The practical costs of hallucinated freedom
This will require some buildup, so let's load up the relevant concepts.
asciilifeform: the uptake of whatever 'liberation' you forcibly thrust upon the cattle will be 0. ( these are creatures whose entire existence sits on a hallucinated pillar of 'choice' etc )
What hallucinated choice could he possibly mean ?
mircea_popescu: for the people who hallucinate choice where there is no space for them to choose, a usg will always be found somewhere.
What the hell ?!
mircea_popescu windows will either compete with tmsr or go away. if it competes -- it becomes. if it goes away -- it becomes. there is no choice and there is no will.
No choice ?! No will ?! What heresy is this!
But let us set heresy aside for a moment, and inquire into a different line.
mircea_popescu speaking of "why the fuck aren't your clotheslines connected to anything, lamer" : why the ef are they still not making aluminium books ? use 5 mils say, ruberized/siliconized edges...
asciilifeform waiwatmircea_popescu which part ?
asciilifeform books?mircea_popescu yes.
asciilifeform with aluminium cover? wai. sounds nastymircea_popescu PAGES. aluminium will go down to 5 micrometers np. this means 1k pages book = 5mm = 1/5th inch thickness. can even make PAGE arbitrarily thick so all books are the same thickness throughout, if you want. can do all sorts of things.
asciilifeform oh hey i got 1 here. except it ain't a book, it's a 1980s capacitor from su. it nicely illustrates the down side.mircea_popescu how is it not a book. will fucking outlats ANY paper support. by 5mn years or so.
asciilifeform mega-pain to separate'em.mircea_popescu ruberized/siliconized edges... are you telling me someone tried and hated it ? because hey, tin foil is in every house, no pain to separate.
asciilifeform this one is mylarized. still pain, because static. sorta why it worx as a cap. but this book would be great, easily hold enough charge to nuke unwary thiefmircea_popescu you don't use electrically isolated pages.
asciilifeform meh then, that's the 1 megafeature. ( not 4evah either, al oxidizes at stp. just -- slowly )mircea_popescu right, alf has decided "permanent book, never will rot away" and "1/10th the thickness and 1/3rd the weight of current afid traps" no features.
asciilifeform not perma, see above.mircea_popescu oxidation dun matter, you don't write in aluminium on it wtf. you can use pre-oxidized alum anyway.
asciilifeform pages will fuse.mircea_popescu not more than tin foil fuses.
asciilifeform gotta try this. i do want one. now where to get nanoleaf al...mircea_popescu i had taken you for a man who has and lived with a library. i am one of those also, and i have nfi how you can not immediately think of the DUST.
asciilifeform oohyeamircea_popescu motherfucker, my library in ro could produce a pail a week. a FULL pail.
asciilifeform i got filters heremircea_popescu yeah well.
asciilifeform but obvious limits.mircea_popescu much better to not have 5 trillion little afid shits eating away at the deliuciouys desert innit now.
asciilifeform tru!! one catch : ain't nobody printing b00kz worth reading, nao. all them bookz, are old.mircea_popescu so you repriont the old ones and need not worry about them.
asciilifeform may as well scan then, neh, if reprint and throw out paper.mircea_popescu btcbase.org/log/2017-04-05#1638413
a111: Logged on 2017-04-05 23:00 asciilifeform but as a massively-distributed long-term backup, aluminium is ~unbeaten -- it's probably the only reason asciilifeform was able to find a copy of genera
asciilifeform this yes.mircea_popescu you will want to note them on aluminium anyway. ANYWAY. might as well make them optoinspectable neh. at a certain loss of density, surely.
asciilifeform i'll point out that the al in cd is not exposed to atmosphere.mircea_popescu asciilifeform you can get single-atom coats nowadays. you could gild the pages at no extra cost. or you know, plutonim them, platinum them...
Why do you suppose there's nobody staying up nights trying to bring to market the aluminium leaf book ?i Do you suppose it's because "it would never work", in the way flight with machines heavier than air, microwave point-to-point communication or touch-sensitive VGA screens could "never work" ? Or do you suppose it's because "it doesn't have a market" ?
This dichotomy is a strange thing indeed, wouldn't you say ? On one hand, the innovative mind is to ask itself some very practical questions, the answer to which does converge in finite time.
"Is this item practical ?"
"Can it actually be made to spec from available materials with extant processes ?"
"Can perhaps the required materials be obtained or constructed if not ?"
"Can extant processes be adapted or refined if need be, or could wholly novel processes be devised ?"
These are all difficult questions. It's not always easy to even formulate them correctly for the given case, it's almost always difficult and without exception costly to answer them meaningfully. Nevertheless, an answer can always be methodically had, and if the answer will surprise it will surprise in a very useful, limited way. The process is, after all, the process of human whiteii civilisation, from its inception to the present day.
Yet there's a different horn to the dilemma.
"Will this product have a market ?"
"Can people be convinced to buy it ?"
The marketeer is not part of civilisation, not of white civilisation in any case. He's exactly the nazi caricature of the jew : an idle, useless mountebank here to extract rents from human naivite and accreted stupidity. He does no useful work, contributes nothing, but sucks the lifeblood out of the culture. It doesn't stop there : he also injects foreign nonsense into it so as to keep the flow fattening him going.
Why is the marketeer possible in ourdemocracy ? Why was the "jew"iii possible in nazi Germany ?
"Women"iv, of course. Here :
The "German maiden" as imagined by the nazi propagandist perceives a choice before her. She could either go left, or else she could go right. The proposal implicit in the depiction is that the maiden's choice is based on hallucinated freedom, that she in point of fact does not have such an option as she perceives.
Is this true ? After all, the chief attribute of propaganda is that it works. For propaganda to work, a false choice must necessarily be at least in principle possible. So regarded, propaganda becomes a very simple exercise, perhaps the oldest trick in the book : crying thief. If the core of all propaganda is that it depicts a choice that is in fact present as absent in order to get the viewer to misrepresent a choice that is in fact absent as present, we have neatly and cheaply (in intellectual terms) explained both why it works and why it harms.
So! What the nazi propagandist is trying to do in that poster is in fact very simply this : every maiden, German or otherwise, has a choice before her cunt. Meanwhile, the viewer of the maiden's choosing, German or otherwise, hasn't a choicev. The proposition of propaganda switches these around, and I'm to believe (without thinking about it, or in any other way deconstructing my experience) that for my looking at the poster it is now therefore not the girl depicted that gets to choose which way her orgasm lies ; but instead it is me who gets to choose whether she does or does not have such choice before her.
If I choose she doesn't have such choice in front of her, thereby I'm also choosing to wear a brown shirt (there's a different poster to make that pointvi) and so on and so forth. Marketing is entirely and exactly the same thing : by representing a choice that does in fact exist, you are distracted from a different choice you in fact should be making. "Would you like one egg, or two ?" is the oldest item in the marketing book, and it squarely makes the point : if asked to choose between apple and blackberry you might indeed forget you simply don't want a stupid pocket dongle in the first place. Will it be coke or pepsi, and please don't notice there's no conceivable reason to even have a "president" ; and certainly not an "elected" one in any case.
This is why "you always have a choice" is such a foundational mantra of ourdemocracy and why pantsuits never cease spewing it : for as long as you believe you always have a choice, you're primed for propaganda. Whether that hook is then used in the nazional-socialist manner as depicted above or in the ourdemocracy-socialist manner as seen on TV makes relatively little difference (and enjoys relatively little stability, they switch back and forth depending on environmental pressures as you've no doubt been noticing these days). The important point is, for as long as you believe you always have a choice, your ass is theirs.
In reality, you don't always have a choice. You sometimes have a choice ; but at some other times you do not have any choice.
Here's an example : if as a young female in 1999 Romania you correctly perceive you do not have a choice, your country will be slightly cooler for slightly longer. If however instead you misperceive a choice that's not there, your country will go to shit half a decade sooner.
If, as an adult male in 1933 Romania you correctly perceive that you have no choice but to defend I G Duca with your life and everything, you have a chance. If you indolently perceive that it's your choice whether to go die aside the man, and could also sit around reading comics or whatever, your imbecility thereby assures you a very special place in hell, called "The Contemporary History of Romania" for short.
Qualitative examples aside, the cost of misperceving a choice that's absent becomes very quantitatively obvious if we return to our previous examples. There's a reason you don't have any cool things, for which the aluminium leaf book stands pars pro toto : if innovatorsvii could rely on your correct evaluation of your choices, they could correctly schedule their own investment of time and effort. Making a better mouse trap would in fact be a technological, rather than hierophantical affair, because you can in fact calculate how much better the better mouse trap would be and how much it would cost to get, at least most of the time. If innovators are however stuck guessing at how often and how deeply will random idiots misrepresent their choices, well... the only safe move is not to play (and if forced to play -- the only safe move is to play the cheapest hand).
Next time you wonder why you don't have any cool shit, offer yourself this ready answer : because people who could have made it couldn't guess whether you'll arbitrarily decide you have the choice of whether to like it or not.viii
Less preening and more work is the obvious solution. Contrary to what your fatlogic circuitry might be trying to tell you -- you don't actually have any kind of choice in the matter.
———- Yes, obviously, the industry has been engaged in a downward spiral towards discovering the cheapest, sorriest excuse for a pile of garbage "the market" will still swallow as a "book", so this would be exactly counter-trend. But... why ? [↩]
- It's only human inasmuch non-white peoples act as if they were white, and in no other case. [↩]
- The constructive item, as imagined by the nazis, and opposed to any kind of reality-based abstract decoction. [↩]
- No, not any kind of reality-based abstract decoction, but the deductively-constructed item. [↩]
- Tradition to the contrary notwithstanding. [↩]
- In relevant part,
"Hey, gun advocates, did you know you like low corporate taxes?" I do? "Yes, because the people you hate are for raising them." Consequently, raising corporate taxes is felt like an attack on the Second Amendment. "Liberals! Taking away our rights!"
[↩]
- This leaves aside a very large section of the same problem : because car makers couldn't rely on buyers correctly perceiving their options, they were stuck coming up with the whole "emissions" nonsense ; and with the whole "electronics + cardboard = modern car" nonsense ; and with the whole rest of the crap.
The reason you live in a cardboard house whereas your grandparents lived in a larger brick construction has everything to do with the fact that you perceive you have more choices you actually don't than your grandparents ever did. That's pretty much all that's involved in the difference. [↩]
- You think this is entirely wrong, at this juncture, because it's finally string-matched some stupid in your head and so it's actively being blocked ? That's nice. Why do you suppose that cute guy never said anything to you ? Could it have been that he couldn't evaluate whether you'll arbitrarily decide you have the choice of whether to like it or not ? Why is it you didn't say anything to that cute girl ? Could it have been that you couldn't evaluate whether she'll arbitrarily decide she has the choice of whether to like it or not ?
Awww...
I'm sure it's works so much differently in all other aspects of life. Sex life is in no sense foundational of all other things, and for sure people don't take all other decisions in the same exact manner, do they.
Well, that's good then. Do you imagine you are at liberty to believe this crap "if you want to", incidentally ? [↩]
