Man Goes to Where Work Is. Hailed National Hero

 Point and purpose of media called into question.  More "not news" at 6.

Why Genius Kids Hate School

Turd Flinging Monkey had a great segment on his latest show that I think would be of benefit to everyone.  It's starts at the 4 Hour 41 Minute mark and continues to the rest of the show.  Consider tuning in because it's more than just "normies stupid, and I hate school" but about value, how society is completely designed against smart people, and how your past is you.

February Minimalism Course Now Open!

Can sign up here.

Psychologists are Not to Be Trusted

I don't think I'll ever come up with such a scam as psychology or "psychologists."

Why Ikea is the Future of the US Economy

My James Bond Villain Couch

Allow me to tell you how Ikea created $2,000 in "NOT-GDP."

I had worked hard.  And not only had I worked hard, but I had worked hard for 30 years.  I saved my pennies and dimes, lived in basements while renting out the upstairs of houses I owned, drove cars over 10 years old, and would bring flasks to bars so I could drink on the cheap.  And over those three decades I was able to pay off my humble house, be mortgage free, and be in the enviable position of retiring before 50.

Part of that early retirement dream was finally selling my investment properties and building my modest-but-dream home.  It would not be a luxurious home as my years of living cheaply had taught me the value of minimalism, but it would be a nice home, culminating my life's work and frugality into a home I would enjoy, not merely live in.

And so in anticipation, for one of the rare moments in my life, I afforded myself something nice.

What was that something?  Ikea's 5 piece "Morabo Sectional" replete with chaise lounge.

My house was designed to look like a Mission Impossible, late-50's, schwank bachelor pad, and I had found the James Bond Villain couch to be the centerpiece of my living room.  And so I permitted myself to drop the $3,200 on this sleek, sexy sectional.

Of course, though, with Ikea, you have to assemble your furniture. And of course, if you've ever been there, you have to use the code on the print out they give you to find all the components that go into creating the set in their warehouse.  And though I was eagerly looking forward to the day I could pour myself a small-fish bowl snifter of scotch, swirl it around in the palm of my hand, and luxuriate on Marabo 5 piece sectional as I made declarations to James Bond on how I would defeat him and achieve global domination...

that would have to wait as Ikea said half my couch was not in stock, and I would have to wait a month to get the remainder of it.

This was understandable.  Sometimes things aren't in stock.  Sometimes things are very popular and sell out quickly. Plus, COVID had people rushing to Ikea to redo their homes as they had nothing else to do.  But after a month passed, and I still had yet to receive a notification that the remaining half of my James Bond Villain couch was delivered, I checked online to see what was going on.

This then started what would inevitably become a 4 month process.

You, in theory, can check the status of your order online.  But there is such little information on Ikea's website that you are compelled to contact customer service.

Ikea is in the throes of a managerial/competency crisis, as people are losing their orders, having the wrong things delivered, etc., which makes contacting customer service about a 30 minute ordeal.

If you get to customer service, you are rolling the dice as to whether or not that person knows what they're doing.  I never received the information I needed nor the same/consistent information from each of the three reps I called to see if the remainder of my couch was ever going to be delivered.  Which compelled me to...

Revisit the physical store to see what was going on, which once again was fraught with its own problems of floor employees looking things up on databases that were not consistent with what was online.

The final straw was when I could no longer pull up my order #.  Ikea, like a heroin-addicted single mom loses her child, lost my order.  Just "poof" gone.  And thank god I saved my multi-thousand dollar receipt to prove that I had paid for it.

In the end I realized that I had wasted more time and labor dicking around with Ikea for a couch that was never going to be delivered.  And so I spent the better part of a cold Minnesota morning, loading up my truck, driving to Ikea, waiting in line, and getting a refund for my half-purchase.  And that experience was the ONLY time I dealt with a competent Ikea employee as the process, though long, went smoothly.

No doubt everybody has horror stories about buying things, delivery problems, an returning them.  But Ikea was different because of two things.  One, the inordinate amount of my time, energy, resources, and money that went into purchasing a couch that simply never existed.  And two, the incompetence at nearly every level and facet of the Ikea organization.  And though I am long over getting frustrated or angry at companies being inept in delivering what they promised, I do believe Ikea serves as foreboding omen of what the future US (and global economy) will look like.  And this is a lesson people with an IQ above 100 need to realize.

All Problems are Caused by Humans

First, you must understand where all problems in the world come from.  They come from other humans.

Yes, a tornado will destroy a house and present you a problem.
Yes, a hurricane will flood your city and damage some property.

But outside natural disasters and statistical chance, nearly ALL of the problems you will face, endure, suffer, and inevitably be-forced-to-overcome are caused by humans who are fucking up.  

Your boss gave you the wrong information to do the project and is now yelling at you for faulty results?
That problem is caused by your boss fucking up.

The waitress added shellfish to your salad when you expressly said NOT TO ADD SHELLFISH, and now you are being rushed to the hospital as you can't breathe?
That problem is caused by the waitress fucking up.

Perhaps you followed your heart and the money would follow when you chose your Philosophy degree, and now you're $75,000 in debt, living at home, and working the same job you did in high school?
That problem is caused by your parents and teachers fucking up.

All problems in your life, be it very important things like your career, marriage, or education to the smallest and pettiest of things like adding onions to your Sub sandwich, are caused by other humans.  And these mistakes not only create incalculable misery, but waste incredible amounts of human time and resources.

But the problem with humans does not end there.  Because in order for society to function and operate, we need to rely not on one mere human to do one mere thing, but a network of MILLIONS of humans to do their jobs correctly, all the time.  When I get gas I'm not only relying on the gas station attendant to do his job, but the pump manufacturer to do his, the credit card payment processor to do theirs, and the fuel truck driver to do his.  When you order food at a restaurant you are easily reliant upon a score of people to do their jobs the right way.  And a corporation is nothing more than thousands of little worker ants who need to do their job right, otherwise the whole thing falls apart.

And today's 2021 Ikea perfectly represents where an entire entity is decaying at this atomic level.

Understand that when I decided to buy my couch through Ikea, I did not engage in the physical buildings, materials, machinery, and inventory that physically makes up Ikea.  I decided to engage and rely upon the thousands of sentient people who control those physical assets to provide a product.  And whereas the Subway sandwich artist may goof up and give me the wrong bread or put mustard on my sandwich when I wanted none, it seems Ikea's people are incompetent at all levels.  And while it just takes one person along the chain line to screw up something, if your entire army of employees are incompetent, well then there's no helping you.

The saleswoman who ordered my couch for me (I think) didn't put the order in.  Just gave me the print out.

The three different customer service people I talked to all had different stories and resolutions to my problem, indicating to me they truly did not know what was going on.

Somebody somewhere either programmed the ordering system wrong or accidentally deleted my order.

And when I physically visited the store, the well-intended floor salesman tried to help, but wouldn't shut up long enough for me to tell him what the problem was or why I was there, which resulted in both him and I wasting about 10 minutes of our respective time.

And so though I am no financial analyst and truly couldn't care about the financial future of Ikea (I obviously never intend on shopping there again), no entity can survive this level of  widespread incompetence.  Ikea will either get it's act together, or fail.

The Ikea Economy

This then brings about a scary insight.  

There is nothing inherently wrong with Ikea's employees.  Ikea has to select from the same pool of incompetent dumbasses that currently populate the US labor market.  And Ikea is no doubt led and staffed by incompetent MBA's and "leaders" who all went to Buck Diddly's School of Business Management or some other such trash business college.  What Ikea does reflect, however, is a decrease in the overall quality and caliber of your average American worker.  The American worker of which went from a grizzled WWII vet who survived The Great Depression, to an adderall-xanax addicted Millennial or Gen Z'er who has not only been brought up under soft and undemanding conditions, but has a worthless liberal arts degree to boot.  Of course that is a very large brush to paint with, but with such weak, untested, and pampered adult children being dumped into the labor market by worthless schools and colleges, it should be no shock that with such decay at the cellular level of the economy (the individual human) companies and the overall economy should suffer, which is has.  

Labor force participation rates are going down.
Economic growth is only about 60% of what it used to be during the 40's-60's.
We have to borrow/print money to bail people/banks/students out of their stupid decisions.
Half the population is dependent on the taxpayer

And perhaps the biggest indication of Americans turning into Idiocracy,

It takes 25 years to grow, educate, and train your average person into becoming a self-supporting worker.

And here is where Idiocracy, the "Ikea Economy" becomes a reality.  Because we are no longer aiming to put men on Mars or develop hover-cars.  We're not even trying to get the nuclear family with a white picket fence.  We're just trying to keep it together.  And worse than that (and this is perhaps the ultimate form of "The Ikea Economy"), the majority of our resources are being spent cleaning up other people's mistakes.  And that does not produce real GDP.

An Economy of Broken Glass

It is unavoidable that a certain percent of an economy's labor has to be spent cleaning up other people's mistakes.  Humans are not perfect and everybody will err, and that err will require a commensurate (perhaps even exponential) amount of resources to clean up.  But if the cellular unit of the economy - humans - are decaying at a rate that they do nothing but fuck up, the percent of the economy that goes to cleaning up broken windows increases at the opportunity cost of genuine economic growth.  

A perfect example of this is social workers.  

Social workers don't produce anything of value.  They merely clean up the mess of broken homes, deadbeat dads, and single mom sluts.  And one can't even claim they do that as poverty, crime, and dysfunctional homes are not only still present, but on the increase.  But their salaries are still counted in GDP and GDP per capita, when there was nothing of value produced there.

But what if on every level, every human, in every institution of the economy, decayed to this level, not just the "social work industry?"

It cost me $2,000 in lost wages and time to order a FREAKING COUCH.

What if one person at the water sanitation department screwed up?  That cost the Michigan taxpayers $600 million with the Flint Michigan water crisis.

What if you major in a dumb subject and need to go back to college to get a degree that's employable?
That is potentially going to cost the US taxpayer $1 trillion.

And forget big ticket items.  What if every interaction you have to have with every human over the course of one day, involves 1 in 10 of these humans fucking up?  Forget water or a college degree, you will waste hours of time just buying a video game or getting gas.

And this is the ultimate cost of "The Ikea Economy."  Certainly, there will be great and many and costly boondoggles like higher education, the welfare state, or the banking crisis.  But when it comes to the normal day to day functioning of society, where we engage in hundreds of individual actions directly and indirectly with thousands of individual people, normal day to day functioning, be it your job, your home, or merely going out in public, will become increasingly less efficient, more costly, and more difficult.  You will have to order your burger three times before the waiter gets it right.  You will have to ask the Ikea rep DO YOU HAVE THIS IN STOCK, and then VERIFY IT IS IN STOCK, before you fork over your credit card.  You will have to check with UPS four times to find out where your package is.  And you will have to call up the electric company three times to get them to turn your power back on.

I may have had a bad experience with Ikea, but I fear it will now become the norm.

The New Normal

The new normal economy will represent what I've been predicting for quite sometime - a second world economy.  

With the average American being a complete idiot, not to mention incredibly spoiled and thinking real work is beneath them AND with enough government welfare/UBI to prevent them from ever having the fear of homelessness or starvation kick their ass into being a responsible adult, you can expect the US (and other nations) to become increasingly like second and third world economies.  Supply chains will become increasingly unreliable.  Bribery will be the most efficient means to get things done.  Underground, black market, or mafia economies will become the most efficient channels by which to get things done.  And the intelligent individual will simply limit the amount of interaction he/she needs to have with the rest of society.  Larger organizations will no longer be functional or feasible, often times being bailed out by a printing press. Entrepreneurs will simply say, "why bother?"  And the real costs of goods will go up.  

But the real problem, I predict, most people will face is the maddening psychological environment this will create.

Think about my desire to buy a couch from Ikea on a very basic, simple, and moral level.

Ikea claimed unto me they had my James Bond Villain couch.  Why else would they advertise it, let alone allow me to purchase it in advance?

But Ikea was not capable of delivering my couch, and I'm pretty sure somewhere in the chain of command of Ikea a man knew this.

This then behooves the question, why are you going through the facade of even offering the couch?  Why are you even in business?  What psychotic mentally ill reason do you have to waste my, and other people's, time?

And thus apply this flawed economic/business mentality to the overall economy:

What if that's every economic interaction and transaction in the economy?  That you're not sure you're going to be delivered what you asked?  That one party says they're going to do "X" and only 50% of the time does so?  To a certain extent this is already happening.  Ikea promising couches that never were.  Universities promises educations/career that would never pay.  Target promising fat women men will inevitably some day like them.  But aside from the obvious and INCREDIBLE economic costs, not to mention all the added costs it takes to clean up these messes, what about the psychological toll people will pay living in this incompetent, mad, Ikea world?

Thankfully, I am a minimalist.  Thankfully, I am old.  And thankfully, I no longer care about society or the economy.  I am going to spend the rest of my days laughing at stupid people making stupid mistakes and screaming at the sky for problems brought about by their own stupidity.  But if you are smarter than the average bear and wish to avoid the pain and agony of this Ikea Economy that cometh, may I strongly recommend you minimize the amount of stuff you need, the number of people you rely on, and prepare yourself psychology for the incompetence that is about to ensue?

______________

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Let Them Be Spinsters

The article is right.  But I don't know what's more annoying.  The whining about what is fated to happen, or the CONSTANT missing the source of the problem which is NOT more women in education, but that said "education" comes with a ton of anti-male, anti-marriage, anti-family spin that convinces women to put their careers ahead of love.

No Student Loan Bailout from Uncle Joe

Oh, that's too bad.

Dear Gen Z, Stop Faking Mental Illness

Or at least stop asking us to give you a government check for it.

Good Morning Coronachan #40 - The "Return of Coronachan" Episode

Good Morning Coronachan LIVE, this morning at 9AM CST!

Tune in ya bastids!

Somebody Nuke Westport, CT

Good Christ.  It's not that it's so bad you're paying teens to write essays about "diversity" in a competition.  Nor is it so bad that the topic that won is about BLM. 

It's that it's in its eighth fucking year.

Liberal Arts Colleges LOWERING TUITION...and It Still Isn't Working

Because the liberal arts and the colleges that teach them are worthless liabilities that have ruined the lives of entire generations.  But by all means, keep lowering tuition.

Outsourcing Your Online Dating

This is a very well-written article about an amazing service - paying somebody to do your online dating for you.

Minimalism Seminar Announced for Feb 24th - 28th.

Details in video below, but you can sign up for a notification by signing up for "my school."

The Economics of Prostitution

Me and Rollo discuss in this segment (pre-cued) about the economics of prostitution. (36:23 minute mark)

All Business Schools Should be Bulldozed

It's a couple years old, but I'm going to read it later.

What Percent of American Women are Even Marriageable?

This is an excerpt from "The Book of Numbers: Analyzing the ROI on the Pursuit of Women."  This is merely one of many different calculations and estimations in the book, all designed to help the average man understand exactly what his mathematical chances are of being successful in the dating/marriage market.  I decided to publish this excerpt of the book because I find the statistics very insightful and telling, if not damning of just what a small percent of the female population is marriage-worthy.  And though you may not buy the book, I was still compelled to share these findings as it will ease the minds of all men that not, it's not you.  It really is that bad out there.

                                    ______________________________

The “Deal Breaker Method” attempts to measure (based on surveys, polling, and other data) what percent of the American female population has no major deal breakers. What qualifies as a “deal breaker” is certainly up for debate. Loudly smacking her chewing-gum may be considered a deal breaker for some, but not at the same level as say a woman with herpes. So to determine what were critical deal breakers that would indeed disqualify a woman from being marriage material we had to focus on critical flaws that were not merely unlikable, but would make a happy marriage an impossibility. And while no doubt this list could be unlimited, we focused on 8 deal breakers deemed to be the most poignant, comprehensive, and relevant to the success of a happy marriage, as well as the interests of men.

#1 Obesity/Being Overweight

Despite what fat acceptance “activists” and an increasing percent of American women want to believe, being big is not beautiful. It is disgusting. It's gross. It's physically revolting. And as it just so happens it's unhealthy. But more importantly, as it pertains to whether a woman is marriage material, it immediately destroys the number one thing men seek in women – physical beauty. And though women may howl at the moon and claim that a man should love a woman for who she is on the inside, we already have a name for women we like, but just aren't physically attracted to - “friends.”

Regardless, since physical beauty is a must, this eliminates the 59.6% of young American women who are obese or overweight as marriage material. Certainly, yes, many men are fat themselves. And yes many men marry fat women, have wives who get fat on them, or even manage to have kids with them. But remember the definition of “success” in this study is happily married and you simply cannot be happily married to someone you're not physically attracted to.

#2 Worthless Degrees

While the world celebrates that there are now more women in college than men, nobody has bothered to ask whether it's for something sensible like Accounting or a colossal waste of time like the Liberal Arts. And when you consider whether the degrees women are getting are worthwhile or merely an excuse to attend a very expensive 4 year party, unfortunately 80.5% of the time it's an excuse to party.

However, it is not so much the degree itself that excludes women from being marriage material as it is what it comprehensively says about them. First, it's a declaration as to how realistic and serious women are about their careers, their professions, and their work ethic. Yes, it would be nice to solve poverty, but usually when a young woman majors in the social sciences it's to avoid real work or rigor, at minimum a delusion to “follow her heart and the money will follow.” You WILL be subsidizing her life as she simply lacks the education and skills to command a self-supporting wage. Second, there are HUGE financial consequences for majoring in the wrong thing. Namely, the tonnage of student debt she's incurred and unable to pay off, making her a HUGE financial liability for any future suitor. Third, many of these worthless degrees are simply rank indoctrination, brainwashing women to value their careers, politics, feminism, educations, etc., above love, which is simply antithetical to marriage. If you marry someone with a “Genders Studies” degree they are not going to be a loving supporting wife, but likely an obstinate, nagging shrew that loves her cultish politics and career more than you or your children.

This isn't to say a nice, sweet girl who's majoring in education to become an elementary school teacher is going to be some nagging, confrontational harpy. Nor is it to say that every girl goes to college (only 72.5% of women do). But it is to use women's choice of majors as a proxy as to where their priorities in life lie, how realistic they are about finances, how realistic they are about life, as well as the chances they will be a political, financial, or even emotional liability to your marriage.

* The data for worthless degrees was calculated using the NCES data for all bachelor degrees conferred in 2018. Every degree that did not have an obvious job or profession attached to it, or were notoriously underpaid professions (education, sociology, etc.) or were typically unaccredited degrees that target poor/disadvantaged groups of students (criminal justice, culinary school, etc.), were deemed worthless.

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_318.30.asp

#3 Percent Financially Delinquent

As financial problems are cited as the number one cause of divorce, finding a woman who has her financial act together is a must. Furthermore, a woman who cannot pay her bills on time is simply not mature enough to marry. And while no doubt young women today have the added financial pressures of student loans for completely unemployable degrees, no self-respecting man can marry a woman who doesn't pay her bills, or worse, is one of the 6% who declares bankruptcy, upgrading themselves to thieves.

Using “ever delinquent” as the metric in a Federal Reserve study to determine fiscal responsibility, 31.6% of women between the ages of 18-35 have been late at least once paying back their debts. Men are only a few percentage points better, but nearly 1 in every 3 women of marrying age have finances that are prohibitive to marriage. This leaves roughly only 2/3rds of women fiscally responsible, and presumably responsible enough to marry.

Data was an average between two age cohorts from 21-30 and 31-40. The study can be found here: https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/gender-related-differences-in-credit-use-and-credit-scores-20180622.htm

#4 Leftist/Socialist/Feminist Politics

While one could make the argument (and be right) that leftist or feminist politics shouldn't be considered a deal breaker (there are democrat men after all), leftist politics are considered a deal-breaker in that they play a role in young women's lives today that goes beyond mere government policy, to that of a political-ideological cult that renders many of them unmarriageable.

In the 1960's when your mother or grandmother, even your curmudgeonly grandfather would vote democrat, it was usually to nobly “help out the little guy” or to perhaps reel in the powers of corporate America. And whether you agreed with them or not, it was to exercise their right to vote and do their part to make America as great as it could be. But for whatever reason they voted democrat it wasn't because they solely valued themselves as “democrats” or derived some kind of life purpose and meaning from it. They were a “housewife” or “plumber” first, who happened to vote for JFK. But today left-leaning politics, and certainly feminism is not about giving the little guy a break or something as mundane as balancing the budget. It has become a substitute for purpose, meaning, value, even love in many young women's lives today. So much so many young women will simply refuse to date non-leftists as a matter of policy, screaming “SWIPE LEFT IF YOU'RE A REPUBLICAN!!!!” (when, in fact, you might be a libertarian).

This makes politics (like other things) a higher priority in leftist women's lives than love. And to truly fall in love (let alone be happily married), you need to put the other person ahead of yourself, and that includes your cultish politics. But worse, this unhealthy obsession with politics, as well as abusing it as a substitute for purpose in life, has many young women flirting with mental illness where they literally hate you because you dare advocate lower taxes or refuse to use made up pronouns. Therefore, it is not the political positions of the democrat party, socialism, or feminism per se that makes these women unmarriageable, but the fact they put it at the center of their lives that render them so. And though this ideological obsession provides left-leaning men a HUGE statistical advantage when it comes to dating (as 65% of young women identify as “democrat” or “feminist”), it will forever sow a seed of doubt as to whether your leftist wife loves you or her politics more.

#5 Single Moms

This variable is very simple. Men don't like raising other men's children. Men are genetically repulsed by other men's genes. Men are also not kosher with being the #2 guy in a woman's life, let alone playing second fiddle to some other guy's kid. And unless the woman was a widow, being a single mom is indicative of poor decision making in the past.

Admittedly, if you're an older man you may not have the luxury to pine for, let alone, hold out for a childless woman. Over time most women will have children and with a 50% divorce rate single moms are an inevitability in every middle-aged man's life. But since this study focuses on younger men who are yet to be married, as well as young women who are not at menopause's door, it is perfectly reasonable and self-respecting to demand your future wife not have another man's kid.

Unfortunately, what you want and what you're going to get are two different things as nearly 40% of single women between the ages of 18-35 are single moms. Worse, the better looking a woman is the higher percent chance she has a kid in tow (this phenomenon was particularly noticeable when surveying online dating profiles in rural areas). The fact is, whether you like it or not, beautiful women attract handsome men and the result is children. Sometimes these people stay married, sometimes they don't, sometimes they were never married at all. But the end result is the average young man today is looking at a dating pool where 4 in every 10 women have some other guy's kid.

#6 STD's

STD's present an interesting problem. What is considered an STD? Is it HPV which nearly half the population will get, yet for the most part is asymptomatic? Is it a death sentence like AIDS? What if it's curable like gonorrhea or chlamydia? What if it's not like herpes? It's hard to pin down what a “deal breaking STD” is.

Furthermore, there are complications when it comes to measuring an STD rate among young women. For instance, the data just doesn't exist for the specific age cohort we're interested in. Different diseases come and go in waves over generations making a stable, usable number an impossibility. And a significant percent of the female population has multiple STD's. There is frankly no way to apply a specific number to the percent of women who have a marriage-disqualifying STD.

Therefore, for the purposes of this study a “marriage-disqualifying STD” was conservatively defined as whether a woman had herpes or not. There are certainly some shortcomings in using this metric, but having herpes is a pretty applicable standard when it comes to marriageability. Most men will adamantly refuse to marry (let alone sleep with) a woman who knowingly has herpes. Herpes is not curable. And there's enough social stigma associated with the disease it's a death knell to your dating life and, consequently, your chances of marriage. A shocking 25% of women are estimated by the CDC to have herpes (though the vast majority of these women are asymptomatic). And remember, that's just one STD. The percent of women with deal breaking STD's is likely higher.

#7 - Mental Illness

Like STD's mental illness also presents a measuring and statistical problem. Do you consider women who ever had a mental illness? Do you only consider women who are chronically mentally ill? Do you consider something serious and permanent like schizophrenia? What about something as minor as dyslexia? Does the suite of “designer mental illnesses” Millennials popularized to get attention in high school count? What about ADHD or “social anxiety disorder?” And who cares if she's faking being bipolar for attention. Isn't that in itself a deal breaker for most men?

Like STD's, an assumption had to be made to simplify the math and just get us into the ballpark. This assumption was that the 25% of women who are on antidepressants are a reflective (though low end) estimate of the overall population of women who are mentally ill to the point they are unqualified to be wives.

#8 - Body Mutilation

The final deal breaker was body mutilation. Like STD's and mental illness, this was also amorphous and intangible. However, mutilating one's body is a pretty clear sign of several things. Mental illness. Bad decision making skills. Immaturity. Financial instability. A lack of purpose and meaning in life. And conformity (especially among women from 18-35). Additionally, physically marring your body not only ruins the number one thing men seek in women (beauty), but can also be visually identified, making it an easily identifiable red flag for any serious seeker of marriage.

But like other metrics, what qualifies as “bodily mutilation?” Is the discreet Chinese proverb tattoo nearly every 20 something girl has a sign of mental illness? Are the “tramp stamps” nearly every Gen X woman got the same? And what if she was a military vet and got the tattoo with her unit in Iraq? Therefore, for the purposes of this study “body mutilation” was considered somebody who had 4 or more tattoos. Non-traditional piercings or other forms of body mutilation (ear gauges for example) were not considered, largely because there isn't enough data about the female population that has them. But there is research (see below) showing the more tattoos women have, the more mentally unstable they are, rendering them for the purpose of this analysis, unmarriageable.

Nearly 1 in 6 (15.3%) of the female population is estimated to have 4+ tattoos.

* Studies/sources for reference:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6347139/

https://www.courierpostonline.com/story/news/local/south-jersey/2018/07/17/national-tattoo-day-south-jersey-show-us-tattoos/791417002/

https://www.foxnews.com/us/fox-news-poll-tattoos-arent-just-for-rebels-anymore
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1440783318755017

https://medium.com/daliaresearch/who-has-the-most-tattoos-its-not-who-you-d-expect-1d5ffff660f8

https://www.reference.com/world-view/statistics-body-piercing-f5db4efae39e98ef

https://blog.bodyjewelry.com/statistics-of-body-piercings-in-the-u-s/

Backing Out Dependence/Co-Correlation and Finalizing the Number

When you tally up the numbers above you get the following statistics:

And while you may be tempted to merely multiply these variables together to get the remaining percent of the female population without a major deal breaker (which would result in .54% - roughly one-half of one percent of the female population), this number is misleading because of the co-correlation between these 8 deal breakers.

For example, it may shock you to find out that a feminist with a worthless degree might also...

• have 4+ tattoos

• have financial problems

• be on antidepressants

• and also be fat.

This results in a Venn diagram where one woman can account for several of these traits, overstating the percent of the female population that is unmarriageable and understating the percent of the female population that is.

 

To account for this overlap two statistical methods were employed to back out this co-correlation. These methods resulted in two estimates of the marriageable population - 1.1% and 1.4% - averaging to around 1.25%.

 

This adjusted number is the finalized number we will be using for Method #1 in calculating the percent of marriageable women – 1.25%.