asciilifeform: mike_c: the basic concept here is the same as in hygiene elsewhere. i, personally, do not know of anyone who has become ill from, e.g., eating rotting carcass. but i refrain nonetheless.
asciilifeform: mike_c: depends what you mean 'the wild'
asciilifeform: i'll let mircea_popescu answer this one (if he feels like..) - iirc there is also a 'diode' in there somewhere
asciilifeform: williamdunne: please try to avoid referring to common lisp as 'clisp' in the interest of not confusing n00bz - clisp is a thing, it is a (pretty poor) free implementation of common lisp
asciilifeform: dr y. wasn't dumb. merely entirely uninteresting, preoccupied with details of daily life as a not-especially-well-of d.c. resident, e.g., where the 'cheapest' petrol is to be had
asciilifeform: from the linked photo earlier, i am still uncertain they they have women..
asciilifeform: nah why do that when you can hang a man upside down and cut off his skin until have they key.
asciilifeform: but i, for one, look forward to reading mircea_popescu's description of life in middle kingdom!!
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: my point is that china is different from ro, ar, usa, in several interesting ways which mircea_popescu appears to heavily discount the importance of. perhaps he has own reasons for this, but i couldn't possible know them..
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: whole orchestra of cn folks, many who did not even appear in the org chart but somehow had leverage, appeared out of nowhere, making a fuss
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: perhaps more on subject, the interesting and magic moment came when a middle-aged animal handler chick from cn was fired (over long-standing dispute over a paper's attribution) with the (.in) chief
asciilifeform: perhaps completes the picture if i reveal that the man had wife, 2 y.o. son, back home. and they lived very well off his chickenfeed salary.
asciilifeform: and yes, this was one. there are moar
asciilifeform: very well: dr y. y., biochemistry ph.d., age mid-30s (at the time); wasted perhaps $2mil of usg piggy, and everybody's time, for 5+ yrs.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu wanted case study of folks i saw with own eyes ?
asciilifeform: some of these are still (!) in ncbi db on www
asciilifeform: few years back, they shot (or perhaps made noises of threatening to?) a mega-crystallographer in uni of beijing. he faked structures for decades, and his subordinates too
asciilifeform: ask the chemistry ph.d. how he got the sheepskin. ask the next dozen, also. 'washed glass for advisor'
asciilifeform: other thing is that these fine folks have been perfecting organized fraud since before euro man climbed down from trees
asciilifeform: not related by blood or marriage ? then you're a barbarian, to be dealt with the way a teenager deals with a coke machine
asciilifeform: then, essentially, urbanized pashtuns, with tribal-familial wot hardcoded in firmware
asciilifeform: or i suppose i could talk about my years of working in labs with ~50% or so cn folks, getting to know'em, but i don't imagine mircea_popescu will find this interesting
asciilifeform: ask al schwartz about the univ. of beijing carrying out (yes) the eotvos trials.
asciilifeform: it isn't a 'couldn't do business,' but my current understanding is that the han chinese see white man sorta how the gypsies see european - as somebody to be scammed clean at the first opportunity.
asciilifeform: who the hell moves to ro to earn the local salary though
