Costas Papaikonomou 🇳🇱×🇬🇷

I know a lot of people in the West are baffled by the Mbappé-Mao storm in China - which in itself shows that Mbappé's ignorance doesn't come out of nowhere... To understand it, here's the best analogy I could think of: imagine the biggest Chinese star in the NBA, with sponsorship deals all over the US. One day he's asked for his favorite meme of himself. He giggles: "the one where they put my face on some guy, I think he was an American slave owner." When the "some guy" in question is George Washington. Whatever you think of the label, you know exactly how that would land in the US: an ungrateful foreigner getting rich off Americans, laughing at the country's founding father in an offensive way - at least to a big share of the population - without even knowing his name. A founding father is the story a nation tells itself about where it comes from. Laugh at him as a foreigner while cashing in on that nation's consumers, and that's not going to go well in any country. The label is also extremely un-nuanced: yes, all important historical figures have their share of darkness and Washington and Mao are no exception. China actually recognizes this: the official line is that he was "70% right and 30% wrong," and the Party's 1981 resolution condemned how his "personal arbitrariness gradually undermined democratic centralism in Party life and the personality cult grew graver and graver" (marxists.org/subject/china/d…) Same for Washington: it's officially acknowledged too. Or at least it was until this year: in January, the National Park Service tore down an exhibit in Philadelphia about the people Washington enslaved there, under a Trump executive order targeting content that "inappropriately disparage[s]" Americans (associationforpublicart.org/…). Which goes to show China isn't uniquely touchy about its founding father...

Marc Andreessen on why he thinks Europe actually wants to be left behind on AI "Europe seems, I just take them at their word, determined to be left behind. They seem enthusiastic about being left behind. They seem to really badly want that" "25 years ago, if you did a list of the 50 biggest tech companies in the world, a pretty significant number were European, probably 15 of the top 50. Today you're basically down to Spotify. Which is great. I love Spotify" "I think they would be very happy if AI didn't happen inside the EU. I think they'd be very happy if social media didn't exist. I think they'd be quite happy to shut up the internet"

The deeply tragic, low level of Dutch politicians. During a debate in the Dutch parliament, Queeny Rajkowski, a member of the ruling VVD party, asks the minister responsible for digital affairs: "Let us invite companies like Anthropic so we can tax them and tell them exactly what they can and cannot do with AI" 🤡🤡🤡🤡

Vertige

Around 2016, Jim Belosic bought a $750,000 laser cutter on a whim. This month, his company SendCutSend raised $140 million and hit a valuation of $2.1 billion. It's on track to make 50 million metal parts this year for more than 300,000 customers. This is the story of how SendCutSend arrived and ended up reviving US industry. corememory.com/p/sendcutsend…

The Netherlands is a leader when it comes to food production due to innovations in agricultural techniques which improve efficiency. Growing a kilogram of tomatoes in the Netherlands requires 9.1 liters of water. The global average is over 210 liters of water per kilogram.

Did you ever own a Sound Blaster back in the day?