mircea_popescu: it protected the people involved in its various wars, from iraq to bitcoin, ever so grandiosely well. it even managed to protect its ground installations in say libya, or for that matter ethereum...
mircea_popescu: they believe they'll get pensions, so why wouldn't they believe the usg will somehow, magically, protect them and their families.
mircea_popescu: supposedly this luft will protect them. somehow. who knows.
mircea_popescu: also it should probably be noted that what worries them isn't "attacking police officer", but the very tmrs-esque "attack government drone"
mircea_popescu: they somehow fail to grasp this a) has al ong history of being tried which b) never failed to produce the opposite effect.
asciilifeform: ' If (1) the victim was (A) a government officer or employee; (B) a former government officer or employee; or (C) a member of the immediate family of a person described in subdivision (A) or (B); and (2) the offense of conviction was motivated by such status, increase by 3 levels.'
mircea_popescu: thestringpuller quite huh. nice.
gribble: The operation succeeded.
thestringpuller: asciilifeform: are you familiar with MPEx CDO? And how the derpage was so bad it was like a 60% default rate.
thestringpuller: That was probably the case for people scamming usagi, which is what it boiled down to. Usagi issued insurance against people who were exposed to pirate (insured their debts), then collected it into risk trenches (A, B and C) of descending risk. he did 0 underwriting, and was overconfident. So all the people who told him they weren't exposed to pirate were.
asciilifeform: which is perhaps the ultimate in 'moral hazard' and a crock of shit
thestringpuller: can insurance even exist in bitcoin yet without devolving into Usagi antics? the liability it too high to insure bitcoin with bitcoin. and insuring bitcoin with fiat isn't insurance.
thestringpuller: everyone is fucked even if they had insurance
gribble: Bitstamp | This order would exceed the size of the order book. You would buy 9580.7606 bitcoins, for a total of 33190089.2632 USD and take the price to 1000000000.0000. | Data vintage: 0.0211 seconds
thestringpuller: BingoBoingo: http://qntra.net/2015/02/bitgo-offers-insurance-the-fdic-way/ << lol came true. now no insurance at all.
BingoBoingo feeling bearish, because what happens when the fuck juice runs out????
mircea_popescu: the rapings will continue until attitude improves.
asciilifeform: to a muppet, anyone who refuses to participate in the consensual 'reality' is dangerous lunatic.
mircea_popescu: that way, they can be sure they will also never be fit to lick my boots clean, ever.
mircea_popescu: no, instead it's just "silently" erase history and... keep the pretense going.
mircea_popescu: they don't go "hey, you know what, MP was right all along, we ARE fucking idiots not fit to lick his boots clean, and will henceforth do just that"
mircea_popescu: but no, they know shit and have opinions on matters and whatnot.
mircea_popescu: all these idiots with usagi "insurance".
asciilifeform: y'know, like the tsar who drew a line on the map with a pencil and ordered rail laid just-so
mircea_popescu: quite typical, too, in the elevator example. "i want things to be made to be what i thought they were going to be at no expense to me!"
asciilifeform: i did say! typical work of heathendom.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: and quite possibly. if anyone cared to reverse the client, all kinds of marvels may yet become possible.
mircea_popescu: but how the fuck does this work, i can just set my system time and send messages back to 2014 ?
asciilifeform: ask ~them~, not me, why this is necessary.
asciilifeform: when he was in the lift.
mircea_popescu: who the fuck in management would say anything other than "so buy a proper phone" to employee who was like "i can't call the company"
asciilifeform: the proprietary clients do such things as guaranteed retro-ordering of messages, very frustrating to folks raised on irc, but the folks who have it - expect it.
mircea_popescu: i suppose this leads us to the fundamental tmsr reform. our view is exclusive, "either it works with this or is banned" ; their view is inclusive, "either it works with this or we change the this"
mircea_popescu: almost like an entry bar. "if you can't get your team irc room together you're all fired"
asciilifeform: eh, supporting the various smart-pnoje clients alone probably employs a whole slave galley
mircea_popescu: so why the fuck would a software house hire eh nevermind.
asciilifeform: why not, thinks luser, put money in the clown head, and eat.
trinque: irc doesn't have emojis and gifs.. would be the "reason"
asciilifeform: because then someone has to sweat, setting up logz, search, bots, etc.
mircea_popescu: so why not just use irc ? i suppose these charge at some point no ?
asciilifeform: is a pretty typical work of heathendom.
asciilifeform: shinohai: it lives in the land of 'aol messenger', microshit outlook, etc.
asciilifeform: https://slack.com << often used by american software co. sorta like irc-cum-logz for the terminally lazy
mircea_popescu still chuckles at the "conference" where the various "captains of industree" were discussing who sleeps on whose floor, because one of them was subletting or bumming out or w/e in some flat in london
mircea_popescu: how the fuck is everyone in vcland making "chat things" after we started a chat thing is anyone's guess.
asciilifeform: slock is this orc subcontractor that only existed in light of ethertardium
mircea_popescu: i thought the grimy looking tual fellow had... a chat thing ?
mircea_popescu: wait these are distinct ?
PeterL: and pick up on other shore
mircea_popescu: shinohai strangely enough, slack can afford to pay for advertising on pastebin ; can not afford to make the people it defrauded whole.
asciilifeform: whichever payload appropriate for the occasion.
asciilifeform: if yer gonna have a nuke in the thing...
mircea_popescu: (it should be pointed out that the torpedo also weighs about the same as a year worth of officer)
asciilifeform: looks like it has not become cheaper, either..?
mircea_popescu: and we'll deduct from this the usual alf "golden toilet" premium yes ?
asciilifeform: (aha, and mircea_popescu will say, 'steal 1,001 of them' but then why not also steal ship.)
mircea_popescu: sure, but in the million range. cocaine should afford one.
mircea_popescu: afaik the tube is actually self-contained. you could just tie it on with chicken wire and will still work.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: it needs such things as locks and seals. the plywood boats are very spartan affairs, lacking even flush toilet.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: the sub in question is not the ru diesel thing, but the plywood handcraft items BingoBoingo refers to, their only defense is to motor in the other direction when they notice pursuit. hence wankery re 'stealth' patrol boats etc.
mircea_popescu: literally, anything from ww2 even, should it score a hit in that horrendous lip of nonsense will crack the ship in two and sink it
BingoBoingo: asciilifeform: Rowboats were the Pubic rallying cry though. But yes everything else seems to suggest designed to beat up on plywood narco subs
mircea_popescu: how, 90 degree rotation and plows for the sub with its beak ?
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: i thought they were for smugglers with subs
mircea_popescu: so how is it a warship then.
asciilifeform: anyway this is american sop, they don't expect to be fired on by so much as bb gun.
mircea_popescu: where's the "i'd like to not have a wall a foot behind me to reflect all napalm and ricochet on my head"
asciilifeform: where's the shield..?
mircea_popescu: what the fuck emplacement is that, "we trust we will never have to use this under fire ; and ideally - at all" ?
mircea_popescu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_gun#/media/File:Chaingun.jpg << so do these fucktards.
asciilifeform: afaik it worked, but was thrown out because it sheds the one serious plus of revolver (simplicity) but keeps the minus (limited capacity)
asciilifeform: on my planet there is no right->left compositive hangul strange in ascii.
mircea_popescu: use the tools shown to bring back head of lizzard in battle ; not the ones that are shiny in the sun.
mircea_popescu: this is how the ethereum humiliation worked ; and why ; and wherefore. and it's how the bitfinex thing played out, for the same reasons.
mircea_popescu: they're built up to exploit the force of this "it works" mistake you understand ? much like a revolver uses the gas to move the next round.
mircea_popescu: you're getting the brunt of it for your "sin" of being naively open, but whatever, you're a big enough boy to survive it i'd hope : the above orcish "when stated plainly they laugh so whatever, the face trick seems to work" is a large part of why people like rms failed without meaning to and without realising they were. much like the hurtless cut of the apple carpace.
asciilifeform: why not point the mouth.
asciilifeform: i dun like the female-gossiptronic aspect of 'i heard'
mircea_popescu: so then say "i heard"
asciilifeform: somehow the face trick works.
asciilifeform: well when instead of 'boeck said...' i say 'the lizard octopus proclaimed via one of its tentacles...' folks laugh.
mircea_popescu: these aren't to be assumed, just because fucktards think socialism, and all things are equal and all "people" are special and so forth.
mircea_popescu: aquae et ignis, you understand. "flycheck" lacks the ability to "it moved" much like hanno bock lacks the ability to "tell" anyone anything.
mircea_popescu: reusing the name does nothing for either, and moreover there's no cause for it. he's nothing to nobody, except a pig fucker with a matching face.
mircea_popescu: for humans, because it doesn't serve any purpose to credit idiots; with anything. for computers, because the whole point of the idiot being named is to make it impossible for his life to continue outside of his association with his fucking a pig.
covertress: don't shoot the messenger
BingoBoingo: covertress: Wait, they FIGHT ENTROPY???? BAD ANARCHISTS!!!
covertress: fireworks in 5 mins http://fuckethereum.com/
asciilifeform wonders what the boecks will move on to now that 'snore, gpg won't import the keyz' is addressed
BingoBoingo: In other lol organophosphate from flower plant good, from chemical plant bad!!! https://www.amazon.com/review/R13Z9ISQBKINA0/ref=cm_cr_dp_cmt?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B0035HA0AK&channel=detail-glance&nodeID=2972638011&store=lawn-garden#wasThisHelpful
asciilifeform: the pretense of exhaustive listing, sinks, yes
mircea_popescu: of course... the other view here is that the dictionary of stupidity sunk flaubert, or to quote, "will be the death of me" .
BingoBoingo: <asciilifeform> mircea_popescu has a quite spiffy article, iirc, concerning the 'bobbeck' species << <asciilifeform> mircea_popescu has a quite spiffy article, iirc, concerning the 'bobbeck' species
asciilifeform: (i challenged the #b-a folk 'dontcha get tired of making monkey noises at mp, try being useful')
asciilifeform: 'though the pgp keys in question do not import into gpg, they can be imported in a couple javascript pgp-trons: https://www.igolder.com/PGP/encryption/ and http://ianpurton.com/online-pgp/ ...'
asciilifeform: speaking of scraps of living matter in the pipe, http://qntra.net/2016/08/phuctor-finds-seven-keys-produced-with-null-rng-and-other-curiosities/#comment-66086
mircea_popescu: (and if you're unwilling to beat your children, this is what you produce. this unrelenting sort of idiot who's never had to learn on his own skin at the age of 3, when the skin is soft and the flesh fixes quickly, that escalation is not to be tried idly ; then has to learn it in the life's school of hard knocks, where there's no fix and no way to grow head back out of beheaded neck.)
asciilifeform: or so at least is the impression.
asciilifeform: neh, 'not falsified yet!!', see, fella's gonna sit by the river-side waitin' for our corpses to float by till he dies
mircea_popescu: the sort of braindamage that'll make one continue putting out predictions that are regularly falsified instead of fixing the tool that produces them is something else.
mircea_popescu: yeah, whatever. i can't be arsed to have anyone dig it up, but certainly germane to this idiocy. imbecile went as far to actually ~predict~, the obviously falsifiable point, that somehow the republic is unstable. because omg, it breks the tenets of socialism and dares have personally invested sovereignity, THEREFORE IT MUST BE BAD.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: believe or not, kako was actually complaining earlier, why do i discuss phuctor finds 'there, in the nuttery' and not 'here'
mircea_popescu: sure. the only problem is that apparently "pillar of komyooniti" is a disease that kills, whereas "obvious signs of mental illness" is a pretty good predictor of stability.
asciilifeform: to whom tmsr folk are 'extremist crackots' with (direct quote) 'obvious signs of mental illness', and hanno boeck is a pillar of the komyooniti.
asciilifeform: the useful idiot
asciilifeform: let's also not forget the most numerous tool,
mircea_popescu: oh right right, he was waxing indignant atop some hallucinated "moral superiority" on twitter, "look at these people calling me what i am, clearly i must be right!!1"
asciilifeform: ^ reactivated ~immediately after the null rng find published
mircea_popescu: who the fuck is bock again.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform http://trilema.com/2016/fred-wilson-is-an-idiot-and-other-things/ << better example
asciilifeform: who collects 'the glory' of 'finding' hole
asciilifeform: then there is the 'do-ocrat', as exemplified by boeck, who 'has done SO MUCH for the komoyoonity! and who are you again pigfucker to question his guiding light'
asciilifeform: who, e.g., works 'round the clock to make sure that, e.g., microshit, is heard in the openbsd throne room, and mircea_popescu is not
mircea_popescu: fucktard beta aspiring to speak in the group. since when may this happen under the fucking sun!
mircea_popescu: buncha those, they piss me off.
asciilifeform: the 'komyooniti organizer'
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu has a quite spiffy article, iirc, concerning the 'bobbeck' species
mircea_popescu: everyone got blogs anyway, and is now desperate for material to fulfill the "one a day" golden rule, amirite ?
asciilifeform: a list of these crimes would probably not be wholly waste of time
asciilifeform: in every case, one discovers that the supposedly 'broken' original still works great, once you remove the rust and monkey shit it was buried under
mircea_popescu: expectation clearly has no impact on living. so then... "here's my favourite oft repeated nonsequitur" ?
asciilifeform: before the thread is lost, i'd like to nominate 'flycheck' as an own and distinct type of fraud, the 'bus broke down, yes, we're the bus now!111' device.
mircea_popescu: it's still unclear what exactly you imagine to achieve through this "i don't expect to live to see a thing" device either.
mircea_popescu: wake me up when flyckech manages to escape the charge of fraud.
asciilifeform: wake me up for the public flogging of every arsemunch who ever broken a link.
mircea_popescu: it didn't "move". they deleted it to circumvent tmsr ban. then, as you'd expect, later tried to lie about that, too.
mircea_popescu: fuck them.
mircea_popescu: FLYCHECK IS STILL BANNED FOR BEING ASSWIPES THAT DELETE CONTENT ON THE QUIET IN AN ATEMPT TO CIRCUMVENT TMSR BAN.
mircea_popescu: now look at the page.
PeterL: just an example, there are plenty of other plots available for about same price, some have road access
asciilifeform: PeterL: no, they'll just wait for you to come out for supplies.
asciilifeform: somebody call that 'galt's gulch' idiot, he'll buy 10 of these
asciilifeform: ^ boxed in by usg from all sides! and pay 5k for the privilege
a111: Logged on 2016-08-04 14:20 PeterL: http://www.upmls.com/land.php?view=1088652&board= "The north east corner of the property touches the Ottawa National Forest. The almost one million acres of this Forest extends from the south shore of Lake Superior to the Wisconsin border."
asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2016-08-04#1514446 << mother of all lulz, 'There is no written legal access for this property, or road into this property. There is walk-in-only access from the Ottawa National Forest.'
asciilifeform: (flycheck was LITERALLY the 'we shall build an alt-country out of stooges and call it your country)
mircea_popescu: but, point being, the story of idiocy would benefit from systematic approach.
asciilifeform: there are also multiple types of shitproject
asciilifeform: there are perhaps half a dozen basic instruments.
asciilifeform: the shitgnomatic toolkit is not large.
mircea_popescu: there's ~no value in considering the individual "people" as people. take mike hearn. he's not as much "mike hearn" as he is "lemme break this while right solution" + x + y.
mircea_popescu: someone should prolly actually classify these, actually.
asciilifeform: which includes 'gender warriors', 'lemme break this until the Right Solution is Consensused', and the whole constellation of plagues.
a111: Logged on 2016-08-04 05:40 phf: i don't know the details of ken sievers, some lesser part of systemd's master wrecking plan, involving firmware devices. probably behavior is somehow mandatory in NSA injection sequence. or else guy is just another righteous prick
asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2016-08-04#1514284 << poetteringism does not exist in order to slip in ~one particular~ cockroach, but to maintain a generally fertile soil for vermin 'control the vertical and the horizontal' (tm) (r)
mircea_popescu sings "i did it one step at a time, and it didn't cost me a dime... i got the only one there is around"
asciilifeform: shinohai: problem is that there's gotta be a bot relaying link contents, and keeping cross-index, and searchability.
a111: Logged on 2016-08-04 05:10 mircea_popescu: actually. less than 10% of people alive EVER HAD a fb. less than 10% of THOSE touched it in the past year.
asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2016-08-04#1514252 << at one point i even had acct there, decade+ ago, it likely still exists
asciilifeform: did mr reptilia 'get' that aston-martin in the hotel parking lot ?
mircea_popescu: so what is this, you'll be sinking the ru navy as part of this project ?
PeterL: Somali pirates spend much less than 45 mn to get their tankers
mircea_popescu: by the time you get to loot, you get to loot like fungi do (visible but nobody to take advantage)
asciilifeform: i can understand folks who buy the subs (as described by mircea_popescu re costa rica narcos) but tanker is lunacy.
mircea_popescu: the industrial world died. once this means everyone can loot walmart, everyone will
mircea_popescu: the whole fucking point of "buy tanker, live on sea" is that you are exploting an early-come apocalypse.
asciilifeform: who, asked 'how we shall deal with uboats' answered, 'let's boil the atlantic'
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu reminds me of the british ww1 admiral
mircea_popescu: bitch, things cost money. what is this "im of the internet and free plox" ?
asciilifeform: buy another! lel
mircea_popescu: there's thousands extra.
mircea_popescu: also, it's a consumer item. you never drydock it. buy another.
asciilifeform: incidentally tanker is a poor solution for another reason - it is, like that 'business jet', a 'have slaves machine'
asciilifeform: and small vessels, for all of their faults, are less breakable than large ones.
mircea_popescu: well, by far the cheapest masquerade of a solution is spending the 45mn or so to buy a junky old tanker and be happy.
asciilifeform: hey i never asserted that the problem was ~solvable~...
mircea_popescu: if you imagine you'll have orlov build you a ship out of a well chosen half walnut that'll perform better in "freakish weather" than a tanker you really should move on to apologetics, what can i say!
mircea_popescu: and the guy... survived ?
mircea_popescu: maybe. of course they're talking of ... 1995 ?
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform i have nfi. maybe ? it'd surely help if they listed names.
asciilifeform: 'Severe weather has sunk more than 200 supertankers and container ships exceeding 200 metres in length during the last two decades. ' << lies ?
asciilifeform: http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Observing_the_Earth/Ship-sinking_monster_waves_revealed_by_ESA_satellites << ?
mircea_popescu: they don't break if driven on land ffs.
asciilifeform: nor the parts.
asciilifeform: good deal to send some ~other~ poor fuck on, to carry cargo.
asciilifeform: they break on waves.
mircea_popescu: and WILL STAY best deal, for your lifetime, given that no amateur shithead/copywriter is going to come up with a way to MAKE NEW ships that'll come out cheaper than the tail end of the industrial process.
mircea_popescu: note that i'm the one explaining "life on the sea" is idiotic, you don't get to hijack that argument. fact remains that IF you're willing to bite the live-on-sea bullet, tanker by far best deal.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform iirc the nutso scientology guy did for a decade or so.
PeterL: http://www.upmls.com/land.php?view=1088652&board= "The north east corner of the property touches the Ottawa National Forest. The almost one million acres of this Forest extends from the south shore of Lake Superior to the Wisconsin border."
PeterL: seems like empty land would be cheaper than boat in the long run
asciilifeform: i am interested in the sea as ~strictly~ a place where the dollar buys moar social-isolation bang than elsewhere, and in no other way.
asciilifeform: millions (even, if one is thrifty, a single million, even of usd) can handily buy the requisite degree of social isolation ON LAND
a111: Logged on 2016-08-04 06:05 mircea_popescu: the reason is obvious, they start at more millions than he has. not more millions than he;d have had the cardano shipped on schedule and we all make it rich off the exploding share price, but neways.
asciilifeform: seaworthy per OWN arse means nothing but 'NOTHING the sea can do to this thing, will sink it'
asciilifeform: any tub is 'seaworthy' when some OTHER arse drowns on it
asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2016-08-04#1514350 << tankers are seaworthy?! perhaps by 'i sit on land while lloyds of london pays for the 100 tankers rogue waves sink every year' sense...
a111: Logged on 2016-08-04 05:50 mircea_popescu: honestly, the age never existed. i've seen such ages, up close and personal. but the composition of this particular version was exceedingly weak. not even teracotta soldiers, more like pillsbury doughmen.
asciilifeform: to the point that i've never thought of gmane as anything but a polluter of search results.
asciilifeform: and ~all of the gmane content is also found elsewhere.
asciilifeform: consider, 'So, anyway, I’m perfectly willing to delete whatever it is they want to have deleted. So I was looking through the stack to see if that was in there somewhere.'
a111: Logged on 2016-08-04 05:16 phf: not really drama as such, oldfag bailed, took his project down with him, project being gmane an old repository of mailing lists (and an ntp<->mailing list proxy) https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2016/07/28/the-end-of-gmane/
asciilifeform: there we go.
asciilifeform: at this point this thing has been responsible for more tmsr downtime than all of the ddos idiocies of the kako age combined.
asciilifeform: and what is so fucking hard about making the thing retry connect FOREVER if not connected ??
asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2016-08-04#1514253 << it was eaten by systemd. there is a (last i saw, working) clean fork, 'eudev'. and it looks like phf explains further down in the l0gz.
PeterL: mpex.co not responding, what is the correct tld?
thestringpuller: The thing that would intrigue me is an updated chart using MP's method from the "lets chronicle the scammer drama" and had a chart for the total loss of the economy due to scams over 2012 charted by month
thestringpuller: So basically Steemit's fate is being turned into a straight up spam machine since it has no soultion in place for the eternal september except "premined votes from ned and dan" and btc bagholders who bought extremely early and can't yet exit. This is the doom I believe Bitcoin would have faced if Roger, Gavin, Hearia, or whatever incarnation of USG programmed hedonist-bot had hijacked the entire system and allowed spam to be cheap. Th
thestringpuller: shinohai: Steem is slowly drying up. Volume and depth evaporated from bittrex, and they've openly admitted now it's designed like a ponzi to bring more people to the scene. But what I imagine actually happens, is a bunch of smart people write bots to go to war with each other. the spam bots and counter spam bots. The spam bots pretty much will just extract revenue from spam like anything else, but in this context it actually works, si
BingoBoingo: Explains the facebook drop!
mircea_popescu: dude what the fuck is that three galon clot
mircea_popescu: hopefully she gets the mj habit.
mircea_popescu: i could never fucking stand the twerp.
BingoBoingo: She sould thank her lucky stars she is too old for http://epmonthly.com/article/the-elephant-test/
BingoBoingo: The math is simple Action Movie > Reality TV
BingoBoingo: Democrat turned Republican Trump killed the GOP, Only Democrat turned Republican Greitens can save it
BingoBoingo: Or from Orlol's father outlet https://www.rt.com/usa/354538-missouri-candidate-machine-gun-ad/
ben_vulpes: not so bad west of the cascades though.
mircea_popescu: things are going to shit north of the rio.
BingoBoingo: 20 seconds of firing a rotary canon is the entire ad
BingoBoingo: Now that he won the GOP nomination for Missouri governor the ads heat up. Trump is totes going to get primaried in 2020 http://qz.com/749606/the-new-gop-nominee-for-missouri-governor-wants-you-to-vote-for-him-because-he-can-shoot-a-massive-gun-into-nothingness/
BingoBoingo: Eh, can't recycle them all for stem cells
mircea_popescu: "old enough to have scarlatine immunity ; young enough to not crack a hip if she drops to the floor"
BingoBoingo: ben_vulpes: 30-35 is when the women should be independent and wealthy after having finished basking in the glory of mircea_popescu and learning
ben_vulpes: anyways, unrelatedly, the new box stands on its own two feet. now to close the colo deal, rack and migrate.
mircea_popescu: apparently there's a silent epidemy killing tens of millions of women in their prime and nobody knew anything about it.
mircea_popescu: speaking of which : there's 10x more women aged 27-29 on facebook than there's women aged 30-35.
ben_vulpes not privy to the uncensored reports
mircea_popescu: the reason is obvious, they start at more millions than he has. not more millions than he;d have had the cardano shipped on schedule and we all make it rich off the exploding share price, but neways.
mircea_popescu: heck, alf should buy one, now's the time.
ben_vulpes: yeesh have you seen the rates though?
mircea_popescu: anyway, i usually ask them in turn how long they've been working, they say something with months in it, i ask them how they like it, they say not very much...