Ran Prieur

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

- Terence McKenna

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July 15. As usual, fun stuff for the weekend. On a tangent from personality typing, Leigh Ann told me I was being too much of a J by not wanting to start a new TV show until an old one was finished. So I browsed Netflix and discovered iZombie. The core idea is that zombies can remain high-functioning if they continue to eat human brains, but they also get the personality, the skills, and memory flashes from the person whose brain they just ate. And the ongoing story is about a zombie medical examiner who eats the brains of murder victims to solve crimes! When I compare it to another paranormal cop show, Grimm, iZombie is better in every important way: better characters, more surprising, smarter, funnier, and even the serious parts have more depth. The only show still in production that I like better is Orphan Black.

After watching most of the Euro 2016 soccer tournament, I think the best game was Wales vs Belgium. The play was exciting and three of the four goals were spectacular, including this header where both the pass and the shot had so little margin for error that the goal seemed impossible.

I've had some breakthroughs in optimizing cannabis. A couple years ago I started with reasonable assumptions: that you get better highs by waiting longer and using more. So I would wait a week or two and then spend an evening going through two or three big vaporizer bowls, if I didn't burn my lungs and have to stop.

It turns out I was doing everything wrong. My lungs were getting burned because I was passing the air through too much weed, which is why a bubbler didn't help. This reddit post, Marijuana and the brain, argues that you actually get better highs at lower doses, and I've found this to be true. My optimal dose seems to be around a tenth of a gram, enough to barely hide the screen in a Silver Surfer vape wand.

The post also says that you should wait at least two hours between hits, or else the highs will clash and leave you feeling burned out, and in my experience two hours is not enough. And whenever I've tried to split a dose over time, whether it was by taking low-temp hits and then high-temp hits later, or by saving up the toasted weed to eat all at once, it has always been unsatisfying. It's like scoring goals in soccer -- or really almost anything, where one hard precise strike does more than a bunch of soft clumsy strikes. This must be why some people get better highs from smoking than vaping, because smoking always gives you everything at once, and with vaping you have to work at it.

So now I tear through my minibowl in about seven hits in three minutes, and because I've solved lung pain (through smaller bowls and also sensing when to take the wand off the heat) I can go hotter and darker and still hold the vapor long and deep. And the most surprising thing is that I can't tell any difference between a one week break and a one day break. Apparently tolerance is a function of quantity, not frequency, and my main obstacle to daily use is keeping my digestive system hydrated.


July 13. I got some good feedback from Friday's question: Why do people want to believe that personality is fixed? On this subreddit post, TheAnarchitect writes:

I think the major reason that people don't want to believe that personality is mutable is because they conflate personality with "Self." The idea that one's personality is mutable over time and in different situations thus attacks their concept of self, resulting in the sensation of ego-death. This is a terrifying concept to individualist dualist westerners, because they cannot shift their sense of self away from personality and behavior to other things like their body, their relationships, their community or their environment. To that mindset, becoming "Someone different" is a form of death.

Ben comments over email:

I tend to think of personality as a result of how a person interacts with the world. In some fundamental way, it's an adaptive response to the environment. So, I think the problem with a lot of people who think of their personalities as fixed, or get obsessed with personality typing, is that they have not interacted much with the world and as such they actually haven't crafted much of a personality. So they put the cart before the horse and latch on to some externally provided sense of self.

For older people, I think there is a fear of externally challenging themselves, which I think is a requisite of personality change. On top of that, there is probably dread over an awareness of the opportunity costs they have incurred by not considering other possibilities for their lives.

This reminds me of one of my favorite mental exercises, the "not that" meditation. Ask yourself, "Who am I?" And no matter what your answer, say "not that" and ask again. The point is not to get a final answer, but to cultivate a sense of who you are that's less like a fortress and more like a surfer.


July 11. Some links about the psychology of motivation. First, a dense science article, Fatigue is a Brain-Derived Emotion that Regulates the Exercise Behavior to Ensure the Protection of Whole Body Homeostasis. Basically, your brain tricks you into feeling body fatigue when your body still has plenty of energy. To overcome this, you need some kind of mental motivation to push your body farther than it feels like it can go. This is not a psychology article, so when the author gets into psychology in the final section, it's mostly speculation about some kind of drive to win. I'm thinking there's room for a lot more complexity here -- different athletes could have completely different things going on in their heads that help them push themselves harder, and most of these are not just psychological but also social.

I'll Retire When I'm Dead: Why Continuing to Work Is Good for a Man's Health. Personally I've never felt like the guys in this article, but that's because I never had a job I liked, I never tied a job to my identity, and I'm relatively good at managing unstructured time. But I'm not normal, and this is why an unconditional basic income would not solve the deeper problem of modernity: the lack of any enduring social framework that makes day to day life feel meaningful.

Four ways to get motivated when you don't feel like working. No earth-shaking insights here, but I like the stuff about the value of negative emotions: a study shows that visualizing doing a task and hating it, is a stronger motivator than not visualizing it at all.

A simple mind hack that helps beat procrastination: "Imagine yourself starting, not finishing." Because long-term projects require restarting yourself day after day, I would phrase it like this: break the task down into smaller and smaller steps until the very next step is so tiny that you can do it.

This fits a big theme in my thinking lately: that becoming better at life is not so much about learning general skills (generosity, tolerance, agency), but practicing those skills on micro scales and hidden levels.


July 8. Some fun and happy links for the weekend:

Heavy Metal and Natural Language Processing. The author does a fascinating deep analysis of the lyrics of more than 200,000 metal songs, including showing the differences between three bands (Motorhead, Machinehead, and Diamondhead), and listing the words that appear most and least in metal lyrics compared to normal language. (Most is "burn"; least is "particularly".)

This podcast excerpt argues that human personality can change. Not only can it change over time, it can also vary radically depending on the situation. What baffles me is: given the popular belief that personality is fixed, and the lack of good evidence, people must want to believe that personality is fixed, but why would anyone want to believe something so depressing? I'm guessing, either they want to justify their own reluctance to change, or they don't want to be disappointed when other people don't change.

How Trees Calm Us Down. The crazy thing is that people get psychological benefits from a nature walk even if they don't like it. No one is sure why, but it seems to have something to do with human attention, where it's good to have something complex but undemanding in the background of your moment-to-moment experience.

Moving from actual trees to "trees", which also calm us down: Your Grandma Needs To Be Smoking Pot, because of new evidence that it might clean out the brain crud that causes Alzheimer's.

And this reddit comment explains terpenes and how they determine the smells and also the effects of different marijuana strains. Here's a longer article on terpenes.


July 6. Bunch o' links about technology:

Edward Snowden's Life As a Robot is about the "Snowbot", a video screen on wheels that allows Snowden to virtually speak at events in America while exiled in Russia. It's also a long smart article with lots of other stuff about Snowden.

Personal robotic aircraft are hovering over the horizon. They're calling them "passenger drones" because they use drone-like technology, but basically this is a next-generation light helicopter where computers take care of stability while the operator just gives simple commands. I'm wondering how far this could go. I don't see them replacing cars, because we still need to move really heavy stuff, so we still need streets, and if we have streets then surface vehicles will always be more efficient (especially if they go slower -- see below).

The dying breed of craftsmen behind the tools that make scientific research possible. It's about scientific glass blowing, an extremely difficult and increasingly rare skill, and a good example of how tech systems are held together by skills that can't be learned from books, only passed on through long apprenticeships. It wouldn't take much of a collapse for a skill like this to be totally lost.

Chatbot lawyer overturns 160,000 parking tickets in London and New York (thanks Lacy). As far as I can tell, the chatbot is not talking to the bureaucracy, only talking to people to walk them through dealing with the bureaucracy. Still, I wonder how many lawyer jobs will eventually be replaced by AI.

A reminder that No Tech Magazine always has interesting tech links. Right now at the top of the page is an article about a super-efficient battery powered rail vehicle. This would be totally cool in postapocalypse fiction, where the few survivors could navigate a continent on the abandoned rail lines. But as soon as you have two vehicles that want to go different directions on the same track, you have a problem.

Finally, from the Onion, Secretary Of Interior Unveils Plans For New High-Speed Creek. If you think about it, this is a sneaky critique of high-speed shit. We know that a high-speed creek is ridiculous, because we understand that creeks are part of an ecology where there are good reasons for them to go the speed they go, and trying to make them go faster would be both difficult and harmful. But humans, in some ways, are part of the same ecology, and some of our ambitions to speed things up are equally difficult and pointless, and make sense only from an ideology that faster is better just for being faster. This subject reminds me of this 1905 San Francisco streetcar video, where you can see the elegant beauty of urban traffic before we ruined it by trying to speed it up.


July 4. I'll probably spend all this week catching up on links. I'm tired of last week's subject, so today I want to tie it off well enough that I don't have to write about politics for a while.

First, a reader sends this pdf article that shows unadjusted happiness scores on page 31, and in earlier pages it talks about how difficult it is to measure happiness even by asking people how happy they are.

On the subreddit, a reader makes an interesting argument that cultural myths have an ecology, and functional old myths have been replaced by dysfunctional new myths in the same way that monoculture crops replace a forest. It's a fun metaphor, but to buy into it I'd have to see examples of how the old myths had symbiotic interconnections like species in an ecology, and how the new myths don't.

Another link from a reader, Some stuff economists tend to leave out. The basic idea is that it's easier to model things than to model human emotions, so our whole system is based on economic models that improve the world of things while accidentally making us all unhappy.

Finally, a Hacker News comment thread on a brief article about collapsing trust in government. I think government is being scapegoated for collapsing faith in our whole way of living. But we have nothing to replace it with, only a massive squabble of whatever bad ideas and charismatic leaders are easiest to follow.


July 1. Two self-critiques on this week's subject. First, like a lot of public intellectuals, I've been framing this in terms of myth vs reality, as if the problem is that suddenly too many people are behaving mythically. But as soon as Leigh Ann said it I knew it was true: myth is the human default. To challenge ones own mythic instincts with careful observation and rational thinking is a learned skill, and one that not many people have learned in this time or any other time. So the real question is not how society veered from reality into myth, but how our cultural myths have veered from creative to destructive.

Second, I mentioned the lack of evidence that Brexit or Trump will make people's lives better -- but how do we even define that? The best place to start would be subjective happiness, but it's surprisingly hard to find data. I went on Google looking for a ranking of countries based purely on asking people how happy they are, and instead I found stuff like the World Happiness Report, which muddles up subjective happiness with numbers like GDP per capita. That seems like circular logic from people who have already decided that quality of life goes hand in hand with economic development. I mean, I still don't see evidence that Brexit will increase subjective happiness, but we shouldn't assume it will decrease happiness just because it crashes the economy.

On exactly these subjects, a reddit comment argues that zombie fiction reflects a societal death wish:

In many ways the return to a simpler life about survival in a hostile environment, is a fantasy about how to remedy alienation. The feeling of hating one's job and doing it only for the money has never been as prevalent as it is now. Even fifty years ago when many jobs appeared worse, people took a certain pride in them. Today most workers feel like their job is absolutely pointless. That's what they would like to overcome, but they don't know how, so the outlet is an apocalyptic fantasy promising the return to human nature. Imagine living as an animal, or in an ancient tribe instead, as a very natural life where issues like depression don't come up the way they do in our developed way of life.


June 29. Continuing on the Brexit: the weirdest argument, which I'm seeing hinted at everywhere and sometimes made explicitly, is that the UK should leave the EU because the big money interests want it to stay. If you follow this to its logical conclusions, we should also stop all international trade and have a nuclear war. But the more interesting move is to trace the logical premises: what would make the elite so perfectly wrong that whatever they want we should do the opposite? They would have to be both all-knowing and totally evil.

I believe exactly the opposite: that the elite have good intentions, but they're ignorant. They are ignorant precisely because they're powerful. Imagine you want to convince some people to do something, but their power is equal to yours or higher. You have to fully engage them, understand their interests and values, and patiently show them that the action is good for them -- or maybe they'll change your mind. But if you had a billion dollars you could just pay them to do it and not have to understand anything.

This is the nature of top-down power, and it's why any kind of authoritarian system, even a benevolent dictator, will keep getting worse the longer it lasts.

The opposite of total authoritarianism is total consensus, where people don't even vote but talk through the issues until they reach a decision that everyone can tolerate. The Iroquois Confederacy came close to this, but consensus is too slow to deal with rapid change or emergencies, or to defend itself from violent conquest, so the best system is some kind of balance.

Western "democracy" is authoritarianism with some clunky mechanisms to try to sweep away the out-of-touch and bring in fresh energy. I support some reforms that would do this better: random ballot voting, periodic cancellation of debts, a corporate death penalty, and an inheritance tax that takes everything above a few million dollars, so you can make your family free but you can't make them too powerful.

Why are these ideas politically impossible, while Donald Trump and Brexit are winning? Why are the most popular reforms the ones that "send a message" without making a good rational case that they'll improve our lives? This goes deeper than politics and economics. There's something happening on the level of human psychology that I haven't figured out yet.


June 27. More about the Brexit, a long reddit comment and discussion about why the town of Burnley voted two thirds to leave the EU. Basically it was economic decline, incompetent government, and corrupt immigrants. But several comments point out that these problems have nothing to do with the EU, and there's no reason to think leaving the EU would fix them. So the voters just wanted to lash out, or they were thinking there's no risk in making a big change because things couldn't get any worse.

Here's a challenge: without making any moral judgments, because that would block the search for deeper causes, explain why all this bad stuff is happening now, when it didn't happen before. I don't expect to see a final answer -- historians still don't agree about the decline of Rome. But my general guess is that we've only had a global high-tech economy for a short time, and we don't know what we're doing. More specifically, there are new and bigger ways for wealth and power to feed back into more wealth and power, and we have yet to evolve the laws and the culture to prevent this.

New subject. A week ago I wrote about the Copa America games, and today I want to cover the last two rounds. I said the USA would lose valiantly to Argentina, but it wasn't valiant. The key moment happened early, when Ezequiel Lavezzi found Lionel Messi unmarked at the top of the box. Three American defenders panicked and rushed to cover him, leaving Lavezzi open and breaking toward the goal. Messi sees the world in slow motion, so he saw all this happening before the ball even got to him, and one-touched a pass over the defenders to Lavezzi who headed it over goalkeeper Brad Guzan who was in exactly the wrong spot. Mentally the USA never recovered. They kept playing hard but played sloppily and Argentina won 4-0.

The story of the final match was supposed to be Argentina, the world's top ranked team with the world's best player, finally winning a championship over Chile. But they missed their chances, leaving the game still scoreless after overtime, and it went to penalty kicks. Now the popular story is that Messi let his team down by sending his kick over the goal. But only moments earlier, Chilean leader Arturo Vidal's kick had been blocked. So after Messi's miss, the contest was still on equal terms: four kicks left, your best player can't help you, and who is the better whole team? Chile had already proven they could win a big game without Vidal, beating Colombia 2-0 in the semifinal. And the shootout told the same story, as Chile buried their next four kicks and Argentina did not. In the end it wasn't about Messi's failure, but Chile's team chemistry and mental toughness.

There was a hint of this earlier, when both teams had reasons to be outraged at the referee, and the sideline reporter mentioned the reactions of the two benches. The Argentine players were jumping and screaming, while on the Chilean side the players remained calm, and only the coach was animated. Juan Antonio Pizzi looks like a meathead car salesman or mobster, but he must be some kind of genius to have his team playing so well on so many levels. I've been watching the European games too and I think Chile is the best national team in the world right now, as disciplined as Germany and almost as intense as Iceland.

I wonder if Iceland's shocking success over much more talented teams, and Leicester City's Premier League championship against 5000-1 odds, are actually the somewhat likely results of a global trend, in which systems built from a foundation of excitement and honesty have a deep advantage over systems built from the need to maintain power. It took me a long time to word that, because even though this subject is all-important, we don't have the right language for it.


June 24. The British are frantically Googling what the E.U. is, hours after voting to leave it. This is a good example of the difference between two kinds of thinking, which I'll call myth-based and reality-based. What defines myth-based thinking is not that it's wrong, but that it feels right without being tested against reality.

Are political decisions more myth-based than they used to be? If so, what might be causing this dangerous trend? I can think of two stories -- which have yet to be tested against reality. One is that political systems are becoming so complicated that it's both more difficult and more boring to observe political reality, so fewer people are doing it.

My other, scarier hypothesis is that we are losing the psychological skill of reality-based thinking, because we have fewer opportunities to practice it. If you're deciding which breakfast cereal to buy, it doesn't matter if you use myth-based thinking, because nothing bad will happen either way. More and more of our decisions are like that, partly because of well-meaning regulations that protect us from bad decisions, and partly because big control systems are making more of the decisions that really matter.

The exception is large-scale democracy, where we still have power, but we no longer know how to use it skillfully. If Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were breakfast cereals, Trump would totally win. And as more of our decision-making experience is on that level, the biggest elections will go to whatever is branded better, not what is best for us.


June 22. Some links on what has become my favorite subject, the psychological dimension of human society. The War on Stupid People argues that our society is overvaluing cognitive processing and undervaluing other skills. Ironically, the article would be better if it had more precise thinking. I'd like to see a careful definition of "intelligence" and a discussion of Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences. There's some good stuff in the Hacker News comment thread, including this:

As we automate more and more fields of labor, we are moving towards a post-job society... Forget our negative perception of "the dumb". We need to fix our negative perception of "the lazy". We must learn how to value people for something beyond their contributions to labor.

One of the best reddit commenters, yodatsracist, explains in detail why people hate Dan Brown. Basically, to feel good about ourselves, we construct a cultural identity, and this is based not just on what we like but on what we actively dislike. I did this a lot when I was younger, but now I try to just like what I like and not care what it says about me. Dan Brown is a clunky stylist with dumb characters, but I think a writer's number one job is to keep the reader from getting bored, and I admire him for doing that as well as anyone in the world.

Finally, redditor damnableluck explains Hannah Arendt's famous phrase, the banality of evil. Edited excerpt:

Eichmann's evil comes from having been a "joiner". In a search for some higher meaning, he gave himself to a cause so completely that he created a intellectual fence around himself and relieved himself of having to think critically or examine his convictions.

There is pleasure in understanding the world around us, and meaning in the unending work of developing and refining a coherent world view. Adopting an ideology short-circuits that effort, providing pleasure and meaning with an unwarranted degree of certainty. Consequently, fully adopting an ideology, whether it's Nazism or Feminism, is fundamentally not a benign act. People do this on a regular basis: unquestioned, mild, allegiance to their church, to their political party, to traditional values, to their social causes, etc. There is a strong intellectual resemblance between the unquestioned beliefs and unexamined assumptions that allow a man to ship millions of people to extermination camps, and the unquestioned assumptions and beliefs that we all operate on, on a daily basis.


June 20. The only way I can keep this blog fresh is to write about whatever's most fun to write about. Today, sports. A few months back I got into women's soccer, and it's a good introduction to the game because the play is slow enough to follow what's happening away from the ball. Now Leigh Ann and I are watching men's international soccer, the Euro 2016 and the Copa America Centenario, and I'm appreciating the game better with the help of cannabis. I like to expand my focus and watch the patterns of players moving together, and I've noticed that some teams have signature patterns, especially on defense: Colombia likes clean parallel lines, while Chile tries to form concentric arcs in a big wedge with the point on the ball.

Weed also helps me see the games as stories, and sometimes they're stories that even the best writers could barely script. On Saturday in Europe there was a fun individual story, as Cristiano Ronaldo, the world's most smug and imperious player, repeatedly failed to score on open shots, including a penalty kick that bounced off the post. But the best team stories have been in the Copa America, with excellent games in all four quarterfinal matches.

The first game on Saturday was the tournament favorite, Argentina, against the Cinderella team, Venezuela. Argentina went up 2-0, but late in the first half Venezuela made a flurry of attacks that had Argentina rattled, coming to a focus in a penalty kick. The kicker looked confident, and everyone expected him to bury it so hard that the keeper had no chance even if he guessed right, and Venezuela would start the second half with scary momentum and only a goal down.

Instead, the world's #77 team tried to embarrass the world's #1 team with a trick, a gentle kick right in the middle that would make the goalkeeper look silly lunging to one side. I don't think it was cruel -- it was a tactical move to get under the opponent's skin and press their advantage. But the keeper saw it coming the whole way. He just stood there and calmly caught the ball, Venezuela's spirit was broken, and Argentina cruised to an easy win.

Early in that game the world's best player, Lionel Messi, was clearly taken down in the box, and the referee refused to call a penalty. This is the opposite of American football and basketball, where elite players get every close call in their favor. Instead the ref was saying, because you're an elite player, you're held to higher standards. This made what would have been a boring game much more interesting, and I think a great referee is like an orchestra conductor, making the game better by setting the right constraints with how he calls fouls.

In the second game, the defending champions were the underdogs. Chile struggled a bit in the group stage, and everyone thought they were a pretty good team that happened to have a great run last year. Their opponent, Mexico, was loaded with talent, riding a 364 day undefeated streak, and playing in America in front of tens of thousands of Mexican immigrants who were even more excited than the crowds at home. They seemed likely to challenge Argentina in the final and stake their claim as one of the best teams in the world.

Instead, Chile came out with a perfect conjunction of creativity, discipline, and raw energy. At first they just seemed feisty and dangerous, but as they continued to win one on one battles and began to swarm the goal, it became clear that they were playing on a level that Mexico had not imagined was possible. They had to work for their first two goals, but at the third goal Mexico gave up, while Chile kept their foot on the gas until the fifth or sixth goal, and ended up with seven. Keep in mind that a goal in soccer is normally harder than a touchdown.

Tomorrow night the USA will lose valiantly to Argentina, and Wednesday night Chile would crush Colombia, except that they'll be playing without world-class midfielder Arturo Vidal, the heart of their team both tactically and emotionally. So the narrative is whether they're strong enough as a team to win without him, and then they'll get him back for either the third place match or the final.


June 17. Music for the weekend, and this is mostly recent and easy to listen to. Living Hour is a dreampop/shoegaze band from Winnipeg, and Steady Glazed Eyes is from their debut album that came out earlier this year. The sound is a more polished version of Bangs by Your Friend, who are from Lawrence, Kansas, 800 miles south on the same central plains.

Most of the Time is a beautiful lo-fi pop song by Jeremy Daly, who records under the name Lou Breed. It's easily the best song on Locus of Control, but that's an interesting idea for a video, where he walks around lip-synching the whole album.

Forndom - DauĂ°ra Dura is another 2016 complete album. They describe the sound as mythic Scandinavian forest music, but to me it sounds like the slow and pretty parts of black metal.

Going back a few years, Espers - Flaming Telepaths is a long psychedelic folk cover of the Blue Oyster Cult classic.

Lately I've been listening heavily to this song by my favorite band: Big Blood - A Watery Down II. It's like space lounge music, with a hypnotic bass riff, lilting phase guitar, swirling multilayered electronics, and dreamy vocals in evolving verses that come back five times to the same chorus over more than 15 minutes.


June 15. State of Surveillance is an episode of HBO's VICE where they interview Edward Snowden. To me, the least interesting thing is how much surveillance is going on and how easy it is. The most interesting thing is from 20:45-23:00, where they argue that broad-scale surveillance is ineffective: The more information the government collects, the harder it is to sort through it and find what's useful.

This reminds me of the unconditional basic income, where it would work better to just give everyone money than to keep a file on every person to try to figure out if they deserve it. The problem is, if you have the power to collect any given piece of information, it's really hard to not use it. I see this as a psychological challenge of letting go of control, but Snowden mentions the political fear that you'll get in trouble for failing to collect some piece of information that turned out to be important. Anyway, this isn't just a weakness of government but also private powers like Google.

Another YouTube video on a whole other subject, Why Poor Places Are More Diverse. It's about the diversity of plant species in poor soil. Where nutrients are abundant, the fast-growing species suck them all up and crowd out the slow-growing species, but where nutrients are scarce everyone can find a niche. Then the video tries to apply this model to human society! This is fascinating, but I think it's a stretch. Notice that their plant argument has detailed evidence for a simple story, and then they project it onto the much greater complexity of human systems with less evidence. And even if they're right, the political implication is ridiculous: that we can make a better world by forcing every place to be poor. Clearly it's better to have abundance and also have laws and social customs to keep the abundance widely spread instead of gobbled up by a few powerful interests.


June 13. A reader reports on the Illinois budget crisis:

Our state did not pass a budget last year. It was a tough year for lots of people, especially those in social services and education. But everybody knew that eventually a budget would be passed, so it was just, Hang on, borrow money to get through, hang on...

But our state also did not pass a budget this year either. Shit is officially hitting the fan. MAP grants for students didn't get funded last year, but schools mostly funded them anyway. This year, students have been told if the government doesn't fund them, the students will have to pay. Universities are cutting staff. Staff are fleeing to more secure jobs. Students are choosing more stable universities.

Public elementary and high schools are unable to begin school next year without funding. Yep, Illinois school children may all be home schooled next year! The homeless shelters in our town for men have closed down. Social services are closing down right and left.

This article explains the political background: Fallout of Illinois budget feud grows. I think the Democrats are being smart and ruthless, allowing a disaster to unfold to gain a long-term political win, while the Republican governor is being stupid and ideological. Republican voters believe that most government spending is waste, but Republican politicians are supposed to know this is bullshit, and promise to slash taxes and spending but never actually do it, because then voters learn through direct experience that government spending is more valuable than they thought.





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