Ran Prieur http://ranprieur.com/#9a417fe513f58988c3b5b1e84cfc57397194a79b 2025-06-18T18:00:55Z Ran Prieur http://ranprieur.com/ ranprieur@gmail.com June 18. http://ranprieur.com/#56a46f5a389a4449b2bb704ad8bd4247ab7b5048 2025-06-18T18:00:55Z June 18. Stray links. The Homelessness Experiment is by a guy who saved a lot of money by living in the jungle in Hong Kong. I continue to think that high end homelessness is going to be a trend, that is, highly capable people who just think homelessness is a better deal than high rent. There's probably already a lot of it going unreported.

Because this is tagged as entertainment I thought it was satire, but it's real: AI company files for bankruptcy after being exposed as 700 Indian engineers

Scientific article, Effects of Psilocybin on Religious and Spiritual Attitudes and Behaviors in Clergy from Various Major World Religions. After 16 months, "participants rated at least one of their psilocybin experiences to be among the top five most spiritually significant (96%), profoundly sacred (92%), psychologically insightful (83%), and psychologically meaningful (79%) of their lives."

And another scientific article, I just like the title: Photon transport through the entire adult human head

]]> June 16. http://ranprieur.com/#d92d2ff0980e472d0739fb7422373ad0d65067d6 2025-06-16T16:40:11Z June 16. Here's a time lapse video of the No Kings Seattle protest. The official count was 70,000, but that's a stadium full and this video looks like two or three stadiums. The march went close to my apartment and I hung out for a bit, and I kept thinking, There's no way Trump can put all these people in camps.

I mean, this is no picnic and it's going to get worse. But the generation that ruled Nazi Germany was raised during an extreme fad of breaking the child's spirit (see Alice Miller's book For Your Own Good) and my generation was raised by Mr. Rogers. We just don't have the cultural environment for fascism to thrive. I don't know how many immigrants and dissenters Trump is going to end up killing, but it will be way fewer than the unseen deaths from slashed health care and public services. That doesn't count as murder because under capitalism there is no right to life, only the right to sell your labor for the right to buy someone else's labor.

My point is, Trump has just put a full clown suit on a deeper error. I've been trying to understand the right by imagining them as Rawlsian gamblers. John Rawls said you have to design a society without knowing which person in that society you're going to be. The left says, "Then I'll make sure every person has their basic needs met." The right says, "Then I'll make a thousand peasants for every king, because maybe I'll get to be king!" What I don't understand is how someone can continue to think that way when they're a peasant.

This Reddit comment (lightly edited) explains:

Most of them believe hierarchy is morally justified even if that means they would not benefit. They believe their position in the hierarchy is due to their own mistakes. They trust that the billionaires with power deserve their position. If you think conservatives would behave differently if they only understood that the hierarchy isn't going to make them kings, your messaging will fail.

They are much like the character Oprah plays in The Color Purple who urges the protagonist to beat her son because punishment is the only form of social change she can understand. Their parents beat them and used their authority as the justification for their child-rearing. They were taught you do things because Daddy says so and daddy is in charge. Everything in their values and beliefs fits in to this worldview, even in their religion they choose moral actions only because the God daddy says they should. Because these are foundational beliefs that touch on so many things they take for granted, any ideas that challenge these beliefs are going to create cognitive dissonance and thus be very difficult to change. Even if that means that they would not benefit from the authoritarian policies. Even when the hierarchy leads to their own suffering they simply blame themselves.

It all comes down to a foundational belief that America is a meritocracy and hierarchies are good and good people get what they deserve and bad people must be punished.

My strategy to break down this belief, which will not succeed any time soon, is to reject the whole idea of "deserve". Nobody deserves anything. Let's just get stuff without deserving it. Or, let's get what we get, and miss what we miss, not from morally charged ideas of reward and punishment from past actions, but from looking forward with the moral principle that you are everyone.

]]> June 13. http://ranprieur.com/#eb8ffd375fc634a78a72e42d808552e6540d3438 2025-06-13T13:10:41Z June 13. Three links on drugs. It turns out the runner's high does not come from endorphins. It comes from endocannabinoids.

Only a specific dose of psilocybin induces lasting antidepressant-like effects. In a study on rats, both lower and higher doses failed to make the rats happier.

New Olympics-Style Games Will Let Contestants Dope Up on as Many Steroids and Drugs as They Want. This sounds cool for spectators, but a lot of athletes will ruin their bodies because they're desperate for money.

And some music. This week I did an expansion and overhaul of my Classic Rock Deep Tracks Spotify playlist. The old list was under two hours and mostly my favorite bands. The new one is over three hours and more comprehensive. Beatles, Stones, Kinks, Who, and Bowie are now represented, and there's even more Blue Oyster Cult. The song with the median number of plays is Blondie's Fade Away And Radiate at 4.5 million. This isn't my best playlist, but it definitely has the best guitar solos.

]]> June 12. http://ranprieur.com/#1483440fde5750832cfd252549bfa6c83c4b8c97 2025-06-12T12:00:49Z June 12. Thanks Tim for this fascinating article, Seven Days At The Bin Store. (If that link doesn't work, here's an archive.) Bin stores are a growing business model where they buy truckloads of random stuff and sell it in bins. It's "where late stage capitalism goes for one final hurrah." Where does the stuff come from?

Returns, repairs, refurbished products, and even recalls fall into the purview of reverse logistics. They are joined there by products that never made it to a consumer because the season ended, or a box was a little dented, or the purchaser never picked up their order, or a retailer was just running out of room in their warehouse.

This is why I like eBay better than Amazon. Now that Amazon is full of Chinese counterfeits and fake reviews, it's not clear which site is more reliable, but Amazon is fed by making new shit and eBay is fed by scavenging already made shit. By the way, I think the day-by-day pricing could be done better. Instead of 10-8-6-4-2-1, I'd go 20-10-5-2-1-free.

]]> June 10. http://ranprieur.com/#664dcc5c109d9925be9736a471962f12341b2300 2025-06-10T22:40:12Z June 10. Links via Hacker News, starting with a thread on the death of Bill Atkinson, one of the greatest programmers of all time. There's some discussion of how his key invention, HyperCard, could have evolved into a much better tech world than the dystopian one we're in.

A long thread about EMP weapons, with lots of debate about whether they would fry small electronics, and how to build a Faraday cage.

Coventry Very Light Rail is a "rail-based travel system that can be delivered at less than half the cost and in half the time of conventional light rail systems, while providing the same benefits." Basically, by spending some money on lighter and stronger materials, it saves a lot of money on digging and infrastructure.

Smart People Don't Chase Goals; They Create Limits. There are some great ideas here, but the author doesn't quite capture the benefits of following constraints over goals, and the Hacker News thread goes completely wrong by changing the title from "smart" to "successful". I would say it like this. If you want to do a specific thing, set a goal. If you want to do something interesting, set constraints. But there's no guarantee the interesting thing you do will be recognized or rewarded.

]]> June 7. http://ranprieur.com/#309e3d5c77069136358b0d2539c79dfca5089274 2025-06-07T19:10:34Z June 7. For the weekend, three happy links about practical things. The Rise of the Japanese Toilet

Cockatoos have learned to operate drinking fountains in Australia

The Right to Repair Is Law in Washington State

]]> June 5. http://ranprieur.com/#39d57fca09c7e62c086d6f2f6214272c1141a033 2025-06-05T17:50:32Z June 5. Quick note on politics. I was just reading how, in 2016, conservative author P.J. O'Rourke endorsed Hillary Clinton, saying "She's wrong about absolutely everything, but she's wrong within normal parameters." I feel something similar about Trump: He's wrong about everything, but at least he's wrong outside of normal parameters. Neoliberalism is dying because it cannot conceive of any alternative to the present system, while the right offers a time-tested alternative: charismatic warlords and fanatical tribalism.

Three Reddit threads about the failure of normal parameters:

What's a thing that is dangerously close to collapse?

What's one thing you think is quietly fading away from our lives or society?

And the most powerful thread, of course removed by mods: What's a sign that someone has quietly given up?

]]> June 3. http://ranprieur.com/#a16ac8dc0f19b2cc2ad4f929c1feae59be9669f1 2025-06-03T15:30:59Z June 3. Probably just posting links this week. I check the Ask Old People subreddit twice a day, and it's mostly just nostalgia, but sometimes there's a great thread that inevitably gets removed. Here are two: How many older people have decided to just stay away from Doctors? And a thread full of good stories about ways people have died besides in their sleep.

I've been heavily following the college softball playoffs, and here's a great play from this weekend where a Texas Tech player steals home, taking off with the pitch and the catcher doesn't notice.

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