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921400+ entries in 0.665s
mircea_popescu: i don't feel particularly lamer than them so.
mircea_popescu: heck of an argument you got thar.
mircea_popescu: so basically the old folks are too cool for us to wear their shoes ?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: the ancients were a different kind of animal from us. they had notions of aristocracy/future-oriented behavour. vs. the tinted window crowd, for whom "I plug the other guy -> get double the gold" is the order of the day.
mircea_popescu: okay, so who sat on the spartan throne ?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: stable shared thrones is probably why Red China outlasted the USSR. but China is a bureaucratic clusterfuck rather than the virile fucktopia you envision.
mircea_popescu: pretty much anyone that's not stupid.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: let's re-phrase the question a bit: who would you personally be content to share your throne with?
mircea_popescu: i don;'t think they cared either way and in the end i don't think they fought for that either.
asciilifeform: the public (for some value of public) is who eventually swings the swords. and they would rather duke it out, with one guy coming out on top, rather than pressuring Pompey to be chums with Caesar.
mircea_popescu: the fate of the triumvirate was that pompey despised caesar.
asciilifeform: the fate of the triumvirate, etc.
asciilifeform: the crowd is irrelevant, except that it does seem to have a tendency to throw its support behind one guy.
mircea_popescu: the harem scarcity is bullshit. there's currently orders of magnitude more slaves looking for masters than masters willing to take slaves.
mircea_popescu: but still, generally speaking, nobody cares about the crowd.
mircea_popescu: nobody may be too strong a world, as insanity is a good bedfellow to exceptional performance
asciilifeform: you don't plug your fellow top dogs for the wormy multitudes. you plug them so they don't - you. because there are only so many palaces/harems/etc. to go around.
mircea_popescu: you understand this ? nobody loves the wormy multitude enough to kill one good man over it.
mircea_popescu: you'd rather burn the world and go have a drink with them.
mircea_popescu: you don't really want to kill the contenders.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: you seem to think that the power game has one level (sexual/personal charisma.) But it really has two: the charismatic men rise to the top, and the winner ends up being the fellow who is quicker on the draw.
mircea_popescu: i don't credit this very womanly approach to history.
mircea_popescu: there's just no way stalin went "omg must protect tyhrone"
asciilifeform: note that Stalin couldn't even ride a horse (Zhukov rode in the victory parade in his stead.)
mircea_popescu: the only alternative is jukov got sick of the shit and weanted out.
asciilifeform: yes, but he pissed him off by being the successful square-jaw in the nightclub.
gribble: jurov was last seen in #bitcoin-assets 1 hour, 10 minutes, and 7 seconds ago: <jurov> preferably resistant to sokal attack
mircea_popescu: i never met stalin or jukov, but i can take an oath stalin only fucked jukov because jukov pissed him off.
thestringpuller: this thing is pretty good
thestringpuller: ;;eightball does game of thrones come on tonight?
asciilifeform: but in what sense is it true, if you plugged the four other contenders before it found you.
asciilifeform: yes, the throne finds you. everybody seems to say this.
mircea_popescu: nobody who endfs on the throne actually goes for the throne.
mircea_popescu: just so with power. the powerful don't actively seek it. it seeks them.
asciilifeform: consider Gen. Zhukov. Too popular, more or less un-purgeable. He had to be slowly demoted, transferred to the outskirts of the empire, finessed into oblivion. Or he would have gone for the throne, for sure.
mircea_popescu: these three are just there cause they;'re the least obnoxious of a sea of similar bitches in heat.
mircea_popescu: no, he's not. most of his time is spent trtying to keep such women at bay.
mircea_popescu: i think the problem is something along these lines : young cock gets into night club, sees successful local mobster with the three girls dotting on him. figures this is a cool squarejaw, he's forcing these women to do such things.
mircea_popescu: you misunderstand the relationship between the powerful and power.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: and what, you would let the successful generals live? so they can take your throne?
mircea_popescu: or moreover this is what the state is, much like a supermodel is her tits and her waist
mircea_popescu: and there's a reason the tinted windows tinted glasses douches in the us have infinite budgets atm. they are THE state.
mircea_popescu: he purged the very generals that won the war
mircea_popescu: this isn't even true.
asciilifeform: actually, Stalin ramped up industry, the war machine, etc. by saving on the men in the leather jackets. (Most of the purging was of the old purging apparatus.) Resources are, unfortunately, finite.
mircea_popescu: tell hemingway "could you rewrite this ? all the m's and w's use so much ink... try writing with more i's instead"
mircea_popescu: that's what you do! it's like asking van gogh to save on paint.
mircea_popescu: save on that ?! what sense does it make!
mircea_popescu: they're a form of expression of that state.
mircea_popescu: but think about it : the old guard of the soviet republic, them people in their leather jackets
asciilifeform: I think Rome could learn; "BitDenarius..."
mircea_popescu: in rome i'd have probably driven them up the wall with my globalist ideas.
mircea_popescu: i just happen to be able to fit more on my bus than the current fashion
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: seems like you were born a few 1000 years too late...
mircea_popescu: trying to save on fucking ain't the way to go about marriage.
mircea_popescu: if this is too muich work for you time to retire.
mircea_popescu: people need a good answer as to why the fuck they're your subjects.
mircea_popescu: that's the motherfucking point of a kingdom.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: fast-forward a decade. you run a kingdom. do you care to spend all of your time personally quashing revolts?
mircea_popescu: education is purely a sexual process. what's this "more fucks than necessary" ?
mircea_popescu: there is no such thing
asciilifeform: yes, but presumably the cost of administering more of a beating than is necessary for a full education is a net waste.
mircea_popescu: this has nothing to do with protecting anything of yours.
mircea_popescu: as long as you mean to enlighten you mean to beat.
mircea_popescu: the only practical way to educate the human being is through violence.
mircea_popescu: not the case.
asciilifeform: well yes, but all else being equal, you want the peasants to submit willingly, rather than hire people to pummel them (with gold that you could otherwise buy a second golden helicopter with.)
mircea_popescu: and the only places not worth living into are those devoid of inequality.
mircea_popescu: whereas the only true measure of development is inequality,
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform it is at the very least red because its only practical use is to try and give credence to this nonsense theory whereby inequality breeds stagnation through "waste".
Namworld: Involves waiting a few weeks, and I don't trust other exchanges enough to deposit there.
asciilifeform: (AFAIK there's nothing "red" about the concept of guard labour. it is just the banal fact that you have to hire rat-catchers if your planet has rats, and this costs you something.)
Namworld: To exit BTC, waiting to buy back in.
Namworld: I use MtGox. Albeit not to daytrade, it's too damn slow for that.
asciilifeform: can't argue with that
mircea_popescu: mtgox doing such a horrible job of it is the bad thing.
mircea_popescu: that's not the bad thing.
asciilifeform: so why is the herd of morons pumping MtGox full of dollars such a bad thing?
mircea_popescu: money can best be understood as the practical equivalent of the theological concept of "grace of god"
mircea_popescu: rthe poor are poor because they are failed human beings, not for any other reason.
asciilifeform: stolen is the wrong word, when people are shoving money at you voluntarily
mircea_popescu: and no. the rich are not rich because they've stiolen from the poor, or from the stupid.
mircea_popescu: "guard labour" is a void notion pretty much. it stems from the ultimately doomed attempt of the intellectually bankrupt left to justify it's nonsense.
asciilifeform: to continue with the analogy, virtually all of the serious BTC people are "rat catchers." In that much of their winnings derive from the "stupid money" at the table - MtGox, people who buy BTC there because the TV said to, etc.
mircea_popescu: it's precisely so they never do.
mircea_popescu: look, everywhere there's going to be pest control.
asciilifeform: if it doesn't matter what the rats do or think, why would MtGox's effect on the rat media matter?
mircea_popescu: and b. because they back all sorts of dubious shit and are generally part of the axis of evil.
mircea_popescu: because a. they keep making dumbass statements that then get fed into the dumbass press which make btc look like a scam
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: so why is the life (and death) of MtGox a subject of interest to you?
mircea_popescu: sure, on ocasion. but fact remains most major players don't even have an account with them
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: to run with the analogy, you should wonder why most of the non-rats are ignoring the Italian restaurant in favour of the garbage dump.
mircea_popescu: the fact that all users are currently that makes zero difference on this score.
mircea_popescu: well it also happens to not matter what the brand is among rats.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: no alternative, if you're a rat. and right now most BTC users are more or less that.
mircea_popescu: sure, garbage bins almost always have some food in them. i wouldn't call this a "brand"
mircea_popescu: depends. there's no such thing as "an alternative". wjhat's the alternative to eating from the garbage ?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: what, exactly, is the practical alternative to Gox right now? OTC, where one has to actually deal with humans? BTC-e, where BTC consistently traces <50USD vs. gox?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: nah, the worst reputation is just some random address you can send BTC or wire USD to from which nothing comes out again. MtGox is still a league above the rest, considering that this is what the rest is by default.
mircea_popescu: i don't see any value there.