35800+ entries in 0.015s
mircea_popescu: look it up, hermann aron fellow, was a sort of german heaviside
☟︎ mircea_popescu: anyway, dramatized in "cabaret" (the thing with liza minelli in it, with the "tomorrow belongs to me" hurr)
mircea_popescu: i r disagree. take the history of say... eh what the fuck is zee jewish german family with the radios ? i'm sure i put it in the logs, albert or albrecht or something
mircea_popescu: not much after. but the methodology is strictly fascist.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform, no, if you look at the history, the soviets were doing it ~after~ zee germans.
mircea_popescu: that's why nyt jewry is so eager to "fight with russia", has no mention of china whatsoever. they figure that's what china'd like to see.
mircea_popescu: it's a "i wonder which of these idle fucks would our overlords think is a best incarnation of their batshit notion of aryan".
mircea_popescu: so no, it's very much not "first, we behead the owner, keep the young aspirant manager director / fucker of owner's daughter against owner's will ; THEN we behead him, once we've trained a working class successor ; THEN we behead successor, put in politruk" cycle of nazi (and then COPIED, lifted wholesale by soviets, like everything else).
mircea_popescu: there aren't any scraps, the whole thing is under glass and someone drops glucose.
mircea_popescu: all that remains is the "not rock boat" struggle so as china continues to drop the pellet in the beautiful ones' cage.
mircea_popescu: ben_vulpes, oh oh. for a moment i thought big black man had as much dick as nero, went and fucked husband and wife for a wedding blessing.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform, yes, but your mapping is incorrect. soviets had a lot of pre-existing fat to burn down in 1920s lulzfest. usg arguably had same in the 70s, when they started with "rights for wife in divorce and woman in workplace" nonsense. it's been half a century, there's nothing left to eat in the great empire of yore.
mircea_popescu: ben_vulpes, did they ever sit down and write the "manual of use" or is their usage of "abuse" still just as spurious as it was when they started whining about it ?
mircea_popescu: i suppose he's the exact item that drove lenin up the wall and resulted in the eventual rape of the "kulak" : comfortable people will politely listen, perhaps, but why bother ?
mircea_popescu: hey, mr hui didn't do so well as an envoy to kishinev either.
mircea_popescu: (for the innocent : "don't put your hands or your dick in the food". because to people familiar with latin and its derivatives, "manipulacion de alimentos" sounds 100% like the wrong approach to handling food.)
mircea_popescu: but i didn't know more than they do in ~any and all fields as a wee tyke in 92, now did i. in fact, that's pretty much how i found out.
mircea_popescu: it's simple enough : no pula! and no mani! in the alimentos!
mircea_popescu: i expect. i mean... i was walking through town yesterday, we went by a sign, girly is, "hey, would you like to take their beautification class ? matricula abierta!" and i'm like... "bitch, i probably know more than they do." it's fucking true. and the next item was "manipulacion de alimentos". there I DEFINITELY!!! know more than they do.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform, in 92 of interest were items like "hey, check it out, road w/o potholes" and "you can go to shop in X field and they'll either have or produce through specified process any item in field" etcetera. what experience informed by 25 years' research identifies as intolerable food was then merely weird. idiots i can smell from miles away now merely counted as very strange and bizarre people. and so on.
mircea_popescu: like if you took all the canadians, allowed the smater 10% to leave, then plonked them all down in haiti.
mircea_popescu: i visited in like... 92 i think. and very much liked it ; something that never recurred on subsequent visits. place's an unredeemed shithole.
mircea_popescu: have you ever even fucking seen british "real estate" ? it's like the doghouse show!
mircea_popescu: hong kong is kramped, but at least the food's mostly edible.
mircea_popescu: they got the worst food, worst amenties, worst weather, worst service, most expensive ugly whores and really, every ingrown hair conceivable out of anywhere.
mircea_popescu: not many ~tourists~, but to imagine anyone goes to the shithole of the western hemisphere for the ... what was it, for the food ?
mircea_popescu: now i'm confused. england is this shitty island with bad weather and very expensive cabs, you heard of it ?
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform, can't be the null set, there's a handcrafted gentoo for instance.
mircea_popescu: that they're idiots enough to buy of own volition (not out of own pocket, not like they own or make money, anyway -- which is why all the discussion re "taxes" is such lulz, what fucking taxes lmao) has no bearing ; and to propose that it's "because" jobbs crusted diamonds to one once and held it over his head is so much logicking with the stones.
mircea_popescu: you know for a fact that if people ~didn't~ buy cellphones, they'd be forced down their throats via "employer '''bought''' and here it is, wear it".
mircea_popescu: so now back to it : idle marketing gimmicks whereby they crust diamonds to a cellphone / put crowns on random selected poor from the socialist horde etc, so as to sell the phones/electoral nonsense w/e they're selling, "it's worth spending your time waiting tables in la, because this one chick we picked gets 10mn a year and so couldn't you (unless of course we arbitrarily and entirely outside of your control pick you)." matte
mircea_popescu: to trade 40% of the world for 60% of a shitty island... "it profits a man nothing to trade his soul for the whole world... but for walles ?!?!"
mircea_popescu: ie, having eu licenses admitted in the island is worth about... 40% of the value of the eu license.
mircea_popescu: to which of course, the brits will respond in kind, predictibly enough -- and here's the capper : the loss to a group of 1mn for rejecting 1k who 1k then reject the 1mn back is... ~999k.
mircea_popescu: ha. no. they decided they're not going to recognize uk-issued driving licenses on the continent.
mircea_popescu: now tell me, what is the absolutely ~dumbest~ thing bruxells could have done ?
mircea_popescu: anyway, let me tell you a lulzy story : so the brexit, yes ?
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform, i don't permit socialist redefinitions of words universally, this is not much discovery.
mircea_popescu: so the sale is always a sham, and the "corporate phone" necessarily the underlying support should sales falter.
mircea_popescu: the limiting factor on human leather goods is the "strong winds" of ye olde prophete ; the driving force of hallucinatoria is mass acceptance, meaning that the individual item value is actually negative. a phone in the factory costs... -5$. not even zero, below 0. whereas once in "consumer" hands, it's worth whatever, 75 bux.
mircea_popescu: anyway, there's a reason veblen goods end up pricey whereas hallucination excreta ends up cheap.
mircea_popescu: the word "project" is not incidental, by the way. hallucinatory world would be all about hallucinations.
mircea_popescu: back when the germans still existed as a people, plenty of demand for human skin couches.
mircea_popescu: the word printed on it is "toYOta", as in, "would you like to be my friend ? we're both exactly just as empty of anything".
mircea_popescu: but see, the word printed on it isn't "please! NOT MY DAUGHTER!" in the blood of a double rape and murder victim.
mircea_popescu: networked items, such as phones, bank cheques, copyright certificates, college degrees etcetera are made of the ~acceptance of all~, not of the suffering of some.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform, it is very much not true, no. veblen goods are as i said above, " made out of the sufference of small children and the tears of young virgin widows". it is an item of denial.
mircea_popescu: (in fact, the immense importance of the phone, and the cellphone, in cultural terms, was exactly this : showing skeptics such as yours truly that bottled hallucination doth sell on actual economic grounds.)
mircea_popescu: the phone is a sort of college degree, meaningless outside the sturcture of meaning that produced it.
mircea_popescu: trivial to sell vertu phones : make a proper encrypted, nsa-proof network, only allow vertuphones to connect. end of story.
mircea_popescu: i would not. speaking of actual items, ie watches, it's not the case that every existent demand can be economically exploited. there's also uranium in the ocean etc. speaking of phones, they're not proper items, they are, like say the jet fighter, merely the sign of something somewhere else.
mircea_popescu: this is like proposing that "look where videogame sexualization ended up" in a discussion about modern sexuality. really, what pipe dreams the pipe smokers dream is not a proper basis for argument.
mircea_popescu: ie, the phenomenology of the lost is a product of the loss.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform, i propose this has nothing to do with anything.
mircea_popescu: if men can somehow convince themselves women are "people, just like them", they certainly can convince themselves watches are people just like them.
mircea_popescu: but this is also irrelevant : local brothel offers much better deal than local wedding chappel in all times and places.
mircea_popescu: and even if it stands to unexamined imagination, "the $5 watch renders the demand for $500`000 watches 0", this is never true. no demand ever reaches actual 0, for very good reasons that have to do with how negative numbers don't exist irl.
mircea_popescu: now, the demand for "a watch made out of the sufference of small children and the tears of young virgin widows" was never 0 ; and will never be 0, no matter what happens.
mircea_popescu: HOWEVER, the collapse was of 500mn not of 1bn. it did reduce the demand, but not wipe it out entirely.
mircea_popescu: gets a wristwatch) the introduction of the quartz movement resolved the problem, pushing supply to ~infinity bn and therefore demand first to 900mn and eventually to maybe half bn. (i haven't worn a wristwatch in like 20 years, because why.)
mircea_popescu: depends in what market. i suspect the "chilling effect" is far stronger than the actual effect. ie, in a market with demand for 1bn watches and supply for ~100mn (which was the case cca 1940, ftr, take say shadow of a doubt : bank clerk who can support wife and daughters in humongous mansion in desirable californa location (santa rosa) out of his bank clerk job is very proud, and his friends are very envious, when he finally
mircea_popescu: rsed to open the kibble package on their own and without complaining it's too hard to open."
mircea_popescu: and the problem isn't even that "it takes a skilled man 5 years to handmake a watch", because half-mn watches would sell and skilled people make less than 100k a year routinely. the problem is rather "are you fucking kidding me, the only way you can find whores is if you find someone to persuade women-on-couches that whoring wouldn't inconvenience their couch-bound lifestyle, wtf handmade clocks. you're lucky if they can be a
mircea_popescu: mechanical movements with standardized parts, now THAT is one fucking lulz.
mircea_popescu: well, there's a large pile of veblenizers that make "heirloom" watches. but they're all mechanically made and consequently fundamentally uninteresting. talk about "Accept the form of the argument so as to debate its conclusions" failure mode. somehow nobody told them that if they do move to industrial process, there's no possible argument as to why not quartz.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform, but clockmaking WAS a school, back before the "you can do anything" and "you're perfect the way ytou are" 1789 moment.
mircea_popescu: anyway -- lawnmower flying machines are slow enough, loud enough, limited enough, targettable enough, undynamic enough and everything else enough that even 1980s tech bound empire can handle them, even "en masse" (they can't mass well either)
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform, sure, once. but as a thing, you know ? as a ~school~.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform, the true reason "no need to optimize on that axis" is because it's a flying machine that doesn't threaten the usg.
mircea_popescu: i would personally really like a metal-miniaturization school. i would like to see not only really tiny machine guns as in ye ancient discussion of anti-fly capable tabletop AA batteries ; but also tiny engines, as in matchbox sized model cars THAT ACTUALLY TAKE FUEL, from the dropper. one drop = full tank. and then go.
mircea_popescu: ben_vulpes, ^L is page break, very early printer-bound substitute for the later notion of "files"
mircea_popescu: ben_vulpes, an' if it's different today it has a lot to do with candi_lustt