faceh
11hr ago
Time and money spent on elder care isn’t spent on roads, farms, or a warm campfire. How far down should our current course take us?
I have no good answer to this particular question.
We can spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars squeaking out a few extra weeks/months of 'life' for a dying elderly person.
They will not enjoy this life, but they will be alive.
Or we can have some norms around end-of-life care that decide that its NOT appropriate to blow wealth that might benefit a younger generation on such diminishing returns.
We currently do not have any real traditions that allow the elderly to end their lives with 'dignity,' And the current instantiation of MAID is clearly not being limited to true "end of natural lifespan" cases.
But if it turns out that the world I like is unsustainable in the state of it that I like, such as for example not relying on literal slavery and/or being race-segregated and sex-segregated and everything you're darkly hinting at, then I'd rather milk it for what it's worth.
See, people seem to read that into any ambiguity I leave in my writings.
But that's quite far from what I'd actually want or even suggest for society. I do not, in fact, think that we need to make blacks into second-class citizens, or strip voting rights from women, or created mandates for childbirths.
I'm mostly in favor of radical individualism, I may be the most nonracist person on this entire board, insofar as I consciously, deliberately choose to judge every single person I meet on their own merits, by their own behavior, and accept their words as truthful in good faith until proven otherwise.
But that runs smack into the reality that a lot of people are not well-suited to run their own lives and this is very detectable in the larger aggregate outcomes.
So when I look at broader statistics, I feel very comfortable discussing them as concrete facts about the world, and proposing the hopefully least intrusive intervention that might improve on the current equilibrium.
Western women are getting less content with life.
Young western men are getting lonely, discouraged, and angry.
A LOT of immigrants in the U.S. are a net economic drain.
Boomers are clinging to wealth and power well into old age, to the detriment of later generations.
Religious groups have higher TFR.
Non-White groups tend to vote for Democrats, Whites are the biggest racial bloc for the GOP.
Ashkenazi Jews have a significantly higher average IQ than the global average. All signs point to this being very genetic, partially cultural.
Kenyans are better at long-distance running than virtually any other group. All signs point to this being very genetic, partially cultural.
I find none of this distressing to discuss, there are many ways to divide up society to try and model the effects of various policies.
I literally just want to have a social order that grants people maximum autonomy, but also a culture that provides basic life scripts that young people can follow to produce generally good outcomes in their life if they're not particularly intelligent and agentic. Complete High School, Get Married, have kids is a pretty decent one.
And, OF COURSE, I want elites/politicians to have skin in the game.
The one thing that genuinely peeves me off is when I see people in positions of power/authority making absolutely DUNDERHEADED policy decisions, causing untold amounts of suffering or economic loss, and then skating off unscathed because they had no direct stake in the outcome/were poised to benefit either way.
So as you can imagine, I maintain an ongoing level of simmering disdain for a lot of our current political class.
This is, perhaps, the strongest argument in favor of fixing demographics now. Even then, the actual effect a currently childless person can have on reversing that is going to manifest 20-30 years later, when the children they've had ASAP grow up and become productive. So people have to believe in the sweet spot of "close enough that I'm gonna feel it, but not so soon that my potential children aren't going to be stuck in Mad Max regardless".
Yep. There's an element of faith required, and that seems to be in shorter supply. People don't know what to believe in, what purpose to work towards, or what the 'point' of it all is.
Did they ever? And even if they did, will they stop the kind of deep states upon deep states we have going on now?
If a king genuinely believed in an all-powerful creator who could and would punish them eternally after death, that would indeed incentivize 'better' behavior during their life.
That's all, just pointing out how the removal of a deity (and the threat of hell/promised reward of heaven) leaves us with very few tools for guiding human behavior.
For a 50% increase from 80 to 120, at best. Anything further will probably have to rely on society-wide life extension methods.
Unless you're arguing that there is a hard limit on how long humans can live, ingrained at a biological level, I don't see this as discouraging.
faceh
13hr ago
I'm not betting on Artificial wombs arriving in the next 10 years. Or 15. 20 seems a stretch.
Which makes the extant supply of organic ones that much more critical.
That, and the fact that a state that's strong enough to reverse course towards replacement fertility has no actual reason to stop at "just a bit of strengthening the nuclear family to keep us at 2.1", makes it look like it's all or nothing.
Well, once again. No religious guidelines in place means no real guardrails on the conduct of the kings, either.
Most projections of the future that aren't AI doom or transhumanist utopia seem to make it clear that you will be dead quite a bit before society collapses to untenable levels.
The Peter Zeihan prediction is that the effects will manifest sooner rather than later, as globalization breaks down, which will very quickly make production of advanced technology/products far more difficult. The order that allows large container ships to travel the seas unmolested is tenuous, and if countries get more desperate as their own economies slip, this order likely fractures.
This will probably lead to a reversion in living standards on its own.
We got the tiniest taste of how quickly this can happen with COVID restrictions shutting down ports.
I'm also going to make a concerted effort to not die any time soon.
And I'd rather bet on the side that's given us the advanced civilization I like.
Realize that this 'side' was a largely Christianized, largely Western European-derived stock, and what we're heading towards/currently have is VERY DIFFERENT from that along most dimensions.
We should be concerned about what conditions for building advanced civilization are also necessary and sufficient for its maintenance.
faceh
14hr ago
I mean, are we saying "high" birthrates, or replacement-level, with maybe a small buffer.
Me I'm not going to say we need to politically mandate a 2.1 birth rate per woman, or require that every woman put out at least 2 kids or face expulsion.
But I think maintaining the 'nuclear family' as the primary economic unit of the country is so self-evidently good for such a country's stability and development, and for the happiness of its citizens, that any policies that might be linked to weakening that unit and reducing family formation should be viewed extremely harshly.
Problem we seem to run into repeatedly is that sans some kind of biblical mandate for family formation and buy-in from some large % of the population, there's just no compelling reason to individually prefer family formation over individualized hedonism in a world where raising kids is no longer critical to individual survival. Otherwise, you have to be high-conscientiousness enough to notice that the society you're living in needs children to continue functioning, so its ultimately in your best interest to keep birth rates above replacement.
Then there's a bit of a prisoner's dilemma issue: can you convince other people to have enough kids to keep the show running, whilst you instead defect and enjoy childfree life with all the joys an advanced civilization can provide you.
Cue the research showing fertility is higher across the board among the religious.
I get to see this happening up close. I have two younger brothers. The youngest has a wife and a 1-year-old kid now. The middle one is continuing with an extended adolescence, chasing every whim and indulging in various vices without much regard for anyone else. He can get a girlfriend with relative ease (currently has one) but is allergic to true commitment.
No prize for guessing which one has a more stable, fulfilling, happy outlook on the world. Then there's me, who really does want kids, and wants to continue to live in an advanced civilization, and considers the propagation of the human species to be a good thing in and of itself. And yet everywhere I turn I see the pillars upholding it all being chipped away, and very few seem to be willing to give up their own immediate comfort to try and address that fact, even assuming they realize there's an issue.
Why so much ire over nature taking its course?
There's a decently convincing and certainly coherent argument that birth rates going too low, even if it doesn't extinct humans, renders us unable to maintain a technologically advanced civilization.
I like living in a technologically advanced civilization, and its our only hope for getting humans off this rock in the near future. Which I think is important. Any threat to this raises my ire.
Short argument: too many nonproductive elderly supported by too few young, healthy, intelligent, productive citizens means our most advanced technologies (i.e., those that utterly RELY on globalized trade and capitalist hyperspecialization) cannot be built at scale. Too much economic activity is devoted to keeping oldsters alive, there's not enough talent in the younger generation to go into the most advanced fields, or to even maintain the advanced capital we've built.
Any industrial and economic advances that depend on such techs shrinks and stagnates. Standards of living fall everywhere.
A microcosm of this is Russia, which 'cut off' from global trade and can only produce tech, including military tech, that it can design and build at home, with resources on hand. If they didn't have massive energy reserves, they'd be even more screwed than currently implied.
Germany is also experiencing this problem, from all appearances.
Maybe AI and robotics comes in clutch, or we make some other crazy saving-throw (artificial wombs, anti-aging tech, some unforeseen breakthrough in global peace and cooperation) but all else equal the predictable outcome of current trends is advanced civilization sputters and regresses, if not collapses entirely. No ignoring the numbers.
faceh
17hr ago
Flame war?
I engage in no such inelegant and crass activities.
"Torch Duel" if anything.
Also, I've heard of them, from growing up in a church.
faceh
1d ago
My hypothesis is that the phones themselves are not inherently the issue.
Nor even the apps.
But the algorithmically curated content which optimized for holding attention, and ensures that they're constantly inundated with content that makes them feel inferior, and provides the feeling of having 'too many options' which leads to decision paralysis and regretting the choices we do make, and generally just increasing anxiety without giving any outlets to resolve or relieve the feeling. Hence, the doomscroll.
The creation of a decentralized panopticon that has a 'leaderboard' so everyone is acutely aware of their approximate rank and is constantly reminded of how poorly they're doing compared to others is going do particular psychic damage to the portion of the population that is hypersensitive to social status.
faceh
2d ago
But consider, does India inspire this level of Patriotism?
I think not.
faceh
2d ago
There will inevitably be gaffes in which the author is being interviewed about what their latest book is about, and it will become glaringly obvious that the author doesn't know what it's about, because they haven't read it, never mind written it.
Hah, easily solved by simply having any interviews of the author be completely AI-Generated videos as well.
Or the author will be approached by a fan at a convention who'll ask them to sign a copy of a book published under their name, and the author won't have even heard of this book.
This one's trickier, but I speculate that the studio/publisher might have an artist/actor/author whose whole body of work is AI, but they hire somebody to pretend to "be" the artist/actor/author for all in-person appearances.
faceh
3d ago
I would point out that the actual shocker here is that this democratizes the slop production. The labels need not be involved in this process at all.
As far as I can tell, "Breaking Rust" is just some person with a Suno subscription who used Distrokid to put the music on all the streaming services, and it ended up being used in some popular tiktok videos. Maybe they did some additional guerilla marketing or something, I dunno.
I've actually done it myself, to vastly less (read: zero) success, just to see how simple the process is.
As far as I know, it was exceedingly rare for an indie artist to make it to the big time while producing music in their garage alone, they needed the studio systems for, if nothing else, distribution/radio access.
It became semi-common in the streaming era for an artist to upload to e.g. bandcamp or soundcloud and get some traction there before they signed with a label.
This current case seems different from even that.
faceh
3d ago
There is a genuine question, is this simply a logical outgrowth of Autotune and modern DAW?
And does the existence of The Gorillaz estoppel any complaints about the artist not technically existing?
And of course, we've had Hatsune Miku for YEEEEAAARS now.
faceh
4d ago
Hey guys, remember a month and a half ago I pointed out that AI-Generated Music had fully crossed the uncanny valley?
I specifically claimed:
I think that if we did a double-blind test with randomly chosen people listening to AI songs vs. decently skilled indie artists, 80+% of them wouldn't reliably catch which were AI and which weren't, if we curated the AI stuff just a bit.
GUESS WHAT.
I do think this either proves that the average country music fan has little taste, or AI music is as good or better than the average country musician.
Damning with faint praise, perhaps, but this absolutely still feels like we've officially entered a new state of play for the music industry.
Related enough to add some commentary.
I can say what I honestly wish I saw more in movies and shows these days:
Competent teams of people coordinating their unique skillsets in interesting ways, where the success or failure of the whole venture depends on everyone fulfilling their role with precision.
That guy is the polyglot, that one there is the martial arts expert, she's got a PhD level understanding of volatile chemicals, and this last dude trains seagulls to steal jewelry from tourists. A rich benefactor is paying us to deliver a donor heart to a hidden village in China to be transplanted into a sick child for unknown reasons.
Ocean's 11 is maybe the ur-example here. "We want to complete an extremely specific set of tasks for the possibility of a singular, massive payoff if everything goes well, and possible ruin if any piece of the plan fails." Maybe Mission Impossible is a better standard example, but the later movies really lean towards "everyone is omnicompetent at whatever talent the plot requires." I still like them, though.
Despite what cynics say, I think the "team of people overcoming massive odds through sheer skill" is a winning trope, and for good reason. I think that's TRULY what makes heist movies appealing.
I also suspect, for example, Star Trek, USED To be about this to a large degree! Everyone on the ship has their specialization and their duties. And as long as they had a competent Kirk, Picard, Janeway, to get everyone to do their job correctly and align their objectives, this was enough to achieve victory against unknown opponents and strange phenomena.
I gather that Modern Trek has discarded much of that framework in favor of more emotional drama and angsty grit.
There was definitely some kind of trend of "swiss army knife" heroes in the 2000's. They spoke every language (or could learn them overnight), they had combat skills, hacking skills, engineering skills, charismatic and witty personalities. Often they were really good at chess. Basically, Mary Sues, with better writing.
Tony Stark being able to build an advanced exosuit in a cave with a bunch of scraps sort of deal. Batman in the comics, for damn sure.
And yes, it has become absurdly obvious that human beings with broad skillsets that are all at least two standard deviations above the average really do not exist. There are grifters who make money presenting themselves as this sort of person (and pay me $100/month I can teach you, too!) but is not anyone out there who can infiltrate the CIA and assassinate a high ranking official then hack the database to erase their own existence, all by their lonesome (or with a handful of supporting cast). Anyone that MIGHT be able to do that probably works for the CIA already.
Humans can specialize very well. But only in like two, maybe three things at most. Scott's review of "Raising a Genius" touched on this. If you're genetically predisposed and trained from near birth at a given talent, you can become world-class at that thing! But the time spent on that training probably precludes being exceptional at much else, for the same reason.
Elon Musk probably can't throw a decent punch. The world's best martial artists are likely piss-poor programmers. Genius-level intellect does not, in fact, guarantee massive financial success. Although it helps. And that's leaving aside the "fooled by randomness" aspect where sometimes, seeming outliers kind of just bungled into their own success.
Nothing wrong with imagining the existence of such people in fiction. I'm a huge fan of the Jason Bourne series myself. But they're probably better categorized as 'modern mythology' than anything else. And this trope is getting WAY less credible in a world that, as you say, becomes more complex to navigate on a yearly, maybe monthly basis.
faceh
5d ago
They've kind of amped up the variety of everything. More ship types, more planet types (also, the planets can have orbits and shifting phase lanes now!), more potential 'paths' you can take when optimizing fleet capabilities and strategic approaches.
The latest DLC added a completely new ship type that is basically a "SuperCapital" that is more affordable than a Titan so it can come online a little earlier.
The TEC Primacy version is interesting in that its modular and you can choose its weapon loadout specifically. So its still kind of 'hero-ish' but you can directly adapt it to the situation at hand as you go.
I've also played games against friends where they sort of eschew capital ships altogether and just build tons of a particular type of unit and that can work if you're not prepared for the sheer number of ships they bring to bear. Although I doubt that's the most efficient use of fleet supply.
The downside is that Capital Ships have items that can be added to kit them out for more specific purposes, and these items have to be researched then individually added to each ship... and replaced if they're expendable. And there's no 'templates' for automatically adding the same loadout to a new ship. So it adds to the Tech tree clutter and requires extra attention to a detail that probably could be automated.
Makes you not want to lose capital ships even if the situation might call for it.
So there's no way to set just general "strategic stance" to automate much of the management of the empire and fleet production. But it is more viable to manage your economy and planet and ship production from the general empire management screen, and only get involved with your fleet's actions in the most pivotal battles.
faceh
5d ago
With TEC, I think you can afford to overproduce anything you might need. If you think you need missiles, build MORE missile frigates than you think you need. If you need strikecraft, build MORE carriers than you think you need, and use the extra strikecraft items on your Capital ships to make even more.
Literally, just think of your fleets as 'units' and the ships as the HP, and your factories as 'healers.' Replace losses as quickly as you can. Don't bemoan losses as inherently bad if you're trading damage at approximately an equal rate.
And of course use Garrisons to bolster your "HP."
If you've got the resources pouring in, you should NEVER have idle factories, especially as enclave. Oh, and build more factories than you think you need, too.
Once you're finally running up against the supply limit, then it pays to get more strategic. There are ships that are more 'efficient' uses of supply than others.
If you've got the exotics, don't be afraid to scuttle your frigates to free up supply, even making a fleet ENTIRELY out of capital ships if you want.
There's a strategy of "Rollin' Kols" which is to send in nothing but Kol battleships with Experimental Beam upgrades and just obliterate any given target in the gravity well.
Man, I'm still struggling with optimal fleet composition for TEC myself.
You can delve into like full-on spreadsheet mania with it, but I genuinely think the number of possible combinations ultimately makes it impossible to really calculate once the game hits a certain size.
One reason I like TEC is that by midgame if your economy is running well, you can spit out whatever ships are needed to deal with the current threat very quickly, so you're replacing lost ships and optimizing your composition on the fly. "Oh shit that's a lot of strikecraft, better send some Flak Frigates in."
You want your fleet's pierce to be able to overwhelm their fleet's durability. Here's the basic rundown. You can sort of kind of ignore the "supply" number if you can tell at a glance that the ships they've sent in don't have the requisite pierce to focus down your ships' health given your ships' durability. That is, even if you were to start losing, you can likely retreat and not take too many losses since their effective DPS is low.
If they've got a lot of durable ships in their fleet, you gotta bring as much pierce as possible.
If there's any stats in the game worth memorizing, its the durability rating of each ship. I mentally have them sorted into buckets of "High, Medium, Low" durability so I don't have to do actual math in my head.
So I'll share my basic approach.
I like to have a wall of higher durability ships as the 'core' of my fleet. I tend to rely on Carriers in the early game, which is to say I have them sit back and send strikecraft in to do the dirty work, so I just want to have a physical shield to keep the enemies at bay.
Then I have to make some decisions, based on what it appears the enemies are fielding. If I'm dealing with strikecraft, the aforementioned flak frigates. If they've got high DPS capital ships, I will probably produce a TON of Corvettes since those help keep the Caps occupied and not killing my more valuable ships (note: doesn't work as well on human players). If they're fielding tough ships with a lot of support: Missiles. Lots of missiles.
Then pick your own caps based on whether you're being more aggressive or defensive. Or, if you like, if you're focusing on killing as much as you can as fast as you can, or if you need survivability (i.e. you're sending a fleet deep into enemy territory and it needs a lot of repair capabilities).
Then add in ship items for your capital ships based on what the enemy is likely to throw at them.
The one big 'insight' I've had that I THINK was fully intended by the Devs was that they have made the default supply cap pretty strict to prevent overuse of "Ball of doom" fleets that can just overwhelm anything, and require harder decisions about where to send your forces, knowing that you also can't hold a lot in reserve.
But in exchange, they've added numerous ways to augment fleet power that doesn't hit the supply cap. Like using influence points to call in NPC factions on your side, or the TEC Enclave's ridiculous(ly fun) garrison system.
So its actually kinda smart to divide up your forces between more than one fleet, and keep them mobile, so you don't have all your valuable supply caught in the wrong spot at the wrong time. And if you notice your opponent has a singular large fleet, you can both prepare to face it by setting up heavy defenses in bottleneck areas, or you can try to harass behind their lines and force them to keep said large fleet on the defensive. Calling in pirate raids on their planets basically demands they send a large force to counter it. Pirate raids are pretty damned expensive in influence, however, so timing is important.
So I think the Devs want players to try different tactics than "make the biggest fleet and dive at the enemy's homeworld."
I've been experimenting with setting up two fleets early on. "Hammer" fleet and "Anvil" fleet.
Anvil is made up of the high durability ships, and is intended to be the first one that encounters the enemy, and is able to stand there and slug it out for long enough for Hammer Fleet to arrive, which is the high DPS, high pierce fleet that can start whittling them down faster, HOPEFULLY while they're distracted with Anvil fleet.
If we get overwhelmed, I can order Hammer to retreat while Anvil covers for it. If we start winning, I can push Anvil forward to take more territory/cut off retreat while Hammer finishes the job.
It's been interesting to keep things managed this way. It feels like this more flexible approach is rewarded so I do think I've uncovered aspects of the game's design that the Devs intentionally added but didn't call attention to directly.
But its still great fun to build up a fleet as large as you can make it, built around what you expect the enemy to field, then smashing large fleets into each other and seeing what happens.
DEFINITELY learn how to get your ships to focus fire on high-value targets, though. They tend to do sub-optimal targeting on their own.
faceh
6d ago
I mean, I played the first game in the series for over 10 years.
When I say that the Second has improved on the first in almost every conceivable way, I want to establish that it had a high bar to clear.
This seems like a major flaw if I can't tell which one I'm getting into ahead of time.
Generally you can tell from the game settings at the outset. The Size of the map is the primary determinant as to how quickly you'll come into contact with the opponent, and whether there's even enough resources to build an economy or if you just hop straight to fighting.
And you can set the game speed higher for ship movement, tech research, and resource accumulation to ensure things end quickly, or lower those speeds to stretch the game out and force a more strategic match.
The largest maps start to feel like playing Stellaris but with just the space battles and economics and less of the tiddly empire management.
And there is a contingent of players who seem to not really want to play competitively at all but instead just set up the largest fleet battles possible then just sit back and watch them play out.
As mentioned there's a steepish learning curve for the tech tree alone, knowing what to research and when is a critical factor and the game will NOT hold your hand to show you which path is ideal.
So it is a bit much to ask of someone who isn't familiar with it to start playing with you right off rip.
faceh
6d ago
I'm playing Sins of a Solar Empire 2, still.
In my general opinion it is shaping up to be a masterpiece of the 4x/RTS genre.
3 different factions, each with two subfactions. Each faction has different specialties and the sub factions tend to be focused on either aggression or defensive strategy. So you have ample options for choosing your preferred playstyle for a given match.
Each Faction/Subfaction has an array of ship types and a decent selection of capital ships, and a dizzying number of techs to research to boost those ships' performance. And each faction has very different strengths and weaknesses when it comes to economy.
And the devs are set to release a new fourth faction, as well as the LONG-anticipated campaign mode, which will finally answer one of the core questions of the lore from the original game.
Finally, the true core combat mechanic being battles between "Fleets", and the fact that EVERY projectile a ship fires is actually simulated in 3D space, and some surprisingly complex damage calculation means there's some extra strategic depth in which ships you've chosen to compose your fleet(s) and which techs you've chosen to optimize their performance.
This means its not quite a "Rock-Paper-Shotgun-Laser-Nuke" situation where every attack has a direct counter and you just keep leveling your units until you win. It is possible for a giant deathball fleet to lose to a smaller force if the smaller force is optimized precisely enough to defend against the ship types its facing. And there's several mechanics to allow you to quickly augment your fleet's strength at opportune moments.
The upshot is that the outcome of battles can be relatively unpredictable, and you do NOT need a higher APM to micromanage your way to victory if you are successful at scouting out the opponent and predicting and countering their strategy. Although high APM helps. And in any situation with 3 or more players, the exact mix of factions and ships being thrown around can force a complete mid-match re-evaluation of said strategy. Finally crushing the guy who was pumping out dozens of cheap ships to harass you feels great until the third guy rolls up with a wall of heavy cruisers backed by support ships to start wrecking your infrastructure.
My one main fault with it is at present is the unwieldy and un-intuitive state of tech tree which makes it hard to learn for new players and kind of 'forces' a certain playstyle on you until you can get enough research to unlock the techs you actually want/need.
Yet the variable scale of the game means you can play a quick 30 minute-1 hour match where the later techs aren't even needed, or you can do a 6+ hour epic with hundreds of planets and multiple star systems that ends with planet-killer railguns, Hundreds of ships duking it out at once and beastly Titan warships that can delete whole fleets in short order.
Anyway, its a very fun game, and I'd host some sessions for Mottizens who would be interested. Its sadly not as popular as it truly deserves.
I don't now what to tell you, dawg.
Women surpassed men in college enrollment sometime in the 80's.
Since then they've racked up more student debt than the men.
Which isn't surprising because they choose degrees that pay less.
And once they've graduated they have far heightened standards for potential mates.
So we have multiple pressures against women settling down with a 'good' man all stemming from the same place.
Which ends with them hitting middle age and lamenting the lack of options.
In sum, many women spend four years or so getting a degree they'll barely use, taking on debt they won't pay back anytime soon, have their personal standards raised too high to accept a partner, and get VERY VERY upset when life doesn't turn out the way they wanted on the back end of that.
And all of that might be not be notable if it weren't for the fact that the women themselves have just become less content with their status. What does it mean when you give a group of people MORE concessions and they express greater displeasure?
Good luck finding an upside in all that. I don't even have to bring up the TFR issue to make this point, but the correlation obviously exists. Hard to see how this has contributed to human flourishing.
At some point the critics look like they have a real, correct argument.
Make whatever value judgment of the situation you like, the stats say what they say, and it supports the view that sending women to college en masse has made them LESS likely to end up satisfied with their life than otherwise.
I don't find these driveby attempts at derision bothersome at all, but I do find the complete inability to engage with the accurate observation of the facts on the ground to be... suspicious.
faceh
6d ago
One still has to grapple with the fact that the women who are now less satisfied with their lives, and having less children, and voting for policies that tend to disrupt productive economic activity in favor of redistribution.
So they are ultimately selecting against the continued maintenance of an advanced civilization.
And advanced civilization appears to be a prerequisite for women having anything resembling equality with men.
If that's the case, then its simply not a sustainable equilibrium, and the ultimate collapse is going to be way worse for future women's interests.
faceh
7d ago
There's some interesting research showing that Lesbian marriages are more likely to end in divorce than heterosexual ones, and male-male marriages divorce less often.
I dunno, if women are even less able to sustain a relationship if their partner is a woman, it indicates that they're not very good at being a 'partner' at all.
And its still very odd gotten less satisified with life even as they have more rights than before
I suggest you're missing some critical factor.
And no this isn't a calling for women to be reduced to chattel. My whole perspective is that the spouses differing roles are complementary, but across the board the male will tend to be the one best-equipped to make decisions for the family as a whole.
Its pointing out that your thesis isn't very explanatory of why women are LESS happy despite MORE concessions than ever, and why women who DO find men to lead them tend to be less neurotic and more happy.
This doesn't necessarily determine how EVERY marriage should be run, of course.
According to this 2020 survey only 31% of US men are single.
I beg you to look at the actual stats broken out by age and notice that your own source says 41% of 18-29 year old men are single.
And that was 2020.
More recent stats suggest Its around 6-in-10 young men now.
Combine that with a rise in sexlessness.
So they're not even hooking up as much!
And there's also good data to suggest that its more women deciding not to settle than men's standards being too high.
Which is to say, pressuring men to settle won't help much.
And I won't even deny that those are valid heuristics.
But its so often used as a means of just writing off the whole discussion.
"Only a Fascist would notice this facet of the world and dare to comment on it."
Okay fine, call me that if you want, but we either discuss it or I suspect certain bad things are going to happen. (note, I'm not accusing you of accusing me of being fascist)
By making it so only the icky right wingers can talk about an issue, a REAL issue, guess whose proposed solutions will end up gaining the most traction?
Anyhow, if anyone is curious as to my preferred solutions or the shape of society I prefer, I can happily explain all that. I don't hide the ball, and I'll bite virtually any bullet when it comes to defending my stance.
Even then, they had to keep up some level of appearances for greater societal buy-in. This is after all why Henry VIII had to go to such massive lengths to divorce his wife, since he had to at least pretend that God's rules were binding him.
I mean honestly, I suspect that's why religiosity is so aggressively waning. The elites/upper classes have abandoned its constraints, and nothing obviously bad is happening to them, so the classes that take their cues from those with higher status are simply learning by example.
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