Having recently purchased a 2024 62kWh (200 mile range) Ariya Engage, I am interested to know the availability of Tesla superchargers along routes I frequent, namely 93 North into NH, 95N into Maine, and 3S/6 into the Cape. Surprisingly there is no API to extract historical data. However one can monitor in real time availability using the Tesla app. I would be interestd to know are there particular days/times when demand is high? How is this affected by weather? Certain stations that are always available or always have wait times?

I gathered the list of relevant charging stations and monitored availability at 2,4,7PM on Fri, Sat, Sun from May through 4th of July weekend 2025. The number at the top of each panel is the weekend date. A Thursday or Monday might be included for long weekends.

Results

Data collection was designed to look for trends e.g. “The Tilton NH chargers are always busy on Fridays at 4PM” but I found that:

• In general high availability across all routes/stations
• Weather had little impact (this was not plotted)
• In the few instances where there were wait times, neighboring stations had plenty of availability i.e. not a global surge in demand but a local stochastic event.
• Some stations were always busy: Manchester NH, Burlington MA (at the mall)
• Stations proximal to Boston have (in general) 12 stalls while distal stations have 8 stalls.

Notes

• The Plymouth MA station came on line in time for July 4 weekend but was unavailable for monitoring during most of this study
• Non-Tesla vehicles only have access to v3,4 stations, not v1 or v2 which are not compatible with the app non-Tesla users use to activate charging. Supposely across the country >80% of stations are v3 or 4, probably 90% in New England, but some of the most useful (to me) are unavailable: Sagamore Bridge MA, Center Harbor NH, and Lincoln NH (Riverwalk parking lot)
• Many non-Tesla users report difficulties with reaching the charging port of their cars due to relatively short cables on the chargers. Ashland NH has a charger positioned sideways at the end stall which made charging very easy.

Conclusions

• Range anxiety is a historical phenomenon no longer applicable in todays world with universal access to Tesla superchargers. Thank you Elon.
• At this time, summer 2025, charger availability is not an issue. I will predict that with increasing EV adoption supercharger availability will continue to be a non-issue due to the competing trends of increasing EV range and increasing availability of destination chargers. Already we are seeing Winnipesaukee rentals advertising EV charging.
• I can sell my gasoline car and depend on the Ariya for long distance driving.

Cliodynamics: History of change; field of study focused on cycles of political integration and disintegration, particularly on state formation and state collapse.

Accelerants of change: elite overproduction and popular immiseration

Wealth pump: take from the poor and give to the rich e.g. through high rent, high taxes on labor with low taxes on capital, low wages

…when a state, such as the United States, has stagnating or declining real wages (wages in inflation-adjusted dollars), a growing gap between rich and poor, overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees, declining public trust, and exploding public debt, these seemingly disparate social indicators are actually related to each other dynamically. Historically, such developments have served as leading indicators of looming political instability.

When the social pyramid becomes top-heavy, this has dire consequences for the stability of our societies.

Inevitably, as the number of aspirants per power position grows, some will decide to stretch the rules…Congratulations, you have just become a counter-elite-someone who is willing to break the rules to get ahead in the game.

https://x.com/devon_eriksen_/status/1855663441115013489?s=46&utm_source=pocket_saves

The republicans and democrats of the past no longer exist. They have been replaced by two entirely new parties.

In the 20th century, the republicans were the party of classical liberalism, and the democrats were the party of social liberalism (the welfare state). These two parties no longer exist.

This isn’t obvious because both new parties used the old names and infrastructures, which they infiltrated. This was easier than building something new, and allowed them inherit the resources and connections of the old parties.

But they are not the same, because not only are the philosophies different, the new parties aren’t based on philosophies at all.

The new parties represent communication technologies. The neo-democrats are the party of television. The neo-republicans are the party of the internet. This single relationship underlies all of their character and policies.

You see, in the 20th century, the prevailing masss communications technologies of the day — radio, television, newspapers, print books — were all expensive to produce, but cheap to copy.

Making a TV show, running a radio station, publishing a newspaper, all required a lot of resources. But reaching one more person with that show, that broadcast, that book, was very cheap compared to the initial investment. This resulted in a particular communications style — one to many. Those who owned these media and could afford to run them, spoke, and everyone else listened. Then the internet came along. Many hands touched it, first DARPA, then universities, but finally private enterprise made it take off. And the cost structure was different. Internet media was cheap to copy, but also cheap to make. Anyone could put up a webpage, and it got easier all the time. And eventually people created websites whose whole purpose was to allow anyone with a keyboard to say what whatever they wanted to anyone who wanted to listen.

This resulted in a different communications style — many to many. Everyone talking to everyone else, or at least to anyone they wanted to talk to. Many people still wanted to just listen, but anyone who wanted to talk could do so.

Obviously, this change in the shape of the national conversation changed the content of that conversation as well … by a lot.

But it also bifurcated the tools of power. America cannot be ruled by force. It’s too big, too sparsely populated, and too heavily armed. Opposing armies can be wiped out with bombs and missile and drone swarms, but territory can only be occupied by men with guns. And the American population is so spread out, with so many guns, that no army in the world can pacify any significant portion of it except a few densely packed, lightly armed cities. And those cities are dependent on rural people to supply their water, power and food. So force is out.

The tool by which pre-internet America was ruled was deception. If you own, or seize control of, the means of communication, which you can do because they are few-to-many, then you can put out any story you want. This allows you to control what the accepted facts are, because you can say anything without fear of contradiction. Even those who don’t believe you, who realize that their TV lies to them, have no alternate, more accurate source of truth…they have only their skepticism. And they can’t communicate it to others, because they don’t own a TV station, and you can use yours to call them crazy conspiracy theorists. Or racists. Whatever.

But when you introduce a many-to-many communications tech into the mix, things change. Now you cannot control the narrative by seizing a few central points, and when you get your message out there, you do not do so without fear of contradiction. You can be fact-checked, and an alternate narrative can be presented, by literally anyone who pays ninety bucks a month for an internet connection. Deception is a lot less effective on this new medium. If you wish to gain power through it, you must rule by persuasion. This means not controlling what facts are presented, but instead controlling how those facts are interpreted. This is done by creating a compelling, persuasive narrative that strings those facts together into explanations for how the world works, and plans for how it might work. And in a world that is split between few-to-many, and many-to-many, communications, deception and persuasion become alternate paths to power.

This has caused a split between leader (and wannabe leaders) based on which style they are adept at using. This is why the parties have been replaced from the inside out and are reshuffling. The elites, those who have the money and power to control few-to-many media, have seized control of the democrats and created neo-democrats, the party of television.

The neo-democrat path to power is to control the media. Seize control of a platform using wealth, power, and connections, and allow only your version of the facts to be told. Then construct an alternate set of facts that implies that voting for you is an imperative.

Global warming is gonna kill us all.
Trump is the reincarnation of Hitler.
Women are being refused life-saving medical interventions in ectopic pregnancies.
Diversity is our greatest strength.
Vast numbers of kids are born the wrong sex, and we must surgically modify them.

Who are the constituents of the neo-democrats, the ones whose interests they serve? The elites. It could be otherwise. Since they are dependent on few-to-many media to get their message out, they must cater to those who can afford them that access, either directly or financially. This is why all the pop-record label singers and Hollywood actors were telling you to vote democrat. Their allegiance to the neo-democrats was an inevitable consequence of their dependence upon few-to-many media. This is why Fox is also aligning with the neo-democrats, despite being traditionally affiliated with the old republican party. They have to. They are a television network. The future of many-to-many media has no role for them. Same with the Manhattan-based tradpub book industry, and numerous other old media from the 20th century. They simply have to be neo-democrat, because the neo-republican future has no place for them.

So who are the neo-republicans?The republican party has been seized by wealthy and prominent mavericks… those who don’t own or control media, but who have money or power because they have an unusual skill… tech investment, brand building, internet marketing, whatever. The neo-republican path to power is to shape the narrative. They don’t own TV stations, so they must speak on the internet. Since they speak on the internet, they cannot speak without fear of contradiction. Since they cannot speak without fear of contradiction, they cannot invent their own facts that support their positions. Instead, they must invent stories that resonate with people, and convince people to interpret the facts their way. This set of problems you experience in your life are due to these things. Vote for us and we will do this other thing instead, and that will lead to this other result.

See how this all makes sense? See how it all fits a narrative? Let’s do this, this, and this, and we’ll make America great again. This is why Donald Trump, a lifelong democrat, had to run as a republican, despite the fact that his platform is pretty much John Kennedy 2.0. Because he didn’t have control over few-to-many media, and those who had it weren’t going to let him in. But he did have a lifetime of experience as a highly successful brand-builder and deal negotiator. So he had to be a neo-republican.

That’s why many of his supporters are former democrats as well… all the ones who rose through skill or charisma. The neo-democrats have no need of such characters, since they are about platform control. And this is why the old-style republican powers, such as the Cheneys, are reshuffling to the neo-democrats. Because deception is their strategy… remember Iraq and their fictional nukes? They have no power to persuade, and no role in a future where power depends upon charisma and narrative persuasion.

And this is why the Obama-centered era of neo-democrat ascendancy (2008-2016)was characterized by internet censorship. The neo-democrats were attempting to make the internet into a few-to-many medium, so they could use their platform control strategy of deception. When the neo-republicans began to break through the censorship by routing around it, they were able to deploy their strategy of persuasion, and start to win.

The neo-democrats “won” the 2020 election because their strategy, venue control, worked for them — the platform, in this case, being the vote counters.

The neo-republicans won the 2024 election because they crippled (perhaps temporarily) the venue control of the neo-democrats, and then deployed their superior persuasion capabilities.

The neo-democrats cannot craft appealing narratives because the inability to craft appealing narratives is what defines them as neo-democrats.

They are the alliance of people who must control the venue because they cannot persuade. This is why they represent the Machine.

Because only the Machine can allow them control of the venue.

They are the people who cannot build a power base on their own merits, so they must serve the Machine or they will have no power.

In the video below, we see what happens when neo-democrats attempt to craft narratives and persuade.

This woman claims to be a tech expert, and tells us a story about how Elon Musk and Starlink fixed the 2024 election.

Her problem is, she’s using the internet as if it were a few-to-many medium.

She’s speaking as if she were on television, and could lie without anyone else being allowed on that television to contradict her.

She’s not a computer expert. And what she’s saying is not even wrong, it’s gibberish. To be wrong it would first have to have a thesis, and that thesis would have to make sense.

I don’t know if this story sounds okay to a layman, but to any software engineer, sysadmin, or even electrical engineer, she sounds like Gene Ray the Time Cube Guy. She doesn’t know what any of these terms mean. She doesn’t even pronounce a lot of them correctly. And the way she hooks them together looks like somebody gluing recognizable bits from an electronics catalogue to a D-list actor’s face for a super-low-budget cyberpunk movie.

When neo-democrats venture onto the open internet, they don’t know how to craft narratives, because they aren’t used to being called on their bullshit. Make no mistake, the 2024 vote split broke into People Who Believe What Their TV Tells Them vs. People Who Look Shit Up On The Internet. By the very nature of their allegiance to legacy tech, the neo-democrats are doomed… unless they can control the internet, or the vote counters.

The neo-republicans must focus on protecting those two systems.

https://x.com/AesPolitics1/status/1855473656547209370

It’s amazing what you can learn after you leave school. –Raymond Dubois

I find that as you get older, if you reminisce about the old days, and you’re not looking forward to a better way of life, better things, you’re getting ready to die. –Raymond Dubois

When the French Canadians first came to Manchester, having many children was the only way they could survive. That was one reason why they had such large families. My mother had twelve kids, and she tells us she was always either pregnant or nursing. The only way that they had to prevent having children was nursing. Even today they say that if you nurse, you aren’t apt to become pregnant. We’re all two years apart, almost in a neat order, which shows the trend of her thought: she nursed them until they were about fourteen months old, then the minute she stopped, she’d get pregnant again. My father was not the type of person who would stop having sex, and he was too moral to go with another woman. He wasn’t that kind of man either. His upbringing wasn’t like that. So I guess they were left no choice….I had a Caesarean with my fourth child, and I didn’t have any more after that. I’m sure they tied my tubes or something, but I was such a Catholic they wouldn’t tell me. My parents still had that very strong Canadian-Catholic tradition. If my husband had made the decision not to have any more children, I would have gone along with him, but I would never have made that decision myself. It was in my marriage all the way through: that you have to have children and do nothing. I don’t see it so much in my daughter. But in my mother’s time, and even my own, most of the French people were not rebellious in any way. They were not given to revolution. They had lived very poor lives, even at home in Quebec. They were people with a deep, simple, religious faith….We had a big stove in the kitchen and three grills in the ceiling, so in the winter a little bit of heat went up to the second floor but hardly any at all reached the third and fourth floors. My mother had a whole set of those old-fashioned irons with the detachable handles. We’d all undress downstairs, and we’d each get one of those hot irons that had been heated in the kitchen stove, wrapped in a towel. We’d run upstairs with the towel, stick that under the covers, two or three of us in each bed, and put our sheet on that. –Alice LaCasse

The doctor said they almost lost me and the baby, too. I asked the doctor how long it would take before I got repaired, and he said, “Two or three years.” I said, “You better talk to my husband.” The doctor talked to him. My husband went and talked to the priest. First he went to the parish priest, which was St. Augustine’s. He wanted to use something so that I wouldn’t get pregnant. The priest said that he wouldn’t give him absolution if he did that. So he went to St. George’s. The priest there told him that he needn’t worry. He said, “Did your wife ever say ‘no’ to you?” My husband said, “No.” The priest said, “Your wife is always ready, she never says ‘no’ to you?” and my husband said, “No.” So the priest said, “You do just the same thing you always do, and nothing will happen to your wife,” and the priest proved true. I had seven children after that. My husband died before me. He was forty-four when he died, and I’m still alive. –Maria LaCasse

My father was very strict. He was so totally against going out with other nationalities that we would have been expelled from the family. Lorenzo continued that same strictness. He checked out who we went out with. We all did marry French Canadians, every one of us but the younger ones. It’s changed with the younger ones. They are like a second generation. My brother married an Irish girl, and my last sister, Lucille, married an Irish boy. Her husband died, and she remarried. Her husband is Irish. My sister Yvette also married an Irish boy. For us, though, it was understood that you married French. It came not only from the family but from the Church. They’d say, “First of all, if you don’t marry in your own language, then you won’t communicate as well; then, if you don’t marry Catholic, you’ll lose your religion. It’s hard enough to get together when you’re of the same religion and the same language; how much harder it will be if you’re not. It’s hard enough to be married, so try to get your own kind.” –Alice LaCasse

An interviewee, Marie Anne Senechal: as the oldest child in her family, she had to serve as a surrogate mother to her younger siblings. Marie Anne raised all of them to adulthood, then continued to assist them, as well as to care for a chronically ill brother and a sister who lived with her. As a result, she postponed her marriage until she was sixty-four, when she married her fiancé after forty years of courtship. Widowed after five years of marriage, she continues to live in what was originally her husbands home. She shares her flat with her sister and brother-in-law and keeps another sister and brother-in-law in the one upstairs….After the Amoskeag shut down, my father didn’t go back to the mills because he was too old. He worked in the cemetery about ten or twelve years, but we never got a cent. He gave up [working] at eighty-seven years old. Eighty-seven years, with no pension, nothing. …When my father died, he was ninety-four years old. He lived upstairs with my sister for two years, and he lived with me for twenty-three years, so I never was alone, to tell you the truth. I was alone only when my husband died, because that was after my sister got married….The sister who helped me the most is the one that is living with me. She stayed unmarried, too. She had a fellow, but he died. She finally got married when she was fifty-four….My husband and I waited forty years to get married. Forty years! The first year I met him, he was eighteen years old and I was six years older. I couldn’t get married because I had to bring up a family, and he had to take care of his mother. When she died, she was ninety-four. He kept taking care of his mother, and I kept on bringing up my family. I thought I’d never marry. I was sixty-seven years old when I got married. And I’m seventy-nine now.

People don’t say very much when they’re leaving. They’re sad, and a lot of them cry. It’s a bad thing when there are no jobs to be had. If only you could say, “Well, the heck with it. I’ll go out and get another job.” But there’s just no place to go. After you put that many years into a place, it’s like a second home. You go every day, you know how much time it’s going to take you, and you come home at a certain time. Just a nice routine. You knew what to do and how to do it, and you knew how long it would take you. Nobody bothered you.

You knew you had a job to go to. It was a good feeling. Now you know your time has come, and you feel lost. You just have no place to turn. I’ve spent half my life in the mill, really, because I’m fifty years old, and I’m going on twenty-three years in the mill. If there were other mills, you could say, “I’ll go to another mill. That mill is just as good.” But there are no other mills to go to. –Bette Skrzyszowski

https://celestemdavis.substack.com/p/why-boys-dont-go-to-college

“Nearly 60 percent of all college students today are women. That’s an all-time high… U.S. colleges and universities have lost about 1.5 million students in the past several years. Men accounted for 71 percent of that loss.”

This is a quote from a Freakanomics podcast episode I listened to this week called “What is the future of college—and does it have room for men?”

In the 1950s, men outnumbered women 2:1 in college.

By the 1990s, the ratio was 1:1.

Today the ratio is 4:6 with fewer men than women attending college.

The question on everyone’s mind is why? Why aren’t men going to college anymore?

Scholars, journalists, college presidents and reddit thread philosophers have all come to the table to add their particular offering to the buffet of reasons why fewer boys are going to college.

The Pew Research Center has found that boys are more likely to think they don’t need a degree for the jobs they want, and when they do enroll in college, work opportunities lure them away.

Ruth Simmons, president of A&M University thinks “the problem is the way we treat our boys in k-12. They turn away from school because of the negative messages they get at school… Behavior that is rewarded for boys doesn’t fit well with good student behavior.”

Another college president, Donald Ruff believes it boils down to money. “Honestly I think it’s the sticker shock. To see $100,000 that’s daunting.”

Author Richard Reeves thinks, “The main reason is that girls are outperforming boys in school.”

Young men are less likely than young women to attend college in every racial group. Source: AIBM
Other reasons I came across while researching for this article include:

Men can make more money without a college degree than women can, so women need college more.

Higher rates of alcohol, drug use, gangs and prison for boys negate college as a viable option.

Colleges are usually left-leaning, so right-leaning students increasingly don’t feel comfortable there. And more men than women lean right.

Men join the military more than women.

A man will sometimes have to provide for wife/kids before he can finish college.

While many of these reasons address why college is less appealing to boys, almost none of them address what has actually CHANGED in recent decades to cause the drop.

Many people cite the lure of trade schools and blue collar jobs as more appealing to men, but when you consider that blue collar jobs have gone down from 31.2% of total employment in 1970 to 13.6% today- why would men suddenly be more attracted to blue collar work compared to an era when these jobs were more plentiful?

As I listened to the Freakanomics podcast, I was confused why they kept skirting around the thing that has actually changed—

What has changed is an increase in girls.

When you look at other areas where this exact same thing has happened, it is not such a head scratcher why fewer men are going to college.

We’re just not talking about it.

Male Flight
White flight is a term that describes how white people move out of neighborhoods when more people of color move in. White flight is especially common when minority populations become the majority. That neighborhood then declines in value.

Male flight describes a similar phenomenon when large numbers of females enter a profession, group, hobby or industry—the men leave. That industry is then devalued.

Take veterinary school for example:

History of the College - Veterinary Medicine at Illinois
University of Illinois’s College of Veterinary Medicine 1948
In 1969 almost all veterinary students were male at 89%.

By 1987, male enrollment was equal to female at 50%.1

By 2009, male enrollment in veterinary schools had plummeted to 22.4%

A sociologist studying gender in veterinary schools, Dr. Anne Lincoln says that in an attempt to describe this drastic drop in male enrollment, many keep pointing to financial reasons like the debt-to-income ratio or the high cost of schooling.

But Lincoln’s research found that “men and women are equally affected by tuition and salaries.”

Her research shows that the reason fewer men are enrolling in veterinary school boils down to one factor: the number of women in the classroom.

“There was really only one variable where I found an effect, and that was the proportion of women already enrolled in vet med schools… So a young male student says he’s going to visit a school and when he sees a classroom with a lot of women he changes his choice of graduate school. That’s what the findings indicate…. what’s really driving feminization of the field is ‘preemptive flight’—men not applying because of women’s increasing enrollment.” - Dr. Anne Lincoln

For every 1% increase in the proportion of women in the student body, 1.7 fewer men applied. One more woman applying was a greater deterrent than $1000 in extra tuition!

Education - Veterinary Medicine at Illinois
Other disciplines that have experienced male flight include:

Biology. While most STEM professions remain male dominated, 10 years ago biology became a 50/50 male/female split. By 2022, 62% of biology majors were women. Biology is now often considered the “easiest” of the STEM majors.

Interior Design. William Morris is considered the father of interior design. After finishing his education at Oxford, he began an architectural design school called “the Firm”— just for men. Many universities had interior design programs. Until women began to enter the design space, at which point it was relegated to a mere “hobby.” Since the influx of women, interior design programs have been pulled from almost all universities.

Teaching. In the 18th century, schooling in colonial America was reserved for the white and the wealthy. Most tutors were men who taught boys. By the middle of the 19th century, girls started becoming students and women became teachers. Consequently, men swiftly left the profession, the pay dropped and teaching was no longer considered a prestigious occupation.

Similar patterns of male flight have occurred in nursing, cheerleading, social work, architecture, gymnastics, library sciences and psychology.

The tipping point
Since males had dominated these professions for centuries, you would think they would leave slowly, hesitantly or maybe linger at 40%, 35%, 30%, but that’s not what happens. Once the tipping point reaches majority female- the men flee. And boy do they flee!

It’s a slippery slope. When the number of women hits 60% the men who are there make a swift exit and other men stop joining.

Morty Schapiro, economist and former president of Northwestern University has noticed this trend when studying college enrollment numbers across universities:

“There’s a cliff you fall off once you become 60/40 female/male. It then becomes exponentially more difficult to recruit men.”

Now we’ve reached that 60% point of no return for colleges.

From aspirational to unimportant: the devaluing of college
As we’ve seen with teachers, nurses and interior design, once an institution is majority female, the public perception of its value plummets.

Scanning through Reddit and Quora threads, many men seem to be in agreement- college is stupid and unnecessary. A waste of time and money. You’re much better off going into the trades, a tech boot camp or becoming an entrepreneur. No need for college.

Compare that sentiment with these quotes about college from years past when more men than women went to college:

“The advantage of education is to better fit a man for life’s work. I would advise young men to take a college course as a rule.” - John D Rockefeller

“The best means of forming a manly, virtuous and happy people will be found in the right education of youth. Without this foundation, every other means, in my opinion, must fail.” - George Washington

“A college degree is the key to realizing the American dream, well worth the financial sacrifice because it is opens the door to a world of opportunity.” - Dan Rather

When mostly men went to college? Prestigious. Aspirational. Important.

Now that mostly women go to college? Unnecessary. De-valued. A bad choice.

Discrimination or Masculinity Norms?
Disturbingly, many men point to women outnumbering men in college enrollment as evidence that feminism is ruining the world and unfairly penalizing men. Discriminating against men.

But men are not structurally or legally prohibited from attending college as women were decades ago. Men are choosing not to go to college.

“Among adults, men are more likely than women to cite factors that reflect personal choices to not attend college or complete their degrees. According to the Pew Research Center, about a third (34%) of men without a bachelor’s degree say a major reason they didn’t finish college is that they just didn’t want to. Only one-in-four women said the same.” - Forbes

They just don’t want to. And why don’t they want to?

Chris Bren offers this explanation on Quora:

School is now feminine. College is feminine. And rule #1 if you want to safely navigate this world as a man? Avoid the feminine.

Read why it’s harder to be a man than a woman here.
But we don’t seem to want to talk about that.

Why would we rather look at everything else before looking at traditional masculinity?
Remember that Freakanomics podcast I listened to? Amazingly, astonishingly, against all odds, they managed to talk for 53 minutes and 32 seconds, interview nine experts on the topic and not once- NOT ONCE -mention male flight or masculinity as a reason men aren’t going to college.

I’m almost impressed witnessing the back-bending they did to gymnastics away from the topic of masculinity.

They came so close many times.

They mentioned that there is one subset of men who out-enroll women. Which subset might that be?

Gay men.

While only 36 percent of US adults have bachelor’s degrees, 52% of gay men do.

‘If America’s gay men formed their own country, it would be the world’s most highly educated by far.’” - Joel Mittleman

At the Joel Mittleman quote in the podcast, I leaned forward…yes… surely now we will wonder why only straight men aren’t attending college… yes?

No. They cartwheeled right back to talking about money.

At one point they mentioned that while male enrollment is down for four year colleges, for two year institutions, the male-to-female ratio has not changed.

But they pretzeled around pointing to masculinity as a reason that the only programs not dropping in male enrollment are those where masculinity is not threatened (HVAC, manufacturing, construction and construction management, welding, etc).

The podcast’s concluding remarks as to why boys aren’t going to college were: “College has become too expensive, too inaccessible and too divorced from its original goals.”

Freakanomics is far from the only one avoiding the topic of masculinity.
Of the 16 articles I read on men not going to college, only two mentioned masculinity or male flight.

Elise Loehnen in her recent article “What’s Happening to Our Boys” noticed this very same omission.

The book “Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why it Matters and What to do about it” by Richard Reeves has become a go-to resource where men and college attendance is discussed.

Reeves was interviewed on that Freakanomics podcast and is quoted in many of the articles I read. Here is what Loehnen says about what his book leaves out:

“While Reeves presents oodles of data about how many boys are falling behind academically… many men are failing economically, and men are the subject of too many deaths of despair, he skates over the question of why. He lands somewhere in the space of “it’s biology,” and that absent the need to protect and provide…

“He offers some practical solutions like redshirting boys in school for a year and incentivizing men to go into HEAL career trajectories (health, education, administration, literacy), but doesn’t address why boys and men are loathe to pick up this thread in the first place. (Hint: It has to do with a collective aversion toward the ‘feminine.’)” - Elise Loehnen

Loehnen references another book touching on why boys don’t go to college where the author interviews boys and men extensively. Masculinity norms are discussed there. That book is called “Rebels Without a Cause: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves and Our Culture” By Niobe Way.

“According to boys and young men, however, the fault lies entirely with a culture that has gendered and sexualized human capacities, interests, and careers and thus made academic achievement, including going to college, a ‘girlie and gay’ thing. We now think in our modern version of ‘boy’ culture that wanting to follow a career in which one takes care of others or teaches people, are part of a pink-collar economy (i.e., girlie and gay). ‘Be a man and get a real job,’ one that is blue-collar, is the message directed at many young men..” - Niobe Way

Way’s book that cites masculinity norms as a main cause of boys not going to college has five reviews on Amazon, while Reeves’s book that does not touch on masculinity norms, has 1047 reviews and is frequently referenced as the authority on the issue.

It’s frustrating to listen to proposed solutions like “teach boys college is important” or “encourage men to go into HEAL professions” without addressing the reason boys don’t want to go to college or into HEAL professions in the first place.2

Male flight and masculinity norms aren’t the only reasons men aren’t going to college, but they make a sizable contribution.

One we seem loathe to look at.

Until we’re actually able to dig up the root of these issues, we’ll just keep weed whacking the behaviors.

1
What changed between 1969 and 1987? In 1972 a federal amendment outlawed discrimination against female students.

2
If you actually wanted a solution for boys to want to go to college, bring back male-only colleges. Watch college suddenly become really popular for boys again.

https://quillette.com/2024/06/17/recycling-plastic-is-a-dangerous-waste-of-time-microplastics-health/

https://thedailyscroll.substack.com/p/june-17-the-most-secure-election

Quit Your Job

…Working even a good job cramps your sense of possibility, imposes narrow objectives, and eats away at the little things that could grow into big things if they weren’t so oppressed by the rigors of existing structure…

This is part of why we need an active leisure class in society. Productive exploration requires the application of skilled personal judgment to chasing hunches and interesting problems without narrow material and objective constraints. It is generally unfair and wasteful for this to be anything but voluntarily self-funded…thus, speculative exploration is a special duty of those with means. Relatedly, it’s unfair and wasteful for the people who could be out there exploring and building the future on their own dime to be either working normal jobs or simply managing their money for profit. This is a key part of what it means to be a responsible elite. You use your privilege and your personal judgment to explore and solve problems that no one else can.

If you have the resources to spend some time exploring, if you are on to interesting threads of novelty that few other people have, and if you have the spirit to tighten your belt, throw out your map, and explore off-road, then your real job is to do so. It is a grave sin to neglect that kind of cosmic duty. But many more people have the means and privilege to quit their tracked careers than ever realize it and act on it. You need far less than you think to live in monk mode and pursue this kind of exploration. What this means in practice is that at some point far before you are or feel ready, you need to quit your job.

Even if you are rich and have no nominal boss, statistically speaking you are still effectively a wage slave. If all you end up doing is nursing the money, without ever exercising the authority to decide on which future it shall be spent, it might as well be someone else’s… You don’t actually need the money; in reality, the money needs you to give it a worthy purpose…

This is related to why man became stunted with the dawn of agriculture. We traded a life limited by the occasional violent struggle over bountiful surplus for a more predictable life limited by grinding labor after barely sufficient nutrition. Scale won out, but not health. Quitting your job, in the full sense I have described here, is a bit like quitting that agricultural life to return to a life of adventure on the wild frontier. It is a much less certain existence and a more violent one. But the combination of leisurely surplus, mortal intensity, and demand for novel virtue is where you will find life at its healthiest and highest. It is where we will find the most important destinies.

My Last Five Years of Work

Live like an aristocrat:
…In the early modern era, landed gentry and similar were essentially unemployed. Perhaps they did some minor administration of their tenants, some dabbled in politics or were dragged into military projects, but compared to most formal workers they seem to have worked relatively few hours. They filled the remainder of their time with intricate social rituals like balls and parties, hobbies like hunting, studying literature, and philosophy, producing and consuming art, writing letters, and spending time with friends and family…I sometimes wonder if there is some implicit classism in people’s worries about unemployment: the rich will know how to use their time well, but the poor will need to be kept busy.

…the urge not to feel useless….

…IQ test results correlate positively with something objective—that is, with differences in reaction times.[24] It is widely accepted among leading psychometricians such as Arthur Jensen,[25] Hans Eysenck,[26] and Ian Deary[27] that IQ tests correlate with this objective neurological measure…

According to research from Iceland, the ‘sweet spot’ in terms of fertility, or producing the highest numbers of children, is your third cousin!(Helgason, A., Palsson, S., Gudbjartsson, D., et al. (2008) An association between the kinship and fertility of human couples, Science, 319, pp. 813–816.)

…In the early 19th century, in London, it was not uncommon to see dead babies in the streets or in rubbish dumps. By the 18th century, the number of abandoned babies was so great in many European cities that orphanages were established to house them. In 1741, the Thomas Coram hospital for foundlings was opened in London. However, due to the lack of wet nurses, 71% of these foundlings were dead by the age of 15, whereas it was roughly 40% in the general population. Due to insufficient wet nurses, foundlings were malnourished and acutely vulnerable to infectious disease…

Nice summaries of civilizational cycling (rise and fall) hypotheses/myths throughout history:

Polybius (200–118 BC)
Societies rise when they are religious, have a deep reverence for the past and for older generations, are prepared to engage in noble acts of self-sacrifice, and follow clear moral rules. These qualities ensure that they have a sense of superiority, a sense of their own destiny, that they are a cohesive community, and that they can be motivated to defend their society, even unto death. When they lose these qualities—which they inevitably do—then they fall. People become too rich and when this happens they lose their ‘fear of the gods’ and with it their selflessness and community spirit, their sense of eternal destiny, their reverence for older generations, and the strict moral rules which bind them together.

Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406)
Ibn Khaldun argued that central to civilisation was the concept of ‘Asabiyyah’, which translates as something like social cohesion or social solidarity. Asabiyyah will increase and reach a peak as civilisation advances but, ultimately, it will go into decline and, with it, the civilisation will go into decline and be displaced by another one in which Asabiyyah is stronger…For Ibn Khaldun, conditions of something like group selection were strong among people who lived in the deserts. This meant they could only survive if they were high in Asabiyyah and manifestations of it such as religiousness and martial values. This high Asabiyyah allowed them to flourish and create cities. However, here the selection for Asabiyyah was lower because conditions were more luxurious. As such, after a number of generations Asabiyyah declined to an extent that they would be invaded by desert tribes that were higher in Asabiyyah and the cycle would begin all over again.

Giambattista Vico (1668–1744)
Vico argued that states pass through three stages: the Age of Gods, the Age of Heroes, and the Age of Men. After the Age of Men, society collapses back into the Age of Gods and the cycle occurs all over again…They began as simple, savage societies whose anxieties were allayed by the gods, whom they also feared. A simple aristocracy ruled over these societies and controlled them through religion or, as Vico terms it, ‘poetic wisdom’. However, this aristocracy was not highly distinct from those whom it ruled. From this, they developed into more complex societies where there was a much clearer divide between the ‘nobility’ (the heroes) and the ‘plebeians’, who fought to gain some of the privileges held by the nobility but were ruled by them. So, society has become less united. In the Age of Heroes, there is a conspicuous and highly distinct ruling class whose members battle with each other for control and to show their strength. In the Age of Men, the heroes cede some of their power to the plebeians. In the previous ages, humanity was ruled by religion and ritual and this upheld the power of the nobility. The plebeians advance their own interests, and undermine the power of the nobility, by advocating a rational way of thinking. This empowers the plebeians but also undermines religion and, in so doing, shatters cultural unity. Religiousness inspires people to work for the common good but now they focus only on the individual. Society splinters into ‘the barbarism of reflection’ in which civil wars are fought solely for personal gain. It duly collapses back to the Age of Gods.

Oswald Spengler (1880–1936)
Spengler argued that all societies that have ever existed—though they may differ markedly in specifics—go through the same fairly clear stages that organisms do: birth, youth, maturity, decline, and death. In its spring, the society is characterised by a ‘culture’ which is based around a strong sense of religiousness. This bears fruit in its summer, in which we then see the height of its creative achievements: its epics, its poems, its plays; all of them religiously inspired to some extent. The culture is vital, optimistic, and does not question its own destiny. However, as it matures into the autumn of its years, it becomes urbanised and wealthy. There appears a Socrates or a Rousseau who questions everything and we enter an age of rationalism in which technological progress goes hand-in-hand with scepticism about religion, aristocratic rule, tradition, and everything that has held society together. At first this generates optimism about a better future, in which standards of living are much improved. Indeed, the society is so certain of the utility of its rational way of thinking that it motivates empire-building and the spread of its way of thinking, often via a political figure: Caesar, Napoleon, or Cecil Rhodes. But, on the other hand, there is a decline in religious certainty, with everything focused around material wealth.This process of rationalisation continues, and every idea is questioned, then everything is rationalised down to money (even having children), all of the old ways are despised, and there is no longer any optimism or soul holding society together. Society is strongly individualist and we enter the winter of civilisation. The constant critique, and artificial attempt to create meaning, leads to a nihilistic, pessimistic world and a gulf between the money-focused elite and the masses, because there is no longer any religious belief that the position of the elite is somehow deserved. Society becomes fragmented, democracy and order break down and demagogues take over, leading an increasingly alienated mass. This is the Age of Emperors. These Emperors are given extraordinary powers to sort out the mess of conflict that society has degenerated into, including problems of external invaders. The despair which people feel is lifted by vague religious yearnings. They engage in religious practices of various kinds but don’t really believe them. But as society becomes yet more chaotic we see the development of a ‘Second Religiousness’, which is an anti-intellectual and rehashed version of the religion on which the society was founded… Spengler insists that, when he was writing, the West’s Second Religiousness remained a number of generations into the future. During this period, society becomes so badly weakened that it is often taken over by societies which are more youthful, and descends back into a Dark Age, to be reborn anew.

…religiousness is associated with stress…religiousness is a significant predictor of fertility: the more religious you are, the bigger your family is likely to be. This may be because many religions teach that children are a blessing from God and you should have as many as possible. But, as the elite become more intelligent, less stressed, and less religious, their fertility is likely to be impacted for this reason. There’s no God who demands they ‘go forth and multiply’, so why bother? Why not just ‘drink, eat and be merry, for tomorrow we shall die’? By having a small number of—or even no—children, such people help to preserve a relatively high standard of living, but it is at the expense of their genetic interests. This compounds the g decline and also leads to a society—and particularly its elite—that is low in ethnocentrism and is nihilistic.

… the basic cause of the collapse of Rome, it is that its level of g rose too high and this set off a process of g decline, because those with the highest levels were both able and willing to limit their fertility. This is the fate of all advanced civilisations. If they become too comfortable, which they do if their g reaches a certain level, they lose their religion, they lack a sense of the eternal, they run out of steam, and they start to decline.

Herder’s Romantic nationalism begins with the dogma that the most natural state is for peoples to live in separate nations internally bonded by shared blood, soil, language, and history. The peasant is the purest and least polluted manifestation of this ‘folk culture’ and, so, to rebuild it we must imitate the peasant, who is seen as diligent, honest, and the best manifestation of Man.

…The fall of religion and the nobility opens up the idea that all men are equal…

…with the development of contraception, people begin to limit their fertility and in some European countries the population growth slows down; only increasing due to non-European immigration and high immigrant birth-rate. The emphasis on equality and the questioning of all traditional ideas continues and we see the rise of feminism, relativism, and the pervading view that life has no meaning…

Winter is civilisation’s old age and, if Spengler is correct, we are already there. He predicts that we develop into a highly globalised world, which is ruled by a kind of international financial elite who are very distant from ordinary people.

..declining voter turnout in Western countries. People despair and feel that their voice can no longer influence events and so they lose faith in democracy and democracy declines. Technology flourishes, fuelled by micro-innovation…. macro-innovation rates are declining also, there is widespread economic stagnation. Feeling completely helpless and no longer trusting party politics, people simply start to elect charismatic individuals who they feel will sort the crisis out and listen to their woes…And they are prepared to give them huge powers in order to do this.

…Growing areas of the nation are no longer populated by the descendants of those who established the civilisation in question…

We can perhaps see parallels between cultural Marxism and the place of secular philosophy in the Fall of Rome. The result of this is a constant state of ethnic strife in increasingly diverse Western nations and massive immigration into them, which the financial elite perceive as a good thing because it keeps labour costs down and renders the populace divided, allowing the elite to retain power.

An elite that is anti-group selected (i.e. purely self-interested) is likely to enhance in their offspring those traits that were most important to its success—traits such as psychopathy.[8] Thus such a ‘liberalised’ eugenics is more likely than not to make things worse for civilisation in its winter years.

On providing for geniuses: There should be no pressure to publish, or deal with bureaucracy, or attend conferences. They must simply be permitted to get on with it, as Newton was.

https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/p/autism-and-the-internet-will-defeat

…Tyler Cowen framed these qualitative observations in economic terms: he argues autistics should be expected to have lower price elasticities and to specialise in production to a greater degree. That is, what they enjoy they enjoy much more than the average person and what they dislike they also dislike more, which makes them less likely to respond to differences in pay when choosing a job and place more value on their enjoyment of it — sometimes to the point that enjoyment is the only thing that matters. This explains why, unpaid and unrecognised, anonymous writers on forums like LessWrong have written thousands of words of often highly technical posts…

…Most workplaces are structured by and for non-autistic individuals, often making it challenging for those on the autism spectrum to leverage their unique abilities in professional environments. While autistic individuals may excel in academic settings or in entry-level positions that prioritize analytical skills, their career advancement frequently stalls. This stagnation largely results from the increasing emphasis on conventional social skills necessary for climbing the professional ladder, particularly in roles that focus on client relations at higher levels. In many professional settings, autistics very often face a real “Glass Ceiling.” It is this relative lack of success and inadequacy that drives many to the Internet…