How do you change the political environment in a dictatorship where ruling class has all the power and majority of the money and controls what you should read, watch or talk about?
A while ago on HN I said the Cheka learned all their techniques from the Okhrana and people took me literally, even replying to the effect that there was no personnel continuity.
What I'd meant is that, having been on the receiving end of all the Okhrana's dirty tricks, and having learned the hard way, the Cheka knew very well indeed how to play those games by the time they were on top.
To repeat this, there has to be a condition: "the oppressed can't bear it anymore." Economically, they are totally fine. They are just cattle who are fed and expected to behave as the owner requires. Ninety percent of Russians who didn't leave the country after 2021 have no incentive to be in any struggle; they are fed, they have work, they have a roof. The conditions that helped in 1917 were related to an economic disaster that the majority of the population experienced, and this was influenced by the 1st WW as well (which took a huge financial toll on the elites as well).
The ca. 1924 Thermidorian limitations of the 1917 success were explained by Trotsky, whose subsequent literary career was thereupon cancelled, via an ice axe to the head.
(I don't know to what degree Eric Blair worried about a similar fate, but we do see that after Animal Farm he moves to a remote island in Scotland, where presumably strangers would draw much greater attention to themselves than in London — and before returning to London for hospital marries a much younger spook*)
* compare a line from Trotsky: "Rakovsky cites a curious remark of Babeuf to the
effect that the degeneration of the new ruling stratum was helped along not a little by the former young
ladies of the aristocracy toward whom the Jacobins were very friendly. ... A census of the wives of the ruling stratum in the Soviet Union would show a similar picture."
Regardless, under current conditions there is no slim chance of rebellion in Russia. Massive conscription, on the other hand, and of course massive losses of the conscripted may cause an effect similar to 1917. However, the next government will be the same dictatorship as it always was in Russia, just slightly less aggressive toward neighbors.
Slightly ot or maybe not, the educational inflection point was deep in the mid of the Cultural Revolution, which suggests that mass rustications are indeed situations to look into..
(The mechanism is probably that STEMish rusticants began to selforganize learning centres)
COVID might have already started the process of Montanacation — elite diffusion to the hills —for the US (tho 2024 might actually reverse it)
For russians so far, the conscripts are so far drawn disprop from the lows; the tops prefer to emigrate/stay out of the country, so wait a bit.
[hokusai said? But painted a few lone wranglers in 甲斐 province]
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Re: Leningrad MTV & Russians
1) Intentionally not hiring locals for NPC role, out of respect for hosts or irony? Drink is Hainanese coconut? Visually refined + verbally profane, such Pansclavonia!
2)nomenklatura/engineers, could keep their kids away from lows as far back as 1950s, or even earlier. Military still more effective diffusive optimizer in AG’s time? Or further back, the Minimes.
I should pay more attention to the credits. There's a lot of soft-power country-checking in RU clips, eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps_Kqeo_tvU#t=180s , or the entire Masha i Medved series, in which it's pretty easy to guess who the panda, tiger, etc. refer to (although the "asiatic" black bear is a little indirect). At this point I've collected BR, IN, & CN refs, just missing ZA. (or maybe I've just missed it, because my Boer-fu is also nonexistent)
EDIT: and I have to give props to HONK FU! The hand-drawn motion blur is a nice touch; who has the time for that these days?
>Given the above signs of signaling, Caplan argues in ch. 5–6[1] that the selfish return to education is greater than the social return to education, suggesting that greater educational attainment creates a negative externality (p. 198[1]). In other words, status is zero-sum; skill is not (p. 229[1]).
There ought to be a way to cross Gogol's Dead Souls with Pauli–Villars ghosts, but both my po*-russki-fu and my unitarity-fu are too weak.
(unitarity keeps things group-like; semigroups/monoids have an "arrow" in that they make irreversible transitions between J-classes; could it be easier to generalise to the latter than to add ghosts?)
* TIL the waste material from copra harvests gets sold for hydroponic use. Is the appearance of the 水耕龍 an auspicious portent for grow rooms?
EDIT: two important differences education-wise here: (a) kids can signal reasonable intelligence and high conscientiousness through vocational school (although a son of my former landlords started on this route, then swapped to the university track after encouragement by his coworkers), and (b) it's way more difficult to set up a degree mill, because kids have to test into becoming eligible for university and the resulting support.
(Upon reflection: I had a career advantage due to my sheepskin's branding being high intelligence, meh conscientiousness, and low conformity; somehow here I am at the other end of my career still faithfully signalling those same weights on HN)
Uh (first off) its the german sense of vertex, not the anglo sense lol
(Image Search for “3-gluon vertex” to get a language independent sense)
On (regrettably still halfass’d) reflection,there are necessary subtleties which your question is stalking but it will take me a few days or weeks to page in
(but now I'm reminded —physics envy, mind you— of a "renormalisation" in regex engines. Recall the definition of A*:
A* == ϵ | A | A*A*
Mathematically, it doesn't make any difference if A also matches epsilon. However, when generating code, if it does, it's very useful to treat the above
as asking for:
A* == ϵ ⨁ A† ⨁ (A*A*)†
where A† recognises only the nondegenerate, "squarefree", portion of A.
Otherwise one risks getting stuck recognising ϵ an infinite number of times (leaving squares in is harmless); anyway the presence of the ϵ means that during* recognition of A*, there is one incoming edge but two outgoing.)
* speaking in terms of left to right traversal, but we can also go right to left, which (by a folk theorem) means we can also calculate bottom up. I'll have to reflect upon what A* might produce, edgewise, in that last case.
Mutual envy hits the sweet spot imho.. to me the (median) Informatiker has superior naming/notation/training. Recall that bit with Moitra et al cutting the Gordian knot of thermalization vs entanglement. (That dude couldnt touch-type to save his bacon, pls forgive the (reverent) gossip)
Here: how far is this regex from non-associativity.
[& this connection is exactly what i was hoping for! I’d hoped the regular in regularity structs would trigger smth, & save us both weeks (of procrastination, in my case)]
Was i born decades earlier, i might have wandered into a VC “human capital destruction” job, since i have a roughly equivalent mix of traits..
The binary ops, sequencing and alternation are associative (monoidal).
The unary op, kleene star, blocks reassociation.
However, it is occasionally useful to use the associative-adjacent identity A;A* == A*;A (and more generally, A^n;A* == A*;A^n;A* == A*;A^n == ...)
A Chirurg, an Architekt, and an Informatiker are discussing whose profession has the most patina. The Chirurg points out that when God removed Adam's rib to form Eve, He was doing surgery. The Architekt points out that when God made Heaven and Earth out of the Chaos, He was doing architecture. The Informatiker just smiles broadly and then asks, "Und? where then think you the Chaos came from? a cereal Gimmick?"
What about a self-organised criticality mobile of threads and swords with smaller swords hanging from them by (beams and) threads; usually just the daggers are dropping on the poors, but every once in a while one of the top threads fails and entire polearms or scythes descend upon a populace?
Mostly figured out the deal with the Leningrad (just noticed the logo animation..)
Shnurov runs a restaurant in Peterburg, “Cococo”, those are prob his employees, and the drink could well be his fave counterseasonal laptop class drink
Closest I found so far to that blue and white package was in Singapore, and the site kept trying to FOMO me: "Jessie Ni just bought ${PRODUCT}" etc.
Next thing you know, the websites will be wanting me to 讨价还价?
Then again, spout pouches are easy enough to get in your own livery, and filling stations run anywhere from USD 1'500 to USD 45'000 depending upon how many pouches you plan on filling per setup op. I'll have to see if Shnur has any CoCoCo house branded goods.
> Shnurova had faced challenges before. She had studied biochemistry but [that was] incompatible with being half of one of Russia’s most glamorous couples. And so she ... became a restaurant entrepreneur.
I suppose this way Shnur will always have a place to play on weekends, even if his style is not so compatible with the CoCoCouture concept?
the offerings at kokoko.spb.ru, how they triage the (upper mid to top) market!
1. Slavophile, past (god save the tsar!)
2. Laptop class, cosmopolitan future (tomorrow the universe!) Here be tropical dragons..
3. “Car dealer” class gastropub, present (dont worry abt that hangover)
In liberal democracies there tends to be no gap between 1,2,..(or 1,3) thank Bibendum??
I think i’ve a reasonably good handle on other-people’s-ikigai.. a shared meal or 2 can lead to some confidence intervals on their future returns — measured in ikigai!
Ikigai trading, otoh, a very delicate matter..
Edit: possible to trisect hn based on how adversarial the relationship to those who pay is ( no tops, but plenty of semiretirees in the uppest house)
> (The mechanism is probably that STEMish rusticants began to selforganize learning centres)
One would think widespread smartphones would help with this? Stuff that in my childhood was only available in university towns is now accessible to almost anyone with an aptitude and an interest...
EDIT: Did Pioneer Houses ever do STEM? "What you've learned, teach a buddy" was a nice slogan...
The ruling class is not a monolith, it's made of people with their own idea who are constantly vying for a better position.
Just this week some part of the US ruling class got some better seats in the game of musical chairs. The game's not much different anywhere in the world, other than the window dressing.
Goldstein, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism (1948) has a description of the game which agrees with Veblen, Luttwak, Bueno de Mesquita & Smith, and probably a few others over the last five thousand years.
If the mid wishes a circulation of elites, they must ally with the low against the high; if the high wishes to prevent this, they can ally with the low against the mid.
A crucial point on which Goldstein, Squealer, and the 2 Ronnies, agree is that no matter which way these alliances are sorted in theory, somehow in practice the low always wind up more or less where they started.
> Oh, it's the meek! Blessed are the meek! Oh, that's nice, isn't it? I'm glad they're getting something, 'cause they have a hell of a time. —Mrs. BN
