So naturally because I’m not the pretty one, she gets all sympathy and I’m now a lonely motherfucker rejected by a lot of people I once called friends.

From your description, it sounds like she sucks. But based on this, I’d say that either your friends also suck, or you suck, or everyone involved sucks.

Good friends don’t just stick with one side of a breakup because they are more attractive. Even if it’s a nasty breakup, good friends will be there for you just as much as they are there for her.

At the same time, I had a friend go through a breakup. I had met his now-ex, and was the reason they met. When they broke up, I and basically all his other friends cut ties, and hung out with his ex. Why? Because before he’d got together with her, I was already considering cutting ties because he was pissing everyone off, constantly being inconsiderate, and refused to take responsibility for his own problems. The only reason he kept all those friends through his relationship was because he was in that relationship - it felt sudden to him, but everyone had been wanting to cut contact with him for about a year before it happened.

Either way, the reason this sucks so much is because you failed to cultivate strong friendships with good people. Imagine another scenario: she breaks up with you, and you have a close circle of friends who support you through the initial period. Due to your status, notoriety, and relationships in the music scene, suddenly lots of women come out of the woodwork who were always interested in you, but knew you were in a relationship. You go out to a gig, and see she’s making out with some douchebag, but you don’t feel so beat up, because you are there with your friends with a new girl on your shoulder.

And ask yourself: what could I have done to make that happen? Your feelings of resentment have less to do with her, and more to do with your needs not being met in this difficult time. So what you should do now should be to find a way to ensure your needs are met in the future. That might mean improving yourself (asking yourself if you do have an alcohol problem), making new friends, picking up a new hobby for a while, reaching out to old friends to ask for help or advice, or yeah, maybe even moving to a new city! But know: until you can see her hanging out with your old “friends” and making out with another guy and feel okay, you still haven’t overcome your issue.

Hot take: women aren’t insecure about their bodies because of advertising campaigns. They are insecure about their bodies because of real social consequences they face from the people in their everyday lives.

People treat you better when you look nice. This isn’t morally “right” or “fair”, but it is true. Intuitively or explicitly, women recognize this, and put effort into meeting society’s expectations of them. If all women woke up tomorrow and said “I am completely at peace with how my body looks”, the beauty industry would likely be largely unaffected, because they would quickly be reminded of the second order effects that their negative self image was driving them to achieve in the first place: a good partner; a better job; more, cooler friends.

No, because the thing that makes a person feel good when they wear makeup is the anticipated reaction of their peers. Per modern grooming standards, straight men (assuming you are straight here) are expected not to wear make up, and thus will garner quizzical or negative reactions from the average person. You already know this, and if you didn’t, it would quickly become apparent once you started interacting with anyone. And once you noticed others’ negative judgement, you would not “feel fly”.

Instead the way to “feel fly” is simple, if not easy - hew better to culturally agreed-upon beauty standards. Cultures and subcultures differ in exactly what this entails. But common things are wearing clean clothes without obvious wear that fit well; getting a good haircut; taking care of your skin; eating a healthy diet, getting exercise, and sleeping well to improve mood and energy levels; unabashed self-expression within cultural constraints through clothing choice, haircut, hair color, tattoos or piercings, or accessories. And, most importantly, by not being overweight.

I crossed the border from Mexico into the US yesterday. Wait time was reasonable - maybe 45 min. They asked where I was coming from and where I was going, and if I had any produce. I said I had some food that was all bought in America (which was true). They checked, and told me they had to confiscate my avocados. I asked if I could just eat the avocados instead. They said that, really, they just needed to confiscate the avocado seeds. So I cut the avos open, gave them the seeds, and they sent me on my merry way.

On the whole, a bit annoying, but everyone was fairly polite and understanding. But for reference, I am a white US citizen, so ymmv.

Which is also a fun thought exercise!

I just instance blocked them

How do?

Entirely possible. I said I’m skeptical that it is better than standard models, not that I’m sure. But, in the absence of other evidence, I’m inclined to believe the economists who actually understand economics, rather than some rando on Twitter saying “called it!” - stripper or not.

TheY’rE bOTh tHE SamE

They realized that cringe increases engagement via hate-sharing.

This says… something… about you. But I couldn’t tell you what.

https://www.texastribune.org/2025/01/22/austin-texas-rents-falling/

As in many other major cities, existing homeowners and neighborhood groups that opposed allowing more homes to be built for decades held significant sway at Austin City Hall. But those forces lost favor amid the city’s skyrocketing housing costs during the pandemic. Austin voters elected City Council members — including Vela — more friendly to housing development.

Now, Austin is one of the only major U.S. cities where rents are falling.

This is 100% not a straw man. Poor people do stupid shit to fuck up their health and waste public money all the time. I know them - they’re my family. The only problem is that they aren’t quite poor enough to be on food stamps, despite trying their damnedest to get there. And so they keep eating themselves to an early grave, because they are stupid motherfuckers who refuse to accept reality or change in any way.

Ok, go talk to random people in the street and ask them if they are okay giving up electricity in their homes for several hours each day in the name of stopping climate change. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

Not all land is created equal. You can buy some land in rural Nebraska right now and build your own modest house for less than $100k. You’d just have to commute an hour to get to the nearest dollar store.

Allowing more multifamily housing allows people to live affordably while simultaneously being somewhere they actually want to live, without having all their utilities and services subsidized by the government (ie, subsidized by people and businesses which exist in efficient and non-parasitic forms of development).

And yes, a big problem is that many americans’ life savings is tied up in their home value. Hence, liberalization of zoning codes and an implementation of a new taxation scheme must be done such that the vast majority of home owners don’t lose huge amounts of wealth and don’t have their lives significantly disrupted. This is very doable in any number of ways.

Under a Georgists tax scheme, government revenue would likely increase.

Right. Developers are champing at the bit to make money.

A lack of correctly zoned land and a plethora of red tape means that building multifamily will be extremely expensive, and thus, extremely risky. Thus, investors demand a high margin return for the risk they are taking. Upzoning and removing red tape increases the supply of land where you can build a multi-family unit, so investors are willing to accept lower-margin returns. It also opens the door to smaller local developers and cooperative developments. And the then expanded amount of multifamily housing drives down the cost of the luxury units as well.

One reason developers build luxury units instead of affordable units is that once they build, they can just sit on their investment and wait until people buy the units at the price point they want. Georgists tax schemes say “shit or get off the pot” - since they can’t profit from the underlying value of the land, they want to sell their units as quickly as possible so they can stop paying the tax. This incentivizes developers to build units that sell quickly, rather than units that sell for the highest price.

This is the way. Have a vibrant, diverse social life where you contribute to group efforts and show off the skills you have. Introduce yourself to everyone with a smile. Be nice to old people and make friends with them - they are the ones who know about jobs that will never be posted to job boards.

I have several friends who are electricians / carpenters / roofers / contractors. They all tend to work about 6 months out of the year, make bank, and then spend the winter travelling. They could work more if they wanted to, but they just don’t want to, and know they can pick up work basically anytime they want. One electrician friend of mine lives in a small town and is working on forming his own business (which would employ only him), and expects that he will out-earn his wife, who is a physician’s assistant, if he chose to work full time.

The problem in the US is that higher density housing isn’t much less expensive, and that’s because there isn’t enough of it, and there isn’t enough of it because developers and investors…

There isn’t enough of it because BUILDING IT IS ILLEGAL!!! This isn’t a failure of the market to build affordable housing, it is a failure of the government to allow affordable housing to be built due to the dominance of single family zoning! And furthermore, sfhs are cheaper than they should be because they are subsidized by the government - the taxes paid by sfh owners don’t even come close to paying for the maintenance costs for the infrastructure that serves them.

If you want to bring down housing costs:

1. Liberalize zoning laws and strip nimbys of their power.
2. Enact a Georgist tax scheme to preempt land speculation and ensure all land is being put to its highest and best use.
3. Overhaul urban design standards, creating more walkable spaces with better transit and cycling infrastructure.

What is an extroverted introvert?

It is a made up meme to explain the fact that almost no one is really extroverted or introverted. meyers-briggs, which is unscientific and was just made up by some dumbass who said “I think humans be like this”, says all people are either extroverts or introverts. But in reality, one’s level of extroversion or introversion depends heavily on environmental factors such as overall energy level or level of comfort with a particular person/group. To the extent that extroversion is a measurable, stable personality trait at all, when it is measured it fits a bell curve across the population - ie, the vast majority of people land smack dab in the middle of extroverted/introverted.

So if you say you are an extroverted introvert, you’re just saying you’re a normal fucking person. It comes from people accepting Meyers-Briggs as hard fact (it isn’t), and then trying to fit this square peg into the round hole of their actual lived experience.

That’s not autism. That’s social anxiety.