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mircea_popescu: asciilifeform we have plenty of egyptian writings, yes. also cuneiforms variously, and aramaic mention.
mircea_popescu: (memorably, a pharaoh of the period speaks of the HORROR of the SEVEN!!111!! ships that came and ravaged his lands. imagine - seven's enough, not even a thousand warriors' worth.)
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform that's not the whole story, but yes, "pharaoh" means great house, for one thing, and it's not practical given the resources of the time to build a great house in any other system.
mircea_popescu: (its evolution in turn based on a very simple notion, directly accessible to the very simple minds then roaming the earth - as quarry taken is to be distributed by the hunt boss, so everything is a quarry and so everything is to be split up. this works for non-pastoral societies quite well, but when it runs into the better organised, smarter and generally more effectual shepherds and riders they get raped.)
mircea_popescu: but the important point is that the highly centralized, redistributive socialism of the 1300s gave way to a very independent, village-centered economy of the early iron age.
mircea_popescu: pretty much all the "ancient towns" that did make it, memphis to tyre and sardis etc were rebuilt after being sacked at that time as well.
mircea_popescu: in fact, the classics agree, if mostly tacitly, that the loss was indeed greater, culturally, than the end of the roman empire.
mircea_popescu: pylos, mycene, knossos, troy, hattusa, tarsus, ugarith, qadesh, byblos, there's many dozens more, all towns that were major centers [of palace economy] and were never heard from again.
mircea_popescu: not just. hittites, minoans, egyptians, you name it. all fell the weight of the greek-ish "people of the sea"
mircea_popescu: they were ~all palace economies, they were all wiped in the ~same half century cca 1300 bc, as the iron age begun
mircea_popescu: anyway, if you're doing palace economy studies, the inca are a dubious, mostly backward in fact and hallucinated in theory and description example. meanwhile, the late bronze age anatolia, levant and golden crescent are much better studied, understood and documented.
mircea_popescu: more like variation i think. rabbits, pigs, all have this boom feeding thing.
mircea_popescu: there's some dispersion re this property in nature. some animals will eat themselves sick. some won't.
mircea_popescu: incidentally : no camel back ever breaks. the animal won't stand if it ~thinks~ it's overloaded.
mircea_popescu: i don't think it's a matter of scarcity necessarily. that the sea flows through fjords does not mean the sea is finite.
mircea_popescu: you ARE given a paper which "shows" you "own" house. right ?
mircea_popescu: there is that. but the clockwork of pretense doesn't actually prevent the general point.
mircea_popescu: in a language not even understood, under many layers of dirt, the capital of name unknown never fell.
mircea_popescu: pretendjuice is the least finite of all resources. even today, after all the men are dead and all the women long raped into usefullness, the hittite empire pretend still lives, unsung and alone.
mircea_popescu: can "work" the same way everything else they do "works".
mircea_popescu: they lost that war, years ago. it's on trilema actually.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform nobody cares enough about fiat. all backing will be through bitcoin, because bitcoin has monopoly on currency now.
mircea_popescu: takes a shitload of stupid to get a world power into african level. took the russians what, a half century to unwind the last four tsars (stalin being the 4th)
mircea_popescu: the immense piled wealth 1850-1950 keeps on unwinding.
mircea_popescu: fish similarly, the better it's hooked, the more it struggles.
mircea_popescu: no, on the contrary, the more it bleeds the more vigorous it gets.
mircea_popescu: well no but it's part of the asciilifeform apodicticology, "nothing that ever happens could disrupt usg".
mircea_popescu: the only conensus would be of esltards and junior high unionized teachers.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform there is absolutely no "consensus" re early physics. there';s at least a dozen articulated theories, maybe broadly classifiable in 3-4 groups.
mircea_popescu: (except in fucking argentina, these people are too mentally slow to even that.)
mircea_popescu: and the "call X for cocksucking" notices unfailingly appear in all public restrooms
mircea_popescu: that said, there's a bunch of crap floating around cold fusion. a sort of quantum computing.
mircea_popescu: where's all these ugly schmucks come from. check out frank luntz for a nightmare sometime.
mircea_popescu: no, as a general rule drones hang for what they are, queens hang for what they did. there's really little other than "he's jwz" needed to hang jwz.
mircea_popescu: someone somewhere absolutely has to hang for "web 2.0"
mircea_popescu: personally i'm much more invested in beheading the schmuck over the "web 2.0" bullshit than whatever foss drama.
mircea_popescu: or what, you think anyone WANTED to read the fucking harry potter nonsense ?
mircea_popescu: 0 to do with demand, which a) doesn't exist and b) is ALWAYS marketing driven anywa.
mircea_popescu: he printed for the same reason vc generally prints : "gotta have finger in all pies you never know which you want later".
mircea_popescu: which is the story here. derpopo's o'reilly's point man in "cryptoblockchainaltechnologies" after being kicked the fuck out of bitcoin.
mircea_popescu: there was a pretty decent monograph on how the early days of "open source" vs "free software" played out, with the wanna-be derp front and center, i think linked in the logs.
mircea_popescu: kinda the strategy of that mini usg, "find pliable idiots in all fields, promote them, get payola when/if nsa needs some planting done"
mircea_popescu: well of course, he exists because the asshole behind ers&co's "we'll get UBER RICH by backstabbing rms", the one with the shoddy "guide" textbook publishing scam, promoted him way back when.
mircea_popescu: amusingly, even twitter's tearing him a new one. lol. mmmmkay. EXPERTISE!
mircea_popescu: does it take some sort of skill and expertise to be loudly wrong about everything you say and collect a whole trophycase of "that one time i was so ridiculous people laughed at me for a week" ?
mircea_popescu: derp is something else. his "speaking skills" ? "expertise" ?
mircea_popescu: Framedragger i always thought the reference there must be "idiot's village".
mircea_popescu: sooo... apple "withholds" "tech aid" from trump campaign. best fucking thing that ever happened to those people, not being bogged down by macs & shit.
mircea_popescu: ima go pick up a slut, will be back in a few hours. just in case any gavin andresen implementations feel the burning need to derp here.
mircea_popescu: shinohai this is ~the result of google existing, basically.
mircea_popescu: not that o noes, this was such a great skillfully involved etc "hack"
mircea_popescu: really, the claim is that buterin and the MIT are mongoloids.
mircea_popescu: must suck to want to matter THIS BADLY and yet not be able to