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User ID: 1865
Forgotpassword
3mo ago
I think this is assuming a lot more development on the part of the 'average male' in history than existed. 3 and 5 both absurd when for a lot of human history the idea of a single male living space/doing meaningful household beautification chores was very rare, same going for stuff like childrearing. I've got a baby and my wife's Southeast Asian older family members are absolutely amazed that I participate in stuff like doing nappies/feeding the baby/proactively doing infant tasks, and even current generations have a greater expectation of it being women/nannywork.
4 I'd agree with, but I think digital communication changes the vibe with being 'overly persevering' since every attempt at communication gets rendered onto the permanent record, and if you've originally met through a dating app you're probably not getting the incidental contact to allow for old-fashioned prolonged pursuit. Online dating makes things way more cut-and-dry. I'd also assume 'Understand planning social events' probably code for woes in getting actual dates out of Online Dating that aren't 'meet me at 3AM', but that's its own tangled metagame of both sides being so unimaginably flaky that trying to perform great romantic gestures gets squeezed out of you pretty quick. Also the literal matchmaking of these things means that the most attractive guys (and therefore the ones that get the most mindshare) are happy to throw out the most casual non-date invitations since they've got economics on their side.
I think the main dynamic shifts are that women's liberation/financial equalization has made it less of a matter of just rolling with the above manchild since it was the only path to leaving the family home and having some independence in life, and that the mainstreaming of Online Dating has absolutely torched a bunch of key social feedback loops.
Forgotpassword
3mo ago
I grew up with dogs and they're super normal to me, and yet it still confuses and dismays me how randomly entitled dog culture is now. Especially coupled with general laxness in obedience training and people having some sort of weird 'my dog is a good dog and can never potentially act out' mindset.
Forgotpassword
3mo ago
Yeah but once you're in charge of such a large organism it's just as much macroeconomic trends and the work of 1000s of random cogs than it is straight up 'Guy A is a great CEO since company did well, Guy B is bad CEO since company did poorly' when they're likely unable to meaningfully steer the ship. My personal experience with Indian skilled immigrants is that the main advantage they have over other groups is being superduper willing and proficient at 'playing the corporate game'. Aggressively gaming KPIs, driving to tick every box and get every possible ingroup referral when applying for roles and generally showing a great savvy at the game of bureaucracy. I was kind of amazed in University seeing how my overseas Indian friends would go about applying for graduateships/internships versus people from other cultures, in how it was systematized and how collaborative a front there seemed to be even from Indians of vastly different geographic origins.
Like corporate entryism is mostly bullshit fugazi busywork for HR so I'm not against the hustle, but I think that relentless targeting of the rules of engagement is the main reason for Indian success as immigrants. Moreso than 'brilliance at the task at hand' and like should it particularly offend me that some person who is a 9.5/10 at leetcode and resume optimization but a 6/10 coder gets the Google graduateship over a 7/10 coder who didn't ruthlessly squeeze out every edge to get their butt on the seat when the job's likely to be pointless floundering busywork anyways?
Forgotpassword
3mo ago
I feel like a certain part of the debate is circling around the conflation of 'high paid' roles, 'productive' roles and 'socially valuable' roles. Indian H1Bs, to me, have an odd spot in which the Indian American success stories that come to mind are the Satya Nadellas, the Parag Agrawals. Custodian elite bureaucrats who are incredible at 'playing the game' of office politics, but relatively few narratives of actual personal innovation and development.
The narrative coming down to arguments around international competitiveness and the 'best of the best' feels silly when a large chunk of the roles that are filled by the imports are managerial within developed businesses or the creation of further dashboards to track clickthrough rates on advertising. This is hardly Werner Von Braun developing rocket science
Forgotpassword
3mo ago
I'm white and far enough off the beaten tourist track that I've literally been questioned about why I'm going where I'm going by Grab Drivers a few times. I wouldn't say I get stared at perse but have had like Mamak workers come and be very curious a few times. The family's super accommodating, which helps. Generally everybody KL-adjacent will have some English, though I'm not a huge fan of KL itself (It's fine but generic SEA capital).
Food is great, my main personal limitation is I can't really train my preferred combat sports since I'm 99th percentile for size in the West.
Forgotpassword
3mo ago
My wife's originally from a part of Malaysia just outside of Kuala Lumpur (and plugging into her upper middle class Chinese family network makes the financial/cultural shift way more manageable than if I was proverbially fresh off the plane). Having spent a decent amount of time throughout SEA & other digital nomad hubs (Vietnam, Bali, Dubai, Bangkok, Singapore etc), I think Malaysia's prettymuch the perfect mid-point in terms of expenses, development and cultural vibes. Main issue I could see with Malaysia, ignoring the local economy, is the lack of a night life, which isn't really an issue for me with a young family.
My wife and I are both fortunate to have fairly niche skillsets/equity in remote-friendly companies that let us continue to earn international Western rates with reasonably strong job security, but interacting with my wife's younger siblings I can see the difficulties of being a fresh 20-something in Malaysia, especially if you are not Malay. Entry-level/customer service jobs in Selangor pay like 700-1k USD a month. My wife got out through a generous international scholarship which led her into her current role through a fairly circuitous path.
I've recently immigrated from a developed nation to Malaysia for a variety of reasons, and whilst I do agree that frequently a skilled professional is probably losing out in purchasing power by immigrating it's understating how hard it can be to get through the original junior ranks in less developed economies and how brutal the work-life expectations frequently are. It's also frequently ironic that Indians who are enthusiastically arguing for quotas in the West are also likely to be victims of a huge, messy internal Idpol system of caste-based quotas that make it difficult to get on the proverbial treadmill as an upper-middle class scion. Malaysian Chinese also find themselves in a similar spot where there's very-strong preferential hiring and university placement domestically for Malays/Muslims which makes it difficult for fresh grads to get anywhere. And if they're fortunate enough to get into the local chapter of whatever elite Consultancy there's literal 120 hour workweeks.
Not directly related, but I find the whole argument around H1B damaging 'competitiveness' to be absurd when the majority of workers even in tech are still firmly in the bullshit job sphere. I'm paid very well for my digital role, but if my company were hit by a meteor tomorrow the world would not especially notice or care. Yes H1Bs might be able to claim high salaries but having more button-maintainers for the Facebook mines doesn't strike me as particularly beneficial.
Forgotpassword
3mo ago
But yeah, I can see the traits, even though most of my family aren't diagnosed. Diagnosing mental illness is more of a recent thing, at least where I'm from (which I'm not telling).
Yeah same for me. Generations of Engineers and other such types, very easy to diagnose my dad, uncles and grandfather with it on vibes alone but I was the first generation to receive any sort of a formal diagnosis. Just used to be socially diagnosed as 'being a bit of a nerd'
Forgotpassword
3mo ago
The pandemic also probably has an enduring effect in blackpilling people on education, it makes it feel like even more of an arbitrary mess to be gamed and engineered.
My understanding is that a bunch of forms of mild noncompliance increased since the pandemic. Education, unregistered vehicles and the like. Polite society lost the mandate of heaven in enough eyes.
Forgotpassword
4mo ago
So long as you're not obnoxious about it there's nil incentive for them.
Forgotpassword
4mo ago
Also surely decent delta of 'significant health event which disqualifies him from the presidency without actually killing him'
Forgotpassword
4mo ago
From memory Trump got to like 60-70% chance to win in betting markets.
Forgotpassword
4mo ago
They could just have had a somewhat flawed process that happened to align with the final consensus last time. These things are such tiny sample sizes.
Forgotpassword
6mo ago
Yeah when it was genuinely an unknown and there was Fog of War I understand the first few weeks, but it being a 2-year saga (and still ongoing for some resolute bunker dwellers) is/was insane.
Forgotpassword
6mo ago
Also the rise of social casinos/sweepstakes site are an additional layer of hilarity in that they circumvent the actual laws around online gambling and they're available in far more states consequentially.
Essentially the model being that if you deposit into Chumba Casino (Billions of USD a year in revenue), you're buying coins which can then be used on slot games and then at the end of play you swap those back into real money. Which circumvents the whole structure around 'real money' gaming, which is an insane loophole even as an industry participant.
Forgotpassword
6mo ago
Still there are going to be grey areas where you have retained enough mental faculties to not be 'gone' but you are still nonetheless a burden in the utility scale.
Forgotpassword
6mo ago
Yeah but the tribe that's generally pro-abortion also tends to be pro public healthcare spending and bottomless purse spending on life extension for the elderly and/or their pets.
Which is the confusing issue here since based on all other Blue Tribe beliefs you'd think they'd really be the pro-lifers and vice-versa for the Conservatives. The whole script gets flipped essentially for this one issue.
Forgotpassword
6mo ago
Also the jobs of the 19th century were better suited to human fungibility. If there was still a widespread low-skilled manufacturing base in the West the immigration dynamic changes a lot, IMO.
Forgotpassword
6mo ago
Yeah. The real and constant threat of firearms in US Policing means the dynamic is fundamentally different to most other nations.
Forgotpassword
6mo ago
Yeah, knowing that there's something valuable over the Americas and roughly how far you've got to go/what the weather dynamics are would likely make the process simpler.
Forgotpassword
6mo ago
Honestly I think this is part of a lot of the more deranged anti-colonialism takes, the lack of acknowledgement of how bad human existence has been for the most part throughout history. Various versions of 'child mortality was very high on remote Canadian outposts, surely they were arbitrarily slaying indigenous children' when it's just a byproduct of child mortality being genuinely frighteningly high for most of human history. There's this weird unspoken assumption of a lot of people that 21st Century Affluent Democracy is just the default state of the human existence for a lot of historical revisionist statements.
Forgotpassword
6mo ago
Medical expenditure on squeezing out those last few years far greater than the cost of just being elderly, though. Not only is the person not being productive, suddenly they've got a raft of major intervention surgeries and therapies.
Forgotpassword
6mo ago
How much of that is reproduction rates and how much of that is the combination of the elderly living longer than ever before + costing significantly more than ever before.
Forgotpassword
7mo ago
The greater sinosphere does have a lot of internal crossover between Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia-Chinese, the mainland and other elements which have their own unique voices. Which I think changes the dynamic somewhat versus Japan where their original market was more solid.
Also people being overly dismissive of the dogphobic. I grew up with dogs and like dogs, but I've been to countries where the norm is sketchy unwashed street dogs and thus understand why somebody from one of those regions might not like to see random dogs popping into their personal space.
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