post_from_work

It took us NINE MONTHS to get a server installed in a data center a few years back. This was Marine-Corps fielded hardware running an ATO'd[1] software stack for real-world situational awareness, going into a Marine Corps data center. The people that run the data center have a glacial Change Management process, exacerbated by everyone in their organization not talking to each other, even though they are separated by cubical walls.

I too have no faith of seeing this stuff implemented anytime soon...

[1] (Authority to Operate, basically approval from the highest IT authorities to utilize something on a DoD network)

If that argument (that leveraging any available artificial enhancement is ok) held any conceptual weight, we would embrace PEDs in athletics. We don't. Ask yourself why?

>>>Morphology of the avatar in your head can be different to your external appearance, ie. you always had large boobs?

I wonder when the Overton window shifted and we began to accommodate insanity. I liked Dave Chapelle's take on this issue in "Sticks & Stones"[1]: if he walked around behaving as if he was ethnically and culturally Han Chinese, nobody sane anywhere in the world would take him seriously. Imagine the response if he applied for PRC Citizenship on the basis of the "morphology of the avatar in his head". It's totally okay to have A Cups. It's insane to assert "well in my head I thought I had D Cups, so just agree with me and treat me as such."

[1] https://youtu.be/jhJDAI7XaAA

It's all the fault of those damn Puritans: people who were such sticks in the mud they were essentially kicked out of Europe because nobody wanted to hear their prudish nonsense. They were all about the "fire & brimstone".

>>>I don't imagine many people would trade sitting on a throne in a grand hall enjoying a feast whilst watching the era's leading performers personally dedicate performances to them for the possibility of selling their body to download a superhero movie and buy a burrito and packet of cigarettes.

That "grand hall" had worse climate control than a Motel-6, and the food was dirty. We can debate the subjective utility of skilled medieval musicians vs a low-end local rock/metal concert with supporting audiovisual systems (a ticket to that can fit within the budget of a few tricks), I would charitably call that a break-even. And a $50 trick buys a LOT more than a burrito and a pack of cigs. You can get a steak dinner at Texas Roadhouse to with your pack of Newport 100s.

The "ick factor" of selling their body was just to demonstrate that even the most down-on-their-luck, homeless, destitute American has a path to access the commodity goods of our age. I don't think it's an absurd reduction to point that out.

Did you read the healthcare link I provided? Death from those sorts of diseases are a tiny fraction of fatalities in the US. They're so small that it is disingenuous to extrapolate them as indicative of the plight of "the poor in Cleveland" writ large.

But just for English kings who died of natural causes, dysentery killed 2 and food poisoning 1, out of 60 total (dead from natural causes, not 60 total monarchs....a 5% fatality rate for the most powerful people in the land. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_monarchs_of_the_Britis...

"made to feel insignificant" "have no power"....I'd really like to see how you are quantifying these, and why you would weight them so heavily in a quality-of-life assessment to even mention them in the same breadth as dying of preventable food sanitation diseases.

>>>if I had to be a medieval king or a poor person in Cleveland, it is such a no-brainer I can't even understand how the question is being asked.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_I_of_England#Death

The King of England died from a disease caused by getting shit particles in your food. Diarrheal disease deaths are barely on the radar of US fatalities. https://www.healthdata.org/news-release/despite-reductions-i...

>>>At first, I was confused reading your assertions of what poor people of the US can do, things that obviously demand money - cash or credit - that a person in poverty don't have.

A homeless, flat-broke prostitute can turn 4 tricks in a day. Let's call them $50 each, for $200 cash-in-hand. Then they can take that $200 to Wal-Mart, buy an Android phone for $50, a SIM card for $50, and one of those loadable debit cards for $50. That leaves them with $50 cash and a $50 debit card balance. They can use their smartphone and debit card to access many of the modern amenities that the parent post mentioned, such as a delivery meal from Uber Eats, or a Greyhound bus ticket, or music on iTunes. The point is, this stuff is within the realm of the possible for the modern poor. It is NOT for a medieval king. Not at all. No matter how large his army, no matter how much gold in his coffers, Richard the Lionheart can't instantly access music from the other side of the planet while traveling across England in a climate-controlled vehicle at twice the speed of a horse.

>>> In fact, for many people (including many men), advice is the least important part and often unwelcome at first. What people are looking for is empathy, being heard and validated.

Maybe I'm just wired differently, but I usually come away a bit frustrated if I reach out to someone and the conversation is basically "I feel you and can commiserate. But I don't have any recommended actions."

In contrast, I had a former roommate who would point out: "See at Step 2? You messed up by taking Action X. Next time do Action Y, and follow up with Action Z at Step 3. That's how you avoid this problem." I don't always agree with his advice or conclusions, but he gives me something actionable, or at least something that triggers thinking through a modified solution to whatever problem I'm trying to overcome.

>>>The point flew entirely over your head.

Funny. I'd say the same applies for you. The whole point of the article is that men and women have different value systems in how they evaluate interpersonal relationships, and your contribution to this discussion has only been: "While I put forth no evidence to the contrary, their conclusion is wrong....and any men who utilize such a value system are bad human beings." It's the same sort of overbearing, arrogant, intrusive shaming language used by religious conservatives in opposition to gay marriage.

>>>you should assume they are judging you by the same standards

I would absolutely assume that my friends are holding me accountable to the same standards to which I hold them. And if they didn't, then I wouldn't trust them as true friends. They should be able to share hard truths ("Hey, you are failing yourself right now") and also be willing to offer assistance to get me back on my path.

>>>If your relationship with all your friends is based on their utility to advance your status, you don’t actually have any friends.

What are the metrics underpinning your assessment of friendship? In order to achieve a status of !friend, there would need to be failure modes for evaluation of actions to drive that conclusion. What are those failure modes? And which of my friends have you evaluated against these metrics to support your assertion? We all know the answer to that: NONE.

Men are under no obligations to evaluate their friendships using YOUR mental model, and possessing a working model that is different from yours does not inherently make them misanthropes out of touch with reality. The level of uncomprehending arrogance needed to come into a discussion with that as a leading talking point is astounding.

Our previous Commanding General once quipped that PowerPoint presentations that transition between geographic focus areas should include slide after slide after slide of blue ocean, to communicate the vast distances involved in our Area of Operations. Otherwise no one appreciates the distances between the islands that are of interest. Too many people think Hawaii and Guam and the Philippines and Okinawa are all just down the street from each other.

You are shooting at strawmen. No one is discussing severing existing relationship bonds due to evolving life circumstances. There are undoubtedly far more variables in such an equation, with complex mitigating factors.

The article is about ideal preferences. Exercising those preferences, often towards objectively-superior utility characteristics, is not misanthropic.

That line of thought would make about as much sense as saying "all lesbians are inherently misandrist". Choosing A over B does not imply any hatred of {B}, or of {A+B} in general.

Consider the opposite characteristics.

As a guy, I don't make time to hang out with other guys who are woefully out of shape / hideously ugly, broke, and with no Game(tm). Those people are not Force Multipliers ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_multiplication ), so why would I allocate my most precious resource, my time, to them?

Recreational sex?

(also I endorse sibling's comment of exercise + healthy diet)

>>>That's essentially an unveiled admission of a want to hold the rest of the world hostage and establish domination. There's little rational nor justifiable about such a want from the perspective of anyone who isn't a U.S. citizen.

We've already been holding the world hostage, arguably since we ended Breton Woods in favor of the Petrodollar, and definitely since the Soviet Union collapsed. This might be rational or justifiable to non-US citizens if we better communicated how Pax Americana is to their benefit. But we suck at soft power, and have squandered much of our goodwill with our devastation of the Middle East. So I fully understand and appreciate, for example, Russia and China doing everything in their power to break the back of our supremacy.

>>>Well, they signed the treaty anyway, did they?....Call it virtue signaling, but in international diplomacy, it's a pretty powerful statement.

It cost the signatories nothing substantive, and it changed nothing substantive. I will absolutely call it virtue signaling.

>>>Which objectives? To who's benefit? Yours? The U.S.? The rest of the world?

Which objectives? The objectives of the nations that employ said security professionals, as typically laid out in a "National Security Strategy" or similar document. So my point here is that in order to convince the people who control nuclear assets to change, one needs to understand them. You can't persuade them if you are not communicating with language that resonates with them in the first place.

>>>This is used as an argument for new, upcoming powers like India or China to forge their own path forward, for better or worse. If the U.S. wants to keep playing a role of significance in the 21st and 22nd centuries, it will have to relinquish its hegemonic stance.

This is actually something I strongly agree with. I think it is folly for a mismanaged nation of 330 million to expect to continue to lord over 7+ billion people that are rapidly closing the gap of technical and/or institutional competency across the board. The US is failing on several key fronts 1) failing to recognize the limitations of its hard (aka military) power 2) failing to make the necessary domestic investments in infrastructure and education to even keep it abreast of rising, high-population nations 3) failing to capitalize on existing soft power.

We should have begun to pivot away from the Petrodollar after the Soviet Union fell, should have kept the footprint in Afghanistan smaller, and never should have invaded Iraq. I would have cut the active-duty Army and Air Force to the bone outside of special operations forces, and relied on expeditionary Navy/Marine forces, sailing from the US itself. That's still an overwhelming amount of combat power for most global security threats. Spend the money saved on high-speed rail, thorium reactors, fusion research, and pre-collegiate education that doesn't suck.

>>>I was only arguing against your point that this treaty was just a bunch of plebs signing a petition.

I don't mind going down the rabbit hole on this word usage. I was trying to use plebs to communicate "not the people making impactful decisions in the halls of power". The governments of non-nuclear powers have no ability to force nuclear states to do anything, so for all practical purposes they are indistinguishable from the commoner folk.

I'll agree that digging deeper into the case of South Africa might yield some insights, but I think much of it boiled down to avoiding international pariah status, which was already a problem due to apartheid.

The Comprehensive Test Ban is one of those brilliant "pulling up the ladder after you've made it" moves. It's a tool to hang over the heads of anyone that needs to debug their nuclear weapons, such as up-and-coming nuclear powers (NKorea, Iran). It hurts the existing nuclear powers (who already have giant datasets and fine-tuned nuclear equations) less than it hurts potential newcomers. And even still, it's not enforced as most of the existing nuke powers haven't ratified it.

>>> My point is only to counter a hypothetical scenario which favors one outcome with another equally fictional that favors the other.

Our two scenarios are not in any way, shape, or form "equally" fictional. Anyone with even the most basic real-life work exposure to the national security establishments of Great Powers can attest to that. And often the populations themselves are cut from a similar cloth. My hypothetical, where the nuclear powers ignore the requests of the non-nuclear nations, isn't too far off from the long-standing refusal to modify the permanent membership/veto power of the UN Security Council. ( https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1758-5899.1... ) So we already have precedent for the Great Powers telling everyone else to pound sand.

In contrast, your hypothetical scenario that posits Russia would eliminate nukes due to "popular domestic demand" is completely out of touch with reality. Look at Figures 6 & 7 from this paper: ( https://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep29483.16 ) A whopping 68% of Russians support either maintaining or expanding the number of nuclear weapons. In the second chart, 52% say the government does "enough" to ward off external aggression via nukes and a further 23% responded the government doesn't do enough and should do more. Although what "the people" want is of limited concern as they don't run Russia anyway ( https://www.amacad.org/publication/russias-oligarchs-unlikel... ). Look at similar public perception survey results for China: ( https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/205316802110328... ). The population wants their government to retain nuclear weapons. Overwhelmingly. The Chinese don't "fear the optics" of nuke possession, or see the program as expensive and unrealistic. Their population, especially the younger generations, are quite hawkish ( https://uscet.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/How-Hawkish-Is-... ) As for India and Pakistan easing tensions and jointly signing an anti-nuke treaty?!?! These two nations don't even have an established back-channel for defusing nuclear escalation! ( https://www.iiss.org/blogs/research-paper/2021/05/nuclear-de... )

I'll bow out, I doubt we will reach any common ground, but I applaud you for maintaining a cordial conversation on a serious and difficult subject.

>>>They’re the ones surrounding a sovereign nation with military forces.

Ever stop to wonder what triggered the change in Russia's force posture?

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11014-us-anti-missile...

In the early 2000s they were entirely focused on counter-insurgency in the Caucasus. They had restructured their military to be brigade-based, so they could deploy small formations easily. What convinced Russia to re-focus on larger, nation-state threats in their near abroad? There was a really good article on the subject which I can't find now, written when Russia reformed the 1st Guards Tank Army in 2014. That reformation meant they assessed a serious risk of a peer conflict from their Western border, and needed a powerful combat formation optimized for such a fight. Russia has eaten 3 nation-shattering invasions along the Western axis of approach to Moscow (1812, 1915, 1941), where there are few natural geographic/terrain barriers. Do you see how sticking weapon systems in their near abroad that undermine their nuclear MAD deterrence, while expanding your military alliance ever-closer to their territory, might make them paranoid?

>>>Some very powerful governments (like Austria, Brazil, and Indonesia) have already signed it and it is already ratified by 59 nations. This is hardly a bunch of plebs signing a petition.

Austria? Brazil? Indonesia? None of those are nuclear-armed states...which means that their "power" is effectively ZERO. It also costs them nothing to slap a signature on a document that has no material impact on their national security, because they have no capability to lose. You seem to have a very....idealistic view of international relations. Let me explain how nuclear disarmament would play out in the real world:

UN Signatories: We don't think anyone should have nuclear weapons.

US/Russia/China/etc: Nah, keeping these "just in case" is an important part of our international influence.

UN Signatories: I guess we will have to forcibly disarm you?

Nuke States: You can try. Invade me, and I'll burn your entire population to cinders, and make your lands glow in the dark for the next 10,000 years. ( https://geopolitics.news/euroasia/russia-adopts-nuclear-firs... )

UN Signatories: Ok on second thought we'll just send you another sternly-worded letter....

And that's how the conversation ends. Because sovereign states that are unable to enforce their will on others have no real power.

>>>What I’m pitching here is for you to contact your national government and encourage them to sign it if they haven’t done so already.

I'm a citizen of not only a nuclear-armed state, but arguably the world's most influential global hegemon: the USA. If any of my politicians even HINTED at supporting such a disarmament, I'd vote them out of office ASAP.

I read the entire treaty here: ( https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Prohibition_of_... ). The Preamble reads like it was drafted by a drum circle of hippies, stoned on a beach in California. It's not written in a manner that is in any way persuasive to the people who actually need to be convinced: the national security leadership.

If this is a policy you seriously want to advance, I recommend taking a hard look at how national security professionals establish values and objectives, assess problems, and work through cost-benefit analyses in pursuit of said objectives. Know your audience, or you will never talk them into an alternative course of action.

The Federal government should set standards for features that need to be present on a State/Territory ID card "in order to facilitate interstate commerce". Then offer to subsidize production/distribution programs run by the States, for any State with a compliant ID program. Even better if we fused all of this with FICAM somehow. (https://www.idmanagement.gov/ )

The DoD has had ID card production figured out for years. All it takes is a work station (for checking your entry in a database and confirming the data that goes onto the card), a specialized printer, and a few other peripherals (camera, fingerprint scanner, keypad). I can walk into a DoD ID card center and walk out with a new card in 15 minutes. You could easily stuff several of these workstations into the back of a van, and then drive around to neighborhoods, bringing ID services to the disadvantaged. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Access_Card

>>>Third, the "lack of a contingency plan" is essentially part of the Prisoner's dilemma which the arms race during the Cold War was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma#Internati... But that doesn't render the argument moot:

If no one can produce a tangible, actionable, PLAN that gets us from "nukes in the hands of sociopaths with itchy trigger fingers" to "no nukes", then yes, the argument is rendered moot. A bunch of plebs signing petitions amounts to nothing but hot air if there is no realistic way to convince a head of state to throw hundreds (or thousands, in US/Russia's case) of the world's most powerful weapons into the dumpster.

>>> But rationally, that's not possible as you end up in a situation where owning nuclear weapons while everyone doesn't is the better option from the perspective of a single nation.

So you identify right here the crux of the matter: a rational nationstate will retain its nuclear arsenal.

The rest of your post is a bad case of shifting the goalposts.

>>>First, history of the past 80 years casts doubts on your claims: >>>The USSR-Afghanistan left an estimated 2 million dead. Nigerian Civil War between 1 and 3 million. France-Algeria War about 1 million. Korean War between 1.5 and 4.5 million dead. Vietnam between 1.3 and 4.5 million.

Let's take the maximal estimates for all of those: 15 million dead. That's a selection of some of the deadliest conflicts post-WW2.......which doesn't even match the casualties of the Eastern Front alone: ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Front_(World_War_II) ), which lasted for a mere ~4 years during WW2. Whether viewed in absolute terms of lives lost or per-capita losses over time (as a % of global human population), the data supports my assertion, not yours.

>>>In fact, after 1945, European integration was considered as an antidote against extreme nationalism in Europe and was heavily advocated for by Churchill.

The Brits have always played one (or more) continental powers against whoever was strongest. When Napoleon ran France, the UK allied with Russia and the Prussians. When Germany was ascendant, they allied with the French and the Russians. After WW2, with the Soviet Union dominating the Eurasian landmass, the only way to counter the Warsaw Pact was to coagulate the devastated West European democracies into a super-state. This was business as usual for the Brits.

>>>Second, "global casualties from warfare being in decline" doesn't imply that no casualties of war, or atrocities, have been committed since 1945.

Nor has anyone in this thread ever made such an assertion (that casualties = 0). Conflict casualties will never fall to 0, for the same reasons homicides will never fall to 0:

1. Human beings exist on a spectrum of morality.

2. Human beings exist on a spectrum of willingness to commit violence.

When opposing value sets overlap with violent inclinations, people die. We can significantly tamper the violence via material abundance, but First World-levels of wealth are climatologically unsustainable for a population of ~8 billion...

>>>The main reason why MAD has become a thing is because a chunk of humanity just wants to see the rest of the world burn.

I'd argue just the opposite. If anyone in a leadership position wanted to see the world burn....it would happen, because they only need to pass orders to one of the three legs of the nuclear triad (silos/strategic bombers/SSBNs) to trigger a response.

There are almost never "absolute mad men" running entire countries (Idi Amin was perhaps the closest IMO). It's just vapid propaganda. It is why it is so important to understand the adversary's problem set, and to place their actions within the correct context of what they are trying to achieve. Lunatics are exceedingly rare, and we still plan for those edge cases with Counter-WMD Quick-Reaction Forces from SOCOM, to mitigate risks of nuke employment:

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/37923/the-army-is-trai...

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/14535/this-obscure-dc-...

>>>Armies of nation states are responsible for the greatest of all human tragedies.

Yes. So why advocate for a return to the pre-nuclear status quo: major powers use their large armies to influence each other, with millions dead. The threat of MAD between the world's powers is why global casualties from warfare have been in steady decline since the end of WW2.

>>>The safest option of avoiding a terrible attack or a major accidents involving these weapons is a total elimination

What is the contingency plan for when every country except ONE agrees, and then the last country, as the only nuclear-armed state, then has free reign to impose its will on the world with now-overwhelming force?

I'm operating from a value framework that aims for building and maintaining multi-generational wealth. The family unit is the most basic, and arguably most important, institution over which we can exert influence. Can't link a relevant book on the subject (sorry, don't have my Amazon purchase history handy), but examine the practices of families that have been wealthy for in excess of 3 generations, and you will often find patterns of behavior that are completely contrary to "conventional wisdom" about marriage, relationships, dating, and family life....especially in the age of third-wave feminism.

>>> like you're looking for a servant than a partner

Who is more the servant, the adult who has the option to spend an entire day inside a physically-secure domicile, or the adult who risks death stepping outside the home 5 days per week (men make up 90% of workplace fatalities, and simply commuting to work on US roadways is a high risk activity)?

We recognize that labor specialization and comparative advantage are some of the most basic and powerful amplifiers of efficiency in an economy. Why would we not apply the same principles to our own household?

Or we can keep doing what we are doing, listening to the advice of charlatans [1]. That has led to women on anti-depressants [2], women unhappy [3][4], single parent (overwhelmingly single mother) homes [5] producing higher rates of maladjusted children [6], and a slew of other issues. Who paid for Cosmo to publish trash for decades? Qui bono? Maybe the same people who leveraged Edward Bernays to get men to buy diamonds? Why would we blindly embracing nerfing the efficiency of the economic and social construct that directly benefits us the most (the family unit)? Meanwhile the richest ~500 FAMILIES in the US are basically robbing the rest of us blind.

>>>it's very "trad-wife" esque

Sure, and it may be strange to those living in the West, but outside the West, "trad-wife" is rather popular with women. Hence why I would overwhelming encourage American men to abandon the US dating market and find what they are looking for elsewhere.

[1] https://www.suzannevenker.com/the-suzanne-suzanne-venker-sho...

[2] https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2020/09/04/Antidepressant-us...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/may/18/womens-...

[4] https://law.yale.edu/sites/default/files/documents/pdf/Intel...

[5] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/12/12/u-s-childre...

[6] https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2012/12/the-real-c...

>>>A good counter argument could be - what if your plans could change? Should you keep this change of plans possible?

A multi-year dating period is advisable. Definitely don't RUSH into popping out babies, but don't wait too long either. That's a difficult needle to thread. But I would think figuring out whether to propagate your genes in an supportive social construct, or not, is something a man has figured out by his early 30's.

>>>Don't forget the rather plausibly-looking model when the better you are, the higher bar you have to satisfy you

Hence why knowing YOURSELF is so important in mate-hunting. A high-flying extrovert might require a dime-piece social butterfly "trophy wife" as essential for impressing his peers, and needs that external validation. YMMV. But IME men "date down" to an adequate woman far far more than women do, so guys insisting on ONLY the absolutely cream of the cream for a spouse are an outlier, and unlikely to be seriously getting advice on HN for that search.

>>>A woman disconnected from her roots and struggling to find her new place in society is something I wouldn't recommend to be near as the cause of issues.

Exactly. Actually a former fling of mine was in just such a situation. Spent years in the Atlanta suburbs a bored housewife. She couldn't work because they didn't have a second car. She felt so isolated and useless that she divorced her husband and moved back to Japan. Now she's 40 and wondering why nobody here wants a serious relationship. shrug

~5 years is a reasonable timeframe for the scales to tip in the PRC's favor.

The PRC is basically "flying the wings" off of the Taiwanese airforce: https://www.businessinsider.com/china-may-be-trying-to-wear-...

>>>Dispersed AA missile launchers (MANPADs) that will deny complete aerial superiority over Taiwan airspace

MANPADs have altitude limitations. Fixed wing manned aircraft can fly high, and use precision munitions to prosecute targets. China also has a large fleet of combat drones that can fly the riskiest mission profiles, even drawing out Taiwanese air defenses by provoking fire, revealing themselves for counterattack.

>>>Satellite and other intelligence technology that can detect boarding ships and potentially guide missiles to eliminate them.

That would borderline on a pre-emptive attack which could be easily spun by the CCP in the court of international opinion. Also, the PRC's integrated air defense systems along the coast are damn heavy, not to mention their surface fleet's own air-defense ships. Good luck hitting ships in harbor with cruise missiles.

The main advantage Taiwan has is that the PLAN has insufficient amphibious shipping capacity to put enough combat power ashore in a reasonable timeframe. But they already have 2 brand-new LHAs out a total 8 planned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_075_landing_helicopter_do...

Combine with the PLAN's existing 8 LPDs ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_071_amphibious_transport_... ), and STUFT (Ships Taken Up From Trade, aka "civilian RO/RO ships pressed into moving military hardware"), and they should be able to credibly move several divisions by 2025. With the growth in their surface combatant fleet and the modernization of their air force, they should be able to keep the US/Japan/Australia busy long enough to not interdict their amphibious assault.

Yeah the Ford-class is obnoxiously overpriced. There is no way the key metrics of an aircraft carrier (sustained sortie generation rate, survivability, long-term maintenance) improved by the leaps-and-bounds necessary to justify tripling the price compared to a late-model Nimitz-class.

This is how you "protect yourself" dating during COVID:

https://www.thesun.ie/fabulous/6112479/covid-sex-positions-l...

>>>I'm an American man in my late 20s/early 30s in a large city

1. What is your long-term objective for marriage? If the answer does NOT include "successfully raise well-adjusted children in a 2-parent household", then don't even waste your time with a marriage. It's an unnecessary legal entanglement if you just want to bang someone and hang out with them for a few decades.

2. Before digging deeper into your wife search, maximize your own attractiveness. This requires a serious period of introspection and self-improvement to correct deficiencies both in character and in physical appearance. There's plenty of solid "manosphere" content on the subject. Try to avoid most of the PUA psychology stuff, except for: tips on overcoming "approach anxiety", "maintaining frame", "abundance mentality", and avoiding "pedestalization".

3. If you are decently attractive, decently charismatic, and in an above-average economic bracket (let's just say debt-free and ~$75k+ annual income), understand that in the GLOBAL dating pool, you are holding the cards. YOU are the commodity. You are the one screening an abundance of applicants for the job position of "spouse", looking to disqualify the bulk of them. So get the fuck out of the United States and date internationally. Especially outside of "the West". It's really not THAT hard to find a woman who is moderately cute, not annoying, with sufficient domestic skills to maintain a household, and a consistently-loving demeanor to take the lead on childrearing. Which leads to my next point:

4. What kind of women are you physically attracted to? The US is a nation of immigrants. It's best to "go to the source" to get the pure uncut product, so-to-speak. If you like blondes, move to Scandinavia to wife-hunt. You like Latin women? Move to Colombia or Chile. "Lightskin" Asians? I would say Japan, but this place is essentially locked down due to COVID..."Darkskin" Asians? Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam. Black women? Don't date an African-American woman (binge watch some Kevin Samuels videos on YT to see why), go get a proper African from Kenya or Tanzania. Etc, etc....

5. Once you are in your target market, leverage benign social circle activities. English-language meetups, coffee shops, local guy friends (don't have some? make some), religious institutions if you are into that. Do NOT wife-hunt on Tinder/Bumble unless you are extremely adept at sniffing out women trying to take advantage of you. Swipe dating is fine if you just need to get some exercise in the bedroom but I generally discourage treating any of those connections as serious long-term prospects.

6. I suppose some of this is dependent on YOUR character and what you like, but I'd screen women based on their family background (are her parents still happily married? ), psychological issues, alcohol/drug abuse, previous relationships (if any), etc... basically disqualify anyone who looks like they might be damaged goods, excessively emotional, unpredictable, etc... When things get serious, definitely get to know her parents if possible.

7. Never repatriate your new spouse back to the United States. Removing them from the family and culture that turned them into such a quality wife undermines all of your efforts. The culture AND the legal framework in the US are toxic and destructive. Keep in mind that ~50% of marriages end in divorce, ~70% of those divorces are initiated by the female, and divorce court will absolutely demolish you with alimony and/or child support payments. NEVER give the US legal system, combined with a woman's whims, the opportunity to fuck your life up.

Good luck/happy hunting! Enjoy the process!

dons flamesuit (IME no-BS dating advice for men on HN is rarely well-received)

>>>I had no idea people outside of tech were taking this stuff so seriously

I know a Navy dentist who told me back in February that he was putting all of his disposable income every month into Cardano. One of the Staff Sergeants I work with made ~$15k back when Doge spiked to the moon, and all of our Lance Corporals discuss the latest coins daily.

>>>Have you read the actual documents? Most of it is Murphy’s unsubstantiated opinion.

His letter to the Inspector General lists reference documents. Even a cursory search via DDG yields some of them, which were covered on HN when they were released back in September ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28965770 ).

https://newsrescue.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/defuse-pro...

https://drasticresearch.files.wordpress.com/2021/09/defuse-p...

https://drasticresearch.org/2021/09/21/the-defuse-project-do...

>>>Nowhere in the documents is any proof that DARPA rejected the research due to gain of function concerns.

Here's the rejection: https://drasticresearch.files.wordpress.com/2021/09/hr00118s...

"The team discusses risk mitigation strategies to address potential risks of the research to public health and animal safety but does not mention or assess potential risks of Gain of Function (GoF) research and DURC. Given the team's approach does potentially involve GoF/DURC research (they aim to synthesize spike glycoproteins that may bind to human cell receptors and insert them into SARSsr-CoV backbones to assess capacity to cause SARS-like disease), if selected for funding an appropriate DURC risk mitigation plan should be incorporated into contracting language that includes a responsible communications plan."

Major Murphy's letter also states: "When synthesized with the EcoHealth Alliance proposal, US collections confirm EcoHealth Alliance was performing the work proposed. The analysts produce their reports in a vacuum, absent the context the proposal provides. As a fellow at DARPA, I could see both, and can do the synthesis."

Do you have access to the intelligence agency collections plans, and/or their analyst outputs? What information do you have that contradicts his statement that his conclusions are corroborated by Top Secret intel analysis?

>>>Everything else is fan fiction by a soldier.

Are you ready to retract that accusation?

I looked up Major Murphy using Marine Online's Locator: he shows up, with his place of work as the Office of Naval Research. My initial skim of the docs didn't raise any immediate red flags to me (things like poor adherence to Naval Correspondence standards for documents). Seems legit. Just my $0.02...