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diana_coman: moscow is also waaaay bigger so presumably the shitholness factor is a few degrees of magnitude higher, easily

mircea_popescu: i'm not saying this is the dood's doing to any degree -- there's a very clear gradient, once the crisis hit, it propagated west to east.

diana_coman: I suspect it's Moscow that was a superlative shithole simply

mircea_popescu: i dunno that he knows what he's talking about. as a factual matter, 1985 living conditions were worse in moscow than in bucharest (and by far worse in bucharest than say cluj, or timisoara)

diana_coman: at any rate, it's not just a palace in dubious style; look at this point of ref: in 1960, new workers in Ploiesti got to buy a strip of land and build their own house; and they did, not one or two but whole streets; some of those were even fixed-size parcel, others (more expensive) not; in the 80s, workers got assigned (when? well, when enough children) some concrete-hruschebas-sorta-kinda-finished on the rule of n-1 rooms (not dorms, room

mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2019-03-13#1901961 << this actually worked into the whole imperialism angle above. ceausescu had both drydocks of large capacity and steel production. decided to make ocean trawlers to compete in the (at the time) ongoing race to the bottom -- throughout 70s world oceans were systematically and industrially depopulated, a classical disaster of commons situation. ☝︎

mircea_popescu: yes dood made a palace in a dubious style, that all the tircovnici obositi kept "superiorily" criticizing. but tell you what -- none of them were born in a better palace. they have all the footing to talk that any other african does.

mircea_popescu: or a hruscheba, or w/e the fuck they call it. makes entirely no difference, for the vast majority of the population of romania at the time had never lived in paved dwellings. ☟︎

mircea_popescu: that log thing about "what sovok is -- it's when they take the poor country girl and give her a house for free", that fucking happened. whole generations of what else'd have [been] turned into http://trilema.com/fata-satului got forcibly taught how to be textile mill workers , and got forcibily placed in 1k sqft of new construction to call a house.

mircea_popescu: diana_coman yes, useful and durable. romania got a hidro power structure, for instance. the reason it even has power today.

mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2019-03-13#1901958 << it's a matter of infrastructure that's discussed. in any fair comparison, nicu's building/whitewashing butade is actually closer to truth than any aferations of the "european stability and development funds" wank. infrastructurally, romania grew in the 60s and 70s. this was not matched hence (or ever afore, even accounting for surface and population, the carol boom is almost a degr ☝︎

mircea_popescu: soviets needed a slightly larger ukraine like i need slightly longer nose hairs. they ~did~ however need a friendly romania more than they needed hats.

mircea_popescu: lenin hadn't what to fight a soccer match with, let alone war.

a111: Logged on 2019-03-13 21:06 asciilifeform: so you try an' make a 'new'. and pray that it worx, before 'a bunch of foreigners land on your shores, buy up some local chiefs, chop down your forests, rip the minerals out of your soil, enslave a few generations, and eventually go home, leaving their bastards in charge'

a111: Logged on 2018-06-19 15:59 mircea_popescu: the universal oppinion of romanian officer corps, which, in romania, a country very german, were more than a third of the whole shebang, was that russians are literally worse than dogs.

diana_coman: I wasn't even for a second considering *those* elites, no; as I said: elites were long dead by that time; the thing was precisely that being between them, well, he was asking the fat pigs to actually do something; big surprise they oinked only louder trembling that the food might stop.

mircea_popescu: witness how the "boierii mintii" to this fucking day have on display neither a) work to compare with trilema or else b) the required prosternation before it.

diana_coman: and yes, I can see him easily and predictably as a scapegoat; kids, don't take crown found in the mud just because nobody else wants it

diana_coman: mircea_popescu, "greaua mostenire" cuts both ways though; he gets to hide behind it for a while but he also doesn't get credit for a while

mircea_popescu: other than escaping the soviets, he attempted a sort of mini-imperialism, the cutest tchotchke show you could ever imagine, romania as an imperial power of a rag tag group of nowhere countries (including columbia, we discussed the very unhappy lulz of romania when those doods decided to just walk out of "agreements" -- mirroring exactly say spain, over the centuries)

mircea_popescu: let's do a quick ro commie likbez : ceausescu took over in '65. he got rid of dej-era leftovers as part and parcel of continuing dej's own policy of escaping the soviets. this the west ineptly (but in typical self-centered manner) misreported as "loosening".

a111: Logged on 2019-03-13 21:24 asciilifeform: diana_coman: this is where i admit that it is above my paygrade to say just how 'maybe without shoemaker, less worse and shorter' . if there's a way to keep neighbours from turning yer congo into a resource extraction base without marching peasants at gunpoint to city and having'em stand in front of lathes to make kalashes, i do not know it

diana_coman: http://btcbase.org/log/2019-03-13#1902040 -> ftr the problem is not that he "moved pesants to town" but simply that he did that a. through blatant lies (what communism is) rather than an honest gunpoint if that's what it takes b. failed in the end anyway ☝︎

a111: Logged on 2019-03-13 18:14 BingoBoingo: "La misma impotencia, o más, sienten las chicas del CB Guadalaviar. Ganaron la liga femenina la temporada pasada. El otro día perdieron 50-4 contra un rival masculino. Hemos pasado de ser campeonas de liga el año pasado a sentirnos humilladas. Es un chasco de competición, todo esto desmotiva, porque todos los partidos acabamos por los suelos con golpes."

asciilifeform: moar of a 'without gun, the words go in 1 direction and are words 'drop on knees an' get ready to please' '

diana_coman: soft words work best with a big gun sort of news?

asciilifeform: no warheads -> not only no red carpet, but you get orders from washington transmitted through a leiah at usg dept of state , and not by going into white house.

asciilifeform: re sovereignty, i cannot resist to add a legendary tidbit : j. hariton , co-designer of sov nukes with kurchatov , in his last yrs of life was reputed to have uttered 'idiot , eltsin, thinks he is getting red carpet reception in washington because he is some kinda man, rather than because they think he has some of my warheads still in working order'

asciilifeform: if the dynastic crown-wearer is enuff of a tard, then yes shoemaker, or cabbie, or defrocked priest, will wear

asciilifeform: wtf was a flunked seminary student an' bank robber was doing wearing crown, could also ask

diana_coman: asciilifeform, sure, at the root of it being wtf was a shoemaker doing with the crown on his head

asciilifeform: if yer wearing a crown and you really think 'no options' , you get out the wagner and cyanide and be sure to also dose blondie the dog 1st to make sure as fuck the cyanide is strong enuff

a111: Logged on 2017-05-31 16:28 asciilifeform: and if someone wants to mention godel etc -- ethical engineer MAY NOT cite godel, EVER, just as a police detective MAY NOT cite the supernatural and admit a hypothesis of miraculous theft from a safe

asciilifeform: as for the old shoemaker, admittedly i never wore a crown, but afaik folx who wear crowns do not have the option of saying 'we lost options'. sorta like the http://btcbase.org/log/2017-05-31#1663960 thing. ☝︎☟︎

asciilifeform: diana_coman: this is where i admit that it is above my paygrade to say just how 'maybe without shoemaker, less worse and shorter' . if there's a way to keep neighbours from turning yer congo into a resource extraction base without marching peasants at gunpoint to city and having'em stand in front of lathes to make kalashes, i do not know it ☟︎

a111: Logged on 2018-05-14 16:41 asciilifeform: there's a common set of jokes from su, q: 'if only we let germany win, we'd be drinking bavarian! riding in mercedes!' a: '... yes, ride in mercedes. but -- as the leather seat.'

a111: Logged on 2019-03-13 16:23 mircea_popescu: diana_coman what, the horses ? the "killed elite" thing would be what, i gh duca ? (and guess what, digging for that reference i also ran into -- apparently there's a piece re the afore mentioned prince)

asciilifeform: it's a slow grinding process. but either the man with the crown sets it in motion, or shortly 'No-one needs to learn to read and write in order to carry rubies out of a deep mine. '

diana_coman: look that if we burnt down everything , we wouldn't even be able to chat; sure, make a new whatever but either you find a way to organically grow it with whatever bridges are needed at first out of what is or it's not going to work.

asciilifeform: so you try an' make a 'new'. and pray that it worx, before 'a bunch of foreigners land on your shores, buy up some local chiefs, chop down your forests, rip the minerals out of your soil, enslave a few generations, and eventually go home, leaving their bastards in charge' ☟︎☟︎

diana_coman: asciilifeform, yes; the contention is whether there is any option in fact to create it out of nothing and moreover by someone who never saw it other than from a distance at best

BingoBoingo: I'm becoming rather convinced the common man encounters a psychological failure mode if they aren't scratching the dirt to avoid starvation

diana_coman: to my mind that's precisely the thing: it's not (or not only) that "screaming meat" but the fact that at the end of it, it's only a replacement with what is in fact an inferior, not a superior thing ☟︎

BingoBoingo: Don't forget the unbutchered labor activists in the Southern Cone who will consider shuttering a Ford factory "a win for the people" ☟︎

asciilifeform: with the diff that auto is 100% powered by 'great inca', you cannot plant petrol inside 'field' in a washington flat to feed to it, nor breed a replacement for when dies

asciilifeform: it is above asciilifeform's pay grade to say with what algo to industrialize a kingdom without mass engineered penury and a good helping of butchery for the folx who dun get message. afaik this problem has no known historic pill.

diana_coman: asciilifeform, you know, that's the thing that popped at me as soon as I lived for any amount of time in the west: ffs those people do *of their own will and even paying money for* precisely the idiocies that I thought communism was to blame for. So in this sense, Ceausescu "ahead of his time" , marete realizari etc etc; I still think the direction totally wrong so pushing it further doesn't seem like a great achievement to me, that's all.

diana_coman: asciilifeform, dunno; but take this re fish since you mentioned your experience in Timis; I can still remember when one found a rotten fish among the frozen "fish" with which communism improved one's diet forcibly.

asciilifeform: does anyone recall old thrd where mircea_popescu linked to a youtube clip of some idiot kid smashing up ancient car that his father gave him, 'cuz not mercedes' ? ☟︎

asciilifeform: diana_coman: i must add also that i went for a week to timis, and for 5 days went past fish market, each time finding there 0 fish. apparently shooting the shoemaker did not fix..

diana_coman: asciilifeform, so having a fish shop without fish is better because he at least knows now that he should have a fish or what?

asciilifeform: diana_coman: historic inland peasant may well have easily born and died without eating a fish, tho

BingoBoingo: https://archive.is/Tfqyw << "Varias calles de la Ciudad Vieja permanecen cortadas y con desvíos luego de que varios vidrios de edificios de la zona estallaran con los vientos que se registraron en las últimas horas." But what did the wind blow? "En la madrugada de este miércoles un vidrio del décimo piso de la Torre Ejecutiva" Ah, the Presidential office tower got its 10th floor windows blown out. Not by a bomb. This Angloph

BingoBoingo: "La misma impotencia, o más, sienten las chicas del CB Guadalaviar. Ganaron la liga femenina la temporada pasada. El otro día perdieron 50-4 contra un rival masculino. Hemos pasado de ser campeonas de liga el año pasado a sentirnos humilladas. Es un chasco de competición, todo esto desmotiva, porque todos los partidos acabamos por los suelos con golpes." ☟︎

BingoBoingo: http://trilema.com/2012/lets-dig-a-little-deeper-into-this-entire-deflation-problem/#selection-69.0-81.360 << In not quite mariscos, a number of local grocers here carry frozen Vietnamese farmed catfish.

asciilifeform: when a wot (whichever wot, physics, austria-hungary, shitoshi's, etc - dun matter) makes the transition to 'institution', the ~actual life~ is definitionally to be found ~outside~ of it

asciilifeform: 'but asciilifeform , if you want lobster, you gotta build a $9000b fishing fleet' 'mno, here's 1 from your own dryer lint trap, and it can bend xrays and modexp in constant time, naowat'

asciilifeform: like napoleon's 'there is a marshall's baton in erry private's rucksack' item.

a111: Logged on 2019-01-04 17:15 asciilifeform: in other olds, apparently i slept through this, but in early 2000s some ru d00d actually built a ~non-grazing~ lens for xray. for pennies, at that.

mircea_popescu: there can genuinely arise the situation where people who aren't necessarily trying to find their way to arby's / olive garden / we are nevertheless sick of polenta and saving to buy a lobster.

mircea_popescu: nt resulting in ordering out" is a little shakily footed.

mircea_popescu: dunno argument was "low hanging fruit". they wanna see what happens at high energy. the only way to see is to make. approximately situation of "when it comes to cooking, don't have to order out. alf has this method of making polenta, works well!" "and if i want lobster ?" "well then you gotta buy a lobster". getting indignant over how "wanting lobster only serves to drive an impossible wedge between budget and mariscos mercha

asciilifeform: but will add that i'd have easier time believing the 'physics picked the low-hanging fruit and now you NEED synchrophasotron for $trillion to do ANY' yarn , if it weren't a balloon fulla fart that i can on occasion puncture with fingernail without breaking a sweat

a111: Logged on 2016-07-11 16:29 asciilifeform: fundamental reason being, a gigantic machine employs and merit-washes 1,000,001 mediocrities

mircea_popescu: if there's even gonna be a next time. i doubt it.

mircea_popescu: i guess this is a workable forcing of the metaphore.

asciilifeform: there is such a thing as autoimmune reaction.

mircea_popescu: consider the traditional antisemitism -- a cluster of lumphocytes around a very real problem, yes, but SUBJECTIVE PROBLEM OF THE JEWS. not irritating "the organism" as such in any sense, beyond the very obvious an' deeply human "you folk can't be this fucking stupid!" thing ☟︎

asciilifeform: erry 'hate movement' is a cluster of lymphocytes around a very real irritant to organism.

mircea_popescu: it is a constant complaint of the actual females, this. and one i always agree with -- when they bring it. because yes, there's nothing fundamentally female about the pig.

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu, as i understand, maps the 'pig' to 'female', but the model is quite same, this is moar of a label on the knobs

a111: Logged on 2019-03-13 16:25 BingoBoingo: <asciilifeform> i dun have a better algo to give for how to reformat a cultural hdd , afaik that's still the state of the art. << Well there is the US Socialist Disney block by block reformat algo as well

asciilifeform: upstack, http://btcbase.org/log/2019-03-13#1901856 << i suspect this is red herring. it is 'institution' making a stab at regaining lost territory. asciilifeform's suspicion is that if 'history struggle', it aint between so much specifically 'new and old elite' as b/w human-man ( who wakes up and knows that he was put upon the earth to cut atom, build harem, etc ) and beetle-man, who 'knows' that he was born to eat from trough prikok ☝︎

asciilifeform: ( recall, the not long ago thrd where a: 'cultures are born, live, senesce, and die, like organisms' m:'poppycock' a:'best i got that makes any sense of the sinusoid')

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: a++ idea for an eco.

mircea_popescu: anyway, back to suleyman -- it is ~conceivable~, and definitely an excellent premise for an umberto eco-like novel, that suleyman gave up his harem to try and produce a harem generator that didn't suck.

mircea_popescu is vaguely curious if a century hence there will be tears shed over "all the destruction". someone's gonna cry for systemd, what.

asciilifeform: lots and lotsa grade-a folx , literally outta the mud, and straight into 'take country from wooden plough to thermonuke and moon buggy'

a111: Logged on 2017-02-03 05:29 phf: my mom had one of those "papa escaped the purges by burning all paperwork but life got tough when they took our governess" piano teachers, who would lament about being forced to teach peasants and brown folk, not on racial grounds as much as "you have to have a bidet in your house for 3 generations, before you can touch a piano"

a111: Logged on 2018-12-02 00:07 asciilifeform: there's a preserved communique from stalin to hrusch, where the latter served up umpteenth list of meat grinder candidates and stalin replied 'rejected, have measure, idiot'

mircea_popescu: is the only distinction that i don't actually hang the various negrated morons ? because i can swear it is to me a merely cosmetic matter, i would not lift finger one to stop it if they were in fact beheaded for it, and stalin did MORE than me in this vein, hence http://btcbase.org/log/2018-12-02#1877763 ☝︎

asciilifeform: e.g. i have a (long-dead) distant kinsman whose father stayed alive in '20s strictly cuz he burned his swiss diploma. pretty sure ~erryone in sovokistans has a similar tale.

BingoBoingo: <asciilifeform> i dun have a better algo to give for how to reformat a cultural hdd , afaik that's still the state of the art. << Well there is the US Socialist Disney block by block reformat algo as well ☟︎

mircea_popescu: diana_coman what, the horses ? the "killed elite" thing would be what, i gh duca ? (and guess what, digging for that reference i also ran into -- apparently there's a piece re the afore mentioned prince) ☟︎

diana_coman: asciilifeform, if you are into purging, at least purge the whole lot and be done with it; this sort of "let's cut the elite and then we grow a new one out of our ass" is stupid

asciilifeform: i dun have a better algo to give for how to reformat a cultural hdd , afaik that's still the state of the art.

asciilifeform: revisiting upstack re ivan and his missing harem -- suleyman is even moar of a case of wtf, had not only correct 'church', but working harem, and then 'wrapped it around telephone pole' when roxy

mircea_popescu: i suppose matter should remain open for he who can be arsed to read on it ; that's the best i have for a theory in the meanwhile.

mircea_popescu: yes, but his mother got poisoned as a little boy, and up until 15 he was... a peasant ?

mircea_popescu: asciilifeform wasn't ivan raised by a regency, in the manner the prince of talleyrand-perigord also describes, "as a vagrant or the poorest of the poor" ?

BingoBoingo: Henry simply did a weak XT attack on the church. Did not hang all of the pedotards

asciilifeform: it is therefore much moar of a puzzler, why didn't

asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: d00d was in a 9000x better pos than e.g. henry viii , to make 'own church, with hookers, an' blackjack' and fuckerryone

BingoBoingo: That Xtian thing's a helluva shackle

mircea_popescu: comprehending is a draw on mental energy ; comprehending women perhaps the largest ; unschooled orcs perceive this issue whereby the costs mount exponentially and the marginal benefit is nil (you can only fuck one hole at a timwe anyways!!).

asciilifeform: tho i must add, unlike shoemaker, ivan was a thinkin' man, spent good % of his life in his (lost to indiana jones warehouse) megalibrary, an' playin' chess etc with courtiers, scheming how to fuck english queen, and so forth

mircea_popescu: "why should i be bothered with a bunch of them". henry also serial-monogamized, rather than make them eat eachj other out.

a111: Logged on 2019-03-13 15:22 mircea_popescu: asciilifeform dood was quite unsophisticated, had this very... well, fundamentally a peasant's worldview, deeply optimistic and over-inclined to fit-in-head.

asciilifeform: i still dunget fully why ivan did not enharem. he had all the 'ducks lined up', boiled in oil good % of the folx in any position to constructively object, even ran experiment where half the kingdom was a personal human-hunt reservation, to test.

mircea_popescu: a) i would ~ignore~ the sons. you've seen me do it before, yet it's not obvious to you. death of heroes belongs to they showing some promise, why muddy it up. what if i mixed some mud in your cocktail ? i would not insult the heroes-in-baking by this addition.