log☇︎
248000+ entries in 0.159s
asciilifeform: it is going there, yes, neither the koreans nor anybody else know how to make molybdenum out of turnips.
asciilifeform: but if your picture of it is based on the ubiquitous southkr/usg crapolade, you would imagine it is a cargo cult pygmy set with straw airplanes.
asciilifeform: but fact is, the koreans built factories, educated engineers, had working hardware, perhaps not first class but quite close.
trinque: they look like backwards villagers that got dosed with SU one day, now to this day say LOOK AM GREAT SOVIET TOO
asciilifeform: granted, i am rather more familiar with western bizarre fetishes than with asian ones.
trinque: certainly not the same level of bizarre sexual fetish
trinque: the west didn't do their particularly weird "beat the 5 year old girls so they prance around like weird trained dogs" did it?
asciilifeform: doesn't keep the 'civilized' west from trying again. ad infinitum.
asciilifeform: so to answer jurov's question, the difference between ru and 'best korea' is that the chaining-to-a-post trick did not work.
asciilifeform: north kr is simply a large-scale version of the thing wonderful civilized americans like to do to prisoners, chain'em up to a post until shits himself. ☟︎
asciilifeform: i dunno that it is possible to consider it in any sense but the political.
mircea_popescu: note that this is a political stance, not a scholarly one.
asciilifeform: everything that happens in north kr, that jurov reads about and goes 'eww', is a creation of the west.
asciilifeform: see the wonderful thread currently going on mircea_popescu's www re the crimes of lincoln
mircea_popescu: i suspect a lot of the bombing enthusiasm past decade has to do with all that impotent rage bottled 1972-1980
asciilifeform: north kr was never agriculturally rich, it was frozen shit land, and from the very beginning of industry in that godforsaken orc peninsula , was the industrial half of it.
mircea_popescu: hey, most of the infrastructure the us has been bombing all over the middle east past decade was put in place by romania. back when romanian extraction engineering was best in world, and haliburton couldn't compete for contracts, so ceausescu ended up with his own concessions which he serviced with his own boats and refined at midia near constanta.
asciilifeform: but to appreciate it, you'd have to actually think re subj and not simply swallow south kr (usg) nonsense ☟︎
asciilifeform: jurov: we had a pretty good 'best korea' thread
jurov: i asked how is that different from best korea. seems you did everything you could to avoid answering that
asciilifeform: there may however be such a thing as 'bridge too far'.
mircea_popescu: all abstractions are ultimately compatible. this is required for their existence.
mircea_popescu: there is no such thing known in nature as "incompatible abstractions"
asciilifeform: which i thought was plain as daylight in the first thread jurov an' i had on subj.
mircea_popescu: gotta engage with what people say not with what you wanna talk about.
asciilifeform: the zeks of butugychag were productive. as were the rocket designers.
mircea_popescu: su is and always was ~as productive as say turkey. orcland.
mircea_popescu: you're thinking of the japanese, mebbe ?
mircea_popescu: also, the soviets were not productive ; not ever.
mircea_popescu: somehow they bought into the delusion that usd is money. and the chinese bought them with sweat. which turns out - is money.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform nah, was powered by selling self to china.
mircea_popescu: modern democracy, like previous democracies, reduce to this, yes. "life is great while burning the furniture for heat - free heat!"
asciilifeform: 1990s american tp was powered by digesting remains of su.
asciilifeform: 'consumer' worx great while he has somebody to eat.
mircea_popescu: moving over to china made the 90s, which were "best ever" and what trump wants to make again.
mircea_popescu: it creates tp for everybody for a decade or two.
a111: Logged on 2016-11-01 22:04 mircea_popescu: anyway. yes, ru chicks would suck cock for tp, jeans, you name it. early 1990s, too.
asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2016-11-01#1561511 << incidentally i was in a '5-star' hotel in usa and they had '1-ply' tp. so perhaps saying no to 3000 ton rockets, doesn't magically create tp-for-everybody. ☝︎
asciilifeform: hence the impression i walked out with.
asciilifeform: these had mercifully brief bio-blurbs on the tombs
mircea_popescu: i dunno, various moderns interred there as well.
asciilifeform: and these weren't even mega-rocket-constructors, but engineers/jurists/architects/fencing instructors/etc in distant and forgotten and since-demolished orcland.
asciilifeform: when i went to the recoleta graveyard in mircea_popesculandia , i could not shake the thought that any single one of the folks buried there, when alive, was worth more than all of current-day usa.
mircea_popescu: once that went away, the notion of nation lost any basis.
mircea_popescu: the ~only reason the concept of nation was politically relevant was because of periodicity of (pre-technological, pre-industrial) war.
asciilifeform: then they die.
asciilifeform: particular groups of people, at particular times - quite temporarily - rise above the shitboard.
mircea_popescu: can't distinguish frenchman, german, russian, etc. even in widely variant environment they build the same "plox to cuckold me" mentality.
mircea_popescu: the globalists/socialists/what have you got this much right, that it's ~meaningless to discuss "nations", seeing how people are universally the same pressed shitboard.
asciilifeform: then, they died, what remained, turned to the neurotypical baseline human turd mass, yes.
asciilifeform: and while they were at the helm (everybody, from janitor to rocket constructor) the anglo shits quaked in their boots.
asciilifeform: incidentally su had ~1 usable generation, the folx who went through the war.
asciilifeform: so perhaps theory was red herring.
asciilifeform: meanwhile the 'successful' folk also... failed in the field
mircea_popescu: all the su stick produced was a horde of anal children. almost as if humans are all on the same mind, and even if you keep the borders locked and the sticks sticking, idiot ru citizen will mirror idiot eu citizen nevertheless
mircea_popescu: it's a great theory that failed spectacularly in the field.
asciilifeform: 'consumer' deserves 1 'consumer good', a stick, to be beaten with, so that he might become something more than consumer, and possibly... produce even.
asciilifeform: that was one of the few things su got ~right~.
jurov: asciilifeform: actually i said nothing about 80s, mircea did. but non-food production woes were a thing
asciilifeform: dun forget to turn off the bear, and feed the reactor with moar vodka
mircea_popescu: you know, when they shot a dog in a bushel of wheat into space.
mircea_popescu: jurov you recall that satellite bidniss ?
asciilifeform: noooow i wasn't there for the magical 90s.
mircea_popescu: anyway. yes, ru chicks would suck cock for tp, jeans, you name it. early 1990s, too. ☟︎
jurov: phf yes, they eventually learned to produce or trade grain. but anything beyond that was never a certainty
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform in that sense the ukraine's been nothing but a famine.
mircea_popescu: phf no, they just didn't have fish at the fish shop ; the meat they didn't have at the meat shop. ☟︎
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu saw schoolgirls sucking cocks in exchange for meat, and i believe it, but i saw no such thing where i was.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform the one where ro minister of defense was like "lolz, what, you think i ran off to moscow ? these idiots have it worse than we do."
asciilifeform: su had famine at the same time as usa: '30s.
phf: jurov: i was actually curious what kind of "famine" you were referring too. usually they can be named by name, like the stalin and Ukrainians. 80s had shortages, but people weren't starving.
asciilifeform: i have nfi which ru mircea_popescu is thinking of.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform eh that's a laughable notion. ru was starving even more than ro by 1985.
asciilifeform: i still dream today, of what i ate then.
mircea_popescu: jurov yea, if you think the soviets had it rough in the 60s you are factually incorrect.
mircea_popescu: nah, the 60s worked. arguably su was above teh west for that brief period.
phf: also don't forget the 40s
jurov: except by then they could exchange oil for grain
phf: well, that was detail rich
mircea_popescu: also in the 50s, of course, but then again that was mutually shared with the french, the germans, and all other idiots who bombed their shit.
mircea_popescu: phf in the 80s
jurov: when there was soviet union
phf: jurov: when was there "periodic famine" and inability to produce ~basic necessities~?
jurov: please, is it really different from best korea? what are 3000ton rockets for when there's periodic famine and general inability to produce basic necessities?
asciilifeform: people would rather be cockroaches than people, and as soon as anybody bothered to ~ask~ them - it was over.
asciilifeform: pissed away the rockets, but GOT JEANS! and WHOREZ!
asciilifeform: doug hofstadter (english! speaker! incidentally) noted, correctly, that (approx.) 'souls, whether or not they literally exist, come in different sizes.'
asciilifeform: to answer the q in the earlier thread, su was a superior culture (vs the anglos, of any time after isambard brunel died) simply because their cult was culturally superior in effect. su pharaoh orders n1 rocket for his pyramidal glorification. anglo pharaoh orders 1,000,000,001 fupas to be fattened.
phf: also was soviet strategy, hence "propaganda" which ignoring retarded western stereotypes was primarily not about "north korea best korea!", but about teaching what "soviet man of future" was supposed and wasn't supposed to do. "soviet man of future cooperates in prisoners dilemma!"
asciilifeform: can try to fix it, possibly, mircea_popescu-style, by breeding a wholly different crop of people, but this takes millenia, and nobody alive here and now will live to see the smallest lick of it.
asciilifeform: imho this is not escapable:
asciilifeform: if they had been +ev - would have stuck around, like maersk liners stick around, but would also be unremarkable, like the liners.
asciilifeform: the 15th c. china of zheng he, had yet other cult object, the mega-fleet (with wooden sailing ships quite comparable in size to today's maersk monsters! )
asciilifeform: trinque: consider: a 'saturn' and the maersk cargo fleet cost similarly. but they are unlike: 'saturn' is a cult/religious object (in the sense where nobody seriously attempts to calculate its roi) , rather more like the great pyramids. ☟︎
thestringpuller: BingoBoingo: I'll change it the next time i'm in the lab with a pen and a pad.
asciilifeform: and some folks believe in accidents that are so convenient for enemy... i do not.
asciilifeform: ~2000 tonnes !
trinque: not the name, but it was a mammoth rocket
asciilifeform: could have easily gone the other way.
asciilifeform: su incidentally had a considerably larger item, which is not famous where trinque lives, because it exploded on the launch pad (killing the bulk of the su space command at the time)