Ran Prieur

"The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed."

- Terence McKenna

blog archives

essays etc.

landblog
land links

techjudge

misc.
links, books, recipes

novel
Apocalypsopolis, book one

zines
Civilization Will Eat Itself, Superweed 1-4, best of

communities

about me

search this site


Creative Commons License

November 29. Recently I've had a few reader comments about how I gave up on the homesteading thing. Here's how I explained it in one email:

"I learned by actually trying it how hard it is. And I noticed that people I knew who had gone back to the land in small groups were unhappy compared to people in the city. In practice, most back-to-the-landers end up being little developers, or remote suburbanites. They still drive into town for food and supplies, they have to drive much farther, they cut down a lot of trees, and the only advantage is a better view."

There are several reasons people want to go "back to the land": 1) They hate the city because they have a low tolerance for chaos. But wild nature has even more chaos! 2) They imagine that rural people will do better in a collapse. But historically urban people have done better, because cities densely concentrate skills, items, and economic opportunities. 3) They overestimate their introversion, and how happy and sane they can be in prolonged isolation. 4) They feel, correctly, that rural self-sufficiency will make their life more meaningful. But this is a young person's problem and a young person's solution: to trade massive physical labor for meaning. Older people have less energy, and more ability to create their own meaning, or to find it in more subtle things.

5) They feel, correctly, that human civilization is a big pile of mistakes. But it doesn't follow that trying to get physically outside it is a good move -- especially not for humans. We're an adaptable species, and adaptable nonhumans like crows and grey squirrels are thriving in human settlements. I think the best move is to stay physically close to the center, but mentally on the fringes. Or as the ancient Christians said, "in the world but not of it."

And here's some music for the weekend, an improved version of my favorite song from a video game, Retro Remix Revue - Gerudo Valley.


November 27. For Thanksgiving, check out the recipe section on my misc. page, including recipes for pies, gravy, and stuffing. I'll be making all three tonight and tomorrow, and Leigh Ann will be making real eggnog. Our recipe: 6 eggs separated, 3 cups whole milk, 2 cups heavy cream, 1 cup 1½ cups spiced rum, 1/2 cup sugar, and nutmeg.


November 25. Posting will probably be light this week. Today, two links in the "sci-fi is now" category, which coincidentally I just found right next to each other on reddit. The internet mystery that has the world baffled is about a very difficult multi-part puzzle, probably a recruitment tool for a spy agency or a tech company, but no one is saying. For a good fictional spin on this, check out the book Daemon by Daniel Suarez.

And how ayahuasca can revolutionize psychotherapy:

"It's not a question of, 'Here's a drug that's going to fix you,'" Mate explains. "It's, 'Here's a substance under the effect of which you'll be able to do a kind of self-exploration that otherwise might not be available to you, or otherwise might take you years to get to.'"


November 22. It's Friday so I'm writing about music again. Monkey-Human Ancestors Got Music 30 Million Years Ago. So music is older than language. This reminds me of something I've noticed about my own musical taste. When I was a kid, I just liked whatever my ears liked. Then as a teenager my taste became corrupted by intellect and identity. On some level I was choosing what to like because of what it said about what kind of person I was. I didn't notice myself doing this but I noticed other people doing it. For example, in a college class about music history, the instructor mentioned African pop, and some liberal students were like "Oooo, tell me more about African pop!" You could see them making up their minds that they were going to love it before they had even heard it. Meanwhile I was drawn to indie rock with smart lyrics, and within that category my honest musical taste was allowed to pick out Camper Van Beethoven and Beat Happening.

Around age 30 I started to recover and learn to go by feel again. As I get older I find that I'm less interested in lyrics and vocal melodies and song structure, and more interested in the soundscape. Last month I argued that popular music is in permanent decline, but now I think this is only true for simple melodies: there is a small finite range of simple melodies that sound good to the human ear, and it's mostly been exhausted. So there will not be another songwriter like Stephen Foster or Paul McCartney because they would have to come too close to stuff that's already familiar.

We can't even objectively define a pleasing melody -- that's how far our intellect is lagging behind our creativity -- while music continues to get better in ways that are even harder to define. This reminds me of a reader comment a few years back about entropy in the universe: that there will never be total heat death because life can always adapt to lower energy by becoming more subtle and complex.

Consider this song from 1967, Waterloo Sunset by the Kinks. In its own musical universe this is untouchable -- nothing like it can possibly sound as good. Now check out this song from 42 years later, Argyle Square by Orphans & Vandals. The theme is the same: the singer expresses the beauty and wonder of a particular London neighborhood. He's barely even trying to sing a melody, and the music behind him is messy. And yet to my ears, once I've learned how to listen to it, this blows Waterloo Sunset away.


November 18. Unrelated links... no, wait, they are related! Just Asking is a short 2007 piece by David Foster Wallace. He suggests that instead of giving up our freedoms to try to eliminate all risk of political violence against civilians, we could hold onto our freedoms and think of the inevitable victims as heroic martyrs. He points out that we already make the same trade-off with traffic laws, accepting a terrible death toll just so we can drive faster. I think the difference is, people take a bombing as a personal insult, a threat to their identity and status, while a car crash just feels like bad luck.

Game Theory Based Contrarian Football is about a high school coach who has done the math, and figured out that it's better to never punt and always onside kick. His team is now dominating their conference. It's inspiring to see someone boldly doing something a better way, but depressing that no one else is following. Even in a ruthless meritocracy like sports, winning games is a weaker motivator than saving face.

Alcohol, Obesity and Smoking Do Not Cost Health Care Systems Money, because healthy people live longer, consuming more health care, and ultimately die of other things that still cost money to treat. I would add: the real reason that alcohol and cigarettes are heavily taxed is that people who use them are seen as morally inferior and deserving of punishment. The purpose of sin taxes is to make obedient people feel righteous.

And a great reddit thread, What are stories about picture perfect families who do fucked up stuff behind closed doors? Sample post:

When I was in school, there was one girl who epitomized all-American girl-next-door cheerleader. She was gorgeous with blue eyes, long blonde hair, perfect body, and always had this 100 watt smile. She was on Homecoming court, and so was her little sister. Her family was prominent locally: the stay-at-home mom ran the PTA, the dad had a prestigious job.

This girl was on a parent-imposed diet since at least 3rd grade, despite never being fat. If she or her sister sassed her parents or got less than a B+ on an assignment, they were told they were "dogs" and they were forced to crawl around the house and eat their food from dog bowls under the kitchen table.


November 15. I overposted this week, so today I'm just going to ramble about personal stuff. Leigh Ann and I are still getting along great after six weeks of living together. The main conflict is that our preferred daily schedules are almost completely different, but we're both flexible. She has a Netflix account and I have a good TV and a Wii, so we've been watching stuff every night. Right now we're going through the TV show Fringe. At first I thought, "FBI agents investigate the paranormal? Hasn't that been done?" But the plots are more complex than the X-Files, and more challenging to stay on top of. Another difference is that all the strange phenomena are man-made. This creates room for my favorite difference, that skeptics don't even get a voice. Olivia comes to her boss with some crazy shit and instead of saying it's absurd, he says now that you've found that out, I can show you something even weirder. And Walter Bishop is probably my favorite character ever.

Two and a half years after buying this house, I finally have curtians on more than half the windows, and today I put on bubble wrap for winter insulation. My bees are also set for winter, with the back half of the hive packed with honey. And I haven't read about this, but I'm sure they're bigger now than they were in summer. With foundationless comb, they have a variety of cell sizes, and I'm guessing that when the weather cooled, the queen started laying worker eggs in the old drone cells, because bigger workers are more fit to survive winter.

In music news, Nik Turner played sax and woodwind for Hawkwind from 1971-1975, and wrote and sang a few songs, like Brainstorm and D-Rider. He should have been washed up decades ago, but he has just come out with a really impressive space rock album, Space Gypsy. That link goes to a review, and here's a YouTube page with Space Gypsy videos.


November 13. The Mysterious Case of Elisa Lam is about a young woman who drowned in a hotel water tank, with no easy way to get in and no plausible motive. Also there's a creepy surveillance video, a dark history of the hotel, a movie that foreshadowed the incident, and other coincidences:

Shortly after the discovery of Elisa Lam's body, a deadly outbreak of tuberculosis occurred in Skid Row, near Cecil Hotel. You probably won't believe the name of the test kit used in these kinds of situations: LAM-ELISA. That is hardcore synchronicity.

The article is on Vigilant Citizen, a smart conspiracy site, but I still think they're too literal-minded. The really weird stuff is not being planned by human elites -- it's the visible surface of a level of reality that we can't even understand with Cartesian/Newtonian thinking. And I think the most powerful people in the world understand less than the people on the front lines. As John Keel once joked: UFO researchers are not telling the government what they know.

And some links related to travel. From No Tech Magazine, Africa Teaches the West How to Build a Car:

In Suame Magazine, first the cars are stripped to the bone. Secondly, all computerized devices are thrown out. A sustainable African car has to be mechanical. When the car is stripped the construction process can begin. The result is a strong and simple car ready to carry heavy loads, with extra cargo space, a mechanical motor, a stronger chassis, stronger rims and iron springs. African roads demand very strong cars.

Probably they get worse fuel economy. But I suspect, as we get deeper into fossil fuel decline, that it will be more efficient to let the roads decay and build cars stronger, than to keep maintaining the roads.

It's cheaper to live in Barcelona and commute to London by air four days a week, than rent in London. You might expect this to change with energy decline, but I think there's still a lot of room to make air travel cheaper, including hybrid airships, and tearing out the seats so twice as many passengers can ride standing up. When you factor in the cost of maintaining roads, long-distance travel in the future might be done almost entirely by air.

And travel across oceans could be done by ship, except I think human extinction is more likely than human culture changing so that we're not in such a hurry. Anyway, water travel is super-cheap. Here's an inspiring blog post, Why Cruise Ships are My Favorite Remote Work Location:

On a cruise ship, everything is taken care of for you. No time at all has to be allocated to cooking, choosing your meal, or to cleaning. You show up at the restaurant, in which all of the food is free, order whatever you want from the rotating menu, eat, and then immediately get up and get back to work.

And the cost, for a transatlantic cruise, is only $30-50 per day. How many of us are living that cheaply now?


November 11. Today, some smart links. Thanks Gabriel for telling me about this blog, Novel opinions by Katja Grace. Instead of a table of contents or a chronological list of posts, the front page is a big summary of all her thinking, where phrases and words serve as links to posts. A few samples:

I like to think that thinking is better than reading as a first step to understanding a topic, but I haven't read a lot about this. ... Calling your mother on Mothers' Day tells her less about your affection than calling her any other day of the year. ... It is best to celebrate unimportant things, so that everyone else doesn't also love them and remove the information from your signal. ... There is no correlation between the verdicts of different wine competitions because if there were, there would be space for fewer wine competitions. ... The process of science could be taught better in the realm of unanswered questions that students care about, rather than answered questions that they don't care about. ... Loyalty is the only commonly approved form of extremism.

Thanks James for this long 1988 essay on teaching computing science by E.W. Dijkstra. The main idea is that computers are a radical novelty, meaning that they are so different that "our past experience is no longer relevant, the analogies become too shallow, and the metaphors become more misleading than illuminating." He makes a similar point to Katja Grace about education: Textbooks "constantly try to present everything that could be an exciting novelty as something as familiar as possible... The educational dogma seems to be that everything is fine as long as the student does not notice that he is learning something really new."

My favorite idea is about halfway down the page: we imagine that artificial intelligence will grow powerful by mimicking human intelligence, but the real power of AI is being smart in ways that computers are smart, and that are alien to human intelligence. Applying this to forecasting the future, long before AI is able to make a replica of your brain, it will have transformed the world so radically that we will no longer be interested in replicating our brains.

Finally, reddit user The Old Gentleman is one of the smartest anarchists on the internet. His posts are loaded with good information and careful thinking. Here's an example, a critique of anarcho-capitalism for failing to understand how our freedom has been destroyed by a radical concept of "property" that we all take for granted.


November 8. Loose ends from the previous post. First I want to say more about state repression. Any control system, including the U.S. government, will crush anyone who is effectively working against it. At the same time, if someone in North Korea holds up a sign that says "Kim Jong-un is a liar and life is better in South Korea," they'll be killed. If you do the same kind of thing in America, maybe someone will glare at you.

I've often wondered, when there's a street protest in the Arab world: Why don't the rulers just ignore it like they do here? One possibility is that Arab rulers are being vain and stupid, and ignoring it really is their best move. The more likely explanation is that in those cultures, for reasons I don't understand, purely symbolic dissent is tactically effective. I would love to know what would happen, step by step, if North Korea or Saudi Arabia suddenly and permanently removed all restrictions on political speech. I have no idea! But I do know that if they stuck it out, eventually the power of political speech would run its course, and there would still be a control system that would now be immunized against language.

This is mostly a good thing. It means that instead of an artificially high level of repression held by intimidation and open secrets, there is a moderate level of repression defined by the inability of the citizens to understand the subtle ways that they're being repressed.

In another loose end, a reader comments:

In too many circumstances, you don't even have to be actively pointing out flaws or advocating changes. If you seem too content, too confident yet not stressed over "advancement", if you seem like you shrug the usual poop off too easily, you will get targeted, and not always by bosses, in fact more often by people on your own level. In today's workplace, if you aren't constantly, visibly stressed, the assumption is that you are slacking off or cheating.

And on another subject, more music for the weekend. Over the last week I've been making and uploading videos of my favorite songs that were not yet on YouTube (and that will not be immediately taken down, like "Boots of Spanish Leather" by Bob Dylan and "Wendell Gee" by REM). Here they are:

The best version of my favorite happy love song, Something Came Over Me by Chris Stamey.

Two great songs by Corndolly, an obscure Illinois girl band from the early 90's: Come Out and Sex Kitten.

The album version of Pajama Party in a Haunted Hive by Beat Happening.

And the first verse of a beautiful song that until now was not available in any form except by watching the movie Cutter's Way, Old Enough To Know by Jack Nitzsche.


November 6. Another big psychology link. The Girl in the Closet is a giant 8-part article about Lauren Kavanaugh, who at age 20 months was taken from her adoptive parents and given back to her evil birth mother. For the next six years she was locked in a closet, nearly starved to death, and repeatedly beaten and raped. Eventually the stepfather confessed to a neighbor, and he and the mother are in prison until 2031. Lauren, now 20 years old, has made an impressive but incomplete recovery.

The interesting question is, why would parents do this? Especially when they had five other kids who, while badly raised, were not horrifically abused. I think Lauren was singled out because she alone had the experience of living in a healthy family. She would not put up with the abuse and neglect of a bad family, and at 20 months, could not possibly be diplomatic about it. The parents had to either raise the level of how they treated all their kids, or escalate the conflict; and the easiest way, other than killing her, was locking her in a closet. And then they either had to admit their own failure, or imagine that she deserved to be locked in a closet. Then she became the sink for all the family's frustration and hostility.

You can see the same thing in repressive states that kill or imprison people who try to make things better. I think it can happen in any dysfunctional system of any size. You could even use this as a definition of dysfunction: that anyone who draws attention to what's wrong with the system and how it could be improved, is punished.

That's why America is not seriously repressive, because if you do that here you're simply ignored. It's also an advantage of a system built out of subsystems from which people are free to leave. You can quit your job at a bad corporation and let it die out while you find somewhere else to be helpful, but it's much harder to quit a family.

I think this can also happen inside of a person: that someone might lock up and punish an aspect of their personality that threatens to make their life better in a way that a more dominant part of their personality cannot tolerate.


November 4. A few psychology links. First, Vandana Shiva explains How economic growth has become anti-life, and most of the examples are about how the way we live has veered away from the way humans like to live, even when we're getting more material wealth.

Also from the Guardian, The secrets of the world's happiest cities. There's some stuff about social connections, but it's mostly about transportation: driving makes us unhappy, and walking and bicycling make us happy, especially if the city is designed for traveling without cars. I have two ideas not in the article. First, given identical commute times, I think we would rather move at a steady pace than alternately move super-fast and be stuck. Second, we cannot operate a car without depending on a giant system that we cannot understand and in which we have no participation in power. The first time we experience something like that, it feels like a magical miracle. But over the long term, we feel disconnected, weak, and unsatisfied.

The Psychological Power of Satan. When we believe in pure evil, it leads to a political climate in which we want to identify the bad guys and totally destroy them, which makes the world nastier. The article is too cautious to make the obvious point that if two sides each think the other side is pure evil, it leads to a feedback loop of increasing aggression -- and then the eventual winners, since they're still unhappy, go looking for more pure evil.

The Psychology of Cheating. Again, mostly obvious stuff: people cheat more when they have more power, when they're in a competitive culture, when they're not being watched, and when they're tired. Notice that the American elite score four out of four. One of my utopian visions is universal democratic surveillance, where there is no spy agency making sure all surveillance is top-down, but anyone can watch anyone at any time. It follows that the most powerful and famous people would be watched every moment, and nobody would seek power unless they were okay with that.


November 1. For the weekend, some pictures, The 33 Most Beautiful Abandoned Places In The World, and more music...

You've all heard that Lou Reed died. Over the years I've become less impressed with Reed's singing and songwriting, and more impressed with his musical style along with other members of the Velvet Underground. I think their second greatest song is Heroin. In 1967 there had never been a rock and roll song that started out slow and pretty and built up to a wall of noise, and it would not be done better until the 1990's -- with the exception of the greatest song of all time, Space is Deep by Hawkwind.

Hawkwind, like many other influential bands, was influenced by Krautrock, which was influenced by the Velvet Underground. One of the most important Krautrock songs, Hallogallo by Neu!, is the direct musical descendant of the greatest thing the Velvet Underground ever recorded, the six minute jam at the end of the 1969 live version of What Goes On. That's Lou Reed on rhythm guitar.


October 31. Quick note for Halloween. I'll be giving candy to trick-or-treaters tonight, and playing the scariest music I can find: an untitled 1971 German experimental piece, 15:33 by Cluster. You might also like this one from Belgium 40 years later, Kreng - Wrak.


October 30. Moving on, lots of stray links. First, the Hacker News comment thread about the latest NSA spying revelation. My favorite comment is in response to someone wondering when the American public will be outraged: "You know what would outrage the public? ESPN being shut down. Most people do not actually care about their privacy." I would say the only two things that would outrage the public would be lack of entertainment and lack of food, and the latter is more likely.

US Healthcare System Explained in Six Succinct Points. Basically, doctors and hospitals have huge incentives to profit from unnecessary treatments, insurance companies respond by not wanting to pay for anything, and it's hard for honest doctors to get treatment for patients who need it. The article doesn't quite say this, but it seems like the bigger a medical organization is, the more corrupt it is, and also the better it is at getting money from insurance companies, so there is a negative correlation between a treatment being necessary and being covered.

Another medical article, Observations: Saturated fat is not the major issue: "The assumption has been made that increased fat in the bloodstream is caused by increased saturated fat in the diet, whereas modern scientific evidence is proving that refined carbohydrates and sugar in particular are actually the culprits."

Mental Illness, the Video Game. A woman who learned to deal with depression and anxiety designed a game about how she did it, a game that directs your attention outside of the game and back into your own mind and body. If humans avoid extinction, it will be through exactly this kind of use of technology, and this game will be historically important.

Top 10 Policies for a Steady-State Economy. These are great ideas, but I wonder how many are politically possible, and how much more likely it is that we will just keep alternating growth and collapse. On the same subject, here's a long reddit comment by Erinaceous, with many links, answering the question Are there any well-established economic theories that advocate for non-growth?


October 28. Last winter one of my favorite blogs was The View from Hell. The author, Sister Y, did not post anything for more than seven months, and then in September made twelve dense posts in 20 days. If you want a lot of readers for your blog, do not do this. Anyway, it's great stuff and if you're smarter than me you should read every word. I'm struggling to barely understand it. Most of the posts are about Experience Machines, a broad philosophical category that includes everything from the Holodeck, to religion, to you putting on a performance to get what you want from someone.

There seems to be an important distinction between an Experience Machine that generates experience, and one that merely filters it, but when I think about it more they're almost the same, since both machines are selecting and arranging stuff out of the larger body of stuff that makes sense to a particular audience. So computer animation in a movie, which in theory could show anything, in practice shows a world almost like the world you already live in. This reminds me of the Ribbonfarm post Welcome to the Future Nauseous, which argues that technology can change society no faster than we can change our cultural sense of what's normal.

Also, this whole subject is related to my post two weeks ago about the book Mediated and the distinction between something that's putting on a show for you, and something that's indifferent to your observation. Consider a TV nature show: this is taking something that's indifferent to your observation, and then picking out bits and splicing them together into something that's putting on a show for you. Isn't this also what we do with religion, and culture? Maybe human consciousness itself is just something that filters a chaotic and indifferent universe into a compelling story.

Here's an especially good paragraph from this post:

Experience Machines vary along the dimensions of being effective (producing desirable, meaningful experiences and preventing or at least domesticating negative experiences), honest (not hiding the fact that they are cultural artifacts designed to produce experiences), and voluntary (rather than forced upon adherents). These traits are not necessarily independent; I suspect the most effective Experience Machines that have evolved in human societies are probably some of the least honest and least voluntary, and I'd expect honesty and voluntariness to generally correlate negatively with effectiveness.

In other words, an experience feels more meaningful if you think it's real and not an illusion, and it also feels more meaningful if you think it's necessary and not optional.


October 25, 7pm PDT. Quick update on today's subject: a new reddit thread, Long time high school teachers of reddit, how have students changed over the years? Lots of interesting stuff, and the clear suspect in the decline of problem solving is No Child Left Behind.


October 25. Today, some obvious links about human potential and its enemies. Why Your Brain Needs More Downtime:

Americans and their brains are preoccupied with work much of the time. Throughout history people have intuited that such puritanical devotion to perpetual busyness does not in fact translate to greater productivity and is not particularly healthy... In making an argument for the necessity of mental downtime, we can now add an overwhelming amount of empirical evidence to intuition and anecdote.

Growing Up Poor Is Bad for Your Brain:

"Our findings suggest that the stress-burden of growing up poor may be an underlying mechanism that accounts for the relationship between poverty as a child and how well your brain works as an adult." ... Coming of age in poverty may lead to permanent dysfunction in the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala -- which, according to the researchers, "has been associated with mood disorders including depression, anxiety, impulsive aggression and substance abuse."

The Risk of Putting Our Knowledge in the Hands of Machines. The whole article is worth reading, with many examples of how automation robs us of the ability to do things on our own, and increasingly, the ability to understand things. To paraphrase myself from a few years back: Machines that do physical work make us weak. Machines that do mental work make us stupid. What's going to happen with spiritual machines?

Measuring America's Decline, in Three Charts. Among OECD nations, Americans age 16-24 are dead last in problem-solving and math, and second to last in literacy. I blame a combination of the factors above. Middle class Americans are stupid from working too hard; poor Americans, who are stupid from being poor, are increasing in number as more wealth is sucked up by the rich; and the rich are stupid from having everything done for them, and also being insulated from criticism and failure.

Finally, thanks DN for a $20 donation. And here's some beautiful music for the weekend: Peanuts Theme (Linus and Lucy) 600% Slower.


October 23. Yesterday's big news is that Amazon has raised the free shipping threshold by 40 percent, from $25 to $35. Notice that they did it without warning. If they had given us a few weeks notice they would have seen a huge spike of sales in the $25-35 range. The fact that they didn't want that spike, shows how much money they're losing in shipping.

This is related to a change they made in 2012. Here's an article about it, Amazon Prime buyers not happy with Add-On Program. Originally Amazon Prime was a way to pay $79 a year to get free shipping on everything. Then they raised the Prime threshold to $25, and low-priced items formerly eligible for free shipping became "add-ons" that you couldn't even buy unless your order was over $25. Here's another article from a year ago that makes the obvious point: "If Amazon will free-ship items totaling $25 without Prime, then why continue to pay $79 a year if the main draw of a Prime membership is free shipping?" The answer is that you get stuff in two days instead of three to five days. Most of us are not in that much of a hurry. And the prophetic conclusion:

[What if customers] begin to reconsider whether Amazon Prime is worth shelling out $79 a year for anyway, and Amazon starts losing money to canceled Prime subscriptions? Why in that case, the company just might decide that it needs to make the advantages of Prime a bit more clear-cut -- for example, by upping the threshold for non-Prime free shipping to $30, $35, $50...

I'm not making a moral judgment here but a strategic observation. The $25 free shipping threshold was too good to last. Amazon was overreaching, and now they're making the biggest retreat in their history, conceding the market for low-priced items to brick-and-mortar stores. It's just more cost-efficient to send a shipping container to Home Depot, than to send it to Amazon and then pay the postal service to deliver all those items to people's houses.

Now, I've heard that it's more energy-efficient to have a few trucks making optimized delivery routes to a thousand houses, than a thousand people driving to the store. But for some reason shipping still costs more. Maybe Amazon could start its own shipping company using automated solar-powered vehicles. And then local stores could respond by installing giant fabricators to make everything on site. For reasons I won't get into here, I do not expect a utopian Maker revolution where everyone has an autonomous home 3D printer.





I don't do an RSS feed, but Patrick has written a script that creates a feed based on the way I format my entries. It's at http://ranprieur.com/feed.php. You might also try Page2RSS.

Posts will stay on this page about a month, and then mostly drop off the edge. A reader has set up an independent archive that saves the page every day or so, and I save my own favorite bits in these archives:

January - May 2005
June - August 2005
September - October 2005
November - December 2005
January - February 2006
March - April 2006
May - July 2006
August - September 2006
October - November 2006
December 2006 - January 2007
February - March 2007
April - May 2007
June - August 2007
September - October 2007
November - December 2007
January - February 2008
March - April 2008
May - June 2008
July - August 2008
September 2008
October 2008
November - December 2008
January - February 2009
March - April 2009
May - June 2009
July - August 2009
September - November 2009
December 2009 - January 2010
February - March 2010
April - May 2010
June - October 2010
November - December 2010
January - March 2011
April - June 2011
July - September 2011
October - November 2011
December 2011 - February 2012
March - April 2012
May - July 2012
August - October 2012
November 2012 - February 2013
March - June 2013
July 2013 - ?