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Pieter Levels Site
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20 September
19 September
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Their words
actually, there are three economic superpowers in the world by this measure. There’s the United States, there’s China, which is clearly number one, and then there’s the EU, which are roughly co-equal.
18 September
17 September
16 September
15 September
From one piece @levelsio on X 2 beliefs · x.com
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Their words
I think we should use this kinds of data to completely turn around Europe's immigration policy: - We should have super easy inflow for immigrants from countries whose previous immigrants have shown low crime rates You're from Japan? Just fly here and you can stay forever - We should then almost completely ban any inflow from countries whose previous immigrants have shown high crime rates with instant deportations
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Their words
I think this is the most common sense policy and it'll make Europe much safer
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Their words
The European Union is big - the third largest economy in the world, but it has great difficulty in transforming economic strength into geopolitical clout.
14 September
13 September
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Their words
Making trade deals with EU is good for Canada. Anything beyond that is just anchoring ourselves to a block who’s economic ambitions aren’t much higher than being an “open air museum”.
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korrents.com
Software is mostly dead; new Silicon Valley startups are building harness or hardware instead.Their words
In the most early adopting tech pioneering place that's Silicon Valley new startups aren't even building software anymore And it's debatable if anyone will actually need a custom harness or it won't just be generically offered by the AI frontier companies So software is mostly dead and hardware it is
12 September
10 September
9 September
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korrents.com
Most commercially produced black pudding today is made with dried blood imported from Europe rather than fresh blood.Their words
Fruit Pig are one of the few black pudding producers at scale who use fresh blood - most black pudding these days is made with dried blood imported from Europe.
8 September
4 September
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Their words
Worse, U.S. officials now openly support and encourage politicians from far-right anti-European political parties, partly because they are ideologically aligned, but partly because Americans now want to weaken the European Union so that U.S. tech companies can evade any regulation, or even taxation.
The Myth of the “Censorship Industrial Complex”anneapplebaum.substack.com
3 September
From one piece Portugal could have been the Silicon Valley of Europe 2 beliefs · levels.io
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korrents.com
Europe's dominant cultural spirit is anti-tech, anti-AI, anti-entrepreneurship, anti-business and anti-progress.Their words
Portugal's choice is cultural though and completely fits the general spirit in Europe which is fully anti-tech, anti-AI, anti-entrepreneurship, anti-business and anti-progress
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korrents.com
Portugal deliberately chose to remain relatively poor and technologically behind rather than become a tech hub.Their words
Portugal collectively decided they wanted to remain relatively poor and technologically and intellectually behind
2 September
1 September
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Their words
And yet, life expectancy about two years more than the national average is rather common in rich regions with selective migration, even in European countries with even access to health care, like France and Spain.
28 August
26 August
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korrents.com
Small European states can demand a war with Russia only because they assume somebody else will fight it.Their words
It is also hypocritical because it is based on the assumption that somebody else (in this case, the United States) will fight for them.
On European hypocrisy and warmongeringbranko2f7.substack.com
25 August
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Their words
Most of the world’s free time has now been monetized by tech companies. In fact, the monetization of leisure time is how Silicon Valley execs make their billions.
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korrents.com
The Trump administration's approach to Greenland is widely perceived as threatening across Europe.Their words
The Trump administration's ongoing obsession with Greenland feels menacing to everyone in Scandinavia, indeed everyone in Europe.
24 August
21 August
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Their words
In short, the venture capitalists and CEOs of Silicon Valley have priced the costs of shame into their business plans.
20 August
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korrents.com
Moonshots succeed more often than Silicon Valley's use of the word admits -- we actually got to the moon.Their words
It's like, you know, when we went to the moon, we did it. And so, historically, the success rate of moonshots is higher than I think people give them credit for.
18 August
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Their words
have to abide by this rule that was written before LLMs were even a thing. And that shows how challenging sort of the the the situation is if you try to set the line too firm to begin with.
15 August
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Their words
The USA has kept dribbling small amounts of military support for Ukraine because it gives the USA a great deal of leverage, the ability to both shape how Ukraine fights its war and even how European states prepare.
13 August
10 August
8 August
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Their words
Increasingly, it is looking much more like the one anticipated by the drugged-up 1960s oeuvre of Philip K Dick, filled with deranged billionaires, machines that claim consciousness, hallucinated worlds and political breakdown.
7 August
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Their words
I think one of the things that makes science the company very special is that it has both of those cultures and is able to integrate them and we're able to simultaneously do some really cool research that I think is really at the edge of the Overton window while simultaneously running clinical trials in six countries now with an approved medical device in Europe and clinical trial results in the New England Journal of Medicine.
3 August
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Their words
in Silicon Valley, there's a common mantra to move fast and break things. However, when you're dealing with atoms instead of bits, breaking things is not really okay. So, the thing you have to do is to move fast and ship safely.
2 August
1 August
31 July
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korrents.com
Startup opportunities are not fleeting; Silicon Valley has reliably had a surfeit of them for decades.Their words
You know, in hindsight, I think that um that was a a poor intuition. Uh it's been pretty robustly and reliably the case over many decades in Silicon Valley has a surfeit of opportunities.
29 July
From one piece Chartbook 462: China shocked - beyond 1.0 and 2.0 to the "Big One". 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
China shock 2.0 threatens high status manufactured goods: European cars and engineering.
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korrents.com
The second China shock is landing on Europe, where the first one landed on the United States.Their words
In China shock 1.0 the key target was the US. In China shock 2.0 it is Europe.
28 July
22 July
From one piece Chartbook 460 Greedflation meets China shock: Can Europe's car industry be saved without making the cost of living crisis worse? 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Protection for European industry should be granted only alongside demands for systematic reform of that industry.Their words
And this in turn means that if we really want to find a way out of the impasse, advocacy for protection and support should be tied to demands for systematic reform.
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Their words
To put this same story another way, the European car industry in the early 2020s was a prime example of greedflation i.e. companies taking advantage of the COVID shock and other disruptions and to hike profits at the expense of consumers.
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Their words
The two seemingly contradictory trends connect, because the relatively low rate of productive investment leaves European industry vulnerable to its most vigorous competitors whose firms are contending with an even more deflationary macroeconomic situation at home in China.
20 July
16 July
14 July
13 July
9 July
2 July
30 June
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Everybody's PerfectTheir words
And now it's Everybody's Perfect, a book that pretty much defines what it means for one text to be "in dialog" with another text. In this case, it's Ada Palmer's Inventing the Renaissance, a stunning magnum opus that tells not just the story of the Renaissance, but the story of the story, all the different ways the Renaissance has been used, abused, revised and recovered, starting with the Renaissance itself. It's a book that will make you rethink everything you know about European history, about the world today, and about the very idea of history itself
28 June
From one piece Europe Needs Air Conditioning 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
American overregulation and labor-market rigidity make elevators far more common in Europe than in the US.Their words
elevators are the rare part of the economy where Europeans have embraced market dynamism while Americans choose overregulation and labor market rigidity.
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Their words
European leftists explicitly advocate that people should be kept poor, uncomfortable, and literally sweating.
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korrents.com
European countries are wealthy enough to afford widespread air conditioning, comparable to Japan.Their words
Europe is not actually poor. Japan is about as wealthy as Europe, and almost all Japanese homes are air-conditioned. Europeans could afford to air-condition their homes (and their hospitals!) just like the Japanese do.
19 June
16 June
From one piece Europe's housing shortages are even worse than America's 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
In fact, zoning was invented in Europe, in Germany and Austria-Hungary, in the late nineteenth century.
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korrents.com
Europe's housing shortages are worse than America's, and Europeans do not discuss zoning as their cause at all.Their words
In fact, European housing shortages are generally worse than America’s.
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Their words
I suspect the same is often true in the rest of Europe: NIMBYism is the ultimate reason why the French and German states don’t solve their housing shortages through unbanning densification, but since the claims of the NIMBYs have been preemptively conceded by everyone, NIMBYism has basically remained latent.
+ 1 more
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Their words
But this effect is far too small to explain the increase in house prices in Europe since 1914, when, after all, most urban continental Europeans lived in flats.
From one piece Machiavelli is the most misunderstood thinker of all time – Ada Palmer 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
And soon we have a precedent that every new pope feels he has the authority to knock down every pawn upon the chessboard if he feels like it. Once that is the norm, even a fairly nice pope still inherits the idea that the pope is going to overthrow and replace governments. And this creates a unique instability within Italy that no other part of Europe is subject to
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Their words
Machiavelli is the first person that we have ever in the European tradition to suggest that it could be viable for there to be more than one political party in a state at the same time.
13 June
10 June
9 June
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Their words
They're the only uh power in Europe that doesn't need to maintain a large standing army because if Britain could maintain a competent navy, no army's going to reach British shores cuz they're going to be drowned at sea.
29 May
28 May
15 May
10 May
From one piece Is Europe in Economic Decline? 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Europe, along with China and the United States, is an economic superpower. And, at this point in time, it is arguably the world’s only democratic superpower.
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korrents.com
Europe is not in economic decline; by the measures that matter most it is keeping up with the United States.Their words
Moreover, by many measures — arguably the most important measures — Europe is, in fact, keeping up with the United States.
8 May
From one piece David Reich – Bronze Age shock, the Neanderthal puzzle, & the sudden spread of farming 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
And so, maybe what you're seeing is that this group of people in Europe and the Middle East over the last 10,000 years has moved into a a period of relatively more stable food, where building up stores of fat are not as advantageous, and there's been selection against this combination of traits.
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Their words
So we just could not see a way this could happen by chance and once we saw that we really felt quite convinced that this was a real signal and that really somehow there has been natural selection to increase the genetic changes that today manifest themselves as more years of school at predicting more years of schooling.
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Their words
but it is the tracer dye, right? Like it tracks into European languages and important aspects of Indo-European culture are coming through Yamnaya.
24 April
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Their words
Canada and much of Europe have adopted different interrogation techniques — such as the PEACE method — which emphasize collecting reliable information over coercion. These approaches still garner confessions; they’re just more reliable.
22 April
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Their words
So, what if geopolitics was to go horribly wrong and tensions escalate and Europe find itself suddenly locked out of US cloud services? I hope that doesn't happen. I still think it's fairly unlikely, but it's no longer unthinkable.
17 April
9 April
2 April
26 March
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korrents.com
AI companies promote themselves around 'taste' because their products are unappealing outside tech circles.Their words
A.I. companies need to associate themselves with taste precisely because their tools are not very palatable, much less cool, to anyone outside of Silicon Valley.
Why tech bros are obsessed with "taste"kylechayka.substack.com
20 March
13 February
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Their words
a worry I have is that the growth rate could be like 50% in Silicon Valley and, you know, parts of the world that are kind of socially connected to Silicon Valley and, you know, not that much faster than its current pace elsewhere. And I think that'd be a pretty messed up world.
12 February
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korrents.com
Silicon Valley talking only to itself has produced a dismissal of ordinary human experience everywhere else.Their words
there’s also within that excitement, and within everybody talking just to each other, there’s a dismissal of the basic human experience across the United States and the Midwest, across the world.
18 January
7 January
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Lovedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers LoveTheir words
If you could only read one book on product management, this would be it. Marty has had a long and storied product management career, and is the founder of Silicon Valley Product Group.
1 January
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Likedrcmnd.app
1913: The Year Before the StormTheir words
1913: The Year Before the Storm presents a whimsical slice of Central Europe. Art historian Florian Illies collates fragments of leading figures month by month, diary-entry style.
12 December 2025
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Their words
And it’s obvious, it’s obvious that they had writing on a perishable material. They can’t just have had inscribed stone seals, and many parts of India today write on palm leaf.
20 November 2025
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Their words
Learning loss is a global phenomenon, exacerbated by a catastrophic event, not a structural flaw unique to the American education system.
10 November 2025
10 October 2025
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Their words
When the Ukrainians say that they are defending Europe’s borders they are correct.
8 October 2025
5 October 2025
30 September 2025
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Their words
Because today, if you take France for example which is a beautiful country with a lot of talented people, but public expenses are 58% of the country's GDP, it's maybe as much more than in the latest stage of the Soviet Union.
27 September 2025
21 September 2025
18 September 2025
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Their words
The average European and UK voter, once he or she moves on from immigration, will notice how Europe and the UK have made energy unaffordable, stopped its growth-exactly as degrowthers wish-and deindustrialized, on the altar of climate policies that do nothing to improve the climate.
10 September 2025
From one piece 2025 State of the Union Address by President von der Leyen, 10 September 2025 2 beliefs · enlargement.ec.europa.eu
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Their words
This must be Europe's Independence Moment. I believe this is our Union's mission. To be able to take care of our own defence and security. To take control over the technologies and energies that will fuel our economies.
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korrents.com
A new world order based on raw power is being drawn right now, and Europe has to fight for its place in it.Their words
Battlelines for a new world order based on power are being drawn right now. So, yes, Europe must fight. For its place in a world in which many major powers are either ambivalent or openly hostile to Europe.
4 September 2025
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Their words
Yes, it's what ultimately killed the dinosaurs, but I'd be amazed if there wasn't some equivalent of Hawaii or New Zealand or some other tucked away island or valley where actually dinosaurs were fine for anything from a few hundred thousand to a couple of million years.
13 August 2025
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Their words
One interesting point is that, in China, you ask the companies to innovate first, and then you regulate after, right? So, that has led to things like P2P platforms. It’s led to lots of kind of financial innovations, some of which has actually been very helpful and good, some of which had been disastrous, but the intention to regulate after the fact is to really not slow down or hinder the innovation. This is a very different approach from Europe. You regulate first, and then companies have to work around that.
31 July 2025
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Their words
We really don't have any well-documented case of anybody, say, from China visiting Europe or Europe visiting China before the Mongols. But since Chinggis Khan, there's never been a year without contact between east and west. It was permanent. Once he created it, it was permanent.
16 July 2025
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Their words
But they they both had something something unique that we didn't know at the time. I'm going to call them concentrated deposits. Not uninsured cuz people are misstating that, concentrated.
19 June 2025
16 June 2025
1 June 2025
19 May 2025
15 May 2025
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Their words
Another factor that is killing Europe’s competitiveness — not just for batteries but for many industrial products — is the high electricity costs.
14 May 2025
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korrents.com
Germany will provide whatever money the Bundeswehr needs to become the strongest conventional army in Europe.Their words
Die Bundesregierung wird zukünftig alle finanziellen Mittel zur Verfügung stellen, die die Bundeswehr braucht, um zur konventionell stärksten Armee Europas zu werden.
30 April 2025
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Their words
I am not here to tell you that the medieval period is a specifically peaceful time, but it pales in comparison to what goes down in the early modern period, in which both the apparently beloved Renaissance and Enlightenment periods lie.
On what Americans know about medieval historygoing-medieval.com
28 February 2025
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Their words
But the underlying ideology is familiar from Silicon Valley, Mark Zuckerberg's dictum to "move fast and break things" and replace the messily human with frictionless technology, built by elite engineers who are supposed to know better than anyone else.
3 February 2025
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Their words
Code and data is hard, but ideas is easy. Silicon Valley operates on the way that top employees get bought out by other companies for a pay raise, and a large reason why these companies do this is to bring ideas with them.
21 January 2025
From one piece No, South Korea Was Not Poorer Than Kenya in 1960 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
The relative absence of pre-colonial states meant that the newly independent African states were largely European inventions; modern Kenya, for instance, inherits the boundaries of British East Africa, which was created by pulling together the Kikuyu, Luo, Luhya, Kalenjin, and Kamba ethnic groups.
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korrents.com
Japanese colonial rule built a far deeper state in Korea than European rule ever built in sub-Saharan Africa.Their words
The Japanese empire reached far deeper into its colonies than any European empire ever did in Sub-Saharan Africa.
20 December 2024
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korrents.com
China now starts about a quarter of the world's new clinical trials, more than Europe does.Their words
Chinese companies are now responsible for about a quarter of new trial starts — more than Europe.
16 December 2024
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Usesrcmnd.app
Tech Lead JournalTheir words
discussions from software engineering leaders, with a focus on Asia and Europe.
11 December 2024
7 December 2024
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Their words
In truth, the UK shares high costs with more decentralized countries, and Spain shares low ones with more centralized ones.
Low Spanish Costs are not About Decentralizationpedestrianobservations.com
1 November 2024
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korrents.com
Europe is losing the competition for talented migrants because it is not an attractive enough destination.Their words
Europe’s real problem is that we are not a competitive destination.
16 October 2024
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Their words
We are pretty sure that the Sphinx, at least, does date back to 12 and a half thousand years ago and with it, the megalithic temples, the so-called Valley Temple, which stands just to the east and just to the south of the Sphinx and the Sphinx temple, which stands directly in front of the Sphinx.
2 October 2024
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korrents.com
Without SpaceX, neither the United States nor Europe would have adequate access to space of its own.Their words
But for SpaceX, both the US and Europe would lack adequate strategic access to space.
30 September 2024
From one piece Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America | Lex Fridman Podcast #446 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Spain and Portugal are unfairly maligned by the Black Legend: it was the diseases that killed the Americas.Their words
I think that the Spanish and the Portuguese get unfairly maligned in what’s been called the Black Legend, that they just marched into America and murdered everyone. That’s not the fact. It was the diseases that murdered everyone.
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korrents.com
Maya hieroglyphs must have been readable across several spoken languages, the way Chinese characters or Latin were.Their words
There must have been a way that multiple languages understood the same writing system. Or maybe there was something like Latin. You know how there was a period in Europe where most people were illiterate and there was this priesthood who all understood Latin and they wrote in Latin? Maybe the hieroglyphs represent a kind of Latin in the ancient Maya world.
1 September 2024
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Their words
In effect there are two different ways to run a company: founder mode and manager mode. Till now most people even in Silicon Valley have implicitly assumed that scaling a startup meant switching to manager mode.
19 August 2024
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Lovedrcmnd.app
The Idea FactoryTheir words
The Idea Factory -- sets the context for the hardware inventions that directly led to Silicon Valley.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Making Silicon ValleyTheir words
Making Silicon Valley -- there aren't many books that say a lot about the Valley pre-Shockley; this one goes back to the 30s.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Revolution in The ValleyTheir words
Revolution in The Valley -- a hundred stories from the early days of the Mac, collected by one of its creators.
29 May 2024
25 April 2024
From one piece Speech on Europe, Sorbonne, 25 April 2024 (Elysee English transcript) 3 beliefs · elysee.fr
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korrents.com
Europe is mortal — it can die, and whether it does depends entirely on choices Europeans make now.Their words
My message today is simple. Paul Valéry said, at the end of the First World War, that we now know that our civilizations are mortal. We must be clear on the fact that our Europe, today, is mortal. It can die. It can die, and that depends entirely on our choices. But these choices must be made now.
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Their words
And so yes, the era when Europe bought its energy and fertilizers from Russia, had its goods manufactured in China, and delegated its security to the United States of America, is over.
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Their words
We cannot sustain the most stringent environmental and social norms, invest less than our competitors, have a more naive trade policy than them and think that we will continue to generate jobs. This no longer holds together.
4 March 2024
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Their words
My understanding is there are Nazis in Ukraine and there are supporters of white supremacy theories, but also my understanding is that they are extremely marginal and they are more marginal than the same sort of groups are in Central Europe, maybe in the U.S. as well.
16 January 2024
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
NewcomerTheir words
Eric Newcomer is the rare Substack journalist who thrives on breaking news. His dispatches from Silicon Valley and beyond have the knowing voice of a veteran observer, but with the open-mindedness that defines a great reporter. The accompanying podcast is also well worth a listen.
3 January 2024
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Chip WarTheir words
Great history of the semiconductor industry, starting in Silicon Valley and ending in Asia.
17 November 2023
From one piece John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 | Lex Fridman Podcast #401 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
All the evidence is that Hispanics are integrating into the American mainstream more quickly and more effectively than the European immigrant groups that came starting around 1835.
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Their words
And I believe that there is a good chance you would've had World War II in the absence of Hitler. I believe that Germany was very powerful, it was deeply worried about the balance of power in Europe, and it had strong incentives to behave aggressively in the late 1930s, early 1940s.
3 August 2023
30 June 2023
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Lovedrcmnd.app
SuperhumanTheir words
I’ve been a happy Superhuman subscriber since they were Silicon Valley’s hottest invite-only club, and I’ve been waiting for them to do something like this for a while.
4 March 2023
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Their words
Beijing decided to partner with Russia, an imperial aggressor, when it is the US and Europe that have markets and technology.
7 December 2022
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Their words
A handful of Silicon Valley executives made the choice for us, in pursuit of adoption metrics and a “magical” user experience.
Why encrypted backup is so importantblog.cryptographyengineering.com
13 October 2022
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Likedrcmnd.app
Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War IITheir words
a fascinating book on the bloody aftermath of WWII as the destruction wound down
26 August 2022
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Their words
The thing is, being a particularly complex or efficient agrarian economy doesn’t seem to have been the most important thing for producing the industrial revolution or it almost certainly would have happened earlier and probably not in Europe.
19 August 2022
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
The European MiracleTheir words
I recommended Eric Jones’ The European Miracle
6 June 2022
1 March 2022
5 August 2021
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
WhistleblowerTheir words
This book forces you to reflect on the “Bro” culture in Silicon Valley. This is a must-read, and Susan’s early upbringing is fascinating.
23 February 2021
28 October 2020
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Likedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
Sapiens: A Brief History of HumankindTheir words
A lot of people have raved about this book in Silicon Valley, so I wanted to see what it was all about. It's a great interpretation of the history of man. Unfortunately, it has about 10% of the citations it deserves for the subject matter. I found it a really interesting set of ideas for how to think about how we evolved. I felt there was some inaccuracies, but appreciate having the perspective of an expert.
29 September 2020
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korrents.com
The tech industry's economic and intellectual energy is directed away from human flourishing rather than toward itTheir words
The economic and intellectual horsepower in Silicon Valley and the wider tech world seems to be pointed away from these goals.
24 August 2020
Nothing matches.
What is a korrent?
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