FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
And every gimmick hungry yob
Digging gold from rock n roll
Grabs the mic to tell us
he'll die before he's sold
But I believe in this
And it's been tested by research
He who fucks nuns
Will later join the church
User ID: 195
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
7d ago
That's actually a really interesting interpretation of much of the sequel of Don Quixote. Quixote and Sancho find themselves taken in by superfans of the first book, a nobleman and his lady, who proceed to put them through all kinds of goofy adventures. The sadism and cruelty of the superfans is sent up for comedy, but how different are they from the author and his readers, who create Quixote so that he can be tortured?
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
7d ago
This is the failure of the Kamala Harris campaign to achieve a close loss, particularly the loss of the popular vote.
I said on here at some near the time when the swap occurred, that it was likely that Kamala would lose the election, perhaps even more likely that she would lose than that Biden would lose, but that the Democrats had to make the swap to try to win the popular vote and maybe hold onto the House, and preserve some argument that they weren't completely spent as an electoral force.
The popular vote win in 2016 provided a talismanic argument for the Dems that they still represented, in some way, the will of the people, and that with better luck or reshuffling of the deck or minor procedural changes they could win again. It was of course legally meaningless, but it was important to the spirit of the team. The Coalition of the Ascendant was still Ascendant, this was white men's Dead Cat Bounce. This time, there is no such rhetorical fig leaf to hide behind. The campaign was a disaster for the Dems. New Jersey was closer to flipping Red than Texas or Florida were to flipping Blue. Kamala lost women and minorities relative to 2020. Culture war issues were largely hidden under the rug by the Harris campaign, who feared to say anything out loud at all. It was a pure defeat.
Where 2016 Hillary's defeat was like a close defeat in which the losing team had more possession of the ball, but the winning team got lucky on a few plays; 2024 was a wall to wall domination, where the winning team was clearly better.
Rhetoric matters.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
7d ago
Why would you, of course, say that?
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
7d ago
Or it might be evidence that career changers are rarer in Europe in general for engineers and programmers and lawyers and everything else for a variety of social reasons.
American colleges typically feature many undergrads in their 20s and 30s. European colleges may not, but if that's true I'd guess it has more to do with tracking systems and admissions and payments and social systems we don't necessarily need to import in order to make med school an undergrad project.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
7d ago
This is an excellent and rarely integrated point in these discussions.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
7d ago
What are you talking about? Why does it matter whether people change medical careers in Europe when people change careers in America all the time despite needing a new degree?
If doctors don't change careers in Europe that would tell us more about Europe and it's education system and career choices than it would about how it would go in America, right?
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
8d ago
Her bra size is essentially fake, in that in America we have decided that all cup sizes above D are kind of gross, disgusting, not sexy. The old Jeff Foxworthy joke about "If you think a 401K is your mother in law's bra size, you might be a redneck!" But cup size is just breast size relative to rib cage, and her rib cage/waist is tiny relative to her breasts. So her measurement would actually come out to something like a 30-F or G, but that doesn't exist in any American store, so she buys a 30-DDDD. Which also mostly doesn't exist.
So when I take her to Nordstrom to buy bras once or twice a year, she's always hoping her rib cage size went up a little, so that her cup size would reduce slightly, and she'd be something more normal like a 32-DD, which might actually be stocked in normal stores. Instead, turns out she's still the same size, and we find out that they have one, basically orthopedic, bra in stock in her size, in nude and black.
I am extremely lucky. But primarily for other reasons.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
8d ago
People do that all the time. People enter undergrad after enlisting in the military, or working a few years, all the time. People take a degree part time, nights and weekends, while working. It's not crazy.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
8d ago
You shouldn't be aware of any of these people.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
8d ago
It's really not, your wife isn't allowed to vouch for you.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
8d ago
I live in Pennsylvania and I can think of five people in NJ and another dozen in NY who would offer me a reference for a permit if I called right now. I don't get what you're talking about. This is an insane assertion.
I'm an opponent of gun rights for felons. I'm an opponent of gun rights for non citizens. And yes, I'm at best neutral on the gun rights of isolated loners.
Anyone can just join a gun club and within a month they'll have two guys willing to vouch for them.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
8d ago
But we aren't talking about socially adept. We're talking about three unrelated people vouching for you. Coworkers. Landlord. The waitress at your favorite diner. Your pastor.
It's not that hard.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
8d ago
Ok, can you seriously think that any functional adult doesn't have three friends? When I got my ccw permit in PA, I had too many friends who wanted to be the reference. And I have trouble thinking of a person who doesn't have three friends who should have a gun.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
8d ago
It was an inelegant way of giving a perfectly obvious piece of advice. The idea being essentially that if one were to rely on being bigger/faster/stronger than one's opponents in training, then when one runs into opponents who are bigger/faster/stronger one will have no way to defeat them.
This happens pretty frequently with Bigs in basketball who put up numbers in high school or college, only to fail in the NBA, because they are now no longer bigger and stronger than the players they are facing. Hell, you see it at every level, there are kids who were Bigs in middle school but never hit that growth spurt to make the high school team and never developed their ball handling and shooting enough to make it as anything but a center. So if you're a 6'7" center on your college team and you think you're good enough to play in the NBA, you better start working on the skills you would need to make it as a wing or guard, because you aren't going to be a center in the NBA.
At our gym any given class is broken down into partner drills and rolling. Drills are working a single technique from a single position, rolling is free play. I'm still figuring out how to meter strength in both. In Drills, the goal is to offer enough resistance and speed to make the practice valuable, but not so much that your partner can't learn the technique cleanly. Last night, I had my partner tell me during a drill that started with me bear hugging him in close while he had me in side control "Hey, you don't need to go super hard during this, just go 60 or 70%." When I was already going maybe 50%, in my mind. There are people who I could essentially arm-wrestle into a kimura and tap, that would be unhelpful as I wouldn't learn to leverage and hit the move against someone as strong as I am. At the same time, when rolling, I use strength to resist my opponent. I owe that to them, they'd really be getting nothing out of rolling with me if I didn't put up any fight.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
8d ago
Would it be wrong of me to refuse to marry/date her because of her past?
No. But it also wouldn't be wrong for you to choose to marry her. You wouldn't be sinning in marrying her. Which is already an important distinction, and an important advancement over most other views of morality historically and presently.
My own personal view, is that deal breakers, while tempting, are bad to have too many of, and really bad to try to enforce on others. Because finding a good partner is hard enough as it is. I know good Christian girls who married their sweetheart from Liberty University, or married a girl they only courted with chaperones, who wound up in miserable, failed, dangerous, or otherwise terrible marriages. Given the importance of finding a good spouse, and the difficulty of doing so, it would seem foolish to throw someone away if you genuinely thought they'd make you happy over one thing.
This, of course, is all big talk on my part, as I already married the perfect woman.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
8d ago
Except that lots of businesses face similar problems.
Every day trucking companies send out employees onto the highways criss-crossing the country, there are about 150,000 accidents en route, and about 600 of them die each year. That doesn't prevent a broker from being able to give me a quote on the phone in ten minutes as to the expected cost of sending a container to Des Moines. The expected cost doesn't contain the possibility of the truck being wrecked, of the cargo being lost, of the driver getting killed, of the trucking company facing liability from multiple passenger car drivers for damage or injuries or fatalities resulting from the wreck. The cost every time the truck goes on the road could range from a thousand dollars to a hundred thousand dollars.
Plenty of fields are picking up pennies in front of a bulldozer.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
8d ago
Furthermore how do you want handle cost overruns. Let's say you get your appendix out and you shop around to whoever reports the lowest price (and it's urgent not emergent so you leave the hospital AMA to go to the cheaper place). Let's say 5k. What do you do when the surgery is a bit more complicated and expensive and the bill is 15k. What do you do when you have a major complication and the price is 1.5 million dollars?
This kind of risk distribution seems to be the big question. I'm not sure what the most just way to handle it is, or that it is the same question in every case.
But this isn't a crazy problem that we only run into in medical care. Every contractor in the world is subject to the same problem. Estimates and quotes from any HVAC contractor or excavator takes account of the possibility of cost overruns. The placement of that cost overrun is negotiated in the contract. They offer you an estimate of the cost, and then a clause in there will tell you that it may cost more, or that this price is only certain for X days, or that cost overruns may require progress payments or be split 50/50 or be subject to additional Good Faith Negotiations. Or they just eat the cost when they get the estimate wrong. Or you have a bond on the job completion which will pay out if the job isn't done.
One could easily sell, as part of the price of the procedure, insurance on the procedure itself covering possible bad outcomes. Rather than tying in the price of every medical procedure in the country with the price of every other medical procedure in the country.
These are all solved problems in every field, except medicine.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
8d ago
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I mostly reject that hypothetical because achieving functional strength and good movement is a whole body process
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That said, I would guess she could do it on five times a week ten minutes a day? It's hard to say because I really don't think it's isolable.
But I should note that Mrs. FiveHour is an extreme outlier in terms of poor balance in this case.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
9d ago
Some days ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no enthusiasm for my current fitness goals, and nothing particular to interest me in the weightroom, I thought I would take up Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.
A gym recently opened near my home and my office. It's something I've kind of always thought I should try, and no time like the present, so I signed up. They offer classes four nights a week for nogi, three nights a week for gi. I'm more interested in the nogi, in that I feel like I'm a little old to buy a karate uniform, but I'm considering getting one so that I can attend more often/conveniently. My schedule is always weird, so I'll go more if I can go any night. Idk.
I've been to three classes so far. I suck, obviously. But I'm rapidly learning new things.
Mostly, in rolling, I find that I run out of ideas. I don't actually know enough to launch any offensive. I vaguely understand the concept of guard, passing guard, mount, etc. But I quickly run out of strategies to actually attack. So I'm basically just trying to survive whatever my partner is trying to do. Which works some of the time. For a while.
The weird part is realizing that I'm big and strong. I work out a lot, but I'm a bit of a hermit about it, really. Home gym master race. And my goals are generally rather obscure things that no one else cares about. The only social sports things I really do are climbing, where my upper body strength is apparent but also limited by my comparatively large body weight for a climber. But now I'm rolling with someone, and I'm much stronger than he is, and he obviously knows a lot more than me and is much better than me, and he is constantly on the offensive, but I can just rip out of the submission. I rolled with a 17 year old who is training for a comp, and he was constantly on the verge of submitting me, and would have easily if I didn't have thirty pounds on him.
It's weird realizing it. Because normally, in my life, I have few opportunities to really test strength outside my basement.
But eventually, every round has been a process of getting choked out in ways I didn't know were possible. Guess I'll see if I get any better.
Anyone have any tips on getting started?
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
9d ago
... Yes? That was the topic under discussion.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
9d ago
Bro what are you talking about.
I've bought a gun once in my life. Outside of my range buddies and the seller three people know about it. The seller was friendly and helpful and frankly cut me a better deal than I expected.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
10d ago
Eagles had a ho-hum trap game against Carolina. This is either the beginning of the end, or it is just a classic trap game where the team didn't game plan for the Panthers, tired from the Ravens and looking ahead to the Steelers. The Eagles won but didn't cover, and came perilously close to losing. The pass game looked disjointed, and we're getting our annual dose of angry AJ Brown, the undermanned pass rush couldn't get home, the pass defense looked the worst it has all year.
Looking ahead to the Steelers, if you're a betting man I'd take the Steelers at current odds. I think the Eagles are more likely to win, but I'd sooner take the moneyline on the Steelers, I don't think the Eagles win 7/10 times. I don't think anybody beats this Steelers team 7/10 times.
Saquon's MVP odds took a step forward, he had a mid game against the Panthers, but Josh Allen lost to the Rams, and despite a brilliant hero performance from Allen, that defeat probably costs the Bills the 1-seed. I still hope Allen wins MVP, but if it's not him it should be Saquon. The other odds leaders don't deserve it as much, it should be a two horse race.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
10d ago
In recent years, it really did seem like the media put in the effort to not glorify mass shooters by plastering their image all over the place, fueling speculation as to their motives, and generally making them look cool.
Huh? When did you think you started seeing this?
We know vastly too much about every mass shooter. Their names and putative motives are plastered everywhere for weeks. They are frequently cited as notables on this website, and people are expected to know who they are.
Something I noted when I first read Coming Apart in undergrad for an assignment, and have only continued to see grow over time: it's not just economics, we're Coming Apart everywhere in America. In almost every way, our society is less equal than it was in 1962. Across domains that don't seem like they should be related:
Fitness Hobbyist athletes of today would largely stomp on the professionals of 1962 in fitness metrics. Nobody in 1962 ran marathons as a hobby, now it is common, no PMC office lacks a marathon guy. Lifting weights was weird, and maybe kinda gay. Now it is common. The lifts and PR times of your average Crossfit box would be jaw-dropping at any of the few existing gyms in 1962. The fitness obsessed are stronger, faster, better than their 1962 equivalents. And yet in 1962 the average person was in better shape than the average person in 2024. They weren't overweight or obese, they could walk ten miles if asked to do so. A randomly selected man of 1962 could join a touch football game or help you move furniture in a way that your randomly selected man of 2024 often cannot.
Sex 1962 society was more monogamous, and because of the drive to achieve pair bonding, most people could get one long term partner and marry them and stay together. More men had sex with one woman in the past year compared to today, but more men had sex with anyone. In 2024, it is vastly easier for some men to get laid, your top percentage of men can get vastly more sex with vastly more partners. But there are also vast numbers of men who never have sex, have no long term partners, and few prospects of getting them.
Cooking Imagine I took 100 mothers from my local high school today, and 100 mothers from my local high school in 1962, and Iron-Chef'd them with scratch ingredients and told them to bake me a cake. I posit that the 1962 mothers would all make more or less the same mediocre American cakes, with some ethnic-white flourishes or particular talents, but mostly pretty similar stuff. But virtually all would know how to make a cake given flour, butter, eggs, sugar. The 2024 mothers, a large percentage would simply have no idea how to make a cake from scratch without premade ingredients, only a vague concept of what to do with the ingredients, and we'd get some truly sad attempts. But among the 2024 mothers, there are also some percentage of hobbyists, Great British Baking Show and youtube obsessives, who will make a ridiculously good cake, vastly better than anything that the 1962 mothers would even know how to attempt. All one has to do to figure this out is look at old cookbooks and new cookbooks.
Physical appearance Paul Newman vs Chris Evans. Or just compare Superman to Superman, or even Hugh Jackman in different Wolverine roles. The earlier physiques are easy for a man with good genetics if they don't screw it up or attainable for most men with a bit of effort, the current physiques are impossible without at least two of good genetics, extreme effort, and pharmaceuticals.
Education More Americans than ever have completed college degrees, the value and difficulty of which we can debate but there is no question that completing years of education highly correlates with intelligence. Fewer books are read every year in America. Authors lack the popular celebrity impact they once had. Literary prizes lack the credibility and punch they once did. PhD Theses of 1962 and earlier are often pretty readable, covering a basic or normal topic. PhD theses of 2024 are often whacko, out there, unreadable to anyone without a master's in the topic already, citing obscure theories unknown to anyone outside deep academia.
Gun Ownership Gun ownership has declined from a narrow majority of households in the 70s to a third as of 2014. At the same time, many gun owners today have an absolute arsenal compared to the men of the 60s and 70s. A lot of Old Timer Fudds at my small town gun club think it's insane that the young guys want to own anything other than a shotgun, a deer rifle, a .22, and a revolver. A small percentage of gun owners in America own a vast number of firearms. This simply wasn't a normal middle-class pursuit in the 1960s.
There are other places it feels like there's something there, but I don't know how to parse them with any rigor. Religiosity, racial tolerance, "handyman" skills, foreign travel, military service, automobile driving. It feels intuitive that in the past, a base level of each was expected in every middle class man and variation was rare; and today extremes at both ends are more common while the middle is shrinking.
We live in the age of the Barbell Shaped distribution. There's something deeper there.
I loved the McMahon doc. One of the most interesting parts that no one commented on: him and his son both had great wrestler genetics. Like, yes there were a ton of roids involved, but still: it's crazy that they were able to put in a solid workmanlike performance in the ring with guys who weren't nepo-babies from ownership. Like most of the other wrestlers who were main event guys were pure genetic freaks who worked their way up, and then you had Vince and his Son participating and they got into it purely from having inherited the role.
It's wild that not only was the original documentary planned as a hagiography, it was specifically planned to go with the Netflix-WWF deal. So Netflix didn't just find themselves with a documentary they needed to salvage from a MeToo disaster, they had to salvage a multi-billion dollar content deal in real time.
I mostly endorse your opinion, and extend it to all famous people. Famous CEOs, politicians, intellectuals. Rare are the famous people who wish they weren't famous, who just want to work and hate what has been thrust upon them, rare enough that I think they can mostly be ignored. Even those who got big out of love of their art, fame changes them, money changes them. A FiveHourMarathon who women recognized in the street would be a different man than I am.
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