[gnu at toad.com: May 24: National Day of Outrage at NSA/Telco surveillance]

[R.A. Hettinga]

At 2:17 PM +0200 5/23/06, Eugen Leitl proves why European GDB is in the
shitter this week:

>People cause politics.

People earn money, which they spend on politics.

>And people are perfectly capable of cheerfully
>disregarding that financial reality (more consensual hallucination, like).

Indeed. Like they seem to be doing in the EU these days. The irony of the
above statement coming from someone who lives at the ass-end the Fulda Gap
I leave for others to work out.

>If it's different in your model, then your model is inaccurate,
>and needs adjusting.

That's right. There are no facts. Just models. Heaven forfend we actually
look at the way the world works. Hint: prices are *discovered*, bunky. Not
calculated with models. Does the name "von Mises" mean anything to you, or
did they edit it out of the German government school system?

As Olsen says, a prince is a bandit who doesn't move. If there's no money
to steal, the bandit, er, prince, starves, too. Ask Mssrs Mugabe, Castro,
and all the other pissant price-calculators out there.

>As to physical models for people, we're not nearly there with
>a statistical peopledynamics -- it's a nonlinear system to start with,
>so there will never be a good descriptor.

Again, you mistake knowledge of the market with a belief in
price-calculation. You think that price discovery is price-calculation.

*You're* the one who betrays his desire for the state to "control" the
economy, and, apparently physics as well. You keep thinking in those kinds
of mechanistic terms, Lysenko is, indeed, your uncle. Or you're his bitch.
Take your pick.

>Protests do work. So do lobbies. Motivating people and cultivating
>contacts is hard -- and of course money helps here, too. All true,
>all orthogonal to writing code.

Protests are like elections, and elections, as H.L. Mencken said, are
merely advance auctions of stolen goods. It's better to produce more goods
than they can steal, or like people do on the internet, goods they haven't
thought to steal yet, or, much better, produce goods which can protect you
from those who steal, which, paradoxically, is precisely what cryptography
is.

>I'm really surprised I had to diagram that for you.

I'm surprised you think markets can be diagrammed.


The point is, cryptography solves, economically, financially, and thus
physically, the entirety of the problem that perrypunks, ip, politech, et
al., seem to be impotently jacking themselves off about at the moment.
Funnily enough, in the case of perrypunks, they're crypto people.

Hell, *you* proport to be a crypto person. You proport to write code. You
have a problem with the NSA, write code, problem solved.

Cheers,
RAH

-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'