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mircea_popescu: this because the market (well, the overcapitalised clueless section of it, anyway) erroneously identifies "professional" with "successful" and ultimately "good".
mircea_popescu: after the failure, the actual ceo disappeared, but antonopoulos reinvented himself as... more "professional".
mircea_popescu: of course their idea of fun was more like mba than like engineer's, but that's squarely besides the point.
mircea_popescu: i mean, all the noobs a la neobee's "ceo", alongside andreas antonopoulos were doing exactly this : implement their idea of fun at the expense of investors.
mircea_popescu: this is going to be a major bitcoin problem, going forward.
mircea_popescu: pt perhaps by mistake. He wants to do interesting engineering and produce new, cool products at the expense of his investors.
mircea_popescu: "In fact, I know of at least one company just like that. It was run by an engineer who had produced a huge success for his investors, only to see the company fall into the hands of Company B type management. So he created a new company. For years now he has sucked in more and more capital from investors who imagine he might reproduce his initial success. But it's clear (to me) that he has no intention of doing so, exce
mircea_popescu: "Company C is not really a company but a consortium organized by a group of activists who correctly perceive the great need for this widget and decide to tackle the issue head-on through tireless community organizing. A group of retired community college professors..."
mircea_popescu: that's fair, in the sense it's fair to represent "engineer" on the basis of kids found loitering around the campus.
mircea_popescu: the solution is to get a better wife, not to make womanhood die in a fire.
mircea_popescu: plenty of similarly socially awkward men believe women to be gold digging sluts etc etc.
mircea_popescu: or else that b) they're going to be their own management, which... myeah.
mircea_popescu: the idea forms that either a) they don't need management at all, which yields all the bizarre "decentralise" things trend, among others
mircea_popescu: somehow as people start to smarten up and realise how shitty us management is failing them, the idea doesn't form that they need better management,
mircea_popescu: he had some bad data re romanian inflation, i pointed it out, herbi (who apparently knows him) conveyed it.
mircea_popescu: lew rockwell similarly, too big for his breeches, by degrees of magnitude.
mircea_popescu: orlov specifically isn't here because when i pointed out to him he fucked up, his reaction wasn't the sane and natural "ow fuck me, i fucked up", but the much more common, and much more human "oh it's not really and i didn't really" and so on.
mircea_popescu: because the fate of the free world pretty much rests on it.
mircea_popescu: all we need is a few ideologically aware writers, and let's hope that they have the sense to give in to the groan-y siren song of a few cam whores
mircea_popescu: pretty much the bitcoin-bitcoin-assets-wot trifecta is the way, i would wager.
mircea_popescu: 'What d'you mean - scheduled? What d'you think science is - a magic wand that you just have to wave to get what you want? Supposing the problem's been put in the wrong terms or new factors crop up? You and your schedule!
mircea_popescu: 'But that means that the project will have taken two and a half to three years,' said the Minister indignantly. 'And it was scheduled to take a YEAR!'
mircea_popescu: the rest of that article hereby incorporated, it should be a matter of record this thing.
mircea_popescu: engineer is shorter than the time it takes to learn the product.
mircea_popescu: t to pass these higher costs on to the consumers. Concerted efforts at cost containment, championed by senior management, burn up more money than they find in savings. Second, turnover among the engineering staff starts to creep up, and after a while employee retention becomes a major problem. An effort is made to boost recruitment, but paradoxically this only increases the turnover rate, until the average tenure of an
mircea_popescu: But then the troubles begin. First, given the short replacement cycle of its widget, it becomes harder and harder for Company B to contain costs while continuing to increase production. Costs of key inputs, such as certain metals, plastics, energy to run the plants, and shipping and distribution costs, all start going up, making their widgets more expensive to produce. At the same time, it becomes increasingly difficul
mircea_popescu: necessary by annoyances or missing functions within the base product). They also build a profit center out of selling spare parts. They see to it that their product does not contain any commodity parts, and that no parts are interchangeable between model years, so that every replacement part has to be purchased through a dealer. Company B does quite well, becoming profitable, doubling in size several times, and gains
mircea_popescu: They work to boost revenue by offering an extended warranty or a service plan (made necessary by frequent breakdowns), charging for premium customer service (made necessary by their normal customer service, which consists of a robotic phone maze backed by a few trainees in India who just read aloud from Company B's public web site in a listless, stuttering monotone) and offering numerous enhancements and upgrades (made
☟︎ mircea_popescu: excellent. guy really should stick with what he understands well (apparently, engineering and production problems) and forget stuff he doesn't get (like, politics)
mircea_popescu: "Suppose you have a company that sets out to make a widget. Let's call it Company A. Its founders are all engineers, of an uncompromising sort, and the widget they design and manufacture is of tremendous longevity, durability and overall quality." << hey check out orlov.
☟︎☟︎ mircea_popescu: because what i had in mind was that two diff metals make a circuit element.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform when you said cycle i thought you meant, electrically. as in, hifreq.
mircea_popescu: (hello people reading the logs, and welcome to mp's personal engineer training hour, where he bothers people who should be doing usefulk things with the task of educating him for free. and now a massage from our sposor.)
mircea_popescu: but my uneducated guess looking at the arrangement is that it would ?
mircea_popescu: of much less interest to someone gilding a pcb than to someone trying to make a parallel connection.
mircea_popescu: but if it's not solid (merely painted on) you get some interesting phenomena
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform are those paralel ports gold or gilded ?
mircea_popescu: "a flashlight concerning itself with implementation details, as opposed to broad theoretical considerations"
mircea_popescu: tactical and strategic are properties of abstracts for crying out loud. you can't have a plapable tactical anything anymore than you can have a concrete idea.
mircea_popescu: so i guess my tit tickling cock shall henceforth be tactical too
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform so if anodized metal is tactical, what's strategical ?
mircea_popescu: far as i can discern this is it, the permanent mode of industry since forever, and how things sould work, and how things that work do work.
mircea_popescu: "This, then, should be the new main thrust of industrial activity: to manufacture and distribute products with the understanding that this process will run out of resources and stop. These products must be designed to outlive the process by which they are made, by as long as possible." << i can't fucking imagine why this would have to appear as new.
mircea_popescu: mike_c the main challenge to economy, since forever, is scalbility.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform prolly some sort of smart battery balancing
mircea_popescu: ThickAsThieves well google, like wikipedia, is only intended as a good enough first approximation.
mircea_popescu: course, the only way people learn this is through trying.
mircea_popescu: the thing is that there's this large group of professional rent seekers who are trying to find a niche for themselves in bitcoin, not the normal way (buy some), nor the professional way (join bitcoin-assets) but the fiat way (politicing and derping around).
mircea_popescu: anyway, bitcoin as made by saotshi is eminently blind-friendly. you can get everything as json from bitcoind and put it through your favorite reader.
mircea_popescu: mike_c another rule is that you can't send people mail as single-image pdfs.
mircea_popescu: blind people gotta use a credit card whether they want to or not.
mircea_popescu: ThickAsThieves ist's just another sympthom of inflation heating up i guess.
mircea_popescu: "As companies try to retain top employees and hit growth targets, some are ditching the annual salary review and doling out raises and bonuses several times a year."
mircea_popescu: which is a GREAT thing. nobody's making new "fully featured" irc clients, which then don't work,
mircea_popescu: yeah problerm is irc clients sorta went into freeze mode cca 2001
mircea_popescu: fluffypony: can't we have assbot ban people that do that for an hour? << this actually is a good idea. kakobrekla could assbot put a ban on anyone it sees part/joining 12 times within an hour, with a ban message that "please get in touch once connection is fixed, ty"
mircea_popescu: mike_c: i don't know. I guess I didn't feel like it fit the rest of his portfolio. << iirc he ended up with it as part of some other acquisition
mircea_popescu: assbot: ING: Future Bitcoin Protocol Should Include Central Bank Functions << yeah, it totally should. I'm fucking sick of having to bitchslap people like ing from the shadows.
mircea_popescu: now, is this proof that the process is broadly non-positive-feedback ?
mircea_popescu: thing was made for cixi, whom i've referenced before. the process was, tumble the thing in water + garnet dust
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform you know the story of the largest crystall ball in the world ?