Ran Prieur

April 7.

2025-04-07T19:50:35Z

April 7. There's an early Philip Dick novel called Eye in the Sky, in which eight people fall through a particle beam and pass through different dystopian dream worlds, each one constructed out of the ideologies and prejudices of one of the eight. That feels like what's happening now, where a few people have enough power to impose their boneheaded utopian visions on the actual world.

It's easy to believe that tariffs are a beautiful way to take money from other countries and give an advantage to domestic manufacturing. Every hundred years, America gets dumb enough to actually try it. In 1828, the Tariff of Abominations destroyed the southern economy, and in 1930, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act tried to stop the Great Depression and made it worse.

Another belief, which makes sense on an emotional level and no other level, is that the state should be run the way a strong father runs a household. Two articles from the Atlantic explain it. One Word Describes Trump, and it's a strange word that will never catch on: patrimonialism.

It is not defined by institutions or rules; rather, it can infect all forms of government by replacing impersonal, formal lines of authority with personalized, informal ones. Based on individual loyalty and connections, and on rewarding friends and punishing enemies (real or perceived), it can be found not just in states but also among tribes, street gangs, and criminal organizations.

And America's Future Is Hungary, explaining how Viktor Orbán has ruined his country, and the American right is in love with him because if you have power, or just fantasize about having power, that's the most exciting way to fantasize about using it.

I'm still somewhat optimistic about America. We're finished as a global empire, and we will never return to the prosperity of the late 20th century. But we have a long tradition of being relatively democratic and respectful of the rule of law. Supposedly things go in cycles, and I'm pretty old and have not yet seen America move to the left on economic issues. It has to happen some time.

My own utopian vision, which has not yet been tried on a national level, but has worked well on the local level, is to absolutely guarantee basic dignified survival to every citizen, and then let the economy emerge from what each one of us chooses to do with that freedom. I think in the next hundred years, as growth ends and capitalism collapses, most of the countries of the world are going to have to choose one or the other: unconditional basic income, or mass extermination. Either way, you won't have to get a job.

April 5.

2025-04-05T17:30:52Z

April 5. Quick note on politics. I went to the big protest today, and maybe it was just the weather, but the vibe was a lot more cheerful than the protest I went to a couple months ago. Also, until now the big media have been mainly ignoring protests, but this one was announced in advance as the lead story on Google news. I wonder what changed. The people who make the phone calls are like, fascism schmascism, but don't mess with my economy.

April 3.

2025-04-03T15:10:16Z

April 3. I'm still taking a break from politics, but if you're interested in discussion of the Trump tariffs, here's a massive Hacker News thread.

My subject today is music, magic, and fit. When a person says a thing is too hard, it means that thing is a bad fit for that person. That's totally normal in modern life, which is why we're all preoccupied with ease and convenience. But if you really enjoy something, you don't mind if it's hard, because that makes it a fun challenge.

I enjoy making playlists so much that I add rules to make them harder. They have to be between one and two hours, and every song has to fit, if not by sounding similar to the other songs, at least by having good transitions with the songs right before and after. I end up cutting a lot of good songs, and when I do, I move them to an "Orphans" folder.

That folder finally got big enough that I divided it into categories and started making playlists. Making songs fit, that were selected by not fitting, is so challenging that I developed a new system. I listen to the songs on shuffle, and when I notice a good transition, especially if it's surprising, I make a note of it.

Here's where the magic comes in. On my laptop, I use VLC, and its shuffle is hit and miss. But when I walk around on headphones, I use my old Sansa Clip mp3 player, and its shuffle is hit hit hit. This is neither objectively testable nor mechanistically explainable, but to me it's obvious that the Sansa is much luckier, and my explanation is that it's a rare item that I've used and appreciated for many years. I even soldered in a new battery. I've put enough energy into it that it's now a minor magic item, with the power of picking the perfect song.

My four Orphan song categories are soft, regular, jarring, and long. I used the shuffle trick for the most difficult "jarring" category, and the Sansa pulled up one great transition after another. That list still needs work, but the soft list is done and polished, and I really like it, Orphans 1: Flowers. While it's not in any order other than good transitions, it happens that the first song is the oldest and most played (1963/25M), and the last song is the newest and least played (2024/6K).