Ghjancarlu Simeoni

The Brand Age: paulgraham.com/brandage.html

@DrMichaelBonner Slightly less cruel. Thank you.

@diankarlu It should appear in April.

Second and FINAL round of proof-editing has begun! Pre-order The Crisis of Liberalism: The Origin and Destiny of Freedom now!

@antonio_cat_ It's been a while. Your last two essays are very good, TY. Will need time to digest.

"In other words, over the long term, the investments that constitute the foundations of capitalism appreciate, with certainty, at a rate exceeding the rate of inflation. Put differently, they always carry a premium over new money creation, which itself exists to serve and sustain those assets. If this ever ceases to be true, one is no longer living in a capitalist society. [...] But in capitalism, technology isn’t just another sector — it’s the system’s final setup. The fate of capitalism is technological not because of ideology or randomness, but because of its premises. At the last stage, the tech sector embodies the giant shift. Profits no longer come mainly from producing things, but from building networks — from creating the systems that connect people, data, and services. The network effect, where value feeds on connection itself, has become the ultimate lever of capitalism." Read the full article (in the comments):

À 20h45 ce soir, @FTViaStella diffuse le premier documentaire consacré à Max Simeoni. Réalisé par Pierre Dottelonde, produit par Paul Rognoni et Paul Antoine Simonpoli.

Is Bleu de Corse a real thing?

@Porkchop_EXP 😂

You will never guess what this is a reply to

@Porkchop_EXP A hardwired French sense of superiority

He said “becoming the Netherlands” like it’s a bad thing but fortunately got dragged in the comments by Dutch patriots.

2 anni fà oghje. Ci manca, è ci punta.

Avvedeci o Stè. Stéphane Casalta 1968-2025 france3-regions.franceinfo.fr/corse/haute-co…

@saintpierre2b Que voulez-vous dire, Monsieur ?

@diankarlu C’est tellement mieux de se victimiser. Et puis ça fait croire aux simplets que c’est la faute des autres

2025, la Corse, objet de fantasmes français. Il y a 30 ans, les Corses étaient plutôt les "arabes qui ont eu la flemme de nager jusqu'à Marseille".

PARADISE DOES NOT LOOK LIKE PARADISE Spent a month in Campania before moving to the US for school. Everybody then wanted to come to America, esp. my Italian friends. Loved the NJ turnpike w/the vitality in the air. Scenery is for retirees with easels --boring w/o the energy.

@Porkchop_EXP Very curious about your sugar-free journey, I ponder your message while helping myself to another spoonful of homemade wild blackberry jelly.

In reality, this is not rocket science. It’s just indigestible fiber glued together with gelatin, flavored with bourbon vanilla and sweetened with monk fruit. And it feels and tastes almost like a regular marshmallow. It’s a Godsend for the sugar-free martyrs, yet apparently no one else in the entire western world produces this.

After months of SUFFERING without sugar, I am now dipping my all-natural, fiber-packed, no-sugar marshmallows sweetened only with monk fruit into same quality Nutella-like chocolate hazelnut spread, both made in California. Incredible things are happening in California. No wonder they think they can colonize Mars.

@ScottRCarpenter Glad you felt the hospitality. Being a very different civilization beforehand, Corsica is still not completly Frenchified despite 256 years of very active (brutal at times) integration. But today, French people are flooding in for the very reasons you're mentioning (4-5k p.a.)

Just came back from Europe. A few take aways. The big cities in mainland France are shitholes. We went to Marseille. It was dirty, it stunk like rotting garbage and we kept getting warnings from our phone that we were in danger based on our location on the GPS. Based on what I saw I don’t think it was lying. Corsica is beautiful. For lack of a better term the Corsicans are very nationalist (even though they’re technically French) and proud of their culture and heritage. And while they have no tolerance for foreigners trying to impose their culture on them they are at the same time friendly and hospitable. The island is clean and the infrastructure is well maintained. The villages, towns and small cities are all quite beautiful. I wouldn’t go back to mainland France but I’d go back to Corsica in a heartbeat. We spent quite a bit of time in Northern England and Wales. Manchester is dirty and needs a facelift. But the small towns and cities are generally well kept, friendly and interesting. We spent most of our time touring those areas and the countryside. The English and Welsh people were by and large friendly, welcoming and hospitable as well. I can’t wait to go back and see more. Almost without exception none of the Europeans could tell whether I was Canadian or American based on my speech/accent and just assumed I was American. Makes sense since I can’t tell the difference between an Aussie and a Kiwi by accent unless both are speaking to me at the same time. They are also, by and large, completely unaware of and unconcerned with North American politics and the current relationship between Canada and the US. They have their own problems and are not concerned with ours. Culturally, we have very little in common with the European people as compared to our southern neighbours (and that goes for the English as well). We don’t sound like them, we don’t live like them and we don’t work like them. Conversely we sound like Americans, look like Americans, dress like them, drive the same vehicles, consume the same entertainment and share an economy that’s almost completely intertwined. We will never have this close of a relationship with the EU. Even though by and large they’re nice decent people the geography and the language and cultural barriers are too wide to create a greater economic alliance. The EU is not going to rescue Canada from its dispute with the US. We would do well to look more closely at what we share in common with our southern neighbours and start mending fences. If we don’t we’re going to end up very alone. And very broke.

@Porkchop_EXP A topical reading: anamosa.fr/livre/on-ne-pe…

Not to mention the fundamental unseriousness of laws against “insults”, it’s also not normal to have laws against “hate speech” - because inevitably what counts as “hate” will be defined by the government and politicians, to silence opposition and criticism. It is not normal when the law allows a sitting prime minister, in Germany’s case Habeck - to file hundreds of criminal complaints against online insults. Nothing about this is normal or good or should be accepted as a reasonable legal compromise to temper “bad” speech. Freedom of speech per definition exists to protect “bad” speech, “good” speech doesn’t need protection.

Western Europeans are dangerously blasé about their highly compromised freedom of speech because having lived in mostly prosperous and stable societies they never learned on their skin what losing it means. Germany is a weird exception to this - having lived through Nazism and now having some of the most draconian speech laws - and that’s because in their autism they can only eradicate one excess with another excess.

@Porkchop_EXP All retail borrowers are collateralized. Merchants, small entrepreneurs etc. heavily most of the time (mortgage, personal guarantee...).

@Porkchop_EXP Democratizing debt has a cost. Very relevant, thank you.

The expectation that a young family should be able live in their own separate housing that they should be able afford with their own income is ABSOLUTELY UNPRECEDENTED from a historic point of view. The idea of a mortgaged home paid over future decades is a very recent phenomenon - a western world post war boom economic luxury, not a historic standard, never has been. Historically, young families have either lived with their parents, or in housing provided by the families - specifically saved for over decades. Debt was never the financial source of housing. Of course once you introduced low-interest debt on the basis of future income expectation into the equation, prices skyrocketed, making buying without debt practically impossible, causing a vicious circle, the effects of which we are witnessing all over the developed world. The discourse treats this as an aberration to an otherwise healthy system, but what is the reference timespan here? Most look back at one, max two post-war western generations that could afford their own mortgaged housing relatively early - that’s it, that’s the historic timeframe. In developing countries, mind you, a pure mortgage is still a novelty of sorts, and interest rates are so high that it makes housing mortgages the less preferred option.

@Porkchop_EXP 😑

POV: husband trying to help