~ First Fence ~

Yesterday, a rather incredible if perfectly banal thing happened.

ThickAsThieves The verdict is in, unless i'm ready to move to Romania, and/or MPEx blocks US customers, and/or I register as a broker/dealer with SEC, I must decline the MPIF mgr position due to legal concerns. Even then, it'd take a combination of those to have any remote chance of safety. :(
mircea_popescu Forward soviet!
ThickAsThieves I need to gtfo USG.

The guy had been pre-announced as a manager on the wunderbar S.MPIF, which would have been, any way you look at it, a major step forward in his chosen career. Like that one time when your highschool coach gets a letter letting them know you've been optioned by one of the majors, like that one time when your highschool newspaper editor gets a letter letting him know you're getting your own talk show on NBC, like one of those times.

The happy recipient of a rather coveted award had to pass on it, because... well, no point in mincing words. He had to pass on it because he was born a slave rather than a free man, and slaves are not allowed to have nice things. That's what it is, the long and the short, the sad, bitter, ugly whole of it. A slaveⁱ may not have nice things.

~ Second Fence ~

Also yesterday, five hours later pretty much :

benkay I'd be satisfied if we allowed sex in America. Allowed it to be a part of life, you know? I go out, I meet a chick as part of my gadding about the local scene. She's an acceptably well-practiced and hardworking programmer. I like her, we fuck. I can't hire her now basically. WTF is this nonsense.
mircea_popescu Why cant you hire her ?

benkay Bringing insane risk down onto the company.
mircea_popescu Eh, have topless day, what.

benkay Hostile work environment. "I don't feel comfortable being topless at work." Don Charnley has some hack for this.
mircea_popescu So work somewhere else.

benkay Except then the Labor Department steps in. "We see that you're making your employees uncomfortable. Please pay us your entire profits for the past ten years."
mircea_popescu ~Somewhere Else~
asciilifeform benkay: atlas, suitcase, airplane.

benkay asciilifeform: working on it.
benkay mircea_popescu: working on it.

I tell you honestly, I would rather give my right arm than give up on working with my women. I always have, even before the Internet, I can't conceive of a world bereft of this nor how could life be possibly worth living in such a pit.

But then again, I was born a free man, and I have lived as such my entire life. They say for those the practical alternatives often appear inconceivable.

~ Third Fence ~

This was discussed here a little while ago, In which you become grain. Quoting from there :

mircea_popescu Let me explain something about this dekulakization concept. You familiar with Buffett pretending taxes "at the top" aren't high enough, and with Gates donating his fortune to "good causes" and so on ?
asciilifeform Technical term, I believe, is 'conspicuous benevolence'. Game theoretically 'dishonest signal'.

mircea_popescu Not at all. Buffett structures the hell out of his deals to avoid taxation. However, there exists a center of people who can't afford good tax shelters, and who could, if left undisturbed, come to one day challenge him. See, the fact that I made the FU Berkshire bet and the fact I pay about 2.85% a year on average are related. I can accumulate. The average middle class guy in the chumpatron, can not.ⁱⁱ Buffett merely aims to keep it this way : high taxes means jack shit to him, other than "Stansislav won't be the next Buffett". That, he likes.
asciilifeform Lul.

mircea_popescu Now, dekulakization is EXACTLY the same. It doth not hurt the rich. It hurts the average who could in principle one day hurt the rich.ⁱⁱⁱ It's a prune-the-middle control strategy, the exact equiv of raising taxes "for social good". Sure, a tree with no middle one day collapses. But until such a day...
asciilifeform can't see how anyone who ever so much as set foot in the u.s. could disagree here.

~ The Complete Prison ~

That's it, you see :

• nothing to do,
• nobody to do it with,
• and no resources to pay for it.

That's it. You're in it.

"But wait," I hear you think, "but wait MP! Doesn't a prison, just like any other room, have to have four walls ? You've only given three."

Of course I have. For the fourth wall, in this just like in any other kind of theatre, is you.

Illustration of la vie est ailleurs via NYTMinusContext.

1. My slaves do, of course, but then again I am a master that doesn't suck. Which hides a moral in there : if you're going to be a slave, make sure you're the slave of a person rather than the slave of a thing. Some people arguably are worth it, but no thing ever is. [↩]
2. This influences our outlook, not just our bottom line. [↩]
3. Once they grasped control of the country, the last fucking thing revolutionary reds wanted was to be wiped from power in another decade or so, as part of the normal alternation of power in society through the alternation of generations. [↩]