Back in France after more than 15 abroad (US, DE, UK). Living in culture shock in Paris.
Paris, France
Joined July 2009
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Luxury store looting in Paris…
Rupert the Bear’s warning on AI, robots and jobs irishtimes.com/opinion/ruper…
Rupert the Bear’s warning on AI, robots and jobs irishtimes.com/opinion/ruper…
One A One S retweeted
Now all we need is a well timed rogue AI cyber incident before midterms to really steamroll the AI regulation bills being pushed.
One A One S retweeted
Government can lie to you.
Government has lied to you.
Government is lying to you.
Government will lie to you.
Live your life accordingly.
One A One S retweeted
I remember when Nassim Taleb switched his preference from Greeks to Romans.
First he thought that Greek abstraction was superior to the crude Romans. The Greeks did philosophy after all – the Romans just built roads.
Then he realized that the Romans’ practical sense was superior to empty theorizing.
Similarly, some time ago I switched from British to American spelling. I used to think the British was more sophisticated – now I prefer the American: simpler, truer.
The pattern is the same in both cases. The more sophisticated-looking option turns out to be sophistication performing itself – the appearance of depth without the substance. The simpler option turns out to be the one that actually works, that gets the job done, that doesn’t require you to perform your education while using it.
This is the fumeux problem stated in miniature. The British spelling, the Greek abstraction, the European theoretical tradition at its worst – all of them mistake the appearance of sophistication for the thing itself. The American spelling, the Roman road, the practical mind that asks not "is this elegant?" but "does this work?" – these are the ones that build something.
Depth that produces clarity is Roman. Depth that produces fog is Greek in the worst sense – beautiful, self-referential, and ultimately empty.
The goal is the road. Not the theory of the road.
Why do the Americans need us, Europeans?
Because our specialty is depth – cultural, philosophical, moral.
The thing is just that depth can easily lead you to sink into the pretentious, the obscure, the woolly, self-important fog where the thinking becomes so layered it loses contact with reality entirely – the French have a word for it: the fumeux.
And Americans are rightly wary of that.
But it doesn’t have to. Depth can also lead to clarity.
And that is what we are here for.
——
Three thousand years of civilization compressed into a relatively small peninsula produce a specific kind of mind – one that cannot encounter a problem without asking what kind of problem it is. Not just what is happening but what it means. Not just what works but why it works and what it costs when it stops.
The fumeux version of this — the pretentious obscurantism, the self-important fog where thinking becomes so layered it loses contact with reality — is what the Americans know and distrust. Rightly. The Frankfurt School was fumeux. French Theory was fumeux. The EU regulatory apparatus producing five hundred pages of directive about the curvature of cucumbers is fumeux at industrial scale. European depth, gone wrong, has produced the most beautiful catastrophes in history – with considerable elegance and devastating consequences.
But Tocqueville went to America and came back with the most penetrating analysis of democracy ever written. Not despite his European depth but because of it. He saw what Americans couldn’t see precisely because he was standing slightly to the side. The depth produced clarity – the clarity that comes from having traced the argument back to its roots and forward to its conclusions, from having named the mechanism rather than just observed the symptom.
America supplies the muscle – the energy, the scale, the dynamism, the willingness to build without asking permission. Europe supplies the depth – the memory, the philosophical framework, the understanding of what civilization is, what it cost, and what threatens it. Neither is sufficient alone. America without depth produces power without meaning. Europe without muscle produces analysis without consequence.
This series is the combination. The American distribution platform. The European depth – specifically the Central European depth, the Polish depth, the depth that comes not just from three thousand years of Western civilization but from having paid the full price for losing it to communism and fighting back. Not fumeux. Precise. Not obscure. Named.
The torch changes hands. The light doesn’t go out. But someone has to understand what the torch is.
That is our job. We have earned it the hard way.
One A One S retweeted
Que faire de cette génération à la nuque raide, qui compte sans cesse sur les autres pour penser à sa place ?
Ce n’est certainement pas en consommant les gras produits bien lourds de chez Bolloré qu’on risque de sauver son âme, la France et la planète en même temps.
Ce n’est certainement pas en s’abêtissant devant des tutos de droitardés sur youtube qu’on va percer le sens de l’existence et imaginer le salut du monde.
Aujourd’hui, l’on se croit apaisé simplement parce que l’on a sombré dans le coma profond. Le combat a cessé seulement faute de combattants : les instituteurs et les curés ont disparu ensemble, comme des lames rouillées par le temps et que l’inutilité de leur combat ont dissoutes. Et l’islam ne tarde pas à nous reposer la question de notre âme.
La liberté se prend, et elle se prend lorsque l’on sait qu’en faire.
Je crois fermement qu’à une culture de vie aujourd’hui s’oppose une culture de mort.
C’est celle qui nous fait croire les maîtres absolus de nos existences, et même de celle des autres, depuis ces embryons dont on se débarrasse en masse jusqu’à ces vieux et ces infirmes dont on éteint la lumière quand on a jugé leur dignité perdue.
L’ordre naturel a été complètement bouleversé par le prométhéisme que notre science et notre technique ont édifié.
Cette compétition pour garder sa liberté et son identité, autrefois, des hommes libres étaient prêts à mourir par millions pour elle ; aujourd’hui le déclin du courage et de la volonté est tel que l’on n’accepterait de perdre sa vie pour aucune cause qui nous dépasse.
Nous avons surmonté le désespoir.
Mieux : nous portons l’espérance.
Celle que la France rentre à nouveau dans l’Histoire, qu’elle redevienne une nation ayant quelque chose de singulier à dire et à proposer au monde.
One A One S retweeted
France's Assembly President worked at the firm that defended Epstein's recruiter — Jean-Luc Brunel, charged with raping minors.
Brunel died in a Paris prison cell in 2022.
Now she's blocking the French parliamentary inquiry into the Epstein files.
One A One S retweeted
Soudain, les Français comprennent que l'État s'est retourné contre eux et ne veut plus du tout les protéger. Il veut juste leur argent et leur résignation.
Mike Myers, a Canadian artist thanking the Canadian tax payer… so much for French artists… (at 2:11).
youtu.be/HPmtQhRW8wU?is=MCAO…
One A One S retweeted
Macron’s France is losing legitimacy as it weaponizes criminal investigations to suppress free speech and privacy. The U.S. Department of Justice has refused to assist France in its investigation of @elonmusk, calling the case politically motivated.
The French prosecutor’s office claims to be independent, but that is untrue: French prosecutors are hired, fired, and promoted by the government. The judicial police — who provide often misleading reports to investigative judges — are also controlled by the government. 🎭
I’m under a similar investigation in France: over a dozen charges, each carrying up to 10 years in prison. Proud to stand alongside Elon Musk and others targeted by Macron's campaign against digital rights. In Macron’s France, being investigated is the new Légion d’honneur.🎖
One A One S retweeted
The “age verification app” the EU wants to impose on the world got hacked in 2 minutes.
Step 1: Present a “privacy-respecting” but hackable solution.
Step 2: Get hacked (you are here).
Step 3: Remove privacy to "fix" it.
Result: a surveillance tool sold as “privacy-respecting”.
One A One S retweeted
La plupart des histoires qu’on nous a racontées sur l’Occident à l’école étaient fausses. Et peu à peu tout le monde s’en rend compte. Notre monde, construit sur trop de mensonges, est en train de s’effondrer.
That 👇 - so true and on point…
Speaking with French people in a business setting is so funny
They be 48yo and they’re still asking peers what uni they went to
98% of them peaked in college so they feel obligated to tell you within the first 10 minutes of meeting them that they went to Polytechnique, ENS ULM or HEC
What you accomplished since literally doesn’t matter because you attended a top school so you’re part of the « elite »
I find it so pathetic
Perhaps your country would be doing better if you were proud of your accomplishments the same way you’re proud that daddy paid for HEC
Anyways
Sorry I am done venting I just had the most cringe call of my life I had to let it out
One A One S retweeted
America was founded by rugged individuals who created government to secure their rights and leave them alone. Americans today want government to violate other people's rights, steal their stuff, and give it to them. The home of the free has become the land of the freeloader.
One A One S retweeted
🇫🇷 Breaking: “France is ready to participate in defending the free world against the Iranian regime”
- French FM Jean-Noël Barrot
Translation: we need a distraction from our lousy economy and low poll numbers. So we will pretend to fight.
One A One S retweeted
I spent time in Shenzhen last year and when I saw Merz come back from China saying Germans need to work more I immediately knew what broke his brain because I lived the exact same cognitive shock
my first week in Huaqiangbei I burned through 4 prototype iterations of a motor controller board for less than a thousand bucks total, back home a friend was working on something similar and spent over 12 thousand for a single revision that took almost two months to arrive
when you live that contrast in your own hands with your own project something permanently shifts in how you see the world and it goes way deeper than speed & cost
what Shenzhen actually built is a collective learning organism, imagine 20 PCB fabs 15 injection mold shops 30 component distributors and a hundred firmware freelancers all within a 2km radius, looks insanely redundant from the outside until you realize redundancy is actually information density in disguise
I watched this firsthand with an injection mold supplier I was working with, this guy had seen a hundred founders iterate similar thermal designs over 6 months so he proactively modified his tooling before I even opened my mouth, he knew what I needed before I knew what I needed, the intelligence lives in the relationships between the nodes and it compounds daily
the west thinks about manufacturing as a cost center you optimize by centralizing…
China accidentally built a distributed neural network of manufacturing intelligence where knowledge diffuses horizontally across thousands of agents faster than any single western company can process internally
so when Merz comes back and says we need to work a bit more I think he saw the problem but COMPLETELY misdiagnosed the solution, telling Germans to work harder is like telling a horse to gallop faster when the other side built a combustion engine
the gap is ARCHITECTURAL
it’s ecosystem density, you need a custom connector in Shenzhen you walk 200 meters, in Munich you send an email and wait 3 weeks
it’s iteration speed, parallel search vs sequential optimization at the system level, it’s risk tolerance, Chinese founders ship something broken on Monday fix it Tuesday ship again Wednesday while European companies are still in the approval phase for the pilot program of the feasibility study…
and Merz only saw the surface, what he missed is the tier 2 cities like Hefei Chengdu Wuhan replicating the Shenzhen model at scale right now
BYD going from irrelevant to outselling every european automaker combined in roughly 5 years, Huawei building its own 7nm chip under maximum sanctions when every analyst said it was physically impossible & behind all of that a government that treats advanced manufacturing as an existential national priority while europe debates whether AI needs another ethics committee
I think what we’re watching is the most asymmetric economic competition in modern history and most western leaders are still framing it as a productivity problem when it’s actually an ontological one
Europe & America are optimizing variables that China stopped tracking years ago meanwhile China is compounding on dimensions the west has no framework to even measure
Merz at least had the courage to name
it out loud and I respect that genuinely but working a bit more inside a broken architecture just means you arrive at the wrong destination slightly faster
NEW:
🇩🇪🇨🇳 German Chancellor Merz says Germans need to work more in order to match China:
“We are simply no longer productive enough. Each individual may say, “I already do quite a lot.” And that may be true.
But when you return from China, ladies and gentlemen, you see things more clearly.
With work-life balance and a four-day week, long-term prosperity in our country cannot be maintained. We will simply have to do a bit more.”