faceh
2hr ago
The democrats are going to get back in office at some point,
Interesting that you can see the case for the collapse of SpaceX, but not the implosion of the Democratic Party as a nationally competitive entity. The national party is losing the fundraising race badly
The Dems next top prospect for President is apparently caught up in a corruption probe. Their bench is critically thin.
Whilst the GOP can always snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, they've got a better talent pool in the near term. This seems like an even-odds bet at best.
An interesting thought is that even if SpaceX under Elon 'fails,' the technology on offer is mostly proven, there's tons of manufacturing capability and engineering talent on tap, and they're right now like the ONLY real commercial path to orbit, and certainly the cheapest/most reliable.
So we might see some other aerospace company swoop in and purchase the whole kit and caboodle at a minor discount, rather than let it be parceled up. Elon also seems to be trying to combine his various companies into one like so many lego pieces. There's a potential outcome where Tesla is doing so extremely well that if SpaceX falters, Tesla steps up and snags it.
People have pointed out that there's a potential parallel to Railroad companies and how the first company to lay out the track and start service were often not the ones that survived. In this instance, I don't think that really applies, insofar as it isn't trivial to bring another rocket company up to speed, whereas with railroads, any dude with some startup capital could hire some Chinamen and start laying track (kidding, but only with respect to the Chinamen).
If SpaceX fails I don't think it fails like Enron. There'll certainly be knock-on effects, but I think it will still exist as a going concern.
One pet peeve I have, which is bad enough that if it occurs, I will usually write off a particular brand, is making small updates to a given product line, maybe not even enough to render them 'incompatible,' but now its got a different product ID, slightly different parts here and there, and shows up as a different item on Amazon, whilst filling the exact same product/price niche.
Even worse when it means that you either don't sell parts for the old model or, fairly often, the old parts are now prohibitively expensive so repair becomes less appealing than replace.
These days you can almost always get around that factor by going and buying a cloned part made in china, but I dislike that since now you're REALLY eating some risk on quality control.
Look, I want you to be trying to innovate and improve the product, and sometimes I buy a replacement and think "why yes, this is a meaningful improvement over the previous version." I just want a certain amount of transparency when that's been done. Software generally does this the right way with versioning.
i just UTTERLY DESPISE when a company intentionally adds to my 'mental overhead' in hopes of confusing me into making a purchase I might not make if given consideration. You're making me think harder about the value I'm getting in hopes that I will not want to bother with the effort and will coast on autopilot.
Meanwhile, a big reason I'm loyal to your product AT ALL is because I'm able to buy it on autopilot and generally won't regret the decision later. I reserve my mental energy for important decisions, don't have me waste it on figuring out if your company's headphones are still up to snuff! (one such 'important' decision is whether to trust your brand or not. And if I decide not, then I flip the switch and leave, and it takes much less energy to leave that switch off than to consider if I should flip it on again).
"Hey we changed the design of our packaging for [reasons], don't bother reading the size/weight to see if we reduced the amount you're getting." Then you see they've shaved a couple ounces of product out and you have to do the mental math to see how the price per ounce or what-have you compares to other options... again.
AI actually makes it WAY EASIER to spot and avoid this practice. Literally just ask it to figure out how the product has changed from generation to generation, compare prices over time and between brands, and if needed see if the brand has changed ownership anytime recently.
Related to my thoughts on Private Equity buying out local businesses, particularly those with lengthy presence in a community.
Everything is owned by an increasingly small number of conglomerates who wear different skin suits to con suckers into buying from them, and not from those other guys, who are also them. It's starting to feel like a home-grown version of Chaebols, or Zaibatsu, and people are checking out.
On the one hand you could chalk this up to just inevitable outcome of Capitalism where all goodwill, consumer surplus, and 'brand loyalty' is converted into shareholder value whenever possible.
I think its not inevitable, but just as in nature, any excess calories will invite predators, scavengers, or parasites to 'restore equilibrium.' "Oh boy, people will pay a bit of premium on this particular brand to gain status/ensure functionality/avoid copycats. Let's see how much money we can pump them for before they balk."
I kind of disagree that "the entire concept of 'brand' has been eroding."
Its starting to appear like the brand is now the only factor that matters, when the individual consumer is not independently able to judge the quality of their products.
One of the more stark examples is the apparent widespread, entrenched preference for the iPhone over any competitor, even though the average smartphones are almost identical in capabilities these days. The higher end Samsungs are usually better than the iPhone in terms of cutting-edge tech. But Apple has a TON of lock-in and goodwill purchased during Steve Jobs' tenure, and current execs seem competent at maintaining that edge. (Yes, I know Apple software itself has some real advantages over Android).
It feels like MBA-types are very keen about recognizing a brand-name that has a positive reputation (even or perhaps ESPECIALLY if the brand is all they have, they don't own any manufacturing capacity), and then 'rug-pulling' the fans/aficianados who 'bought in' while it was on the rise to squeeze a burst of cash from them even while removing those factors/features they most loved about the product itself.
This is perhaps most annoying to me because I think 'brand loyalty' is mostly a good thing insofar as there's an 'implicit' contract that the company will keep its products of generally the same sort of quality and, one hopes, pricing as they've been, absent some external forces acting upon them and the customers are able to buy said products without having to do extra research to know what they're getting. And usually don't have to worry about the customer service because the company knows repeat business will come so keeping satisfaction high is prioritized.
When the company changes ownership and management, they usually go right about breaking that implicit contract (ADMITTED that there is no legally enforceable cause of action here!) but are happy to coast off customers' belief that little has changed, and certainly won't ever explain that they're cutting corners to save costs.
faceh
1d ago
I wonder if sometimes that's a natural result of forming a sufficiently complete/complex model of reality to basically explain almost everything you encounter, and yet realizing it is still incomplete, or unsatisfactory. You keep having to push back the explanation of 'where it all came from' to the big bang and then... what?
If there's not something else out there, and if that something doesn't transcend our understanding of physics, then how in the hell did we get the rules known as 'physics' in the first place?
And if you can't let that thought rest, it opens the door to many things being possible. Believing in ghosts isn't so 'odd' if you're already theorizing about alternate timelines and the existence of higher dimensions that could harbor intelligent life.
And of course, the belief in superintelligence being possible... well that creates an opening for all sorts of weird things that could happen to you.
faceh
5d ago
This + hormonal birth control has undoubtedly had massive downstream impacts. Probably on things other than pure TFR, too. Sometimes literally downstream, turning the frogs gay.
My strong opinion, but is 'loosely' held in the sense the data to support it is spotty, is that the 'phones' aren't the proximate cause. Its the algorithms.
Maybe this distinction doesn't matter because the smartphones are what enabled the algorithms.
The never-ending doomscroll, the optimization for engagement, the gamification and then the gamblification of all things, the centralization and enshittification of the web, the dominance of clickbait and later ragebait content, and I'll throw in the competitive ranking of every aspect of life, all of it ultimately driven by serving ads... I genuinely think that is primarily due to companies designing black-box algorithms that optimized for ads and pure attention-seeking, and away from prosocial, high agency, discreet good behavior.
That path may have been the most likely way things developed, but I think there were different outcomes possible if we had achieved certain political solutions or incentives had pulled in a different direction. If, SOMEHOW, 'serving ads at every possible turn' was NOT the primary way to finance the web's development. I guess that's also imagining the Google never becomes dominant and makes trillions of dollars from having the best advertising tech.
Eternal September would still be at thing, of course, even if we improve incentives the sanity waterline for the online world is already abysmally low. I just think that we COULD have hit an equilibrium where the online economy wasn't driven by attacking that sanity waterline, driving it lower and exploiting the differential. To somewhat overstate my point. Try to imagine, if you can, an app ecosystem that earned money from you only to the extent your life was actually improved by the use of the app, rather than ruthlessly trying to get you addicted to the point you spend money irrespective of the outcomes. Where social discord was considered an actual externality in the vein of pollution or toxic waste that should be internalized as much as possible.
Evidence that is kind of ambiguous would come from comparing the Western internet to the Chinese internet. I think it sort of supports my point because They cracked down on algorithmic feeds and have been more active on censoring types of content considered antisocial or corrosive. Notoriously their version of tiktok was more 'wholesome.'
I do not say here whether their censorship tactics are good or bad (I have my opinion), but I just offer it as a counterfactual to the West's situation. Maybe the actual outcomes aren't all that different in the end.
Ultimately it would be VERY dicey to separate out the variables here, especially with Covid throwing a wrench in everything.
This is also my short-term AI fear, BTW. Once they finally breach the norm against serving ads in your token stream, I expect bad things to follow in that space as well.
faceh
6d ago
That's partially my point. if you can massage the numbers then even rank incompetence isn't necessarily enough, it might require literal criminal charges.
I suspect Chicago has been that way for a longgggg time.
Yeah, I've pointed out that particular case before, where rank incompetence is enough to get you removed if you make your local community's lives noticeably worse.
Although Karen Bass is seemingly testing the limits of that premise.
Of course, Chesa got a high-paying, high prestige job RIGHT after getting booted, so the Dem machine takes care of their own too.
Not sure how credible.
Barely.
High estimate of 12% of the Bernie bros actually pulled for Trump is not nothing, but not quite a credible threat (to be clear, I don't think Fuentes' calls to vote Dem are a credible threat either).
If it were true, though, what’s the mechanism for tightening the leash? Are there a bunch of midlevel Dems who mellowed out to get a Senate seat?
I'd normally guess its simply funding and access to party resources to run a campaign, but in reality I'd bet they will straight deplatform or cancel them with kompromat.
Which is the approach they've applied with Platner, it seems. How many times has a Democrat pol who was gaining momentum gotten hamstrung by "allegations" and "leaks" when they run afoul of the national party line? I can think of a few offhand.
faceh
7d ago
This seems most correct. In the Trump era, there's less willingness to (publicly) swing over to the other side by Dems who are disappointed with their own politicians' performance. I'm sure many will do so privately yet I'd guess in lower numbers than years past.
So the risk for Dems is mostly that their candidate is so off-putting or blatantly unqualified that voters stay home. But (moderate) voters staying home would mean that the more extreme wing, by actually showing up, is driving more of the outcome. In safer blue districts, you'd expect this would mean the extreme candidates can win unless the GOP opponent is able to eke it out.
I dunno, I haven't seen a situation where some Dem candidate is so bad that it actually activates more of their base to come out and cast a vote against them in protest. I bet some local elections it has happened.
Although it is 'odd' that I notice alt-right figures like Nick Fuentes flogging the "Trump/Other righty politician is too friendly with Israel, we must vote Democrat to punish them."
You never, ever, EVERRRRR see a lefty extremist going full "Vote for Donald/The Republican candidates down the ticket to teach our side a lesson!"
I'd say this has resulted in somewhat of a 'dual strategy' where the Democrat establishment, which historically has a tight leash on its own national-level candidates, will let extreme candidates run without interference at lower levels, whilst yanking the chain and ensuring that such candidates can't reach the point where they are contesting less safe, more critical positions. I also think this strategy is starting to get away from them.
faceh
12d ago
Yep.
Its one of those situations where the constraints in place made it more 'special.' As a student, you expect to actually run into the players on campus. They were expected to spend a full 4 years there, and attend (easy) classes. They weren't millionaires (yet) but had a good shot at making it big in the NFL if they did well.
Ultimately, I'd be fine if the college football players make money from their likeness, but the team as a whole should still feel entangled with the college its tied to in ways that aren't easily severable, and that's just completely lost now. "Student-Athlete" just isn't really a thing.
I don't want to just randomly lay another problem at the Boomers' feet, but it sure looks like they're the ones who decide to break the system by both being the deep pockets that keep pumping up the athlete's values AND keep pulling out the guardrails on various behaviors and restrictions on the athlete's loyalties b/c they want to make their preferred team as competitive as possible.
Overall seems like another example of a 'runaway' system where everyone pursuing their immediate interests shifts the whole edifice elsewhere, at the detriment of the whole.
I have many thoughts on such things.
faceh
13d ago
Its kind of both.
Its very frustrating to grow into a world where sex is treated simultaneously as some uninteresting normal thing that everyone has and its no big deal, and yet also this critically important feature of social life around which one's personal status in the hierarchy revolves.
You go to college, and women can be very open about sleeping around, with no shame. But if you propose a tryst to one, out of the blue, with the implication that this woman is easy to get into bed, this is considered a massive, 'creepy' faux pas.
So its less "she wouldn't sleep with me" and more "why am I punished for seeking out sexual access when everyone else treats sexual access as a casual, unremarkable feature of college life?"
But there is absolutely the portion of this ecosystem, the semi-predatory male who specializes in getting naive women to open their legs that doesn't get remarked upon.
faceh
13d ago
Not the evidence I've seen.
Specifically, college educated womens' voting patterns (in the U.S.) vs. those of non-college educated women.
I would agree that their natural inclinations are towards the left, if anything.
faceh
14d ago
My suspicion is that the rise of 'useless' genders studies degrees and major overproduction of women with degrees took off in the 90's, hence why we didn't really get a swarm of SJWs until the 2010s.
Colleges were hives of leftist thought long before then, but that was counterbalanced by there being ample alternative routes for one's career before that point.
Also, look at the stats on women getting Masters and Doctorate degrees to see where the problem became SERIOUS.
My modest proposal there is death penalty for such men.
But people find that goes too far, so I would suggest we simply castrate them, as a compromise.
I've already munched on that bullet.
My thesis is that they're just way more susceptible to virtually any ideological brainwashing, just as the Orwell quote implies.
And college is completely captured by lefties at every level, so, that's where the brainwashing pushes them.
College is in my view a large part of the problem. Social Media and Tiktok is another. Arguably that's the mechanism through which they police each others' behavior once they're out of college.
I wouldn't imply this guy was bound for a happy ending, or that ANY woman was going to be a good fit for him.
But on the margins, the fewer stable relationships formed, the more you got guys who might have otherwise been able to get some kind of fulfillment from a family who are instead left out in the cold, and MIGHT be pushed into this sort of action. And to the extent guys like this can't even harbor a HOPE of getting a relationship, more of them might decide to not even try, and then the question is what they do with their lives.
They're not bought in to the future of their society, so where should they direct their efforts?
The social technology for lifelong celibacy has fallen from favor.
What happens if the pair of you have a serious argument, a really bad blow-up, when in a relationship? It can be fixed, or he decides you need to be shot?
Also, since when did women, in general, actually prefer 'stable' boyfriends? Recall my point about Luigi getting fangirls. Although being conventionally attractive helps.
Part of this guy's whole argument is that women are selecting for traits like aggression, short temper, capacity for violence.
faceh
14d ago
My ongoing modest proposal is RETVRNing to 1993.
Females attending college en masse seems like the nexus of many issues.
That's where they get turned into lefties.
That's where they incur significant amounts of debt.
That's where they rack up a body count.
That's where they acquire inflated standards in mate choice.
It burns 4+ years of fertility.
In short, they become far less appealing as partners in most cases, on the back end.
So it stands to reason that making it harder for women (and people in general) to secure student loans would reduce their attendance rates and would organically, downstream of that, lead to more relationships, marriage, and children.
I could write a manifesto on that topic, but I wouldn't want to shoot anybody to get it attention.
faceh
14d ago
You adapt to them. In the modern dating landscape, you either lean into the hypergamy and superficiality of it all, or you reach a mindset where you are okay with staying a virgin for a long time, potentially forever.
The third option is you lash out at the system itself. For a lone wolf this won't be particularly impactful.
I mean, Clavicular is maybe the ur-example of "lean into the hypergamy and superficiality of it all," he's only twenty years old and is clearly depressed at the life he's now 'stuck' in (by his own doing, naturally). This won't hold over the long term.
Where do we go from here?
MY personal belief is that once we start to lose the Boomers, the primary bulwark against political changes in this country, a LOT of political options that were previously stymied will come on the table.
We might be able to limit how extreme those options end up being.
faceh
14d ago
Its not lack of sex, its the basic impossibility of economic calculation when society reaches a certain level of complexity.
The problem is, the distribution of sex is intractable at EVERY level above, maybe, the village, without some distributed coordination method.
Go look at various attempts at forming small scale communes and see how many of those failed because one guy started hogging all the women despite the representation that it was all about free love and equality. Okay, its also because all the labor ultimately fell on the men, or a small subset of them, they can't even get the distribution of LABOR right in these cases.
Ironically, you're thinking too big. Not every "Marxist movement" is the Soviet Union.
Oh, and just a note guess what China has to start cracking down on in the name of Marxism.
Because even under Marxism with Chinese characteristics, you can't make women WANT to settle for just any dude.
A not insubstantial reason for the rightward shift of young men is that they notice that the left applies Marxist logic to every problem except the one problem that they are bothered by most of all.
No joke, this is one core reason Marxist movements will always fail, since sexual reproduction is a massive bottleneck, and yet by all lefty logic every person should be 'entitled' to reproduce, yet women are biologically wired to jealously guard their own reproduction, so 'distribution' of sexual contact, let alone actual reproduction, will ALWAYS turn hierarchical, unequal, and skewed towards the 'attractive' males, whilst attractiveness itself is never equally distributed.
I read (glanced over and noted the arguments) the manifesto, and it leaves me with an awkward feeling.
Basically the guy is pretty much correct on the pure factual level about everything he's seeing.
Its clear to me that he has directly experienced the modern, toxic dating pool/culture, and was probably caught between the impulse to adapt to it as it exists, or to lash out against it as an unfair, unsustainable, unhealthy artifact of modern culture.
The fact that he analyzed it with lefty-coded language is interesting but doesn't add much insight.
I find his ultimate methods abhorrent, unjustifiable and ineffectual.
But unfortunately I can't readily point towards a more effective strategy that he could implement on his lonesome. Solving the problems he identifies requires coordinated efforts.
So I'll keep my points brief:
I've pointed out how Male Grievances are almost never given any legitimate airing in mainstream publications. Indeed, it is exceedingly rare for a male writer to get to publish a piece on gender issues at all!
As you noted, Men are not allowed to organize around their own interests as a gender.
No politician ever voices male grievances as part of a policy platform.
So as this guy found, if you have not built up a large following a la Clavicular, your concerns will never get heard, your voice will never raise above the din of social media. You functionally do not exist.
And the one mainstream figure who was willing to voice these concerns was Charlie Kirk, and he got murdered by a lefty.
Oh, and add on that Lone wolf shooters like Luigi Mangione can garner significant female attention.
A lot of guys will connect the dots thusly:
"I have no real hope of getting a wife and happy family in my lifetime. I have no political representation. Nobody will listen to me if I speak out myself. No publications will ever stump for my concerns. I can't organize with other males to advocate for my interests, and if I DO become famous and popular whilst speaking out, I can just be killed in cold blood. However, if I do enough damage and spill enough blood, suddenly I have people paying attention to me... and if I survive I might see increased female attention to boot. Worth a shot."
Something something burning down village to feel warmth.
So my ongoing concern is that we're going to see a serious uptick in young male crashouts that involve (attempts at) mass killings or destruction, many of which won't be as thoughtfully targeted as this one.
What do you think happens if a generation where an actual majority of the men don't even believe in gender equality achieves political power?
Implement some solutions now to correct course, or I'm genuinely afraid for how the Zoomers will end up addressing this problem that, from their perspective, stole their future.
This guy was a 25. A Zoomer. The concerns he puts forth in that manifesto are WIDELY HELD amongst Zoomer males.
And these Zoomers are NOT BEING OFFERED A BETTER PATH FORWARD in the status quo.
Solve for Y chromosome.
I also would challenge anyone who thinks SpaceX or Starship are doomed to show their predictions about the success of Starlink.
Did you predict in advance that they would pull that rabbit out of their hat? Did you expect that it would manage to find a market that rapidly? I sure as hell didn't.
There were some doomsayers about Starlink but I feel confidence now that the product is here to stay. If someone didn't account for that in their larger prognostications then they should probably make sure to allow for a lot more uncertainty as to the surprises that might yet be in store.
More options
Context Copy link