gribble: Securities Act of 1933 - Securities and Exchange Commission: <https://www.sec.gov/about/laws/sa33.pdf>; Securities Act of 1933 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securities_Act_of_1933>; Securities Act Of 1933 Definition | Investopedia: <http://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/securitiesact1933.asp>
ninjashogun: Google: "Securities Act Section 2(a)(1)" and read the first sentence
ninjashogun: Google Securities Act Section 2(a)(1) and read the first sentence
mircea_popescu: which is the fundamental reason why stuff like the wot and otc trade and so forth are so important.
mircea_popescu: the problem with this, of course, is that it doesn't actually work.
asciilifeform: it's why 'gox == btc' in the us press, etc.
asciilifeform: this is the phoundation in 1 sentence.
mircea_popescu: on one hand they're scum anyway, so not likely they'll suddenly discover a backbone, and on the other hand even if they were to try you already have enough on them to put them away for a long, long time.
mircea_popescu: as far as the alphabet soup is concerned, the ideal situation is to have everything penetrated by people like kenna.
mircea_popescu: in that you can always have them inform on anyone else stupid enough to be in business with them.
mircea_popescu: eh, currently the usg policy is something along the lines of "well why put away the scammers, they're useful players"
BingoBoingo: Well, it's by the Wired guy who got pissy on twitter.
mircea_popescu: and then tried to come back to bitcoin for more and got smashed
mircea_popescu: and then ran off and made a real estate development which floundered
mircea_popescu: the guy who stole a bunch of customer funds
jurov: in the US most of it is
asciilifeform: in other news: in california it is illegal to teach - anything - without a permit:
asciilifeform: ever since, whenever i see the english word 'opportunity' in the idiot press, i think of just this.
asciilifeform: many years ago, a 'seedy' and much-beloved bar in my town was torched at night, by unknown saboteurs. the local rag proclaimed that 'this is an opportunity! the land will be put to good use by respectable developers!'
jurov: yall don't understad. They are Proudly Officially Recognized for once!
BingoBoingo: asciilifeform: On the planet where the rectothermal is repackaged as a fashionable relaxation on par with massage and enemas here.
asciilifeform: 'I think this is going to create a huge opportunity for hosted wallets, says Jered Kenna, a bitcoin entrepreneur and the CEO of Moneyandtech.com. He believes that the smart bitcoin wallet makers will simply be able to add this as a service, tracking the capital gains and losses as you spend your bitcoins through the year, and maybe even issuing you a convenient 1099 at the end of the year.'
asciilifeform: (for the headline lulz)
dexX7: ty, i guess it's only a matter of the right question ;)
asciilifeform: if hieronymous bosch were alive today, painting pictures of the torments of the damned in hell, perhaps he'd feature a human disk controller
gribble: Camera Lenses | Nikon Digital Camera Lenses | NIKKOR Lens Optics: <http://www.nikonusa.com/en/Nikon-Products/Camera-Lenses/index.page>; We test the Vtec Wide Angle and Macro Lens for iPhone 4: <http://www.photographymonthly.com/News-and-Reviews/2012/2/We-test-the-Vtec-Wide-Angle-and-Macro-Lens-for-iPhone-4>; Insert Coin: Piper melds home automation and security in a simple ...: (1 more message)
punkman: they'll never run out
mircea_popescu: at some point dodgy promoters are going to run out of angles to try and spamvertise donations. then what ?
benkay: and the service ain't that great anyways so fuck 'em.
diametric: mircea_popescu: though, I guess they ultimately did me a favor. It broke my addiction to MMOs and gaming in general, though I do play casually from time to time.
bounce: if you look at the (wikipedia) list of acquisitions it's the userbase they pay most for. actual tech doesn't sell well, databases full of users do.
diametric: well, I was never actually in danger of getting fired, I just did not enjoy having that much personally identifiable information hanging out there.
mircea_popescu: if some random schmucks manage to get you fired you're better off weithout the idiots anyway.
diametric: mircea_popescu: i didn't sell gold, but i did other things that caused them to actually track down my place of employment via linkedin and try to have my fired. I should actually state it wasn't Blizzard. Blizzard was not bad about it, it was the brass as Activision.
diametric: though after they banned me I was very tempted to rape their policies in as many ways as I could.
benkay: zuck wants to point and laugh at carmack the code monkey
diametric: that belong on the onion..
bounce: I don't suppose there'd be a way to get a ban for selling wow gold overturned on the grounds that blizzard isn't paying taxes over it
benkay: there's some interesting synchronous behavior.
mircea_popescu: my friend freud says that since you said it just as i was going to bed, clearly it's the case.
mircea_popescu: benkay those thighs ;/ they look unwomanly.
bounce: you more or less sound like that turkish guy in one of the bond novels
mircea_popescu: one of the chief complaints of my slavegirls is that they have no measure of control over x
mircea_popescu: bounce i used it as a metaphor for a guy who says "you do what i tell you or i kill you" and then proceeds to stick to his word.
asciilifeform: once you determine what part of a kitchen is a cockroach and which parts aren't, the next step is clear
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform or moreover, to make sure that none of the imitators survive
bounce: this the bloody-handed dead guy or some metaphor I'm missing a reference to?
asciilifeform: bounce: one of the purposes of stalin is to distinguish between imitators and the genuine article.
bounce: 'sdies, even without need you can, iff you have some vision or other to back it up. that's apparently a rare thing, seeing how there's only only jobs and a fsckton of imitators and NIH-botching immitators
mircea_popescu: which is why stalin even exists in the first place.
mircea_popescu: this discussion neatly maps on the cellphone/landline discussion.
gribble: Magnetoresistive random-access memory - Wikipedia, the free ...: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetoresistive_random-access_memory>; MRAM-Info | MRAM News, Resources & Information: <http://www.mram-info.com/>; Everspin Technologies, Inc.: <http://www.everspin.com/>
mircea_popescu: geting the damned thing to actually reboot was hell
bounce: in such an environment it's perhaps easier to see a different abstraction than the "files in directories on drives" we more or less take for granted
mircea_popescu: some of the early memories kinda worked this way
bounce recalls reading someone lamenting the world didn't go the wossname "persistent" route -- run a program, it'd auto-save to disk. next time you start it, auto-picks up where you left it. but on full OS level.
bounce: no need to generalise the point in obvious irrelevancy though
gribble: Good cop/bad cop - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_cop/bad_cop>; Good cop bad cop (disambiguation) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_cop_bad_cop_(disambiguation)>; Beyond Good Cop/Bad Cop: A Look At Real-Life Interrogations : NPR: <http://www.npr.org/2013/12/05/248968150/beyond-good-cop-bad-cop-a-look-at- (1 more message)
mircea_popescu: bounce also known as "plenty of people in the us cannot drive"
mircea_popescu: what's a free market other than an endless caleidoscope of a mexican standoff
bounce: er. should kids on tablets be able to interact with the hard drive? it's a bit like asking if drivers should be able to interact with their motor. plenty people prefer stick. esp. in the us plenty people *cannot drive* without automatic
mircea_popescu: that'd otherwise have taken a flamethrower at redmond
mike_c: keeping apple alive prevented more DOJ attention at the time.
mircea_popescu: any sane dog will keep the wolf alive.
asciilifeform: msdos was in some very real sense 'soviet' - as in, all the known joys, but a kid can build explosive xxxx at his parents' dacha without being harassed
mircea_popescu: the general idiocy of "the community" ie, the paying public, being the field on which technical solutions have to live.
mircea_popescu: so perhaps it was quite free market : we just got the better alternative, which sucked.
mike_c: the 'dark age' of apple would have been the 'no apple' age if microsoft hadn't given them money to keep them alive.
mircea_popescu: come to think about it, i don't know there's something in the world i ever hated more than a mac, and in this sense a ms-dos pc seems a muchly preferable alternative.
asciilifeform: the outcome, unsurprisingly, was the death of apple corp. (it does not really exist today, just 'next' corp. renamed 'apple')
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform there is sucvh a thing as idiocy through absence.
mircea_popescu: fucktards running tablets today don't even realise they should be able to interact with their hard drives
asciilifeform: it is no coincidence, though, that ms became synonymous with 'home computer' in the 90s and not earlier.
mircea_popescu: i'll readily grant that it didn't operate in any kind of free market in the 90s. but your statement was as of product
mircea_popescu: the free market leg however, i do not.
mircea_popescu: so now, the "competition on technical merit" leg of your statement, i see
mike_c: ^ i think you are underestimating what it took to build the monolopy.
mircea_popescu: so these are not free market ?
asciilifeform: and if that were the end... then, bundling pacts with pc makers, the collusion with intel to kill 'os/2' (secret cpu instructions), many other wonderful things
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: i presume you know the story of msdos
asciilifeform: mike_c: by that token, we should look up to 1990s russian mob as business teachers. 'take contract on creditor when cheaper than paying back loan', rectothermal cryptoanalysis, the joys.
asciilifeform: the notion that ms turdware is a product of any kind of free market or competition on technical merit is a real comedy.
mike_c: nobody does have the power to tell the powerful what to do. mp has stated that some 5 million times.
mircea_popescu: "nobody should have the power to tell us what to do"
asciilifeform: mike_c: the microshit style of 'doing business' goes a long way to explaining the popularity of communism, etc. among technical types.
asciilifeform: well yes. the latter is more like the famous disease where the victim cannot feel pain.
asciilifeform: on the flip side of this, 'coward dies a thousand deaths, brave man - one'
mircea_popescu: just another way of not being dumb as rocks, as it were.
mircea_popescu: "It's hard for anyone much younger than me to understand the fear Microsoft still inspired in 1995."
mircea_popescu: soo... inb4 500 bitcointalk threads where all sorts of experts explain how mp was indeed right and they were indeed clueless ?
benkay: thestringpuller: 'mpoe' is now an artifact of history
mike_c: it's good to be lockheed.. best lobbyists in the industry.
asciilifeform: B007: since when, 1970? it's the same airplane every time
jurov: no they guessed right that advertising is important. search is "only" the precursor for the addiction
mike_c: lampelina runs b-a.com now. hopefully she will remove the password requirement soon ;)
mircea_popescu: "If circumstances had been different, the people running Yahoo might have realized sooner how important search was. But they had the most opaque obstacle in the world between them and the truth: money."
bitcoinpete: mircea_popescu: quite enjoyed your fun article. the sizes of the gaps between those layers is nothing to sneeze at :)
mircea_popescu: you familiar with the yahoo dotcom boom cycle ?
mircea_popescu: tbh procter and gamble may be the first item on that list able to duke it on its own
B007: why would the govt sponser google?
mircea_popescu: that's why start-ups can be easily destroyed by getting the wrong money sources early.
ozbot: List of largest manufacturing companies by revenue - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
B007: all the private companies, landlords
bounce: greece is a shambles, but so far hasn't been too good for the eu economy as a whole. how would turkey have been different?
B007: it's hard to image some of those things happening in the us when it collapses because of its private sector though
gribble: Meet Fukuppy, the inadvertent Fukushima mascot | World news ...: <http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/15/fukuppy-fukushima-mascot-japan-fridge-egg-name>; Fukuppy, Fukushima Industries new mascot, is branding disaster ...: <http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/fukuppy-fukushima-industries-new-mascot-is-branding-disaster-8881883.html>; Fukushima Industries New 'Fukuppy' (1 more message)
bounce: anyway, apropos churchill re americans, the eurocrats have a good track record of starting the same but finishing in the same way hasn't been in strong evidence
mircea_popescu: i wonder how long till #bitcoin-assets gets the webby awards for the coolest place on the web
asciilifeform: [context: pres. carter dreams a bad dream] - 'plenum of central committee. ussr gensec reads report: great successes by the bread farmers of Kuban, Stavropol, Smolensk, Texas, Colorado provinces...'
mircea_popescu: all these bank branches
jurov: how would it avoid the crisis?
ThickAsThieves: makes sense to me, you go into a country and have your military running the place for a decade, why not just stake claim?
mircea_popescu: the only way to use money in 2006 would have been to lift up turkey.
mircea_popescu: nobody asks the eu what it wants to stand for tho.
bounce: with erdogan in office? bit against what the eu purports to stand for.
mircea_popescu: that'd have fully avoided the eu crisis.
mircea_popescu: actually it was sensible. turkey should have been taken into the eu in 2006
bounce: how long did the ottoman empire take to collapse?
bounce: the US found new enemies to fight, as it is wont to do
mircea_popescu: usa and ussr dissolved really at the same time
mircea_popescu: mike_c the us was boss roughly speaking 1915 - 1980
bounce: can just declare the 10 day reich at home then. take two weeks off, nobody notices. success.
asciilifeform: what is 'startup' crapola if not 'the 1-year reich'
mircea_popescu: who thinks the crap is "sustainable" and what's sustainable even mean in that context
mircea_popescu: saving animals and the environment and whatnot.
mircea_popescu: sorta like all the numerous "ngos"
jurov: and they really thought such foreign policy is sustainable?
asciilifeform: Officially, all Soviet representatives regard these parasites with touching feelings of friendship, but privately they call them 'shit-eaters' ('govnoed'). It is difficult to say where this expression originated, but it is truly the only name they deserve. The use of this word has become so firmly entrenched in Soviet embassies that it is impossible to imagine any other name for these people. A conversation mi
asciilifeform: 'In examining different kinds of agents, people from the free world who have sold themselves to the GRU, one cannot avoid touching on yet another category, perhaps the least appealing of all. Officially one is not allowed to call them agents, and they are not agents in the full sense of being recruited agents. We are talking about the numerous members of overseas societies of friendship with the Soviet Union.
asciilifeform: the happily-colonized folks
ThickAsThieves: lol [KS] (KS]@thinks.the.feds.are.investigat.in) has joined #bitcoin-assets
mircea_popescu: rror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?
mircea_popescu: And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with te
asciilifeform: afaik all of these folks (or younger successors) are still employed
gribble: Project MKUltra - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra>; History of MK-ULTRA. CIA program on Mind Control.: <http://www.mindspring.com/~txporter/sec3.htm>; CIA Mind Control Operation MK-ULTRA - YouTube: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i46RI2twVao>
gribble: Church Committee - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee>; Church Committee Created - US Senate: <http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/Church_Committee_Created.htm>; Church Committee - US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence: <http://www.intelligence.senate.gov/churchcommittee.html>
mircea_popescu: nearly ended the batf
mircea_popescu: at any rate. the waco debacle has been perhaps the costliest enforcing action by the various bureaus
ThickAsThieves: "Google's new cloud storage prices are as low as $0.026 per gigabyte as a flat rate, far below Amazon's lowest offering of $0.037 per gigabyte, which kicks in if you're holding terabytes of data in the AWS cloud."
asciilifeform: 'Царь Голод' (in the original)
asciilifeform: that's more in the department of 'Lord Hunger'
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform in the spirit of that example, 1mn people killed on highways each year, no stalin.
mircea_popescu: but anyway : the hissing of the serpent is easily ignored, until the point you cross its boundary.
mircea_popescu: and without an actual man, there's no actual power.
gribble: Quote by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn : And how we burned in the ...: <http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/34738-and-how-we-burned-in-the-camps-later-thinking-what>; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes (Author of One Day in the Life of ...: <http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/10420.Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn>; The Gulag Archipelago - Wikiquote: (1 more message)
mircea_popescu: for all the appearance and pretense of stolid solidity.
mircea_popescu: it's difficult to overstate just how fragile the entire morloch actually is.
mircea_popescu: meanwhile, five people don't settle and the entire system collapses in flames.
mircea_popescu: specifically : people who are already defeated take into consideration nonsense such as "oh but the feds have a 9x% conviction rate" as a ready-made excuse to settle.
ThickAsThieves: it's also an absurd degree of taxation: say i buy a Walmart Gift Card with btc, i should pay sales tax, gains tax, then the seller reports profit and is taxed, revenue used to pay employees is taxed. then you tack on the accounting burden on both sides, plus the seller's burden as tax collector
mike_c: asciilifeform: indeed. how exactly would they make an effort to collect anyway? impossible.
gribble: Three-strikes law - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-strikes_law>; Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent: Harvey ...: <http://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp/1594035229>; Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent: Harvey A ...: <http://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target- (1 more message)
mircea_popescu: irrespective of the relative sizes.
asciilifeform: my guess is that no serious effort will be made to actually collect the tax. rather, it will be used as a scourge against folks who need to be 'lettre de cachet'-d.
bounce: IMO bit of a failing of government to stick to asking whether they can get away with taxing, and not asking whether they should
mike_c: i do see your point, but i agree with ascii. it makes no practical difference since the bureaucrats will not recognize said difference.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform that's fine and dandy, but the best way for their pretense to remain standing is for tem to vehehery carefully steer out of the way of their masters.
mircea_popescu: see how neatly this all locks together ? :D
mircea_popescu: mike_c there exist no fiat zero asset corps.
bounce: at least the tax office rarely is interested in anything but taxability
mircea_popescu: stock is a portion of the business, so i get a brick out of the building that is represented by the stock
ThickAsThieves: Dota 2 gets intricate too, the more i play the more items i get, they provide a market for selling items for USD credit
asciilifeform: i think everyone here is aware of the practical difference btween btc and cement. but the bureaucrats aren't - or will pretend, at any rate, for as long as it remains possible
mike_c: if my employer pays me in stock, i owe taxes. can't hit me in the head with that
jurov: don't give anybody a reason to use silver bullets then
ThickAsThieves: and the hospital had commited theft if they did not produce the lead back to the owner
diametric: I've done a lot of things with WoW over the years before I quit about 3 years ago
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform this is true. but, again, with pb i can hit you over the head.
asciilifeform: my understanding is, if i'm shot walking on the street, i theoretically owe 9g of Pb worth of tax on the windfall of perfectly good lead.
mircea_popescu: either it's not taxable throughout, except for realisation
diametric: which I said those selling the wow gold are liable for taxes
bounce: er. if nobody "owning" WoW gold can hold title then even "stolen" (or traded, or whatever) gold is held without title, and so it canot possibly be theft, now can it?
asciilifeform: in the usa, if someone hands you money, or cement, etc. for whatever reason, it is officially taxable
mircea_popescu: it's just that they can believe in one hand and piss in the other, see which gets warm first.
mircea_popescu: o i know what they believe.
asciilifeform: my understanding is that selling 'wow gold' is quite like sub-leasing an apartment where the original lease forbade it
mircea_popescu: in neither case a representation is made as to transfer of title, which makes blizzard's ip assertions irrelevant.
diametric: I'm not disagreeing with you, I'm telling you having actually talked to Blizzard's legal team what they believe
ThickAsThieves: regardless of issuer and the rules it imposes
mircea_popescu: but that's really besides the point.
diametric: ThickAsThieves: all of this in Blizzard's eyes constitutes theft of intellectual property
asciilifeform: (afaik it is technically illegal to be a subsistence farmer in the u.s.)
asciilifeform: it even demands that miners pay tax, the same way farmers are made to
diametric: they need to pay taxes, but blizzard doesn't.
bitcoinpete: ThickAsThieves: I've been keeping up with the logs at least :)
asciilifeform: ianal, but the linked proclamation seems to declare 'legitimacy' for this purpose
diametric: mircea_popescu: in the same way if I stole your TV and sold it, you're not responsible for capital gains on it.
diametric: Technically USD you made illegitimately would be taxed as income, just as any other illegitimate sale
mircea_popescu: diametric so how much are THEY paying ?
bitcoinpete: It has too many footnotes, too many airquotes, and is a bit long (and therefore error-prone).
diametric: ThickAsThieves: none, since Blizzard explicitly states ownership of the gold belongs to them.
BingoBoingo: The younger one has had a Beiber like fanbase for some time since his arrest.
ozbot: #FreeJahar: When Conspiracy Theorists and One Direction Fans Collide
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: they're cult figures here in usa. tabloid magazine covers were printed with special magnified mug shots for their wanking.
mircea_popescu: now how the fuck can women tell who the violent males are ? he looks totally harmless to me.
mircea_popescu: the consensus in the harem seems to be that these chechen boyz (as typified by todashev) sure are pretty
jurov: she apparently tweeted it (but these slovak scumbags did not link it)
asciilifeform: waiting for timoshenko et al to proclaim that yesterday's 'leaked nixon tape' of her asking fellow ua fucktards 'can't we find a nuke with which to cleanse the russian scum' - in perfect russian - is fake
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform ThickAsThieves amusingly, there was recently a very similar case re milk.
Mats_cd03: "While the Assisting Trooper attempted unsuccessfully to draw his handgun" the 2 second rule nearly prevails once again
asciilifeform: from the loltron:
asciilifeform: tldr - government report excusing the execution of a famous suspect, claims that he reached for... a sword.
ThickAsThieves: The Court decided that Filburn's wheat growing activities reduced the amount of wheat he would buy for chicken feed on the open market, and because wheat was traded nationally, Filburn's production of more wheat than he was allotted was affecting interstate commerce. Thus, Filburn's production could be regulated by the federal government.
asciilifeform: because not burning it could affect the market price.
asciilifeform: the losing side (a farmer) was required to burn his crop.
asciilifeform: (anyone who thinks that this is an exaggeration, look up the case)
asciilifeform: and hence it would have affected the price of bottled farts interstate markets
asciilifeform: because you could have bottled and sold the fart
asciilifeform: then, there was a court case, where they ruled that, in essence, a fart is 'interstate commerce'
asciilifeform: intro for noobs. in the u.s., the central government was once traditionally limited to regulating 'interstate commerce'
blackwhite: the IRS in Denmark ruled it's not taxable
gribble: Wickard v. Filburn - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn>; Wickard v. Filburn | The Oyez Project at IIT Chicago-Kent College of ...: <http://www.oyez.org/cases/1940-1949/1942/1942_59/>; Wickard v. Filburn – Case Brief Summary - Lawnix: <http://www.lawnix.com/cases/wickard-filburn.html>
asciilifeform: blackwhite: no such thing. the decree sums to 'as taxable as cement'
blackwhite: (the article is in Danish)
asciilifeform: if it existed, it would gravitationally move the planet's spammers and 'seo' scum the way the moon moves the ocean.
asciilifeform: this reminds me of an idea that i (and probably everybody) had at one point - a betting engine with auto-resolution using google (or some other mechanical process)
mircea_popescu: moreover, the whole thing is begging the question. "how do you make money if you know how to make money already ?" "in the manner you know".
asciilifeform: i was assuming that the proposal is about bitbet as it currently exists - where bests in the style of 'boxing match' are heavily represented
asciilifeform: i was thinking of a far more mundane aspect, where the best source of info re: the outcome of, say, athletic match, isn't 1000 googles, but the boxer who can decide to 'throw' the match
mircea_popescu: misses the point that you'd have to construct that inefficiency first, which precludes the use economically.
mircea_popescu: so in general arguing "in this inefficient case the inefficiency could be used like so"
asciilifeform: polite gentleman offers 100x the usual price