297100+ entries in 0.072s
mircea_popescu: now let's wonder why exactly is the usg dept of facebook able to spend 20bn on some random purchase of a valueless firm
mircea_popescu: As the protests in Ferguson, Missouri over police fatally shooting 19-year-old Mike Brown have raged through the past several nights, more than a few people have noticed how relatively quiet Facebook news feeds have been on the matter. While #Ferguson is a trending hashtag, Zeynep Tufekci pointed out at Medium that news about the violence was, as best, slow to percolate through her own feed, despite people posting libe
mircea_popescu: decimation: mircea_popescu: minor nitpick - I don't think USG employees get dental actually << generally no, but afaik nsa folk do.
mircea_popescu: <ICEbErg> PHGMYUBYUIREYAE YRN B lYaY, ONDLNYAYNBEE X oHREPE NAHRYUER?
mircea_popescu: now i can say mp stands for musi puxi and nobody will fucking know just how great it is.
mircea_popescu: it's like reading curtis bouvard, guy read alot but never had any sort of help to become a systematic thinker.
mircea_popescu: that much doesn't even annoy me, my problem is that he without exception ends up pleading to ignorance, to numbers, to baculum, to some fallacy.
mircea_popescu: curtis yarvin a footnote of meaninglessness in a larger discussion, as every fucking time.
mircea_popescu: now grant one more thing : there's going to be no space until long after the ocean floor is alma mater.
☟︎ mircea_popescu: i nearly got done in in romania by a 5 sq inch, 100 gram piece of tile that fell a foot in front of me, from ten or so floors up.
mircea_popescu: no thing can kill you by fallling on your head under water.
mircea_popescu: no living thing underwater was ever pierced by a tootphick turned into a pike by "unseasonable" winds.
mircea_popescu: doesn't say anything useful. to fish water is as unremarkable as air to you.
mircea_popescu: whereas the neptune inconveniences appear uncommon and thus remarkable,
mircea_popescu: specifically : just because you're used to zephyr's inconveniences to the point you don't notice them anymore
mircea_popescu: living makes one live, this much is agreed. merely pleading to ignorance isn't much contribution (and his tendency to plead to nonsense is why i dislike curtis)
mircea_popescu: in this sense, global warming would be a boon for humanity, if it weren't a wholly concocted piece of nonsense.
mircea_popescu: energy is not actually expensive, both nuclear and geothermal generators can conveniently live submerged.
mircea_popescu: burning the resulting hydrogen in your own atmosphere a) purifies the air and b) makes water.
mircea_popescu: you don't need "air", you need oxygen. oxygen is in water, and not expensive to get out.
mircea_popescu: that's a cost of about 100k in scrap metal. ie, affordable.
mircea_popescu: decimation let's put it this way : long before 2050 it will be feasible to build a submersible that never surfaces, can host one redditard and weighs under 1k tons.
mircea_popescu: well not done with the logs and pinging ascii, but with this skein
mircea_popescu: this is, in so many words, the whole hope of humanity.
mircea_popescu: obviously some kids will do fine in any conceivable arrangement.
mircea_popescu: ah but outside of personal experience, i'm discussiong a system.
mircea_popescu: it is when everyone else is taught to get out of your way because you are better than them.
mircea_popescu: so i guess in a sense the observed difference readily reduces to "well, the us is a true popular democracy : they have no privileged highschool, everyone goes to the prole vocational crapolade"
mircea_popescu: this attitude was principally what distinguished the privileged hs from the prole "vocational" w/e.
mircea_popescu: i mean you could be cool other ways, but an inability to ace something meant you, in so many words, sucked.
mircea_popescu: at the time in question, you literally could not go on a date if you sucked in school.
mircea_popescu: this resulted in a very docile and obedient population. they, for instance, always took notes. we never did.
mircea_popescu: e common man - or woman - so they'd not be embarassed if teacher asked followups and b) was credibly something they could come up with while still correct above a C lvl)
mircea_popescu: you know it's bizarre, because it didn't work that way in romania of yore. we had a pretty sweet tacit agreement where the slower girls could copy for exams. generally there was a boy-genius in charge for any subject (chemistry was HARD and a chick did it, but otherwise was boys) and the guy in charge usually prepared a "for the class" version of the test (something that gave good marks but was a) comprehensible for th
mircea_popescu: decimation and less tits. the few (like,4 or so) actual participants at the things i ever talk too, all 4 mostly went there for the braless wonders in attendance. it was apparently THE place to meet chicks.
mircea_popescu: the result being a scary fucking combo of psychotic expressivity (they also drink a lot, ukrainian style).
mircea_popescu: the interesting thing with those people however is that they speak and old, and for this reason arguably more powerful version of romanian (still with the very romanian "all other languages are just romanian badly pronounced") and they're all fluent in russian. especially the huy-russian part of russian.
mircea_popescu: planeta moldova being pretty much the only claim to cultural fame/intellectual achievement of the imaginary country of "moldavia".
mircea_popescu: maybe not as clean ultimately but certainly cleaner per unit effort.
mircea_popescu: suddenly the coder kid discovers he can be a much better lawyer than most judges specifically because he can read a cleaner version of the text than people who learned it on the "linguistics" path.
mircea_popescu: "just because you say goto 10 don't expect me to care, nitwit"
mircea_popescu: at which point sudden immunity to say salesmen develops.
mircea_popescu: then one readily progresses, about the age of 16 or so, to realise that necessarily the same is true of their own naitve language
mircea_popescu: pretty much the only correct way to learn english, if you ask me.
mircea_popescu: decimation it's a curse hiding a blessing : in learning english as the pronounceable pigdin of computer symbols, one learns to disrespect the social conventions the language carries otherwise.
mircea_popescu: kakobrekla: satisfying log. keep up the good work. << i guess we're all labrats in kako's little lab experiment.
mircea_popescu: so yeah, i used to include 10. Merge Merge instructions in basic programs.
mircea_popescu: the word merge was there, which in romanian means "it works" (technically, "it goes") and is often a colloquialism "-merge ? -merge, merge" roughly works to "how goes it ? " "okay I guess".
mircea_popescu: in this spirit : my old z80 clone had an english "codeword" instruction set printed out right on the kbd, as was fashionable at the time.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform: and we always wondered what an 'EGGOG' was. << ahaha that's so cute.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform: but for desktop machining - perfect. so long as you aren't in a hurry. << well no, see, electricity is still sold by the watt. whether you're in a hurry or not, you still need same wattage, so still are beholden to the same (rather high) cost. so i suppose "so long as you're making something small enough for your fun doing it to be worth the 0.001 cent to 1/4 dollar price transition"
mircea_popescu: TheNewDeal: it's just a trilema article written like shakespeare, no? << it's the merchant of venice ye lout! :D
mircea_popescu: " you will need to swap the electrolyte a few times, and clean the cavity (at least with a nail) from the products of electrolysis." from the imgur in question. this is not strictly true : in some cases the electrolyte products are protective, in some cases however they are not. depends a lot what we're drilling. (this is roughly why rust is a problem for iron but not aluminum say.)
mircea_popescu: part of why the wot is so fucking useful. "you're not a ceo until mp says you're a ceo" has, along with its excellent oppressive potential, some incredible value in practice.
mircea_popescu: the problem with letting people self identify instead of having third parties identify them is that people will mis-selfidentify.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform: with little-to-none attention to principles << the reason would be that chemistry is not a science. physics is the science. if the kids wanted the principles they'd go for physics. if they didn't that means they don't wish to understand the thing, but merely you know... be engineers :D