asciilifeform: $ticker btc usd
btcinfobot: Current BTC price in USD: $57129.1
verisimilitude: $ticker btc btc
btcinfobot: Current BTC price in BTC: $1
shinohai: xD
verisimilitude: I was checking an edge case.
shinohai: I do need to fix my lazy ticker script. Only uses dollar symbol instead of correct currency symbol.
verisimilitude: It would be easier to remove the currency symbol, considering the context is unambiguous.
shinohai: Prolly so, bot runs on telegram too so I try to put a *little* eyecandy in there lol.
verisimilitude: I barely know what Telegram is.
shinohai: "Telegram ... where shitcoiners meet!" (tm)
asciilifeform: $ticker usd btc
btcinfobot: Current USD price in BTC: $0.0000175
asciilifeform: lel
shinohai: OMG USD CRASHING!
verisimilitude: $ticker help
btcinfobot: Error! Requires 2 parameters - Please see `man ticker` for usage
verisimilitude: $man ticker
btcinfobot: unknown topic "ticker"
verisimilitude: Beautiful.
verisimilitude: man ticker
verisimilitude: Alright, as figured.
shinohai: irc bots are mostly -ev activity. I'd prolly take time to write the man pages for all I lack if it was paid bot service.
shinohai: But people only pay for spambots, so meh.
verisimilitude: This is an example of where documentation shouldn't be decoupled.
asciilifeform: wb trinque . how's the allegedly frozen texas ?
trinque: hi asciilifeform. all that mysterious white stuff has nearly melted.
trinque: we had no issues.
trinque: the grid and water systems around here are apparently remarkably impoverished, but I'd be rude to fault such a mild snowstorm for any of that.
asciilifeform: trinque: heard lulzy things re 300x markups and over-9000 mains current bills.
asciilifeform: will paste, for the lulzrecord :
asciilifeform: 'On Monday evening the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) cited its “complete authority over ERCOT” to direct that ERCOT set pricing at $9/kWh until the grid could manage the outage situation after being ravaged by the freezing winter storm.'
asciilifeform: '...the PUCT left the directive in place and continued to force prices to $9/kWh, approximately 300x higher than the normal wholesale price. For a home that uses 2,000 kWh per month, prices at $9/kWh work out to over $640 per day in energy charges. By comparison, that same household would typically pay $2 per day.'
asciilifeform: i.e. konsoomer pays coupla times the cost of typical diesel generator rental, automagically
trinque: yeah, very much looks like the state fucked the smaller energy buyer companies.
trinque: it's deregulated until it ain't.
trinque: my energy co is owned by the city, so rate changes don't float. bureaucrat controlled.
trinque: and honestly, I'll take real soviets over fake capitalists any day.
asciilifeform: trinque: near as i can tell, is simply part of the 'termiting' of usa's infrastructure by the financial 'managerial' caste. orig. was under banner of 'privatization', soon to rebrand, prolly, as 'socialization'. but will be same process w/out skipping a beat.
trinque: aha, looting.
asciilifeform recalls the mindfuck of hearing about variable-rate house loans. when 1st heard, thought 'joke'
asciilifeform: last yr in washingtonistan, water utility pricing was doctored 'to incentivize economy'. asciilifeform's bill moar than doubled, and asciilifeform dun even have a working garden or anything of the kind.
asciilifeform: if a similar tax increase had been enacted, there'd've been various wankage. but this -- in utter silence.
trinque: but ARM's a good deal, y'see, when you're going to flip the house in a year for 150%.
asciilifeform: utilities are a very handy place to squeeze moar yachts outta the serfs.
asciilifeform: lol
trinque: this place is a fractal-fuck. I just haven't found anywhere else I'd rather be.
trinque: speaking of utili-lols, I found out recently that I "cannot" just run my house on my own solar array.
trinque: I must send my generation to the grid (metered-out), and then use the grid (metered-in)
trinque: and the fucks set the rate for out, aside in, of course.
trinque: I'm clearly still too close to the god-forsaken cities.
asciilifeform: aha! rather like a fella from pennsylvania once described to me, they had a town where errybody had wells and septic systems. suddenly -- banned, commission went around to verify that all wells & tanks cemented, as 'favourite son contract' enacted to build a public pipe grid. sticking errybody w/ 700+usd bills for next 25y.
trinque: right now the "out" rate is even favorable, but wtf, I'm going to spend 50k to hope it stays favorable?
asciilifeform: locals contested in court; lost.
asciilifeform: trinque: tx banned living in anyffin not connected to grid??
trinque: austin did, which is my current squat.
asciilifeform: afaik errywhere else, if you want to spend on batteries, you can
trinque: yep, I will probably just head further out in time.
trinque: there's some really nice land out west of austin.
trinque: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2021-02-19#1031811 << most significant, as I chose to study latin before reattempting digestion of other eurolangs (which paid off, as it's obviously made it much easier)
snsabot: Logged on 2021-02-19 11:47:21 asciilifeform: trinque: outta curiosity, was this your 1st encounter w/ a lang which retains the knobs that fell off english ?
trinque: but my first encounter with a knob missing in english was spanish subjunctive
trinque: "it's fine if speaking of hypotheticals and counterfactuals takes more time in english; who does it?"
asciilifeform recalls having headache w/ english subjunctives -- 'should've could've would've' etc
asciilifeform recalls dictation, 'how much wood would the wood chuck chuck if the wood chuck could chuck wood'
trinque recently learned of greek dual; what a beautiful concept.
trinque: the universe is indeed made of connected pairs, and they stopped to bother with expressing it specifically, rather than just another stop on the number line.
trinque: this apparently fell off at some point, as they do.
asciilifeform: granted not as 'sexy' as a dead/classical lang, but i suspect trinque would luvv finnish. where a case for damn-near errything ('into', 'outta', etc)
verisimilitude: How does the subjunctive differ in Spanish?
asciilifeform: verisimilitude: it's conjugatory (vs. engl)
verisimilitude: Alright.
trinque: should you cook, I would be happy.
trinque shakes cobwebs out of brain
trinque: something like... me alegro de que cocines
trinque: probably butchered that entirely; I expect shinohai will tell me
trinque: verisimilitude: it establishes the hypothetical as a space for chains of verbal action, which feels more direct an expression than sprinkling the statements with qualifiers.
trinque: what's most annoying about english is its lack of a particular style
trinque: chinese has (as I understand it) zero declension or conjugation, all strings of particles.
trinque: english sometimes conjugates, sometimes strings along particles, sometimes ...
trinque: interesting to consider the problem from the perspective of a parser
trinque: a chinese parser would be quite stateful; a latin parser might even approach context-free
shinohai: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2021-02-20#1031928 << Tengo hambre, cocinate algo puta perezosa.
snsabot: Logged on 2021-02-20 21:45:57 trinque: probably butchered that entirely; I expect shinohai will tell me
asciilifeform: lol
shinohai: Of course, it's colloquial Spanish from household but you get the idea ^.^
asciilifeform: trinque: yer right re cn; i ate enuff to notice that 'no grammar in the earthling sense of the word'. but headaches from other reasons entirely: hieroglyphs, as erryone knows; but also the profusion of idioms mixed into errything (typical 4-hieroglyph literary allusions) but often implicit, making commonplace documents impenetrable for anyone who is not versed in the lit
asciilifeform: thimbronion may be able to comment in detail.
trinque: shinohai: lol
trinque: asciilifeform: yep. I have a personal allergy around memorizing arbitrarity from american church and american school.
trinque: doesn't get me very far with chinese.
thimbronion: asciilifeform: I have nothing really to add. I feel like studying it is making me stupider.
trinque: > memorizing arbitrarity
verisimilitude: I've taken Chinese lessons, and didn't like what I'd learned, either.
trinque: it is a subjugation technique.
verisimilitude: I asked my teacher the etymology of a scientific term, and apparently it was a custom term.
verisimilitude: There was no ``rhyme nor reason'' behind it, apparently.
trinque: "our father who art in heaven; hallowed by thy name..." etc
verisimilitude: The only thing disgusting about that is how many people know it compared to how many understand it.
trinque: just in-group signaling noises; it sounds like their language is packed with them.
verisimilitude: Machines can be made to repeat sentences without understanding them; humans doing such is worthless.
trinque: verisimilitude ever heard the acronym use at a tech megacorp?
trinque: same dumb shit.
thimbronion: oh man the acronymimsm at gov't agencies is over the top though
trinque: same thing
trinque: the "oh you don't know?" schtick might be the oldest political game.
verisimilitude: I'd wager on ``What's that over there?'' before maiming being the oldest trick.
asciilifeform: human langs are all fulla arbitrary crapola.
verisimilitude: Only the things I don't like are crap; the rest is neat.
asciilifeform: re 'ingroup signal' -- consider how most english folx react to the idea of phonetization
asciilifeform: (in fact is very similar to how chinese react to idea of abolishing hieroglyphs. 'i suffered, so should the sons')
asciilifeform: ( and see also apropos. )
snsabot: (trilema) 2019-09-29 asciilifeform: and of course ye olde ѣ . lenin gets the credit/blame for the cuts, but 5 successive monarchs in fact proposed to cut the dead glyphs, each time ran into opposition from 'ohnoez, ornament of the language!111' academicians
verisimilitude: There are advantages to hanzi.
trinque: asciilifeform: yep, same as "I'm circumcised and so will you be"
verisimilitude: Well the solution to that I like is killing people who insist on it, but let's not delve too deeply into that topic.
verisimilitude: One thing Mao did eliminate, assuming he deserves credit, is foot-binding, which is a similarly disgusting practice.
trinque: I don't much go for hobbled women either.
asciilifeform: verisimilitude: it aint 100% clear to me that it's different in anything but degree (or all that much) from euro 'heels'
verisimilitude: The simple fact of things, is that the world would be better if everyone I didn't like were dead.
asciilifeform: verisimilitude: if it's any consolation, eventually all dead..
trinque: lol
verisimilitude: It's hard to argue with this, even if one be included in the set to die, since death frees us from caring about it.
trinque: every young man discovers solipsism for himself.
trinque: doesn't make it profound.
verisimilitude: I occasionally wish I could kill people through the Internet. It occurs to me I could've then died as a child that way, but this of course spares me of it, so it's acceptable.
asciilifeform: most folx, luckily, dun have much aptitude for solipsism.
verisimilitude: I'm mature enough to reject solipsism, but not enough to not want it.
trinque splits the difference at narcissism
trinque: re: death, never considered it much of a freeing
trinque: evaluations end there, no?
trinque: what'd be free?
verisimilitude: I don't think it matters much.
verisimilitude: I've barely programmed at all this year.
asciilifeform: verisimilitude: what prevented ?
verisimilitude: It's myself.