asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: what, like bitcoin ? << ameri-zek could escape if he had 10^7 usd or 10^4 bitcoin, say. but he won't ever see either, 'like his own ears without a mirror.'
asciilifeform: for most americans, walking to mexico would involve having to work for a living - a punishment far harsher than anything they do in jails here
asciilifeform: nothing to stop the zek from walking into the permafrost, either
asciilifeform: the snow, bears, starvation - do the guarding.
asciilifeform: thestringpuller: you probably heard that many 'gulag' facilities were not guarded at all.☟︎
asciilifeform: note that the analogy is not exact. the american equivalent of a soviet job with travel privileges would be, say, the right to own significant foreign (or theoretically liquid enough to become foreign) assets
asciilifeform: as diplomat, your 'wife' might actually be someone whose only job is to shoot you in the head if you start to 'turn.'
asciilifeform: incidentally, pretty much none of the above were sent abroad with actual wives, children
asciilifeform: thestringpuller: then you don't get posted abroad.
asciilifeform: e.g. diplomats, military attaches, competitive athletes
asciilifeform: this is why a man with a profession that puts him in range of escape was required to have family.
asciilifeform: if you 'see reason' - you're a free man. get to keep doing what you were doing. except with a little microphone listening, or the like.
asciilifeform: back to the treatment of nothaus - this was SOP for dissident types, at least post-stalin. you land, not in a jail cell, but a comfortable 'hotel room', where no one hangs you upside down, no! - but well-dressed, educated fellows have little chats with you over good coffee - to make you 'see reason.'
asciilifeform: in cases like his, it is traditional for the inquisitor to make a series of offers to lighten punishment substantially in exchange for agent recruitment
asciilifeform: (soviet term, in contrast to the 'little jail' - a jail in the usual sense; the big one - ussr.)
asciilifeform: so there we go. he's in 'большая зона' (the big jail.)☟︎☟︎
asciilifeform: walking the globe without a gps collar ?
asciilifeform should practice blogging while hanging upside down with gag
asciilifeform: my understanding is, the most one can hope for, if you aren't chtulhu, assanger, mircea_popescu - when the wagen comes, is to die with honour, without implicating other partizans
asciilifeform: he was, famously, denied the traditional 'last phone call'
asciilifeform: when (imho undeservedly) famous social engineer k. mitnick was captured, the jailers actually believed he was a chtulhu
asciilifeform: the magic incantation in that case is adequate fire support
asciilifeform: when at war, your perspective on what happens if you fall into enemy hands isn't 'know the magic incantations that will force them to let me go'
asciilifeform: this is why i simply don't get people who continue to think of their relationship with the u.s. court system in legal, rather than military, terms.☟︎☟︎☟︎☟︎
asciilifeform: decimation: which is why, with the possible exception of folks who can cough up astoundingly large ransom, falling into the hands of u.s. 'justice' system should be thought of as equivalent to ending up in a gestapo dungeon.
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: phun phact. russia produced 308 winchester since early 1970s. why? brezhnev received a costly hunting rifle as a gift from usa. needed to feed it...
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: but if it's an actual concern, i vaguely recall that a number of u.s. vendors offer titanium firing pins for just about anything short of a nambu
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: my understanding is that this is virtually unheard of
asciilifeform: decimation: gave them to pet, who doesn't give flying fuck about noise
asciilifeform: decimation: had those previously. also, unsurprisingly, bose.
asciilifeform: then somebody asks 'why not shooting plugs?' and answer, 'try wearing those for 14 hrs'
asciilifeform: most of the time i don't even connect the input to anything
asciilifeform: if, say, monsanto - sold a set with an extra -5dB attenuation, made of reprocessed kittens and personally signed by obama, at 20x the cost - i'd buy it...
asciilifeform: decimation: that's what i have. bose's. with antiphase.
asciilifeform ashamed to admit, owns some bose hardware. mainly because nobody else comes close in plain old noise zapping. (tried many vendors.)
asciilifeform: in my simple orkish minds, anything i have to switch off a filter to see is spam. but hey, who has never spammed.
asciilifeform: 'Canceling Kickstarter cancels the pledges, so nothing to return except an apology to those who pledged for Kickstarter's siphoning and selling their profile. (A fair number said this is why they would not participate in this or any other crowd-funding scam, that we should be ashamed of aiding and abetting the hustle.)'
asciilifeform: tor prize << ad gone because prize claimed in five seconds. because contest was trivial.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: opressed populace... it'll side with the enemy << who will invade usa? martians? and should they invade, for what purpose other than rounding up inhabitants for biodiesel? one might suppose folks would support usg over biodiesel harvesters?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: yes, but it is odd to see it mentioned in the u.s. 'pravda'.
asciilifeform: '...officers scoring personal bonuses of up to twenty-six thousand dollars a year, straight from the forfeiture fund. In Titus County, forfeiture pays the assistant district attorney’s entire salary. Farther south, in Johnson County, I came upon a sheriff’s office that had confiscated an out-of-state driver’s cash, in the absence of contraband...'
asciilifeform: i've been told this is SOP in japan, as well.
asciilifeform: bitcoinpete: this (as discussed in the log) is not a thing in every u.s. uni, but only at the 'ivy' ones (most expensive, direct ladder to the lizardocracy)
