Stripper Friendship Puzzle Solved

davids: Is it ethical for you to crawl around under the tables of the strip club orally gratifing the patrons so they don't spend their money on lap dances? I know that you are on a personal mission but no one on this list wants to get sucked off by you.

Man, I love this quote:

Yoda: "ethics simply don't apply in strip clubs"

Then he gets on my case, about how bad it is to mislead the poor strippers. (Ironic too since he is the one using the spend money/hide your intentions to sneak in under the radar strategy.)

They are in your pants RL.

Where are the STRIPPERS during this discussion?

Davids: Everything we question you on seems to be "only a joke" all of a sudden. I guess we just don't get your sense of humor. Such as it is.

You fellers sure have big vocabalarys...I'm feelin' a bit intimedated. Guess its a good thang I got a big dick an a pockit ful of munny...

Do you guys talk to strippers like this?

Oh, and if I'm wrong about anything I was only joking and you guys are idiots for not getting my subtle brand of humor.

shakey's pizza?

Geessh... The profundity implied in the topic was obviously a joke, as the first sentence should have made clear. As I've said before I think that if some of you older guys here developed a better sense of humor you might not have to pay for female affection anymore. Might be able to get it for free! Imagine that!

Oh, and as an addenda, the title of this thread "Stripper Friendship Puzzle Solved" very clearly implies definitive knowledge of a previously unsolved mystery. To be very clear, we all know it can mean many things, you stated catagorically that it was always a malicious lie. This thread implied some sort of new and definitive revalation. Forgive me if I had this shit figured out 10 years ago (after I had been going to strip clubs for about a month).

DavidS, this is my last post adressing your arguments. I agree with Shadowcat.

I know what a strawman is, apparently you do not. When you characterize someone's writing as shallow that strongly implies a greater depth of knowledge on your part. When you claim that anyone concluding two nobel prize winners are brilliant is somehow wrong, that leads to the conclusion that they are not brilliant, and you are qualified to make such a judgement. Despite MANY very detailed posts about how "friend" can have many different levels of meaning you still see only two. Your initial one that it is an outright lie, and your new one that it is a complete joke (i.e. an outright lie). Speaking of straw men you claim to have definitive knowledge of what many of us know, or believe, and then attest that any denial of your premise is apriori false. This, in science is what we call a non-falsifiable hypothesis. It is the very definition of bad logic. I'm not even going to get into preconceived conclusions being borne out (e.g. strippers are all liers and anyone believing differently is a fool and deluded). Let's just say I have tired of your intellectual shit. It stinks like anyone elses. You can google and write a coherant sentance. Sorry not enough any more. I reserve the right to vent, as you have done quite often. Now that I have done so, I am done with you. I remember when I was 20 and had it all figured out but fortunately there was no internet and I could only embarass myself in front of my drunk college buddies. Get in touch with me in 20, ok maybe 30 years, and maybe we can have an interesting conversation.

You're an interesting poster, AN, in a sort of diabolical sense. You like to subtlely twist another person's posts or "fill in the gaps" to make it look like they said something they didn't. (This is called a strawman for those who don't already know.)

I'll tell you what: I'll spell this one out for you but in the future I may well ignore if you are going to use sleazy debating tactics:

a) It has always been position that strippers do not really mean it when they say they are your friends and that it is a lie. What I was not aware of was the inside the joke and basis of rationalization it provides. Many of you didn't know it either (though it will be easy for you to lie and claim after the fact that you did). In fact, when the subject came up, I think it was you or chitownlawyer or whoever who said it meant they appreciate you as a nice customer, enjoy spending their time with you as opposed to someone else, blah, blah... What I am advancing here is that strippers do not even mean that much. They just mean you are a "regular customer". You could be nice or not. They will refer to you in the dressing room as "their friend" anyway as long as you are their regular customer. You could even be old, fat, and a grade A asshole, you will be told you are their friend anyway if you are their regular.

b) I never advanced my observation as earth shattering. In fact I implied in the very first sentence that I was bit embarrased that it took me so long to see. What it does provide, however, is an quick and easy way to interpret what strippers say: just substitute "friend" for "regular customer" and reparse the sentence.

c) I never claimed to be smarter than Hayek: In fact I credited him with a brilliant observation in the computational theory. I just said his thesis in Fatal_Conceit did not rise to the level of brilliance. Maybe we could survey 20 economics professors and see if they agree?

d) Just because I disagree with the classical economists and think of them as shallow does not mean that I think I am smarter than them. What has happened with them is that they create models based on overly simplistic axioms and hence to start from shakey foundations to reach the often errorneous conclusions they did.

It's exactly like some mathematician constructing an elaborate mathematical construct that does not apply to our universe because the axioms are wrong. Sure the mathematician is still smart if he can build an elaborate and consisten model from his axioms. However, at the same time, he can be faulted, even called shallow, for starting with the shakey foundations he did.

Ok, got that?

Now on a bit of a tangent:

The real problem with the classical economists is that they were not objective (same with the Marxists): They knew the conclusions they wanted to reach and constructed the model to reach the desired conclusion: ie. free market capital is optimal.

If there is some corollary that intuitively that does not make sense, say from an ethical prespective, then rather than admitting this is a problem with the theory they will just say "well that just proves that what you thought was unethical really is ethical after all".

Anyway, you are behaving badly now, obviously upset about something and it's hurting the quality of your posts. (You started off good but have taken a nose dive lately.) Good luck getting back on track, man.

If someone I knew gave me money every time I saw them, I would call them my friend too. And if it was a lot of money, I might even tell them I love them.

If that's what you think of the stripper-customer relationship and if you don't like it, then stop going to the clubs. Don't keep looking for love in all the wrong places, as the old song goes.

Davids: Although you may take it as a put-down, it really isn't...with your zero-sum, "winner takes all" approach toward dancers, I sincerely wondered after reading one of your posts if your were an Ayn Rand-style objectivist.

Some jokes are just to subtle for certain minds I guess. But then again, looks like many posters here think Friedman and Hayek were "brilliant", so maybe it's not that surprising.

Anyone into Ayn Rand while we are at it?

Davids, if it is so obvious that it is a joke, why isn't anyone laughing? Maybe it is not funny. It is only funny for you.

For the millionth freakin' time when I say stuff like "exactly 98.3% of strippers do blah" it's obviously a joke. Sheeshh... Bunch of no sense of humor types here. No wonder you guys have to pay women to pay attention to you.

Fellows,

It's funny to me that you guys continue to acknowledge David S. It's even funnier to me that you bother arguing, debating or playing verbal pattycake with him. Some men you just can't reach.

He has the same worth as any delusional preacher on a street corner who thinks they're saving the world. You guessed it...he's a joke. Moreover, he's a geek who enjoys getting under people's skin for kicks.....what a sad, sad individual.

Certainly not worth anyone's time or thoughts. I suggest you join FONDL, myself and a few others and realize that he doesn't exist anymore.

davids if you understand what academics is all about you would never go around forcefeeding and insisting on your opinions. Someone as well read as you are must know that even research based observations are just a best guess and a lead-in to further research on the topic. An academic will never write on a strip club discussion board that he's confident if we asked for opinions of everyone here they would agree with him. An academic would never pull statistics out of his ass to the tenth decimal place. An academic is careful about what he writes and understands when something is just an opinion. And we are here to post opinions to relax and share and have fun, so that's ok. But you want to contribute academically to this then get yourself some frequent flyer membership and start flying all over the world collecting data from random strip clubs about how often strippers scam people and tell us what you find (along with all the other considerations of research, but I'm sure you know all about them). In the meantime save us your arguments about your "understandings" because they are just your "opinion," and not the freaking "truth"! Understand that! Post it on your wall!

I'd also note that anyone who describes Hayek's writing as "shallow" has either never read him, or is going for the most pretentious pseudo-intilectual in history award. (Yes Newton was interesting, but I find his theory of gravity to be not nearly subtle enough. He doesn't even begin do discuss barometric pressure and wind shear.) The same goes for those that don't understand that classical economics are the foundation of modern economic theory.

Does Davids remind anyone else of a frequent poster on another board that some of us frequent...a certain "Top Gun?"

I'm just asking.

Yoda: Yeah you're right lying, cheating, and scamming and anything else strippers do is acceptable because you say so, and yer an ass-kisser so it must be so.

AN: Hayek did write some interesting stuff. All too shallow in the end. If you take Yoda's word out of context "Books are nice. Reality is what it is." Applies pretty well to classical economics.

FONDL: I was an economics major in college, and was accepted to the doctoral program at a major university. However, I decided that the positives of academic life (access to a basically unlimited, rolling supply of undergraduate women) did not outweigh the financial and career uncertainties that come with being junior university faculty. Thus, the law.

AN has done an excellent job of refining and extending my analysis. Certain goods are fungible, and, assuming that they meet a basis level of quality (usually as a binary function...they are of marketable quality, or are not), the consumer should look strictly at price. Examples of this would be grain, gasoline (assuming that you don't drive something really exotic), or milk. However, with other economic goods, there is stress on some other aspects of the transaction, to the point that price is not the sole determining factor. These goods tend to predominate in the area of personal services. I think that, if you want a long term, quality relationship, you need to focus on fairness and a high comfort level on both sides, rather than simply focusing on price.

Davids: We all get it. We understand that textbook ethics simply don't apply in strip clubs. For that matter, they often don't apply to male/female relationships outside of the club. Books are nice. Reality is what it is.

DavidS, Let's not get into religious discussions here, but if you want to read some interesting economics I'd recomend some of F.A. Hayek's works on socialism. He basically refutes most of the Keynesian nonsense that our present generation of economists was fed in school. Economics is a lot of nonsense because economists started to try to view economies as something one could design rather than study. Capitalism was not invented, it was discovered and formalized. It's the difference between studying the laws of physics and believing that you've invented them.

Given that far too long discourse I want to add to ChiTown's comments on using a buisness model. There are two ways to view this, as a small buisness model or a Walmart model. It seems to me that most of us older guys are looking at this as a long term buisness relationship where you find a trusted vendor who gives you a quality product at reasonable prices and build a trust based on mutual satisfaction. You want to be Walmart. You want everyone competing for your buisness and hence willing to undercut each other on price, sometimes even selling at a loss just to get into the market. The only reason Walmart can do this is that they spend so much money, they are such a huge market, that the vendor makes up the lower profit margin on volume and the expansion of their buisness potential. I dunno if you spend enough to be Walmart, but I'm happy finding a dancer I trust and like and knowing what I'll get.

chitownlawyer: Everyone I've known who has studied economics, including PhD students and professors has confided to me that it's all a bunch of non-sense.

I have about 20 books backed up on my reading list right now. Naive, er, classical economics will never been on that list.

Maybe you and the others here oughta read some books on ethics, since you obviously don't get it.

Yoda: I should hope that most posters have not been strip club regulars for years on end. That would be pretty pathetic won't it?

Also you're not trying to tell me what to do are you? I won't like that.

"Every voluntary transaction enriches all parties to it." I like that, I never heard that before. Milton Friedman? And what's a lawyer doing reading economics classics? Your interests must be quite different from most of the lawyers who I've known, and I've known a bunch of them - I once worked for a big legal department of a large corporation as a government rep/part-time lobbyist (which is a big mistake organizationally, but that's another issue.)

Which reminds me of a funny true story, which I hope you won't find offensive because it isn't intended to be. A few years ago I briefly got to know an attractive young lady who confided to me that she was doing some hooking on the side, in addition to her full time job, in order to provide a better life for herself and her son. She worked a 4-day week and booked a motel room on Fridays. We were having lunch together and she mentioned to me, obviously with some puzzlement, that most of her clients were lawyers. With difficulty I refrained from making the obvious comment, but I found it to be highly amusing.

Davids: You're babling on about things that most of us figured out years ago. Why don't you just find another hobby....

David, I don't understand your hostility toward dancers. Although you are obviously more articulate than RomanticLover, and able to present your thoughts in a more nuanced way, your emphasis on game playing and "psyching out" dancers indicates that you think the relationship between customer and dancer is an adversarial one. I see it as commercial, with the possibility of some personal aspects...within the commercial relationship. I have clients that I take to ball games, to play golf, out to lunch occasionally, send the obligatory "business" Christmas gift to every year. I think both parties understand that these things are part of a commercial relationship. I don't get offended if the phrase "friend" is a term of art in the club, because I understand that my interaction with the dancer is, from her point of view, to maximize the flow of money from me to her. My goal is to maximize whatever sensuous pleasure I get from her dance. I suppose a dancer could be offended that I will not tip her as much, if at all, if she keeps her top on while dancing, but that reflects the "terms of trade" from the point of view of what I am trying to get out of the situation.

If you want to further refine your "solution" to the stripper friendship puzzle, read "The Wealth of Nations" by Adam Smith, "Free to Choose" by Milton Friedman, or any economics text written from a free market perspective.

It's all about maximizing utility, my friend...on BOTH sides of the transaction. And remember, as I love to say, "Every voluntary transaction enriches all parties to it."

DavidS, Sorry, but you are a joke. After weeks of arguing you FINALLY come to the realization that when a stripper calls you a friend it may not mean quite the same thing as it does OTC, which many of us have been trying to tell you, and then you expect me to take you seriously when you claim to be smarter than two nobel prize winners, because after all their observations were so obvious. Yeah, so is gravity, now. Here are a few other revalations you can lay on us in the next few weeks. Strippers are interested in making money. Customers lust after strippers. Some customers get carried away. War is bad. Puppies are nice. Any other earthshaking insights you wish to share?

AN: Hayek actually did do one brilliant piece of work, but it had to do with the theory of computation, not economics.

In Fatal_Conceit he introduced an interesting idea, but it was too obvious to deserve the label "brilliant".

DavidS, So it is your contention that Friedman and Hayek aren't brilliant? Well, you are the board's resident know-it-all.