135900+ entries in 0.035s
mircea_popescu: "I bet if you went to a client and presented a 200 kilobyte site template, you’d be fired. Even if it looked great and somehow included all the tracking and ads and social media crap they insisted on putting in. It’s just so far out of the realm of the imaginable at this point. " <<->> curl '
http://trilema.com' --silent --write-out 'size_download=%{size_download}\n' --output /dev/null
mircea_popescu: people on the outskirts naively care, i guess is the explanation.
mircea_popescu: the problem is, other soldier went "see, sargent prevents torque experiments".
mircea_popescu: (burbuja means bubble in teh construction worker / hotel maid language)
mircea_popescu: such a chinese thinker. all he wants to do is spit out a pictogram.
mircea_popescu: sigh, ima have to read the fucking telegraph to try and guess wha you mean ?
mircea_popescu: except, they charitize correcly : the giver as the sole arbiter of the degree, kind and type of want.
mircea_popescu: but in that laboratory setting, they still live as humans, and display human behaviours, such as charity.
mircea_popescu: ie, when a black person gives something to another black person.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform i perhaps confusingly, meant their own subjective thing, did not mean the bulk of it.
mircea_popescu: much like the dope dealing black people in ghetto do today.
mircea_popescu: the jews possibly did, but only under pressure from russian crown.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform i don't think the english had at any point decentralized charity.
mircea_popescu: i suppose the one point easily missed is that ~the one in need~ is no arbiter of the type, degree and kind of his need! the one GIVING is the sole fucking arbiter as to what the needy needs, when and how much of it.
mircea_popescu: in fact, if the poor complain that charity as-is is insufficient, you're a thousand times better off simply burning them all down than trying to "optimize" it.
mircea_popescu: anything else is acceptable, raping infants, eating your wife, whatever the fuck. but DO NOT centralize charity.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform the point isn't that one wants the poor to necessarily starve. the point however is that charity may not be centralised.
mircea_popescu: denying the crap is, at least to my eyes, just as important if not more important than bitcoining.
mircea_popescu: it tends to raise taxes slowly, until in a century or a millenium they reach the 20%ish threshold and then the whole thing's fucked.
mircea_popescu: anyway, the insidiousness of christianity, as a jewish sect, is the whole "must take care of the poor" thing.
mircea_popescu: sometimes they shamble on, like teh chinese for instance. i suspect the us is headed that way also.
mircea_popescu: this is not so universal. some places/people can't live as independent human beings.
mircea_popescu: russia seems to be going that way, re putin's out of ideas convo.
mircea_popescu: rarely, a 60-80% thing (soviets) will crack up and re-become 5-15%.
mircea_popescu: so, if it goes over ~20%ish, it crosses event horizon, and rapidly collapses in 60-80%.
mircea_popescu: you can have space dust. but NOT in this band around a planet.
mircea_popescu: well, also natural. like any celestial body's interdicion area.
mircea_popescu: there's quite an uncanny valley between the 60-80%ish of the "civilised world" and the 5-15% of the rest.
mircea_popescu: almost all subhuman congregations of the mongoloids in the pacific islands qualify throughout. and the similarly subhuman aztecs qualify. and most of the north american tribes.
mircea_popescu: inca does qualify. nothing in europe pre napoleon does, nor does england crown pre ww1.
mircea_popescu: in any case : a marginally acceptable definition of "palace economy" is : tax over 50% of gdp. by this rule the usg, eu etc qualify. nothing else in the world does.
mircea_popescu: not so. it was on the contrary, quite autonomous thing.
mircea_popescu: anyway. you'll have A LOT of trouble proving 1800s england was a "palatial economy". tax was ~inexistent at the time.
mircea_popescu: re "towers of hanoi" ? "early blockchain! by priest hand!"
mircea_popescu: this moves the discussion to a debate as to the true substance of that place.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform the fact still remains you picked something that only ever appeared in one place.
mircea_popescu: it only appeared in one place, thus therefore if you claim that one place was "palatial", then boom, and if you claim it isn't, then equally boom.
mircea_popescu: i for instance count philosophy as such "differentiates" us. you apparently only count a narrow definition of math-engineering ?
mircea_popescu: the reason you can't see it there has to do with the definitions rather than with the fact of the matter.
mircea_popescu: you'll have to define your terms. how about, the cussacks ? the danubian pastoral communities ? the northern carpathians woodworking culture ? what do you wish to see ?
mircea_popescu: you can produce examples of subhuman populations. be they there or here or anywhere, they're still subhuman, and sum to 0.
mircea_popescu: "why won't you be reasonable, mr X!" "because i'd like to do something!"
mircea_popescu: we're standing on the shoulders of unreasonable and naught else.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform not product in any sense. everything we use is the accidental byproduct of what the palace would have wanted to but didn't manage to "bring under control".
mircea_popescu: it lies convincingly for some, but this happenstance doesn't speak in favour of their intelligence.
mircea_popescu: how about computing ? the whole century's worth of palace cs yielded... 500 boatloads of "culture" and nothring right, proper or even usable.
mircea_popescu: what now ? your doghouse theory just died, turns out the doghouse's the other way.
mircea_popescu: point in case : there isn't a 1% as much bitcoin-culture in all the usg.mit, usg.whartever sponsored "teams" and "think tanks" and etc of what's here.
mircea_popescu: no palatial-style masturbation pretending to be culture.
mircea_popescu: not in the slightest. one doesn't follow from the other.
mircea_popescu: intelligent people become anything they wish, which is incidentally the only definition of intelligence worth the mention. if not "social sciences" useful.
mircea_popescu: which is why and wherefore the wot will spread at the point of the sword and no other way.
mircea_popescu: the point being - that not only is the palace economy drone incapable of living as an effectual human being. it is much more importantly UNWILLING TO BECOME ONE. which is the main point.
mircea_popescu: and then rape the daughters and tie them seven to a pole and so on. what.
mircea_popescu: shit, i could DEFINITELY burn down the ~10mn strong buenos aires with a thousand people, that were actual people ie, the sort one'd run into back in the yugoslav war days.
mircea_popescu: cortes burned the whole thing with what, five hundred men ?
mircea_popescu: anyway, the situation at the time is very much reminiscent of the current usg palace economy. one warrior is more than a match for many thousand "upstanding citizens". if seven ships worth 1k people sporting kalash with infinte ammo landed on us west coast, which consisted of "start-up culture" only, the result would be very much what happened at the end of the bronze age, or for that matter at the end of the aztec empire.