possible that what women mean by dad bod is not what's popularly envisioned, too.
I've been musing an effortpost about this, but I think that law and order has been an incredibly negative influence. It completely messes with peoples sense of how common things are in society and what the problems are with the justice system.
A crime and law drama that conformed better with the realities on the ground would be a good thing.
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