asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: i presume you know the story of msdos
asciilifeform: mike_c: by that token, we should look up to 1990s russian mob as business teachers. 'take contract on creditor when cheaper than paying back loan', rectothermal cryptoanalysis, the joys.
asciilifeform: the notion that ms turdware is a product of any kind of free market or competition on technical merit is a real comedy.
asciilifeform: mike_c: the microshit style of 'doing business' goes a long way to explaining the popularity of communism, etc. among technical types.
asciilifeform: well yes. the latter is more like the famous disease where the victim cannot feel pain.
asciilifeform: on the flip side of this, 'coward dies a thousand deaths, brave man - one'
asciilifeform: [context: pres. carter dreams a bad dream] - 'plenum of central committee. ussr gensec reads report: great successes by the bread farmers of Kuban, Stavropol, Smolensk, Texas, Colorado provinces...'
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: reminds me of, in reverse: '...Идет пленум ЦК, Генеральный секретарь читает доклад: Больших успехов достигли хлеборобы Кубанщины, Ставропольщины, Смоленщины, Техасщины, Колорадщины.'☟︎
asciilifeform: afaik most modern despots would be quite satisfied with ancient egypt's 5000 yrs of 'sustain'
asciilifeform: (rezun's classic 'soviet military intelligence')
asciilifeform: ght run as follows: Today we've got a friendship evening with shit-eaters', or Today we're having some shit-eaters to dinner. Prepare a suitable menu'.'☟︎
asciilifeform: Officially, all Soviet representatives regard these parasites with touching feelings of friendship, but privately they call them 'shit-eaters' ('govnoed'). It is difficult to say where this expression originated, but it is truly the only name they deserve. The use of this word has become so firmly entrenched in Soviet embassies that it is impossible to imagine any other name for these people. A conversation mi☟︎☟︎
asciilifeform: 'In examining different kinds of agents, people from the free world who have sold themselves to the GRU, one cannot avoid touching on yet another category, perhaps the least appealing of all. Officially one is not allowed to call them agents, and they are not agents in the full sense of being recruited agents. We are talking about the numerous members of overseas societies of friendship with the Soviet Union.
asciilifeform: my guess is that no serious effort will be made to actually collect the tax. rather, it will be used as a scourge against folks who need to be 'lettre de cachet'-d.
asciilifeform: i think everyone here is aware of the practical difference btween btc and cement. but the bureaucrats aren't - or will pretend, at any rate, for as long as it remains possible
asciilifeform: my understanding is, if i'm shot walking on the street, i theoretically owe 9g of Pb worth of tax on the windfall of perfectly good lead.
asciilifeform: in the usa, if someone hands you money, or cement, etc. for whatever reason, it is officially taxable
asciilifeform: my understanding is that selling 'wow gold' is quite like sub-leasing an apartment where the original lease forbade it
asciilifeform: (afaik it is technically illegal to be a subsistence farmer in the u.s.)
asciilifeform: it even demands that miners pay tax, the same way farmers are made to
asciilifeform: ianal, but the linked proclamation seems to declare 'legitimacy' for this purpose
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: they're cult figures here in usa. tabloid magazine covers were printed with special magnified mug shots for their wanking.
asciilifeform: jurov: i have this crap set to 'interrupt', not 'poll', so i might be a little behind.
asciilifeform: waiting for timoshenko et al to proclaim that yesterday's 'leaked nixon tape' of her asking fellow ua fucktards 'can't we find a nuke with which to cleanse the russian scum' - in perfect russian - is fake
asciilifeform: this reminds me of an idea that i (and probably everybody) had at one point - a betting engine with auto-resolution using google (or some other mechanical process)
asciilifeform: i was assuming that the proposal is about bitbet as it currently exists - where bests in the style of 'boxing match' are heavily represented
asciilifeform: i was thinking of a far more mundane aspect, where the best source of info re: the outcome of, say, athletic match, isn't 1000 googles, but the boxer who can decide to 'throw' the match
asciilifeform: actually gru usually bought on the free market
asciilifeform: eh, it was never infinity. not even close to $maxint.
asciilifeform: if 'watch' is a west german tank engine, and i'm 'gru', then it is worth 100x the price, no?
asciilifeform: this is a little like 'moldbug's chessboard' - fight between move-select-via-reddit vs. an actual grandmaster
asciilifeform: 'mine google' gives a little asymmetry - 'pull plug' - more.
asciilifeform: e.g. the ones who 'know', with a good degree of confidence, that difficulty will drop on day x, because they can personally pull the plug on a chinese minerfarm - etc
asciilifeform: perhaps i'm thick, but it still seems to me like the biggest winners on bitbet ought to be folks sitting on the right side of an information asymmetry.
asciilifeform: everything there is to know about rng is 1950s state of the art.
asciilifeform: ThickAsThieves: i do hope that you don't think me to be some sort of rng hero
asciilifeform: freedos, last i checked, wasn't 'bug for bug compatible' with msdos.
asciilifeform: plenty of industrial systems, etc. still run on dos 5 and later - but, fortunately, the source (largely asm) was leaked years ago.
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: Microsoft releases source code << carefully calculated insult to the public - dos 1.1
