mircea_popescu: under the umbrella of the Ghee Kung Tong, identified by the feds as a de facto Chinese mafia organization. Chow begs to differ: “My organization is not what they call a secret society,” he says. “People misunderstand—it’s not a secret. It’s a private self-help group, helping people, our people. It’s about loyalty, trust, honor. As the chairman, it’s my job to help people.”

mircea_popescu: "Today EFF is pleased to announce Let’s Encrypt, a new certificate authority (CA) initiative that we have put together with Mozilla, Cisco, Akamai, IdenTrust, and researchers at the University of Michigan that aims to clear the remaining roadblocks to transition the Web from HTTP to HTTPS."

mircea_popescu: BingoBoingo: Well this whole Jesus thing has kind of been a huge bummer for Western civilization ever since the Romans started taking it seriously <<< it happened as the very complex roman religions were brought closer to the understanding of teh plebs.

mircea_popescu: i still can't shake the same bemused, "wait, did the monkey srsly just try to shoot me with a stick" disbelief whenever confronted with it, to this day.

mircea_popescu: it took me a coupla passes until it sunk in that the woman actually is seriously presenting this as some sort of an argument,

mircea_popescu: asciilifeform: that is, 'slavery is bad mmkay because what if you were a slave' << lol i remember an encounter with this in kindergarten. substitute whoever attacked some longstanding privilege of mine that i meanwhile forgot with the totally unexpected "can't do that, because what if all the other kids want it too ?"

mircea_popescu: who was it, baez had a song about how [the wife] has opened the last can of baked beans

mircea_popescu: right. so yeah, the worst thing about a friend getting cancer is that point where they lose it

mircea_popescu: anyway. in the country where no man may say "do it this way ~becayse i say so~" all sorts of pathologies are bound to develop. because in point of fact a country has some scope for that sort of thing, whether you want to or not. and like in any living organism, once a metabolic pathway is blocked, homeostasis becomes extremely difficult if at all possible. and will take all sorts of crazy to pull off.

mircea_popescu: right ? i predict "the dictates of reality" as a concept to make its appearance at the war on terror warcrimes tribunal.

mircea_popescu: governing a herd of idiots who nevertheless think themselves the crown of creation is no easy feat. it is also no feat any thinking man should ever accomplish, for any accomplishment at all, and most mere attempts, are quite morally wrong, and taint something fierce.

mircea_popescu: instead, he will present a list of "proofs". of his value, importance and utility. which he knows are bunk. but what's he to do ?

mircea_popescu: just like a professor won't have the mp superbity to go into the review meeting hands in pockets and deliver a stern "fuck you, i'm doing you a favor being here, now you prove yourselves to me and then go home."

mircea_popescu: "Do you want riots in the streets? How much does it cost to prevent LA (or the city of your choice) from catching fire? Answer: $600/month/person, plus Medicaid. Medicalizing social problems has the additional benefit of rendering society not responsible for those social ills. If it's a disease, it's nobody's fault. Yay empiricism.

mircea_popescu: preexisting policy goals ? DING DING DING the man's a winner! check out the ~coinicidence~ there!

mircea_popescu: asciilifeform: applying statistical (or otherwise) counterfactuals to an actual reality is a mistake of the same elementary scope as division by zero, or direct conversion of metres to grams - but for some reason which entirely escapes me, this is not obvious to people << the reason may escape you but is obvious.

mircea_popescu: BingoBoingo ".@rabite I think I liked you better as a Christian, could you go back to the Jesus stuff please" lol

mircea_popescu: *: asciilifeform always wondered, in that spirit, if there exist folks with 'useful' tattoos, e.g., one that turns you into a 'human slide rule' <<< yes. in russian prisons.

mircea_popescu: (women have a very deeply entrenched masochism in them, as you'd expect of machines made to actually carry to term and give birth. the more heavily sexed ones often have trouble managing it until their late 30s)

mircea_popescu: asciilifeform: what's a 'bme' anyway? << body modification ezine, was a focus for a bunch of weird individuals + some really banging adolescewnt females

mircea_popescu: it's funny how the history of that thing went. it was about as retarded as lesswrong, originally, a sort of obscure livejournal clone populated by worthless shut-ins (which doesn't mean alkl shut-ins are worthless).

mircea_popescu: stop selling reddit short, it's a great empire of intellectual pinnacling.

mircea_popescu: anyway, i guess now i'm stuck doing a rawls is a clueless ignoramus masquerading as a philosopher (if the "american" part didn't give it away by itself), inept enough to present mere circular reasoning as "moral thought"

mircea_popescu: "you are greatly overstating the importance of the site, it's not reddit sized. it's not even digg.com sized, as of today. it's actually smaller than your blog, 5-10k a month sort of affair."

mircea_popescu: the ever-loving intel dept i could not survive without actually just slipped me a note,

mircea_popescu: wait, you are crediting a 35 yo blogger from san francisco with having single handedly created the pop-bayesian idiocy now making up half of applied math out there ?!

mircea_popescu: asciilifeform anyway, consider leaving a shlomo comment on the article itself, for readers of teh future.

mircea_popescu: and, for the curious soul, artforz' timewarp attack explained : https://bitcointa.lk/threads/possible-way-to-make-a-very-profitable-50-plus-ish-attack-for-pools.33704/#msg521772

mircea_popescu: maybe an idea to make a proper list ?

mircea_popescu: and since doing this, bitcoin foundation (the actual one) may get a lol at just how sparse this is : https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Prohibited_changes

mircea_popescu: "Elimination of output scripts: all transactions pay-to-scripthash, probably with a single byte indicating the scripthash type. Other than reducing effective output script secrecy (which is not possible without OP_EVAL anyways) this is believed to be costless, and the secrecy can be recovered with recursive OP_EVAL. The motivation here is that data in outputs is far more expensive than inputs because some outputs may b

mircea_popescu: here's a good one, asciilifeform, ben_vulpes, whoever else can follow the logic :

mircea_popescu: i suppose the 10 buns in a package producer lobby is working as we speak to make the bread knife illegal.

mircea_popescu: on the other hand, outside some very narrow applicaitons such as i dunno, oversized icecream cones, i don't actually use nor would i want to use a plastic spoon. because what for ? do i need it to eat my campaign flan and i'm too far from an actual table with actual cutlery or something ?

mircea_popescu: on one hand three cents is an insane price to pay for a plastic spoon. those things go for about a bitcoin a ton. so whatever, 500 satoshi each ?

mircea_popescu: decimation: I would therefore like to ask all my readers to take a look around them and note everything plastic, and then say a quiet "thank you" to the right-wingers <<< imo that argument fails on pretty much all the angles.

mircea_popescu: rather than a lot of peri-blather.

mircea_popescu: kakobrekla: dafuq do you know, maybe you need to bridge two pins together with a diode hanging for no reason to make it work <<< this is how i used to solder things!

mircea_popescu: decimation: also here's her PhD: http://shesquad.com/melanie-shapiro/ "Dr. Melanie Shapiro holds a PhD in Consumer Behavior and specializes in customer acquisition, branding strategy and digital marketing. " <<< ahh this chan delivers.

mircea_popescu: ""We are the most secure option because we're a piece of dedicated hardware. We use multi-sig authentication. There are three keys and each of those keys is stored in a different location.""

mircea_popescu: mats_cd03: durian is a weapon of mass destruction <<< you thinking Duriel ?

mircea_popescu: asciilifeform: ^ #b-a search is broken. why am i seeing text that does not contain the literal word 'structuring' ? <<< mthreat's thing has a stemmer.

mircea_popescu: decimation: "The Brazilification of society can be a samba carnival assuming you approach it the right way, and most importantly, get to live on the pleasant side of the barbed wire fence." <<< this has been exactly my experience to date. ☟︎

mircea_popescu: asciilifeform: it will be a 'temporary relocation center' to them, even when the shower heads start hissing out the zyklon. <<< well, as tal said to pete, "what's my incentive to interact with reality ?"

mircea_popescu: "On top of this the recent release of SolidCoin has highlighted another problem in the Bitcoin protocol. It it susceptible to a drop off in "mining power", which is essentially the people who process transactions switching to more profitable things such as SolidCoin."

mircea_popescu: "We wondered why nobody fixed the issues and made things easier for the many out there that aren't computer engineers. After some discussion with a few of the developers we came away completely surprised. They thought, and still do, Bitcoin is fine and very little needs to change."

mircea_popescu: anyway, let the record reflect that yes, there was a point in 2011 when gavin was sane.

mircea_popescu: that thing's such a gem, i had forgotten.

mircea_popescu: as far as i can tell, a sort of wanna-be -assets minus the cool stuff.

mircea_popescu: I know people think "one day" SolidCoin/MicroCash will be worth a lot but it's hard to sell that to a wife as I'm sure some of you may be aware! <<< actually, it's difficult to sell that generally.

mircea_popescu: lmao i 1) know! 2) let's make 3) a 4) list.

mircea_popescu had no idea how great a qntra will be until qntra was finally made, and now he's like... omfg how did i live before.