It's perfectly possible Mayer did unique work that paid her compensation and much more in savings. Without the counterfactual, we cannot judge her.

I'm getting General Ripper vibes over here...

Also, work is the only means by which we do things that can benefit others. It's all very good to be concerned with your own experience, but if you want to be helpful to a partner, a family, or a community, you have to work.

This is why work has such meaning. It makes benefits that are not purely selfish. Benefiting other people strikes me as more meaningful than simply attending to one's self, trying to make the days until death more pleasant. This selfishness is what has always troubled me about the popular hedonistic conception of meaning that's taken hold in recent decades.

What you're describing is called NoFap; this community is based on the /r/nofap subreddit and is pretty much entirely separate from the culturally-Othered groups you seem to be trying to "weirdify".

Incel have no interest in NoFap.

To the degree that redpill and Proud Boy-like communities belive in NoFap, it's simply based on the repeatable observation that not masturbating increases energy and motivation - especially sexual motivation. Any man who can go two weeks without ejaculating will observe this easily for himself. The difference can be staggering - you feel like a different person.

It has nothing to do with some strange mysticism. Redpillers, especially, are entirely about rejecting traditional mystical beliefs ("soul mates", "love conquers all", "meant for each other", etc) in exchange for repeatable results-yielding methodologies. Nofap is such a methodology.

Not sure where you got this meme, but let's let it die here now because it's as disconnected from reality as most of what mainstreamers say about marginalized male sexual communities.

So your belief is, the dominant economic-political movement in America regards "preserving the inferior status of blacks" as an end goal in and of itself? Or is this an instrumental goal that somehow serves some other purpose?

Not to score social points. Not for meaning. Just to relax and feel good for a week.

Weather can be a big factor. In the middle of five months of winter, daily snow, not seeing the sun in weeks, and working hard in an office every day, a week relaxing in the sun somewhere warm can be very beneficial - and not just in a trite or self-indulgent way. Seasonal mood disorders and work-related stress are real problems and time far away is a real solution.

Plus, if we're here to enjoy life, then self-indulgence is also one ingredient of a good life (accompanied by others). You don't have to be seeking "meaning" every moment of every day like a Terminator seeking his target.

I think that's what he's saying - a general point that people's understanding of climate (and thus predictions about it) are poorer than commonly believed.

It's predicted by astronomers and physicists who study stellar evolution.

Then your conviction that every job must be exactly 50% of each gender no matter how much power must be wielded to make it happen would be a massively misguided recipe for tyranny, harming both men and women.

To call it 'worst' is a value judgment and not an objective statement, any more than saying the abortion or divorce rate is better or worse.

Obviously there will be a few nitrogen molecules bouncing around in there so it seems there must be some arbitrary cutoff.

Imagine a farmer who farms to exhaust the soil. He earns money but in 30 years, the farmland is rendered useless. He becomes poor in the end.

Another farmer farms slower, leaving fallow years, sustainably. He earns less money but 30 years later the farm is productive. He remains wealthy in the end.

Going from farmer 1 to farmer 2's strategy is not a change in ethics. The second farmer didn't care about the land as an end in itself. He just thought longer into the future, and knew how to measure assets that weren't obvious (in his case, land quality; in real life, loyalty, image, healthy communities to embed in).

Go out in frigid weather with a T-shirt on. You'll soon shiver - your body is recruiting muscles to generate heat. But also, your "brown fat" cells will start pumping out heat as well.

History, terrain/density, climate, culture, and even genetics all likely play a role. Not just policy.

I would be curious to learn how the numbers compare between Norwegians and Norwegian-Americans. That'd cut a few confounders at least.

It only seems that way because pre-1960, the world was entirely dominated by sects (e.g. religions) with large families. All the old religions are very traditionally pro-natalist for a reason. Go forth and multiply!

If the population didn't grow, it was only because there was just no more food to feed more mouths. So it was for all of human history until recently.

It's only now that there is a significant group of people who choose not to have large families, and who have the birth control technology to make it happen. As with past sects who followed this path, they will dwindle as a proportion of the population. We are in nothing like a steady state, and high-fertility groups absolutely will own the future, just as they owned the past.

Topical here is The Most Important Graph In The World:

https://www.unzcloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Populati...

Still totally understandable from an employer's point of view. e.g. How much of a discount would you need to hire a nanny previously convicted or domestic abuse?

But, it still functions as a de-facto punishment. But the rationality of it is what makes it difficult to address, without taking away the freedom of free people.

Perhaps a solution would be to make judges explicitly state that part of the punishment is to have a really hard time finding work, to make them acknowledge what's being done. Then, if the judge doesn't wish to make this part of the punishment, he can order that the criminal's future employers be subsidized, or that the record be hidden.

The thing is, these are political non-starters. Even if the overall result is better, we know what'd happen the first time a felon with a hidden record or whose paycheck is government subsidized does something awful on the job. And that will happen, fast.

Former criminals are far more likely to commit crimes than random citizens. So it's rational to discriminate against people with records. This fact has to get acknowledged, and my sense is that a lot of people don't want to because it makes the problem seem really hard to solve.

Overall, given that employers should have the right to choose their employees with knowledge intact (see: nanny example), but criminals shouldn't be receiving life-long extrajudicial punishments, I think subsidizing their wages to some degree, if they find work, seems like a good policy option. I wonder if it's ever been tried.

At 5pm they play a 30-second traditional Japanese lullaby. If you ask people, they say it means it's time for children to go home - though as far as I can tell it has nothing to do with actual school schedules. I'm not sure everyone realizes it's actually a warning system.

It's just people not wanting to associate with others who are more likely in the future to commit dangerous or destructive acts, because they fear being victimized. They rightly believe that if this person committed such an act in the past, they're more likely to do so in the future, as compared to someone with no such record.

If you pretend the motivation is to punish the other, instead of to avoid being victimized, you'll never be able to understand this behavior and thus will never be able to change it or adapt to it.