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The Arc of History – politicalbetting.com

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  • StillWatersStillWaters Posts: 6,763

    Leon said:

    My advice for 20 year old “socially akwards” is to focus on your career, and some suitably outdoorsy hobbies, and return to the “market” at 30.

    The market winnows pretty quickly.

    That's good advice. My advice for socially awkward 20 year olds (and I was one as well, in a way), is to listen more than talk, and be nice. Don't lie to impress, as they'll discover the truth soon enough.

    And whatever you do, do not follow *any* of the advice in "Millions of Women are Waiting to Meet You"
    My memory is vague, but doesn’t the author of that book end up having quite a lot of sex with a large number of women? ie in the hundreds, albeit not millions?

    Might all be lies of course - probably is - but if true it suggests his advice is not all bad
    Doesn't he also ends up divorced after a short marriage to a much younger woman, with two daughters who don't live with him (and one lives on the other side of the world?) Doesn't he end up spending much of his time on the Internet, trying to convince strangers that his globe-trotting life is anything more than an empty shell?

    Didn't he also get tried (and acquitted) for rape?

    No thanks.
    That’s a little nasty of you.

  • turbotubbsturbotubbs Posts: 14,878
    Andy_JS said:

    Visegrád 24
    @visegrad24
    ·
    2h
    BREAKING:

    Swedish authorities report that the gas leak from the Nord Stream 2 hole in the Swedish Economic Zone is increasing in strength.

    It seems as if the Russians are pumping gas into the pipeline.

    As long as there is gas, it won’t be possible to get close to investigate.

    Do gas leaks cause similar problems to oil leaks?
    Shouldn’t think so. Poorly soluble in water, will rise to the surface rapidly (see the pictures). Might be some localised oxygen depletion in the water (competition), but limited I’d expect.
  • Andy_JS said:

    At least we don't live in Burkina Faso where they seem to be having a coup every 5 minutes.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-63111763

    Interesting that a lot of Russian flags were flying on the TV report they did on Al Jazeera yesterday.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,248

    John W. Rich (Fake Tech Exec)
    @Cokedupoptions
    ·
    31m
    Elon Musk weighing in on Russia/Ukraine since he is an expert in failed takeover attempts

    It's quite depressing that a really really smart guy, trying to think of a way of avoiding nuclear apocalypse, is being harangued, mocked and slandered on Twitter. I don't feel sorry for him, I feel sorry for US

    This is deadly serious now. Yet people are flippant. A lot of the people who doubt there is a serious risk of nuclear war seem to have that notion "because nuclear war is unthinkably bad, therefore it won't happen, also Putin is not mad"

    Er.....
  • turbotubbsturbotubbs Posts: 14,878
    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Leon said:

    kyf_100 said:

    darkage said:



    You could look at it a different way.
    Incel (involuntarily celibate) is a subset of 'men who are just celibate'.
    If dealing with women becomes too difficult and risky, then they could just decide to stop bothering.
    No one is forcing men to have sex and go in to relationships with women.
    Particularly now that you have pornography, virtual reality etc.
    Perhaps it will get to the point where men adopt children, etc, in the way that single women sometimes give birth by IVF etc. Would this be such a bad thing?
    I am not saying that this is a healthy state of affairs, but it could be where the current phase of the 'sexual revolution' is leading to.

    I'm inclined towards Houellebecq's answer, that it is "the law of market forces".

    The dating market is the most capitalistic and selfish market there is - nobody wants to redistribute wealth in this market. There are a variety of things that make a person attractive - looks, physique, wealth, intelligence, sense of humour, style, youth etc. But each and every one of undeniably has a "sexual market value" based on these factors.

    Now enter globalisation.

    Up until about 2008, you largely met people through your social networks or your immediate surroundings. Social media didn't exist... you have to remember Facebook was limited to universities only until 2006 and the other stuff, instagram, tiktok, tinder, blah, didn't exist at all. So you'd go to a bar, meet through a college society, the young conservatives, a friend of the family, work colleague etc.

    That all changed once our lives went online.

    Consider an absolute stunner of a 21 year old girl. She's got model good looks and every man who meets her wants her. In 2005, she probably would have met people through uni, or at a bar, at her place of work, etc. Take out the oldies, the uglies the fatties etc - and she's probably got a dating pool of 1000 eligible bachelors in her town or wider social network to choose from.

    Fast forward to 2022. All a beautiful 21 year old has to do is have access to an iphone and instagram and just by posting a few bikini shots, she can have 10,000 followers and premier league footballers in her DMs, if she's pretty enough.

    Her sexual market value hasn't changed, but her access to an infinitely larger global sexual marketplace has.

    This is very good for the attractive people of this world, but very bad for the unattractive ones. The attractive people have vastly more options at their disposal. The unattractive ones - well, are still unattractive, so many, many, many more rejections. It doesn't matter how many instagram selfies they post, they still get no interest.

    We know that this is true of Tinder, if Tinder was a country it would have one of the highest gini coefficients in the world.

    https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-guys-unless-you-are-really-hot-you-are-probably-better-off-not-wasting-your-2ddf370a6e9a

    What all this means for society is, unfortunately, exactly what you'd get in any society where the resources are so unevenly distributed. You have an aristocracy with high sexual market value (through beauty, money, status etc) hoarding all the wealth, with an impoverished peasantry slowly starving to death.
    All of which kind of ignores the fact that many men and women are attracted to each other for reasons other than their looks. Yes, in a nightclub or bar obviously the first thing that catches the eye is looks but it takes about 5 seconds actually talking with someone to realise that, whatever their superficial attractiveness, you sure as hell wouldn't want more than the briefest of flirtations.

    This simple truth is proved by the fact that, in spite of the fact that 99% of us - whether male or female - are not 'stunners', the vast majority of us end up in romantic relationships that thankfully outlive the initial superficial attraction.
    And again you totally miss the point. I’m not surprised you never got laid for years if you’re this obtuse

    Internet dating. Dating apps

    They make everything much more instant and visual. So the less good looking guys don’t even have a chance to pull. This is a real phenomenon and it is unquestionably bad for society. See all the incel shooters in the USA

    And guess what, unless they are sad sacks like you, the vast majority of people do not use dating apps to get partners. They don't have to because they are able to actually interact with the opposite sex face to face rather than hiding behind a phone.
    It is you who completely miss the point. You are the incel.
    Vast majority is way wrong, the interweb thinks 40% of relationships start online.
    Both my lads met their girlfriends that way, both nice lads but hardly top 10% looks wise.

    It’s how everyone meets. Probably a majority of under 40s

    It’s how I met my last 38 girlfriends. That’s not an exaggeration

    It’s how you find someone who REALLY suits you. It makes total sense. It widens your choice by orders of magnitude
    ...last 38...

    ...someone who REALLY suits you...

    Hmm...
    It surely depends what you are looking for. Someone might suit you for a few nights, or a few weeks - and this more transient need should be mutual

    Realising this was a breakthrough moment for me. ie Not every woman had to be potentially The One, and maybe the girl isn't looking for The One either!

    Instead you get an affable companion, some agreeable sex, no one falls in love, then you move on. It is pleasant, and the internet enables you to do this because you can find partners seeking the same
    Sounds like a model approach for someone with a limited attention span and frequent boredom. Others prefer the in depth romance of knowing a partner for decades.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,248

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Leon said:

    kyf_100 said:

    darkage said:



    You could look at it a different way.
    Incel (involuntarily celibate) is a subset of 'men who are just celibate'.
    If dealing with women becomes too difficult and risky, then they could just decide to stop bothering.
    No one is forcing men to have sex and go in to relationships with women.
    Particularly now that you have pornography, virtual reality etc.
    Perhaps it will get to the point where men adopt children, etc, in the way that single women sometimes give birth by IVF etc. Would this be such a bad thing?
    I am not saying that this is a healthy state of affairs, but it could be where the current phase of the 'sexual revolution' is leading to.

    I'm inclined towards Houellebecq's answer, that it is "the law of market forces".

    The dating market is the most capitalistic and selfish market there is - nobody wants to redistribute wealth in this market. There are a variety of things that make a person attractive - looks, physique, wealth, intelligence, sense of humour, style, youth etc. But each and every one of undeniably has a "sexual market value" based on these factors.

    Now enter globalisation.

    Up until about 2008, you largely met people through your social networks or your immediate surroundings. Social media didn't exist... you have to remember Facebook was limited to universities only until 2006 and the other stuff, instagram, tiktok, tinder, blah, didn't exist at all. So you'd go to a bar, meet through a college society, the young conservatives, a friend of the family, work colleague etc.

    That all changed once our lives went online.

    Consider an absolute stunner of a 21 year old girl. She's got model good looks and every man who meets her wants her. In 2005, she probably would have met people through uni, or at a bar, at her place of work, etc. Take out the oldies, the uglies the fatties etc - and she's probably got a dating pool of 1000 eligible bachelors in her town or wider social network to choose from.

    Fast forward to 2022. All a beautiful 21 year old has to do is have access to an iphone and instagram and just by posting a few bikini shots, she can have 10,000 followers and premier league footballers in her DMs, if she's pretty enough.

    Her sexual market value hasn't changed, but her access to an infinitely larger global sexual marketplace has.

    This is very good for the attractive people of this world, but very bad for the unattractive ones. The attractive people have vastly more options at their disposal. The unattractive ones - well, are still unattractive, so many, many, many more rejections. It doesn't matter how many instagram selfies they post, they still get no interest.

    We know that this is true of Tinder, if Tinder was a country it would have one of the highest gini coefficients in the world.

    https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-guys-unless-you-are-really-hot-you-are-probably-better-off-not-wasting-your-2ddf370a6e9a

    What all this means for society is, unfortunately, exactly what you'd get in any society where the resources are so unevenly distributed. You have an aristocracy with high sexual market value (through beauty, money, status etc) hoarding all the wealth, with an impoverished peasantry slowly starving to death.
    All of which kind of ignores the fact that many men and women are attracted to each other for reasons other than their looks. Yes, in a nightclub or bar obviously the first thing that catches the eye is looks but it takes about 5 seconds actually talking with someone to realise that, whatever their superficial attractiveness, you sure as hell wouldn't want more than the briefest of flirtations.

    This simple truth is proved by the fact that, in spite of the fact that 99% of us - whether male or female - are not 'stunners', the vast majority of us end up in romantic relationships that thankfully outlive the initial superficial attraction.
    And again you totally miss the point. I’m not surprised you never got laid for years if you’re this obtuse

    Internet dating. Dating apps

    They make everything much more instant and visual. So the less good looking guys don’t even have a chance to pull. This is a real phenomenon and it is unquestionably bad for society. See all the incel shooters in the USA

    And guess what, unless they are sad sacks like you, the vast majority of people do not use dating apps to get partners. They don't have to because they are able to actually interact with the opposite sex face to face rather than hiding behind a phone.
    It is you who completely miss the point. You are the incel.
    Vast majority is way wrong, the interweb thinks 40% of relationships start online.
    Both my lads met their girlfriends that way, both nice lads but hardly top 10% looks wise.

    It’s how everyone meets. Probably a majority of under 40s

    It’s how I met my last 38 girlfriends. That’s not an exaggeration

    It’s how you find someone who REALLY suits you. It makes total sense. It widens your choice by orders of magnitude
    ...last 38...

    ...someone who REALLY suits you...

    Hmm...
    It surely depends what you are looking for. Someone might suit you for a few nights, or a few weeks - and this more transient need should be mutual

    Realising this was a breakthrough moment for me. ie Not every woman had to be potentially The One, and maybe the girl isn't looking for The One either!

    Instead you get an affable companion, some agreeable sex, no one falls in love, then you move on. It is pleasant, and the internet enables you to do this because you can find partners seeking the same
    Sounds like a model approach for someone with a limited attention span and frequent boredom. Others prefer the in depth romance of knowing a partner for decades.
    Of course. Each to their own. I like to mix it up a bit. Long relationships, then periods of frivolity in between
  • Jim_MillerJim_Miller Posts: 2,396
    Let's see, here are two main subjects being discussed here today, the one introduced by CycleFree, and what to do about Putin. Since the latter is far easier (for a man, anyway), I'll start with that:

    A just outcome for Putin would have him being arrested promptly by Russian police, given a speedy trial -- and then hanged for treason. (And then his many accomplices should face the legal consequences for what they have done.)

    Nonetheless, I would not object if we, with the help of other Russians, were able to end this war by persuading him to go into exile, to Cuba, for example. In fact, since the Cubans are now asking for help to recover from Hurricane Ivan, I wouldn't even object to giving them a bribe, disguised of course, to take him.
  • rcs1000 said:

    Andy_JS said:

    Visegrád 24
    @visegrad24
    ·
    2h
    BREAKING:

    Swedish authorities report that the gas leak from the Nord Stream 2 hole in the Swedish Economic Zone is increasing in strength.

    It seems as if the Russians are pumping gas into the pipeline.

    As long as there is gas, it won’t be possible to get close to investigate.

    Do gas leaks cause similar problems to oil leaks?
    No

    Because gas is lighter than water, it will travel to the surface and dissipate.

    Rubbish for global warming, but doesn't fuck up the ocean.
    Different if it is flowing from a well as it often has lots of other nasty contaminants with it as well as some heavier hydrocarbons. But I assume what they are pumping through the pipeline has already been processed so will have all of that stuff removed.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,248

    Leon said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    @Richard_Tyndall



    You’re simply wrong

    My understanding of dating apps (not that I have ever used one, I've been in a monogamous relationship for almost 30 years!) is that they are a real variety and many of the more successful ones like eHarmony are focused on personality matches not looks. Isn't tinder more about hooking up for casual sex than meeting your life partner? By definition if most relationships start via dating apps then most of those who use them successfully are probably a bit minging.
    This is beyond clueless

    I may know nothing about dating but I can add up. It can't be simultaneously true that adding apps are both preventing most people from finding a partner and helping most people find a partner.
    They are increasing inequality. In a global sexual marketplace, with millions of participants, everyone is competing for the top 20% or so's attention. In a much smaller marketplace, everyone more or less finds their place - because eventually you run out of viable candidates.

    With tinder, you can theoretically keep swiping forever until you meet your perfect match, the right match is only ever another swipe away. So people keep swiping.

    Furthermore, for attractive people, easy access to unlimited matches disincentivises them settling down in the first place. So it may well be the case that the top 20% of people are having far more frequent casual sex, while the bottom 80% or so is hardly getting laid at all.

    The raw data from the dating apps backs this up, as discussed here - https://archive.ph/JqVOC

    The findings from Tinder, Hinge and OkCupid are summarised as thus:

    "The great majority of women are only willing to communicate romantically with a small minority of men while most men are willing to communicate romantically with most women... It seems hard to avoid a basic conclusion: that the majority of women find the majority of men unattractive and not worth engaging with romantically, while the reverse is not true. Stated in another way, it seems that men collectively create a “dating economy” for women with relatively low inequality, while women collectively create a “dating economy” for men with very high inequality.

    In terms of inequalities between attractive people (by times swiped) vs unattractive people, the gini coefficient for women is fairly average (men will swipe on most things, including average women) but the gini coefficient for men is equivalent to the 8th most unequal country in the world (women will only swipe on the very most attractive men).

    The great thing about stats like those provided by the above article is they cut out all the *personal experience* of what it was like "in my day" or "for my lad, who's average looking" etc, and looks at the raw data of hundreds of thousands of users and millions of swipes.

    And the data doesn't lie, here. The dating game is harder than it has ever been (for men at least) and the brutal truth is most men aren't getting sex, because most women simply don't find them attractive.

    The study OKCupid publised using their own stats sets this out in absolutely brutal terms - women find very few men attractive, and rate almost all men as below average in attractiveness:

    https://archive.ph/LDVFm
    Don't you go blinding PBers with actual data. We have @Richard_Tyndall here, who once had fumbling bad sex in the 1980s, to tell us what's what. And @Foxy is a doctor so he knows things about things
    Leon, to be brutally frank here, I have mostly been very successful in my relationships where you, by your own admission sadly, have not. Whatever your thoughts on dating and whatever your track record of hundreds of unfortunate one night stands, I would recommend my happy and stable relationship over the decades as a far better example to follow than the mutual masturbation sessions that have epitomised your love life for so many years.
    lol
  • GardenwalkerGardenwalker Posts: 20,812
    edited October 2022
    When has Kwasi brought the statement forward to?

    The commentariat are frankly funereal about the Truss premiership, I haven’t seen anything like it, but I still think she’ll struggle on for a wee bit.
  • turbotubbsturbotubbs Posts: 14,878
    Leon said:

    John W. Rich (Fake Tech Exec)
    @Cokedupoptions
    ·
    31m
    Elon Musk weighing in on Russia/Ukraine since he is an expert in failed takeover attempts

    It's quite depressing that a really really smart guy, trying to think of a way of avoiding nuclear apocalypse, is being harangued, mocked and slandered on Twitter. I don't feel sorry for him, I feel sorry for US

    This is deadly serious now. Yet people are flippant. A lot of the people who doubt there is a serious risk of nuclear war seem to have that notion "because nuclear war is unthinkably bad, therefore it won't happen, also Putin is not mad"

    Er.....
    Yes, but Twitter. It’s full of complete utter arses, and their sycophants. It’s even worse than pb.com.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,145
    edited October 2022
    rcs1000 said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Leon said:

    kyf_100 said:

    darkage said:



    You could look at it a different way.
    Incel (involuntarily celibate) is a subset of 'men who are just celibate'.
    If dealing with women becomes too difficult and risky, then they could just decide to stop bothering.
    No one is forcing men to have sex and go in to relationships with women.
    Particularly now that you have pornography, virtual reality etc.
    Perhaps it will get to the point where men adopt children, etc, in the way that single women sometimes give birth by IVF etc. Would this be such a bad thing?
    I am not saying that this is a healthy state of affairs, but it could be where the current phase of the 'sexual revolution' is leading to.

    I'm inclined towards Houellebecq's answer, that it is "the law of market forces".

    The dating market is the most capitalistic and selfish market there is - nobody wants to redistribute wealth in this market. There are a variety of things that make a person attractive - looks, physique, wealth, intelligence, sense of humour, style, youth etc. But each and every one of undeniably has a "sexual market value" based on these factors.

    Now enter globalisation.

    Up until about 2008, you largely met people through your social networks or your immediate surroundings. Social media didn't exist... you have to remember Facebook was limited to universities only until 2006 and the other stuff, instagram, tiktok, tinder, blah, didn't exist at all. So you'd go to a bar, meet through a college society, the young conservatives, a friend of the family, work colleague etc.

    That all changed once our lives went online.

    Consider an absolute stunner of a 21 year old girl. She's got model good looks and every man who meets her wants her. In 2005, she probably would have met people through uni, or at a bar, at her place of work, etc. Take out the oldies, the uglies the fatties etc - and she's probably got a dating pool of 1000 eligible bachelors in her town or wider social network to choose from.

    Fast forward to 2022. All a beautiful 21 year old has to do is have access to an iphone and instagram and just by posting a few bikini shots, she can have 10,000 followers and premier league footballers in her DMs, if she's pretty enough.

    Her sexual market value hasn't changed, but her access to an infinitely larger global sexual marketplace has.

    This is very good for the attractive people of this world, but very bad for the unattractive ones. The attractive people have vastly more options at their disposal. The unattractive ones - well, are still unattractive, so many, many, many more rejections. It doesn't matter how many instagram selfies they post, they still get no interest.

    We know that this is true of Tinder, if Tinder was a country it would have one of the highest gini coefficients in the world.

    https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-guys-unless-you-are-really-hot-you-are-probably-better-off-not-wasting-your-2ddf370a6e9a

    What all this means for society is, unfortunately, exactly what you'd get in any society where the resources are so unevenly distributed. You have an aristocracy with high sexual market value (through beauty, money, status etc) hoarding all the wealth, with an impoverished peasantry slowly starving to death.
    All of which kind of ignores the fact that many men and women are attracted to each other for reasons other than their looks. Yes, in a nightclub or bar obviously the first thing that catches the eye is looks but it takes about 5 seconds actually talking with someone to realise that, whatever their superficial attractiveness, you sure as hell wouldn't want more than the briefest of flirtations.

    This simple truth is proved by the fact that, in spite of the fact that 99% of us - whether male or female - are not 'stunners', the vast majority of us end up in romantic relationships that thankfully outlive the initial superficial attraction.
    And again you totally miss the point. I’m not surprised you never got laid for years if you’re this obtuse

    Internet dating. Dating apps

    They make everything much more instant and visual. So the less good looking guys don’t even have a chance to pull. This is a real phenomenon and it is unquestionably bad for society. See all the incel shooters in the USA

    And guess what, unless they are sad sacks like you, the vast majority of people do not use dating apps to get partners. They don't have to because they are able to actually interact with the opposite sex face to face rather than hiding behind a phone.
    It is you who completely miss the point. You are the incel.
    Vast majority is way wrong, the interweb thinks 40% of relationships start online.
    How many end on-line?
    I remember hearing about a colleague in another organization dumping his lady friend by email and this was thought very modern/unseemly. Must have been about 2000?
  • StillWatersStillWaters Posts: 6,763
    IshmaelZ said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    kle4 said:

    PeterM said:

    Leon said:

    An articulate and different position

    https://jacobin.com/2022/10/ukraine-russia-us-nuclear-war-putin/

    TLDR: “if Ukraine takes Crimea = nuclear war

    We need a ceasefire soon”

    not only that but a ceasefire would save many ukrainian lives too
    Hahaha, we're already right back at the 'People die while defending themselves, so they should stop' that we got at the start of the invasion.

    Tell it to Jeremy Corbyn, he'd be receptive.

    It's like no one has ever experienced any work of fiction or morality reminding us that, occasionally, things are worth fighting for. As the Header might suggest.
    Jacobin that @Leon quotes is a pretty hard left site, and like much of the hard left doesn't seem aware that Russia is no longer Communist.
    You could engage with the argument rather than pleading guilt by association

    I despise Putin, loathe this war, and I am delighted Ukraine is on the attack

    But we have to be realistic, because Russia is a great power with nukes. That’s just a fact

    Totally humiliating Russia will simply provoke the ultra-Nationalists. Even if Putin falls he’ll be replaced by someone WORSE, who might be happy to hook up with China

    Let them keep Crimea if Crimeans so desire
    I don't buy this "There are first and second class countries in the world. The first class countries are allowed to make decisions for themselves, but the second class ones have to ask permission of the nearest first class one."

    Ukraine is allowed to join NATO or the EU or whatever: Russia doesn't get a veto on the basis that they were once a great power.
    Except the members of NATO and the EU do get a veto on Ukraine joining, so you haven't really eliminated hierarchy.
    And Ukraine cannot continue the war without western arms and money, our money, so we also get a say. And while we want Putin rebuffed and diminished - or gone - we don’t want him replaced by someone even worse and we don’t want to die in a nuclear war. So we have our say
    We get an opinion. We don't get a veto. And if we were stupid enough to try I hope they would tell us to go fuck ourselves.
    And if Putin drops a modest nuke on Snake Island or Odessa, what do we do? Should we all die for Ukraine?
    No we should continue to fight for them - which is about the only chance we will have to live. Because if Putin sees he can drop nukes and no one does anything then we know he will not stop there.
    I rally cannot comprehend why people just don't get this. If dropping a nuke gets him what he wants, why wouldn't he do so again to get what hw wants? And why wouldn't every dictator want nukes and save all the money their conventional armies cost (which as Russia shows can be lacklustre)?

    Besides, I don't think he'll use a nuke. There's other, more deniable things he could do. Chemical weapons; disrupting our comms or gas supply. Hitting a Ukrainian nuclear power station. But he knows all of those have dangers, even if they are more deniable.
    He only has to drop one nuke, because if it works, he knows he can do whatever the fuck he likes without ever actually dropping another. Deterrence theory is both incredibly complex and brutally simple like that.

    And if he drops one, I would vote every time in a GE for the Let Vlad do what he wants up to but not including invading the UK (Britain actually, he is welcome to NI) party vs the Some things are more important than life itself lot.
    He wouldn't need to invade Britain - he'd invade other countries that he sees as being in his sphere of influence, and then just subvert our democracy to be more pro-Russia. And we'd just take it.


    Worse, other countries will see this 'nuke diplomacy' works, and do the same. That *will* end up in total nuclear war.
    How would he subvert our democracy? He wouldn't, because Russians in the House of Lords would be come unacceptable.

    And n oit won't. The more we all roll over and let him have his way the less his incentive to nuke anything. Why cause a mega airburst over Paris if you expect to own the place in 6 months time?
    And when he has all the continent why do you think he won’t come for London?
  • stodgestodge Posts: 12,741
    Andy_JS said:

    BBC breaking news — government to bring debt plan forward from November.

    No great surprise - seven weeks of uncertainty and speculation unlikely to be well received in the markets. Local Councils will also need to know how much (or little) they'll be getting next year.

    With inflation where it is, Councils are already prepared for a real time fall in funding but it's no surprise some in local Government finance are wondering if they are going to be the fall guys for Kwarteng's £43 billion.
  • IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830
    rcs1000 said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Cyclefree said:

    I am just dropping in. Is anyone discussing Iran? Or what it means to realise that universal human rights are not in fact universal? Or indeed the courage of women in such countries, courage few of us would be able to replicate?

    Or are we back to @Leon's views on sex and why young men are not getting enough of it? And that this is all women's fault for not wanting to be pawed by men they don't like? Again.

    Self-importance verging on Get professional help now, levels. Nobody is obliged by law to read your essays, you have been told a thousand times to self-edit or actually get edited to make them readable and you just won't listen, and yes we were talking about techniques for removing feminine underwear with one's teeth.

    Have a nice evening.
    Calm it down @IshmaelZ
    Sure, gonna drink Chilean Pinot Noir and watch Threads.
  • GardenwalkerGardenwalker Posts: 20,812
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Leon said:

    kyf_100 said:

    darkage said:



    You could look at it a different way.
    Incel (involuntarily celibate) is a subset of 'men who are just celibate'.
    If dealing with women becomes too difficult and risky, then they could just decide to stop bothering.
    No one is forcing men to have sex and go in to relationships with women.
    Particularly now that you have pornography, virtual reality etc.
    Perhaps it will get to the point where men adopt children, etc, in the way that single women sometimes give birth by IVF etc. Would this be such a bad thing?
    I am not saying that this is a healthy state of affairs, but it could be where the current phase of the 'sexual revolution' is leading to.

    I'm inclined towards Houellebecq's answer, that it is "the law of market forces".

    The dating market is the most capitalistic and selfish market there is - nobody wants to redistribute wealth in this market. There are a variety of things that make a person attractive - looks, physique, wealth, intelligence, sense of humour, style, youth etc. But each and every one of undeniably has a "sexual market value" based on these factors.

    Now enter globalisation.

    Up until about 2008, you largely met people through your social networks or your immediate surroundings. Social media didn't exist... you have to remember Facebook was limited to universities only until 2006 and the other stuff, instagram, tiktok, tinder, blah, didn't exist at all. So you'd go to a bar, meet through a college society, the young conservatives, a friend of the family, work colleague etc.

    That all changed once our lives went online.

    Consider an absolute stunner of a 21 year old girl. She's got model good looks and every man who meets her wants her. In 2005, she probably would have met people through uni, or at a bar, at her place of work, etc. Take out the oldies, the uglies the fatties etc - and she's probably got a dating pool of 1000 eligible bachelors in her town or wider social network to choose from.

    Fast forward to 2022. All a beautiful 21 year old has to do is have access to an iphone and instagram and just by posting a few bikini shots, she can have 10,000 followers and premier league footballers in her DMs, if she's pretty enough.

    Her sexual market value hasn't changed, but her access to an infinitely larger global sexual marketplace has.

    This is very good for the attractive people of this world, but very bad for the unattractive ones. The attractive people have vastly more options at their disposal. The unattractive ones - well, are still unattractive, so many, many, many more rejections. It doesn't matter how many instagram selfies they post, they still get no interest.

    We know that this is true of Tinder, if Tinder was a country it would have one of the highest gini coefficients in the world.

    https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-guys-unless-you-are-really-hot-you-are-probably-better-off-not-wasting-your-2ddf370a6e9a

    What all this means for society is, unfortunately, exactly what you'd get in any society where the resources are so unevenly distributed. You have an aristocracy with high sexual market value (through beauty, money, status etc) hoarding all the wealth, with an impoverished peasantry slowly starving to death.
    All of which kind of ignores the fact that many men and women are attracted to each other for reasons other than their looks. Yes, in a nightclub or bar obviously the first thing that catches the eye is looks but it takes about 5 seconds actually talking with someone to realise that, whatever their superficial attractiveness, you sure as hell wouldn't want more than the briefest of flirtations.

    This simple truth is proved by the fact that, in spite of the fact that 99% of us - whether male or female - are not 'stunners', the vast majority of us end up in romantic relationships that thankfully outlive the initial superficial attraction.
    And again you totally miss the point. I’m not surprised you never got laid for years if you’re this obtuse

    Internet dating. Dating apps

    They make everything much more instant and visual. So the less good looking guys don’t even have a chance to pull. This is a real phenomenon and it is unquestionably bad for society. See all the incel shooters in the USA

    And guess what, unless they are sad sacks like you, the vast majority of people do not use dating apps to get partners. They don't have to because they are able to actually interact with the opposite sex face to face rather than hiding behind a phone.
    It is you who completely miss the point. You are the incel.
    Vast majority is way wrong, the interweb thinks 40% of relationships start online.
    Both my lads met their girlfriends that way, both nice lads but hardly top 10% looks wise.

    It’s how everyone meets. Probably a majority of under 40s

    It’s how I met my last 38 girlfriends. That’s not an exaggeration

    It’s how you find someone who REALLY suits you. It makes total sense. It widens your choice by orders of magnitude
    ...last 38...

    ...someone who REALLY suits you...

    Hmm...
    It surely depends what you are looking for. Someone might suit you for a few nights, or a few weeks - and this more transient need should be mutual

    Realising this was a breakthrough moment for me. ie Not every woman had to be potentially The One, and maybe the girl isn't looking for The One either!

    Instead you get an affable companion, some agreeable sex, no one falls in love, then you move on. It is pleasant, and the internet enables you to do this because you can find partners seeking the same
    Sounds like a model approach for someone with a limited attention span and frequent boredom. Others prefer the in depth romance of knowing a partner for decades.
    Of course. Each to their own. I like to mix it up a bit. Long relationships, then periods of frivolity in between
    No offence, but having read this blog for about ten years, I don’t recall your having a “long relationship”.

    I’ve had common colds that last longer that your average “thing”.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,145
    IshmaelZ said:

    rcs1000 said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Cyclefree said:

    I am just dropping in. Is anyone discussing Iran? Or what it means to realise that universal human rights are not in fact universal? Or indeed the courage of women in such countries, courage few of us would be able to replicate?

    Or are we back to @Leon's views on sex and why young men are not getting enough of it? And that this is all women's fault for not wanting to be pawed by men they don't like? Again.

    Self-importance verging on Get professional help now, levels. Nobody is obliged by law to read your essays, you have been told a thousand times to self-edit or actually get edited to make them readable and you just won't listen, and yes we were talking about techniques for removing feminine underwear with one's teeth.

    Have a nice evening.
    Calm it down @IshmaelZ
    Sure, gonna drink Chilean Pinot Noir and watch Threads.
    Very Thatcher era.
  • EabhalEabhal Posts: 5,781
    Leon said:

    John W. Rich (Fake Tech Exec)
    @Cokedupoptions
    ·
    31m
    Elon Musk weighing in on Russia/Ukraine since he is an expert in failed takeover attempts

    It's quite depressing that a really really smart guy, trying to think of a way of avoiding nuclear apocalypse, is being harangued, mocked and slandered on Twitter. I don't feel sorry for him, I feel sorry for US

    This is deadly serious now. Yet people are flippant. A lot of the people who doubt there is a serious risk of nuclear war seem to have that notion "because nuclear war is unthinkably bad, therefore it won't happen, also Putin is not mad"

    Er.....
    It's all down to Zelensky, the elected leader of a sovereign country. His call - he has the mandate and the responsibility to his people.

    If it comes to the threat of nuclear weapons, he's the most powerful person on earth.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,248

    Leon said:

    John W. Rich (Fake Tech Exec)
    @Cokedupoptions
    ·
    31m
    Elon Musk weighing in on Russia/Ukraine since he is an expert in failed takeover attempts

    It's quite depressing that a really really smart guy, trying to think of a way of avoiding nuclear apocalypse, is being harangued, mocked and slandered on Twitter. I don't feel sorry for him, I feel sorry for US

    This is deadly serious now. Yet people are flippant. A lot of the people who doubt there is a serious risk of nuclear war seem to have that notion "because nuclear war is unthinkably bad, therefore it won't happen, also Putin is not mad"

    Er.....
    Yes, but Twitter. It’s full of complete utter arses, and their sycophants. It’s even worse than pb.com.
    It will be kind of fitting, and a suitable epitaph to our benighted age, if we all die in a nuclear holocaust because Prez Zelensky got in a Twitter spat with the Aspie guy who makes cars
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 61,574
    Driver said:

    Leon said:


    Leon said:

    kyf_100 said:

    darkage said:



    You could look at it a different way.
    Incel (involuntarily celibate) is a subset of 'men who are just celibate'.
    If dealing with women becomes too difficult and risky, then they could just decide to stop bothering.
    No one is forcing men to have sex and go in to relationships with women.
    Particularly now that you have pornography, virtual reality etc.
    Perhaps it will get to the point where men adopt children, etc, in the way that single women sometimes give birth by IVF etc. Would this be such a bad thing?
    I am not saying that this is a healthy state of affairs, but it could be where the current phase of the 'sexual revolution' is leading to.

    I'm inclined towards Houellebecq's answer, that it is "the law of market forces".

    The dating market is the most capitalistic and selfish market there is - nobody wants to redistribute wealth in this market. There are a variety of things that make a person attractive - looks, physique, wealth, intelligence, sense of humour, style, youth etc. But each and every one of undeniably has a "sexual market value" based on these factors.

    Now enter globalisation.

    Up until about 2008, you largely met people through your social networks or your immediate surroundings. Social media didn't exist... you have to remember Facebook was limited to universities only until 2006 and the other stuff, instagram, tiktok, tinder, blah, didn't exist at all. So you'd go to a bar, meet through a college society, the young conservatives, a friend of the family, work colleague etc.

    That all changed once our lives went online.

    Consider an absolute stunner of a 21 year old girl. She's got model good looks and every man who meets her wants her. In 2005, she probably would have met people through uni, or at a bar, at her place of work, etc. Take out the oldies, the uglies the fatties etc - and she's probably got a dating pool of 1000 eligible bachelors in her town or wider social network to choose from.

    Fast forward to 2022. All a beautiful 21 year old has to do is have access to an iphone and instagram and just by posting a few bikini shots, she can have 10,000 followers and premier league footballers in her DMs, if she's pretty enough.

    Her sexual market value hasn't changed, but her access to an infinitely larger global sexual marketplace has.

    This is very good for the attractive people of this world, but very bad for the unattractive ones. The attractive people have vastly more options at their disposal. The unattractive ones - well, are still unattractive, so many, many, many more rejections. It doesn't matter how many instagram selfies they post, they still get no interest.

    We know that this is true of Tinder, if Tinder was a country it would have one of the highest gini coefficients in the world.

    https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-guys-unless-you-are-really-hot-you-are-probably-better-off-not-wasting-your-2ddf370a6e9a

    What all this means for society is, unfortunately, exactly what you'd get in any society where the resources are so unevenly distributed. You have an aristocracy with high sexual market value (through beauty, money, status etc) hoarding all the wealth, with an impoverished peasantry slowly starving to death.
    All of which kind of ignores the fact that many men and women are attracted to each other for reasons other than their looks. Yes, in a nightclub or bar obviously the first thing that catches the eye is looks but it takes about 5 seconds actually talking with someone to realise that, whatever their superficial attractiveness, you sure as hell wouldn't want more than the briefest of flirtations.

    This simple truth is proved by the fact that, in spite of the fact that 99% of us - whether male or female - are not 'stunners', the vast majority of us end up in romantic relationships that thankfully outlive the initial superficial attraction.
    And again you totally miss the point. I’m not surprised you never got laid for years if you’re this obtuse

    Internet dating. Dating apps

    They make everything much more instant and visual. So the less good looking guys don’t even have a chance to pull. This is a real phenomenon and it is unquestionably bad for society. See all the incel shooters in the USA

    And guess what, unless they are sad sacks like you, the vast majority of people do not use dating apps to get partners. They don't have to because they are able to actually interact with the opposite sex face to face rather than hiding behind a phone.
    It is you who completely miss the point. You are the incel.
    But this is simply and probably wrong (you fat clueless twat etc etc)

    These days people meet via social media, very often dating apps. It’s absolutely standard
    I wonder if I was one of the earliest PBers to meet a partner through the Internet? I met a GF through a bulletin board (Mono, if anyone remembers that) in 1992. Pre-WWW.
    Mono was awesome at its peak. I never met a partner through it, but my sister did. (Genuinely true fact.)
    They really named a dating app after an infectious disease ?
  • solarflaresolarflare Posts: 3,623
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    John W. Rich (Fake Tech Exec)
    @Cokedupoptions
    ·
    31m
    Elon Musk weighing in on Russia/Ukraine since he is an expert in failed takeover attempts

    It's quite depressing that a really really smart guy, trying to think of a way of avoiding nuclear apocalypse, is being harangued, mocked and slandered on Twitter. I don't feel sorry for him, I feel sorry for US

    This is deadly serious now. Yet people are flippant. A lot of the people who doubt there is a serious risk of nuclear war seem to have that notion "because nuclear war is unthinkably bad, therefore it won't happen, also Putin is not mad"

    Er.....
    Yes, but Twitter. It’s full of complete utter arses, and their sycophants. It’s even worse than pb.com.
    It will be kind of fitting, and a suitable epitaph to our benighted age, if we all die in a nuclear holocaust because Prez Zelensky got in a Twitter spat with the Aspie guy who makes cars
    It'll be funnier when his robots accidentally go all Skynet on us.
  • GardenwalkerGardenwalker Posts: 20,812
    @aneil
    Panorama on BBC1 revealing one of great green scams of our time. The Drax pellet burning power station. And with our money. @BBCPanorama


    Another Tory grift by the smack of it.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,248

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Leon said:

    kyf_100 said:

    darkage said:



    You could look at it a different way.
    Incel (involuntarily celibate) is a subset of 'men who are just celibate'.
    If dealing with women becomes too difficult and risky, then they could just decide to stop bothering.
    No one is forcing men to have sex and go in to relationships with women.
    Particularly now that you have pornography, virtual reality etc.
    Perhaps it will get to the point where men adopt children, etc, in the way that single women sometimes give birth by IVF etc. Would this be such a bad thing?
    I am not saying that this is a healthy state of affairs, but it could be where the current phase of the 'sexual revolution' is leading to.

    I'm inclined towards Houellebecq's answer, that it is "the law of market forces".

    The dating market is the most capitalistic and selfish market there is - nobody wants to redistribute wealth in this market. There are a variety of things that make a person attractive - looks, physique, wealth, intelligence, sense of humour, style, youth etc. But each and every one of undeniably has a "sexual market value" based on these factors.

    Now enter globalisation.

    Up until about 2008, you largely met people through your social networks or your immediate surroundings. Social media didn't exist... you have to remember Facebook was limited to universities only until 2006 and the other stuff, instagram, tiktok, tinder, blah, didn't exist at all. So you'd go to a bar, meet through a college society, the young conservatives, a friend of the family, work colleague etc.

    That all changed once our lives went online.

    Consider an absolute stunner of a 21 year old girl. She's got model good looks and every man who meets her wants her. In 2005, she probably would have met people through uni, or at a bar, at her place of work, etc. Take out the oldies, the uglies the fatties etc - and she's probably got a dating pool of 1000 eligible bachelors in her town or wider social network to choose from.

    Fast forward to 2022. All a beautiful 21 year old has to do is have access to an iphone and instagram and just by posting a few bikini shots, she can have 10,000 followers and premier league footballers in her DMs, if she's pretty enough.

    Her sexual market value hasn't changed, but her access to an infinitely larger global sexual marketplace has.

    This is very good for the attractive people of this world, but very bad for the unattractive ones. The attractive people have vastly more options at their disposal. The unattractive ones - well, are still unattractive, so many, many, many more rejections. It doesn't matter how many instagram selfies they post, they still get no interest.

    We know that this is true of Tinder, if Tinder was a country it would have one of the highest gini coefficients in the world.

    https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-guys-unless-you-are-really-hot-you-are-probably-better-off-not-wasting-your-2ddf370a6e9a

    What all this means for society is, unfortunately, exactly what you'd get in any society where the resources are so unevenly distributed. You have an aristocracy with high sexual market value (through beauty, money, status etc) hoarding all the wealth, with an impoverished peasantry slowly starving to death.
    All of which kind of ignores the fact that many men and women are attracted to each other for reasons other than their looks. Yes, in a nightclub or bar obviously the first thing that catches the eye is looks but it takes about 5 seconds actually talking with someone to realise that, whatever their superficial attractiveness, you sure as hell wouldn't want more than the briefest of flirtations.

    This simple truth is proved by the fact that, in spite of the fact that 99% of us - whether male or female - are not 'stunners', the vast majority of us end up in romantic relationships that thankfully outlive the initial superficial attraction.
    And again you totally miss the point. I’m not surprised you never got laid for years if you’re this obtuse

    Internet dating. Dating apps

    They make everything much more instant and visual. So the less good looking guys don’t even have a chance to pull. This is a real phenomenon and it is unquestionably bad for society. See all the incel shooters in the USA

    And guess what, unless they are sad sacks like you, the vast majority of people do not use dating apps to get partners. They don't have to because they are able to actually interact with the opposite sex face to face rather than hiding behind a phone.
    It is you who completely miss the point. You are the incel.
    Vast majority is way wrong, the interweb thinks 40% of relationships start online.
    Both my lads met their girlfriends that way, both nice lads but hardly top 10% looks wise.

    It’s how everyone meets. Probably a majority of under 40s

    It’s how I met my last 38 girlfriends. That’s not an exaggeration

    It’s how you find someone who REALLY suits you. It makes total sense. It widens your choice by orders of magnitude
    ...last 38...

    ...someone who REALLY suits you...

    Hmm...
    It surely depends what you are looking for. Someone might suit you for a few nights, or a few weeks - and this more transient need should be mutual

    Realising this was a breakthrough moment for me. ie Not every woman had to be potentially The One, and maybe the girl isn't looking for The One either!

    Instead you get an affable companion, some agreeable sex, no one falls in love, then you move on. It is pleasant, and the internet enables you to do this because you can find partners seeking the same
    Sounds like a model approach for someone with a limited attention span and frequent boredom. Others prefer the in depth romance of knowing a partner for decades.
    Of course. Each to their own. I like to mix it up a bit. Long relationships, then periods of frivolity in between
    No offence, but having read this blog for about ten years, I don’t recall your having a “long relationship”.

    I’ve had common colds that last longer that your average “thing”.
    Er, what? In the last ten years on this site I met someone, fell in love, then got married to them (and we were very happy, and we had one argument). We lasted four years as a married couple. four brilliant years. We only divorced coz she is much younger and wants kids, and I've had mine and can't be doing with more babies, they are too much like Brexit

    The split broke my heart and made me nearly suicidal during Lockdown 3. I told you all about it on here

    I don't lie about this stuff, what's the point. PB can be very consoling if you are honest and ask for advice....
  • PeterMPeterM Posts: 302
    Eabhal said:

    Leon said:

    John W. Rich (Fake Tech Exec)
    @Cokedupoptions
    ·
    31m
    Elon Musk weighing in on Russia/Ukraine since he is an expert in failed takeover attempts

    It's quite depressing that a really really smart guy, trying to think of a way of avoiding nuclear apocalypse, is being harangued, mocked and slandered on Twitter. I don't feel sorry for him, I feel sorry for US

    This is deadly serious now. Yet people are flippant. A lot of the people who doubt there is a serious risk of nuclear war seem to have that notion "because nuclear war is unthinkably bad, therefore it won't happen, also Putin is not mad"

    Er.....
    It's all down to Zelensky, the elected leader of a sovereign country. His call - he has the mandate and the responsibility to his people.

    If it comes to the threat of nuclear weapons, he's the most powerful person on earth.
    not really...im sure if the threat of nuclear weapons becomes real Zelensky can be "leant on"
  • AlistairMAlistairM Posts: 2,004
    DavidL said:

    AlistairM said:

    There are reportedly multiple encirclements happening in Kherson right now. Waiting for confirmation.
    https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1577006669606707200

    What we are consistently seeing is mobile, well equipped and trained forces out manoeuvring static, poorly equipped and trained forces leaving them in a position where they can surrender, die or run away.

    It reminds me a bit of the Falklands war where professionally trained troops ran a much larger force of conscripts ragged and defeated them.

    How on earth did the Russians get this bad?
    Corruption driven by an oligarchy in place to appease a dictator.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,771
    Leon said:

    We have finally found a subject on which PB knows absolutely fuck all

    Dating

    We have found another subject on which @Leon is clueless: successful long-term relationships.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,145
    Nigelb said:

    Driver said:

    Leon said:


    Leon said:

    kyf_100 said:

    darkage said:



    You could look at it a different way.
    Incel (involuntarily celibate) is a subset of 'men who are just celibate'.
    If dealing with women becomes too difficult and risky, then they could just decide to stop bothering.
    No one is forcing men to have sex and go in to relationships with women.
    Particularly now that you have pornography, virtual reality etc.
    Perhaps it will get to the point where men adopt children, etc, in the way that single women sometimes give birth by IVF etc. Would this be such a bad thing?
    I am not saying that this is a healthy state of affairs, but it could be where the current phase of the 'sexual revolution' is leading to.

    I'm inclined towards Houellebecq's answer, that it is "the law of market forces".

    The dating market is the most capitalistic and selfish market there is - nobody wants to redistribute wealth in this market. There are a variety of things that make a person attractive - looks, physique, wealth, intelligence, sense of humour, style, youth etc. But each and every one of undeniably has a "sexual market value" based on these factors.

    Now enter globalisation.

    Up until about 2008, you largely met people through your social networks or your immediate surroundings. Social media didn't exist... you have to remember Facebook was limited to universities only until 2006 and the other stuff, instagram, tiktok, tinder, blah, didn't exist at all. So you'd go to a bar, meet through a college society, the young conservatives, a friend of the family, work colleague etc.

    That all changed once our lives went online.

    Consider an absolute stunner of a 21 year old girl. She's got model good looks and every man who meets her wants her. In 2005, she probably would have met people through uni, or at a bar, at her place of work, etc. Take out the oldies, the uglies the fatties etc - and she's probably got a dating pool of 1000 eligible bachelors in her town or wider social network to choose from.

    Fast forward to 2022. All a beautiful 21 year old has to do is have access to an iphone and instagram and just by posting a few bikini shots, she can have 10,000 followers and premier league footballers in her DMs, if she's pretty enough.

    Her sexual market value hasn't changed, but her access to an infinitely larger global sexual marketplace has.

    This is very good for the attractive people of this world, but very bad for the unattractive ones. The attractive people have vastly more options at their disposal. The unattractive ones - well, are still unattractive, so many, many, many more rejections. It doesn't matter how many instagram selfies they post, they still get no interest.

    We know that this is true of Tinder, if Tinder was a country it would have one of the highest gini coefficients in the world.

    https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-guys-unless-you-are-really-hot-you-are-probably-better-off-not-wasting-your-2ddf370a6e9a

    What all this means for society is, unfortunately, exactly what you'd get in any society where the resources are so unevenly distributed. You have an aristocracy with high sexual market value (through beauty, money, status etc) hoarding all the wealth, with an impoverished peasantry slowly starving to death.
    All of which kind of ignores the fact that many men and women are attracted to each other for reasons other than their looks. Yes, in a nightclub or bar obviously the first thing that catches the eye is looks but it takes about 5 seconds actually talking with someone to realise that, whatever their superficial attractiveness, you sure as hell wouldn't want more than the briefest of flirtations.

    This simple truth is proved by the fact that, in spite of the fact that 99% of us - whether male or female - are not 'stunners', the vast majority of us end up in romantic relationships that thankfully outlive the initial superficial attraction.
    And again you totally miss the point. I’m not surprised you never got laid for years if you’re this obtuse

    Internet dating. Dating apps

    They make everything much more instant and visual. So the less good looking guys don’t even have a chance to pull. This is a real phenomenon and it is unquestionably bad for society. See all the incel shooters in the USA

    And guess what, unless they are sad sacks like you, the vast majority of people do not use dating apps to get partners. They don't have to because they are able to actually interact with the opposite sex face to face rather than hiding behind a phone.
    It is you who completely miss the point. You are the incel.
    But this is simply and probably wrong (you fat clueless twat etc etc)

    These days people meet via social media, very often dating apps. It’s absolutely standard
    I wonder if I was one of the earliest PBers to meet a partner through the Internet? I met a GF through a bulletin board (Mono, if anyone remembers that) in 1992. Pre-WWW.
    Mono was awesome at its peak. I never met a partner through it, but my sister did. (Genuinely true fact.)
    They really named a dating app after an infectious disease ?
    And one transmitted through kissing (and more). Like Orange trying to market their phones in NI, only twice as bad.

    https://www.cdc.gov/epstein-barr/about-mono.html
  • SandyRentoolSandyRentool Posts: 20,398
    One bit of interesting news today. The Truss has U-turned on the previous U-turn and said that Bradford will be served by Northern Poorhouse Rail.
  • GardenwalkerGardenwalker Posts: 20,812
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Leon said:

    kyf_100 said:

    darkage said:



    You could look at it a different way.
    Incel (involuntarily celibate) is a subset of 'men who are just celibate'.
    If dealing with women becomes too difficult and risky, then they could just decide to stop bothering.
    No one is forcing men to have sex and go in to relationships with women.
    Particularly now that you have pornography, virtual reality etc.
    Perhaps it will get to the point where men adopt children, etc, in the way that single women sometimes give birth by IVF etc. Would this be such a bad thing?
    I am not saying that this is a healthy state of affairs, but it could be where the current phase of the 'sexual revolution' is leading to.

    I'm inclined towards Houellebecq's answer, that it is "the law of market forces".

    The dating market is the most capitalistic and selfish market there is - nobody wants to redistribute wealth in this market. There are a variety of things that make a person attractive - looks, physique, wealth, intelligence, sense of humour, style, youth etc. But each and every one of undeniably has a "sexual market value" based on these factors.

    Now enter globalisation.

    Up until about 2008, you largely met people through your social networks or your immediate surroundings. Social media didn't exist... you have to remember Facebook was limited to universities only until 2006 and the other stuff, instagram, tiktok, tinder, blah, didn't exist at all. So you'd go to a bar, meet through a college society, the young conservatives, a friend of the family, work colleague etc.

    That all changed once our lives went online.

    Consider an absolute stunner of a 21 year old girl. She's got model good looks and every man who meets her wants her. In 2005, she probably would have met people through uni, or at a bar, at her place of work, etc. Take out the oldies, the uglies the fatties etc - and she's probably got a dating pool of 1000 eligible bachelors in her town or wider social network to choose from.

    Fast forward to 2022. All a beautiful 21 year old has to do is have access to an iphone and instagram and just by posting a few bikini shots, she can have 10,000 followers and premier league footballers in her DMs, if she's pretty enough.

    Her sexual market value hasn't changed, but her access to an infinitely larger global sexual marketplace has.

    This is very good for the attractive people of this world, but very bad for the unattractive ones. The attractive people have vastly more options at their disposal. The unattractive ones - well, are still unattractive, so many, many, many more rejections. It doesn't matter how many instagram selfies they post, they still get no interest.

    We know that this is true of Tinder, if Tinder was a country it would have one of the highest gini coefficients in the world.

    https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-guys-unless-you-are-really-hot-you-are-probably-better-off-not-wasting-your-2ddf370a6e9a

    What all this means for society is, unfortunately, exactly what you'd get in any society where the resources are so unevenly distributed. You have an aristocracy with high sexual market value (through beauty, money, status etc) hoarding all the wealth, with an impoverished peasantry slowly starving to death.
    All of which kind of ignores the fact that many men and women are attracted to each other for reasons other than their looks. Yes, in a nightclub or bar obviously the first thing that catches the eye is looks but it takes about 5 seconds actually talking with someone to realise that, whatever their superficial attractiveness, you sure as hell wouldn't want more than the briefest of flirtations.

    This simple truth is proved by the fact that, in spite of the fact that 99% of us - whether male or female - are not 'stunners', the vast majority of us end up in romantic relationships that thankfully outlive the initial superficial attraction.
    And again you totally miss the point. I’m not surprised you never got laid for years if you’re this obtuse

    Internet dating. Dating apps

    They make everything much more instant and visual. So the less good looking guys don’t even have a chance to pull. This is a real phenomenon and it is unquestionably bad for society. See all the incel shooters in the USA

    And guess what, unless they are sad sacks like you, the vast majority of people do not use dating apps to get partners. They don't have to because they are able to actually interact with the opposite sex face to face rather than hiding behind a phone.
    It is you who completely miss the point. You are the incel.
    Vast majority is way wrong, the interweb thinks 40% of relationships start online.
    Both my lads met their girlfriends that way, both nice lads but hardly top 10% looks wise.

    It’s how everyone meets. Probably a majority of under 40s

    It’s how I met my last 38 girlfriends. That’s not an exaggeration

    It’s how you find someone who REALLY suits you. It makes total sense. It widens your choice by orders of magnitude
    ...last 38...

    ...someone who REALLY suits you...

    Hmm...
    It surely depends what you are looking for. Someone might suit you for a few nights, or a few weeks - and this more transient need should be mutual

    Realising this was a breakthrough moment for me. ie Not every woman had to be potentially The One, and maybe the girl isn't looking for The One either!

    Instead you get an affable companion, some agreeable sex, no one falls in love, then you move on. It is pleasant, and the internet enables you to do this because you can find partners seeking the same
    Sounds like a model approach for someone with a limited attention span and frequent boredom. Others prefer the in depth romance of knowing a partner for decades.
    Of course. Each to their own. I like to mix it up a bit. Long relationships, then periods of frivolity in between
    No offence, but having read this blog for about ten years, I don’t recall your having a “long relationship”.

    I’ve had common colds that last longer that your average “thing”.
    Er, what? In the last ten years on this site I met someone, fell in love, then got married to them (and we were very happy, and we had one argument). We lasted four years as a married couple. four brilliant years. We only divorced coz she is much younger and wants kids, and I've had mine and can't be doing with more babies, they are too much like Brexit

    The split broke my heart and made me nearly suicidal during Lockdown 3. I told you all about it on here

    I don't lie about this stuff, what's the point. PB can be very consoling if you are honest and ask for advice....
    Is that so?
    You should write a rom-com about it.
    What’s Richard Curtis doing these days?
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,145

    One bit of interesting news today. The Truss has U-turned on the previous U-turn and said that Bradford will be served by Northern Poorhouse Rail.

    Served by the Oliver Twist class of DMU?
  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,248
    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    We have finally found a subject on which PB knows absolutely fuck all

    Dating

    We have found another subject on which @Leon is clueless: successful long-term relationships.
    What is a successful long term relationship? Ten years? 40? 3? Six weeks? All your life? Is there some legal definition?



  • CookieCookie Posts: 11,183
    There is a mathematical formula for finding The One (or, indeed, the shortest supermarket queue) - which is that of all your potential partners (or checkouts) you reject the first 1/e (i.e. about 37%) and plump for the next one which is better (or shorter) than all you have previously rejected.
    Interestingly, the chances of getting your ideap partner (or shortest queue) this way are also about 37%. Which is the best you can do.
    Of course, you need some rough idea of your number of potential partners. In the limited dating pools of yore, this was fairly easy. But when Millions of Women Are Waiting To Meet You it's a tad harder: 37% of millions implies quite a lot of dating before you settle.
    I reckon most of us know this instinctively/subconsciously: realistically how many potential partners are left, whenwe're approaching 37%, and when it might be time to declare this one The One.
  • When has Kwasi brought the statement forward to?

    The commentariat are frankly funereal about the Truss premiership, I haven’t seen anything like it, but I still think she’ll struggle on for a wee bit.

    This is probably the size of it;

    General impression from conversations about Truss's leadership today is everyone knows it's over but no one has quite figured out to end it.

    https://twitter.com/Samfr/status/1577006021784080384

    But headless chicken or half-dead autocrat modes could last quite a while.
  • EabhalEabhal Posts: 5,781
    PB warning: Unionists on twitter looking at the Scottish sub-samples and getting excited about SLAB

    More broadly, why are the Lib Dems so shit? Actually going backwards
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 61,574

    Andy_JS said:

    BBC breaking news — government to bring debt plan forward from November.

    This was always on the cards. Having triggered this crisis, the government could not keep "the markets" in limbo till November.
    That was possibly the most idiotic bit of the special fiscal event.
    Though there’s serious competition for that.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 61,574
    Those who propose Ukraine to give up on its people and land — presumably not to hurt Putin’s bruised ego or to save Ukraine from suffering — must stop using word “peace” as an euphemism to “let Russians murder and rape thousands more innocent Ukrainians, and grab more land”.
    https://twitter.com/DmytroKuleba/status/1577011584656109568
  • IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830
    Nigelb said:

    Driver said:

    Leon said:


    Leon said:

    kyf_100 said:

    darkage said:



    You could look at it a different way.
    Incel (involuntarily celibate) is a subset of 'men who are just celibate'.
    If dealing with women becomes too difficult and risky, then they could just decide to stop bothering.
    No one is forcing men to have sex and go in to relationships with women.
    Particularly now that you have pornography, virtual reality etc.
    Perhaps it will get to the point where men adopt children, etc, in the way that single women sometimes give birth by IVF etc. Would this be such a bad thing?
    I am not saying that this is a healthy state of affairs, but it could be where the current phase of the 'sexual revolution' is leading to.

    I'm inclined towards Houellebecq's answer, that it is "the law of market forces".

    The dating market is the most capitalistic and selfish market there is - nobody wants to redistribute wealth in this market. There are a variety of things that make a person attractive - looks, physique, wealth, intelligence, sense of humour, style, youth etc. But each and every one of undeniably has a "sexual market value" based on these factors.

    Now enter globalisation.

    Up until about 2008, you largely met people through your social networks or your immediate surroundings. Social media didn't exist... you have to remember Facebook was limited to universities only until 2006 and the other stuff, instagram, tiktok, tinder, blah, didn't exist at all. So you'd go to a bar, meet through a college society, the young conservatives, a friend of the family, work colleague etc.

    That all changed once our lives went online.

    Consider an absolute stunner of a 21 year old girl. She's got model good looks and every man who meets her wants her. In 2005, she probably would have met people through uni, or at a bar, at her place of work, etc. Take out the oldies, the uglies the fatties etc - and she's probably got a dating pool of 1000 eligible bachelors in her town or wider social network to choose from.

    Fast forward to 2022. All a beautiful 21 year old has to do is have access to an iphone and instagram and just by posting a few bikini shots, she can have 10,000 followers and premier league footballers in her DMs, if she's pretty enough.

    Her sexual market value hasn't changed, but her access to an infinitely larger global sexual marketplace has.

    This is very good for the attractive people of this world, but very bad for the unattractive ones. The attractive people have vastly more options at their disposal. The unattractive ones - well, are still unattractive, so many, many, many more rejections. It doesn't matter how many instagram selfies they post, they still get no interest.

    We know that this is true of Tinder, if Tinder was a country it would have one of the highest gini coefficients in the world.

    https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-guys-unless-you-are-really-hot-you-are-probably-better-off-not-wasting-your-2ddf370a6e9a

    What all this means for society is, unfortunately, exactly what you'd get in any society where the resources are so unevenly distributed. You have an aristocracy with high sexual market value (through beauty, money, status etc) hoarding all the wealth, with an impoverished peasantry slowly starving to death.
    All of which kind of ignores the fact that many men and women are attracted to each other for reasons other than their looks. Yes, in a nightclub or bar obviously the first thing that catches the eye is looks but it takes about 5 seconds actually talking with someone to realise that, whatever their superficial attractiveness, you sure as hell wouldn't want more than the briefest of flirtations.

    This simple truth is proved by the fact that, in spite of the fact that 99% of us - whether male or female - are not 'stunners', the vast majority of us end up in romantic relationships that thankfully outlive the initial superficial attraction.
    And again you totally miss the point. I’m not surprised you never got laid for years if you’re this obtuse

    Internet dating. Dating apps

    They make everything much more instant and visual. So the less good looking guys don’t even have a chance to pull. This is a real phenomenon and it is unquestionably bad for society. See all the incel shooters in the USA

    And guess what, unless they are sad sacks like you, the vast majority of people do not use dating apps to get partners. They don't have to because they are able to actually interact with the opposite sex face to face rather than hiding behind a phone.
    It is you who completely miss the point. You are the incel.
    But this is simply and probably wrong (you fat clueless twat etc etc)

    These days people meet via social media, very often dating apps. It’s absolutely standard
    I wonder if I was one of the earliest PBers to meet a partner through the Internet? I met a GF through a bulletin board (Mono, if anyone remembers that) in 1992. Pre-WWW.
    Mono was awesome at its peak. I never met a partner through it, but my sister did. (Genuinely true fact.)
    They really named a dating app after an infectious disease ?
    More age gappery. To me mono means not stereo.
  • Well now.


  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,248
    Nigelb said:

    Those who propose Ukraine to give up on its people and land — presumably not to hurt Putin’s bruised ego or to save Ukraine from suffering — must stop using word “peace” as an euphemism to “let Russians murder and rape thousands more innocent Ukrainians, and grab more land”.
    https://twitter.com/DmytroKuleba/status/1577011584656109568

    There might come a point when we will have to stop our ears to the Cries of Ukraine. Horrible but true
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,771
    Leon said:

    Pagan2 said:

    Leon said:

    There are a lot - I mean a LOT - of retarded seeming 20-something males.

    I don’t blame the girls for steering clear.

    The lack of sympathy on this site for socially awkward young men is really quite repulsive
    The lack of sympathy is due to the fact most of these socially awkward young men are dicks that think they are owed sex.
    Perhaps you'd feel different if it was your son?

    I am the father of daughters, btw, so I'm not talking my book. It astounds me: the misanthrophy on here. "These men are stupid dim misogynist layabouts who deserve to have no sex"

    No, a lot of them are perfectly pleasant and would really like a nice girlfriend - just one - but technology and society have evolved in a pernicious way that really harms their chances. How is this difficult to understand, and why is sympathy so limited?!
    Low status men have always struggled to find partners. This is not a new phenomenon. It's just that in the Internet age, they get to see high status men having sex with beautiful women.
  • GardenwalkerGardenwalker Posts: 20,812
    The Ukrainians are low said to control the Svatove-Kreminna road in the North East; and the town of Dudchany in Kherson.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,145
    Eabhal said:

    PB warning: Unionists on twitter looking at the Scottish sub-samples and getting excited about SLAB

    More broadly, why are the Lib Dems so shit? Actually going backwards

    (a) isn't new on PB. We get Unionists (no names, no packdrill, but they are from the exotic realms East of Ealing) jumping up and down about single percentage point changes in subsamples.

    (b) Because their voters like farm animals and the previous leader understood that, and the current leader doesn't so doesn't get himself filmed in farm animal movies? I have no idea, otherwise ...
  • SandyRentoolSandyRentool Posts: 20,398

    @aneil
    Panorama on BBC1 revealing one of great green scams of our time. The Drax pellet burning power station. And with our money. @BBCPanorama


    Another Tory grift by the smack of it.

    This whole biomass scam is a fecking disgrace. And now the buggers want another big slice of taxpayers money for a carbon capture project.

    They should be told to piss off.
  • Eabhal said:

    PB warning: Unionists on twitter looking at the Scottish sub-samples and getting excited about SLAB

    More broadly, why are the Lib Dems so shit? Actually going backwards

    Look at the 1997 precedent.

    Lib Dem vote share went down but they went from 18 to 46 MPs.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,145
    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Pagan2 said:

    Leon said:

    There are a lot - I mean a LOT - of retarded seeming 20-something males.

    I don’t blame the girls for steering clear.

    The lack of sympathy on this site for socially awkward young men is really quite repulsive
    The lack of sympathy is due to the fact most of these socially awkward young men are dicks that think they are owed sex.
    Perhaps you'd feel different if it was your son?

    I am the father of daughters, btw, so I'm not talking my book. It astounds me: the misanthrophy on here. "These men are stupid dim misogynist layabouts who deserve to have no sex"

    No, a lot of them are perfectly pleasant and would really like a nice girlfriend - just one - but technology and society have evolved in a pernicious way that really harms their chances. How is this difficult to understand, and why is sympathy so limited?!
    Low status men have always struggled to find partners. This is not a new phenomenon. It's just that in the Internet age, they get to see high status men having sex with beautiful women.
    Eh? Edward VII? A later Prince of Wales? LG? Filmstars? Long before this interweb thingy.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,771
    AlistairM said:
    That's quite funny: Musk being trolled.
  • Is that so?
    You should write a rom-com about it.
    What’s Richard Curtis doing these days?

    I think Richard Curtis is still getting annoyed by Bernard Jenkin.
  • GardenwalkerGardenwalker Posts: 20,812

    Eabhal said:

    PB warning: Unionists on twitter looking at the Scottish sub-samples and getting excited about SLAB

    More broadly, why are the Lib Dems so shit? Actually going backwards

    Look at the 1997 precedent.

    Lib Dem vote share went down but they went from 18 to 46 MPs.
    Yes.

    Overall share goes down as voters rush to evict Tories.
    Tactical voting goes way up as they rush to Libs in select seats only.

    Overall result is more MPs.

    Having said that, I’ve really no idea why the LDs cancelled their conference.
  • Well now.


    I take it that's bad.

    #ProvincialScienceMaster
  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,248
    edited October 2022
    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Pagan2 said:

    Leon said:

    There are a lot - I mean a LOT - of retarded seeming 20-something males.

    I don’t blame the girls for steering clear.

    The lack of sympathy on this site for socially awkward young men is really quite repulsive
    The lack of sympathy is due to the fact most of these socially awkward young men are dicks that think they are owed sex.
    Perhaps you'd feel different if it was your son?

    I am the father of daughters, btw, so I'm not talking my book. It astounds me: the misanthrophy on here. "These men are stupid dim misogynist layabouts who deserve to have no sex"

    No, a lot of them are perfectly pleasant and would really like a nice girlfriend - just one - but technology and society have evolved in a pernicious way that really harms their chances. How is this difficult to understand, and why is sympathy so limited?!
    Low status men have always struggled to find partners. This is not a new phenomenon. It's just that in the Internet age, they get to see high status men having sex with beautiful women.
    But you are wrong. The numbers of men going without sex have surged


    "About 1 in 3 men ages 18 to 24 years reported no sexual activity in the past year, according to a new study

    Between 2000-2002 and 2016-2018, past-year sexual inactivity rose from almost 19 percent to almost 31 percent among men ages 18 to 24, according to researchers led by Dr. Peter Ueda, a postdoctoral researcher at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden."

    https://www.healthline.com/health-news/young-adults-especially-men-having-sex-less-frequently

    How many of them are willingly celibate?
  • StillWatersStillWaters Posts: 6,763

    Leon said:

    We have finally found a subject on which PB knows absolutely fuck all

    Dating

    When you have to pay, it isn't really a date.
    When I was dating my now wife I paid for everything…
  • Well now.


    I take it that's bad.

    #ProvincialScienceMaster
    It's never a good sign when people put restrictions on withdrawals.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,771
    AlistairM said:

    There are reportedly multiple encirclements happening in Kherson right now. Waiting for confirmation.
    https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1577006669606707200

    I'll have you know that this is all part of a carefully prepared Russian plan:

    https://twitter.com/imetatronink/status/1576761552195112960?cxt=HHwWgMCq4eKR5OErAAAA
  • BarnesianBarnesian Posts: 7,979


    Westminster Voting Intention (2 Oct):

    Labour 52% (+6)
    Conservative 24% (-5)
    Liberal Democrat 10% (-3)
    Green 5% (+1)
    SNP 5% (+2)
    Reform UK 3% (-1)
    Other 1% (–)

    Changes +/- 28-29 Sept

    redfieldandwiltonstrategies.com/latest-gb-voti…

    Whoops

    Lead below 30 points.

    Conference bounce for Truss? :)
    Why are Lib Dems taking a hammering - they didn’t aid and abet the bad budget! 😠

    Libdems the only challengers throughout Blue wall so why don’t they share the Tory slump? Something whiffs about these polls to me, I think they are Mickey Mouse polls, I don’t trust them as being remotely permanent.

    There has been ephemeral polling glitches before, Hague wiped out Blair’s lead during Labour conference week one year, voter frustration with not liking being unable to put petrol in car. It was all short lived, polls went straight back to normal a few weeks later.

    Without that foundation in fact Lib Dems should not be dropping by a quarter, they should be going up with blue wall voters switching from Tory to them, I refuse to believe these polls are for keeps, I choose to believe it will be back to a Lab lead about 10 in a few weeks and Lib Dems back to 12+. You can’t believe something is for real when its not founded in fact. Do you see what I mean.
    Suppose LibDems had a 20% share in every seat. They would get zero seats with a 20% share. Look at the Greens. 5% share, 1 seat.

    Suppose LibDems had a 50% share in 50 seats and a 2% share in the other 600 seats. They would get 50 seat with an overall share of just 6%. Look at the SNP. 5% share, 51 seats.

    As voters get wiser to tactical voting and Labour becomes more LibDem friendly, I think that LibDem supporters in Labour seats are declaring that they will vote Labour at a General Election, and in Tory/LibDem marginals, Labour supporters are declaring for the LibDems to get the Tories out.

    That is why, as a LibDem, I'm pleased to see the national LibDem share remain around 10%. I know it is a LOT higher in Tory/LibDem marginals. So it must be a LOT lower in the many Tory/Labour marginals - which is good news for anti-Tory voters, who are the large majority.
  • EabhalEabhal Posts: 5,781
    Carnyx said:

    Eabhal said:

    PB warning: Unionists on twitter looking at the Scottish sub-samples and getting excited about SLAB

    More broadly, why are the Lib Dems so shit? Actually going backwards

    (a) isn't new on PB. We get Unionists (no names, no packdrill, but they are from the exotic realms East of Ealing) jumping up and down about single percentage point changes in subsamples.

    (b) Because their voters like farm animals and the previous leader understood that, and the current leader doesn't so doesn't get himself filmed in farm animal movies? I have no idea, otherwise ...
    I want A to be true, but I'm guilty of hopecasting on SLAB.

    On B, I just thought the "blue wall" and Scons would go to Lib Dem over Labour. Weird.
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 38,517
    Just realised that I set off on my coastal walk 20 years ago last Saturday (October 1st 2002).

    Which means for the next year, I'll know exactly where I was twenty years before.

    For instance, today, 20 years ago, I did a 20-mile walk from Auldhame to Thorntonloch in Lothian. Including an attempt (failed) to cross a footbridge over the Tyne in the grounds of grounds of Tyninghame House.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,145
    edited October 2022
    IshmaelZ said:

    Nigelb said:

    Driver said:

    Leon said:


    Leon said:

    kyf_100 said:

    darkage said:



    You could look at it a different way.
    Incel (involuntarily celibate) is a subset of 'men who are just celibate'.
    If dealing with women becomes too difficult and risky, then they could just decide to stop bothering.
    No one is forcing men to have sex and go in to relationships with women.
    Particularly now that you have pornography, virtual reality etc.
    Perhaps it will get to the point where men adopt children, etc, in the way that single women sometimes give birth by IVF etc. Would this be such a bad thing?
    I am not saying that this is a healthy state of affairs, but it could be where the current phase of the 'sexual revolution' is leading to.

    I'm inclined towards Houellebecq's answer, that it is "the law of market forces".

    The dating market is the most capitalistic and selfish market there is - nobody wants to redistribute wealth in this market. There are a variety of things that make a person attractive - looks, physique, wealth, intelligence, sense of humour, style, youth etc. But each and every one of undeniably has a "sexual market value" based on these factors.

    Now enter globalisation.

    Up until about 2008, you largely met people through your social networks or your immediate surroundings. Social media didn't exist... you have to remember Facebook was limited to universities only until 2006 and the other stuff, instagram, tiktok, tinder, blah, didn't exist at all. So you'd go to a bar, meet through a college society, the young conservatives, a friend of the family, work colleague etc.

    That all changed once our lives went online.

    Consider an absolute stunner of a 21 year old girl. She's got model good looks and every man who meets her wants her. In 2005, she probably would have met people through uni, or at a bar, at her place of work, etc. Take out the oldies, the uglies the fatties etc - and she's probably got a dating pool of 1000 eligible bachelors in her town or wider social network to choose from.

    Fast forward to 2022. All a beautiful 21 year old has to do is have access to an iphone and instagram and just by posting a few bikini shots, she can have 10,000 followers and premier league footballers in her DMs, if she's pretty enough.

    Her sexual market value hasn't changed, but her access to an infinitely larger global sexual marketplace has.

    This is very good for the attractive people of this world, but very bad for the unattractive ones. The attractive people have vastly more options at their disposal. The unattractive ones - well, are still unattractive, so many, many, many more rejections. It doesn't matter how many instagram selfies they post, they still get no interest.

    We know that this is true of Tinder, if Tinder was a country it would have one of the highest gini coefficients in the world.

    https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-guys-unless-you-are-really-hot-you-are-probably-better-off-not-wasting-your-2ddf370a6e9a

    What all this means for society is, unfortunately, exactly what you'd get in any society where the resources are so unevenly distributed. You have an aristocracy with high sexual market value (through beauty, money, status etc) hoarding all the wealth, with an impoverished peasantry slowly starving to death.
    All of which kind of ignores the fact that many men and women are attracted to each other for reasons other than their looks. Yes, in a nightclub or bar obviously the first thing that catches the eye is looks but it takes about 5 seconds actually talking with someone to realise that, whatever their superficial attractiveness, you sure as hell wouldn't want more than the briefest of flirtations.

    This simple truth is proved by the fact that, in spite of the fact that 99% of us - whether male or female - are not 'stunners', the vast majority of us end up in romantic relationships that thankfully outlive the initial superficial attraction.
    And again you totally miss the point. I’m not surprised you never got laid for years if you’re this obtuse

    Internet dating. Dating apps

    They make everything much more instant and visual. So the less good looking guys don’t even have a chance to pull. This is a real phenomenon and it is unquestionably bad for society. See all the incel shooters in the USA

    And guess what, unless they are sad sacks like you, the vast majority of people do not use dating apps to get partners. They don't have to because they are able to actually interact with the opposite sex face to face rather than hiding behind a phone.
    It is you who completely miss the point. You are the incel.
    But this is simply and probably wrong (you fat clueless twat etc etc)

    These days people meet via social media, very often dating apps. It’s absolutely standard
    I wonder if I was one of the earliest PBers to meet a partner through the Internet? I met a GF through a bulletin board (Mono, if anyone remembers that) in 1992. Pre-WWW.
    Mono was awesome at its peak. I never met a partner through it, but my sister did. (Genuinely true fact.)
    They really named a dating app after an infectious disease ?
    More age gappery. To me mono means not stereo.
    Nope, mono was definitely a bug back in the 1980s. As well, as you say, as a hi-fi term.

    Edit: but come to think of it, if that was the intedned meaning, still: why call a dating app "Single"?
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,771
    PeterM said:

    just seen on talk tv that Putin may be planning a nuclear test on the ukraine border....missiles have reportedly been seen heading for the border

    Why would they need to move the missiles to the border (where they could get hit by HIMARS/artillery)?

    The whole point about missiles is that you can fire them a long way away from your opponent.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,145

    Just realised that I set off on my coastal walk 20 years ago last Saturday (October 1st 2002).

    Which means for the next year, I'll know exactly where I was twenty years before.

    For instance, today, 20 years ago, I did a 20-mile walk from Auldhame to Thorntonloch in Lothian. Including an attempt (failed) to cross a footbridge over the Tyne in the grounds of grounds of Tyninghame House.

    Oh,. I know some of that sector well - part of the John Muir Way today.
  • PeterMPeterM Posts: 302
    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Pagan2 said:

    Leon said:

    There are a lot - I mean a LOT - of retarded seeming 20-something males.

    I don’t blame the girls for steering clear.

    The lack of sympathy on this site for socially awkward young men is really quite repulsive
    The lack of sympathy is due to the fact most of these socially awkward young men are dicks that think they are owed sex.
    Perhaps you'd feel different if it was your son?

    I am the father of daughters, btw, so I'm not talking my book. It astounds me: the misanthrophy on here. "These men are stupid dim misogynist layabouts who deserve to have no sex"

    No, a lot of them are perfectly pleasant and would really like a nice girlfriend - just one - but technology and society have evolved in a pernicious way that really harms their chances. How is this difficult to understand, and why is sympathy so limited?!
    Low status men have always struggled to find partners. This is not a new phenomenon. It's just that in the Internet age, they get to see high status men having sex with beautiful women.
    But you are wrong. The numbers of men going without sex have surged


    "About 1 in 3 men ages 18 to 24 years reported no sexual activity in the past year, according to a new study

    Between 2000-2002 and 2016-2018, past-year sexual inactivity rose from almost 19 percent to almost 31 percent among men ages 18 to 24, according to researchers led by Dr. Peter Ueda, a postdoctoral researcher at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden."

    https://www.healthline.com/health-news/young-adults-especially-men-having-sex-less-frequently

    How many of them are willingly celibate?
    status is of course relative....mens status relative to women in the workplace has fallen considerably in the last 20 years so more men are seen as low status and unsuitable for women....a good argument can be made that much of this female "outperformance" is somewhat artificial and may be driven by quotas and positive discrimination....more worryingly this may ultimately negatively impact economic performance.....the UK is now starting to fall well behind many other countries
  • EabhalEabhal Posts: 5,781

    Eabhal said:

    PB warning: Unionists on twitter looking at the Scottish sub-samples and getting excited about SLAB

    More broadly, why are the Lib Dems so shit? Actually going backwards

    Look at the 1997 precedent.

    Lib Dem vote share went down but they went from 18 to 46 MPs.
    Yes.

    Overall share goes down as voters rush to evict Tories.
    Tactical voting goes way up as they rush to Libs in select seats only.

    Overall result is more MPs.

    Having said that, I’ve really no idea why the LDs cancelled their conference.
    Thanks both. It's a sort of "unrealised" Lib Dem surge.
  • Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    We have finally found a subject on which PB knows absolutely fuck all

    Dating

    We have found another subject on which @Leon is clueless: successful long-term relationships.
    What is a successful long term relationship? Ten years? 40? 3? Six weeks? All your life? Is there some legal definition?



    For it to be successful I would suggest it has to be permanent. Otherwise it has, by definition, failed at some point.

    Of course, there may be rare examples where the two partners decide to separate by genuine mutual agreement with both happy with that outcome but I would suggest such circumstances are vanishingly rare.

    I have known my wife 32 years and been married for 29. If our relationship ended now, for all that it is filled with happy memories and has produced two great kids, I would consider that it had, ultimately, been a failure.

    Though to be fair I suppose it all depends on what you want out of it and expect to put into it.
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 38,517
    Carnyx said:

    Just realised that I set off on my coastal walk 20 years ago last Saturday (October 1st 2002).

    Which means for the next year, I'll know exactly where I was twenty years before.

    For instance, today, 20 years ago, I did a 20-mile walk from Auldhame to Thorntonloch in Lothian. Including an attempt (failed) to cross a footbridge over the Tyne in the grounds of grounds of Tyninghame House.

    Oh,. I know some of that sector well - part of the John Muir Way today.
    Is it possible to cross that *&%$£&%*ing footbridge? ;)
  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,248
    edited October 2022
    This thread is an example of the bleak stupid anti-Musk nihilism on Twitter


    "There are a variety of problems with this proposal. There is no reason to think there would be a free and fair vote in areas occupied by Russian forces (as we just saw) and many Ukrainians who lived there were displaced when Russia invaded and wouldn't be able to vote."


    https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1577011983781888001?s=20&t=Q2oCz0KHHI6hfJImCgQlwQ

    It is followed by hundreds of comments telling Musk to shut up, stay in his lane, butt the fuck out, and so on

    Sure his proposal is flawed, any proposal will be flawed. What, tho, is the alternative? Not one of these twitter warmongers addresses the very real possibility that Putin is about to drop a nuke. And if he does, what then?
  • EabhalEabhal Posts: 5,781

    Just realised that I set off on my coastal walk 20 years ago last Saturday (October 1st 2002).

    Which means for the next year, I'll know exactly where I was twenty years before.

    For instance, today, 20 years ago, I did a 20-mile walk from Auldhame to Thorntonloch in Lothian. Including an attempt (failed) to cross a footbridge over the Tyne in the grounds of grounds of Tyninghame House.

    If you have Google photos you get these memories from "this day 5 years ago". Makes me rather wistful.
  • GardenwalkerGardenwalker Posts: 20,812
    Carnyx said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Nigelb said:

    Driver said:

    Leon said:


    Leon said:

    kyf_100 said:

    darkage said:



    You could look at it a different way.
    Incel (involuntarily celibate) is a subset of 'men who are just celibate'.
    If dealing with women becomes too difficult and risky, then they could just decide to stop bothering.
    No one is forcing men to have sex and go in to relationships with women.
    Particularly now that you have pornography, virtual reality etc.
    Perhaps it will get to the point where men adopt children, etc, in the way that single women sometimes give birth by IVF etc. Would this be such a bad thing?
    I am not saying that this is a healthy state of affairs, but it could be where the current phase of the 'sexual revolution' is leading to.

    I'm inclined towards Houellebecq's answer, that it is "the law of market forces".

    The dating market is the most capitalistic and selfish market there is - nobody wants to redistribute wealth in this market. There are a variety of things that make a person attractive - looks, physique, wealth, intelligence, sense of humour, style, youth etc. But each and every one of undeniably has a "sexual market value" based on these factors.

    Now enter globalisation.

    Up until about 2008, you largely met people through your social networks or your immediate surroundings. Social media didn't exist... you have to remember Facebook was limited to universities only until 2006 and the other stuff, instagram, tiktok, tinder, blah, didn't exist at all. So you'd go to a bar, meet through a college society, the young conservatives, a friend of the family, work colleague etc.

    That all changed once our lives went online.

    Consider an absolute stunner of a 21 year old girl. She's got model good looks and every man who meets her wants her. In 2005, she probably would have met people through uni, or at a bar, at her place of work, etc. Take out the oldies, the uglies the fatties etc - and she's probably got a dating pool of 1000 eligible bachelors in her town or wider social network to choose from.

    Fast forward to 2022. All a beautiful 21 year old has to do is have access to an iphone and instagram and just by posting a few bikini shots, she can have 10,000 followers and premier league footballers in her DMs, if she's pretty enough.

    Her sexual market value hasn't changed, but her access to an infinitely larger global sexual marketplace has.

    This is very good for the attractive people of this world, but very bad for the unattractive ones. The attractive people have vastly more options at their disposal. The unattractive ones - well, are still unattractive, so many, many, many more rejections. It doesn't matter how many instagram selfies they post, they still get no interest.

    We know that this is true of Tinder, if Tinder was a country it would have one of the highest gini coefficients in the world.

    https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-guys-unless-you-are-really-hot-you-are-probably-better-off-not-wasting-your-2ddf370a6e9a

    What all this means for society is, unfortunately, exactly what you'd get in any society where the resources are so unevenly distributed. You have an aristocracy with high sexual market value (through beauty, money, status etc) hoarding all the wealth, with an impoverished peasantry slowly starving to death.
    All of which kind of ignores the fact that many men and women are attracted to each other for reasons other than their looks. Yes, in a nightclub or bar obviously the first thing that catches the eye is looks but it takes about 5 seconds actually talking with someone to realise that, whatever their superficial attractiveness, you sure as hell wouldn't want more than the briefest of flirtations.

    This simple truth is proved by the fact that, in spite of the fact that 99% of us - whether male or female - are not 'stunners', the vast majority of us end up in romantic relationships that thankfully outlive the initial superficial attraction.
    And again you totally miss the point. I’m not surprised you never got laid for years if you’re this obtuse

    Internet dating. Dating apps

    They make everything much more instant and visual. So the less good looking guys don’t even have a chance to pull. This is a real phenomenon and it is unquestionably bad for society. See all the incel shooters in the USA

    And guess what, unless they are sad sacks like you, the vast majority of people do not use dating apps to get partners. They don't have to because they are able to actually interact with the opposite sex face to face rather than hiding behind a phone.
    It is you who completely miss the point. You are the incel.
    But this is simply and probably wrong (you fat clueless twat etc etc)

    These days people meet via social media, very often dating apps. It’s absolutely standard
    I wonder if I was one of the earliest PBers to meet a partner through the Internet? I met a GF through a bulletin board (Mono, if anyone remembers that) in 1992. Pre-WWW.
    Mono was awesome at its peak. I never met a partner through it, but my sister did. (Genuinely true fact.)
    They really named a dating app after an infectious disease ?
    More age gappery. To me mono means not stereo.
    Nope, mono was definitely a bug back in the 1980s. As well, as you say, as a hi-fi term.
    Speaking of stereo, the Beatles “release” a new Giles Martin remix of Revolver on October 28.

    I may have mentioned before that the Beatles on Spotify have been almost unlistenable due to the very shitty compression.

    You can now listen to the last four or five albums in glorious technicolour. Martin is slowly working his way through the back catalogue…
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 66,751
    rcs1000 said:

    AlistairM said:

    There are reportedly multiple encirclements happening in Kherson right now. Waiting for confirmation.
    https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1577006669606707200

    I'll have you know that this is all part of a carefully prepared Russian plan:

    https://twitter.com/imetatronink/status/1576761552195112960?cxt=HHwWgMCq4eKR5OErAAAA
    Good grief.

    Where do I get some of whatever he's smoking?

    That's funnier than the Darth Putin account.
  • Beibheirli_CBeibheirli_C Posts: 7,981
    edited October 2022
    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Pagan2 said:

    Leon said:

    There are a lot - I mean a LOT - of retarded seeming 20-something males.

    I don’t blame the girls for steering clear.

    The lack of sympathy on this site for socially awkward young men is really quite repulsive
    The lack of sympathy is due to the fact most of these socially awkward young men are dicks that think they are owed sex.
    Perhaps you'd feel different if it was your son?

    I am the father of daughters, btw, so I'm not talking my book. It astounds me: the misanthrophy on here. "These men are stupid dim misogynist layabouts who deserve to have no sex"

    No, a lot of them are perfectly pleasant and would really like a nice girlfriend - just one - but technology and society have evolved in a pernicious way that really harms their chances. How is this difficult to understand, and why is sympathy so limited?!
    Low status men have always struggled to find partners. This is not a new phenomenon. It's just that in the Internet age, they get to see high status men having sex with beautiful women.
    But you are wrong. The numbers of men going without sex have surged


    "About 1 in 3 men ages 18 to 24 years reported no sexual activity in the past year, according to a new study

    Between 2000-2002 and 2016-2018, past-year sexual inactivity rose from almost 19 percent to almost 31 percent among men ages 18 to 24, according to researchers led by Dr. Peter Ueda, a postdoctoral researcher at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden."

    https://www.healthline.com/health-news/young-adults-especially-men-having-sex-less-frequently

    How many of them are willingly celibate?
    Probably all of them, because if they are not prepared to put some effort in, no woman is going to have a relationship with them.

    Look at it from our point of view. A lot of these inadequates want little more than to stick their dicks into a woman. What does she get it out it? What is in it for her? Some (possibly unclean) knob up her very sensitive privates? And for what? Women do not have instant orgasms like men do, thus foreplay is needed as well as patience and care.

    In short, as a woman, there is absolutely NOTHING in it for us to let some horny young bloke use use as sex toys.

    If they want to get off, introduce them that most compliant of ladies that all blokes know - Pamela Hand, otherwise they need to put some effort in to sorting themselves and their attitude out.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,771
    Leon said:

    Elon Musk is having a massive stramash online about his plan for world peace


    "You are assuming that I wish to be popular. I don’t care.

    I do care that millions of people may die needlessly for an essentially identical outcome."

    https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1576995429094285313?s=20&t=8q2aHOiRH-4ik2jI-GJZew


    More power to him, I say, We need to take the threat of Armageddon a lot more seriously. We are close

    Giving into Putin might defer Armageddon this time, but it makes it more likely in future.

    Better to stand up and a take the chance of being wiped off the planet.
  • BarnesianBarnesian Posts: 7,979
    Leon said:

    John W. Rich (Fake Tech Exec)
    @Cokedupoptions
    ·
    31m
    Elon Musk weighing in on Russia/Ukraine since he is an expert in failed takeover attempts

    It's quite depressing that a really really smart guy, trying to think of a way of avoiding nuclear apocalypse, is being harangued, mocked and slandered on Twitter. I don't feel sorry for him, I feel sorry for US

    This is deadly serious now. Yet people are flippant. A lot of the people who doubt there is a serious risk of nuclear war seem to have that notion "because nuclear war is unthinkably bad, therefore it won't happen, also Putin is not mad"

    Er.....
    It's a version of better dead than red (or under Putin's heel).

    Putin's nuclear blackmail is not just Ukraine's problem, it's a problem for all of us.
    If we allow him to succeed because he's frightened us, then nuclear deterrence is dead and there will be no stopping him.
    That's why we should take the risk of a nuclear exchange rather than the certainty of Putin's hegemony if we buckle and appease him.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,145
    edited October 2022
    Eabhal said:

    Carnyx said:

    Eabhal said:

    PB warning: Unionists on twitter looking at the Scottish sub-samples and getting excited about SLAB

    More broadly, why are the Lib Dems so shit? Actually going backwards

    (a) isn't new on PB. We get Unionists (no names, no packdrill, but they are from the exotic realms East of Ealing) jumping up and down about single percentage point changes in subsamples.

    (b) Because their voters like farm animals and the previous leader understood that, and the current leader doesn't so doesn't get himself filmed in farm animal movies? I have no idea, otherwise ...
    I want A to be true, but I'm guilty of hopecasting on SLAB.

    On B, I just thought the "blue wall" and Scons would go to Lib Dem over Labour. Weird.
    TBF my feeling about Scottish subsamples is (as stated before) like finding weird turds on the lawn - poke with stick but really all one can do is wait for the real owner to emerge, in an election, or get DNA sampling done like Alec Jeffreys's original rationale for DNA sampling, ie a proper Scottish survey. So many interactions possible and all modified according to seat, including some pro-indy Labour going to SNP thanks to SKS going all HYUFD.

    @Gardenwalker has a point; so does the one of us (whom, shamefully, I forget) that some Tories are still sitting on the fence deciding whom to go for.
  • LostPasswordLostPassword Posts: 14,772
    On dating apps, I met my wife on OkCupid about a year after I signed up to the site. We've been together for nearly 15 years since.

    In the year before we met I sent a lot of messages that were not returned, made a few friends at group meetups and had a single very short-lived thing with someone that still confuses me.

    I'm pretty sure that, going by the statistics, OkCupid would have rated my returns on my time as very poor and low. And yet I'm now married. This is because I only had to get properly lucky, and meet the right person for me, once (and then not drive them away by being an embittered arsehole when I did so).

    It was a lot of rejection to fit into a year, and that isn't easy. So I'm sure the statistics are right, but I'm also confident that, for men looking for long-term relationships, they're not as bad as they sound, because you don't need to win on those statistics. If you're a guy who only wants to casually date lots of different women, and you're not in the top x%, then you will struggle.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,248
    edited October 2022
    rcs1000 said:

    PeterM said:

    just seen on talk tv that Putin may be planning a nuclear test on the ukraine border....missiles have reportedly been seen heading for the border

    Why would they need to move the missiles to the border (where they could get hit by HIMARS/artillery)?

    The whole point about missiles is that you can fire them a long way away from your opponent.
    BREAKING: President Putin is set to demonstrate his willingness to use weapons of mass destruction with a nuclear test on Ukraine’s borders, defence sources have warned - The Times

    https://twitter.com/Faytuks/status/1576986753453666305?s=20&t=Q2oCz0KHHI6hfJImCgQlwQ



  • solarflaresolarflare Posts: 3,623

    Pagan2 said:

    Leon said:

    Pagan2 said:

    Leon said:

    There are a lot - I mean a LOT - of retarded seeming 20-something males.

    I don’t blame the girls for steering clear.

    The lack of sympathy on this site for socially awkward young men is really quite repulsive
    The lack of sympathy is due to the fact most of these socially awkward young men are dicks that think they are owed sex.
    Perhaps you'd feel different if it was your son?

    I am the father of daughters, btw, so I'm not talking my book. It astounds me: the misanthrophy on here. "These men are stupid dim misogynist layabouts who deserve to have no sex"

    No, a lot of them are perfectly pleasant and would really like a nice girlfriend - just one - but technology and society have evolved in a pernicious way that really harms their chances. How is this difficult to understand, and why is sympathy so limited?!
    I have a son not a daughter he just turned 30 today and he would echo my views he knows these sort of people and his comment would be "Well if they weren't complete arseholes who do things like take a girl out then tell her she owes them sex as they paid for the date then...."
    I don't think there's any doubt that there's a small sub-set of men who have developed a warped sense of reality and do exactly that, and for which they should be rightly smacked upside the head.

    But they are no more representative of the entire possible cohort than saying "all Tories are scum" or "all Labour voters are lefty wokists" or whatever lazy broad brush statements folk make. There's much more nuance to the debate than that.
    OK - from the other side of the fence...

    There are indeed a lot of nice men out there and those that always got my attention were the ones that did NOT act like d*ckheads. The eventual "winner" was someone I could relax with, who had some similar interests to me and was clean, tidy and capable of talking to others.

    So, if the incels want to improve their chances, they could start by washing regularly, putting some effort into their appearance and losing the sullen attitude. I am not here as a human sex toy for their amusement.
    Thanks for the response. Of course you are not a sex toy for the amusement of a small, specific set of men with warped views. No-one is. It's not expected that people should just sigh and give in and date these people to make them feel better. No, they should not be tolerated in that or any sense.

    The point I was trying to make (probably unsuccessfully) is that not everyone - not even remotely nearly everyone - who is an "incel" in the sexual sense is an "incel" in the sense of the warped, msyogynist attitudes against women thing. But the assumption from a reasonably significant fraction of folk here seems to be that there can only be a 1:1 direct correlation between these two things, which is back to the "all tories are scum" level of discourse. All I'm trying to say is that being hopeless in the attractiveness stakes on online dating sites - which is many men, as others have posted from the statistics - does not equate to "incel" and vice versa.
  • EabhalEabhal Posts: 5,781
    ...and that consequently, this country is at war with Italy

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/hawaiian_spaghetti_67939
  • Jim_MillerJim_Miller Posts: 2,396
    Now, for CycleFree's problem, an observation (but no solution): 1. When I was growing up in a small town, it was assumed that almost all of us would get married. I had two older sisters, and they would have known which girls were potential marriage partners for me. (I would not be surprised if they ranked the potential partners, and am sure they could have.)

    2. About 10 years ago, the Washington Post ran a story about a young black woman, who was raising two boys by herself in DC. Since they were getting to the ages where the gang culture might tempt them, she decided to move as far away from that as she could. She found a town in Montana that seemed to fit her needs and visited the town to check it out.

    While on the visit, she was in one of those small town restarurants that are social centers, as well as places to eat. She was a little bothered when she saw some people apparently discussing her, but she decided to move to the town anyway.

    After she got to know people there, she asked some of them about what they were discussing when they saw her on that visit. She learned that they were engaging in one of the favorite small town occupations: match making. There was a single black man living in the area, and they were trying to decide whether to call him, so he could come in and meet this attractive lady.

    (As computer scientists can tell you, the "stable marriage problem" is far easier to solve when the numbers are small: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_marriage_problem )
  • GardenwalkerGardenwalker Posts: 20,812
    edited October 2022
    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    PeterM said:

    just seen on talk tv that Putin may be planning a nuclear test on the ukraine border....missiles have reportedly been seen heading for the border

    Why would they need to move the missiles to the border (where they could get hit by HIMARS/artillery)?

    The whole point about missiles is that you can fire them a long way away from your opponent.
    BREAKING: President Putin is set to demonstrate his willingness to use weapons of mass destruction with a nuclear test on Ukraine’s borders, defence sources have warned

    https://twitter.com/Faytuks/status/1576986753453666305?s=20&t=Q2oCz0KHHI6hfJImCgQlwQ
    That’s the same bloody article posted upthread. The “Ukraine’s borders” is pure invention of the tweeter.

    This stuff is a bit too serious to malark with.
  • EabhalEabhal Posts: 5,781
    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    PeterM said:

    just seen on talk tv that Putin may be planning a nuclear test on the ukraine border....missiles have reportedly been seen heading for the border

    Why would they need to move the missiles to the border (where they could get hit by HIMARS/artillery)?

    The whole point about missiles is that you can fire them a long way away from your opponent.
    BREAKING: President Putin is set to demonstrate his willingness to use weapons of mass destruction with a nuclear test on Ukraine’s borders, defence sources have warned

    https://twitter.com/Faytuks/status/1576986753453666305?s=20&t=Q2oCz0KHHI6hfJImCgQlwQ



    Nuclear train. @Sunil_Prasannan , your insight please
  • PeterMPeterM Posts: 302
    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Elon Musk is having a massive stramash online about his plan for world peace


    "You are assuming that I wish to be popular. I don’t care.

    I do care that millions of people may die needlessly for an essentially identical outcome."

    https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1576995429094285313?s=20&t=8q2aHOiRH-4ik2jI-GJZew


    More power to him, I say, We need to take the threat of Armageddon a lot more seriously. We are close

    Giving into Putin might defer Armageddon this time, but it makes it more likely in future.

    Better to stand up and a take the chance of being wiped off the planet.
    so we ve gone from hide in your houses for 2 years for a disease with a 99% survival rate to risking nuclear apocolypse ....something is slightly awry in your judgement of risk
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,145

    Carnyx said:

    Just realised that I set off on my coastal walk 20 years ago last Saturday (October 1st 2002).

    Which means for the next year, I'll know exactly where I was twenty years before.

    For instance, today, 20 years ago, I did a 20-mile walk from Auldhame to Thorntonloch in Lothian. Including an attempt (failed) to cross a footbridge over the Tyne in the grounds of grounds of Tyninghame House.

    Oh,. I know some of that sector well - part of the John Muir Way today.
    Is it possible to cross that *&%$£&%*ing footbridge? ;)
    https://johnmuirway.org/assets/routes/routeMaps/82520d7862/section_10.pdf

    Looks like it ...
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,771

    rcs1000 said:

    Andy_JS said:

    Visegrád 24
    @visegrad24
    ·
    2h
    BREAKING:

    Swedish authorities report that the gas leak from the Nord Stream 2 hole in the Swedish Economic Zone is increasing in strength.

    It seems as if the Russians are pumping gas into the pipeline.

    As long as there is gas, it won’t be possible to get close to investigate.

    Do gas leaks cause similar problems to oil leaks?
    No

    Because gas is lighter than water, it will travel to the surface and dissipate.

    Rubbish for global warming, but doesn't fuck up the ocean.
    Different if it is flowing from a well as it often has lots of other nasty contaminants with it as well as some heavier hydrocarbons. But I assume what they are pumping through the pipeline has already been processed so will have all of that stuff removed.
    A very good point. But the gas has to have been scrubbed long before it reached Nordstream, right? (Or one would assume so.)
  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,248

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    We have finally found a subject on which PB knows absolutely fuck all

    Dating

    We have found another subject on which @Leon is clueless: successful long-term relationships.
    What is a successful long term relationship? Ten years? 40? 3? Six weeks? All your life? Is there some legal definition?



    For it to be successful I would suggest it has to be permanent. Otherwise it has, by definition, failed at some point.

    Of course, there may be rare examples where the two partners decide to separate by genuine mutual agreement with both happy with that outcome but I would suggest such circumstances are vanishingly rare.

    I have known my wife 32 years and been married for 29. If our relationship ended now, for all that it is filled with happy memories and has produced two great kids, I would consider that it had, ultimately, been a failure.

    Though to be fair I suppose it all depends on what you want out of it and expect to put into it.
    And I suggest this is rather ludicrous. A successful relationship is one where both sides are happy. It can last an hour or a decade or a lifetime, there is no one single standard. And that is probably enough on the subject, we have bigger fish to fry
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 38,517
    Eabhal said:

    Just realised that I set off on my coastal walk 20 years ago last Saturday (October 1st 2002).

    Which means for the next year, I'll know exactly where I was twenty years before.

    For instance, today, 20 years ago, I did a 20-mile walk from Auldhame to Thorntonloch in Lothian. Including an attempt (failed) to cross a footbridge over the Tyne in the grounds of grounds of Tyninghame House.

    If you have Google photos you get these memories from "this day 5 years ago". Makes me rather wistful.
    I've got a website filled with memories of that walk. Nowadays it would just be on a Wordpress or similar blog, or on Facebook, but back then I rolled my own. I updated notes each night in a Psion 5, then put with pictures every few days onto a PC. Every couple of weeks, I'd run a script to get the changes delta, and post off a DVD with the changes to a friend, who would upload them to a server.

    How times have changed. Now it would just be take photo on phone and upload it immediately.

    Updating the website was almost as much hassle as the walk...
  • Eabhal said:

    ...and that consequently, this country is at war with Italy

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/hawaiian_spaghetti_67939

    Ugh.

    I'm glad Italy doesn't have nukes;
  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,248
    edited October 2022
    PeterM said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Elon Musk is having a massive stramash online about his plan for world peace


    "You are assuming that I wish to be popular. I don’t care.

    I do care that millions of people may die needlessly for an essentially identical outcome."

    https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1576995429094285313?s=20&t=8q2aHOiRH-4ik2jI-GJZew


    More power to him, I say, We need to take the threat of Armageddon a lot more seriously. We are close

    Giving into Putin might defer Armageddon this time, but it makes it more likely in future.

    Better to stand up and a take the chance of being wiped off the planet.
    so we ve gone from hide in your houses for 2 years for a disease with a 99% survival rate to risking nuclear apocolypse ....something is slightly awry in your judgement of risk
    Quite

    The casual way people here are talking about "taking the risk of nuclear war" is mind boggling. They should all go and watch THREADS
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 50,770
    Andy_JS said:

    BBC breaking news — government to bring debt plan forward from November.

    They are slowly picking up on my plan to get out of this a few days ago. Some more to go though.
  • Beibheirli_CBeibheirli_C Posts: 7,981

    Pagan2 said:

    Leon said:

    Pagan2 said:

    Leon said:

    There are a lot - I mean a LOT - of retarded seeming 20-something males.

    I don’t blame the girls for steering clear.

    The lack of sympathy on this site for socially awkward young men is really quite repulsive
    The lack of sympathy is due to the fact most of these socially awkward young men are dicks that think they are owed sex.
    Perhaps you'd feel different if it was your son?

    I am the father of daughters, btw, so I'm not talking my book. It astounds me: the misanthrophy on here. "These men are stupid dim misogynist layabouts who deserve to have no sex"

    No, a lot of them are perfectly pleasant and would really like a nice girlfriend - just one - but technology and society have evolved in a pernicious way that really harms their chances. How is this difficult to understand, and why is sympathy so limited?!
    I have a son not a daughter he just turned 30 today and he would echo my views he knows these sort of people and his comment would be "Well if they weren't complete arseholes who do things like take a girl out then tell her she owes them sex as they paid for the date then...."
    I don't think there's any doubt that there's a small sub-set of men who have developed a warped sense of reality and do exactly that, and for which they should be rightly smacked upside the head.

    But they are no more representative of the entire possible cohort than saying "all Tories are scum" or "all Labour voters are lefty wokists" or whatever lazy broad brush statements folk make. There's much more nuance to the debate than that.
    OK - from the other side of the fence...

    There are indeed a lot of nice men out there and those that always got my attention were the ones that did NOT act like d*ckheads. The eventual "winner" was someone I could relax with, who had some similar interests to me and was clean, tidy and capable of talking to others.

    So, if the incels want to improve their chances, they could start by washing regularly, putting some effort into their appearance and losing the sullen attitude. I am not here as a human sex toy for their amusement.
    Thanks for the response. Of course you are not a sex toy for the amusement of a small, specific set of men with warped views. No-one is. It's not expected that people should just sigh and give in and date these people to make them feel better. No, they should not be tolerated in that or any sense.

    The point I was trying to make (probably unsuccessfully) is that not everyone - not even remotely nearly everyone - who is an "incel" in the sexual sense is an "incel" in the sense of the warped, msyogynist attitudes against women thing. But the assumption from a reasonably significant fraction of folk here seems to be that there can only be a 1:1 direct correlation between these two things, which is back to the "all tories are scum" level of discourse. All I'm trying to say is that being hopeless in the attractiveness stakes on online dating sites - which is many men, as others have posted from the statistics - does not equate to "incel" and vice versa.
    Fair enough, and thank you for clarifying.
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 40,950
    I know plenty of super eligible, for some unknown reason still single women in their 40s/50s. They go on tons of online apps to try to find dates and here are some observations they have made:

    1. People lie.
    2. It's always worth having a (daytime, very public) coffee with someone.
    3. There are plenty of women per single men at that age and the men somehow manage to remind the women of that.
    4. It is surprising perhaps (I have scrolled with them - not a euphemism) at how few actual "right" men there are when you dissect each one and apply what seemed to me to be reasonable criteria.

    The whole dating paradigm has ISTM changed with the internet. As someone sensibly put it:

    Before: before you went on a date with someone you knew there was a spark and you then worked out if you had common interests.
    Now: before you go on a date with someone you know all there is to know about common interests but you don't know whether there is a spark.
  • pingping Posts: 3,724
    edited October 2022

    Well now.


    Hmm

    Not sure it’s much of a story. yet…

    Investors have requested withdrawals in September amounting to 2.5% of the NAV.

    Everyone investing in those funds knows the risk that they might freeze cashouts. I’m surprised it’s only 2.5%, tbh, given the rise in bond yields makes bonds a much more attractive proposition.
  • AlistairMAlistairM Posts: 2,004
    Not sure how Russia can have no reinforcements given how many they have been mobilising. How many are in any fit state to fight though?

    Russian source claims Dydchany has been liberated: "The Russian army left Dudchany on the Southern Front. There are no reinforcements. The situation is critical."
    https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1577025320393199616
  • Richard_TyndallRichard_Tyndall Posts: 30,846
    edited October 2022
    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Andy_JS said:

    Visegrád 24
    @visegrad24
    ·
    2h
    BREAKING:

    Swedish authorities report that the gas leak from the Nord Stream 2 hole in the Swedish Economic Zone is increasing in strength.

    It seems as if the Russians are pumping gas into the pipeline.

    As long as there is gas, it won’t be possible to get close to investigate.

    Do gas leaks cause similar problems to oil leaks?
    No

    Because gas is lighter than water, it will travel to the surface and dissipate.

    Rubbish for global warming, but doesn't fuck up the ocean.
    Different if it is flowing from a well as it often has lots of other nasty contaminants with it as well as some heavier hydrocarbons. But I assume what they are pumping through the pipeline has already been processed so will have all of that stuff removed.
    A very good point. But the gas has to have been scrubbed long before it reached Nordstream, right? (Or one would assume so.)
    Yep absolutely. The only immediate issue with this is going to be hazard to shipping (ships don't float on gassy water, as a number of drilling rigs have unfortunately found out in the past.




  • Beibheirli_CBeibheirli_C Posts: 7,981
    edited October 2022
    I should point out that shyness around women is not necessarily a problem. If I was interested in a shy man I would be patient to see if he opened up. I know some of my friends who have done this and had lovely times and relationships.

    No, for me, the deal breakers are personal cleanliness, good manners, neat appearance when going out.

    Oh, and a nice sense of humour is a BIG plus.
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 38,517
    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Just realised that I set off on my coastal walk 20 years ago last Saturday (October 1st 2002).

    Which means for the next year, I'll know exactly where I was twenty years before.

    For instance, today, 20 years ago, I did a 20-mile walk from Auldhame to Thorntonloch in Lothian. Including an attempt (failed) to cross a footbridge over the Tyne in the grounds of grounds of Tyninghame House.

    Oh,. I know some of that sector well - part of the John Muir Way today.
    Is it possible to cross that *&%$£&%*ing footbridge? ;)
    https://johnmuirway.org/assets/routes/routeMaps/82520d7862/section_10.pdf

    Looks like it ...
    I think you're wrong; the footbridge is further downstream from the A198 bridge, to the south of Tyningham House. Unless I'm reading that map wrong?
  • Carnyx said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Nigelb said:

    Driver said:

    Leon said:


    Leon said:

    kyf_100 said:

    darkage said:



    You could look at it a different way.
    Incel (involuntarily celibate) is a subset of 'men who are just celibate'.
    If dealing with women becomes too difficult and risky, then they could just decide to stop bothering.
    No one is forcing men to have sex and go in to relationships with women.
    Particularly now that you have pornography, virtual reality etc.
    Perhaps it will get to the point where men adopt children, etc, in the way that single women sometimes give birth by IVF etc. Would this be such a bad thing?
    I am not saying that this is a healthy state of affairs, but it could be where the current phase of the 'sexual revolution' is leading to.

    I'm inclined towards Houellebecq's answer, that it is "the law of market forces".

    The dating market is the most capitalistic and selfish market there is - nobody wants to redistribute wealth in this market. There are a variety of things that make a person attractive - looks, physique, wealth, intelligence, sense of humour, style, youth etc. But each and every one of undeniably has a "sexual market value" based on these factors.

    Now enter globalisation.

    Up until about 2008, you largely met people through your social networks or your immediate surroundings. Social media didn't exist... you have to remember Facebook was limited to universities only until 2006 and the other stuff, instagram, tiktok, tinder, blah, didn't exist at all. So you'd go to a bar, meet through a college society, the young conservatives, a friend of the family, work colleague etc.

    That all changed once our lives went online.

    Consider an absolute stunner of a 21 year old girl. She's got model good looks and every man who meets her wants her. In 2005, she probably would have met people through uni, or at a bar, at her place of work, etc. Take out the oldies, the uglies the fatties etc - and she's probably got a dating pool of 1000 eligible bachelors in her town or wider social network to choose from.

    Fast forward to 2022. All a beautiful 21 year old has to do is have access to an iphone and instagram and just by posting a few bikini shots, she can have 10,000 followers and premier league footballers in her DMs, if she's pretty enough.

    Her sexual market value hasn't changed, but her access to an infinitely larger global sexual marketplace has.

    This is very good for the attractive people of this world, but very bad for the unattractive ones. The attractive people have vastly more options at their disposal. The unattractive ones - well, are still unattractive, so many, many, many more rejections. It doesn't matter how many instagram selfies they post, they still get no interest.

    We know that this is true of Tinder, if Tinder was a country it would have one of the highest gini coefficients in the world.

    https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-guys-unless-you-are-really-hot-you-are-probably-better-off-not-wasting-your-2ddf370a6e9a

    What all this means for society is, unfortunately, exactly what you'd get in any society where the resources are so unevenly distributed. You have an aristocracy with high sexual market value (through beauty, money, status etc) hoarding all the wealth, with an impoverished peasantry slowly starving to death.
    All of which kind of ignores the fact that many men and women are attracted to each other for reasons other than their looks. Yes, in a nightclub or bar obviously the first thing that catches the eye is looks but it takes about 5 seconds actually talking with someone to realise that, whatever their superficial attractiveness, you sure as hell wouldn't want more than the briefest of flirtations.

    This simple truth is proved by the fact that, in spite of the fact that 99% of us - whether male or female - are not 'stunners', the vast majority of us end up in romantic relationships that thankfully outlive the initial superficial attraction.
    And again you totally miss the point. I’m not surprised you never got laid for years if you’re this obtuse

    Internet dating. Dating apps

    They make everything much more instant and visual. So the less good looking guys don’t even have a chance to pull. This is a real phenomenon and it is unquestionably bad for society. See all the incel shooters in the USA

    And guess what, unless they are sad sacks like you, the vast majority of people do not use dating apps to get partners. They don't have to because they are able to actually interact with the opposite sex face to face rather than hiding behind a phone.
    It is you who completely miss the point. You are the incel.
    But this is simply and probably wrong (you fat clueless twat etc etc)

    These days people meet via social media, very often dating apps. It’s absolutely standard
    I wonder if I was one of the earliest PBers to meet a partner through the Internet? I met a GF through a bulletin board (Mono, if anyone remembers that) in 1992. Pre-WWW.
    Mono was awesome at its peak. I never met a partner through it, but my sister did. (Genuinely true fact.)
    They really named a dating app after an infectious disease ?
    More age gappery. To me mono means not stereo.
    Nope, mono was definitely a bug back in the 1980s. As well, as you say, as a hi-fi term.
    Speaking of stereo, the Beatles “release” a new Giles Martin remix of Revolver on October 28.

    I may have mentioned before that the Beatles on Spotify have been almost unlistenable due to the very shitty compression.

    You can now listen to the last four or five albums in glorious technicolour. Martin is slowly working his way through the back catalogue…
    Great news. The Sgt Pepper remix done a few years ago is superb. I look forward to what he’s done to Revolver, bet it’ll sound awesome. The original mixes are definitely showing their age.

    Coincidentally, I have just this evening started reading the extended version of Tune In, vol 1 of Mark Lewisohn’s Beatles trilogy. It was first published in 2013, I read it when it came out, but now I’m diving into the 750,000 word extended version. And it only goes up to 1962.

    The second volume should be along in a year or two, looking forward to that.
  • SandyRentoolSandyRentool Posts: 20,398

    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Andy_JS said:

    Visegrád 24
    @visegrad24
    ·
    2h
    BREAKING:

    Swedish authorities report that the gas leak from the Nord Stream 2 hole in the Swedish Economic Zone is increasing in strength.

    It seems as if the Russians are pumping gas into the pipeline.

    As long as there is gas, it won’t be possible to get close to investigate.

    Do gas leaks cause similar problems to oil leaks?
    No

    Because gas is lighter than water, it will travel to the surface and dissipate.

    Rubbish for global warming, but doesn't fuck up the ocean.
    Different if it is flowing from a well as it often has lots of other nasty contaminants with it as well as some heavier hydrocarbons. But I assume what they are pumping through the pipeline has already been processed so will have all of that stuff removed.
    A very good point. But the gas has to have been scrubbed long before it reached Nordstream, right? (Or one would assume so.)
    Yep absolutely. The only immediate issue with this is going to be hazard to shipping (ships don't float on gassy water, as a number of drilling rigs have unfortunately found out in the past.




    See also the Bermuda Triangle and gas releases from dissociating methane hydrate deposits.
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 66,751
    Eabhal said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    PeterM said:

    just seen on talk tv that Putin may be planning a nuclear test on the ukraine border....missiles have reportedly been seen heading for the border

    Why would they need to move the missiles to the border (where they could get hit by HIMARS/artillery)?

    The whole point about missiles is that you can fire them a long way away from your opponent.
    BREAKING: President Putin is set to demonstrate his willingness to use weapons of mass destruction with a nuclear test on Ukraine’s borders, defence sources have warned

    https://twitter.com/Faytuks/status/1576986753453666305?s=20&t=Q2oCz0KHHI6hfJImCgQlwQ



    Nuclear train. @Sunil_Prasannan , your insight please
    Unnecessary. Overhead electrification is much more efficient and safer.
  • FairlieredFairliered Posts: 3,869
    Carnyx said:

    One bit of interesting news today. The Truss has U-turned on the previous U-turn and said that Bradford will be served by Northern Poorhouse Rail.

    Served by the Oliver Twist class of DMU?
    The buffet car will only sell gruel.
  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 25,046

    I should point out that shyness around women is not necessarily a problem. If I was interested in a shy man I would be patient to see if he opened up. I know some of my friends who have done this and had lovely times and relationships.

    No, for me, the deal breakers are personal cleanliness, good manners, neat appearance when going out.

    What is it about those particular traits that you find so objectionable?

This discussion has been closed.