294000+ entries in 0.097s
mircea_popescu: "The Usability of Better Men, And Other Such Nonsense". should be a book.
mircea_popescu: they always think being better men comes naturally to them.
mircea_popescu: there's a lot of advantages to living dirty, dirt chief among them.
mircea_popescu: i once took a pretty girl off the hands of a better man, strictly for the reason that he was beset by this mental disease of "before x, must y. before y, must z, no less than k" and on it went. i was beset by no such issue and so i fucked the girl before he managed to satisfy the prerequisites to having the town council meeting that'd have decided if it was a good idea to turn over the covers in their marital bed.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform: people have asked me why haven't escaped, and i answer 'i haven't $xx mil.' to which, eyes bug out, and i have to explain 'a real escape means retrieval is not simply legally, but militarily uneconomical.' << let me tell you a story.
mircea_popescu: a government can only be relied on to enforce an agreement when it's to your detriment, so makingany sort of reflexive agreement with a goverment makes no sense. the only sensible agreements one can make with governments is "how about you two fight".
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform: plus it isn't clear that paying the 'legit' fees gets you anything in the long run. who's gonna force usg to honour the cancellations when they decide not to? the devil ? << this is the most germane point. i'd rather pay power Y to cancel my citizenship with power X than power X itself.
mircea_popescu: The20YearIRCloud: ben_vulpes: low leverage on real estate bought at a value has done well in every crash in the US, including the 1930s depression era <<< how about twelve oaks ? how well did outright owned property fare in the face of the carpetbagger ?
mircea_popescu: ben_vulpes: creating noise << here's some noise for you : borrow as much as you can, to buy consumer items, then liquidate everything for cash, buy bitcoins and a plane ticket. wish everyone left behind good luck on your way out, what's an extra 100k they have to pay on your account on top of the 2 trn they have to pay for on bush's account and the 9 to 15 on obama's ?
mircea_popescu: *: ben_vulpes puts the fiat assets in lady v's name << you plan on leaving her behind or something ?
mircea_popescu: unless you credit the "here's the secret engineers hate : how a social media employed mom of three from kansas built a fusion reactor in her kitchen!" ads
mircea_popescu: which is quite why the regular beatings delivered to them by people who didn't go to school. engineering - a comparable line of work - doesn't suffer from this plague of "he's a voodoo plumber and well... his plumbing is actually better than ours"
mircea_popescu: nothing flattering about it, the military (all nations) has yet to have made a decent school. even the stuff they think is good stinks.
mircea_popescu: sorta the same way you can tell if this pinoy chick learned english with the nuns.
mircea_popescu: nah, i'm quite confident he went to school (mid level, nothing fancy).
mircea_popescu: assbot: U.S. Hikes Fee To Renounce Citizenship By 422% - Forbes << color me the transparent color of surprise.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform btw, does orlov admit officially to russian military training as a strategist/analyst/whatevs ?
mircea_popescu: "Add to that the relentless radio chatter, all in Russian, which anyone who wants to can intercept, and the operation becomes impossible to hide." orly.
mircea_popescu: jurov well see, if your simile revolves around sex (and being gay is all about sex innit) then sex is best considered all around. the old "never use an item you don't see the full contours of" engineering caveat.
mircea_popescu: "Because if Russia invaded on Thursday morning, this is what the situation on the ground would look like by Saturday afternoon." sounds suspiciously like "i am a potent man, if i had raped her she'd be pregnant. is she pregnant ? no ? well then!"
mircea_popescu: i wouldn't trust orlov much furher than i can throw him tbh.
mircea_popescu: law always and everywhere functioning as this device for the construction of a simplified world more or less based on the world as is
mircea_popescu: yes but the point of contention there would be that according to the russian law, there exists no such thing as a gay russian citizen
mircea_popescu: jurov: asciilifeform re:orlov it's similar as russian police completely ignoring tortures of gays...if they aren't complicit actively, then it isn't massacre? << this theory is appealing unless one stops to consider they were by this token complicit in the murder of whoever many million "tutsi"s whatever the fuck that may be, happening wherever the fuck that may have happened at some point nobody cared about.
mircea_popescu: ben_vulpes: more like an unkempt bush than any sort of a hedge. * ben_vulpes goes off to come naturally << irl lol.
mircea_popescu: i think someone put "my dear" for "hello" in some sort of 1970s azn manual of english
mircea_popescu: im very helpful according to most people i know! HELPING COMES NATURALLY TO ME
mircea_popescu: science comes easy to you according to yourself, some friends that are into business and this is somehow my problem ?
mircea_popescu: yeah, well, maybe you shouldn't trust that too far then.
mircea_popescu: <xmj> To me, science comes naturally. << know anyone who actually is of this opinion ?
mircea_popescu: really boring! Which is to you say, you're a typical human female."
mircea_popescu: gets the heart going. I see it has yours going, when the science was
mircea_popescu: witch-finding and crime-solving and conspiracy-theories -- that really
mircea_popescu: unnatural training is required for that. But gossiping and
mircea_popescu: naturally. Certainly it naturally sucks at doing science; much
mircea_popescu: blame, because witch-hunting is something the human brain does
mircea_popescu: want the cure now! And when we don't get it, we look for a witch to
mircea_popescu: "We all act as though we're immortal until we get sick, and then we
mircea_popescu: in other news, people living in africa get less sunstroke.
mircea_popescu: "experiment" studies people who already did live there. helpful o.O
mircea_popescu: "In one of the most comprehensive studies of its kind, researchers at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in partnership with the Harvard School of Global Health have found that people living at higher altitudes have a lower chance of dying from ischemic heart disease and tend to live longer than others."
mircea_popescu: the "no pain, no gain" equation holds all sorts of critical, unexpected applications.
mircea_popescu: decimation: yeah that's a good point. I think the money is less important than the relative status, which is less important than just getting people to defer to their betters quickly << no, not quickly. painfully.
mircea_popescu: decimation: it is probably terrible to become an object of some fad among elites today << you know, i'm a poststructuralist jus' fine.
mircea_popescu: The20YearIRCloud: i've been off reading physics articles trying to grasp things and lost the conversation << should probably be the motto of b-a
mircea_popescu: knew a camwhore who slept with her laptop because the one time she didn't it felt snubbed and wouldn't work right the whole day.
mircea_popescu: govt offices, newspaper offices, phone pharms, i seen it everwhere.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform i can attest the faith healing already happens, in those sad sad caves where middle aged women huddle to stroke their collective pretending to be part of civilisation.
mircea_popescu: there's no distinguishing sufficiently advanced tech from magic, nor sufficiently decayed tech from faith.
mircea_popescu: but if you ever wondered why towards the end of an epoch art moves from classical to trollage... well... art is a sort of societal immune system.
mircea_popescu: society in general and civilisation in particular is predicated on making sense of the world, which readily reduces to avoiding being humiliated. this is fine and dandy until it actually works.
mircea_popescu: she is a "wiser woman" now. happily married now. at her place in life now. well...
mircea_popescu: when she's 16, she runs out of school (for which she risks a reprimand) and hides behind the bleachers to... kiss (for which she risks quite a lot of societal shunning)
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform consider the life and deeds of gabrielle, a buxom blonde girl.
mircea_popescu: (something needs to push rocks up in the air, and the space station too. what's needed to push them down ?)
mircea_popescu: <asciilifeform> (of what? if we knew, there'd be at least a hypothetical pill.) << the public appetite for personal humiliation decays, and with it, the possibility of life.
mircea_popescu: right. this was accidental, not the result of conspiraci, ie, political organising.
mircea_popescu: and the subsequent ones didn't spread out but converged ?
mircea_popescu: for that matter, recall the story of the milikan pious fraud i think it was ?
mircea_popescu: no but srsly, i can see perfectly valid reasons to not trust measurements made by new guys on new tools.
mircea_popescu: decimation basically, it was a new immigrant vs old immigrant debate. the old guys had savings and wanted to keep them. the new guys had mortgages and wanted to get rid of them.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform i really don't think its as political as all that.