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?

Her icons are still better-designed and more appealing than anything we have now. And that’s just such a great photo of her.

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.

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.

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.

I realized today that a lot of fields are mostly about saving people from their bad ideas. My field — IT — certainly is. I spend more of my time doing this than any other single activity.

From what I’ve heard this is also true of law, insurance, engineering, and accounting. And I am sure many others. Humans are very weird.

We’ll Miss You: Pioneering instant messaging program ICQ is finally shutting down after nearly 30 years.

ICQ is still better than any similar program that has been created since. That’s because it centered the user rather than centering corporate needs or Foucaldian control mechanisms. And that makes all the difference.

What is the mindset of people who get repeatedly scammed?

The mindset is called “huge dumbass.” No other explanation is required.

Most people with good social skills don’t realize that those are learned — they just don’t understand that they acquired them early, through natural interactions with peers, and in fact they were not (mostly) born that way.

Those like me who had few natural interactions with peers, who were shunned and hated, but who later learned to have high-level social capabilities know 100% that those skills are learned. Because we did it the fucking hard way when we were much older and when rejection stings that much more intensely. And it was worth doing but damn it was difficult.

The privilege of the properly-socialized is that they don’t understand they have privilege at all; try being raised by wolves in a social hellscape and see how you like it. (Obligatory “You wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where I was raised.”)

The first ten on today’s playlist:

These days if I were in the forest and had to choose between a man, woman and a bear, I’d also choose the bear. So I get it.

Weighing in on “Man or Bear.”

Good article. I wanted to highlight, though, something that I think a lot of women don’t realize: men are also in danger around unknown men, though not (usually) in the sexual realm, unless in prison. Dealing with unverified men is extremely perilous for us as well. We just do stuff anyway. Is higher risk tolerance nurture or nature? I don’t know but it’s certain men in our society do have that.

For instance, my paratrooper buddies and I went to a neighborhood in Cairo we were specifically told not to enter because we were told we should not go there. (And the advice was correct! We left at a full sprint with some dudes with knives chasing us. Lord, paratrooper shit. How am I even alive.) Won’t see many women partaking of that kind of insanity, though.

I appreciate she does not paint all men as demons as so many women and as nearly all strains of modern feminism do. That is much appreciated and it really elevates my opinion of her ideas and experiences.

Why doesn’t children’s suffering make me sad, but I can’t even think about animals suffering?

Because you’re socially retarded, like many people are now who act and behave the same. It’s a symptom of a diseased society. Don’t get me wrong — I don’t think animals should suffer either. But I do see people say shit all the time like, “I’m fine with humans getting slaughtered left and right in this film, but if a dog gets hurt I can’t watch it!”

And you just know they’d be that way about real life, too. A sick society produces sick people.

Are commercial “third places” a dying breed?

They are. I remember when Starbucks used to have chairs and even comfy couches in the 1990s. Now they are concrete brutalist nightmares that obviously want no one to spend time there. The entire design motif is based on getting you to flee as hastily as possible.

Malls now complain and kick you out if you “loiter,” especially if you are under 18 (though I have been kicked out of a mall for sitting down when I was well over 18 and had a valid movie ticket). I remember when the whole fucking point of malls was to loiter and hang out. What the hell are we even doing here?

And a lot of PMC libs still like to believe corporations love them. It is so absurd to behold. I also was going to go on another rant about how Haidt is right about his thesis and how the above is related, but I’ll save that for another post (also, anyone who thinks Haidt is wrong is an enormous dumbass, but that is obvious).

Indeed, this is how most people seem to operate.