problem_redditor
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User ID: 1083
Where did you get any of that from what he said? You've basically imputed all of your own imaginings onto him based on one comment posing you a hypothetical.
For what it's worth, I agree with @TitaniumButterfly. Your commentary is routinely so incredibly low quality I barely respond to it, but I would honestly prefer not to see it here.
Even assuming it is "different", the idea that you can only objectify people if you can see their junk is an idea I reject. Traditional "sexy poses" for men include things like action poses, strength and power poses, work poses, rebellious or defiant poses, etc. And if those men are all the way naked, then you can't see that they can afford that Hugo Boss suit, or what kind of work they do, or whether they're in some kind of uniform, or what kind of social status they have. Men are often sexy because of what they can bring in the way of protection, social status or resources. The way men are objectified reflect that, and just because they are based on what men can do or have or can get or earn doesn't mean they aren't objectifying. Being objectified as a tool is still objectification.
That being said, I very much disagree with the idea that female sexuality is anywhere near as fluffy-bunny as your portrayal. There's many examples of women cheering over and happily consuming male shirtless scenes, e.g. those in Twilight, many of which featured widely popular scenes of an underage Taylor Lautner in states of short-term dehydration after having consumed 5,000 calories per day to maintain his muscle tone; he eventually had to negotiate for fewer shirtless scenes. I'm gay and am not unfamiliar with gay porn, a genre which apparently sees 50% female consumption in spite of them not being anywhere close to the target audience. And I can tell you there is a lot of cock visible in almost everything.
Definitely agree that the hoe scaring countries off the beaten path are the nicest ones and tend to contain the most idiosyncratic and interesting things. Also they're not crawling with tourists and souvenir shops trying to sell you tack shit, or if they are it's in a very unique local way that's still of interest to an outside observer.
Overcurated leisure experiences like cruises, resorts, very guided tours and so on are overpriced and negate so much of what I like about travel that I barely view it as an option.
But the people benefiting from that were the men running the show and the TV network, not the girls themselves.
Earning income from bouncing up and down on a trampoline is an obvious and measurable benefit. It's also notable from a cursory search how many of these trampoline girls already had jobs like those before their time on The Man Show; the job histories of many of these girls include Playboy and fetish modelling as well as burlesque dancing. What you’re objecting to is called employment, and they made their free and informed choice on that front. On the topic of the costs of such a job, many other jobs (mostly male dominated ones, I might add) qualify as worse than this one and boast high occupational injury and death rates; unless you argue that all employment is exploitative a la Karl Marx there is no basis for special pleading.
he would be delighted to date her and not think less of her and would still treat her with respect as wife material instead of "woo-hoo, I get to bang the thot".
Even if one doesn't necessarily want to date her (and yes, being in such professions indicates personality traits that don't always correlate well with what most people are looking for in an LTR), that doesn't imply you have to see her as Not A Human or whatever extreme point of view you were imputing onto OP. And nonetheless not thinking of a lingerie model as wife material certainly does not mean you view women in general as "a disparate collection of parts to jerk off to", if anything that contraindicates such a viewpoint since it suggests there is a difference between who you want to jerk off to and who you want to spend your life with.
In any case looking at their lives it appears that many notable “Juggies” (the trampoline girls in question) were capable of bagging a husband and having children, so I'm unconvinced the cost of taking on such a job is anywhere close to how you portray it.
problem_redditor
2d ago
Yes because this is such a massive risk. As we all know, it is extremely commonplace for a brother after heavy porn use to attempt to mount his sister.
The endless kvetching about men perceiving women as sex objects when they choose to present themselves as sex objects is always quite amusing. The idea that one should be taking umbrage on behalf of the women even when objectification was their goal is downright incomprehensible to me. People appear to believe that when a woman dresses skimpily and gives everyone involuntary panty shots it should somehow have no effect on how anyone thinks of her, no matter how shamelessly she is advertising her services, and woe betide the man who dares to notice since it's clearly just a failure on his part to Appreciate Her Personhood enough.
And it is only male attraction that is to be judged in this way, of course. That doesn't apply to a woman rubbing one out to a picture of David Beckham.
but if the guy in question never matures out of that attitude, then yeah: gosh why aren't women getting married to men who think of them as a disparate collection of parts to jerk off to, what a puzzle.
If you have created lewd content of yourself and disseminated it into the commons for money or other gain, you are advertising yourself as being willing and able to fulfil a certain need, and people who stumble upon that will view you in that context. Seriously the quoted statement above is about as intellectually sound as saying that I don't view bus drivers as Fully Realised People because I'm not interested in the minutiae of my bus driver's internal life and see him as a tool whose purpose is primarily to take me from point A to point B. People interact with others differently in different contexts. Yes, in a context where someone is advertising or providing services to me I am seeing them primarily instrumentally through the lens of what they are offering me, that doesn't mean I would not be capable of viewing and approaching them in any other manner with a different goal in mind if I were to encounter them in other contexts (say, in a social setting). That’s normal human psychology, not a pathology, but if women want to opt out of relationships for that reason then that is their choice.
The travelling was a means, not an end in itself. In both instances the origin is a type II or sometimes type III activity that is being repackaged as type I fun while clinging to the cachet of being type II/III.
But leisure travel is old, it has been an end in itself whenever conditions became stable and there was any slightly sizeable middle-to-upper class; ancient Romans travelled all through Greece, Asia Minor and Egypt for fun (and sometimes left reviews of their experiences on the historical sites). Tourists would travel to the pyramids and the ruins of Troy, motivated by the concept of otium, or "self-realisation time". Temples would derive significant portions of revenue from tourism; they charged fees, contained artefacts for sightseeing and often claimed to house some legendary figure's remains. There were tourist resorts in Baia and Naples. This isn't particularly limited to Rome either, Chinese literati engaged in landscape tourism, going to mountains to gather herbs and appreciate scenery.
I'm also not certain the "stolen valour" hypothesis works very well here to explain the cultural cachet travel currently holds. Merchants who would have travelled heavily in the course of their work were not considered particularly high-status people in many historical societies (Greece, Rome, China, early medieval Europe all considered them a disreputable, parasitic nonproducing class). A lot of times travelling becomes vaunted once it becomes a pastime that the wealthy are willing and capable of participating in, when the empire is stable and it can be portrayed as a form of self-cultivation and source of worldly enlightenment instead of a job performed by the lowly for money.
Also I feel like seeking novelty by partaking of foreign people's native mundanity contributes to the starving of novelty in one's own culture. Cultural output requires the boredom and appetite for change that motivates people to organise and take action.
That is quite the opposite of my take. Cultural exchange has shaped societies in many novel ways over the years; it's far more often that novelty via partaking of foreign people's native mundanity results in that novelty being exported back to one's own society and syncretising in interesting and new ways. To continue with the Roman example from before, after the annexation of Egypt and significant travel there Roman Italy gained a large market for Egyptian-looking artworks and syncretic pieces of art that the well-to-do put in their homes. And while not so related to travel, the development of European chinoiserie largely was caused by coming across porcelains and textiles from China, in other words partaking in "foreign people's native mundanity", and it resulted in many new art styles such as Rococo.
My perception was that the flavour profile of Beijing food had a good bit less depth and spice than the other regions of China I visited (such as Shanxi, where I really enjoyed the food), and I crave spice to an absurd level. Admittedly I've not spent too long in Beijing, just four days so I probably haven't had the chance to try too much; I had kaoya, zhajiangmian, Beijing-style shaomai in the Qing dynasty restaurant that spread these dumplings throughout China and a small handful of other regional specialities, I'd say they were fine but not great. I'm sure there's great food there though and am happy to accept recommendations for the next time I go.
Agree with most of your points. There's also lots more traditional practices going on in China than most people tend to think, IMO. People almost seem to believe all culture got supplanted by Communism - I've seen people assert that communist China "destroyed" things that a 5 minute Google search would prove still exist - but honestly it's quite clear visiting Mainland China that a lot of varied regional practices remain extant and have flourished heavily under liberalisation (sometimes you can find some seemingly really improbable things still being practiced, like the hermit lifestyle in the Zhongnan Mountains that stretches back all the way to the Qin dynasty). Aspects of traditional stuff actually seem to be cool among the younger generation in China unlike most other places in Asia I've visited, and as a Malaysian Chinese much of what I saw felt rather familiar to me.
Hoeflation doesn’t necessarily have to be conducted only through revealing the body but can also be achieved through augmentations of the body itself. On the extreme end of this, think of the women who utilise surgeries and fillers and gaudy makeup to accentuate everything to the point that they look terrifying and emotionless and I’m not sure any man finds them even remotely attractive.
Though now that you’ve mentioned it, it would be very funny to see some episode of some adult TV show take this idea and just run with it, where the thotting goes so far that it becomes downright grotesque and your average woman 100 years in the future aspires to being a Cronenbergian body horror.
I think you’ve got a fairly wild interpretation of my remark. Here in the US it’s a common theme among parents, “learned people,” and the elite social classes of society that “traveling” and “experiencing the world,” is something only a healthy or well formed individual does.
This is certainly a thing, and there are people who are extremely pretentious about it sometimes; I don't think there's something particularly wrong with someone if they don't want to travel. Just pushing back against the notion that things are broadly similar wherever you go or that it sucks ass. And the "I find many westerners to be overly scared by countries that have been marketed to them as 'third world'" wasn't exactly specifically directed at you, that was meant to be more of a tangent about other people I know.
I mean yes, there will always be similarities between people and places you come across based on the fact that ultimately everyone is human and will share basic human traits; you're never going to meet the heptapods from Arrival. But the specific differences have actually become incredibly apparent to me as life goes on, especially after having moved. I've come to believe that places in the world are not nearly as interchangeable as I would have initially thought, and that "settling in" culturally to a totally new country is in practice more difficult than it initially seems. "You can take the boy out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the boy" kind of deal. And all of these differences really matter to your QoL.
But traveling for the sake of traveling because you’re a rootless hobo who loves getting mistaken for some kind of
bumurban nomad is my insult and reversal for the megaphone that always wants to tell me there’s something “wrong” with me because traveling isn’t a basic cornerstone of my life.
Thing is, I don't think this is a good mental conception of the people who really enjoy travelling for its sake. It really is just a difference in novelty preference and openness-to-experience. At least personally speaking, I find life gets extremely, painfully dull day-to-day, and while travelling isn't the only way to shake somebody out of one's routines and established mental patterns that get canalised, it certainly is a very effective one.
Some people don't feel the need to do that, some people enjoy the comfort of the daily routine and their familiar environment, and that's fine! But some people really prefer novelty, and perhaps they're typical-minding when they try to push others out of their comfort zone, but they're almost certainly not doing so out of malice or necessarily even superiority, and that retort is going to come off as needlessly hostile.
I mean it’s more or less “like this” almost anywhere you go (where you don’t want to put your life at risk).
Out of curiosity, where have you actually been? I grew up in Malaysia and now live in Australia, I've travelled all over Europe and Oceania, been to North America and most recently have been exploring Asia, and could not disagree more with it being "like this" almost anywhere you go.
To be blunt, I find many westerners to be overly scared by countries that have been marketed to them as "third world" and as such overwhelmingly travel to a restricted range of relatively culturally similar places, though I actually often find them (particularly the Asian ones) safer and more pro-social than much of the West is today.
I mean yeah, I’ve always wanted to visit the morbid, desolate and forbidden stay away zones your mother would never want you to go to as a sense of adventure, but not as a way to marvel and mull over the fact that they have toilets and take a shit “just like we do!,” all the way in China.
"Morbid, desolate and forbidden" are the last descriptors I would apply to China, and I am going again this year. You're not going to be arbitrarily detained unless you want to sell drugs or something. There's extremely rich history, fantastic infrastructure, some really great food (outside of Beijing at least), it's very safe and cheap, albeit the digital ecosystem there can be a pain and people there smoke like it's 60s America.
Frankly, out of all the places I've been I would use that word to describe urban Canada. In other words, there's a lot of places I would deem as viscerally different while still being very safe.
I read papers a lot in my free time, and pretty reliably notice that a very large proportion of researchers in the STEM fields are ching chongs from Peking and Tsinghua (this is, in fact, the primary thing that started me questioning my initially China doomer beliefs and got me to start looking into what they were actually up to). This analysis suggests that the US share of total global scientific publications has fallen from 40% to 15%, whereas China's has increased to 32% as of 2022; in addition it now contributes 35% of top journal contributions, suggesting that this research is not of low quality. Note this surpasses both the US and EU.
Here is another such analysis, suggesting China has a lead in 37 of the 44 technologies surveyed. For a good number of technologies they apparently on average publish nine times more high impact research than the runner up, most often the US. It's most certainly not the case anymore that Chinese technological progress is a discount Temu version of Western research, albeit public perceptions have struggled to catch up with that reality.
You're correct and if anything you are actually underselling the point. Maoist China itself actually was able to manage a very high rate of economic growth, to the point that it outstripped Germany, the USSR and Japan during their modernisation periods. According to Maurice Meisner, in Germany the rate of economic growth for the period 1880-1914 was 33 percent per decade. In Japan from 1874-1929 the rate of increase per decade was 43 percent. The Soviet Union over the period 1928-1958 achieved a decadal increase of 54 percent. In China over the years 1952-1972 the decadal rate was 64 percent. China’s modernisation was actually wildly successful from the start and unlike the Soviets they didn't end up disintegrating, stagnating and lapsing into kleptocracy, though the whole "millions must die" situation is an obvious and big caveat.
The early PRC under Mao went from an industrial base smaller than Belgium to the sixth largest in the world, and this occurred without much external help, except for stuff like limited Soviet aid in the 1950s paid back in full by the 1960s. It was almost entirely endogenous. People always praise Deng but the capability to take over the world's factories didn't come out overnight in 1979. Deng essentially ended up inheriting an already-industrial China with the potential for huge further growth, so long as the right incentive structures were introduced (and they were).
In general, I'm kind of convinced that quick modernisation requires a dictator with the intent and willingness to move fast and break shit, though that approach is certainly not a sustainable system to run a state with over the long term. It also contextualises to me why Mao is still regarded in China, in spite of public perception of him having soured and even the CCP being willing to openly condemn many of his excesses.
Depends on my mood. For when I want my brain tickled, a lot of electronic stuff works: Aphex Twin, Autechre, Boards of Canada, Squarepusher, Death Grips, Plaid, Oneohtrix Point Never, Clark, Blanck Mass, Iglooghost, The Flashbulb, Venetian Snares, Bogdan Raczynski and Burial's later output are a few that come to mind.
When I want more punky/proggy material, Can, Black Midi, Talking Heads, LCD Soundsystem, Joy Division, The Fall, The Clash, Kino, Jagatara, David Bowie, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, The Mars Volta (specifically Frances The Mute), RE-TROS, Angine de Poitrine, Yes' more proggy works, Massive Attack and others are on rotation.
For more traditionally danceable stuff, I tend to gravitate towards The Avalanches' first album, Louis Cole, Justice and Daft Punk, and when I'm in the mood for more pretty/folky music, there's always Animal Collective, Beach House, Sufjan Stevens, Toumani Diabate, Tim Hecker and Radiohead.
"Unconventional Right"; I would say that's pretty spot-on.
Most of the questions appear to lack sufficient detail (expected for a 24-question quiz, but still). For example the question about U.S. foreign policy is a simple dichotomous choice between "The U.S. should take into account the interests of its allies even if it means making compromises with them" and "The U.S. should follow its own national interests even when its allies strongly disagree". Then there's also the question that reads "Thinking about assistance to people in need, do you think the government 1: Should provide more assistance, 2: Should provide less assistance, or 3: Is providing about the right amount of assistance" which is so poorly defined and obviously depends on the group of people in question and what kind of assistance we are talking about here.
The way this test functions it's more like a political thermometer test where you pick the statement you feel the warmest towards in sort of a vibe-based manner, and I treated it that way when I was answering. For all intents and purposes I would still say it would classify people broadly accurately, but my autist brain did not feel good entering a response to some of these.
EDIT: Looking also at the opinions held by each of these typology groups, it is noticeable just how extreme "Leftward Progressives" are as a group. The profile of their answers are far more homogenous and partisan than any other group on most topics of contention, including their counterparts; the "No Apologies Right", which I'm guessing is (charitably) either an artefact of how these typologies have been defined or (less charitably) simply a result of intense purity spiralling.
I intellectually agree with you on the broad strokes and the impossibility of restructuring society around the whims of "creatives" - yet emotionally sympathise with @Corvos, since I find myself in a similar boat and used to create a lot of music in university (as well as when I was laid out flat by chronic illness). Given the musical taste you've demonstrated here I doubt you would like any of what I made, but I honed my skill at it until I would say I was at a professional level, or at least close to it. I have some receipts to prove it, too; I minimally marketed my music and ended up selling over $1,000 worth of it with pretty much close to zero financial investment on my part (this is not much in context, but considering how little I was trying to get eyes on it, I'm surprised it actually gained so much traction). At one point I had a friend show a track of mine to someone who had studied audio engineering in university, and they asked to speak to me so they could understand how I was making what I was making. Not to toot my own horn too much, but I was good at it.
At this point, though, I've been so radically run down by the endless demands of my work, which I have complained about here and here, and I barely find myself making anything at all. I used to be so much more of an interesting person; I used to make more, I used to read more, I used to care more about things, and now I find myself largely blanking out in front of the screen during much of my free time because my work and personal commitments swallows all of my energy. I would be lying if I said it didn't bother me.
To be fair, I constantly see artists who are just bad and whose creative endeavours amount to just dabbling make this claim as well (way too many people in the electronic music sphere are capable of only making drone music), and a lot of times it does in fact boil down to a skill issue and placing a lot of blame on "capitalism" to mask their own lack of motivation and talent. But not every eight-hour shift was made equal, and the amount of time I spend at work almost certainly heavily exceeds eight hours per day when you count the unpaid overtime, I'm not really capable of sparing the time to have lunch many (most?) days. The fact that people use the justification to bolster their own failure to accomplish things is not incompatible with the existence of people who are actually burned out as hell on their jobs, barely keeping their head above water on that front, and who would genuinely make things that are worthwhile if their motivation wasn't constantly being sledgehammered.
Been making my way through a fiction backlog. Tried Recursion by Blake Crouch two weeks or so ago, which was an extremely fast paced and not-all-too-deep mind-bendy read where the stakes increase astronomically towards the middle and end of the book, sort of like the kind of thing a turbo-charged Christopher Nolan would write if you plied him with a lot of LSD and crack. There is one Big Lie you have to believe in order for the book to make any sense at all, and towards the end of the book the characters completely overlook an obvious solution to the main conflict of the story after over a hundred years of iteration with only a relatively thin plot justification for the oversight, but if you can accept that (and the very simplistic prose) the story's good fun.
Read The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch on Saturday after having it on the back burner for a while; it was entertaining for a bit but the prose was clunky and story-wise it felt all over the place, since it was trying to pull together so many elements - murder mystery detective plots, apocalypse scenarios, time travel (of a sort), deep space travel, incomprehensible starfish aliens, timeline-hopping Nazi vigilante groups, and more - and it never felt particularly unified as a result. The book doesn't always explore these plot points to its fullest extent and threatens to become incoherent under the weight of its own story a lot, and I never got the sense that there was an underlying gestalt to the entire story, which is something I generally like with twisty sci-fi. Also somehow nobody ever sees an ethical problem with creating whole temporary universes filled with people who think and feel, all of whom will blink out of existence once the traveller leaves.
Currently on Quarantine by Greg Egan and enjoying it a lot so far, though some of the futurism has aged rather poorly in retrospect.
96%, and I'm actually surprised because in real life I hardly remember the faces of anyone I don't meet frequently (I actually often struggle to pick out prominent public figures by their looks, who I remember far more by their names and policies than I do their faces). In practice I store people as an abstract set of traits and positions in much the same way I do concepts.
In the vast majority of contexts the specific way somebody's face looks is probably the attribute of theirs I care the least about, and I suppose I just don't bother to commit it to long-term memory.
It's a fantastic show. Without spoiling anything in particular, you have to be patient with it at least until the last episode of S1. I understand how the pacing would come off as slow at this stage, but all of the setup pays off hugely with one of my favourite season finales put to screen.
S2 is more of a mixed bag in my opinion with some borderline nonsensical plot points towards the second half of the season, but still manages to pull itself together in a satisfying way and is very worth your time.
I've been listening to the new Boards of Canada album Inferno, which released just two days ago. My expectations for this one were high, given they were a seminal electronic band of the 90s, and Inferno breaks a massive thirteen-year hiatus where they all but went radio silent and left the entire fanbase twisting in the wind. It's all too easy for artists to fumble a comeback after an extended hiatus (looking at you, James Murphy, American Dream has all of your worst music), but I'm glad to say that this is one of their best albums. It also doesn't feel at all like a cheap attempt at nostalgia-bait where an artist tries and fails to capture the sounds of their heyday; in fact they go in a completely fresh sonic direction that couldn't contrast more with the fuzzy, warm, childhood tape sounds of their first two albums.
The tracks here are extremely dark in tone, as well as sharp-edged and unmistakably electronic in their sound. They also draw from a far more eclectic range of inspirations than any of the tracks on their other albums - most of their other albums had a much clearer singular source of inspiration; Music Has The Right To Children and Geogaddi are clearly based off the music and sounds on old educational tapes and Parks Canada ads, whereas Tomorrow's Harvest is obviously a pastiche of 70s/80s apocalypse film soundtracks. The Campfire Headphase is a bit less cohesive and incorporates aspects of acoustic folk into its sound, but still relies on the more pastoral and sweet atmospheres of their early days. Inferno, however, is... not that. In spite of the music on here bearing superficial hallmarks of their earlier work such as ambiguous transposed chords and extensive samples ranging from Hare Krishna chanting and televangelists to educational docs and so on, their sound is now unexpectedly jagged and hi-fidelity. The production is absolutely immaculate, which is not a typical approach for Boards of Canada.
So many highlights. Prophecy at 1420 MHz, Father And Son, The Word Becomes Flesh, Into The Magic Land, Deep Time and All Reason Departs are fantastic tracks that really epitomise what the album has to offer. The second Prophecy comes in you know you're going to be in for a ride, the onslaught of hard-hitting drums and the electronic synth textures are infectious. But probably the biggest surprise on the album is the penultimate track You Retreat In Time And Space, which is placed on the album after a whole onslaught of increasingly ominous and evil tracks; it acts as a climax to the album with an absolutely blissful slow synth-funk ballad featuring a whole lot of guitars, bells and warbly synths that almost appear to sparkle. One could almost mistake it for a Daft Punk track if they didn't know Boards of Canada made it, albeit on a second look it's not all too difficult to see their DNA all over the track.
The fact that a band this old and this heralded is still putting out quality works this late in the game is great. Fantastic album. 8.7/10.
Warning: Shitty vent post, typed out hastily in a hotel somewhere in rural Australia.
Last Friday a good number of things happened at work that sent my anxiety levels through the roof, all of which were caused or exacerbated by the decentralised structure of public tax accounting, which features a system where one preparer works under a number of reviewers on different jobs (which can be anything from a tax return to a business activity statement to a tax planning task).
So the inciting incident for this cascade of bullshit is that I had booked five days of leave a good while ago, and I had followed the proper procedure by sending a leave form to my most direct superior that then got sent to the firm’s secretary for dissemination. But somehow one of my managers didn’t seem to know about this beforehand and was surprised the day before due to some kind of error in internal communication on the firm's end, at least that's what I was told when I asked about it, and as a result I had to perform emergency handovers of some tax returns I was working on one day before I went on leave (since this was the case, I have offered to assist periodically with work when I can make myself available). This has never occurred before and in all previous instances my superiors appeared to know I would be going on leave before I even had to inform them, but it appears I cannot rely on internal communication and will need to take things into my own hands in the future, despite any expectation to that effect never being communicated to me. Somehow I feel this issue is going to end up being placed on me in the end as the junior. “Doesn’t communicate well” or something.
In addition, I got bitched at by one of my managers that same day for dropping one of the 5000 balls I’ve been juggling - I forgot to send out a reminder email to a client for a business activity statement, while sidetracked with other extremely urgent work that had to be completed, and this meant the necessary client information arrived late. The lodgement date came due over my leave period, and he complained that he would now “have to” work on the client’s business activity statement in my stead, in spite of the fact that applying for an extension of the due date would have been an option. I consider this criticism to be rather hypocritical since just less than a month ago his own failure to sign and approve a lodgement email had resulted in this same client lodging an instalment activity statement two months past the due date, and the only reason why it got solved is because I noticed the issue; I suppose mistakes are only unacceptable when they're mine. Nevertheless I stayed at work four hours late that day just trying to placate him and getting the workpaper to at least a reviewable state, though why the firm couldn’t just ask for a due date extension from the ATO is unclear to me (requesting extensions is not uncommon at all; ostensibly the reason for not seeking extension in this case is not to jeopardise the payment plan the client has with the ATO, but if lodging an instalment activity statement two months late doesn’t jeopardise it, I seriously doubt this will either). He was also not happy that I “got to their tax compliance late”, meaning I deprioritised this client’s tax return in favour of meeting the year-end lodgement dates for other taxpayers. For the record that is a decision I fully stand by, since this client is nearly insolvent and I would prefer to prioritise clients that actually pay us and not ones who are in arrears for a year’s worth of billings.
I consider both of these to be prime examples of how the multiple reporting lines of public accounting firms really messes everything up. Firstly, you report to so many people that when one person doesn’t get tied into what you’re doing due to some breakdown in internal communication it ends up causing issues. Secondly, it misaligns incentives really badly - different clients are assigned to different managers that then get delegated to you, and while on a firm level it’s better to prioritise clients that actually do pay you as compared to clients whose status as a going concern is in serious question, on an individual-manager level everybody just wants you to get to their clients regardless of how much it makes sense at all because it personally affects them and how they are evaluated. I always see people saying that accounting is a “good job for autistic people” but frankly I just think it’s terrible, at least if you go into public. You need to communicate almost constantly with a revolving door of managers, reviewers and clients to make sure things don’t fall apart, and there are so many seemingly nonsensical aspects of the job that really only make sense once you start interpreting them through the lens of incentive structures. Yes, I am badly burned out and looking for exit opportunities.
IIRC this has also been heavily supported by all of the data collected on the topic, where the Chinese routinely rank as some of the most optimistic people in the world, in many cases taking away the top spot. I concur that there seems to be a general vibe in China that their lives in the future will be better than it is today, whereas many people in the West seem not to believe that, appear to believe their future is mainly governed by institutional forces, and take stagnation as a given.
Like OP mentioned even Rust Belt-ish depopulating industrial cities in areas like Dongbei don't seem to have this same downbeat view nor do they have the same level of self-destruction, drug use and crime that impoverished areas in the West do. There's just a lot less self-sabotage in general, IMO.
My hair is pretty nice. Just short of unmanageable East Asian straight, though I suspect that I've settled into a pompadour and fade that I'll keep well past the point it goes out of fashion.
Count yourself lucky. My hair is the most unmanageable chink hair you can possibly imagine; it stands up so straight that it looks like I've been electrocuted, even when grown out relatively long. It's impossible to style and gives me painful hair splinters that I'm constantly picking out of my fingers. I just get it all buzzed off (which poses its own problems, since short hair needs to be cut very often and my hair grows blisteringly fast).
problem_redditor
1mo ago
It exists in some point in the possibility-space, in the same way that technically you can also arrive at Shakespeare's Macbeth through a random character generator. The question is why our universe happens to have taken on these specific exact properties. Making anthropic arguments to explain this primarily only makes sense to me if you postulate the existence of many other "rolls of the dice": e.g. the existence of other universes with different physical laws, or the idea that physical laws are actually not consistent throughout the universe.
To let loose for a bit, the absolute gall of this user never ceases to astound me, especially considering she routinely violates so many of the rules of this forum. So many of the rules are about limiting antagonism, charitability, kindness, avoiding low-effort participation, avoiding weakmanning, providing evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory one's statement is, and she just freely flouts all of these rules as if they shouldn't apply to her. In this thread alone she has done this to at least two separate users: she has assumed your mental state and accused you of not seeing women as anything other than body parts to fuck and jerk off to, then accused someone posing her a hypothetical of holding a whole list of imagined uncharitable points of view she has no basis for.
I understand the point of having affirmative action for minority posters in order to ensure ideological diversity, but when someone vandalises the commons this consistently and has such a small (nonexistent?) roster of quality contributions they end up having a strong net negative effect on the forum. And somehow both of you collectively got singled out for being inflammatory earlier in spite of the fact that you were responding to a ridiculously uncharitable and downright slanderous picture she painted of you. Incredible.
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