HighResolutionSleep
No bio...
User ID: 172
HighResolutionSleep
5hr ago
men being of genuinely lower quality and women not actually needing to settle to avoid starving.
I think of all the modernisms about the history of men and women that breaks my heart the most, this is probably it. Women only did it to not starve.
Whenever I feel like I might not be doing enough, I remind myself that inadequacy is impossible to escape as a man. If the men who came home from World War fucking Two weren't worthy, then it simply isn't achievable and never was.
I don't think the solution is to "browbeat" men, but I think moral disapprobation on both sexes has been implemented, historically. That horse is out of the barn. Give me a solution that doesn't reduce to "Women need to settle or starve." Or just "browbeat women instead."
There's nothing to be done. You can't have a solution that isn't just browbeating men that doesn't involve some level of browbeating non-men. It's impossible.
HighResolutionSleep
2d ago
Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names
Unsung feature of making these mistakes: you don't have to deal with users like these.
EDIT: This is a joke, right?
HighResolutionSleep
12d ago
Right. This is an asked and answered question. We already throw men into Definitely Not Debtors Prison if they refuse to participate. What reason do we have to believe this couldn't be trivially scaled up and out?
My position on this issue is that men as a demographic should be extremely careful when proposing coercive measures to solve this problem, as virtually all of this coercion is all but guaranteed to fall on their own heads. Men can be conscripted, both into war and child rearing, and women cannot. If you peel back the (philosophically) liberal live-and-let-live sentiments many in our culture harbor, you'll find nothing but contempt and scorn for what little freedom men have in this domain. Do you think this is likely to change any time soon?
HighResolutionSleep
15d ago
Ah, well. I guess there's nothing to be done. Men too awful. Good for nothing. Never did well. How could we ever hope to build a demographically stable future while carrying such worthless dead weight?
Hey, good reason to go for broke with longevity right? Maybe I can find support here for my $100T regenerative medicine campaign. Men being impossible isn't a problem if they're unnecessary for securing the future.
HighResolutionSleep
15d ago
The problem is that there's often an unspoken third item:
- Don't be angry or upset about it, or move to organize against it. That's gay.
HighResolutionSleep
15d ago
We really need to do a "you halves he picks" analysis on these types of proposals. You guys define just how hard the millstone of racial and sexual discrimination grinds on the have-nots, but I get to pick who they are. If it's truly no big deal, you won't mind it pressing down on women and minorities, right?
HighResolutionSleep
15d ago
Cool, so it's okay if we took these policies and turned them on their heads? DEI for white guys? I mean, truly talented women, blacks, and browns can just succeed anyway. No biggie, right?
HighResolutionSleep
18d ago
I thought we were talking about something else; sorry to interrupt.
HighResolutionSleep
18d ago
Americans are not a curated performance designed for the consumption of a particular audience. I've heard this isn't a flaw unique to my people.
HighResolutionSleep
18d ago
Well, the good news is that if you'd like to stop hearing what Americans think of you, you'll have no problems curating an accurate block list. What's stopping you?
HighResolutionSleep
18d ago
I think national identification should be opt-in. This seems to me to be straightforwardly the best possible world. It would protect online anonymity for those who want to preserve it at maximum capacity, short-circuit bad faith "doxxing" objections, and allow those who wish to pass themselves off as belonging to a particular nationality to prove it.
If someone want to present themselves as American, I'm pretty sure replying to their post with "nationality kept private" on their profile would pack about 90% of the same rhetorical punch as the actual information being there, while carrying almost 0% of the downsides.
Sure, my country might have been founded by anonpoasters, but due to technological limitations, those reading The Federalist could at least be reasonably certain that they were American anonpoasters.
HighResolutionSleep
18d ago
As I'm sure you're painfully aware, we Americans are almost categorically unashamed to boldly declare our nationality to anyone who will listen. It's a complaint I hear a lot of.
So, per the original complaint, you're unlikely to have unidentified foreign influence contaminating your information space, at least from Americans.
HighResolutionSleep
23d ago
You can't switch from a Big Mac to a NY Strip and call it inflation, it has to be a fundamentally comparable good.
Cool, so base the numbers on comparing like goods and stop fucking with them. How is a bureaucrat supposed to measure how much more better the Philly Cheese-steak is? This also doesn't solve the double counting problem. The BLT doesn't count for less dollars in the GDP line go up so shut up data.
EDIT: It also doesn't solve the problem that, in a lot of cases, consumers stopped buying the Big Mac because it was outlawed.
Gas is impossible to game, a gallon is a gallon
Unfortunately, you cannot eat or live in gas.
HighResolutionSleep
24d ago
Right, but that doesn't change the fact that the car is now, in fact, more expensive than it was before, which is what a measure of inflation is supposed to capture.
This fraud is revealed when the same discounting principle isn't applied to, say, GDP, or other "good numbers". Oh yes, you bet your ass the extra dollars get counted there. With this neat trick, you get to double, triple, maybe even quadruple count the benefits of a technology or innovation.
Things in the past were going well enough for the common man that there wasn't much to notice here, but now that John Everyman is getting squeezed from all angles, the official numbers are starting to look suspicious. Hard to ignore the dissonance when your typical bag of groceries jumps 20% and the official numbers are still like "3% :)". Becomes clear that the numbers aren't about you or people like you. There's so much witchcraft that goes into these numbers anyway that they are essentially a matter of interpretation rather than fact, and it's becoming clear to a lot of people that it's a picture painted by a club they're not in. And yeah, I guess if you're an upperclassman like Scott is now, it's easy to believe everything's great. But if you're a member of the Rent Food Gas class, you have been getting obliterated.
It's actually difficult for me to believe the level of condescension that these people are speaking to the working class. I couldn't imagine biting the hand that feeds me that hard. Maybe we need a little bit of rising Bolshevism to remind these people who actually runs the place.
HighResolutionSleep
1mo ago
Well, all I can say for sure is that I've never met one asking about the hospital bills I never paid, and that debt collectors are notorious for collecting on things they have no business doing so. Consult your local and state laws.
HighResolutionSleep
1mo ago
Personally, I'm speaking from two different articles of personal experience:
- Knowing both a nurse and an EMT, who have seen the internals of hospital billing and know how the sausage is made, both of whom have advised me to not pay hospital bills if I do not feel like it;
- My doing exactly this multiple times, and suffering no negative consequences whatsoever.
I don't know the parameters of how these reddit people were sought after. Perhaps I've seen so much success because I establish myself as a nonpayer immediately. I've heard from sources on the internet sounding credible that there's some arcane legal black magicks wherein one can be bound to a largely fictitious debt by sending its conjurer so much as a single dollar. Some sign on penalty of perjury that they are owed an imaginary debt on the hopes the legal ritual will coerce payment from targets. I'm sure there's a lot of Weird Tricks that people can use to extract money from hapless victims.
However, my personal experience with medical bills has been as follows: I go to the hospital to get something done, I get something in the mail that says something to the effect of "after your insurance paid 100 gorillion dollars, your remaining balance is 10 gorillion dollars, please send check or money order", I throw this demand directly into the trash, and I never hear about it ever again. It goes to the same black void as the jury summons. One time I got three invoices, from three different organizations, demanding three separate pounds of flesh for one thing I got done at a hospital. I ignored them all, and never heard from any of them ever again.
I'm not saying that this is applicable to all bills one can receive from a hospital, or that this maneuver could be pulled in any American jurisdiction, etc. I'm just saying that people getting demands from hospitals should consider their nonpayment options, if available.
It's been said that you can't con an honest man, but this may be another wisdom that modernity has turned on its head.
HighResolutionSleep
1mo ago
From what I've heard, they can certainly "send it to collections", in the sense that they can give it to an internal department to harass you about it. But they can't actually sell it to real collectors who ostensibly have a legally enforceable debt that they can collect from you, and who ostensibly have a legal justification to put marks on your credit score. I'd be curious to know if these individuals you know actually got marks from this specifically.
An even if they do, there's an entire playbook for effectively telling these people to fuck off. I've never had to use it, because in my experience, it never even got to the harassment part. Once again I will say that your experience may vary depending on many, many factors, but I would just urge anyone reading to appreciate that fact that just because someone shoves an invoice at you doesn't mean you have to pay it.
HighResolutionSleep
1mo ago
I would like to stress that I don't know the exact conditions under which this works—so please take this strategy at your own advisement and peril—but I have had multiple hospital visits in my life so far and have gotten away with paying exactly $0 by simply ignoring demands for money. These were organizations that had all of my info, my insurance, knew where I worked and lived, etc—and so far I've experienced no durable negative repercussions.
Your mileage may vary.
HighResolutionSleep
1mo ago
My understanding is that there are many cases in which there is essentially nothing substantive that they can do, not even touching your credit score. I don't know if this changes if you, for example, sign something ahead of time that explicitly says you agree to pay with specified remediation if you don't, etc. This is why I urge the poster to evaluate their position for the freedom to decline paying, and consider taking that option if it exists.
HighResolutionSleep
1mo ago
Thankfully, it's not a huge dollar figure, but it's the sheer stupidity of clinging to price opacity, which inevitably finds some way to reach into my pocket and pull out more money, that annoys me.
Suggestion: consider not paying. My conversations with a few in the know and my personal experience has led me to the understanding that in the US, in many cases, paying hospital bills is essentially optional. Like many modern systems, it's one that relies on the charity of good faith actors to subsidize deadbeats.
A while ago I went to the hospital to get a scan done. After taking an obscene amount of money from my insurance, I got no less than three invoices in the mail: one from the hospital, one from the hospital's network, and one from a radiologist society or something, all claiming that I owed them money. I never paid out a cent, and nothing ever happened.
I am not a lawyer and I don't know your specific situation, but consider the virtues of simply refusing to pay.
HighResolutionSleep
1mo ago
happy dreams of an economic crash that will finally put women in their proper place
To steal a turn of phrase from 2014 Tumblr feminists: welcome to the background radiation of my life, lady.
You can turn The Motte off. You don't have to read Andrew Tate's twitter feed. There's nowhere I can hide where I won't eventually be ambushed with a reminder that the world considers me inferior.
HighResolutionSleep
2mo ago
I don’t know which sex, on average, defected first.
It speaks to the thickness of hypoagency bias that women can write ten thousand volumes of "So I'm Defecting, Here's Why and What That Means for You" (you did an oppression, you disrespected house work, you called me Jane Catlady, etc) over the course of decades and we still can't figure this one out.
To me the question was never who defected first—but rather were women justified in burning it all down. Litigating that question with individual women extracted so much from me that I'm simply not interested in doing so anymore. Agreeing to disagree, I'm now much more concerned with what's to be done about the fact that women find the historical conditions that generated sustainable fertility intolerable. It troubles me because all solutions I've heard from all across politics right now seems to be some flavor or variety of "well if it really gets down to it men will simply be forced to pay the market rate for replacement", but I think people, specifically men who haven't spoken to women about the subject, grossly underestimate how high that price really is. We had a world where childbirth was considered a woman's bloodsoaked battlefield, and that valuation was considered by women to be oppressively low.
Fathers and mothers alike agree, because that is how it was back in their living memory, that women must be submissive to men because men do deserve it
And it was decided that, in hindsight, they didn't actually deserve it, they never deserved it, and the fact that they got it is strong contender for the biggest heist in human history. I sometimes find myself wondering: if my forefathers who sacrificed so much more for so little weren't worthy, what possible hope do I have?
Well, I don't actually think men can do anything about it on their own; their marginal value is basically zero, after all
My preferred solution is dumping 100 trillion dollars over 30 years into regenerative medicine with an eye toward enhanced longevity. This would attack the big problem from both ends: both reducing dependents and increasing lifetime fertility at the same time. The pitiful value of my blood isn't a threat to me if I'm never compelled to trade it, but I worry there will be a decade or two of experimentation with the "men just pay up" solution before it's realized to be a dead end.
Hopefully I've been born just in time to have aged out of being a primary target.
HighResolutionSleep
3mo ago
Then by the iron laws of economics, the price must increase. In this case you can make a very simple argument that H-1Bs are depressing American wages.
I think this really cuts to the heart of why arguments about immigration policy get as emotional as they often do. What defines a "labor shortage"? Simple: when the cost of it is "too high". What defines "too high"? Government policy. What defines government policy? Politics.
When the government opens up an immigration channel that targets your vocation, you are essentially being told by power that you are getting paid too much for what you do, and you need to be paid less. When the government denies your entry into a higher paying market, you are being told you aren't worth that.
People get emotional about this.
HighResolutionSleep
4mo ago
I apologize for having fun in the fun thread
They didn't make it up themselves. They picked it up from the broader culture, and slapped a coat of And That's a Good Thing! paint on it.
Too many to count; the issue is that, like face guy's proposals, you'll reject them because they involve some measure of browbeating prescribed to non-men.
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