Ran Prieur

May 26.

2014-05-26T12:16:20Z

May 26. The last Monday of every month is Finger Pointing Day, where I cluster all the best complainy links. But first, like everyone else, I want to politicize the Elliot Rodger spectacle in California. That emotion-dripping rabble-rousing speech by the victim's father frightens me more than the actual killings. I would rather live in a world with an occasional mass murder, than a world with all the limitations on freedom and privacy necessary to prevent it from ever happening again. More generally, I would rather live with the risk of acute pain, than the certainty of chronic pain.

Now, on to bashing America. Here's a reddit comment about the close relationship between American Evangelical Christianity and the Republican Party:

Grover Norquist and others put together a strategy wherein business would back social conservative candidates, while single-issue groups (pro-life groups, NRA) would support low taxes and deregulation. The idea was that business would supply the money to win elections, while the single-issue folks would supply the energy needed to get people out to the polls. This is how the GOP is able to stay viable in elections even as the percentage of rank-and-file Republicans decreases.

Another reddit comment in which a German argues that American culture is compassionless, impulsive, and authoritarian:

If I say "you're authoritarian", what I mean is that you strongly remind me of Germany in the past. No, not the Nazis. Of Germany leading up to World War One. A society that held its military in high regard, where someone in a uniform was seen as intrinsically better than a civilian, no matter if it was a military or a police uniform. A time when orders were to be followed, not questioned.

Why America's essentials are getting more expensive while its toys are getting cheap. The reason is that manufacturing is being off-shored or automated, while local services are losing public subsidies. The result is that "prices are rising on the very things that are essential for climbing out of poverty." The deeper story is that we're in a feedback loop in which more power gets concentrated in the center, leading to political changes that make it easier for more power to be concentrated in the center. If we continue on this path, most people will be locked in poverty and desperately competing to sell personalized services to the rich.

And a possible solution, from an article where the finger-pointing tone is not at center stage, but is called up to support an argument for a precise set of policies: Radical Centrism: Uniting the Radical Left and the Radical Right.

The essence of a radical centrist approach is government provision of essential goods and services and a minimal-intervention, free enterprise environment for everything else... The principle of radical centrism aims to build a firewall that protects the common man from the worst impact of economic disturbances while simultaneously increasing the threat of failure at firm level. The presence of the public option and a robust safety net is precisely what empowers us to allow incumbent firms to fail.

May 23.

2014-05-23T12:46:50Z

May 23. Some happy stuff for the weekend. First, some readers disagree with Monday's pessimistic drone article, because they think independent engineers will make better drones than engineers working for big systems. I'm not sure about that, but it does look like we're headed for a world drone war, and society will eventually stabilize around whatever faction can build the best drones.

Fare Dodging Is an Organized Rebellion in Stockholm, and It's Winning. There's an organization called Planka that's basically an anarchist insurance company: members pay a monthly fee, agree to evade public transit fares, and Planka pays the fines if they get caught. Could this strategy subvert other systems?

Also from the NY Times, My No-Soap, No-Shampoo, Bacteria-Rich Hygiene Experiment. A company called AOBiome is testing a bacterial skin tonic that might make you clean and nice-smelling without soap, and will probably make you healthier, but the catch is that you can't use soap or you'll kill the friendly bacteria. I would love to try this! I quit using shampoo back in the 90's, and my hair was oily for only a few weeks before it adjusted.

Related: an inspiring article about Wim Hof, a Polish body-hacking guru who can hold his breath for five minutes, swim in icy water, and consciously control his immune system. There's also some good science about brown fat, which can be turned quickly into heat, but most of us don't have it because it only develops when you expose yourself to the cold. I wonder what other parts of the human potential we can unlock if we are just willing to be uncomfortable.

May 21.

2014-05-21T12:58:14Z

May 21. Loose ends from Monday. Sometimes I think if we could just use language with perfect accuracy and precision, there would be no more disagreements. When I said that living with your parents is a way of gaming the system, I did not mean to imply that kids and their parents are adversaries. Ideally they are allies, and parents are helping their kids game the system by giving them a way to avoid rent.

On the subreddit, there's a thoughtful post about finding meaning, and how most people are going to want something better to live for than just gaming the system. I agree. At this point in my life I've basically won the game. I could get a cheap apartment and just make food and get stoned and listen to music all day every day for the next thirty years. But I've taken on the responsibility of owning a house because it feels meaningful to turn my yard into a forest garden, and I continue to do this blog because I enjoy seeking and spreading ideas.

Related: yesterday I did a major rewrite of the "Can you summarize your thinking?" section of my about me page.

May 19.

2014-05-19T12:06:04Z

May 19. Two depressing links. From three days ago, a massive reddit comment thread about how young people feel they have nothing to live for. I can't advise anyone on how to make money, but I would like to advise young people on how to find meaning in life. When the system is designed to crush you, one thing you can live for is to game the system. If you're on public assistance, or living with your parents, or in any way getting benefits from the system without putting work into it, that's not something to feel guilty about -- that's a small victory! A larger victory, which you can organize and fight for, would be more benefits with fewer conditions, ultimately an unconditional basic income that's high enough for everyone to have a modest apartment and not have to look at prices when buying groceries.

That might never happen. This article, Drones will cause an upheaval of society like we haven't seen in 700 years, argues that the invention of the gun took power away from the elite and gave it to the people, and this will be reversed with progress in military drones:

The day that robot armies become more cost-effective than human infantry is the day when People Power becomes obsolete. With robot armies, the few will be able to do whatever they want to the many. And unlike the tyrannies of Stalin and Mao, robot-enforced tyranny will be robust to shifts in popular opinion. The rabble may think whatever they please, but the Robot Lords will have the guns... Imagine a world where gated communities have become self-contained cantonments, inside of which live the beautiful, rich, Robot Lords, served by cheap robot employees, guarded by cheap robot armies. Outside the gates, a teeming, ragged mass of lumpen humanity teeters on the edge of starvation.

I don't expect it to be this bad. The elite don't want to be evil. They actually want to help the masses -- but without giving up a shred of political power. There will be war and starvation as we pass through the bottleneck of converting from nonrenewable to renewable resources. But on the other side, we will all be guaranteed comfortable survival, and the elite will manipulate us not by locking up the food, but by shaping a culture in which our lives have more meaning if we do what they say. They're already doing this now, which is why young people in no danger of starvation still feel worthless if they don't have a job.

May 17.

2014-05-17T12:40:45Z

May 17. Quick note: a couple weeks ago I uploaded a video to YouTube, the first 25 minutes of the Live at Epplehaus version of Doomsday Machine by Electric Moon. I was thinking I'd submit it to the listentous subreddit, which has a 27 minute time limit, but I've given up on that, so I've deleted the short version and uploaded the full 40 minute version at the above link.

May 16.

2014-05-16T12:40:42Z

May 16. Over on the landblog/houseblog I've made a big post with the latest story about the bees. Basically I left too much honey in the original hive for too long, they turned it all into bees, they threw off a bunch of swarms, I caught two, and now I have three hives.

And some fun stuff for the weekend: a collection of ten bizarre illustrated stereographic gifs. And did you know there was a guy who played jazz on bagpipes? Rufus Harley - Sunny.

May 14.

2014-05-14T12:27:34Z

May 14. NY Times article on the corporate future of marijuana, The Bud Light-ification of Bud. The main point is that until now the stuff has been wildly inconsistent, and testing and industrial processing will make any given product as reliably similar as two cans of the same beer. The title implies that there will also be a reduction in quality, but the article itself never says that -- but there will be. I'm pretty confident in the following prediction:

1) Big Cannabis will stop using the traditional strain names, like Blue Dream and Sour Diesel, in favor of new names that it can trademark. 2) They will breed new varieties, not for the flavor or the quality of the experience, but for high efficiency and compatibility with large scale industrial production. 3) They will figure out how to extract all the cannabinoids and then put them back in precise amounts, because that's what they do now with nicotine in tobacco. 4) The typical blend of cannabinoids and additives will make people docile and productive. If they find a cheap way to make a product that's extremely psychoactive, they won't do it, or if someone does, it will be made illegal. 5) At the same time, independent enthusiasts and small businesses will continue to breed and sell high-quality minimally processed particular strains, but they will be much more expensive, like single malt whisky is now.

May 12.

2014-05-12T12:14:49Z

May 12. A week ago I wrote about the dumbest people worried about human extinction. Today, the smartest people. Thanks Adam for pointing me to this reddit thread from just this morning, We are researchers at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, ask us anything! The whole thing is loaded with good ideas, not just about how technology could exterminate us, but also how it could make the world more interesting or more repressive.

Related: one of my favorite redditors, Blisk McQueen, comments on the serious dangers of resource depletion, including a personal story about watching the water dry up in California's central valley.

May 9.

2014-05-09T12:35:14Z

May 9. For the weekend, some sports and entertainment. First I want to explain the barefoot shoe controversy, after the news that Vibram FiveFingers has settled a lawsuit. The journalism on this issue is terrible, compounding Vibram's original error, which was not shoe design but marketing. It's very simple: when walking or especially running, it's good to come down on the balls of your feet so your ankle allows your calf muscle to absorb the impact, and it's bad to come down on your heels and knock the impact up to your knee and hip joints. Sloppy marketing led people to believe that the shoe would do this for them, when really you have to do it yourself, by deeply changing your habits, and the best thing a shoe can do is not get in the way. This might be a good time to buy used FiveFingers on eBay, and if you don't like the articulated toes, Merrell barefoot shoes are also good.

Yesterday was the first round of the NFL draft, and here's a smart article about How NFL teams ignore basic economics and draft players irrationally. Charts show how teams overestimate the value of a higher pick relative to a lower pick, so trading up is likely to be a bad deal and trading down is likely to be a good deal. What I find most interesting is the final section about the overconfidence effect: "As people are given more information, the accuracy of their analysis often hits a ceiling, but their confidence in it continues to increase." So a GM might fall in love with a certain player and give up too much to get him. I think that's what the Bills did yesterday with Sammy Watkins. By the way, even though the draft is fun, I support ending it and making all players free agents from the beginning.

You might have seen the browser game 2048, where you slide tiles around to add powers of two and try to get to 2048 before you run out of space. I prefer this game based on 2048, Fe[26], because the rules are more complex, but after learning the rules it's easier to win. It's based on the fusion of elements that happens inside a star. Quick strategy guide: 1) Avoid bumping 3Helium into 4Helium, because this makes 7Beryllium which gets in the way until it decays. 2) Try to get three 4Helium's lined up so you can fuse two of them into 8Beryllium, and then quickly add the third one to get Carbon. 3) When you get your first Carbon, do the same thing to get another Carbon, except now you're also trying to avoid fusing a 4Helium with your first Carbon. Once is okay because it turns to Oxygen which you need anyway, but again and you've got Neon, and once more and you've got Magnesium and you're totally screwed. This is the hardest part of the game. 4) When you've got two Carbons, bump 4Heliums into them to get two Oxygens, then fuse them into Silicon. 5) After that it's a slam dunk to just keep adding 4Heliums as your Silicon changes into a string of heavier elements, finally 56Nickel which decays into 56Iron. 6) After winning, you can keep playing to try to get more Irons, or just rack up points.

There was a reddit thread a few weeks ago with some clips of all-time great plays in soccer (world football). My favorite is this Lionel Messi Goal vs Getafe.

Finally, an awesome four minute animated video, How To Cheat, Do Drugs, And Succeed At Baseball, By Dock Ellis, who famously pitched a no-hitter on LSD.

May 7.

2014-05-07T12:47:04Z

May 7. Loose end from Monday: In the comments section of that Mythodrome post, Dermot has made a long comment about the distortions and fanaticism of the Near Term Extinction people. My favorite line: "Comical or tragic? Depends if you're related to or friends with someone who kills themselves as a result."

Two more doom links: This is what tent cities will look like after peak oil, about a prototype of a tent with photosynthetic algae in the walls. And a new subreddit for people to demonstrate traditional skills.

On a different subject, this morning Erinaceous made this great reddit comment thinking about the public-private debate in terms of networks. Basically, if there's a physical network with lots of infrastructure, like railroads or the electric grid, then there's an inevitable monopoly because it's too hard to build a competing network, so the government should take it over and make sure it's run for the good of all. But at the lower levels of the network, where competition is easy and more information is required to make good decisions, it's better for stuff to be private.

May 5.

2014-05-05T12:35:33Z

May 5. Recently Paula made what she says is her final post on Mythodrome, about the death of Mike Ruppert, childhood abuse, and the Near Term Extinction movement. She speculates about the dark psychological motivations that would make someone go out of their way to believe that humans are going extinct in this century. Her argument that we are not going extinct is that the future is unknowable. I don't think the NTE folks have even made a case for human extinction, only for catastrophic climate change and the inadequacy of the present system to get most of us through it. There's a general failure of prediction here that I've mentioned before: the inability to imagine the existence of something for which you cannot imagine the particulars. In this case, they cannot imagine precisely how humans might adapt to climate change, so they imagine we will not adapt.

At the other extreme, here's an interview with a techno-optimist, Andrew Hessel, on why synthetic biology and the Netflix model are the future of medicine. I'm sure he's right about the technology, but not the wonderful social revolution. Mark my words: there will be a biotech 9/11, a terrifying spectacle that will not kill that many people, but will serve as an excuse for a few giant corporations and governments to hold a monopoly on powerful biotech, which they will use to tighten their political and economic control over all of us.

May 2.

2014-05-02T12:23:15Z

May 2. Yesterday I wrote more about reductionism and beauty in an email, and I like it enough to post it here:

Modern culture seems to think that all of reality can be reduced to number and measure, and beauty is just an imprecise way of thinking about it. Plato thought that all the muddy stuff in our world is just imperfect reflections of perfect geometry in a deeper world. I think he had it backwards. There is a Platonic form for beauty but nothing else. The deeper world is more muddy, and geometry and logic are powerful shortcuts for thinking about reality, but there are only certain places you can go with them.

A reader has been making lots of posts to the subreddit, and it's decent stuff, but for some reason it's not appearing on the subreddit page. You might want to check out his user page.

And more music. The space rock I mentioned the other day is closely related to Krautrock bands of the early 1970's, and a contemporary band called Camera plays prettier Krautrock than the original bands. Here's a YouTube playlist of their 2012 debut album, Radiate! And here's a review.

Holy Fuck has a similar sound but they're more varied and inventive. That link goes to a playlist of one of their albums, and my favorite track is Lovely Allen.

Finally, thanks to an anonymous donor in my own state for some cannabis of the Jack Herer and Flo varieties. I look forward to trying them out, and to more people being able to do this legally.

April 30.

2014-04-30T12:37:37Z

April 30. I almost posted this Monday, but it's a thoughtful article that goes a little beyond finger-pointing: Music Criticism Has Degenerated Into Lifestyle Reporting. The author points out that it's normal for writers in sports and cooking and business to cover the technical stuff, but music writers seldom do. Then he argues that in the second half of the 20th century, music became primarily a tool for people to define their personal cultural identity:

Even statements that appear, at first glance, to address musical issues are often lifestyle statements in disguise. I've learned this the hard way, by getting into detailed discussions over musical tastes, and discovering that if you force pop culture insiders to be as precise as possible in articulating the reasons why they favor a band or a singer, it almost always boils down to: "I like [fill in the name] because they make me feel good about my lifestyle."

This might explain why [mediocre hipster band] is so popular, but I think he's exaggerating the problem. We have more freedom to choose what we listen to, and a wider range to choose from, than anyone in history, but it's like any new power: people use it badly before they learn to use it well. Also I think he's being unfair in asking people to say precisely why they like something, as if reductionism can reach the heart of beauty.

This reminds me of a parable I came up with last weekend when I tried out the vaporizer: A civilization sends out a space probe filled with recordings of its most beautiful music; another civilization receives it, and they try to decode it as a message in symbolic language. What do they not understand?

I'm going straight into music links early this week. My new favorite band is Electric Moon. That goes to a playlist starting with a typical example of their sound -- the word "song" doesn't really apply. Musical innovations begin with someone, in the context of the old style of music, doing something new for a few seconds. Then someone else notices and stretches the sound out longer. Eventually someone says, "Why can't we play like that all the time?"

Electric Moon, almost all the time, plays improvised space rock jams. I would define "space rock" as steady hypnotic rhythm, optional analog synth, and lead guitar with distortion and phase effects. Here's a textbook example of the space rock guitar sound from the last three minutes of Hawkwind's Space Ritual live version of Space is Deep.

A more interesting example of Electric Moon is their 40 minute Live At Epplehaus version of Doomsday Machine, because the bass is trying to be as deep and sludgy as good stoner doom metal. Here's my favorite example of that, Mind Transferral by Electric Wizard. Unlike most stoner metal, it's not ruined by vocals, but notice how the lead guitar is totally metal, not space. Now check out a great contemporary space guitarist, Ripley Johnson of Wooden Shjips and Moon Duo, playing the song Escape. But the backing music is nowhere near sludge, and the jamming doesn't really start until halfway through. Coincidentally, Electric Moon combines what I like most about Electric Wizard and Moon Duo, but there's room to do it better, and more of the time. As for why I like that particular sound, that's in the realm of the ineffable.

April 28.

2014-04-28T12:21:29Z

April 28. The last Monday of every month is finger-pointing day, where I lump together some links about those bad people doing those bad things, rather than dwelling on that stuff all the time.

How to get beyond the parasite economy is about Guitar Center, and how it was ruined after it got bought by the giant blocks of money that rule the world, who used it as a tool to make money in almost incomprehensible investment schemes, instead of a tool to sell musical equipment. This reminds me of David Graeber's distinction between capitalism and the free market: The free market is CMC, where money is used to convert one commodity into another commodity. Capitalism is MCM, where a commodity is used to turn a concentration of money into a larger concentration of money.

Another example: The crazy regulations that keep American beer bad. Beer distributors are really in the business of concentrating money, and they use some of it to buy the government and prevent breweries from selling directly to customers.

A reddit comment on how the highway system has destroyed wealth and generally ruined America.

Your bra may be killing you. Some scientists argue that "there is a strong connection between breast cancer and bra wearing for many hours per day," and that the Komen Foundation and the American Cancer Society are covering it up.

And if you get cancer, or anything that kills you slowly, here are some reddit comments about how the medical system is terrible for dying people.

If you want my personal philosophy, I don't really believe in evil. It's always just some form of short-sightedness or misunderstanding. Even the worst individuals are just caught in a habit of being mentally or emotionally contractive. The reason we have to tell each other to "open your mind" or "open your heart" is that it feels bad. Tightening yourself feels good, and letting your "self" merge with the outside is painful -- in the short term. Over the long term, it's the other way around.

April 24.

2014-04-24T12:27:28Z

April 24. Unrelated links. The Flora of the Future is about how it's good that opportunist plants are filling ecological roles in cities, and how designers should go with this and not try to fight it by sticking to "native" plants of the recent past. The article has some nice photos of thriving wild plants in developed areas.

From the Anarchism subreddit, a comment about how to motivate people to work, including a critique of the whole concept of work, and some different answers. Basically, in a bad society, "You steal their food and only give it back if they will work for you." And in a good society...

if you allow everyone to seek out and find their own niche, regardless of its permanence, temporariness, perceived importance, etc., and don't place value judgments on them, the important jobs will get filled, and the ones that people don't actually want to do, will either become communal tasks (everyone cleans up the bathroom when they see it's messy), or machine-assisted/automated tasks.

According to new brain research, The future of depression treatment may come from inducing worse depression. This makes sense to me. As a general rule, if you're stuck in something, it's good to try pushing in many directions, not just the direction you eventually want to go.

And here's an article critiquing the article about casual marijuana use being bad for you, calling it "quite possibly the worst paper I've read all year". This month I've been helping someone move in exchange for a Silver Surfer vaporizer, but I don't see myself ever using it more than once a week.

April 21.

2014-04-21T12:20:24Z

April 21. I've argued before that you can learn more from sports than politics, because the sports world is more honest and transparent. This is even true for the hidden stuff. Meet The Bag Man is an excellent article on every level, from the insights of the bag man interviewees to the web design. It's about secret payments to college football recruits, and the surprising thing is how well the system works. Colleges and the NCAA continue to make billions of dollars from TV contracts without giving the athletes anything but free education (which a better society would give everyone already). At the same time, athletes are being paid by wealthy alumni who can easily spare the money. Everyone wins -- except the colleges with little or no hidden payments, and the colleges where the bag men are sloppy and get caught. One of the most interesting bits is how the bag men can influence head coaching jobs by cutting off money for coaches they don't like.

Of course the political system works the same way. This article describes how nobody cares what you think unless you're rich. In two charts, the opinions of average citizens have almost no effect on policy, while the opinions of the elite have a strong effect. This is much more sinister than football, where the elite are actually moving wealth down the pyramid, and the total number of football wins and losses stays the same. The political elite are conspiring to make the rich beat the middle class by an ever wider margin, and everyone loses, even rich people themselves, except the little part of them that sees making more money as a fun game.

April 18.

2014-04-18T12:58:45Z

April 18. Some happy stuff for the weekend. Happiness makes your brain work better. "Rather than thinking of success as the source of happiness, we should think of happiness as a source of success -- and one that's more under our control than we imagine."

From the Raptitude blog, 15 unexpected side-benefits to living in the present moment.

This tower pulls drinking water out of thin air. Not only that, it looks like Hieronymus Bosch architecture.

Finally, relax with 40 perfectly looped ambient gifs.

April 14.

2014-04-14T12:15:31Z

April 14. On reddit, Sivel comments on psychedelic drugs, describing how your personality gets taken apart and you can put it together differently, how the drug is a tool that can either help you or harm you, and how to reduce the risk of a bad trip.

Psychedelics should be viewed like climbing a mountain. The mountain peak has its appeal with the sublime feeling of standing atop it if one is daring enough to get there. And while some may find the experience meaningful a lot of people will only find themselves way too fucking high on a big rock. But most important is how the mountain does not move, it does not feel or love, and so it does not care if you live or die on it. The only feelings it will give you are the ones you reflect off of its steep faces.