Another way to put this is: all your relations are belong to HR https://t.co/aV0W2xdoqN

— Geoff Shullenberger (@daily_barbarian) June 20, 2020

I’ve been goofing on it a lot lately, but I have been seriously pondering the desire of many “progressives” to eliminate the idea of consent from those 18+ to attempt to understand it.

In prog circles, it’s starting to move towards the idea that women can only consent if they are 30+ or even older, and anything more than a two year age gap — no matter how old the relationship participants might be — is de facto rape. How does one go about understanding this? It’s senseless and frankly utterly insane from most perspectives, so I haven’t yet fully found the ideological lens that sharpens it for me into any sort of focus.

What Geoff is talking about, where everything is politicized, is part of it, but I don’t think that captures the entire panoply of reasons that progressives want to remove the ability of people to decide what is best in their own lives. The conservatives make too much of the nanny state plaint, but they are not entirely wrong about this and examining it from that perspective provides a few insights.

Another important component is the dominance of neoliberalism. If everyone can be herded away from any natural relationships developing, any actual connection, into algorithmically-approved predictable liaisons, then selling to these people and prognosticating their future actions becomes vastly easier. Apart from politicization, this is a large portion of it I think.

And another aspect that’s not insubstantial is that as women have gained more power, they have of course tended to be older, and thus they have a nice lever to eliminate dating market competition by making larger age gap relationships immoral or illegal.

I suspect in the future that any relationship with more than a three or four year age gap will be made outright illegal, and all relationships will go through some sort of “social review” where they are either approved or denied based on a variety of factors, sociological and educational.

This is the progressive “utopia” (really a dystopia). Now get in the pod and eat your bugs.

Not a big fan of Less Wrong, but yes to all of this.

And then you run across somebody who tries to tell you, not just that they can’t outguess the stock market, but that you’re not allowed to become good at it either. They claim that nobody is allowed to master the task at which they failed. Your uncle tripled his savings when he bet it all on GOOG, and this person tries to wave it off as luck. Isn’t that like somebody condescendingly explaining why juggling three balls is impossible, after you’ve seen with your own eyes that your uncle can juggle four?

I’ve literally had people tell me what I do in the stock market is “impossible.”

And I look in my bank account and it sure doesn’t seem impossible. And I tell them this. Then they tell me it’s “just luck” and I say, “Twenty plus years of luck seems pretty unlikely.”

People have a very hard time accepting that there is something that you can do easily which they cannot do at all. Which, fine, I will gladly take their money too.

Wireless is a trap.

Agreed. If you can go wired, do so. Wireless, no matter how good, has high latency, very high jitter, is prone to interference and is generally a worse experience.

My co-workers wonder why I never have any trouble with audio or video on my meetings online. It’s because I have a 10gb wired network at home and only use wireless rarely. Wired is still and always will be superior to wireless.