mircea_popescu: there's very little economy in your fiction, not just this present comet thing, but the previous thing with the truck. such wasteful abuse of literary means.
undata: the ruler should be a search function identifying merit and putting it to work
undata: and lets say the guy that knew how to stop it shot himself 10 years ago because he could not find a use
undata: lets say there's a comet heading for us
mircea_popescu: so then what do you care about "wasted" generations whatever that may mean.
undata: I'd rather not matter to anyone.
mircea_popescu: who mostly got eaten by wolves or w/e, or the 1000-1010 generation, that didn't even exist.
mircea_popescu: the 2000-2010 generation of usians isn't anymore lost than the 1500-1510 generation of usians
undata: mircea_popescu: and then the truckers get tired of losing loads and we lose generations instead
undata: given the task to deliver, does it help the trucker's delivery to have only enough gas to arrive at his destination
mircea_popescu: anyway, any frustrated desire is as entitled as any other. once it satisfies itself so it's no longer a desire it will have gained its rightful death.
undata: mircea_popescu: when you get used to masters which withold food, don't you dream of otherwise?
mircea_popescu: so then that's your answer :)
undata: what is the benefit of weakened citizens?
mircea_popescu: you presently are able to feed yourself, which indicates nothing about whether you OUGHT TO be so able.
undata: so my family feeds itself because it presently can, which indicates nothing about whether that fact is due to their own action
undata: but I can see that I've used some of their terms to describe how I feel about it
mircea_popescu: you don't like the ulterior effects of socialism, but you do like some of the premises, such as "X for all", as in, "a future for all", "a chance for all" etc.
undata: in my particular, engineers who rot in the halls of googles and facebooks, I think
mircea_popescu: has all the spunk that hasn't filled a vagina been wasted ? how about that's not been swallowed ? rubbed on tits ?
mircea_popescu: well, the problem with "wasteful" is you gotta specify more about the situation than you can.
undata: mircea_popescu: in reading your article, it seems that one of the disconnects in the above has been that I perceive certain kinds of conflict wasteful which you do not.
mircea_popescu: hmm can't find it now, but ayway, there's an entire wank niche dedicated to woman-to-cow transformations, woman-dairy farms etc.
mircea_popescu: jurov the dictator's a political institution, not a gnoseological tool.
jurov: "all men must gather on the camp of mars" and now all men in actual fact must so gather. << okay, but to return to the topic, how this advances rational thought?
mircea_popescu: (if we're to trust the usual US statistics and general scientific consensus, which is to say comic books)
asciilifeform: what modern folks think of as 'dictator' is really, (psychiatric observation) the name given to a fellow who tries to do the job of aristocrat without having been bred for the task (as in a woman who thinks she can fill in for a milk cow)
mircea_popescu: cincinnatus says "all men must gather on the camp of mars" and now all men in actual fact must so gather.
mircea_popescu: jurov not so. the definition of dictatorship is merely "he whose word makes truth"
asciilifeform: the disappearance of the aristicrat (fellow who is bred to the task of 'deciding where to live to') is the basic boojum
mircea_popescu: (ie, the chtulhy cult)
mircea_popescu: ontological fear of nothingness chewing away at his frail identity somehow resolved.x No, maybe they came to him, saying look Cincinnatus, you are the best among us, and the best by so very far you must be our dictator and he said Maybe; well see. What plans did then Cincinnatus have, exactly ? That all men must assemble on the Camp of Mars ? And if they hadnt, what exact moral impedimentd have th
mircea_popescu: specifically, "What fucking plans ? Why does the dictator have to absolutely have some sort of plans, aforethought ? Maybe hes a dictator in the proper sense, because his group perceived him as worthy. He didnt go to them, like an obnoxious lawyer spawn, with a list of whatever items are fashionable - promises, intentions, qualities, college degrees - to ask to be made a dictator and thus have the gaping void and
assbot: On The Superiority of Monarchy (or, adnotations to Why the Worst Get on Top) pe Trilema - Un blog de Mircea Popescu.
mircea_popescu: undata here's an article discussing that "leaders" thing : http://trilema.com/2014/on-the-superiority-of-monarchy-or-adnotations-to-why-the-worst-get-on-top/
asciilifeform: extant problem is not the overabundance of 'flies' (plenty of funded garbage in babylon as now) but the disappearance of 'cutlets'.
mircea_popescu: how so lol! wait, i'm proving the negative now ?
jurov: thus the trilema's article is false
jurov: i guess the surviving ideas and people will get selected cvasi randomly
undata: mircea_popescu: then why does every leader impose one?
mircea_popescu: hence the entire "proceed from cause not towards goals" thing.
mircea_popescu: undata there is no goal possible in politics.
undata: mircea_popescu: how is any other goal coherent absent that
jurov: i'd rather like an answer that when current system finally fails due to bitcoin, will this get us rid of only the bad ideas?
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform but how do you measure the wastefullness of pointlessness ?
asciilifeform: the concept of 'waste' requires a process goal.
mircea_popescu: the proof that there was nothing there to waste in the first place is the simple fact of having been wasted.
asciilifeform: 'sanitars of the forest' !
mircea_popescu: undata you can't waste the living.
mircea_popescu: ;;google "under the guise of making prison more like school the reverse is of course accomplished."
mircea_popescu: fuck you google, that's the worst matching ever.
undata: mircea_popescu: the highschool in my home town was apty designed by a prison architect
gribble: New Orleans schools feel too much like prisons | The Hechinger ...: <http://hechingerreport.org/content/new-orleans-schools-feel-much-like-prisons_15964/>; The School-to-Prison Pipeline | Teaching Tolerance: <http://www.tolerance.org/magazine/number-43-spring-2013/school-to-prison>; Fact Sheet: How Bad Is the School-to-Prison Pipeline? | Tavis ... - PBS: (1 more message)
mircea_popescu: ;;google "in the attempt to make prison more like school, they made school more like prison"
undata: the US public school system is a prison system
undata: asciilifeform: today's american phd has the requisite psychology to thrive climbing ~25 years of bureaucracy
mircea_popescu: actually the reason it can't be fully learnable has more to do with godel than with tits and ass.
asciilifeform: or the male equivalent.
undata: the US is just... done.
asciilifeform could point out that today's phd is not the same animal as james clerk maxwell's. but doubts that it needs saying.
undata acknowledges that a lot of people "doing it right" got smashed to pieces when the USSR collapsed as well
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform since the iris young nitwit was mentioned, here's a q for you : how many maths or generally actual scientists you ever heard of that were full professors at 34 ?
asciilifeform: (rules of engagement between the 'arsonist' and the 'firewood' are determined primarily by technological state of the art)
gribble: George Orwell: You and the Atomic Bomb: <http://orwell.ru/library/articles/ABomb/english/e_abomb>; Orwell's 5 greatest essays: No. 4, "You and the Atomic Bomb" - Los ...: <http://articles.latimes.com/2013/nov/05/business/la-fi-mh-orwells-atomic-20131104>; Fifty Orwell Essays - Project Gutenberg Australia: <http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300011h.html>
asciilifeform: ;;google you and the atomic bomb
mircea_popescu: but this alone is not nearly the strength of your previous statement.
undata: they may just be incredibly shortsighted
undata: mircea_popescu: depends on what comes in the next frame
asciilifeform: the only thing inventor (artist, whoever) can do is argue to the arsonist that he'd be of more use as something other than firewood
mircea_popescu: out of their dried skins reality is built
mircea_popescu: that's the point of metaphores, to keep getting punctured.
mats_cd03: or rather, can't grok.
mircea_popescu: mats_cd03 puncture one, we can go from there
undata: mircea_popescu: I am suggesting that the people I'm describing are doing it right
asciilifeform: see also, obligatory, j.c. scott, 'the art of not being governed.'
asciilifeform: externalised costs << the entire story of government is - some folks staying warm by burning other folks' furniture (or dessicated carcasses.)
mircea_popescu: keeping the mob busy on reddit atm
mircea_popescu: for we're looking at the full story.
mircea_popescu: once they get lynched by an angry mob you can say what you will,
mircea_popescu: undata that they're momentarily realising gains out of externalised costs that haven't yet caught up with them.
mircea_popescu: people, of the common kind, can only be fed by a master.
asciilifeform: or, rephrase: does it actually cost 2k usd/mo. to keep the box presently over my head standing? if not, who pockets the difference?
undata: people fed themselves throughout history
mircea_popescu: and if putin keeps hammering him in the head all over the middle east, your scrip may be as good as the confederate's.
asciilifeform: there is a reason why i say 'usaschwitz.' what's the actual problem, in most people's mind, with living in a concentration camp?
mircea_popescu: is obviously a dependency on the fucking master in question
mircea_popescu: the food your master chooses to dispense to you in exchange for scrip that master has given you n the first place
mircea_popescu: mats_cd03 it's not the whole story of food.
mats_cd03: the food i consume has nutrition, and calories, and it sates the appetite. so far, my life expectancy has not changed in any way. how is it nto food?
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform but somehow the people who expect to be able to eat without being slaves also bitch at the people fighting for the oil requisite for that arrangement.
mircea_popescu: this is the quintesential broken approach. there's "food" as you're talking, there's "food" as he's talking.
mircea_popescu: mats_cd03 then why don't you have any ?
mats_cd03: the work required to produce food _has_ been reduced
mircea_popescu: careful with those "We"s brother
undata: we can make iPhones, but not reduce the work required to produce food?
asciilifeform: 'food' in the abstract, in the sense of what is the total input required for the 'machine' (mr inventor) to function.
asciilifeform: undata: what do they pay protection money with ?
asciilifeform: incidentally, this doesn't always work. witness the mindless regurgitators who shine in every academic chumpatron.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform: machines that can do this exist, they are called animals, and generally have their own problems that prompt people to invent less-general machines. << splendidly put.
mircea_popescu: (to be perfectly fair the original japanese folk story doesn't have that explicit in there, but hey. posteriority separates and all that)
asciilifeform: 'a hedgehog marches in the fog, with a rifle.' 'not funny at all, but at least it's a tale about war!'
mircea_popescu: adlai there is no guarantee that turtle language includes space for more than "terrible"./
mircea_popescu: and the turtle from kyoto, back towards its pond
mircea_popescu: the turtle from osaka, back towards its pond, in osaka
mircea_popescu: oh, terrible brother, just terrible. how about kyoto ?
mircea_popescu: they saluted each other, and soon realised each comes from the other's destination. so they naturally inquired
mircea_popescu: after putting step after step for long enough they met at the midpoint of the road between kyoto and osaka.
mircea_popescu: eventually the turtle from osaka had enough of this indignity, and securely tying a salad leaf to its carapace, proceeded on the road to kyoto.
mircea_popescu: eventually the turtle from kyoto had enough of this indignity, and securely tying a salad leaf to its carapace, proceeded on the road to osaka.
mircea_popescu: an old turtle had lived for many years in a pond in osaka. in the later days a new concubine introduced a habit of launching ever more bright felinars at night, which bothered its sleep.
mircea_popescu: but bothered the turtle, because it could no longer see the light of the soon or the moon, or the stars.
asciilifeform: undata: glorious leader given the power... tends to turn it into a masturbation implement << straight to aristotle's 'politics' on what the pill here is.
mircea_popescu: an old turtle had lived for many years in a pond in kyoto. in the later days a new concubine introduced a habit of throwing strands of silk over the pond, which became fashionable,
mircea_popescu: speaking of which : anyone want to hear retold the ancient japanese story of the turtle from kyoto and the turtle from osaka ?
asciilifeform: asking inventors to always 'independently wealthy' is like asking your computer to harvest all of its energy (and material to create additional parts) from the environment on its own accord. a 'would be nice' scenario, but there are good reasons why it is not practical. machines that can do this exist, they are called animals, and generally have their own problems that prompt people to invent less-general machin
mircea_popescu: <undata> it is likely having grown up here that gives me deep skepticism that things are ever "better" << the canonical form of this is, "it is unlikely for the tadpole that ever lived in the same one puddle to imagine what different puddle means"
undata: regardless I'm not the guy
undata: glorious leader given the power to reshape society tends to turn it into a masturbation implement
undata: rather than just in a different shape
asciilifeform: not everybody even bothers to tell anyone.
asciilifeform: i (and quite a few other folks) have a collection of own 'lilienfeld's transistors'
undata: there needs to be at that time someone with the sense to lead and the means to offer something in exchange
undata: asciilifeform: seems like the opportunity to get it "done" only arises from time to time
asciilifeform: undata: just one specific example where devil is in the details.
undata: mircea_popescu: "someday the right master will pour the right answers into my head. then I'll be great, you'll see"
asciilifeform: undata: otto lilienfeld has a transistor in the '20s.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform> what does it actually take, in terms of resources, to keep a mathematician going? << food.
mircea_popescu: <undata> americans can't communicate with each other well enough to solve any problems. << this is true actually. seriously, "dating guides" ?
asciilifeform: what does it take to keep the flies off.
undata: asciilifeform: how about owning the means to produce one's own food
asciilifeform: what does it actually take, in terms of resources, to keep a mathematician going?
undata: americans can't communicate with each other well enough to solve any problems.
chetty: well it is sad, I don't have an answer, just recognize the problem, ...what will turn the herd?
mircea_popescu: their wife.
asciilifeform: chetty: hero - straight to sword. what should mathematicians eat ?
asciilifeform: the machine is actually structured very well to avoid creating conscious malcontents. they happen anyway.
asciilifeform met quite a few genuine thinkers, leaves of living matter in the great garbage disposal of u.s. academia. folks who spend 90+% of their time on 'grantmanship' while fully aware of the idiocy of the entire structure. but had no escape ticket.
mircea_popescu: the word sinecure originates from this time, specifically the actual peasant sucking the cock's despising of the uncocksucky position of kepler.
asciilifeform wasn't bottle-buddies with kepler, cannot attest as to the degree of enthusiasm with which he sucked the cock
asciilifeform: it is also worth thinking about what kind of cocks folks we regard as 'genuine article' had to suck, in their times, to stay fed. e.g., kepler's tours of duty as court astrologer.
mircea_popescu: just, as people stopped trying alchemy they rejected it, it's all therein contained.
mircea_popescu: it doesn't take some sort of official pronouncement, like the "chemistry foundation" of 1700 signed a statement that they "now hereby reject the heresy of alchemy"
asciilifeform: jurov: the (very fragile!) mechanism at work here is the process whereby the 'flies were separated from the cutlets'
jurov: they did not reject it
asciilifeform: jurov: that was the thought here
mircea_popescu: adlai the point is that nothing forces you to speak on topics on which you have nothing to say
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform self-styled "regulators" love to whine pathetic about the "irresponsible risk seeking behaviours" of banks or whoever, conveniently omitting to mention that it's the disease of the system, it's what socialism necessarily breeds (through blindness), and that they themselves took some insane gambles. such as the 50 year "let's finance pseudoscience, who knows,\ maybe it pays off"
asciilifeform: whence and whether this goes - cannot say
asciilifeform: the one inescapable fact about extraction of chemistry from thousand years of alchemy is that - it is done by chemists, rather than alchemists.
assbot: The problem of claims pe Trilema - Un blog de Mircea Popescu.
BingoBoingo: the incredible hulk << Actually a scientist
mircea_popescu: not so unlike the purely usian folly of taking life advice from movie stars, "since we like this we might also pretend this is good, or right, or whatever"
adlai: i'm not even sure how you'd go about doing such research in a real scientific manner... lots of noise in the signals
mircea_popescu: the entire field is essentially predicating that marx,cCarnagey, ziggler, the incredible hulk et al are actually scientists, or to be taken seriously.
adlai: asciilifeform: who were the sinecures?
mircea_popescu: adlai which these ?
adlai: mircea_popescu: have you seen any serious science done on these topics?
asciilifeform: 'In most (though not all) cases, all a designer must do in order to implement an unfeature is to refrain from tying the users hands in a particular way.' - yours truly
assbot: Loper OS » The Simplest Lisp Machine
asciilifeform: ('lisp' as properly defined is not a programming language, but merely a catalogue of avoided mistakes in the construction of a programming language. see: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=405 )
mircea_popescu: <asciilifeform> (not the literal qwerty, but the 'platonic' qwerty seen as the overall human failing where folks agree on buggy shit and then cement it in place through 'sunk cost') << fwiw i disagree with this assesment. english is broken because it's a commercial pigdin, language without a country. the old languages of yurp are actually fine, and to this day more powerful than any synthetic syntax.
gribble: Poetry Lovers' Page - Rudyard Kipling: Macdonough's Song: <http://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/macdonoughs_song.html>; Macdonough's Song. Rudyard Kipling. 1922. Verse: 1885-1918: <http://www.bartleby.com/364/318.html>; Once there was The People - Terror gave it birth - The Quotations ...: <http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/29843.html>
chetty: <adlai> the public, from itself!//<<< opt out
adlai: the public, from itself!
asciilifeform: (not the literal qwerty, but the 'platonic' qwerty seen as the overall human failing where folks agree on buggy shit and then cement it in place through 'sunk cost')
chetty: <adlai> mircea_popescu: requirements like regulation must adapt to best protect the public's interests// whats 'the public'? Who would you protect? and from what?
adlai: mircea_popescu: requirements like regulation must adapt to best protect the public's interests
mircea_popescu: adlai> we could define that the turd network doesn't count as output, since it's communication between computers and not output to the user <<< reading this sort of shit makes my head bleed
asciilifeform does not regard quines as particularly interesting, because they are only a real challenge in retarded programming systems
adlai: it can end with the blockchain in a comment, and then when it's outputting, it just keeps spitting out blocks
adlai: alternatively, it could modify its own code to include the blockchain
adlai: we could define that the turd network doesn't count as output, since it's communication between computers and not output to the user
mircea_popescu: is he like the only b-a jew or something ?
mircea_popescu: adlai its output is already specified, and the specification is incompatible with quine
mircea_popescu: the shit they come up with you know ? "to claim that there are no solutions to X equation is RIGID!!!11"
mircea_popescu: so his argument goes that well, ussr is not a good example of how socialism generates wealth because it wasn't rich enough to begin with, whereas china is very rich now, so maybe it will try sociaism, notwithstanding that the path it took to get rich is the same path everyone took o get rich, specifically antisocialism.
asciilifeform: like trying to scoop out the sea with a tea cup.
mircea_popescu: http://www.contravex.com/2014/10/20/software-doesnt-fail-socialism-does/#comment-4247 << this is probably the ultimate example of socialist mind rot.
adlai: - is amazing, because CL actually has the concept of a quine programmed into it's specification
adlai: asciilifeform: you know what the shortest common lisp quine is?
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform you know, the official bitcoin foundation official bitcoin core code.
mircea_popescu: ben_vulpes asciilifeform others : here's an idea, can you make the official code also be a palindrome ?
mircea_popescu: if i'm quirky, it's because all those chemicals in the filters.
mircea_popescu basks in the glory of being an anthropologist, and therefore politically allowed and intellectually immune to the drawbacks of rooting through the human headshit pile
mircea_popescu: whatever, pick any one of the chick pulp authors
kakobrekla: actually im still here, cause it works w/o the fans.
mircea_popescu: adlai it royally sucks as a "philosophy", or "economic theory", too.
ben_vulpes: adlai: anathem? single shitting?
asciilifeform: ('atlas.' once you know this, it bricks you in the face.)
adlai: imo 'anthem' is much better, can be read in a single s(h)itting
asciilifeform: 'anathem'
asciilifeform: second law of thermo exists. but it does not follow that we are required to piss in our pants.
jurov: theoretical wanking aside, we're still just beings living off thermodynamical gradients - thus fundamentally something must leak
mircea_popescu: say, atlantis went there.
mircea_popescu: as human history presently stands, the reality of such memory loss is actually supported
mircea_popescu: then you'd have a memory leaking situation
mircea_popescu: if you with some regularity could no longer find neither your girlfriend nor her house,
asciilifeform: suddenly you end up in a bubble of finite size that's diverged from the rest of the universe << this featured in n. stephenson's mega-tale 'anathem'
mircea_popescu: newtonian mechanics that leaked memory would be more like, suddenly you end up in a bubble of finite size that's diverged from the rest of the universe
jurov: but they are broken
mircea_popescu: jurov yes, but they're not broken.
gribble: The Infamous Brad - Atlas Shrugged 2: Shrug Harder - bradhicks: <http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/393124.html>; Going Galt - RationalWiki: <http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Going_Galt>; Atlas Shrugged: The Hidden Context of the Book and Film - David Brin: <http://www.davidbrin.com/aynrand.html>
jurov: <kakobrekla> you know - at least you are dealing with jus one broken stack, not layers upon layers. << you know, even newtonian mechanics themselves are just abstraction layer
adlai: up next, the long awaited sequel to Atlas Shrugged... "Turtle Dove"
kakobrekla: adlai its little fleas until you get to the turtles.