Ran Prieur

March 9.

2026-03-09T21:10:53Z

March 9. Three stray links. How the "Kill Line" Redefined the American Dream in China, about the Chinese finding out how fucked up America is. "Perhaps most incomprehensible to the Chinese observer is the 'welfare cliff'. In China, social safety nets are generally perceived as a staircase: as you earn more, you contribute more, but basic protections remain. In contrast, the American system often functions like a trapdoor."

Thanks Christopher for this one: In Vermont, one man is bringing pay phones back to life. He sets them up to use the cell network for free, and pays the costs himself. There's no reason towns everywhere couldn't do this, except that our public institutions are ossified and everyone has given up.

And a great Reddit thread that was removed for having a poorly worded question that was probably written by a bot. But the answers contain a lot of interesting stories about kids who are smart in unusual ways.

March 6.

2026-03-06T18:40:46Z

March 6. Music for the weekend. Jimi Hendrix Was a Systems Engineer, a somewhat technical article on his innovations in guitar effects.

Today is Bandcamp Friday, and Twisted Teens are a pretty good New Orleans garage band.

Trevor Babb - Septet is an amazing psychedelic instrumental. When I'm high I can listen to this over and over.

And I've finished a new playlist. In January I revamped my funeral playlist, and being in that frame of mind, I kept noticing songs that had the right vibe but not the right lyrics, like Here's Where The Story Ends, or Old Shoes and Picture Postcards. So I dug up a bunch more songs like that. There are breakup songs, sad love songs, songs about the beauty of life, two instrumentals and at least one song where I don't know what it's about. My working title was "secret funeral", and after listening, ordering, and culling, I decided that's the best title: Secret Funeral

March 4.

2026-03-04T16:20:05Z

March 4. There are no psychopaths is an interesting article arguing that most of the things we believe about psychopaths disappear when science looks closely. For example, it turns out that they are capable of empathy and the full range of emotions. The author thinks we should abandon the diagnosis completely, but I've known people who fit the classic psychopath definition, and it would definitely be a mistake to treat them like normal people just because science can't pin them down.

So here's my theory: Psychopathy is not a mental illness -- it's a lifestyle choice, and it's specific to very charming people, because otherwise it won't work. Charm is a kind of power, and every kind of power is a temptation to do evil. When the power of charm corrupts, what it looks like is someone going through life treating other people like vending machines and moving on when it stops working.

Related, Epstein/Evil in the Empire of Power: Not Chaos, but Order. This is a very cynical and completely accurate analysis:

The recent release of files related to Jeffrey Epstein did not shake the world because they revealed something entirely unknown. They shook it because they confirmed, with documentary coldness, a truth usually spoken only in whispers: that absolute power does not live within common morality, but creates a parallel morality of its own.
...
The untouchability of these figures is not a flaw of the system, but its highest achievement. It does not arise from the absence of laws, but from their excess; not from a lack of evidence, but from the fragmentation of truth. The public receives enough information to be shocked, but never enough to demand real accountability. Scandal turns into spectacle, and spectacle into fatigue.

March 2.

2026-03-02T14:00:13Z

March 2. Three Reddit comment sub-threads for these weird times, starting with one about AI and dreaming:

For decades we have known that two tricks to help you lucid dream are looking at your hands or trying to read text because dreams don't do hands or text well and can be clue that you are in a dream.

Why the fuck are dreams and AI suffering from the same glitch?!?"

Under that are a ton of comments and some half-baked theories. I think it's just that those are both cognitively difficult tasks, and AI and dream consciousness both struggle, unless you burn a lot of computing power or you're a talented dreamer. By the way, I rarely manage to lucid dream, but I do have a test that works every time. I jump up, and try to delay coming down. In a dream I can always do it. In the physical world, not yet.

Another big sub-thread about the ability to diagnose sickness by smell. This is a real thing. The reason we don't have smell test clinics is that the medical industry would have to develop a whole system for certification, and probably training, and there's no incentive with the present system bringing in so much money.

A shorter sub-thread about relationship scams, in which the OP, who fell for one, is not paranoid enough, and the featured comment lays out the whole process of how it works. This reminds me of stage magic, in that the audience can't imagine that the magician would go to that much trouble.