I'm sending this partly out of relief, but partly because its the best chance I'll get to rant and reinforce David Graeber's point that there is nothing moral about debt obligations. In a just world, anyone originating a loan would be accepting a risk that the debtor might default, or die, or the real value of the currency-denominated loan might collapse, and would attempt to cover that risk by securing collateral, charging interest, and seeking insurance.

In fact, however, student loans operate in a realm of moral hazard - although banks charge interest and, in some cases, secure collateral, they are backed by the US federal government, both through federal guarantees and interest subsidies, and indirectly through a set of draconian enforcement laws that include garnishing wages, tax returns, and entitlements, including Social Security, as well as rescinding licenses including in some states a driver's license. Under no circumstance are banks left holding the bag.

In fact, student loans aren't even held by the banks that originate them. Sallie Mae resells them on the secondary market as "student loan asset backed securities" - basically the right to collect the income stream from me or other graduates of my generation.

I would feel less bad about this were I to simply be paying highly trained professionals to educate me, but that is not what's been happening. The explosion in tuition (and debt) has coincided with a collapse in pay for educators. Individual professors have not been earning less, but increasingly they have been replaced with near-minimum-wage non-tenure-track adjunct faculty. Tenure-track hiring has dropped off so precipitously that a newly minted PhD has a 1:350 chance of finding a full-time position.

Instead the increase in tuition has gone towards facilities and administrator salaries. Administrator positions have grown at 10x the rate of faculty positions since I graduated high school, and every year the number of administrators making more than one million dollars per year doubles. To put that in perspective, adjuncts are making $5000 per semester per course, and their pay has remained essentially static.

There are people who think, and I am becoming one of them, that student loans are a way of liquifying a previously untapped resource, specifically the future lifetime incomes of people not born lucky enough to have parents who could pay cash for tuition. "The economy" loves an untapped resource, and has been maximizing the rate of return by upping tuition and decreasing eligibility requirements. To a lot of people, this looks like a bubble.

I wanted to end this rant by encouraging everyone to send $20-$100 to Rolling Jubilee or some other debt abolition group. They buy debts on the secondary (collections) market and, instead of collecting them, abolish them entirely. Unfortunately, for reasons I don't understand, RJ has stopped accepting donations.

I'm just curious how this is going to end. My guess is, eventually Americans with unpayable debt will be a political majority, but because they don't understand that the debt was amoral in the first place, they will not be ambitious enough to force a mass cancellation of personal debt, and instead they'll pass some tame laws to protect debtors from starving or going to prison, and to keep debts from being passed on to family members. The deeper problem is the popular American belief that all income is deserved. Can you give me a non-circular definition of "deserve"? In practice, high income is normally just a sleight of hand to turn power into more power.

Open at your own speed, but open.

Dig what's happening to you.

By "dig" I mean get into it. There are lessons for you there. And when it gets uncomfortable, that's an important time to open and dig.

Here's a short, inspiring article about GoG.com, a company that makes old games work on new machines and is committed to never using digital rights management, and never forcing you to be online to play them. By the way, today a reader asked if I'm ever going to make a page about my favorite games. I don't know, but I can tell you that my favorites on GoG are Heroes of Might and Magic 2 and Lords of the Realm 2, and I have Ascendancy on my wishlist. And I haven't played it in a while, but I continue to be excited about the development of Starsector.

Finally, check out these geometric beehive sculptures:

The artist first builds transparent polyhedrons and cubes with an inner framework of wooden dowels, at the center of which he places the queen. After introducing the rest of the hive, he then rotates the sculpture every seventh day based on the roll of a die.

We are Tim and Noah Hussin, documentary filmmakers who are presently developing a television show concept for a major network. The show focuses on 'backcountry philosophers,' and we are looking for potential subjects who live away from the urban and suburban expanse of the United States who offer provocative perspectives on life and whose perspectives are expressed through their daily motions.

I probably won't end up on the show since I live in the city, but they wonder if I know anyone who would be a good subject. If any of you are interested, or know anyone who seems like a good fit, you can email Noah Hussin at his name (first and last names as one word, including both h's) at gmail.

Also here's a trailer for their previous project, a movie coming out next spring called America Recycled, where they ride bikes across the country talking to people living on the fringes of society. The message seems pretty close to what I was thinking ten years ago. Now I think, however you choose to live, you should do it because it's enjoyable on its own terms, because it makes you feel alive, not because you think it's necessary for survival, or because you think you're on the vanguard of a revolution.

On a similar subject, there's a new subreddit post by a guy who was convinced by reading Quinn and Jensen to turn his life away from what he felt like doing, to what he thought he should do. I hope my writing has never had that effect. Probably, worst case, I convinced someone to do something they felt like doing that ended badly. But it occurs to me, if Quinn and Jensen were truly radical, they would never line up with should. Only when an ideology becomes dominant (if not in popular culture then in a subculture) will it have the moral force to stifle excitement.

We recreate in adult relationships some of the feelings we knew in childhood. But the love we knew as children may have come entwined with other dynamics: being controlled, feeling humiliated, being abandoned, never communicating. As adults, we may then reject candidates, not because they are wrong, but because they are too well-balanced (too mature, too understanding, too reliable) and this rightness feels unfamiliar and alien. We head instead to candidates whom our unconscious is drawn to, not because they will please us, but because they will frustrate us in familiar ways.

From the victim's point of view they are with a person who loves them so, so much, and wants them to be happy, and wants to be good to them, but they (the victim) are such a bad, useless, stupid, worthless, annoying person that their loving partner can't help but get angry and abuse them.

Wow, that's depressing. I have to end with something happy for the weekend: Camper Van Beethoven - Good Guys and Bad Guys.

All surfaces must be regularly cleaned; weeds eradicated, car oil spots removed. Clothes in closets are to be organized by color, and contestable items - heavily religious books, personal photos - must be removed or neutralized. Every item has a rule, and everything must be exact: the rotation of pillows, the fold of towels, the positioning of toothbrushes. Even the stacks of novels casually left on the bookshelf are placed and angled with pinpoint detail.

One of my favorite themes is how a skilled person using low tech can outperform an unskilled person using high tech. How to Write 225 Words Per Minute With a Pen is about a 19th century writing system called Gregg shorthand.

A seemingly fair overview of the latest Israel-Palestinian conflict, posted by an Israeli on the Arabs subreddit.

This article, Why It's Worth Paying More for Legal Pot, describes the unprecedented detail in the labeling, including the strain name, the genetic background of the strain, where it was grown, how it was grown, when it was harvested, and the percentage of five different cannabinoids. Personally I'm not going to buy any until the outdoor harvest comes in and the price drops. But I can't think of any other product that gives this much information to consumers. One of my utopian visions is that every time you buy food, you can see a live video feed of the farm.

By the way, after a three week break, Saturday night I took nine vaporizer hits of Jack Herer and spent a few hours thinking about hypotrochoids as models for intersecting parallel worlds, something that did not seem nearly as profound the next day. My most valuable insight was that the Main Title Theme from Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is damn near Bob Dylan's best song.

Education, specifically Western education promoting democratic values, interferes with children's work and their parents' expectations for their work. It makes them more dependent on their parents, and makes them less likely to be servile and submissive to parents. And education itself provides an alternate means of achieving adult status other than having children. In the presence of these conditions, the demand for children is apparently low.

Also, the end of the first post has a great bit about the transition from the study, the room in the house that used to be the patriarch's seat of power, to "the lowly and shameful man cave", where the man takes refuge from the woman's otherwise total control. If you're curious about my house, Leigh Ann and I have separate bedrooms where we each do what we want, and in the common areas I have the final say, but I usually defer to her superior aesthetic judgment.

Continuing Monday's subject, there's a thread on the subreddit, titled "Ran's next adventure", in which several readers are talking like I'm a teenager and they're my dad. [July 10 update: there's some good stuff there now.] And big thanks to moderator puck2 for styling the subreddit to match the blog.

Postmodern thought is dismissive of high-minded notions of true beauty and ultimate meaning and such, but it pretty much embraces the trickster, free play, the willingness to survive and outmaneuver the terrible monolithic forces hedging our lives, to be a gadfly and a libertine and a force of and for pleasure.

Modernist absolute truth often came with a demand for heroism or sacrifice, while the postmodern absence of absolute truth comes with an injunction to make your own contingent but consistent meanings. Both are related models for existential validation in an uncaring universe, but one seeks to correct the other by minimizing the coersive and authoritarian elements implicit in its modeling of "truth".

Finally, an email from Chanita who hosted me in NYC on my last tour:

There is this guy in Kentucky who is trying to establish a free permaculture teaching space, Earth Tribe Trust. He says it's like trying to run a hospital where all these patients are pouring in and he's supposed to be helping them, but he's just like this crazy janitor. I think he's being a bit humble and has a lot of hard work and some better than decent permie building skills and experience. But anyway, he's looking to have more people come down and teach whatever they feel like teaching, pretty much.

He's a rainbow -- it seems like the space is quite inclusive and chugging along. They have built themselves a very pretty outdoor kitchen, rocket stoves, earthship in progress, etc. Very open, tendency toward dictatorship negligible. Appreciation of anarchism and cooperation high. Accepting of trans persons without discussion or pause. Anyway, I know he needs some other folks to be there to teach, especially because he will be working on a project abroad for a while in the fall and I thought you might know folks into his model.

Outside the US, "preventative care" means a nice sit-down with a dietitian and a daily stroll. In the US, this $2500 test can make a disease cost $6000 to treat instead of $150,000! Great deal! So let's get fifteen million people to get this test every year to prevent two thousand cases for a net savings of negative thirty-seven billion dollars.

When someone like Elon Musk comes along, someone who is clearly is working very hard toward Pareto optimal outcomes (watch or red about his personal history), we simply cannot fathom that his actions can't be explained outside a traditional Nash-equilibrium, dog-eat-dog model of capitalism.

Closely related: 17 images showing The Decline of Trust in the United States.