33700+ entries in 0.012s
mircea_popescu: yes it is. but the argument presented is specious in either reading -- there's no "neighbours overrun", and if there is -- the proposed measures did nothing about it.
mircea_popescu: but populace eminently is not the criteria, which is why the "totally not a dating site" "community" of fetlife can't stand up to... me.
mircea_popescu: if populace was the criteria, should have applied for admission as chinese ssr in 1972.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform, you are sitting there seriously proposing to me that a man-and-his-bushels uranium mining op is more productive than a mechanized item ?
mircea_popescu: he didn't live in a world where this was possible. but by 1980 -- eminently doable.
mircea_popescu: the ~punishment~ for ~failure~ to perform exceptionally well would have been a one way ticket to jeansland.
mircea_popescu: anyway --- if i ran the moscow polytechnic, the advertisement would have been "either make it in the 1% or else we will paradop you in america, or whatever other african shithole you belong to".
mircea_popescu: i just see it as wankers, the sort that could participate but doesn't.
mircea_popescu: and you're thinking of the wrong side of this. nevermind -1 hruschev. think -1 yuri derpopovich herpopov. all 50 mn of them. not "prevent emigration", but dump at sea ~everyone.
mircea_popescu: and kinda why they're stuck with the "legitimacy" mechanism, "gadaffi is not the legitimate owner of syria"
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform, kinda why we have the negrate mechanism. cheap and effectual, better than any kalash.
mircea_popescu: either of which is a perfectly acceptable solution, but one of which MUST always be deployed.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform, this understanding nevertheless does NOT relieve the soviet brass from having had to and having failed to either a) produce something alternatative for them to sing or b) shoot them all, a la maduro.
mircea_popescu: anyway. so the rate that'd have allowed soviet industry a positive epsilon return on capital goods was cca 10-20:1 in 1992 (depending how and what you sort) and the "tourist rate" was 60:1. bingo.
mircea_popescu: of course it is. much like anyone with head out of ass sees apple as apple. wtf would they have seen it as.
mircea_popescu: otherwise, same processes were supposed to work the same way ; and most of the peripheral agents not in the "need to know" bubble are even to thsi day claiming they worked as supposed.
mircea_popescu: the only unexpected element is the discovery that the population of fucktards ~wasn't actually relevant~ for the republic.
mircea_popescu: now, the "creation" of "ethereum" is entirely out of the playbook of clinton "bringing rock'n'roll dollars to moscow" or mp bringing dollars to buenos aires etc.
mircea_popescu: the people involved weren't ~stupid~, see. notwithstanding what the officious jews "all agreed".
mircea_popescu: i said before that the principal question of the 80s was "da-i romaneasca ?" ie, "but is it made here ?". this'd be why.
mircea_popescu: this is called "inefficiency", but it's not industrial inefficiency, it's socially-mediated pseudo-inefficiency created by the Ps deliberately (if "unknowingly") choking out I because they;'ve decided they want their country dead.
mircea_popescu: should you do that, you'll have a directly addressable measure of wrecking : the Ps will push the TR above the level where I can finance its import needs out of the receipts for its exports.
mircea_popescu: now, the needs of I are relatively fixed ; the "needs" of P vary. should P decide that it only wants import goods, you may be tempted to create a "tourist" rate for the foreign currency
mircea_popescu: suppose you have the following elements : I[ndustry], producing goods whichg can be exported and needing materials and equipment to be imported ; and P[opulace], expecting to be paid a living wage (anyone's pretense to the contrary are idle, all the advanced socialist peons want or ever wanted was "cash for being here", that'\s why socialist states even exist or ever existed, to provide that, from napoleonic france onward) an
mircea_popescu: also, understand the very informative self-destructive pattern that became evident in dying su and was by all appearences well understood by "western world", judging at least by how they keep trying to apply it :
mircea_popescu: i'm sorry. i mean, ~devaluation~ is always a camp phenomenoin.
mircea_popescu: can be, yes. but in any case -- there's no such thing as blackface devaluation. blackface is ALWAYS a camp phenomenon.
mircea_popescu: the key ingredient for the "shovel-and-wheelbarrow" mark in germany isn't so much the paper itself, as it is the individuals who'd have traded "all of this" for "any little of that".
mircea_popescu: this is the deep issue uniting "rock and roll in the soviet union" with "malinche, lover of hernan cortes" : without a ~well connected local~ to spit on the local items, there can not be a serious devaluation of them.
mircea_popescu: moreover, currency collapse is always driven by naggum's idiots ("in order to be in a position where one must either strike or die, one must have put themselves into such a position, for instance by expecting to buy a lot of things they cou;dn't make"). the camp/blackface duality (
http://trilema.com/2017/pronouncements-on-camp/#selection-161.66-161.165 ) is very much apropos : without a "nouveau riche" class, ie, without a b
mircea_popescu: in order for something to be money it must be "at least this common" ; much like in order for locusts to swarm they must be touched at least this often by other locusts.
mircea_popescu: rather, it's a symptom of rarity. the currency function of a good depends on some contextual properties ; if there's few enough dollars in the country, the dollar bill is less money and more... artwork, say. becomes a kind of stamp.
mircea_popescu: and also : no real interdependence of price and supply. generally, when the supply increased the price also increased ; while when the supply dropped, the price also dropped.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform, what else ? usa, where ideas go to die.
mircea_popescu: (anyway, for documentary lulz : once the russkis introduced a vague approximation of an interbank currency market in 1991, the volumes traded were in the 10mn range. this is ALL THE DOLLARS IN THE COUNTRY. think.)
mircea_popescu: (and yes it was a crime to own bitcoins for soviet citizek.)
mircea_popescu: anyway, but yes, the principal reason ru had a relatively easy time in the 80s (unlike, say, 2015s argentina) is because VERY LITTLE dollars in private hands.
mircea_popescu: stalin says "4:1 because 14:1 is ridiculous", that's what it is.
mircea_popescu: democracy has well documented troubles controling what people buy. soviets... hey, only state could buy anything anyway.
mircea_popescu: they had a comparatively easier time, seeing how they had much better control on trade.
mircea_popescu: consequently, some at least cursory argument could be had that the price signals are substantially enough different to not be comparable (and god only knows how many man-hours the inept "intel" services of the firm of r, t & f spent trying to discern if official ruble is .5 or 4 to 1 dollars TRULY.)
mircea_popescu: anyway, the one thing the soviets (all of them) did well was confound the issue. see, because "not consumer but industrial economy", various industrial goods were significantly cheaper, and all sorts of consumer goods significantly more expensive, than in "real world" of reagan thatcher and friends.
mircea_popescu: rather, a "i don't know how to write sales copy" thing.
mircea_popescu: it's always going to be a purely aribtrary market created by authority fiart, whether it's "write this string on your tits" or "tell me the string yulyiana has written on her tiots"
mircea_popescu: just so a chunk of rubles bought nothinmg, but if broken into small eno9ugh chunks it bought you say state secrets.
mircea_popescu: exactly like "what does dolalr buy today" ? "well, if you disperse it enough, it buys you some inept wrangling from local orcs". exctly like how $1mn does not buy you much ; but if you break it into $20 chunks you can have "marketing online" "services" from retarded university-of-maryland-criminlogy whores,
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform, local coin does always buy ~something~. drujba, whatever it may buy.
mircea_popescu: ro was about 100 lei to the dollar, making the avg salary then about $30 or so. (per month, about 1/30 or so of us average salary at the time).
mircea_popescu: i doubt that. what was the black market dollar rate in 1985 moscow ?
mircea_popescu: BingoBoingo, shootings outside of slums is a little like shittings outside of bathroom.
mircea_popescu: it's how the soviets did it, isn't it ? in that brief interval between when they died and when they fell.
mircea_popescu: italian not mexican, sorry (they're next to each other). and yes some deds.
mircea_popescu: oh i forgot to mention -- yest as i was moving about town somebody shot up the mexican embassy here
mircea_popescu: anyway, the "up" and "down" may not be as firmly manifest as you personally imagine. postmodernism is bizarro world, up is down, they say hello when they leave...
mircea_popescu: hey ; be that as it may it's still more than what trump managed to date.
mircea_popescu: BingoBoingo, btw, did you actually come out of it back to health ?
mircea_popescu suspects alf will be nothing short of thrilled to discover he now has the power to shape usg "law enforcement" policy.
☟︎ mircea_popescu: the "read something in #trilema and got moving" part '''inexplicably''' missing from jewonline.today.
mircea_popescu: it's mostly eulora stuff to date, you can see it in #eulora
mircea_popescu: there's technical writing and there's commercial copy writing, much like there's technical drawing and pornography. crumb (if you ever saw the footage of his interacting with his estranged son), is imo the best example of the evanescent item here under discussion : the old man ~tries~ to tell the young squirt what to do, but of course the young'un knows better.
mircea_popescu: mod6, as they gain experience linking things people learn not to put punctuation marks after the link >D
mircea_popescu: you'd almost suspect, "whoa, now that's a thinking chick, best landing page ever, bet you she sells all the pot she's trying to". except, of course, no such subtility or sophistication is ever to be suspected online. she's genuinely just
https://preview.ibb.co/e6azd8/hurr.jpg -ing about.
mircea_popescu: some people even like the engineer-spawned failures at commercial speech ; but seriously now, what THE FUCK do they do in highschool these days ?! the whole point of the exercise, once they gave up teaching anyone anything back in the 70s, was "you go to hs to learn how to talk to girls and businessmen".
mircea_popescu: though i like how you gave up any hope of "what does that mean, no approx" >D
mircea_popescu: (also, i hope everyone is reading pivopollo correctly as /pɪvopõʎɔ/, yes)