I fly a lot. To me I think it'd be enough if the airline offered water, wi-fi, headphones, and pillows+blankets on long flights - all for free, without selling anything at all. Everything else (food, entertainment devices and accessories, diapers and other hygiene, etc) we can bring ourselves, and it would probably feel better than being nickel-and-dimed for these things during the flight.
None of the things you saw as being in that comment (“I will always have food and a house without any work or bosses” or “privilege of the top 1%”) are actually in the comment.
They are, though.
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"No force in the world can take from me my five hundred pounds. Food, house, and clothing are mine for ever. Therefore not merely do effort and labour cease..."
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"by some luck and hard work made it to the top, but they had to hustle for it, and it did not come naturally to them; it was not their birthright" -- which I described as "being at the top is my birthright".
I read it differently. That comment was talking about a level of financial security as high as "I will always have food and a house without any work or bosses", and a level of confidence as high as "being at the top is my birthright". Let's be real, these things are the privilege of the top 1%, both now and historically. I'm all for giving more people these things, but that's different from being only attracted to the top 1% - that's just assholish, no matter the gender. People should give the 99% a goddamn chance.
1I’d be interested in reading a good treatment of this conjecture
This is Lenin's theory of revolution. You need to have a party governed by "democratic centralism" (each member must obey every decision of the party as a whole). It needs to wait for a "revolutionary situation" (weakness of elites and discontent of masses), then act decisively to take and keep power. Every successful revolutionary in the 20th century has studied this theory.
1full-time RV travel
kids I’ve met being raised on the road
This sounds really interesting! Do you write about it somewhere? Or can you share some impressions?
Maybe different people have different ways of seeing. For example, most AI art kinda scares me and makes me close the tab as fast as I can. My reaction to plastic surgery is similar. Photos of Aella online have the obvious worked-on lips, when I see something like that in real life I want to walk out of the room. These are instinctive, immediate reactions. Judging from reddit, many people have the same reactions. But many don't; maybe that set includes you. So folks like you will talk about "tasteful surgery", and folks like me will keep being freaked out by each actual example we see.
As to your hypothesis about "part of the sales department", this is a bit funny. You linked to a paper by Parsa et al. Have you tried googling Keon Parsa?
I don't like being that person, but I guess I am that person: I defy the data. There are many people around me (mostly women) who have had work done, and it always looks horrible. Low regret rates don't mean much to me, because another thing I see clearly is that the people who had work done become delusional about how it looks, and often get tempted to do even more. I see people look at themselves in the mirror and see themselves delusionally. I see people having unnaturally less movement in the face. I see people whose procedures age badly, and are by now impossible to reverse. It's not something I'm repeating from the internet, it's what I've seen in reality for years. How those studies got those conclusions, I don't know, but they must be doing something wrong.
The thing is, I've seen some people get a lot more success from changing location or social scene, or from losing lots of weight. But I don't think I ever saw anyone getting a strong boost from plastic surgery / limb lengthening etc. It just seems oversold to me, and lots of ads outright manipulate people into it.
I think these differences in averages could all be true, but still not affect the median man very much. I mean, let's say Alex gets 0.5 compliments per year and Bob gets 0.25 (yeah the median man gets about that much). That's a 2x difference, but it still doesn't matter. Certainly not enough to get surgery over.
The attractive men also don't care much about these differences, I don't think. The differences only really matter to those who are on the cusp - not too attractive currently, but could be much more attractive with small changes to looks. I think more people imagine themselves in that category than actually are. Then they'll get the surgery, get a real but small improvement, do more drastic stuff and so on. Not sure that's good advice.
If any improvements in attractiveness will likely be marginal anyway, it makes more sense to try milder measures first. Optimizing one's social life might also give a marginal improvement. Moving to another area might be more than marginal actually. So I'd say first try all these things.
I think there's been a lot of well-poisoning. For example, people say "universal free healthcare paid by taxes is equivalent to stealing".
It's tempting to say that's a small thing, but maybe not. Arguments from liberalism often seem to favor the rich and screw the poor. It's not even a problem with the arguments, but with liberalism itself: those who have more than they need will enjoy compounding growth, get more influence on laws and the press, use that influence to tilt the playing field in their favor, and life will increasingly look like a game of Monopoly.
The only remedy for that is inherently illiberal: lots of progressive taxation and redistribution. So maybe it's worth rethinking what the "bedrock" should be. Principles of individual freedom, and principles of helping the weak at the expense of the strong, should at the very least be on equal footing. FDR had the right idea calling it the New Deal.