Libertarian Man of Mystery

Money or a long life: which is more important?

Based upon what people complain about, money is more important.

Women often complain that they make less money than men. But women outlive men by five years, yet you never hear men complaining that they don't live as long as women.

Probably, one of the reaons why men die younger is that they literally work themselves to death earning that extra money.

Asian women and BMI, plus other commentary

Susan left a comment which shows bad logical thinking (but don't be too offended Susan, most of the comments suffer from the same problem--few are as logical as the Libertarian Man of Mystery):

i'm an asian female and i have no idea whether white women are upset about the asian girl/white guy dating. it's quite common these days and none of my white girlfriends ever said anything about it.

i think it's just a matter of preference. majority of the guys i've dated post college have been white but it doesn't mean that i only exclusively want to date white guys. it just happens to have become a preference now. and as far as asian women having no breasts of curves, i think that's false b/c several of the asian women i know have them.

and what's with the generalization that asian women go for successful men while white women don't. trust me, *ALL* women are generally attracted to successful/responsible men (whatever field it might be in). Only maybe women who like drama might desire otherwise.

First of all, I want to talk about her statement, "as far as asian women having no breasts of curves, i think that's false b/c several of the asian women i know have them." Susan, we are talking generalities. Of course you can find an Asian woman that has a completely different body type than the typical Asian, but this web page has a more scientific comparison of racial body types.

Asian women have a lower mean Body Mass Index (BMI) than white women. Furthermore, the author of the cited web page also points out that Asian women, despite having a lower BMI, have a higher body fat index! A white woman I know once observed that Asian girls go from skinny to fat without any in between state. This observation is justified by the data: because Asian women tend to have less muscle mass and bone density than white women, when they gain a little bit of weight they look fat.

What body type do men prefer in women? This would seem to be heavily influenced by culture. The paintings in the art museums show that in the 17th century, men liked a fat woman. As late as the 1950s, Marilyn Monroe was considered the height of sexiness, yet she was much chunkier than the skinner actresses and models of the present.

I think that from a bio-evolutionary perspective, being extremely thin would be an indicator of poor health, so modern man's like for the skinniest women is mostly cultural. Nevertheless, men who have bought into the culture of thin may prefer Asian women. But I think most men aren't attracted to the thinnest women, they prefer a woman of median BMI for their race, or mabye slightly below the median BMI but not too much below.

Picking on some of Susan's other statements, she wrote "majority of the guys i've dated post college have been white but it doesn't mean that i only exclusively want to date white guys." Considering that there are so many single Asian me out there, that fact that she mostly dates white guys seems to me to be a pretty strong preference for white guys.

"and what's with the generalization that asian women go for successful men while white women don't." I certainly never said that being successful is a negative. But what I did say is that women of different races have different priorities. So while all women would prefer a man who was both good looking and successful, given a choice between a man who was ugly but successful, and one that was good looking but unsuccessful, I stand by my observation that a higher percentage of Asian women would pick the man who was ugly but successful.

"i have no idea whether white women are upset about the asian girl/white guy dating." People get upset with anything that intereferes with their privilege. But "asian girl/white guy" dating is much more harmful to Asian men than it is to white women, so Asian men would be the demographic group that should be most upset. Because Asians are a small minority in the United States, interracial dating is only stealing a tiny percentage of white men, but from the perspective of the Asian man, a significant percentage of Asian women are being stolen by white men.

Bad economic thinking and senior discounts

My post about seniors riding the subway for half price received some comments that are examples of bad economic reasoning.

Karen wrote, "It's market segmentation. Some people won't ride the subway at full price but will ride it at half price." I don't see why seniors wouldn't ride the subway at full price. Two dollars isn't a whole lot of money, and it's a lot less than a cab ride or driving. (For those who have never driven around New York City, a drive into Manhattan can often mean $7 in tolls plus $30 for parking.) Nor do I see why we should care if some people don't ride the subway, they are crowded enough anyway, even during the non-rush hour periods.

Also, people in high school or college have less money to ride the subways than seniors do. When I was a student, a subway fare seemed like a lot of money to me! Yet my retired grandparents always seemed to have plenty of money even though they were non-college graduates and neither of my grandmothers ever worked after they got married.

xx y writes, "Most of those people are not riding during the peek [sic] hours." Now that card readers have replaced tokens in the NYC subways, if the MTA wants to give a discount for peak hours, such a policy can easily be implemented. The Washington, DC subways have different fares for peak and off-peak travel. And as I wrote before, during the off-peak hours, the subways are still pretty darn crowded.

xx y also writes, "NYC wants to keep those seniors in the state anyway, they pay income taxes on those pensions, IRA withdraws, and SS." There is something to the theory that seniors are more beneficial to the local economy, mainly because they don't have any children using up costly public education services. But there are more efficient ways of keeping them in the city. How about a direct tax break on their local income taxes? I seriously doubt a half price subway fare is preventing anyone from moving to Florida.

White men, black women

I get the feeling that some who read my previous posts about Asian women have the idea that I prefer Asian women over other races. This is not the case at all.

I don't find the Asian face attractive compared to the white face. And Asian women are nearly all ectomorphic--skinny with no shape to their behinds, no breasts. There are some men who like skinny women, and maybe such men are the ones who like Asian women. But not me.

Black women have the best bodies--voluptuous with nice muscle tone. There are, unfortunately, a higher percentage of black women who have too much meat on their bones for my tastes, but the rest of black women have fabulous figures.

Most black women in the United States are part Caucasian. I believe that the typical American black is 25% Caucasian. So most American blacks, and especially the lighter skinned ones, are actually a mixture of the two races and not pure African. The blending of two races usually creates better looking offspring.

You see plenty of couples where the man is black and the woman is white (and black men seem to go for blondes who are somewhat bigger than the average white woman), but you seldom see couples where the man is white and the woman is black. Why is this? It's hard to believe that I'm the only white man who appreciates the beauty of a black woman, so it must be that black women don't care for white men.

Why do old people ride the subway for half price?

If you are 65 or older, you get to ride the NYC subways for half price.

I ask why? Don't old people get free money from the government in the form of Social Security, as well as other goodies like Medicare? Old people probably have more money most younger New Yorkers. They should pay their full fare just like everybody else!

In addition to the money they don't pay, the reduced fare program also costs the MTA additional money in administrative overhead. And surely some people will try to cheat the system by pretending to be 65 when they aren't.

Everyone should pay full price for the subways, with no exceptions.

UPDATE

I wrote a followup post responding to comments.

How to win arguments

Anonymouse commented to my previous post:

Dude. You are a fucking idiot. You were a lot more interesting when you were the dimwitted bride-for-sale Libertariangirl.

Well for starters, I have to agree with the last part of the statement that people found the blog a lot more interesting when a hot blonde "girl" was doing the posting. Although I wouldn't say she was dimwitted, she was actually quite a genius, though prone to ditzy spells.

But back to the beginning of the quote, calling someone a f-ing idiot is not an uncommon debating tactic, but it often indicates that the person flinging the insult is suffering from a bout of cognitive dissonance. Unable to form a rational rebuke to a conclusion that he doesn't want to agree with, the result is anger at the messenger.

Despite the fact that I know that Anonymouse is the real idiot and not me, the name calling still hurts. That's why I like anonymous blogging a lot better, because it's a lot easier to deal with people calling a virtual identity an idiot rather than the real me.

More about Asian and white women

Christina is outraged by my comments from my previous post about Asian women looking for different attributes in men than white women. She wrote:

WTF! Really, let me state that again. WTF! The only women that don't want men who are educated, introverted, and have stable careers are women that are a) uneducated, b) wildly unpredictable and c) poor.

While obviously my points a, b and c are generalizations, your comment about white women was the most ignorant I've seen in ages.

Well first of all, I agree that being educated is generally always a plus. But how much of a plus? For Asian women, it may be a plus three, but for white women only a plus one.

Being introverted isn’t considered a good quality in the United States. One presumes that like most psychological characteristics, introversion/extroversion is distributed along a bell curve. The ideal place to be in the United States would be perhaps a half to a whole standard deviation from the median on the extroverted side.

If you read a lot of personal ads at online dating sites, you’ll see that people say they are “outgoing” quite a bit, because it’s a desired characteristic.

The average Asian is more introverted than the average Caucasian. So Asian women are more used to being around introverted people because their families are more introverted, and they are more introverted themselves so they would be more comfortable with someone similarly introverted.

And finally we get to the issue of a “stable career.” I’m not sure exactly what that means, but it’s a phrase that I see used a lot and I mimicked it. Stable seems to mean safe but boring. IT is a safe career, but considered very boring. I suspect that a lot of white women see a job in IT as a minus.

I think that one or two generations ago, American women desired men who would be good providers and fathers, but today physical attractiveness and an exciting personality have become ascendant. Of course, physical attractiveness is what men always wanted in women, so I guess women have become more like men.

White men, Asian women

This is a followup to my previous post where I pointed out that interracial couples in which the man is white and the woman Asian are pretty common in the United States.

I guesstimate that about 20% of Asian women prefer to date white men. For example, I once dated an Asian woman who said that she only dates white men.

Some people try to explain why white men prefer Asian women, but I don't think that line if inquiry yields anything but mostly bogus generalizations. If white men have no preference for white or Asian women, but 20% of Asian women have a clear preference for white men, then that's all that's needed to explain the mixed race couples.

I noted in my last post that Asian women who like white men often have a preference for men who are educated, introverted, and have stable careers (often in IT). White women don't have a preference for this type of man, so a man who fits this category will have better luck with Asian women and this is probably the real reason for why many white men are involved in an interracial relationships.

Asian men are hurt the most by interracial dating. Very few white women are interested in dating Asian men, and with 20% of Asian women not interested in them either, many Asian men in the United States are doomed to bachelorhood.

Russian brides revisited

implications of russian brides in u.k. That was a Google search that someone used to find my blog, and for which my blog shows up as the very first entry. Unfortunately, the visiting web surfer wouldn’t have found the answer to his query in any of my posts.

But I think it’s a pretty interesting question! And I’m pretty sure the answer is that there are so few Russian brides in the U.K. that they pose no implications outside of the lives of the groom and his immediate circle of family and friends.

Regular immigration surely has much greater implications. I don’t know so much about the U.K., but here in the U.S. I see enough mixed couples in which the man is white and the woman is Asian to suspect that Asian immigration might be having an impact on sexual relations. The beneficiaries are white men, especially the types of white men that Asian women seem to like: educated, introverted, and with stable careers (often in IT).

White women tend to see men with Asian girlfriends or wives as failures who couldn’t cut the mustard with a white woman.

Plugging the same search into Google, I did find an interesting academic paper from 1999 about “mail order” brides on the internet. I discovered that Russian women misrepresent themselves:

As I met the women in Kyrgyzstan it became apparent that some fudging of their biographies and photos had taken place. Most were slightly older then they had listed on the web sites, though only by a couple of years. And while no one I met was overweight by any means, very few of them actually looked as if they spent the energy and time at aerobics and body building that they had claimed on their forms. Most dramatic was the realisation that a closed mouth smile on the Internet site was often a way of hiding the proof of a Soviet dentistry system which favoured gold teeth.

The gold teeth thing is scary.

Harry did whom?

What exactly did Boeing CEO Harry Stonecipher do to get himself fired? Did he just have sex with another company employee, or are there salacious details that are being hidden from the public?

Columnists at Newsday and the Seattle Times are also confused.

Is there are new corporate standard that says you can’t have sex with another employee? Or does this only apply if you’re the CEO?

Meanwhile, not many are talking about how the tipster knew about the affair, but a good guess is that the tipster is an employee in the IT department who was reading Stonecipher’s emails.

The Calico Cat has a photo of Debra Peabody, the employee that Stonecipher was having the affair with, and the immediate reaction is yuck. Is it true that a guy with all of Stonecipher’s money and power can’t find a better looking younger woman to have sex with? People thought Clinton had bad tastes, but Monica is a veritable babe in comparison.