202700+ entries in 0.053s
mircea_popescu: but there's worse flags to die under, so there's that.
mircea_popescu: the only good news is that wot can in fact owrk for this puropose. it solves it completely.
mircea_popescu: so you know... that's the large thing here. unless we manage to make the wot actually work for this purpose
mircea_popescu: the reason is... because... not having the much hated IP at the time,
mircea_popescu: the detailed procedures of industry, as employed in the 1800s.
mircea_popescu: you know what also was lost, exactly the same way, for exactly the same reason ?
mircea_popescu: so you don't want to own a faucet, instead prefer to alter schroedinger with your mind ?
mircea_popescu: "my faucet leaks so i wonder how this gravity curvature of spacetime thing could be made to work to my benefit"
mircea_popescu: and i'm entirely at a loss as to why you'd want to engineer THAT
mircea_popescu: (but that's because it never was given a chance. you know, like al's thing)
mircea_popescu: the obvious one is the communitard "cooperative" thing socialists always rave about.
mircea_popescu: but the ev consideration, and the capital allocation consideration, and operations are three points forming a triangle
mircea_popescu: not even necessarily a likely or in any case the only stable solution
mircea_popescu: consider the problem of cannon in ww2. obviously, an -ev machinery IN OUR CURRENT PEACETIME TERMS.
mircea_popescu: yes there may be a why somewhere. maybe there is. maybe they jacked off and spludged in that shape. none of your busienss in any case.
mircea_popescu: does not mean there's room for any specified number of computers.
mircea_popescu: the fact that there's room for six CAPITAL ALLOCATORS total
mircea_popescu: so your choice of whether you want a good computer or not reduces to whether you're willing to live without the mass delusion of you know, "democracy" or w/e it's called.
mircea_popescu: if people get "salaries" for doing "work" which have to then be collected back from them - the mcdonald, walmart, windows and britney spears are unavoidable.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform depends. do you live in a world where most capital is uselessly distributed to idiots ?
mircea_popescu: (the only solution to the soft-warm comparison is a decent pair of tits)
mircea_popescu: let's get back to your original idea. can you state it ?
mircea_popescu: the point of comparison weould be "pile of scrap metal in the approximate shape of a desktop"
mircea_popescu: ftr, hfcs is 1-200 per 640 lb barrel. it's like sugar, about 4k calories per kg. so your kid costs
mircea_popescu: 2.5k calories a day * 365 * 20 is a decent chunk oif change even in hfcs terms
mircea_popescu: not so. average cost per kid over 1-18 is about 500k atm. that makes the stable cost quadrillions. computers don't cost that much.
mircea_popescu: but looky : man in space is -ev in the sense that if you make a bill of the required materials, and then divide the stores by that, you come to a number that's < world pop.
mircea_popescu: "all i did all week was write a program to save me one keystroke per month - INCREASE WORKEFICIENCY!1"
mircea_popescu: but this does not speak about the activity of computing, or automating, or process design. it merely speaks of the idiot in question, and his tribe.
mircea_popescu: time he spent = 10 to 100x time he saved, not to mention he saves time that's not worth saving in the first place.
mircea_popescu: the way "computer expert" approaches a problem ? first, he sits around imagining a problem that might be. then he comes up with the most theoretically-lovable way to solve a general problem three steps removed from what he imagined. then he proceeds to fail to implement a solution that mostly works.
mircea_popescu: there is a directly obvious place where this is true. the way i approach a problem ? i have someone do it by hand. after enough of this, i have someone else automatize the easy to automatize parts. it grows from there.
mircea_popescu: chiefly for the reason discussed earlier. there is literally nothing most people can do that's worth paying btc for.
mircea_popescu: nevertheless, it seems very improbable that arrangement will survive bitcoin.
☟︎ mircea_popescu: sponsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house. "
mircea_popescu: "I think that it's extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I don't think we are. I think we're re
mircea_popescu: fortunately there's very little actual matter consumed in vlsi.
mircea_popescu: the soviets need stalin like i need my nail clippings.
mircea_popescu: the state, bulbously putrescent as it is, does not get to propose the false dichotomy - "us or nothing"
mircea_popescu: that was broadly my point, that the infantile "usg closes down so we're closing this park, and you'll be sorry!11" dies right here.