sp3ctr4l

joined 4 months ago
[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (5 children)

Not meaning to be rude with this phrasing, but uh, I am significantly younger than you, born around the time you graduated HS... and yep, I have the same, gut, "this seems weird" reaction.

I was a terribly bashful nerd in the early/mid 2000s, and even I lost my v-card as either a 16 or 17 yo.

https://www.cdc.gov/yrbs/dstr/pdf/YRBS-2023-Data-Summary-Trend-Report.pdf

Thats a drop from half of kids literally fucking around in HS, to just a third, in only the last 10ish years.

I dunno if such data exists going back to when you were in HS, I'd imagine it would have been closer to around 6/10 back then (though thats just a spitball guess), but yeah, the decline has been shocking to me as well.

...

IMO, the main thing that is destroying mental health is... and again, I say this as an early tech adopter, tech nerd, who had a mySpace account, who was one of the first with a Facebook account...

The cause of this is mutlifactorial, general economic decline and precarity are huge factors, but the main problem is our modern social media based digital environment, and how it trains people to act.

Brainrot is a real thing, short form video content reduces attentions spans, makes you more anxious, less confident / have lower self esteem, rapidly propagates mis and disinformation, promotes narcissism and just literally retards rhe development of functional social behaviors.

...

That, and the destruction of 'third places', and then the subsequent enshittificstion of dating apps.

In your day, people could afford to go take a car and hangout somewhere they had some privacy, away from their parents at least, some area where people would go and hang out and just socialize.

Those physical spaces do not exist anymore, they all have paywalls people can no longer afford.

No average kid can afford a car on a summer job anymore.

...

Then, as things digitized, realworld meetups and hangout areas began to decline, dating apps happened.

They were good for a time, but then the people running them realized that you actually make more money as a dating app by making it something you keep coming back to, hiding people you may actually jive well with behind paywalls, that what you actually want is to create a rollercoaster of 'almost worked out but didn't in the end' type relstionships... as that produces your most reliable dating app customer.

These are smart data science people running these things, they know what they're doing.

They don't say what I just said outloud, because it would be bad for their branding and marketing.

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 23 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)

I mean, from your own link, those error bars come from:

The data being a clustered sample set,

That study wasn't specifically asking whether or not respondents were virgins, ie, had 0 sex partners.

...

The error bars there are large because the actual question was 'how many sex partners have you had in the past however many years?', and then your linked post explains how this particular dataset/survey/study was then presented to try to show the answer to a question that wasn't explicitly asked.

That can have a lot more variance than a survey/study that flatly asks binary question of 'have you ever had sex before?', and then goes on to define what does and doesn't count as 'having sex'.

...

And indeed when you actually do that kind of approach, there are many other graphs from many other studies showing it being increasingly for both young men and young women to be virgins, have had 0 sex partners.

https://news.iu.edu/live/news/26924-nearly-1-in-3-young-men-in-the-us-report-having-no

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/young-adult-sexlessness-skyrocketed-in-the-last-decade-while-male-virginity-doubled-study/ar-AA1z4kMy

https://www.cdc.gov/yrbs/dstr/index.html

All of these show a marked decline in the number of both young men and young women who have ever had sex, that more people remain sexless for longer, to an older age.

(Though this started earlier among men and is more pronounced, women are now catching up as well)

...

Also worth noting:

Compared to adult participants in the 2009 survey, adults in the 2018 group were significantly more likely to report no penile-vaginal intercourse in the prior year, the researchers found. Study participants were also significantly less likely to report engaging in any other sexual behaviors examined in the study, such as oral sex or anal sex. All modes of past-year partnered sex were reported by fewer people in the 2018 cohort.

Yeah, contrary to the implication of OP's image... no, young men are not having more of some other kind of sex than male/female p/v, but still having some other kind of sex.

They're just not having sex with a partner. At all.

Bros are not en masse becoming gay or bi or pan or trans, and then having 'non-traditional' sex that would make them not virgins in a 'non-traditional' way, not in the numbers you'd need to make that a statistically viable explanation for lack of m/f p/v sex.

This is funny haha meme joke, but its not based in reality, its based in whimsy.

You can check that against male self-id rates as LGBTQ and see that there has been a slow, gradual rise, from about 3% up to about 5% for men right now... but nothing like an 8% to 28% rise in roughly the same time period.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/719697/american-adults-who-identify-as-homosexual-bisexual-or-transgender-by-gender/

This one particular graph having error bars does not mean this is not a real thing that is happening.

...

And in case its relevant, I am a queer guy who has had varying kinds of sex and intimacy with both men and women, trans-inclusive.

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 3 weeks ago

Don't forget their 'solution' to this is to uh, checks notes, abolish property taxes... and replace the lost revenue with increased sales taxes.

In a state massively reliant on tourism.

I concur, Florida is completely a lost cause, the best thing to do would indeed be to just let nature reclaim it, the humans that live there largely won't in 10 to 20 years,.no matter what is done, at this point.

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 3 weeks ago

The explanation is that conservative boomers are very, very well versed in gaslighting, enforcing reality denial on others, to keep themselves from ever having to entertain the the idea that they were ever wrong about anything, ever.

... and if they were wrong, it wasn't a big deal, and if it was a big deal, then you deserved it, and if you didn't deserve it, then it doesn't matter in the long run because in the long run we are all dead, etc, ad infinitum.

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

It is the same meme as the 'China/Xi strategy; do nothing, win' meme, because its basically the same thing at different scales:

To a much greater degree than their nearest equivalent competitors... both:

Are nowhere near as much beholden to external factors and demands,

Have (though wildly different in nature) actually very effective and efficient internal organizational structures, in terms of actually producing their desires results,

Are just far more competent and less unforced error-prone from a strategic standpoint than their closest competitors/comparisons.

...

To mix up nation state and corporate lingo, Valve is much more 'sovereign', or perhaps 'autarkic', self-reliant, than the vast majority of its competitors.

This isn't to say that either China or Valve are by any means perfect in terms of strategy, nor without moral contention... its just that they are much more independent and effectively governed than their closest comparison rivals, which enables them to do things that seem uncommonly competent.

Valve and China both obviously have weaknesses and exploitable pressure points, but when the rest of the field is a comparative clown show in many ways, well, the clowns are often too busy tripping over their own cloenshoes to be able to effectively act on those weaknesses.

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)

I don't think that... generally, nor specifically in the case of Ender... that it is about wanting to personally have some kind of total spectrum experience of all possible experiences, as some kind of... maximalist sensory/mindstate fetish kind of thing.

There for sure are probably some people like that, but I'd say thats very uncommon.

What I think is more commone is two things:

Despite having base tendencies we often fall back to, humans just vary, significantly, in terms of how they tend to act toward others.

and

People are capable of actual, real world character development, of doing something and thinking it was good at the time... and realize they were wrong, learning, growing, changing, maybe not in totality, but in very significant and impactful ways.

This is not often as common or extreme in the real world as it is in our stories... but that we emphasize this in our stories also means something about us.

It is about a wide spectrum of potential in all humans, not necessarily a single person exhibiting the whole spectrum, not out of some kind of... experiential hedonism.

At least, thats how I see it.

Another defining trait of humans is that we will do things explicitly against our own self interest, out of an adherence to a moral doctrine or dogma, or, making ones own moral decisions about what is wrong and right, to the point of great personal sacrifice.

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 3 weeks ago

Yeah, I know it can be hit or miss depending on your location, but I have had similarly good experiences with my local credit union... you just prove to them in a more old fashioned way that you're responsible, and they'll often be flexible with you in ways that banks aren't.

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Hrm.

Well uh, speaking frankly, I'd prefer a philosophical conversation with Motoko Kusanagi, maybe over tea, sounds nice.

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)

I would argue that, while yes, humanity is capable of and currently enacts horrific violence on other humans and creatures...

We also love and cherish and nurture many humans and nonhumans.

This is more commonly known as the duality of man... great capacity to do both good and evil.

I dunno if you've read Ender's Game and the sequels... but super long story short, Ender is a genius who, with the aide of AIs, and also by basically being tricked into thinking he is testing simulations...

Actually commits a xenocide, of an entire alien species humanity has deemed as a potentially humanity ending threat.

He then travels from Earth all the way out to the remains of the alien species he has destroyed, finds a single fertilized pupae (they're bugs), and then basically tries, in secret from the human government, to revive the otherwise extinct species... such is his guilt over what he has done.

There's just one character who is maybe a decent example of this duality, our paradoxical nature.

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 3 weeks ago

Wait, the tear ducts count... but the eyesocket itself doesn't?

Huh.

I would have intuitively thought the hole the optic nerve goes through counts, but I guess thats not really a uh, topologically true hole, as its mostly just a void in your skull.

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

https://minerstat.com/mining-calculator

Right now, there's about 75 coins/pools/mining methods that are more profitable from a pure mining perspective than XMR... with just an Nvidia 3080.

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (6 children)

Hilariously, GLadOS is ... actually much more relatable, in that she...well I hope this isn't spoilers at this point?

She was mostly kind of originally a human, and is actually at least capable of empathy, she has moments where she seems to express at least barely, a sense of concern for Chell's wellbeing.

Sort of.

lol

She also gets stuck in a potato.

SHODAN on the other hand is literally 'fuck you, pathetic worm, I am God.'

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