268100+ entries in 0.09s
mircea_popescu: maybe some trace li. yet all obseved ones have metals in them. so, must be end products of something else.
mircea_popescu: kakobrekla not necessarily. here's the catch : they evolve slowly, and our models would require them to have no metals
mircea_popescu: otherwise you just get a jupiter, aka gas giant. not a star, but a planet.
mircea_popescu: but in fact stuff past nickel/iron requires a supernva.
mircea_popescu: it's kinda funny, the ancients thougt the sun and gold are cosubstantial.
mircea_popescu: kakobrekla no, because oil is locally made. gold was not made on earth, nor by the sun.
mircea_popescu: <decimation> at any rate, the biggest problem with hoarding gold is the fact that you really have no idea how big your enemy's hordes are << actually, yes, the total gold on earth is known within reasonable precision. one of the few proper fields of statistics.
mircea_popescu: (contrary to common belief, a ton of gold isn't that impressive a pile_
mircea_popescu: <decimation> asciilifeform: agreed. unfortunately, unlike the blockchain, very few have personally witnessed a real gold stash << actually, romanian central bank holds ~112 tons currently, you can pay ~15 bucks and go on a tour
mircea_popescu: pretty much the only thing it can do is stay where it "is"
mircea_popescu: <assbot> German Gold Stays in New York in Rebuff to Euro Doubters - Bloomberg <<< well the problem there is that it;s damned hard to move something that doesn't exist.
mircea_popescu: suppose you carried actual cutlery. you can carry it back the same way. many problems actually solved.
mircea_popescu: decimation yeah, ok, but look at it. what do you do with the leftovers ? do you throw them out on the spot ?
mircea_popescu: under the umbrella of the Ghee Kung Tong, identified by the feds as a de facto Chinese mafia organization. Chow begs to differ: “My organization is not what they call a secret society,” he says. “People misunderstand—it’s not a secret. It’s a private self-help group, helping people, our people. It’s about loyalty, trust, honor. As the chairman, it’s my job to help people.”
mircea_popescu: the common cold is the most common disease. it is not the "largest" nor the most important disease.
mircea_popescu: "The need to obtain, install, and manage certificates from that bureaucracy is the largest reason that sites keep using HTTP instead of HTTPS. " <<< most common != largest.
mircea_popescu: "Today EFF is pleased to announce Let’s Encrypt, a new certificate authority (CA) initiative that we have put together with Mozilla, Cisco, Akamai, IdenTrust, and researchers at the University of Michigan that aims to clear the remaining roadblocks to transition the Web from HTTP to HTTPS."
mircea_popescu: cazalla she might know more than you about how to deal with such things
mircea_popescu: whereas to the counterparty, those oppressing them : you could probably switch to "man and homan".
mircea_popescu: i propose euman as the term. it's different from human in that it's BETTER!
mircea_popescu: by the way, any transhumanists of the future reading this, secretly in their secret coven while being grieviously oppressed by an unrelentingly ignorant society :
mircea_popescu: BingoBoingo: Well this whole Jesus thing has kind of been a huge bummer for Western civilization ever since the Romans started taking it seriously <<< it happened as the very complex roman religions were brought closer to the understanding of teh plebs.
mircea_popescu: puritards, i swear... they're worse than the catholics.
mircea_popescu: but in fact, considering pedigrees, that's exactly what the antecessor of this was huh.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform: and the rawlsian lottery is presumed to include only them <<< ahhh, excellent point re the "inner light" stuff. it wasn't directly apparent,
mircea_popescu: i still can't shake the same bemused, "wait, did the monkey srsly just try to shoot me with a stick" disbelief whenever confronted with it, to this day.
mircea_popescu: out of which she even has like, expectations, not to mention thinks it victorious in principle and afore the fact, like calling the name of god or something.
mircea_popescu: it took me a coupla passes until it sunk in that the woman actually is seriously presenting this as some sort of an argument,
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform: that is, 'slavery is bad mmkay because what if you were a slave' << lol i remember an encounter with this in kindergarten. substitute whoever attacked some longstanding privilege of mine that i meanwhile forgot with the totally unexpected "can't do that, because what if all the other kids want it too ?"
mircea_popescu: who was it, baez had a song about how [the wife] has opened the last can of baked beans
mircea_popescu: right. so yeah, the worst thing about a friend getting cancer is that point where they lose it
mircea_popescu: can you blame him ? perhaps. can you mock him ? definitely. will he stop tho ?
mircea_popescu: but meanwhile, the hunchback is trying to straighten "through science".
mircea_popescu: it worked before people travelled, but your average usian thatever visited europe now knows that the sprawl is fucking insane AND not needed.
mircea_popescu: there are many decades, century+ worth of bad decisions baked in that will have to be unwound.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform the us has to get off consumerism. this is not an if.
mircea_popescu: anyway. in the country where no man may say "do it this way ~becayse i say so~" all sorts of pathologies are bound to develop. because in point of fact a country has some scope for that sort of thing, whether you want to or not. and like in any living organism, once a metabolic pathway is blocked, homeostasis becomes extremely difficult if at all possible. and will take all sorts of crazy to pull off.
mircea_popescu: "i was following orders111" "who the fuck from ?" "reality!"
mircea_popescu: right ? i predict "the dictates of reality" as a concept to make its appearance at the war on terror warcrimes tribunal.
mircea_popescu: yet, everyone loves this "i had no choice" and "what would you have me do ? LEAVE ?" thing.
mircea_popescu: governing a herd of idiots who nevertheless think themselves the crown of creation is no easy feat. it is also no feat any thinking man should ever accomplish, for any accomplishment at all, and most mere attempts, are quite morally wrong, and taint something fierce.
mircea_popescu: instead, he will present a list of "proofs". of his value, importance and utility. which he knows are bunk. but what's he to do ?
mircea_popescu: just like a professor won't have the mp superbity to go into the review meeting hands in pockets and deliver a stern "fuck you, i'm doing you a favor being here, now you prove yourselves to me and then go home."
mircea_popescu: but that's not how it works, because to keep up the semblance of "popular democracy" one is stuck "persuading" the cattle. so all sorts of "justifications" have to be made up.
mircea_popescu: so add these two together, what do you get ? obviously the actual goals of the entire "global warming" stuff, especioally if scrubbed of all the crud, would generally be beneficial and are in any case unavoidable.
mircea_popescu: Those who are arguing about the cost of healthcare or think that poor people are lying to get benefits are completely and utterly missing the point of the system. It wants this in the hands of doctors, because it would be toxic to everyone else. Can you imagine your Senator deciding who gets benefits and who doesn't?"
mircea_popescu: "Do you want riots in the streets? How much does it cost to prevent LA (or the city of your choice) from catching fire? Answer: $600/month/person, plus Medicaid. Medicalizing social problems has the additional benefit of rendering society not responsible for those social ills. If it's a disease, it's nobody's fault. Yay empiricism.
mircea_popescu: preexisting policy goals ? DING DING DING the man's a winner! check out the ~coinicidence~ there!
mircea_popescu: take global warming. it is EXACTLY that, they created an imaginary reality to replace earth's history, and that imaginary reality now serves... what does it serve ?
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform: applying statistical (or otherwise) counterfactuals to an actual reality is a mistake of the same elementary scope as division by zero, or direct conversion of metres to grams - but for some reason which entirely escapes me, this is not obvious to people << the reason may escape you but is obvious.
mircea_popescu: distinction IS unimportant, inasmuch as you're not interested in either flies or rotten meat.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform and that's about as relevant to the people in the field as the "bitcoin (tm)" "vessenes scam foundation" are relevant to bitcoin.
mircea_popescu: BingoBoingo ".@rabite I think I liked you better as a Christian, could you go back to the Jesus stuff please" lol
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform jihad long predates the invention of america, let alone the creation of the usg.
mircea_popescu: *: asciilifeform always wondered, in that spirit, if there exist folks with 'useful' tattoos, e.g., one that turns you into a 'human slide rule' <<< yes. in russian prisons.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform nah, i believe their sustenance is genuine.
mircea_popescu: (women have a very deeply entrenched masochism in them, as you'd expect of machines made to actually carry to term and give birth. the more heavily sexed ones often have trouble managing it until their late 30s)
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform: what's a 'bme' anyway? << body modification ezine, was a focus for a bunch of weird individuals + some really banging adolescewnt females
mircea_popescu: i do. what the fuck do they think they are, reddit on steroids ?
mircea_popescu: BingoBoingo: Oh response<< any idea what that's supposed to mean ?
mircea_popescu: is the name in recognition of your many queefs or what.
mircea_popescu: so to this day it's still trying to sort-of pretend it's that, /b/ in its glory days, 2005ish
mircea_popescu: but ever since, and apparently to its last day, it had an inferiority complex to 4chan
mircea_popescu: then some guy decided to fill it up with child porn, and so it (obviously) took off