117800+ entries in 0.87s
mircea_popescu: (this was counterintuitive to the grunts doing money changing in the street, we had a good laugh over steaks about it, when discussing venezuela's plans to the same thing. after it played out they decided
i was a god. because hey, why admit you were wrong when you could think the guy who's right is simply supernatural)
☟︎ mircea_popescu: meanwhile, the contact points with the outside economy are controlled as well as they can be (they can't be - most of the local trade is in the hands of the chinese, who own the proud but stupid argentine. whenever
i want to move dollars, or to dispose of any other actyual economic or poltiical matters,
i talk to an asian person. no exceptions.
i wouldn't break a date with han because macri called, sort of thing)
mircea_popescu:
i dunno why everyone acts like this 300 old bit of wisdom (in french) is novel.
punkman: oh forgot 3 boeings in malaysia, fuck it
I'll get new ones
mircea_popescu:
i've been in "every mainstream media" like they say. whatever the fuck that's worth.
PeterL: which book is it where Baba Yaga ends up living in an airplane?
I think is was an Orson Scott Card thing?
assbot: Logged on 17-12-2015 23:45:23; pete_dushenski: based on alf's repeated references to gsm as 'toy crypto',
i don't think he maintains any delusions about cell phone security
punkman: "
I am currently retired, simply stocking perishable groceries overnight two or three nights per week to make writing possible." << is that how retired works?
BingoBoingo: Murican Poverty: "Big Mamma is your ideal customer. Yes, she might eat an entire rotisserie chicken while her children devour a box of snacks. But not only will
I look the other way,
I’m willing to pay some retarded white guy $10 an hour to clean up her mess. She is the cash bomb. No customer, not Bill Gates or the Dyke Queen of West Germany spends as much money on retail food as Big Mamma. This is not calculated as a percentage
☟︎ pete_dushenski: based on alf's repeated references to gsm as 'toy crypto',
i don't think he maintains any delusions about cell phone security
☟︎ ascii_field: meanwhile, 'socket no message in first 60 seconds, 0 1' between two boxes which
i control
☟︎ pete_dushenski: though neither is likely to fill every single samsung container ship,
i grant.
pete_dushenski: adlai: because treaded vehicles are slow and thirsty, which,
i guess container ships probably are too, at least compared to floating pallet.
BingoBoingo: pete_dushenski:
I mean how else does Samsung get container boats from 2nd Korea to Shenzen?
adlai: sup dawg,
i herd u liek boats
pete_dushenski:
i can see hong kong being 'landlocked' but unless dc is surrounded by mountain ranges that
i don't know about,
i'm not sure
i see it either
BingoBoingo: Or maybe CONDO for COck aNd DOg mongler.
I dunno how the FBI names these people
pete_dushenski:
i was just comparing flights from edmonton to two different destinations for this winter, seattle and cancun, and found that flights were $500 per person regardless !
pete_dushenski: and here
i was thinking that new cars were a raw deal...
BingoBoingo: <mircea_popescu> curious how long they take to BAN ME!111 omaigawds << You aren't looking in Missouri or Ohio?
I though you were doing Anthropology, or Whaleology.
mircea_popescu: the douche thinks this can be successful, in any sense.
i rest.
trinque:
I'll wager it's a "take a picture of your whiteboard and d1g1t1z3 it" aka one bored afternoon's project.
ascii_field:
i know of some which actually require 50+ shots
mircea_popescu:
i mean don't get me wrong, it's a theory, but that's about it.
mircea_popescu:
i saw it but
i'm not persuaded it explains anything. what, exactly, someone can't just walk into the dc copy the server ?
ascii_field: to the point where
i EXPECT a three dollar part to arrive sunday morning if ordered on friday night
assbot: Logged on 17-12-2015 17:48:02; mircea_popescu:
i mean... you can order magazines delivered by the little magazine stand. or flowers. ANY store, you walk in, you want delivery, they'll fucking deliver.
ascii_field:
i'm just not seeing the predicate here ('above median') as being true
assbot: Logged on 17-12-2015 17:45:38; mircea_popescu: and at this juncture
i'd like to inquire with the esteemed audience whether they'd allocate the "not as terrible as medium average" to the datapoint that he had 10's of k's of pounds to blow on this (ie, rich is not as stupid as poor, ceteris paribus) or to the fact that he's british (ie, pureblood is not as stupid as mongrels, ceteris paribus).
mircea_popescu: "
i intend to one day be a singer" is not how you get the fucking job. WHERE HAVE YOU SUNG BEFORE BITCH. that is it, that is all.
mircea_popescu: "You must never, ever, pitch the product to the customer and ask for their feedback. Instead, the conversation serves the purpose of ascertaining whether the lack of recipe diversity and frustration with takeaway food or ready meals is a big enough problem for which
I offer a solution that they would pay for. To reach this conclusion, don’t ask about their future intentions (“would you buy this?”), but do ask abo
mircea_popescu:
i don't like the idea because
i send the girls. picking good stuff is complex. but yes, if they could be trusted to do something other than the usual anglosphere "this is how supermarket gets rid of all the imminetly-rotten junk", then yeah.
punkman:
I even like the idea,
I'd probably want to buy ingredients by the week
mircea_popescu:
i mean... you can order magazines delivered by the little magazine stand. or flowers. ANY store, you walk in, you want delivery, they'll fucking deliver.
☟︎ mircea_popescu: There never was a need for a service like ours in the UK in the segment that we picked (urban professionals, couples without kids or with one baby max). << ironically, the need does exist. argentina does one thing right, and that is they are FANATIC with deliveries. you can have ANYTHING delivered.
i don't mean, walk into supermarket, order two pellets of mineral water and have the supermarket deliver it - you can do t
mircea_popescu: and at this juncture
i'd like to inquire with the esteemed audience whether they'd allocate the "not as terrible as medium average" to the datapoint that he had 10's of k's of pounds to blow on this (ie, rich is not as stupid as poor, ceteris paribus) or to the fact that he's british (ie, pureblood is not as stupid as mongrels, ceteris paribus).
☟︎ mircea_popescu: of radioactive fumes emanating from commercial kitchen equipment, all be zombified and eat patrons’ brains, yes, in that case
I might be tempted to purchase a trial product from you. Once. Then
I’ll take a risk with the zombies.”
mircea_popescu: However, we committed the big mistake of presenting people with the idea and asking them if they liked it and would buy it. And when people said yes, WE thought they meant “launch it and
I will buy”. In reality, they meant “
I’m not entirely excluding the possibility that one day, when Ocado trucks run out of gas, supermarket doors get blocked by red-hot lava and restaurant waiters will, due to a mysterious leak
mircea_popescu: This will be the number one lesson
I will never forget and the absolute key to understanding Dinnr’s failure — we were not solving anyone’s problem.
I should have found that out in my initial market research, especially in my 1–1 interviews.
mircea_popescu: "In those days,
I spent 9 hours a day, 6 days a week, sitting in a cold warehouse in West Acton, hot air blowers creating 25 degree bubbles around parts of my body in an otherwise 14–15 degree room. The large industrial fridges were empty. Long gone were the days
I pre-stocked ingredients for faster order fulfillment. Now, when an order would come through,
I would jump on my bike and buy fresh ingredients at a nearby
mircea_popescu: why the fuck would you not include pepper.
i mean, leave aside all the other idiocies involved, why the FUCK would you not include the very few items that are already prepackaged for this and have been for 50 years.
mircea_popescu: "what do you mean the great equations don't apply to me ?! what,
i'm like, not good enough to matter in this sense ?!?!?!"
mircea_popescu: And
I when
I asked people from my high school to answer questions and spread the word a bit,
I thought that a bunch of them would have respect for what
I’m doing and want to help out. Almost no one did, which
I found to be quite selfish of them.
I don’t think my initial expectations were too unreasonable given what
I had known, but my beliefs have since been updated."
mircea_popescu: "
I overestimated peoples’ desire to help someone starting a startup and trying to do something good. This will probably sound naive, but
I don’t think it is.
I thought that people would have some sort of respect for what
I’m doing and want to help out. For example, the high school guidance counselors
I tried to contact, maybe the default is for them to operate in a bureaucratic way, but
I had thought there was a
mircea_popescu: "
I spent 2 weeks cold calling college counselors saying, “Hey
I’ve got free student reviews of Ivy League schools. Check it out, let me know what you think, and sign up here if you want to be notified when
I get more schools.” Almost all of them ignored me."
mircea_popescu: Throughout sophomore year
I read all
I could about startups, and about things like finance, marketing, strategy, economics, design, technology etc. The following summer
I started learning some HTML, CSS, JS and PHP, but didn’t make much progress (
I also started a very early version of the website that
I’m writing this post about)."
mircea_popescu: My sophomore year of college
I was a neuroscience major and my plan was to unlock the secrets of the mind and universe. Then
I realized that the path of grad school, professor, grants, and incremental research wouldn’t be a great way to pursue this goal. At the same time,
I read Paul Graham’s essay on How to Start a Startup.
I felt a strong sense of “
I could do this!” and “making a lot of money from a startup
mircea_popescu: "
I realized that many of the true money-making businesses in healthcare really aren’t about optimizing delivery of primary care. This is a longer discussion but
I realized, essentially, that we had no customers because no one was really interested in the model we were pitching. Doctors want more patients, not an efficient office."
mircea_popescu: "Product: Bitshuva What
I didn’t understand was, you charge not for how much work it is for you. You charge how much the service is worth."
nubbins`: <+mircea_popescu> in other news, chick on okcupid : "porque no me escribis en castellano << they say castellano in peru too, but if
i'm not mistaken this is not universal in south america?
mircea_popescu: in other news, asciilifeform :
i comissioned a server with 128gb (ecc) ram, on the understanding that they'll upgrade it to 256gb just as soon as they can get the sticks in the dc. will be passing you the coords later today, so phuctor can live again.
mircea_popescu: But around July
I just couldn’t take it anymore.
I wanted a product. A real one. Not just a mockup. So what did
I do? Instead of fully focusing on finding a CTO, or looking for other ways to get somebody creating the product,
I decided to learn how to code and do it myself. Coding was on my bucket list anyhow, so
I figured, this is the best opportunity to make it happen. So
I took a 2 week crash course in Rails, and
mircea_popescu: "We built like crazy. That’s the thing about us engineers; if you give us something interesting to build, we will forget everything else and just build. Our first prototype, which automated lights, was ready in 45 days. The second prototype, which could automate lights, fans, ACs and water heaters was out in another month. This is really fast according to hardware standards." <<
i wish
i could disagree.
mircea_popescu: and
i feel it's a peety you folks manage to find 2k calories' worth of roadkill each day.
mircea_popescu: see, when
i say white westerners aspire to be dead, this is very pointedly, very exactly what
i mean.
mircea_popescu: "Look, it wasn’t that women didn’t want custom clothing. Designer clothing by nature is custom, in a sense. The real problem was that while on average our users spent up to 7 minutes per session (insanely impressive
I might add), they weren’t sure if they wanted to purchase the clothes that they spent all that time personalizing. We knew because we asked. We (creepily?) added almost all of our initial customers t
mircea_popescu: in other news, chick on okcupid : "porque no me escribis en castellano, soy argentina" mp on okcupid : "It's not your fault you're Argentine. It is however your fault you're a dumbass. That's what
I wanted to see, if you're just Argentine because your parents were dumb, or whether you are actually dumb yourself. Having established that point, a bon entendeur, salut."
mircea_popescu:
http://log.bitcoin-assets.com/?date=17-12-2015#1345340 << and
i also don't buy into this narrative. soviet russia was also a middling successful economy up until... what, hruschev decided to bury you ?
i guess. the fact of the matter is that there's a shelf life for all delusion, printed right on the box. seoul adapted, pyongyang did not adapt. yes, it's true that neither had the resoureces to force the adaptation of t
☝︎ mircea_popescu:
i guess they're sovereign, in that lord-of-the-flies sense. whatevs.
mircea_popescu: this is an incredible depth of rot in these heads by now,
i am persuaded that what they PERCEIVE as the problem is that it's... get a hold of youself... it's NOT META ENOUGH. that's the fucking thing, these dickless, otaku imbeciles feel deeply threatened by the fact that a guy learning to do what his country generally sucks at is TOO REAL.
mircea_popescu: <asciilifeform> starve.' << how does this differ from mircea_popescu's classical prescription 'go shoot a policeman' ? <<< this question is indistinguishable from where
i sit from asking "how does saying 'you see a girl you like ? go fuck her.' differ from saying 'you see a girl you like ? go raise her children by another man!". while
i grant that there could in point of fact truthfully exist nooks and crannies in the
jurov: ben_vulpes:
i'm using konversation, it always asks politely when pasting long/multiline text
assbot: Logged on 17-12-2015 02:47:47; asciilifeform: ( aaand if you know why, you're prolly as ready for the glue factory as
i am... )