100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
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User ID: 2039
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
11mo ago
I've searched for it dozens of times, including opening up old laptops and pouring over their browser histories, but I can't find it.
"It" was a blog that a FtM (that's chick-to-dude) transitioner was keeping about their ... transition. It was well written, deeply personal, and absolutely without trans ideology talking points or vibes. It was a wonderful example of an honest seeming person without any sort of ideology-induced hangups. It was incredibly and (unfortunately) uniquely informative.
The author shares one story about either beginning or hitting a major increase in the hormone replacement process. He's excited that he's going to start feeling testosterone-y like all other dudes. The week this starts, he's driving to work in traffic and someone cuts him off. He reports that, all of a sudden, he has a full blown panic attack and has to pull over to try to calm down. Perhaps the hormone replacement process has a high variance early period? Maybe he jacked up the dosage? Hmm, concerning.
I should note here that the author writes about going to a trans support group in his city. They help each other with the process as the different members are at different stages.
The author relates how he shares this panic attack incident to his group. There's an odd silence and some chuckling from some of the FtM's further along. People share knowing looks. Finally, one of them pipes up and says, "Dude .... you got "guy angry" for the first time." In a wonderful moment of self-awareness, the author writes about how he (when he was a she) never came close to appreciating what true male rage felt like. Even when "she" was 10/10 steamin' mad for some reason, it never came close to .... How a dude feels in Tuesday morning traffic when some asshole cuts him off.
I hope this jogs the memory of someone else who can point to that blog. There was a lot of good knowledge in there.
Anyway - I apply a similar view on male versus female sexual drive. It's definitely a difference in kind. It's been highlighted hundreds of times that men watch porn and women read trashy novels that end up at a sexual encounter but with a lot of very cringey situational foreplay. The male fantasy is the act itself, the female fantasy is the journey to the act. It is, however, also a difference in degree. I believe women when they say they get "super duper horny." I believe that, in their own framework of horny intensity judgement, they are at 10/10 Would Fck Again. But how does this compare to a male arousal rubric? I submit that female "10/10 Would Fck Again" is near equivalent to "Popped a bone watching that new Shakira music video on mute while at the airport bar." I'm having a little bit of fun here, so please don't try to nuke me on the rough comparison.
None of this should be taken as a judgement in validity, value, or worthiness of either male/female anger/arousal. Any moron who tells a woman, "oh, you're just girl angry, it's not that big of a deal" deserves whatever kitchen implement is launched at his head. And any idiot who tells his date, "No, but, like, I really want to fuck" deserves his future session of sullen, very alone rage masturbation.
I wanted to add something related but tangential to @self_made_human 's post on therapists.
The business model issue.
Without doxxing myself, I'm just going to say that I once had a person who ran / co-owned a therapy practice explain how his business ran. He and his partner would contract with independent providers who would contract with them, they guy and his partner would handle all of the overhead, paperwork, legal, marketing, etc. and take a percentage of patient fees.
He told me that the customers break down into three groups.
The first two are what you would probably expect.
The first group is more or less stable people who go through specifically difficult life circumstances and require the services of a therapist for some amount of time. People after a divorce, death in the family, traumatic event. In addition, you also have those with enduring mental health issues (major depression, bipolar etc.) that can function in society but probably need therapy and possible medication to do it. In many ways, these are the "best" patients in that the therapist gets to see them heal, grow, thrive etc. Very much a win-win.
The second group are folks with severe mental illness that have sought out therapy usually with the assistance of family and / or friends. Now, because the guy telling me about this was running a very much for-profit no-insurance practice, I will caveat that this is one perspective / reality. I can definitely see how this group's dynamics may be different at other kind of practices / state sponsored hospitals etc. Anyways, these folks have brutal situations and are doing what they can to manage. In addition to the severe mental illness, substance abuse and other self-destructive behaviors are super common. Some therapists really are dedicated and do what they can to help, but few and far between see these folks really turn it around. Maybe a few "stabilize" and can live with a lot of family support.
So, here's the first business question. Do you think Group 2 here can ... pay their bills? on time? Even with family support, the answer is "no."
But that first group! Surely they always pay. The answer is "yes" .... for a time. Remember, folks in that first group often "get their shit together" after 6 months, a year, two, three ... And even the ones that are getting therapy for decades are probably not doing it weekly after a while. They often slow down to once a month or even less frequently as check-ins.
So, from a cash flow perspective, you're in a rough spot; some percentage of your patients are so unreliable you can't really put much confidence in their recurring revenue. Another percentage pays, but does not pay with enough volume or long term durability to cover that other group. What to do?
Group Motherfuckin' 3.
Group 3 are the textbook, highly online, utterly insufferable "therapy culture" people. Soccer moms, yuppie young professionals who probably had awesome childhoods, confused and wistful early retirees, college professors (who may be banging those young professionals), and art history majors. Unfulfilled dads don't get therapy - they become very good at grilling meat and an expert in either WW2 or the Civil War (God Bless all ye taxpayers!). Group 3 is at least weekly in their visits. Many are more frequent. Most will go through periods of "needing" more intense therapy. They change prescriptions a lot for .... unknown reasons. If they catch a hint of lack of interest from the therapist, you can bet they will effect some sort of scene outside of therapy to re-energize their sessions (_"When we were in Cabo, I told Braden that I wanted to try polyamory. He just went golfing without saying a word! HOW CAN I LIVE LIKE THIS!") I'll be nice a little here; sometimes, Group 3 types just need a little professional reassurance and they do turn their shit around. Sometimes, even, they realize a lot of their problems are of their own making or that their perspective was just miscalibrated. Yet, the majority are absolutely using a therapist as a paid friend. Depending on where you live, lap dances from strippers are more cost effective.
Back to business - how do we square the circle of Group 1 and Group 2 not covering our costs or making us money?
Group Motherfuckin' 3. And boy do they Make. That. Money.
What to take away from this? As @self_made_human 's post pointed out - therapy works (if you work at it, I would add). But the problem is that so much of the therapy business and market is now geared towards "therapy culture" people that it's creating a really bad situation in which new providers either think that everyone they're going to meet is just an exasperated housewife or, even worse, that everyone they're going to meet is just an exasperated housewife who doesn't care if it's $275 / hr holy shit free money hack. When that second group comes face to face with their first hard case of a patient, it can be horribly destabilizing for both of them. The proliferation of the online telehealth therapists is the poster child for this.
What's the market solution? I don't have one and I don't want one. If we ever get to the point as a society where we really deeply subsidize mental health services, we're going to be broke overnight. Think about that - that's creating a free service for when you feel bad. Absolutely uncapped demand. And, as I hope this post as pointed out, the way it works in practice, you do have an effective voluntary (albeit semi-informed) wealth transfer tax. I will never not let rich people spend their money the way they see fit.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3mo ago
This is the professional website of the study's lead author
This is me reading tea-leaves a little bit, but some things stand out to me.
The majority of his academic background is in business (MBA) and a fanci-fied version of IT. His professional experience was with CACI which is laughably described as a "mid-size" consulting firm. CACI is a notorious "body shop" Beltway Bandit that makes billions of dollars off of staff augmentation for Federal Contracts. Their own website states they employ about 25,000 people.
This provides a mental model, at least, of how this study - and its accompanying malfeasance - came into being. This is a consultant in a classroom. "What does the client want as an outcome? Racism. Okay, great! We can work the numbers to make it say that."
In the Daily Caller piece that the reddit post links to, they have a screenshot of this guy's Microsoft Word comments - one of them literally says, "this is not the story we're trying to tell." This is straight out of a consulting 101 MBA class.
At some point in the 2000s, Academia became a kind of side option career for people who aren't actually serious academics or researchers. You could pickup up a PhD from somewhere in something and then get associate or adjunct status. Sure, this salary wasn't great, but it gave you that credential to pass around as a digital hustler - you could go on podcasts, do paid speaking engagements, consult on the side for $300 an hour. It was a weird kind of self-reputation-maxxing. And that's part of the real long term rot of the academy. If you got a PhD in the 1950s or before, it's because you were almost monkish in your devotion to serious study in a field.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2yr ago
Liked this post. Two additions for consideration.
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Political / ideological affiliation for all graduate programs outside of the licensing professionals (law, medicine) has shifted left since at least the 1990s. And educational / teacher's graduate programs are in a league all of their own. There's left, there's progressive, there's actual socialists, and then there's teacher's colleges. I just tried to find the report on this that I'm thinking of, but wow is Google really trash theses days. The report I'm thinking of mentions that a reason for this is that graduate education programs, even among the social sciences, has a particular resistance to, well, evidence. Think about it. If you're trying to compare the long term outcomes of a particular teach style, you have to track children over several years and then somehow control for cognitive ability, parental involvement, and personal preferences (Alice likes math naturally etc.) This is impossible almost from the jump. Therefore, a LOT, of the courses taught in graduate education courses are one step away from woo-woo bullshit. I had a family friend who, already quite liberal, shifted his graduate program to education technology (basically finding better ways to catalog and use online materials in public schools) because he was aghast and the low level of rigor in the teaching instruction courses.
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It's worth looking at who teachers used to be and who they are know. Fun fact; there are more active duty Navy SEALs than there are male pre-K teachers in the US. The number of men teaching in public schools at any grade level has plummeted. This is now starting also to happen to women past 40. Classrooms are led by younger, highly educated women, who quickly burn out and do something else. Pair this with administrator's inability to really do anything with disruptive students, and classroom order and discipline is DESTROYED. Then, it doesn't even matter what the instruction style is. Repeating words, guessing them based on context - none of it matters when have the class is filming a TikTok and the most the non-binary double masters grad at the front can do is loudly clear her throat.
This post got longer than initially intended, but you caught me mid caffeine stream. There is no viable path for public education in the US for the close to mid-term. COVID was the last nail in the coffin. Parents will turn to home-schooling and private schools until teachers unions finally go bankrupt because their membership goes to zero.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
11mo ago
The WSJ published an article today about the voting gap between men and women below the age of thirty. The conclusions should be familiar to the Motte's CW crowd and I'll be diving into them in this post. What is striking and, even better, plainly quantitative, is how just how far apart young men and women are on some issues. In several cases, it's 30+ point gaps. Anecdatally, I'm seeing and hearing similar division. That the WSJ is leading with this also shows how it is now firmly in normie discussion circles.
I've always thought that the true risk to American society wasn't a breakdown
in race relations, but in gender sex relations. This is because of the plain
fact that you need the opposite sexes to get along to continue families,
communities, the nation, society as a whole.
I've tried to break it out below.
The Issues
The WSJ highlights the following issues as most divisive to least, first with those issues that women are more in favor of:
- Climate change
- Abortion
- Student Loans
- Gender identity (specifically of children)
Those with the biggest gaps the opposite way, where men approve of the issue moreso than women, are (again, in descending order):
- The Trump era Tax Cuts,
- Repeal and Replace Obama Care (note that overall men are actually slightly on-net negative about this, but women are 23 points more negative),
- Build The Wall (men at -4, women at -47)
Instead of thinking about these in terms of the issues themselves, I've decided to be a little more cultural war-y (because that's. why. we. are. here!) and interpret these issues thusly;
- "Climate change" Is a big, hard to define, but very scary bad thing. It's mythical and functions almost like a curse. Furthermore, it is THE virtue signaling issue. People (think) they get all kinds of social credit for driving an EV or using paper straws etc. It has weird touchy-feely connections to "mother earth" pseudo-religious traditions. Women under 30 probably have a higher likelihood of going to festivals like burning man and so having a very personal connection to these "vibes."
- "Abortion" is a stand in for the wild claim that "they" are trying to "take away" unspecified "rights." It's a fantastic personalization of an "our team good, their team bad." We're under attack is always a great rallying cry (see: Pearl Harbor, 9/11) and if you can personalize it down to the level of "rights" it sticks well. But what "rights" are we talking about? If this is the number two issue for women, I have to assume there's some sort of female-centric set of rights, right (haha)? Well, of course the thing to point to is Dobbs and abortion. What "right" was stripped remains a mystery but, again this is about personalization of an otherwise kind of hard to pin down concern.
- "Student loans" I haven't come up with decided case here. Part of me thinks its just general irresponsibility of The Youths. "College was fun, but I don't actually like paying for it." A more female angle might be "a college degree is important today for status signaling, I'd much prefer someone else pay for it." But that seems a little too easy. I don't have a well developed theory here. An interesting side point is that the article quotes that 60% of graduates are female and those female graduates hold 66% of all outstanding student loans. Not a massive over-representation, but noteworthy enough. My suspicion here is that a very small 1-3% of female grads are taking out MASSIVE loans for obviously low earning majors (art history, music, etc.) from incredibly expensive private schools. Usually the folks doing that have family money aplenty. It's sad to me that there are some middle class girls who are mimicking elite status at places like Williams or Swarthmore and leaving school at 22 with $150k in debt to do it.
- Gender identity. Again see points 1 and 2. This is a virtue signal linked to "self expression" and "my right to be me"
Now, for the Men:
- "The Trump era Tax Cuts" Honestly surprised me given the age cohort. People generally don't start (a) making enough or (b) having to support multiple kids until they're in their 30s to really pay attention to taxes. Given that a lot of stories about young men in particular are about how they don't have real jobs and live at home, this is really unexpected.
- "Repeal and Replace Obama Care (note that overall men are actually slightly on-net negative about this, but women are 23 points more negative)." That Men are actually on-net negative about this (but women are far more negative) and that this is a back burner issue at the moment makes me think that this was simply all the WSJ could find for polarizing issues. Don't know what to make of it exactly but don't think it actually tells us much.
- "Build The Wall (Men at -4, women at -47)" Makes a lot of sense. Men always have a more natural inclination towards protecting their in-group. Any guy who isn't deeply committed to open boarders is going to have a natural knee jerk in this direction.
How We Got Here
That's how the issues stand today. I think it makes sense to take a step back and ask "how we got here" over the past few voting and CW cycles.
For Men, I think much or all of this can be traced first to MeToo and second, to its slightly less witch-hunty successor, DEI. One guy in the article says he feels like there are purity tests on the left that are used to berate men into compliance. The article itself also says that many right-wing men don't talk about their views with women for fear of retaliation or other social consequences.
It's hard to overstate how deeply MeToo hit society. I was working a BigCorp gig at the time and it was very common to hear tips from male coworks at happy hours after work about never having a one-on-one with a female subordinate or, at least, doing it out in the open where other people can see the whole encounter. It was the first time I had heard of the Mike Pence rule. I've always looked at MeToo as a weird attempt at bloodletting by Hollywood that morphed into witch trials. There was nothing in the way of sincere attempts to improve male-female professional relationships, just a lot of virtue signalling and subtle actions taken to guarantee against false accusations (see above). The net result on a lot of men was to, I think, begin to question if "the left" and its various causes were simply new ways of trying to tear men down. Another guy in the article states, "It would seem the white male is the enemy of the Left."
For the young women, their quotes bring up (a) Trump being boorish and gross dating to the 2016 election and (b) Dobbs. Again, the "abortion rights" messaging intentionally conflates a complex issue about the start of human life (which Americans are notoriously conflicted and contradictory on) with a more easy to handle and generically adaptable "women's rights." This is why you see it rebranded as "reproductive rights" most often. If it's about just You versus "they" (who are always all male) it's an ease fight to jump into. If it's about more than that, I think women - being generally intelligent - do stop and think to consider the complexity. The media scored a massive win in portraying Dobbs as "taking away the right to abortion."
Trump's amplification of male boorishness ("Grab her by the pussy", "Only Rosie O'Donnell" etc.) is probably the most generation-centric issue in the article. I'm just elder millenial enough to remember the concepts of "boy talk" and "girl talk" growing up (shout out to Melania). Any guy who's ever been in an all male group outside of a professional one (so, a sports team, military, etc.) knows how gross yet hilarious those conversations can get. That kind of speech, however, doesn't go outside of the invisible walls. Guys speak in such over-the-top ways in locker rooms etc. as a way to signal in-group loyalty and build cohesion, but they understand it can and should only take place in those places. This exactly what Trump was doing on that access Hollywood tape. He was making a goofy gross joke to a fawning idiot who was going to laugh at whatever Trump said. He didn't say it at the Met Gala. I think that the outrage was most acute for younger women shows that a whole generation grew up without any awareness whatsoever that differently sexed styles of language exist.
The article also brings up the Kavanaugh hearings. This is strange to me. I always though the Dr. Ford testimony was both contentless and pretty obviously manufactured in a "repressed memory" pseudo-science way.
Boys and Girls are Different
The issues, and my interpretation of them, point to what should be an obvious truth. Men and Women have physical and cognitive differences across their normal distributions. This manifests in society and social reinforcement and, ultimately, results in different relative rankings of shared values. I believe Men and Women largely share the exact same values but rank them in different orders and with different weights placed on them.
Men still intrinsically respect strength and are suspicious of weakness or incompetence. Biden had to drop out of the race because everyone, but especially men, were thinking "no way can this guy lead the country for another four years. He does know what planet he's on." As soon as there are questions about your competency - you're toast. You can be an asshole (although I believe you shouldn't be) so long as you can get the job done.
The Trump assassination attempt probably solidified some male voters who may have been "holding their nose" in the Trump camp. See Zuckerberg calling it "badass". Trump popping up with blood on his face shouting, "fight, fight, fight" hits most guys right in the Papua-New-Guinea-Kill-The-Neighboring-Tribe lizard brain. It's watching your team spike the football in the endzone times four million raised to the power of NAVY-SEALs-KILLED-BIN-LADEN.
A basic male pattern in groups is to defer to the "natural leader." Interesting how often that correlates to height, perceived physical capability, a deep voice, and an outgoing and kind of domineering personality. Trump is maxed out in all of those non-physical traits and that explains so much of his attraction.
Women value this too (remember what I lead with) but there does come a limit in which the domineering personality becomes overbearing, tone deaf, and, at its worse, abusive. Still - better He tends towards jerk than wimp.
A key quote from the article is “Young men just want freedom, recklessness, adrenaline.” Couldn't agree more and half of my comments here have been about the destruction of masculinity models for boys in the West. Female centric views of childhood, safetyism, and "play nice" strips boys of this and has for some time. ADHD or just rambunctious boys are getting classified as special needs.
Rather than try to find some sort of balance, I think it's accurate to say the Left has leaned harder into this. The entire concept of "toxic masculinity" is mostly about finding ways to make male behavior that may be offensive to female sensibilities actually reprehensibly immoral. Returning to Trump's boorish language, I am all for calling it out as unpolite, but making the jump to "advocate for sexual assault" is hyperbolic. And this gets to the core of the issue; the extreme liberal faction of the Democrat party not only looks down on traditional male behavior, they want to make it so beyond the pale as to be effectively criminal. MeToo ended the careers of several men who were guilty of nothing more than being awkward jackasses who didn't understand how to flirt. Is that worth one Harvey Weinstein? Tell me in the comments.
Swinging back to female relative values. I see a sensitivity to the prevention of harm (manifested in fear emotion heavy issues like global warming) as well as an appeal to authority (the state) to strictly guarantee certain highly personal values. This is best captured in the "women's rights" meta-issue. Is this a reference to abortion? voting rights (if so, how)? Non-strictly governmental issues like pay equality? I don't think it matters, I think it's designed to me a flexible mapping point. Whatever you think is the women's rights issue is correct. All you have to agree on is that "They" (white republican Men) are coming for it. There are two quotes from interviewed women that reveal this:
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“What we’re worried about is our rights being taken away,”
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“If I had to guess why a lot of women are leaning very strongly toward more liberal issues, it’s that we’re afraid.”
Fear. Protection. "Somebody should do something!"
I think this really does women a disservice. It's the same as politicians who essentially use a narrative of emasculation to get men behind them. You've seen this a lot in Trump speeches going back to 2016. "They're taking our jobs" speaks to a hard-wire male perspective on providership. But politicians love an emotionally resonant hack. They won't change tactics anytime soon.
J.D Vance got into some hot water after his "cat lady" comments reappeared. I do think this was an unforced error. "Virgin" is used as an insult to Men and "old hag" and all of its varieties are used to belittle women. Sexual capability is still a big deal and so going after it is a low blow and will trigger a lot of hot resentment even in those not targeted. When a guy is emasculated, all guys feel it even if it isn't happening to them. When a women is targeted for being "the old hag" women can feel how that lands even if they are out of harms way. Vance would do better to focus on something that is tangible to women but not so personally direct - children. "The left wants to indoctrinate your kids" has been winning (see Youngkin in VA).
The above leads us too...
Are We Really Talking About Sex?
"Some men interviewed said they were fearful of criticism by women and expressed their resentments only in private and with other men. Several said they hide their conservative views because women they know have said they won’t date right-leaning men."
I'll pair the above with the fact that both of the women pictured in the WSJ piece are overweight. One, in a green and white dress, is obese.
To what extent are these resentments based in sexual frustration in both directions? I'll offer the opinion, which should be no surprise, that I think it's more about differences in relative value preferences. I don't think we're a nation of genocidal incels and femcels. If anything, I might point the finger more at social media and online spaces creating echo chambers and infinite positive-feedback loops yet divorcing users further and further from normie reality.
Yet, sex is important and young men and young women want it. The politics (literal and figurative) of dating certainly haven't gotten any less complex over the years - and they now definitely involved literal politics. But it's signalling all the way down. Am I really offended that this guy taking me out for a $134 meal is a Trump supporter? No, I'm worried he won't be able to effectively prioritize my emotional needs in the relationship. Am I disgusted that this girl I'm going to SoulCycle with is wearing her Pussy Hat? No, I'm worried she'll hector me to death if I say "retarded" once at home.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1yr ago
A significant portion of the population have these orientations, and the broad public didn’t realize how widespread it was.
Well, no.
It's pretty much always been 3-5%. The recent uptick has been because people get social status for calling themselves bi while never, ever actually engaging in bisexual behavior.
And this is exactly why the PMC is so insidious - it takes its preferred hyperminority positions, signal amplifies them to the moon, and then targets as immoral "literal hitlers!" anyone who doesn't pledge histrionic fealty to the issue.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
9mo ago
OpenAI To Become a For-Profit Company
You'll notice that the link is to a hackernews thread. I did that intentionally because I think some of the points raised there get to issues deeper than "hurr durr, Elon got burnt" or whatever.
Some points to consider:
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It is hard to not see this as a deliberate business-model hack. Start as a research oriented non-profit so you can more easily acquire data, perhaps investors / funders, and a more favorable public imagine. Sam Altman spent a bunch of time on Capitol Hill last year and seemed to move with greater ease because of the whole "benefit to humanity" angle. Then, once you have acquired a bunch of market share this way, flip the money switch on. Also, there are a bunch of tax incentives for non-profits that make it easier to run in the early startup phase.
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I think this can be seen as a milestone for VC hype. The trope for VC investors is that they see every investment as "changing the world," but it's mostly a weird status-signaling mechanism. In reality, they're care about the money, but also care about looking like they're being altruistic or, at least, oriented towards vague concepts of "change for the better." OpenAI was literally pitched as addressing an existential question for humanity. I guess they fixed AI alignment in the past week or something and now it's time, again, to flip the money switch. How much of VC is now totally divorced from real business fundamentals and is only about weird idea trading? Sure, it's always been like that to some extent, but I feel like the whole VC ecosystem is turning into a battle of posts on the LessWrong forums.
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How much of this is FTX-style nonsense, but without outright fraud. Altman gives me similar vibes as SBF with a little less bad-hygiene-autism. He probably smells nice, but is still weird as fuck. We know he was fired and rehired at OpenAI. A bunch (all?) of the cofounders have jumped shipped recently. I don't necessarily see Enron/FTX/Theranos levels of plain lying, but how much of this is a venture funding house of cards that ends with a 99% loss and a partial IP sale to Google or something.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
7mo ago
Mobile sports gambling is like, really, really bad, mmm'kay
Color me in the not surprised category. The article, and the additional one's it links at the bottom, do a good job of toe-ing the line between "people should be given the freedom to make choices" and "holy shit this is sentencing those with addictive personalities to lives of poverty."
I'm not super interested in talking about sports gambling itself, although I welcome any good anecdotes, and would instead like to invite comments on the concept of "digital addiction."
There's enough literature out there now that there's a strong enough case to be made that digital technology - very specifically smartphones - can cause behavior patterns that can accurately be described as addictive. However, there is still a delineation between digital addiction and physical/neurological addiction of alcohol and drugs. As a society, we acknowledge the basic danger of these substances by age-limiting some and outright prohibiting others.
My general question would be; what are the major culture war angles on digital addiction? For kids? For all of society?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
9mo ago
I don't know if we can say for sure that Israel intended this, but the effects are pretty substantial.
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On the eve of a likely conflict, Hezbollah's entire simple comms chain is now suspect or compromised. 80% of modern worn is coordination and logistics. If you can't do that, you lose before you show up.
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The level of paranoia is going to go even further off the charts. "They got into the pagers and the walkie talkies, what else are they in?" If your Hezbollah and want to audit everything with a microchip, you can do that, but at the cost of being combat ineffective.
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Israel is demonstrating subtly to Iran that they can pull off very sophisticated supply chain attacks. "We know where you are / we know what devices you're using / we know how to hack them."
I can see someone at the Naval Postgraduate School or Army War College writing a big "Grey Zone" theory of combat thesis on this in a few years.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
6mo ago
Sam Altman Is Super Excited for a Great 2025
Yesterday, Sam Altman posted this short personal blog post. The material takeaway is summarized in this paragraph;
We are beginning to turn our aim beyond that, to superintelligence in the true sense of the word. We love our current products, but we are here for the glorious future. With superintelligence, we can do anything else. Superintelligent tools could massively accelerate scientific discovery and innovation well beyond what we are capable of doing on our own, and in turn massively increase abundance and prosperity.
"AGI is right around the corner. Seriously, we mean it this time." Okay, I'll believe it when I see it and if that means I'm not worried enough about "alignment" and "safety" that's fine. Our robot overlord will smile upon me or he wont.
Sam's explicit assertion here will be debated on all the normal forms and tweet ecosystems. Thought pieces will be written by breathless techno-bros, techno-phobes, and all others. LessWrong is going to get out the Navel Gazer 6000.
None of that is particular alarming to me.
What is; the first 2/3rds of Sam's blog post.
This is because it is an amazing amalgam of personal-corpo speak that is straight out of a self-congratulatory Linkedin post. Here are some highlights (lowlights?);
Moving at speed in uncharted waters is an incredible experience, but it is also immensely stressful for all the players. Conflicts and misunderstanding abound.
The overwhelming feeling is gratitude; I know that someday I’ll be retired at our ranch watching the plants grow, a little bored, and will think back at how cool it was that I got to do the work I dreamed of since I was a little kid. I try to remember that on any given Friday, when seven things go badly wrong by 1 pm.
This three were particularly triggering for me:
Looking back, I certainly wish I had done things differently, and I’d like to believe I’m a better, more thoughtful leader today than I was a year ago.
I also learned the importance of a board with diverse viewpoints and broad experience in managing a complex set of challenges. Good governance requires a lot of trust and credibility. I appreciate the way so many people worked together to build a stronger system of governance for OpenAI that enables us to pursue our mission of ensuring that AGI benefits all of humanity.
My biggest takeaway is how much I have to be thankful for and how many people I owe gratitude towards: to everyone who works at OpenAI and has chosen to spend their time and effort going after this dream, to friends who helped us get through the crisis moments, to our partners and customers who supported us and entrusted us to enable their success, and to the people in my life who showed me how much they cared.
I think one of the points of near consensus on The Motte is a general hyper-suspicion to this kind of disingenuous koombayah style of writing. It's "Everyone love everyone", "we're all in this together" , "we made mistakes but that's okay because we care about one another."
This is exactly the kind of corpo-speak that both preceeds and follows a massive round of brutal layoffs based on the cold equations of a balance sheet. Or some sort of change in service to customers that is objectively absolutely worse. I am deeply surprised that it seems Sam has truly adopted this at his most personal level. This was not a sanitized press release from OpenAI, but something he posted on what appears to be his personal blog. Sure, many personal blogs become just as milquetoast as corporate press releases if/when a person gets famous enough, but, in the tech world, a personal blog or twitter account is usually the last bastion for, you know, actual real human style communication.
I had another post a few months ago about OpenAI. One of the things that came out of the comments was a sort of "verified rumor" that Sam Altman is a pure techno-accelerationist but without any sort of moral, theological, or virtuous framework. He simply wants to speedrun to the singularity because humans are kind of "whatever" in his eyes. This blog post, to me, provides some more evidence in favor of that. He's using the universal language of "nice to everybody" which is recognized - correctly - as the sound the big machine makes right before it thrashes you. This follows a pattern. OpenAI was a non-profit until it wasn't. Mr. Altman went to congress in 2023 to beg for totally not-regulatory capture for his own company but for, like, you know the good of everyone.
The technical merits and viability of AGI aside, the culture war angle here is that while many other groups are having meaningful open discussion about the future of economic, political, and social life with AIs/AGIs, Altman (and a few others like him) are using the cloaked, closed, and misleading language that has become the preferred dialect of the PMC. As I said, it is especially abundant right before they screw you over.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
11mo ago
Frustratingly, mentioning this to my Harris-supporting friends just gets sighs and eye-rolls, like "Why does this even matter?"
The exasperated eye roll followed up with a comment like "why does this even matter?" or "are we still talking about this is 202X" etc. should be recognized as the liberal-PMC capitulation performance.
You see no one on the PMC every really loses. At least not all at once. It's more of a slow wandering into obscurity that ends in chairing an Alumni outreach committee at bard and a memoir that sells exactly negative seven copies. If they always think they can come back, they will stay on the team.
But the subtext is clear enough; "I don't want to talk about this because I am aware that the facts are quite inarguably not on my side. I will, therefore, socially pressure you into, at least, reducing the pointedness with which you address the issue"
This has become my default response to any sort of national level "police misconduct" story. I believe it will remain that way indefinitely.
I've recommended the Donut Operator YouTube channel before and I will again. It's a good look into what are far more common situations in everday policing. Specifically, a lot of it is tedious "negotiation" with non-compliant people who are very likely on drugs, in some sort of mental health crisis, or just plain extremely anti-social. The thing is, sometimes this tedium very quickly escalates into a life or death situation. It's impossible for me to write well enough about it. Watch some of the videos. The speed from which we get to 100 from 0 is starling.
The larger culture war angle here is that, much like the military profession, the PMC have zero direct experience with policing as an occupation. Being a police is pretty much the last, best blue collar union job. Like most of those jobs, the pay is OK but not great and, in certain jurisdictions, is not keeping up with inflation. The candidates for these jobs are not all bearing Masters in Criminal Justice with special concentrations in sociology and negotiation tactics. They're ex-enlisted. They're former High School and Div. 3 athletes. Many of them have several cops in their families. It's a job in the classic J-O-B sense (not a "career") for most.
And what a job it is! The saying has been posted around the internet for sometime, but, as a cop, everyone you interact with, you're interacting with on "the worst day of their life." That's a bit of a hyperbole, but anything from a traffic ticket on up is a noteworthy stress event for most people. It's always been funny to me that The Largely Online have a special softness for customer service people and the aggravation and idiocy they daily encounter yet fail to see that being a cop is customer service times ten plus guns and knives.
So what do you get when summing all these things together? An overwhelming amount of peaceful outcomes. This study points to over 60 million citizens having at least one encounter with police in 2018 and this one quotes 1769 fatalities in 2020. Sure, the years aren't precisely the same and staring with the simple 'encounters' number might be too dilutive, but I believe the point remains; most of the time, the Police do a great job of not killing someone.
I think that's close to remarkable given that it's objectively one of the highest stress (and quick to escalate) occupations out there. And that's its staffed by people who have training measured probably in the weeks-to-months range instead of the many-many-years of notably less stressful PMC Jobs.
Everyone once in a while you're going to have a bad shoot. This could be one of them, or it could not, that's for a jury to decide. But think about what the larger narrative is; at the Presidential level, we're going to hyperfocus on a single incident in order to draw wild conclusions about a statistical population that consistently demonstrates in the opposite direction. No, as Scott Alexander would point out, no one is outright lying here, but the manipulation tactics are plain to see.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1yr ago
Selecting "role models" from within the system just continues the current system. The flavors change like all seasonal consumer goods.
I've written before about the cartoonish man-boy masculinity in current marketing. (I mean, Jesus, they literally have a boy with a beard in the first 20 seconds of the clip. This is what the marketers think of you). What is marketed and allowed is a no-consequence, no-potency masculinity that's safe and fun for all ages. There are uncountable YouTube clips that draw the obvious parallel between a boy at toy shop and a Dad at Home Depot / Fleet Farm. Adult manhood in the west is a cute "awww, look at them play!" trope.
Even within the current system, you hear complaint about prolonged boyhood and doughy soft man boys. SNL keeps almost pointing at it. For the greatest example; Seth Rogen's entire existence and career. In fact, this is also where clowns like Tate fall short. Tate was a kickboxer - not a soldier. His "manly" development was in a tightly controlled professional sport. I will always remember the time when I got into a scuffle with a fraternity brother who was a Division-1 Wrestler. He handily stomped my drunk ass but I was surprised to see him obviously shaken up after the fight. In our drunken bro-hug reconciliation, he let me know that "that was the first time I've been in a fight, man!"
I think the crux of it lies in the fact that a society wide ritual of real consequence to mark the transition from boy to man has been effectively eliminated.
Through the 20th century, the transition I'm talking about was when boys banded together for a hunt or tribal level military service. Consequences were real, people got hurt, women weren't only not "allowed" - it would've been actively detrimental to have them involved. Thus, you also had real and meaningful identification of a fundamentally male activity (hunting / war). While that no longer exists, women still absolutely have their sacred capability and activity; motherhood (or, at least, the ability to be a mother even if not chosen). (For a different post, but I also think that moterhood is under systemic attack as well.)
In another post (which I'm too lazy to link to) I pondered about how to get something like this back up and running today. It's hard for a few reasons; 1) Hunting isn't at all "necessary" the way it was in societies past, so the social honor / social proof reward would be absent for some sort of rec-league hunting team 2) War is a contest of human-techno-logistical systems now and you need committed professionals. As much as I love my Marines, the "warrior spirit" can't help you against guided munitions 3) I can't actually bring myself to be okay with something on the order of 1-2 in 10 young men being permanently maimed / killed for no other reason than to help generally promote good society wide models of masculinity. The closest approximation I came up with is a re-worked National Guard program (male only) that would start at the end of High School with something like quarterly musters until the age of 50. So many legal / logistic problems with that and I don't know if it would actually result in much more than a federally subsidized "guns and bowling" league.
In short - I just don't have any good ideas for this one, but I know it's a massive problem.
Until we figure out that idea, modern secular man will be one version or another of perma-boyhood --- the "giggling at my own farts" of Seth Rogen or the "pussy and punching" paper Tiger of Andrew Tate.
Quick side note: I believe there are viable traditional religious solutions to this (surprise!) but those simply aren't broadly implementable without sprinting towards a theocracy.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
10mo ago
Marcotte is a strange single issue writer. Click on her byline and almost every headline has either "Trump" or "MAGA" in it. She is THE face of 3rd wave feminist Trump Derangement Syndrome. It truly is a bizarre obsession. It seems to me that her writing is intended for an audience of cosmopolitan women who sincerely think that a Trump election = overnight Handsmaid's Tale coming into reality. It's some sort of sexual-political BDSM LARPing because there's never a consistent causal train of thought. I've had conversations with these folks in person. They cannot articulate how the Constitution would actually be suspended or voided. There's a logical gap that's forded with vibes based projections and catastrophizing. Allusion to Nazi Germany are not uncommon.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1yr ago
This is a very narrow appreciation of the case and zero appreciation of the context.
Prosecutorial discretion is employed literally everyday in America. And it is up and down the socioeconomic chain and goes left and right. In Baltimore, they sometimes decide not to prosecute multiple felons on gun charges because ... racism or something. When it comes to campaign finance laws, as I understand it, it's close to impossible to run a national level campaign without accidentally breaking the laws a few times - which is why these are almost always handled by the FEC with, at most, fines and public disclosures.
Alvin Bragg wanted to shoot his shot with this case and he did. As @jeroboam said, no one believes this case would've been brought against any other politician besides Trump.
So, while what happened inside the narrow walls of the courtroom may be all on the up and up (which, right now, I believe more than I doubt) ... and while a good deal of blame here should be on Trump's defense team for going full retard ... the facts are that targeted prosecutorial discretion brought a case into a courtroom that would've never made it off a legal pad in any other context. I'm sorry if I hurt your feelings, Mr. Shapiro.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1yr ago
I can't remember who said this, I think it may have been one of the podcast bro's back in 2016, but part of Trump's attractiveness - as a born-into-wealth billionaire - to working class people is that he looks, sounds, and acts like they think they would if they were billionaires.
- He has a big plane with his name on it
- He
boughtmarried an exotic european supermodel - His business books are all about "hard nosed deal making" instead of .... EBITDA and capital structure leverage
- He had a big TV show about ... business-ing!
- Red ties and gold stuff everywhere
- He owns the golf course. He can probably, like, get beers brought to him!
- His sense of humor isn't a dry and acerbic wit (William F. Buckley, looking at you), it's name calling and the kind of cool kid in-group bullying you'd see from High School preps and jocks (which he is.)
This feeds into a comfortable narrative for working class southerners and midwesterners. Sure, he's a plutocrat, but, unlike Mitt Romney, I can envision him tearing into a Big Mac because I have seen him tear into a big mac a bunch of times.
One thing to point out: Trump gladly and gleefully wears MAGA ballcaps a lot. In $5000 suits. And it somehow looks ... normal? Most other politicians would never make the fashion faux pas of mixing a ballcap with a suit and, even if they did for some sort of folksy photo-op, it would seem about as natural as Hillary's southern drawl. Trump thinks his MAGA ballcap looks fucking awesome and so wears it with confidence, arrogance, and pinache. Double for the dick-length red ties.
Trump is, in fact, a real estate huckster. And if you're a working class dude or chick, you know a lot of real estate hucksters, or used car salesmen, or plumbers who do bad work and overcharge, or house painters who use lead paint still, or an electrician who's been electrocuted on more jobs than he hasn't...you're probably related to one or more of these people. So, Trump Is. Your. Guy.
(Side note: This is why Ramaswamay failed. He may be just as much of a huckster as DJT, but ... a biotech huckster? Not going to work)
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1yr ago
(Mixed rant / actual CW post. I defer to the Delphic wisdom of the mods to discern this)
New book by Blake Butler out.
What caught my eye was the uncharacteristically vitriolic nature of Tyler Cowen's post. He flatly states "I don’t know of any better argument for social conservatism than this book." That's the culture war angle which I invite comments on. It produced some thoughts regarding household privacy which I hadn't thought of before. Would there be progress across all of the trans/COVID restrictions/guns/abortion issues if we frame it as "just don't talk about some stuff and we're all fine."
But on to the semi-rant part.
It seems like both Butler and his wife are people supremely in touch with the importance of their own emotions and, even worse, their own perspectives of their own emotions. It really does seem like the unending continuation of a sophomore's first late-night dorm room pseudo-philosophy discussion. "But like, I feel like ... I kind of ... get it, man."
Take this from the review:
She is a ferociously hard worker, committed to her writing and her teaching (she is a professor of creative writing), and also to baking—an art, like poetry, that depends on precision. She loves philosophy and nature, Melville, Cocteau, the Detroit Pistons, and “The Office.” He is touched by her fragility, her willingness to expose herself to him. “Love someone back. / You just begin,” she writes in her poem “Hopes Up,” and, eventually, he takes her advice.
Philosophy. Nature. Baking. The Office(!). And two sentence platitude poetry. Forgive me if I'm not with "it" or, even worse, if, like Abe Simpson, I don't even know what "it" is anymore, but this seems like almost a parody of a bad basic b*tch dating profile. I wonder, would she have described herself as "quirky." I'll quickly chastise myself here for disrespecting someone who has taken her own life. Let's move to a deeper question.
From all accounts, Molly, Butler's wife, seemed to be a deeply troubled person who allowed her mental health issues to fester to such an extent that she behaved extremely poorly. True emotional spousal abuse, almost gleeful infidelity before and during marriage, and some questionable professional-personal decisions. Yet all of it seems to have been hand-waved away through a self-serving belief in some sort of deeper understanding of "the human condition." I remember thinking something similar when reading Christopher Hitchens on his own drinking. Hitch was a raging alcoholic, and he knew this. When he wrote about it, however...
I work at home, where there is indeed a bar-room, and can suit myself.… At about half past midday, a decent slug of Mr. Walker’s amber restorative, cut with Perrier water (an ideal delivery system) and no ice. At luncheon, perhaps half a bottle of red wine: not always more but never less. Then back to the desk, and ready to repeat the treatment at the evening meal. No “after dinner drinks”—most especially nothing sweet and never, ever any brandy. “Nightcaps” depend on how well the day went, but always the mixture as before. No mixing: no messing around with a gin here and a vodka there.
Oh, ho ho! What a card! Yes, he's sauced beyond belief, but have you seen his turn of phrase?.
It's a simple assertion; no amount of genius - real, imagined, or self-perceived - excuses you from being degenerate, abusive, socially irresponsible, or actively antagonistic. My worry is that Mr. Butler and his late wife were constantly so self-absorbed that they used a mix of literary romance, hyper-rationalization, and substance abuse to avoid engaging with a very normal, good, and productive feeling: guilt.
I've written before about how modern society ripped away traditional male gender toles and how that could be good, bad, or a mix. That's beside the point. The point is that it failed to produce any sort of replacement. It's a void and we're seeing the fruits of that.
In terms of guilt, a movement away from traditional religion may be good, bad, or mixed, but there's been no secular alternative. The Catholic church has a very prescriptive system and process for the sin-guilt-penance feedback loop[^1] I do not see the same in the modern secular culture. In fact, I see the opposite. The pop-psych concept of "self care" appears, to me, to be a blank check for instant and unequivocal absolution from responsibility. Did you sleep with a bunch of your spouse's friends, randos, and some of your own students? Do you have a drinking problem that's causing you to fail in your high trust relationships? Do you use social media as a social weapon? - take some time to understand your own trauma and experience. Where's the part about going "holy shit, I fucked up bad here and need to say sorry."?
This all ties up to a larger theory that modern and postmodern culture does two things that are mutually reinforcing in a downward spiral. (1) Emphasize the individual above all else (even the immediate family) and (2) Remove traditional social structures, expectations, and rituals and replace them with nothing so that the only refuge is deeper back into hyper-individualism. Sprinkle in our du jour oppression narratives and class struggle and you've got the perfect recipe for a level of personal-self deception that leads, ultimately, to self-destruction; suicide, in Molly's case.[^2]
Nature abhors a vacuum (I can use that cliche because I'm a bad writer who can't get published). It follows that those going around in their Hoover Uniforms and actually creating vacuums are truly deplorable.
[^1]: I know this religion the best, which is why I named dropped it. My assumption is that the other Abrahamics, at least, have something similar. [^2]: Caveat that I am not wholly blaming modern culture for causing Molly's mental illness, but I am saying it probably abetted its growth and the lady's ultimate demise.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
9mo ago
"That is a damning non answer" is hilarious coming from Walz.
You said you were in Hong Kong during the deadly Tiananmen Square protest in the spring of 1989. But Minnesota Public Radio and other media outlets are reporting that you actually didn't travel to Asia until August of that year. Can you explain that discrepancy? You have two minutes.
Walz' response (bolding is my own):
Yeah. Well, and to the folks out there who didn't get at the top of this, look, I grew up in small, rural Nebraska, town of 400. Town that you rode your bike with your buddies till the streetlights come on, and I'm proud of that service. I joined the National Guard at 17, worked on family farms, and then I used the GI bill to become a teacher. Passionate about it, a young teacher. My first year out, I got the opportunity in the summer of 89 to travel to China, 35 years ago, be able to do that. I came back home and then started a program to take young people there. We would take basketball teams, we would take baseball teams, we would take dancers, and we would go back and forth to China. The issue for that was, was to try and learn. Now, look, my community knows who I am. They saw where I was at. They, look, I will be the first to tell you I have poured my heart into my community. I've tried to do the best I can, but I've not been perfect. And I'm a knucklehead at times, but it's always been about that. Those same people elected me to Congress for twelve years. And in Congress I was one of the most bipartisan people. Working on things like farm bills that we got done, working on veterans benefits. And then the people of Minnesota were able to elect me to governor twice. So look, my commitment has been from the beginning, to make sure that I'm there for the people, to make sure that I get this right. I will say more than anything, many times, I will talk a lot. I will get caught up in the rhetoric. But being there, the impact it made, the difference it made in my life. I learned a lot about China. I hear the critiques of this. I would make the case that Donald Trump should have come on one of those trips with us. I guarantee you he wouldn't be praising Xi Jinping about COVID. And I guarantee you he wouldn't start a trade war that he ends up losing. So this is about trying to understand the world. It's about trying to do the best you can for your community, and then it's putting yourself out there and letting your folks understand what it is. My commitment, whether it be through teaching, which I was good at, or whether it was being a good soldier or was being a good member of Congress, those are the things that I think are the values that people care about.
Followed by this absolute banger from the mods;
MB: Governor, just to follow up on that, the question was, can you explain the discrepancy?
Tim Walz is the politician you get with a highly censored and early prototype ChatGPT. You can see that he's snatching bits and pieces of talking points and stringing them together in loosely probabilistic ways, but there's no coherence. It also lacks that wonderful post-modern impressionistic word salad of both Harris and Trump.
The Democrats really love doing this. Back with Hill Dog, they chose Tim Kaine and, IIRC, leaned in to calling him "America's Dad." Walz pick reinforces something that's obvious but hard to see - the Democrat party is absolutely loathsome of effective masculinity. A squishy assistant football coach who was part of the National Guard (but never deployed) is just fine. Or a "technically I was in the Navy!" gay dude. But an actual Man with hard coded male sensibilities is a non-starter.
I think the election is mostly back to a 50/50 toss-up, with some big risks for Harris (the longshoremen strike and fallout from Helene being the first of the October surprises). What is not a 50/50 toss-up is the relative Male-Female support. Regardless of the winner, the exit polls are going to reveal a societal level bifurcation at the sex level.
This 'idea' has zero percent chance of ever happening. And it's not because of rich people lobbying.
It's because it would catastrophically destroy all markets (public and private) overnight.
This is because the price of anything is different at different times and, before an actual transaction occurs, is only an approximate representation of what a theoretical buy and seller would agree on. There are plenty of reasons zero buyers and zero sellers would want to proceed with any transaction at a given time.
Example A would be startups. Startups raise cash from investors to get off the ground, develop products, market and sell them, enter new markets, acquire other companies etc. Their "valuation" at any given time is largely a projection of possible future revenue and/or a future reasonable acquisition price. It is not, in anyway, a guarantee of a spot cash price for equity. I think Anduril, the cool new defense technology company, has something like a $15bn valuation after its last funding round. To make the math easy, let's say there are 100,000,000 shares outstanding all with equal seniority etc. (this is a toy example. The realities are always more complex, which factors in later). Is anyone going to pay anyone else the $150 / share in the secondaries market for Anduril? Fuck no. There are maybe some early investors who got in at $10 (or less!) who may want to sell at $50 or something to lock in gains, but the biggest holders (including insiders) are holding out for an IPO or acquisition.
These are multi-year equity holders. What does their tax situation look like? Are they taxed every year based on new VC funding and the follow on valuations of the company? If that's the case, they would end up paying more in taxes than they invested in the company while being unable to liquidate their holdings in a thinly traded private market. Investing in a start up would become financially impossible. Perhaps evening just starting one on your own. What happens then? Only incumbent, large, highly traded public companies can be invested in - but you still have to pay tax on your not-cash winnings. Very quickly, there are only a few nationalized companies doing any business t all. Retail investors mostly hold cash which inflates away to nothing and there is zero new capital formation and investment. That's stagnancy and inflation - aka stagflation - and is the very model for how to kill a country and, very likely, pave the wave for a populist demagogue to seize power.
Taxing unrealized capital gains is literally taxing a business for existing and operating as normal, but with some sort of arbitrary number thrown on top of it as "valuation." If that number is wrong, which it will be sooner or later, you divide the business by zero and it not only ceases to be viable, it implodes overnight.
Much like price controls, this is an "idea" that reveals profound economic and financial illiteracy. It is 100% vibes based in a Robin Hood aesthetic and is designed with all the depth of most sloganeering. It should be viewed for what it is, a very public display of a lack of interest in developing meaningful policy in any direction.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2yr ago
Quality post. I don't have any factual or analytical quarrels, just a different point of view based on experienced-influenced shifts in value prioritization.
I once had a 90 minute each way commute for about a year. That's 3 hours in the car Monday to Friday. I hated it. Traffic is a stress machine; you have to be vigilant constantly in what is a boring situation with high stakes (even a fender bender has long term impact on your insurance premiums, what if the other guy doesn't have insurance, wear and tear on your car compounds, etc.) Especially on the drive home, I would get back feeling far more drained than I anticipated and this would sap my energy and motivation to do much more than sloppily prepare a Bro Dude dinner and veg out in front of the T.V.
For most of my career after that (even pre-COVID) I had either sub 30-minute public transit commutes, or a healthy mix of WFH mixed with 1 - 2 times weekly sub-30 minute driving commutes.
Without an ounce of doubt, the public transit experience was worse than every other mode including 3 hours daily. This is because it makes you tired and weary of people.
In any major American urban city with public transit, for going on close to a decade, daily riders are confronted with antisocial behaviors ranging from the mild yet still inexplicably annoying (those folks who play music on speaker instead of using headphones) to the low level criminal (open drug use or exchange ... panhandling) to the worrisome (erratic enough behavior that you must become vigilant in anticipation of potential threat) to the just .... disheartening (fare evasion by someone who obviously could pay it but understands "hey, no one is going to stop me" is now a policy in many cities). The compounding effect is that you have a constant availability bias. I can remind myself all I want about bad mental models and cognitive biases, but if I saw another homeless dude taking a shit on the platfrom this morning, I'm probably tipping a little lighter, I'm probably scoffing a little harder at a "therapy instead of jail" article in the Atlantic.
The "public space" is only public insofar as there's an understood order and general preservation of the space by the public. Otherwise ... it's a No Man's Land with a random free-ride-machine punching through it. There has to be some sort of collective respect and even pride in the thing itself. Public transit should be more than a competitor to private cars, more than a utilitarian cost-per-mile exercise. A ride should be considered part of the experience of that locale, that city, that city's culture. But ... if the current lowest comment denominator of that city's culture is open air drug market / improvisational lavatory / au-plain-aire insane asylum / literal free rider problem Illustrated ... then that public space and that public good (the transit system) is no longer what I would call capital P Public. It's a state run shitty service through Thomas Hobbes' human ant farm.
I'll let the wonderful Mottizens debate specific policy, but I'll die on the hill of this larger point - public spaces without genuine daily public support (in the form of prosocial behavior) and an understood order of things become lawless lands. It is the job of Government to reasonably encourage the prosocial behaviors (posters and the like) ... and decisively enforce actual law breaking. I do not understand how any public servant, especially elected ones, can look at fare evasion and go "oh well. It's not like they're killing anyone!" No, I suppose they aren't stabbing Cash App cofounders to death (oh wait .... sorry, too soon?). The suicide of citizen cohesion is done in slow motion and one cut at a time.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5mo ago
is on the brink of descending into tranny.
Epic freudian typo.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
9mo ago
Real Nice Economy You Got Here. Be A Shame If Someone Broke It
This clip of Harold Daggett is popping up all over twitter. The immediate aesthetics are comical; the accent, the glasses, the jewelry. If it looks like a mobster and sounds like a mobster....
There's enough discussion on the Presidential Race in the VP debate threads. The CW angle here is how the image of the "American Union Man" has always been 99% hagiography. They have been lionized in Bruce Springsteen songs and other pop culture kitsch since the 1990s at least, but the hard economics stopped working in the 1970s. Unions are a tax on everything downstream of them. Functionally, it's racketeering and extortion. They owe their bewildering continued existence to the fact that they function as a bedrock reliable voting bloc with lockstep leadership control .... until now?
We had the teamsters refuse to back any candidate earlier. Your modal longshoreman is almost certainly a Trump voter. But Trump despises Unions. So ... what's happening?
Really great write-up. Thank you.
Your response is valuable because it demonstrates the mix of slippery-slope, bad faith reporting, and sleight-of-hand that poisons the abortion debate. Americans are notoriously self-contradictory in their opinions on abortion. Thus, re-framing an issue has an outsized impact on changes in opinion. I like your consistent use of alternative headlines to point that out.
There are very few pro-life folks who are zero-exception pro-life. Rape, incest, and life of the mother are the default exceptions. But the focus shouldn't be on the exceptions (which will always be a small percentage) but on the modal abortions and the contexts that produce them. The article (and your response) do a good job of highlighting that abortions are often the product of repeated bad life choices and general irresponsibility. I don't think being generally kind of a fuck-up should be a life long sentence for poverty, but there is a limit to what you can be absolved of. Denying a child from being born is far, far past that line.
Going back to the culture war angle, it gets difficult to even "hear out" pro-life arguments because they get so slippery. Obama used to take the median liberal position on abortion that was summarized as "safe, legal, and rare." That last part made the conversation at least possible. It wasn't like we were having parades for abortion or anything. The median liberal position today seems to be on-demand abortion access for any reason, potentially into the third trimester or even at birth. Point out how crazy that is and you get responses like the ProPublica article - "women are literally dying because of these anti-abortion laws." It isn't moving the goalposts, it's making up new rules as you go while also manipulating the score.
If you bring up the fact that there's only one way to make a baby (sex) and suggest abstinence and/or sexual discipline, you aren't looked at as extreme, but as childishly out of touch. What, go without sex? Yes. Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. No one has ever died from not fucking. In the most dishonest and illegitimate response to that idea, there are people who will say that practicing and preaching abstinence is actually some sort of reverse sexual-slavery that dehumanizes specifically women. Once we linked sexual activity to the amorphous "personal expression" we let the genie out of the bottle. The argument goes: "Anything you tell me to do is oppression and potentially violence. Anything I demand from society is actually a guaranteed human right that has been withheld because of systemic oppression." Heads-I-win-tails-you-lose.
Taking a look at my own history that went from casually pro-choice to rigid pro-life, I'd assert that if you draw any firm line in the sand you are setting yourself up for a slow (though possibly accelerating) drift towards a pro-life stance because the opposite end keeps getting more extreme. Yes, I know this is a version of the "we're the normies; they just keep getting crazier!" argument, but ... I think the craziest are saying their quiet part out loud.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
11mo ago
but let’s be honest here that Trump the Character is uniquely toxic for American politics
Don't assume this is a consensus feeling. It is absolutely not.
What does "toxic" mean? I hear it all over the place. "Toxic masculinity," "Toxic work environment," "Toxic relationship." But what does it mean besides "bad ++" ?
(Tagging at @BahRamYou and @Tractatus because this is all kind of flowing together)
No one should be a chicken processor for their entire career. Or a waiter / waitress at a diner or fast casual restaurant (service staff at high end restaurants is another matter). Or the proverbial burger flipper.
These jobs should be more or less easy-in-easy-out temporary employment for people who need cash to pay their bills. If you read some of the mid century "road" novels, you'll see how a pretty common modus operandi was for the protagonist to roll into town on his last dollar, pick up a few days work doing janitorial work at a auto garage or something, and then go on his merry (usually drunk) way of philosophizing. I've written about this before. It's not so much that people in the 50s/60s were raising full families on these unappealing jobs, it's that these unappealing jobs were the equivalent of day rate motel stays.
So, problem number one is that employment law and regulation has become so burdensome that we literally have millions of jobs that are not worth having - for either the employer or employee. These are the jobs that immigrants (many illegal, all of them willing) actually end up taking. I think I actually saw the very beginning of this as I was finishing high school. One summer, I got a job at a book store - I filled out a single page application and was working the next day. I got a check at the end of the week. The next summer, I got a job at a decent restaurant. The first FULL DAY, I had to fill out pages and pages of digital corporation nonsense on the computer, then watch a bunch of compliance videos (mostly about not falling down in the kitchen or being on drugs), and then had to sign even more physical paperwork relating to me 'trainee' status. This is all so that this restaurant (owned by a corporate chain) doesn't get sued to death by various regulators for not ... self-regulating.
To put it in economist terms, the friction for labor is so much higher than it was decades ago, that it isn't worth going through that friction for some of the lower paying jobs.
For immigrants, however, employers might just skip the paper work and pay in cash. Or, if they employee is visa connected, the company knows they won't just rage quit one day and face deportation. I can't support this at present, but I also feel like the visa-employment situation has a cottage industry of consultants who help the employers manage all of the paperwork (for a fee).
But the fact remains that shitty jobs have always been shitty but, before, you could hop in and out of them, collect some cash, and be on your merry way.
The second issue is that market interference has made the cost of certain things untenable. The major one, of course, is housing. There simply isn't enough (because of burdensome construction regulations and the perverse incentives of home equity appreciation). Wages can't keep up. Wages, however, have kept up with some things that we now consider close to necessary - computers and phones. A decent laptop can now be had for less than $500. Same for a phone. Monthly cellular service is between $20 - $100 depending. nearly gig level internet at home is $100- $200 a month. Very few Americans who want a phone do not have one. Very few Americans who want broadband (and don't live intentionally in the middle of nowhere) do not have it.
All of this is to say I see "the immigration question" in it's economic context as really an outgrowth of a much bigger issue - over regulation and bureaucratization. I shouldn't care too much about low skill immigrants because, if I am competing with them, we're all essentially "taking turns" in that job pool. As we go up the skill ladder, I'm competing with fewer people and then things like community and connections (networks) become more important (which I, as a native, ought to have an advantage in). Instead, because jobs are such high friction now, I am at the bottom of the skill ladder competing with people who exist with the ability to better slide through the legal maze of employment because they are either (a) breaking the law or (b) part of a international labor movement system that penalizes me, ironically, for having been born in the right place.
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