Comments by docsavage (page 47)

I used to have a regular in a strip club that was very attractive. I told her one time she looked like a young Elizabeth Taylor and she didn't know who that was because Taylor was an actress before this girl was even born. I asked her one time if she goes to clubs. I had never been to one. She said not usually because she isn't interested in the guys there but sometimes when she is feeling a little down or depressed she would go to one because all the attention would give her an ego boost. I think the clubs would be filled with a lot of girls like that. Since they aren't looking for sex your chances with them are low. You would either have to be in the top twenty percent of guys or be willing to go home with a below average girl to have a good chance. Many guys don't really get this aspect of women. They don't get an ego boost just from a female being friendly. I've heard this referred to as being put in the "friend zone" and this is seen as an undesirable place to be for men. Younger men have to learn ways to avoid giving women what they want without getting anything back in return. You need to learn to eject from a situation quickly if it appears you are being exploited. If a girl is actually interesting maybe she might be worth talking to at a club but just talking to a girl or buying her drinks in hopes of sex is probably a waste of time. It sounds like you have correctly identified the situation in clubs where there are a lot of guys being friendly and a few girls not making an effort to be friendly as a place to stay away from.

A number of strippers in small Indiana towns drive to nearby Indianapolis to work. There is more money to be made there and there is less chance of running into someone they know. Clubs in college towns like Night Moves in Bloomington have the additional problem of male college students coming in and acting rowdy and hitting on the strippers but not spending much money. It's always a struggle for those clubs to get and keep talent and without talent it is hard for them to stay open. If the club was closed for awhile during the epidemic it might not have had the cash reserves to weather the storm.

Mayor Hogsett here in Indianapolis is letting the clubs open but at only fifty percent capacity. Bars and nightclubs will be allowed to have live entertainment which for strip clubs means strippers will be allowed to dance up on stage. Closing times are midnight.

The strangest song I ever watched a girl try to strip to was "Eleanor Rigby" by the Beatles. It didn't work as a strip club song. I was also surprised to hear "Fever" by Peggy Lee one time in a club.

I've only abandoned a dance once after it started. I started to do one with a girl and when I touched her breast she said I had to give her extra money to touch her. This was in a club where something like that is a normal part of the lap dance, she said it in an unfriendly tone of voice and she waited until after the dance started instead of telling me before it started what was allowed on a normal lap dance. I told her I had enough and handed her the money for one dance and left. I've had three girls I walked off on before the dance started. One told me her lap dances were $50 in a club where the norm was $25, one yelled at me I wasn't sitting in the right place on the couch, and one wanted to start in the middle of a dance and angrily refused when I asked to wait until the start of the next dance. I would say ninety nine percent of the time I don't have problems. I've noticed the one percent of strippers I have problems with usually have short stripper careers because I don't see them stay at the club very long. I think most guys expect to be treated with some level of politeness and not be treated as an inferior by a girl they are spending money on. Girls who aren't willing to do that can't usually make it in a strip club because they are competing with other girls who are willing to be at least a little bit polite and friendly.

All the clubs in Indianapolis were open a couple of weeks and then closed again when there was a spike in cases. While they were open, with the exception of reopening weekend, there were fewer customers and fewer dancers.

I live in Indianapolis. I miss both the clubs and the girls. There are several reasons why this is happening. Part of this may be a form of neo-puritanism. Even in normal times a lot of people don't like strip clubs and bars. If you can claim they are a source of disease spread, you can use that as an excuse to shut them down. If you can keep them shut down long enough, you can drive them out of business permanently. The objection to strip clubs used to come mostly from the religious fundamentalist right but now a lot of the feminist left don't like them either. That means you can no longer depend on liberal Democrat mayors like Hogsett here in Indianapolis to allow them. Part of this is a dislike of small business owners by Democrat mayors. Small business owners aren't dependable Democrat voters so the fewer of them around the better. Welfare recipients and government workers are dependable Democrat voters so if you shut down private businesses and throw their workers out of jobs and then give them welfare or government jobs you create more votes for the Democrat party. Part of this is a desire by the media to make money. People pay more attention to the media during a crisis so the media is always trying to drum one up. Part of this is just panic. People don't understand the threat here. Polls show the public believe that 9 million have died from this when it is less than two hundred thousand. Polling also shows they think half of deaths are under the age of sixty when it is really 10%. The average life expectancy in the U.S. is 78 and the average age of death for a Covid patient is 78 so most people who die from this would have died shortly from something else. The hard hit states of New York and New Jersey and the countries of Sweden and the U.K. had higher than average deaths in April this year but lower than average deaths in July. People died from Covid in April who would have otherwise died a few months later. An average 78 old can expect to live 10 more years but the typical 78 year old who dies from Covid isn't an average 78 year old. Forty percent of deaths in this group are in long term health care facilities where the average life expectancy is six months. If people understand the actual risk here it would decrease the panic and hysteria but you aren't going to learn any of this from the mainstream media or liberal Democrat politicians.

Unemployment dropped according to the most recent report but a quarter of the new jobs were government jobs and many of those are census jobs that are temporary and won't be around long. Most of the rest of the new jobs were low wage service sector jobs. There were very few decent paying manufacturing or office jobs added. I've had strippers tell me a good portion of their income comes from guys with a yearly income of forty or fifty thousand dollars who come in and buy a few lap dances. They can't survive on just rich guys because there aren't enough of them so there needs to be plenty of male middle income workers for strip clubs to survive.

RandomMember, when you make comparisons in deaths between Sweden and Denmark you are making an apples and oranges comparison because they don't have the same demographics. Denmark has much stricter immigration laws than Sweden and fewer third world immigrants. A large number of deaths in Sweden were in this immigrant group. Many immigrants in Sweden were unemployed so the government set up a program to find jobs for them and gave many of them jobs in nursing homes. Their poor Swedish language skills and lower IQ made it difficult for them to follow directions on how to control the disease and this caused higher death rates in nursing homes. Swedish police have little control in immigrant areas of major cities. The Swedish authorities were aware of this and knew it would be difficult to enforce lockdowns in these areas and that was a factor in deciding to not lockdown. So a lesson to be learned from this is to have less third world immigrants but American liberals who point to Denmark as an example to follow ignore this. They think third world immigration is good because immigrants overwhelmingly vote to put more liberals in office. There are other factors involved too I've read about. Unlike Denmark, the northern part of Sweden is very cold so the population is concentrated in the south leading to greater population density. Higher population density equals more deaths. Stockholm has higher mass transit usage than any other Scandinavian city and that leads to more deaths. There was an unusually low number of flu deaths in Sweden in 2019 so many people who would have died from the flu in 2019 died from coronavirus in 2020 instead. Sweden followed the Andrew Cuomo policy of moving sick people from hospitals to nursing homes with similar results. Sweden uses a death classification method which puts more deaths in the COVID- 19 category. Finnish people like to retire in Sweden so Sweden has more elderly people. I don't know if all of these factors are true but they sound plausible. The mainstream media is not going to report any of this because they want to make the Swedish model look bad so if you Google on this you are going to find mainly information coming from one side. There is a problem with proponents of more government intervention in general. They tend to look at short term benefits of a government intervention while ignoring long term costs. When considering the effects of an intervention you need to look at both the seen and unseen. The seen is in the present and the unseen is often in the future. This focus on the present has led lockdown proponents into advocating policies which will have disastrous . long term results. The coming economic contraction will lead to future deaths of despair like suicides and deaths from drug and alcohol abuse. Cancer deaths are already increasing in the U.S. because diagnosis and treatment were put off due to the exclusive focus on this disease. If you add up all these future deaths caused by the lockdown it may very well exceed deaths from Covid-19.

RandomMember, the epidemic isn't over in Denmark yet. They had a spike in cases at the beginning of August and the Danish government then required everyone to start wearing face masks on August 15th when using public transportation in an effort to combat the increase in cases. Estimates are that the Danish government deficit will be 8% of GPD this year compared to 4.5% for Sweden. The Danish government was able to decrease their economic contraction by borrowing and spending money to stimulate the economy. This money will have to be paid back in the future using increased taxes which will cause lower economic growth then. So the Danish policy decreased cases and economic decline in the short term while pushing it off into the future. Here in the U.S. the economic damage from the lockdowns will last years into the future. For example, it is estimated that half of all restaurants may eventually go out of business. The three trillion extra dollars the U.S. government had to borrow to deal with the economic damage from the lockdowns will have to be paid back. Americans will have a lower standard of living in the future because of this. Someday they will look back on the lockdowns and will realize what a mistake they were.

The original rationale for the lockdown was to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed. When it became obvious that wasn't going to happen in most places, the reason for the lockdown was switched to suppressing the disease. Sweden, one of the few countries not to go into lockdown, had a large number of deaths at the beginning of the epidemic but once the individuals most likely to succumb from the disease had caught it and died then deaths rapidly dropped. The efforts to suppress the disease in the U.S. spread the deaths out over a longer period of time but in the end we had the same number of deaths. Overall, not only did the U.S. not have fewer deaths but the U.S. might have been left worse off in other areas since shutting down strip clubs and all the other businesses caused a lot of economic damage. Sweden had only a 6% economic contraction in the second quarter of this year compared to a 10% contraction here in the United States. A lot of the economic contraction in Sweden happened in the import-export sector which was disrupted by the lockdowns in neighboring countries.

Paul is somewhat of a libertarian and has pushed for police reform in the past. The liberal mob who attacked him are such dummies they can't distinguish between someone who is at least somewhat sympathetic to their concerns and someone who is actively hostile to them. Politics is about finding common ground, coalition building, and not alienating potential allies. BLM is slowly losing public support from a few months ago due to their excesses, i.e. rioting, looting and physical intimidation.

If you live in or are visiting Indianapolis the Hip Hugger is currently the closest open strip club. The Indy clubs reopened but were closed again when the city had a mild summer spike in COVID-19 cases. It's unknown when they might open again.

I'll only comment about politics here if it is some way related to strip clubs. For example, I might talk about the government response to the Chinese bat soup flu epidemic because part of that response involves deciding whether or not strip clubs should be open and what is allowed in them if they are open. In normal times I might bring up the subject of government paternalism as it relates to strip clubs. Local governments will sometimes try to heavily regulate or even shut down clubs. They do this in the name of protecting the strippers from sexual exploitation (though possible financial exploitation of male customers is never brought up). They do it for public health reasons to protect strippers and customers from sexually transmitted diseases. They do it for reasons saying it is immoral in some ethical or religious sense for the people involved and even that allowing it at all harms community moral standards. It would be worthwhile discussing to what extent the government should be involved in protecting customers and strippers from themselves and to what extent they have a right to make what others consider to be bad decisions. Also, how much allowing strip clubs to exist harms anyone else who never actually steps inside one.

I had one review that passed but was down voted by a single person saying I didn't list cost of basic services. I said the club only had one type of lap dance and listed the price and said there was no entrance fee. The only thing I could think of I didn't include was drink prices. I would never consider drink prices a factor in picking clubs to go to so would never include it in a review unless in a rare case where the prices were set absurdly high. Is this something that is a major factor for most strip club customers?

RandomMember said: "We've had 162K deaths so far and the U Wash simulation (the one Dugan quoted from the WSJ in March) is now predicting 300K deaths by the end of the year." To reach 300K deaths by the end of the year you are going to have to have a thousand deaths a day until then. We've had that number recently because of a surge in the Sunbelt but new cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are now declining. Florida went from 250 deaths on a day a week ago down to 80 yesterday. It's unlikely we are going to reach a New York level of deaths anywhere else in the country since we were lucky enough not to have a national policy with a President Cuomo ordering all the nursing homes in the country to take sick patients. Even if we did reach 300K by the end of the year that doesn't necessarily mean we will have an additional 300K deaths this year. Forty percent of deaths are in nursing homes. The average stay in those homes is sixth months which means many of the deaths from the disease would have happened shortly after from other causes. The hard hit states of New York and New Jersey had a lower number of deaths in June of this year than June of last year. Most likely, people who would have died in June 2020 in those states died in April 2020 from the virus. So the overall additional deaths by the end of the year may not be 300K. You also have to be aware that hospitals get extra money from the federal government for each COVID 19 patient so they have an incentive to reclassify deaths with COVID as deaths by COVID. This inflates the total numbers. As for the saying we have to beat the disease to save the economy, that reminds me of the formerly well known statement from the Vietnam War saying we have to destroy the village in order to save it. It is unfortunate that so few people have any knowledge of history now and don't know anything about that government fiasco or all the other government fiascoes up to the current government fiasco in handling this disease.

I will go less. There is an assumption that the economy will bounce back but I don't think that will happen. We are just beginning to see the economic effects of the lock downs. We will be a poorer country in the future and having the government print up money and pass it out won't offset that. The money printing will create higher prices from inflation. With many people continuing to be unemployed while others are struggling with the higher prices there will be less demand for strip clubs. Strip clubs are a luxury and when times get bad guys will cut spending in that area. Beside having less extra cash, I also like the variety of different clubs and there will be fewer clubs for me to go to so I will also go less for that reason. This is all unfortunate. A recent poll found Americans think nine million people in the U.S have died from Covid when it is more like 1/60th of that so support for the extensive measures to deal with this are based on a wildly unrealistic belief in how serious this really is.

The $600 a week going to 30 million people is costing the federal government $75 billion a month or almost a trillion dollars a year. With tax receipts dropping by a fourth and outlays increasing the government is running unsustainable deficits. We need to have most people working and paying taxes. This program discourages these people from working since this combined with state benefits pays two thirds of them more than they were making before. The program should at least have a reduction in the amount of the benefits. Now you have people making fifty thousand dollars a year sitting at home doing nothing while others making the same amount or less are out working.

There is a sign on the front of the building saying a new owner has applied for a liquor license and there is an upcoming hearing on it. That means it may possibly reopen. It may not reopen as a strip club, though. It could reopen as a regular bar or as a restaurant serving alcohol. The owner died several years ago. His heirs were minors. Apparently someone with little experience or knowledge of or interest in strip clubs stepped in to run it. It was barely hanging on and it was only a matter of time before it went under. The extended lock down probably sped up the process.

It normally takes two weeks to go from hospitalization to death. This was found to be the amount of time when the disease first hit New York. Hospitalizations have been increasing for longer than that in Florida and other sunbelt states without major increases in deaths. New York had 600 plus deaths a day at its peak but Florida isn't close to that. Death counts for this disease are also inflated. Hospitals are given money by the federal government for each coronavirus patient so they classify people who died with coronavirus as deaths by coronavirus. For example, one Florida guy died in a motorcycle accident and was classified as a coronavirus death because he had coronavirus at the time of his death : https://www.fox35orlando.com/news/fox-35-investigates-questions-raised-after-fatal-motorcycle-crash-listed-as-covid-19-death

Total cases in Florida have increased by 83,057, up 87%, the last week. Currently, 78.7% of all hospital beds and 81.4% of ICU beds are occupied. One week ago it was 80.3% of all hospital beds and 83.5% of all ICU beds occupied. So, at the same time there has been a big jump in cases, hospitalizations have stabilized and even dropped slightly. They would drop even more but recently recovered elderly patients are being held in hospitals instead of being put back in nursing homes. Florida has been cautious about putting still possibly sick patients back into nursing homes since the beginning of the epidemic because they might infect other nursing home residents and this has turned out to be a good idea. It has a lower death rate than states like New York that didn't do that.

Teleworking from home turned out to be a plus. I am in a low level supervisor position and when I work from home I don't have to do things like go over and wake up people who are sleeping at their desk. I can do the parts of the job I enjoy like answering questions via skype or email and working at my computer. I have also saved money from not going to clubs and cooking more at home. Negatives mostly involve lack of social interaction. I don't have a wife (divorced) or children at home. I miss talking to people at work. Getting together with friends has ended because they are all old and fearful of going out. I miss the girls in the clubs. Beside doing lap dances with them I often talked to them too. I relied more on my cat for company recently. The hardest of all to take was when he became very sick and I had to have him put to sleep when the vet found he had cancer. I had him for 13 years and he was the only pet I ever had so it was the first time in my life I had to deal with the death of a pet.

There are 54,000 thousand hospital beds in Texas, 14,000 available and 2,000 Covid patients in hospitals. Unless there is a 7X increase in patients they shouldn't worry. To put things in perspective, 0.007% of people in Texas currently have it while 99.993% don't have it. Part of the increase in hospital use is coming from large numbers of patients going in for elective surgeries that were previously postponed. When they enter the hospital they are tested for Covid and then classified as Covid patients if they test positive.

In the city I live in, Indianapolis, I've seen bad management ruin several clubs but have almost never seen good management take a bad club and make it better. There aren't enough talented management people around here to make it happen. The one case where I saw a club improve, Babes, it seemed to be due to the manager being someone the dancers liked. One dancer told me he created more of a party atmosphere in the club. He didn't have a lot of petty little rules and basically let anyone do what they wanted as long they didn't hurt someone else. He was replaced by someone who was friends with the owner and the club quickly declined because she was way too strict, fired too many of the best dancers for minor rule infractions, and would be rude and unfriendly to people.

SaltyNuts says: "In Arizona I haven't found this to be true, the clubs are full even with some stricter dance floor contact." Thanks for the report. Here in Indianapolis they aren't able to open until June 14th. I've been looking for any information I can find about what is happening in other states as they reopen their clubs.