asciilifeform: but mircea_popescu does! which is cool.

asciilifeform: 'cause i don't breathe the liquid ammonia atmosphere of the planet where x lives

asciilifeform: my whole point was that i don't ever expect to personally meet x.

asciilifeform: (you may need advanced necromancy, i intend to be quite dead then)

asciilifeform: wake me up when afghani goat computer is built.

asciilifeform: for certain height of building you can only have if some fool 'devotes life.'

asciilifeform: hence the link to mircea_popescu's 'tallest building' essay

asciilifeform: (try to forget, for this example, the moral colour of word 'steal' - think of the sense in which we 'steal' milk from the cow, or samurai steals his XXXX koku of rice / yr. from the peasant)

asciilifeform: sometimes they steal it with own hands, sometimes a friend helps.

asciilifeform: this is paid for with stolen gold

asciilifeform: see, back to what mircea_popescu referred to as my 'temple of nonsense', intellectualism is this thing where some folk devote their whole lives to -ev folly like writing poetry or proving theorems

asciilifeform: trinque: no more than, say, a bear is.

asciilifeform: and the prisoners.

asciilifeform: the one with 'height of the tallest building'

asciilifeform: see also mircea_popescu's mega-article on subj, http://trilema.com/2014/un-prophete

asciilifeform: which is why i said http://log.bitcoin-assets.com/?date=26-11-2015#1331959 ☝︎

asciilifeform: and also that we have just such a party scheduled for the near future

asciilifeform: btw i can't possibly dispute that anti-intellectual brutes eventually eat up the cultured folk. this is one of the most recurrent patterns in recorded history (greece swallowed by rome, chinese conquered by their sequence of barbarian waves, etc.)

asciilifeform: how's that

asciilifeform: aha

asciilifeform: trinque: mongols, interestingly, ate up the culture of the folks they conquered

asciilifeform: entirely without - would mean continuing in the 1600s jp state of the art, using only what was produced by noble self-sustaining (on the backs of the peasantry) samurai thinkers.

asciilifeform: but this is not what 'doing better without boole' means.

asciilifeform: sure.

asciilifeform: does 'rengaku' ring a bell ?

asciilifeform: jp cribbed on the exam.

asciilifeform: this blade has two edges.

asciilifeform: which is why we aren't speaking jp.

asciilifeform: the samurai failed to produce, e.g., a george boole.

asciilifeform: (why write down how you clobbered the $derptribe? smearing ink on paper is -ev!)

asciilifeform: and this would include all of what pretty much anybody thinks of as 'culture'

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: pretty much everything i give half a fuck about, in that case, is a direct product of 'insanity'

asciilifeform: trinque: was lamenting a planet where no one can be boole.

asciilifeform: trinque: nope.

asciilifeform: trinque: somehow the point of the george boole example escaped you. the idea was that he had the freedom to do something other than immediately +ev practicalities.

asciilifeform: blew my mind when i learned of it

asciilifeform: aha they had almost textbook holhoz !

asciilifeform: which is to say, eaten up by folks ~with~.

asciilifeform: trinque: i happen to think that 'without', ru would live in the same place as the incas

asciilifeform: possibly 'cultured' is best illustrated with positive example - like that ss colonel who happily presided over firing squads but would not permit rare plant collection in captured ru institute to be burned

asciilifeform: ineffectual nuttery is ineffectual, newz at 11 ?

asciilifeform puts on sophistry gas mask with fresh cylinder

asciilifeform: and where did stalin come in ? i must've woken up in some parallel universe ?

asciilifeform: wai wut?!

asciilifeform: was able to exist.

asciilifeform: trinque: the idea is that it existed as a -ev flourish on culture, like poetry.

asciilifeform: but do you see the idea here ?

asciilifeform: well, more like 100

asciilifeform: trinque: boolean algebra sat for ~150 yrs before anyone remotely conceived of a 'problem requiring it'

asciilifeform: and how much room in the general sense for something like noncommutative algebra, in 'dope world.'

asciilifeform: and how many scum who are good at precisely one thing.

asciilifeform: but how many escobars.

asciilifeform: a man like, e.g., escobar, may have been a first class cultured mind

asciilifeform: trinque: now your diode is in the wrong way

asciilifeform: spiffy architecture and good org but precious little science and not even particularly much poetry.

asciilifeform: at best, result will look like rome

asciilifeform: take me to their particle accelerator.

asciilifeform: trinque: show me the great theorems of the mexican dope cartels

asciilifeform: but then again mircea_popescu personally burned library of alexandria so go figure.

asciilifeform: and yet i see the loss of the physics/maths/etc. as a historic calamity, and it boggles my mind that any cultured man would disagree

asciilifeform: this is a historic fact.

asciilifeform: you mean, stubbornly insist on doing physics instead of peddling dope

asciilifeform: back to my original point, i don't see any reason why folks like me will fare any better under this collapse than they did under sovcollapse

asciilifeform: well in that sense, no.

asciilifeform: if not their flesh

asciilifeform: aha and what does mob eat!

asciilifeform: (they were a prey base for it)

asciilifeform: actually it grew straight from the 'cooperativ' thing in '80s

asciilifeform: in that the latter ~did~ do the whole employment thing

asciilifeform: thing is, b-a as we have it today (at least as far as my naked eye can see) is not feudalism and not even ru mob

asciilifeform: no reason

asciilifeform: tell this to moiety ?

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu inhabits this peculiar mental universe where everybody (with possible exception of himself) is a malleable chick

asciilifeform: before knowing of the old book

asciilifeform: microscope is actually a terrible hammer. the reason i am so fond of the image is that i actually used it as one as a boy

asciilifeform: aha, sometimes it has great potential as fuel

asciilifeform: aha but spurious analogy - youthful rose has ~other assets~

asciilifeform: considering that the original observation was about my reserved spot in the diesel tank.

asciilifeform: i'm perfectly fine with self as object

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu does not appear to actually disagree?

asciilifeform: aha. ergo 'not even last five seconds'

asciilifeform: how?

asciilifeform: now let's suppose that mircea_popescu is ultimately right about 'ride horses, throw out computer' and folks like me are not at all needed in the future. but let's try to imagine, e.g., a surgeon, trying to keep himself fed and clothed using b-a wot...

asciilifeform: how's that

asciilifeform: hence the 'five seconds under feudalism' note.

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: i did not say 'wot is useless' but that i in particular do not - as demonstrated experimentally not long ago - command particularly much market value there.

asciilifeform: most of the old slaves, as we both know, are worth their joules in diesel

asciilifeform: but nowhere is it written that the old slaves are somehow smoothly converted into new-style slaves.

asciilifeform: sure.

asciilifeform: just that this is of approx. the same interest to me personally as the long-term dwarf phases of sol

asciilifeform: oh i've no doubt that it ~will~

asciilifeform: or what was it

asciilifeform: 'have own legs'

asciilifeform: because - what was the term mircea_popescu used - ...

asciilifeform: (fwiw the subject has no emotional button push for me, because i don't expect to last for as long as five seconds under feudalism) ☟︎

asciilifeform: that is, if we actually see a transition to feudalism, like so many folks salivate for

asciilifeform: miner defection might take longer than anticipated if mining begins to have a 'noblesse oblige' component, vs. straight +ev commercial motivation

asciilifeform isn't even entirely convinced that this has not already happened

asciilifeform: aha.

asciilifeform: eventually the miners - defect.