A lot of people here are pointing out the fact that leagues don’t exist, and that is true. But there’s a bigger issue here that’s not being brought up, which is that you’re viewing relationships as mutual infatuation. That’s not what relationships are.

Love is a conscious choice. You love with your mind, not with your heart. You don’t need to be infatuated with someone to love them. And frankly, I would argue that infatuation is a huge negative in a relationship, because it causes you to make irrational choices that will put strain on the relationship. If you aren’t attracted to your date, the proper thought process should be:

“That sucks, but it’s not a dealbreaker. Do I feel like I will still be friends with this person after years of living together? After learning all of this person’s bad habits? After being annoyed to hell and back by this person, do I see myself still choosing to value this person?”

If the answer is yes, then you’ve got yourself a potential partner that you might love.

Another thing to point out is that physical attraction is very tightly related to the people you’ve been around. It’s not uncommon for someone to find their partner increasingly attractive over time.

FDA is intrinsically good but currently does its job below expectations. Doesn’t mean that it’s bad, just means it’s not doing enough. And without FDA, things can and will get significantly worse. Things can always get worse.

Have you heard of Roko’s Basilisk? Basically, if we were in a simulation, it’s best not to acknowledge it

For reference, that business model is called the loss leader pricing scheme. It’s the one where you sell a product for cheap with the expectation that the customer will buy something else that’s more expensive alongside it. It’s more common than you would expect.

For instance, eggs and milk are placed at the back of the store because there’s a higher chance of you picking up other things to buy on the way to the back.

IKEA does something similar with their food court.

The Steam deck is sold at a loss, because Valve makes their money back via game sales. The same is true for all gaming consoles

All F2P games operate on the same principle

My understanding is that Costco gasoline is so cheap because it’s offset by product purchases in-store. Also, Costco food court

Might consider getting something that only plays well on keyboard/mouse. Factorio comes up off the top of my head. Shooters also generally translate poorly to controllers, so perhaps that?

currently doing PhD

happy with topic

no mention about happiness with life

Yeah that sounds about right

Translation appears accurate, but misses the cultural element. In my admittedly limited experience, this is pretty par for the course for Chinese humor. Compared to Western humor, Chinese humor is more brash and abrasive, and almost boastful when viewed from an outside perspective. I can definitely envision someone receiving that sort of response as a joke (“What, you didn’t receive game of the year? Why did you even go?”). And it would certainly agree with my impression that he makes a lot of crude jokes on his social media that don’t translate well into English (see: the IGN article on how the developers are sexist). It can really be quite difficult for inexperienced people to determine what statements are humorous and what statements are earnest, since the difference is often really subtle, even when read in the original language.

I’m not necessarily defending him, since these sorts of jokes do have a nugget of honesty to them, but my read is that he plays them up for humor.