Chevalier

Not to argue with personal taste, but I think most of these problems are just becoming accustomed to a different UI. Vivaldi is easily the most customizable browser on the market, and it's not even close. I don't work for Vivaldi and I'm not getting paid by them, just a fervent acolyte.

1) I'm not sure I understand. You don't like how small the icons are, so you made them larger, but then you don't like they're larger? Like you, I also like nice big hitboxes, and I haven't noticed any issues. If you're just trying to scale the webpage zoom, look at the bottom right corner of the status bar -- there's a zoom bar you can drag.

2) Try the Human theme, which changes colors to complement whatever webpage you're looking at. I absolutely love it. I use vertical tabs, which aren't cluttered; maybe the horizontal tabs are? If you don't like square tabs, you can round the corners to squircles in the settings.

3) The command panel works flawlessly for me to search current open tabs, bookmarks, etc. Maybe it's just a different implementation than Firefox?

4) The trash icon at the bottom of the vertical tabs isn't to close all tabs -- if you want to do that, just right-click any tab and select "close all tabs below." The trash icon is a SUPER useful recovery tool that stores your browsing history, essentially. If you accidentally close a tab or a window, you can just restore it by clicking the trash icon and selecting the closed tab/window in reverse chronological order.

Vivaldi today is what Firefox was twenty years ago -- just outstripping all competition and being an absolute joy for the end user. You can customize Vivaldi to be whatever you want it to be, and I think you'd really enjoy it as your default browser.

First, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart. There's a VERY strong censorious zeitgeist sweeping the country, and we liberals seem to have no defense against attacks from our left. The unpersoning and deplatforming mob hysterics, often in the name of race essentialism or systemic oppression, are terrifying for any student of the Chinese Cultural Revolution or the rise of Soviet thought policing.

If liberalism means anything, it's the ability of the individual to speak truth even when the mob or the government demands that they remain silent. Substack is one of the only platforms available that hasn't bent the knee to the hysterical mob, and I can't tell you how grateful I am for your spine.

Regarding the app, it's very welcome. I've been using the Safari bookmark in the meantime, and the app is FAR better -- the ability to interact more smoothly, save position, etc. A couple issues:

1) Unarchiving? I experimented with archiving an article. While I'm able to find it in the archived section, I don't see any option to unarchive it.

2) Themes? My theme is set to dark, which is great, but I also enjoy sepia in daylight. I don't see any option to change the color scheme.

3) Podcasts? Podcasts in Substack sound like a great idea, but I've had nothing but problems trying to add certain podcasts (e.g. Late Republic Nonsense) to my PocketCasts app. The only way seems to be having Substack email me a personalized podcast subscription URL rather than an open feed I can just search for in PocketCasts. Partnering with Callin might be an interesting idea, since they seem to have adopted the "Substack but for podcasts" model -- often even recruiting Substack talent.

4) Discovery? I'm really glad to see a discovery tab, and I'd love to see suggestions ("if you like Glenn Greenwald, you might also like...").

5) Pricing? Substack has a great model of direct payments, with writers I want to read, but it gets steep very quickly. Rather than dropping $100/year each for five different writers I want to follow, could you explore bundling? Superstars like Glenn Greenwald or Matt Taibbi will probably want to remain independent, but there are lots of smaller names who might benefit from exposure through bundling several smaller newsletters under a single price; or simply from more flexible pricing entirely. I don't think I've seen a single newsletter that offers an annual subscription for under $50-60.

I have a subscription to Apple News almost exclusively for the WSJ, but they also have a lot of other inferior magazines -- The Atlantic, New Yorker, etc. As dramatically as they've fallen in quality, it's still a compelling bundle for $10/month, with my payments allocated across publications based on the articles I read. Have you considered a similar bundle, or allowing writers to form their own bundles?

6) Saving articles? I can save articles to a bookmark and store them in a bookmark folder, which works fine, but it would be convenient to save my favorite articles in Substack that allows me to revisit them.

7) Improving comments? The comments section isn't bad, but they could also become crucial draws. Reddit and HN are draws generally for the quality of their comment sections. Substack currently has an unusually excellent audience -- generally intelligent people interested in deep dives into controversial subjects in order to find the truth. There must be some way to liberalize and interweave comment sections in order to draw on audience expertise and perspective.

That sounds brilliant, but I have no idea how to do any of it. (I have a legal background, not a technical one.) Are there any plug-and-play tools that will do it for me?

If anything, Vivaldi seems faster for me than Chrome was. I haven't seen any of the performance slowdowns that other people on this thread have mentioned. Possibly because I haven't enabled the Mail/Calendar/Feeds full-fat option?

Vivaldi is easily the best browser I've ever used, bar none. But for lacking two-factor authentication on the account itself, I have no complaints - the vertical tabs, web panels, bookmark tree, and the Human theme are unrivaled by any other browser.

I didn't discover Vivaldi until recently, but I'm a fanatical convert now. Strongly recommended.

...no, they don't. Or at least not in the way that this article suggests.

First, we should divide "dating" into two markets -- one for sex and one for long-term relationships.

In my experience, existing dating apps overwhelmingly cater to the sex market. Even the ones supposedly designed to set up professionals are used by both genders to find quality people for quick flings. There IS massive "inequality" in the sex market -- women overwhelmingly judge men by a Pareto distribution, as evidenced by multiple studies (that I can cite upon request) -- but the fact that the average woman is uninterested in the average man doesn't stir within me a call for equitable distribution of sex partners.

Then there's the long-term relationship market, which I admittedly don't know has been successfully addressed by any app. OKCupid's premise was that it would set up compatible people for long-term relationships, but I think OKC is out of vogue now. This is the void that apps like The League are trying to fill, I guess, though I'm baffled as to their appeal.

For women (or either gender that wants to secure long-term commitment from a high-status, high-income mate), The League sort of makes sense. When you're done with your Tinder carousel and want to move on to a relationship, here's a pool of wealthy, connected men whose bank accounts suit your lifestyle aspirations. That's not a pitch that will inspire lust, but at least it's more palatable than admitting to being a sugar baby.

For men, though... why would you want The League? Even if you're an unattractive guy, making what amounts to a Tinder profile for your bank account is just a terrible idea. If you're attractive enough, you can just have sex via Tinder. If you want to pay for sex, there are existing options. If you want someone to love... apps that brag "half of its active members earn more than $500,000" and its kin are frankly not going to provide that.

- - - - -

This article conflates two important ideas without really addressing either. There IS a very real, accelerating trend of what's called "assortive mating," where highly intelligent people move out of Nowhere, Kentucky to major cities where they meet spouses in line with their intelligence and success. These successful couples have more successful children, who then mate with other successful children, and so on. The less successful people are left behind, mate with other less successful people, and have less successful children who mate with other left behind children. This brain drain is both international and intranational.

Then you have the question of mating strategies, particularly the (traditionally female) interest in securing long-term commitment. The recent book "Date-onomics" did a decent job describing the massive demographic challenge facing educated women in this market -- educated women overwhelmingly desire more successful men, but men generally don't care about their mates' education or status. In fact, as men prefer to date younger women, aging women face the twin challenges of narrowing interest and increasing competition (due to population growth or cultural differentials like age gaps). The League and its kind deserve some respect for nakedly addressing these mating strategies -- men offer up their status and wealth, and women presumably only need to be young and attractive.

Dating apps probably DO accelerate assortive mating. Women are particularly sensitive toward status in men, especially educational attainment. (At least in the long-term relationship market, not necessarily in the sex market.) So ideas like The League and its competitors aren't necessarily a bad idea -- if you can market it as "OKCupid for successful people" rather than "Saudi prince seeking Instagram model." As far as I can tell though, anyone mature enough to want a long-term relationship is not in the douchey Vegas-ish market that The League is targeting. Anyone tasteless enough to want The League is probably more interested in its clique than its offerings. And that leaves wide open the potential market of "successful professionals who desire other successful professionals for long-term commitment without having to sort through the proletariat."

Orrr among people who wear vision correction, the US population has a higher median income that can afford contact lenses.

Without condemning anyone, the US has a very stratified class system. Those lower on the socio-economic ladder may not invest in vision care, which is a more complicated and expensive proposition in the US than it is in Europe. Among those that do, the US population probably has more disposable income than their European counterparts.

I love Europe, but saying that Americans hate nerds and Europeans are intellectual is just lazy. Many European policies, especially in terms of monetary policy and immigration policy, are not what I would call thoughtful or logical.

Anne Frank was a refugee, ergo all refugees are Anne Frank. Cultural values and religious duties do not in any way influence the risk undertaken by a host country. ISIS in no way reflects a quite textual interpretation of Islam, and any assertion of European cultural superiority to virtually any part of MENA is to assert racial supremacy of Europeans.

I support a strong immigration program, including refugees. However, immigration should be limited to compatible cultures and high-reward immigrants. Can we institute an incredibly basic filter to exclude cultures that boast popular support of the murder of homosexuals? (Or apostates, or heretics, or blasphemers, or...)

Oh for christ's sake. I am a major proponent of public transit and walkable cities. Anyone who shares my support should be cheering wildly at Uber's expansion. Uber is the greatest, and perhaps the only, threat that we've ever had to American car ownership.

With Uber, those occasional necessary car trips can be contracted out cheaply and easily. When you aren't FORCED to own a car to survive, many people simply won't buy one. The fewer people that own cars, the more heavily transit and bicycles will be used for daily trips. Ride-sharing is perhaps the most important blow ever struck against American car dependency.

I'm tempted to sneer at iPods too, but it's actually a pretty good choice for the gym. If you're worried about your $800 iPhone getting crushed, an iPod touch will record your lifts just as well; or an iPod Shuffle will clip on to your shirt for a long run through a bad neighborhood.

Also for kids where parents don't want to buy expensive contracts. Or even frugal adults who can just make all their calls through Hangouts/Skype and don't need a cell plan.

...so we've gone from debating which word we should use to describe conservative reactionaries to the denial that they even exist.

I'm honestly kind of impressed.