asciilifeform: Mats_cd03: history suggests that the 'lead standard' mode of a given country is strictly connected to what can be pilfered from military supplies, when the men guarding them turn free agent. so you're almost certainly correct.
asciilifeform: they don't sell this in shops around here
asciilifeform: incidentally, nothing (at least, at present time) stops an owner of XXXX bezzlars from driving to a precious metals seller and filling as many buckets as he can afford.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: i'm paid in perfectly ordinary u.s. bezzlars
asciilifeform: in the u.s. in general, people with money (but not quite a 'fortune') who want to rent something nice vs. playing debt games, are a bit of an under-served market.
asciilifeform: to be fair, it is a little bit from the peculiar conditions where i live. most of the rentals are geared for students, and are gigantic, divided into rooms.
asciilifeform: quite the same here. and yet, i've been trying and failing to rent a house for ages.
asciilifeform: has very advantageous economics for this << how's that
asciilifeform: mike_c: if only this existed in my town (and, run by something other than scammers)
asciilifeform: airlines regularly find stowaways in landing gear shafts, dead of asphyxiation and frost
asciilifeform: (better excuse than the 'targeting error' that demolished the chinese embassy in belgrade. the one that happened to contain the pieces of the 'stealth' machine.)
asciilifeform: can't wait for 'we didn't mean to demolish XXX. bot got hacked.'
asciilifeform: re: burglars: everyone who gets burgled quickly learns j. e. hoover's lesson 'justice is incidental to law and order'
asciilifeform: competent burglar can trip over a miraculous surprise and end in jail
asciilifeform: intelligence doesn't kill people << certainly. this goes back centuries - e.g. inquisitor would hand the heretic over to the 'secular arm' for processing.
asciilifeform: ever hear the saying 'see Naples and die' ?
asciilifeform: my secret hope is to meet the interesting ones some day. although it will probably be before my firing squad.
asciilifeform: officially limited to cases like this
asciilifeform: re: mircea_popescu's thoughts the other day about bank accounts being mandatory in u.s. - typically, when you sign up for direct deposit of salary here, you also sign a pact that allows the employer to withdraw.
asciilifeform: this is a good educational story re: fiat.
asciilifeform: '...officials at Texas Steel Conversion mistakenly issued Cesar Jaime Saldivar a paycheck for $99,275, and now they want it back. Saldivar, 25, who was captured on video making a large cash withdrawal, has been charged with felony theft...'
asciilifeform: admittedly through the lens of, well, whatever he was.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: if i recall, the writer in question wasn't prescribing 'principles' for people, but tried to catalogue where various anthropological common threads (taboos among savages, etc.) were.
asciilifeform: possible revelance to beetle men discussion:
asciilifeform: he already knows what he sums to - zero
asciilifeform: beetle man lives a kind of demo version of death, even alive
asciilifeform: there is also the undying, zoological enmity of mediocrity to anything colourful, alive.
asciilifeform: 'territorial' behaviour, not even specifically mammalian
asciilifeform: they exist, and are the muscle, bones, of bureaucracy
asciilifeform: who thrives on 'housing committee' and similar places. takes delight in demolishing orchards, at the owner's expense, for 'violations', and the like.
asciilifeform: i think the dynamics of pediwikia 'deletionism' are vaguely interesting - the innumerable pages on obscure fictional characters, etc. that stand perfectly firm, and so on. but the topic has been beaten to death elsewhere.
asciilifeform: fuck damn it, i of all people am responsible for infecting people with lolcats.
asciilifeform: it's interesting how, after many years of talmudic sophistry, the 'pua' folks arrived at their current technological state of the art: buying a plane ticket out of the u.s.
