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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   2525 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 6, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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What's with pace of ru-ua war? I recall a time ago someone posted a link to "how much land changed hands by month" infographic. Is there any current thing? Would be interesting if it was done in terms of pre-war population instead of land. (p.s.: https://x.com/War_Mapper/status/1841903419021295712 )

I looked at some words in google trends. берцы+берці (military half-boots) was primarily googled by those who eager to server in military and want to buy boots beforehand.

повербанк (powerbank) and to smaller degree аккумулятор (accumulator) are searched by people who want to protect against power outages

ТЦК (current name of draft offices in Ukraine) has also something to do with draft, no idea if it's googled more by dodgers or not

Румунія+Румыния (Romania) was googled a lot in summer 2024 when Ukraine had spike in draft dodgers

вибухи,взрывы,прилеты, прильоти - explosions Can't say I found something really interesting with this

How bad do you think Milton will actually be?

Seems to have been pretty mediocre?

I have a sizeable fraction of my retirement allocated to IAUM. But the boomer on my shoulder[proverbial] of course nags me that “not your wallet, not your coins”, and it feels inevitable in the long run that one of these will happen:

  1. One of the custodians or one of their employees will quietly steal some bullion, just plain theft;
  2. One of the trustees or one of their agents will deviously steal some bullion, in some elaborate book-cooking scheme; or
  3. An external party will forcefully steal some bullion, in a dramatic heist.

Am I correct in thinking that paying to maintain a ladder of moderately long-dated (say 1y), moderately OTM (say 15%) PUTs on IAU is the only way to really insure against those risks?

For example, -IAU260116P42 had an Ask of $0.60 today — does that mean that it would have cost 100×$0.60 = $60.00 to buy a “16-month insurance policy with a 15% deductible” on 1.88 troy ounces of BlackRock’s gold IOUs, or am I dangerously misunderstanding how options work?

Im probably not helping in a "beysian" or "utilitarian" sensense but i agree with the proverbial boomer on your shoulder.

When push comes to shove or shit hits the fan, money in the bank trumps money in stocks (or blockchain), and money in hand trumps money in the bank.

Survey about parenthood: how do you describe people whose kids have left the nest? I was under the impression that the social role of "parent" took a back seat when the kids move out, but a conversation with grandparents last night has gotten some responses I did not expect.

Some people always want to be referred to as parents once they've had kids...and my gut feeling is that I don't like unspoken implications of that. Haven't put it into words yet why, though.

As long as I or any of my siblings alive, my parents will obviously be “my parents”, though they are now also approaching “empty-nester” status once they're no longer boarding a pack of minors.

When/how does this even come up? When it comes to preferred-reference-terms, at least pronouns by contrast are a part of nearly every sentence... if I'm introducing a coworker to a new contact, I won't say “and here is Dr. Michael, a parent and our cybersecurity lead” 🤨

This came up in a meeting with whitehairs. I claimed that setting up childcare on site would help attract parents. To which one replied, "Well, I'm a parent, and I don't see how that helps me any!"

My primary impulse is still "No, you were a parent." And there's some background wars of framing that go into this.

Seems to me like the term “parent” covers more than you intended even without expanding it to cover parents of adults.

Wouldn’t your childcare proposal only benefit a certain subset of parents? I’d avoid confusion by stating directly: instead of “parents” maybe consider using “parents of small children”?

I agree with the whitehair in the abstract, to the extent that if asked without context "are empty nesters parents?" my answer is yes. But from what I can tell from the context you've provided, he was simply being an overly sensitive ass. If you say "providing childcare will help attract parents" it's obvious to everyone but pedants with axes to grind that you're using shorthand for "parents of young children" (afterall, everyone would agree that the parent and primary caregiver of a 16 year old is a "parent," but they are also implicitly excluded from your contextual use of the word).

No, you were a parent.

If I heard "Bob was a parent but is no longer", I would take that to mean that he'd outlived his offspring.

Some people always want to be referred to as parents once they've had kids...and my gut feeling is that I don't like unspoken implications of that.

Some people who have served in the military also do this.

As for parents, perhaps we should treat them the same way? I say we thank them for their cervix.

The pun is appreciated, though the conclusion is not. In my deferens, it's always taken at least two to tango when children are made.

I say we thank them for their cervix

CARLOS!

Could you provide an example of a sentence where you don't think using 'parent' is right?

Does anyone have strong opinions about e-ink tablets? I'm in the market to upgrade from a Kindle and debating a few options:

  • DayLightCo has amber backlight and can be used outdoors, but isn't true e-ink. I'm not sure how the image "beauty" will decay. It's the only one with full 60hz support, and it doesn't support colors.
  • Remarkable: These look stunning. I love the true e-ink look. But they have a closed system that doesn't support most apps (Obsidian) without tinkering. I've heard they're just a glorified notepad.
  • Boox has the worst name but the most features, and seems to support a lot out of the box. I can't put my finger on why they give me the wrong impression.

Any thoughts appreciated.

I saw a coworker take notes with one and found it super cool and looked into the models a while ago. Ridiculously expensive. These devices basically cost iPad prices. And many seems to not be even that good for their most basic use case of functioning like an e-notebook.

I guess for me part of the value is that e-ink tablets can't do what an iPad can do. I don't want to be distracted by discord and twitter. I don't want movies and webpages. And I think e-ink looks beautiful and it helps me want to read more instead of getting sucked into the scroll.

As someone who has a deposit on one the the daylight computers, what about it isn't true e-ink?

I was about to go check myself by can't seem to access the website at the moment.

I love my kindle keyboard, old though it is, and despise touchscreens on my e-readers. I tried the kobo and hated the software and touchscreens.

e-ink is a specific technology, daylight isn't using it. e-ink is owned by the E Ink Corporation. It's fundamentally different from an LCD, it uses electricity to flip microcapsules onto and off the back of a transparent surface. Some of these microcapsules are black and some are white. This is what gives the image such a crisp paper-feel, it's not emitting light like an LCD, it's actually static material that reflects light. Every image is basically etched into the tablet. It's also why draw times are so slow and there tends to be a "ghosting" problem. Recently developers figured how to get this process to simulate color, which seems like it's reaching almost good-enough.

Daylight isn't using e-ink, they're using what's called "transflective LCD". It's an LCD with an extra reflective layer underneath so that light from the environment reflects onto the image. This article has some more in-depth explanations:

https://newhavendisplay.com/blog/transmissive-vs-reflective-vs-transflective-displays/

Using LCD is how daylight solved the screen refresh rate and ghosting and other latency. It seems like they're basically the first mover to try this approach for paper-like tablets instead of using e-ink. I'm very curious to see how it looks, especially because the amber backlight seems like a huge plus. In the few videos I can find online it looks fine. But e-ink looks incredible to me and I'm not sure I want to give that up.

I also miss the kindle keyboard. I think that was a phenomenal product and a genuine step forward in man's history with technology. It wowed me. Everything looked good, it was a computer made human, it was a better experience than reading a physical book. Buttons were mechanically simple and simpler than turning a page. I could carry 100 books in my pocket. Instant dictionary. It was great. I never got over the switch to touchscreens, which ruined the user interface (I have to put my hand between my eyes and what I'm reading). The kindle keyboard seemed to disappear from Amazon's service page, they've stopped supporting it, I have no idea why, maybe some patent trolling. I think it's a shame that trendline in technology was abandoned. We give kids in schools these junky laptops that only distract them when we have all the technology for making incredible learning devices ready-to-hand. I can't overstate my enthusiasm about this. We have all the technology to make ultimate reading-learning devices, we have the technology to make something that is well-tuned to the human experience, more well-tuned than anything we have ever made before. Instead of designing new computers for better features that we passively let alter our day-to-day, we could be making superdevices that progressively advance our future with technology. And we basically stopped that whole technological line so we could stream Netflix on everything, and we put touchscreens where they don't belong, and now the supervisionaries are chasing crazy boondoggles like neuralink. Gahjhhjhhhh

I really want daylight to be good, the amber backlight alone is exciting, but I need to see how it compares to e-ink before I can commit to one.

Yeah, e-ink is a great technology and it looks amazing. I haven't used a laptop in years, so I took the plunge with the daylight on a whim, but my old kindle keyboards have died on me and I'm stuck with newer, but still old, models. I still resent the touch screens. I hold the damn thing with my hands, it can't start flipping pages every time my thumb brushes the screen.

When I get the daylight, I'll have to make a post about how I like it.

I think it's a shame that trendline in technology was abandoned

Pebble somehow managed to go bankrupt.

Their products were far and away superior to anything Apple (to say nothing of Google, who gobbled up Fitbit, who owns all the old Pebble IP) offers today in terms of responsiveness, software quality, and battery life; they were even working on a Raspberry-Pi-fication of their watch.

I still believe that an open (as in, "not restricted to what the app store pushes") wearable computer connected to the cell network combined with a watch would have been the next frontier of personal computing had they survived. Sadly, it was not to be.

I have an older Boox e-reader and I love it. It is not particularly good-looking, unlike the Remarkable, but the fact that you can install any Android app is a game changer. Some of them are quite big, which is important if you plan on using it for PDFs.

PDFs is a big use case, since if I wanted to just stick with epubs I could just stick with my kindle. How do you feel about the lag and overall design? I don't mind the slow refresh for e-ink in general, and I know I can configure Boox pretty extensively through the menu, but I think it would annoy me trying to do general OS-like stuff swiping around if the interface was jank.

Also, how long does the battery usually last you?

Then get something as big as your budget can afford. The first time I bought the Nova I found it a bit too small, so I upgraded.

I am not bothered by the refresh rate, but I am mostly using it for reading academic papers or books, so I spend more time on a single page than someone reading comics for example. For the same budget, I’d rather have something big and comfortable than something smaller with higher fresh rate.

The autonomy is huge, I rarely charge it, so I couldn’t tell you.

I'm team reMarkable. I was on the pre-order for the rM2 years back. It is a glorified notebook, which is what they position it as. I'm not on the latest firmware version, as I don't think the features of fw 3.x are worth it. They are reasonable open with ssh and root access and they respect the free software that they use.

If you already have a digital workflow and you need apps, then this is the wrong choice.

For me it's a notebook for handwritten notes and a koreader eink ebook reader using a small hack.

How do you feel about reading on the Remarkable? Everyone has great things to say about sketching and taking notes, which would be a nice feature, but I primarily imagine using it to read books, especially PDFs I can't get to look nice on my kindle.

hey @gattsuru - you got any information on the state of the freelance/fan art market these days, in whatever portions are adjacent to you?

Hm.

In terms of total throughput and market velocity, there's not a lot of good formal metrics, and a combination of small events (eg, the owner of FurAffinity recently passed away), normal cyclical behavior (the start of college/end of grant season tends to slow the markets down a bit), and weird stuff (a bunch of Brazilian artists were on Twitter and have fled, SF tech sector is being more aware of their finances) make the few informal ones I do have insight on kinda unreliable. My gut feeling's that total commissions are not hugely far from historic trends either up or down, but I don't know that I'd notice a 25% change.

At the very least, I have to scroll pretty far down the list of furry artists I know before any are struggling to fill commission slots, and their prices haven't had to go down much if at all. Mainstream (fan)artists look similar at first glance, but I'll admit I've got a much more shallow reference pool there. Neither furry nor anime conventions have been struggling to get visitors or sellers; weirdest thing there has mostly been a (perceived?) increase in group booth buys and (in anime spaces) reseller booths.

Online direct sales have had a few payment processor crisises, mostly over fees. Nothing too noteworthy. I don’t have good metrics on Patreon-style subscription or Kickstarter-style funding, outside of new rules on outre content, so no real clue how businesses focused there have gone.

There's a lot of talk about a slump in mainstream 'gallery' art, and that is something artists in my circles are at least tense about. That said, I don't really interact with even the more consumerist side of that market, and I don't think the market pressures there are the same as in any space I do maneuver (even KendricTonn-style stuff, cw: artistic human nudes, sells a different way, though his experience going from galleria artist to social media artist is increasingly common). And I do think there's been a small slump among 'creative filler' sort of stuff, like in-ttrpg illustrations or logo and photography work, either in favor of aigen or in favor of minimalism.

Aigen remains controversial. Most furry-specific reputable sites (FurAffinity, Weasyl, SoFurry) ban it; those that allow it tend to be general-purpose or allow even more controversial stuff, most conventions ban it or require labeling, and some segments of the conventional market are working toward blacklists. Mainstream sites permit it more, but haven't found a good solution to the spam problem: DeviantArt and ArtStation aren't as slop as Facebook, but it's still got a lot of stuff that seems more scam than interesting. Pinterest has gone absolutely tango uniform with it, which I'd normally find entertainingly deserved if there weren't occasional honest folk on the site before hand. Community-focused spaces built for AI have handled it better, but in turn it's mostly prompters trading tips there, with (relatively) no one to scam.

Tumblr-style fandom of everything, or at least the part of it I see, is in a bit of a lull. The last big memeable character stuff was Delicious in Dungeon, and while it remains pretty popular, it's also been a while. Not the first major period with no big characters taking the site by storm, but usually end of summer has a couple. Not sure if it's a result of fewer universal bits of culture, or just the big movie drops being unpleasant (eg The Boy and the Heron) or more often sucking. Still a lot of original-like fan art, and fan-other-media. Princess : The Hopeful Crystal Edition has got a few Rule Zero issues in a mixed game, but an extremely strong thematic approach and clever in a few decent ways. The lead writer's an absolute putz, but Eat God is looking pretty fun.

I've heard second-hand that some of the East Coast Ren Faire art environments have been very feast-or-famine, even compared to their normal standards, with a lot of reseller or laser cutter-grade stuff on one hand and fewer artists getting run dry of stock, but no clue how significant, or even if it's more the normal flow as the season crosses.

Not sure if that covers what you're looking for, and I'll admit I've got pretty low confidence for most of this.

That was pretty much exactly what I was looking for.

the question was prompted by seeing an advert for a self-published book, with cover-art in a very eye-catching watercolor style which immediately triggered my "that's AI" sense, and it made me curious about the state of the market these days. I've had several experiences of what I suppose you could describe as AI paranoia, the creeping suspicion that the bots are getting past my personal filter. I figure the best way to tell where the tide is would be to see where peoples' boats currently are.

It's definitely showing up pretty often in those adjacent spheres like covers, advertising, and illustrations, especially among the level of self-published writer that previously would have gone with pretty minimalist art, or where artist availability was never great, or where business models made it appealing. Places like RoyalRoad it's getting increasingly difficult to tell, and some of the episodic work will start with aigen and move to commissioned art later that it gets tricky to highlight specific examples.

I just got an email from Rescue the Republic, which I supported with some cash. The gist is, "Yay, we had 4 million Youtube views...Americans are taking notice!" I've seen similar things with Trump videos on X. Always some form of "something happened on this platform...Americans are totally into it!"

I understand that most viewers of Youtube are still Americans (correct me if that's no longer true) so, yeah, maybe in some basic way the statement is true, but I cringe whenever I see these types of claims. It's the Internet, man...you have no idea who watched your video, upvoted your comment or forwarded you tweet.

Am I way out over my skis here? Is it a safe claim to make or is the rest of the world being under-counted? am I right to side-eye these kinds of claims?

I'm pretty sure youtubers can see who is watching their videos, even down to a subnational level. I think they could tell if it was Floridians or Californians. Don't think X is on that level.

It's pretty trivial to collect demographics. Google knows what IP address you used to visit YouTube, and that IP address pretty trivially traces back to a specific city. I'd expect YouTube makes this information available to content creators, since knowing your audience helps you tailor your content. Back when I was working with such tools, it was a pretty standard feature - even my tiny personal blog reports which countries I get visitors from.

I'd be more suspicious of social media making the same claims - as far as I know, Twitter doesn't provide any way to get that sort of information. It wouldn't be hard to build a 3rd party tool to calculate that data, but it would be relying on profiles listing a self-reported location.

Anyone knows of some good estimates about the Iron Dome capacity/expense and how big of a barrage must be flung at it for it to be saturated. To me it seems that all Israel adversaries do their best to throw some token rockets and then do nothing. Possible tactic to create the fake complacency that enabled oct 7th?

To me it seems that all Israel adversaries do their best to throw some token rockets and then do nothing.

Did you miss the fireworks recently? They got plenty of missiles through, hitting much of Nevatim airbase amongst other things. There were videos of dozens of missiles piercing air defences. Either the Iron Dome was saturated or they judged it too costly to sustain their missile defences.

The Iron Dome doesn’t intercept those missiles, it only works on low tech Hamas and some Hezbollah stuff, for the Iranian missiles they need arrow which is less reliable and has more costly interceptions.

Quite right. Either Arrow was saturated or they judged it too costly to sustain their missile defences.

My knowledge is very limited, but my understanding is that nobody has really figured out comprehensive defense against this kind of ballistic missile.

Why hasn’t an online secretive / semi-anonymous labor union movement developed? The biggest problem with forming a union is that your employer finds out before you have the potential to disrupt operations. But if a sufficient number of employees are organizing clandestinely online through a semi-anonymous community, then they can declare days of disruption without the risk of being fired. This would wildly increase the ability of employers to negotiate for higher wages, because for many businesses a disruption that occurs at the right time would spell ruin for their business. Low-wage employees have an easier time finding another job, whereas the employer might suffer disastrous losses if the labor activity becomes a regular occurrence. This seems like the most expedient way to increase worker’s rights and conditions in America if you’re into that kind of stuff. We could see Amazon drivers increase their wages like Dockworkers.

If your so-called-union doesn't have legal recognition, then

  • 51% of the members can't strongarm the other 49% into line, and certainly can't extort union dues from them.
  • the terms of your contract don't bind non-union workers
  • Hiring replacement workers is as simple as hiring workers

EDIT: I may have misread that. I interpreted it as "a union movement for semi-anonymous labour", like the gig economy. The biggest problem with forming a union is that workers don't want to be in a union. Any workplace that has majority support (by definition) could gather memberships, call a vote, and unionize.

If workers can discover the secret platform, so can employers; so the only real benefit is anonymity. The employer still knows people are organizing, approximately how many, and whether there are any planned Days Of Disruption.

If everyone is genuinely anonymous, you have no idea if there are a thousand workers on your side, or one very bored troll with a thousand accounts.

It's still pretty easy to punish everyone who was absent on the Days Of Disruption; you might get a few false positives, but employers don't seem inclined to mind that.

There are easy ways to structure the platform so that an employer is not aware of organizing plans. If the users have signed up under the promise that they will strike when announced, then only a small number of administrators behind the platform have to know how many employees at x company are ready to strike. When a strike is announced, the members stop working. If this occurs during an important time period for the company (like: holidays for Amazon), then the costs associated are far greater than the mere cost of hiring new workers. This would force the hand of employers to negotiate for no other reason than it is less costly to do so. This can be repeatedly infinitely, because low wage workers who are fired can work at a new company. Plausibly, employers may create a list of employees who have engaged in union activity and publicly release it, but the plausible deniability of the platform could lead them to be sued. There are ways to strengthen such a platform against trolls, like by requiring the employee to identify themselves to an administrator only.

Employers can also create a platform that keeps a list of "unreliable employees" who just so happen to have participated in 2+ strike days, and collude to never hire these people. You don't have to bother going public, and of course you would never claim that they're striking, just "unreliable", which is obviously true. Carve out a half-assed exemption process for anyone who has a legally protected absence, to give yourself an extra fig leaf.

Or just pay one of your thousands of workers $100 for their login, so you know what's going on. Or have every employee install an app on their phone, then use that app to check for the evil union app. Keeping secrets amongst thousands of people with varied levels of commitment is not a problem anyone in the world has ever solved. Management's counter-attacks only need to be secret amongst a small group of especially invested people, so it's a deeply asymmetrical challenge.

You also lose all legal protections, since you're not actually a union, you're not legally declaring a strike, and so on. Which makes retaliation vastly easier, because they don't even need to find other excuses, they can fire you directly for this. I'm honestly a bit surprised that "coordinating to destroy a business" is even legal outside of a union/strike? I'd think if my employees all conspired to try and ruin me, I'd have a decent legal position to sue them.

All objections aside, it also seems like you could easily prototype it over email or something; you only really need a dedicated platform if you want to go big. If you really believe in the idea, you just need to find a group of workers willing to try it out. I really don't think it will go well, but it's absolutely an experiment you could run if you believe differently

But you don’t need to keep it secret among thousands of people. You would sign up anonymously, convey some form of proof or likelihood of employment to a handful of die-hard administrators, and then simply don’t go to work when the administrator tells you. Only the administrator would need to know how many strikers work at z company. The financial damage caused by this couldn’t be made up by hiring new people, and if you’ve persuaded a sufficient number of the low wage employee base to do this, a corporation has no choice but to negotiate because otherwise they simply don’t have workers.

Simple economics.

Labor unions compete with compete with non-union labor.

You can compare the economic effects of most unions to something like a plague that kills only teenagers or inexperienced workers.

Any employer in that situation would try to keep their current employees, possibly pay them more, or provide other non-monetary side benefits to keep them.

But there is an obvious loser in both situations: the teenagers and inexperienced workers.

An anonymous online forum would actually allow the teenagers and inexperienced workers to anti-coordinate with the striking workers. What's a great time to walk in and get a job ... The same day half the workers are no shows.

Unions are hugely privileged under US labor law. There's no need to organize in secret, because employers aren't allowed to fire workers for trying to unionize. I believe that what you're describing would be an unprotected strike, and that employers could legally fire workers for it.

I think the workers would also be in legal trouble.

This all seems really dumb to me: we spend all this time and energy learning as children (and as parents teaching our own children) how to problem solve, practice mutual respect, agree to disagree, and form amicable relationship, but then adults throw that shit completely out the window when it comes to politics.

Why is that?

A lot of politics is literal life-or-death issues. If you ban an important medical procedure, people die. If you invite a bunch of criminals into small communities, the murder rate goes up, and people die.

Safer political stances still tie into this - taxes go up, families are poorer, now the kids don't get enough to eat. Or taxes go down, social services collapse, and now getting laid off is a death sentence.

Even the safest political stance still gets into tribalism - you support X, which "everyone knows" is aligned with our political enemies, so clearly you also support all of their other political stances.

but then adults throw that shit completely out the window when it comes to politics.

Couple of reasons - first politics are identity lately. Second there are basic disagreements and there is no external pressure that will actually put the culture war sides on the negotiating table even grudgingly. There is no respect and no one is willing to earn the other side's respect - so agree to disagree and amicable relationships are just not possible.

“We” (elementary school teachers, really) teach them those things in hopes they’ll have fewer fights to break up or tantrums to subdue, not because they’re effective strategies

Because people are very good at trying to get others to follow norms, but terrible at following the norms themselves. It's kind of like how it's easy to plan a healthy diet for someone else, but hard to eat that way yourself. It's also worth pointing out that there are plenty of adults who do act the way we teach kids how to act. It's a subset (however large) of bad actors who are ruining things for everyone.

It's also worth pointing out that there are plenty of adults who do act the way we teach kids how to act.

So then lets platform those people and not anyone else.

This is why I bring my political commentary here, and not shouting into juvenile name-slinging fora like Twitter or most of Reddit.

I'm doing my part.

Because it's all wishful thinking. It's not working for the kids either, regardless of how much propaganda we feed them.

That sounds rather apathetic.

Maybe? I don't see teaching soft skills to have much effect. Leading by example, yes, but teaching-learning them seems to me like so much fruitless effort.

How do Faiths and Philosophies Deal with the Convert who is a Satiated Sinner?

We all know Augustine’s famous formulation: Lord, make me pure, but not yet. How should we deal with someone who applies this strategy successfully: they sin for as long as anyone would reasonably like to sin, then with perfect timing they find religion, live an ordered an righteous life, and tell anyone who will listen that their prior life was bad and sinful. And on the one hand, I might agree that they are correct: their prior life was sinful, their current life is better ordered; but on the other hand there’s something annoying about someone “having their fun” and then turning around and telling you not to have yours, or claiming their objectively enviable life as some form of tragedy they were forced to endure rather than a result of their own choices.

The classic, Augustinian example is the born again Christian who sleeps around when they are young and then finds Jesus right around the time that most people get bored of sleeping around anyway. Inasmuch as one can point to anything like a secular liberal life-path it looks something like HIMYM : date and sleep around and party from college through your mid-late 20s, at which point you’ll be ready to settle down and switch your tax light to available. As the joke goes: how do you find your soulmate? Turn 27, it’ll be the next person you date. Most people, even without finding any religion, tend to get tired of sleeping around, and get married. But the difference is that the born-again Christian goes through this process, attributes their change to finding religion, and lectures everyone in range about how they should never do the things they did. And it’s hard to take them seriously and not say: You had your fun and now you want to keep me from having mine.

The feminist example was one brought up by my wife: women who earn celebrity exploiting themselves in ways that they later write oh-so-thoughtful-thinkpieces with all the right feminist verbiage self-victimizing and finding all the ways that the thing they made money off of was horrible; conveniently right around the time when they can’t exploit their ill-gotten hotness anymore. Emily rat-polish-nonsense is trying for a second career as a feminist crusader, starting with getting angry about the modeling career that helped her net a rich man that would enable her to pay to play in publishing. But my wife brought up Callista Flockhart, who has tried to do advocacy around the eating disorder she had throughout her early 2000s acting career, without really reckoning with the damage that starving herself did to girls watching to benefit herself; Bella Hadid who says she regrets her nose job because it took away her Palestinian nose, while living off the results of the plastic surgery she’s gotten; and [the Kadashians]](https://people.com/kylie-jenner-regrets-getting-breasts-done-7565553) of all people try to self victimize about the “pressure” they felt to get Darth-Vader quantities of plastic surgery, pressure they themselves have done more than anyone else to create. And my wife’s feeling is that these women want to have their cake and eat it too: hit “betray” on feminism when their young and exploitation pays, then find Feminism when their career is starting to flag and cry a river of tears about how they were mistreated when they were making money.

The problem in either case being that while Augustine’s plea is deeply human, and fairly normal, the message such a convenient conversion sends is undermined, it’s at cross purposes, it will come across as “do as I say not as I do” to the young, who will take the whole story as permission to sin with an assurance of later acceptance after conversion.

Possible solutions:

There is no problem, they’re probably mostly sincere, you’re just jealous. This might be accurate, I have a teacher’s-pet personality and an autistic focus on fairness in some things. The first time I remember thinking this was as a virginal high school junior-senior, when I went through a weird phase of dating like five girls in a row who all gave a variation on the same story: she wasn’t a virgin, she had lost it to a boyfriend she thought was forever some time last year, but she didn’t want to do it again until she got married, and she was willing to give me a try out for that job. And as an immature seventeen year old boy, I would have probably happily dated a fellow virgin who wanted to wait until marriage, but working toward marrying a girl who had sex with other guys before but made me wait was out of the question. Looking back, I was immature, my analysis of the situation was incorrect, and my jealousy was asinine. Maybe I’m just emotionally wrong about this.

They might not really be sincere, but this is the best case scenario path for them. We want to encourage conversion to our religion, and that means accepting converts where they are. The Prodigal son and all that. Though I find this mostly dissatisfying, in that the Prodigal Son comes home after eating pig slop, rather than having a great time and just sorta coming home one day. His conversion from rock bottom is sincere, it doesn’t tell us what to do with insincere converts.

This is the actual path for converts, growing up. Not everyone is a saint from day one, and really a life path where you have your fun and then mature is the ordered life path we’re aiming for. We don’t actually expect to convert young people, they’re too busy having fun, we just want them to wander back when they’re old. This I find dissatisfying, in that nobody actually preaches this, and accepting it from converts undermines the message to the young by observed example.

Is there something I’m just not seeing here?

“having their fun” and then turning around and telling you not to have yours

This is based on a misperception.

The sin and degeneracy I was mired in for a decade wasn't really fun, if it were I wouldn't have needed to be so drunk to do it.

The truth is I was deeply unhappy and unfulfilled. I wouldn't tell you not to have fun, I would tell you that sexual degeneracy alcohol and drugs are a false fun. They cannot lead to a lasting happiness, peace or fulfillment. They're distracting and numbing.

As some of the other comments have already pointed out, it's not man's place to determine whether someone has truly converted and repented, it's God's.

In the Gospels, there are two parables (that I can recall of the top of my head) that deal with this issue - The Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32), which is relatively well known even to non-Christians, but also the perhaps lesser known the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard (Matthew 20) where, abridging siginificantly, the workers who were recruited later and did less work on the vineyard were paid the same who were recruited earlier.

Regardless, there certainly should be a degree of prudential judgement and healthy dose of scepticism about a convert like the one you are describing. That is, someone who seems to be converting merely because it is convenient and beneficial for themselves and not a genuine conversion. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be welcomed by the community broadly, but that they're not necessarily going to get 'benefit' of finding a tradional spouse.

The Catholic perspective on this (I don't have time to go find the supporting sections in the Catechism/other sources) is that God will forgive you of your spiritual sin, but that doesn't mean you're immune from the temporal consequences of your sin. This is fairly obvious when talking about a sin like murder. You still have to serve your prison sentence (and Catholics would broadly support that even if you repented), and when you are released and try to integrate back into society people would rightfully be wary of you even if you became a Christian.

Similarly, a formally promiscuous man or woman may struggle to find an always traditional, virginal woman or man to marry. That's just a temporal consequence of their sin. Maybe if they are sincere then someone may accept them and marry them regardless (perhaps even someone who was in a similar situation!). But quite possibly not. In some sense, it may effectively be penance for their sin. They're not guaranteed marriage, it may not be their vocation.

At least from a Christian perspective, it's not your job to distinguish sincere converts from insincere ones, it's God's job. He can tell the difference, and if someone goes around doing sins, and then pretends to repent at the last minute for reputational gains but is insincere, then you can treat them as a legitimate convert and then when they die they go to hell anyway because God is not deceived.

That said, someone repenting of their sins, regardless of whether they are genuine or not, should still be made to face the consequences of their actions and do their best to make whole anyone who they have harmed. If a murderer repents while in prison, you can forgive them for their murder while still making them carry out the remainder of their legal prison term. If someone has stolen from you and repents, you still make them return what they stole. If someone has wild sex and ends up with three children with three different partners, they still have to raise those children and deal with the burden that places on their future relationships. Repentance should be a thorough and life changing experience that either requires someone to be sincere in order to actually choose to commit to, and so burdensome that nobody will want to do this fake get out of jail free stuff.

If the mass murderer wants to repent on his deathbed and God wants to forgive him for free, that's between the two of them. You can still put him in jail regardless of whether you believe him or not, because the insincere murderer deserves to go to jail, and the repentant murderer can go to jail as part of their repentance.

The first time I remember thinking this was as a virginal high school junior-senior, when I went through a weird phase of dating like five girls in a row who all gave a variation on the same story: she wasn’t a virgin, she had lost it to a boyfriend she thought was forever some time last year, but she didn’t want to do it again until she got married, and she was willing to give me a try out for that job. And as an immature seventeen year old boy, I would have probably happily dated a fellow virgin who wanted to wait until marriage, but working toward marrying a girl who had sex with other guys before but made me wait was out of the question. Looking back, I was immature, my analysis of the situation was incorrect, and my jealousy was asinine. Maybe I’m just emotionally wrong about this.

You were emotionally very right about this. "I have this very precious thing that I'm demanding a high price for but yeah I totally gave it to someone else for free" says something about how much you're valued. You were right to walk away.

Sure, but my analysis was entirely off base. I didn't understand that it was ultimately somewhere between a statement that she just wasn't that into me, and a shit-test in the classical sense. I took the statement seriously as "I no longer want to do the thing I previously wanted to do."

Something has always seemed intensely, deeply distastefully unfair about the “mafioso is forgiven on his deathbed” thing. You can be as awful, as cruel, as nasty to your fellow man as you want in life, as long as you “checkpoint” after major sins by asking for forgiveness. It’s a completely consequence-free life unless you’re unlucky enough to die before asking for forgiveness the last time. That’s almost double unfairness - the elderly don / rapist / warlord is almost certainly forgiven since he can spend his early 90s praying, while the young sinner both dies young and goes to hell.

I mean, the Catholic solution is purgatory. A sinner who doesn’t do penance for his sins will have penance done to him before entering heaven, no matter how sincere his repentance. I believe orthodox toll houses are also a solution here, but I don’t understand them well enough to not straw man.

Of course it gets complicated in unfair-seeming ways.

I believe orthodox toll houses are also a solution here, but I don’t understand them well enough to not straw man.

They are not. Mytarstva are there to tally your forgotten sins and measure them against your virtuous deeds. Confession eradicates your sins completely as long as you sincerely repent, that's why it's a sacrament. I don't know the doctrine well enough to talk about the efficiency of the anointment of the sick, which is supposed to facilitate the absolution of your forgotten sins.

The feminist example was one brought up by my wife: women who earn celebrity exploiting themselves in ways that they later write oh-so-thoughtful-thinkpieces with all the right feminist verbiage self-victimizing and finding all the ways that the thing they made money off of was horrible; conveniently right around the time when they can’t exploit their ill-gotten hotness anymore.

I wouldn't need to go that far, to me the obvious one is the Hollywood Me Too movement. It was a masterful effort to frame the situation in a way that was maximally charitable to the women. What from one side looks like "actresses being forced to have sex with sleazy producers in order to not be blacklisted from the industry" looks a lot like "actresses getting roles by sleeping with producers" if you look at it from the perspective of a struggling would-be actress who maintained her integrity and rejected sleazy producers. Sure, I imagine most of them didn't go proposing sex to these producers to get jobs, but they didn't walk away in disgust (until the Me Too movement); Hollywood needs actresses in movies, if all of them refused to sleep with sleazy producers, actresses would still be hired and movies would still be made. People who stayed in that industry and put up with sex pests because they were "afraid" of losing paychecks higher than the average person has to retire get very little sympathy from me.

Anyway, to your main point; like with Pascal's Wager I don't think there's any "meta level" you can hide insincerity from omniscience. Sincerity requires your whole mind and soul to be behind it. You can't plan when you'll sincerely convert because if you only convert because of your plan then it's not sincere. If there is no real regret for your past, if you look at it fondly like it was the good times and now you're just doing the upkeep to not pay any price for it, then you're not being sincere. The sincere convert truly regrets what he did, he hates what his sin did to his soul and dreads having to account for it after his death even after his conversion. Everyone else is not going to fool an omniscient god, they're just fooling themselves.

Im probably ignoring the spirit of your post, which is Christian. But I'm curious. What happened to those 5 girls after you broke up with them? Do you know if they actually abstained from further sex until marriage?

If they didn't, I think they refused to put out for you because they just didn't feel lustful passion for you. There was no repentance involved. Of course, it is awkward for them to say that. Once is happenstance and twice is coincidence, what do you think five times is?

I think your conclusion, that you were jealous, is correct by the way, regardless of their sincerity.

But I'm curious. What happened to those 5 girls after you broke up with them? Do you know if they actually abstained from further sex until marriage?

Man, I have a birthday and a wedding anniversary and then you ask me to reminisce? Buckle up boyo.

One I lost track of entirely. We honestly had nothing in common except her best friend was dating my best friend.

One, A, I never talked to much after high school, but a couple years later I heard A married some Russian guy during undergrad, which unkind rumors called a green card marriage, and then he more or less abandoned her while refusing to divorce her. I don't know how that ultimately ended up.

One, B, would have a great deal of drama senior year with my childhood friend Chris as he wanted to have sex with her and she didn't want to have sex. Then we graduated high school and B went off to a southern party school and had what I understood to be a lot of fun. Funny how what was so important and dramatic in high school was meaningless by second semester of undergrad.

C would start dating a friend of mine from track a week after rejecting me, they would be inseparably hot and heavy all of senior year, talked about forever. He had gotten into UMichigan, and C chose to go to Michigan State so they wouldn't be too long distance, despite having never been to Michigan. The week before we all left for college that summer, my parents told me to invite a bunch of my friends to dinner at the country club we belonged to. C and I had remained close, along with D who was a good friend of hers, and so I invited both of them, along with several of my Brown and Jew crew friends from AP classes. Dinner is nice, it's the fireworks from the summer church festival down the road and you can see them from the balcony, when suddenly C leaves the group to take a phone call. Then she comes back, upset, and grabs D, and they go off to talk. We all plan to go back to my parents' house and shoot pool after. D asks me where she can take C to be alone, they go back to a spare bedroom in the basement. Turns out, C's boyfriend, the one she was moving 12 hours away to Michigan to stay with, had dumped her via text. After that she's cycled through a pretty standard serial-monogamy process. POSTSCRIPT: Years later, Mrs. FiveHour, who I met in undergrad, would go to law school, and in one of her 1L classes a guy would walk up to her afterward and say Hey, your last name is FiveHour, do you know FiveHourMarathon? And she'd say yeah he's my husband, and the guy would FREAK out holy shit FiveHourMarathon got married I knew him in high school. And she comes back and asks if I knew him, and I said yeah that's C's old boyfriend, I've told you that story before, you know the one who dumped her via text 72 hours before they were going to move to Michigan together? And Mrs. FiveHour looks at me with horror and says, C was so upset over HIM? All that drama over THAT GUY? Mrs. FiveHour was not impressed. C laughed until she choked when I told her this story after we ran into each other at the diner back home.

Of course, when C was crying over her erstwhile boyf, D was alternating between comforting her and stealing kisses with me. We'd been very close friends, and at some point it had turned into a doomed summer fling. She had decided that her wayward days were over, my wayward days had just begun, and we both kinda knew we weren't going to do long distance: I was headed to NYC for undergrad and she was off to Liberty to be a good Christian girl. But still, we talked about it, we flirted about it, we thought about it, even though ultimately we weren't going to do it; we had a lot of affection for each other, and I'd still rank her in marriageability top 5 of any girl I've ever known. She would meet a nice boy at Liberty, and still lives out there with her husband and kids. So I guess her repentance was as sincere as could be. I still can't over that her husband's last name is Dork. Not kidding, scout's honor, hand on the bible: his surname is Dork, D's name is now Mrs. Dork.

I'd imagine all four of them thought of it as sincere. A and D certainly put forth a best effort, to varying degrees of success. C, after her own heart, tried her best: I've remained friends with her and never once has she not been sincerely disgusted by the men who break her heart afterward and swears never again. B I guess didn't do that well, but that's more a change of circumstances and social contexts than anything.

My own negative reaction was a mix of jealousy, pride and a sense of entitlement to a life I'd consumed in media rather than in reality. Given, it worked out well enough for me in the end: all were nice enough girls, but Mrs. FiveHour is the Mrs. for a reason.

Thanks for the long recap! Didnt realize it was such bad timing

I'm not religious, but you articulate the very human feelings on both sides very well.

What I would say, from a stoic perspective (and what I would say if I were still a Christian) is that it's not your job to decide if their repentance is sincere, and you're only harming yourself by stewing about all the fun they got to have before they found God.

That's not to say you need to take such conversions at face value. Sincerity (or lack thereof) will usually reveal itself.

I can understand being resentful of girls who slept with other guys but want you to put a ring on it first. Maybe she's just using you as an orbiter and fallback, or maybe she really does feel psychically damaged by her earlier experiences. I suspect Callista Flockhart really does regret her earlier ED and wants to spare other girls from going through that. But you can't know what's in their hearts. If you don't want to forgive people, well, you don't really leave open a path for redemption, do you?

From a Christian perspective, what matters is repentance and not when it comes. If you truly repent of your sins, even on your deathbed, that's good enough because Jesus paid the price and he forgives you. Notice that wiggle room with the word "truly", though. Christians aren't idiots either, and we know that someone's repentance might not actually be sincere. But that also isn't something we are capable of (nor have the standing for) judging. God has to sort that one out.

From there, it gets more complicated depending on your tradition. From a Catholic perspective (and even some Protestants, e.g. CS Lewis), most people will go through purgatory. This isn't something we know much about, more something that we deduce from two points in the Bible. First, "nothing unclean will enter [heaven]" (Revelation 21:27), and second, "There is no righteous person, not even one" (Romans 3:10 but the sentiment appears many places). So, if nobody is pure, nothing impure can enter heaven, and if we are somehow to be in heaven anyway, that implies some kind of purification that happens. We also have reason to believe that this process is painful, as some people "will be saved, but only as through fire" (1 Corinthians 3:15). There are more verses but that's the gist of it.

So, from this perspective the answer to your dilemma about satiated sinners is that those people will not suffer damnation, but there will be consequences for them. They will have to go through the (likely painful) process of being purified from those things before they can enter heaven. Thus it's better to avoid sin (as much as you can), so that you won't need as much purification before you can enter heaven. To use a medical analogy (always a good source of metaphors for sin), the satiated sinner is like someone who has abused the hell out of his body, and then decides to get back into shape. It's totally possible, but it'll be harder and more painful than if he had taken care of his health in the first place.

This tension is noted in the gospels as well. See Matthew 9:

And it came to pass, as Jesus sat at meat in the house, behold, many publicans and sinners came and sat down with him and his disciples. And when the Pharisees saw it, they said unto his disciples, Why eateth your Master with publicans and sinners? But when Jesus heard that, he said unto them, They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick.

Believers go through all sorts of mental gymnastics to convince themselves that actually they are indeed super evil and thus deserving of the title "publicans and sinners", as satirized in this Matt & Trey parody of Mormonism where the main character envisions his damnation in hell with Hitler and all the other Bad People because he stole a donut when he was 5.

Of course, actual Protestant theology is even better: you’re condemned not because you ate the donut, but because Adam ate the donut. Err, apple. Well, okay, we don’t know it was an apple, it could have been any fruit (but was probably a fig since Adam and Eve used fig leaves to hide their nakedness). So, let’s say a Fig Newton. Anyway, the point is you inherited this Original Sin by your birth: you were born fallen.

Now that we’ve successfully self-flagellated, we can take our place at the table with the publicans and sinners and Jesus.

——

You can see why actual publicans and sinners find these people a bit insufferable at times.

Speaking of which, can someone turn this water into wine? I’m not a drinker, but I hear it makes these people go away, so that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.

Very relevant sketch: https://youtube.com/watch?v=UEp3zUR9YAM?si=SRup9sUqO_0OFNUX

The classic, Augustinian example is the born again Christian who sleeps around when they are young and then finds Jesus right around the time that most people get bored of sleeping around anyway.

I immediately thought of Russell Brand, who has made a hasty conversion to Christianity just as numerous allegations of sexual misconduct were beginning to come out. Cue all the jokes about him giving up "preying" for "praying".

This is an interesting question. It’s complicated in subtle ways. You can see the Satiated Sinner Question as a balancing act between justice and mercy. Justice says that errors deserves punishment and righteousness deserves reward. Mercy says that each person must be lovingly motivated to pursue the good regardless of their past, and rewarded in doing so. If you choose justice at the expense of mercy, then a longterm sinner has no motivation to pursue righteousness. The mercy-starved sinner’s future outlook would lack any appetizing reward, and they would be unmotivated in their journey toward betterment. But if you lack justice, then everyone (sinner included) has reduced motivation to pursue the prescribed righteous conduct. Being justice-heavy means that the repentant sinner never obtains the status they otherwise would have had. Being mercy-abundant means that the repentant sinner can easily make up the status they have lost with little effort. The balance is that we must optimally motivate a lifelong sinner to pursue righteousness, and yet optimally motivate the righteous person to pursue even more righteousness!

We can consider a classroom. A justice-heavy teacher allows for no assignment to be made up except for serious and valid reasons. A mercy-abundant teacher allows for poor-performing students to make up an assignment to get them back on track and reinvested in the work. What’s interesting to consider is that the focus with the most utility depends on which student you are dealing with. I can easily imagine a student with a bad home life, dealing with personal issues, who is on the verge of giving up on his class because of how far behind he is. Emphasizing justice does not help him, neither will he “learn” from failure, as his issue stems from motivation and emotional distress. Lovingly allowing him to hand in something simpler, and reducing the standard for him particularly, can result in new motivation in the class, and more importantly a new attachment to the teacher and school generally. A school that cares about him as a particular human with particular issues is a school he can love, which is clearly better for his particular development.

On the other hand, we can imagine a student who ought to have more justice and not more mercy. This is for a student who is lazy and uncaring without excuse, and especially for a student who violates important rules in a selfish deceptive manner. The failure is important so that he learns his behavior is truly punished, so that hopefully he doesn’t repeat it again. Showing him mercy would be counterproductive, whereas in the distressed student it may be productive. My intuition is that this difference is deeply tied to an individual’s health, IQ, spirit and status.

So how do we solve this universal problem?

One solution is to know them, in that “subjective” sense of having a long conversation and trying to determine whether they are an earnest repentant or a satiated sinner. I do believe that human intuition can tell us this. LLMs and AI show us that the most sophisticated technology available to us is often no match to human intuition. While judging someone is a subjective judgement, it’s probably the closest we can get to an objective judgment, because everything else can be gamed, but human intuition is hard to game. Do we give our significant other a test if they violated our trust, or do we instead trust our intuition? Intuition rules over everything here. If it is impossible to fake, then the motivation to be a satisfied sinner is reduced: “what if I can’t fake it when I’m done?”

Another solution is to reduce the reward for their lifestyle and also love them mercifully. This is actually a crucial part of the Parable of the Prodigal Son. The prodigal son did not recover the full status of what he previously lost! After his profligate spending and ruin, he aimed to become a servant in his father’s household. He remembered that even the servants were well-fed with bread (not exquisite meats). The father embraced his prodigal son with fatherly love (mercifully wishing for his good and loving him), and he celebrated his return with splendor. But the son no longer had a share in his father’s wealth. To his well-behaved son he says “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours”, meaning that the remainder of his wealth goes to the good son — the prodigal son does not deserve to recover the wealth which he wasted. (The word used when the prodigal son demanded his share of the “wealth” is actually “ousia”, which means property or being, and is used in the mysterious epi-ousia, the “super-substantial” or “above-being” bread of the Lord’s Prayer, translated somewhat retardedly as “daily bread”. How many of God’s hired servants have more than enough bread?).

I think this trusty old parable actually sheds a lot of light on this problem. Sinning should always reduce status; the righteous should be greater status than the recently-forgiven. But the return of every sinner onto a Godly path should be greatly celebrated, almost absurdly celebratory. They should be maximally hyped up about it, because that’s for their good. Because “it is fitting to celebrate and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.” But, hyping up and loving a homeless person who cleaned himself up is a lot different from seeing the formerly homeless person as equal in status to some longstanding community member who lived well. The longstanding community member must be respected and honored more in day to day life. (If the former vagabond lives very well for years, then his status should be greatly increased, but never to the height of what his status would be had he not vagabonded. But maybe close to it. I think that’s correct).

The deeper meta pattern of how to socially-prescribe reinforcement for previous defectors comes up a lot, I think. Someone used to say the N word? OnlyFans girl goes trad? Amber Rose speaking at the RNC? I think there’s an instrumental case for quickly rehabilitating defectors, but I think America screws up in how it valorizes and honors the returning defector. If you were a druggie profligate and then became an evangelical pastor, your previous life as a sinner should not be used to enhance your reputation. You can still be a pastor if there is no one better, but speaking about your past should make you feel nauseous, not excited and nostalgic (what it seems like for these people sometimes).

The rub is that hyping up and celebrating the repenter is also part of status. Ask anyone who was a well-behaved and diligent kid with a layabout sibling how they felt when their sibling was praised and hyped up for merely measuring up for once, while their own constant diligence was taken for granted and any lapses were punished much harder than the constant inadequacy of the sibling.

Intentional or coincidental, you’ve hinted at a plot point of the parable:

Now his older son was in the field, and as he came and drew near to the house, he heard music and dancing. And he called one of the servants and asked what these things meant. And he said to him, ‘Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fattened calf, because he has received him back safe and sound.’ But he was angry and refused to go in. His father came out and entreated him, but he answered his father, ‘Look, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command, yet you never gave me a young goat, that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fattened calf for him!’

In our parable-world, the obedient brother never receives a celebration like this, but he did receive other things: the constant connection to his father, the share in his ousia (interpreted either as wealth to inherit or, spiritually, his nature), and lastly the return of his lost brother (and he gets to eat the calf too). Your experiences are somewhat different as you’re describing an over-strictness to the good sibling and an under-strictness to the bad sibling. But, it’s probable that our parable-patriarch was a loving father to his obedient son, advising him and hyping him on many matters. And it is probable also that if the layabout had stayed in his father’s estate (as opposed to defecting away from his whole “kingdom” so to speak) that he would be criticized or at least advised regarding his errors, in a loving fashion. Our layabout son had instead alienated himself from paternal authority altogether: true defection and true sin. And the celebration upon his return shows us the community’s greatest value: not in industry and correctness but in saving the lost and raising the dead (metaphorically), something better for the communal whole and better for emotional wellness. A spiritual social safety net. [you could, plausibly, tie this discussion to the “slack” topic you find in SSC and elsewhere… and how miserable a place like South Korea is, with their emphasis on industry and rank and not spending money lavishly on genuine welfare — competition of brother, not love].

But I don’t think that the parabolic celebration actually confers status on the profligate. It is a costly signal of the love they have for him as a human (and brother) despite his transgressions. And that love is best for him to have, and best for him to associate in his heart with his family, so that he can resume brotherly duties without shame or ill-will. After this celebration, he is not going to take over the estate of his father, and he has no more inheritance. So his status is effectively permanently lower in re wealth and role, but restored completely in re humanness. Today with our homeless crisis, how many profligates refuse to get help because there is no loving paternal figure to meet them halfway and memorably celebrate their return? Instead there’s efficiency bureaucracies, and competition, and status and status and status and status… cultures which promote family over everything have much lower rates of homelessness and drug addiction.

What adaptations have you made for your spouse?

For example, my wife and I went to the family place at the beach this weekend. My wife hates traveling, factually. She always wants to go home early, even on a short trip. She's a homebody.

I also can't sleep in. So, even though per the username running isn't my thing, when we go to the shore, I wake up at 5am and I run/walk at least fifteen miles. I put in a podcast or an audiobook, I head out before sunrise, I enjoy the quiet and the breeze and the waves, I finish up and hop in the water, and by then she's awake and we go get coffee and...go for a walk, because that's what we do. I get in a whole event before she wakes up. That way if she wants to leave early afternoon instead of hanging out and leaving at night, I feel like I still got in a full day of "shore."

What have you done to work around your spouse's foibles?

My husband and I headed off a lot of potential conflict by writing our own marriage contract (nothing legal, more like a "memorandum of understanding" of what's important to us). One of the most useful agreements is that besides a shared bank account, we'd each have our own separate accounts. That saved a lot of problems: I can go into a used book store and come out with a stack, and he can order whatever esoteric electronic gadgets as he wants for his latest bike-improvement project, and no discussion need occur.

The biggest though didn't make it into the memo, but fortunately happened anyway: we have separate toilet rooms. Separate toilet rooms save marriages.

My wife has raccoon and squirrel genes, I swear. Or just mild OCD.

First, she washes everything like it's been covered in mud and refuses to use a salad spinner. She claims to make a mean stir-fry, but it's not a stir-fry when everything is steaming in its own wetness. I gave up and toss only new stew-like recipes her way. If I want to put some browning on something I just wait until she's away and cook it myself.

Second, she has the world's biggest strategic supply of cleaning supplies and paper towels she doesn't know the size of. I tried to police this behavior and force her to use it up, but I now simply notice when it starts to spill over from the assigned cupboard into other storage spaces and demand she stop buy stuff until it fits again.

Oh, and the biggest one was probably her daily shopping habits, but that was a long time ago. I come from a relatively affluent family, while she comes from a struggling one. However, I grew up a penny pincher that derived certain pleasure from optimizing every single purchase. She, on the other hand, would shop around only for expensive purchases, but would just put food she liked into her cart. We had more than a few huffing and pouting matches, I threatened to put her on a monthly spending budget, but in the end I ended up setting up a daily recurring payment to her card that functions as a soft limit: I will top it up if she runs out of money at the till, but she has to call me for that. She has started noticing at least some of the prices, which is good enough for me.

I wonder what her answer to this question would be.

My wife is constantly leaving her shit in the bed when she goes to sleep, because she refuses to admit that she's tired and will fall asleep in approximately five minutes. So when I go to bed (an hour or two later than her), I take her phone and glasses and set them on the nightstand so they don't get lost.

She also has a fear of the cupboards being left open, because "a spider might get in". So she really gets upset if I leave the cupboards open by mistake, and I had to learn to make sure they are always closed when I go in them for something. That one isn't as bad because I really should close the cupboards anyway even if it has nothing to do with spiders.

But so it goes. Nobody is perfect, and I love her so I do these things even if I sigh and shake my head a bit sometimes. I am sure she does similar things for me, although I'm not brave/foolish enough to ask what exactly my annoying habits are.

I am sure she does similar things for me, although I'm not brave/foolish enough to ask what exactly my annoying habits are.

I feel intense guilt when my wife visits her parents. I tore her away from their traditions. I'm a 5am person, her parents don't wake up until around ten. Over years of sleeping together, my wife now wakes up between six and seven. My wife can barely get along with her family on a visit anymore, she's up at 730 after sleeping in and she's tearing her hair out by the time they're up.

5am?! I am glad you're not my spouse, I would get like three hours of sleep. With proper blackout curtains I can sleep in to an extreme degree. I was alone in the flat on a weekend one time and only woke up when my wife called me to tell they were leaving the summer cabin. That was... 4pm, I think? I try not to do this, because my sleeping schedule goes out of whack (maybe I should give the old 320 a try), so I will try to get up at around 11 on a weekend. My wife's up at around 9:30.

My grandpa was a morning person, though. On a Saturday he would wake up at 7, have a leisurely shower, shave, breakfast and then start our old Soviet vacuum cleaner that sounded like a jumbo jet to wake the rest of us useless lazybones up be done with the chores as quickly as possible.

My wife loves shopping, whereas even stepping foot in a mall basically saps me of the will to live. So I usually have my ebook on hand and plop down on the nearest bench to wait. Kinda lame but that way she can take all the time she wants and then we can go eat together afterwards or whatever. The alternative of shopping together makes her want to leave early because I'm such a downer. But unless I have an objective, browsing around really doesn't do it for me.

The husband couch is one of those things that most malls/stores have for a reason. They know, lol.

I feel like more and more malls/stores have removed those benches/couches. I guess to deter loiterers? But it sucks, there's just no chance to rest. Makes me want to leave instantly.

I walked into a mall with my partner recently and got slammed with people trying to sign me up for services/charities what have you. I hate those places. I'm one of those downer guys though and she complains she can't take me shopping because I always want to leave early. Like why would you spend your time there if you don't already know what you're going to purchase?

Though It does makes me realise how different I am to the average man, when I see the other mall denizens shambling around.

The aggressive sign-up/sales people are the worst. Just doing their jobs obviously but it makes just walking around annoying.

You'd think the mall management wouldn't allow people to harass shoppers, because this would lead to more people shopping from home to avoid them > less mall customers > stores closing > death spiral for mall.

Though It does makes me realise how different I am to the average man

I don't think you actually are. Most men that I've ever known are like what you described. When we go shopping it's like a beautiful surgical strike: get in, get the thing, get out in 10 minutes flat. When I see men just milling about the mall it's almost always because they're there with a woman.

Honestly, men are just plain better at shopping than women. Even when just browsing around, we get shit done. When I was a teenager I went to the mall of America with a (male) friend and two girls. In the 2-3 hours we were there, my friend and I checked out every single store we wanted to see, got some ice cream, and even rode the little roller coaster they had. Meanwhile the girls had covered 1/3 of the mall or so. And it's like that every time I've compared the shopping habits of men and women.

Last time we took a mall trip, my wife loves shopping but she's also a bizarre raccoon who will spend all day walking through stores, not buy anything, then go home and try to find the things she looked at second hand across the internet. Typically, I do the same thing you do and read a book as I follow her around. I don't mind following her around, reading, carrying bags, paying for things. But I absolutely drew the line when she asked me to take notes on sizes and styles. That was too far for me.

I'm 26yo, single, no dependents, in Alabama. My gross income is currently 71% of “Area Median Income” according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. I'm currently paying 17.4% of my gross income in rent. I'm working a W-4 job at 75% FTE and enrolled in undergraduate at 9CH/semester (75% my school's definition of full time) as a Senior graduating with a bachelor's of science this December or May.

Are there any kind of “gibs” that might be available to me in this situation?

  • I looked up “housing choice vouchers”, but it seems that while I do technically qualify, those require you to (a) spend thirty freaking percent of your income on rent; and (b) move into a housing authority affiliated property. Paying more money for less safe housing is of course no advantage.
  • I looked up food stamps, but it seems that I don't even qualify for those, as after taking the standard deduction, rent, renter's insurance premium (required by landlord), and Earned Income deduction, I'm still grossing about 164% of the Eligibility Limit.
  • My employer offers a 401(k), in which I am putting all my spare income into a Roth account, so low-hanging fruit of the Saver's Credit is definitely already got. I'm also in generally excellent health so I'm just taking the Obamacare-Certified HDHP which my employer pays two-thirds of the premium on, and stuffing a bit of HSA money to get myself out of the higher tax bracket.
  • Day-to-day expenses are already about as low as they'll get, aside from a $100/mo cash allocation for social activity.
  • My GPA of ~2.1 (already exercised retroactive withdrawal cleanup) and my white male status together I suspect make fishing for scholarships a waste of time.

The biggest gains will probably come from the income side. For new grads there is often a path of increasing job titles e.g. associate --> staff --> senior --> manager. If you stay at one company each jump is usually a minimum set amount of time and the pay bump is often somewhat fixed based on your current salary. If you look externally for the next step/network you can sometimes get to the next job title sooner and be offered higher pay.

Also, a good perk to consider is employers that pay for continuing education that can be leveraged into higher paying jobs (e.g. an employers that pays a large percentage of tuition reimbursement for pursuing a master's degree).

The biggest gains will probably come from the income side. For new grads there is often a path of increasing job titles … each jump is usually a minimum set amount of [seniority] and the pay bump is often somewhat fixed based on your current salary.

Yeah, I've been working at the same company since graduating HS 7 years ago, and been arguably under-compensated. My boss has all but guaranteed me that my pay will approximately double immediately upon graduation; if it doesn't, I'll be rezzing up the resume right away to start shopping around for when the brief no-quitting-allowed period expires after my current company reimburses me for this last 1 or 2 semesters of school.

Mostly, I just want to get through this last stretch a bit easier.

Day-to-day expenses are already about as low as they'll get

You may still want to double-check against the numbers published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics—specifically, the "gross income less than 15 k$/a" column in the "size of consumer unit by income before taxes" table. (Note that these numbers were gathered in the 2022–2023 period, so they should be multiplied by something like 5.2 percent to account for inflation from January 2023 to today.)

I need some advice.

My depressive 22yo nephew just came out as MTF trans, is changing his name, and will be starting hormone treatment. It’s a huge shock: he’s been depressed for years, is mildly autistic, but he’s a gamer and has had manosphere opinions in the past so I would never have thought this possible.

This terrifies me because my 5YO son is also mildly on the spectrum and is impressionable. Now that this is “in the family” I am worried he will cotton on to it.

My personal view on trans is neither here nor there, but for the record I think it’s a mental illness spread by social contagion (like anorexia). This may be incorrect, but if it is, what model should I have for this?

My primary concern is to minimize the odds my son becomes trans, or becomes confused, exposing us to questions from his school, etc.

How should I handle this? What should I tell him about his cousin? What would you do?

My personal view on trans is neither here nor there, but for the record I think it’s a mental illness spread by social contagion (like anorexia).

I'd dare say that your personal views are extremely relevant. If you didn't view it as a mental illness, you wouldn't have anything to worry about.

Realistically, the best thing to do is probably try to explain it objectively: some people get tattoos, some people do drugs, and some people transition. I think TheBailey covers this fairly well.

Depending on your comfort with the alternatives, I'd also point out that men can absolutely wear dresses, play with dolls, and learn how to do makeup. Sometimes "trans" is really just "I want to play with my sister's cool toys". Usually this ends up just being a phase - the allure of the forbidden is a lot stronger, and also you start to realize there's social consequences unless you're majorly autistic (I'm mildly autistic, but I can definitely tell whether this sort of behavior is situationally appropriate)

That said, it's worth noting that transition is one of the safest, least-regretted medical decisions a person can make. Just don't rush into anything surgical and most of it is fairly easily undone. I can still easily pass as a guy if I'm in an area where being trans/female makes me feel unsafe. Even if you view it as a mental illness, the actual known-successful treatment IS "be chill and play along with their delusion."

(Not surprisingly, this is a topic I know a lot about, and am also wildly biased about - feel free to ask me questions, although I don't check the site super-regularly)

How often do you see your nephew?

Twice a year, approx

I probably teach my kids about mental illness and try to sugarcoat that his cousin is ill in a gentle way (which he is via depression, which you can motte and bailey for the trans thing if you get called out on it). I'd teach my kids binary genders by showing, not telling.

I'd take comfort in the fact that by the time your child reaches adulthood, this social contagion is likely to be in decline (with more clearly explored science on hormone disrupters, links to autism, studies on conversion leading to suicide etc).

It seems like the direction of travel is for child transition to stop but for adult transition to be normalized.

Since you take the social contagion stance, you will need to “vaccinate” him against the idea.

Have “the talk” where you explain clearly and directly and honestly — especially since you say he's somewhat on the spectrum, I remember when I was his age I could always smell when I was getting a sideways explanation — what you want him to understand about the situation from your own perspective, putting it at the appropriate level for the kid, for example for a 5yo it might be something like:

> Some people aren't happy with being born a boy or a girl.
> Sometimes, these people will use makeup and costumes to disguise themselves as what they *want* to be seen as.
> Sometimes, they'll even use drugs and surgeries to try to change their bodies to look more like a boy or more like a girl.
> When they try to do that, it usually doesn't work out so well, because you *can't* actually change a boy into a girl. [Go into detail here about what exactly *you're* worried about going wrong!]
> If that's something you ever start to worry about, remember that you can always talk to us about it. [Aside: Do you have a trusted spiritual leader you could direct the kid to, such as a pastor or youth study group leader that shares your beliefs and has competence is handling issues age-appropriately? If so, maybe brief that spiritual leader about your concerns beforehand so he knows whether to answer or to tell the kid to “ask your parents”.]

If you don't feel comfortable having that talk, but you're concerned that others are going to take the talk to him and present the wrong premises, or present the premises in the wrong order, in order to effectively “infect” him…

My primary concern is to minimize the odds my son becomes trans, or becomes confused, exposing us to questions from his school, etc.

…then it seems like you will have to eliminate his contact with any sources of that information. You could, for example, order the trans nephew (under threat of either trespass or you and yours leaving) to “dress like a man” at family gatherings to avoid raising questions, and if you actually think he's going to overstep the bounds of parental authority and share information about gender identity with your son without your oversight, then that needs to be addressed as well; if you think that someone at his school is going to expose him to that information, then look into homeschooling or changing school districts, if you're not up for making a news case out of yourself; etc.

Disclaimer: I was homeschooled by parents who have essentially the same perspective as you do; I turned out trans (MtF) anyway once I found out about it around age 12~13 when I got unsupervised internet access, though none of my 4 siblings did, despite them all getting unsupervised internet access younger than I did.

Thanks for the repl(ies).

I turned out trans (MtF) anyway once I found out about it around age 12~13 when I got unsupervised internet access

Your parents sound like me, though I don’t home school. If it’s not too personal, what did your journey look like? If you became trans after hearing about it on the internet, would an introduction to the phenomenon in some other way have been less appealing to you? What was your pre-existing mental state like? Does being trans make you happy?

My model for how this works for most people is they are depressed for some reason that can’t be pinned down. Despite mental health messaging, it’s still low status to be mentally ill. At some point they go down an internet rabbit hole on trans and realize it’s a way of transmogrifying their mental problems into something sympathetic and avante grade.

would an introduction to the phenomenon in some other way [than self-directed unsupervised internet research] have been less appealing to you?

I pretty much learned everything I could about it as quickly as I could; I doubt there was any kind of manipulation of the order of evidence being presented by parents that would have affected my ultimate conclusion. I spent about as much time as I did on math homework in the basement on my PC reading PubMed and Sci-Hub and forum articles from all sides of the political divide, on that specific topic.

However, to this day it's a small negative facet of interaction with my mother is that she occasionally makes some rueful comment about how I've “bought into this delusion”, since I have explicitly never made any kind of politically disputable claims that I “am I woman” or anything like that.

If you try to take the approach using political rhetoric like “trans people can't accept reality” — remember, one of the aspects of being on the spectrum is taking things literally, and there is an implicit “every/∀” on unqualified general statements in English — or selective facts like “the [genital] surgeries have a high regret rate” (which is relatively undisputed, but for that very reason most trans people don't get those kinds of operations), you may end up briefly getting the kid on board as an ideologue, but when he eventually finds out that you essentially “lied” to get him on board with your particular perspective, you risk ending up strictly worse off from a relationship perspective than had you not broached the topic at all, and having had no impact on his actual outcome.

My model for how this works for most people is they are depressed for some reason that can’t be pinned down. Despite mental health messaging, it’s still low status to be mentally ill.

That may be true. It may even be common. But — if you grant that there are any legitimate cases of gender dysphoria — depression is a symptom of it, so “Joe has depression” does not on its own preclude “Joe has gender dysphoria”.

I live across the country from my family; I see them on Christmas and whenever one of them has occasion to fly out to my city for a business trip. In summer of 2023, when I went back on HRT after an (in retrospect) very ill-advised 18-month experiment in desistance, my father, who would generally invite me out for lunch whenever he was in town, did so again and was astonished at how much I seemed to be “thriving” compared to the last several times he'd seem me; he even took a picture to send back to the family to capture what he saw as he was so struck by it. He was not informed of my having gone back on HRT, and would have disapproved had he known. I have many, many similar anecdotes of people who happened to be against Transgenderism noticing and commenting on marked improvement in my well-being as broadly construed as could be seen from the outside when I first went on HRT seriously around age 17.

Setting aside any bad vibes you're catching from his queer behavior and presentation per se, has your nephew improved academically, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, or socially since getting on HRT?

Despite mental health messaging, it’s still low status to be mentally ill.

As a quick tangent: if you're not a single parent, have you and your spouse talked about your approach to Shiri's Scissor childcare topics like antidepressants? Being on the same page, or at least knowing what page you each are on, before a storm hits will make things much easier.

For example, if one of you thinks that “trying whatever the doc recommends for a few months” is a great first-resort for a kid who's been acting funny, while the other views any psychotropic prescriptions as the absolute last resort only after ruling out any reasonable possibility of lifestyle changes fixing it, finding that disagreement out only when it's time to choose is going to make things much, much harder and more stressful than they need to be.

(And of course, an alleged GD case would be just one somewhat central instance of the general case of “things like antidepressants”.)

At some point they go down an internet rabbit hole on trans and realize it’s a way of transmogrifying their mental problems into something … avant-garde

Circling back around: does your son have a large fraction of queer people, same-sex-attracted people, or “allies” in his sphere of influence, which I assume is mostly his cohort at school plus the school staff? Is there any “clout” to be got?

You mentioned your nephew was 22yo; is he in college, or a NEET, or somehow in a workforce that's got him to to this, or do you think it's only to look cool for the apocryphal “strangers on the internet”?

Has anyone put the bug in your ear of the concept of autogynephilia yet? That seems to be a larger and more insidious “threat” than social contagion, at least for males.
Gender and the Brain with an AGP Neuroscientist - Benjamin Boyce on YouTube

… [and] sympathetic …

It may be worth noting: something that has exploded in either popularity or awareness over the past few years is arguably the opposite of that — not people chasing any kind of attention, but just staying in the closet and not drawing attention to themselves while quietly medically transitioning:

It may be the case that … simply dressing and acting a minimally surprising way while trying to find a partner, will prove a huge waste of [time], and that my only actual shot at finding [a good spouse] is to embrace some more flamboyant identity than [my current approach,] the absolute-maximally conservative option … [which] feels the most natural to me

That word was not even a blip on Google Trends all the way up thru December 2019, yet I saw that very word in use in forum and imageboard culture around 2010, as I guess some kind of sleeper strategy.

https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub

SCP-3125 is an extremely large, highly aggressive anomalous metastasized meme complex originating externally to our reality and now partially intersecting it. … Because humans have no natural exposure to ideas as aggressive as SCP-3125, human minds have no protective evolutionary adaptations against it. Individuals possessed of SCP-3125 become incapable of entertaining weaker, "conventional" ideas, and become instead wholly bodily subordinate to the purpose of serving and disseminating the core concepts of SCP-3125.

https://voetica.com/poem/3341

Christopher Robin
Got up in the morning,
The sneezles had vanished away.
And the look in his eye
Seemed to say to the sky,
“Now, how to amuse them today?

You are MtF trans? I don't mean to get overly personal. I would suggest my advice to you a few weeks ago regarding online dating was misplaced, as I haven't the foggiest notion how the dynamics of dating a woman would be for a MtF trans person. Apologies.

No apology needed; you responded to my question exactly as I asked it. I am currently presenting as a more or less regular guy as I'm seeking an essentially “traditional” heterosexual relationship. I may have forget to explicitly say that in my post, but I (it seems correctly) assumed that that's the implicit default and was supported by subtext of my message. It's not hard to hide breasts, and when people dote on my complexion I always tell them it's “just” from a low-carb diet and collagen supplementation, which I'm sure are also contributing factors.

I figure that politics and health issues are a “3rd date or so” topic, so I plan to disclose this around then; I'm not actually trying to “trap” anyone or do the classic boomer behavior of waiting 15 years into a marriage and then acting out by cheating.

Not to put too fine a point on it but are you saying that you still consider yourself a woman but wish now to be involved in a relationship with a woman? But you are "presenting as" (to use your terminology) a "regular guy" (whatever that may mean...I guess male who watches football and drinks beer?) This seems as if it should inform a great deal about your dating strategy.

Not to put too fine a point on it but are you saying that you [do] consider yourself a woman

No; I don't consider myself a woman. I consider myself a male who takes estrogen and bicalutamide more or less as a cosmetic procedure and/or mental health intervention, while acknowledging the tradeoff that this will make it much more difficult for me to woo a physically and mentally hale wife. I have had this perspective unchanged since I first learned what transgenderism was and realized the category seemed to fit me (modulo the actually-being-on-HRT aspect, of course).

but wish [to] be involved in a relationship with a woman?

While I'm sure a same-sex committed relationship would have plenty of potential to be both fulfilling and mutually beneficial, I've always been absolutely sure that I want to have and personally raise my own biological kids. If a suitable man were to actually pursue me and be willing to accommodate the whole Dave Rubin style high-effort surrogacy thing, I guess I could in theory be open to that — I believe am “meta-attracted” enough to be on par with my fundamental gynephilia, not that it's a practical thing to compare anyway — but if I have to put in the effort to be the pursuer, then I want to at least be pursuing a relationship that has some inherent potential for the whole “having kids” thing to be relatively straightforward.

Of course, every straight male has the fantasy of being actively wooed by a suitable woman; but you don't need to plan for the case where everything simply falls into your lap and works out perfectly; it's the genuinely likely positive outcomes that need to be harvested on purpose.

"presenting as" […] whatever that may mean...

I have medium length hair kept clean and brushed out but broadly unstyled, and I always wear men's button-up shirts with either slacks or jeans. I am currently undergoing laser facial hair removal so I don't have to shave as often; but I don't wear makeup, I go by a conventionally male name, and I don't engage in “voice training” or any other kind of intentional attempts at acting “Queer” or performing femininity. While occasionally I will so-called “male fail” (people mistaking me for a woman, at least until I speak,) I'd like to think I barely even register on “gaydar”.

^I don't know whether that addresses your confusion. If it doesn't, I think I'll need a more specific question. If it seems like I'm intentionally dodging your request for my underlying ethos with an incoherent stream of nominally relevant but disconnected facts, I promise that I am not trying to be obtuse.

This seems as if it should inform a great deal about your dating strategy.

It may be the case that this “false advertising” strategy — that is a quote; I have been accused of it IRL, though not by anyone I actually dated — of simply dressing and acting a minimally surprising way while trying to find a partner, will prove a huge waste of both my own time and my prospective partners' time, and that my only actual shot at finding an excellent, willing life partner (of either sex) is to embrace some more flamboyant identity than the absolute-maximally conservative option, but I want to at least shoot my shot with this approach first as it feels the most natural to me.

Interesting. Thanks for being so forthright. As a straight male who has been wooed, it's not my fantasy and I'm not a fan. Just to get that out there.

I don't have much to offer, I'm afraid. Way different Weltanschauungen. Miles apart. But then perhaps I'm miles apart from many here, in different ways.

Probably IRL we could sit down and maybe I could straighten you out. Just kidding. We could have an interesting chat though, I bet.

I didn't click the embedded link. Maybe I will on my computer tomorrow.

It's so strange to see /tttt/ rhetoric on here.

I consider myself a male who takes estrogen and bicalutamide more or less as a cosmetic procedure and/or mental health intervention

Do you take HRT from a prescription? Or DIY?

It's so strange to see [transgender 4channer] rhetoric on here.

Sorry to mince words, but I believe I kept my post pretty free of rhetoric. I gave a true, relevant, and politically neutral description of the situation and why I'm approaching it the way that I am; and I imported two minor pieces of jargon which already breached imgeboard containment and made it into the wider internet lexicon 3 years ago and 13 years ago.

(If your choice of words wasn't meant that specifically, and you actually meant “jargon” or “ideas”, just ignore this; I'm only taking umbrage with the possible implication that I'm at least in part running some kind of scripted dialogue tree or other regurgitation that's been optimized for Persuasion. If you didn't mean “rhetoric” in that way, I apologize for my misunderstanding.)

Do you take HRT from a prescription? Or DIY?

Started DIY; currently DIY; though I spent a year or so with an MD supervising / writing scripts at one point. That was no value added and I got bad vibes from the doc anyway (in 2018 she had never even heard of bicalutamide despite allegedly being specifically an endocrinologist and prescribing HRT for other MtF patients; she tried to switch me over to spironolactone, which is known to cause long-lasting brain fog and may actually cause problems with breast development).

I may check out one of those trans and queer focused “telehealth” providers (doc-in-a-box / pill mill) now I'm 26 and could use a prescription to foist 80% coinsurance for this cosmetic maintenance medication off on my coworkers and employer via health insurance… thanks, Obama!

While I'm generally pretty skeptical about credentialism, since I've seen even well-regarded doctors make pretty bad mistakes, and especially trans-related stuff you tend to either get vastly over-hesitant (like your mentioned brain fog combo, I've also seen docs prescribe combos that have known cancer risks) or under-cautious, it can definitely be worthwhile to have a second set of eyes for a lot of the endocrinology stuff.

You're far enough along that you're not likely to see the 'whoops I accidentally a whole order of magnitude' level problems that come up in newbies, but even people who have good access to blood testing for things like liver function often find themselves least able to think through the numbers if there's a problem.

Sorry, you've probably already considered these tradeoffs, but the downsides are severe enough that I'm bound to offer it anyway in case you haven't.

Jargon is a better word, I didn't mean anything by rhetoric. And it's not just the terms, I feel like your viewpoint is also very similar to the depressed repressors there, but I guess that has also (tragically) spread outside of the board.

I mean, be honest that his cousin is mentally ill leading to delusions. Trying to sugarcoat his delusions to make them 5yo palatable will do nothing but make him feel more willing to imitate the cousin.

If you do this, just be aware that it'll almost certainly come out because children have no filter at all. A 5 year old is very likely to go "Dad says you're mentally ill!" at some inappropriate time.

A 5 year old is very likely to go "Dad says you're mentally ill!" at some inappropriate time.

@Highlandclearances Do you talk politics with the kid at all? Is he mentally developed enough to understand the idea that “there are some things we could get in big trouble just for believing”, & to grasp the severity of “big trouble means that they might even take you away and you'd never get to see us again”?

There are a very small number of cases of kids claiming to be trans and being taken away from parents who don’t ‘affirm’. These cases seem to have other, actual, child abuse going on, but I’ll concede that it’s possibly a legitimate danger to lose a trans child for being opposed to transgenderism.

I’m not aware of any parents losing custody for opposing transgenderism when the child is cis.

I’m not aware of any parents losing custody for opposing transgenderism when the child is cis.

I'm not aware of this ever actually happening, but Scotland's recent hate speech bill makes it a legal possibility for someone to be arrested for a political opinion they expressed verbally in the privacy of their own home, and "gender identity" is a protected characteristic in Scotland.

There are a very small number of cases of kids claiming to be trans and being taken away from parents who don’t ‘affirm’. These cases seem to have other, actual, child abuse going on

I agree that the number is small, but how are you getting the idea that there was other abuse in these cases?

but I’ll concede that it’s possibly a legitimate danger to lose a trans child for being opposed to transgenderism

California was one step away from legally mandating that possibility. What makes you think that non-affirming = abuse is not a popular belief among social workers?

There are a very small number of cases of kids claiming to be trans and being taken away from parents who don’t ‘affirm’ … I’m not aware of any parents losing custody for opposing transgenderism when the child is cis.

How do you factor out / mitigate the toupée fallacy there?

I’ll concede that it’s possibly a legitimate danger to lose a trans child for being opposed to transgenderism.

My recommendation was a specific instance of the general case of just giving your (non-abused) kids yearly don’t talk to the police training, a great first step towards keeping them out of the clutches of the poorly-run infrastructure that's supposed to target other people. Admittedly the technique isn't exactly “asymmetric”, but to the extent it's cheesing the system — well, if the good parents don't use it, it won't stop bad parents from using it anyway.

I’m well aware kids have no filter. But structuring your life around avoiding giving offense to people who are, at best, deeply confused is misguided.

I didn't say OP should do that. I just think that one should bear it in mind, so that they are prepared for potential consequences. Knowledge is power, and all that.

So, what are you reading?

Still on Future Shock, The Cheese and the Worms and Scaramouche. Also going through Committing Journalism: The Prison Writings of Red Hog.

I recently binge-read The Barbarian by Casey Hollingshead. Unprofessional and possibly not even all that good, but somehow I still found myself enjoying it.

Continuing this theme of novels based on niche video games, I tried reading Ring Runner Derelict Dreams, but bounced off.

The Passenger and The Road by Cormac McCarthy. The Passenger I find hard to read because frankly, it goes far over my head. Especially the conversations with hallucinations are just painful. I have a good deal of trust in the author and I'm fairly sure that he knew what he was doing even as he was headed for 90 and the grave, but so far I haven't adjusted to the book. The Road is a re-read for me, and it resonates a lot more now that I'm a parent.

I'm abandoning "Introduction to AC Machine Design", "Electric Machine Fundamentals" answers the same questions for me and isn't making me want to refresh on the entire dependency tree of vector calculus first. I did get "Principles and Applications of Electromagnetic Fields" for the Aspirational pile, though. "How to Keep House When You're Drowning" remains inspiring and comfortable. Factorio continues to eat me.

I'm reading Il Gigante, a book about Michaelangelo and the David. It's pretty mid, not bad but not really telling me anything I didn't know.

I just started Moby Dick on audiobook. We do all still think of going to sea, don't we?

Reading through Montaigne's essays again, mostly just because there are a lot of bite sized ones that make for good early morning reading.

Just finished Lord of Light by Zelanzy which was great. About to start The Forever War.

I would love to read The Forever War again, it's a fast one and really great. It gets compared with Starship Troopers a lot, and I think it wins out of the two for me.

I love Starship Troopers, and The Forever War was written partly as a rebuttal to how Troopers "glorifies war", so you'd think I should hate it, as an Ur-example of leftists hijacking something so they can update it with The Message, for Modern Audiences. But it's so much better as a rebuttal than most modern reboots of that type. It treats the theme as a necessary part of a good story but not a sufficient part, so it puts just as much effort into characterization and plot. It feels like (and AFAIK was) well-informed self-criticism by an insider of the culture being criticized, not ignorant cheap shots from an outsider. It treats its genre as a promise with conventions that it lives up to, not just an arbitrary color palette slapped onto a generic story. And even considered as a rebuttal to previous fiction or as a commentary on non-fiction events, it manages to avoid the typical minor failure of "so tenuous an allegory that it doesn't really contribute to the debate" and the typical major failure of "so heavy an allegory that it doesn't really stand on it's own", threading the needle perfectly. I personally prefer Troopers, but I'd still call Forever War the more proficient of the two.

I wish I could praise any more of Haldeman's work as much. I remember kind of liking Camoflague, and I think Forever Peace, but not enough to reread them, whereas Troopers wasn't even Heinlein's best Middle-Grade/Young-Adult book.

Well put. I also like that both books serve as fine novels even for those who don't typically read sci-fi (including myself). I'd feel comfortable recommending The Forever War to most readers since it's enjoyable on multiple levels that you described.

If anyone here writes professionally or semi-professionally, in any domain, I'd love to hear your process around daily drafting and editing.

I've start to build a content base for a blog (details of which I will not be sharing so that I don't doxx myself, sorry). I can draft out 1,000 words a day consistently. Editing it is probably a 2-3x time commitment over the rough drafting. I don't feel like I have a real "process" however. It's kind of just - write a thing. Re-write a little until I have a solid structure. Edit for clarity, tighter sentences, that kind of thing. Should I have more?

To copy what the other guy said;

Writing and editing are not the same, they engage different portions of your brain. Process is different for everyone. I generally find it easier to just write and put down what's in my head first, then go have a drink or a meal or a night out. Then come back and read it properly, at which point I've usually found it to be garbage or in need of much more clarity. I've had more success treating writing/editing like different processes rather than one complete process.

Editing is tough for this reason. It's more work. Writing can be fun. If you're trying to stick to a schedule, try and alternate writing/editing days. Keep a backlog of drafts. Depending on what you're writing, if you know what you're writing about, during the editing process go back and cut out the extraneous fat that has nothing to do with what you're trying to communicate. You'd be surprised how much better stuff reads when you don't try and do anything fancy with the language or mess with complicated grammatical structure.

You'd be surprised how much better stuff reads when you don't try and do anything fancy with the language or mess with complicated grammatical structure.

I am compelled to offer my sincerest, most profound, and most forceful sentiments of gratitude. Your eloquent presentation of what must have been, of course, hard won knowledge is a great addition to the discourse capture in this community

Thx.

Been writing (professionally, freelance, hobby, semi-sordid erotica under a pseudonym…) for 25+ years.

My approach is:

  1. write the thing
  2. take account of how writing the thing feels (if it feels flowy, it’s much more likely to be good)
  3. edit the thing (this can be just a single run through for a short piece, or for a longer or more consequential piece, printing out the whole thing, laying it in sheets on the floor and taking a red pen to anything that seems out of place or which doesn’t add to the forward momentum)
  4. leave it a while (at least a night)
  5. read the thing (if it emotionally stirs me or moves me to read it, it has a decent chance of being good, or at least as good as I can make it)

After that, having the courage, tenacity and organisational chops to get it out into the world and into the hands of the best person/people you can find to read it is a whole other set of skills.

If your aspirations are for maximum excellence in writing and editing, I recommend Draft No. 4 by John McPhee.

Draft No. 4 by John McPhee

Than you. Amazon'ed.

Figured this is a good place to ask about "AI". I'm putting that in quotes because a lot of things that are called AI aren't actually. But here I'm referring to any tools that are marketed as AI. Let's put this out there first, I don't trust AI. I don't trust it with my personal data, I don't trust it to get things right, I'm annoyed with how ubiquitous it's becoming in online articles and internet comments. I think a lot of companies are way over-hyping their products.

And yet at my workplace, there was a webinar called "how can AI work for you". And there's this whole lineup of self-described experts in the industry trying to sell it as a productivity tool - like actual, reputable sources. So I'm thinking, I'm 100% a Luddite, I've never been an early adopter, but maybe I should be taking it seriously.

Yet despite all the breathless copy about how AI can do absolutely anything, I've found actual, tangible examples thin on the ground. So I thought I'd ask the Mottizens - are you using AI and how? Has it made your workflow better? Give me your success stories!

If it helps, we can say I'm in facilities management. So I do scheduling, purchasing, administrative stuff, light tech support, process write-ups, document management, and I have a stuffed tasklist of both recurring things and current one-time projects I'm working on.

As someone else said, think of it as a cool friend who will never judge you and to whom you can ask anything - even the questions you're hesitant to ask. My use cases include:

  • Proofreading or improving the quality of writing for important messages or anything that requires extra attention. You need to fine-tune your prompts to avoid slop (delve into, tapestries, crucial...)
  • Brainstorming ideas.
  • Exploring research directions when I don't know where to start, or when I only have a vague idea to begin with.
  • Writing, improving, or translating code.
  • Progressing at language learning
  • Clarifying things when I can’t or don’t feel like asking someone directly.
  • Finding recommendations without going through tons of SEO slop. This includes things like recipes or travel tips. Just throw whatever you have in your fridge and it will usually suggest decent things you can make.

Yet despite all the breathless copy about how AI can do absolutely anything, I've found actual, tangible examples thin on the ground. So I thought I'd ask the Mottizens - are you using AI and how?

Without getting into details, I am a "algorithms engineer" for a big name tech-company. "AI" or more accurately "Machine Learning" is absolutely a core component of the job but as you seem to be aware, AI as it is popularly discussed is very different from AI as it actually exists.

As I've touched upon before, publicly available machine learning frameworks do show promise in the sense that there are clear applications waiting to be capitalized on. In your specific case of facilities management, the ability to quickly collate and summarize large swaths of disparate data seems like it would be eminently useful, but that is not something that is going to automate your job away is it?

Here's an example from non-LLM (because LLM are massively overemphasized here): Fixing a noisy photo I took after the sunset against the sky.

First thing is using AI Denoise to massively reduce the visible noise due to the lighting conditions.

Second is using AI sky detection to make a one-click accurate mask of the sky so I can easily even out the brightness between the ground and the sky.

Final step is using content aware remove (aka generative neural network) to remove distracting tree branches with near-perfect results.

You could have sort of done the same four years ago, but it would have resulted in blurry details (from old school stupid denoise) and taken an order of magnitude more manual work. With AI tools it's just pointing at the thing and telling the app to "Just Do It".

All this is specifically with… what, Adobe Photoshop? Or a different program?

Lightroom / Photoshop or a bunch of other similar programs. Pretty much every major image editing app has added or is racing to add AI features because they are so useful. Some sort of decent AI denoise is nowadays expected even from free apps.

Photoshop has some of the strongest AI tools for digital artists, but there are GIMP plugins for some capabilities that are pretty robust, too if you don't want to get trapped in the Adobe hell.

I wanted to check one of the settings/capabilities on a robotic manipulator arm, but didn't know which menu it was buried in or how to access it. I knew that the procedure was laid out somewhere in one of four(ish?) manuals, each of which are 600+ pages. I asked copilot, and it gave me the correct step-by-step instructions on the first try.

I'm going to give you the opposite of what you asked for: in my opinion LLMs are not actually very useful. They're a neat toy, but given that you cannot actually trust them to get the right answer they slow you down rather than speed you up. They're 99% hype, not substance.

whole lineup of self-described experts in the industry trying to sell it as a productivity tool

No shortage of snake oil people around, looking for the next big thing to try to sucker people into swiping the credit card.

BUT!

It is a massive productivity tool.

Can’t speak to your day to day or possible ways it can help (in short: it can), but I’ve been using it for:

  1. In-house coder in building a practical web app (I can read a decent amount of code but I’ve never written code professionally). It’s helped me get to a working prototype in roughly 8 hours of prompting/testing/fixing/retesting.
  2. Trained GPTs for some very specific writing/editing projects, which allows me to get to a very solid first draft in about 10 minutes instead of 2 hours.
  3. Analyze thousands of rows of data and give some recommended actions, likely costs, potential benefits and timeframes. (This was SEO and web analytics data.)
  4. Teaching me loads of things. NOT information. More a conversation that allows me to go deeper in my self-education on a particular topic (e.g. coding, mathematics, finance, spreadsheet functions etc etc).

A broader more philosophical question is the possible impact of all this productivity on society and individuals. Will people become less resourceful? Will society as a whole become habituated to forcefed AI-generated soulless crap? Who knows. Probably second, third and fourth order effects that can’t be predicted. But overall, if you actually work with it rather than expect it to do something for you from start to finish, and then get good at working with it, you can fast track the hell out of a lot of things.

The value it has as basically being a "really smart friend" with infinite patience and an extremely deep well of knowledge is hard to overstate.

But man, if it gets to the point where you can actually start replacing your friends with it and it can fine-tune its responses to make an idealized conversation partner... or partners, no reason it couldn't simulate multiple roles in a conversation... it seems likely to drive further atomization.

I've commented on this before

AI (specifically: LLMs trained on specific tasks) are doing objectively impressive things. To get to where you can produce and benefit from those objectively impressive things takes some level of technical prowess. I'd argue the current de facto system for building with LLMs is LangChain.

If that landing page is mostly greek to you, there's still a lot of things you can do with Claude / OpenAi -- but a lot of it might be of questionable business value. Here are some examples

  1. You can have an LLM summarize a large report / research paper. It will provide a good summary, but it might provide incorrect facts, so you still have to search through to make sure your numbers are good.

  2. In the inverse, you can throw a bunch of facts and raw notes into one of these services and say "write out a summary email in a professional tone using this." It will but, again, you'll need to check the specific numbers to make sure it hasn't hallucinated.

  3. It helps with brainstorming if you can offer a specific enough question. Don't ask "How should I look at the automotive market for a new product?" You'll get over generalized pablum back. Ask "We want to introduce less expensive mufflers in the U.S. truck market, what are three potential ways to approach a GTM strategy, and please explain your reasoning for each one." It won't give you some golden holy-shit-we're-rich answer, but it will trigger your own thinking.

  4. This is very recent, but I've started to ask it to help design powerpoint slides. Unfortunately, the work I'm doing now is in a "think in powerpoint" culture. I hate designing slides. Once I have a concept for the information flow down, I can hack the slides together while watching TV or whatever. So, I throw a bunch of my notes in and say "tell me how to make this real pretty in a powerpoint deck." It comes back with a great deal of useful suggestions and, recently, vector graphic code to actually build the thing (which is SUPER handy).

That's all I can think of off the top of my head. Now some caveats:

  • Never ever put sensitive corporate / client / business / personal data into the big public LLMs (that's Claude and OpenAI and gemini etc.). They say everything is private, but that's probably not true. More importantly, you're probably breaking a terms of service or NDA you signed somewhere a long the way if you do this. I get around this by running my own models on local hardware. This is getting easier and easier to do from a setup perspective, but it also requires a pretty hefty box to run the big models. My starting assumption is that your average person has a laptop and that's it. Asking you to go out and drop $3-5k on a heft GPU box isn't reasonable. You can run these models in the cloud but, again, without doing some technical setup, you're running into the same privacy concerns.

  • Never, ever, use these LLMs for research or fact finding. This is already happening in meaningful ways and it is terrifying to me I have literally seen an executive at an F500 type "how many automotive retailers are there in the USA?" ... he took the LLM generated response and threw it into an e-mail like it was God's Own Truth. This is gross negligence. The public LLMs do not go out and perform real research. They are not a database of facts. They are probabilistic generators. They literally make up everything. But people are lazy in general and far more lazy epistemologically. We've already seen a court case with made up (LLM generated) case citations. We're going to see this in research, in financial reporting (to an extent. That's already so over regulated that I think it will be slow) and without a doubt in policy making. And it's a really, really obvious error to the extent that the AI companies have disclaimers everywhere saying "don't use this as a research tool."

Oh, well.

I listed a bunch of "anyone can do this" examples for you. Now, if you're technically inclined and have the patient to write code, follow tutorials, and build real systems - LLMs are fucking incredible. I absolutely believe we will see, in the next 5 years, a company of no more than 10 - 15 people be worth $1 bn with the revenue and cashflow to back it up. 10x engineers are already using code trained LLMs to replace junior engineers and build full systems in a matter of days. Technically inclined researchers are building hybrid RAG and CoT systems with timeseries graph databases to create overnight ontologies, yielding something like an expert reasoning system that can still be interrogated. Anything that's dressed up number crunching (SEO optimization, marketing reporting) that used to require teams of many and hundreds of hours can already be effectively replaced outside of corner cases.

I'm still profoundly unconvinced of the the AGI/ASI argument and robot overlords is just SciFi. I am beginning to believe more and more in the hypothesis that we will see 30% unemployment for some period of time while we hit an LLM productivity inflection point. I don't know what the way out would be, but I have faith there will be one. Also, this isn't going to be bottom up unemployment. White collar professionals are going to be hit just as bad.

I have used it with some success to translate my pseudo code in one language to another that I'm mostly unfamiliar with. It isn't perfect but for this purpose it's usually superior to stackoverflow because it will produce something specific to my problem, even if it doesn't fully work. For writing regular code it's not very useful as anything more than autocomplete and sometimes checking for syntactic errors.

I've also used AI picture generation for some presentations but this isn't really a form of productivity increase and is mostly because I think it's fun.

I've tried using it for text generation but I've found it to be lacking. Its kind of similar to trying to hand something off to an Indian consultant, you need spend so much time specifying what you want that you lose time compared to just doing it yourself.

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