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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • It used to be that women couldn’t open their own bank accounts. Depending on how far back you go, they couldn’t even own property. In this context, women really needed to get married if they wanted to do anything. For this and many other reasons, the bar was lower, men could get married with less effort. Nowadays women can do anything and the only reason for them to want a man is if they want to, so you actually have to put in effort now.

    Also, gender roles are changing and there’s no clarity as to what being a man is supposed to mean in 2025. If it’s not protecting and providing, if it’s not dying in war, then the purpose of men is undefined as of now, and there’s a tendency to want to return to the older gender roles.

    And late capitalism is stressful, and men aren’t going to college as much these days. There’s lots of reasons but this is what i can remember in five minutes

    Further listening material


  • I have a passing familiarity with the politics of a couple countries, and they all fit this pattern: their constitutions say nothing of a two-party system, they don’t even say anything about parties at all. People just choose to create political parties, and then those parties coalesce into two major parties.

    The reason that this happens is because people, from voters to every level of politician, look at the rules of the game and make tactical decisions; their tactical decisions cause a two-party system to emerge.

    The USA is a really extreme case of this; in Europe there are more parties, and they even very occasionally come to power. Current french president Macron broke a decades-long streak of two-party governance in his country.

    Further viewing material:

    What is tactical voting

    Minority Rule: First Past the Post Voting

    The Alternative Vote Explained

    My takeaway from this is that there are things that can be done to improve the voting system, as suggested in these videos; but i don’t even like representative democracy at all, i think there’s better solutions in direct democracy (referendums and such). Representative democracy was designed to put elites in charge, voting was initially reserved for land-owning nobility. Extending voting rights to more people doesn’t change what the system is designed to do.



  • I feel like AI companies have been scraping Reddit for their datasets already since the beginning and without permission. In fact, unless there’s been a regulation change that i’m not aware of, i’m not sure why they would have Reddit “sign away” the data when they can just scrape it.

    Also dubious if the current form of AI has a future. They seem like they should revolutionize every sector when you look at their capacities, but in practice their applications might be more limited than we thought?

    Anyway, if Reddit does go public i will be deleting my account within the hour. The only reason i haven’t yet is that i’ve been a moderator of the same subreddit for eight years and it’s the only thing that’s been consistent in my life in that time, i’m kind of attached. The reason i will is i didn’t sign up to create value for shareholders, i signed up to create value for a community.