In which we post yet another ten thousand plus interesting or amusing - or neither - tweets

If you're a road warrior, then you have lounge access and have no need to pay for food. I'm sure David Brooks would get access to lounges, whether it's airline run, or AmEx's Centurion Lounges.

Now, not all lounges have hot food, but there are work-arounds. For example, I've had "Elite" status on Air New Zealand for over 10 years now (for you alliance junkies that's their highest designation, a step up in NZ's system from Star Alliance Gold but still considered Gold to the rest of the alliance), which gives me access to United lounges in the US (even though most United status holders aren't allowed in) and Maple Leaf lounges up north. In LAX I head for the Star Alliance lounge in the International Terminal even if I'm flying domestically. I can get gluten free food, take a shower, have some wine or champagne and sit outside watching the planes land or on the mezzanine watching the ebb and flow of people in the terminal. The only trick is to give myself a long-enough layover, given it's a 15-20 minute walk to Terminals 7 and 8 where United is.

Given I am one of the people who like the journey rather than simply the destination, it's quite the enjoyable day. And all comes included with my airline status. I have a hard time believing David Brooks doesn't have status on at least one airline.

The International Terminal is much nicer now than it used to be. It's the only part of LAX that doesn't stink to high heaven in my mind.

 

Late to this, but most definitely. There is a lot of male “anxiety” about dating and gross transactional terms like “dating sexual market value” are tossed around social media. Female educational attainment/income gains mean women are less dependent on men. And dating via apps which is kinda transactional/interview based anyway means it can be difficult to get to actually know someone in a more organic way.

There’s a lot of child free and childless not by choice discussion too. I met up with a former colleague I was close with maybe 6 weeks ago. Frankly, I’m a bit ashamed I didn’t really “get” this until we chatted. 41 year old woman. Grad degree. Good career but not a complete workaholic. Probably makes 250k/year, owns her home, has saved plenty. Good, good person. Not arrogant about what she has done in life, very kind and empathetic. Lived on three continents but has spent the vast majority of the last 20 years living in one city. Nobody is everyone’s cup of tea but she’s not an unattractive person. And it honestly gutted me when she talked about being alone, not having kids, veering away from our mutual friends and her sis because everyone is in parent mode and how painful that can be. She has an otherwise fulfilling life, but she’s not someone’s “person”.

And that is generally down to how too many single men view a woman like that if she didn’t find a partner much earlier. A lot of men don’t want to share the household labor aspects. She’s not dateable out of the gate for a lot of guys who are at least honest or not good enough at deceiving women into their attitudes re: household stuff. For those who are, she gets about 12-18 months in with someone before a guy is no longer on his best behavior and she realizes he isn’t equipped to share the heavy lifting of household/child rearing. Then a similar amount of time off before seriously dating someone else. Two year working abroad to get over “the one”. Rinse and repeat. And then 28-38 goes away.

So her self esteem when it comes to dating is in the toilet. Even 20 years ago, women like that were much more uncommon. Male relationship attitudes (overall) haven’t caught up with economic realities of a growing group of more “successful” women. I know a lot of child free women living their best lives. But now that she kinda opened my eyes to it and some of the signs, I also have known a lot of childless/unmarried by circumstance women who entered some state of grief mode at maybe 38-42 it took them a decade to climb out of.

And a lot of the right wing talking points tend to gloat about the existence of these women. If only they were willing to accept doing 80-100% of the cleaning, chores, cooking, errands, vacation planning, party/event/holiday hosting, kid stuff, then they’d be so much happier.

 

Enjoying the journey is critical on long trips. But when you’re flying from Chicago to Cleveland or Nashville for work, you just wanna get there, get your thing done, and get home ASAP. Even the client dinners suck when you're counting the emails you need to respond to and the work piling up you’ll be doing at 10pm when you’re back at the hotel.

 

There is a species of American that gloats because our birthrates are higher than much of western Europe and east Asia. But the rates will continue to fall. Why shouldn't they?

 

I'd ask what the mileage is on his truck. I suspect it's barely double-digits.

 

Once saw a Subaru with a Romney-Ryan sticker in 2012.

 

Are Subarus considered "leftie" cars? I'm on my second Outback and 4th Subaru overall.

 

Since at least the 90's.

 

Back in the day we considered them the "lesbian-mobile".

In 2005 Subaru had a commercial that targeted the LGBT+ community - they were one of the earliest to do such things. They had a deliberate marketing campaign designed to attract LGBT+ customers, lesbians in particular.

 

Yep! I also remember them being seen as cars for lesbians since I was old enough to understand it.

Subarus have a rep for being geared towards outdoor types for as long as I remember, hence the left wing association.

 

My wife would get hit on by ladies all the time when she’d take our dog out in my 2003 Outback (RIP to both dog and said Outback).

 

A common fantasy

 

Historically, the leftiest of them all. But maybe Prius now has that title.

 

"You can't argue with evolution, Bucko: The natural skills of women are axiomatically directed toward the home, and it's only an ideological pathology that would lead someone to reject this product of millions of years of evolution. I've read Solzhenitsyn: he knows what happens when you reject facts in favor of ideology. A woman leading a meeting in the workplace is almost indistinguishable from forcing a man to labor in the GULAG."

 

Every other car in New England's a Subaru. Good for the AWD but I hear they spend too much time off-roading in the repair shop compared to Hondas & Toyotas

And of course New England lesbians love 'em

In the 1990s, Subaru’s unique characteristic was that the company increasingly made all-wheel-drive standard on all its cars. When Subaru marketers went searching for people willing to pay a premium for all-wheel-drive, they identified four core groups who were responsible for half of the company’s American sales: teachers and educators, healthcare professionals, IT professionals, and “rugged individualists” (outdoorsy types).

Then they discovered a 5th: lesbians.

“When we did the research, we found pockets of the country like Northampton, Massachusetts, and Portland, Oregon, where the head of the household would be a single person—and often a women,” says Bennett. When Subaru marketers talked to these customers, they realized these women buying Subarus were lesbian.

“There was such an alignment of feeling, like [Subaru cars] fit with what they did,” says Paul Poux, who later conducted focus groups for Subaru. The marketers found that lesbian Subaru owners liked that the cars were good for outdoor trips, and that they were good for hauling stuff without being as large as a truck or SUV. (In a line some women may not like as much, marketers also said Subaru’s dependability was a good fit for lesbians since they didn’t have a man who could fix car problems.) “They felt it fit them and wasn’t too flashy,” says Poux.

Many of them even felt an affinity with the name.

‘Subaru’ is the Japanese name for the Pleiades, a six-star constellation. When Kenji Kita, the CEO of Subaru’s parent company, Fuji Heavy Industries, chose the name in 1954, he chose it to represent how six Japanese companies had merged to form Fuji Heavy Industries. But in English, the constellation is also known as the Seven Sisters—the same name as a group of American women’s colleges.

https://priceonomics.com/how-an-ad-campaign-made-lesbians-fall-in-love-with/

 

So what would be considered the gay man's car of choice?

 

The Pleiades are "Matariki" in Polynesian cultures. The appearance of Matariki over the horizon marks the start of the Polynesian new year.

 

There really isn't one. Some go for sportier cars, others go for trucks (my rule of thumb for the latter was the bigger the truck, the smaller the penis - which did hold true based on a limited sample size).