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mircea_popescu: so, they end up buying plastic pret a porter sacks for whatever they wanna spend, and me an' my remnant friend can discuss sartreria.
mircea_popescu: he dun want a bottle to enjoy with his private, personal, wholly owned whores. he want a bottle to drink by himself and feel JUST LIKE nigger in x movie.
mircea_popescu: ie, there's a whole lotta aspirational buying and scant else besides.
mircea_popescu: that's not even it. whole bunch of tards, "oh, this bottle of champagne is great, $5000". as a factual matter no bottle of fizzy is genuinely worth that much. not anything you'd drink, anyway. what';s worse, if i pour that and random bottom shelf stuff they couldn't tell them apart. half the time can't tell bicarb fizz apart.
mircea_popescu: i hope she gets to die with it ; honestly other than me the only other customers are pretentious middle aged women buying 20 bux worth of presents with credit cards and the occasional ranchero getting a funeral suit or w/e.
mircea_popescu: i have doubts it'll survive the passing of the current generation, the girlies in the shop are utterly confused at proceedings that seem only natural to her and me, but what can you do.
☟︎ mircea_popescu: nah, old networks survive here. egyptian cotton still exists, peruvian cotton still exists, there's a lot going on in the real world, ie, outside us concentration camp.
mircea_popescu: somehow, however, this isn't "acoso callejero". dudes poking them to "hey, my dick's here", that never happens. confusion reigns.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform they do this weird thing where they poke (literally, with finger) girl walking by me to get her attention then "omg your purse is open!!!". fucking weird as all hell.
mircea_popescu: but no, i dun own any jeans. actually, hit up the local specialist in gentleman items (run by this very nice old lady, whom, when she dies, that is IT for dressing in costa rica). two suits, four extra pairs of pants, four shirts, a tie, a dozen socks and a pair of pijamas. all natural fiber, look fetching on me too. took like a fucking hour, and a brick of cash, but honestly i can't think of a way i could have spent the hour
mircea_popescu: (indistinctly, same applies to teh bois. in fact, they have it worse, lotta difficulty involved in securing a cunt you know is there but can't even see)
mircea_popescu: i literally believe they feel their cuntal purse is open or somesuch
mircea_popescu: i suspect it's some kind of psychological comfort somewhere. the same kind of femherd cowsies keep pestering my slaves about how "they gotta get jeans" as pester them about "omg your purse is open"
mircea_popescu: well yes, if i did any shaft mining, i'd buy some pairs of jeans.
mircea_popescu: there's this "stealing nose" kiddy interaction trope from the period, adults pretending to steal kids' noses.
mircea_popescu: only thing i see was literally, they were afraid their cunts will fly off.
mircea_popescu: they weren't lying, they wanted the shit. what for, who knows, but there it is.
mircea_popescu: lest their cunts fly off or who knows what's going on in the noggin.
mircea_popescu: in retrospect, they weren't even lying, you should see them, 100% in the shit.
mircea_popescu: chicks wanted jeans, what. because miner garb is SO COOL OMG.
☟︎ mircea_popescu: china was net silver importer by the megatonne, for this exact reason, "what fucking miami, keks"
mircea_popescu: there's a ~reason~ miami "pressures" latin ameritards, but period "london" did not in the slightest impress 1880s chinese.
mircea_popescu: so no, while in theory appealing, this theoretical autarky is not at all how things worked in the practice we're discussing. they had unclosed cycles galore, and there had to be a solution, AND they were in no measure to produce the solution.
mircea_popescu: (and this is why closed borders is a very fucktarded policy -- you obviously WANT to let the idiots out. the only problem commies encountered was that if they opened the borders, the idiots'd have ~stayed~. which is already indicative of the breakage.)
mircea_popescu: eg, our autarky works, nobody here sits wistfully dreaming of reading i dunno, #linux logs.
mircea_popescu: IF your autarky workls, THEREFORE there's no possibility of miami.
mircea_popescu: that's precisely what it is, the measuring of the pressure of a miami nearby.
mircea_popescu: specifically meaning, resources you misallocated into making less-useful-than-possible end products.
mircea_popescu: this is the true measure of unclosed cycles, you understand ? if your local currency is dropping, it is always dropping under the pressure of unclosed cycles
mircea_popescu: i don;'t mean the black market in goods. i mean the financial black market.
mircea_popescu: yet you can't buy the dollar for 0.00005 btc anywhere. it's the same 0.00025 everywhere.
mircea_popescu: by the time they cut the pig, official rate was <20:1, black market was >100:1
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform it doesn't. but it is also very easy to measure unclosed cycles : as they leak, the black market widens.
mircea_popescu: "what is the end product of Qx ?" "well... more of the workforce came late more often, missed more days, and feels should have larger salary and less work to do"
mircea_popescu: in fact, ro 1980s and us 2010s are so fucking similar it blows one's mind.
mircea_popescu: nevertheless, the point stands -- either close your cycles or die.
mircea_popescu: ye, the ONLY measurably increasing output of running the 1980s state economy was an increase of per-capita laziness, uselessness, and personal sense of entitlement of the "worker"
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform we're not discussing that. this was peacetime economy, and the ~only product of its working was more per-capita laziness.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform the world that is is the world that is. one must close all cycles in it, one can't simply go "oh, we'll keep going the insolvent '''right way'''."
mircea_popescu: had they actually been done on fucking time, they might've paid for themselves as the plans planned.
mircea_popescu: can just as well say "far seeing leader sabotaged by inept idiocy of workers"
mircea_popescu: and the low skill, low productivity, worthless workforce ain't no fucking joke, either. you can say "ceausescu made wrong call, bet on oil, prices changed, he lost". the THING however is, ceausescu made bet in 66, plans called for plants to be done by 69, they were done by 74.
mircea_popescu: gotta start doing ~something~ besides saying "fuckyou" to parents, is the fundamental lesson of all adolescence.
mircea_popescu: apparently it's worth something for no more than ~decade.
mircea_popescu: yes, romanians thought "theyt're working". they were playing, 9 cases out of 10.
☟︎ mircea_popescu: as the workers weren't willing (nor even able) to PAY to play, their very expensive playground got cancelled.
mircea_popescu: ie, cubic meter of raw gas worth 10, cubic meter of gas processed by azomures, worth 6.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform cost to make in "just sell the natgas at bekescsaba, rather than send to azomures"
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform what do you want me to say ? "if atomic winter came then 1980s ro industry would be good" ? these if dun work.
mircea_popescu: and the list goes on. romania made more phospo-nitrogen fertilizer than the us currently uses -- and it cost to make about twice what anyone'd pay.
mircea_popescu: romania made train engines nobody would buy, and train cars that it could not use.
mircea_popescu: you're thinking of the survivors. romania had ~9x more industry than you can summon to mind.
mircea_popescu: what is now alro was one of the largest bauxite processing plants in europe. it cost ~over 8k ~~~1980~~~ usd to make a ton of aluminum there, and this at romania's EXTREMELY CHEAP hydro power rates.
mircea_popescu: that, sadly, was unsupportable, correctness be damned. and if you ain't gonna do the right thing, iliescu's way the fuck better a schelling point than herpitty-derp&co.
mircea_popescu: execute, as in, shot in the head. everyone, as in, 2-3mn people.
mircea_popescu: so yeah, while isarescu was trying to figure out which accreditives to sign in which order on which day, bnr of that winter being the largest cheque kiting entreprise in the entire world, a bunch of morons sitting on upturned beer cases "discussed politics". that nothing comprehensible came of the latter effort's the participants' fault.
mircea_popescu: ault. this is what the mass-romanian is and does, nobody is needed to "do it to him", much like nobody's needed to drag shit into lelea saveta's cunt. she does it, by herself, every time she wipes.
☟︎ mircea_popescu: and incidentally, this continues -- there's "romanian bdsm" dorks today, as fucking if, amusingly omitting to mention that there's exactly one romanian bdsm-er ; and
hilarious cvasi-republican posturing and all the rest of it. that they're drowning in hollow halo of buzzwords which nevertheless fails to mask at all the complete sadness underneath is not like the fucking martians' f
☝︎ mircea_popescu: now, admittedly
the average 20yo living in 1990 had no fucking clue of any of the foregoing : not merely because the average 20yo has no fucking clue anywhere and anytime, ustarded 20yos actually go into debt to go to "college" today, even! but also because other than the romanian citizens i personally know, NO FUCKING BODY had ANY FUCKING CLUE about ANYTHING. AT
mircea_popescu: s about for another idle decade, waiting for the pile to rot"
mircea_popescu: by which i mean, that negotiating with the miners was the absolute worst fucking decision possible. the policy is either correct, in which case it gets defended, or incorrect, in which case it gets corrected. there can't possibly be this "oh, we should x but let's y instead", factual-abdication-without-formal-abdication. in which sense diana_coman has a solid point, "dood should have had his referendum ipso facto in 77, not b
mircea_popescu: and it mostly did better because isarescu is not ceausescu, at that. ie, came from a wineyard fambly.
mircea_popescu: ition ro went for, and mostly got. in the large land grab post us collapse, romania got what pieces it could grab, and while it didn't grab as much as say germany, or poland, it grabbed WAY the fuck more than even france, let the ufck alone jokes like spain. and it did better in this land rush than it did in the 60s/70s oil rush we discussed yest.
mircea_popescu: there's exactly nothing wrong with "making breaks for bmw". all bmw consists of is producers of parts, an assembly plant, and a sticker factory. what you ~want~ in that cake is to be one of the parts producers. it is folly to imagine "owning intellectual property" in "the brand" has any fucking value. it is idiocy to try like the argentines, to assemble chinese kits and call it "an industry". the only good position is the pos
mircea_popescu: so yes romania kinda lost its nuclear technology plants ; but romania also now has fine mechanics that actually works, and actually makes money, and unlike bulgaria or fucking austria, let alone jokes like costa rica or argentina, has a very well working, agile and effectual industrial base. narrower than it could have been in a very idealised sense, but way the fuck wider than it'd have been had eg the "agricultural plans" o
mircea_popescu: so no "tranzitie" bullshit whatsoever : we're gonna have to cut all the spurious "industry" in name only, and cut all the fucktards who depend of it. and IT WAS DONE. and it was done as hard and fast as it ~could~ be done, witness the whole "miners invading capital" lulz during radu vasile.
☟︎ mircea_popescu: ie, the writer dorks aren't the ~only ones~ he was... abstainedly uncritical with. cowardly enough, he also did the same when his skin was in it.
mircea_popescu: are sunteti din pozitia de expati prin multinationale.] actuallty fixed romania's pre-eminent problem in the 90s, one that ceausescu failed to even dare address -- witness how there's no discussion of "you fucks are the worst miners that ever went down a shaft" in response to the "jos cu burghezia rosie" bullshit he had to confront in valea jiului cca 77.
mircea_popescu: the supporting in 3 was not merely food -- all these idle useless fucktarded dorks expected to eg heat tghemselves in winter for free with the abundant waste heat resulting from 2. and to steal off the production like. and to generally not work and etc. with the possible exception of bulgaria, romania had the worst workforce of anywhere in europe, at moment 1990.
mircea_popescu:
http://btcbase.org/log/2019-03-14#1902443 << actually, it was quite fucking obvious : 1. the country has a large industrial base ; 2. that is only useful to turn a dollar's worth of energy into about 20 cents worth of vandable product ; 3. while at the time supporting a population that was 4. shockingly unskilled labour.
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