All of it. You're telling me to think through this myself and the way I think is incompatible with what I'm being told to do.

I thought it could be made compatible with ease if only I had some of a fraction of the perspective of someone else but I've taken to accepting what I'm being told so that would be "having them do everything for me," which I do not want.

Because people started telling me to do things instead of telling me what they thought like I expected. In the first steps of trying to do what they were telling me to I was told that I'm not trying and that I should stop expecting them to do the work for me so I tried to make stronger and stronger statements about things to show that I was working hard but that just made everyone think I am a jerk.

If anyone would like to give me opinions like "The pictures you have are nice but I can't see _____" I'd deal with that very differently.

Nonono. I asked if there was something wrong with my profile. That's a request for opinions.

I have been been much nicer to opinions than I have to advice. My opinion of the advice is that almost all of it is trash. The opinions behind it are alright but in telling people to do things you cannot blame them if they ask you to explain what you have told them to do.

Even when I'm complaining about people not doing the things that I have instructed I ask if people understood what I was saying. Even with the implicit "answer the following question" people behave as they do not understand what I am saying so the very rude question about how people would respond if I were to -talk much dumber- was justified. Few people here are advanced enough with English to recognize it instead of emotionally lashing out at the implication that they are stupid (get over it, I was speaking relatively and yes, if my sentences are too complex to be read I need to dumb them down to an appropriate level.)

Doesn't understand what? The Advice? Yes.


I enjoy letting words stream out of my fingers. It's quite relaxing.

So don't worry. I'm relaxed as I say all of this. I've already explained how I don't have normal anger. I'm writing things in the tone I am to communicate the ideas more effectively. If other people would relax they might understand what I'm saying.

I've been helping myself for a year and the advice I got at the start indicates I was doing very poorly. So you are you telling me that I am supposed to ignore this advice?

-

I'm wondering why nobody has said anything about what I changed the headline to. Is "NO" really an acceptable thing to have for that?

Yes, people think that in person as well. I know I'm trying to not complain so much now but I haven't been able to figure out why I look so much younger than other men my age.

Is my face too round? Have I made a terrible choice of hairstyle? Is there something I can do with makeup that would help?

I let "dark" characteristics show through quite a bit more in internet discussion because they build value and you might notice I amped it up when someone said they don't know who I am.

I'm very displeased that people get the impression that I am resistant to change. I've been saying almost constantly that I just don't understand how to use their advice but more than that I immediately leapt upon the first criticism I received as an opportunity to heavily revamp my profile.

-

So here's the thing. I want to be less negative. I tried to change my profile when I first heard that.

But there is a problem. When I make myself stop thinking negatively I stop thinking altogether. Inside my head it becomes silent except for negative thoughts that rise to the surface as my self control waxes and wanes.

So I have been saying that I need something else. People have thought I'm asking for the help a child would get where they go through step by step but JUST giving advice about how to deal with negative thinking is what I have been asking for.

People have ignored that and told me that I am essentially a rotten person for not having taken the advice I got.
"I still have a problem."
"You're just not trying hard enough" reminds me of what the people I know with Asian mothers go through and have you ever met anyone like that? They're entirely justified in being frustrated.


But at this point I really don't expect anyone to help me with any problem I have using their advice. I am defective for not being able to do it and I'll stop hassling people for what is obviously wrong with me.


So I haven't looked at other profiles yet. I know with plenty of certainty that I'm not gay but how attractive something looks is the only way I can think of to judge if a profile is good or not. What do I need to do to gain anything from reading men's profiles?

Ok, we pretty much agree. Thank you for being forthcoming~

I've been ranting for pages how rude it is for most people to be responding the way they are.

Why is it so much to ask for some clarification?

I agree that it was rude but I see it as only returning the rudeness to people.

Should I be happy that people don't listen to me?

The advice "It's good, don't change it" is understandable enough but I don't understand what other people are telling me to do and it's like struggling to understand someone talking in another language.

Edit: But hey, if the "this internet dating stuff isn't actually any good for meeting people" advice was right why does it matter if I burn bridges here anyway?

Well the implied part of that was "if you want me to continue talking to you in a civil manner." I do not tolerate quote mining for very long.

...but if the sentences I have just said explain what you are saying then why are you saying it? I just got done explaining it.
If you were agreeing with that could make sense but you're asking questions which indicates you think there are unanswered problems.

No, keep the chronological order in mind. You said the sentence we've been altering first and then I showed you another sentence using the same structure.
The thing about pointing out why mine was nonsensical was exactly why your first one was. Parts of what you're saying don't seem consistent and if you aren't going to retract some of your statements you should at least admit that some did not convey what you were saying as well as intended.

And again I don't see how this fits with your mention of unequal exchanges that sparked most of this tussle. I'm not inserting my own meanings on to what you've said and saying that doesn't make sense- I'm showing a dozen different trains of though and showing how one thing or another derails each one.

Right now I think the most likely one you were going for would be that unfair exchanges come back to haunt us. Is this close?

Well maybe not. After complaining about no explanations of picture advice I did get the one response from Ruth but that was that I didn't need more pictures so I still don't know the answers or even starts of them about anything I asked.

Would people respond to me if my replies were shorter and dumber?
Like "More pictures? What is more pictures?"

Example: I give a list of questions about how to do more pictures. How do people respond? "I don't read what you write and your opinion is wrong."

Oh, I forgot to mention that I understand why people don't respond. Just like a lot of people ruin everyone else's reputation by ruthlessly seeking out internet nookie there are a lot of people who are just crazy sending out messages. Well not that kind of crazy-

What I'm saying is that in being polite and turning people down there is occasionally a re-reply that is basically distilled hatred.
I know, how dare anyone reject you after you went to all the trouble of writing a message or copying a pasting one to them?

I consider myself polite so I respond to everyone but then again it's not like people I've turned down saying they hate me IN CAPSLOCK would upset me anyway (actually I laugh about it in other settings so probably the same in this setting..


Now, really something around 2/3rds of the people you or I contact would actually get along with us really well but 1/3rd to 1/5th even so much as reply and my understanding of the reason for this (aside from things everyone mentions like profiles for people who aren't actually interested in dating having profiles,) would be that we don't know or make clear what we're looking for.
"I'll know it when I see it" sorts of mentalities lead to not really liking any of what you see as much as you realistically would.

So you didn't think that the way I blamed teachers for screwing up my education would be a turn off?

Thank you for giving me your opinion though. If you scan the first page of this you can find people referring to what I had before, and it was shorter so that's really all there is.

But now I'm going to undo most of that thank you by complaining about how you couldn't at least say yes/no/not sure about the items on the pictures list :(

You need to stop plucking out single sentences from what I'm saying because the ones after them explain what I'm saying to the conclusion of the idea and I don't think anybody wants to read run on sentences like this one just because I'm tired of being misquoted.

So, the trade can only be measured in value. Value is subjective and everyone values things they don't have more than things they have a lot of.
So does this or does this not mean that no exchange is ever equal?


So value of what person A is giving away and value of what person B is giving away added together are less than what they have afterwards because they also got the value of social connection.
Exchange is not just A+B=B+A. Exchanging A and B is worth more than that, thus nonzero.
Are you saying something different and if so what?

Well of course time is a factor. There must be some point in time where a value judgement is made. But that judgement could happen at any time.

And there is no intrinsic requirement for anything to ever be or ever have been equal. "Without the moon going around the Earth, Jupiter can’t be BIG."

I'm glad that you said the opposite in a way that you can see it's ridiculous because "when trade is equal there are no consequences." You get the reference don't you?

So money is only worth whatever we value it like how water is only worth whatever we value it.
Man, I wouldn't wanna be holding on to that desert water if it became worthless.

You get the economy well enough but you need to not just string together all the ideas other people have been saying forever. They make less sense without their context.



Ok, what courses do you take or what tone are you?
Are you not involved with Scientology?

That's a weird point to make.
You seemed to object to me saying that the goal was to become free of those influences but then there was that "a state where no influence can cause the bad part" line.
That's what I thought I meant.


Well going by the OT story the bad parts are confused dinosaur spirits that have no rightful business sharing your body with you.

But ya, basically every unenlightened behavior comes from the bad stuff so if you get rid of/free yourself from all of that then you'll be able to really live in harmony.

- I don't really get why people think what South Park showed is so ridiculous. Oh, the world is held up by four elephants standing on the back of a turtle. The Gods killed Ymir and his body became the many worlds connected by the tree Yggdrasil. The one true God sent himself to Earth as his son by the Virgin Mary and died for our sins but wasn't dead three days later. Mohamed ascended to heaven on a unicorn (or Pegasus? I'm less familiar with that one.) Zeus cracked his head open and his fully grown daughter popped out.

EVERYTHING sounds crazy when you're not a member. I don't see any reason to blame people for not wanting to share this stuff with people they know wouldn't accept it anyway and would just give them a lot of crap about it. I think Scientology waits an awfully long time to spring this on the followers but L Ron established it in a different time (well, still this century but you know,) so maybe people were even bigger ***** about beliefs back then.

-_-

It's good advice because you didn't need it.

...

I'd benefit from talking to lex? What do you mean by that?

This is exactly what's frustrating me. Would you like to count how many times I've said "I don't want you to write it for me"? The count in my head is getting high enough that I don't think people should be saying this to me.

This would be like if the teacher was telling students "write down when train A and train B meet" without having ever given the lecture about how to do the algebra that story problem is based on.


Do you realize that I have been rewriting my profile as this goes along? I haven't heard any mention of the sarcastic move I made in the interests field and I have got no idea if it's appropriate to keep that in there.

Now with the "put up more pictures" comment I'll readily do that just as soon as somebody tells me what counts as more pictures.
This sounds like a really stupid thing to ask because you know that I am not going to submit the exact same file seven times but right now to me every picture I can imagine is exactly the same picture. I really don't know what makes those different.

Ok fine, I can't pick out of infinity and it's clear that people here can't either so I'll make a mechanical list and somebody please tell me which things on it make a picture different enough.

Distance from the camera.
Light level.
Direction I'm facing.
A scarf.
The background.
The back of my head or otherwise not showing my face.
My hands being in the picture.
My feet being in the picture.
Holding a pencil or other object.
Covering up parts of my face.
Holding a cat.
Kissing a dog on the lips.
Facial hair.
Being wet from a shower.
Brushing my teeth or other actions that are remotely capturable with me being the photographer.
The relative absence of tone on my abdomen or the hair on my appendages.


Are there terribly obvious things I'm not listing?
Ok, I put some freebies in there so I understand a little but the majority of it is genuine. "More pictures" is really useless to me because I would have had at least three up if I could determine this on my own.

I'm glad are giving me advice but the total lack of anyone ever talking to me when I ask "what do you mean by that?" ruins it all for me. I've already said it but it needs repeating: I don't have the common sense to make this work. That is what I am so frantically asking people for, not for them to do everything for me.

The something you're asking about was "more prolonged cooperation." You know, like what I wrote right after the sentence you asked that about. Social connections would be another way of saying it.

I really really dislike your definition of value here.
"When there is an unequal exchange the consequences will always show up sooner or later." By what criteria is it unequal? Value is subjective so that would barely ever be the same on both sides. Physical material is obviously not going to be equal because we're basing these trades on our subjective perception of value. Even the work in producing things is unequal in too many ways to even go into.

Without there being a time when it is equal there's not really any connection in what you said. "When the moon goes around the Earth Jupiter is BIG."

Heh, I just realized I'm letting something else make me act harsher about this.
Still, what are you ever saying?

That is the only way I will describe me if people don't set down some guidelines.

Here's what almost all of what I'm reading sounds like to me:
Write a good profile.
How?
Write a good profile.

I'm going into all of this detail about what I'm asking for because every time I ask "How?" people keep not telling me how so I think you might understand if I talk slowly, clearly, and without anything left out.


So it's too much text. Is what's actually in my profile now enough? Should I swap things out?
I've already had the commentary that my writing went negative in some of what's there so there must be something I could do better.

-IS- my profile dry flat and lacking personality?


I'll relax when I think I have accomplished something. I'm not actually as stressed as I'm making myself sound but this is still frustrating.

No, that's not it at all.

Well let's look at farming. Historically a single family has been capable of running some portion of land all on their own but it's a lot of work. For the most part they produced enough food for themselves with maybe some excess that they could sell but not very much.

Fast forward to when people started buying refrigerators and washing machines and you should be able to understand why the women started having enough time to make clothing to sell. Because of an exchange they were able to spend less than -all day long- working on homemaking and the value of that is higher production with which they could make more exchanges.

By making more frequent exchanges it is not just a flat exchange of things with the only differences in perceived value. A tool I have a thousand of it obviously not as valuable to me as it is to someone without any but that's because it improves their condition in a way that it does not improve mine.

Services are also a great kind of exchange in that not only do people not have to accumulate tools they use infrequently but that experts in the use of the tools do the work even faster which gives everyone more time to do things.

Our exchanges have nothing to do with equal material value and are everything about personal value. Five pounds of wheat may very well be worth having someone's fingernails groomed but the objective value there is very different. One day worth of custodial work worth drinks, snacks, and a movie? Well, that deal is probably a little unbalanced but people seem pretty aware that the cost of the ticket is lower than it would be because the food is more expensive and if they don't have enough excess production they just forgo those comforts while they watch the main event.

But if we scale up and look at exchanges between rival groups there's something that both parties gain that neither would have been able to give away. Exchanges between these groups can lead to more prolonged cooperation.

It's not just A working with B get more done than A working alone. It's that they get more than A working alone plus B working alone, and it's not just subjective.

I'm well aware of the idea of warping space so you have a shorter distance to travel. That's actually been part of the near light speed type travel because of how relativity works- in order to go any faster you also expend energy to stretch and compress the space around you so that light seems to go the same speed.

Way back with Star Trek they proposed warping space just in the direction you're pointing and then not even accelerating up to anywhere near light speed (because if you speed up you've also got to speed down and this would make it very hard to dodge anything in your path and generally waste a lot of energy,) but warping space still takes the same level of energy expenditure.

So what I am saying is that all of the commodities that reproduce but are limited on Earth could very easily be grown on numerous other worlds and then they could cart back freight liners worth of cocaine and land it right in within the borders of the country they intended to sell it in instead of having to smuggle small portions through customs.

-

The National Debt means China paid for our war. We could just give them the finger and wipe the debt clean but we know that then they might have to declare war on us because that's such a huge amount of money we basically stole right from them but even if not we know that they certainly wouldn't lend us money again and nobody else probably would either when it was known that we don't pay our loans off.
What we do is we sell a bond for, say, $10,000 and at the end of X years the bond is exchanged for a little more than 10,000. Our country has the option of paying it off early if we actually get the money to do so and then much like loans we pay less because we've used their money for a shorter period of time and they get a similar payout per year but their money is in their hands sooner and we had to pay them less for having used it.

Some of the time our country makes enough money that we don't just have no national debt but we've actually got excess. That excess isn't ever big enough to run a war with because we'd have to sit on a mountain of cash "just in case" instead of using it for nice things like city improvements and support systems for people who have fallen on hard times.

While the Chinese investors could be aliens they are still only working in that system and they don't own us beyond that we want to pay them back to maintain our reputation so that we can get a lot of money again when we're spending a little more than we make.


Well yes, that's not news. The total value of all of the stuff we have and make divided by the total number of dollars is how much a dollar is worth. Everyone knows that paper is just paper now because teachers are trying to explain that in ancient times money was actually precious metal that people were trading with each other but money is best used not by sitting on it but by circulating it to get people to ultimately make more valuable things out of the less valuable materials. So we stopped sitting on our money and we stopped sitting on our precious metals so that they could both do more.

The real currency isn't drugs, guns, and cubicle slaves but rather everything we exchange currency for be it the contents of Walmart, untrained labor, or a spin on an MRI machine. It's Yachts and unicycles and modern or ancient pieces of art.

But things like the oil we use could also be utterly dominated by producing it on other worlds. You can use vegetable oil to run a car as well as gasoline but the problem has been making so much of it when we need as much farm land as we have to produce food. With genetic engineering and a few planets with decent farmland and then the only trouble would be when the intergalactic oil tankers wrecked into the shallows around pluto and covered all the space penguins in toxic corn-oil (anyone can tell from that that I don't actually think they would have any problems, right?)

Well in Scientology we are aliens. Well, not the true "us" but most of who we are, basically all the bad parts, is alien and the point is to become free from those influences.

Now, most Scientologists don't believe that because most Scientologists are not in OT ranks but that is what the tapes and sessions eventually built up to if they keep advancing.
Having sex with young children all over the world turning you into an immortal is the thing that they made up to make fun of Scientology- the episode before that was just making fun of people who follow the words of children who are supposed to be their earlier leaders reincarnate and the kinds of jerks that use those systems for monetary gain, or in other words they were saying that not everyone running the Church of Scientology is free of corruption, just like in every Church of Anything.

So what rank are you?