Bingology - BingoBoingo's Blog

Let us look at where this city used to be:

We have the obligatory fortress hill across the bay surrounded by comparatively new ghetto. On this side of the bay the old city is distinguised from barrio Centro by the newer hood's wider streets capable of being lined with trees.

The footprint of the city as it was when the British occupied it with 10,000 men for 9 months, the footprint of the Capital of a newly independent country, of a country that fought decades of civil wars... It all sits there in an area I don't spend much time because it is too far from the parts of the city I use. The only streets in that footprint still regarded as relatively important are 18 de Julio which starts where the old city ends and the Rambla which hugs the coast. The city's major thoroughfares Avenida General Riviera, Boulevard Artigas, Avenida Italia, 8 de Octubre, and Louis Alberto Herrera don't even come as close to the city as it was as the building whose roof the city was photographed from.

It is a tiny portion compared to the size of the city's footprint today.

Coming from where I do, last week there was a holiday. One of two where everything shuts down back home as compared to the many down here where everything shuts down, though to a lesser extent in my barrio compared to the rest of the city. Here the billoards marketed the day after the holiday, as they do back home. Advertisements were everywhere though fewer people than normal were hanging out at the mall for Black Friday. I suppose big sales aren't much of a draw when the money with which to buy what is on sale is lacking.

Anyways, seeing as having particular foods is a major point of the holliday I had some work to do. With Gloria the Peruana as a competent cook, the bird problem resolved itself. The only turkeys were frozen US imports offered at 329 pesos a kilo, I didn't think to acquire a duck or goose for butchery at the Feria the Sunday before, and a whole splayed seasoned "pollo parrillero" was 400 pesos.

The concept of stuffing however didn't parse when described with words, so I had to demonstrate. Thusly a portion of the groceries were understood, and the purpose of a substantial number of the groceries was likely beyond the understanding of anyone other than myself in the store that the loaves of crusty bread, chorizo, cebollas, and pasas de uvas rubias had a common fate.

Here we have the chorizo browning with the onions, raisins, and mix of balcony grown and commercially acquired herbs. The two loaves of bread had already been torn and dried in the oven to the kitchen's puzzlement while the stock lay in wait to hydrate the whole orchestra before the much of hydration would once again be sacrificed and baked off in the oven. The result was understood and lauded. It turns out stuffing theory can indeed be grasped.

There is a common problem in explaining Republican doctrine established through hard won experience and practice to the uninitiated:

BingoBoingo that's a good idea incidentally. lotta stuff we invented last tuesday and in the brief interval became seemingly "older than dirt" / "in kindergarten!!!" is in fact entirely unheard of outside the walls. - Mircea Popescu

Thusly for the benefit of myself and whoever might care, I will collect some information and thoughts in one place. Like I recently did with the other thing. I will try to keep this at the introductory level eschewing bleeding edge proposals, details of shortwave propagation, and The Republic Woodpecker in favor of practices which can be utilized today.

The Problem And Its Evolution

Back in the decade of 00's tech companies and the fledling social media companies which would soon ossify into the familiar monsters we know today were all about Free Speech or as some activists have been pushed to refer to it in an attempt to meme while mocking mechanical censors Freeze Peach. The year tech companies began their frog boiling transition away from Free Speech was 2011, around the time David Freese gave his speech after the World Series game six miracle performance against the Texas Rangers. Back then Occupy Wall Street was a thing, Hussein Bahamas was gearing up to campaign for his second term, and 4 years later many of those same activist and voters tired of "More of the Same" would join the Make America Great Again train.

For much of the Internet's first decades memes and trolling which touched the political frequently failed to gain substantial traction without mainstream media blessing.¹ The push to maintain a dialectic was rarely threatened, though 4chan's /b/ community could occasionally break through. As ineffective as the Occupy Movement was, it marked the turning point where younger internet aware folk were beginning to utilize the social engineering and influence tactics that allowed the Clintons to make the transition from hippy anti war protestors to Pantsuit wearing warmongers imposing their violence on the Middle East and the World.

The fiat powers that be very much want to resist their slide into irrelevance even as their power to achieve their desired outcomes is measurably fading. It is important to understand that why they want you silenced is not "hate speech" at all. It is because they need to define their opposition straw man, and if your words actual words are avaible that task becomes harder. Hence the push to marginalize the fiatist Pantsuit's actual opposition. With this we background we can move on to resisting censorship.

Considering The Best Possible Outcome For An Anonymous Creator

Anonymity is great for thieves and "law enforcement" agents subverting movements in the COINTEL tradition, but it is absolutely awful for writers, thinkers, and actual people trying to shape the world.

Consider the following example of the best case outcome for the work of an "anonymous"²
author:

This fellow made an image at the intersection of at least three memes³ which I found clever enough to share. I have no idea who produced it, which prevents me from searching for other works by the creator of this wonderful piece. If I could tie this image to an author I could share other works further increasing their influence on the world. At the same time neither myself nor the author of the image have any hard guarantees that the image author is actually anonymous to the adversaries he ought to be most concerned with. If his enemies manufacter a pretext to bring suffering to him, I will lack anyway to know he is suffering and bring attention to his plight. Should the author wish to take credit for this work of art in the future, he is likely to be plagued by doubt unless vouched for by people with strong reputations, and even then his authorship may still be disputed.

To summarize the fate of the successful Anon:

1. One or more pieces of work get recognition, each one standing independently
2. The Author's unified body of work is doomed to fragmentation
3. Potential failings in the Author's pursuit of anonymity create substantial risk without any chance of martyrdom should they meet misfortune at the hands of the enemy.

Outside of this best case scenario the production of anons is noise and discarded as such.

The Power Of Identity

The Daily Stormer survives today entirely on the names of Andrew Anglin and Weev. Are they doing as well as they could have if they would have aligned themselves with The Most Serene Republic? Probably not, but they are indeed managing to continue publishing and being read.

The doxing fear is largely a manufactered insecurity pushed for the purpose of promoting mouse behavior over man behavior. The worst outcomes of from doxing which get paraded around to promote the manufactered insecurity tend to involve people who get into and continue to sustain heated emotional arguments with people they shouldn't be arguing with, or people selected by lottery to endure the daily hate. The truth about doxing is the people it hits hardest are the people who were most confident in their anonymity and a class of people commonly referred to a "lolcows" who are socially maladapted in ways invite bullying.

Consider the case of GAW miners during Qntra's early history. Homero "Josh" Garza and his band of scammers were running a scheme suckering idiots and they had retained lawyers that graduated law school and were memebers of relevant state bar associations and everything that goes along with that. They had struggled to put together the names of the not at all secret Qntra principals who were calling them Jizz moppers and shitting all over their scam. During this same period another aspiring Bitcoin news site tried leveraging the obviousness of the GAW scam into a launch pad and they got bogged down in the fiat legal system.

The winning move is not to fear doxing, but to gird yourself so that doxing is pointless. Should the media's daily hate focus on me I will likely be temporarily inconvenienced to some degree, but the fallout would likely be a larger net positive for me than them and so the studious ignoring is likely to continue. When an FBI agent and a US Treasury agent knocked on my front door in August 2014, I did not hide the fact there was a conversation on my front lawn. I fucking blogged the encounter while it was fresh in my hungover mind!

I am pretty sure I hit the publish button well before the pair finished their several hundred mile drive back to Peoria, Illinois. Three years later I flew to Uruguay using a passport in my name and four years later I am still blogging. Just about everything in my life now is better in every way that it was in August 2014. If I had been the sort of idiot who instead of blogging his encounter went and bought a fake passport before fleeing in panic for the purpose of preserving "anonymity" at all costs, I almost certainly would have had problems.

Freedom lives in truth and the light. A pseudonym or pen name can be fine, but you defnitely want an identity as a writer. If you truly fear the damage doxing can do to your life, start fixing your life to mitigate that fear.

The Importance Of WoT

Without aweb of trust you can't be part of an actual social network. Having a WoT presence tied to your identity, as defined by your posession of a cryptographic public/private key pair, is the essential element for having franchise now an into the future. Not having a cryptographically enforced WoT identity means other people are left to guess "Well, that sounds like something he would say" or you become dependent on someone with a cryptographically enforced WoT indentity vouching for you based off of in person interactions. Not having a WoT identity negates the myriad of benefits promised by this world wide web.
When you depend on a social network without a cryptographic WoT to defend the integrity of you identity you make yourself entirely dependent on the platform provider's good will. Such a dependence is unnecessary, unsanitary, and people will judge you negatively for it. For all of the good sane things appearing on Heartiste, understand that Heartiste is handicapped by a lack of WoT presence. Heartist has readers, and commenter, and maybe even has a contingency plan for when the axe comes for him and Wordpress.com censors him. Yet, his lack of WoT presence is nothing other than a handicap. Suppose Wordpress hands the keys of his blog over to an agent of the deep state he criticises so much, and the deep state agent begins a series of posts that frog boil the blog's tone away from sanity and towards the unhinged? How does Heartiste repudiate the imposter? With a WoT presence Heartiste simply signs a and publishes a statement alerting everyone to what happened, his pseudonym stays safe, any anyone who wants to verify the authenticity of the statement can thanks to public key cryptography. This is the GPG social contract.

Without a cryptographically enforced WoT identity, merely being banned from a platform is the least of the evils a hostile tech company can inflict. Refusal to register in a WoT leads to insanity like proposing Trump "regulate" internet companies, an outcome which similarly creates unecessary dependence on a benevolent thousand year Trumpreich while leaving plenty of room for he said zhe said mischief and account "hacking" in the end. With a WoT, you don't need daddy's approval and intervention. At some point you have to take responsibility instead of outsourcing it.

Censorship Resistant Hosting And Pizarro

So you've got a WoT identity. Why host on Pizarro? Why not bounce around among heathen services like a pinball constantly passing GPG signed statements as you get booted from place to place for "wrong" speech?

You pay Pizarro, because Pizarro pays Pizarro's upstream enough to hurt if Pizarro has to move. The reason for contracting with a independent datacenter in Uruguay is pointedly not the culture. The reason is to get out of the USG/EU cuck NATO reich and its Pantsuit media panic bubble. Microsoft is big, the loss of whatever money Gab paid Microsoft for azure hosting is less than pocket change to microsoft. The revenue loss to Godaddy when they steal domain names for wrong think does not hurt Godaddy.

Now, when an independent datacenter provider has a customer paying them for a rack and pipe to the rack, losing that customer would materially hurt their balance sheet. Keeping good relations with our upstream means Pizarro has a WoT enforced good neighbor policy. That means don't do retarded shit only cops do like trying to call todler fucking child porn free speech. The only people who like child porn and want to publish it are cops. The only people who want to send spam emails are people who don't understand email is functionally dead, and email spam is a -ev pursuit that has been milked to death. If you want censorship resistant hosting, Pizarro wants you. If what you want to do is legally dubious in a fiat jurisdiction, we ask you to consult us because there are crosses I am willing to die on and then there's running a tor darknet market where I can tell you to just seek out a cartel instead for greater profits. Pizarro's commitment to WoT hosting means I am putting my physical person and well being at risk for our customers while mod6, asciilifeform, and other investors are betting their precious capital on this taking off.

If you are a person insteresting in saving personhood and everything that makes the world nice, hit me up and Pizarro will treat you right. If you are a Pantsuit worshipping FBI stooge interesting in flashing your toddler fucking home made porn at the world, I will be happy with your consent to arrange for a medical professional trained in either dentistry or vaccination to bite off your dick on the beach before you are fed to sea wolves.

1. Mainstream here is used to denote both unrepentant Pantsuitist organs and their token `conservative` opposition. [↩]
2. To me, I have no idea of these particular meme image's author. This does not mean their identity is unknown to their declared enemy. [↩]
3. The Virgin versus Chad meme, The NPC meme, and the Russian Bot meme to be clear. There could be others embeded which I have missed. [↩]

Little movement from last month outside of the Brasilero "real", though Brasil should be great again soon after their upcoming election.

Prelude

For much of the world, Uruguay mean "Legal Cannabis", so let us begin by looking at government numbers:¹

• Adquirentes 28.470
• Cultivadores 6.819
• Clubes Membresía 107
• Farmacias 17

Let us walk through these numbers. Just under 30,000 bipeds have registered to stand in line at 17 pharmacies for plastic baggies of subsidized government weed 5-10 grams at a time for no more than 40 total grams a month. The 40 total grams is difficult for buyers to achieve because the government can't grow enough to satisfy this small registered demand. Registering as a buyer involves going to the post office with a cedula, proof of address in the form of a utility bill or letter from the local police stations, and then filling out an application that involves getting fingerprinted.

The 107 membership only cannabis clubs each have between 15 and 45 members, with the club's license coming into danger should the number of members fall too low or climb too high. These clubs allowed to grow up to 99 plants at a time and are bound by substantial regulatory compliance burdens. Before going to the post office to register as a club, the involved parties have to formally register a "civil association" with the Ministry of Education and Culture. Membership in one of these clubs usually runs 2,500 to 5,000 pesos (80 to 160 USD-ish)² monthly and one time initiation fees to join a club starting around 15,000 pesos (470 USD-ish).

Finally there are just under 7,000 people in the country who registered to grow their own cannabis, up to six mature plants at a time for up to 480 grams annually. The application process involves going to the post office with a cedula showing citizen or finalized permanent residence status, a utility bill, and not getting fingerprinted like the registered buyers. In exchange for registering as a home grower, it becomes no big deal under the law for the homegrower to have up to the full 480 grams of product in their domicile at a time. The buyer and club member, per the letter of the law, only get to have up to 40 grams at a time before the law says problems can happen.

Now anyone at all, registered or not, gets to possess 40 grams of cannabis without regard for whether they are a citzen, resident, or tourist. While many Uruguayos will wank around trying to insist "tourists can't have marijuana", as long as the act of charity, commerce, or generosity which put cannabis in tourist hands isn't subject to very unusual police attention, a tourist can smoke or eat as much cannabis as they want. Once it is in their hands, it is theirs

Now that the wank of officiality is out of the way, we can proceed to substantive matters.

The Plant Itself

Cannabis is called weedfor a reason. Cannabis readily thrives anywhere in the world with a suitable climate, and it will do its damnest as a strictly annual plant to survive in hostile climates waiting to stumle upon the right genetics that will allow its children to thrive. Like annual plants with tremendous growth potential including pumpkins and tomatoes, growing conditions can substantially affect whether the plants reach their potential and the quality of the harvested crop, if any.

Similar to big cats, speciation is hard. Just like any big cat can fuck another big cat with a good chance of producing viable offspring, so goes cannabis. Like the big cats, environmental niches and the tyranny of geography has allowed the natural development of many distinct regional landraces with substantial genetic diversity.

These landraces can largely be sorted into three phenotypes, two of which have day length dependent flowering cycles.

• Sativa type plants have the largest naturalized range covering the Americas, Africa, and much of Asia. Generally tall with thin leaves, these varietes dominate plantations from Mexico through Paraguay all the way to Uruguay. The length of time these plants spend flowing tends to be especially long, especially long in equitorial varieties. The long flowering times are why seeds from Latino plantation weed aren't going to yield a useful crop in Ohio. By the time days are short enough for them to go into flowing mode temperatures are rearing up to dive into the shitter.
• Indica type plants are shorter, bushier, more cold and shade tolerant plants traditionaly cultivated for sticky hashish production in Southwest Asia. Their smaller size allowed indoor cultivation in locations not specifically built around housing 2-5 meter tall fiber beasts. The flowering cycle of these varieties is also tied to day length though the length of the flowering period tends to be shorter.
• Ruderalis type plants are still smaller and more cold tolerant guys who naturally hang around the caucasus. Not particularly intoxicating in their wild form, ruderalis plants reservoir of desirable genetics including a recessive autoflowing gene and other traits that enhance environmental robustness. The landrace which produces dry hashish in Morocco manages to have a number of ruderalis sugestive traits including autoflowering and dwarfism while still managing to be intoxicating... and substantially seperated from the caucasus by geography.

From these diverse pools of genetic stock hybridization and selective breeding have created a number of varieties with wildly differing combinations of traits from gigantic high yeilding autoflowers to a variety called "Alaskan Thunder Fuck" on account of having been cultivated and developed in Alaska.

Pharmacology of Cannabis

Cannabis can have a wide range of effects from speedy head highs to profound sedation, and these effects may present in various combinations with varying levels of self perception of intoxication. While language police will typically single out THC as the single major "psychoactive" component, other compounds like the tranquilizer CBN are clearly psychoactive in their effects, per the definitions of the effects themselves yet... language and rules wank creates congnitive dissonance. At present a substantial fountain of popular wank is on how aromatic terpenes which can lend the flowers a variety of scents and flavors modulate the experience of cannabis intoxication which being careful to never attach the word "psychoactive" to the terpenes.

Subtle to profound effects on memory creation and retention during and after cannabis intoxication are of greatest anthropological and cultural interest.

Propogation

Cannabis may be propagated by seeds or cloned via cuttings. In the case of autoflowering plants, they must be propagated by seed. Some photoperiod cultivars are propagated only via cloning.

A cannabis plant will be of either one of two genders. As the primary desired crop from cannabis plants is female flowers, preferably unfertilized, male plants are usually only of interest for breeding. Under a number of stress conditions, female plants can develop male sex organs and fertilize themselves and other female plants. The resulting seeds will be guarenteed to grow female plants, though the type of stress inducing hermaphrodism may predisponse the children to more readily sex themselves weird. The stress threshold for triggering hermaphrodism varies substantially between cultivars, Thai cultivars are notorious for reliably growing male parts late in flowering if unfertilized earlier.

Seed cultivars enjoy world wide distribution and many clone only cultivars have spread to multiple continents in a testament to the success of the drug on wars. There are a number of established breeders distributing a wide variety of cultivars which grow true to advertised type. There are also a number of sloppy operations crossing established cultivars, and distributing their creatively named by less predictable wares.

Many reputable breeders have been in continuous operation since the 1970's and 1980's when the drug wars first started heating up.

Cultivation

The bar for cultivating cannabis for smoking is lower than that for cultivating tomatoes for eating. Like tomatoes, the potential end product and it's growth to there is going to depend on genetics. As established in the section on cultivation this is a solved problem. Quality genetics for numerous cultivars can be acquired in Uruguay be going to a grow shop with imported seeds from an established breeder and paying 200-450 pesos per feminized autoflowering seed depending on variety, breeder, and grow shop. Seeds for the satavia type cultivar grown and exported from Paraguay³ can readily be found in limited quantities pressed cannabis exported from that country, but efforts to grow plants of that type to a similar or greater quality requires a similar plantation effort.

Live plants yet to flower can also be acquired from grow shops and the Sunday street market ferias.

Cannabis can be cultivated indoors or outdoors. While photoperiod varieties of cannabis are generally considered to have a greater maximum potential for intoxicant content, the details can sufficiently influence the end product to the extent that autoflowering varieties can produce a higher quality end product in many cultivation situations. These situations include urban outdoor grows where nighttime light pollution can not be completely controlled without effort and the situation where and idiot with a plant playing god over his charge's artificial sun does not completely optimize the switch from vegatative growth to flowering growth in harmony with the rest of the plant's growing conditions.

Numerous cultivators in Uruguay, licensed and unlicensed, manage to produce cannabis of varying quality. At the bottom are efforts to cultivate found Paraguayo seeds and at the top there is a limited amount of world class product. The middle is wide and sparsley populated. Contracted growers of government weed for pharmacy distribution produce four cultivars. Alpha 1 and 2 are indica type cultivars, while Beta 1 and 2 are sativa type cultivars.

High Times magazine, back when it was cool, was built on spreading cultivation knowledge and providing advertising space to seed vendors with the aim that it would help achieve legalization as cannabis production became far too widespread to surpress. As they succeeded, the cool is gone and they have moved onto full blown Conde Nast type advertorial wank.

Persons interested in cultivating their own cannabis are advised to pick up seeds for an autoflowering variety, throwing them in an appropriately sized containers for their final size, and growing them exactly like a container tomato down to light calcium supplementation. Water smart allowing for the pot to wet/dry cycle when the plant grows into it and feed the thing lighly as though you have to worry about delicate tomato skin cracking. Cut back on the nitrogen once it starts flowering, and stop all fertilizing before harvest.⁴ Let it take in the actual sun. As with all new horticultural adventures, avoid the tempation to fuck with a plant you haven't personally shepherded through a full lifecycle yet. Congratulations! You have become a solid 90th pecentile B+/A- cannabis grower while observing the plant's whole lifecycle.

Whether indoor cultivation should be considered boils down to the exact same formula versus the price of electricity that Bitcoin mining does. Reddit can be mined for many example of persons cooking their plants with heat emitted by their light fixture while at the same time not delivering enough light for healthy growth. This happens even though detailed instructions for indoor growing setups at any scale are freely available on the internet along with growing logs
(archived).

Training, pruning, and all sorts of other normal cultivation techniques can be applied to cannabis for higher yields when correctly applied. Photoperiod plants tend to be more forgiving to train as their vegatative period can always be extended if they need more time to recover. Autoflowering varietes run on a strict internal clock with substantial potential for tears if aggressively trained and cut.

También, all manner of unnatural and toxic plant growth regulators can be applied to improve the visual appearance of the flowers according to community standards. Similarly while some cultivars naturally produce fruity smells and tastes, these too can be doctored into the crop. Throw in some plant hormones, and this loose community managed to invent their own Monsanto.

Harvesting And Storage

The timing of a cannabis harvest will affect the portions of psychoactive compounds in the end product. Exposure of harvested product to light, heat, oxygen, and moisture will affect the psycoactive contents of the product. The highest concentration of psychoactive compounds will be in trichomes produced in greatest number on and near the flower buds. Substantial compounds will be present in the buds themselves, but given the ease of cultivation many societies will traditionally produce hashish from the trichomes without need for bothering with the extra bulk in storing plant material from the buds themselves. Leaf material with a visible accululation of trichromes may be productively dried and sifted for hashish production.

In cultures that consume whole flowers, traditionally the flowers are pressed for greater shelf life and ease of handling. While it may currently be fashionable to prefer unpressed dry flowers, they suffer from a drastically reduced shelf life and they will shed trichomes any time they are handled. This limits fashionably unpressed flowers to a largely marginal role analagous to seasonal local produce at a farmer's market that loses substantial value with time and transit. Storage in a cool, dark, humidity controlled environment can help to preserve the quality of product.

A number of extracts and concentrated cannabis products including butane and alcohol solvent extracts. Equipment for producing hot pressed resin from whole flowers is ubiquitous in grow shops located in Uruguay, but sales of the equipment appears to be low.

The psychoactive components of cannabis are unavailable via the oral route of administration, but heat treatment can decarboxylate THC allowing for the production of edible products.

Consumption

By a large margin the most popular method of cannabis consumption in Uruguay is hand rolled joints, followed distantly by edible products, with other methods of consumption trailing sufficiently to the point of being statistically insignificant. Rolling papers of varying qualities are available at every kiosko, with the most common and default option being a brand of orange colored papers suffering a profound poverty of adhesive. Some kioskos carry a wider variety of papers than others, but every kioski will have the standard orange papers. Growshops tend to carry a wide variety and large inventory of international brand rolling papers.

In spite of the frequency with which the practice of rolling joints is carried out, skill in rolling remains rare

Pipes and bongs of many types and materials are prominently displayed in stores. A complete absence of the classic "dugout" type one hitter and wooden stash box combo from the market in Uruguay at any price point is notable.

Edible baked goods are sold in the Sunday market ferias, though in recent weeks the number of vendors doing so has contracted. Products for topical application with a pharmokinetic profile that impedes the possibility of intoxication are widely available.

Imported brand name vaporizers are advertised at higher than the typical markup for imported goods

Cultural Effects

Marijuana legalization has three primary population level effects.

1. Outright legalization robs cannabis of its outlaw, rebel cool factor. Visitors from places where cannabis isn't legal get to enjoy a novelty in smoking openly in public around cops, but for residents it simply becomes an alt-beer less likely to get you into acute danger when overconsumed. It settles into being just another vice that happens to have even less "stick it to the man" cred than other vices.
2. Marijuana legalization substantially hinders left wing activism. Many personality traits and situations that draw bipeds to frequent cannabis consumption also draw those same bipeds to pantsuitism and socialism. The would be activist free to wake and bake every day has a substantial amount of idle time which could have went to activism instead harmless tossed out in a haze. Similarly, the idea that a left wing Hussein Bahamas just might be talking about marijuana when he says "Hope and Change" without further specification is a major draw to leftist inclined bipeds. Upon getting blessing to gay marry their reefer, they get the feeling they have arrived and the threshold necessary for pantsuits to engage them raises. In combination with socially approved habitual intoxication, everything seems less urgent since they can smoke and feel good. While they might sympathize with tranny reparations or any other cause, they are incapable of becoming passionate about anything that hasn't already knocked them out of homeostasis.
3. Consumption of marijuana promotes the development and belief in false memories. The social engineering potential for this is tremendous, which is likely why Pantsuit pushes normalizing marijuana consumption. The effect on activism in the previous point is likely why Pantsuit is cautious in actually legalizing cannabis.

In short marginal bipeds become even more marginal while tourists have another recreation option.

1. From Ircca, the Cannabis Agency. [↩]
2. As of this writing the USD runs roughly 32 Pesos Uruguayos [↩]
3. The regional perspective is that Paraguay is the likely largest producer of cannabis in the world with a climate and soils well suited to growing their giant sativa type plants. Paraguay is credited with keeping Brasil, Argentina, and the rest of the region supplied with smoke.

   Another thing to note is that cannabis use and possession of up to 10 grams is allowed and legalisation proposals in Paraguay typically consider plant counts above 100 to be reasonable for a person's personal growing. This is in contrast to other fiat jurisdictions that limit personal mature plant counts to the single digits. [↩]

4. To be clear we are talking about determinate cultivars of tomatoes here, the ones that flower and fruit in one go. We aren't talking about indeterminate monsters that keep producing new flowers and tomatoes until they die. [↩]

As an a person who enjoys OS weird, when I heard the first beta release of Haiku came out I knew I'd end up playing with it. As its inspiration BeOS was one of the several "ahead of its time" OSen that were crushed by the Windows/Mac/*nix wave I figured there might be something in it. Some playing and doc reading lead to more than a few idle thoughts:

• The fellows behind it maintain a gcc 2 toolchain for backwards compatability on x86 while having a seperate gcc toolchain for x86 and other platforms that tracks newer gcc versions. This suggests it could be forked and built on a Republican toolchain without too much fussing. If I have a free hand in 5-10 years I might try that.
• My hardware worked. The onboard graphics controller in my AMD E-350 was allowed to control the graphics. There wasn't any hardware in the laptop left unrecognized or obviously dysfunctional.
• It has a ports tree. The ports tree offers some choices in the vein of GPG 1.4.x vs evil GPG 2. The software the offer as packages tends to pick the awful newer versions as the default suggestion
• The PRNG is yarrow.
• Haiku is very GUI centric. As a GUI centric OS it appears far better behaved than any recent GUI centric African linux. It probably won't be replacing anyone's well worn and practiced workstation interface.
• A brief non-exhaustive stress test where different video were played at the same time failed to induce stuttering, like in the old BeOS demos. Ubuntu can't do this. Your experience may vary, deeper probing might find problems, but on the surface it seemed to preseve the real time flavor of its ancestor.

As it stands today Haiku isn't replacing anyone in the Republic's current workstation setup,¹ and adapting it for that use would take a substantial investment of time. On the other hand Haiku is very much worth considering for an entertainment kiosk, recreational device, certain kinds of nostalgia itches, or baby's first computer. In most cases where Ubuntu seems like a tempting solution, this Haiku beta release is probably going to work.

1. On the other hand BeKUNTd could get a V genesis sometime in the late 2020s [↩]

Can you see?

We have one package previously opened bearing tape from "Terminal de Cargas Uruguay"

Now we move closer to the wound for a better look at the repair

After verifying the package contents AN HERO EMERGES! It's a wild Alfajor Oreo!

Unwrapped the Alfajor Oreo is smaller than the native Alfajores Uruguayos. This betrays its Argentine Origin as Alfajores Argentinos suffer from dwarfism.

Slicing in half further reveal Argentine traits. Instead of adapting oreo stuffing to more resemble dulce de leche, Alfajor Oreo has a stiff cream filling confirming Argentine origin definitively. By happenstance it is identical to common, lesser oreo filling.

First the pesos

Now onwards to our URU-gay:

Passing through Plaza Independencia on my way between errands I saw a sight!

Surrounding the masoleum of Uruguay's national hero

And the foot of his statue

Was some sort of gay education event








No scantily clad people celebrating their sexing. No obviously gay people at all. Just one AIDS tent, a bunch of craft tents roughly a quarter of which were selling grinders and other smoking accessories, and a total attendance on par with St. Paul's parish Kirchenfest in Highland, Illinois. Far fewer people than turn out for the weekly feria Tristan Narvaja were in the historic district's central plaza across from the Exective branch's office building for an event planers decided was important enough to warrant rainbow canopies.

From another plaza two blocks away. It's this colorful every day.

Adjusting to urban life has probably been a bigger adjustment for me than language and Latino/Italian culture¹ Since I've become aware of the fitness thing again I've been doing the whole body bodyweight thing alternating days. The nice side effect of forgetting about fitness, is that when paid attention to again it doesn't take much time to see some progress. My eyes are making if over the pullup bar. But it helps that this activity has a concrete purpose in adapting to Urbanity, to that point I would rate its importance up there with additional solo drilling of vocabulary and grammar before departure.

Useful to the solo urban pioneer is the 15 to 25 liter² daypack.³ A lot of sites, reddits, and members of the travel fandom will instead advocate building a luggage strategy around a 35-45 liter "carry on travel backpack" as the center of everything. While this may be fine for recreationally or even in some cases productively hopping from hostel to hostel every few days, a pioneer builds things and building requires tools. On most international flights you get to bring a carry on suitcase and a separate "personal item" piece of luggage into the cabin. This maximizes your space from transporting valuables, fragiles, and their padding. As a young republican pioneer who will be building stuff, you are probably transporting some tools and materials that are going into checked bags. Having checked bags is fine, and the only way you are going to have an all important claw hammer from the moment you leave your destination airport for your new life.

Your daypack should be able to comfortably transport your essential work tools, a change of clothes, and an additional load for the greater value of 10kg or 10% of your bodyweight for arbitrary distances covered on foot. Is this how you are actually going to load your daypack everyday? No, not unless you keep arbitrary ballast in your pack habitually. Like solid leather boots that you might not wear everywhere and forever after you get the lay of the land, it a useful excess of capability. Loot drops are rarely weightless no matter what the games tell you.⁴

Securing your daypack given its contents is an extremely high priority. It does not go unatttended unless secured. If you are in a hostel it and NOT your carry on or drug stash⁵ goes in your locker. Alternately it can sleep with you in your bed.

James Lafond offers considerations for securing the backpack while it is being worn. In my own surveys of pedestrian latino lands they absolute highest risk situation for having a backpack stolen is when you are a short local woman disembarking from a bus.

If you are a mid 20s woman under 5 feet tall who insists on fashionable looking backpacks and your daily commute from the inner slums to outer slums involves one transfer between bus lines, you can count on losing your backpack to groups of young male adults at your transfer point at least annually. If you are an adult male sleeping on the street with your backpack under your head or in a teddy bear position, it might never be stolen. No factors I have observed affect likelyhood of bag theft as highly as being a short woman who takes the bus.⁶

The only strong predictor of attempted bag theft for males I have seen is visible intoxication, and this affects locals and tourists alike.⁷ The incidents I have heard of suggest a less than 30% success rate against drunks⁸ while stoners tend to more specifically "lose their wallet" after getting comfortable with new strangers than have their whole backpack forcefully taken. The most successful thieves tend to grab and run while hanging around bus stops.

Now what makes a good daypack? Wide, padded shoulder straps and a good fit for your body. During his visit to Montevideo
asciilifeform was a substantial fan of using a chest clip or strap to enforce an optimally load distribution position for the shoulder straps. In the following months I've beome a convert. On the other hand I still suspect a load bearing padded hip belt is overkill for this role. If you have time before your departure go to REI or something and try out some packs. Try them with weight until you find one that works for you.

The other major consideration is protection from the elements. Cheap rainproof backpack covers can be found just about anywhere, but here in Montevideo where partly cloudy skies can occasionally drop driving rain the 30-ish seconds it takes to deploy the cover can lead to substantial anxiety drying out your laptop because the fucking bag had a seperate leaky zipper covering a dedicated laptop compartment. A laptop sleeve built into the main compartment is the less anxiety inducing design, especially when paired with an application of scotchguard. Scotchguard should be applied after soaking the daypack and any other textile luggage with a liberal application of a repellent insecticide labeled for bedbug control. Other travelers can be filthy.

Getting and playing with a pull up bar⁹ has noticably improved¹⁰ my comfort when rucking around with my own rucksack. Before I got the pullup bar doing rows with a knotted blanket secured in the bathroom door similarly lead to noticable improvements in posture and comfort. Long walks with a bunch of optimally distributed weight in the pack loaded into the pack helps with conditioning for your new life while burning a noticably higher volume of calories than simply walking, which in turn makes the pull up bar friendlier, and so on.

One other nice feature is a convenient pocket for the camera and sunglasses. A solid point and shoot camera that works well in a variety of situations is a godsend. The republic enjoys pictures,¹¹ get in the habit of taking them often before your new location becomes boring and normal.

1. The target audience for this piece is anyone who finds themselves in the situation I did in 2017 or aspires to find themself in such a situation. If you already have slavegirls to enlist for porter duty it may be less relevant. [↩]
2. Your torso length will largely be the determining facor in the size that fits comfortably. [↩]
3. It is to my shame this did not occur to me before getting on the plane, coming from a place where you either carry a bunch or shit xor go for a long walk. Instead I went for a stupid shoulder `boarding bag` of limited long term utility as my personal item. [↩]
4. Not to mention the excess capacity is valuable when playing tour guide for the girls coming through your hostel. [↩]
5. Should you happen to have a drug stash in a hostel it should be trivially secured, easily stolen, and its location an open secret. It should be an early warning system for sticky fingers where the worst outcome is losing a small amount of some physical altcoin. In the event things of yours no matter the value routinely go missing, you need to move yesterday. The caliber of people you are around is too low, your reputation is dogshit, or both. [↩]
6. Even then avoiding the inner and outer slums substantially reduces the risk of theft to the short woman. [↩]
7. This risk is substantially reduced in males who habitually sleep on the street regardless of intoxication level. [↩]
8. The cannonical attempt in my memory is the report from a group of young men affiliated with the hostel drinking in a restaurant/bar's outdoor seating area on the sidewalk. The group of agressors were unarmed and the defenders produced broken glassware in a successful defense against an attempted mugging by insufficiently supported threat of violence. Several months later one fellow from that incident was walking back from a get together with a female companion. Her backpack was successfully snatched by a committed runner who managed to escape in the end. Note this is Uruguay in 2017-2018 and not James Lafond Presents Baltimore. [↩]
9. Do not pack this. Acquire a new one locally. [↩]
10. Even the traction from the force applied by the weight of my legs while hanging from the bar has a nice albeit temporary effect. [↩]
11. If you do not already keep a blog there are many other problems to be remedied well before pioneer duty becomes a possibility. [↩]

So the "Poder Ejecutivo" Tabaré Vázquez ordered the Army "Comandante en Jefe" Guido Manini Ríos to be arrested with intensity for 30 days because he made a comment criticizing the nominally ruling Fat Forehead coalition's changes to military pensions. Because "How dare the Army Commander" criticize the government run by the a shitshow of lefty rebels whose terrorism triggered a period of protective dictatorship in the 1970's during which many current Uruguayo politicians were arrested for the usually commie terrorist crimes like armed robbery.((Eventually during the 1980's they did their own sort of `Truth and Reconcilliation` deal where they became an `Our Democracy` state again either pardoning or immunizing everybody depending on which side they were on. The commie rebels got involved in Politics, took over in the 00's, and now they have gone full circle and become `The Man` keeping everybody down. )) Ok, so on the surface the driving narrative appears to be commies ruthlessly enforcing restrictions on political speech because "our democracy" and fear of "muh dictatorship" lingering around.

But while the Uruguayos are not a happy people, a lot of them remember the not quite so bad times of the 90's and the 00's. Uruguay is an expensive country full of poor people. Wages are incredibly flat across professions for the Uruguayos who are employed. Gainfully employed people engage in habits like hoarding plastic grocery bags. Sure a good number of Uruguayos mine dumpsters to find items of value to flip while in Venezuela people are mining dumpsters for potential dinner. Meanwhile the value of the Peso Uruguayo is slipping, but it isn't outright cratering like the Peso Argentino. The Chinese buy increasing amounts of Uruguay's agricultural output while farmers make less. Grocery prices aren't that far out of line with North American standards. Unlike the Argentards, the Uruguayos tend to be aware they are poor and they usually resign themselves to that. Their attitude to the fact that they are getting poorer seems more complicated than the simple resignation to their poverty in general, but it is hard for me to suss out a general sentiment.

In this environment the Fat Forehead coalition keeps on pushing unpopular things as is the way of the eternal pantsuit. In this Uruguay where the fact free plastic grocery bags included with grocery purchase has spawned numerous cultural norms around bags and their uses, a ban on stores giving the bags away is about to come into effect. I have not met anyone in this country who wants this ban, and and the reaction it induces seems to be viscerally negative. Yet Frente Amplio is trumpeting this incredibly unpopular measure. Now Uruguayos are very good at bottling up and hiding their anger till they snap, so it is very possible they think they did something popular. Similarly the Frente Amplio sitting at the Intendencia of Montevideo gender neutered the Queen of Carnaval in a very unpopular move.

Meanwhile the opposition National Party¹ is pushing something they call "Vivir sin Miedo" which is a plan to let the police do night raids and give the Army a law enforment role.² I am disappointed they aren't pushing to go back to the "no rules" attitude towards guns they had until 2002, but this is a culture of low expectations outside of football and even then they over-moderate their enthusiasm.

In this environment the Comandante en Jefe Guido is trying to quietly return from his current mission in Mexico to quietly serve his 30 days while the opposition parties are stoked on rallying at Carrasco International Airport. Rallying that Guido is trying to discourage with an indeterminate amount of sincerity.³ While it is too early to predict Frente Amplio beated at the ballot box, Military Coup, Bolivarian Revolition, or "Make Uruguay Great-ish Again" happening there's enough here for local politics to get interesting. I have doubts⁴ that there's enough capacity for action in the population here for anything too dramatic, but there is a non-zero chance⁵this country gets interesting.

1. Formerly known as the White Party though the papers occasionally still refer to them as the Blancos. [↩]
2. The Navy already does Coast Guard style water and shoreline law enforcement while the Airforce does airport security. [↩]
3. Uruguayos aren't the easiest people to read. [↩]
4. This is still some distance for meeting the Qntra bar. [↩]
5. In which case this piece will surely be linked from Qntra. [↩]

Below are prices of some groceries in found at retail in the wild in Montevideo. At any given moment prices tend to be flat with adjustments happening in lockstep. These prices reflect retail grocery stores. Sunday ferias tend to run under grocery store prices.

• Parboiled Rice 1 kilogram - 40 pesos
• Milk 1 liter Tetrapack - 34 pesos
• Blackberry Jelly glass jar 370 grams - 149 pesos
• Frozen Salmon 1 kilogram¹
  - 699 pesos
• Pancetta/Bacon 1 kilogram - 530 pesos
• Box of mixed Chocolates 400 grams - 149 pesos
• Boneless Skinless Chicken Breast 1 kilogram²
  - 255 pesos
• » "Ensalada Rusa" 1 kilogram - 348 pesos
• » "Tienda Inglesa Cafe Glaseado" 500 gram bag - 159 pesos
• » "Medallones Entrecot" Beef Steaks 1 kilogram - 325 pesos
• » Dulce De Leche 500 grams - 95 pesos
• » Tea "Presidente" 25 bags - 80 pesos
• » "Ensalada Alemania" 1 kilogram - 329 pesos

1. Origen de Chile [↩]
2. "Suprema" in the local parlance, typically sold as the hole apron of meat [↩]