decimation: point of interest - on youtube one can easily obtain copies of the vienna philharmonic new year's concert (neujahrskonzert). it's clear that it is broadcast all over europe, yet I have never heard of it being broadcast in the us

decimation: apparently this is one artifact of the divorce between england and the 'continent'

decimation: right, which is why it amazes me that it's unheard of in the us

decimation: asciilifeform: another colleague of mine is shipping his back as we speak - kernel panics every 20min or so << I'm convinced that the 'gpu issue' happens on even more recent macbooks

decimation: apple assumes that you don't need to use your computer to compute, so it isn't designed for sustained levels of cpu-pegging

decimation: asciilifeform: not having an intelligence agency of my own, i regard it as an open question just how usg might behave should it ever begin to lose < My prediction is 'descent into regional civil war'

decimation: asciilifeform: it seems the polarization version of the experiment would be much easier to set up

decimation: I had a similar experience when I went to italy on holiday

decimation: in the major italian tourist cities, the 'inner ring' around the tourist sites are full of restraunts that are obvious chumpatrons targeting usians and germans

decimation: mircea_popescu: I assume you saw this article http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/feb/21/a-feast-of-engineering-whats-really-in-your-food

decimation: "The strapline for a product called Butter Buds®, described by its makers as “an enzyme-modified encapsulated butter flavour that has as much as 400 times the flavour intensity of butter”, sums it up in six words: “When technology meets nature, you save.”"

decimation: it's as depressing as you would think

decimation: "Over the past few years, the food industry has embarked on an operation it dubs “clean label”, with the goal of removing the most glaring industrial ingredients and additives, replacing them with substitutes that sound altogether more benign." "If you noticed that it contained an amino acid such as L-cysteine E910, your enthusiasm might wane, especially if you happen to know that this additive can be derived from animal and human

decimation: hair. But a range of new-wave yeast extracts is increasingly replacing E910. "

decimation: new! "contains" "natural" "ingredients"!! it's profitable for us and "ok" for you

decimation: it smacks of 'all voice, no exit'

decimation: yeah in fact the reason the us succeeded as it were for the first hundred years was because there was much empty virgin territory, so people could 'express agency'

decimation: asciilifeform: "-ev" < it's admittedly the case that 'basic science' seems to be advanced mostly through 'dumb luck'

decimation: in the sense that some crank comes up with an idea that happens to be right, rather than the result of some carefully arranged program of research ☟︎

decimation: gabriel_laddel: who was the 'herri seldon' who foresaw the development of leonardo?

decimation: er, 'hari seldon'

decimation: but the earlier masters couldn't have predicted the results of their erudition

decimation: I'm not using the word 'random' to mean 'acausal'

decimation: sometimes this happens in unconnected pairs

decimation: what 'basic science' did the manhattan project advance?

decimation: it seems to me that basic science is something that is only obvious in distant hindsight

decimation: so did the swiss patent office 'organize' to advance physics by paying einstein in exchange for clerk-serfdom?

decimation: mircea_popescu: roughly, 'conservative' in america today means 'republican', which also means 'pro-state'

decimation: not exactly, but he wouldn't be invited to any parties at cpac

decimation: mircea_popescu: modern us politics is a sandpile built upon equivocation

decimation: generally, my understanding is that 'paleoconservatives' want to wind us society back to something resembling the 'cis-democracy' in that moldbug peice

decimation: one of murray's books advanced the idea that the ruling us elite were cutting asunder all social mores and strictures that bound the masses

decimation: while they silently keep those mores alive amoung themselves

decimation: george will sort of fits that description

decimation: oh, murray also co-authored 'the bell curve'

decimation: which controversially asserted that jews were smarter than blacks

decimation: no, but they strongly 'taught the controversy'

decimation: one datapoint "“The NLSY, administered in 1980 to by far the largest sample (6,502 whites, 3,022 blacks) in a national study, found a difference of 1.21 standard deviations on the AFQT.”"

decimation: AFQT means 'armed forces qualifying test'

decimation: from the book: “In any case, you are not going to learn tomorrow that all the cognitive differences between races are 100 percent genetic in origin, because the scientific state of knowledge, unfinished as it is, already gives ample evidence that environment is part of the story. But the evidence eventually may become unequivocal that genes are also part of the story. We are worried that the elite wisdom on this issue, for years

decimation: almost hysterically in denial about that possibility, will snap too far in the other direction. It is possible to face all the facts on ethnic and race differences in intelligence and not run screaming from the room: That is the essential message.”

decimation: the book has a whole chapter on the subject of defining intelligence

decimation: but essentially ends up with the 'classical' theory, which is 'this statistical thing that tends to pop out reliably on these tests'

decimation: someone had to shape the mud into huts

decimation: at any rate, the "iq" thing seems more useful when applied on the population level

decimation: it might not tell you who to hire next, but it would explain why nobody in the city you are visiting has heard of plumbing

decimation: aye

decimation: wow those really are palaces

decimation: is this what they do with all the coins they manage to scrape together?

decimation: my usian upbringing causes me to conjure some dude living in a hovel or a wagon upon hearing 'gypsy'

decimation: plus the prisioners would be occupied with something, instead of scheming how to spray bodily fluids on whoever happens by the slot

decimation: another variant: all the prisoners play 'WoW' - upon gaining some princely sum of gold they can be freed

decimation: hehe yeah

decimation: maybe someone should make a bitbet for the date of the appearance of an official usg 'game'

decimation: the purpose of the game would be to 'sink' hours of the otherwise idle usg employees

decimation: you could ration it slowly if you lived in rural kansas

decimation: what's wrong with enslaving yourself to someone better?

decimation to bed

decimation: !down decimation