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

[Eugen Leitl]

On Tue, May 23, 2006 at 08:53:26AM -0400, R.A. Hettinga demonstrated
his comprehension difficulties:

> >People cause politics.
>
> People earn money, which they spend on politics.

Dude, politics has been with us at least since social primates.
Politics is not just played for money, power is another major
currency.

> >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.

And your point being... ?

> >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

We can't. Unless you broke out of Plato's cave you have to stick
with models. Economics is a model, too.

> calculated with models. Does the name "von Mises" mean anything to you, or
> did they edit it out of the German government school system?

Dude, I'm not interested in arguing religion with you.

> 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.

You don't have to preach to the choir, you know.

> >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.

No. You're still model-tarded. Economy is a special case of ecology.
People are not money-driven, they're prestige-driven.

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

Actually, I'm not the obsessive-compulsive one talking about
markets, so I resent such projections.

> *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

Aroo? Too much window-pane acid in your morning coffee?

> of mechanistic terms, Lysenko is, indeed, your uncle. Or you're his bitch.
> Take your pick.

Thanks for lightening up my working day with some free entertainment.
Appreciated.

> >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

So if I protest for my privacy, who am I stealing it from?

> 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.

So if they send you to Guantanamo because you won't cough up your keys
how is cryptography going to protect you from being sodomized by a
broomhandle
by sadistic guards?

> >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

Cryptography solves jack if it's not being used. I'm not surprised
that I have to explain that to you.

> al., seem to be impotently jacking themselves off about at the moment.
> Funnily enough, in the case of perrypunks, they're crypto people.

I see them organizing public protests. I also see them writing code.
I see you trying to shut up people by your "cpunks write code" mantra.

> Hell, *you* proport to be a crypto person. You proport to write code. You

Nope, I'm not a cypherpunk. Never claimed to be one. I'm just tracking
political and technology news and running servers with code that
cypherpunks wrote.

> have a problem with the NSA, write code, problem solved.

I write code nobody uses (too afraid, too ignorant), problem not solved.

--
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820            http://www.ativel.com
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