BingoBoingo: mircea_popescu: It's amazing how you old point "everything costs the same everywhere" is holding true.
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mircea_popescu: BingoBoingo cheap transportation makes french "terroir" (as distinct from arab terreur) a meaningless concept.
BingoBoingo: mircea_popescu: It really does. Everything I keep reading published on connection prices says "OMG region X is expensive"
BingoBoingo queries in region X, finds... Price is price is price
mircea_popescu: the web doesn't keep up with pricing issues in this sense.
a111: Logged on 2017-11-06 20:01 hanbot: <asciilifeform> in other lulz,
https://archive.is/UVcTG >> 'reports of death of yet another Saudi prince' << meanwhile i was reading this morning "riadyh ritz-carlton now detention center for saudi royals", (
http://archive.is/p7KPc), but tuned out when "evidence" seemed to consist of "booking websites" not having rooms available.
mircea_popescu: there's conservation rules afoot in teh universe, and the web isn't going to produce an increase of information ; it provides a fraction of what you put in back and no more.
BingoBoingo: Yeah, turns out source Homo Reddictius was citing consisted of a likely disinfo piece by Cloudflare
BingoBoingo: Well, except for places where X is expensive because not built (i.e. those tiger economies)
☟︎ mircea_popescu: expensive where not built, expensive because temporary disruption (flood, bait-and-switch in switch cycle by socialist "corporation", etc)
mircea_popescu: (fwiw marriott still reports their ryadh carlton not available for check-in. sounds moar like nationalization than anything)
mircea_popescu: nah, moar like failure of orange revolution ("teh people matter, and here's a buncha dorky chicks fresh from usg "criminology" studies going topless hurr durr) had dept of blue usg move to white revolution ("teh people dun matter, here's kings-youngest-son being totally the true lost tsarevich!!!"). in this case the local pretext for legitimacy is that 32yo princelet.
mircea_popescu: sooner or later the dorks will understand that until/unless burned down us "embassy" / all ustards coming in detained and shot, there won't be peace.
☟︎ mircea_popescu: as it is, next in the queue is plaintive missive from mohammed bin salman about how "he was tricked" and "teh deliveries didn;t live up to promises" in a few months/years/whatever.
mircea_popescu: to keep to form he'll make a blogpost now about how "he was surprised by wealth", ers style
mircea_popescu: amusing that this shit worked in saudi arabia where it failed so miserably in turkey.
BingoBoingo: Well, the Saudis aren't the Turks. They have oil and their borders are protected by hot sand. Turks are surrounded and have the Mediterranian's back door in their face.
mircea_popescu: more like, turkey actual country. saudi arabia, like venezuela, very much madmax item, "here's this oil rig surrounded by vagrants. need big lawnmower."
mircea_popescu: incredible fucktards though, argued with the dude all summer long, had no missile-acre at the ready ?
mircea_popescu: "bitch, you call me to a meeting i fail to return from, there's 10`000 rockets per square kilometer that take to flight. better hope they all miss, unless you're prepared to live in ruins-of-riyadh"
BingoBoingo: My impression of Saudi Arabia is sandier, hotter Cali suburbs with more pinoys.
mircea_popescu: originator of the entire political system that took down teh wtc.
BingoBoingo: Sounds more like Cali when you mention that
mircea_popescu: and a fine example of nazi-socialism standing opposed to roossvelt-socialism. country essentially ruled by a fuhrer + the propaganda/gestapo construct (here, wahhabi clerics + "security" forces)
BingoBoingo: Sure, both places had a history or something like it for however longly/briefly. Now just McMansions and neurosis everywhere.
mircea_popescu: anyway. usual failure mode -- got "us trained" moles into the security half of the construct, because "more competent", which is universally false but then again disease works by the host failing to recognize the pathogens, then 30 years later wants to "futuristic cities" where "people can have fun" and obviously list aramco on nyse.
mircea_popescu: anyway. the deeply inept handling of qatar recently (which was, at least nominally, his responsibility, even if botched 100% by ineptitude imported by ustards) and the goingnowhere in yemen promise to yield the end of the whole affair.
mircea_popescu: conseuquently i dun think i'd buy saudi assets for less than 50% premium.
BingoBoingo: Same as Cali. Everything was cool and patriarchy then evil USG mole Zorro fucked everything up by opening Chicano studies departments
mircea_popescu: "it should help that prince mohammed, following the example of ibn saud, sees the importance of forging a special bond with the united states", sez teh official propaganda for anglotards. quite. lol.
BingoBoingo: lol, "special relationship" is an awfully weird way of saying they blackmailed queen pantsuit during Arab sprang
mircea_popescu: but no, there's no getting out of it : turkey-iran with a russian background much much stronger than usg.israel + usg.saudi-arabia. israel isn't coming apart just yet -- therefore the peninsula must.
BingoBoingo actually saw made in Israel merchandise. Items were... plastic boxes
BingoBoingo: Sure they J'd up the plastic part to calling them "Innovative structural foam" but... Fucking plastic boxes
mircea_popescu: kek. by the time epithets are part of the "name" you know the marysue fiction's well caked at the edges.
mircea_popescu: seriously, chicklit heroine meets Cool Guy McFucksticks ? i wonder what the odds are of such a name naturally occuring...
mircea_popescu: i suppose next time i am about to call something mp-whatever ima say gooduseful-whatever instead.
BingoBoingo: Anyways items were branded with some store private label licensed from once manufacturing company, and prominently marked "Made in Israel" because that's where other brand got their plastic boxes from too.
mircea_popescu: great winners in all of this, of course, zee chinese -- who get to see likely lightningstrike in land far far away rather than in sea as close to home as say... taiwan.
BingoBoingo: Eh, the ZC's have their own problems to deal with
mircea_popescu: yeah, like building a mile-wide train-and-road belt from beijing to vienna.
BingoBoingo: Also the structural defects inflicted by the bastard pidgin
mircea_popescu: fwis the strategic plan is "one week silk road : car or train, take your pick". IF they do manage to build it, which isn't a given even if not necessarily unlikely ; and IF they manage to market it so it reaches their traffic goals (this part, easier), all the "vision 2030" bs by everyone else, from crown prince of saudis to kirschner prince of us to etc fade in a very very distant bokeh.
mircea_popescu: artificially intelligent google "can not calculate driving directions" as it stands now.
mircea_popescu: but whether it will go through turkey or through ukraine (doh. turkey, evidently) is by far the more important consideration of today.
mircea_popescu: (suddenly us "involvement" in afghanistan more geopolitically understandable, is it)
mircea_popescu: but on the upside -- a 80 lane highway perfect place for ai driving. can have lanes sorted by speed at a 1kmph resolution. there's a marginal but present for "american technology companies" even in chinese owned future!
mircea_popescu: in any case the only viable alternative to "well... let's just have another war, then" i've seen anyone propose. mile-wide highway still costs a billion or two per track mile, making the whole project large enough to give substance to something like us gdp. (that it will pointedly not be in any way related to us, secondary consideration. bitcoin isn't either, to its great benefit.)
mircea_popescu: paradoxically, there's even an argument for freight. yes, it's true that shipping is cheapest per mile. the problem with postmodernity is that the needs are so fragmented and the costs of onboarding so significant, shipping could conceivably lose out.
mircea_popescu: in this model, rather than have a) load it on ship in a week, from the single port, and then take n weeks to reach destination, and then unload and distribute by lorry, so yes you pay 0.01 per km on sea, which is 99% of the distance, but then 10 for the servicing, making your total cost 10`000 * 0.01 + 6 * 10 = 160
mircea_popescu: you might prefer to b) send it via train freight from exact origin to exact destination, at cost of 0.02, which is to say 8`000 * 0.02 = 160.
mircea_popescu: whether the increased precision (no, you don't have to have your item lorried to port and then from port to dest) actually gives a 20% shorter distance, or 25 or 15% ; and whether the cost can be kept to 0.02 or even the foreseen 0.014 rather than 0.025 or 0.1 etc...
mircea_popescu: but the argument is undefeatable -- ship burns oil. train can burn electricity which can mean hydro, can mean nuclear, can mean things. things other than oil. in this sense, it's unavoidable.
mircea_popescu: whether 2050s unavoidable or 2150s unavoidable though...
BingoBoingo: Then there's always going to be some incredibly time insensitive goods needing moving, which will preserve some form of shipping. Hence riverboats still traveling the Mississippi, but rarely with cargo that isn't bird attractant.
mircea_popescu: it's funny how shipping counterintuitively loses to land routes. even among the romans, who were built AROUND a fucking sea, seaborne gross tonnage in any year was less than road gross tonnage in same year.
mircea_popescu: yes road cost a whole lot more to maintain than the sea's 0. but this is a counter-argument here, we're overpowerful and desperately in need of useful work to do, ntowa.
mircea_popescu: moreover, as pointed out before in various contexts, europe exists specifically because of road network.
BingoBoingo: Seriously. Then again the "overpowerful" part drives river traffic construction. "why train extra 30 miles to Mississippi when build port on Kaskakia river" and other weirds
mircea_popescu: exact problem discussed above! the issue with ports is that they, unlike train station, naturally concentrate.
mircea_popescu: whereas trains... fuck... make 5. make 55. make one per mile. what diff can it possibly make.
mircea_popescu: all euro industry was, at the time the "Common market" somewhat distant goal, served by rail spokes custom built.
mircea_popescu: and with computerized control and much better robotics, you actually get car-level (about 50 tons) control! have the railcars switch in and out of high-speed bands! it's easy when you have 30 of them!
mircea_popescu: piddly ass 1817s level tech of single-railtrack doesn't reallty expose the power of rail in all its glory.
BingoBoingo: Well, packet switching is a thing. Whether the packets are bits or tons.
mircea_popescu: in this future worldview, us role is very much that in which turkey lingered throughout the 1800s.
mircea_popescu: once-notable empire, meanwhile powerless, saddled with a bunch of nominal allies thatr don't like it and readily intervene militarily against it.
mircea_popescu: the similarities are striking -- ottoman porte made it a point of not learning languages, much like us.
mircea_popescu: i suppose this is one of those major "there are two kinds of people" things : those who speak languages, and those who don't.
BingoBoingo: Yeah. Anyways another toxic legacy of the 80s-present action movie thing is villianizing the capable.
mircea_popescu: i guess so, at that. tv forced mistake, "gotta give the viewer steak"
mircea_popescu: problem is... there's only one stake for the tv viewer, and it dun look pretty.
BingoBoingo: Yeah. Anyways, transition from "hero spies at least speak French" to "Don't trust them Ruskies, they learn our language!!!"
☟︎ mircea_popescu: but to revisit upstack : the item contemplated, 80 car lanes on each side of 30 traintrack lines would redefine a number of things. the new town then becomes... the switching station. every unit-of-distance the 30 tracks turn into a switch yard, 120 lines, 600 lines, whatever. in between these, the traintracs are fully reversible, meaning the trains run in arbitrary directiosn! around this yard is then built town, out of serv
☟︎ mircea_popescu: icing industry needed for switchyard maintenance, and human services for the involved humans and so on. around this town then go the thick roads. so the town of the future has a "west side" and an "east side" in the sense of... the part of town margined by east-bound or west-bound megahighway.
mircea_popescu: by the time you end up with 500 or so 1mn strong towns dotting the mega-road, you've a whole new nation of a whole new kind. larger than current day us
mircea_popescu: which is why and wherefore the whole "not much room in future for united states". there isn't.
mircea_popescu: gives very palpable, estimable value to something asciilifeform already amply describes as having felt on own skin, which is... "land value" of wash dc real estate ? why, 0, it's a sea away from The Road. san francisco ? same. congo capital ? SAME.
BingoBoingo: Short story of the transition is from George Lazenby as James Bond to Bruce Willis as accidenticop
BingoBoingo: Anyways, Mega highway offers plenty of wonderous oppresatunities
mircea_popescu: it has to. basically, it's mongol horde v2.0 (this is not well understood today, but the mongol horde was first and foremost -- its roadmaking. they had a sort of "red carpet roll" they went on).
a111: Logged on 2017-04-05 18:42 mircea_popescu: merv, or generally the mongol reduction of persia from a coupla million to a coupla hundred thousand is the fundamental civilisational act. not the building of the scum, but the purging of it. much like "writing prb" is not an achievement in computer science ; but purging it into trb is.
BingoBoingo: Not to mention, those truck stops will prolly be hella wild
mircea_popescu: except not so many trucks, since rail readily available.
mircea_popescu: which is how this works. take say unit-of-distance, the yet undefined item of the future, to 100km. that means ~100 towns the whole length of this ; it also means a local delivery max range of 200km is ample : if you needed more than that you should have just sent teh goods one station further up/down.
BingoBoingo: Well, plenty of pickup trucks. Just like suburbia there will be a subset of folks who purchase such to swear they've been off of mega road with it before.
mircea_popescu: which means the "civilised world" reduces to europe, china coast, and a 2-3-4mn sqkm thin strip uniting them, with The Road in the middle and civilisation reaching out .a coupla hundred units perpedngicularily north and south.
mircea_popescu: (state of california is 400k sqkm, for comparison. mass is 27k.
mircea_popescu: the major winner ? why, persia, now called iran. teh age of sail adventure having been chewed up and spit out, the world is going back to itself.
☟︎ mircea_popescu: and consequently the future chances of any kind of islam that's not the deeply sensuous thing of the 1300s is zilch. saudis are headed the same place new york went.
BingoBoingo: There's probably reasons for colonies to still be interesting in mega road world, but not the ones that though themselves empires
mircea_popescu: lol this chick is retarded. hopefully lafond bagged her dumb ass, wtf, "he didn't say this jokingly". rly bitch, was he really liek some military guy ?
BingoBoingo: In still further equalitarian studies outta Harvard: "As with most proceedings at Harvard, the anal sex workshop placed great emphasis on equality. After the presenter noted that “not all men have penises, not all women have vaginas,” she argued that “the butthole is the great sexual equalizer. All humans have a butthole.”"
mircea_popescu: there's few things less "equal" than say male anal sex receptacle and female anal sex receptacle.
mircea_popescu: for the same money could say "car is the great equalizer, crossover and 1960s era euro cars same thing"
a111: Logged on 2017-11-11 06:31 mircea_popescu: but to revisit upstack : the item contemplated, 80 car lanes on each side of 30 traintrack lines would redefine a number of things. the new town then becomes... the switching station. every unit-of-distance the 30 tracks turn into a switch yard, 120 lines, 600 lines, whatever. in between these, the traintracs are fully reversible, meaning the trains run in arbitrary directiosn! around this yard is then built town, out of serv
a111: Logged on 2017-11-11 06:27 BingoBoingo: Yeah. Anyways, transition from "hero spies at least speak French" to "Don't trust them Ruskies, they learn our language!!!"
a111: Logged on 2017-08-24 17:25 asciilifeform: or, more famously, a character referring to 'general motors' ends up speaking of a Генерал Моторс
a111: Logged on 2017-11-11 06:47 mircea_popescu: the major winner ? why, persia, now called iran. teh age of sail adventure having been chewed up and spit out, the world is going back to itself.
a111: Logged on 2017-11-11 04:33 mircea_popescu: asciilifeform just what the bolix wanted huh
a111: Logged on 2017-11-11 04:49 BingoBoingo: Well, except for places where X is expensive because not built (i.e. those tiger economies)
BingoBoingo wondering what the weird might be with block 494023
☟︎ BingoBoingo: Seems to be where a lot of TRB nodes are shown stalled.
BingoBoingo trying to find that point. May have been rotated over.
BingoBoingo: Well, other node has unrotated debug.log but is further behind than 494022
mod6: good to be watchin tho.
mod6: every now and then they get behind a few blocks.
mod6: gotta start somewhere
☟︎ ben_vulpes extracted a apple extended keyboard ii from the parental domus this morning, only to find that a) the capslock key has a physical lock and b) apparently needs some nutty 'teensy' micro to turn the ancient proprietary 'apple device bus' serial format into usb; and turning it into serial is apparently Just Not Done
ben_vulpes: yup, going to have some fun pulling the thing apart.
ben_vulpes: let me know if you recall with what to look up this ots part
ben_vulpes: ps2, the depths of my golden era hardware ignorance knows no plumb
ben_vulpes: not complicated enough to survive in the brave new world.
ben_vulpes: messy, but hey at least visually inspectable.
jhvh1: BingoBoingo: Bitstamp BTCUSD last: 6370.9, vol: 14976.25423386 | Bitfinex BTCUSD last: 6302.7, vol: 72843.79787908 | Kraken BTCUSD last: 6329.9, vol: 6932.19852237 | Volume-weighted last average: 6315.46947334