mircea_popescu: sam altman is the exact equivalent of britni spears.
assbot: Logged on 01-03-2015 00:25:20; gabriel_laddel: from http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/03/sam-altman-is-not-blithering-idiot.html
mircea_popescu: not aryan white, either. dat vampire look, darkhaired goldilocks
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform myeah. and they're all colored.
mircea_popescu: http://log.bitcoin-assets.com/?date=01-03-2015#1036423 << ironically, the decay contains its own cure. there is literally nothing better for your average redditard than a forced communal living situation.
assbot: Logged on 20-01-2015 23:17:04; mircea_popescu: ben_vulpes well, it's clarified some things for me. i live within blocks of the center of all "manifestations" "public meetings" and so forth. there's on average two a week of these. they're not all political, but the political ones seemed quite suspect to me
asciilifeform: "what is the plan b of yonder artificial lake, once dykes fail ?" << 'what should one do when a shell lands in the trench ?' -- 'jump up twenty metres and scatter yourself around.' (brit., circa ww1)
gabriel_laddel: mircea_popescu: local political situation (are the orcs known as such?), number of useful nuclear engineers to take care of the two reactors you've got etc.
mircea_popescu: "i have come to liberate the buds man!"
gabriel_laddel: I will note for those reading, Argentina's orcs look the part.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform there's nothing whatever optional about these "plans". they're not plans in the normal sense, moar like, "what is the plan b of yonder artificial lake, once dykes fail ?"
assbot: Logged on 01-03-2015 00:04:30; asciilifeform: ben_vulpes: to round off the earlier thread, house will be confiscated a) ahead of schedule, if you get lucky b) when your local real estate racket's ability to crank out drywall, pour cement, assemble the thing is outpaced by, e.g., flood of $refugees from $pisshole who 'deserve' your house and your neighbour's
mircea_popescu: http://log.bitcoin-assets.com/?date=01-03-2015#1036409 << speaking of the entire "deserve your house', the fema experiments in st louis were a complete success.
asciilifeform: consisting of a buncha newly minted retirees in the swiss alps
asciilifeform: my guess - quite like the soviet 'b plan'
asciilifeform: say, today there's a 'quadra tracker' for every five or six working portable mass-spec products, what if the proportion were reversed ?
asciilifeform: (of the working hardware kind)
asciilifeform: pointing out that the voodoo will be the wunderwaffen of choice for a hypothetical 'berlin '45' usg, rather than wunderwaffen
gabriel_laddel is not entirely sure how things will play out, but MF's prescription is really the only available option
gabriel_laddel: nah, those who invest in voodoo will get slaughtered by those who enact the plan you voiced on Mr. M's blog.
asciilifeform: this one is gonna be short on manhattan project and long on amulets issued to the cannon fodder that 'ward off bullets with the power of jizzus'
gabriel_laddel: Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. when that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. that I belive is our basic function: to develop altenatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.
asciilifeform: gabriel_laddel: check your time machine settings. you've arrived at the wrong war
gabriel_laddel: Vaguely related to the conversation above, I'm hoping for a war sometime soon - they are a good way to go about separating content from nonsense. Von N., Teller, etc. wouldn't have been able to work on the atomic bomb without the various powers that be helping out.
asciilifeform: e.g., turkish eunuch having (decorative, naturally!) harems of their own, complete with... eunuch guards
gabriel_laddel: ^ on the macro scale, far more damaging
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: where do you suppose the legends of moneyed folks hunting bipedal prey in arizona, etc. come from ?
gabriel_laddel: BingoBoingo: well yes, c does modify the rewards pathway, but one neednt do it.
BingoBoingo: gabriel_laddel: When you make your fortune on stupidity, the cocaine you can afford makes you liek the stupidity
gabriel_laddel: related to "cocaine" - the only way I can do boring parsing tasks anymore is by drinking enough caffine to get high.
asciilifeform: for the microshit and www stack shit eaters
asciilifeform: for the 'a-students' who have all the crud memorized unthinkingly and 'are marketable'
BingoBoingo: "Cocaine Induced Brain Atrophy" is the obstacle
asciilifeform: must be fueled by burning hatred for the way it all is
asciilifeform: and no one will undo the 40 yrs of retardation who has reached this state
asciilifeform: but if that venture relates to computing in any way, you will probably render your brain unfit for the original mission.
asciilifeform: so quite right - one needn't (mustn't!) start there.
asciilifeform: gabriel_laddel: well actually your observation is correct above: the only way to fund such a thing is to be obscenely successful in some entirely unrelated venture.
asciilifeform: i specifically assign the failure of each and every attempt to date with the notion that you can get to the moon by piling chairs.
gabriel_laddel: If your goal is to do a chip level restart, one needn't start there, from a business perspective.
asciilifeform: and how 5m wouldn't even appear as a droplet of rain in the seven seas.
gabriel_laddel: I disagree. You want to do this in one fell swoop. There are other ways to go about it.
asciilifeform: gabriel_laddel: problem is, the folks willing to be the 'pioneers with arrows in their back' would each have to pay 100M not 100K for the thing to happen.
gabriel_laddel: My point with the 20k is that there are individuals who are willing to fund such ventures. Yes, MP hasn't put up 5MM usd for sane computing, but afaik, no one has proposed such a plan to him.
gabriel_laddel: I agree. My point is that there is a market.
asciilifeform: incidentally, there is apparently a market for diamond-and-gold-encrusted but otherwise ordinary wintel laptops.
gabriel_laddel: Also, MP gave 20K to openBSD - there are people willing to fund such ventures.
asciilifeform: who's gonna pay the $25K that thing will - inevitably - cost ?
gabriel_laddel: Yes. Someone needs to specify their requirements, then someone else needs to take a trip to china, find suppliers etc. and assemble somthing sane. Like system76, except not for Ubuntu crap
asciilifeform: do all the peripherals - incl. gpu and power management module (e.g., suspend-to-ram) function without burping under linux/bsd ?
gabriel_laddel: feminist theater
asciilifeform: because what's the alternative.
asciilifeform: another colleague of mine is shipping his back as we speak - kernel panics every 20min or so
asciilifeform: the madness of the terminally bored is key to understanding much of what we spoke of here.
gabriel_laddel: Also, I /don't like/ the macbook retina, fancy as it may be
gabriel_laddel: Eh, perhaps I'm strange, but these things don't tickle me in the right places. Mountains of coke? Fun, surely, but it gets boring after a while...
asciilifeform: why ru oligarchs buy british sport teams, without giving a damn whether it wins or loses, etc
asciilifeform: but also a certain amount of 'sultan has infinite money, why shouldn't he sit down on a toilet of monocrystalline diamond, the costlier and more useless - the better'
gabriel_laddel: "why funded and by whom ?" << I really can't figure this out, it's like the relationship the USG club have with the Saudis. *mumble mumble* ... little boys... *mumble mumble*
gabriel_laddel: I don't think it's a scam exactly... what they want is for nothing to change, and he provided it. :/
asciilifeform: but as i gather the urbit folks are occupied primarily with pitching just this elaborate scam on the vc circuit
asciilifeform: watch his film (somebody filmed him pitching at a conference of one kind or another)
gabriel_laddel: the impotent bezzle-lords?
asciilifeform: incidentally - and i am quite sure that mr mold would disagree - but he went to the precise place where i proclaimed he is doomed to go.
assbot: Unqualified Reservations: Sam Altman is not a blithering idiot ... ( http://bit.ly/1DnlA1X )
gabriel_laddel: from http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/03/sam-altman-is-not-blithering-idiot.html
gabriel_laddel: Has anyone considered the possibility that the living dead are kept around, safe from the Soilent Green pot, encouraged to be fruitful and multiply, etc. precisely to help make arbeit macht frei ever so slowly more palatable to the remaining humans?
gabriel_laddel: Could we instead ask for concertina wire, mine fields, and automatic turrets separating the human beings - with their robotic plenty - from the zombies, with their decay and hunger for flesh?
gabriel_laddel: I think this "Stanislav Datskovskiy" guy has the right idea though...
gabriel_laddel: I've listened to my friends talk about their sibling's lives at google. They make (nominally) lots of money, but it all is consumed by the costs of living.
gabriel_laddel: the hell that googlers live in now is amusing
asciilifeform: outfits such as 'google', i'm told, are experimenting with bringing back the factory dormitory. which would have a bright future in usa, if there were any factories
asciilifeform: gabriel_laddel: voluntary (nominally) for the adults, yes
assbot: Logged on 13-11-2014 05:31:28; asciilifeform: 'Astolphe de Custine was brought up for a time by a faithful servant, living in penury with her in the only room of the Custine home that had not been looted and sealed off by Jacobin zealots and thieves.'
gabriel_laddel: also the kibbutz is a voluntary arrangement afaik
gabriel_laddel: Used for communal something-or-other
gabriel_laddel: Incidentally, a friend of mine from Romania told me a story about what happened to his family's house during the communist revolution: It was seized, concrete was poured on the (expensive hardwood!) floors after it was stripped of any valuables.
asciilifeform: the practical difference is that folks -work- at a kolhoz
asciilifeform: rather than straight cynical meat warehouse
asciilifeform: if their luck holds.
asciilifeform: these folks are being prepared, by the flats far more so than anything in the lecture halls, for how the rest of their lives will be lived.
asciilifeform: just a few hrs ago i drove past a street where they were knocking down, as we speak, sixteen or so blocks of rental houses
asciilifeform: ben_vulpes: where i live, the rental racket is being rapidly rolled up by mega-conglomerates who specialize in building titanic blocks of communal flats
ben_vulpes: i'm sure there's some fatalistic reasoning against buying property and renting it out in this scenario
asciilifeform: the renters - different story.
asciilifeform: ben_vulpes: the rentiers are swimming 'in chocolate' and happier than could ever wish
assbot: Logged on 29-01-2015 04:09:15; asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: the town where i live is being slowly converted into gigantic sov-style communal flats (officially, 'student housing', in practice - they will live their whole lives therein)
asciilifeform: when it becomes a question of physical difficulty in obtaining any other way, or even prior - a symbolic but tasty bone thrown to folks who hate you for what you are - the confiscations.
asciilifeform: ben_vulpes: to round off the earlier thread, house will be confiscated a) ahead of schedule, if you get lucky b) when your local real estate racket's ability to crank out drywall, pour cement, assemble the thing is outpaced by, e.g., flood of $refugees from $pisshole who 'deserve' your house and your neighbour's
asciilifeform: 'So far there has been only one issue with the text content: publishing of drug production recipes is illegal in Russia, so we received a request from the government agency to hide them from visitors from Russia (otherwise they would block the whole site). Visitors from other countries can see those pages.'
mircea_popescu: btw i sent the archive.today guy a note, if he shows up him
assbot: Logged on 28-02-2015 23:38:48; ben_vulpes: i'm interested in the survivor's tale. taking notes on how to get the least fucked.
asciilifeform: was that the one where 'i'm not selling a license to shoot bookies today'
mircea_popescu: put it at the top, tis great.
assbot: Logged on 28-02-2015 23:24:13; asciilifeform: though folks who differ from above portrait solely in the have-money part (e.g. shrem) are also a favourite prey animal
mircea_popescu: http://log.bitcoin-assets.com/?date=28-02-2015#1036312 << "we only pick fighters we know we can put the fear of god in".
asciilifeform: but what if one of the ingredients went missing. or hiccuped.
asciilifeform: ben_vulpes: and the factory churns on, because the trucks carrying gypsum come on schedule, the roughnecks show up, etc
mircea_popescu: <asciilifeform> probably 'name own price' << yeah, right. usg would rather have google translated material by some crafty armenian at "pay grade" than pay what competent guy asks.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform i can read russian poetry a lot better once someone's conveniently done 99% of the work, found the equivalents, set out the rhyming scheme etc
asciilifeform: there is actually a small drywall (sheets) factory not far from where i live
asciilifeform: ben_vulpes: basic observation (by no means mine! or even solely orlov's) is that collapse comes 'in fits.' for example, at the moment it did not occur to you to think that obtaining drywall or labourers to knock together a 'shitboard' house, could ever be problematic
asciilifeform: ^ parts 2 and 3 in same thread below there.
assbot: Logged on 22-12-2013 19:11:43; asciilifeform: http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/060105_soviet_lessons.shtml
asciilifeform: if you like dead tree, it's 'reinventing collapse', 'hold your applause', and 'the five stages of collapse' in that order.
asciilifeform: he devotes a few pages to them.
asciilifeform: (the folks who got the worst of it, are not here and are certainly not writing books in engl.)
ben_vulpes: is orlov's account of the soviet collapse halfway accurate?
asciilifeform: basic hypothesis here: the machine is still burning fat, rather than own muscle, while what is being stolen is the surplus
ben_vulpes: why go through the trouble of confiscating, when again, funds for disbursement to the 'blessed poor' can be routed to the homebuilders?
ben_vulpes: what, then?
asciilifeform: not simply a matter of balance sheet, either.
asciilifeform: answer is that the machine doesn't work if run on 100% bzollar
ben_vulpes: politically useful. see the routine audits of whoever's not in power.
ben_vulpes: why bother? just print more.
asciilifeform: right now is 'easy going' because the polizei are only expected to deliver up carcasses for the show trials, rather than revenue
asciilifeform: i.e. the folks with houses, jobs, savings (miracle!), bitcoin
asciilifeform: esp. once the maggots are done with the rotting flesh (above tale and similar) and start on the living meat
asciilifeform: two tastes that go great together (TM)
asciilifeform: the only thing better than a generic imbecile is one with a titanic bag of benjies under his car seat
asciilifeform: though folks who differ from above portrait solely in the have-money part (e.g. shrem) are also a favourite prey animal
asciilifeform: ben_vulpes: the interesting thing is that so far they use that and only that kind of 'feedstock'
asciilifeform: esp. if you consider that they have to be 'cleared', (nominally) loyaltied, etc
assbot: Logged on 27-02-2015 01:24:58; asciilifeform: usg found two clinically certifiable imbeciles and now they have 'terrorists' in the dock
BingoBoingo: decimation: I'll give it another read. Maybe you could give a writeup a try since you seem to have a hook for it.
chetty: someone should start returning the favor
asciilifeform: ^ a snowdenism featured a cellar where nsa likes to open mail, plant bugs in routers, etc. there was an outside shot. someone appears to have found it on 'google earth' and is now marked
mod6: thestringpuller: what?
ben_vulpes: <asciilifeform> [04:32] what does ben_vulpes do with his apple boxen? just throws them out when disk fills ? << generally, backup disk, format, give to pets and or repurpose as misc. computing devices around the house/office.
cazalla: maybe it's an aussie thing to use killed for violent deaths, i am not the only one.. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-02-28/bitcoin-ceo-adam-tepper-killed-in-thailand/6271440 http://www.smh.com.au/national/australian-killed-in-thailand-identified-as-independent-reserve-ceo-20150228-13rmqe.html
thestringpuller: "i dont think its a good idea to go poking around the profiles of the dead on reddit."
chetty: yep, Andrew Tepper, A Tale in the Desert and Dragon Tales
BingoBoingo: dies or died probably the better word though
gribble: '60 Minutes' correspondent Bob Simon dies in car accident - CNN.com: <http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/11/us/bob-simon-dies/>; Woman killed after 3 vehicle accident on the Mass Pike | WWLP.com: <http://wwlp.com/2015/02/26/one-car-crash-on-mass-pike-in-westfield-injuries-reported/>; Bruce Jenner in Horrible Car Crash -- 1 Person Dead | TMZ.com: <http://www.tmz.com/2015/02/07/bruce- (1 more message)
mircea_popescu: cazalla a) killed is a little misleading, traditionally "died" is the word for accidental death ; b) isn't this teppy of dragon tale / tale in the desert fame ?
jurov: <asciilifeform> where's the stalingrad, damnit. << since usg is in hybrid warfare mostly with itself... no stalingrad possibly recognizable in that mess
asciilifeform: Since we, only we, are the buglers we've got.
asciilifeform: And dream till I die, of the bugler's bright song?
asciilifeform: Life hits me hard, knocks me out of the ring.
asciilifeform: And heroes awakened, and out poured their blood,
asciilifeform: Tachankas [1] and cannon did roll through the mud,
asciilifeform: And buglers were blowing their bugles once more,
asciilifeform: You'll learn who is who, and the truth cannot hide:
asciilifeform: 'The Buglers' (Noam Korzhavin, 1955.)
asciilifeform: eh, what the hell, it's ~1kb
gribble: The operation succeeded.
cazalla: you don't see them now do you fluffypony ?
mircea_popescu: http://40.media.tumblr.com/4a63527f5a90fd698739f30285fe0ba0/tumblr_mmoapj3TvS1rnhnkmo1_1280.jpg i leave you with the gift of dulap.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: say later if were able to digest it. otherwise i might have to attempt a transl.
asciilifeform: where's the stalingrad, damnit.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu remarked, iirc, that i'm living in berlin circa '44, but it looks rather more like '38 here.
asciilifeform: then - yes, leaks like sieve
decimation: maybe he was in the cherry business too
asciilifeform: when the last usg fighter runs headlong into the last usg bomber, and the fireball takes out their last aerial tanker, we can say 'can't'
asciilifeform: might check under the bed and see if the red button's still connected to something, before splat ?
mircea_popescu: on the asphalt.
mircea_popescu: and then splat she goes
mircea_popescu: it'd be because everyone's so saying, not for any other reason.
asciilifeform: kid may be so far he's spherical, but father was very, very rich.
mircea_popescu: eh... here's the caper : if she were, for a weird reason, the fucking queen of terrania
asciilifeform: usg is running on two centuries of plunder and exuberant technowankery, from which, granted, only fumes remain in the tank
asciilifeform: rather than just disfiguring
asciilifeform: or the locations of all x,xxx nato arms caches in ru and eastern eu
asciilifeform: or, going back to more familiar ground, the microcode update key perma-baked into all intel cpu since '95
asciilifeform: something from which no recovery is possible, any more than from shooting self in the head with a 'stinger'
asciilifeform: what'd count as a -real, indisputable- usg leak? example: info leading to perma-pwn of a whole constellation (hell, why not all of them) of usg orbiting junk
mircea_popescu: "can god make a rock so big and hide it so well he ends up making another one ???"
decimation: the journalists are made to look like buffoons
asciilifeform: get the budget high enough without making secrecy impossible << this is right back to the 64-quadrillion-bzollar question. the dept-of-breaking-pgp gets $maxint and remains totally secret - not to say that they've succeeded or even tried, but we have no idea how much cocaine they were able to buy with the $maxint, nor the carat purity of the gold of which their toilets were made
mircea_popescu: you can't get the budget high enough without making secrecy impossible.
mircea_popescu: well, i'm not the king of tinseltown, however, on the grounds of my cursory familiarty with the topic of making movies (ie, being a producer),
asciilifeform confesses to having only a very basic familiarity with the subject
mircea_popescu: actually they aren't. tax deductions abound.
mircea_popescu: the major difference here being that your example is some kids having fun, my example is some idiot trying to force a meme.
asciilifeform never sure if ever to believe these figures as they are traditionally ultra-lowballed for tax purposes
asciilifeform: the 64-quadrillion-bzollar question, nein ?
mircea_popescu: just look at the crud that gets released. and that's on "normal" topics, girl meets boy or w/e.
mircea_popescu: dude, they can't even make a film looking credible on 100mn.
asciilifeform did not see the film, but will say that he could probably produce a 'snowden' film with an arbitrarily high degree of 'truthiness' given a few $10M-usd
decimation: but he also seems rather aggrandizing
asciilifeform: (who said it had to be the sea)
asciilifeform: but basic point is that machine doesn't just cost what machine costs, but some actuarial numbers based on what the corpses' legal reps are likely to attempt/achieve
asciilifeform: what does ben_vulpes do with his apple boxen? just throws them out when disk fills ?
asciilifeform only opened it because had an ssd from visually identical machine of the same make, which turned out to be incompatible.
mircea_popescu: http://log.bitcoin-assets.com/?date=28-02-2015#1035767 << could the command be less verbose ? no : and no add- whatever. make it like deedbot- deed http://etc
mircea_popescu: http://log.bitcoin-assets.com/?date=28-02-2015#1035740 << the power of bitcoin decimal depth.
mircea_popescu: well im not really THAT into it, but i recall part of the eu assumption conditions was "no territorial disputes and no unresolved conflicts"
asciilifeform: otoh the original war was never declared, iirc
mircea_popescu: for every 10 bux of this there's 100 bux of "we got raped and had to pay the rapist for his cab fare"
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: now -that's- interesting. got a link to the treaty ?
asciilifeform: ^ these folks are -still- making it
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform sure. the thing about them orders and dynasties is... they do not work.
mircea_popescu: http://log.bitcoin-assets.com/?date=28-02-2015#1035693 << they did when they went into eu
asciilifeform: because, in a well-cultivated sc4mz0r0cr4cy with multigenerational rackets, there is usually an established pecking order
asciilifeform: but sometimes - there is.
mircea_popescu: if you ask the slut, often enough it's because "he's the only one that asked, and i was getting bored"
asciilifeform: not always there is a logical answer, granted
asciilifeform: thing is, with scam, the question is always 'why does this fella get to run this scam and not some other'
mircea_popescu: that pellet of usd that htey lost in iraq, that went to the arabs more than to the pansy ass sons of - sons of whom anyway ? patreus ?
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform i would guess that the successful instances of actual merit wash, as opposed to usg being straight scammed, to be under 10%.
mircea_popescu: whether actual bots or just human equivalents.
assbot: Logged on 27-02-2015 23:59:53; Stunna: The amount given away is pretty minimal due to botters
mircea_popescu: http://log.bitcoin-assets.com/?date=27-02-2015#1035660 << kinda the problem with giveaways : they attract exactly the scum, those you specifically do not want to deal with.
mircea_popescu: no, the govt itself.
asciilifeform: in any given instance of meritwash, somebody's being chumped (various folks who swallow the snake oil)
mircea_popescu: obviously they'd operate on a (being scammed) to (merit washing) continuum. it won't be either 0% or 100%.
asciilifeform: inviting cranks from abroad - altogether different ballgame from locally cultivated cynical graft
mircea_popescu: or is one special among all the idiot bureaucracies for reasons (tm)
asciilifeform: even usg, in the not too distant past, did this
asciilifeform: outside of usg - rules different, sure; foreigners invited to work their magic
mircea_popescu: the heamul project one. you recall, generalissimo peron was going to get cold fusion going.
assbot: Logged on 27-02-2015 20:45:01; ascii_field: the racket is open to 'favourite sons' exclusively.
mircea_popescu: http://log.bitcoin-assets.com/?date=27-02-2015#1035594 << would you say the same of the original richter ? he was an immigrant.
trinque: we are certainly not grazing animals, nor should we behave like them