Pro idiotas, which obviously means, people who have ideas. Ie, idiots.

The title is, of course, reminiscent of deadweasel.ⁱ

Part I. Captatio [malevolentiae ] readerii

jurov https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=361852.msg4729286#msg4729286 let mpoe-pr (con)descend upon me.
Problem with BOURSE forced buyback on Cryptostocks
MP "The cofounder (forensick) left the company and told me he has not seen any bitcoins from the IPO and moreover was left with some outstanding debt by Markus Weiler (dotcoin)." No srsly, you people keep doing this shit. Stop doing it. It is stupid. Everyone is like insane, feels this irresistible urge to shill for the first scammer that comes by with honeyed lips.ⁱⁱ It's like virgin highschooler kids getting married at 17 to support some random ho. jurov there you go.

jurov You mean I'm shilling for forensick?
MP No. I mean, take this guy, forensick. He becomes a cofounder right ? Why ? Well... cause someone was "being professional". Herp.

jurov Yes, he appeared toward me as one.
MP And then... his name is used there, right ? And then... it all blows up, and it turns out he was in fact no cofounder. He was just... an idiot. With nothing better to do with his time, with no idea what a name is and how it works, with nothing at all.

jurov Yes, something like that.
MP I could name names of people doing exactly the same, with fake miners, with bs of all sorts. I won't. Point remains, this is being done too fucking often. Stop thinking that words matter. Someone calling you a cofounder and you're all tickled pink ? Stop enabling fraud.

KRS1 Some want to feel important, even if they are making the same buck.
MP This happens to be the definition of idiocy. You are better off with two friends than with two hundred "friends" who mostly come by to steal things from your house and take bank loans with copies of your id they obtained while you weren't looking.

jurov Well, what would you do? ask for their contract comes to mind. (Back in September.)
MP Suppose one day you're walking down the street and some guy offers you a joint. Do you take it or do you figure "hey, a fuckwit I never saw before is trying to get me drugged up" ? I mean... this is really 9 yo stuff. Do not go to the strip club with perfect strangers.

jurov Honestly, it depends on my frame of mind. I can be incredibly stupid in exactly the wrong moment.
MP So that's what I do. I don't deal with people I don't know. I test. I build histories. I check histories. I review references. What, some guy that has no WoT, no presence, that I don't know Suddenly has an idea ? Suddenly can be a CEO ? No, he can't. Look at NeoBEE for an instructive example. We're not equal, even if we can type the same strings in a box they still aren't the same strings. Depends whose name signs on them. We're not equal, even if two people have "the same idea", in one head it's an idea, in another head it's nothing.

That's what it is. There's no such thing as "an idea", for damn sure. And there fucking definitely on a stick is no such thing as "your idea". Get over yourself.

Part II, Documentatio discutio privatae otherum itemque.

Guy #1, wants to start business, sees OpenBSD news, approaches me on twitter, follows link to #bitcoin-assets. Our encounter is preserved for posterity. He choses to ignore it (because why not ignore difficult things you need and stick instead with easy things you want ?!) and proceeds to insist (because obviously you'll be able to bruteforce your way into it, that's why the poor are poor in the first place : cause they're so god damned powerful. Right ?).

Guy #2, wants to start business, is told what he needs to do, doesn't directly see why that should be! Like so :

Joe Hi.
MP Hey.

Joe How are you doing?
MP Pretty good.

Joe We talked the other day about a new project (graph theory based jobs board)
MP in -assets ?

Joe Yes, I think so. I had a cofounder as of then, i.e. we had talked a few times via skype. Now I'm having trouble getting a hold of them.
MP Aha.

Joe I was thinking of just saying, Fuck it, and seeing about just paying for labor to put it up. Any interest in this? I'm EXTREMELY flexible with terms. This is not going to be my life's work.
MP Nope. You been reading what was being said in -assets ?

Joe Yes, you said that I should go off and produce a working prototype with traction, etc etc. I don't have that level of commitment at the moment. (Or funds.) As a matter of fact I'm overextended on another project as well (proprietary hardware). I'm not a 24 year old with nothing but time on my hands.
MP I think you must have misread. Re-read the log for that day, I would say. Carefully.

Joe Well, okay. That's what I remember being told - to come back with a working prototype, etc. On a different subject (loan for the proprietary hardware project), oh some people talked about a WoT thing. But these two things are separate - the jobs board doesn't require much money at all. Just partnership.
MP I think your notion that you may decide what means what and what should be interpreted how and what is separate from what is completely unwarranted. Your options are to either do what you're told or go find some other venue. Bitcoin does not give a shit what you may think on any topic until you learn how to speak the language.

Joe This is very close to programming languages (like Perl) that ask you to read a 500 page reference on it for a month or two before starting to code. Well, you can see how well Perl is doing as a language. CF: PHP, with no such requirements.
MP Right. If you had read the logs you'd have known why php is a horribly chosen example for your purpose.ⁱⁱⁱ But you don't, so you can't meaningfully talk to me.

Joe I don't see how it's reasonable to ask me to lurk and read logs for a year, on a subject that I'm not particularly interested in, just so that you don't have to think about what I'm saying ("speak your language" as you say.) I'm not a bitcoin financier baron, nor do I want to become one.
MP I don't see why you imagine what you think reasonable has any bearing.

Joe Did you always have this attitude? Or only since you've gotten money?
MP No, I have money because I have this attitude.

Joe Then the attitude came first :)
MP See how well your attitude worked for you so far, since we're doing php examples here.

Joe Well, so far I have an incorporated company that I own 100% of (90% after a small note converts). I also have another project that I have a collaborator on that I haven't met yet. I don't mean to say that I know everything, but flexibility and trying to connect with people even if I might not know 100% what they'd like me to, has gotten me a certain distance certainly.
MP Certainly. http://trilema.com/2013/youre-gonna-have-to-learn-that-variety-speak/

Joe Take embedded electrical engineering. I was told to read 5 text books on electrical engineering that are 1000 pages. I did look through them, but I didn't do months of projects (no time for it). If I had, the company would have no other progress except myself having 0.5 years of electrical engineering experience instead of 0 years. I have to balance that time investment with everything else.
MP Yes, but that is engineering. Here, you're trying to do finance. These aren't the same thing. Presumably someone could learn how to cook by spoiling dishes. A surgeon can't learn how to surgeon by spoiling abdomens.

Joe That is true. And a good point.
MP We're even, because I'm going to use this (anonimized) to make an article. The problem is getting obnoxious by now.

Joe I would be interested in that article. As long as you anonimize it it would be useful to me. So you just don't think there is a way to do finance by finding "indulging" people who will translate some things for me? (The way "indulging" engineers did, rather than make me learn eveyrthing about their domain)?
MP I am translating things for you, silly. I'm just not putting up with your sliding definition and tendency to equivocate.

Joe How do you explain people who were funded with 0 finance background and very little understanding of what htey were signing, except for their investors' assurances? Who still came out ahead? Like the makerbot guy, bret pettis, who was just an English teacher before the Foundry group invested $10M into his company.
MP I have three girls living in an apartment. How do you explain their rent being paid ? Maybe they're lucky. Maybe they're loved. Maybe they're entrepreneurs.

Joe What do you mean by that example?
MP That your example means nothing.

Joe That you're paying their rent but not charging them? I think my example means something, because all of the startups that were just founded by just hard-noesd MBA types, like Zynga, take a nosedive soon thereafter. Whereas Google was founded by two CS majors who knew 0 finance, same for most tech companies. However, they had to be supported by investors/partners who knew more than them, translated, and also had to be indulging and not take advantage.
MP I think maybe your view of history is tailored to suit.^iv

Joe Yes, it's tailored to my specific sector, which is starutps. It would be differnet if I made my living in finance, or real estate, or....
MP You're always better served by knowing, at least the basics, than by praying for good luck and nice people.

Joe I agree with you. However, you didn't direct me to a reference to read - which I would have. You directed me (maybe someoen else did) to lurk on IRC for a year and read logs....
MP Asshole move, huh ? Aite, so come back in a coupla hours, you'll have something.

Joe Okay. I am reading your variety speak article as we speak btw. I do have one reference that kind of supports your view. It's the story of how RapGenius changed their reception by investors just through joining YCombinator. The founder said thta their model, web site, or plans ,didn't really change at all. but they 'learned to walk the walk'. I'll find it.
MP I know it.

So now... this problem is as old as culture. The pupils - at least the brighter among them - wish to know why should they have to bother to learn -que and -ii and -ae and -um. The magister - at least the better among them - will retort with a very strict fuck you and do what you're told.

What would you want me to do ? These problems of the young mind should have been resolved in school. Not secondary level, primary, this is highschool stuff at the latest. They obviously aren't anymore in our god forsaken colonies across the oceans, owing to the complete disintegration of society, culture and everything else their economic bankruptcy is bringing about. So what of it ? They're still noobish problems, early stumbles in the quite lengthy path of intellectual pursuit. Why should some very special kid be less special, and why should he learn the word for "special" which happens to be exactly "special" ? And why is autism on the rise in the US ?

Culture is culture is culture, there's not much more than can or indeed should be offered on that particular topic.

More important, I would say, is the observation that he who doesn't know by that very fact reliably does not know what he's missing, and so his only rationally defensible choice is to submit. He could submit to this master or to that one, and ironically his position makes it impossible to evaluate said masters afore submitting to them.

Traditionally the solution was to submit to as many as possible, see how well that works for you. With postmodernism however, the pretense of difference is so easy to put forth that one could in principle spend his entire life doing the same thing in different clothes and so that doing comparison is seemingly subverted. Take the Apple game store as a convenient example to understand this : if you own a tablet, you could download games. And there are many many manymanymany games to choose among. Except they're pretty much one dozen, made by six or so companies, which simply make hundreds of graphical templates. You can play Apple mmorpgs, except they're all the same one. Your friend likes ninjas and you like wizards, and so you play Wizards of Treasure and he plays Ninjas of Doom. Totally different logos, and that's all.

Now consider this :

You are the 98%

There’s a difference between what you need and what you want, and the media will always, relentlessly give you what you want. Do you know why you have such poor candidates every single election? Because you want them, you want someone you can easily judge for some sexual indiscretion or because they called latinos chicanos. “Well, that matters to us!” Then you got what you asked for.

The media will have data mined the culture and chosen for you two cans of Campbell’s Chicken Soup, and then encouraged a public debate about which can is a better representation of the spirit of the country, the one on the left or the one on the right. “Well, that matters to us!” I know.

You do in fact have two good indicators at your disposal. One credible indicator of actual difference, rather than manufactured faux-difference for the sake of faux-variety is intraductibility. Except, of course, that which is actually intraductible is easily elided, and eluded, and reinterpreted^v. The other credible indicator is simply how inconvenient things are. Not so hard figuring out whether you're doing what you want or not, now is it ?

Generally, for your own sake, you should spend most of your time not doing what you want to do, and especially so if you're young. This, obviously, flies in the face of pretty much everything you thought your meanwhile collapsed civilisation "stood for". It does. Happiness outside of deliberate and well understood slavery is quite illusionary.

So what now ?

Nothing now. Your life as you thought you had it is forfeit. That's that. Go find something to do with yourself.

1. "deadweasel: the jumping off point, for idiots, is as soon as they have an idea." [↩]
2. This has happened more times already than I have the stomach to count. Scammer comes by, sets up shop, acts all "professional" and sucks up to socially awkward, business-y inept religious leaders (because that's exactly what tech leaders are, stop trying to elude this point). They fall for it, and now scammer has some powerful puppets. STOP DOING IT OH MAY FUCKING GAWD.

   Read MPOE-PR :

   Giving over half a million bitcoins to a random idiot is a bad idea. There are people whose personal responsibility in this matter is greater than that of most everyone else, people who have in effect acted as lieutenants for the random idiot. This thread is a convenient spot for all of them to avoid the indignity of being called out, and instead freely and willingly admit their mistake, and by admitting it learn from it. Specifically, learn that they aren't nearly as qualified as they thought to play the "banker", and by this make one step towards maybe one day actually being bankers.

   Read Wikipedia :

   Affinity fraud includes investment frauds that prey upon members of identifiable groups, such as religious or ethnic communities, language minorities, the elderly, or professional groups. The fraudsters who promote affinity scams frequently are – or pretend to be – members of the group. They often enlist respected community or religious leaders from within the group to spread the word about the scheme, by convincing those people that a fraudulent investment is legitimate and worthwhile. Many times, those leaders become unwitting victims of the fraudster's ruse.

   Read whatever it takes you to read, just as long as you stop doing it. [↩]

3. ==== [↩]
4. No, seriously, someone somewhere honestly believes the Goog founders were financially innocent ? Shocked I am. [↩]
5. As to the reinterpretation, see Luke-jr. [↩]