time_management

The fact is that, if a woman's had a lot of casual sex, she's developed a taste for variety and you have no hope of being her ideal man. When you're in bed with her, she's wishing you had Biff's abs, Jethro's penis girth, and the "roughness" of that club promoter whose name she's forgotten. So she's likely to cheat after a while in search of those traits, and even if she doesn't go off and do it, she's going to be mentally cheating all the time by fantasizing.

I'm a guy of mostly above-average physical traits and skill, but it's humanly impossible for any man to be the best at everything, for every woman. I don't have, for example, a 10-inch dick that's 5 inches wide, and I wouldn't really want one, to be honest; I'm more than happy with what God gave me. But that's what it takes to please a woman who's had 20 partners, because she's taken a lot of huge dicks and is "stretched out".

A woman who's been with too many guys is always going to be missing that one thing that some other guy did or had, and nobody wants to be with a woman who's going to be constantly fantasizing about other men.

No, because it would be tiring and pointless, and I'm never going to convince you that you're wrong anyway.

The two words are practically synonyms. One gains skill through experience. Again, go try and get a job and use that line.

Quality of experience matters a lot more than quantity. Having had sex with 10 or more different people does not make a person good in bed. In fact, it probably means that he or she sucks for two reasons. 1. People who can get meet their sexual goals easily have no incentive to learn how to do anything right. 2. If he were talented at all, he'd probably be able to find something more fulfilling, which would mean more long-term relationships and less time to rack up a number.

Where do you get that idea? Maybe I'm miscommunicating drastically, but I see a world of difference between being against casual sex and wanting women to be subservient household slaves.

I'm not advocating a slide back into the '50s. I'd much rather go into the future-- a future where people respect themselves and each other, and in which the sexes related as equals. However, casual sex is inherently anti-feminist.

Seriously, do you want to marry someone who might cheat because your dick is not as wide as that of a hookup who happened to show up at the college reunion? Do you want your teenage daughters to be raised by a woman who dated the football team, and to learn about respecting themselves from such a person? Is sex with a woman special if it used to be available to any guy with a six-pack and a nice car?

If a person gets into the habit of casual sex when young, that person's almost certain to cheat in a long-term relationship, even if the relationship is otherwise going well. It's not a habit that people break easily.

I would love to hear why you think sex is "deviant". It seems natural and healthy to me; after all, we were all born with the equipment built right in.

I think casual sex is deviant, not sex as a whole. The "equipment" may be "built right in", but its purpose is not to be used lightly and indiscriminately. After all, it can make babies.

Look around at the sorts of people who have a lot of casual sex. Do you seriously want them to be highly represented in humanity's genetic future, and the sorts of relationships they would have if bound together for 18 years to comprise the environment in which the next generation is raised?

Being inexperienced in any important skill is good reason to be looked down upon.

You're conflating "inexperienced" with "unskilled". I don't think there's much of a correlation. If anything, people who are overexperienced tend to be shitty lovers, because they've never need to develop any skills. If someone's that good, why would s/he have slept with 20 other people and still not found someone who came back and wanted to make it a relationship?

The worst side effect of casual sex is its cultural effect. "Hookup culture" is extremely debased and elevates deviant behavior to accepted status, if not a social requirement in some circles (e.g. being inexperienced, even for moral reasons, is looked down upon by many women in New York). However, if the sex is entirely private, and doesn't involve the woman I end up marrying, then I don't know about it, it's none of my business, and I don't care.

What I don't like is living in a culture that engenders distrust and dislike between the sexes, and encourages dishonorable behavior in young people. It seems like a lot of young American men behave unscrupulously and rack up a number not because they want to do so, but because of social pressures; they know most women won't respect them if they aren't at least as experienced as they are.

Unfortunately, though, there's a lot of rot in our popular culture with regard to sexuality and human relationships. I have no idea if the effects on men are as bad as those on women; obviously, I'm inclined to notice the damage it does to women, but it could be equally damaging to men. It's quite possible that 85+% of American men are unfit for long-term romantic partnerships as well.

I don't think casual sex is necessarily immoral, assuming that neither person intends to get married in the future. The main victims of consensual casual sex are future romantic partners of the participants, so if both participants have completely foresworn the possibility of having long-term relationships, I have no ground from which to call it immoral. However, it seems that this particular "use case" is pretty uncommon.

The problem is not that there are no decent American women. Obviously there are. The problem is that there are few of them, which means that the competition's pretty fierce.

I think the problem is that we live in a society that provides financial incentives for women to leave relationships on a whim. This might not influence actual relationships very much, but it creates a negative and adversarial culture.

On a side note, I think the word "misogyny" is massively overused, just as "feminism" is often misapplied.

I'm somewhat elitist, and I think the corporate-made suburban American culture (or lack thereof) is a massive fail. I'm a cultural conservative, and strongly opposed to "hookup culture" because I think it has destroyed something precious-- an environment of mutual respect between the genders, without which love is not really possible. However, I also think that I'm more liberal, anti-racist, and feminist than the vast majority of people.

I could be doing something utterly wrong, and if I am, I'd love to know what. I get by, right now, by being extremely selective in terms of whom I'm willing to date, which means that I spend a lot of time single.

The big problem is that American women are prone to "groupthink", and judge a man's desirability based on how attractive they presume other women to find him. So a guy with a low number is perceived as unwanted for that reason alone. Women in the rest of the world are a lot more independent-minded and don't fall to this.

I take it the other way. I've decided that if the majority of women in NYC aren't going to respect me because my number is (voluntarily) low-- not zero, but single-digits-- I shouldn't feel bad about being an unforgiving bastard when it comes to women being too experienced/"stretched out". Regardless of age, I don't think I could marry a woman whose number's higher than 5.

The truth is that, although I don't care much what people do in private, I could never marry a woman who's had casual sex. I find it pretty unadmirable, and wouldn't want a person who behaved that way having and raising my children. Sex and the City makes me want to throw up. So it would be utterly wrong and hypocritical to hold myself to a different standard... and extremely counterproductive, since it would make me unmarriageable from the perspective of a woman who shares my values.

If I decide that getting married and having kids is a serious priority of mine, I'm probably going to spend a couple years living overseas.

I agree with the rest of your post, though.

In 2003, I came up with a Magic-like game that solved a lot of these problems. It wasn't a kill-your-opponent game, but a German-style TCG with a Victory Point (VP) system, making it more amenable to multiplayer games. There were no "life points", but you had Action and Focus points that you could use to draw extra cards or resources, to give creatures an advantage in combat (making it more nondeterministic), etc. The number of strategic options per turn was vastly greater than in Magic, so it was harder for a player to get "stuck" and unable to do something useful.

Unfortunately, at the time I knew nothing about programming, nor had any money (I was 20). It was pretty obvious that the only way the game had a shot would be to take it online. Now I could hack it up, but I've forgotten most of the mechanics.

The disadvantage of this game, and why I think it wouldn't have ever taken off the way M:tG did is that, despite having "better" design from a Euro-style perspective, it wasn't a game that would finish within 30 minutes. A turn involved multiple players (most phases of turns were concurrent) and had a lot more strategic options than Magic's "untap, draw, cast, attack" formula that describes 90% of turns, so a single turn would last 3-10 minutes.

The Clinton regime had an expansion and a recession. So did the Bush regime. Neither leader nor political environment was able to alter the underlying business cycle. But, under Clinton, we had an unprecedentedly prosperous expansion and a mild recession; under Bush we had a shitty expansion ("jobless recovery" into 2004) and a devastating recession. Douchebags, enabled by the lax regulatory climate, had much to do with this change. Although there are certainly plenty of douchebags on both sides of the political aisle, the fact is that a Republican political and economic culture is more douchebag-friendly. Douche Czar Erik Prince, for example, thrived in the Bush administration.

Douchebags aren't responsible for the fact that a bubble occurred, but they influenced the character of it greatly, and magnified the human cost immensely. Most notably, there is the fact that this bubble was in real estate, a type of investment that appeals greatly to the status-driven douchebag mind. (If you don't consider house flippers and real estate speculators to be vintage douchebags, you're seriously out of touch.) A bubble in real estate has a monstrous human cost, whereas one in gold is relatively irrelevant to most people.

Square-root hack is as follows: regular rounds are scored on the square root (rounding down) of the deadwood difference, capped at 5 points. Undercuts get a bonus of 3, plus the square root of the differential. Gin scores 4 plus the square root of the opponent's deadwood. So the ranges are:

Regular: 1-5 Undercut: 3-6 Gin: 5-13

The victory condition is to have win a round when you have at least 20 points, and you are in the lead.

Second-turn Gin is extremely rare, but first- or second-turn knock is not rare. With the regular system, a second-turn knock (pure luck) can be a 60+ round, and that's more than half the game. With this system, it's only 5 points.

Let's recap: he was with her for a year and thought he was going to marry her. She's very attractive, and they look happy together. I'd argue strongly that he'd need a very strong reason to break up with her, and the email doesn't provide one (although it does provide her with good reason to break with him).

If you have to dump a good relationship with a beautiful girl, you're doing it wrong.

American prenuptial deals have included a wife being able to limit Sunday football games to one a season, and another having to limit her weight to 120lb (55kg)

made me think of this:

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0217062contract1.html

(Rated R for evil creepy fucker.)

If only someone could do something similar for mana drought/flood, Magic would be a pretty good game.

However, the JVM libraries are well-supported and generally can be trusted to work. For a lot of the wheels I'd rather not reimplement, they're quite useful. I don't think that the Clojure of 2020 will be as reliant on Java, but for now, the JVM libraries are very useful.

SBCL:

(defun f (x y) (let ((z (gethash x :a))) (+ z y))

Clojure

(defn f [x y] (let [z (get x :a)] (+ x y)))

Having syntax for maps is a huge win. Like ML's pattern matching, it's one of those things that changes your coding style entirely for the better, in a way that you wouldn't predict just by looking at the feature.

The only think I miss from CL when I work in Clojure is keyword arguments to functions. There, the Clojure way is a bit worse:

(defun f (x &key y z) (list x y z)) (f 2 :z 3) => (2 nil 3)

(defn f [x {y :y z :z}] (list x y z)) (f 2 {:z 3}) => (2 nil 3)