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.
11m ago
when billionaires steal more from all of us everyday?
This is a reddit level trope.
Please, please, please tell me, specifically, how billionaires are committing massive theft every day. My opinion and prediction is that you can't because you don't actually mean what you've written. What you mean is that "billionaires make lots of money, I don't, and that's bad." Which, if you want to say it, is actually an argument you could make!
But instead we get to this righteous indignation based on personal emotion and now, suddenly, billionaires are repeat mega felons. Come on.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
15m ago
even if I mess them up, I’ll go to jail.
Nitpick. But this isn't true unless you're just being repeatedly careless with corporate taxes. If there isn't a clear intent to not pay or to avoid tax, the IRS wants you to pay far more than they want to prosecute you.
Where you are 1000% correct, however, is that if you mess them up because of a totally indecipherable tax code, you may have to pay all sorts of penalties, which does seem, to me, to be outrageous.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
23m ago
I know what you mean, and it is a thorny problem when it is a unforeseeable circumstance. People change and get strange. Marriage and children do change husband and wife.
But, I am also now thinking of a friend's cousin who matched with a guy on tinder, found out on the first date that he was fresh out of a 7 year prison sentence for armed robbery .... and will be celebrating her 2 year anniversary with him, I believe, in February.
Mate selection is important. "Follow your heart" has to be one of the most catastrophic psyops of all time, for men and women but, again, especially, for women. If you can envision that idea that the man you are marrying will use his provision of resources as a way to trap you in a non-consensual relationship, perhaps you shouldn't marry that guy. If your friends and family voice hesitation in their approval of a mate, you should probably listen to them. That actually makes me think of another psyop - the young woman (usually an aristocrat) who doesn't want to marry the man she is "supposed" to (usually a very eligible and stable male aristocrat) and, instead, follows her hear (see above) to marry the black sheep / sad boi / romantic poet that she really loves. They always end up happily ever after, and, suspiciously, he's often some sort of hidden prince who is absolutely loaded.
I've never seen this happen in real life, and, far more frequently, I've seen mothers desperately tell their daughters, "hey don't marry this deadbeat!" But, following the heart, they sometimes do and the consequences are disastrously predictable.
I'll de-genderize all of this. The problem is in the assumed pure autonomy of the individual to know what is best for themselves in all circumstances. "Live your best life" and all of that. But that's a recipe for consistent cycle of FAFO learning. I ask my friends and business partners for advice constantly and they do the same with me. There's not necessarily a hierarchy or approval mechanism to it, but its a fantastic way to interrogate different opinions from people who care about you and who have different mental models of how things work. As a society, however, we've carved out this weird exception for literally the most consequential decision you will ever make. Marriage.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
32m ago
But we do our best to prevent it from operating.
Exactly. But the cost of that prevention is passed on to people who make good decisions. That's the whole perversion of it. "Suicidal empathy" is one of the great bon mots of culture war discourse. It is possible to love-your-neighbor-to-(mutual)-death
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
34m ago
Think of a goodbrained version of "never meet your heroes." If a goon actually pays for a prostitute or companion of some sort, he has to fully interact with a person for some length of time. That could go wrong. It could make him feel bad. The distance created by a screen creates a perception of control and the ability to "Rage quit" if things go south. But they still want the knowledge that there's someone real over there.
Don't get me wrong, a portion of the "real people" online sex market will be taken by AI. Perhaps a pretty large portion of it. But there's going to remain these other niches. If online porn and COVID didn't kill stripclubs (and it didn't), I don't see how they every really go away.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1hr ago
This would already be the natural course of things if we got rid of the fully retarded summer break. I don't know the origin of this practice (farming?) but the longitudinal data is indisputable; backsliding occurs in the summer, child abuse goes up, crime also goes up.
Furthermore, we have this horrible discontinuity where, from ages 6 - 22, people develop a "I have a long break to look forward to" mentality and then, upon entering the workforce, realize that isn't the case.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1hr ago
Phrased differently, this is just a massive tax cut for married couples that have kids. Which is has been a big part of mostly Republican tax ideas for decades now.
If I'm a guy making $100,000 at my job, and I'm paying 20% of my income in taxes each year but, if I get married and have a kid, that goes to 5% for the life of the kid, that's about $1,200 per month that could go to the kid. A 5 second google indicates that this is actually close to bang on for childcare monthly costs. Making up the difference would be mom having a part time job, or just coasting on savings for a year or two before getting a raise to say $125,000.
If we could get this massive tax advantage, we'd be set, right? Probably not. I am quite convinced that the deeper issue is in women having a totally irrational fear of being "trapped" because they aren't making their own money. It's almost a Jekyll and Hyde monster tale. They marry a guy because he's nice, funny, smart, and a good provider. They have a child because they both want to and love each other. Then, suddenly, he's demanding sex after dinner every night, beating her, and neglecting the child. The heroine can't leave because she's a helpless woman with no recourse (nevermind family, friends, or just a community that wouldn't tolerate spousal abuse). It just doesn't track. I'm not blaming women here, either. I think a combination of feminism-consumerism-hyperindividualism has convinced both men and women, but, especially women, that not having the means to support yourself (even within the context of a family) makes your morally reprehensible.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1hr ago
The blackpill moment for me came about five or six Christmases ago.
I was came home to see mom, dad, and my siblings a few days before Christmas. At this time of year, every year, my dad finalizes his books. He has always run the household finances top to bottom, even though my mom had her own entrepreneurial career since I was little. This year, however, dad had extra time on his hands because, well, he'd been retired for the full year. Probably to keep busy, he was self-auditing the family's entire financial history since my oldest sibling was born (if you haven't figured it out by now, my dad was a finance nerd).
Coming into his office to greet him after, of course, hugging my mom first and learning about all the amazing Christmas cookie recipes she had shared with the other church ladies, I found my dad looking a bit sullen. Nothing catastrophic, but definitely something there. I perked up at once. Had he miscalculated their retirement forecast? Impossible, he'd been thinking about that daily for over a decade before he retired. What was it? Had mom started splurging on fur coats or trinkets for the grandkids?
I asked him what the matter was and his response was direct, "We should've never paid for heath insurance. We came out behind."
This was beyond stunning to hear. It was like finding out that I was adopted all these years later. Why? Because one of my siblings, in her teenage years, had had five major surgeries that required; A specialist-of-specialist surgeon to actually do each one, multi week hospital stays each time, weekly (later monthly) checkups locally, and prescriptions for all sorts of exotic medications. The whole saga actually played out over 4 years. Complications, poor recovery, etc. I was fairly young so I don't remember the worse of it, but this has always been cited as why my mother went prematurely grey.
I asked my father to explain. Pulling up the World's Greatest Excel Spreadsheet, he walked me through historical premiums, deductibles, out of pocket expenses. At the end, the =SUM() function told the tale; had mom and dad paid out of pocket instead for all that time, they would've saved money.
Two important caveats
- This does include family premiums my dad was paying across multiple employers both before and after my sister had her issues. I guess you could call this a bit of an apple-and-oranges situation. I'd be open to arguments.
- In order to pay at the time for all my sisters surgeries and hospital stays, my folks would've probably needed to take out a second mortgage. Dad had thought of this and done some analysis using the prevailing rates of the time -- he still believes it would've netted out in their advantage. I believe him on the raw numbers level, but the mental toll of having hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt overhanging for years may have "cost" more than the spreadsheet captured. Again, you be the judge.
Still in all, this was my helathcare blackpill moment. The normie narrative around healthcare is "yeah, it's too damn expensive, but if you really need it it's worth it." Well, like, no. My sister's bills probably put us into about the top 5% of expenditure for the years she was in the middle of everything. And yet, the numbers still didn't crunch.
Since then, I've learned that the top 1% of healthcare "users" (that is, people who are consuming care) represent about 50% of overall healthcare spending. It's a crazy power law. But that actually isn't the problem. As others have pointed out, it's all of the off book spending that gets done for defectors. This then gets passed up the chain to the middle and top. For every deadbeat who uses the ER as his or her primary care physician, many of them as "frequent fliers", that's thousands to tens of thousands of unpaid costs that have to get paid somewhere. And that somewhere is you, the dutiful policy holder. It is the ponzi schemes of ponzi schemes because the pyramid is upside down -- the people at the top aren't actually capturing a bunch of value and then playing slight of hand with those lower, it's that those at the very bottom are pushing all the cost up.
This is one of the moral dilemmas I actually think about most. If I, god forbid, ever need some sort of major procedure done, do I just defect and refuse to pay? They can't send me to jail. Maybe my credit score goes to shit forever, maybe I even go bankrupt. Eh, but then I'm just going to be a cash-only vagabond and live as free as I please.
But it would be wrong and immoral. As much as it is a totally rigged game, I see the only hope for society to be to continue to at least observe the rules of the game. Defecting in a collective action problem shifts immediate personal cost to prolonged socialized cost. It's inherently anti-social.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1hr ago
This got nuked when it became illegal to deny people for preexisting conditions. It's doubly fucked when something like half all all chronic conditions can be traced to poor lifestyle management; diet, exercise, and substance misuse/abuse both legal and otherwise.
To extend the "most ships don't sink, most mail doesn't get lost" metaphor; most people want to drive their cars forever without hitting anyone or being hit by anyone. People who drink too much, smoke, don't exercise, and eat pseudo-food might not desire to see the doctor in a philosophical sense, but they're loudly ignoring the reality that they will need to in short order. It's the equivalent of driving blindfolded with your feet and, after hitting a lightpost, proclaiming, "_of course I didn't want to do that!"
In the west, we're actually pretty good at solving the big problems of actual healthcare (not health insurance) through good old fashioned innovation and market incentives. Diabetes used to mean losing a foot, and insulin changed that. Antibiotics going back to penicillin mean that you can literally get your can now body cavity opened up in ways that, in yesteryear, would've been a slow and agonizing death by infection. I contend that the greatest medicinal invention ever was functional public sewage and waste disposal paired with ubiquitous flush toilets and showers.
We're very bad at dealing with repeated objectively horrible decision making at the individual level. This is the thread that ties together not only healthcare but also welfare, criminal punishment, and abortion (to name the a few off the top of my head). If a given person wants to keep making awful decision, a free society has to tolerate that to some extent. The alternative is tyranny. What a free society should not do, in my opinion, and cannot do perpetually, is actively subsidize these bad decisions and/or the consequences arising from them.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2hr ago
Ultimately this is also why I don't see how Onlyfans continues to exist as a business model for flesh-and-blood women after this year.
That one is easy.
Ultimately, it'll become an even more premium service. Gooners will pay extra for some sort of cryptographically verifiable proof of realness. Setting up a digital chain of custody from a digital camera to actual final presentation on OnlyFans or another site wouldn't be too arduous and (markets in everything) someone will create a service to do just that.
Saying that AI porn will destroy "regular" porn fails because it relies on the same logic as "porn will destroy the market for webcam girls / strip clubs / prostitutes." It isn't all about the simple visual arousal, but about a parasocial/pararomantic/paraintimate relationship.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2hr ago
And while both the boy generating the deepfakes and those passing it around (or even receiving it) could probably charged with federal CSAM stuff, that's such a nuclear option it's extremely unlikely anyone would seriously even threaten it here.
Thought experiment, what if one of the boys shows it to his creepy uncle and then snapchats it to his creepy uncle? Then creepy uncle is in possession of CSAM - even worse if he then darkwebs it to all of his other chomo friends.
Obviously, probably not going to charge the minor male with accessory, right? But this is the "break containment" mega problem for cases exactly like this. Call it "deepfake laundering"; kids unwittingly doing stuff that, in the realm of adults, would be 100% illegal.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
20hr ago
The basic problem is that our civilization is emotionally allergic to a key active ingredient of the medicine, and that's not something any amount of sugar-coating can help. Take the religious shell away and put it in a container that's as secular and facelessly bureaucratic as we are, and I don't think it makes a difference to the overall reaction.
I like this sentiment and I'm going to use it to comment more broadly on what I see as an aggravating tension between Tradition and Traditionalism. I'm use those two words so I can play off the "all -isms are bad" meme.
Tradition is a set of beliefs, values, and, importantly, ongoing or repeated behaviors that are inherited from the past with the goal to preserve the present and pass on to the future.
Traditionalism is vibe based gesturing at "how it used to be" with the implication that "it" used to be better. There's going to be some kind of attempt at vaguely repeating the behavior of the past - often incomplete - and a lot of rhetoric about the past. There will be close to zero deeply held beliefs and values under the surface. As Rob Henderson might say, it's mostly about signalling. These are the RETVRN people. I mentioned a young woman like this in previous post.
I think these are your "neotraditionalism" people (all -isms are bad!). And I agree with you that these very "neo-trads" would never vote for some of the ideas you have laid out. Why? Because it would be bad for them, personally, as individuals. And thus I trace this back to the rise of hyperindividualism (isms! isms! isms!).
I'm not advocating for actual collectivism the way Mamdani did in his inaugural speech today. I'm advocating for the idea that there was a society before that gave us what we have to day and our job is to sustain it and then pass it on. That's the chain of real capital-T Tradition that did sustain so many different human societies up until about the 20th century. The proto-causes are still up for debate; was it the industrial revolution? global financialization of capitalism? the "trauma" of WW1/2? I can't weigh in with authority here, but I can point to one thing that I think is key:
The Baby Boomers broke that chain of real capital-T Tradition. In both directions. They looked at their parents with their going to church and waiting for matrimony and not smokin the wacky-tobaccy and said "Peace and Love, Man!" before inventing the pill, porn, no-fault divorce, equality, feminism, and affirmative action. Next, wanting to enjoy the prosperity of a post WW2 America (that they, the boomers, totally earned on their own and didn't inherit from the Greatest Generation) voted for Social Security, Medicare/caid, and home mortgage subsidy. This created a massive debt burden that they would never pay because their children and grandchildren will.
Gen-X kind of got caught in the crossfire, but when you could work at a coffee shop in Manhattan, smoke cigarettes, and date a quirky mid in the 1990s, it was kind of ... whatever, cool, I guess.
Millienials woke up to the grift and Gen-Z seems to have been born nihilistic. They know the boomers looted the store and then stuck everyone else with the bill. They, rightfully, are enraged by this but only a small fraction has eaten the bitter medicine and realized "ah, shit, we're going to have to fix this ... and it's going to be hard for a while." Instead, 90% + of Mil-Z-enials are somewhere between "Government provided everything, tax the rich" and "Fuck it, Imma get mine. Let's hit some crypto scams, bruh" Both of these are anti-social and, of course, non Traditional. I agree heartily with you that only a hyper minority of mostly religious or strongly philosophically disciplined / metaphysically driven people in these two generations are seriously committing to "we can rebuild, and our kids will benefit."
How this all plays out is that we're going to see a slow motion culling of the population where we can afford it most - young men. We know this because it has already happened. I don't even need to quote the stats anymore. Opioid epidemic, 6 - 8 million prime age males out of the workforce, incels, no friends etc. A great way to sidestep demographic gravity is to led some deadweight drop. That's bleak and I know it. It's also what's happening.
The next necessary ingredient is peeling back the feminist lie of fulfillment in a career alone. This is already starting. When TradWife tiktoks trend for a while and then we get backlask like "is having a boyfriend cringe?" articles, it means the ideas are now circulating and its just a matter of time before some percentage of women decides "fuck a job, I want babies." It doesn't have to be that great a number, it just has to be present outside of the semi-sequestered religious communities (Amish, FLDS, etc.)
The thing that keeps me up at night is how long all of this could take. Returning to my original framing, the people who buy into Traditionalism aren't actually willing to do what needs doing to fix things because it will probably mean accepting a slightly materially less comfortable quality of life for some time and an absolutely lower social quality of life as well (i.e. getting branded as a kind of weirdo). But they will gesture vaguely to things like "encouraging earlier marriage" and "keeping a family together." But will they endorse women not going to college? Will they endorse no-fault divorce? Of course not. And I wonder how long this will draw the pain out, especially when the other side (progressives) are offering sprinting into oblivion. The Traditionalism-ists don't need to really dig deep to retain political and social sway when their opponents are literally recommending self-castration, baby murder, and neo-surfdom.
As I've said before in this thread and as Amadan said below, I don't want to control women (or men) from a State perspective. If a woman wants to get three PhDs and never marry, that's on her - just as it would be on a man. But, right now, we're actively subsidizing those decisions socially, culturally, and even financially whereas were suppressing capital-T tradition socially and culturally. This isn't "boo hoo unfair!" this is drawing out the agony for society.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
making marriage even more exclusive and difficult is going to collapse it further.
Yes, probably, but people will adapt.
Think about the way it worked in the past. If you wanted to have sex, marriage was the only way for most people. In fact, the whole trope of a man promising he loves a woman only to flee the morning after coitus is illustrative of this. If you were sleeping around a lot, as a man or a woman, you were circling the drain, so to speak. After a while, the only people you could have sexual congress with were just as on the margin of society as you were. The obvious exception here is, of course, wealthy / elite men who could engage the services of discreet prostitutes or employ some sort of concubinage on the side.
Then, during the sexual revolution in the west, this changed. You didn't have to promise yourself to your high school sweetheart. You could kind of dog around for at least college, but maybe get wifed/husbanded up right around graduation. But, if we play the tape forward another 50,60 years, we have what we have today; perpetual fuckery (or an utter lack thereof) well into one's 30s.
If we flip the switch back, you'll see a dip in the marriage rate for some time. Then, as a planned and stable marriage becomes more rare it will regain social currency and people will begin to orient themselves towards it. Situationships, polyamory, etc. will be seen as weirdo fringe stuff.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
First off, when you say something like "highly gatekept" you're giving away some of your online habits and, more enjoyable for me, you give me the opportunity to -
YesChad.jpeg.
I absolute want to gatekeep marriage. That's, like, the point, bro. If you don't literally keep the gates you're doubly fucked when the barbarians show up.
All those people in situationships are not going, "I wish there were a death pact contract I could enter with a partner that society and law would force us to respect"
That's hyperbolic and you know it. People in situationships want to get out of them. So much so that "defining the relationship" is literally the next meme after situationship in the meme-chain of modern dating. The problem with that next step is that it isn't actually a true next step. There are plently of memes and funny YouTube videos that illustrate how when one part wants to "define the relationship" the other party swerves and avoids in order to keep the undefined situationship going. And the world continues to burn turn.
You can't just decree from above that some action is to be seen as desirable and have people abide;
I agree completely.
We used to, however, let people make their own decisions and then live by their own consequences. If you didn't want to make a good decision, you totally could! But then, later, you'd have to deal with it. The problem today is that a large part of society that routinely makes good decisions and employs delayed gratification, self-sacrifice, and discipline is actively coerced (via taxes) to subsidizing tens of millions of people who not only make bad decisions but actively defect from a pro-social game.
Let me be clear, I don't want be to be forced to abide any of my personal values system ideas. That would be tyranny. I just want consequences to have actions for everyone. My original comment that gatekept marriage attempted to outline what I think the requirements for making a good marriage decision are. People are free not to abide by that, but they must abide by the consequences.
Good post. It does a good job of clearly stating the problem of R/K selection theory in the context of human beings.
The vast majority of human history is a bunch of elite men getting lots and lots of women pregnant. The problem with this is that once you hit the agrarian revolution, let alone the industrial, the necessities of society at a scale beyond the village means you have to find some sort of social institution to prevent a lot of intra-male mate competition.
Enter marriage.
Marriage is a miracle. It's institution (which is close to a human universal, btw, in any society that's progressed past hunting-gathering) creates a way for males to pacify their natural urge to kill other males as means to guarantee mate access, and also creates a basic economic and social building block. Throw on top of it property and inheritance rights, and you've got yourself the beginnings of something durable.
When the institution of marriage breaks down, you can see what follows. It isn't anything new, it is a de-evolution to our chaotic ancestors' way of mate selection. Does this kind of sound like the modern dating market? Lack of commitment, multiple partners in parallel, "infidelity" beginning to lose all meaning and significance, "situationships" being strategic ambiguity by both men and women to hedge their bets.
I'll dig it up later (if I remember) but I was listening to a podcast where the guest had a great line. Marriage, specifically the wedding, isn't about a public commitment of love to the other person, it's about publicly signaling that both of you are off the market and that you'll abide by all of the laws and norms around marriage - and so should other people! There's no ambiguity. If you sleep with a married man or woman, you're a homewrecker. You should know this because of the publicly displayed wedding band that is visible at all times (and also, you know, that other person should tell you they're married).
But marriage, at least in the west, is utterly meaningless - doubly so for any sort of real legal or social consequences for failing to live up to its requirements. Cheated on your wife? No big deal, there's couples counseling. Or you can just get a divorce. You've been divorced? Who hasn't! It's so easy to do now that you don't even need a reason other than "I guess I just don't like him/her anymore."
And we haven't even got to the wildly out of balance reality of the legal system. If I'm a 34-37 year old male, tall, in good shape, earning a high income, getting married is such a high risk that many lawyers specifically recommend against it. The only exception being a prenuptual agreement that is so stacked against the wife that it becomes quite foolish for her to get married because she'll be in a kind of economic concubinage.
As many others have said, the way to fix this issue - to the extent that it is possible - is through recultivating social esteem. Marriage should be a capital-B Big Deal and should be reserved, frankly, for worthwhile men selected by women with honor and virtue. I'm not going to get all "virgins only" here, but when a retired pornstar marrying some guy isn't scene as laughably retarded, we've got a problem. Marriage should be seen as a goal for the ambitious young man in the same way that starting your own business is - not for the feint of hard, full of needs for sacrifice and hard work, but, ultimately, a quite noteworthy achievement.
Adultery should be a crime. I'd not recommend locking people up for it, but it should be a misdemeanor that is publicly searchable. There has to be real consequences for promiscuity that violets a marriage contract. If you want to sleep around with other unmarried folks, that's fine.
Finally, I don't see how you can re-invigorate marriage in a wholly secular worldview. An important mental shift is in seeing "husband" and "wife" as a distinct and special human role. What are the specific and unique duties a man has to a woman and vice-versa in a marriage. How does one's behavior necessarily change? If these questions aren't answered thoroughly, you devolve to the modern secular marriage; roommates who occasionally sleep together and file taxes together.
To comment on your framing of "alphatize the betas" vs "betatise the alphas" -- the answer can only be to alphatize the betas through a series of verifiable and impossible-to-cheat milestones in life. This traces back to ceremonies and traditions around the journey to manhood. In human history, a woman wouldn't marry a man who couldn't provide food and shelter for her and their likely offspring. Today, marrying an unemployed man or a man with shaky employment stability should be a not starter. Physical fitness matters - fattys need not apply. I think the biggest missing piece is social and community esteem. If a man has literally no friends or has no meaningful community network, he is not marriageable - even if making millions of dollars!
But again, even with the rubric I've just laid out, it doesn't matter unless marriage matters.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
14d ago
No, I agree with you.
It's like people who write on a computer. Like, what are you even doing? If you aren't sharpening a quill and using ink you sourced locally, you're not writing you're just, I don't know, digital lettering. Ugh. As a true writer, I can't even. People these days are just not at all aware of what it means to scribe.
the mass market version is almost always a watered down, lower quality version of the original.
This is wrong. It's an infinitely better product because it's convenient, cheap, and tastes good unless you've retardmaxxed your tastebuds for no other reason that snobbish elitism.
Industrial strength coffee won WW2 and got us to the fuckin' moon before the Russians.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
14d ago
Capitalism is an economic system, not a social or political one.
It's embedded with the politics and culture of whatever society under examination.
If you have a problem, you have a problem with the culture. You could fight about it in a kind of culture ... war.
But capitalism isn't the problem. You're committing and obvious, to the point of intentional, category error.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
14d ago
zero-sum, winner-takes-all status competition reminiscent of capitalism
That's not how capitalism works. Free market exchange is inherently positive sum. When it becomes zero sum and / or rent-seeking, that means a market distortion (usually regulation) is to blame.
You and I often disagree, but your discourse is mostly of a far higher quality than smooth brained reddit "lulz late stage capitalism" tripe. Perhaps I caught you on an off day - you're also arguing strenuously that people replicate a subculture that selects for some of the worst physiognomy out there.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
14d ago
Yeah, actually, this does make more sense. I think you're right.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
14d ago
But you see what you've done, right? You've introduced a new method for building status -- wealth.
A couple Haredi start working at the AMZN warehouses and one of them gets promoted one day. He's now going to enjoy more wealth, a de facto higher status with his male peers and, because of that, a choice of mates. Soon, all the other Haredi start competing for status via wealth games instead of Torah study and fertility games and, boom, you've got modernism.
The lack of work is intentional, not a weird outcome of degeneracy in this case. And this is the critical issue with pretty much all hardcore RadTrad visions of society -- they actually kind of glorify poverty.
Remember, I'm saying this as a Latin Mass TradCath myself. As much as I really do hate modernism, I also hate material, non-self assigned poverty (i.e. Monks don't count). Deprivation is bad all up and down the stack. Those without means don't suddenly become spiritually wealthy (again, setting aside those that make the willful decision to do that like Monks). Mostly, they become dangerous amoral creatures who act more and more anti-social.
So, no, don't try to copy the Haredi. Instead, live in the world but not of the world. Pay your taxes, but don't bilk welfare. Use computers to do your job better and to find high quality information, but not to ingest slop and ragebait. Get a job, get married, have lots of babies to solve your own TFR rate but don't worry too much about everyone else's TFR.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
14d ago
Testable predictions if my theory is true: SIDS rates will be higher among lower IQ parents and higher among blacks, probably also higher among single mothers.
..... (sadly) ding, ding, ding.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
14d ago
I've worked on CL HFT systems (n.b. since ~2017 the field's not looked anything like the popular world things, because of regulatory and policy changes.)
If you do an effortpost on your experience here, I'll find a way to compensate you.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
14d ago
Women genuinely struggle to lead men, and are more indecisive, more prone to command by committee, crack more easily under stress, and blatantly favor their sisters in every situation.
Tell the group how you feel about Captain Shaina Coss
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
14d ago
You're not accurately modeling the level of evil.
It's not that the government will euthanize the eldery. It's that society will encourage the elderly, gently, to kill themselves.
This is why you're seeing discourse around assisted suicide and "death with dignity" popping back up. But, you now what, it's probably not a big deal, I mean, that's only a fringe element of people who---
1 in 20 deaths in Canada is assisted suicide.
Oh.
So we've got a 5% "rank and yank" quota going on. Bump it up to 10%, concentrated in the elderly and "differently abled" and, all of a sudden, we've got a nice little euthanasia-eugenics garbage collection app for society. Go Team!
If there is not a fundamental sacred respect for life in a society, then that society defaults to a pro-eugenic stance. Over time, with subtlety, that society will ruthlessly select for its preferred characteristics like a breeder surveying new born puppies.
Here is the actually comically American list of names
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