astrolabia
1mo ago
Do expect your kids to have jobs if we build machines that can do everything better and cheaper than humans?
astrolabia
2mo ago
testosterone supplements are only useful if you are totally committed to being very serious about working out
I don't know much about it, but my understanding is the opposite - that hormones + no exercise is much better for putting on mass than no hormones and lots of exercise. At least, I saw a study to that effect one time, and it's certainly the case that male teenagers put on muscle much faster than even relatively athletic females. But please don't take my word for it.
astrolabia
2mo ago
Yes, sounds like we are on the same page, and OP is psyching himself out.
I said my wife is "ostensibly progressive" because she has a conservative personality, she just happens to have been raised and schooled in a progressive, feminist echo chamber. (Today's beloved conservative position is often yesteryear's progressive overreach). She just can't bear to be against the consensus, and I think instinctively knows that arguing with me is likely to move her away from the consensus, so literally can't discuss politics for more than 2 minutes without getting too upset to weigh arguments. I find this frustrating and sad, and she talks as if it's devastating to her to be with someone who has the wrong opinions, but it doesn't actually come up unless one of us brings it up.
I actually think it's reasonable for her to refuse to argue issues on their merits with me, because I'm just a much better arguer than her. She's right to fear that I could argue convincingly for just about any position, right or wrong. For this reason I've told her that it's fine for her to disagree with me on anything without being able to articulate why, especially when it comes to joint decision-making.
astrolabia
2mo ago
a somewhat-effeminate underemployed head-in-the-clouds armchair intellectual
I loved your post and agree with your advice. But as a guy who had a sort-of-similar trajectory, this still sounds totally fixable! I know you said you're struggling with physical health, and I haven't used testosterone myself, but is there a reason you're not trying to simply become literally high-T?
I’m too redpilled on women and too unable to play along with the female style of unfocused political venting to have much chance of a successful relationship with the kind of progressive woman
My wife is the picture of ostensible progressivism, and it certainly causes tension, but it's not fatal. I always thought the red-pill message was that politics aren't usually dealbreakers even if they're stated to be - you can simply change the subject, agree and amplify, or simply be a compelling enough package that she'll find ways to make it work from her end. I know it's easier said than done, but it sounds like you have the basic ingredients at hand!
astrolabia
2mo ago
I wouldn't kick yourself. After all, if it was so obvious that EU growth would lag, wouldn't those stocks have been even lower-priced?
astrolabia
2mo ago
‘Farmer’ is a job that’s literally never going away. Subsistence farming communities aren’t dependent on an industrial civilization having an inexplicable soft spot for them
It's already reduced by about 50x, and I'd claim that subsistence farming isn't really feasible in much of North America, or won't be soon, because of high land taxes on all the good farmland.
there is no one on earth who doesn’t need what they produce.
If I were a cartel, I'd rather have at least semi-industrialized farmers on my land than subsistence farmers. "Subsistence" means you don't produce much more than you need to subsist, which means you can't produce much taxes for the local cartel / government.
I don't know why you think this is an either/or, though - there are other insular Amish-like groups with high fertility that are also fully modern when it comes to production, e.g. the Hutterites and Mennonites.
astrolabia
2mo ago
Men are orders of magnitude stronger than women
No, they're not 100x stronger. Did you mean multiple standard deviations stronger?
astrolabia
3mo ago
I don't think it was culture war - probably just well meaning people with tentative grasp of current tech and the normal bureaucratic tendency to expand your authority.
This does seem to match much of normal culture war behavior, though, just without the step of demonizing the people who oppose one's naive overreach.
astrolabia
3mo ago
Yes, I agree.
astrolabia
3mo ago
Yep. I think it'll also eventually be illegal to raise a kid without allowing your parenting to be scrutinized in detail. I think the main reason it isn't today is because it'd be too expensive, not because it'd be politically untenable.
astrolabia
3mo ago
From the point of view of the powers that be, this seems like a great argument in favor of muzzling LLMs.
astrolabia
3mo ago
in the name of "ethics", been barred from driving trips already serviced by trains
I agree that this is ridiculous, but I'm also not sure how I'll make a living when machines can do everything I can cheaper, better, and more reliably.
astrolabia
3mo ago
Wow:
the 1865 act (the "Red Flag Act"), which required all road locomotives, which included automobiles, to travel at a maximum of 4 mph (6.4 km/h) in the country and 2 mph (3.2 km/h) in the city
astrolabia
3mo ago
It sounds like you agree completely with zataomm?
astrolabia
3mo ago
I have to pick my battles. I spent some political capital pushing back on the particular progressive rot infesting the institutions I'm part of. Bringing up immigration in professional settings apropos of nothing seems like a bad use of everyone's time.
I'm not proud of not bringing this up, but I'm saying that this is a very different phenomenon than keeping quiet because I'm secretly glad that my country is being ruined by mass immigration because it benefits me in the short run. And I think my colleagues who champion mass immigration are doing it mostly for altruistic or signaling reasons, not because it improves their position materially.
astrolabia
3mo ago
Whoops, edited for clarity. I meant on average.
astrolabia
3mo ago
Isn't it clear that these proximate causes are mostly Schelling points for coordination? The same people rioting have also been upset by thousands of other smaller incidents. Same for the Floyd riots.
Urban professionals have made it clear that importing migrants for their personal comfort matters.
I think this is unrealistically conspiratorial. I am an urban professional, and it's clear to me that refugees and anyone coming from say, Haiti is not a net contributor to my or any of my countrymen's comfort [EDIT: on average]. But I don't talk about it often for fear of being fired or ostracised.
astrolabia
3mo ago
Did Meloni actually do much about immigration to Italy, though?
astrolabia
3mo ago
I don't get it - I agree that a more serious accusation would be unrecoverable, but she just said "I'm unhappy that you made out with me".
I'm also not sure what you're talking about in the second paragraph - this guy has already demonstrated all of the 'decent human being' virtues in spades.
And then maybe she’d deign to give him another shot again, but if she didn’t it just means he wasn’t able to do the bare minimum of manning up and passing the shit-test with a high enough grade.
Yes, that's what I'm claiming. I think it's actually not-totally-crazy behavior, either. It's similar to guys teasing each other partly to show that they can handle a bit of pressure / aggression.
astrolabia
3mo ago
Dude, she accused me of molesting her.
This is consistent with what I was saying - my point is that she's being obviously unreasonable!
She's also a fucking sperg
I also might be wrong about this, but my understanding from being a bit of a sperg myself is that things like the rules of attraction + most emotions are similar to everyone else, but with a layer of neuroticism and poor social skills on top.
Even if that's a thing women do, she wouldn't.
I personally spent way too long thinking that sufficiently smart women wouldn't require, or play, these kinds of games - thinking something like "If they are so un-self-aware as to play the normal BS social games, I'm not sure I want them anyways". I've also known a few amazing women that were self-aware enough to understand their own reactions, but even they still had the same requirements for attraction as the others. I think your dating experiences would make way more sense if consider that even sperg women have similar romantic responses and impulses as normal women.
astrolabia
3mo ago
Her message was a good sign! It sounds like a classic shit test. It's just a final check to see if you can stand up for yourself before she decides to date you. If she wasn't into you anymore, she would have just ignored you or waited for you to press the issue. She was provoking you to see if you'd show backbone.
A better answer would have been: "You're an adult, and you weren't that drunk. Don't play games.". I know this would feel like a 180 from your normal personality, but that's the point!
I once was on a relaxed second date with a very hot girl who was a little out of my league, hanging out in my room. I had had experiences like yours in the past and was expecting something similar. Almost on cue, the next time I tried to get her attention to talk, she ignored me to type on her laptop for 5-10 seconds. When she finally answered, I did something very unlike my normal personality: I warmly but firmly said something like, "You're being disrespectful, you need to leave for tonight." I said that I want to see her again but not any more tonight. She didn't even seem all that upset, and was a little shocked, but also almost pleasantly surprised. She came over again the next day and we had an intense affair until I moved away for school.
I know I must sound like an incredible ass, and you shouldn't take my word for it, but I'm normally an easygoing guy to the point of being overly passive. But I (finally) realized that you only have to show a backbone once or twice to make a girl feel comfortable around you indefinitely - but they usually won't feel comfortable until they've seen you do it - hence the need for shit tests.
astrolabia
4mo ago
Did you mean Russel conjugation?
astrolabia
4mo ago
Wow, I never heard about the 1977 flu this whole time. And I thought I had built an information diet that would expose me to this kind of forbidden knowledge.
I beg you to consider the possibility that progress in AI development will continue. The doomers are worried about future models, not current ones.
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