#but the point is: it isn’t about a scorecard or my analysis. it’s about love. it’s about love! | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

bomberqueen17 · 5 years

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meanderings0ul replied to your post “ineptshieldmaid replied to your post “msilverstar replied to your...”

Not sure what this adds, but as someone who's spent a couple years mostly writing M/F who is really only into the F part of that, that is also an Experience. Mainly because some of the M char I literally have to go read others describing their charms and extrapolate cause I'm a big ol' ?

I guess it really boils down to fundamentally cihet folks seem to read M/F stuff as 'i am attracted to x and wish I was getting what y is getting' so if that dynamic in the char pov isn't there some of them get ??? about it, but that is definitely not the queer experience of reading and writing it.

Yeah, I think you’re not wrong on that dynamic-- the point is not necessarily to self-insert, but like. it’s for sure way closer to that for a lot of people than it is for my sometimes-borderline-what’s-that-ace-spec-thing-where-you-like-sex-but-not-for-you? autochorissexual, that’s it. my sometimes-borderline-autochorissexual ass. I absolutely do not want to read sex with me in it!! and i Get that’s not typical but it’s so hard to understand such a fundamentally different POV, y’know?? Which is another angle of queerness, I think. But yeah, it’s gotta be quite different to be monosexual in either direction, and I just don’t know what that’s like well enough to fully imagine it.

And I have that problem you describe too sometimes-- not specifically with M, but with just, characters in general, I definitely go through phases where I am Too Ace to write porn but I really want to read porn and the porn I want nobody else has written, so I have to psych myself up to write it with other people’s descriptions.

(It’s weird how this doesn’t necessarily coincide with the phases in my actual RL sex life, which are largely governed by sheer geography. It’s all very weird and I haven’t done any analysis on it. Suffice to say that while my RL sex life definitely affects the fic I write, there’s a lot of stuff I write that I am Not Actually Into, for the record. Porn does a lot of heavy lifting in my life that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with real sex, for the record. Which is probably another thing that varies really widely by reader and is sort of interesting but also probably impossible to describe.)

ineptshieldmaid replied to your post “ineptshieldmaid replied to your post “msilverstar replied to your...”

Related: an exceedingly rare variety of Fictional Man and also real man is ‘man who realises his dick has its charms but dexterity and forearm strength is what he’s really got to offer here’

MY FAVORITE CATEGORY OF FICTIONAL DUDE. I mean not all the time, but I definitely have characters whose main, like, characterization note is their slowness to deploy actual cock, as opposed to literally anything else. I think my entire Lost Kings saga was an excuse to write porn featuring that guy. IDK, I love that dynamic, it’s the best.

It’s not that I don’t like my stories with M in them to have cock! I do! I just. It’s like. Sometimes it’s optional.

(IRL I admit to a certain overwhelming fondness for a sexual partner who is clearly Super Into my enjoyment of stuff, but not one who is like, keeping a scorecard of orgasms because he’s gonna get a free prize once he fills up the punchcard, no thanks. Like, a partner who really genuinely wholeheartedly gets off on my sexual pleasure, that is awesome, but not one who’s like ok I put the coins in the Orgasm slot when do I get my Validation?? Prove my prowess!! ... Like, no, buddy, you need a therapist for that, not pussy.)

#meanderings0ul #ineptshieldmaid #Het Sex Discourse!#fic writing

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deniscollins · 5 years

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Congestion Pricing: N.Y. Embraced It. Will Other Clogged Cities Follow?

Beginning 2012, New York City will charge drivers a toll to enter Manhattan’s most congested neighborhoods as a way to raise money for public transit and to persuade people to abandon their cars. Some argue that this privileges the rich and is an unfair tax on the poor who cannot afford the toll. If you were on San Francisco’s city council, which faces the same congestion problem, would you implement a congestion toll: (1) Yes or (2) No? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision?

Los Angeles traffic is so bad that buses crawl along at less than 12 miles an hour. In San Francisco, car speeds have fallen to 10 miles per hour. And Seattle’s streets are so choked the city needs to find ways to have fewer cars altogether.

Major cities across the United States are facing increasingly clogged roads and have had frustratingly little success in dealing with them. But now that New York has adopted congestion pricing in Manhattan, the rest of the country is far more likely to seriously consider embracing such a policy — even though it was once considered politically toxic, according to municipal officials and transportation analysts.

“New York’s use of congestion pricing could be a game-changer,” said Travis Brouwer, an assistant transportation director in Oregon, which has considered congestion pricing for traffic-jammed Portland.

“If New York City can prove that congestion pricing can work and gain public acceptance, it could give cities like Portland a boost as we look to introduce pricing.”

New York, the country’s largest city, will charge drivers to enter Manhattan’s most congested neighborhoods as a way to raise money for public transit and to persuade people to abandon their cars. The tolls are expected to start in 2021.

Philadelphia is now considering congestion pricing for the first time, closely watching New York’s move, “to see how this can help improve equity, safety, sustainability and mobility,” said Kelly Cofrancisco, a spokeswoman for Philadelphia’s mayor, Jim Kenney.

Los Angeles and San Francisco are already conducting studies to lay the groundwork for congestion pricing, and Seattle’s mayor, Jenny Durkan, is leading efforts to have congestion pricing in place by the end of her first term in 2021.

“It really does help to be able to point to some peer city and say ‘They’re doing this and it’s working,’” said Michael Manville, an associate professor of urban planning at The University of California, Los Angeles, who has advised Los Angeles on congestion pricing. “At the very least, it changes the conversation in other cities.”

Not everyone is ready to sign up. Kathryn Barger, a Los Angeles county supervisor, has raised concerns that congestion pricing could unfairly penalize drivers in communities with limited public transit, where “driving isn’t a choice, it’s a necessity.”

A handful of cities in Europe and Asia already have congestion pricing in place; it has helped clear roads in London, Stockholm and Singapore. But it has also been assailed by drivers and critics as an unfair tax that hurts the poor.

Fueled by an economic boom, a revival of urban areas, a proliferation of Uber and Lyft cars and an explosive growth in package deliveries propelled by the rise of Amazon, the average speed in urban downtowns fell to 15 miles per hour last year, down from 18 miles per hour in 2015, according to INRIX, a transportation analytics company.

“I believe the time has finally arrived to explore congestion relief pricing in major cities,” said Phil Washington, the chief executive of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority. “Here in Los Angeles, our congestion challenges are just as bad, if not worse, than Manhattan’s.”

He added, “We cannot sit idly by and watch it get worse.”

In New York, many details of a congestion pricing plan — including how much drivers will be charged — are still being worked out. The plan was the culmination of a campaign that started 18 months ago and drew transit groups as well as prominent business, civic and labor leaders, who saw no other way to tackle gridlock.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo staked his name on it and wielded his political power to push it forward, making it a centerpiece of the $175 billion state budget after past efforts had unraveled. Even Mayor Bill de Blasio, who had been lukewarm about congestion pricing and has had a frosty relationship with the governor, threw his support behind it. They had made the case that it was crucial for raising the money needed to modernize the city’s crumbling subway system.

And city transit officials, facing a growing financial crisis, warned repeatedly that the alternative would be huge fare increases.

Congestion pricing’s moment follows decades of failed efforts to unclog roads around the country. Historically, cities responded to congestion by building more roads or widening existing ones — only to find that those, too, became jammed, said Matthew Turner, an economics professor at Brown University.

As a result, America’s roads are carrying more traffic than ever. The number of people driving to work climbed to about 130 million in 2017, up from 121 million in 2012, according to an analysis of census data by Social Explorer, a research company. Of those, more than 116 million drove alone, and only 14 million car-pooled. Just 8 million workers took public transportation.

The increasing traffic has been accompanied by concerns over health, safety and environmental implications. The number of pedestrians killed in traffic in the United States is approaching a three-decade high.

Traffic woes have emerged as the underside of successful cities: The boom leads to an influx of new residents, businesses and construction. More than two dozen major American cities, including New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Austin, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle, have more congestion now than a decade ago, according to an annual global traffic scorecard by INRIX.

The most recent scorecard found that congestion left American drivers sitting in traffic an average of 97 hours last year, up from 82 hours in 2015. That, in turn, cost the economy roughly $87 billion in lost productivity last year, up from $74 billion in 2015, according to INRIX.

“It only takes one car that doesn’t get through an intersection to block two lanes of traffic,” said Trevor Reed, an INRIX transportation analyst.

In Seattle, Amazon’s relentless rise has helped to turn the city into a major tech hub. Now, major infrastructure and development projects are expected to lead to even more gridlock.

“As we build a city of the future, we must reduce our reliance on cars,” Ms. Durkan said. “My goal is to make our downtown core a healthier place for all with fewer cars, a more equitable transportation system and less climate pollution.”

Road pricing has been used on some American highways since the 1990s, with tolled express lanes — or so-called Lexus lanes — built alongside regular lanes, offering a faster alternative to drivers who are willing to pay for it.

Cities are trying to figure out how to make it work on streets. “There’s a critical mass forming where people are saying, ‘enough is enough,’” said Stuart Cohen, the founding director of TransForm, a California-based group that released a recent report on congestion pricing. “They’ve tried everything else and nothing’s working.”

Still, Charles Komanoff, a New York economist whose models were used to develop the congestion pricing plan, said the idea of “putting a price on driving” clashes with America’s car-loving culture in which driving wherever the road may lead is often seen as the ultimate freedom. He compared pushing congestion pricing forward to “shooting a rocket to the moon.” “There’s so much gravity — the forces opposing this are so powerful — it almost seems like defying nature,” he said.

Oregon looked at congestion pricing in 2005, but “our traffic wasn’t that bad, so people weren’t willing to pay a toll to escape it,” Mr. Brouwer said. But Portland has been gripped by congestion as Amazon and others have opened offices. State officials are seeking federal approval for what would be the state’s first highway tolls on a seven-mile stretch through Portland.

Congestion pricing has also been seen as a burden on drivers who are poor and have been displaced from downtown areas by rising housing costs, and now must drive to work because of minimal access to public transit.

“Social equity was the conversation stopper when it came to congestion pricing,” Mr. Cohen said. “In West Coast cities, equity is very high on the political agenda.”

But Mr. Cohen said gridlock also slows down the bus and transit services many poor people depend on. Congestion fees, he added, can be discounted or subsidized for impoverished drivers.

In Los Angeles, public buses traveled at an average of 11.8 miles per hour last year, down from 12.2 miles per hour in 2013, according to transit data. Mr. Washington said he wanted to use the congestion fees to pay for transit improvements and to cover fares so that everyone can ride free.

A spokeswoman for Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles said he has supported looking at congestion pricing “because it has the promise to dramatically reduce traffic and improve quality of life.”

Still, congestion pricing remains a tough sell. After a recent report by Boston leaders and educators that recommended charging $5 to drive in some neighborhoods, Boston’s mayor’s office said the city would not be implementing congestion pricing.

In New York, drivers would be charged for entering Manhattan below 60th Street, where the average speed for vehicles is down to 4.7 miles per hour, from 6.9 miles per hour in 1994.

John Corlett, a lobbyist for AAA in New York, said the new fees could shift gridlock to other parts of the city if drivers bypass the central business district to avoid tolls. “To say this is going to reduce congestion may be a false hope,” he said.

But Sam Schwartz, an architect of the city’s congestion pricing plan, said he had received calls from officials and others in more than a dozen cities that have been monitoring New York’s progress. “If you can do it in New York, you can do it anywhere,” he said.

San Francisco is considering congestion pricing after trying other options to combat gridlock downtown, including expanded bus and rail service, installing dedicated transit lanes and added bike routes, said Tilly Chang, executive director of the San Francisco County Transportation Authority, which is leading the city’s congestion pricing effort.

“Everyone agrees there’s a problem,” Ms. Chang said. “There are multiple views of the solution. But frankly, we’ve tried a lot of them and they’re not enough.”

#Traffic Fees

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sunshineweb · 7 years

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Why I Don’t Talk About My Stocks Publicly, And Why You Shouldn’t Either

It was sometime in the middle of 2008 when the realization of a global financial crisis had finally settled on the Indian stock market. I was working on my job as an analyst.

One stock – an Indian engineering major – I had recommended to our clients at the start of the year had fallen around 30% since my recommendation. Not just the stock price, the business had started to wobble. But I closed my eyes to that because my recommendation was now public and many clients would have bought it in their portfolios. To change my view after a 30% cut in stock’s price, however honest I would have been to accept my mistake, would have been a disaster.

Now, this wasn’t just one example that I can think of from that time. There were a few similar such recommendations I and my team had made then.

Some stocks had fallen just because the markets were down. But a few had fallen because their underlying businesses were also bouncing around on a rough wicket.

“What would our clients think of us,” I asked my colleague, “If we change our view now after the stock has already declined? It would hit the trust our clients have on us!” He agreed.

Anyways, cut to June 2012, a year after I had started Safal Niveshak. As part of the StockTalk initiative where I wrote about companies without explicitly recommending their stocks, I covered a leading Indian medical device company Opto Circuits. Here, despite having concerns on its working capital and goodwill on the balance sheet due to aggressive acquisitions, and just because I found the valuations reasonable, I avoided warning readers about the dangers of investing in the stock.

The stock fell sharply after my report on the business, and I got in the defensive mode. Over the next eight months, and after the stock had declined 52% from my report date, I wrote two posts re-explaining my stance on the business.

Despite knowing and communicating to readers that mine was not a stock recommendation but plain business analysis, I was in the “explanation” mode. Why? Because I had made a public appearance with my analysis on the stock, which had started playing dirty games with my mind.

I never owned that stock before, while, or after writing that report. But here is one lesson I learned from this episode, which I could also relate to what I was doing “not changing my mind” in 2008. And that lesson is…

Public Commitments are (Often) Dangerous Robert Cialdini wrote in his brilliant book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion –

Consider the organizations dedicated to helping people rid themselves of bad habits. Many weight-reduction clinics, for instance, understand that often a person’s private decision to lose weight will be too weak to withstand the blandishments of bakery windows, wafting cooking scents, and late-night Sara Lee commercials. So they see to it that the decision is buttressed by the pillars of public commitment. They require their clients to write down an immediate weight-loss goal and show that goal to as many friends, relatives, and neighbors as possible. Clinic operators report that frequently this simple technique works where all else has failed.

This was about losing weight, where the person making a public commitment to lose weight would not have to change his or her stance after some time. When you want to lose weight, nothing in the world would lead you to change your stance so that you want to start gaining weight. In such cases, making your intentions public or committing to your goals or resolutions in public is often helpful.

But what about commitments where you may need to change your stance in the future? Like stock market investing? Like weight loss, you fall for the commitment and consistency bias even here. But that is dreadful when the external situation warrants a change in your stance, including sometimes a complete reversal of what you had originally wanted to do.

I have seen this happen with myself like I explained above, and a lot of fellow investors including a few highly successful ones. At certain points in their investing careers, they went publicly vociferous about their stocks and paid a heavy price when commitment and consistency bias sucked them away from changing their minds when the facts changed.

Just because they had spoken publicly about their stocks, and when their stocks started falling because of a negative change in the underlying businesses, they could not adhere to what Keynes once said – “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

See what happens inside your brain when you tell your child that you’re going to give her a treat, and she replies, “You promise?” Your brain will now not allow you to reverse course because you have taken a position publicly, and that public is the most difficult to manage i.e., your child.

Speaking Publicly about Stocks is (Often) a Bad Idea Guy Spier writes in his book The Education of a Value Investor –

Over the years, I began to realize that it was a bad idea to speak publicly about stocks that I own. The issue isn’t that other investors might steal my best ideas. The real problem is that it messes with my head. Once we’ve made a public statement, it’s psychologically difficult to back away from what we’ve said — even if we’ve come to regret that opinion. So the last thing I want to do is walk into the trap of making a public statement about a stock, given that the situation might later change or that I might subsequently discover that I was wrong.

Public commitments, you see, tend to be lasting commitments. And as Spier writes, even when you come to regret your original decision, it’s difficult to change your mind because you have committed to it publicly.

Whenever one takes a stand that is visible to others, there arises a drive to maintain that stand in order to look like a consistent person. We all love consistent people, and always want to look like one. After all, someone who is inconsistent is looked at as fickle, uncertain, or unstable. On the other hand, consistency is a hallmark of being rational, assured, trustworthy, and sound.

Given this context, it is hardly surprising that people try to avoid the look of inconsistency. For appearances’ sake, then, the more public a stand, the more reluctant we will be to change it.

Michael Lewis, author of The Big Short, chronicles the subprime crisis that nearly led to the downfall of the global financial system in 2008. In this book, Lewis profiles, among others, Michael Burry who was one of the very few investors who could see the subprime mortgage crisis coming and thus bought credit default swaps that ended up being highly profitable.

Here is an excerpt from the book where Burry comments on why he dislikes debating his investment positions, particularly related to the credit default swaps (emphasis is mine) –

Inadvertently, he’d opened up a debate with his own investors, which he counted among his least favorite activities. “I hated discussing ideas with investors,” he said, “because I then become a Defender of the Idea, and that influences your thought process.” Once you became an idea’s defender, you had a harder time changing your mind about it.

Coming back to Cialdini, here is what he writes in his book –

Once an active commitment is made, then, self-image is squeezed from both sides by consistency pressures. From the inside, there is a pressure to bring self-image into line with action. From the outside, there is a sneakier pressure—a tendency to adjust this image according to the way others perceive us. And because others see us as believing what we have written (even when we’ve had little choice in the matter), we will once again experience a pull to bring self-image into line with the written statement.

Guy Spier writes (emphasis is mine) –

Instead of discussing current holdings in my letters to shareholders, I now provide a detailed postmortem on stocks that I’ve already sold. This gives shareholders a clear insight into how their money is being invested, but it doesn’t interfere with my ability to act as rationally as possible going forward. For me, this has certainly removed a psychological burden. I’d argue that most individual investors would also benefit from keeping quiet about their current investments since this talk only makes it harder to operate in a rational way. It’s so much easier when you don’t have to worry about how other people might judge you.

You now know the reason why I don’t talk about my stocks publicly. I won’t even if I am paid to.

I have seen the grave pitfalls of doing the same. I have experienced the quirks in my brain that emerge after such public announcements, and which play around with my sanity.

A lot of people think I do not showcase my investments or don’t talk about my stocks “because I am frightened of being mocked at of my average results.” But then, I know that I have nothing to prove to anyone except to myself.

Live with an Inner Scorecard Warren Buffett has talked about the concept of Inner Scorecard. In Chapter Three of his biography Snowball, he was quoted as saying this –

The big question about how people behave is whether they’ve got an Inner Scorecard or an Outer Scorecard. It helps if you can be satisfied with an Inner Scorecard.

I always pose it this way. I say: ‘Would you rather be the world’s greatest lover, but have everyone think you’re the world’s worst lover? Or would you rather be the world’s worst lover but have everyone think you’re the world’s greatest lover?’ Now, that’s an interesting question.

Here’s another one. If the world couldn’t see your results, would you rather be thought of as the world’s greatest investor but in reality have the world’s worst record? Or be thought of as the world’s worst investor when you were actually the best?

In teaching your kids, I think the lesson they’re learning at a very, very early age is what their parents put the emphasis on. If all the emphasis is on what the world’s going to think about you, forgetting about how you really behave, you’ll wind up with an Outer Scorecard.

Let’s face it. Not a day goes by that we are not tempted to glance to the left and to the right to see how we measure up to the people around us and what others think of us, our work, our stocks. But it doesn’t stop there, does it?

We’re tempted to compare our children to other children, our spouse to other spouses, our salary to others’ salaries, our car to others’ cars. It’s frustrating. It’s exhausting. And as Buffett would tell you, it’s a trap.

This act of comparison with others – or seeking validation from others, that is one of the key intentions behind speaking publicly about stocks – is what is driven by living with an Outer Scorecard. And all it leads to is constant frustration because we will never stand up perfectly to what everyone else wants us to look like or be like. Over that, there are many of those who are waiting to criticize and pull us down, whatever we say or do.

Take Bruce Lee’s Advice “A wise man adapts himself to circumstances as water shapes itself to the vessel that contains it.” ~ Anonymous

The thing that separates us humans from other animals is that we constantly change into new forms, new avatars. We are sad, we are happy, we are emotional, and we are angry. We communicate through different languages, we do different kinds of work, and we deal with different kind of people differently. Effectively, we keep on changing ourselves as per the demands of time and situation.

In fact, success in life depends largely on whether we are able to change ourselves with changing times. If we are flexible and formless – like water – taking the form of whatever is around us, we gain power and succeed against those who rigidly hold on to their ground.

Despite this, when it comes to our ideas – especially when we have only one – we rigidly hold on to them…

…very much like Henry Ford who supposedly said, “People can have the Model T in any colour – so long as it’s black.” This nearly ruined Ford Motors Company in the 1920s, because while Mr. Ford was in love with his idea of “only black Model T” cars, Americans were shifting to bigger, faster, fancier, and brightly painted automobiles.

…or very much like the old “me” who would often not change views on stocks even when the circumstances changed, and paid heavy prices. A lot of this happened because my job required me to go public with my views on stocks.

I have seen several other investors fall in love with their stocks in the garb of “buy and hold”. So they will hold on to businesses, and especially those that are going downhill, and especially those where they have made their commitments public.

They will remain stuck in a status quo mode because they now hate to admit publicly they’ve lost money. They will even put a higher value on the stocks they already own than they would be willing to pay for the same things if they didn’t own them. All this because they’re too rigid to change their ideas, even when circumstances are shouting at them to do so, and because they are facing the public’s glare.

If you have been through such a moment in your own life (or investing life), you would like to read what Bruce Lee has to say –

Empty your mind. Be formless, shapeless, like water. Put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. Put water into a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can flow or creep or drip or crash. Be water, my friend.

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Charlie Munger says –

The game of life is the game of everlasting learning. At least it is if you want to win.

In fact, a few of life’s great pleasures are to keep learning, letting go of previously cherished ideas, and emptying your mind for new ideas to come in. Then you’re free to look for new ones. And you can only do that when you, like water, are formless. When you don’t live life on others’ terms (Outer Scorecard), but only yours (Inner Scorecard). And, with respect to investing, when you don’t publicly commit to ideas because you may need to change your view in the future.

So, speaking publicly about your stocks can often (not always, but often) lead you to pain…

…but it’s always a pleasure to be quiet and formless like water, my friend.

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heliosfinance · 7 years