Gaashk
1d ago
That was my experience as well. I heard it. It was fun! I listened five times of so, and that was enough. Now sometimes I hear it and groan. That's also how I feel about "Golden," but since I have little girls, I'll continue hearing it for some time, probably.
Gaashk
1d ago
(unattractive) men are expendable, mostly unwanted, dangerous, useless, and generally deserve to be lonely, poor, and depressed.
There are some different things going on.
Yes, men who act like depressed women are unattractive to women. Very clearly so.
You say that women's actions have changed, but men's haven't. That is untrue. Men's actions have changed from running an economy where most of them were farm laborers, and many of them are soldiers at some point in their lives, to one where most of them are doing basically the same work as women. It's romantically neutral to negative to work the same job as a romantic interest, but it's unwise for a woman to choose to try to attract an older man and become his tradwife, because there aren't actually that many such positions available (it's much harder to find a breadwinner husband than a job), he has to actually be extremely trustworthy, because being a divorced housewife is pretty lame even with alimony (it probably won't work twice), and they actually have to get along, we all live in nuclear families now.
Yes, of course a man who expresses that the particular woman in front of him is wonderful, and he would be so pleased to write her a poem, take her out to dinner, dance with her, and stare longingly into her eyes is more attractive than a man who expresses that she's fundamentally just acting out her sordid evopsyche roles, that she is in fact a cheap whore.
That's not to say that there aren't women who are achingly badly, or even that current social systems don't produce more bad action from women than some other systems.
Should we as a society do something? Should we pay women to be single mothers?
Paying women to be single mothers seems like a bad idea: children should have fathers. Not enough having involved fathers is part of the current social malaise.
Perhaps we should live in smaller social groups. The only time I've gotten romantic attention from men, and eventually found a husband, was through small social groups. It's not that women find 80% of men unattractive full stop. They find 80% of men who are strangers unattractive. If there are 10 eligible bachelors, it's much clearer whether any of them are a good match or not. I would like my children to be involved in smaller social groups, including in high school, college, church, and clubs as teens and young adults. Even modern churches are the wrong size! Many are tiny, weird house churches or enormous, town sized mega churches. People are meant to interact with about a hundred people or so, the appearance of infinite choice is going very badly. We've discussed moving to some more village like environments when our daughters are older.
Gaashk
1d ago
Those clubs sound like they would be highly gender segregated. That's fine, I think basically banning gender segregated spaces was a mistake.
One of the things that people did in the past was to have tension between most activities, which were sex segregated (school, sewing circle, calling for tea, books, cigars, and talking about politics, etc), and a few activities, which were not (church, dances, dinners). Then the people in the segregated spaces are not datable, but those in the mixed spaces are. That seems probably better for romantic tension than the current set up where a bunch of people at work or in the robotics club or wherever seem like they might be datable, but in practice aren't.
Gaashk
1d ago
That makes sense. School is long, it's a full work day, so if you want kids to actually engage with the clubs (unless they're high energy and in a sports club, but those are mostly sex segregated), you have to cut school. I like the idea of the Alpha School half day academics, half day clubs set up -- they aren't even loosing that much academic time, mostly just re-organizing it.
Gaashk
1d ago
It doesn't sound like it's an option for most Eastern women anymore, either.
Gaashk
4d ago
I'm not saying that the apartments are why Japanese people have given up on romantic relationships, but "Tokyo does it" isn't a strong argument when the concern is with family formation
Gaashk
10d ago
My neighborhood has feral horses. They're fine, follow the rules, look both ways when crossing a street, and look after themselves.
Gaashk
10d ago
Yes, it will probably take several years to change the system, so that the users are just uploading the documents to the AI assisted system directly, and you are guiding them through how to find/upload them.
My job is offering pleasant experiences to children. It is already not strictly necessary. I suppose in the future an AI could order the supplies and curriculum. Actually I would prefer it to to organize a more distributed system for providing experiences to children, so they aren't stuck all condensed with up to a thousand children in a single school, and some of them freak out about that.
Gaashk
12d ago
I think it's probably driven by trait neuroticism.
My husband usually insists on driving, and offers a continual commentary on his perceptions of the other drivers and their lack of virtue. When I drive, he does offer a medium amount of commentary on both my driving and that of the other cars on the highway, though less than when he himself is driving. I am in general a much chiller driver, though he will back seat drive about opportunities to pass on a one lane road, to save five minutes over the course of an hour's drive, which is a matter of preference, but I am annoyed that he accepts my preference less than I do his. Also, he makes me navigate to new out of the way places he has found, then criticizes my navigation instructions, but won't switch positions. This has become much better now the we have a screen in the car that displays the map.
Here's a thought experiment: Suppose a couple is driving along and the woman starts back-seat driving. The man might say something like "Ok, why don't you drive?" (And this really happens.) In these types of situations, the woman typically declines the offer. By contrast, a man is more likely to say something like "ok, sounds great, pull over and let's switch places."
This has not been my experience.
Gaashk
13d ago
I am a bit confused about it. I made about three images, they were cute, they were better than a Photoshop filter from 2005, but then what? I didn't want to print them or anything?
Gaashk
17d ago
Do you hope to have kids? Does she?
Her having "meltdowns" under stress is concerning. Not just whatever's happening to her, but also as mentioned elsewhere, that you're calling it that. If you stick with her, and have a baby together, and she gets postpartum depression, and you have to be up every couple of hours bottle feeding the baby because she can't manage... will you be alright?
It's concerning that after two years neither of you is willing to move closer to the other.
Gaashk
17d ago
My parents have been married for over 40 years. They meant in Dostoyevsky as Philosophy class, talked about their favorite philosophy professor all through my childhood, and have joined book clubs together. Every time I call my mom, she talks about some book they're reading for their club, and how they're proposing books and voting on them with their club mates. This is very sustainable!
My husband and I like talking about new places we visit, new restaurants, new experiences. This is a bit rough right now, with three young children, but still a large part of our lives. We had a day off last week, and found some new places that surprised us in a town we'd already been to many times. This is also fairly sustainable.
You and your girlfriend probably need to do actual things together, even if it's just attending an in person book club and bringing your physical books, and talking about your search through the local used bookstore to find copies or something.
Gaashk
20d ago
It doesn't have a bad reputation in comparison to other places, it just doesn't have much of an economic base. Maybe it's just the last place in the country for all the subsistence farmers' children to move to an apartment in town. Maybe the Intel plant is a bigger economic force than I realized?
- & 3 Possibly!They have a mix of old and sprawling. Currently they're building apartment complexes and the kind of subdivisions everyone else built in the 90s, like the city planners saw Phoenix or Houston and admired them. People are anxious about this -- there's even less access to water than Phoenix or Houston. My neighborhood is on water restrictions right now.
That's interesting.
I have tolerable art skills, but low intrinsic motivation. Sometimes I get over the hurdle of deciding what to paint, and then I do actually paint it, but more often I get stuck at "what could I possibly do with another painting of a flower? Where will I store it? I already have too many photos even, and I don't have to physically store them" and don't paint it.
I spend a lot of time talking to software developers and adjacent people, and am entirely unable to imagine what kind of thing I would program, if I had a program creating ginn. There are some apps (ugh, terrible word, so tired of it) that I have that want fewer of. Why did I have to download an app to get a concert ticket? I don't think it's just because I'm old, I'm not all that old. My millennial friends are often talking about how much they dislike screens, and want less of them, and less things on them, and how there's quite too much digital product already, even for free.
Gaashk
21d ago
What's the deal with new housing going up like crazy in places that have few jobs and negative population growth?
I asked an AI about this, and it said something about how even though people are leaving the region, there's still a backlog of housing supply, especially for smaller units such as apartments and starter homes. I do in fact see a lot of apartments going up, and I suppose "starter homes," though the kind that costs more than the median home price for the area (which is not especially high). And then the expectation is that when Xers and Millenials get older, they'll buy the sprawling houses that are currently occupied by boomers? These houses seem very large, and I don't really understand them.
I sort of get what's happening in places like Arizona and Florida, where a larger than usual retiree cohort wants to live somewhere warm in a nice new easy to maintain house. I guess Phoenix is still adding subdivisions by sheer force of cheapness?
Gaashk
22d ago
Jezebel
Yeah, when I looked her up just now, an article that came up mentioned the TV show, which I had never heard of. Her website has her most recent articles in famous places like The New York Times and The Guardian, which look dreary.
What are the certain internet corners saying?
Gaashk
22d ago
I've been listening to To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. It reminds me of my experience trying to read James Joyce: mostly confusion. But since it's an audiobook, at least I can accomplish tasks while I listen.
Gaashk
22d ago
I think I heard Louise Perry talking about it on her podcast, but that was the first I'd heard of Lindy West, and it wasn't clear why people care, or what West is known for. Surely she can't be known simply for being fat and abrasive?
Gaashk
22d ago
The dream: I live somewhere hot and sunny. I get a solar panel attached to my house or carport or neighborhood. The money I was already spending on energy goes into paying for the solar panel.
The reality: subsidies go to the enormous concentrated solar farm in the middle of the desert. Birds and lizards keep getting burnt to death from the heat, and it looks terrible over much larger areas of land than an equivalent fossil fuel plant and oil pumps. They pay less in taxes than the oil extractors, and maintain fewer roads (I care about this in a large, net oil producing state). Are the giant desert solar farms supplying energy to one of the desert data centers that's competing with traditional chile farmers? Is it running air conditioners somewhere? Where? I could look this up, but neither have most of the people taking the poll.
Result: Meh. It's a good idea to develop the technology, I guess. Not especially "green" in implementation, though.
Gaashk
24d ago
Yes, I think in the long term we'll just have to move (and kind of wanted to anyway).
In the meantime, we are extra annoyed that they built a house, and then an unpermitted tiny house (the county apparently doesn't care, we did tell them), and then invited their dysfunctional son into the tiny house with his loud engine, while pregnant with our third child, which has a way of trapping people for a while, and not getting the best sleep to begin with.
I guess now I have something to add to the list of things to look out for when buying a house in the future, anyway.
Gaashk
25d ago
There is an irrigation ditch, owned by the water association, and I could certainly stand in the ditch as he drives past, or in my own driveway, which merges with his, it just doesn't seem very useful. He already knows we don't like it.
Yeah, the sheriff department said that we could try calling their help line each morning, and maybe they'll come check it out. It just seems annoying for both us and them when nothing will probably come of it. They said they can, if they come when he's still here, pull out a decibel counter, if he doesn't notice them and turn it off or something. One time they came to check on him, and he went completely dark and silent for three days, which surprised me and seemed disproportionate.
Yes, something along those lines. For most men, that he is able to, and wants to, work an ordinary, predictable, man in the grey flannel suit kind of job while his wife has and raises children for a decade, then spends several more years training for and finding outside work.
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