251300+ entries in 0.051s
mircea_popescu: samir doesn't sound like a slut name and twitter doesn't sound like it is going to publish good boobs. so i'ma click on something else instead.
mircea_popescu: why do businesses in a country that's struggling with the spectre of deflation - businesses locate in the prime rib of that country, even - have problems typical of hyperinflating environments ?!
mircea_popescu: instead of pretending like we're fixing the problem like preet, let's try and think about the causes. why do firms perceive the need to artificially cap salaries ? this seems only rational in an hyperinflationary environment.
mircea_popescu: incidentally i suppose, the quote also throws a harsh light over the widespreadness of price fixing in silicon valley. seriously, fucking law interns ?
mircea_popescu: and you know "rudius media empire" was a thing, and some kids that meanwhile got jobs / wives / unsuspended sentences ACTUALLY BOUGHT INTO
mircea_popescu: "strategist". what is your strategy ? "i pretend like i matter on the internet" why ? "YOU DONT UNDERSTAND HOW THE WORLD WORKS".
mircea_popescu: well i can't seem to find it, but he has a bit about "you don't believe me ? then believe x, she was stupid enough to quit medical school to join x shartup and now is a relationships expert"
mircea_popescu: tucker max at any rate quit law school for it, or to quote tlp
mircea_popescu: by now, there's an entire generation of essentially useless men hoping they will be able to make a living off this model.
mircea_popescu: the author is one tucker max, famous for nothing in particular (and whose life story is instructive, in case any chickies born yesterday actually believe amanda hess or randi zuckerberg are "feminist" models, and something good for her, and failed to understand that
http://trilema.com/2015/the-worm/ is simply a fable about gawker.
mircea_popescu: About a week after Fenwick’s announcement, and the resulting Infirmation.com message board “explosion,” Wilson, a Fenwick competitor, announced they were paying summers $2,400. Each of the other Silicon Valley firms quickly fell in line after that, including Fenwick.
mircea_popescu: . I even used one of my aliases to play the other side. It was beautiful. Of the 20 messages on this topic on the first day, I probably posted 10 of them. I kept this up, at a slightly lower output, for about three days.
mircea_popescu: I was unhappy with this, so I immediately posted this info on the Infirmation.com Silicon Valley/SF Greedy Associate board, and then, using four or five different anonymous screen names, proceeded to have a thread discussion on how horrible this was, how Fenwick was insulting it’s summers, how no one was going to accept their offers because the firm was so cheap it wouldn’t fork over the extra $300 a week, etc, etc
mircea_popescu: How does this relate to the story? The summer salaries had already been announced in New York at $2,400, and everyone was waiting for the Silicon Valley firms to announce their summer salaries [Fenwick had four major competitors in Silicon Valley at the time: Cooley, Wilson, and Brobeck (these are abbreviated names of law firms)]. Fenwick was the first to announce; they did so sometime around late April, and they annou
mircea_popescu: a flood of associates or law students to that firm, and away from Firm B, before Firm B even knew what was going on.
mircea_popescu: As a result of these developments, partners at all the majors firms monitored these message boards, looking for the latest gossip about their firms and their competing firms. They had to stay up to date, because a change in benefits in Firm A could mean a flood of ass
mircea_popescu: a few others like it, junior associates at all the major firms started sharing info with each other about the relative benefits and detriments of their particular firms on these Greedy Associate boards.
mircea_popescu: ith each other about salary, benefits, work conditions, anything they choose. One of the sparking events was when Gunderson, a relatively small firm in Silicon Valley, raised their starting associate salaries from somewhere around the industry average of $100,000 to $125,000. One of the first places this information was posted and disseminated was the messages boards on Infirmation.com, and from that event, as well as
mircea_popescu: Infirmation.com is a job-related website that has message boards on it, where anyone can anonymously post anything. The message boards are divided by region, one being for New York associates, one for Silicon Valley, one for Chicago, etc. These message boards, called “Greedy Associate” boards, had vaulted to fame in the preceding months as a means for associates at different firms to anonymously share information w
mircea_popescu: What does this have to do with anything? Well, I was almost single-handedly responsible for Fenwick, and basically every other Silicon Valley firm, raising their summer associate salary from $2,100 to 2,400. How is that possible, you ask? The beauty of the internet, and the influence of an amazing website called Infirmation.com.
mircea_popescu: During the spring, Fenwick announced that they were going to pay summer associates only $2,100, which was below the $2,400 that most big firms in New York, LA and Chicago were paying their summers. Yet, right before we arrived in Palo Alto, Fenwick, along with every other Silicon Valley firm, announced that they were going to pay summers $2,400, commensurate with the big firms in other major cities.
mircea_popescu: anyway, if anyone's curious as to how exactly stuff like reddit or tardstalk work, here's a blow by blow, by a guy in the know :
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform i don't trust it, if it wasn't obvious already.
mircea_popescu: i very much doubt they still believe "the problem" can be contained with muppets.
mircea_popescu: ben_vulpes it's not too bad for my health. definitely worse for the long term prospects of the heathens
mircea_popescu: then soon enough the HABIT of innovaton forms, and it's set. becomes culture, and win.
mircea_popescu: when there's money to pay for it, and necessarilty in the shape of "fallen from the sky", the marriage with absurd constraints is the most productive thing known to man.
mircea_popescu: they nevertheless sent mail on special paper. thinner than the bible sheets.
mircea_popescu: these absurd constraints are a great driver of innoivation. for instance, the "lawless", "rugged" and obviously unwashed rapists of the wild west ?
mircea_popescu: and it's a great blessing, too, you know ? if that's what it costs you won't be sending much gawker across.
mircea_popescu: er. All the bullion was shipped in bars by stage to San Francisco (a bar was usually about twice the size of a pig of lead and contained from $1,500 to $3,000 according to the amount of gold mixed with the silver), and the freight on it (when the shipment was large) was one and a quarter per cent. of its intrinsic value."
mircea_popescu: e was traceable clear across the deserts of the Territory by the writhing serpent of dust it lifted up. By these wagons, freights over that hundred and fifty miles were $200 a ton for small lots (same price for all express matter brought by stage), and $100 a ton for full loads. One Virginia firm received one hundred tons of freight a month, and paid $10,000 a month freightage. In the winter the freights were much high
mircea_popescu: here : "Speculation ran riot, and yet there was a world of substantial business going on, too. All freights were brought over the mountains from California (150 miles) by pack-train partly, and partly in huge wagons drawn by such long mule teams that each team amounted to a procession, and it did seem, sometimes, that the grand combined procession of animals stretched unbroken from Virginia to California. Its long rout
mircea_popescu: these arrangements, the making thereof, that's what the whole tinseltown is built on.
mircea_popescu: more importantly : the cost of hay in carson city was 250 dollars per ton in 1962, and had been as much as twice that. at the same time a horse could be had for 30.
mircea_popescu: for that matter, cca 1890 a japanese invasion of the entire west coast was regarded moderately likely and entirely feasible in principle.
mircea_popescu: nothing existed there prior, or in the words of sinatra (a man the age of one's grandparents), "this place was sand before i came here and it'll be sand again before i'm done with you!"
mircea_popescu: anyway, people readily forget history. siegel had to beg and steal new york money to build, what essentially was, the first building in the desert.
mircea_popescu: i doubt that claim, but it's certainly not impossible.
mircea_popescu: you realise mexico city is larger than all texas, right ?
mircea_popescu: it took 50 years, that could only be built because of the previous 50. and so on.
mircea_popescu: you have to understand in 1890 nobody wanted to leave new york (where show biz lived) to go in tumbleweedland.
mircea_popescu: but with it, "that's california for you", something conceptually entrenched already in the times of mark twain. on the basis of which, hollywood, and shockley.
mircea_popescu: california minus the gold rush, and the resulting adaptaiton, would have been washington with a coastline.
mircea_popescu: (btw... the reason silicon valley as a marketable product exists today ? that.)
mircea_popescu: so much wastage has never seen, not since the great california gold rush at any rate.
mircea_popescu: "The "Bitcoin Foundation" poured an unforgiveable number of coins into the market to feed Gavin Andresen and his family…and for what? 3 years of development that's just about to get flushed down the drain? The appearance of relevance without any of the hard work of thinking and making things work correctly? [...] Consider the tragedy wrought by an internet forum accidentally blessed with untold riches and weep."
mircea_popescu: danielpbarron nothing hypocritical about it : if WE fork bitcoin, then it's ok. if nobody claims to do it, nobody gets quashed.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform 1 because allowing two ways to do things never killed anyone and 2 probably because i want to see the stuff. i suspect it's a derivative of the general "fits in head" principle.
mircea_popescu: hopefully we'll get a way to automate communication between gribble and assbot once nanotube gets around to it.
mircea_popescu: (no you don't have to redo the history, it was copied over)
mircea_popescu: you know how to voice yourself on the new model bitstein ?
mircea_popescu: ;;later tell pete_dushenski you know these log copies where you capitalize the first letter in a line but not subsequent sentence leads nor 1st person pronouns is very odd looking.
mircea_popescu: "the nonsense we belive in is not really nonsense, which is why we can't hoild a conversation with random people. let's instead talk of sports!"
mircea_popescu: let them fucking come and worship instead of going around in circles like headless chickens pretending the whole world's a chicken and someone severed its head.
mircea_popescu: “The most recent poll showed that the majority of Americans no longer believe the conspiracy theory that a species emitting only 3% of the world’s supply of a poor heat-trapping gas are magically cooling the planet… I mean heating the planet…. or wait, I mean causing the weather to change now.”
mircea_popescu: in other words, there's a lot of value in ~actually being the nightmare~, on the side.
mircea_popescu: but yes, that is unrelatedly the winning strategy, and sure, it's working splendidly. in spite of sustained pretense of everyone to you know, "who is mp".
mircea_popescu: stalins purges were just good politics, if not from a very society-approved paradigm.
mircea_popescu: yes, i'm sure "they" lie, notwithstanding that "they" doesn't even exist as such outside of the sufferer's sufferances.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform the steve dutch piece is funny because... "i lie" gets transmorgrified into "they lie" in such a predictable fashion.