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Pocket reading

  • Is Europe in decline?

    About the ‘Europe vs US – who has it better?’ discussion that I started following in this post: now Paul Krugman has decided to weigh in (paywall, great deep dive, he’s also written followup articles):

    But how accurate is this perception of European underperformance? While there are valid reasons to be concerned about Europe’s future, the trash talk reflects ignorance of the real issues. And even economically sophisticated, Draghi-type discussions are, I would argue, misleading. Europe is simply not poor the way Mississippi is poor. Moreover, by many measures — arguably the most important measures — Europe is, in fact, keeping up with the United States.

    And Luis Garicano (is he related to Pieter ‘Europe should have a Tesla’ Garicano? Has to be, right?) responds:

    Krugman’s “Don’t worry, be happy” message to Europe this weekend is damaging to Europe’s reform agenda. He uses current-price PPP to wave away the structural productivity gap that @a_bergeaud and others have carefully documented.

    – So, yes, Luis Garicano is related to Pieter Garicano. Seems to be father-son, from the looks of it. They even wrote a reply together!

    Paul Krugman wrote two posts this week arguing that Europe is broadly not falling behind the United States. He argues that the change measured by the Draghi report is mostly due to growth in the technology industry, which has distorted GDP numbers without actually leading to higher standards of living in the United States. We should believe our eyes when we walk around France and walk around Mississippi.

    Unfortunately, Krugman is wrong. The measures he uses understate European stagnation.

    I need some time to read all this stuff!

  • I Want To Believe

    Lots of UFO news last week:

    (both links via Tyler Cowen, who has more on the topic)

    My bet? Yes, US gov will confirm alien life. Why? Read on, reader…

    One of the more delicious bits of Sun Ra’s mythic lore is the early visionary experience he had as a young man in Alabama. It was there in 1936 at the Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University that a young Herman Poole Blount (he would later legally change his name in 1952) was transported to the planet Saturn. In an oft-quoted passage from John Szwed’s seminal biography Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra, Blount-later-to-be-Ra describes the event:

    ‘My whole body changed into something else. I could see through myself. And I went up… I wasn’t in human form… I landed on a planet that I identified as Saturn… they teleported me and I was down on [a] stage with them. They wanted to talk with me. They had one little antenna on each ear. A little antenna over each eye. They talked to me. They told me to stop [attending college] because there was going to be great trouble in schools… the world was going into complete chaos… I would speak [through music], and the world would listen. That’s what they told me.‘

    • But that’s not all! The whole, well-researched post is worth a read. Come for the art, stay for the obscure articles:

    ‘We review the salient evidence consistent with or predicted by the Hoyle-Wickramasinghe (H-W) thesis of Cometary (Cosmic) Biology. Much of this physical and biological evidence is multifactorial. One particular focus are the recent studies which date the emergence of the complex retroviruses of vertebrate lines at or just before the Cambrian Explosion of ∼500 Ma. Such viruses are known to be plausibly associated with major evolutionary genomic processes. We believe this coincidence is not fortuitous but is consistent with a key prediction of H-W theory whereby major extinction-diversification evolutionary boundaries coincide with virus-bearing cometary-bolide bombardment events.’

    Edward J. Steele et. al., Cause of Cambrian Explosion – Terrestrial or Cosmic?, Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, Vol 136.

    Yeah, take a minute to digest that. Retroviruses from outer space, say these authors, caused the Cambrian explosion. And they explain it very well. I used to be a panspermia sceptic, but I’m convinced now.

    And, then, in Bar Cali in Nijmegen, a place I don’t live but was visiting this weekend and you should visit it too, my wife points out this poster to me:

    Coincidence? I think not.

  • App review times

    For weeks now, Manton Reece has trying to get the iOS version of InkWell approved. Android’s been live for weeks, now. But no luck on iOS’ side.

    We’re having the opposite experience with Meadow Merge: Android 1.0.0 version is stuck on review, while iOS version 1.0.2 is currently in review.

    I remember when X was Twitter, I was working at an app studio, and you could check what I think was a crowd-sourced ‘App Review time’ account posting averages. We saw iOS review times go down steadily from a full 4 days to 6-12 hours. Our only Android developer would laugh and laugh.

  • ‘The mystery in the medicine cabinet’

    ‘So, for many years, if I needed a painkiller, I’d try to take ibuprofen rather than acetaminophen. My logic was that if eight grams of acetaminophen could kill my liver, then one gram was probably still hard on it. I’m fond of my liver and didn’t want to cause it any unnecessary inconvenience. 

    But guess what? My logic was wrong and what I was doing was stupid.’ 

    Dynomight, ‘The Mystery in the Medicine Cabinet’, Asterisk Magazine

    Love this deep dive – but also this precise topic. I’m the exact same way! I also hold ibuprofen in much higher regard.

    ‘Ibuprofen was a more modern invention. So it hurts your stomach a little bit, so what. Paracetamol kills people! And the taste is better.’ Now I know the foolishness of my ways.

    Be sure to check out the little table near the bottom. Don’t take painkillers when you’re hungover!

  • AI Week

    ‘One day your company announces: stop everything, it’s AI Week. Build something with AI. ‘

    Han Lee, The AI Great Leap Forward

    Obviously, this quote was included my official AI Week introduction slides.

    To sketch the rapid developments in AI since the take-off with Opus 4.5 in November 2025, I showed a bunch of different quotes I’d come across via Hacker News in recent weeks. Some elated, some depressed, some judgmental, some histrionic.

    This one got some laughs.

    So yes, we organized an AI Week.

    I’m not a developer but I lead a team of developers. I’ve been using Claude Code since December 2025, building little apps, automating things, generally feeling the future reaching out from the clouds and putting working software in my hands.

    But nobody on my team seemed to be doing that. And I kept thinking: Why is nobody talking about this? Am I the only one seeing this?

    Make some room

    The answer was obvious, once I thought about it. People might be trying it out on their own time. But during work hours, maybe you feel self-conscious talking about AI. It’s so hyped it can give off weird vibes. Also, you come to work to work on specific features and client requests. There’s not always room in that schedule for “go explore new technology.” And you can’t really expect everybody to study this stuff at home.

    At the same time, I kept reading about how AI is going to change software development dramatically. The productivity gains I was seeing myself. I was vibecoding really decent apps in 4-5 evenings. I understand good programming is more than just vibing a bit, but if programming speeds up even just a little, everything downstream has to keep up. Testing, releases, client contact. The whole pipeline. How?

    Our parent company is also doubling down on AI adoption, which gave me a nice tailwind. But even without that: our team needed to thoroughly engage with the most important technology development of our lifetimes. You can’t watch this one from the sidelines, and you can’t do it in a day.

    So we organized a full AI Week. It was great.

    What happened

    So many chores are baked into software development that we’ve just accepted as the cost of doing business. Things we never got around to automating because we were always too busy building the next thing. Agents can handle a lot of that now. You just have to set them up.

    So after some inspiring demos from advanced users, teams split up and spent two days on self-chosen projects. Real client work continued, it wasn’t a total shutdown. But the focus was on exploring what was possible.

    Non-developer roles surprised me all week. They came in without preconceptions about what “proper code” looks like, or worries about maintainability and testability. They just went straight for what the technology could actually do for them. One customer support officer built an AI toolbox for checking clients’ bug reports, documentation (‘could be a feature!’), tone of voice, etc.

    Beginner’s mind, in the best possible sense.

    Obviously there were also skeptics going in. Some came around. Some still have doubts. That’s fine. The goal was never to convert everyone. It was to experiment as a team and build some shared experience. We did that. And we made a really good start on automating away those chores.

    Once every few months, at least

    I want to do this regularly. Every three to six months. People need time to adapt to new technology — and honestly, even before AI, I hadn’t done enough to just step back and let the team improve their own tools and processes. An AI week creates the permission to do that.

    If you’re thinking about organizing something like this: do it. You don’t need an agenda. You need a week, a shared focus, and people who are curious enough to try.

  • ‘Why I use a Dumbphone in 2025 (and Why You Should Too)’

    ‘While everyone carries a phone in their pocket with a thousand reasons to get distracted, I use a phone without apps, without social media, without distractions. Many would say I’m limited, but I say I’m free.’

    From https://samueleamato.xyz/2025/06/04/why-i-use-a-dumbphone.html

    I keep thinking about ditching my smartphone, but I never do.

    Our’s not a healthy relationship, my iPhone 14’s and mine. It helps to chuck some apps, but I keep finding new ways to distract myself. Currently it’s Dutch news and Hacker News (where I found this, in June of last year, let’s be honest), before that it was Imgur and Vinted, and before that it was Reddit. I’ve owned e-ink devices but they kept dying on me, making them very expensive not-quite tablets.

    The promise of a dumbphone is having more quiet time and being in the moment – but the moment is often awful, boring, or both. Books often can’t hold my attention anymore, and friends don’t come over as often as they did when I carried a dumbphone in the late 90s and early 2000s.

    Anyway, it seems to be working for this guy.

    You have to wonder how that site of his renders on his dumbphone though.

  • Why should Europe have a Tesla?, pt. II

    In February, in response to Pieter Garicano’s ‘Why Europe doesn’t have a Tesla’, I wrote:

    Most Europeans will still prefer to live in the EU, even if growth is slower for the next 10 years, if it means being able to have better living conditions, and less fallout from having to sustain a billionaire class.

    Today, per Euronews: A new way to measure poverty shows the US is falling behind Europe

    As of 2025, the time needed to earn $1 is 63 minutes in the US. This is about twice the average across Germany, France and the UK.

    In Germany, Europe’s largest economy, it takes 26 minutes. In France, the figure is 31 minutes, while in the UK it rises slightly to 34 minutes.

    These figures suggest that average poverty in the US is about twice that of these three countries.

    (…)

    “How can a rich country’s economy grow and yet become poorer?” [Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford Oliver] Sterck asks, referring to the US in his article for The Conversation.

    His answer is simple: inequality.

    I ask again: Why should Europe have a Tesla?

  • Things to read (week 8-2026)

    “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that “the poor” did not exist in classical antiquity.”

    Matthew Walther, Technological Poverty, The Lamp Magazine

    “(We) provide the first causal evidence on how AI adoption affects productivity and employment across more than 12,000 European firms.”

    Inaki Aldasoro et. al., How AI is affecting productivity and jobs in Europe, CEPR.org

    “The first voice of the police report belongs to the nightclub’s doorman, who, through the peephole, observed my mother coming home in her gray coat. They spoke briefly; she told him she appreciated his keeping an eye on things.”

    Louise Bokkenheuser, My Mother’s Body, Virgina Quarterly Review

    “The Barclays, the Lloyds, the Cadburys, the Rowntrees, the Clarks, and the Wedgwoods were all prominent Quaker merchant families. A religious minority that at its peak numbered almost 60,000 people in the country of 6 million – just under 1% – at that time produced an overwhelming share of England’s commercial and industrial infrastructure, so disproportionate that it still puzzles economic historians.”

    Will Manidis & Nabeel S. Qureshi, Rented Virtue, Minutes

    Matcha Trunks, An Interview with Khun Bedu of the Karenni Nationalities Defense Force, Adventures in Asia Tenggara

  • When Coyotes Threatened Livestock, etc.

    “(Once) guardian dogs establish an equilibrium, ranchers are well advised not to upset it. Killing a coyote that’s not preying on livestock will create a vacuum, which might be filled by one that’s unfamiliar with the local order—and thus inclined to look on livestock as food.”

    Chris Pomorski, When Coyotes Threatened Livestock on Central Texas Ranches, the Solution Was to Unlock an Ancient Ability in Dogs, Smithsonian Magazine

    I used to think these guard dogs worked as an attack force, but they’re more of a deterrent most of the time. Violence is rare, apparently. The coyotes don’t understand the concept of property – but they understand pack hierarchy and territorial behavior.

    One of my kids is afraid of dogs. I always tell him: ‘You usually don’t have to be scared, as long as you know how to behave around dogs. Don’t make sudden movements, and let him smell you.’

    Just his luck: during a walk in the woods the other week we emerged from a behind a little hill, and scared a fairly small, black dog. It immediately started barking quite aggressively. My kid was scared out of his wits. The dog didn’t do anything wrong, though: it was being a totally normal dog. It’s just that we tend to misunderstand, or rather underestimate the otherness of animals.

  • Japan: through a mirror darkly

    “The average American, unfamiliar with Japanese social norms or cultural history, likely thinks this is some reflection of premodern Japanese values or ritual suicide traditions. It’s not.“

    @oceandrops, Japan Is What Late-Stage Capitalist Decline Looks Like

    It’s tempting to view Japanese work-life balance issues as rooted in its pre-modern culture of shame and duty.

    This article convincingly makes the case that instead, it’s all related to Japan’s poorly performing economy, and it’s a prediction of where we’re all headed.

    “The convenience culture [of Konbini stores selling excellent food, WPB] is not leisure culture. It’s a substitute for home life in a society where people lack the time to cook, rest or socialize. The U.S. has equivalents – Sweetgreen, Chipotle, Uber Eats, Amazon Fresh – all reflect the same shift toward outsourced domestic functions.”