asciilifeform: these folks are pro at exactly one thing: keeping the cattle from stampede.
asciilifeform: dub: when folks start to burst in shopping malls into bloody mess, they won't be able to keep a lid on it. and they know it. so what can they do? cultivate an atmosphere of bullshit, so the news will be met with maximal skepticism.
asciilifeform: dub: they're ddosing the public with 'yet another 134 false alarms in city X!'
asciilifeform: chetty: when exactly do you cross the line << from a sane (e.g. soviet) epidemiologist's point of view - when you set foot in a 'hot zone' - you're infectious until proven innocent.
asciilifeform: and to desaparecer certain inconveniences in the chaos.
asciilifeform: just as herr orlov predicted based on experience elsewhere
asciilifeform: copper pipes routinely vanish from houses left unattended for some days, in a number of u.s. locales
asciilifeform: jurov: tell that to american scavengers. they've even pulled up fiber! purely through a combo of retardation and 'shoot first, questions second'
asciilifeform: '3g' gprs stack is actually very similar to classical dialup internally.
asciilifeform: in 20 years the average us citizen is on dialup << copper phone net torn down. and where not torn down, scavengers are working. so no, not fiber, it'll be either nothing or dog-slow radio a la africa.
asciilifeform: when folks say 'we want it like gold' - do they mean 'confiscatable', 'bulky', and 'largely traded as sham paper' ?
asciilifeform has only a simple four-bit feelings register (sloth, avarice, lust, wrath)☟︎☟︎
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: this requires special modes of thought - like reasoning about how small is electron, or how large - galaxy
asciilifeform: ed to the Age of Reason and thence to the first and second industrial revolutions, such notions were discredited. Now it seems that the Wheel has turned full circle (even if there never really was a First Age) and we are back to worrying about true names again...'
asciilifeform: 'In the once upon a time days of the First Age of Magic, the prudent sorcerer regarded his own true name as his most valued possession but also the greatest threat to his continued good health, for -- the stories go -- once an enemy, even a weak unskilled enemy, learned the sorcerer's true name, then routine and widely known spells could destroy or enslave even the most powerful. As times passed, and we graduat
asciilifeform: if you stay out of the buildings (not everyone can resist temptation to teleport into a nearly intact soviet childhood) it's clean. cleaner than a good chunk of the 'civilized' world.
