Housed In

It’s crazy that between us we make in the neighborhood of half a million a year and we can’t find a house we actually want to live in. We can afford many, many things — but the problem with housing in the US is that it all fucking sucks.

Having money but being unable to spend it due to lack of good choices is a vastly better problem than the opposite, don’t get me wrong. But it’s absurd that you can throw vast amounts of money at something and still end up with the same crap construction, “open plan” bullshit and poor living conditions as someone who spends 1/10 of what we would.

Money doesn’t really buy you much we care about. Does housing actually work for anyone in this damn country?

Kate

Metafilter is filled with clowns, but in a piece the other day (sorry, lost the link; too lazy to look for it), I was attempting to figure out why so many of the the MeFi commenters hated Kate Wagner so much. And I do not completely have the answer but I think it’s related to the PMC lib ideation that corporations actually love them.

Insanely, the majority of them really do seem to believe this. I think it’s a protection from harm thing in an increasingly precarious world; if they sincerely believe a corporation (or many corporations) love them, then it helps them to feel protected, insulated, enveloped in a bubble of care. That it’s a complete fiction doesn’t play into it — the feeling is all that matters.

Thus, Kate with her cheeky satire and disdain for both PMC lib aspirational goods and for corporate propaganda and production makes her the sworn enemy. They must strike her down rhetorically to preserve their parasocial amity toward corporate entities who couldn’t care less if they live or die.

As I said to start, MeFi is filled with vapid clowns.

Datedness

Young women fall out of love with dating apps.

Young women have nearly unlimited options in the dating realm*. As a man who doesn’t have to also endure (as much) harassment as women experience, this seems like a magical wonderland — since even an average woman receives something like 200x as much interest as even an above-average man. For a man to receive as much interest as even a below-average woman, he has to be in the top 0.5% of men or so.

Even an extremely-attractive man (top 0.01%) typically does not even receive as much interest as an average woman. And this is why dating for men really fucking sucks.

But back to the topic at hand: women, with nearly unlimited options and vast power in the dating market, resent when they are at all treated like men and face any form of rejection. Additionally, at least 50% of women on dating apps use it as a form of validation and/or re-enacting past traumas rather than to actually, you know, date.

This comment also said it pretty well.

However, the reality is women – especially in the US – have been told for the last several decades that they’re all magical fairy tale sparkle princesses.

We’ve arrived at an imbalance where one group has wildly over-inflated estimation of self-worth and market value all clawing over a small percentage of the other group perceived to be top quality partners based on metrics that scarcely matter anymore while almost completely ignoring the remaining 98%.

College educated professional career women no longer reliant on the income of a male partner shouldn’t need to be chasing high income male partners; it’s some kind of darkly hilarious admission they still want security from someone else and are subconsciously still locked in a mind prison of centuries-old gender roles.

Exactly. Luckily, I already have an amazing partner. But if I did not, I’d definitely not even attempt to date an American woman. I’d be in Europe somewhere, where women’s mental health has not been so blasted to hell by social media and idiotic ideas.

As that comment noted, a majority of women are competing over maybe ~5% of men. And this works about as well as you’d expect. In this case, women deserve their unhappiness and resentment. They’ve earned it.

*And I am told this does not give them any power at all, no sir. Of course, this is a lie.

Trade

I think I underestimated the extent that RTO was just a sneaky lonely extrovert bailout plan. It’s not only that, of course, but it has been an unfortunately large part of the RTO push.

As I’ve said plenty of times, I will never work in an office again. I’ll return to daytrading before I’d do that. There’s nothing as destructive to productivity as in-office “work” — except perhaps being eaten by hyenas, etc.