asciilifeform: decimation: don't confuse the aftermath of the romans/soviets marching home from the colonies with rebellion.

asciilifeform: what soviet arms, with the possible exception of trench-diggers at tbilisi, quelled the rebellions?

asciilifeform: that's because he's piss-poor (in the non-monetary economy of the place, the one that actually counts)

asciilifeform: if they have any say about it.

asciilifeform: the lepers will not suffer an identifiable colony of the healthy to live

asciilifeform: as seen in '300'

asciilifeform: Ephialtes of Trachis

asciilifeform should go to bed

asciilifeform: but the other fellow

asciilifeform: fuck, not ephialtes

asciilifeform: u.s. is Elphialtes 'with an army and navy.'

asciilifeform: rather than individual escapees

asciilifeform: re: en masse colonies

asciilifeform: orlov has a pretty good 'do it now, in the open, and they'll zap you' piece

asciilifeform: (re dreams)

asciilifeform: inner emigration. works great until gasenwagen.

asciilifeform: it's just buried

asciilifeform: nope

asciilifeform: (the original piece, vs. the ad for the book-length elaboration)

asciilifeform: http://www.resilience.org/stories/2008-11-11/five-stages-collapse

asciilifeform: strike that

asciilifeform: for those who somehow avoided hearing of it, a basic 'newton's laws' of the degringolade: http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/p/the-five-stages-of-collapse.html

asciilifeform: yarvin also noted 'yi yi zhi yi'

asciilifeform: try microaggressing against herr dimon, should you ever chance to encounter him in a lift.

asciilifeform: nobody cancelled this

asciilifeform: at least here.

asciilifeform: palpably.

asciilifeform: then divide its cost by the five round cells inside.

asciilifeform: (go to your cellar, find one and saw it open.)

asciilifeform: probably everyone here knows about modern 9 volt battery.

asciilifeform: and jump on it

asciilifeform: this is the correct approach to explanation, btw: stuff a crowbar in the contradictions between observed reality and the extant crap

asciilifeform: haha

asciilifeform: no need to pay for transport, etc

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: how could it be otherwise?

asciilifeform: (see the 'price ceiling' discussion from a few months ago)

asciilifeform: until people get eager enough to start throwing neutrons

asciilifeform: (to follow the analogy)

asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: presumably it responds to the correct incantation only.

asciilifeform: if gold could be teleported at will, and likewise stowed in an inaccessible 'never-land' by the owner, one would need no electronic cryptocoin.

asciilifeform: was this really a shock to anyone?

asciilifeform: 'even' in the russian prison there are smart folks. some, perhaps not quite smart enough to spring loose, some that stay out of habit, some that have simply not located a sufficiently fat herd of bullocks...

asciilifeform: but, seeing only what can be seen in the infamous quote, it was a good show.

asciilifeform: i doubt this is a surprise to anyone

asciilifeform: leaving aside the question of whether a particular mouthpiece of the headless dictatorship believes this, it is clearly intended for the consumption of folks who do (or could, with the right prod)

asciilifeform: witness herr dimon, believing that 'surely this cartoon coin can be copied just like mp3'

asciilifeform: seems to me like they are actually envisioning that cartoon coin, except somehow 'made of bit'

asciilifeform: except perhaps with great effort, and if you remember early childhood exceptionally well.

asciilifeform: folks with fully-decked-out brains, who can reason in abstractions, can't really picture what it's like not to

asciilifeform: or they can't imagine concept of 'coin'

asciilifeform: i think these folks literally have to see a gold coin, albeit a cartoon gold coin

asciilifeform: they demand these curious idols.

asciilifeform: re: the abstraction-blind.

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: remember 'the camel has two humps' piece?

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: imaginary physical, dead tree book or cardboard box that the product somehow “is”..These are required supposedly because “it’s professional” ..it helps the bullocks imaginary perceptions << the gold coins generated by the script all crapcoin artists seem to use. or the cardboard '90s software box drawn (identically!?) by all peddlers of winblows turdware...

asciilifeform: easily. but they were a bit too 'cold'.

asciilifeform: sailing isn't quite enough though

asciilifeform: result: fleet burned, deep sea navigation verboten - as wasteful...

asciilifeform: brought back animals from africa, etc. to no useful end

asciilifeform: (arguably their equivalent of 'space program')

asciilifeform: see the Zheng He voyages

asciilifeform: the chinese visited some of our present dysfunctions rather early on.

asciilifeform: 'Group Responses to Specially Skilled Individuals in a Macaca fascicularis Group'. E. Stammbach

asciilifeform: http://www.loper-os.org/pub/codemonkey.pdf

asciilifeform: and why their alchemists got firmly wedged in alchemy

asciilifeform: dives into, (for those of us who do not know chinese) the reasons why the gadgets did not transition into what we think of as 'technology'

asciilifeform: rec. reading re: china: 'The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West', T. E. Huff ☟︎

asciilifeform: the kids wouldn't fit in their parents' chairs.

asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: this was an actual problem in japanese metro in the '80s.

asciilifeform: they had countless neat things.

asciilifeform: they 'color within the lines' (as pre-braindamage paul graham put it)

asciilifeform: of, you could say, insufficiently high temperature in the simulated-annealing sense. ☟︎☟︎

asciilifeform: the chinese, as i understand, got stuck in a certain 'thermodynamic' trap

asciilifeform: point being, if that piece were written by a demented martian, i should like to learn martian.

asciilifeform: haha

asciilifeform: ('russian i would learn, simply because, it was spoken by lenin') ☟︎

asciilifeform: (deliberately ungrammatical. it is spoken by some conquered savage, in a Mayakovsky poem)

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: perhaps you've heard the infamous ' Я русский бы выучил только за то, что им разговаривал Ленин' line

asciilifeform: if i recall, it was mpoe-pr

asciilifeform: whoever wrote that tale

asciilifeform: the author, about whom i know virtually nothing else - is a titan.

asciilifeform: required reading, for anyone who gives half a damn.

asciilifeform: http://thewhet.net/2012/shall-be-delivered/

asciilifeform: (by mpoe-pr)

asciilifeform: see the immortal 'Shall Be Delivered'.

asciilifeform: which is still an improvement.

asciilifeform: it will resolve to elaborate ruses to steal keys

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: re: the fool's fake passport: once it becomes possible to do business only with those who follow formula of 'fuck people, do business with keys,' social engineering goes mostly away.

asciilifeform: people who put no value on understanding.

asciilifeform: (to borrow from herr bush's 'truthiness')

asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: this is a classic example of 'proofiness'

asciilifeform: decimation: see, for example: the notion of 'formats.' (http://www.loper-os.org/?p=309)

asciilifeform: decimation: the rot goes far deeper.

asciilifeform: even now i can get the modems to pass garbage from one end of the town to another.

asciilifeform: ricochet was a true mesh network

asciilifeform: before the appearance of inexpensive/ubiquitous 'ip over cellular'

asciilifeform: leaving a gap of several yrs with no economical replacement

asciilifeform: ricochet was a classic example of a co. with a real, useful product, killed by gross mismanagement

asciilifeform: they work - but no backhaul.

asciilifeform: they still respond to signals! i once bought a ricochet modem just to determine this. ☟︎