LIbertarian, economist, tech and anti-aging enthusiast, Liverpool FC fan; opinions expressed here are my own
Aix-en-Provence, France
Joined June 2009
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Daniil Gorbatenko retweeted
Disgusting and insane that after Republicans get routed in part because of too many associations with white nationalism, someone who says “America was built by White men, for White men” is going viral as some sort of sage.
America was built by freedom-loving people for freedom-loving people.
There is nothing to be proud of with whiteness or any other skin color.
I am grateful to everyone, regardless of skin color, who is building America right now. Which includes a ton of brilliant nonwhite immigrants without whom we’d be in far, far worse economic shape.
We need pro-freedom politicians who feel and exude actual love for freedom-loving people of all skin colors—and who want more of them. Those politicians would be unstoppable.
America was built by White men, for White men. If it wasn’t for the generosity of White men, you’d be stuck in some middle eastern shithole right now, getting beaten by your petty tyrant husband for having the audacity to read or some other insane barbarian charge.
Yet rather than thanking White men for letting you parasitize our homeland, you denounce the very people who built it and graciously allow you to share in its freedoms, even at their own detriment.
You can call that racist. It doesn’t make you any less a beneficiary of it. And it won’t do you any good when we send you back.
As for many bad things in life, you have government interventionism to thank for most ugly modern architecture (caveat: obviously modern architecture isn't all ugly and doesn't have to be)
Art Deco didn't die from being exhausted, it got blacklisted.
Its three main phases - Zigzag, PWA / Stripped Classical, & Streamline - weren't exactly sequential, they overlapped all throughout the 30s. But what happened after 1929 wasn't just that zig zag Deco became too expensive, it was evolving from the 'Return to Order' (WW1) beginnings towards a more robust machine age adapted classicism.
Earlier funding collapsed from private elites to the state, and a more civic form emerged - Stripped Classical/Classical Moderne. It was transatlantic, global. The American WPA, PWA, democracies and authoritarian regimes across the West all embraced it because the goal was the same: instill optimism, civic-mindedness, and resilience. Put your skilled artists & artisans to work.
It was seen as worthy recieving state funding for its public face - blending both classical & modern, a forward facing embrace between design, industry & craft.
That more colorful zig zag form was made logistically difficult to revive after 29, then that difficulty was made permanent. Deco needed a 50-year Beaux-Arts ecosystem - terracotta kilns like Gladding McBean and Atlantic Terra Cotta, plasterers, metal foundries, carvers, mosaicists - & that ecosystem took two hits.
The 29 crash bankrupted the firms & dissolved the apprenticeship pipeline, then the war shifted what was left to war industries. By 1948 a fully crafted lobby was hard to build like 1926 even if you wanted to.
Hard isnt impossible. With a regular cycle craft revives with demand, but revival was blocked.
Tax codes, FAR, federal budgets, and curtain-wall specs all rewarded flat, uncrafted surfaces, so there wasnt much incentive to maintain the ateliers.
The firmest lockout was ideological. To make High Modernism the post-war approved standard, its promoters had to discredit what came before.
Politically, Stripped Classicism was rebranded as "fascistic" because Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin had used identical forms. Culturally Deco, especially Streamline, was the 1930s World's Fair spirit: mass-produced household objects made beautiful, futuristic, optimistic, commercial & everyday.
High Modernism was austere, 'European' & highbrow, it treated that populist optimism as kitsch. That created a self-fulfilling loop: disincentivize the decorative, let craft firms die, then accuse dead craft as proof decorative design is infeasible.
Hence the narrative that Deco simply "fell from public taste" is fake.
It was slowed by the war, logistically hollowed out by '48, then ideologically blacklisted afterwards - making way for [indirect] tacit state support through modernist capture this time with the opposite design ethos: (mid century)"modernism".
The people never chose the glass modernist box over Deco. The people were simply never asked.
Reality is stranger than fiction
Explaining to TradFi guys I meet at conferences that insulting Dear Leader is to North Koreans what garlic is to a vampire is an endlessly gleeful factoid to me
That a group could be amongst the most sophisticated threat actors on the planet, yet have such a simple weakness, is something most people just couldn't conceive of on their own. Their reactions to learning about it are an endless source of entertainment
Funny stuff mentioned by Scott Alexander:
"SAMUEL HARRIS ALTMAN anagrams to MASS UNILATERAL HARM (but also UNREAL ALARMIST SHAM). Also, DARIO AMODEI anagrams to AI DOOMER AID."
Here is hope thus begins the end of MAGA.
I wish people in other developed countries could learn from the disaster it has been instead of needing to experiment with their own versions.
Reality is stranger than fiction.
"Shares of On Holding fell 3.6% on Tuesday as Mbappé faced a backlash among Chinese consumers over remarks referencing a "Chinese dictator" in connection with a meme featuring Mao Zedong. Stifel analyst Peter McGoldrick reaffirmed a Buy rating and $41 price target on the stock, leaving his Asia-Pacific revenue and profitability estimates unchanged."
Daniil Gorbatenko retweeted
Is Latin America finally moving up the global high-tech value chain? Some remarkable numbers suggest the region is making progress. A few highlights from a fascinating new @AmerQuarterly piece in collaboration with JP Morgan Private Bank:
• 🇲🇽 Mexico briefly overtook Taiwan as the largest supplier of advanced technology products to the U.S. in 2025. In the first half of 2026, its high-tech exports to the U.S. surged another 47% to $98.3 billion. The U.S. now gets 40% of its server imports from Mexico.
• 🇧🇷 Brazil is emerging as a major hub for AI infrastructure. Already home to 218 data centers, the world's 11th-largest total, Brazil could see its capacity more than double by 2030. Its abundant renewable energy is a major competitive advantage.
• 🇨🇷 Costa Rica offers a compelling model for moving beyond commodity exports. Medical devices already account for roughly 40% of its exports, and the country is now building a semiconductor industry through partnerships among universities, government and multinational companies.
• 🇩🇴 The Dominican Republic is another country to watch. Its electronics exports grew 50% from 2018 to 2023, and its extensive free trade zone network could help it become a significant player in semiconductor assembly and testing.
• 🌎 The bigger picture: Latin America's exports of information and communications technology services nearly DOUBLED from 2020 to 2024. The region has a real opportunity to capture more of the global AI boom—but sustained gains will depend on education, R&D, energy infrastructure and smart public policy.
More from Nur Cristiani and Rich Brown in @AmerQuarterly:
americasquarterly.org/articl…
What a surprise. An archaic politician backed the most by people believing that all life should be organized according to an unreadable archaic book.
I think people like Stephen Davies got it partly right in their predictions of political realignment.
In most developed countries the collectivist, identitarian right is ascendant, close to getting power or is already in power.
Regardless of whether the main political opponents are technocratic centrists like Macron or Draghi or leftists like Biden/Harris and Pedro Sanchez or traditional rightists like Mertz.
The identitarian right has also significantly moved away from pro-market positions, especially on international trade.
However, I think there are two major things Davies and others got wrong:
1) The internationalist, social liberal part of the predicted realignment hasn't really materialized.
The left has failed to genuinely stand for international trade and even legal immigration. They have largely kept focusing on defending the increasingly untenable welfare states and regulatory strictures in the labor markets and industrial and energy development domains in the name of environmentalism.
2) More importantly, the main reason for the ascent of the collectivist right hasn't been that most voters suddenly became conservative identitarians across the board.
Rather, the main reason has been that the bloated governments have gone too far in stifling economic growth and general dynamism. They even increasingly lack the means to adequately respond to international security challenges.
Meanwhile, wildly excessive economic interventionism, coupled with stuff like restrictions on housing construction and the insane attempt to prevent people from taking drugs, has also made it way harder to integrate some immigrants and especially reintegrate people populating the urban ghettos.
It has also prevented former industrial areas from bouncing back economically much more than they would otherwise have, making many people living in them feel deprioritized.
The mostly irrational voters have predictably interpreted all this not as the fundamental failure of interventionism but as the wrong people having been in power for too long.
The siren song of right-wing populists resonates now because they seem to be different and closer to the people and their concerns. Wrong people in power is an explanation so much more pleasant in its simplicity that a structural failure of interventionism.
IMO this is strong evidence that aging is mostly a programmed process.
"Menopause reshapes female physiology, yet current understanding is limited by small longitudinal cohorts that characterize it as a gradual transition. Large-scale biomedical datasets remain underutilized because the final menstrual period (FMP) age is rarely recorded. Here we present a computational framework, inspired by astronomy, that reconstructs FMP-anchored trajectories from cross-sectional data by removing the blurring caused by variation in FMP age across individuals. Applying this to two independent cohorts totaling 300 million laboratory tests revealed a step-like physiological cliff at the FMP including endocrine, skeletal, hepatic, renal and lipid systems."
Why, oh why has economic growth stagnated? Why so much taxes on everyone?
Well, here is the main reason why.
Also, Switzerland and Ireland's figures explain to a large degree why their economies have performed way better than most other developed ones.
Daniil Gorbatenko retweeted
Le problème fondamental c'est que les gens ne comprennent pas que, pour financer un État-providence, il faut s'appuyer sur une base d'imposition très large et taxer la classe moyenne parce que les sommes requises sont énormes et qu'il n'y a pas d'autre choix.
En pratique, ça veut dire que d'une manière ou d'une autre, le financement repose principalement sur les revenus du travail, parce que non seulement c'est de loin la principale composante du PIB dans une économie moderne mais qu'en plus les revenus du capital sont beaucoup plus difficiles à taxer.
C'est pour ça que, dans quasiment tous les pays européens, le financement de la protection sociale repose principalement sur les cotisations et les taxes sur la consommation, qui directement ou indirectement sont principalement alimentés par les revenus du travail.
Même au Danemark, où l'impôt sur le revenu joue un rôle beaucoup plus important qu'ailleurs, l'assiette d'imposition est beaucoup plus large qu'en France et l'essentiel du financement repose aussi sur les classes moyennes, donc en dernière analyse principalement sur les revenus du travail.
Si vous consacrez 1/3 du PIB à la protection sociale, comme c'est le cas en France, vous allez forcément devoir financer ça principalement avec les revenus du travail, parce que c'est près des 2/3 du PIB et que les revenus du capital, outre encore une fois ils sont beaucoup plus durs à taxer, c'est 5 à 6 fois moins une fois prise en compte la dépréciation.
Il n'y pas de réserve de pognon dans laquelle on pourrait facilement taper sans que les classes moyennes doivent payer. On pourrait certes gratter un peu d'argent en taxant le patrimoine davantage, mais dès lors qu'on veut épargner les classes moyennes, ça n'ira pas chier très loin au regard des besoins si on ne réduit pas les dépenses.
Le seul moyen de financer nos dépenses de protection sociale, sachant qu'à l'heure actuelle on le fait à crédit en s'endettant à des taux qui ne font qu'augmenter, c'est soit de travailler plus soit d'augmenter la productivité et, comme on n'a pas de baguette magique pour augmenter la productivité et que ce n'est certainement pas en s'endettant pour financer les retraites plutôt que de l'investissement productif qu'on va le faire, il va falloir bosser plus ou couper dans les dépenses.
Si on continue de ne pas vouloir regarder la réalité en face, tout ce qu'on parviendra à faire, c'est rendre l'austérité encore plus douloureuse le jour où elle sera devenue inévitable parce que les investisseurs ne voudront plus nous prêter qu'à des taux exorbitants et, en attendant, mettre encore plus à l'os les services publics parce qu'il faut bien trouver le pognon pour financer les retraites et les dépenses de santé quelque part.
Quelles sont les "revendications légitimes" des manifestants exactement ? Ils ne sont pas contents parce que le revenu disponible réel n'augmente pas voire recule, mais ce n'est pas une revendication ça, c'est un sujet de mécontentement. Donc qu'est-ce qu'ils proposent concrètement ?
La réalité c'est qu'ils seraient incapables de faire la moindre proposition concrète réaliste. Si on leur demandait, tout ce à quoi on aurait droit ce serait des slogans débiles, plus de pognon qu'on n'a pas et la pensée magique habituelle selon laquelle il n'y a qu'à "prendre aux riches".
Mettons qu'on rétablisse l'ISF et qu'on instaure la taxe Zucman, honnêtement pourquoi pas si c'est le prix à payer pour qu'on puisse faire le reste, ça rapporterait 20-30 milliards à tout péter et il faudrait encore en trouver 100 de plus, donc où tous ces gens avec leurs "revendications légitimes" proposent qu'on trouve ça ?
Daniil Gorbatenko retweeted
The first copies of my book are here!
The result of years of research and writing, 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘎𝘳𝘪𝘮 𝘖𝘭𝘥 𝘋𝘢𝘺𝘴 takes the reader on a tour of a thankfully lost world of bloodletting, filth, destitution, and famine-induced cannibalism.
Pre-order now: a.co/d/0hrciEBm
Daniil Gorbatenko retweeted
Quiz: A French teacher costs ~€85k a year. How much of that goes to him?
~€37k (43%)
How much goes to paying retired teachers?
~€35k
French teachers see less than half of what they make because of the egregious French pensions.
But there's more:
To most people, riots like those that took place in France last Saturday show merely that the police response was a complete failure.
While more could probably have been done, there are serious limits to what can be done against thousands of rioters without causing major injury or death to a bunch of people.
So, in reality, what riots actually highlight is that most of the social order holds not because there are the police, courts and jails but because most of the time the vast majority of people choose not to violate other people's rights.
Of course, this idea is sadly not something that the political process is concerned with... Everyone just wants easy explanations and fixes.
There are two main positions on disagreements over science. One just implies that we should just defer to established science or consensus. The other holds that science is just a pluralistic process where everything always needs to be contestable.
I think both positions are inadequate.
Consider 2 types of potential scientific disagreement:
1) Over whether climate sensitivity to increases in atmospheric CO2 is high.
2) Over whether CO2 creates a greenhouse effect.
In economics the analogues could be:
1) The Great Depression was initially caused by a monetary tightening.
2) Inflation is always about more money chasing the same supply of goods or the same amount of money chasing a lower supply.
Disagreements of type 1 are unsettled research questions at the frontier. More importantly, they are such because in complex, multifactorial, nonlinear systems/orders it's hard to definitively prove that outcome A was due to cause X and especially to what degree.
Whereas disagreements of type 2 are about basic understanding of how the same systems work, not explanation of specific outcomes.
IMO there should be no attempts to invoke consensus/authority in type 1 disagreements but such attempts will typically be fine in type 2 disagreements.
P.S. I suspect that this is still a considerable simplification but it's better than a binary distinction between "Bow to Science" and "Nothing in science is truly settled."
Daniil Gorbatenko retweeted
People mock GDP per capita and economic freedom at their own peril.
