mircea_popescu: i get why it'd be nice for ruthlesness to carry the connotations meanness properly does. however, something being nice doesn't really do anything. if only it did, then the nice people'd be like mages, calling forth reality out of their fucking song.

mircea_popescu: a total fucking misnomer, by the way, what they mean is "ruthless". mean denotes something else, it's a sort of spiritual cheapness.

mircea_popescu: indeed : in order for the "only nice people" mantra to be "supported" after a fashion, one needs to be not only completely ignorant of the classics, but not even realise that the fucking central subject both in their writings and in their own, stated estimation, was "how to rule people", and this is in no small part a consideration of what they call "mean".

mircea_popescu: anyway, looking at it from the other angle, "check out what incredible cultural gymnastics the socialists need to justify and defend their ludicrous dogmas"

mircea_popescu: "come see paul graham read aramaic at the bottom of his start-up hat, and then translate it with the herpimm and the derpimm, two magical entrepreneurial stones from ancient egypt."

mircea_popescu: that problem, you know ? "o noes, james smith has reinveted the wheel!"

mircea_popescu: which, empirically, it would seem to.

mircea_popescu: the problems he considers are in fact very rudimentary restatements of ancient considerations, and his complete unawareness of the space readily gives me ground to say "being a progressive makes you stupid".

mircea_popescu: at least, this was the approach favoured by socrates and his school (platon, aristotel). which brings us back to the problem with paul graham : he is exactly the sort of scandalous ignoramus the us produces these days.

mircea_popescu: of course, even should that be the merely unavoidable flow of things, proposing to stick with "nice people" as a palliative is not unlike proposing to stop eating because well, eating will in due course bring about your death.

mircea_popescu: there is of course also this (perhaps not entirely uninterested, perhaps even progressive-wetdream, perhaps actually correct) theory that ruthlessness rusts over time, and in the end you're always left with a psychopath.

mircea_popescu: the people who manage to distinguish the effectually ruthless from the merely psychopathic always come out ahead, whether they're otherwise great or not, intelligent or not, whatever their situation may be.

mircea_popescu: depends a fucking helluvalot WHAT, or as the case may be whom. the "best people" that are attracted to spineless idiots are never successful.

mircea_popescu: this is like saying "you can't get cool people to hang out in places where there's fire because fgire burns".

mircea_popescu: "Another reason mean founders lose is that they can't get the best people to work for them. They can hire people who will put up with them because they need a job. But the best people have other options. A mean person can't convince the best people to work for him unless he is super convincing. And while having the best people helps any organization, it's critical for startups."

mircea_popescu: apparently graham has not done his pascal reading. how about that lol.

mircea_popescu: out real problems. Which is particularly painful to someone who cares how their brain is used: your brain goes fast but you get nowhere, like a car spinning its wheels."

mircea_popescu: "Why? I think there are several reasons. One is that being mean makes you stupid. That's why I hate fights. You never do your best work in a fight, because fights are not sufficiently general. Winning is always a function of the situation and the people involved. You don't win fights by thinking of big ideas but by thinking of tricks that work in one particular case. And yet fighting is just as much work as thinking ab

mircea_popescu: obviously sin breeds sin, had the generation of justices called to protect their country in the 1920s done a good job of it, the following generation wouldn't have seen itself confronted with "the government has stolen people's gold, whatcha gonna do about it"

mircea_popescu: yes, it's a landmark failure of the us legal system to protect the us the us pretends to be.

mircea_popescu: decimation excellent find, the euclid case.

mircea_popescu: the rteason the civilise west exists is specifically because fucking idiots got burned at the stake for being fucking idiots.

mircea_popescu: incidentally, all the people trained to hate the supreme sacred congregation of the holy office and their historical activities :

mircea_popescu: nor, since there's no way out, is there any incentive to do anything but worsen it.

mircea_popescu: decimation since carter at least. yes. and there's no way out of this.

mircea_popescu: and even then, it's hit-and-miss

mircea_popescu: perhaps not understanding that "give me free money" only works for that kid, with the truck.

mircea_popescu: undata pretty much, it's almost as if cazalla's farm decided to enact itself into a "tech scene"

mircea_popescu: the day will come when being white will actually be exactly what the white supremacists feed themselves out of fearing : a handicap.

mircea_popescu: neither russians nor chinese are all that ethnically blind.

mircea_popescu: and, unlike the fucking pretense and idiocy now current in the white world,

mircea_popescu: just wait the scaroma victim out.

mircea_popescu: it's like nobody bothers to wish ill on the cancer patient. that's why russia and china are not even remotely interested in a large scale war.

mircea_popescu: there's nothing more corrosive to a state, and a society, and ultimately a culture, than fake money. it's the curse of fucking doom, you don't even need enemies if you got that.

mircea_popescu: because people do this, there's idiots whose careers are entirelyt constructed out of "advising start-ups", like undata is keenly aware.

mircea_popescu: the sheer amount of plain idiocy being imported into the software of the world by this avenue far exceeds all the idiocy that could ever be imported into openssh or the kernel.

mircea_popescu: add to that all the idiots living off "free money" that was GIVEN tro them, while selling themselves on and trying to sell everyone else on how they're "making a positive impact"

mircea_popescu: linux is a nice comfortable chair. after red hat is done sitting in it, it will perhaps be still usable. maybe. like the woman that delivered a baby hippo will still make a good wife.

mircea_popescu: like the stuff discussed above re usg agency redhat, fuycking up linux. EXACTLY the stiuation of the giant ruining a chair. ☟︎☟︎

mircea_popescu: that's the small part. the big part is the disruption it has already caused, and it continues to cause each passing day.

mircea_popescu: "If the Treasury were forced to convert the $1.4 trillion in short-term bills (on which it now pays an average interest rate of 0.056 percent) into 30-year bonds at the average rate it is now paying on such bonds (4.919 percent) the interest on that $1.4 trillion in debt would increase 88-fold." <<< this is wreaking untold havoc on the entire known world, incidentally .it's not just the disruption it WILL cause as it u

mircea_popescu: undata see, this is why you should go work for me making 0.18 btc an hour.

mircea_popescu: kakobrekla: yes because even more pretending will save the world << my fucking thoughts exactly.

mircea_popescu: undata: please take my course on the above for only 10 BTC << too cheap to work.

mircea_popescu: because yes, there fucking IS more to it than just the politicals of uncle sam going "o hai linux guise, you has some cattle of mine, taking them back kthxbye"

mircea_popescu: jurov: this is the undoing of C.. due to its memory unsafety they must decide to either bloat the kernel or suffer the overhead <<< out of the 10`000 billion lines of commentary written on the "usg is making up money and giving it to redhat to implement its policies ; whereby control economy is now called "do-ocracy" topic the past year or so, yours is the first one to actually be fucking sensible.

mircea_popescu: does anyone currently do this ?

mircea_popescu: should make for pretty decent shows for like, corporate parties and expensive weddings and whatnot. And now, Billy Bob, the Ice Mage!

mircea_popescu: in any case... the high fantasy power of the ice / frost mage, at your fingertips. all you need is a compressor.

mircea_popescu: perhaps works even better at the bottom of a shallow lake. "self-reorganising lake".

mircea_popescu: as the gas expanding sucks heat out of the canister, ice forms, which insulates, so eventually the gas coming out the outlet is itself supercooled, sucking the heat out of the atmosphere and making ice in random patterns. baiscally, "self-building ice tree"

mircea_popescu: then open up an outlet in a convenient atmosphere, such as where a mist machine is working, or maybe just very humid tropical climate,

mircea_popescu: so here's an idea i just had : if one were to take a gas with favourable properties (such as high phase lambda, low evaporation temperature, stuff like that) and put a bunch of it liquefied in a canister