267400+ entries in 0.076s
mircea_popescu: and it goes right into the extraction economy discussion. you familiar with that one ?
mircea_popescu: it's that "first they came for x but i said nothing" thing, exactly. it's not in any sense a novel or a marginal idea.
mircea_popescu: without him, romania spent half a century in the warsaw shitter. with him, it'd have probably been greece instead.
mircea_popescu: the best case study for this in my view is romania in the 30s. idiot, indolent romanians allowed the worst among them (iron guard, dubious local fascist wannabe) to assassinate the best romanian that then lived, one duca.
mircea_popescu: specifically, some midgets betray some other midgets, which they need to survive.
mircea_popescu: they are really narrowed. what happens there is treason. treason never works politically.
mircea_popescu: how about "my uptime is longer than poettering's coding experience". what bootup "?
mircea_popescu: so, yes, "faster boot times". a more irrelevant metric could scarcely be devised.
mircea_popescu: compare ms-dos, still to this day accepted here as a paragon of programming,
mircea_popescu: at first they promise "jobs for everyone and cheapoer prices"
mircea_popescu: now, this is a general economic principle, and it applies jut as well to monolithic coding approaches.
mircea_popescu: soon enough you turned greenwich village into detroit.
mircea_popescu: the shops that were closed by its competition won't return
mircea_popescu: ye, the people that left in exasperation at all the sprawl won't come back.
mircea_popescu: the stool he sat on, however, will never recover from having been sat upon.
mircea_popescu: should it find a nice place to sit for a while, such as a neighbourhood, it will be fine for as long as it sits, and when that's done can walk away
mircea_popescu: think of a supermarket as if it were a giant, walking the land of midgets.
mircea_popescu: decimation yes, exactly what monoturdism usually promises.
mircea_popescu: just because your old clunker is rusty doesn't mean you should add a bamboo patio on the roof.
mircea_popescu: fizzled as one'd expect. there's a reason india was a colonial empire and not vice-versa.
mircea_popescu: this is actually a general point. i recall a few decades ago bored stupid californian housewifes and ex actresses went all crazy about how india is going to be teh great cure
mircea_popescu: Even worse would be to think that the simplicity of Africa holds some kind of answers for Western society: remember "It Takes A Village"? Trust me on this: there is not one thing that Africa can give the West which hasn't been tried before and failed, not one thing that isn't a step backwards, and not one thing which is worse than, or that contradicts, what we have already.
mircea_popescu: somehow i deduced you mean pills just don't work in principle somehow
mircea_popescu: amusingly, what the african activists willing to speak plainly say sounds a whole fuckload of a lot just like what the paternalist southern lobby was saying in the us, early 1800s.
mircea_popescu: "If a cure for AIDS was found tomorrow, and offered to every African nation free of charge, the growth of the disease would scarcely be checked, let alone reversed." i ca see this.
mircea_popescu: yeah seems the inescapble fate of the black race, extermination at the hands of the yellow.
mircea_popescu: other than being an european in the "mare nostrum" sense of that concept, me either.
mircea_popescu: well you know, without this without that... basically you're what, talking of "african americans" ?
mircea_popescu: first class had better service than anywhere i've ever been, including switzerland
mircea_popescu: this is very unfair. i have personally used the egyptian trains, cairo to luxor
mircea_popescu: The result of decades of "foreign aid" has resulted in a continental infrastructure which, if one excludes South Africa, couldn't support Pittsburgh.
mircea_popescu: well, in fairness part of this may be that the african gdp is sinking in realer terms. if same were applied, the us sunk since the 80s something fiercer
mircea_popescu: 17 countries saw a decline in real per capita GNP between 1970 and 1999, despite receiving well over $100 billion in World Bank assistance
mircea_popescu: Among old Africa hands, we have a saying, usually accompanied by a shrug: "Africa wins again." This is usually said after an incident such as: a beloved missionary is butchered by his congregation, for no apparent reason.
mircea_popescu: i remember this. when i was like 6 old women around me were "omg, you look like you're from biafra! eat something!"
mircea_popescu: "In my lifetime, the following tragedies have occurred, causing untold millions of deaths: famine in Biafra"
mircea_popescu: your own life is not actually within your control. valuing something outside of your control is logically broken, and that basis is enough for any ulterior brokenness to be itnroduced.
mircea_popescu: it's just typical of actual people, as neatly opposed to dickles otakus or w/e populate teh us.
mircea_popescu: anyway, the "casual attitude to life and death" he discusses is in no way typically african.
mircea_popescu: Two friends died from stepping on landmines while on Army duty in Namibia. Three died in horrific car accidents (and lest one thinks that this is not confined to Africa, one was caused by a kudu flying through a windshield and impaling the guy through the chest with its hoof--not your everyday traffic accident in, say, Florida).
mircea_popescu: "Finally, if you add the horrifying spread of AIDS into the equation, anyone born in sub-Saharan Africa this century will be lucky to reach age forty." ahem.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform 1/2/3/4 it seems quite probable that's exactly how this particular "engineering for excellence" thing works.
mircea_popescu: pete_dushenski BingoBoingo i like how positive you two are tho.
mircea_popescu: hm where's that discussion re labs and measurements and how things get accepted
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform some amount of free voice will help some cases. no amount will help all cases.
mircea_popescu: but there's your answer at any rate : voice model chills speech. this includes some speech you didn't apparently want chilled.
mircea_popescu: then paste the result. it's maybe 30 seconds. but yeah, i guess, a hassle.