I don’t think the fumes from vaping are especially safe or welcome, either. At least there’s no littering, though

You probably watch YouTube with the sound on and no headphones in public, too.

Every smoker I’ve met gets very defensive about “why can’t I breathe my toxic fumes on everyone else?? What’s the big deal?? And then they get so mad when I litter like get over yourself”

Smoking in public is indefensible. There are smoking cessation programs.

Probably because they’re addicted, enjoy the high, and don’t have the means or strength of character to quit.

I don’t drive anymore because I live someplace with transit and sidewalks, but when I drove I always signalled turns. Low effort, high safety.

I didn’t realize until adulthood that some households don’t really prioritize music. My parents were always playing and telling me about the music they grew up with (classic rock, because I’m old and they’re older)

Every once in a while I’ll meet a peer who’s like “oh yeah we didn’t have a lot of records” and I’m like oh that checks out with you not knowing the velvet underground

But I try not to be a jerk about people not knowing stuff, because no one needs that.

People are kind of stupid and lazy, and if there’s no immediate benefit for doing something or punishment for skipping it, they’ll do whatever’s easiest. We’re all like this to some degree, in some contexts or other.

It is a little funny to me that some people just don’t have professional standards. I would make a good faith effort to respond completely to a work email because that’s the job. But I don’t think that’s it for a lot of people.

There’s a lot of ADHD and friends in the world, and a lot of it is untreated. They’re not skipping questions out of malice. They’re probably trying their best. Still failing, but trying. That counts for something.

A lot of people also don’t read well. They won’t likely show up on a texty medium like this, but they’re out there. It may be uncomfortable and embarrassing for them to try to read your email, especially if the level of diction is high and the vocabulary extensive. Most people are emotionally kind of fragile, and won’t put up with that shame for very long. I think that’s why a lot of people want to hop on a call or have a meeting when it could’ve just been an email. They can talk fine, but communicating in written words is harder.

I thought you were exaggerating that he’s 91. Our government has too many ancient farts, maybe.

Depends on how the assassination is done. If it’s a headshot on trump, Vance will likely be president. If someone flies an IED drone into the two of them and they both die in the explosion, that’s different.

Terror Riff sounds like something you’d hear in a doom metal album.

I’m not sure if you’re implying they’re the same person, as in they won’t ask anyone out and then wonder why nobody goes out with them? Because that I can’t really explain

Yes indeed. There was a guy I was talking to a while ago who said he never got any dates from the apps. I wanted to be helpful, so I asked him to describe his process and what happened.

He said he’d match (good), and then send them a nice personal message (great), they’d chat on the app (good) for a couple weeks (what) and then they’d stop responding.

He never asked them out but he’d keep talking to them, and seemed confused why he wasn’t having dates. I’m not exactly sure why- maybe he was waiting for the perfect moment that never came. I think this is somewhat common because I’ve seen a lot of profiles that say “not looking for a pen pal. Ask me out!”

I told the specific guy I was talking to I recommend asking people out after like one exchange and you’ve cleared your dealbreakers, and I hope that helped him.

my most general advice in that case would be to try to be more open. Nobody wants to pry answers out of you.

This is good advice. A very common blunder I see is people dead-ending conversations. Like someone will be like “oh my gosh I love your spaceslug T-shirt. Did you ever see them play live?” and they respond with “no [end of message]”. Like, what. How is the other person supposed to interpret that?

If it was in person I’d be like “oh ok this person doesn’t want to talk” but on an app, after we matched? Why respond at all? Just unmatch if you’re not interested, or respond later when you can whole-ass the response.

The dating app replaces only the “asking someone out” step, not the actual date itself.

I want to nitpick on this, because I’m told a lot of people use these apps, match, and then never actually ask the other person out. They then are sometimes puzzled why they’re not going on dates.

The only thing online dating changes is that people don’t need to take a rejection straight to their face and get embarrassed into never trying again.

It also helps filter out “oh, she doesn’t date men”, “wow, he’s anti-vax”, “he doesn’t want kids, ever, and i do” kind of stuff. At least, when the app is working and not fully enshittified. That stuff is valuable.

Sorry for the nitpicks. Good post though, thanks.

No one is saying to try to fuck women in public

You are making some wild assumptions about me. At no point did I ever say it was appropriate to engage women who are just living their lives in public. In fact, in the post you’re replying to, I said I agreed with you.

Body language has been a part of humanity since before modern humans existed. You can tell, I hope, the difference between a frown and a smile.

What is how you talk to people?

Also I’m not sure how to square “unless they make it clear they want to be bothered” with your rejection of body language and subtlety.

Those are true statements, but seem to be a whole other topic from what we were talking about. You were rejecting the ideas of body language and subtlety by saying that’s asking for mind reading and childish.

No why the fuck would I talk to random people?

Maybe you should ease up on giving advice and making proclamations on how to talk to random people then

My fellow sapient, do you engage with real people in the world? Your position has merit in a “imagine a frictionless, spherical cow for this physics problem” kind of sense, but is absolutely unrelated to the real world of humanity the entire time we’ve existed, and probably going back to earlier primates as well.

It’s not acting like children. It’s acting like adults. Most adults use subtlety for a variety of reasons. Personal safety and letting someone down gently are just two that come to mind.

You can want everyone to have a standard API with nice json output, but that’s just not how humans are. Expecting it is folly.

I don’t think we can draw conclusions from this without knowing more details about what was in the “good” profile.

If the “good” profile was interesting like “I love extratone and 16th century spanish poetry” I can see why that won’t get hits. People can’t relate to it. But the matches you do get will be starting in a better position.