Ken0sis
1mo ago
Yeah, it surprises a lot of people, but Russia has had really successful longstanding agreements with the US and Norway dating back well into the Soviet era. Generally speaking, Russia's willing to align with its neighbors against more exploitative third parties (historically Poland and Japan, but possibly China in the future).
Ken0sis
1mo ago
Increasingly convinced that polar access is going to become a wedge issue for the Russian-Chinese alliance: Russian fisheries practices have generally leaned towards conservation and effective management of existing stocks and I don't particularly get the sense that they're down to let China go scorched-earth in their EEZ or even in international waters where straddling stocks are a problem.
Ken0sis
1mo ago
Yeah as a zoomer/current college student this is 100 percent correct. Of the guys in my friend group, the ones with the best success are just the strongest Hinge warriors who are willing to put themselves through the meat grinder to get a date. I've been working pretty consciously over the past month or so to make a serious attempt to talk to a girl every night I go out, but you run into a couple of issues:
-The Venn diagram of women you are interested in and women who frequent your mid college bar doesn't feature a very large overlapping zone, and other means of large-scale socialization are unreliable at best for a variety of reasons (attendance isn't guaranteed, demographics usually skew towards freshmen, often too loud and packed to hold a conversation)
-If you manage to get to the stage where you buy someone a drink, your dog and pony show has to be pretty much flawless or else you're cooked
-There's a weird lack of communication about interest, so you can talk to someone for well over an hour, buy them a couple drinks, have a great conversation, feel like you're in an unambiguous position with regards to intent, and then have them tell you they have a boyfriend (this exact phenomenon has happened to me on multiple occasions)
-Even when things go really well, there's a decent chance that it doesn't click on your end and you're your own worst enemy
Relying heavily on online dating generally mitigates the first and third obstacle, and the other two can be fixed through sheer numbers and persistence. It's a demoralizing process, but the easiest way to hit a bullseye is to throw a lot of darts.
Ken0sis
1mo ago
Аs an autistic hardcore fan, I definitely agree. Another thing worth noting is that you have to kind of obscure your level of knowledge around people you don't know well. Being a SABR member might embellish my resume among baseball fans, but it's not gonna help me much when I'm talking to a girl at a bar. I suspect we see a lot more hardcore enthusiasts on a daily basis than we realize, but there's a sort of social contract we sign to make casual conversations more bearable.
Ken0sis
1mo ago
I'm 21, which places me well on the younger tip of my two biggest strictly recreational interests: MLB and menswear, and I would generally say I make a serious attempt at nerding out in those areas. What I think has changed is how atomized the communities are from broader audiences. Being a baseball fan 60 years ago meant arguing over whether Willie Mays or Mickey Mantle was better. Today, it means arguing over whether or not to use defense-adjusted or fielding-independent statistics to measure the value of pitchers, which is a much more interesting question (Mays was clearly the better player), but also far more granular and inaccessible to casual fans and passive bystanders. Similarly, I think a lot of people are surface-level fans of the Smiths than in the past, but I think past Smiths fans are probably pretty comparable to present Bladee fans in terms of depth of knowledge (although Bladee is probably a much bigger leap for a non-fan than the Smiths are). I think it's actually gotten harder than ever to start getting interested in a lot of subjects because most of the in-depth communities are in so deep that there aren't really any clearly visible footholds to start off with.
Polish supertrawlers were the fleets that first exploited the Peanut Hole (the small stretch of the Sea of Okhotsk that was out of Russia's EEZ until 2013 I believe) and were also pretty active in the Donut Hole (the stretch of the Bering Sea outside of the US and Russia's EEZs) until both ended up being closed. It was kind of surprising to learn about it at first because they kinda get smol beanified due to their history but especially in the post-Soviet era they've been a pretty substantial third party presence in international fisheries (Also, as someone currently taking an imperial Russian history class I fw the Time of Troubles reference heavy)
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