222100+ entries in 0.067s
mircea_popescu: and exactly for the reason stated : if you're a slight prize, you get the best crop of tenants competing for you. if not... you're stuck rooting through the bottom of the barrel.
mircea_popescu: you WILL actually make more money letting slightly under market than in ANY other way.
mircea_popescu: dude pete_dushenski has his moments. whodda thunk he has such subtle points down pat as "the most important thing is to not overprice".
mircea_popescu: usians don't even know what thery're missing, gettin gdrunk for the first time at 21 is not the same.
mircea_popescu: the 2nd is pretty bad throughout, sort-of a lawrence of arabia made by first time drunk teenagers
mircea_popescu: (the chickens are in the cockpit, occupying the entire left side)
mircea_popescu: president even quips that imagine, the most important man of the 2nd richest most powerful country being reduced to this! air force one powered on chicken droppings!
mircea_popescu: the first's only vaguely notable because it depicts a marginal us (in the 70s) running everything on chicken shit
mircea_popescu: "slapstick of another kind" and "the last remake of beau geste"
mircea_popescu: shit, i go watch a couple bad marty feldman movies, the log runs off
mircea_popescu: in point of fact this is unchanged millenia later - very few kids end up here, a few more are in the military, and the rest on reddit.
mircea_popescu: yeah, pretty much. so... it couldn't conceivably been a bad standard for them, inasmuch as it was... the standard.
mircea_popescu: otherwise... maybe become a client for some important patron, and done what the us sub-political class does today. in the day's huffington post and astroturfed meetings and whatnot. a very precarious existence, certainly the slavegirls had it better.
mircea_popescu: the alternatives to this are unclear. if very clever you could have traded, but various ethic groups had a defacto monopoly on that, and a very large cultural advantage.
mircea_popescu: this allowed you to take a young woman and start a household in relative security. the exact american dream.
mircea_popescu: well ok, but in terms of standards : as a young man with no property, your options were essentially to go into military service, which offered pay and, upon serving 18ish to 20something years, a large settlement payment and provincial land.
mircea_popescu: it really wasn't much higher risk than being in the army, which was you know, a good chunk of the population, especially poorer.
mircea_popescu: even the xtians were thrown to the lions, not to the gladiators.
mircea_popescu: then presented them (or sold them on to senatos and other dude farmers)
mircea_popescu: that's how that thing went, sporting promoters of the 100s went around, buying young strong slaves,
mircea_popescu: a gladiator was more expensive a piece of fixed capital than a whore.
mircea_popescu: gladiator battles didnt' have THAT many casualties, you know.
mircea_popescu: trinque my point is that actual roman weaponry would not present an improvement.
mircea_popescu: i guess if you force them, by allowing armor. buyt then again, gladiatorial combat didn't allow much armor.
mircea_popescu: i don't think mma guys if given the option of gladitorial arms would actually take any.
mircea_popescu: BingoBoingo i think it's just the way it's being promoted. boxing harks to a different time, with different people. mma is more tuned for the contemporary kid. different life balances.
mircea_popescu: williamdunne i guess. don't you think it kinda detracts from the whole thing ? like, "here, monkeys, a silver coin. FIGHT!"
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform the nasdaq thing is just, they want to use a centralize custom scamcoin to somehow track pre-ipo trades. not really clear what this actually is, tbh, and i somehow doubt it's more than the intersection between inept bitcoin piarism and vague plans for vapornothing.
mircea_popescu: williamdunne hey, i enjoy watching some dude beat the crap / get beaten the crap out of as much as the next guy, but it helps a lot if i know them/there's a substantial quarrel/something.
mircea_popescu: i used to watch some boxing many years ago because i was friends with some promoters etc. never got into it.
mircea_popescu: BingoBoingo i dunno dood. by this reasoning you could put the chinese state budget on "making obama get nobel prize"
mircea_popescu: something must be very wrong with boxing if 50 yo ex champs can still walk around unaided.
mircea_popescu: this is the point where i admit this had been all wild speculation and i have nfi.
mircea_popescu: the "social studies" grant eaters are larger than the texas oil industry.
mircea_popescu: the size of that cohesive group is merely a function of the resources wasted on it.
mircea_popescu: what are you more likely to run into, a girl that doesnt want to fuck because of what she's heard the catholic church say, or a girl that wants to go topless because of what she's heard of femen ?
mircea_popescu: well, who you gonna bet on, in the quadriplegic box match ? the blind or the stupid ?
mircea_popescu: if that's the case, as it well may be the case, they're not nearly all that disorganised. arguably better organised than the government.
mircea_popescu: obviously baltimore riots were a plan hatched and executed by the baltimore drug lords, but it *may* be also part of a larger frontline, a probing operation as it's called.
mircea_popescu: but of much more direct interest, "It is hard to see why this same pattern wouldn't hold once the US places much of itself under military occupation."
☟︎ mircea_popescu: "There is a pattern here: it seems that whenever Americans arm, train and equip an army, that army stands a really big chance of simply melting away, with the weapons falling into the hands of those who want to use them against American interests."
mircea_popescu: guy's practice was mostly focused on dietary approaches to medicine.
mircea_popescu: gabriel_laddel but if anyone opposed to smoking, drinking and eating whatever falls into your hads is "new age bs", then hippo should be too.
mircea_popescu: heh. he paid 4k and wants to make a profit, CLEARLY he should get 5k.
mircea_popescu: lobbes i was talking about femen specifically. you think not ?
mircea_popescu: so... yeah, which way the state goes is part and parcel of it.
mircea_popescu: not that it's not genuine sentiment, i'm sure to some degree it is. the topless sluts were ALSO genuine sentiment, for sure just as genuine, definitely as widely held. the result ? 400 people, beat up by police, not 4mn pushed by the govt press agents.
☟︎ mircea_popescu: bwahgaha. these EXACT PEOPLE prostituted their dead, and their living, wives, children, the lot. by the HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS. not even fifty years ago.
mircea_popescu: "If you think about it just a tiny bit, nothing on this scale could be contrived artificially, and the thought that millions of people would prostitute their dead for propaganda purposes is, frankly, both cynical and insulting."
mircea_popescu: at this rate they could probably use it as an anti-islam equivalent.
mircea_popescu: dude seriously, that's how russian orthodoxy-lite works ?
mircea_popescu: "Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, [blablabla] made the sign of the cross, in the Russian Orthodox manner. This simple gesture transformed the parade from a display of military pomp to a sacred ritual."