The first ten on today’s playlist:

Honestly, it’s probably the phones. The most plausible explanation for teenage unhappiness.

Yep. It’s mostly the confluence of phones, social media and the conconmittant social isolation and having a parasocial relationship with your own friends. Denying this is just admitting that you were wish it were different, not that it is different.

All of this works in concert, which to many people means it isn’t happening.

Too many women’s advice to men: Date who you’re not attracted to, because it benefits me.

Women’s reaction to being told the same: You’re a horrible misogynist sexist for suggesting I date anyone I’m not attracted to! How dare you!

Makes no damn sense.

How to develop attraction to post-menopausal women?

The advice mostly isn’t bad, but it is funny many women giving advice to a guy to be attracted to people he’s not attracted to, but woe fucking betide you if you suggest a woman date someone she isn’t attracted to. We’ve seen that enough, haven’t we?

But dating is all about hypocrisy and deception, so….fits.

My advice is date who the fuck you want as long as they are above the age of majority. Ignore everything else. Ain’t nobody like that, though. Which is how you know it’s right.

Waking up and reading that Yevgeny Prigozhin migrated to a 'secure' device after a breach, in order to OPSEC y0self komrade, well that tickled me like mad

The device in question. Oh just a throwback to a simpler time pic.twitter.com/uEfrVeYF7B

— Daniel Cuthbert (@dcuthbert) March 23, 2023

That’s the Psion 5! I had one of those and loved it. Having a real keyboard is so much better than touchscreen. Vastly better. I can’t believe we’ve completely abandoned those for touch bullshit.

I told y’all MBA types would start demanding a return to the office despite it being demonstrably very much less productive.

This was just inevitable. If MBA types actually cared about productivity, they would’ve behaved much differently even before work from home.

Marisa Tomei has the best personality. Sure, she’s beautiful — but many Hollywood women are. But it’s her personality that really makes her shine, back then….

And more recently.

Interesting how she’s mellowed but is still just as sunny as she always was. Such a wonderful laugh. I like that Don Rickles says to her, “You have the happiest face I have ever met.” That’s a great compliment.

The first ten on today’s playlist:

I’m an American liberal, and I just surrendered on behalf of Zimbabwe to an inebriated chipmunk. How you like that, Zimbabwe, being controlled by an inebriated chipmunk? Bet you don’t like that much, huh?

Do these get hard at some point?

I should play in other languages.

Doing this always makes people scream at me for being an out of touch elitist, but: the basket of {median house, new car, 2 kids to college} is more affordable today (51.5%) relative to median family income than it was in 1953 (52.3%) https://t.co/z6E41TWE5N pic.twitter.com/TzATNFUgGG

— Quantian (@quantian1) March 22, 2023

This is utter crap. It’s just complete dipshittery. Smart people think they can lie with impunity because they don’t usually encounter anyone more intelligent than they are.

Well, I am smarter than every single one of them and have read wayyyyyyyyyyyy more — which is lucky for all of you. Words have meanings, motherfuckers, and I know them all. To wit, lie number one:

The drawback to using family income measures is that they disregard persons living in nonfamily households, who tend to be disproportionately young or old.

Conversely, in some situations it is appropriate to exclude nonfamily households: for example, housing affordability. It is based on family income rather than household income, because nonfamily households are not typically buyers.

This clown is using “family” income rather than “household” income so that he can deliberately exclude those most affected by how much more expensive various life needs are now. That’s the first deception. The second bit of hokum is that the female labor participation rate roughly doubled since 1953, meaning the already-duplicitous “family income” is quite a different thing compositionally since that time. In other words, it takes more people earning more money to buy not even the same things available in 1953.

One of my points was covered more eloquently by someone else in another thread, so I will just stick that on down there at the bottom. But another very important factor this omits is health care costs. Toss that in and the calculus changes enormously. Of course, that’s exactly why it was left out.

Another issue is “Average college tuition rate.” Many colleges were completely free in 1953 so the average cost here is utterly meaningless. In most states, for a state school, your tuition would’ve been $0.

The US was also in recession in 1953. That probably also changes things a bit, but that’s incidental.

If what clown Quantian claims is in fact true, this would also not be true: “Millennials only hold 3% of total US wealth, and that’s a shockingly small sliver of what baby boomers had at their age.”

Here’s what I mentioned I’d put at the bottom — hedonic adjustments. This really distorts what is actually affordable.

Thread (1/16). How is that our economic statistics suggest workers have been making slow but steady progress in recent decades, while popular perception is that their family finances are coming under increasingly untenable pressure? I've been working on this, here's my answer:

— Oren Cass (@oren_cass) February 20, 2020

What puzzles me about doofballs like Quantian and his sophistry is attempting to figure out what they are trying to prove here? Do they just want to have us believe that Millennials and Gen Z are inherently lazy, and that’s why they are not buying houses nor building real wealth? What? I mean, they obviously have it much worse. An old girlfriend’s dad had his own apartment working part-time at a grocery store in the early 1960s, for fuck’s sake. That is completely impossible anywhere now.

Quantian is a liar. Reality tells a different story.

DPReview.com to close on April 10 after 25 years of operation.

The only good camera and related gear review site on the internet closing. No real surprise, after Amazon bought them. Companies in general hate unbiased review sites. Most are now gone — this was one of the last ones standing. Its disappearance be a terrible loss to the photography community.

There are entirely too many so-called liberals attempting to surrender on behalf of Ukraine. What the hell is up with them? If they are so invested in that outcome, they should go over there and fight on the Russian side.

I’m sure Wagner would appreciate having some more bodies to spam across the lines in a human wave attack.

seen too many innocent, simple people go down after ordering pizza when they’re desperate for pizza in places where no one actually has fresh pizza ingredients, or is even 110% sure what a pizza looks like

— Faine Greenwood (@faineg) March 21, 2023

Indeed. I ordered a pizza in China once. Once. That was a large fucking mistake. I’m not sure what I got, but that was not a pizza, had nothing to do with pizza, was made by not a single person who’d ever even seen or even read about a pizza — and it tasted like licking the bottom of a dumpster.

That was sometime in 2005. Matters might’ve improved since then. At least it was cheap, though.