Wasn't it the case that the plurality of new marriages were now formed from online dating? If that's the case, it likely isn't also the case that relatively few women are going to online dating.
My speculative hypotheses:
1. I very rarely see longitudinal or time based data about dating apps. I'd guess, however, there are lots of subsets. A small number of long-term serial daters and hookup artists. A large number of purely casual users. An unknown but probably largeish number of sporadic users who seek and find relationships, then leave. Because they're successful, they quickly disappear from the dataset.
2. The data "most relationships are formed online" coupled with "most women don't go online for relationships" dovetails nicely with the data that suggests large numbers of young people aren't dating at all, or even particularly interested.
It's very simple. "But what about that guy ... " - "Ha, oh yeah, that guy! Well, that one doesn't really count, because ..."
The data comes from surveys asking people to report facts about their sex-related attitudes and behaviors, and, even putting any questions of methodology, motivation, selection, and question phrasing aside, any conclusions made on the basis of that data depend absolutely on whether those people are conveying accurate information.
They aren't. People deceive others and themselves all the time about that kind of stuff for all kinds of reasons. They lie so much about this subject area that it likely wins first prize for provider of the least reliable data.
Handle's Second Law is, "The medium is the mendacity. If you want accurate claims about anything involving the nature of intersexual relations, then from men, only in writing, from women, only in song, and from surveys, only in utopia."
I think you are mixing two different root statistics. It isn't that the plurality of new marriages were from people met on online dating sites, but rather online in general. That is to say, they met on dating sites, or hobby focused forums, online games, comments sections, whatever. There's a big difference there, I think. I know exactly one married couple that met online dating, but actually a handful that met playing World of Warcraft, or on tabletop gaming forums.
So I think there is an important distinction between services specifically for dating vs online social groups. Both fall under "met online", but are very different in use.
Maybe? I guess I don't have any confidence in the data here. Maybe naively I assume "met online" usually means people were looking in dating places, but it would be an easy question to solve with the right kinds of survey questions.
Aye, I think survey takers need to update their surveys; I don't think they have a good fundamental understanding of how online society works. I look at all the "X-thing Meetups!" happening, usually with no attachment to dating apps, and think "Most of those people met online, and if they care enough about this subject to meet in real life they seem pretty likely to find people of the opposite sex to marry at these sort of meetups, seeing as how they share a passion." (That is, assuming there are people of the opposite sex in the group... not 100% the case!) Yet survey takers seem to think people only meet and make friends and form relationships on sites specifically dedicated to the idea, not "MyNicheHobby.org".
Yeah, between this reality and the point Handle makes (people lie) there's so much going on here that's just not visible in the data.
Even within webspaces, there are infinite variations. Like, go to a place like Reddit, and there are explicit dating subs (i.e. r4r), subs to talk about relationships, and then subs where meeting IRL would be totally off topic (i.e. gaming or Game of Thrones fans). And some that aren't explicitly dating, but are similar (i.e. Indianapolis or "Indianapolis Meet Ups).
You'd think someone would ask something like, "Where did you meet:"
Online/Offline "through"
a. Dating/relationship oriented site
b. Dating space associated with a common interest (ie the "find a date subforum on your message board about etymology" or church match making circle).
c. Non-dating space (we randomly met and chatting at grocery/on WoW).
I just finished "Number Go Up" by Zeke Faux on the whole crypto industry. It included significant interviews with SBF. Faux is an investigative reporter that specializes in financial scams, but the book started being written before SBF's fall.
Faux seemed to take SBFs philosophy seriously and asked him about it candidly. I'm going on my own memory of a single read through, but he pointed out the usual issues with utilitarianism.
1) If your utilitarian calculation says its OK to lie, cheat, steal, etc then you have license to trample any traditional moral code.
2) Citing reputation risk doesn't necessarily salvage #1, because there is always the chance that you could get away with it (this appears to be what SBF thought and what the author says is quite common in these scams).
3) It isn't explicitly stated in the book, but looking at his extensive review of SBFs personal habits its quite obvious that his lifestyle choices (drugs, sleep, relationships, diet, mannerisms, values) are the kind of thing that would make it very hard to calculate utility accurately (a hard enough task for the best of people in the best of circumstances).
4) After it all blows up he interview SBF who basically says that he got the utility calculation wrong (for what he feels seemed like decent reasons at the time). The idea that some things are incalculable and that he should understand his own flaws and vices might affect his calculations didn't seem to occur to him.
---
As to stable coins the book actually starts as an investigation of the stable coin Tether. His conclusion is that the purpose of tether and other stable coins is to facilitate financial frauds. In fact the people at tether might have the safest business model because Tethers don't pay interest rates and treasuries are paying over 5% these days. So in affect Tether can collect a huge fee for helping to enable illegal transactions.
Whether Tether will survive he seems not to know (the people running it he feels are of low character and prone to scams, but if they could just satisfy themselves with 5% maybe they can get by).
I think these scumbags would have been just as likely to drink their own ethical kool-aid and rationalize their bad behavior regardless of whether Utilitarian, Episcopalian, or Rastafarian.
Ethical analysis of deontological rules in isolation suffers from a fallacy of composition. It's not about whether each rule with its arbitrary line-drawing and inflexibility can be justified by itself. It's about how lots and lots of such hard and fast rules, mandates, and prohibitions acting in concert together effectively minimize one's room for maneuver in attempts to construct such rationalizations of excuses that could be socially accepted. It doesn't make sense to ask about the consequences of a single rule, because the question is about the consequences of the aggregated constellation of all the rules, and if it is ok for anyone to question an ethical rule, then one removes the keystone to the arch as there can be no genuine feeling of the inviolable sacredness of the rules, and then none of them will continue to be treated as hard and fast with bright lines.
"Weiss, who despite her full-time job as an agitator managed in her spare time to build a multimillion-dollar, multi-pronged platform in less than three years, can do something that the L.A. Times probably couldn’t do if it gave the tickets away for free: fill a 1,600-seat theater."
"Those daughters who do go on dating apps receive an ego boost from being sought after by frogs. And they get to indulge in a preference for frogs that are tall." Oh, that line made me laugh 🤣
"The best use case is ... if the dollar is no longer a reliable store of value."
Not the best. Try replacing with "... if the mainstream transaction system is no longer a reliably neutral institution."
See, it depends what you means by "best use case".
If you mean, "Macroeconomic condition which would cause large numbers of normie people and institutions to jump ship whenever possible from the fiat-currency-denominated mainstream accounts-and-transactions system, and start using crypto instead," then ok.
If you mean, "most compelling non-speculative sources of demand for crypto, short of wild inflation" that is, "The biggest advantage that crypto has over even a reliably-stable-valued fiat system, in terms of providing a major benefit to one's personal interests," then no way.
That best case is, "the mainstream system gets so bad that lots of people need a way to circumvent it in order to maintain control over their money and to use it the way they want to."
That is, to get what they want, people now face a "Mayor or Mafia?" choice between systems that are either state-adjacent or crime-adjacent.
If the former becomes inferior to the latter then, if they can, then they will flip from a system full of gatekeepers eager to curry favor with the state, to one full of groups eager to operate in defiance of the state. "I understand. You found paradise in America, had a good trade, made a good living. The police protected you; and there were courts of law. And you didn't need a friend of me. But uh, now you come to me and you say -- 'Don Corleone give me justice.'"
The best case for "Don Corleone's Justice Depot" is when the Justice System (1) stops giving people justice, and (2) can't shut him down, and (3) can't stop people from going to the competition.
That is, the best case for crypto isn't about unreliable prices the level of which is hard to predict, it's about unreliable intermediaries the use of which is hard to avoid.
It's part of the more general, bigger, and more urgent problem of the breakdown in out society's key institutions in their capacity to remain neutral, focus exclusively on factors relevant to their core missions, and to reliably perform their essential functions. Yuval Levin call your office.
That's because no institution can serve two masters. If the state can get to you, it will make you comply with the imperatives of the state ideology, and that new master trumps the old one of pursuing the original mission and doing that job fairly and competently.
Which is why that isn't happening much anymore.
Today, law enforcement doesn't reliably enforce the laws. Disease controllers don't reliably control diseases. Social platforms won't reliably give you a platform to socialize. "This decision is final and there is no appeal." Internet service providers won't reliably provide you service for the internet. (See Nick Nugent's recent "viewpoint foreclosure" series at the Volokh Conspiracy.)
Likewise, banks no longer just let you bank. "I'm gonna need to see some ID." - "Here you go, it says 'Franklin'." - "Good enough!"
The dark joke sarcastic line demonstrating the profound difficulty in dealing with this problem, and the absurdity of claims trying to downplay its significance is, "Just build your own internet!"
Actually, forget about the whole internet, even email is a bridge too far. It's impossible to even host your own little email server anymore because if you are trying to email accounts under their control, the big players can't be relied upon to deliver your emails quickly, or at all. (See Greg Fawcett's "GMail is Breaking Email" and Carlos Fenollosa's "After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel. The oligopoly has won.")
There is apparently a whole "Toady Defenders of the Oligopolies" ecosystem out there, and Satan had to start construction on a new circle of Hell, both because the Dark One wished to install novel tortures better suited to that particular behavior, and also simply to make room for the huge expected influx.
But getting back to dollars vs crypto, there are the textbook three money functions, "store of value", "unit of account", and "medium of exchange". I never thought that this was cutting nature at the joints or that these notions were conceptually distinct enough to be genuinely separable. Whether fiat currency can store value at all depends on whether you can use it with other people to make exchanges and so forth. But the point remains that whether you want to have and use something as money depends on it reliably performing all three functions, and the serious impairment of any of those functions will encourage people to go elsewhere and use something else.
See, there are two ways for your dollars to be unreliable stores of value.
You could distrust the money, or you could distrust the money movers.
Either, "It's my money, but it ain't what it used to be." Or, "It's good money, just not truly mine."
So, the first way is rapid and uncertain inflation. Americans tend to mistake this for the only way, because a lot of work over a long time went into making them believe they could trust their financial system to not screw them over in various unfair ways for which they will have no recourse or remedy. That won't last much longer, which is sad, but at least it will help correct that mistake.
And that's why there's a second way, which is that, it doesn't matter even if your dollars are universally believed to be, and are in fact, the -best possible- stores of value, if -you can't use them-.
That is, use of the dollar system compels you to go through (and pay for!) monitoring, gatekeeping, and regulating intermediaries themselves subject to politicized state power, vulnerable to public or media pressure, and protected by a lawless jurisprudence that makes contract terms illusory and empowers them with what is in practice an effectively unilateral flexible discretion to freeze "your" funds and kick you out.
Compared to their need to avoid trouble with the government, press, or social media, they have zero incentive to care about being neutral or fair or making mistakes in the case of individuals, and any attempt to fight back is completely hopeless. Anyone who is going to say, "But muh private companies should be free to do whatever they want ... " with regards to the necessarily-state-adjacent giant entities operating in the contemporary banking system, please don't embarrass yourself.
Those intermediary institutions are getting more obnoxious, restrictive, politicized, and unfair every day. "First they came for the accounts of the truckers, and I just kept banking, because I was not a trucker."
See, either you think your property will decline in wealth, or you think your rights to use that wealth will decline below what qualifies as property.
To understand this, let's say you own a plot of land. The state hates and wants to crush you, but still concedes that you own the land. But -they- own the land under the public roads that completely surround that plot. And while you were away, they build a giant fence on the edge of those roads so that you couldn't get back on your land.
If they say, "Hey, we have every right to build a fence on our own property!" they are not correct. They have no such right and must provide you with an easement for ingress. That's because building that fence conflicts with the rights they have already granted you by making the land your property, which include the rights to control and use it. If you can't use it, it's not property. If the impair your capacity to use the land such that it no longer qualifies as property at all, our legal tradition insists that they took it from you, and they must pay you a fair price for it.
By analogy, the reliability of the value of your dollars in the system depends on whether the system treats them as your property, with the minimal legal respect actual property is entitled to receive. If they don't, you can only spend so long as they allow you to, and otherwise you are at their mercy. When "at their mercy dollars" sell for normies at the same steep discount to cash as in the criminal underworld, if they can, people will flip.
I think there is a very credible use for stablecoins. As long as there is demand for dollars and it is difficult to open a dollar-denominated account or to send dollars around the world, stablecoins fill a void. If you have family in Venezuela or Argentina, you can either pay a fortune to Western Union to send them money, or you can maintain an account that holds USDC (the stablecoin issued by Circle).
It's also a way to allow an investor who holds crypto assets to either hedge or to keep assets tied to USD without any fluctuation.
I would also consider that existing payment rails are remarkably slow and expensive. SWIFT and others are obsolete. They function for a limited number of hours each day, they are difficult to use, and high cost. There is a lot of room for innovation in this space...
Tove K continues to have excellent sex-difference posts - some of the earlier ones there are also noteworthy, She doesn't know why avg & below avg men are on Tinder, and think they should leave:
"If men on the dating market are both peaches and lemons, peaches will always be underappreciated. Unless they can actually show they are peaches.
Superficial dating sites like Tinder are useless for that. So what are men with modest outsides and attractive insides doing there? Why are they wasting their time and money on sites populated by women who want to boost their confidence through dating superficially attractive men? "
I think that most lemons think they at least have a peachy heart, and that's good enough. Tove points out that many gals are interested in casual sex with great looking guys; others note the girls are usually hoping for more and often regretting afterwards. (While men regret NOT having sex with some possibles) Tove gives some good reasons for the women to be there, while noting casual sex is not high on most women's idea of a good relationship date, and that far fewer women are there.
Yet without a better analysis of why so many men are there, and I don't know, there seems to be something missing. I suspect many of the guys do go to bars, late, and find out that "at 1:30 there are no ugly girls".
I'd swear less than a month ago you didn't know why women all thought they could pick tall men on the dating apps and tall men had their choice of women. Now women have their choice of men. I'm not sure if you are stating contradictions or you just now answered a previous question.
I don't know if I'm just lucky or use or approach then differently than most, but I barely recognize this description of dating apps. It's a common description - essentially the only one among educated types - so I don't doubt its commonality/accuracy for most folks. Nonetheless, over several years and different apps, it has not been my experience.
My experience is that most adults of settling age (30+?) on the apps are indeed looking for a long-term partner. Most relationships formed on apps are not long-term for the same reason most other relationships are not - most people you meet are not The One (or even the 0.86 you can round up to 1...). So, again as in offline life, most people need to be patient and to talk to/meet many people before they'll meet a great long-term partner.
But that's still the goal, and one many people achieve (or at least taking meaningful step towards) via online dating apps
The little that I know about dating apps leads me to understand that most are oriented toward hookups, not long term. But there are people who truly are seeking more substantial relationships and might even find one. A younger, male relative who is somewhat shy has been trying to meet a woman for a permanent, family situation. So far, not much luck. Decades ago I used the pre-internet dating app called “personals” in the local newspaper and met my wife. Perhaps it all depends mightily upon each person’s intention as they use whatever tool or avenue at their disposal.
Wasn't it the case that the plurality of new marriages were now formed from online dating? If that's the case, it likely isn't also the case that relatively few women are going to online dating.
My speculative hypotheses:
1. I very rarely see longitudinal or time based data about dating apps. I'd guess, however, there are lots of subsets. A small number of long-term serial daters and hookup artists. A large number of purely casual users. An unknown but probably largeish number of sporadic users who seek and find relationships, then leave. Because they're successful, they quickly disappear from the dataset.
2. The data "most relationships are formed online" coupled with "most women don't go online for relationships" dovetails nicely with the data that suggests large numbers of young people aren't dating at all, or even particularly interested.
It's very simple. "But what about that guy ... " - "Ha, oh yeah, that guy! Well, that one doesn't really count, because ..."
The data comes from surveys asking people to report facts about their sex-related attitudes and behaviors, and, even putting any questions of methodology, motivation, selection, and question phrasing aside, any conclusions made on the basis of that data depend absolutely on whether those people are conveying accurate information.
They aren't. People deceive others and themselves all the time about that kind of stuff for all kinds of reasons. They lie so much about this subject area that it likely wins first prize for provider of the least reliable data.
Handle's Second Law is, "The medium is the mendacity. If you want accurate claims about anything involving the nature of intersexual relations, then from men, only in writing, from women, only in song, and from surveys, only in utopia."
I think you are mixing two different root statistics. It isn't that the plurality of new marriages were from people met on online dating sites, but rather online in general. That is to say, they met on dating sites, or hobby focused forums, online games, comments sections, whatever. There's a big difference there, I think. I know exactly one married couple that met online dating, but actually a handful that met playing World of Warcraft, or on tabletop gaming forums.
So I think there is an important distinction between services specifically for dating vs online social groups. Both fall under "met online", but are very different in use.
Maybe? I guess I don't have any confidence in the data here. Maybe naively I assume "met online" usually means people were looking in dating places, but it would be an easy question to solve with the right kinds of survey questions.
Aye, I think survey takers need to update their surveys; I don't think they have a good fundamental understanding of how online society works. I look at all the "X-thing Meetups!" happening, usually with no attachment to dating apps, and think "Most of those people met online, and if they care enough about this subject to meet in real life they seem pretty likely to find people of the opposite sex to marry at these sort of meetups, seeing as how they share a passion." (That is, assuming there are people of the opposite sex in the group... not 100% the case!) Yet survey takers seem to think people only meet and make friends and form relationships on sites specifically dedicated to the idea, not "MyNicheHobby.org".
Yeah, between this reality and the point Handle makes (people lie) there's so much going on here that's just not visible in the data.
Even within webspaces, there are infinite variations. Like, go to a place like Reddit, and there are explicit dating subs (i.e. r4r), subs to talk about relationships, and then subs where meeting IRL would be totally off topic (i.e. gaming or Game of Thrones fans). And some that aren't explicitly dating, but are similar (i.e. Indianapolis or "Indianapolis Meet Ups).
You'd think someone would ask something like, "Where did you meet:"
Online/Offline "through"
a. Dating/relationship oriented site
b. Dating space associated with a common interest (ie the "find a date subforum on your message board about etymology" or church match making circle).
c. Non-dating space (we randomly met and chatting at grocery/on WoW).
d. Thought friends
e. etc...
I just finished "Number Go Up" by Zeke Faux on the whole crypto industry. It included significant interviews with SBF. Faux is an investigative reporter that specializes in financial scams, but the book started being written before SBF's fall.
Faux seemed to take SBFs philosophy seriously and asked him about it candidly. I'm going on my own memory of a single read through, but he pointed out the usual issues with utilitarianism.
1) If your utilitarian calculation says its OK to lie, cheat, steal, etc then you have license to trample any traditional moral code.
2) Citing reputation risk doesn't necessarily salvage #1, because there is always the chance that you could get away with it (this appears to be what SBF thought and what the author says is quite common in these scams).
3) It isn't explicitly stated in the book, but looking at his extensive review of SBFs personal habits its quite obvious that his lifestyle choices (drugs, sleep, relationships, diet, mannerisms, values) are the kind of thing that would make it very hard to calculate utility accurately (a hard enough task for the best of people in the best of circumstances).
4) After it all blows up he interview SBF who basically says that he got the utility calculation wrong (for what he feels seemed like decent reasons at the time). The idea that some things are incalculable and that he should understand his own flaws and vices might affect his calculations didn't seem to occur to him.
---
As to stable coins the book actually starts as an investigation of the stable coin Tether. His conclusion is that the purpose of tether and other stable coins is to facilitate financial frauds. In fact the people at tether might have the safest business model because Tethers don't pay interest rates and treasuries are paying over 5% these days. So in affect Tether can collect a huge fee for helping to enable illegal transactions.
Whether Tether will survive he seems not to know (the people running it he feels are of low character and prone to scams, but if they could just satisfy themselves with 5% maybe they can get by).
I think these scumbags would have been just as likely to drink their own ethical kool-aid and rationalize their bad behavior regardless of whether Utilitarian, Episcopalian, or Rastafarian.
Ethical analysis of deontological rules in isolation suffers from a fallacy of composition. It's not about whether each rule with its arbitrary line-drawing and inflexibility can be justified by itself. It's about how lots and lots of such hard and fast rules, mandates, and prohibitions acting in concert together effectively minimize one's room for maneuver in attempts to construct such rationalizations of excuses that could be socially accepted. It doesn't make sense to ask about the consequences of a single rule, because the question is about the consequences of the aggregated constellation of all the rules, and if it is ok for anyone to question an ethical rule, then one removes the keystone to the arch as there can be no genuine feeling of the inviolable sacredness of the rules, and then none of them will continue to be treated as hard and fast with bright lines.
"Weiss, who despite her full-time job as an agitator managed in her spare time to build a multimillion-dollar, multi-pronged platform in less than three years, can do something that the L.A. Times probably couldn’t do if it gave the tickets away for free: fill a 1,600-seat theater."
Ouch, that one's gonna leave a welt.
"Those daughters who do go on dating apps receive an ego boost from being sought after by frogs. And they get to indulge in a preference for frogs that are tall." Oh, that line made me laugh 🤣
"The best use case is ... if the dollar is no longer a reliable store of value."
Not the best. Try replacing with "... if the mainstream transaction system is no longer a reliably neutral institution."
See, it depends what you means by "best use case".
If you mean, "Macroeconomic condition which would cause large numbers of normie people and institutions to jump ship whenever possible from the fiat-currency-denominated mainstream accounts-and-transactions system, and start using crypto instead," then ok.
If you mean, "most compelling non-speculative sources of demand for crypto, short of wild inflation" that is, "The biggest advantage that crypto has over even a reliably-stable-valued fiat system, in terms of providing a major benefit to one's personal interests," then no way.
That best case is, "the mainstream system gets so bad that lots of people need a way to circumvent it in order to maintain control over their money and to use it the way they want to."
That is, to get what they want, people now face a "Mayor or Mafia?" choice between systems that are either state-adjacent or crime-adjacent.
If the former becomes inferior to the latter then, if they can, then they will flip from a system full of gatekeepers eager to curry favor with the state, to one full of groups eager to operate in defiance of the state. "I understand. You found paradise in America, had a good trade, made a good living. The police protected you; and there were courts of law. And you didn't need a friend of me. But uh, now you come to me and you say -- 'Don Corleone give me justice.'"
The best case for "Don Corleone's Justice Depot" is when the Justice System (1) stops giving people justice, and (2) can't shut him down, and (3) can't stop people from going to the competition.
That is, the best case for crypto isn't about unreliable prices the level of which is hard to predict, it's about unreliable intermediaries the use of which is hard to avoid.
It's part of the more general, bigger, and more urgent problem of the breakdown in out society's key institutions in their capacity to remain neutral, focus exclusively on factors relevant to their core missions, and to reliably perform their essential functions. Yuval Levin call your office.
That's because no institution can serve two masters. If the state can get to you, it will make you comply with the imperatives of the state ideology, and that new master trumps the old one of pursuing the original mission and doing that job fairly and competently.
Which is why that isn't happening much anymore.
Today, law enforcement doesn't reliably enforce the laws. Disease controllers don't reliably control diseases. Social platforms won't reliably give you a platform to socialize. "This decision is final and there is no appeal." Internet service providers won't reliably provide you service for the internet. (See Nick Nugent's recent "viewpoint foreclosure" series at the Volokh Conspiracy.)
Likewise, banks no longer just let you bank. "I'm gonna need to see some ID." - "Here you go, it says 'Franklin'." - "Good enough!"
The dark joke sarcastic line demonstrating the profound difficulty in dealing with this problem, and the absurdity of claims trying to downplay its significance is, "Just build your own internet!"
Actually, forget about the whole internet, even email is a bridge too far. It's impossible to even host your own little email server anymore because if you are trying to email accounts under their control, the big players can't be relied upon to deliver your emails quickly, or at all. (See Greg Fawcett's "GMail is Breaking Email" and Carlos Fenollosa's "After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel. The oligopoly has won.")
There is apparently a whole "Toady Defenders of the Oligopolies" ecosystem out there, and Satan had to start construction on a new circle of Hell, both because the Dark One wished to install novel tortures better suited to that particular behavior, and also simply to make room for the huge expected influx.
But getting back to dollars vs crypto, there are the textbook three money functions, "store of value", "unit of account", and "medium of exchange". I never thought that this was cutting nature at the joints or that these notions were conceptually distinct enough to be genuinely separable. Whether fiat currency can store value at all depends on whether you can use it with other people to make exchanges and so forth. But the point remains that whether you want to have and use something as money depends on it reliably performing all three functions, and the serious impairment of any of those functions will encourage people to go elsewhere and use something else.
See, there are two ways for your dollars to be unreliable stores of value.
You could distrust the money, or you could distrust the money movers.
Either, "It's my money, but it ain't what it used to be." Or, "It's good money, just not truly mine."
So, the first way is rapid and uncertain inflation. Americans tend to mistake this for the only way, because a lot of work over a long time went into making them believe they could trust their financial system to not screw them over in various unfair ways for which they will have no recourse or remedy. That won't last much longer, which is sad, but at least it will help correct that mistake.
And that's why there's a second way, which is that, it doesn't matter even if your dollars are universally believed to be, and are in fact, the -best possible- stores of value, if -you can't use them-.
That is, use of the dollar system compels you to go through (and pay for!) monitoring, gatekeeping, and regulating intermediaries themselves subject to politicized state power, vulnerable to public or media pressure, and protected by a lawless jurisprudence that makes contract terms illusory and empowers them with what is in practice an effectively unilateral flexible discretion to freeze "your" funds and kick you out.
Compared to their need to avoid trouble with the government, press, or social media, they have zero incentive to care about being neutral or fair or making mistakes in the case of individuals, and any attempt to fight back is completely hopeless. Anyone who is going to say, "But muh private companies should be free to do whatever they want ... " with regards to the necessarily-state-adjacent giant entities operating in the contemporary banking system, please don't embarrass yourself.
Those intermediary institutions are getting more obnoxious, restrictive, politicized, and unfair every day. "First they came for the accounts of the truckers, and I just kept banking, because I was not a trucker."
See, either you think your property will decline in wealth, or you think your rights to use that wealth will decline below what qualifies as property.
To understand this, let's say you own a plot of land. The state hates and wants to crush you, but still concedes that you own the land. But -they- own the land under the public roads that completely surround that plot. And while you were away, they build a giant fence on the edge of those roads so that you couldn't get back on your land.
If they say, "Hey, we have every right to build a fence on our own property!" they are not correct. They have no such right and must provide you with an easement for ingress. That's because building that fence conflicts with the rights they have already granted you by making the land your property, which include the rights to control and use it. If you can't use it, it's not property. If the impair your capacity to use the land such that it no longer qualifies as property at all, our legal tradition insists that they took it from you, and they must pay you a fair price for it.
By analogy, the reliability of the value of your dollars in the system depends on whether the system treats them as your property, with the minimal legal respect actual property is entitled to receive. If they don't, you can only spend so long as they allow you to, and otherwise you are at their mercy. When "at their mercy dollars" sell for normies at the same steep discount to cash as in the criminal underworld, if they can, people will flip.
I think there is a very credible use for stablecoins. As long as there is demand for dollars and it is difficult to open a dollar-denominated account or to send dollars around the world, stablecoins fill a void. If you have family in Venezuela or Argentina, you can either pay a fortune to Western Union to send them money, or you can maintain an account that holds USDC (the stablecoin issued by Circle).
It's also a way to allow an investor who holds crypto assets to either hedge or to keep assets tied to USD without any fluctuation.
I would also consider that existing payment rails are remarkably slow and expensive. SWIFT and others are obsolete. They function for a limited number of hours each day, they are difficult to use, and high cost. There is a lot of room for innovation in this space...
Tove K continues to have excellent sex-difference posts - some of the earlier ones there are also noteworthy, She doesn't know why avg & below avg men are on Tinder, and think they should leave:
"If men on the dating market are both peaches and lemons, peaches will always be underappreciated. Unless they can actually show they are peaches.
Superficial dating sites like Tinder are useless for that. So what are men with modest outsides and attractive insides doing there? Why are they wasting their time and money on sites populated by women who want to boost their confidence through dating superficially attractive men? "
I think that most lemons think they at least have a peachy heart, and that's good enough. Tove points out that many gals are interested in casual sex with great looking guys; others note the girls are usually hoping for more and often regretting afterwards. (While men regret NOT having sex with some possibles) Tove gives some good reasons for the women to be there, while noting casual sex is not high on most women's idea of a good relationship date, and that far fewer women are there.
Yet without a better analysis of why so many men are there, and I don't know, there seems to be something missing. I suspect many of the guys do go to bars, late, and find out that "at 1:30 there are no ugly girls".
I'd swear less than a month ago you didn't know why women all thought they could pick tall men on the dating apps and tall men had their choice of women. Now women have their choice of men. I'm not sure if you are stating contradictions or you just now answered a previous question.
I don't know if I'm just lucky or use or approach then differently than most, but I barely recognize this description of dating apps. It's a common description - essentially the only one among educated types - so I don't doubt its commonality/accuracy for most folks. Nonetheless, over several years and different apps, it has not been my experience.
My experience is that most adults of settling age (30+?) on the apps are indeed looking for a long-term partner. Most relationships formed on apps are not long-term for the same reason most other relationships are not - most people you meet are not The One (or even the 0.86 you can round up to 1...). So, again as in offline life, most people need to be patient and to talk to/meet many people before they'll meet a great long-term partner.
But that's still the goal, and one many people achieve (or at least taking meaningful step towards) via online dating apps
The little that I know about dating apps leads me to understand that most are oriented toward hookups, not long term. But there are people who truly are seeking more substantial relationships and might even find one. A younger, male relative who is somewhat shy has been trying to meet a woman for a permanent, family situation. So far, not much luck. Decades ago I used the pre-internet dating app called “personals” in the local newspaper and met my wife. Perhaps it all depends mightily upon each person’s intention as they use whatever tool or avenue at their disposal.