57700+ entries in 0.017s
mircea_popescu: it was that a) it didn't know what to steal (as per above re lisp) and b) it couldn't steal fast enough.
mircea_popescu: that was the level. the problem with the romanians wasn't that they couldn't steal -- of course they could ; nor that it was in any way immoral or dubious to steal -- holy hell, country-in-development trying to catch up with technology, a good half of the techs involved were sympathetic anyway.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform anyway, to put things in readily meaningful perspective : you going "oh shit, we can use this bit i dug up out of bernstein to improve phuctor speed" is 100% what a PRIME example of such "sourced tech" would have been. that the soviets'd have paid for and the whole project involved would be decorated and congratulated after taking however long, 18 months to do it.
mircea_popescu: "everyone will be main player in his own world of warcraft!"
mircea_popescu: and yes soviets paid occasionally for ro sourced tech. it was without known exception (to me) sourced in eg france.
mircea_popescu: and he went to the hot spot of the whole shebang, which was teh germanies.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform he was the nominal chief of the whole shebang.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform consider : pacepa defected in bonn. why not in new york ? except if there was 0 reason for the spy chief to ever go to new york. and his period item (letter to dana) is knee deep in eurocentric issues. noel bernard, srsly ? who the fuck cares about noel bernard.
mircea_popescu: the claim would be more presuasive had you referenced it.
mircea_popescu: things don't change just because new generation of lambs came out of pregnant ewes this spring like each othe rspring before it.
mircea_popescu: defected as a 50yo. a 50yo ready to claim oswald worked for kgb.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform yes but by the 70s his active duty time was over.
mircea_popescu: me either, nor could he have. anyway, to recap -- dood was chief of ro belin residency. once retired (from field work), about simultaneous with ceausescu ascension, was promoted to strategy role in bucharest.
mircea_popescu: but eg, the pdp the romanians cloned was obtaind via soviets. the z80s were all swiss sourced.
mircea_popescu: romanians got them from the soviets as a general rule.
mircea_popescu: people wanted to see italian films with antonelli, and french stuff, not hollywood nonsense.
mircea_popescu: this notion that ra-ra-ra usa-america is very much post 2000 nytimes construction. people in the 60s gave almost no shits about the us, unless like the italians they cxould directly leach.
mircea_popescu: right, and he survived because he scared them off. laissez.
mircea_popescu: (kgb also did europe, because paranoid. not very good, but ample resources)
mircea_popescu: ro did europe, mostly, kgb did us, mostly. they interoped.
mircea_popescu: rly ? cuz what, he had a martha stewart type show on tv ?
mircea_popescu: i seem to recall every single wall jumper net drain on puyblic chest for whole life.
mircea_popescu: consider -- various mexican jumped border, us sent back.
mircea_popescu: i don't think this subject of your nostalgia ever existed outside the vhs world. it's like muller.
mircea_popescu: well in this sense whole dnc long defected to china, moved desperately to prevent ru-us rapproachment back in the early days of 2016 when sitll possible.
mircea_popescu: what exactly could you possibly use one for ? not like they even have the usual value of "stolen documents", i guarantee you if you examed the O-paygrade you'd find not a single soul as well informed as the famous contractor/defector.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform i can't think of a competent anyone in the whole us army/navy/airforce brass.
mircea_popescu: i suspect because no one wants americans for any purpose.
mircea_popescu: buncha defectors since korean war to china, but ... not nearly the same interest.
mircea_popescu: it's not common for eg greeks or italians to go crazy over "the beatles", they simply make a local band like that and that's it.
mircea_popescu: the equivalent population does not exist, it's an epiphenomenon of collapsed colonies, like argentina, like america.
mircea_popescu: just so ustards are going to buy pacepa's nonsensical books.
mircea_popescu: you'\re still missing the important point. usg is looking for a brand to show its large citizenry. much like every attempt to hold a tech fconference in argentina degenerates into a bunch of local tards speaking/stepping over each other to blather meaninglessly in the hope of thereby attaining a certificate of humanhood from the foreigners,
mircea_popescu: it's like asking about "flea defectors". parasytes dun meaningfully defect.
mircea_popescu: the problem with this is that soviet military man valuable ; chinese valuable ; romanian evidently valuable. what value does us tard bring ?
mircea_popescu: not usually advertised, but the expat community large indeed.
mircea_popescu: nah. it's already very much siberia as far as they're concerned.
mircea_popescu: kinda why the whole ww2 made him so trotsky-sensitive, too.
mircea_popescu: trotsky too idiotic to have stalin killed back when he could.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform in the long run, stalin's internationalism proved the terribly wrong strategy. shoulda went with trotsky.
mircea_popescu: but anyway, in spite of an inability to speak in public, or to make sense, extemporaneously or not, ceausescu was a major player in the status quo of 70s and 80s. that whole "don't mix into the affairs of others", very strong nationalism, managed to paralyze the us-owned and hosted un for two decafdes.
mircea_popescu: very much it. extremely easy to defeat ustardation : just say no. it helps if you have a fully built system providing an alternative.
☟︎ mircea_popescu: you recall that (uncharacteristically well written) orlov article re "power of nyet" ?
mircea_popescu: the latter needed moar size ; the former a better ideology. evidently worked for eg china, so there is some tolerance.
mircea_popescu: moreover -- doubtful pill. didn't help soviets ; didn't help romanians.
mircea_popescu: (closed here means "without externalities" rather than anything else)
mircea_popescu: the over-reaching all-important point is that had the dudes of 1985 produced an ideologically-closed system, by 1995 there'd have been a WHERE for people to go, other than windows.
mircea_popescu: until macrosensible nobody even in bad dreams considers the cancer a threat.
mircea_popescu: that final "all the better" being the republic part. they failed to construct this system whereby extreme violence applied to everyone else was a net positive, in and of itself, for no other reason.
mircea_popescu: and if this takes putting a few million instagramers on stakes, ALL THE BETTER.
mircea_popescu: and thereby, an ivory on every desk not a fucking windows.
mircea_popescu: the important point is to be able to make the world make fucking sense against the constant yelps of the idiots who want the world to be comfortable.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform except it doesn't do anything. works like a painting works.
mircea_popescu: merchants had merchant code, scholars had what meanwhile became an universalised immunity, "first conviction walk"
mircea_popescu: there were two groups worth the mention during "golden age" of europe : mechants, and scholars. the prime characteristic of either ? immune to common law process!
mircea_popescu: but leaving these proper statements aside -- never mind the civilisational aspect, limit yourself to culture. they might've bothered to realise the only enemy is the taxpayer, moved to limit his impact on government. exactly as the medieval collegiate disputes flew.
mircea_popescu: ("oh, romanian gymnasts!!!" "yeah, right. you are aware none of the girls actually wanted to be there, yes ?")