Yuval Steuer

a ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.

This is insanely backwards. Slavery has been one of the very few near-universals in human history. What's exceptional about Britain is that it was one of the first major societies that abolished the slave trade and then abolished slavery in much of its empire, and spent decades using the Royal Navy to intercept slave ships. If the point of teaching history is to understand how a civilization got things wrong, surely we should also want to understand how it eventually changed its mind, and what it took to do so?

Of all the attacks on refrigeration systems across Europe, this one should worry us the most. Someone managed to change the settings of cold rooms storing plasma for transfusions at three French blood-service sites, through a supplier's systems. Thankfully the blood service had its own monitoring and alarms, and the staff intervened before anything was lost. But we must stop and think about what this means. We're connecting practically everything to software, including the things we depend on to keep people alive. We need to become much better at defending these systems, and making sure they can still function when something goes wrong.

Trump says that America will stop giving Israel ~$4 billion a year. I think this could be good news, and it's worth clarifying a couple of things. Before 1967, France was the country supplying Israel with most of its weapons. The military partnership between America and Israel as we know it today, started growing after the Six-Day War, and American assistance expanded in the following years as Israel gained more strategic importance in the Middle East. But America was also benefiting from this alliance. Most of that money goes towards American weapons, which gives back to Americans and allows Washington some influence over Israel's military decisions. And obviously, ending the aid would also mean giving up some of that influence, which is something worth considering. That assistance made sense for both countries at the time, but Israel's situation has incredibly changed since then. If Israel can now pay for its own defense it should not be interpreted as America abandoning it, the opposite! The two countries could now start cooperating more closely on intelligence, cyber, defense technology and joint development, as partners. The beginning of a healthier and stronger partnership. And I think a West with more capable and independent allies is a good thing. The measure of a successful alliance should be how strong its members have become and less dependence is a very good indicator.

"decline can always be reversed” yet decline is the natural state of things. reversing it takes people who still love their country and what it stands for, and leaders with the courage to act. look at lee kuan yew in singapore or bukele in el salvador. decline can be reversed, but it never reverses itself.

this kind of thinking is, at its core, antithetical to everything western liberalism stands for the entire premise of liberal democracy is that people with fundamentally different beliefs can disagree, debate, and compete for political power without violence you don't get to threaten a "reckoning" every time an election doesn't go your way. threatening people with violence to change their political behaviour is terrorism, not democracy but what makes this rhetoric even worse is the underlying framing. political opponents are no longer people you disagree with, but enemies who need to be defeated at any cost the whole point of western liberalism is that we found a better way to resolve our differences than threatening each other into submission this kind of thinking needs to be categorically rejected if we want to retain any semblance of civilization we've become so accustomed to living in free societies that we've forgotten how extraordinary and precious that freedom actually is

One of the best feelings you can experience in life is seeing someone you love fulfill themselves while being the truest most authentic version of themselves and staying loyal to their nature

The biggest enemy is your uncontrolled mind

One day, you’ll bury your father Most people want you beside them. Your father wanted you to go further than he ever did And when you look at him for the last time, you might understand him for the first You’ve lost the only man who cared more about your improvement than your approval

Poverty creates hardship. It does not dictate how people behave in response to it. Culture does.