domain:worksinprogress.co
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
3m ago
If we step out of the realm of absolutes and extremes, I think we can say that a preference for some degree of chastity in a partner is real and good, or at least a perfectly legitimate preference. My personal belief is that women who have had a large number of sexual partners tend to be emotionally damaged and are probably not going to be good long-term relationship choices. Preferring someone that has a more normal history seems just fine to me.
On the flip side, like you said, it's worth noting that just getting someone that has a fairly normal history isn't actually sufficient to tamp down the gnawing insecurity about the past. There really is a part of the male ego that many of us have to vary degrees that just wants to be the fucking best, period, completely unthreatened by those losers in the past. But then if they were losers, that devalues her! This whole mental spiral is just wildly unhelpful, so addressing it internally is worthwhile. Addressing it also doesn't mean completely throwing away the healthy alarm bell though - if you notice that someone really did hook up with dozens of guys, yeah, there's probably a problem there and it's good to not just smash that feeling.
Like so many emotions, the emotion has value, but needs to be balanced. Righteous anger is an appropriate response to some situations and a poor response to others. The correct approach to righteous anger isn't to try to eliminate it, it's to understand its origins and make sure that it's only triggering when it's actually appropriate. Likewise for the old green-eyed jealousy - you should feel like guarding your partner, but you can't take it to the extreme of getting all weepy because you're not the first partner a 25-year-old woman has had.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
6m ago
I like it.
Specifically, I like it a lot better than the pseudo-stratification that we’re getting by relying on high deductible health plans.
NewCharlesInCharge
8m ago
Remember the "don't say gay" bill? If you were being very charitable, you could say that the so-called "don't say gay" bill in Florida did prohibit "saying gay" in certain contexts, so I suppose the reporting on it comported with Scott's ideas on bounded distrust, that the media rarely concts outright lies.
But the reporting on North Carolina's HB 237 looks to consist of outright lies. Background: the state already has a law on the books that prohibits concealing your identity when committing a crime, with a consequence that the class of misdemeanor or felony commited gets bumped up by one. During the pandemic they added an extemption to the law for thsoe wearing a mask for health reasons. HB 237 removes that exemption.
News media are reporting that North Carolina is banning mask wearing in public. Some examples of those spreading the idea that this is a general ban on public masking:
- Winston-Salem Journal: Bill to end masking in north Carolina clears Senate. Health advocates say completely barring masks could hurt people who are immunocompromised
- US News and World Report: North Carolina Lawmakers Push Bill to Ban Most Public Mask Wearing, Citing Crime
- Charlotte Observer: The party of ‘freedom’ wants to ban mask-wearing for health reasons in NC
WaPo adds some more context, and describes the law as a prohibition on masking during a crime, but still lies in their headline by saying that the bill bans mask wearing at protests generally:
netstack
Texas is freedom land
10m ago
That…isn’t that how it already works? It’s definitely true for speeding and vehicular manslaughter sentencing. I don’t really want to spend my afternoon looking for overpass suicides, but I would not expect the truck to be blamed in that scenario, either.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11m ago
Should I fix myself? No, it is the women who are wrong.
Could be true, but probably not very useful advice.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
12m ago
And people say the U.S. is too car-centric!
This would be a terrible policy. People already burn their cars for insurance fraud. This adds an obvious incentive to cause personal injuries while you’re at it.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
14m ago
My favorite story of the day is an intersection of old Covid drama, current protest drama, and a healthy dose of TheMediaRarelyLiestm. Per the news headlines, NC Senate votes to ban people from wearing masks in public for health reasons:
The North Carolina Senate voted along party lines Wednesday to ban anyone from wearing masks in public for health reasons, following an emotional debate about the wisdom of the proposal.
Republican supporters of the ban said it would help police crack down on protesters who wear masks — which some lawmakers called a growing concern, saying demonstrators are abusing Covid-19 pandemic-era norms to wear masks that hide their identities.
Now, I will certainly admit to having a great deal of contempt for people that are still wearing masks and having immediately experienced some schadenfreude, but as someone that just doesn't really trust the media to rarely lie, I thought I had better go check what the bill actually says. As it turns out, what the bill does is strikethrough a temporary exemption that had been added as a Covid-era protection:
SECTION 1.(a) G.S. 14-12.11 reads as rewritten: 19 "§ 14-12.11. Exemptions from provisions of Article. 20 (a) Any of the following are exempted from the provisions of G.S. 14-12.7, 14-12.8, 21 14-12.9, 14-12.10 and 14-12.14: 22 (1) Any person or persons wearing traditional holiday costumes in season. 23
(2) Any person or persons engaged in trades and employment where a mask is 24 worn for the purpose of ensuring the physical safety of the wearer, or because 25 of the nature of the occupation, trade or profession. 26
(3) Any person or persons using masks in theatrical productions including use in 27 Mardi Gras celebrations and masquerade balls. 28
(4) Persons wearing gas masks prescribed in civil defense drills and exercises or 29 emergencies. 30
(5) Any person or persons, as members or members elect of a society, order or 31 organization, engaged in any parade, ritual, initiation, ceremony, celebration 32 or requirement of such society, order or organization, and wearing or using 33 any manner of costume, paraphernalia, disguise, facial makeup, hood, 34 General Assembly Of North Carolina Session 2023 Page 2 House Bill 237-Fourth Edition implement or device, whether the identity of such person or persons is 1 concealed or not, on any public or private street, road, way or property, or in 2 any public or private building, provided permission shall have been first 3 obtained therefor by a representative of such society, order or organization 4 from the governing body of the municipality in which the same takes place, 5 or, if not in a municipality, from the board of county commissioners of the 6 county in which the same takes place. 7
(6) Any person wearing a mask for the purpose of ensuring the physical health or 8 safety of the wearer or others.
The strikethrough in the quote is the only exemption eliminated by the change. The actual text of the criminal statute 14-12.7 is:
§ 14‑12.7. Wearing of masks, hoods, etc., on public ways. No person or persons at least 16 years of age shall, while wearing any mask, hood or device whereby the person, face or voice is disguised so as to conceal the identity of the wearer, enter, be or appear upon any lane, walkway, alley, street, road, highway or other public way in this State. (1953, c. 1193, s. 6; 1983, c. 175, ss. 1, 10; c. 720, s. 4.)
The other sections say essentially the same thing, but for a few other contexts. The core of these is that it's illegal to use a mask to conceal the identity of a wearer in public places. The Covid-era text was being used as a way for people to conceal their identities and use the health carveout as a shield against the plain meaning of the law by playing the Taylor Lorenz card. In contrast, no, little old ladies going to medical appointments scared out of their minds and wearing N-95s aren't going to be stopped by police, because they're obviously not attempting to conceal their identity at health clinic.
One might be inclined to explore whether this is one of those rare media lies or whether they didn't quite technically lie, but I don't personally find that a terribly interesting game to play. Instead, I think the interesting thing to consider is why Democrats are so strongly opposed to this. I can see a few options, none of which are mutually exclusive. In roughly ascending order of badness:
-
They simply don't understand the law despite the plain text reading that indicates that the exemptions are only relevant in the case one that has actually violated the criminal statute in the first place. In being so confused, they think eliminating the exemptions really is banning people from wearing masks.
-
Distrust for Republicans runs so deep that despite the text being clear and obvious, they think that villainous right-leaning prosecutors will start filing charges against people that have done nothing other than go to their chemotherapy appointment with a mask on.
-
They don't really think there's anything wrong with the reversion, but they see it as a good opportunity to call Republicans fascist grandma-killers.
-
Support for protestors concealing their identity while behaving badly actually does run strong with some on the left and they see keeping the easy loophole of everyone just being able to claim it's for their health as a very good and important thing to do.
To me, these all make my opponents sound very bad! I don't think they're actually uncharitable though and suspect that some would just outright articulate the second and fourth options above as their rationale. For my part, I'll pre-register my prediction that the statute will only be used against people that are actually committing crimes, not against random mask enthusiasts that are otherwise doing nothing wrong. If I turn out to be wrong, it's time for some introspection.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
16m ago
Maybe there’s a problem with repatriation? I don’t actually know if countries have to accept criminals if they’re originally citizens.
SomethingMusic
18m ago
The breaking of social covenant and the rise of selfish societies
Recently in the news, Red Lobster is reporting an 11 million dollar loss, which is forcing the company to close many restaurants and possible file for chapter 11. The problem? Their '$20 all you can eat shrimp' deal was too good. Some anecdotal evidence indicates that large tables would order one or two orders of the never-ending deal, causing huge losses as large parties would share a single plate for $20, causing significant restaurant losses.
In the past few years, NYC has seen significant increases in retail theft, with stores facing many millions of dollar losses, with the estimate of retail theft being up to 4.4 billion dollars for the state alone. The cost of thefts cause a cyclical cycle, it forces stores to raise prices to cover the loss of the theft, which in turn prices people out of purchasing goods, which again raises theft. So far, the plans the governor has been trying to put into place seems to have done little to curtail any theft.
A 2024 jobs report shows a massive shortage of manufacturing labor, with 770,000 manufacturing jobs open. Labor participation has not recovered from the COVID crisis, with participation at 63.3% just before corvid and around 62.5% from the most recent report. Labor participation was highest before the 2008 housing crisis during the Bush admin around 67%. 7.5 million men have dropped out of America's workforce, meaning that they are not job seeking and therefore wouldn't be tracked as part of unemployment in FRED data.
There's a lot of words spilled on the internet on 'high trust societies'. Places like Japan where a lost item will be much more likely returned to its owner than, say, Detroit. Or rural America, where people will pay money at an unattended farm stand for fresh fruits and/or vegetables. However, trust doesn't fully cover what's going on in the west. /u/johnfabian's post is not about trust, but rather the breaking down of the covenant between constituents and their governments that keep a society basically functions. These social functions are much more simple than trust. It's about not running a red light, not driving the wrong way down a highway, or waiting in line for a train rather than trying to crowd on regardless of capacity.
Western society flourishing was largely predicated on this tacit understood social covenant: on an individual level, each person does their best to contribute through labor - be it stocking shelves to software development to entrepreneurship. In turn, the government upholds the status quo and optimizes legislation for stability and prosperity for the working class.
However in recent times this has changed. I'm not sure if the western governments decided they can have it's cake and eat it, too, or that the only way to perpetuate power is finding a new voter base, but the recent focus on marginalized groups has significantly eroded the trust away from indigenous constituents. It doesn't take a genius to tell that demographic groups are being treated, litigated, and policed based off of completely different rule books, and this type of treatment always creates division and resentment. The covenant between government and the constituencies broke, which changed the payoff matrix. As governments pick and choose which demographics to control, people become more selfish, as the ability to create value from freer markets diminish.
This is why 'selfish societies' is a better term than 'low trust' societies. As much as people love to yell at corporations for perusing short term gains, individuals pursue selfish gains at the cost of others even more as shown from my examples alone. Trust does not fully explain how people behave in the aforementioned examples, but selfishness does. Low male employment, antiwork, and the rise of NEET-dom has nothing to do with trust, but selfishness adequately describes the motivations for the ideological positions they hold. Obesity isn't a trust issue, it's a selfish issue, where people would rather eat themselves into oblivion instead of finding a healthy balance and self restraint. Even the declining birthrate is a result of selfishness; people would prefer to have the increased income and enjoyment of consequence-free fornication instead of laying an effective and positive groundwork for future generations.
The question, then, is it possible for a government to regain the respect of its constituents, and can the people understand that there needs to be some amount of selflessness to create an environment to nurture the next generation?
Sheepclothes
18m ago
Is it real and good, though? If you have a partner, is she "pure"? Restricting myself to virgins is not a viable life strategy, and way harder than fixing this. According to others with this condition who have tried, it doesn't even help. If anything, my monkey hindbrain is using this as an excuse to break up with her for other reasons. I'm open to admitting that.
sliders1234
22m ago
Solution isn’t simple. Countries have tried economic incentives and mostly failed or slowed the decline.
It also introduces a huge deadweight loss of higher taxes. Since most of these ideal heavily bread females would be supported by heavily taxed men who are their husbands it’s wooing just further depress economic activity. The past would have expected the man to man up and work 80 hrs a week if he needed and transfer directly to his wife instead of using the government as a middleman.
Probably far easier to propandize all the Instagram executives. Instead of filling young females with attractive girls traveling to Bali bombard them with pretty pregnant chicks with 5 children and a dutiful loving husband. You can change economic incentives sure but changing what people value changes how the evaluate incentives. If real life hot pussy is begging men to man up I am guessing there is no shortage of men willing to work 80 hours a week for that deal.
Social media turned a not insignificant faction of young girls into Hamas lovers so I would bet on social media being able to make young girls obsessed with cute little humans.
My understanding with meth, and I've been "out of the game" as it were for a little while, is that Mexican OC and their partners (the mentioned bikers) have had US meth distribution on lockdown for a while. Its manufactured semi-openly in Mexico in large amounts and smuggled in for distro with local groups.
One thing that a chemist might find lucrative nowadays are the broad range of "technically legal" drugs that have flooded the market in permissive states. I don't know a whole ton about those though, other than the local guys who set up a lab extracting the psychoactive substances from legal hemp, the various D8/D9/THC-A etc edibles and vape carts that have flooded head shops in the last decade or so.
edit - Independent meths labs were absolutely a viable enterprise for a good period of time though. I'd estimate from the early 80s through the late 00s you could make a go of it, especially if you had actual professional level skills. Tons of absolutely garbage crank got sold for decent amounts of money in the heyday. Pure meth, or "Ice" always went for a premium as most amateurs were entirely unable to make it. By the time you started hearing about clandestine labs exploding, and years before Breaking Bad debuted, it was pretty much on the way out though. Putting the cold pills behind the counter, and tracking the other possible precursors really worked. Many of the amateur labs operated entirely off of cold medicine shoplifted by addicts who were paid in finished drugs for supplying ingredients. I knew several people involved in this as many levels back in the late 90s. Its basically impossible now unless you can somehow divert from the inside. One funny anecdote (to me anyway) was that the tweekers who paid in cold medicine were referred to as Smurfs.
Ding ding.
There seems to be a situation where a corporate job is, dare I say, a substitute good for a committed husband. A woman getting a corporate job is given healthcare, a retirement account, oftentimes food and transport are subsidized, she gets a social life and maybe some travel attached to work, and is REWARDED for giving up her prime childbearing years to produce extra value for the shareholders. Many of the reasons women have 'settled down' with men in the past are satisfied by a decent job that provides baseline benefits as part of the package.
But a corporate job can't provide her with a kid. So while all the above 'benefits' are legible, the opportunity cost of NOT having a kid is not concrete until, say, 15 years down the line where she's got a career but she's still single and childless and her bio clock is punishing her for not reproducing.
Looking at it that way, males are in direct competition with megacorps to attract mates who will want to raise kids. They have to offer a 'better deal', which is to say they have to make enough money to provide shelter, healthcare, retirement, food, transport, etc. And if the female isn't explicitly incorporating 'bear and raise children' into her calculation then the corporate job looks like a solid choice.
So yes, WHY are women discounting the sacrifice of their childbearing years so heavily? Are they actually aware of the opportunity cost there?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
26m ago
In summary, low entropy implies high predictability and low information content.
...Am I crazy, or is this the exact opposite of how the term is used in physics? Like, heat-death is a high-entropy state, right? it's also highly ordered and predictable, right? Did information theory actually flip the sign on the term?
Thoroughlygruntled
31m ago
I just want to throw in a quick statement of support for the current rule. The rarity of finding free discussion of controversial topics that doesn't immediately devolve into 4chan-level shitposting is the entire reason I'm here. No moderation is ever going to be perfect, but the Motte is one of the best moderated discussion forums I've ever seen. You guys really don't get enough credit for that.
Almost all of them? Even in the heavily male dominated industries you mention women are somewhere between 10 and 30% of all workers. Do you think if 36% of all farmers disappeared no one would notice? What about 10% of all construction workers? Or hell, how about healthcare. Would no one notice if 88% of all nurses disappeared overnight? What about 38% of all physicians?
ALMOST making my point here.
Who would notice if nurses and physicians disappeared? People with doctor's appointments, or the elderly and infirm who depend on nursing care.
Most people wouldn't notice right away because most aren't going to see a nurse or doctor very often.
Compare that to say, if your local power plant shut down because all the staff left. Who would notice? Literally every person whose electricity just switched off.
In the case of physicians, the economic impact wouldn't be immediate because economic activity could still continue even as the healthcare system suffered from a huge backlog. We kinda 'proved' this during Covid. Work continues even if the hospitals are overwhelmed.
In the case of energy production, or internet infrastructure, tons of economic activity would INSTANTLY cease because those inputs are NECESSARY to said activity. So we'd "notice" immediately.
10% of construction workers would indeed be a hit, but with some reshuffling construction would continue.
Also, it is of course likely that just because they make up some significant portion of the workforce, it does NOT imply they're actually responsible for the same share of actual productivity.
If the female 36% of all farmers are only producing 10% of the food, the actual felt impact is less severe than the first number would imply.
And that's a good distillation of my point. Its likely that 80% of economic productivity is the result of the efforts of 20% of the people. And I'd bet my left testicle that the most productive members of the economy are mostly male.
So if females quit working and we lost 50% of the workforce, I would guess we'd lose closer to 10% of economic productivity. Which is to say... we'd survive.
And if females quit working and we lost 50% of the workforce but actually devoted themselves to raising kids such that all childcare costs were internalized, the actual hit would probably be negligible.
If she quits working outside the home to raise a child very little of that value comes back to her in a form that can be spent to sustain herself. If the state wants more women to choose raising children then more of the value that action produces needs to come to them in a form they can use to sustain themselves.
I think to make this proposal make sense, it would be simpler to say that the male whose sperm produced the child she's caring for is on the hook to pay her for her work caring for the child. Rather than the government taking the male's money via taxes and distributing it to women as some kind of subsidy just give her a direct claim to the guy's money as compensation.
I think it is, more specifically, technological development. It reduces the amount of labor needed to perform household tasks, freeing that labor up for other uses, and increases economic productivity at various tasks outside the home. Technological development simultaneously increases the benefits and reduces the opportunity cost of working outside the home.
The huge glaring irony, though, is that almost any female-centric industry can be to some extent 'replaced' by technology (I will grant that this is NOT the case for Nursing)... except bearing and raising kids.
Like, any job that a female can do, a male with the right tools, automation, and basic support can presumably also do. EXCEPT THE PRECISE JOB THAT FEMALES EVOLVED OVER MILLENNIA TO PERFORM, which men still struggle with despite better tech. In the case of bearing children, men are literally incapable of doing it.
So it seems like steps toward a solution require us to 'un-taboo' the idea that females bearing children is in fact a good social priority and women should be encouraged to become mothers.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
37m ago
Fair, I was working from the OP's statement about whether economic activity would be "seriously disrupted." I'm not sure how serious it would have to but I think all the examples I give would qualify.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
40m ago
Almost all of them? Even in the heavily male dominated industries you mention women are somewhere between 10 and 30% of all workers. Do you think if 36% of all farmers disappeared no one would notice? What about 10% of all construction workers? Or hell, how about healthcare. Would no one notice if 88% of all nurses disappeared overnight? What about 38% of all physicians?
You're equivocating between "wouldn't notice" and "wouldn't grind to a halt".
I know LLMs are banned here so mods please don’t ban me for this. Here is what I get from chatGPT when I ask “what does it mean for something to be low entropy in the context of the information it contains?”
In the context of information theory, low entropy indicates that the information content is highly predictable and ordered. Entropy, a concept introduced by Claude Shannon, measures the uncertainty or randomness in a set of data. When entropy is low, the data has less randomness and is more structured, meaning that there is less information content or fewer surprises in the data.
For example, a string of repeated characters like "AAAAA" has low entropy because the next character is easily predictable. Conversely, a string of random characters like "G7d2#k9" has high entropy because the next character is unpredictable. In summary, low entropy implies high predictability and low information content.
This is what I mean. Very low information, skimmable (because it’s predictable and repetitive).
I agree that “low information density” would be a better way of phrasing this, it seems like I am using this term wrong. Thank you!
fartVader
42m ago
Fair enough. But towns like Edison NJ, Redmond WA, Sunnyvale CA & Fremont CA sit on a whole another tier. (afaik)
nice place with good schools
The schools are good because the people are rich and the residents are hard working. If the schools are to stay good, it makes sense that newest generation of rich and hard working people are moving in.
good schools is 10x in prices
Nimbyism strikes again. Enough place for everyone, but SFHs screw everyone over. Especially true in places like OC and SD, where the populations could 5x without space being an issue.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
42m ago
I think I touch on this in my last paragraph. From the perspective of the person choosing to have children (or not) a lot of the social benefit of having and raising a child comes in the form of a positive externality they don't receive. Maybe it's an opportunity cost for society to, in some sense, have someone work rather than raise children but that externality isn't an opportunity cost for the people doing the choosing, they were never going to receive that benefit anyway.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
46m ago
I did not intend to denigrate them by calling them wants instead of needs, sorry if it came off that way. I agree those things cannot be satisfied without some kind of fundamental change in human nature. I'm interested in what this coordination end looks like.
fartVader
46m ago
I understand your concern, but look at it in context.
infested with Indian and Chinese tech workers
I said that
Indian or Chinese, bay-area tech workers
and I am one of them (though I wanna leave the bay area asap)
It is a phrasing we use among ourselves all the time. It is easy to be self-deprecating when you're making bank.
this seems to be a place where it's ok to call an immigrant group an infestation
Yes, I can call my own group of people whatever I want. I was being edgy, sure. But, you're making quite the leap, going from 1 mis-used word to accusations of chattel-slavery era racism.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
50m ago
What counts as "low?" According to the World bank Japan has a female LFPR of 55%, Italy's is 41%, and Israel's is 61%. This is compared to, say, the United States at 53% or Afghanistan at 5%. Israel is an outlier in terms of TFR but I'm given to understand that's heavily driven by population subgroups that mostly don't work.
Maybe this comes down to a drive for status and status alone? If they are encultured in a society that gives less status to mothers/housewives than it does to those in corporate positions, moving up the corporate pecking order would be the rational choice for a status-seeking agent. The exceptions—Mormons, traditional Catholics, Amish, etc.—are cultures that afford status to mothers of larger broods of children.
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