asciilifeform: (pharmacologically or some other way)
asciilifeform: i was about to say 'balls cannot be grown from empty space' but it is conceivable that the biological foundation of what we think of as 'willpower' could be discovered and played with
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu did not say 'cannot grow own balls'
asciilifeform: 'the pie' implied some harvestable resource, no ?
asciilifeform: what means 'grow', other than discovering a duplicate planet somewhere ?
asciilifeform: (does it count as 'grow' if you, british, conquer india? build machine looms driven by gurlz ?)
asciilifeform: what is the pie in this line of thought ?
asciilifeform: the guy who needs 200megatonnes of reactor fluid recirculated and laundered ?
asciilifeform: or is mircea_popescu's argument is that the 200megabux is in 'recyclable real estate bezzle' usd, which, if spent on turkeys, would send shock wave that could topple cities ?
asciilifeform: of whatever they paid to have that thing shat out
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: not keybase this time. a fresh one.
asciilifeform: the really galling thing, to me, re: the 200mil sc4mz0rz, is that for prolly less than half of that, a sane man could build a perfectly serviceable chip fab in the pampas or the like
asciilifeform: speaking of, last i checked, 'trezor' was still reflashable from the usb jack.☟︎☟︎
asciilifeform: but yes, he got to sell the pick axes.
asciilifeform: without it, quite likely, he would have been nothing.
asciilifeform: 'We'd paid nearly $1 million in income tax on our profits for calendar year 1999. Not so bad considering that we built everything from a $10,000 investment.' << at the risk of cribbing from obama's 'you didn't make that company', greenspun... did not make that idiot dotcom gold rush!
asciilifeform: 'During the spring of 1999, for example, recruiting 5 hires would earn the employee a Honda S2000. Recruiting 10 employees would net a Ferrari F355. A trophy F355 in bright yellow was kept parked outside of the Prospect Street office in Cambridge to entice employees into recruiting. Later in the summer of 1999, as new management was brought on board, the policy was quietly changed to a lease of the cars, not outright ownership
asciilifeform: or straight ponzi, e.g., yahoo, amazon
asciilifeform: it was all acquisition/'exit' games, all the way down.
asciilifeform: none of greenspun's cohort was thusly bathed for creating anything like a properly salable product that somebody, somewhere, actually ~wanted~
asciilifeform: so nothing really changed other than the particular flavour of muppet being bathed in benjies
