I’m not sure how deliberate it is, but I find it kinda weird just how often the values of the elite just so happen to be things that are absurdly destructive when practiced by lower class people. Not getting and staying married, not working hard and striving at every chance, not avoiding drugs and alcohol, behaving wildly in general, and so on — all of these things will make it much harder for a poor person to gain wealth.
Its not weird at all. First off, money is a great insulator against the consequences of poor behaviour. Secondly, those aren't really the values of the elite. The higher your class the higher the likelihood that you stay married, people don't strive at every opportunity and people in over-consume drugs less.
Finally the things listed makes it harder for everyone to gain wealth (except striving), but the already wealthy do not need to, which is another reason why they can have a degenerate lifestyle without as disastrous consequences.
The elite value the freedom to do what they want and don't care about what happens to other people (or rationalise their preference as an improvement for everyone, damn observable reality), unfortunately if you're poor and without strong willpower you're more more vulnerable to the available vices than the elite. Which of course doesn't make things better, it's arguably even worse.
The second reason is to create a layer of cultural mulch around the pathways to success. The truth is that nobody actually gets success without an extremely strong drive to strive for it.
I don't think this is true, although i guess it depends on what your criteria for "extremely strong drive" and "success" is.
I know multiple people with only a moderate drive for success that have become dollar decamillionaires and two that are dollar centimillionaires.
The people with extremely strong drive for success are doing very well too of course but not necessarily as good or better. At some point it seems that drive and intelligence hits sharply diminishing returns and you end up with somewhat luck-based results. This goes for both career and startup success.
You need enough drive and intelligence to get a seat at the table but once there you get to roll largely the same dice as the rest of the guys there.
I think this is also why the media doesn’t like Tiger Mothers. Those women and their kids unironically believe that striving is good and that puts them in competition with their betters. The Asian kids who study more than you are trouble. And if white parents start doing this as well, it’s a problem.
Once again I disagree. I think people don't like Tiger moms is because they engage in zero sum crab bucket behaviour, which if generalised pretty much amounts to torture of the youth, without material or spiritual benefits on the group level. IE. their zero-sum behaviour becomes (very)negative-sum if generalised.
Ioper
1mo ago
How is it a waste? You should use that energy and drive to improve yourself so that you can attract a mate. Killing it seems counterproductive as it would likely passify you further.
Ioper
1mo ago
Its been a while but:
- Being unhygienic and smelly
- Leaving trash everywhere they go
- Almost always wearing very casual and dirty clothes
- Getting into loud public fights about inane shit.
- Getting drunk on weekdays and getting into fistfights at the local pub
- Doing drugs in public
- Spitting indoors
- Stealing from the local supermarket
- Wearing way too much makeup and waxing their eyebrows
- Harassing women
- Very publicly running their prostitution business out of their apartment.
- Constantly abrasive towards everyone
- Having phone calls (or watching/listening to media) on speaker on public transit
- Stealing laundry times (if you have a communal laundry room), and fighting with you about it when confronted
- Constant, unrelenting lies about their poor behaviour
- Casual destruction and defacement of public property
Ioper
2mo ago
Also the manga section keeps growing. I'm not surprised that American comics seem less popular than ever, but I am a little surprised at the manga growth.
What makes you surprised?
Ioper
2mo ago
With the caveat that i don't think that movie stars really exist in the same way anymore, I think Robert Pattinson is a cut above most prominent actors his age, is decent at choosing prjoects and is consistently starring in commercial and critical successes.
Ioper
2mo ago
Perhaps I'm just in some kind of anti-astrology bubble or what did you mean was the same in Finland? That astrology is or isn't rising among women?
I have seen nothing of that here in Sweden so perhaps you should restrict yourself to American women rather than western women?
That said, of the people reading horoscopes and pursuing things like alternative medicine it seems like the overwhelming majority is female. I would imagine this has to do with agreeableness. Agreeable is a short distance from impressionable and some % of people will be conned into astrology. Then, when you reach critical mass of followers then others will simply engage in the activity because others are doing it, especially those vulnerable to social contagion.
Men have other gender specific failure modes, like chronic contrarianism and overconfidence, leading to things like falling for crypto-scams.
That may be so but it's also true that whites are taller and stronger, only those things do not matter as much (on their own anyway) for many popular sports.
What should be said is that fast twitch muscles are very important and west Africans have more fast twitch muscles.
I feel like a lot of it comes down to something both being a good line and being memeable like
I don't even know who you are? In Avengers end game
or
You get what you fucking deserve! From Joker
or
Lisan Al-Gaib! From Dune.
People will not only learn the line from the movie but from the memes as well.
Ioper
2mo ago
You don't have to do that. You can say that truth isn't a good safeguard against deception, with the biggest deceivers being the ones telling you the "truth".
Lying isn't good but at the end of the day deception is worse. Its kind of like how betrayal is worse than opposition. You don't even have to play defense at all.
Can't you just say that Trump lies, the democrats deceive, if that's what you mean?
Would fit well with general rightwing memeplex of casting the democrats as the great deceiver(s). It would also be an opportunity to own the fact that Trump lies. Truth or lies isn't the primary issue, it's deception that's the issue (in politics, in news, in science, etc).
I think you underestimate the degree to which plenty of people completely stop working when "working from home". You might think they were low productivity before but now they're producing practically nothing.
I'm under the assumption that we will move towards a situation where pretty much all jobs for which it isn't trivial to measure productivity for, isn't commission based or where the the organisation is sufficiently small that people share ownership, will move back to almost 100% office.
This means all larger companies, governmental agencies, etc. When it isn't it will often be with a tacit understanding that the job is in fact part time.
Also, correct me if in wrong but was it really resistance to the Nazis/Soviets that caused the deaths or that they ended up being a battleground between the soviets and Nazis as well as having a disproportionate number of Jews? Their disproportionate suffering was due to geography and demographics, not diplomacy.
It seems to me that much of the destruction would have happened either way, but there being a small outside chance that the soviets/Nazis would leave them alone and route around them if they got deterred by the British security guarantees.
Ioper
2mo ago
Define unacceptable. I'd say that most younger people who aren't shut-ins or teetotalers have at least tried weed at some point. Habitual use among respectable adults is very rare and you most certainly wouldn't smoke with colleagues even if you might get drunk with them.
I'd say it was really unacceptable in the 90s, somewhat unacceptable and naughty in the 00s and almost whatever from the mid 10s and on, among younger people anyway.
I think Sweden might be at the late 00s level of American acceptance?
Ioper
2mo ago
it's going to be an adjustment to waking up in the dark and stumbling home when it's dark at 4. I can only imagine it's even worse in Sweden!
Seeing as Stockholm is north of Kirkwall, I'd say so. But then again we're used to walking to school/work in the dark and walking home in the dark as well.
I have some family living up north though and they note that most of the people who move there move away again and it's never due to the cold. People just don't understand how oppressive it can be that the sun barely comes up above the horizon for months at a time (or at all). People think they know but they don't.
Ioper
2mo ago
Moving to a small town can be tough if you don't know anyone, even if you're a native. I know plenty of people that did their residencies and law clerk service out in the sticks in Sweden and they sounded about as miserable as you.
Keep your chin up, It'll get better once you get to a city!
Also, get season appropriate clothing if you haven't already. I've seen so many Indian tech workers over here that are underdressed come winter and I know how miserable it can be, even if it's just walking to and from the bus. Just go to a goodwill if you don't want to buy something new.
Ioper
2mo ago
When I went to look I found that drug use among Swedish youth is down, especially among boys, but only alcohol use is really down.
Perhaps it's different in other places and only alcohol use is down everywhere. I might have conflated English language articles about decreased alcohol use with Swedish articles about general decline.
(3) an increase in safe and quality products
From my very distant PoV (weed isn't legal here and neither me nor any of my friends smoke), it seems like this isn't an entirely good thing. When I listen to some podcasts, life long smokers talk about how it used to be that you couldn't really overdose because the weed was kind of shit but now with capitalism fueled breeding operations and distilled specialised products, this is now a real concern, especially for new users.
I guess it's mostly a thing where culture and regulation needs to catch up to the new reality but the process isn't entirely painless.
Ioper
2mo ago
Isn't consumption of all drugs, including alcohol, way down for young people? The only thing that's really up is public opioid use, but not use in general.
People stay at home and consume digital media instead of getting intoxicated.
I may be wrong but I feel like I've read a lot of articles talking about this.
I used to believe that the green parties and their members wanted to save the environment and stop climate change. I've now come to believe that isn't really true and that their championed policies are at best counter-productive in relation to their stated goals, and they're uninterested in improvement. They don't want society to work well, decrease suffering or the environment to be saved. What they really want is for their aesthetic preferences adhered to, consequences be damned.
Furthermore, like all parties outside of the mainstream they seem to be magnets for the worst members of society.
All of this is commonplace things on both the right and leftwing extremes, but it isn't recognized as much for the greens, which is an issue. They get legitimacy from championing the cause of the day while having just the same skull generating disregard for reality and/or the consequences of their actions as the commies or Nazis.
Ioper
2mo ago
The site just ate my fairly long response and I can't be bothered to retype it.
I disagree and think you vastly overestimate the broad fame of athletes. People do not know the names and faces of athletes in sports they're not actively interested in unless they're written about a lot individually, over a long time. Many people won't know even a single current athlete in many sports.
Better than where?
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