asciilifeform: 'He added that while robots aren't typically designed to be armed — they're used for observation or dismantling purposes — law enforcement could decide to use bomb robots when officers are in immediate danger.'
mircea_popescu: (it's something like a coupla billion worth, ie just enough to bridge britain through the brexit)
mircea_popescu: similarly fascinating, how women grew hair on head throughout the roman empire, showed up on coins with currently fashionable hairdo nevertheless ; or how they've had two tits and a slit for millenia yet always dressed in period dress everywherw!
trinque: fascinates me how the ancient instincts wear whichever "politically expedient" mask is available in the times
mircea_popescu: oh the german derp. myeah.
trinque: the raped chick
mircea_popescu: some derpy chick by the name selin goren got raped by a bunch of arab immigrants, liked it, reported to police that she was robbed by a group of german men.
mircea_popescu: and in other rotherham lulz, https://www.rt.com/news/349784-german-migrants-assault-lie/
mircea_popescu: these can't possibly participate in any sort of forum where actual people intercourse, simply because they've not what with.
mircea_popescu: somewhat relatedly, most people don't figure they have ANY authority. therein included, the authority to decide what to do with themselves at any point (gotta be in school in half hour! shiot im late for job interview! omg office hours!) or for that matter what to believe.
mircea_popescu: and of course it's perfectly understandable, the whore has a whore's personality not because she's an evil harpy shrew but because it's the only way to survive at the bottom of the shit ocean : batten the damned hatches.
mircea_popescu: time, or more likely, the grave will straighten out this hunchback.
mircea_popescu: it's infantile, sure, and moreover they're pretty miserable at it. nevertheless, it's what they're doing, and there's no outside flippable switch to get them out of it.
mircea_popescu: but the invisible line that unites curtis yarvin, that "lesswrong" derp, spandrell fellow, the restaurant manager chick yesterday, and on and on an endless list of these, is specifically that they welded the head shut.
mircea_popescu: anyway, to formalize this, i figure there's people who're looking to take ; and people who're looking to give themselves away asciilifeform . tmsr is entirely and to some degree by design inadherent to the former. it may, maybe, work for short intervals, but not too likely, and certainly less likely over time. this results in a lot of butthurt, calling it a cult, whatever.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform i wonder how much he makes out of selling books in 2016 for the love of lols.
asciilifeform: at this point, folks with actual interest in the subject would last five seconds in the school.
asciilifeform: thestringpuller: re 'institutional' - every other year or so i visit the headquarters of the dept i graduated from, on foot, just because i live nearby and why the hell not. but lately it is almost a challenge to avoid barfing
mircea_popescu: good translators ? without exception they're major actors in one, often both cultures.
mircea_popescu: iirc it was more a case of "hey, i'm here to promote ; oh you're not really an audience ? ok, ima go promote down the street"
asciilifeform: this is why i was sad to see spandrel drummed out, he was potentially a window into the other things.
thestringpuller: asciilifeform: the same rationale behind why there is no "sane computer" thread. i.e. dumbness is institutionalized. so wouldn't useless students be merely a symptom of this?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: the marginal refuse of the west picked up the derpiest chinese material
thestringpuller: so lack of "useful students" is the sole problem?
thestringpuller: They are useful, but are not rewarded for their usefulness...how is this sustainable?
thestringpuller: asciilifeform: so the fate full nodes are facing, is a similar fate good teachers face?
a111: Logged on 2016-07-08 14:31 mircea_popescu: though their classics give me hives.
asciilifeform: i suspect that the good teachers have been driven into drink, and retirement
mircea_popescu: $s brin the elder
mircea_popescu: though their classics give me hives.
thestringpuller: mircea_popescu: not sure where that abroad would be. << the ones I would trust with money usually studied in China.
mircea_popescu: there is no us citizen alive today who is qualified to as much as teach latin.
thestringpuller: asciilifeform: illicit experiments in your cellar. << What about a good teacher? Is the teacher extinct from a scholarly perspective.
mircea_popescu: thestringpuller not sure where that abroad would be. damascus maybe.
asciilifeform: thestringpuller: i've never met a 'study abroad' type in usa who wasn't prestige-farming 'future student leaders!111' apparatchik candidate
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform can't really experiment with the other kind however ; an tomes lie. not by design but in effect.
asciilifeform: actual education, in usa, to the extent it can be had, is done by skipping class and hanging out among the dusty tomes, and illicit experiments in your cellar.
mircea_popescu: was marginally possible in the 80s, but no more.
mircea_popescu: alf has it. you can not, for any sum of money, acquire a classics education in the english language today.
thestringpuller: the actual education even if considered "top class" results in MIT graduates unable to light a bulb with battery + wire
asciilifeform: but you ~can~ pay 200k usd to derp about the great zimbabwe for 4 (5? 6?) years.
asciilifeform: you ~can't get either kind in usa
thestringpuller: mircea_popescu: a classics education always beats a stem << this doesn't get undergrad children jobs in the US. interesting though, that having gotten a stem education, i feel extremely deprived of not having studied as many classics
mircea_popescu: but whatever, i have no expectation to explain to ustards that a classics education always beats a stem education. not in this life. the contrary nonsense's been derped too much, and they've never seen anyone with a classical education anyway.
mircea_popescu: notrly teh other way around.
mircea_popescu: you know... it's social interaction that fell behind their redittardedly advancing technologee
asciilifeform: also a case of 'cost paid by mircea_popescu to talk to a thousand derps to get their pennies is not a cost because we say so and shuddup terrorist'
mircea_popescu: "One of the more interesting long-term practical benefits of the technology and concept behind decentralized autonomous organizations is that DAOs allow us to very quickly prototype and experiment with an aspect of our social interactions that is so far arguably falling behind our rapid advancements in information and social technology elsewhere: organizational governance. " << apud buterin, 2014.
mircea_popescu: it's like infants were locked in a tower somewhere and asked to imagine how the world could be.
mircea_popescu: think about it alfie, if i want to buy a thousand votes i'm going to say so and pay a million, rather than talk to a thousand derps and pay them a cent each.
mircea_popescu: Quadratic voting is a procedure that a group of people can use to jointly choose a collective good for themselves. Each person can buy votes for or against a proposal by paying into a fund the square of the number of votes that he or she buys. The money is then returned to voters on a per capita basis. Weyl and Lalley prove that the collective decision rapidly approximates efficiency as the number of voters increases. By cont
mircea_popescu: and speaking of purely academitarded wankatrons, "Glen Weyl has uploaded a new version of his paper, Quadratic Voting (written with Steven Lalley), to SSRN, which now includes the completed proofs. Quadratic voting is the most important idea for law and public policy that has emerged from economics in (at least) the last ten years.
asciilifeform: ETH, not necessarily BTC or fiat). The irony is it's the pro-fork people who tend to be the loudest voices calling their opponents "shills."'
asciilifeform: 'One thing a lot of pro-fork people don't realize is that they're basically encouraging a very damaging form of speculation on the value of ETH. Because a hard fork promises to return ETH at a rate of < 100 DAO per ETH, it encourages people to buy up large amounts of DAO tokens at their current rates (> 100 DAO per ETH), and then actively advocate for the fork to happen. Last time I checked, this guarantees them a profit of > 30% (in
mircea_popescu: gotta economize on the lulz, comedy goldmine running out of gold.
mircea_popescu: https://archive.is/vOYow << should be sufficient lulz to bridge you over for another week.
mircea_popescu: "This is why I love Ethereum. The main net is live for less than a year, yet tthis is the third big convention. " to quote the locals.
mircea_popescu: atm all hopes pinned on microsoft-sponsored "devcon" for the scamcoin. basically, mit can either get another usg agency involved or they're dropping it, they lost all they were gonna lose on it already.
mircea_popescu: i don';t recall when that was, they had like a week maybe ?
asciilifeform: yeah but at some point they gotta pull trigger, no ?
mircea_popescu: i dunno, drama fountain, we kinda covered the basics, they just rehash, shanonize and markov the same stuff endlessly.
mircea_popescu: they've got a solution
a111: Logged on 2016-07-08 12:57 mircea_popescu: o hey look at that, ethereum actually up 2.5%.
asciilifeform: they do.
mircea_popescu: beetle therein depicted made it to 1yo! gets party butt-hat.
mircea_popescu: but hey, "the eu is not so much a conglomerate with a very small penis as an agglomeration with a particularly large clit"
asciilifeform: but omfg11!11111 the ~teeth~!!!1111
asciilifeform: they picked worthless lap dog instead of rottweiler
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform eu has a small penis. greeks are 10mn, turks 80. not to go into details of how lazy pretentious people fit much better, or into how they're also not much of a threat.
mircea_popescu: country's basically the equivalent of shannen doherty. was hot briefly in its youth, by now it's a great way to pour money down the drain.
mircea_popescu: i see no other possible explanation.
asciilifeform: about the brits ?
mircea_popescu: you familiar with my theory ?
asciilifeform: one of the mega-mysteries in my mind re gr is wtf was the logic behind inviting them into eu in the first place
mircea_popescu: certainly not a sort of meal ticket for the accursed lot.
mircea_popescu: internet demolished books, then printing. cable caries many million mile-tons of substitute goods per second
mircea_popescu: lol. you know how many unneeded ships there are today ?
asciilifeform: greeks could still make a noteworthy mess - they have ships, perhaps could get hold of a few nukes, demolish eu ports
asciilifeform: entente invaded, got arse handed to them.
mircea_popescu: otherwise this quickly becomes the greek argument, "we borrowed and spent but shouldn't have to repay because hey, new government!"
asciilifeform: sorta how revolutions work tho - none of the dumb shit is binding.
mircea_popescu: once he did, it's committed, he did it as the legitimate representative at the time, his shit no matter how dumb is binding.
mircea_popescu: notrly how this works. if they were so high and mighty, should have shot him BEFORE he committed ~the country~
asciilifeform: ww1 is somewhat different case, the ~you~ died
asciilifeform: you borrow, buy a horse, the horse dies, you still owe
asciilifeform: and at any rate it is not very good example, didn't we learn that derp's mother was co-borrowing ?
mircea_popescu: point in case : if parents of useless redditard shoot him, they STILL owe on his college debt
asciilifeform: or when the idiot who put you there gets his rightful bullet, along with his whole family
mircea_popescu: in fact thinking about it - the ro-ru bad blood starts with the revolutionary derps deserting the front. cela ne se fait pas.
asciilifeform: likewise the locals gotta have some desire to fight for your crown, rather than for their local chieftain, (or even redditing instead)
mircea_popescu: hence the "2k people signed up for deportation" lulz yest.
mircea_popescu: course... there IS that epic tale of sobieski's siege of piatra neamt, anyone know it ?
mircea_popescu: i think the poles prolly won by point count.
mircea_popescu: kinda went both ways, between the suceava and krakow courts.
mircea_popescu: BingoBoingo eh, pre 1800s the russians hadn't yet been invented in europe. was all polish.
mircea_popescu: and in ww1, there was proper ro army alright. there wasn't proper ru army, though, lenin's idea was to a) abandon the allies front and b) go "wee wee please don't beat us up mr european powers sir"
mircea_popescu: mno, there's also that little one in the 1880s when tarevich wrote desperately to plox come to turkey and save our asses we're dying here.
asciilifeform: i only recall 1 where there was a proper ro army
mircea_popescu: pick any one of them.
BingoBoingo: venmo is basically a tool that puts a 1 cent price tag on spamming the shit out of anyone with a venmo coin client
a111: Logged on 2016-07-08 06:09 mircea_popescu: also re tiny : ro is 15% of ru or somesuch ; ru is 35% or so of eu or somesuch. tiny country is monaco, diff story. otherwise, germany's a third of brazil and saudi arabia a 15% of pakistan naimean ?
deedbot: [Qntra] Water Charity Maximizes Their Marketing On Paypal's Venmo - http://qntra.net/2016/07/water-charity-maximizes-their-marketing-on-paypals-venmo/
deedbot: [Qntra] Theranos CEO To Be Banned From Operating Lab - http://qntra.net/2016/07/theranos-ceo-to-be-banned-from-operating-lab/
mircea_popescu lolz at the shitcoins. bitcoin cap 10bn, yest trade 1/4 bn (2.5%) ; ethereum "cap" 800mn, yest trade 11mn (1.2%) ; ripple "cap" 250mn (hey, recall when it was 1bn+, above ethereum ?), yest trade 500k (0.2%).
mircea_popescu: thestringpuller women, too, because fucking equalitards omit to mention to girls how they really can't keep up with dudes.
mircea_popescu: o hey look at that, ethereum actually up 2.5%.
thestringpuller: Man thinking about all the parties I've been to where there was some girl puking her brains out in her "night gear" (the kinda clothes you wear to work the corner), crying their eyes out with someone annoyed holding their hair back.
thestringpuller: Another good one is as a freshman, one of my friends lived in a dorm with a lot of sorority pledges. So when she was getting up for her 8am class, she'd see girls stumble in go to the toilets. Puke. Put on makeup, and go to class...
thestringpuller: Funny story. My last semester in school, I was walking to my goto pub. These chicks are crossing the street right? One of them pukes on the light post. Her friends help her stand a little. Then after the light changes she continues walking as if nothing ever happened.
thestringpuller: and this is why the current game I'm playing is 20 years old...
thestringpuller: Like when EA bought PopCap cause Plants vs Zombies could be remade 4mn times like the sims and still sell.
thestringpuller: oh wow activision is going the EA route.
mircea_popescu: thestringpuller if she would where's her titpic! :D
thestringpuller: My girlfriend would very much hates that about the US.
mircea_popescu: it's one thing to put a 50 ft tall poster of a nude woman kissing a campari olive on a drab gray wall across from the campus enclosure.
thestringpuller: Yea. The college club scene is very akin to herding. Actually similar to high school.
mircea_popescu: and the problem with this theory is that us media, unlike everyone else who's sane, won't carry nudity.
thestringpuller: So all the "advertisement" is in relation to 1) showing guys there are hot girls there 2) getting hot girls there
mircea_popescu: thestringpuller club scene is fundamentally pimp scene. it'd better be, the alternative is what, highschool cafeteria + prep talks ?
thestringpuller: The plebs for college students usually is just "get as many girls here as possible to attract frat dudes to buy them drinks"
mircea_popescu: that gives you a steady stream of those in the 100s, and then all the aspie schmucks pay to get in and rub... elbows.
mircea_popescu: nah. the way this works is you open a 10k seater club, have 50-100 girls to go to all the CEO types in that city, tell them "if you agree to come to X club this weekend i'll take all my clothes off and you can fingerfuck me right here on yoru desk"
thestringpuller: Yea. I used to work that scene. Honestly the club scene in america is very much turning into "the pimp scene" or maybe it always was taht.
thestringpuller: Aha. I was talking more about the pub-esque "regulars". You know the drunk who spends 2k a month on booze.
mircea_popescu: clubs DO work like this, in the larger towns. but the lists are maintained by a loose network of associated strippers/whores/pr girls, who do the promotion footwork.
mircea_popescu: back in the old country, reservations worked like so : unknown plebe could get "reservation", only valid if none of the important people showed up.
mircea_popescu: thestringpuller there a) is no such thing as loyal customers and b) no conceivable reason restaurant would care. which is why they don't even bother to keep lists.
mircea_popescu: ~the same relation as between playing candy crush and cooking.
thestringpuller: more like useful in the sense of new local restaurant trying to target the most loyal customers
mircea_popescu: there is scarce relation between "web metrics and online analytics" and marketing.
thestringpuller: given bitcoin is anti-consumer, marketing doesn't have an immediate value because any sane business should not care about what the consumer thinks
mircea_popescu: useful in the sense playing candy crush is useful. gives you something to do in the subte.
thestringpuller: advertising is generally bastardized. analytics and metrics are useful (sometimes). depends on if you care about the market reaction or not.
mircea_popescu: you can ask the ethereum huffers to be fucking sane already until you fall over. but #etherape and a few short weeks later they've all woken up.
thestringpuller: the lets poke wordpress sites until one of them gives and then post a bunch of spam backlinks
mircea_popescu: kinda in line with the diy ethos of the rest of computing. you want to be secure ? you're better off taking out the holes than "hiring a team of experts". whatever you want - take it, don't ask.
mircea_popescu: from experience, "hacking" delivers infinitely better results than "advertising". ie you're better off raping the site than paying the site.
thestringpuller: although i think the campaign was yanked prematurely @_@
thestringpuller: (iirc from the namworld campaign with coinroll or what not)
gribble: The operation succeeded.
gribble: The operation succeeded.
Joshua-I: They didn't just permit it, but were studied in it, which in the cases of their private residences and gardens suggests the opposite of what you suggest at the end there
Joshua-I: Those noble types did like to impress each other and feel an exclusivity in their interpretations of art
mircea_popescu: also re tiny : ro is 15% of ru or somesuch ; ru is 35% or so of eu or somesuch. tiny country is monaco, diff story. otherwise, germany's a third of brazil and saudi arabia a 15% of pakistan naimean ?
Joshua-I: I rewatched True Romance the other day (thanks to you) and now I must have those rad sunglasses Clarence wears at some point
mircea_popescu: otherwise, lightbulbs were apparently invented sometime in 2010
mircea_popescu: the ridoinculous half-afro-and-mustache look of the 70s and wtf-is-with-sunglasses-indoors 80s/90s
mircea_popescu: and in other "50 years of" news, http://filthygifs.tumblr.com/post/130267399248/ganguponher-ah-yes-dp-the-great-american
a111: Logged on 2016-07-08 03:26 Joshua-I: Art is the most supreme, most divine of instructions
mircea_popescu: "there can be no such thing as lithuania" "yawell."
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform this may well work from the "public good" interest, but what exactly does it do for lithuania ?
asciilifeform: tiny countries who bend over for nee owner and think that they still get to decide anything, remind me of the familiar 'yappy dogs' old women keep
asciilifeform: when joined nato and told that their '13333347' 'werewolf brigades' or wtf nazi claptrap was unneeded and they would be working as nurses strictly in nato army, should there even be any lithuanians left on day 2 of war ?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: do you recall the lithuanian butthurt of half a decade or so ago ?
mircea_popescu: the one universal socket wrench, ointment and single idea anyone could ever need! DEMOCRACY!
mircea_popescu: this is the typical characteristic of cults and quacks, of course, but who's to notice THAT.
mircea_popescu: eedom to give us all their shit for free, and romania really didn't need a nuclear activities agency",
mircea_popescu: anyway, i gotta admit the "democracy" drivel is nothing if not incredibly flexible. can be spread on bread as "science not cults!!11", can be spread on bread as "say no to silly (orly?) power games and ~~~sycophancy~~~" because if you call male independence the bad word it'll totally stick, men are really just a bunch of women that deeply care about labels like that. can obviously be spread as "the people of libya want the fr
mircea_popescu: apparently one of the direct, entrenched results of no woman being pimpslapped for talking out of order in anyone's personal memory is a whole lot of those "that's nice dear, now come to bed" sorta vomits.
mircea_popescu: what am i going to hear next, that the people of libya want "freedom" ?
mircea_popescu: "Because I mean WOT is not too revolutionary when it is just another name for a bunch of peoples' non-interoperable personal black books between which information can be exchanged only by explicitly manual means." << da fuck, "your working thing's no good!"
trinque: we'll see how the number of shooters dwindles though
a111: Logged on 2015-09-02 04:15 asciilifeform: the discreditation of local police apparatus, for its eventual demolition and replacement by unified fed gendarmerie, is going on schedule.
trinque: http://www.theatlantic.com/news/archive/2016/07/dallas-protest-shooting/490451/ << reporting that the suspects have threatened a bombing
trinque: hey, maybe they're gonna have a revival of allah snackbar, #blacklivesmatter edition
a111: Logged on 2016-06-15 20:49 asciilifeform: no word re the american snipers in bucharest '89, or moscow '93, or venezuela '02, ...., ...
BingoBoingo: Nah, if there is only one it is this treatise on money http://trilema.com/they-really-are-buttcoins-nao
trinque: check this guy out.. the one
Joshua-I: I've found it.. the one important trilema post: http://trilema.com/2014/what-interests-me-in-a-project/ ;P
Joshua-I: Think the gettin' will be good post-halving
Joshua-I: Easily fulfilling the requirements of sense and intellect simultaneously
Joshua-I: Art is the most supreme, most divine of instructions
Joshua-I: Not much for aesthetics are we
asciilifeform has secret vice - luvvvz various artz, spent good chunk of chicago trip in the gallery
mircea_popescu: which is why people teach the upper class kids these things ; the rest dun has teh time.
mircea_popescu: it WOULD be fucking boring ; without knowledge of the history etc.
mircea_popescu: that this rank nonsense of obvious source still survives is nothing if not a testament to the ignorant, parochial ustardian society.
mircea_popescu: the expectation art would "move you" is a late revival of idiotic victorian-romantic notions whereby women, mentally stunted by their gender and therefore incapable of comprehending art, nevertheless "felt it" somehow, ovary-magically.
BingoBoingo: http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/bizarre-graffiti-fires-and-other-vandalism-target-st-louis-churches/article_dd45a33c-b23f-53bb-aea2-370617575e34.html
mats: not sure if i'm broken or the art.
mats: no endorphins moving around, no sense of the thing inspires a sense of awe or beauty in me, i literally don't feel anything
mircea_popescu: mats not sure how familiar with art history & theory you are, but anyway, the point is let's call it "essentialisation", ie, a very deep stylisation of form.
mats: i dunno man. the vast majority of all art i have ever seen exhibited in museums and galleries or whut not do absolutely nothing for me
asciilifeform: 'We sellin' scramble, coke en smack, keep them junkies commin' back.' << l0l
mats: the eyeball protrusions, is that supposed to mean something?
mod6: <+mats> and apparently mike judge plans to bring it back << there was a new season that he created a year or two ago
a111: Logged on 2016-07-08 01:20 phf: there used to be a generation of 70s anthropologists in u.s. who read gary snyder and did things with their hands, they would teach all these interesting retro technology classes. they are mostly gone now, i've managed to catch their last wave and got a distinct feel from them "kids these days fucking suck"
mircea_popescu: the difference between the 70s born shitheads and the millenials being that back in the 70s http://btcbase.org/log/2016-07-08#1499121 and therefore there was someone to mock them
mircea_popescu: mats ~nobody finds it funny that didn't know 5`000 various idiots that, if brancusi'd, end up beavis and butthead.
mats: i never understood the humor in 'beavis and butt-head'
BingoBoingo: Not to mention the imported corn
mircea_popescu: i keep hoping the great cornholio shows up in comment section one day
mod6: i like the corn related stories on qntra
mircea_popescu: but anyway, corn output doubled since the 80s/90s. it can't be said agro tech hasn't improved.
mircea_popescu: the corn is everything.
mircea_popescu: "just the corn" = all soda ; all mcdonalds/etc hamburgers ; all sauce, icecream etc.
BingoBoingo: And that's just the corn
mircea_popescu: check it out, there's a worldofcorn.com website for BingoBoingo 's pleasure. 2015 us avg yield was 168.4 bushels / acre for a total 13.6 bn bushels. corn is about 400 calories / lb, there's 56 lb per bushel of shelled corn, thus therefore
a111: Logged on 2016-07-08 02:01 phf: the lady is clearly special
Joshua-I: If you go with a browser like lynx the redirect never happens
Joshua-I: Well I'm not willing to bother running it again, but from what I can deduce it checks whether you're running certain browsers then fucks your browser accordingly with nasty js
ben_vulpes: pick either malice or incompetence
ben_vulpes: Joshua-I: btw, d'you plan to negrate pankkake for the malicious js?
phf: the lady is clearly special
mircea_popescu: but in other headfucking.net news, http://66.media.tumblr.com/17c94b60081a797c24faa5be296473c9/tumblr_mflc8zFSsZ1s1vwalo1_400.gif
mircea_popescu: i suspect she's not quite together.
ben_vulpes: rape scene, french flim, something something the girl
shinohai: so many mixed reactions there mod6
mircea_popescu: http://66.media.tumblr.com/f16c8cb89f75bf1274bac0fb3aee0689/tumblr_nvgkmunt4o1roh230o1_400.gif << place the scene.
mircea_popescu: one day all the trolage is going to come back to bite us.
mircea_popescu: s'the problem phf, your alf-made interpreter barfs on unterminated data ? :D
BingoBoingo: Right, freenode has aimed its anus at you, hence you getting the shit. Phenomenon colloquially known as aimnus.
BingoBoingo: asciilifeform: Nah, it is exactly as shitty as last week. Just happens to have aimnus'd at you at the moment.
asciilifeform: in other nyooz, fleanode is really turning to shit.
BingoBoingo: I mean seriously the people derping about STEM, access, and MOOC have to be actually taking about something other than what they say those things expand to
hanbot: shelters of the world! i'd take a yurt class fo' sho'
hanbot: BingoBoingo not a bad idea. how 'bout i keep it and its wretched brothers aside as i go and write a roundup thingie when done? to go with the "peace studies" one and whatever other horrors await.
phf: there was a guy at local community college who taught "shelters of the world" class, which started with "build a log cabin for a grade" some time in the 80s and ended with "design shelter on paper, bring me something, i will make curve"