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.
3d ago
Tagging @OracleOutlook as well
The Wikipedia entry on Contemporary Catholic Liturgical Music lists "Popular composers." It's a hit list of boomers born in mostly the 1950s. Yes, the overwhelming feeling is that these people dabbled with hippie shit in the 60s but then decided they actually weren't down with the pagan beliefs and wanted to have a 401k and live in the suburbs.
If you look at the linked videos for the clown mass and, especially, the puppet mass, look at the preponderance of greyhairs. The boomers really did enjoy fucking up everything good and True.
I didn't go to my first Latin mass until my late 20s. It was a sung high mass on a Sunday. 90 minutes long. One of the first feelings I remember having after leaving was one of anger. I was so upset that my entire childhood and adolescence was spent at suburban novus ordo masses with pudgy retired hippies singing horrible contemporary hymns, Father Friendly sermons about "making sure Jesus is your best friend!", and an utter lack of energy, reverence, and glory. When you leave a latin mass now - especially a high mass - you feel like something meaningful happened. All of the motifs around spiritual nourishment and renewal that rung totally empty after a Novus Ordo actually come into tangible fruition.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4d ago
I wonder if even a compromise new Pope represents a major concern for traditionalists, especially in the west.
As I understand it, the "traditionalist" catholic movement was largely underground after Vatican II all the way until the 1990s. The two largest groups dedicated to the Traditional Latin Mass, the FSSP and the ICKSP, weren't even founded until 1988 and 1990, respectively. Even up through the Benedict XVI pontificate, traditionalists were very small and fringe (again, if my understanding is accurate)
This changed when Francis got The Big Chair. His break with a lot of seemingly bedrock doctrine (see Amoris Laetitia from 2016) contributed to the strengthening of the traditionalist movement. The Traditionis Custodes (2021) has been seem by some as a direct attempt to smash the TLM (although this is contradicted in part by how Francis dealt with the aforementioned FSSP, ICSKP, and even the SSPX).
All of this is to say, nothing rallies a group like The Big Bad Enemy, and traditionalists had that with Francis to their hearts content - especially the sedevacantists and other RadTrads, including the Very Online versions.
If a New Pope is elected who, on day one, states "Yeah TLM is fine for whoever wants to celebrate it. Bishops don't need to ask for approval anymore. Go for it." does this take a lot of the Righteously Indignant (TM) wind out of the sails of the traditionalists? I don't know, but much hay was made for a reason during the Francis Pontificate.
Electing Pizzaballa would be, I think, a epoch defining moment for the church for the better. If there's a Cardinal out there (besides Zen) who has "future Saint" written all over him, it's probably Pizzaballa.
WSJ Article on Elon Musk's Reproductive Habits
(Side note: I know WSJ is paywalled. Can one of you internet heroes find an alt link?)
Thanks to @zoink:
Archive Link: https://archive.is/EVkGv
It's pretty weird. Musk, according to the article, references his children, collectively, as his "legion." He has a vision of a sort of compound in Texas for all of the women he's reproduced with along with the children. The cult vibes only get stronger until they run into cold hearted legal recourse. It appears, from the article, that drawn out family court proceedings, estrangement, and some sort of financial settlement are par for the course with Musk. Effective co-parenting or an amicable albeit non-exclusive relationship? Odds are low.
I've always been suspicious of Musk because a few reasons, but I'll decline to elaborate on those specifics in order to bring up a broader culture war point.
While "pronatalism" (loosely defined) is so hot right now on the right, there are some pretty major fractures beneath the surface. A lot of them have to do, unsurprisingly, with the centrality and importance of a stable nuclear family. Next to "the economy" (whatever that may mean), issue and topics of the family, I believe, are of paramount importance when drawing cultural and political lines. In the pronatal sphere, I see a two camp (at least) breakdown:
-
Have All The Babies All The Time (HAT-BAT) - This is firmly where Musk is king. The idea is simple mathematics with a dash of eugenics; if you are a "worthy man" have as many babies as possible. Multiple women? Fine. Selecting women based on your own rubric of "genetic desirability" also fine. This is where HBDers put their rubber to the road.
-
Have All The Babies And Raise Them In a Family (HAT-ARF) - This is the providence of traditional religious groups and a particular kind of secular cultural conservative (often, it's kind of hard to distinguish between these two subgroups because the latter will play-act at the religious part without really meaning it).
While it might seem that HAT-BAT and HAT-ARF might be able to leave each to their own and agree on "yay babies," I suspect that HAT-ARF will, quickly, stop to say "wait a minute, you actually have to raise your kids. A ton of data says that broken families have horrible social outcomes." And that right there is a major culture war split.
I'm a pronatalist, in the broadest sense possible, yet I do think it's too much to ask to necessarily tie that to some sort of religious requirement. Yet, I also don't see anyway to build functional societies without a nuclear family as the foundational unit. Spreading The Worthy Male Seed was the de facto method of world population for thousands of years. (Insert the stat here on how everyone in Central Asia is Genghis Khan's grandson/daughter). The result was a lot of continuation of the de facto state of man - war, strife, instability, and short lives. The formalization of monogamous marriage and all of the social and legal codes and laws that fractal out from there was a 2000+ year slow process that resulted in the stabilizing of families, of societies, and preservation of pro-social cultures. Destabilization of the family (sexual revolution etc.) has destabilized society and culture. Looking at it that way, the "Musk Mode" pronatalism is far more regressive that he - or others with similar strategies - would like to admit.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
15d ago
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
16d ago
Watch for staff turnover.
If this really was "the plan all along," I would expect most people to stay put.
If there was some moment where Trump "realized" that this was a massive economic blunder, he'll move or fire people, while still claiming "yep ... plan all along"
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
18d ago
As @MaiqTheTrue says, the rot goes back much longer and, I would add, across many different domains.
This is at the root of anti-enlightenment / anti-modernist thinking (a position I seemingly become more comfortable with daily). Humans used to have a much more humble and limited opinion of their ability to understand the complexity of the universe and capital-T "Truth." Much of that was left to religion, theology, or, sometimes, applied ethics and morality. In fact, even the best thinkers of the enlightenment period had a totally different conception of religion and faith in terms of epistemic systems.
Whereas today, in purely rational terms, it is fashionable to draw a box around theology and religion as a kind of esoteric study of the human spirit or heart, classically, religion and theology was seen as a bedrock component of any knowledge system in much the same way we might think of arithmetic, basic grammar, or ... geography? (you take your pick).
And I think it's taken 300 or so years for the compounding effects of that loss to be felt. Your post highlights demoralization as a key issue. Many other places I've seen the term "crisis of meaning" thrown around. The figures for male suicides, drug overdose, and chornic alcoholism are often lumped together as "deaths of despair." The problem, to me, seems to be that a purely rational worldview creates a fundamentally underdeveloped system of knowledge and personal agency - we really do become the rational ideal. That is, information processors. But that alone does not make life livable, nor does it do anything to orient us towards useful application of information processing. One thing I know for sure about Scott from SSC - he is a world class thinker. Another thing I know for sure - sometimes he chooses the goofiest things to think about.
The various more developed religions do a lot to remedy this. The more purely "spiritual" ones (Buddhism etc.) I think aren't as great because they fail in engaging with the world in the opposite direction of rationalism. Instead of overthinking, they actively cultivate a profound detachment from things that may subjectively feel serene and peacful but is just a different method of undermining prosocial activities. If people find themselves adverse to organized religion, I see the most effective systems being some of the classic virtue ethics regimes -- stoicism etc.
There's going to (always) be a temptation to secularize the religious in order to try to split the baby and get the maximum amount of "meaning" without all of that pesky sin-and-metaphysics. This is the primary critique of Kant's categorical imperative. And I think it's a valid critique - secularizing something that is inherently not isn't possible and you're more likely engaging in some elaborate self-deception. Play the tape forward and you end up with wokeism - which has all of the anthropological trappings of a religious belief system yet is rife with internal contradictions and has zero rigorous epistemic construction.
In a nutshell, people need to cultivate a sense of faith - deeply held belief something transcendent and beyond themselves that they can orient a life towards. And there needs to be an accompanying practice of it. Just like physical fitness or general mental acuity, if you aren't doing "it" everyday, you're getting worse at it.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
21d ago
1945-1979 saw a massive expansion in the American manufacturing sector
A good place to start in analyzing this (which is true, btw) is to ask "why?" Better yet, to ask "what were the prevailing macro conditions that allowed this to happen?"
Tracing that, you'll probably stumble upon the answer that is accepted by all serious economists and historians; after world war 2, ALL of the countries that had the human capital, technological proficiency, and public infrastructure to support a massive scale manufacturing sector were literally blown to shit and had suffered massive amounts of prime age male death ..... except for the USA.
1945 to 1979 happened as a fait accompli because no other country on earth could - at scale - do it.
In 2025, this is not the case. We would be immediately competing (with drastically higher labor costs by law) with several other countries (two of which who have larger absolute populations than us) who have spent the last 40 years (re)developing their manufacturing sectors.
But wait - we're already close to optimal in terms of manufacturing value add. The Chinese beat us out because they have three times the population and negative three billion times the respect for human rights. So when you, or anyone, says "bring back manufacturing!" - what in the actual hell do you mean? It's already here. Especially the best of it. In terms of high-end technical manufacturing (complex systems, aircraft, large machinery, etc.) the U.S. is so far out in first it's not even a competition.
The "manufacturing jobs" people like you seem to want are, what, exactly? Lightbulbs? Tee-shirts? Flip-flops? These are not jobs that pay well. These are not jobs that support families. These are not jobs that make strong communities. These are subsistence level toil.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
22d ago
I regularly read articles about how protectionism is the secret sauce behind China's economy.
Written by whom, Experts?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
23d 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.
23d ago
Unfortunately, according to DOGE's own numbers, it's a lot of "on paper" savings.
From some previous contracting work, I know an unfortunate amount about how Federal procurement works. The DOGE tracker sites I've found have direct links to FPDS (Federal Procurement Data System) pages for very specific contracts. That's good! But the devil is always in the details.
For any given government contract, there is the total lifetime value of the contract and dollars already obligated to it. As a toy example, let's say the Department of Commerce wants to do some general IT upgrade. It does some market research (not really, lol, but, whatever) solicits some bids, reviews proposals, and awards a contract. The total award value may be $500m, $1bn, or even more. But that doesn't mean the contract gets a big up-front payment of $1bn. It means that the Department of Commerce has given itself permission to spend up to that limit on this one particular contract (technically, depending on the contract type and structure, it could be across a lot of smaller contracts and/or task orders, but let's keep things simple for now).
When DOGE lists its numbers, its listing that full $1bn ceiling as the "savings." A few different media outlets tried to Point And Laugh at this, but the reality is that they're wrong as well. For the Department of Commerce (or anyone) to award a contract, they don't necessarily have to already have the budget approved by congress. In the industry, the term "unfunded opportunity" or "unfunded contract" is used in this case. The Government customer has a true need for whatever it says it does and can go through the bid and proposal process - but they have no obligation to actually pay you only because you've won a contract. Now, if you do any work on that contract, that's a different story. The fact of the matter is, unfortunately, that you can have a government contract that is effectively worth nothing even though it says "eleventy billion dollars" on the piece of paper.
Returning to DOGE, that they are canceling contracts and counting the ceiling value of those contracts could or could not be significant. If the agency in question already had their budget approved (and for several of these larger, longer term contracts, it is highly likely that was the case) then this the cancelling of these contracts does in fact save money from a future budget perspective. But it's not necessarily as if DOGE "found" $1bn dollars sitting in a commerce account somewhere and has now repurposed it for the General Purpose America Fuck Yeah account. They've freed up budget room next year and in the years following.
OR, they've cancelled a contract that was unfunded to begin with and so the savings are quite imaginary. It's like if you get an unexpected car repair bill and then mentally "cancel" your beach vacation. Did something happen? Not exactly. And certainly not in a true fiscal sense.
But wait, there's more. Just because a single contract within the Department of Commerce (to stick to my previous example) got cancelled, doesn't mean the agency as a whole won't find a way to reshuffle the budget and retain those dollars. Again, Congress controls the budget and they approve it every year (or, as has been the case for about the past 20 years - I'm not joking - the pass a weird series of CRs or otherwise out of order budgetary actions to sustain the budget as is with some new starts - kind of).
So, when do DOGE cuts get real and sticky? When Congress passes a budget. That's when you'll be able to actually see meaningful money stop flowing to agency / department X,Y, or Z. Until then, it's an on paper "win" (or not, see above) and, because it's happening totally within the executive branch, nothing stops a potential Democrat President in 2028 (or whenever) from flipping the switch in the other direction and directing Department of Commerce (and everyone else) to go ahead and try to get those IT contracts rolling again.
And I think this is part, though not the largest no most important part, of Elon's likely downfall in the Trump 2.0 admin. What he is used to doing in the corporate world is not possible in the Federal Government. The entire reason the founders set the system up the way they did was to make things intentionally hard to coordinate. They split the budget passers from the budget users and the law makers from the law enforces from the law interpreters. They did this because they wanted the default option to be "nothing happens." In the 18th century, this meant Americans were mostly free, then, to run their own lives. But through gradual executive overreach, aided many times by a cowardly Congress, we now have a poor situation in which the Executive kind of gets to do whatever it wants unless Congress or the Courts calls it out.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1mo ago
Quoting a quote is fucking stupid, retard.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1mo ago
Agree with all of your points.
People willing to work for low wages just don’t exist in America.
In this case, I'm going to defer to you as your post history (assuming a stranger on the internet isn't lying!) does demonstrate a more consistent exposure to these realities.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1mo ago
Also tagging @HughCaulk.
I agree with you. I'm not advocating for deportations because of race animus. I'm advocating for 1) deportations of illegal immigrants AND 2) a massive overhaul of labor laws.
Here's is my big post on that point
I don't buy the idea that natural born Americans "just don't want to work" - I believe that combination of the welfare state and labor laws actively prevent them from easily getting basic level jobs. The only way for these basic level jobs (exactly the ones you listed) to get done is to illegally employ foreigners. To be blunt; we have outlawed cheap labor in this country, so the only way to hire cheap labor is to do it illegally one way or another. Who is going to have an easier time accepting and illegal job; someone who is already violating US law or someone who is not?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1mo ago
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1mo ago
I just feel like being excessively harsh on illegal immigration is punching down.
But this isn't being excessively harsh - this is complying with the laws (and punishments as written). There's nothing "excessive" about it.
Do you feel intense competition for jobs or homes from illegal immigrants?
That's the thing about national economies - we all experience warped market conditions (for employment, housing, healthcare, and basic goods) because of illegal immigration. That these experience may be more acute in TX,NM,AZ doesn't mean they are not experience elsewhere in the country.
A massive percentage of the American agricultural workforce is of questionable legality. Yet they've become so endemic that any agricultural concern that tries to play fair and not hire illegals finds their production costs are too high and gets competed out of business. Think about that for a second; there is a large American industry wherein the only way to remain viable is to flirt with legally dubious hiring practices.
I would like to see swift and stubborn crackdowns on that. Excessive would be letting illegal employment continue to be de facto all across the country.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1mo ago
The reason(s) for this is even worse.
If you can document that you posted a public job notice, you can demonstrate to the Feds that you are "equal opportunity" employer - even when you wanted the job to go to a specific friend-of-an-employee already. Seriously, this is how it works.
Part of it is also used by large public corporations to send noise to hedge funds. Hedge funds will scrape job postings as a rough proxy for expected hiring (and, therefore, demand) for certain companies. A bunch of ghost jobs can confuse the HF algorithm.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1mo ago
Me: "Here's my experience in the field"
You: "I'm not you, so this doesn't help me"
.... I don't know what I can do for you? I'm trying to relate my experience and perspective. I'm not trying to craft a career strategy for randos on the internet.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1mo ago
Experienced Tech Bro checking in.
Leet code grinding and blind resume application have been losing propositions for years. This isn't new info. The career / job strategy median is:
- Recruit hard out of undergrad. The good news is you're cheap and a degree from a "good" program will probably get you an offer. Your whole job is to learn how XYZ corp does their development / product roadmapping etc.
- 2 - 4 years in, you lateral. You DO NOT do this with blind resume flinging. You use your network of friends (you've been making those, haven't you) to figure out who is hiring and which one of your friends has the relative clout to get your resume in front of a decision maker.
- (Option B after undergrad) Do the startup thing. Whole other world, but it's an option, at least.
- (Option C) Pivot to a tech adjacent role; solutions architect, tech sales / sales engineering, technical PM. The good news here is that networking is built into your job. If you're good at your job, you're good at networking and the inertia supports itself for a while. This isn't a guarantee to wealth, but you'll never be jobless.
- If you want to stay hard on the engineering track, you job hop as much as you want to build a big salary / options. Really, however, you need to start creating some sort of public portfolio. This used to mean just having a good GitHub profiler with some pet projects. No longer. You need to be involved in some sort of ongoing and pretty large scale open source project etc. The idea is that you're creating true "subject matter expertise" in some niche.
- Now you're getting headhunted for that expertise. Well funded startups, big time roles at FFANGs etc.
The keen eyed among you will detect something here; a tech career is now much like any other professional career; you have to network and you have to develop some sort of specific edge, usually born of genuine interest and passion in a niche area. The era of "Yes, I can sling code pretty good" is over. That was 2005 - 2015, give or take a two years in either direction.
I simply don't believe the Gen-Z has it worse story. I can remember when I was in High School and everyone wanted a job at the local hardware store because it paid really well and wasn't that difficult if you had some level of real interest in, well, hardware stores. This being commonly known, kids from all over the county would stop by to drop off their resumes everyday. How many do you think were called back and interviewed?
Luckily for me, the owner's son happened to be in my grade and we were in the same Geometry class.
I had a really good summer working at the hardware store.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1mo ago
Thank you! Sincerely.
- When you say 'high liturgy', do you simply mean the High Sung Mass aka Missa Cantata? Or are you speaking more broadly?
- Definitely tracking how important Fr. Berg is to the Fraternity. He's on his 3rd run as Superior General.
- ‘rebuffed pope Francis’ - Tracking. I'll admit, as I did previously, confusion and ignorance here.
It seems to me that some sort of reintegration isn't that difficult to imagine, but that it would just take a few last painful steps on all sides to make it happen. Like you pointed out, Williamson was schismatic or, at least, cheerfully antagonistic. Another assumption I'd make is that part of reintegration would be at least a private admission by Fellay and/or other leadership that, yes, Lefenvre did some not-very-nice-things and we (the SSPX) acknowledge that. Mostly, I chalk a lot of this up to the fact that the Roman Catholic Church is a massive bureaucracy that moves very slowly (one of the things I like about it most) and the crucial variable here is mostly just time. It would also seem that everything is on pause until Francis goes to his reward as well.
Again, appreciate your continued commentary here as you're obviously more well versed on this stuff than my trying-to-TradCath-ass.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1mo ago
Thanks for this.
The FSSP and SSPX split has so many weird interconnections. I'm still parsing them. As you say, the FSSP is in full communion with Rome, yet has a much broader schizo tendency. The SSPX seems to have rebuffed Benedict XVI's sincere invitation to get back into communion. Then, when Pope Francis tried again - and SSPX rebuffed the offer again - Cardinal Burke, of all people, appears to have totally dismissed the SSPX. But it also appears to me that the SSPX has really well informed their priests in terms of doctrine. The SSPX podcast, regardless of where you come down on the issues presented, is full of priests who could be teaching graudate level theology, philosophy, and metaphyiscs. When I imagine their depth of catechesis and priestly formation versus a guitar-and-piano NO priest, I have to chuckle.
I'm looking for a reliable Latin Mass and want to avoid even accidental schism. At this point, I'm getting interest in the ICKSP if for no other reason than, as the kids say, their "drip" is "on point."
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1mo ago
Thanks! This actually aided my understanding.
Would it be your opinion, then, that the hard-to-define behavior patterns I described, and you expanded, actually do fall on a contiuum that includes outright grooming? That is, they are different in magnitude, but not in kind.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1mo ago
Dude, thanks for reminding me about The Wailing. Watched it on a random Netflix Saturday Night years ago, thinking it would be some sort of Ju-On knockoff that would help pass the time.
Absolute power banger of a film. The final ending gave me legit horror move "I am fucking scared" vibes I hadn't felt since watching OG Exorcist when I was 12 or something.
I think your post - in its entirety - is the "right" answer. This film is doubt and doubt on multiple levels. Forget "who's the bad guy", do we even know what the fuck actually happened? I think an interesting comparison to make would be No Country for Old Men. On the surface, it's a really good neo-noir-western with a hero Cowboy protagonist assisted by the grizzled elder sheriff. Unfortunately, our hero just runs out of time and luck.
Right? Maybe not. Maybe the whole pont of NCFOM is that all of the action - the chase scenes, the cleverness of the protagonist, the one-step-behind earnestness of the sheriff - is actually totally pointless. The universe scale forces of fate and end consequences of seemingly insignificant actions are as inescapable as they are unknowable. "What do I have running on this coin toss?" "Everything." What actually happened in that movie? Maybe nothing. The ending is notoriously abrupt and follows a soliloquy that, although vivid, sort of has no point. It is as if the movie itself is telling us "nothing happened in this move and you knew the end before you walked in - which is that there is nothing in the end."
The Wailing does this by confronting us, at first, with a good-vs-evil doubt situation. But the more times you watch it the more you start to think, "Can I even tell good an evil apart? Do I have any coherent plan for 'stopping' or 'fighting' evil if I think I've confronted it?" It's doubt on top of doubt so that once you simply reconcile yourself to taking a leap of faith on one plane, you are immediately confronted with a whole never world of doubt on another one.
But I could be wrong.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1mo ago
The breakeven point for flying is anywhere from 6 - 8 hours depending on personal preference. With one major caveat.
First, the 6 - 8 hour number:
- Assume 1 - 2 hours traveling to and waiting at airport before departure
- Assume 1 - 2 hours at destination airport getting bags and then getting transportation to your final destination.
This is 2 - 4 hours of "overhead" (in the business sense) time. You are not traveling at 400 - 500 mph. You are making no meaningful "progress" towards your destination.
Spending 2 - 4 hours of "overhead" for a 1 hour flight (a 1 hour flight probably being in the neighborhood of 300 - 350 miles) is a think trade on time alone. A 300 - 350 mile drive, assuming mostly interstate travel, is 5 - 6 hours. So, while the advantage is still in air travel by maybe 2 - 3 hours (expected value), you have to factor in;
- Probability of a flight cancellation or delay
- Personal cost of security lines, the airport experience, and comfort on a plane (this is highly variable person to person, I will admit).
- Big one: cost.
Flying, even an hour, is almost always a multiple hundreds of dollars expense. Yes, we all have that friend who has the story about getting a ticket to Paris for $43 dollars because he booked it on Christmas Eve or something. But the right expectation for an economy class ticket is $200 - 400 on the lower end for a 1 - 4 hour flight, booked well in advance. Add a checked bag fee. Add incidentals at the airport etc. And this is all for one person. As soon as you bring a friend or a spouse, everything doubles instantly.
But let's just go back to time alone. Let's say you're on a nice and easy 2 hour flight and your time/thru/from the airport on both sides is 1 hour. 4 hours total door to door. Good day. But let's say there are some delays, or you're a little neurotic so you leave an extra hour earlier and maybe this 1-2-1 turns into a 2-2-2. 6 hours.
A potential 6 hours and above average stress and frustration. Maybe we roll snake eyes and the flight is canceled altogether.
Versus a 6 hour drive that starts when I want it to and ends with me pulling into the driveway of wherever my final destination is. Unlimited pit stops in between. Snacks. My tunes and no one else's. I am Captain of the Car and not jammed in next to strangers in a high pressure can with leaky closet bathrooms.
It's an expected value play. A perfect flight trip is absolutely better on every metric and can be a wash to slight advantage on price. But a bad flight trip loses in every way. A median flight trip is mostly dependent on personal preference.
The variance on driving as a full experience is so much less.
However, once you get beyond 8 hours of driving, the returns to flying (by the same rubric) start to rise exponentially. Once you hit even just 12 hours of driving, you're probably talking about a potential hotel stay and you get into the area of actual injury risk due to fatigue.
The major caveat I mentioned at the top, however, is that flying is actually hugely dependent upon your final destination being within 60 - 90 minutes of the airport. Landing and then knowing you have another 2+ hours of travel through another medium of travel is, at least for me, massively demoralizing.
I have an uncle who lives 13 hours, by car, away. I try to visit him once a year. I planned out the plane-train-bus method of getting there. 8.5 hours. A likely 2-2-1 flight trip plus 3 hours in a rental car there. But then am I paying for NOT driving the rental car once I get there? No, wait, my uncle can just drive 6 hours round trip to get me. I just have to coordinate him. Hmm, maybe I can drop off the rental car a little closer to his cabin and then he meets me in betw--
No.
Me. car. Spotify. I'll stay in that dated by clean and quiet motel on the end of the first day. If I get up at 7am on day 2, I'll be at Unc's well before lunch.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1mo ago
To add to this in a different direction, there's the issue of malicious ambiguity and suggestion.
I was once at a viewing of Y Tu Mama Tabien at a campus "art house" while in college. I was there because the girl I was trying to sleep with was there and I was more than willing to sit through that mindless nonsense if it meant appearing "deep" and "thoughtful" to her.
As I remember it, during the movie's climax, the female lead has sex with both of the male leads (consecutively, not concurrently) and then, for some reason, the two male leads have a homosexual encounter. The two male leads, up until this point, are pretty typical - albeit Mexican - BroDudes. So, it's kind of an abrupt and hamfisted tranisition. I think it's supposed to be a message about the "blurry lines" between male bonding and homosexual acts? I don't know. There was a similar vibe around the whole Brokeback Mountain thing (which, funnily enough, was completely and obviously rehashed by The Power of the Dog - which one a bunch of awards).
In the "discussion" that followed the viewing of the movie, some freshman of ambiguous gender and obvious lack of ability related an emotional and oh so brave personal anecdote about "experimenting" with his childhood best friend before matriculating to college. He told us, the captivated audience, that although he is definitely straight, it was still an amazing and tender experience.
I thought the speaker was probably gay as hell - Not That There's Anything Wrong With That (TM).
Looking back on these various movies and the "discussion" that followed Y Tu Mama Tambien in particular, I think there's some level of subtle support for homosexual activity among straight men that can accompany otherwise anodyne discussions about gay people / culture etc. I can't put my finger on the reason for this. I think it's far short of hardcore grooming (as it mostly occurs in adult groups, for one). Perhaps it's just a "personal expression" thread pulled too far. Maybe light-grade fetishism? Sexualize virtue signaling on the part of practitioners? Again, I'm not certain about the why but I am closer to certain that it does happen.
Reasonable people can assert, "Suggestion isn't coercion. It's not like these people are forcing you to commit sexual acts of any orientation!" Which is true. But consider the social repercussions your average DudeBro might face if he were to go around casually chortling, "I dunno, Stacy, maybe you should go get naked with Brenda and just kinda see what happens. Could be pretty fun!" Or, as another comparison, change the independent variable from sexual orientation to race - "Yooooo! You gotta go try asian P*ssy!" or "Jewish guys always lay pipe well" -- all received outrage would be more than expected.
Yet, as that clip from Atlanta points out, the de-facto response from The Party of Science (TM) is "sexuality is a spectrum you can really do whatever you want." It's not coercion, it's support so subtle that it's eternally deniable, but there is a there there.
This is a very mid-wit argument that is as specious as it is ever present.
"Without the Left women and minorities wouldn't be able to vote!"
Nonsense. This is a view of history as inherently progressive; you have good guys and bad guys and all of the bad guys will eventually lose if we just Resist hard enough. It's the fever dream of sophomore PoliSci students and ACLU lawyers alike.
Segregation and black enfranchisement itself were very non-linear and more a product of reform and reactionary ebbs and flows. People often forget that we had a black senator from Mississippi in the 1970s for instance. And that link shows the plethora of other black elected official holders before 1900.
The failure of Reconstruction was that it was, in fact, so radical as to provoke a counter-reaction that may have been stronger than what would normally occur. You then get Jim Crow and the Solid South for another few generations.
But that doesn't fit into the neat narrative of "Slavery Awful --> Lincoln --> Emancipation --> Oh no, KKK! ---> Rosa Parks, MLK ---> 1964 --> We're equal now! --> Oh wait, George Floyd, let's pretend it's 1964 again"
Do a deep dive into the better conservative (small c) thinkers; James Burnham and Willmoore Kendall. You'll see that one of the tenants of conservative thought is that it's totally fine for people to think whatever they want so long as the political system cannot be co-opted by the Small But Loud to coerce the Many But Disinterested to abandon their beliefs - as "ugly" as they might be. Democracy is a process and a system - never an "outcome" generator.
From, The Conservative Affirmation by Kendall:
I know that, of course, all of us enlightened folk, if we were living in Alabama in 1955, would've definitely been on the "right side of history" and bravely advocated for desegregation. I mean, like, how could you not?
Because you (in Alabama in 1955) didn't really have a passionate attachment to the issue. It was simply the way things are. You're mostly interested in paying your mortgage and raising your kids. But, all of a sudden, your kids' teachers start telling them about their inherited culpability for slavery and you go, "Hey, what the fuck?" and now ... you're involved.
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