asciilifeform: like the doomed office plankton jumping from a burning skyscraper, they don't much care where they land.
asciilifeform: what we're seeing is not love of the typewriter, but a desperate flight from wintel.
asciilifeform: given the small quantities of the machines bought, it seems likely that each will inhabit a separate room. precisely the best circumstances for such a bug.
asciilifeform: (don't believe? try it yourself. each key has a detectably-different sound.)
asciilifeform: decimation: typewriters are trivially snooped via ordinary acoustic bug.
asciilifeform: implementation - an exercise for alert reader.
asciilifeform: essential attribute of such being that it cannot be determined to be what it is other than by being actually used in a broadcasted transaction.
asciilifeform like probably everyone else, contemplated the mathematical curio of a 'panic key' that irreversibly destroys coin (in a hypothetical 'btc 2.0' apparatus, naturally)
asciilifeform: the only possible pill against this situation is - to not end up in it.
asciilifeform: even the dumbest bureaucrat presumably understands this.
asciilifeform: weakest link in btc apparatus is still - the owner. esp. if he's hanging upside-down, waiting for the next whack with a thick telephone book.
asciilifeform: only objective re: the wagen - don't get in.
asciilifeform: when did plausible deniability release anyone from gasenwagen?
asciilifeform: blind 'taint' analysis is one thing, a list of 1mil names and deposit addrs is quite another.
asciilifeform is still waiting for the first leak from the u.s. dept. of wherever-the-stoolie-reports-from-btc-exchanges go.
asciilifeform: if all you want to know is 'did the sr coins move' etc.
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: Taint analysis doesn't work << except when it does
asciilifeform doesn't know who could possibly disagree with this
asciilifeform: depends, i suppose, on what you'd call 'living.'
asciilifeform: and the question of what precisely a 'living wage' might be, in bezzleworld, is a rather tricky one.
asciilifeform: but if you compare folks carrying on in exactly the same profession, the pay is similar
asciilifeform: perhaps from academics who escape from usg research houses to private firms
asciilifeform isn't sure where the notion of 'usg pays starvation wages' comes from.
asciilifeform: of the roughly two dozen staff in my lab, there were, i think, at most two u.s. born folks at any given time.
asciilifeform: other little 'secret' - with the exception of 'secret' agencies, a contractor need not be a u.s. citizen.
asciilifeform: and, unlike many civil service posts, are 'fired at will'
asciilifeform: on account of the mundane fact that - they are cheaper.
asciilifeform: decimation: generally, the containers they ship in.
asciilifeform did ~3 yrs of this type of contracting. a real laugh. didn't even have paid time off.
asciilifeform is only familiar with the particular bureaucracy where he once worked
asciilifeform: (rather than paid 'piecework', like the customary meaning of 'contractor' in, e.g., the construction trades)
asciilifeform: most of the contractors are hired for a fixed salary, agreed on before-hand, as if they were normal employees
asciilifeform: even today, buying the kind of insurance available for a token fee to civil service folks or employees of large concerns - costs 1-2k usd / month if you do it 'as a human'
asciilifeform: 'contractor' here means actual contractor, vs. proper full time employees of private firms who bid on federal contracts
asciilifeform: decimation: 'insurance on your own dime' generally means something like zip - no group discount
asciilifeform: chetty: National institutes of heAlth
asciilifeform: there is a third option, that i'll bring up for completeness because it appears to be very popular these days: piss in a paper cup, write 'beer' on it, drink up.
asciilifeform: (actual poster in a former workplace of mine)
asciilifeform: 'a decade in the lab could save you an afternoon in the library.'
asciilifeform: just as, if you want a glass of beer, no need to go to the pub - find some sand, salt, build a forge, having the glass, find some hops, barley... perhaps you will drink a superior beer in a few decades
asciilifeform: well, technically not required. you can always decide to spend the next 20 years as a historian and walk the author's sources yourself, coming to his - or a different - conclusion.
asciilifeform: required reading: j.c. scott, 'the art of not being governed.'
asciilifeform: why did the rulers of ussr, china, etc. push so aggressively for mechanized agriculture? to free the plow-pullers from their toil so they can watch opera?
asciilifeform: in so far as food can still be produced via traditional low-tech methods, the dream remains a dream
asciilifeform: the folks pushing the 'urban' ('totalitarian', etc, pick favourite term) model of civilization cannot really ever let go of the dream of the total annihilation of the 'rural' model.
asciilifeform: eventual goal, for the state, is an endgame where you can't grow your own potato in secret any more than you can produce your own 14nm cpu.
asciilifeform: more recent example - ussr, collectivization
asciilifeform: if something gets in the way of this business model - in usa or elsewhere - terminator.
asciilifeform: usagi: at present, they have a very lucrative business (in usa) of filing mass lawsuits against folks on whose property their product ends up, through whatever means. hence the unprofitability of 'terminator'
asciilifeform: a historical annoyance, for all forms of state, is that folks can, in general, grow food without asking it permission first.
asciilifeform: chetty: even with the poison, to approach something like the lethality of the mass automobile would be quite a feat. the more interesting aspect of present-day 'gmo' is geopolitical ('terminator seed', etc.)
asciilifeform: chetty: speaking here of the one incontrovertible engineered effect (augmented tolerance for herbicides, pesticides)
asciilifeform: pete_dushenski: noose is traditionally reusable
asciilifeform: electric chair, meanwhile, did its fair bit to delay the adoption of alternating current mains (just like its inventor, edison, wanted it to. though he would've like to delay it forever.)
asciilifeform: if things had gone slightly differently, we might be debating whether medicine ought to make use of hypodermics, even today.
asciilifeform: story time. the appearance of the mass-produced hypodermic needle in 19th c. came in time for the peculiar debate in usa re: 'humane' methods of execution. poison injected via hypodermic (today's fashion) was proposed. rejected at the insistence of the medical world - they argued, probably correctly, that it would scare off folks from agreeing to be injected with anything. (eventually electric chair was adopted.)
asciilifeform: pete_dushenski: for any other application, you need a total ability to piss on patents - backed up with thermonukes. a la ussr.
asciilifeform: but no, somehow, 'gmo' equals what monsanto inc. does.☟︎
asciilifeform: or say, go and fix RuBisCO, world's most inefficient enzyme, bottleneck in photosynthesis. then grow enough on garden plot to feed entire street. destroy land/wealth equivalency, mass chaos, good times.
asciilifeform: people debate 'gmo food' as if i can go and buy, e.g., tomato plant that expresses caffeine, etc
asciilifeform: there is only, at present, 'foods optimized to resist gargantuan quantities of herbicide on the field.'
asciilifeform: someone, somewhere, may well possess the secret of how to build a thermonuke using the materials of ordinary electronics.
asciilifeform: if either side had tested a working pure fusion device, in the customary 'drilled well' method, the public would not necessarily have learned of the fact.
asciilifeform: official story is that both east and west expended astonishing resources on the problem - and, generally believed, that nothing came of this.
asciilifeform: that is, requiring no fissile initiator
asciilifeform: it is generally known that the 20th c. 'holy grail' of nuke engineering was the so-called 'pure fusion' device.
asciilifeform: let's give example from outside of cryptology
asciilifeform: i wouldn't imagine the 'sworn monks' can keep the lid on indefinitely - only thus far. as we've seen, they succeed in keeping the lid on 'suite a' & co. is the argument, then, that the pressure under the lid cannot be too high then ?
