The ugly truth about France and some of the other European countries currently in turmoil - and which none of the politicians want to admit because it'd be political suicide - is that you can't solve the problem by going after immigrants (as the right asserts) or the rich (as the left asserts), but you could solve it by going after the old. One extraordinary statistic for you: people over 60 in France, a quarter of the population, own 60% of France's wealth, non-financial and financial (ofce.fr/pdf/revue/2025/3-192…). And here is another crazy statistic: that same quarter of the population, those above 60, receive nearly two-thirds of all social spending by the French government (previssima.fr/actualite/prot…) - which is famously among the highest in the world (France's government spending is an insane 57.3% of GDP). Last statistic: they make up about 40% of voters because they're a third of registered voters (insee.fr/fr/statistiques/266…), and they turn out far more than anyone else (franceinfo.fr/elections/sond…). Put our 3 statistics together and there's almost a bit of an apartheid situation here: the old own most of the country's wealth, collect most of the social spending and have the political power to keep it that way. Which makes them a de-facto rentier class, living off assets and transfers paid for by younger generations. And, of course, at the risk of stating a truism, the future is built by the young. Yet France keeps effectively taking money away from them to give it to those whose working lives are already behind them - and need the money far less since they already own the country's wealth. What about inheritance, I hear you ask? That's the funniest/saddest aspect: given that life expectancy has kept rising, the French now inherit a home at 54 on average. The most common case is someone in their 80s leaving it to heirs in their 50s, in effect the very old transferring wealth to the about-to-be old (insee.fr/fr/statistiques/fic…). You can add this to our earlier apartheid statement: on top of all the rest, even when the old finally let go of their wealth, it stays within their own "camp". That's my personal situation, incidentally: I'm 42, my father is 71 and he is starting to look at ways to pass things on to me and my siblings, when our professional lives are already well settled, so it'll arrive when it changes things the least, which is pretty much the French system in a nutshell. Now, I get that there'd be some unfairness in going after them: they paid into the system their entire working lives, playing by the rules of a social contract that told them if they paid up they'd collect at the end. Changing the rules now means breaking that promise, which is admittedly unfair. But there's no magic wealth tree in any society: you can only take it where it is. That's the way most major societal transformations end up happening. They're often triggered by a catastrophic event (the so-called "four horsemen": mass-mobilisation war, revolution, state collapse, plague) BUT what really drives change is a transfer: wealth gets pried from the privileged class who've been sitting on it and handed to those who'll build what comes next. So, in theory and in an ideal world, you can do without the catastrophic event and directly proceed with the transfer... The fact that in France, and elsewhere in Europe, it's the youth protesting is probably no coincidence - even though they don't frame it as a generational fight. And even though, cruel irony, the left politicians many of them march behind promise to bring the retirement age back to 60 (lcp.fr/actualites/legislativ…), which would make the situation even worse. Let's say they understand intuitively that the system is stacked against them, even if they haven't yet figured out how. And politicians are obviously doing what politicians do, meaning pandering to the people who actually vote, while pointing the young towards easier - and politically convenient - scapegoats. To be clear I'm not saying it's the only problem in France, VERY far from it. I'm also not saying that all old people in France live a lavish lifestyle at the expense of younger generations: there are also plenty of very poor retirees who, if anything, would deserve more. What I am saying is that it's probably the biggest elephant in the room: everyone can see it, nobody dares mention it - no politician, from any side, wants to run on cutting grandma's pension - and it makes every other problem harder to fix.

I think we’re going to see a lot of stranded compute in partially complete data centers

Start having discussions with family members about code words to authenticate each other

If you think Midtown Manhattan in the afternoon is much, much sketchier than it used to be, you're right thebiggerapple.manhattan.ins…

UK 🇬🇧 average draught beer🍺 prices. 1970-2026: Look at the enormous jump in price in the last 2 years: 1970: £0.11 1971: £0.12 1972: £0.13 1973: £0.13 1974: £0.15 1975: £0.20 1976: £0.23 1977: £0.27 1978: £0.29 1979: £0.34 1980: £0.41 1981: £0.49 1982: £0.54 1983: £0.62 1984: £0.66 1985: £0.72 1986: £0.76 1987: £0.82 1988: £0.88 1989: £0.96 1990: £1.10 1991: £1.26 1992: £1.31 1993: £1.37 1994: £1.42 1995: £1.48 1996: £1.56 1997: £1.65 1998: £1.70 1999: £1.74 2000: £1.78 2001: £1.82 2002: £1.85 2003: £1.95 2004: £2.03 2005: £2.13 2006: £2.21 2007: £2.31 2008: £2.41 2009: £2.49 2010: £2.58 2011: £2.69 2012: £2.80 2013: £2.87 2014: £2.94 2015: £2.96 2016: £2.99 2017: £3.05 2018: £3.06 2019: £3.09 2020: £3.16 2021: £3.26 2022: £3.49 2023: £3.80 2024: £3.90 2025: £5.17 2026: £5.34

🇺🇸 Jack Dorsey’s new AI voice model Dessa is absolutely insane. There is no way to distinguish it from a human, man … crazy. Thats kinda cool, but many people will get attached to it and isolate from real humans even more. Many will get scammed on the phone, especially grandpas and grandmas. The future is coming get ready

There's lots of discussion about a16z dropping the word 'crypto'. It's actually a sign of crypto winning. It's outgrown being a standalone sector and now runs through global finance and frontier tech: payments, trading, tokenization, AiFi, and much more. We've spent more than a decade building this industry to make it useful everywhere, and we should welcome it escaping its own category. People used to say 'internet companies' - which is a prehistoric phrase now. Eventually, calling something a 'crypto company' should feel just as redundant. Many of us (including me) will keep the word. But the millions, and soon billions, using it every day won't care what we call it. They'll care what it lets them do.

This is how I'd fix the iPhone Duo's ridiculous sidebar. I call it Twin Islands. Two little glass bars: one around the camera for statuses, one at the bottom for app controls. Apps get the full width of the screen. Controls stay under your thumb. Thoughts?

🔴 EN DIRECT La préfecture de police de Paris invite les commerçants à recourir à des agents privés avant les prochaines manifestations l.bfmtv.com/Y3FV

It's been a lot of fun trying the Duo out for a week, but it feels like I've gotten to use an extraordinarily polished prototype — not a finished product that I'd want to buy and carry. daringfireball.net/2026/10/t…

if steve jobs saw you reserving 15% screen width for a single icon and then putting a left side arrow back button on the unreachable right side of the screen he would've personally taken you behind a dumpster and beat you with a metal pipe

Front-end is sacrificial The only point of a UI is user comfort the first and only time they see it. From then on: - personal agents don’t care about the UI - security means you need to reduce the attack surface and harden Headless everything 👇 interconnected.org/home/2026…