182400+ entries in 0.059s
mircea_popescu: "An observation: Sheen went publicly insane early last week. It wasn't until this Tuesday night, after Extra and Today started showing the goddesses, that the court ordered an extraction team to medivac his kids. He's had a week of full on insanity, 20/20 had an entire crew in his house last Saturday, Radar was in there all day and no one felt obligated to rescue the children, but go on TV and publicly say you like mu
mircea_popescu: "every time history repeats itself, the price goes up."
mircea_popescu: holy shit, don't save these derps from car crashes, it's immoral not to mention unethical.
mircea_popescu: “But as a feminist, a writer, and a gentlewoman of fortune, I refuse to be cast in any sort of boring supporting female role, even though I have occasional trouble crossing the road, and even though I did swoon the teeniest tiniest bit when I realized it was him. I think that’s lazy storytelling, and I’m sure Ryan Gosling would agree with me.”
mircea_popescu: Recently, a rising Hollywood superstar saved a young woman’s life from an oncoming cab in New York City. Most women would swoon over a guy like this coming into contact with her let alone him being a hero (a real human being) to her. Instead, she revealed a very telling thing about her nature
mircea_popescu: i wonder what became of that whole crew then. there's what, adozen or so people writing ?
mircea_popescu: "Anyone on the outside should be able to see this for what it is: a mafia style protection racket. Pay us. If you pay us, we will protect you from those who... don't pay us."
mircea_popescu: "Why are you hearing about this story, in this way: "oh my god, those bastards won't even cut a break to a poor black woman?" Because that story simultaneously delivers the government's message: "we don't squander taxpayer resources; we'll fight to protect every dime we can get." The symbiosis between media and politics: the media gets their readers, and the government gets their message relayed to the public. Ther
mircea_popescu: "I've started a new site, Partial Objects, which is a short form, high post frequency version of TLP, and I'm going to use TLP for longer posts." << gone, sadly.
mircea_popescu: if your "hindbrain" observably malfunctions you've been stupid, insistently, for a long long time.
mircea_popescu: by the time your cd tray is moving in and out as if possessing a life of its own, the "browser toolbars" are long past the bottom of the monitor.
mircea_popescu: you readily understand this if you think about hardware, which you aren't psychowired to nuttily defend. by the time the bearing audibly rumbles, the fucking software in that car has long been a mess.
mircea_popescu: trinque the important part here is this : by the time the ancient parts function in "failure modes", the "life of the mind" is broken beyond comparison.
mircea_popescu: in the end this might all be about that learning curve / experience after all.
mircea_popescu: in a sentence such as "a narrow burn cycle to keep moving the market".
mircea_popescu: mats do you understand conceptually what "burning" is ?
mircea_popescu: if your ssh/sftpd "does not work", just like if your atm pin doesn't work, try twice
mircea_popescu: lol well... i think is standard knowledge by now, but if it isn't : do NOT retry that fifth time.
mircea_popescu: or the discussion of the "poor entrepreneurs" and their bizarre notions of equity and dilution ?
mircea_popescu: mats you recall the discussion of the "poor tenants" and their proclivity to focus on a single measure to be lied to ?
mircea_popescu: No, I'm a dummy. The purpose of universities is to suck up Stafford loan money. And the purpose of journals is to mark territory, more money in that, like a corporation that spins off a subsidiary. NO CROSS SCIENTIFIC DISCUSSION ALLOWED IN SCIENCE, EVER, EXCEPT IN SCIENCE, NATURE, AND THE POPULAR PRESS."
mircea_popescu: "Exactly. So you should have sent it to the physicists. You know, the ones who work a building over in the same university that you do. That was the whole reason for universities, right?
mircea_popescu: more on point : is there any reason you suspect it's either differentiable or even continuous ?
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform be that as it may, each and every markslord is more than free to use his resources whichever way he pleases.
mircea_popescu: the dispute is deeper than that. he just doesn't want to work towards fixing the current paradigm. which i guess is fine. you apparently do. imo this is also fine, that's why there's two of you, so you can be in two places at the same time.
☟︎ mircea_popescu: this. they thing "oh, patria si buitres no", "soberania" blablabla. then talk football and peronismo. and don't matter. and it's ok, because THEIR FRIENDS see them as people.
mircea_popescu: "Let's take all this at face value. Is he entitled? Delusional? I don't doubt for a moment he sincerely believes he is a lawyer, because lawyer for him isn't a profession or even a job, it's a label, a code word for a kind of intellectualism he wants for himself. As long as "all of my friends see me as..." it was well worth the cost. He didn't study to become an attorney, he bought a back-up identity." << exactly
mircea_popescu: funyn thing being that they seem blisfully unaware of this.
mircea_popescu: i ocasionally encounter derps living the delusions of the foregoing, who i threaten and they go away.
mircea_popescu: i have yet to have met any argentine in any sort of position of power or relevancy of any kind whatsoever.
mircea_popescu: someone should go into fucking middle east to be blown to bits by really angry men, to protect this pasty ass' dumbass notions of reality. this is worth doing.
mircea_popescu: He gives a slight shrug and a smile as he heads back to work. "It could be worse," he says. "It's not like they can put me jail."
mircea_popescu: "Bank bailouts, company bailouts -- I don't know, we're the generation of bailouts," he says in a hallway during a break from his Peak Discovery job. "And like, this debt of mine is just sort of, it's a little illusory. I feel like at some point, I'll negotiate it away, or they won't collect it."
mircea_popescu: Unless, somehow, the debt just goes away. Another of Mr. Wallerstein's techniques for remaining cool in a serious financial pickle: believe that the pickle might somehow disappear.
mircea_popescu: everyone in argentina is a lawyer btw. im telling you, this country is the logical conclusion of that country.
mircea_popescu: "They understand I'm in a lot of debt, but I've done something they feel they could never do and the respect and admiration is important." [my edit: he isn't actually practicing law.]"
mircea_popescu: pete_dushenski this is where i go "had he spent the 350k on bitcoin in 2011, he'd have a little over 500k-1.5mn a year now"
mircea_popescu: "It's a prestige thing," he says. "I'm an attorney. All of my friends see me as a person they look up to."
mircea_popescu: MR. WALLERSTEIN, for his part, is not complaining. Once you throw in the intangibles of having a J.D., he says, he is one of law schools' satisfied customers.
mircea_popescu: sure, my hos regularly get two bedroom, two bathroom apts, provided a) they're good at what they do and b) live in pairs or triples.
mircea_popescu: He lives with his fiancee who is "unperturbed by his dizzying collection of i.o.u.'s." She doesn't want him to get a corporate law job because (take a sip first): "we like hanging out together." Carly, another unemployed law graduate explains, "I guess I kind of assumed that someone would hook me up with something." I'm sure she felt she deserved it."
mircea_popescu: all on borrowed money. There were cost-of-living loans, and tuition of about $33,000 a year. Later came a $15,000 loan to cover months of studying for the bar.
mircea_popescu: "WHEN Mr. Wallerstein started at Thomas Jefferson, he was in no mood for austerity. He borrowed so much that before the start of his first semester he nearly put a down payment on a $350,000 two-bedroom, two-bath condo, figuring that the investment would earn a profit by the time he graduated. ...Mr. Wallerstein rented a spacious apartment. He also spent a month studying in the South of France and a month in Prague --
mircea_popescu: allow me to refer to the source material in my response.
mircea_popescu: given three kids ahead of you and three kids behind you you could ALWAYS pick at least two of each kind.
mircea_popescu: fucking hell. when i was that age i knew exactly where i could go. EVERYWHERE. and so did they.
mircea_popescu: et hired?" They think to themselves, "amn't I bright? Hard working? Fluent in legal theory?" And the employers respond, "how the hell would we know that?""
mircea_popescu: "And once they're in law school, there is more grade inflation and even retroactive adding of .333 to everybody's GPA. And now law school graduates are surprised to find they're unemployed. Law students had no real measure of their status as an applicant; no reliable descriptor of what kind of a school they went to (short of branding); and no reliable measure of their performance there. "What do you mean I can't g
mircea_popescu: that hole. relationships, business arrangements, political arrangements, scientific models, all of it the same exact hole left behind. "this is where nothing used to be".
mircea_popescu: g. "I think I belong in a top tier school..." How do you know? The analogy is you have no idea what kind of a man you are and thus what kind of a woman would be right for you, so you just harass the girls that other people think are the best. Then if you don't get her you're angry at the girl ("these bitches just want jocks and legacy applicants"); and if you get her you're surprised to find that three years with
mircea_popescu: "See? Grade inflation. We already know about the problem of grade inflation in colleges; the LSAT was supposed to help offset this by offering a standardization. Now the ABA wants to do away with the LSAT requirement. Fine. But the result of all this is you can't really be sure how you compare to other applicants, so instead you demand objectivity in the schools' rankings as a proxy to guess where you might belon
mircea_popescu: specifically. "precision that you can't act upon". could be the "web analytics" business as well.
mircea_popescu: "A ranking, like the "percent employed", is an example of information bias. You think you know something, but you don't. If Fordham is #21, is that different than saying it is #29? Or saying it is in the second decile? It's a deliberately obfuscated precision that you can't act on. That level of "certainty" does not inform your decisions."
mircea_popescu: all of this is ACTUALLY going on. and has been. for years, decades.