mircea_popescu: arguably clinton was a lot better than the lot of them, but hey. he didn;t in the end have the balls to come out and say "i am the president. i fuck whoever i want whenever i want in whatever manner i feel like. get lost twerps"
mircea_popescu: not worse than the current
greenspan_fan: asciilifeform also, it lead to the election of obama, and some of those people (depending on proximity to political center) were terrified of what he might do
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform so for the folks running the forbidden city all sorts of things were epic pants creaming victories.
mircea_popescu: it wasn't bush building a mosque there.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: for the folks who actually run the place, this was an epic pants-creaming victory, rather than the apparent humiliation.
mircea_popescu: we can take the historical facts as historical facts tho.
greenspan_fan: ok, we cannot take the actions of george bush as an example of great or even good strategy
mircea_popescu: soo... for the arab side : 1.enemies looses bank ; 2. we gain mosque ; 3. we destroy some enemy wealth ; 4. enemy destroys some more of its own wealth.
mircea_popescu: at a cost to the us of about billions in direct damages, and then billions more in materiel over a war they've yet to win.
mircea_popescu: ten arabs turned a spot of their choosing in manhattan from bank to mosque.
greenspan_fan: in the event of some unifying scenario of principle actors (say, a world war) they'd be much more effective
mircea_popescu: greenspan_fan it could project more power at the risk of having its arms broken off and used to beat it over the head.
mircea_popescu: not sure that's the read i'd put on luteranism
greenspan_fan: i'd still say that the u.s. could project more power but doesn't because the world is too complicated. Something might be a good idea tactically but terrible strategically, etc.
decimation: the Reformation is another example - once Luther revealed the lies of the church, hundreds of third parties immediatedly started to grasp for the raw power up for grabs
BingoBoingo: Lessons in BTC business http://www.spike.com/episodes/9tk3so/bar-rescue-on-the-rocks-season-2-ep-209
mircea_popescu: but we're not there yet.
mircea_popescu: decimation the reference was pre cromwell tho
mircea_popescu: which they live subjectively as a rape by reality.
mircea_popescu: the beauty of "national emergencies" is that even bureaucrats suddenly become free agents
asciilifeform: usually, free agents account for most of the heads, though
mircea_popescu: for they well know that the enemy may or may not be inclined to buy the nurnberg defense.
mircea_popescu: moreover, finding agents to do the beheading becomes expensive
asciilifeform: once the collective hallucination pops, no amount of public beheading brings it back
mircea_popescu: greenspan_fan yes the stuff around charles
mircea_popescu: a, now in THAT case the interests allign.
asciilifeform: decimation: don't confuse the aftermath of the romans/soviets marching home from the colonies with rebellion.
mircea_popescu: i suppose one could take the parliamentary wars in england too
mircea_popescu: it shows that in a national emergency the govt and contractor interests are not merely not alligned
asciilifeform: what soviet arms, with the possible exception of trench-diggers at tbilisi, quelled the rebellions?
mircea_popescu: ever heard of the an lushan rebellion ?
greenspan_fan: but in cases of embezzlement, they're wasting capacity
mircea_popescu: somehow it wasn't a north vietnamese that leaked the homemade porn of the fucktarded "supreme leader"
mircea_popescu: as the entire snowden thing shows.
mircea_popescu: exactly like the us.
asciilifeform: that's because he's piss-poor (in the non-monetary economy of the place, the one that actually counts)
mircea_popescu: but he's too kindly to actually cash in on his investments that looky helped the village thrive.
mircea_popescu: and i nthe local whorehouse
mircea_popescu: so he ends up "investing" : he buys a share in the local cafe
mircea_popescu: nevertheless, he's a frail old man without a clue.
mircea_popescu: he has pension payments, and the thai are poor.
asciilifeform: if they have any say about it.
decimation: all of that fancy military hardware would be gone tomorrow if the dollar collapsed
greenspan_fan: mircea_popescu: yes, but if they decided to actually get their money's worth it would be spectacular
mircea_popescu: wait, was it the soviets ? i think it was.
greenspan_fan: I think they do, but it would be politically complicated to actually deploy it.
greenspan_fan: higher defense spending than just about every other country combined
greenspan_fan: military bases in half the world's countries
decimation: it sufficiently conflicts the interests of the bureaucrats that they cannot see the threat clearly
asciilifeform: rather than individual escapees
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform i believe that to be a lie. would you say i'm not personally an example of in the open etc ?
mircea_popescu: Solzhenitsyn spent a while exiting in his head then did it properly
mircea_popescu: greenspan_fan generally, the third world or your dreams.
decimation: there is no exit
greenspan_fan: the question is where can you exit to?
decimation: I like to experience the fifth stage when I play dayz
ozbot: The Five Stages of Collapse
asciilifeform: for those who somehow avoided hearing of it, a basic 'newton's laws' of the degringolade: http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/p/the-five-stages-of-collapse.html
mircea_popescu: greenspan_fan well how could it play out ? teh fifth that matters tried to voice till they got bored, now they're mostly exiting
mircea_popescu: every dood with a ged and a history of shelf stacking thinks they're a person just as much as me. this bizarre state of affairs can only lead to fallover.
mircea_popescu: the country's nigh on ungovernable, and the reason is simply that the 4/5ths of the population that are the idiots believe they are not actually subhuman.
mircea_popescu: people much poorer who lack the delusions of grandeur are actually doing just fine all over the rest 19/20ths of the world.
mircea_popescu: all the problems the us faces today are strictly an attempt to somehow manage the frustration of the stupid that the unsustainable system induced.
mircea_popescu: in the real retelling of the situation, they start smoking pcp and quit showing up for work.
greenspan_fan: mircea_popescu: they move on to a new fandom (catharsis!) or get a clue; new people are attracted by the same mechanisms as the previous cohort
mircea_popescu: thus the costs baloon to eventual doom.
mircea_popescu: frustration in the stupid can never be resolved.
mircea_popescu: greenspan_fan it's unsustainable because it creates frustration in the stupid.
decimation: I suspect that merely attempting to enter the same confined room with him would be considered a 'microagression'
decimation: yeah there's no doubt that the elite whites in America would import any barbarian available to level their redneck enemies
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform like what, say he is ugly and his mother dresses him funny ?
decimation: with all the attendant rot
mircea_popescu: after which i'll gladly answer if you need further answering
mircea_popescu: greenspan_fan check the sling dope article ?
decimation: In old Japan, it wasn't illegal to be an asshole. It wasn't even illegal to be an asshole to a samurai. But it was illegal to be an asshole to a samurai - if you weren't a samurai. See how it works? You might say the samurai were a sort of protected class. A system not at all unique to old Japan. Always and everywhere, "microaggressing" against the protected class is hazardous to your health.
mircea_popescu: no shortage of posts on the subject methinks :D
mircea_popescu: decimation http://trilema.com/2013/youre-the-guy-who-wasnt-good-enough-to-sling-dope/
mircea_popescu: arguably society as a whole extracts more benefits from the stupid who think themselves smart than from any other venue,
mircea_popescu: cryptorush is a fine example in an endless string of fine examples as to why this nonsense is harmful to the stupid poor.
BingoBoingo: If a billionaire falls 99% in the forbes standings they are still richer than Rap Genius
greenspan_fan: I mean, if the true scope of the gulf between the average and someone in the 0.001% was really appreciable, the average person has so much less to lose
mircea_popescu: ie, that tons of people are completely clueless as to their proper place in the world.
greenspan_fan: this isn't always the case though
mircea_popescu: just the fact that someone'd even consider hassling you is indicative of serious systemic problems.
greenspan_fan: (just not the one you care about)
greenspan_fan: you're much less likely to get hassled as a billionaire if you pretend other people are worth as much as you by some metric
BingoBoingo: It doesn't even have the history to be religion.
mircea_popescu: decimation yeah, the religion of "views".
mircea_popescu: but the social implications
mircea_popescu: imagine walking around with ~50mn in the shape of ten coins, weighing 1/4 pound
mircea_popescu: but say it was like a dollar, you needed 5 of them for a cup of coffee
mircea_popescu: i wonder what one could have bought with a denarius or two back then
mircea_popescu: "In 301, one gold aureus was worth 833⅓ denarii; by 324, the same aureus was worth 4,350 denarii. In 337, after Constantine converted to the solidus, one solidus was worth 275,000 denarii and finally, by 356, one solidus was worth 4,600,000 denarii."
BingoBoingo: decimation: People who lack the btc to overstock.com?
BingoBoingo: decimation: BFL ships things... To Tiger Direct and newegg after their customers give up on them.
mircea_popescu: o cause not having delivered anything else they're now delaying for better stuff to not deliver
decimation: yeah. they claim it's because they are having to delay delivery of the newer 20 nm chips
mircea_popescu: decimation "everyone's making roi" or how did the scammertalk go
BingoBoingo: mircea_popescu: Well, I think when herbi was trying to sculpt an orderbook I pointed out that in fiat world the cheapest part is the money. Maybe this week a trailer park sells for $200, maybe next for $200,000
decimation: I bought one of the knc miner neptunes, thinking they would deliver. In retrospect, it was a dumb idea. Now they want to deliver me rights to their "datacenter" that will mine for me
mircea_popescu: BingoBoingo it's dubiously fiat's fault, seeing how the solidus and aureus backed the same principle.
BingoBoingo: mircea_popescu: American handegg has the same problem as boxing. Amazing where ad revenue goes when fiat backs the ads.
mircea_popescu: decimation notice that asic production only began in earnest once the set of fanbois crossed into the 100k heads territory.
mircea_popescu: BingoBoingo boxing has the problem that every fight kills you a little.
BingoBoingo: The problem with boxing is the opposite thing. Where any party can veto any matchup. At least tennis forces these issues.
BingoBoingo: The Alma mater couldn't do it. Maybe this woman who turned tits into a rocket can.
BingoBoingo: mircea_popescu: Well he started with two other noobs. One had sense to quit hours after my blog post. The other didn't quit until a few weeks ago. The one unfortunately stuck with the forum handle has sent me so much angry correspondence.
mircea_popescu: "It is plain to see, from both sides of the issue, the troubles associated with PayPal payments. The problem SWMC would have with accepting PayPal payments is this: An investor purchases a Contract for X-GH/s using PayPal for the purchase. The mined BTC for the Contracts is paid to the investor over the following 6 months (for this example, the life of profitability of the investment.) Then, sometime between 6 to 12 mo
greenspan_fan: mircea_popescu hi, I've been reading your blog and thought I'd check out the chat
ThickAsThieves: the one for your tongue
mircea_popescu: grossly stated, "seeing how the value of gold in a finite space would be a function of other physical processes in the same finite space,
BingoBoingo: Oh the solar wind dude somehow managed to get scammier https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=297334.msg5225572#msg5225572
asciilifeform: this is the correct approach to explanation, btw: stuff a crowbar in the contradictions between observed reality and the extant crap
decimation: it's my understanding that sdcards are cheaper than the equivlient plain flash ships
mircea_popescu: kinda shows why the entire utilitarian and monetarist stuff is nonsense with a dab of cream.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: how could it be otherwise?
mircea_popescu: in the strict utilitarian view of utility.
asciilifeform: (see the 'price ceiling' discussion from a few months ago)
BingoBoingo: asciilifeform: I mean we can add some crypto to gold teleportation, but at that point the gold may as well be superfluous
mircea_popescu: decimation one of the advantages of au is that it being elemental, it's actually finite in any finite region of space.
asciilifeform: (to follow the analogy)
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: presumably it responds to the correct incantation only.
decimation: what if I teleported all the gold on Jupiter?
BingoBoingo: asciilifeform: What protects the gold from malicious teleportation?
decimation: I was watching Top Gear last sunday and they were driving a Dacia sedan
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform the absence of both of these being long regarded as a bug in the implementation of physicality.
asciilifeform: if gold could be teleported at will, and likewise stowed in an inaccessible 'never-land' by the owner, one would need no electronic cryptocoin.
decimation: in the final analysis everything can be taken from you, except your soul
mircea_popescu: it could just as well show that the pedestrian definition of "physical" isn't really as important as we thought.
decimation: bitcoin teaches that the valuable part of the gold coin isn't the physical coin but merely the information it conveys
mircea_popescu: then you discover some of those people actually heard of merlot, and even can distinguish it from pinot.
asciilifeform: 'even' in the russian prison there are smart folks. some, perhaps not quite smart enough to spring loose, some that stay out of habit, some that have simply not located a sufficiently fat herd of bullocks...
mircea_popescu: like... suppose there's a club of shitbathers, who seek out filthy stables and other animal warehouses to bathe in the crap
asciilifeform: but, seeing only what can be seen in the infamous quote, it was a good show.
mircea_popescu: there are, you know, even in soviet russia smart people.
asciilifeform: leaving aside the question of whether a particular mouthpiece of the headless dictatorship believes this, it is clearly intended for the consumption of folks who do (or could, with the right prod)
mircea_popescu: i don't know the guy well enough to discern da fuck he's thinking under n layers of public communication bs
mircea_popescu: im not entirely sure that's his problem there.
asciilifeform: seems to me like they are actually envisioning that cartoon coin, except somehow 'made of bit'
mircea_popescu: they are proceeding on a radically different sort of abstraction than the number-servants
mircea_popescu: but you are wrong to think that the language-servants are not proceeding abstractly.
mircea_popescu: possibly the most imporant articles i ever published but the shit's fucking abstruse.
decimation: you see this phenomenon with the Old Republican goldbugs who try to understand bitcoin
BingoBoingo: Oh Seals now says they require 2 confirmations to credit deposits while only actually requiring one.
mircea_popescu: i have a set of three articles in romanian laying the foundation for understanding this and many other bullshits.
asciilifeform: or they can't imagine concept of 'coin'
mircea_popescu: it is not nearly as silly as it seems. there's a fundamental tension at work.
asciilifeform: i think these folks literally have to see a gold coin, albeit a cartoon gold coin
mircea_popescu: they're "professional" which really is just a shoddy translation of "civilised", ie, part of the polity
asciilifeform: re: the abstraction-blind.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: remember 'the camel has two humps' piece?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: imaginary physical, dead tree book or cardboard box that the product somehow is..These are required supposedly because its professional ..it helps the bullocks imaginary perceptions << the gold coins generated by the script all crapcoin artists seem to use. or the cardboard '90s software box drawn (identically!?) by all peddlers of winblows turdware...
BingoBoingo: I think I'm going to try sealwithclubs, been about 9 months since I've been there. Maybe I can make a profit or two.
decimation: for the most part, yes
decimation: heh. I doubled my money with btct and asicminer, but then I heeded the warnings of mpoe-pr and bailed
decimation: yeah, the emperor or whoever has the mandate of heaven which is universal, why bother escape?
chetty: comfortable people stay home, the miserable go adventuring
decimation: I wonder if there is the same itch in China to try to gain alludial rights, like the English moving to New England
mircea_popescu: some people put up better with this bs than others.
mircea_popescu: "you'll find the east indies, you just don't know where".
gribble: Animaniacs - Ballad of Magellan - YouTube: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pM-igYjn6E4>; Animaniacs - The Ballad of Magellan - YouTube: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fg6pXhZxbOI>; Poem: Ballad of Magellan - HolyJoe.Org: <http://holyjoe.org/poetry/rugg.htm>
asciilifeform: easily. but they were a bit too 'cold'.
mircea_popescu: and in general, we could have been a subcategory of their culture much like they ended up a subcategory of ours.
mircea_popescu: chinese merchants shopwing up in europe would have disrupted the hansa
mircea_popescu: may i remind you that at all points of human history the chinese hel;d the upper hand.
decimation: the Romans managed to trade with China too
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform because they could never sail, because they were fucktarded in the roman sense
asciilifeform: (arguably their equivalent of 'space program')
asciilifeform: see the Zheng He voyages
mircea_popescu: who knew that sort of ossified, concrete stability is the enemy of long term survival.
mircea_popescu: it all begun when they decided it'd be more stable if they stopped making fun of their captives.
mircea_popescu: this is perhaps usable as an explanation of why the us and generallythe english world collapses today
mircea_popescu: this contains the seeds of improvement.
asciilifeform: and why their alchemists got firmly wedged in alchemy
mircea_popescu: decimation something in that sense. i dunno that it could be readily reducible to any other form.
asciilifeform: dives into, (for those of us who do not know chinese) the reasons why the gadgets did not transition into what we think of as 'technology'
asciilifeform: rec. reading re: china: 'The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West', T. E. Huff
BingoBoingo: If only the Chinese had enough inate malice, they could have been the ones to hook the English on opium
decimation: every man for himself vs. veneration for the entire family/community?
decimation: There is something about the West that breeds a certain creativity that is absent in the far East
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: this was an actual problem in japanese metro in the '80s.
BingoBoingo: I'm still lol'ing at decades of nutrition made soldier outgrow the chinese army's tanks
mircea_popescu: by 1800 they were still dicking around.
asciilifeform: they had countless neat things.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform tell you what. they had alchemy inception cca 2nd century BC.
asciilifeform: of, you could say, insufficiently high temperature in the simulated-annealing sense.
mircea_popescu: decimation it's not even the bureaucracy. i despise their 5000 years of dumbass comme-il-faut-confucianism
decimation: they have 5,000 years of bureaucracy
mircea_popescu: i've not learned chinese yet mostly because i know of no noteworthy intellectual achievement in their classics.
mircea_popescu: but yes, this is the major criterion i employ to guide me linguistically.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: perhaps you've heard the infamous ' Я русский бы выучил только за то, что им разговаривал Ленин' line
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform you mean of the whet ?!
decimation: this guy is a hero to the amateur radio guys - he's making is own open-source codec for low bitrate speech
asciilifeform: the author, about whom i know virtually nothing else - is a titan.
ozbot: Shall be Delivered | The Whet
BingoBoingo: mircea_popescu: I'm juggling 8 tasks, but is there a bounty on the post key apocolypse novel?
mircea_popescu: doesn't seem much there yet.
asciilifeform: see the immortal 'Shall Be Delivered'.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform actually the novel of "how will SE look in a post-key apocalypse" could be an interesting novel.
decimation: I'm some guy livin' in the US
mircea_popescu: social engineering as the venetians knew it "mostly went away" too.
decimation: on the other hand, you could argue that "IS-95" is a "format" and Qualcomm camps out on that with their custom crapware
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: re: the fool's fake passport: once it becomes possible to do business only with those who follow formula of 'fuck people, do business with keys,' social engineering goes mostly away.
BingoBoingo: mircea_popescu: I might lean towards thinking the proof is valid, but could come in at hundreds of KB if only enough Aspies were locked in an attic with some meth.