Do you really wish Facebook, Google, Coinbase, Amazon were European “successes”? Maybe Apple, NVIDIA, but they are as much Chinese and Taiwanese as American stories. The programming language I write all day is developed in Switzerland and Poland. 1/
Europe lags not in technology, but friendliness to business and capital. And that is at best a double-edged sword. /fin
Are you sure the claim is true that the US has grown so much faster? It is true, if you define growth by conventional stats. 1/
But the US drops in ranking if, for example, you subtract health care from GDP (of every country in your dataset). 2/
If you think the US does not overall provide more welfare conducive health care than European states (a pretty easy claim to support!), then health care’s larger share of GDP in the US should not count as prosperity. 3/
The claim generalizes. Mechanically, rentierism increases GDP. If good internet costs twice as much here, because telecoms are not competitive, that’s scored as greater GDP. 4/
Magazines like The Economist will talk about US outperformance. But they implicitly view the world from the perspective of investors. Most people’s welfare is not primarily a function of financial investment returns. But they persuade us this is a valid, “objective” way to look at the world. 5/
Rentierism is real growth, from investors’ perspective. It is extraction from everybody else’s perspective. 6/
The contemporary United States is not to be emulated. It is a cautionary tale. Europe’s social difficulties stem from having taken too much inspiration from the US, not from failing to follow in US footsteps sufficiently. Careful what you wish for. /fin
is there more entrepreneurship in the US? that’s a thing i don’t know, would want to look into. there are a lot of VC style startups and “successes” in the US, but that might be because the US tolerates (and celebrates) monopoly power and rentierism more than more civilized countries.
Nope.
it has not always been like this. it’s always been a thread of American culture, but during some time periods (especially the early postwar years), the US government was highly trusted. 1/
the failures and injustices of the early 21st century, plus media able to circumvent traditional gatekeepers which are well funded by plutocrats to discredit government, have left us in a very bad place. /fin
yes. an irony. they are performing the perception of villainy they so adroitly exploited to gain power.
the default american attitude is "the government is fucking up and screwing us", so whoever is the government has to swim upstream hard to avoid becoming unpopular.
Likewise!
I think you're all great and I rarely have any trouble with any of you.
[tech notebook] Zero-ish overhead logging facade in Scala 3 https://tech.interfluidity.com/2025/05/26/zero-ish-overhead-logging-facade-in-scala-3/index.html
📌
🎂🥳
sometimes i'm not quite sure whether it is a grift or a scam.
we’re all going through some things.
You blame the government for making it more expensive while you raise your price in the name of compliance. Such a shame they are making it so expensive.
“I don't mean to be alarmist, but I do think it's time to start assuming everything you see online is fake.”
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dictator.
photo of a vaguely phallic potato chip.
it’s homeopathic math.
the Republicans will remind us that it’s much less racist to point out that children have small fingers when they bring iPhone assembly back to our shores.
except running for president, unfortunately.
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