I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell

As previously described, I went into this thingi in the hope that it will be really very bad.

Well.. it's not.

It's not good, either. In fact, it's hardly a film at all, exactly in the sense that training flights are not liner flights. It could be a decent graduating project, for instance, or an above-average home video. In either case it really doesn't qualify for professional distribution.

For one thing, the cinematography screams amateur at the top of its lungs. The set is what you'd expect in your average middle class wedding footage, with the props provided by the catering service.

For the other thing, the screenplay is a huge steaming pile of hacky. It's not a matter that it breaks some convention or other of this craft. It's just that it unabashedly displays a strict unawareness of any of the actual, objective constraints involved. As an example, you know how in (badly done) cartoons and re-dubbings of the Hitler's Rant youtube clip there's occasionally a lengthy bubble intended to "go into" a short interval ? Like say Bruno Ganz grunts and the caption goes "blabla-bla bla bla bla bla, blablabla bla bla blablabla yadda yakkity yak", sixty-eight syllables ? Well... this may work (sort-of, not really) in cartoons and in fanon, but it does not work for a script. If you don't know it doesn't work, because you don't have the experience with the craft, because you didn't go to school nor bothered studying it, then you do hacky things like having the characters talk into the air for long intervals throughout the "movie". Which breaks it.

That's not the only example available either, it helps to have a plot, and a premise, and some ideas, and you know, other stuff like that. All I'm saying is that if some guy's "car" is missing three wheels (one's replaced with a painted cardboard box tho!) you're probably not going to expect a working stereo or blinkers. Nor should you. In any case, whatever you may expect : Tucker Max's screenplay is an old clunker with a single, painted cardboard wheel.

For the third thing, Jesse Bradford is just a humongous ham (and this film appropriately ended his "career", such as that was). Don't get me wrong, hamming it up is a perfectly legitimate strategy, especially in situations where a weak director, incredibly bad screenplay or serious problems on the set render any hope at a legitimate result unsubstantial. And hamming it up does occasionally create a jewel out of dung and straw. But for this thing to work, a substantial majority of the cast must be in on it, and work well together. These kids don't work well together in any case, and Bradford hams it up on the solo. It comes out miserably. Yes, I am aware that Internet "irony" and "sarcasm" are these particular things, sure, sure. You'll have to be aware that while the Internet may well consider itself the United States of media, that approach didn't work for the original United States, either. It doesn't work here, film doesn't care what works online, it never heard of online, it's a different jurisdiction. Play by the book or go to jail, geddit ?

The better parts are the women. Pratt's character is supposedly the prissy blonde girl, but she's admirably balanced : on one hand she lets her mom have some space, on the other hand she hushes her out when hushing her out's called for. Dominczyk's character is a "whore" (stripper, really) that manages to deliver the sane part of feminism convincingly, and to everyone's benefit. They're both pretty, they both play acceptably given their age and the environment, it's unfortunate they ended up here but they're still young enough to recover.

Matt Czuchry is okay, but he's more of a doggy follower than the alpha velociraptor the screenplay seems to imply. This contrast between the actor's style and projection and the screenplay's apparent expectation could have worked to great humorous effects, if the narcisiac pushing the entire project had been ejected and kept off the set. Unfortunately as-is it only works to dizzy and distract, and in the end misses out on any possible chance to have signified something.ii

There's the occasional chuckle-inducing retort. I don't remember any of them, but as a general rule of thumb, you got about even odds every time a character says something that's shorter than six words. Which, all told, comes to about a dozen opportunities in an hour and three quarters.

I've never seen a cinematic project so badly hurt by its own writing since the days I was fucking Romania's starlets, roughly a decade ago.

———I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, 2009, by Bob Gosse with Keri Lynn Pratt, Marika Dominczyk. [↩]Incidentally, I imagine Tucker Max was heavily involved in the selection of his "face" in the film, something that's universally a bad idea but particularly so here. He ended up with a kid that superficially looks like him on a physical level while also being someone he could get along with, which means, exactly wrong for the role.

More generally, this earthen, pedestrian, methodical but uncomprehending "I'm a peasant and I work the soil" approach to life and everything displayed in this corner is in fact very descriptive of Tucker Max as a whole. His idea of a premise for a funny story is, "guy meets girl". But that's kinda banal, so he figures it should suffer an alteration, "to make it even funnier". What could be changed ? Not the guy, as the guy is "him", so that leaves the girl. Ok, suppose the girl was a midget. Then the banal storyline ("And I gave her my best 'I want to fuck you right now' face and she gave me the cutest 'Oh baby you make me all wet inside' face") can be sed -i 's/''d into "And I gave her my best 'I want to fuck you right now' face and she gave me the cutest 'Oh my spine hurts so bad' face". Because she's a midget, you see ? It's funny, I tell you. Laugh, damn you!

It's not as much that he has no talent for writing, it's more that a) I could write a script that could outwrite him and it'd take me less time than it'd take him to get drunk and b) he wouldn't know talent if it fell on his head.

I have no doubt that some horses make fine Senators, as the esteemed Senate proves to us on a daily basis. This nevertheless does not mean that some other horses don't belong working the fields. They do. This is one such horse. [↩]

« The night of four shows

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Category: Trilematograf

Sunday, 19 October, Year 6 d.Tr.

I don't know what the hell I said. I gave her an ultimatum and there's nothing I can do. It's a machine. The little light is blinking right now: 'Come and listen to the idiot. Hey everybody, the idiot's on!'

mircea_popescu

It follows that he cannot know that certain people at certain times do not understand in Parry-or Eliza-like ways. That is to say, he has no way of knowing that we do not ourselves sometimes function by means of "clever tricks".

Actually, I will go as far as to say that it is always certainly the case understanding happens through "clever tricks". It was NEVER the case anyone ever understood anything whatsoever in any case at any point in human history, [self]delusion to the contrary notwithstanding.

asciilifeform He is thinking of another variety of clever tricks.

mircea_popescu Is he ?

asciilifeform The mechanized stage magic of Eliza.i

mircea_popescu That's exactly what I mean.

asciilifeform I'd have to disagree that 'understand' is a null-word.

mircea_popescu Go right ahead, but what else do you bring ?

asciilifeform People have never been seen to, e.g., rotate themselves in the 4th dimension and end up rechiralled. But they do occasionally understand things. At least, beyond 'Eliza' level.

mircea_popescu Let us not discuss this in terms of understanding, something we care about. Let us instead discuss in terms of love, something we don't care about.

asciilifeform ?

mircea_popescu So : your idea of understanding would be in fact "transformative love". Ie, it'd give you the ability to turn, if not marble into virgin, at least whore into housewife. Dja think this was ever displayed ?

* asciilifeform must confess he is rather puzzled at this point.

mircea_popescu Whyssat ?

asciilifeform Well, if I had to give an example of 'understanding', involving 'transformation', I'd offer the transformation of pebbles on a beach (original 'calculation') into well, calculation, and mathematics, and, ..., nukes. Wide net, but somewhere in it there flops a fish, 'understanding'.

mircea_popescu Nah.

undata One of you is using understand in a much stricter sense than the other.

mircea_popescu The sort of understanding you propose is a relationship between mind and object that's transcendental. The ready comparison is the supposed transcendental relation between man and woman. Outside of this, all that's left is Eliza-understanding. And, obviously, fucking. Ie, a manipulation of the subject according to the rules of the reality it inhabits. What Eliza does, what no strings attached sex is. If you recognise a naive romanticism in one field, the other should also be obvious. All women are whores and all thinkers are Eliza. The ability of whores to distinguish themselves from "those cheap streetwalkers" is not that important globally, having more to do with ego and stress than anything.

asciilifeform All microscopes are hammers.

nubbins` All scarves are farts.

undata "Modeling is by definition incomplete" ?

mircea_popescu undata if you will. asciilifeform yes, essentially, which is why the microscope hammer thing never persuaded me.ii

* asciilifeform is firmly persuaded that every microscope is a hammer. However, not every hammer is a microscope, demonstrably. And therein lies the boojum.

mircea_popescu Not every hammer is a microscope to you. Not every whore is a partner you'd entertain, either, but that has little to do with the principles involved.iii

asciilifeform The principle involved, i must confess, escapes me. And I'm not altogether certain that I'd profit from grasping it.

mircea_popescu Let's approach on a different tack. What is the method through which I could write software that distinguishes between actual science and global-warming-science ?

asciilifeform Even the elixir of distinguishing cat from dog by mechanical means, so far escapes programmers. Who would even dare to ask about sciences.

mircea_popescu Well, the reason might be that there couldn't be such a thing. There's nothing that makes "good science" better than a pile of shanonized papers. You can test them, of course, but this is practically speaking aesthetics.

asciilifeform Aha I see where this is going.

mircea_popescu So, yeah. All thinkers are Eliza, the distinguishing among Elizas, like among whores, purely an application of one's own aesthetic preference.

nubbins` No true Eliza would offer such an argument.

asciilifeform 'Don't worry, sizzling in electric chair, Ohm's law is a lie'. The difference between the flesh before and after, 'aesthetic preference'.

mircea_popescu Are you a current dreaming it's frying a butterfly etc.

nubbins` And somewhere, somewhen, the sound of keys clacking on a keyboard was heard.

asciilifeform l0l

nubbins` ha

undata "Gravity" holds the Moon to the Earth.

nubbins` _/ -_- _/

mircea_popescu undata the argument mind, isn't that some Eliza-trees don't make much better looking reality-clothes than others. The argument is whether they're actually different. If one function returns rnd(0,15) and the other rnd(20,42) it is easy to establish which returns the larger number, but that doesn't mean they're not the same damned function.

asciilifeform Afaik Western traditions of sophistry are not even the most die-hard adherents of this idea. In some variants of Islam, they actually believe that 'if the circuit works, it was will of Allah' and nothing more.iv And today perhaps the allmighty favours Ohm's law, tomorrow - not.v

mircea_popescu And the brain is in no sense and to no degree a logic processing machine. Nor, ironically, are actual logic processing machines all that intelligent. To us at least.

nubbins` "[...] the argument is whether they're actually different."

Saturday, 15 November, Year 6 d.Tr.

How to make money on the Internet while pretending you know what you're talking about and accumulating a legion of mindless followers - for fun and profit!

herbijudlestoids Hope I can show you some cool stuff when the sample size gets bigger.

Vexual Trade it herbi.

mircea_popescu Night all.

kakobrekla Make a blog, post results. I hear that is what people do. Nite mp.

mike_c Sell predictions. Tell half of them it's going up, the other half it's going down. Next week, split your list again and repeat. Works for sports touts.

herbijudlestoids I might buy a couple of bitcoins and bet on just dice...maybe...kind of got my heart set on buying as much MPOE as I can.

mike_c That would be better than betting on jd.

herbijudlestoids Best mates here, peace.

* Now talking on #bitcoin-assets

mircea_popescu Wow mike_c knows how the sport tout biz works. Props.i Incidentally, this is how idiots like Keiser work, too. All the obscure web "financial experts", or bet picking experts, or so on work on the same business model :

You put up a site with some content and drive a ton of traffic to it. Google ads, whatever. This is your start-up cost.

You gather leads for your "special picks" list, which you contact via email. This is your stable of suckers.

You split them in equal halves and give one half one pick, the other half the opposite.ii Now you have 50% of the list worth of people who think you must be on to something.

You subdivide both divisions and feed them a new pick on a new event. Now you have : a list of people who know you fucked up twice, this you discard ; two lists of people who think you got one out of two, these you merge ; a most valuable list of idiots who think you got 2 out of 2. That latter list is your money maker. The merged list is where you mine for idiots.

This simple scheme allows you to actually extract a profit out of the stupidity of people who are too stupid to realise just how stupid they are. It's also how government works, without exception, everywhere.

ThickAsThieves Now swap lists for Financial News Networks.

mircea_popescu "all the obscure web "financial experts", or bet picking experts" :)

ThickAsThieves Surely someone has done a study how often TV picks work out to be worse than flipping a coin.

mircea_popescu Surely nobody has bothered. Because the scammors can pay, and can scream, whereas the idiots can't pay, and can scream too, and they will scream against their own interest and in support of the scammors. You don't get a MPOE-PR in all venues. In fact, she's so novel that people that guide themselves by "what I've seen"iii generally imagine she's a poor PR.

ThickAsThieves It's also funny that this is just economics, nothing sinister. Having MPOE-PR on TV just wouldnt be as profitable ad Mad Money.

mircea_popescu Well, science employed to dominate idiocy is the idiot's definition of sinister.

In general, a poor understanding of sampling, biases and other matters statistical is naught but an invitation to having your pocket picked while you're busy thanking the picker for doing you the favour and praising him to others for having taken the time.

Other than that, the direct results of this thing and its bretheren are that recommendations from nobody in particular are worth nothing at all ; that anonymous entities are not allowed to voice an opinion, nor are secret bloggers worth any credenceiv ; that social proof is meaningless in any online conversation (yes, that means nobody cares how many followers/likes/whatever you have) ; that voting is dead as a legitimizing device (not just culturally, but in politics too - you can no longer claim you represent Jormania on the grounds of having received X votes from random Jormanians) and plenty of other such goodies.

Welcome to the post-post-structuralism the Internet generated. I hope you'll like it here.

———The more models you know, the better chances you are to find one that works in any circumstance you may find yourself. Think of it like it were shoes : the more shoes a woman has, the more likely she is to not be able to go anywhere because she has no shoes. Erm... Ok, maybe that wasn't the best example I ever gave, but I still trust you get the idea. [↩]Obviously if multiple variants are possible you can multi-split your list. For instance if an event has possible results A, B, C and D with chances 50%, 30%, 10% and 10% respectively, you'd be well advised to split your list into 4 bits in the same proportion and feed them the respective answers (so 50% of your suckers get A, 10% C etc). This can result in lists of people who think you're God, because you picked the right 10% event X times in a row, and all it cost you is whatever aggregating suckers costs - which since the Internet isn't really much at all. [↩]As opposed to trying to understand what's happening. Simple pattern recognition, like most celenterates. [↩]For all you know he's running fifty of the damned things, on the same model. Conde Nast for instance is trying exactly this, and has been for the past decade. Among plenty others. [↩]

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Category: 3 ani experienta

Sunday, 02 February, Year 6 d.Tr.

How to live to be happy

By far the most practically important aspect of the structuredi sexual relationship is orgasm control.

There are undeniable biological differences between male and female sexual organsii, which create in turn differences in the practice. From what I theoretically understand, the pivot of male orgasm control is the cock cage, an attachable instrument making erection impossible and manipulation difficult. The unreleased male is, from what I hear from they in the know, pliable, obedient, eager to please and generally a lot less inclined to engage in the behaviours and thought processes that'd amount to greatness in the case of a smarter, better man but instead coallesce into an insufferable pile of obnoxious in most cases.

As far as women are concerned, however, orgasm control is not mere orgasm denial - either because nature itself denies them sufficiently or because on the contrary, nature has better equipped them to come - but orgasm training. Generally speaking, any cunt you bother fucking should be able to come, by itself, on your command. Most healthy young women have already spent sufficient time playing with themselves to be able to achieve this by rubbing their own clit, and if the sprawled nude beauty before you hasn't that's either because you take them too young or because you take them too stupid. Either of these is easily adjusted, so adjust accordingly.

That the woman should be able to come when you tell her to is a given ; whether that should also carry the strengthening rider "and only when you tell her to" is an open question. It does create slightly needier, more desperate for attention women, which may be just the ticket if you're engaged in removing the misplaced delusions of independence and supremacy out of a miseducated teenager. Conversely it is exactly the bane of the harem, god help you in the spraying midst of half a dozen huries that can only come when you tell them to.

Be that as it may : the source of all unhappiness in this life is trying to do things yourself in order for results to appear in others. Engage in no such nonsense : if you want the woman to come, have her make herself come, do not try to make her come yourself. This is how to live to be happy.

Accept no substitutes!

———A structured relationship is that relationship in which both (all) parties explicitly agree to a specified one's preeminence in all matters. Whether the specified one be a woman or a man, it must absolutely be a single individual, as per the discussion of sovereignity (which this exactly is, within the relationship in question).

Whether the relationship is sexual or not matters little, irrespective of one's definition of sexuality. For instance any sane definition of sexuality will place lesbian relationships in the "foreplay relationship" rubric, because girls rubbing together can't possibly be sex - but nevertheless the same discussion applies.

Whether the person in charge is the same on all types of decisions the relationship may encounter, such as is the case in the TPE relationship, making the person in charge the master and the others the slaves ; or whether the person in charge varies by type of decision, making the relationship merely a functional marriage, exploring expedition or whatever else (truly, no relationship can ever function or has ever functioned on a different premise) again matters little, the relationship is still structured.

The unstructured (or destructured ?) relationship is one in which no explicit agreement exists as to who is in charge, neither on a case by case basis nor in general. All the parties are stuck re-enacting the ancient problem of communication in socialism. This unfortunate arrangement is obviously the result of either mental slowness, mental laziness or a combination thereof, much like not knowing where your cups go is either because you're mentally retarded to the point of being barely able to function, or because you couldn't give less of a shit about cups. You do however know where your car keys go, and where your wallet goes, and where your title deed goes, provided you're together enough to have car keys, wallets and title deeds in the first place.

Unsurprisingly then, the unstructured relationship myth rhymes with the other avatars of the socialist mind - that unmistakeable manifestation of the marriage between stupid and lazy. Among its numerous fairy tales (like the welfare state that works, and the unelected bureaucrat who knows how to spend resources better than their actual owners, and the equality of all people, animals & things and so on ad nauseam) the unstructured relationship finds its proper home. Then people stand around, unable to decide where to go for dinner, and the brighter of them wonder whether there's not a better way. Yes, there is a better way. Structure your relationships. All of them. [↩]Without getting into all the details, the penis naturally works towards ejaculation, which is the physical mark of the male orgasm (even if non orgasmic ejaculations are possible, should the male be well tied down and a trained hand in charge of his penis), and is flanked by refractory intervals : before ejaculation, an interval during which ejaculation is unavoidable, after ejaculation, an interval during which arousal is impossible (and often stimulation painful) ; whereas the vagina can be used perfectly well without orgasm, and can orgasm without actually being used. [↩]

« The problem of ideal social systems - reprint

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Category: Lifespiel

Sunday, 02 November, Year 6 d.Tr.

How to have fun as an intelligent person

This post is many layers of meta deep. Let us begin.

The first layer of fun is to examine things, and criticise them. Like so :

Neil: mircea_popescu: MisterE no actually, betting both sides is the way to play.

Tuesday, 25 March, Year 6 d.Tr.

How to find out if you're stupid in one easy step

Let me show you an article doesn't need to be long to be good.

The United States Government, like any government of any place afore known or in the future to be devised, can strictly, exclusively and only regulate the conduct of its citizens. That is absolutely all.

No government can (or indeed may, but that's a different discussion) regulate the conduct of sovereigns, of aliens, nor the workings of reality. So yes, when you go

I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands,

what you are in fact saying is

I ask that my conduct be regulated by some clueless bureaucrat somewhere, and I submit to the unseemly results thereof afore the fact.

Irrespective of what you think you might be saying, this is the substance, the effect and the presumable intent of your words.

And now let's offer what the title promised. Have you ever at any point used the phrase "regulate Bitcoin" or some equivalent ? Well, there you goi. You're stupid.

End of story really. Now go accept the DMV into your life or whatever it is you sickies do.

———The best indicator of stupidity is confusion among unlike items. A guy that lives in a village where milking cows has been an activity forever and proceeds to try and milk a goat is a scientist. A guy that similarly tries to milk a squirrel is similarly a scientist. One's successful and the other isn't, but this makes in the end little difference, for all we know it could have come out the other way.

The guy who attempts to milk weeping willows however... that guy's just plain old stupid. That's all. [↩]

« Why Dogecoin is a scam, why the people pushing it are assholes, why Business Insider is a contemptible piece of shit, why anyone who ever worked for it will be dancing in the street for nickels and why Kevin Rose is a fuckwit. Plus other considerations.

On periphery and the peripheral. Ephemerides are also mentioned. »

Category: Gandesc, deci gandesc

Friday, 07 February, Year 6 d.Tr.

How many years you got ?

decimation Much like Mr. Yarvin's Goldenstein : unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2008/02/return-to-castle-goldenstein-gold.html Except Bitcoinstein has a much brighter looking future than Goldenstein

mircea_popescu Now you're making me read more of that stuff. It always pisses me off, because the kid is clearly bright and yet clearly wilfully stupid. Anyway.

decimation Sorry. He has his good moments, but I agree he is a spaz. Bitcoin is immune from legal tender law. Unlike fiat, no bank will be able to force depositors to accept bank credit (in bitcoin) as fungible with actual Bitcoin.

mircea_popescu Well this article does a lot to explain his psychological drive in being so bitcoin-butthurt. Anyway, the arguments he makes are mostly sound and generally banal, it just so happens they didnt work out for gold. The reason they didn't is that gold has a negative mining return. What I mean by this is : Romania sits on a mountain of gold. It was the main source of minable gold for the Roman empire, when they finally conquered Dacia the local king's treasury financed 100 days of straight games with plenty left over. The austrians mined it, Transylvania still sits on a pile of untold millions of ounces. About ten years ago a mining group formed to cut out one certain mountain, convert it to gold (and silver, palladium, tungsten, etc etc) and pay the government 20% (of the gold only). They've been trying to push this deal for the entire decade, hiring PRi, doing TV shows, paying the idiots living there fiddy bux a head to go "omfg we're dying of hunger", the works. It never worked, to date, it'll never work to any date. My objection, and i'm confident the thing that sunk the project (not for it being mine, but for it being sound) is simply this : why bother with all the digging, all the cyanide ponds, all that, just to get gold out fo the ground, move it 500 miles south west and then... dig a hole, put it there and guard it ? Just put up a sign, National Bank of Romania Gold Vault, Rosia Montana Division on that mountain and be don with it. It's... just as gold, and just as buried, where it stands.ii In short : a land deed on a gold field is as good as gold itself. You have a negative incentive to actually mine it, whereas you have a positive incentive to mine Bitcoin.

decimation Indeed. Gold in the ground as ore is just as good as gold in the ground as a bar.

mircea_popescu So the driving force isn't Bitcoin's immunity to the legal tender law, it's Bitcoin's immunity to the real estate law. Bitcoin is immune to human agency, which means you can't pass a law to hinder its fungibility. More importantly tho... there's no rational way to represent property in yet-unmined blocks. This is so obvious it escapes notice, yet it's the more important factor.

decimation Right, unlike anything physical, unmined Bitcoin is utterly useless.

mircea_popescu Right-o. Precisely BECAUSE it is in no way physical. Or in other words, the reasons all the "experts" in old-fiat crap give for Bitcoin's [eventual] failure are in fact its points of strength. This strengthening the chief pillar of all hermeneutics.iii

decimation Right, and all the game-theory arguments about savings is really just restating Gresham's law. Except bitcoin is harder than gold. Goldenstein < Bitcoinstein.

mircea_popescu Indeed. He does get a lot of mileage in wordcount out of restating the banal, but he does so in a pleasant form and this is a good thing, you never know which exact word combo is some guy's aha moment. Nevertheless, it's still just as much dicking about with shit we know.

decimation I find the Goldbug's (enemies of the fiatists) objections to Bitcoin to be amusing, because they complain about the lack of physicality. Whereas that's bitcoin's greatest strength, as you point out.

mircea_popescu Well in their defense, they just rooted for the correct principle their whole life, fighting valliantly for their sanity as an oppressed minority. To have, within their lifetime, their cookie stolen by a newcomer...

ThickAsThieves Old Republicans.

mircea_popescu Pretty much. Imagine if after having pampered Jesus for 30 years, the entire thing was suddenly taken over by baby Allah. Fucking religious war. So I can understand why a 50 something guy with a bunch of gold bars and no functioning linux distro is fucking pissed at Bitcoin. And tbh I kinda feel for him. Sadly tho, they also can't be helped, because... as TAT points out, "The problem here is that you have no mechanism with which to do so, and that because language is not employed for the purpose you imagine it employed."

ThickAsThieves And why in 15 years Bitcoiners will be crying over some newer thing.

Duffer1 I'd be surprised if it took 15 years.

ThickAsThieves Me too.

decimation At least James Turk is smart enough to recognize a good thing when he sees it. Hopefully he will get his Bitcoin exchange running at some point.

ThickAsThieves language exists so we dont have to hit each other and grunt to communicate, just more economy at work. Probably mostly cuz female facial expressions were never well-interpreted either.

mircea_popescu Possibly, though I find female facials easier to read than males'. I suspect the reason is people tend to spend more time looking at other bits, and so lack practice.

ThickAsThieves I always considered myself instinctively above average with body language.

mircea_popescu So does everyone else.

ThickAsThieves Yeah but me more so!

mircea_popescu Those with good reason for good reason, those without good reason for D-K reasons. Anyway. It's not clear at the moment that an improvement on Bitcoin is in principle possible. This is true of gold, too, at least up to about 2005 or so. It did take > 2k years with gold so maybe 15 is short. Maybe we have 250 years.

———Which pretty much sunk a number of aspiring "internet celebrities" into the muck, incidentally. 1, 2. [↩]Moreso, actually, in that the expense of mining it acts as insurance against it being stolen. Basically, the equivalent for not mining your gold would be NRFB. Improves the value of any collector's item significantly. [↩]The observation that as a novice reading a text, it will readily separate before your very eyes in the banal and the insane. As you approach actually understanding it however, that which used to appear banal regains its extraordinary (which is why it was put there) and that which used to appear insane regains its banality (which idem). This not exactly unrelated to the Seinfeld problem, which really is just a zoomed-in formulation of the same principle. [↩]

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Category: Bitcoin

Sunday, 02 February, Year 6 d.Tr.

Hitler MP

For a little context, things went like this :

DrahogErusiel: portraits, commissions, and original paintings by Maureen Gubia

MPOE-PR: MP sez "Have them do one of me as Hitler." Can you do that? "Let them go wild with it," he says.

Then the deal was arranged, as such (with SaltySpitoon as an escrow agent) :

Ok, so the deal is: SaltySpitoon gives me an addy, I'll send 0.505 BTC there (incl his fee), which he confirms. I'll send you a mailing address, at which a hand painted MP-as-Hitler piece of artwork is delivered before April 1st, 2014, as otherwise specified in this thread. Upon receipt I notify teh Spitoon, so he can release the escrow. Upon nonreceipt I idem notify teh Spitoon, so he can release the escrow. Except in case of a dispute you're barred from posting pictures of the thing, because MP wants to do it himself.

Also, good call on making your WoT, I guess you'll be getting your first rating from MP himself.

The thing showed up as normal postage yesterday, April 1st, and I picked it up earlier today, April 2nd. Day or two late but it seriously makes no difference (and from what I hear from the artist, it took about a month in transit - go post office go!). Here's a shot :

This works as authorisation to pay the BTC held in escrow for this job. Thanks everyone!

« S.NSA, March 2014 Statement

Obama-Clinton, or the end of the republic. »

Category: Oda Superbiei

Wednesday, 02 April, Year 6 d.Tr.

Hi, this is the article title.

It all started as all good things start these days : on irc, written by people who aren't me. How do you like that ! Oh, you're still dealing with the title... well, what can I tell you, forget about it. One sometimes runs out of titles.

Anyway, check this beauty out :

asciilifeform: The 'time microscope' thing is typical of aging inventors who, by virtue of being cut off from competent peers (either by having none alive, or being on the wrong side of a jail of one kind or another) end up flying off untethered into strange. E.g : Tesla's 'ghost telegraph'.

kakobrekla: I guess misconceptions add up over the years.i

asciilifeform: I don't think this is it at all.ii Rather, this is more like the folks who send binders full of crackpot proofs to maths profs today. If you're unable to interact with an actual community of your peers, you tend to go way off in some strange direction. Sometimes, with interesting results, more often - with none. Another thing about aging inventors - when they become anxious to carry out a 'last hurrah,' the mechanism in their heads that is needed to dis-invest in an unproductive line of inquiry breaks. 'This ghost telegraph! It'll be what I'm remembered for! just needs a little tweaking.'iii

kakobrekla: Heh, good points.

cazalla: What's a ghost telegraph? I cannot find anything on google.iv

asciilifeform: E.g.

asciilifeform: Another similar, but distinct phenomenon is: people who regularly have ideas usually have fat notebooks full of strange. When these get published posthumously, quite a bit of strange is revealed.v E.g. Karl Friedrich Gauss had a big fat binder that contained, among other things, both types of non-euclidean geometry. But it also had a good bit of crap.vi Hard to find good material about an inventor's 'dwarf star' phase, because the real demented folks inevitably pick it up and add flourishes of their own. Some 'idea people' don't have these 'coffin liner' binders, they just publish everything.vii And tend to end badly.viii Oliver Heaviside's notebooks, it is said, stoked a furnace for many years. (Heaviside, the fellow who turned maxwell's equations from 23 in about that many unknowns, into the 4 that we learn in school, and coughed up terms like 'impedance'.) Re: invention, for the impatient: the greatest heroes who ever lived, who none of us are fit even to be beheaded by, had terrible signal-to-noise ratios, because that's simply how it works. The most one can hope for is to get one or two major ideas 'out'.

cazalla: I wonder if people are testing his hypothesis.

asciilifeform: How? See MP's little piece about 'art'.

cazalla: In the binders full of crackpot writings as you mentioned.

asciilifeform: If you dive into the binders, you're almost certainly doomed to be lost in the noise. If you don't believe this, get thee to a dusty book store and buy bucky fuller's 'synergetics' I and II. That was his coffin notebook that some lost soul printed up. More or less unreadable - as they tend to be, using 1000s of terms known only to the dead man.ix After all, he was writing for his own self.x You can try to read this stuff and make sense of it, but more often than not you'll just be 'rorschaching'xi your own mind. There are so many blanks for imagination to fill in, you'll mostly be reading the contents of the blanks.

So now there you go. To quote Art Vandalay, this is the true spirit of Christmas : people being helped by people other than me.

———This is a perfectly valid approach to explaining the type of insanity. To understand, consider the problem of dead reckoning :

If you start at 0,0 and your job is to get to 7,3 then pathfinding is an easy enough task : you need to make 7 X's and 3 Y's, in whichever order. So if at some ulterior point you find yourself at 9,1 you'll know you overdid X and now need to double back. But what if you don't have the ability to "find yourself" ? What if all you have is "turn right 44 degrees and go one day, then turn left 18 degrees and go three days , then turn right 55 degrees..." etc ? You'll be in for a world of hurt, because after a coupla weeks of this treatment you're more likely to find yourself just about to enter your mother, never mind your intended destination. (For a very pleasant in depth discussion of the topic see Nick Szabo's Dead reckoning and the exploration explosion.)

What's worse for ideal problems (as opposed to real problems) is that while you're (at least in principle) equally likely to err on the left as on the right with the degrees business, you're not equally likely to err on the left as on the right in politics, for instance. Find me the blue voter that's just as likely to go "well I suppose there is some merit in randomly discharging your weapon while hooting" as "well I suppose if it is for their own good, better hop the kids up on pharma". Or, whatever, the red voter that's as liable to come out with "well I guess taking it in the butt isn't the end of the world" as "well I guess if the girl wants to have an abortion it's her right, and not the doctor's business to oppress her with his notions as to whether she is or isn't pregnant". And politics is just the tip of the iceberg, you think it's a notoriously contentious topic because it lets you. It's something your brain feels ready to consider. Just how fucking stupid you are, for instance, isn't something you're at all prepared to even consider, which is why it's such an uncontentious topic : you're very very smart and clever and nice and good, and so is everyone you meet. O wait, no, scratch that one, considering just how fucking stupid they are poses no serious dangers of bruising your own ego. [↩]Amusingly, yes he does. [↩]You know that your parents are senile once they stop saying "whoa, that thing I came up was a stupid idea". And that's exactly how your kids will know you're senile too, in due time. [↩]Talk about asking the right way eh ? [↩]Amusingly, one'd think the same is the case with Newton, who spent more of his time trying to figure out alchemy and theology than the falling of the bodies and calculus, especially if that one were a "realities" mind (as opposed to "humanities"). Nevertheless, I hold this to be untrue : the man's nonscientific writings are quite fucking brilliant.

In any event : the curated view of the history of science (and generally, ideas) as presented by textbooks is significantly biased in that it systematically leaves out parts of reality (the very definition of curation, hey). Consequently people who grow up on nothing but manuals develop some pretty fucking strange ideas of how inventor papers are supposed to look (symptomatic for this problem, the general impression that photocopies of such papers sometimes included for "historical flavour" are kind-of unkempt, badly organised and generally putting to shame the neatly delineated textbook discussion.

You'd think this is only interesting to ninnies that are inexplicably preoccupied with a correct and complete preservation of the history (of ideas), until you happen to realise that the reason your middle class, well mannered, well brought up miss is hooting over Kanye West is exactly of this nature. Gotta let the girl get dirty, and preferably starting at a very young age. It'll be a lot easier for the both of you this way. [↩]As far as anyone knows.

No, seriously, this is important. [↩]You know, like I do. [↩]Fuck you. [↩]And you thought you had it hard with Trilema's 100s. You have it easy, buster. [↩]And so should you. [↩]Ie, giving yourself ink tests, which is to say : whatever output your brain comes up with "from reading" those things has more to do with your brain than the things. Which is why good education starts with getting the kids to SHUT THE FUCK UP because NOBODY CARES WHAT THEY "THINK" and they, personally, are worthless shitbags. (Here's a great example of the process actually working out in practice.) It may ruin their "self esteem", but self esteem is roughly unrelated to anything of import. It may, however (especially when solidly backed into a wide array of hickory switches prominently displayed on the walls) get their stupid brain to stop talking long enough for them to actually have a chance at understanding what's going on.

And to make your pleasure : the stupid way is typically feminine, it's what gossip is all about - two girls enjoying a half an hour together each talking her own narrative undisturbed. Undisturbed by the anthropocentric paternalistic oppressive and chauvinistic culture invented by men to... reign in... idiots... which is to say... women and children. True story. [↩]

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Category: Gandesc, deci gandesc

Thursday, 06 March, Year 6 d.Tr.

Hey, stupid women ? We need to talk. Smart women don't want to be with you anymore.

First, let's consider this nonsense :

So, what would you say happened here ? My own call would be that someone, ie miscreanity, misread, misunderstood and misrepresented what was happening around her. This is usuallyi a symptom of that someone (ie miscreanity) being stupid. Because that's what happens when you're stupid : your brain doesn't work properly, and so finds itself unable to read, understand and correctly represent what's going on. So you end up with misrepresentations that other people are now stuck either ignoring or correcting, in their own time and at their own expense.

This is quite problematic, especially because other people, very immoral and outright evil people have noticed a chief property of the stupid, that markedly distinguishes them from all other disabled people : they're also in denial about it. This denial is a somewhat common occurrence in the early stages of grief, especially for people with otherwise small, sensory disabilities. It's not common for someone missing a leg to pretend like they don't - gravity takes care of that in short order - but blind people for instance, especially in their early blindness days may well refuse to accept they're blind and so continue with "normal" activities that are suddenly very dangerous for them. Like you know, driving a car. Or people going deaf, pretending - out of sheer vanity, mind you - that they can hear just fine, and then proceeding as if nothing they failed to hear was in fact said so they can get "unfairly" canned.

This common sin of humanity called vanity creates then an easily exploitable niche for the contemptible, which is why talking heads sprout such nonsense with such panache. It generally takes more effort to fix the misrepresentations and misapprehensions filling the average stupid head in denial about its stupidity than it took to put them there in the first place, and definitely more effort than anyone's willing to expend - because people may enjoy and seek out the company of the blind, or of the lame, yet nobody will ever enjoy the company of the stupid, and quite opposite to seeking it out, they'll spend quite a bit to try and avoid it.

However, since every advertising dollar is equal to every other advertising dollar (a sad state of affairs which is quite co-morbid with the current collapse of Western society) and since the stupid are both abundant and easily accessible for the contemptible, simple market forces push the production of ideal objects towards the lower bound. You can try to spend your time and wrack your brains to come up with a good joke, and make good tv programs. Some people will get it, and appreciate it. Or instead, you could spend infinitely less time and no brain power to come up with the sort of shit miscreanity would lap up. You'll get trashed to hell on Trilema if MP feels like it that day, which isn't really all that often, which means you'll be mostly scott free, which means you can continue to pretend like you're part of human society. You're not, you're worse than a whore, but just as long as nobody knows it's all ok, right ? And then you kiss your kids in the morning and go to "work". No shame, just self esteem.

Anyway, all this happened yesterday. Meanwhile miscreanity, the stupid in question, had enough time to sleep off her hangover, become undistracted, focus and so on. What happens today ?

The first paragraph is just a rehash of the original stupidity. It is there so the stupid (ie, miscreanity) can give herself the delusional ego boost of "coherence". She... "thinks", in that old cumrag that is apparently expected to function as her brain, that repeating something stupid over time actually does something for you. Something positive, I mean.

The second paragraph is novel delusional ideation, and quite amusing. The very fucking point of the bet is to allow people who agree with the notion that Bitcoin will outperform Berkshire as an investment to confront the people who disagree with same. That's the controversy before BitBet, that's what stakes are taken on, that's the whole fucking point. Miss Stupidity, however, knows better.

And the third paragraph is pay dirt.ii But before we go into that, let's take a little detour :

So now, what happened there ? Some chick had a falling out with some dude. Oh noes, the horror, the incredibilosity, the "omaigawd-this-has-never-happened-before-since-the-dawn-of-time" factor involved. We're in uncharted territory over here folks, mind your step.

Nevertheless, what does the stupid woman in question tend to misrepresent the situation as ? O, you've guessed it, a problem of all women. And the contemptible are quick to jump on the opportunity, because they know that's the niche, currently. That's what the fucktards will pay their bitcents for. That's their pay dirt.

Has miscreanity been stupid and reacted by trying to pass her very own, very personal stupidity as "a broader problem", preferably of "a group" that's preferably not well identified other than by external, superficial factors ?iii Has Horvath been stupid and reacted by trying to pass her stupidity as "a broader problem" ? And equally of a group, equally unidentified except for superficial factors, right ?

So there you have it, the ancient, kindergartenesque belief that if "all the kids" or at least "most of the kids" do it then it can't really be so bad. Miscreanity couldn't have been stupid, she was just... you know, thinking of the children.iv This is the fundamental drive of the unthinking, to seek a group, which is exactly what makes socialism, in all its forms and "different" implementations the exclusive domain of the stupid.

This is why feminism has gone from respectable to laughably ridiculous and contemptible over a couple of generations : once stupid women start trying to offload their own stupid on womanhood, and once the Leahs of this world catch on and latch on, the whole thing's in danger.

So, dear stupid women : you're not feminists, and you're not fighting for the cause, and you're not even women. Because being stupid is this all-consuming, all-devouring thing, she who is stupid can be nothing else. She can't be a mother, she can only be stupid. She can't be a cab driver or a waitress or a banker - she can only be stupid. Whatever clothes she dons, whatever labels she tries to paste on, the stench of stupid reaches through and marks her, just as in the case of garbage. You don't care, when confronted with a pile of garbage, whether it's garbage that aspires to be a steak, or computer parts, or wet rags or anything else. It's all equally garbage, and you don't want any part of it. That's exactly, but I tell you exactly how it goes for stupid, too. Once you're stupid you can be nothing else.

And this is not because "the men" or "chauvinists" or piggies or Chtulhu "conspire" to prevent you from being what you aspire to be, or doing what you aspire to do, or shut you out, or ignore you and look right past you and move right past you. It has nothing to do with them. It has everything to do with you. You're the one ignoring, shutting out, looking right past your own stupidity.

That part is the part that's all about you. The one part you try to misrepresent as being about them, about the world, that's the part that's all about you. How stupid you are, how bad you stink, how unsufferable company you are - that's about you. What's not about you is everything else, that you keep trying to misrepresent as being about you. It's not. That part is about the world.

So now that we're clear : smart women don't want to be with you anymore. They never did, they never will. Get lost.

PS. Miscreanity is not a girl, she's just some dude named Ramon. Which is exactly my point.

———Not always. People who are tired, or under the influence of mind altering substances, or just distracted, or under a bogonic spell, or on and on, can actually do or say stupid things. The ready way to distinguish between someone who is stupid and does stupid things on one hand and someone who is not stupid but merely did something stupid is in their reaction to commentary. The actually stupid insist. [↩]I wouldn't really have even bothered with this article if there wasn't a third paragraph there, because contrary to what the stupid imagine, I don't use them for dissection material in order to hurt and humiliate them.

It's not about them, I couldn't care less about them, they're not human as far as I'm concerned. Just like I'm all in favour of butchering a million or a billion, or however many cute fluffy bunny rabbits, be it for making medicine, or cosmetics, or music out of their cries of agony, or whatever else - I'm equally in favour of torturing, mistreating and abusing the stupid in absolutely any way. That's what they're here for, after all, and if that's what gets you off by all means, who cares.

It doesn't really do anything for me, but nevertheless I will dissect them, with no regard to their own whatever bullshit, if I figure I could use the parts to teach, illuminate and instruct people about stupidity. And so here we go, check out the spots on Miscreanity's liver. [↩]I can almost hear Nixon's "silent majority" over here agreeing with him. What's the criteria to be on Nixon's side ? Why, you just need to be, he's co-opted you on that basis. Cool deal, huh ? [↩]Which is how girls end up gangraped in school : the kids figure that if all the other kids are doing it then it's okay. [↩]

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Interacting with fiat institutions, a guide »

Category: Cocietate si Sultura

Monday, 17 March, Year 6 d.Tr.

Heretic salmon teriyaki

You will need a bottle of red wine and a woki. Heretic teriyaki is not done with a grill, or with rice vinegar. If you're a pussy you might try white whine, maybe a Riesling or something.

You set the wine to a very slow simmer. You know it's very slowly simmering when tiny bubbles of vapor form over the entire surface of the liquid.

Time for the spices.

That's right, I already have a fine marble mortar and pestle, because of a very dear friend that has my comfort at heart. So : grind mixed pepper, very fine, slice ginger, very thin. No garlic, we're not peasants over here. Maybe some sweet spices (allspice, cinnamon, muskatnuss etc), up to you. Add the lot into the wine.

After the wine had a few minutes to simmer add in the brown sugarii and a little vinegar. Let the sugar fall to the bottom of the pot undisturbed and be slightly caramelised by the fire.

Once that's done, cut the fire, add the soy sauce, let the whole solution cool for a little then add the salmon and let it marinade there for a while.

And that's about it, once you're ready fry it and serve it.

(Not that you have to. It's salmon after all).

———Depicted here, a fine Argentinian Malbec. [↩]You can use either the light of the heavy. I prefer the heavy. You know it's the right thing because it shines roughly like ground goethite. [↩]

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Category: Zsilnic

Thursday, 12 June, Year 6 d.Tr.

Here's an idea for you

mike_c Who wants to read in VR anyway?

mircea_popescu Me. For instance, I'd like a measurement overlay.

asciilifeform Me. But not 100M wankers. Not yet.

mike_c Well, overlays would be more of a see-through augmentation thing, not a closed off VR experience, no?

decimation I think a competent driver with a good measurement overlay coupled with a radar/laser rangefinder would be more safe in a variety of conditions. Especially if FLIR were available.

mircea_popescu Absolutely. Good laser you can drive in fog.

decimation That's clearly an application for high resolution optic viewers. Ideally you have car-mounted sensors without any blockage from the columns in the vehicle

mircea_popescu Obviously, lasers in the lights. Actually... you don't really need oculars for this. You could make a decent windshield. This I think is a start-up idea right here, sell windshield + sensor kids for the aftermarket. People would be all over your shit. 100mn of them too, because nothing gets a guy off quite like having the girl that's about to give him a blowjob think he's Batman.

pankkake I want sensor kids!

kanzure Sensor kids...

mircea_popescu Kits omg.

decimation I think the angle here is that the "my startup life"i folks in California want to jump directly to full automation. Why not mine the more easily achievable sensor augmentation market?

mircea_popescu What do they know. Someone get elon musk in here lol.

Musk mircea_popescu, he's busy with exploding Teslas.

decimation Maybe we can wrap everyone in a titanium shell so they don't experience hardship in life.

mircea_popescu Musk well, imagine how cool it'd be if the windshield'd show the explosion parameters in Futura typeface just as you're flying through teh clouds.

So there you go, that's your idea : pick a popular, high end model (preferably, but not necessarily, one where the manufacturer is friendlyii) and sell after market kits consisting of replacement windshield + replacement headlights + some sort of console integration (that part may be readily dispensed with, if need be, you could just use voice activation and control, or iPad integration or a myriad other alternatives). The headlights work exactly like original headlights but they also contain a configuration of rangefinding lasers (perhaps for the top range product, also radar + sonar + flir in some combination - note that you don't actually need to use audible sonar ranges for instance). The windshield is a transparent LCD like Samsung makes, or if not a polarised-reflective surface which reflects correctly polarised light projected from somewhere on the dash. Or if not something similar.

Once installed and activated, your system creates a little map of the road, including the distances and speeds of all objects a distance ahead.

Think of the benefits for the driver :

Can drive at night, through fog, without major impediment. Check.

Can see any obstacles on the road, whether stopped or moving, whether they have lights or not.

Can see through some walls, most corners etc.

Easier to do pretty much anything you need to be doing as a driver, much safer, very win.

So... go do it ?

———You know, like My Little Pony - Caked Old Cum Is A Lovelife meets Livin' It Large With Da Kardashians. [↩]Which is measured by the criteria that they'll seed you and no other. [↩]

« The psychology of the bagholder

A short compendium of stupid things you should never say »

Category: Zsilnic

Saturday, 29 March, Year 6 d.Tr.

Here's a thought : being Bitcoin is more of a something to be than being Jewish ever was or could ever be.

Bartenura Pretty subjective thing, "being Jewish". I mean in plenty of ways it's not, such that the comparison is valid. But I imagine for a lot of people things like religion have this "personal meaning" that can't really be qualified nor quantified, such that any sort of comparison is not especially meaningful.

Abarbanel How so ?

Bartenura "It makes me feel like a good person".

Abarbanel So do bitcoin people.

Bartenura "God loves me".

Abarbanel Exactly.

Bartenura Etc.

Abarbanel Yep.

Bartenura Yes but how do you arrive at measures for "more" or "less" there?

Abarbanel Because being bitcoin is just as much a religion as judaism is, all the way from hermetic traditions a la kabbalah to unitarianism-like social bs. And bitcoin is just as much a legal and moral code as the Torah is, in exactly the same manner, with interpretation by wise people and so on, and with voluntary observance and so forth. And bitcoin is just as much a source of identity, and a red thread permitting a people to exist under no matter what sort of outside oppression. Perhaps this to a larger degree than the jewish tradition, arguably. What's not arguable is that it'd be to a lesser degree. And finally, bitcoin is also many things the Torah'll never be, but dreams of being - such as you know, built in, measurable and objective karma.

Bartenura Well I don't actually have a counter, you addressed it well. Inasmuch as bitcoin provides measures for "karma" and is explicit and quantifiable where judaism (or any other religion) is in the abstract and provides no godly coupon books, the "more of a something to be" works. It's just a different sense of being than I think most people bother themselves with.

Abarbanel Well... how about that sense you perceive most people bother themselves with ?

Bartenura They're more about what it feels like, and firmly decided that wealth and ownership shall be separated forever from "fulfillment".

Abarbanel But even in this context : a system which contains A and B is more than a system which contains A. No matter what people think or would like to think or how they represent what they think or like, more is more. And for that matter the Jewish tradition pointedly rejects that separation, it's just recent clueless US folk that misrepresent everything, geography and history be damned, that have decided to delude themselves into thinking this nonsense is anything but very peculiar to them. "Oh, money makes no difference to me" and similar bs. It's nothing but puritanical conceit meanwhile confused for substance.

Bartenura Well so long as we're discussing a difference between objective, quantifiable things and subjective feelings I think "this" nonsense is the same nonsense that's always been nonsense and will forever be so.

Abarbanel But listen : suppose there's this feeling. Whatever, let's call it derpage.

Bartenura Does it have an emoticon?

Abarbanel @-#. So when you feel it, you feel derpage, and that's your feeling. Suppose now there's this other feeling, let's call it herpage. So when you feel this one, you feel derpage and also get a chocolate mint balanced on your nose. It just... suddenly pops into existence, right on your nose. Now! Wouldn't you say herpage is more than derpage ?

Bartenura Thusly described, yes. But what if when I felt derpage I felt like I was in love, and herpage was more like a vague emotional itch, and the mint?

Abarbanel Except it's not. It's exactly as love-y.

Bartenura How do you know that tho'? How do you know that a happy Jew is feeling "exactly the same" as a happy bitcoiner, who also has the extras?

Abarbanel Well, we're not discussing individual Joe, who perhaps feels that sex is boring, and inserting baseball bats and coca cola bottles in his anus is true bliss. We're discussing moreover the things themselves, and in this respect sex IS more than insertion. Notwithstanding what individual nut Joe may imagine he thinks on the matter.

Bartenura But feelings aren't a thinking matter. And they're not particularly "things" such that can be discussed as "things themselves".

Abarbanel How do you know sex is more than insertion ?

Bartenura Because it's insertion and.

Abarbanel Exactly.

Bartenura But I *know what insertion is*. That's important, and necessary to make the comparison.

Abarbanel Well ostensibly we know what Jewish is.

Bartenura How! Are we Jewish?

Abarbanel So : a) in the parts we know, the equality is visible ; b) in parts we don't know (ie, mysticisms) the jury is and will remain out, or else back to a) ; and then c) there's more. Just you watch that the Messiah actually comes riding on a bitcoin.

Bartenura Eh fuck that blockchain.info'll be down for weeks.

« Awstats and stuff

How to have fun as an intelligent person »

Category: Gandesc, deci gandesc

Sunday, 23 March, Year 6 d.Tr.

Here's a mystery the Internet may wish to help elucidating.

BitBet pays referrals, being both the first Bitcoin site to have done so and to date the most consistent referral programme in the entire space. This, of course, means we keep track of things, and keeping track of things means we notice things.

For instance, that we've just paid 6 referral fees in total sum of 0.03067221 BTC (equivalent to bets made of about 3 BTC) to address 1FX22c76vybHJSJdCCjKHDHhcMDhDX87nw.i That address happens to have some history in Bitcoin. Specifically, it's an old GLBSE address (that has nonetheless last been spent from April 2014).

But wait, there's more! Someone made a sort-of translated into Russian BitBet clone (bitbet.su). It is in no way authorised, nor do I for a moment suppose it's safe to use it as a proxy for BitBet.

If you try to get a betting address from this clone site, it will pass your request along to BitBet, obtain an actual BitBet address and forward it to you (note that this behaviour can change at any time and is not to be relied on). That request from the clone to BitBet passes along a referral. That referral is... 1FX22c76vybHJSJdCCjKHDHhcMDhDX87nw.

So now :

Either Theymos, Nefario or some other scammer involved with GLBSE are actually back to using old wallets/addresses ; or else someone is pulling an elaborate prank.

Either someone is actually using bitbet.su to place bets on bitbet.us via a completely insecure MITM proxy, or else someone is pulling an elaborate prank.

In either case, some important points :

If you are concerned about MITM for any reason you can verify that the address you are using is in fact controlled by BitBet, through the following procedure : ask for an address to bet, send a small sum, fractions of Bitcents. Wait for the transaction to get a confirmation. Get on a different connection, and load bitbet.us. If your bet is listed on the site, the address you obtained is actually valid, and it can be safely used for further bets as detailed in the FAQ. If your bet doesn't show up, please let us know.

If you would like to be involved in Bitcoin, there are better ways than this nonsense. Get in touch, we don't bite.

But all that aside, what the fuck is going on here ?! Anyone got any ideas ?

———This, by the way, is public info, you can track it with the blockchain explorer of your choice. [↩]

« Further Argentine weird.

So the Dollar Vigilante scam ring is going to jail. »

Category: S.BBET

Friday, 19 September, Year 6 d.Tr.

Here's a great SF premise

Suppose there's some sort of space exploration mission underway, consisting of launching some sort of large-ish unmanned thing towards say Jupiter or whatever.

Suppose that the mission fails, unexpectedly, and suddenly. Everything seems to be in order, the launch is successful, the instrument exits Earth orbit as planned, goes for a while, and then suddenly... there's an explosion.

But not any sort of explosion, mind you. A humongous explosion. The light of it is actually seen on Earth during the day, it blots out the Sun. Early estimates put the total energy released somewhere in the range of... one ZettaJoule. Yeah, that's right, 1021 Joules. One and 21 zeros. 1`000`000`000`000`000`000`000`000`000`000`000`000`000`000`000`000`000`000`000

`000`000.

Minutes thereafter, further explosions are seen, mostly on Jupiter, some on Saturn. Fortunately, the largest one, a few hundred times larger than the original, happens on the dark side of that planet, but the glare cuts a visible outline of Jupiter in the daylight sky. The electromagnetic storm ensuing ionizes the troposphere to the degree aurorae are a feature for months, all the way to the Equator.

Everybody promptly forgets about the lowly space mission, while for months the brightest minds on planet Earth scramble to figure out what to do while the brightleast minds on planet Earth scramble to "come up with policies", recognize each other for counts of minutes and thank each other for their leadership. Then one day, a chap nobody thought was particularly bright manages to add two and two together, and has an excellent story to tell the world :

On one hand, the suddenly missing craft weighed in at about eleven thousand tons. That, if one bothers to apply mass to energy conversioni would yield just about... one zettajoule. And should the craft in question have ran into a solid antimatter object, the resulting explosion could have conceivably fragmented it, and thrown it off its calculated course, enough so that the bits fell onto the nearby gas giant, causing all the other explosions. And it turns out that if you do a little geometric and gravitational modeling, it's quite plausible that in fact the object in question was just about a million tons give or take, and it was probably made of either anti-iron or anti-nickel. Or perhaps an alloy of the two. An anti-alloy.

And this anti-alloy chunk was coming straight for Earth, as it turns out, and it was painted black (except you know, with anti-paint, which isn't anti-black ie white, it's just anti-matter, but otherwise exactly paint) which is why nobody saw it. So conceivably, it was sent by a civilisation somewhere that has the technology to send large chunks of matter across space with the accuracy to make them home right on Earth, and is probablyii composed out of individuals more or less physically similar to humans.

So now the debate rages : what to do ? Was it intentional ? Should they be "punished" ? How would you know, and moreover, how does the deer punish the hunter, when but for the bullet holes it wouldn't even know there's a hunter there, and still can't make him out ?

But perhaps it was unintentional, and so the behaviour should be excused. Especially seeing how there's exactly jack shit one could do anyway. What's easier than ignoring large, flashing signs of danger ? And what's more specific, more aptly proper and characteristic of an extinct species ?

Obviously antimatter porn suddenly starts trending on derpix or whatever it's called, while the lowly probe that turned out to have serendipitously saved planet Earth from its programmed obliteration is retroactively rechristened as god, jesus and ghandi, and has a bunch of various sects "following it" and "interpreting" "its message" to mankind.

And so there you have it, a whole universe, but what's really valuable : a whole alt-universe built on a sustainable premise. It's reasonable, it makes sense, it's interesting, you can live a lifetime out of exploring the implications and intricacies attendant.

And... who knows, maybe you'd be doing future generations a favour.

———Einstein's famous e = m c2, that is. [↩]At least the local anthropologists think, based on the coincidence of the unit of measure, because it takes roughly similar people to come up with roughly similar millions and roughly similar tons. [↩]

« Life's lemons, a list of steps

MiniGame (S.MG), September 2014 Statement »

Category: Cuvinte Sfiinte

Thursday, 02 October, Year 6 d.Tr.

Here's a great idea for a film.

Whole thing happens inside a brownstone building. On the ground floor, there's a bar, large lcd screens mostly doing newsy channels, patrons comment, drinks etc. On the third floor there's an apartment, inhabited by an old guy, kinda depressed recluse type. He has a tank with five fishes.

In bar, news report, Somali guy not speaking any English and not dressed for the season found very disoriented in the lobby of Chicago theater.

In apartment, all of a sudden, tank has only four fishes. Fifth fish flapping desperately on floor. Old guy is weirded out, picks fish up, sticks it back in tank.

In bar, bunches of various weird news reports, random people missing, cars missing, airplane missing, random people found, random accidents with cars suddenly driving off cliffs and whatnot. One guy in swimsuit rubbing tan lotion on disrupts Winter Games in the Alps. He claims he was at the beach. Generally the idea is that suddenly people find themselves in random places, played for maximal weird lulz.

In apartment meanwhile (interspersed with above), old guy getting increasingly depressed. He's shown contemplating a bunch of psych advertisings. He's also shown randomly teleporting around his apartment. He eventually hangs himself.

In bar, newscast shows "fringe scientist" who presents his theory to explain all the recent weirdness : according to him, "reality" really is a matrix type construct, probably abandoned by its original creators and now starting to decay, which is why people get relocated. He's calculated that in general any moving object has about a 50% chance of randomly appearing in another location somewhere on "Earth" (just the ground tho, not ocean or midair) for every 100'000 kilometers it moves times the number of people it contains. This has to do with the way objects are iterated by the software running "the universe".

The film closes on the savant's observation that the glitching is slowly increasing, and if his calculations are correct, person swapping should start sometime in the next year.

« Random weird shit

Big numbers, random numbers and who's got your number ? »

Category: Gandesc, deci gandesc

Friday, 18 July, Year 6 d.Tr.

Hello everyone, I'm Facebook Martin and this is the racquetball trick.

Without getting into a lengthy exposition of my historical pronouncements derriding Facebook, let's get right to the point :

Step A.

mircea_popescu Namworld can you be bothered to run a similar thing for me ? it's been half a year since i last tried them, moar lulz can't hurt.

So he agreed and I sent over the usual hodime to be employed on Facebook's... books.

Step B. He just reported the results :

If that's not legible you can click it, but anyway : Facebook claims that in exchange for my 40 bux it showed an ad to an article of mine a grand total of 205`359 times, on average 7.47 times per person for a total of 27`491 peoplei resulting in 627 total clicks of which 447 unique. Which would make the nominal per click cost of this campaign about 10 cents, or roughly speaking >100`000% what I normally pay. But that's okay, because they can't provide the sort of volume I normally get anyway.ii

Step C. Fortunately, we also have tools.iii

$ grep -nc "facebook" trilema.com-Dec-2014

167

$ grep -nc "GET /2014/bitcoin-in-argentina-exactly-nothing-to-do-with-the-derps/" trilema.com-Dec-2014

13547

$ grep -nc "GET /bitcoin-in-argentina-exactly-nothing-to-do-with-the-derps/" trilema.com-Dec-2014

304

The catch here is that normally Trilema articles are preceded by the year, whereas the Facebook ad was directed to a version without the year (it still resolves to the same article, it just doesn't share the same URL), which allows us to distinguish between the two. Thus we're now in the blessed possession of a coupla interesting tidbits :

Roughly half the Facebook clickers set their referral, whatever that might mean. Somehow I doubt it means "they're well informed computer users that understand the difference between a browser and an internet". Maybe that's just my bias.

Out of the 627iv total clicks Facebook claims to have sent, barely a quarter actually made it over.v

Out of the 13k reads some article I published this month got this month, a little over 2% are due to Facebook while I'm paying for it. If I didn't bother paying they wouldn't practically exist.

The importance of this bit can't hardly be overstated, once you wrap your head around the revolutionary notion that it is not Trilema which is judged by Facebook, but vice-versa!

There's little debate to be had over the point that reading Trilema is by far the best way some random Facebook user could be employing his time. There's also little debate to be had over the point that Facebook's nothing to nobody. On account of its sheer size it simply can't be anything but this sidewalk everyone tramples on. In this perspective, the fact that Facebook reports "a lot of traffic" is by and large irrelevant : they don't go anywhere good. A large pile of cars turning around on a very large roundabout, not ever getting anywhere would scarcely constitute "commerce". Sure, you could perhaps spend a lot of borrowed money to make a very large roundabout. You could perhaps find a large number of bored / angry idiots to drive around on it endlessly (especially if you don't charge for the gas). But this is no sort of economic activity, it's just an elaborate waste, of everything. The participants could all be dead for all it'd matter to anyone - and turning this on its head, Facebook could just make a trillion bots to click and post on each other's walls, it'd be equally important.

So no : Facebook doesn't matter, in the contemporary world. Not economically, not culturally, not in any way, shape or form. It's just a cultural epiphenomenon with delusions of economic importance stemming from a fundamental misunderstanding of the economics of culture by pedestrian sorts of thinkers. Just like myspace was in its heyday, just like hi5 was shortly aftervi, Facebook is a colossal waste of everyone's time.

Or at least, that's what I think about it. But mind that with Facebook, some article I wrote got 13`851 reads, whereas without Facebook the same article got 13`547 reads. I can thrive just fine without it. Can it survive without me ?

———Which, since they're doing this repeat thing, would perhaps mean that the total Facebook population that meets the (not so well defined) "interested in Bitcoin" criteria would fit four times over in Tyler, Texas. [↩]Think about it - if Facebook were as huge as you think, it wouldn't have to wrap my ad around 7.5 times to earn a hodime. Sure, I could "relax the criteria", but if I did that, what exactly is the putative advantage you imagine Facebook offers against self-help stuff ? Oh, that it costs way too much ? Ok, anything else ? [↩]Since the month's log weighs in at 460 MB, we will be using actual tools, such as grep. [↩]We don't know (mostly because I couldn't be bothered to check) if our 304 are unique. In fact, for all we know the difference between 627 and 447 is made out of 14 different people, one of which clicked the ad 167 times - perhaps under some sort of misinformed notion that this somehow hurts Trilema. In which case the total results of the Facebook campaign are half what they seem plus one bored/angry guy who knew Trilema from afore anyway. [↩]Why would this be ? Speculative explanations include bots doing "research". [↩]You don't even recall that one do you ? [↩]

« Noche de la Inmaculada Concepcion, en imagenes

Cine cunoaste stie. »

Category: Meta psihoza

Thursday, 11 December, Year 6 d.Tr.

Have you taken a horse ?

Me I wonder how many people realise that that which they hold dearest is the filthiest shit of themselves.

Her It's not exactly that which they hold dearest. They don't really understand it, which is why they pretty much always have a weird tag on it like 'zen', which for you instantly connotes that it's this stupid thing. But it's not necessarily the case they hold it dearest. It's mysterious, and they may well have a lot of hope for it, but you can't hold dear that which you don't get.

Me Nono. When a person is asked to think about "what is the one thing they most feel close to their heart, they most identify with", the result of self-exploration as to their "true self" ? That's the shittiest part of them.

Her I say you're wrong. Most people when asked to think about etc etc, will say something about love. It wont' actually be about them. It won't be about their zen or their creativity or whatever.

Me Say is one thing.

Her Oh I think they mean it. What you see on the internets and in general isnt the result of people actually answering that question. It's people doing something else entirely.

Me I can judge by what people do.

Her Yes but why on Earth would people be "doing" answers to soul searching questions honestly on fuckin' facebook or whatever.

Me It's the nature of the beast.

Her It's facebook, they're going to build little construct sandcastles to play socialtime with their friends.

Me Mnope. The "soul" is there all the time, see ? When they're doing something grand, there's a lot of the momentum of the moment carrying them. You can't see if it's their "soul" or the breath of the revolution making them fucking icons of Nike. But when they're doing something small... then you can see.

Her No, they earnestly are answering this question? When they're doing something small yes you can see, but what you see is something small. How can you suppose you have everything needed to extrapolate this into an entire person? I mean sure we can insist that each action no matter the magnitude must be carried out with representative thought and grace and character. That seems a bit too unforgiving for sanity.

Me Thats not what we're saying. What we're saying is that the substance of the actor shows itself in the most minute action at all.

Her Yes but are we able to perceive this substance? If we're in love I suppose it works, but if not?

Me Like for instance, take a horse.

Her I have taken a horse.

Me This horse, he's not like other horses. He once tried to jump over a creek you see, like a playful thing, but landed badly. Didn't break its leg, but it kind of hurts ever since. This may not show on parade, or when running furiously. But when it leisurely eats a grass one day... you'll see his foot is ;/

Her Ah but see, this is recognizably true and moving for the very reason that it is essential to the horse now, and involuntarily shown; a part of him. The humans aren't doing this. They're constructing shit.

Me Hahahaha! Of course they are. Why wouldn't they ? How wouldn't they ? That's what was said : that which is closest held, the part of one that one thinks most fundamental, deeply him - that's the worst shit he is.

Her Because they don't want to be a naked horse of the Earth eating grass and doing things their body tells them to do. They want to live in their neighbor's house and be a certain self-representation and all sorts of irrelevant shit. They make stuff up. The horse isn't making anything up.

Me Yes, they make shit up, but not out of a rng which they have in their compartment. They make stuff "up" out of the stuff they are.

Her That is such nonsense.

Me There is nothing novel in the world. Of that which there isn't any in the world, even less is in any one person.

Her There is so much, so f r e a k i n g much of that "stuff" out there!

Me Ahahaha again we come to the hashes. Ok, sit down and listen.

Her I am sat.

Me Ah, good. Zo... what is a set ?

Her A set is any collection of items that meet the criteria defined by the rules of the given set.

Me Kinda circular.

Her Yeah

Me "A set is a collection of definite items."

Her A set is a collection of definite items.

Me Definite is the requirement. They don't have to meet any rule other than be specified, identifiable, somehow known for sure. Ok, what is a function ?

Her That I don't know.

Me A function is a relation between two sets, so that elements of one correspond to elements in the other.

Her Understood.

Me What's an injective function ?

Her I don't know.

Me That is a function which offers the guarantee that all elements in the first set will have been related to the 2nd.

Her Um. Why doesn't the fact that it is a function guarantee this on its own? If elements of one correspond to elements in the other...

Me Like, you walk into a zapatoria.

Her Ok.

Me The pricing function is injective : while it guarantees you any shoe will have a price, it does not guarantee that any price has a shoe.

Her Oh I see. Ok.

Me Now, what's a surjective function ?

Her I'd guess the opposite, that it is a function which offers the guarantee that all elements in the second set will have been related to the first.

Me Yup. Now, a bijective function is a function that's both injective and surjective. What's a hash ?

Her A hash is an injective function.

Me It's a fixed length injective function. It makes two specific guarantees : that all members of the 1st set will yield a result, and that the result will be exactly of a given length.

Her Okay.

Me Now, in cases where the function works on a set with values on the same set, such as for instance bunches of numeric functions, the direct application is that you can hash the hash.

Her I don't understand what this means "the function works on a set with values on the same set".

Me Like earlier, we had the pricing function, (shoes) -> (prices). We could have the "multiplication by three" function, (numbers) -> (numbers). It works on the same set.

Her Okay.

Me Now bring up a terminal and go md5sum

Monday, 27 January, Year 6 d.Tr.

Hair, the musical

Check out this glorious image, released by Best-Korea's Best-Broadcaster KCNA as support for something or the other and widely used by nonbest-media (such as the BBC) to illustrate a recent story about how Best-Korean Best-Students are best-required to wear the bestest hairdo of all time, which used to be known as "The Chinese Smuggler" back in the day a few years ago :

It supposedly depicts a contingent of military leaders. In it we observe :

Two actual professionals, scrunched in the bottom right corner, their faces clearly depicting, in order from right to left : just how well things are going for the best-army of the best-country in the world and just how fucking drunk one has to get to make it through these parades.

No less than 7 babes directly visible, plus a couple less tall and less babe-y babes crying behind the Best-Hairdo's Esteemed Neck, and probably a few hidden by His Best-Portliest-Figure. These chicks look like they've just powdered their noses. Heavily.

Scrunched in the top and far left sections, an indisctinct number of indistinct men of varying indistinct ages. The straggler - breaking out of formation to better expose himself to the gaze of Best-Leader should fortune decide Best-Leader looks behind him - is a middle aged man telling us a story. A story of competitive pressure in which not being a tall babe with a well powdered nose is a serious drawback. Those young athletes up there in the peanut gallery can't all be faggots. Some of them are men, just like I am, just like Best-Kim aspires to be and likes to pretend he is. What's keeping them from forcing ten nine eighti seven six five inches of hot man meat down Best-Kim's Best-Throat ? And moreover, how long will it work ?

It's funny to see capitalism scrunching out of a publicity shot of the best-socialist regime everii, something Obama merely dreams of dreaming of.iii And to top it off the whole thing looks like publicity shots for a musical!

Can't wait for the next act. And incidentally... if anyone is doing this entire "world policing" thing : wouldn't you say that for as long as you're not bothering North Korea bothering anyone else is at best hypocritical ?

I know, I know, you can't mess with the Chinese anymore than a dog can mess with a lion, but still, things are what they are, neh ? What exact privileged interest does China have in Korea that Russia doesn't have in Crimea ? I'm missing something here, aren't I ?

Or perhaps you are.

———Jesus god Azns already. [↩]Even leaving aside the straggler middle aged guy, why do the girls' faces look a) white to various degrees but b) much whiter than the men's ? This wouldn't be some sort of differentiating pressure of capitalist substance, would it ? I'm sure that the shorter girl with smaller tits and grotesque features stands just as good a chance of participating in best-Kim's best-orgy as any other, no ? [↩]US students must take the same anticonceptional medicine Obama takes, that's a few tweaks away from sporting the same hairdo, wouldn't you say ? [↩]

« A mental problem

Vanitas »

Category: Politica si Prostie

Thursday, 27 March, Year 6 d.Tr.

Hai sictir, Timisoaro!

Seven years agoi intel established that things aren't going to be going well for the US and perhaps abandonment of my very comfortable if somewhat boring domicile in San Jose, Costa Rica might be a good idea. You never know which way the colossus with clay feet is going to collapse.

Upon sieving the entire worldii according to an entire list of criteria we won't go into, two quite separate options came out as "best" : Timisoara, Romania and Christchurch, New Zealand. I picked, mostly by pure chance, Timisoara. It wasn't a choice informed by any sort of national considerations - I harbor no such delusions - nor in any way based on some sort of great fame or perceived worth of this settlement. In short, I didn't come here like you'd go to New York, I came here like you'd go to Raleigh, NCiii. Still, considering the alternative was in the interim hit by a major earthquake and found itself unsettlingly close to the site of the largest nuclear incident in the history of planet Earthiv, I can't complain of chance.

Timisoara - in spite of the entirely undeserved fame it enjoys among Romanians themselves - showed itself marginal from the onset. It has been slowly deteriorating ever since then, and by now it soundly counts as a complete shithole. It is inhabited by a collection of remarkably inept if incredibly dense bovines, barely qualified to act as domestic servants but misrepresenting themselves as some sort of Freiherren if not Herzogen outright. This is a point which deserves some illustration :

While average incomes never have (and likely never will) match social security payments in Western Europe, a liter of milk retails in Timisoara's supermarkets a good 20% above what you'd pay in Paris, France. Most other FMCG items hover around the same premium, plenty above. Why ? Stupidity tax, obviously. When you have to organise economic activity with idiots you end up spending more than if you had sane people you could employ.

While gas prices are roughly double what they are in the USv, and while the average local makes ~400 dollars per month after tax, and while the whole town is about fifty square milesvi they manage to somehow have traffic. Not a little traffic, either, but quite a lot : it can easily take you four hours to cross the town in rush hour. All ten six and a half miles of it. And they all "own" cars, too. In fact, I know numerous people who rent one room studios (wherein they live with a woman and her children) while paying leasing for a recent BMW. Which they park in front of the crummy, concrete prefab apartment building, making access impossible. But they don't mind, a two lane street doubleparked on each side with cars the rottinculo living nearby can't afford is a Timisorean's ideal. Why should cars be moving anyway ?! Not like he can afford the gas - it's all for showvii, that's all that matters.

Seven years ago, Timisoara had for the second time elected a mayor out of a party with absolutely no support in national politics. Because they imagine they're special. This resulted in years of dismal support from the public treasury for the city, which ensured underdevelopment and sealed its fate, economicallyviii. And so they re-elected the guy for a third term. After which - this is where it gets beautiful - they elected a complete fucktard in his stead. A complete fucktard who had the support of what at the time superficially seemed like a major national partyix, and a major player in the governing alliance. Which alliance promptly collapsed, which party is pretty much dead as a going concern. And so, it's not that they've stuck to stupidity : they managed, a decade and a half later, to recreate the original conditions of their original stupidity. Going for another ride, these people!

As you'd perhaps expect on the basis of 2 and 3 above, the utterly inept if woefully pretentious new mayor proceeded to import palm trees, which had to be guarded by the local police for months, ending up costing a significant portion of the city budget. Why would a town where the fig tree grows wild specifically need palms ? You don't grok this fala thing yet, do you.

On the same lines, the same guy started a massive road work project, digging up literally every other street in the entire town (all of them in the center). A sort of local adaptation of Boston's Big Digx. This, obviously, could have been started and completed by parts - but then where'd the fala be ? And so six months before the political support for his party collapsed, the man dug up the entire town. It will be all finished just about the time I come back, which won't be this decade. In fact, I judge it more likely for Timisoara to be finished as a cityxi than for the diggaton to be finished as a construction project.

The one thing which Timisoara does consistently and well is failure. In 2007 I attempted to organise an art exhibit, on the terms that I was going to pay, in cash, for everything involved. They didn't manage to do it. Last year, I attempted to support a nascent local party, by paying for a quarter's rent and other expenses (a quarter ton of alcohol, mostly) for a bunch of self-styled neonazi local kids. I pulled the plug on that thing three months later, at the end of which they.had.not done.anything. I'm not sure you exactly grok me, it's not that they hadn't round up the town's minorities and set them on fire. It's that they couldn't get together to make some stencils which someone (hopefully, someone else) was perhaps sometime (2015 ?) going to use for some purpose. Somewhere. Whatever.

To sum up : when I came here the town had no starred restaurants, but it had about half a dozen passable ones, including a sushi place. There is exactly one passable restaurant left today. There were two left last year. There's one decent hotel, there used to be three or four excellent dessert shops but none remain, there used to be at least a dozen great cafes but there's maybe two left and so on and so forth.

But what really got my goat, and I will never forget and never forgive, were the cycle paths. There's a dedicated article on the topic, aptly titled The Idiocy of Timisoara's City Hall. It cost the mayor at the time his seat, but all in vain, the idiocy persists.

Anyway : I enjoy walking, and I walk a lot. And I do not walk alone. And I expect BOTH women to be able to walk in step with me, on either side, and for people coming from the opposite direction to be able to pass us comfortably. This means that I require a good network of walkways no less than seven meters wide all through the center of the entire town without exceptions. You can't cut a meter wide "cycle path" through the middle of the walkway, and then have cars park on the other half, leaving me with room to walk single file, dear fuckwits. I do not walk single file, I'm not a virgin, I am a man with a harem. Get your heads out of your asses already.

So yes, this is a large part of why I'm leaving, the god damned cycle paths, but only as a formal expression of fundamental rot. These people aren't cool enough, aren't accomplished enough, aren't actually worthy of my continued presence. Timisoara has failed to retain the only important thing that ever happened here, in six or so centuries. Let this be forever remembered, as such. All you need to do to fall off the map is piss off one well chosen individual. All you need to do to exist, and to matter, is cater to the one guy that matters. Forget the fucking votes already, nobody cares, the voters themselves first on the list.

Anyway, that's it. I'm outta here, and I won't be mentioning this shithole named something I already forgot ever again.

———It's been seven years almost. Sed fugit interea, fugit inreparabile tempus, singula dum capti circumvectamur amore. [↩]Quick, how many towns are there in the two hundred or so different states ? [↩]"It's close enough and far enough to DC" sort of consideration. [↩]Seriously, global warming worries you ? How about all those YottaBecquerels being dumped in the Pacific ? It's quite improbable we'll manage to extinguish ourselves through warming the planet. It's quite certain that if we do manage such a feat, it will be through mishandling of radioactive material.

Take it as an open invitation to think more and derp less. [↩]I kid you not, a liter here goes for 6.3 RON or so, and there being 3.78 liters in the gallon and 3.25 RON in the dollar, it comes to $7.32 per. [↩]You can comfortably go around the whole thing on foot in a day. No question about it, it'd be a pleasant walk - if you enjoy walking in mud boots, of course. [↩]Fala, in Romanian in original. [↩]Timisoara fancies itself the capital of a region, and economically relevant. This may have been true at some point, but meanwhile Arad, a minor Transylvanian town fifty miles away, has managed to divert most economic activity towards it, through not being quite as retarded. [↩]Except it was already well fucked. [↩]In terms of absolute size, scaled down. In terms of inefficiency and waste, roughly equal. [↩]It'd go bankrupt if it could find anyone stupid enough to lend it money. [↩]

« Ubuntu is a worse piece of shit than MS-DOS ever was.

The sharp friar and the golden jew discuss your options »

Category: Oda Superbiei

Tuesday, 20 May, Year 6 d.Tr.