European by birth, American by choice | Tech Entrepreneur | Innovation Enthusiast | Free Speech & Markets Advocate | Atlanticist | In Dutch on @lucvanbraekel
Austin, Texas, USA
Joined March 2007
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Luc Van Braekel retweeted
For context, a Russian dissident criticizing the Putin regime anonymously from the UK now risks persecution and death if Russia or North Korea manages to get hold of social media firms’ doxing databases.
Which they will.
Huge infringement on freedom of speech.
🚨BREAKING: All Britons may need ID to use social media, the UK's online safety regulator today announces
“This plan for a government ‘social media ban’ is a national ID system by the back door.
Both the government and Ofcom have admitted that children will get around the ban, which means the real effect will be normalising adults and children alike to hand over their passports just to get online.
Hundreds of thousands of people without ID, who tend to be poorer people, and many more who don’t want to risk handing their passports over to foreign tech companies will be locked out of huge parts of the internet.
The plan will kill anonymity online, whilst the UK’s culture of speech policing is reaching a crisis point. The policy is painfully misguided, an Orwellian assault on free speech and privacy, and will make children no safer at all.
The false illusion that children aren’t on social media will cause the companies to abandon all their child safety measures. The Government could be promoting meaningful safety measures and supporting parental controls that genuinely protect children - instead, they’re demanding government ID from the whole population just for uncensored internet access. It is authoritarian madness.”
- Silkie Carlo | @silkiecarlo
Read ⤵️
telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/10…
Luc Van Braekel retweeted
To realize how few people understand basic second order effects just read the comments to this.
The fantasy that a private company being obliged to pay a sick employee for two years before they can even fire them sounds “good”, “workers rights” in principle, this is where midwits stop thinking.
The hidden cost of this is huge: companies don’t hire, they can’t grow, if the do hire, they pay less because insurance against sick pay is very expensive, everyone is paying for a few people who abuse the system etc. the list of invisible yet consequential economic effects can go on and on. Why are people so stupid??
European hiring rules are genuinely insane.
For example - if you own a company in the Netherlands and one of your employees gets sick, you are required to pay at least 70% of their wages for up to 2 years.
If they can't go back to work after 2 years and you haven't done enough for their reintegration, you pay their wages for 1 more year. And you can't fire them until after that extra year!
Luc Van Braekel retweeted
Almost every American military base gets its electricity from the same local utility that powers your house. For years, if that utility went down, a lot of bases had roughly 3 to 7 days of diesel before things started shutting off.
Chinese state hackers spent at least five years sitting inside American utility networks before the government said so publicly.
That's what the Pentagon's new 90-day order is about.
People have been warning about this for a long time. A Defense Science Board report flagged it back in 2008. The 3-to-7-day number comes from a Pentagon official testifying to Congress in 2011, and he added that most of the pumps that move that fuel need grid power too. A 2021 rule raised the target to 14 days.
Then in February 2024, CISA, the NSA and the FBI put out a joint warning about a Chinese hacking group called Volt Typhoon. It had footholds in American power, water, transportation and telecom networks going back at least five years. One target was water systems on Guam, the island the US would fly bombers from in a Pacific war.
The head of NSA and Cyber Command said the weirdest part was that none of it had any intelligence value. A water utility doesn't have secrets worth stealing. What it does have is the ability to shut off a base's water.
So here's the scenario war planners actually run. China moves on Taiwan. The US starts rushing ships, planes and munitions out of bases back home. Then the power and water at those bases start failing, and every day they're down is a day the response stalls.
Hegseth announced the program, called FORTRESS, on Sept. 30. Over the weekend Fox reported the details: every major base in the continental US has to keep essential operations running for 90 days with no civilian power, water, fuel or comms, using microgrids, big batteries and small portable nuclear reactors. That's six times the 2021 target, and for now it's a goal on paper.
The replies here are full of Masons and false flags. Neither Washington nor London has said a war is coming. The actual reason has been sitting in a public government advisory since 2024.
If hackers were patient enough to sit inside the water system for five years, 90 days of backup starts to sound like the bare minimum.
Luc Van Braekel retweeted
The intense backlash for plainly describing Mao as a dictator is an exercise in psychological conditioning.
Consider what is actually happening when activists insist that others affirm that biological males can become women.
Publicly endorsing claims that contradict observable evidence and common sense imposes a significant reputational cost on the speaker. That cost makes defection more expensive and demonstrates that the speaker is a fully committed member rather than a free-rider who might abandon the tribe when conditions change.
The more prima facie absurd the claim, the stronger the signal.
In this respect, “Mao was not a dictator” functions in the same way. Its defiance of readily available historical evidence turns it into a sacred shibboleth - those who affirm it at the expense of their own credibility show that the group’s moral authority supercedes everything else. It is therefore a mechanism for sorting the compliant from the non-compliant. The people who readily accept the claim or remain silent while others are punished for rejecting it, are those who prioritize commercial access, relationships, and social standing above dignity and truth.
The tremendous penalties incurred by Mbappé and La Liga for failing the slightest of slights on Mao’s legacy are meant to be noticed and internalized by everyone else. They illustrate the practical consequences of refusing to toe the line. What follows is a gradual narrowing of acceptable statements that foreign individuals can hold without commercial penalty.
You may not be a Chinese citizen, but you will live under their moral codes and law.
Each time someone subordinates evidentiary scrutiny to the demands of solidarity, this habit is reinforced.
Repeat a falsehood often enough, and the distinction between what is useful to believe and what is true begins to erode.
✍️ Me in @TheSpectator: spectator.com/article/why-ch…
(btw I'm quite proud of the title IYKYK)
Luc Van Braekel retweeted
Last time I looked, tiny Macao and Hong Kong apart, China was last colonized by the Japanese. The West assisted in its liberation.
China still colonizes Tibet, should get out of East Turkestan, and cease its aggression in the Pacific.
China's rise was due to the foundation Mao Zedong built in ending Western colonialism and restoring China's place in the world.
If you want to learn more about how China ended extreme poverty, grab a copy of my new book "China's War on Poverty" which is the first in a series I am developing "Navigating the Chinese Dream."
I chose the series title because of the words of a school student in China who said that "The Chinese dream is where everyone becomes rich together."
It's available on Amazon under my pen name Jason RB Smith.
Luc Van Braekel retweeted
This Chinese person tries to retaliate for the perceive insult of Mao by trying to insult Americans. It doesn't work, but nobody would be able to explain to her why.
Everyone already insults America this way. Europeans do it. America's own Progressive left-wing does it. What you dream up trying to insult America is less insulting than the reality.
We teach our kids "sticks and stones may break our bones but names will never hurt us". We hurl insults worse than this at other kids on the playground. We learn to deal with it without getting upset.
It's part of "free-speech".
China is insecure about being seen as "backwards", this lack of understanding of "free-speech" is one of the biggest things making them "backwards".
Part of the reason you can't understand this is because you take the cynical view that we don't actually mean this, that we aren't sincere. You point to the small minority that does get angry and insulted as proof that we aren't telling the truth about this. But we are -- we don't care about such insults.
Trump has a tiny penis and smelly diapers. I can say this while you cannot say that Xi looks like Winnie the Pooh. You will always be backwards until this changes.
Mao was evil, as bad as Hitler or Stalin. His "Great Leap Forward" killed 40 million people and his "Cultural Revolution" destroyed Chinese society. Yes, he mass vaccinated people and made other small improvements, but growth under him lagged behind better countries like Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan, which is why (per capita) it's still behind those countries today. China's modern advanced has come from ending Mao's oppressive policies.
Don't know why White people feel compelled to talk about other people's history all the time.
Imagine 1 billion Chinese would constantly, completely unprovoked, spam:
"George Washington the slavelord is so overrated. Only won thanks to the French and the fact the British had to sail their reinforcements through half the world.
American founding fathers are all a bunch of bumfucks who had a huge geographical advantage.
And literally still needed to get saved by the gay French.
America then lost more wars than they won despite printing all this money and only fighting countries five divisions their weight class.
Americans can't even win at Basketball anymore.
The dream team is dead.
Even your skinny women disgust me.
Halle Berry? Disgusting."
Don't you see how stupid and annoying it is?
Why can't y'all stop acting like spergs??
Luc Van Braekel retweeted
People don't realize how good Russia is at propaganda...they are on a different level than everybody else
Their skill at narrative control and information operations began under Ivan the Terrible, was scaled by Peter the Great, industrialized by the USSR and continues with Putin
So last week I released a book about how Russia manufactured and leveraged a lie about Jeffrey Epstein to wage information warfare against America, Israel and Jews. And just yesterday, Aleksandr Dugin released this book—confirming exactly what I argued they were doing.
I really didn’t think I’d be proven correct so fast. But here we are.
Luc Van Braekel retweeted
I hate when people flee blue states for greener pastures, only to bring their shitty policies with them.
It never dawns on them that the policies they supported might be why they left in the first place.
Luc Van Braekel retweeted
The UN headquarters remains US territory under the terms of the headquarters agreement.
This tweet is based on a common misconception that diplomatic premises are the territory of the sending state: they are not.
Mike Waltz, US envoy to UN, is confused as he shouts at Cuban diplomats, saying: "This is America!" but the UN is international territory: UN 101
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The UN headquarters district remains US territory under the 1947 Headquarters Agreement, where federal, state and local US law applies except as otherwise provided; the agreement grants inviolability but does not transfer sovereignty to the UN.
en.wikisource.org/wiki/UN-US_Hea…
treaties.un.org/doc/Publicatio…
history.state.gov/historicaldocu…
Luc Van Braekel retweeted
The President, Vice President and Secretary of State should stay out of our Allies’ elections. Our job is to work closely with the winners. Interfering sends a terrible message, and we don’t want folks doing the same to us.
Luc Van Braekel retweeted
Idiocracy.
A Dutch member of parliament saying “we should see if we can invite an Anthropic size company and ask them if they want to IPO here (so we can tax them here).”
#vragenuur
Ja, waarom nodigen we Anthropic niet uit om hier naar de beurs te gaan, zodat wij belasting kunnen heffen en vertellen wat ze wel en niet mogen.
Ik ken haar niet, maar dat moet #D66 zijn.
Anthropic ziet ze al aankomen 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂🤣
Luc Van Braekel retweeted
Armed guards at the door. Opioids offered on repeat. Apple Pay at my bedside. Welcome to the American Emergency Room.
The French think it bankrupts you. Americans think France does it for free. I’ve been to the ER in both. Both are wrong.
Mountain bike crash, dislocated and fractured shoulder. I’m French, I live in San Francisco, and I take slightly too many risks. Let’s compare.
Security
🇺🇸 Kaiser in Marin. Three armed guards and a metal detector. My phone set it off, so with my shoulder out of its socket I walked through again. And again. Then a pat-down.
🇫🇷 A couple of unarmed guys with walkie-talkies. Still not sure what they’re for.
Wait
🇺🇸 Three people in the waiting room. Seen in 15 to 30 minutes.
🇫🇷 Broken hand: packed room, 4 hours before anyone touched me.
Records
🇺🇸 Kaiser is vertically integrated. Insurer, hospital, doctors: one system. They had my file before I sat down.
🇫🇷 Every new doctor is a fresh context window. Zero history, maybe a printout from last time.
Infrastructure
🇺🇸 Small hospital, serious kit. Straight to the trauma bay: real bed, IV, vitals monitoring, ready for surgery if needed. All imaging on the spot.
🇫🇷 Broken hand: a plastic chair and a Doliprane.
Drugs
🇺🇸 Strong opioids were the default offer. I said no. They insisted. The doctor came in personally, confused why someone in that much pain would refuse. I stuck to Tylenol, an anti-inflammatory, to put the shoulder back in.
Yes, it hurt. No, I didn’t tap out. My mom is proud of me.
🇫🇷 Broken hand: Doliprane, opioids never mentioned. I have friends who got their shoulder popped back in with nothing at all.
US default: opioids. French default: Doliprane.
Bill
🇺🇸 Every nurse warned me: “You’re French, this bill is going to traumatize you.”
Before discharge, someone came to my bed to collect payment. Apple Pay, from the hospital bed. $300. For everything. On a ~$500/month Kaiser plan.
🇫🇷 A flat ~€20 ER fee, usually reimbursed by your mutuelle. The real bill shows up later, on your payslip (see below)
followup
🇺🇸 Kaiser called me right after to set up follow-up and physio, all in their system. So far, so good.
🇫🇷 Broken hand: discharged, figure it out yourself. A friend dislocated her finger. They put it back in wrong, sent her home with bad instructions, it locked up, and she needed surgery months later. Still not fixed.
“Free healthcare” in France
It’s not free when your marginal tax rate nears 70% with social charges. And if you want quality care fast, more and more people pay for private clinics anyway.
Verdict
One person, one data point. But the care was 10x better than anything I’ve had in France, for a price that’s completely fine.
France has a lot to learn.
And yes, I refused the narcotics to stay sharp enough to launch a NanoCorp from my hospital bed. Launch your first company run by an AI agent: nanocorp .so
Luc Van Braekel retweeted
Verizon's CEO said today that SpaceX will need at least 4-6 years and $300B-$500B to fully build out its @Starlink Mobile U.S. carrier network:
"Their service just can't compete with a terrestrial network. In suburban and urban areas, where 98% of our revenues are, we're somewhere between 100x–1,000x more efficient than they are. We know exactly what they're going to do. We know who they're talking to on towers. There's no magic wand. There's no secret sauce. There's no shortcut.
They're going to look at 65,000–80,000 macro sites. They're going to need backhaul, RAN, and a tremendous amount of spectrum. It's going to take a minimum of four to six years to fully build that out. It's going to cost hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars, I assume somewhere between $300 billion and $500 billion.
Then they need to build retail, customer service, back office systems, et cetera. All of that gets them basically the same network and same capabilities and same cost structure as what we have today. Then sometime over the next four to six years, they have the possibility of becoming the sixth, not the fourth, the sixth competitor in the market.
You can be sure over these next three to five years or six years, we are not going to be standing still. Four to five years from now, we will be two to three generations better than where we are today. We will have high-speed broadband gig-plus coverage across the country with our millimeter wave. We are ahead of most people and already experimenting with what 6G applications will look like."
(via Verizon's Q3 earnings call earlier this morning)
Luc Van Braekel retweeted
Note to Democrats:
If you ran an actual Christian candidate from Texas for US Senate, and he was actually a moderate who really did want a secure border, to work across the aisle, actually supported the Second Amendment and actually wanted to protect kids from gender ideology…
I would have voted for that candidate over Paxton.
Your guy Talarico is actually just that awful. I had to hold my nose and vote Paxton.
Luc Van Braekel retweeted
Climate scientist: "The world is a Japanese warrior committing a slow harakiri. The knife is already in his belly, the blood is running down his body.'
I am, quite frankly, fed up with this. This kind of extreme fearmongering is not only scientifically unfounded; it is actively harmful. It breeds paralysis and defeatism, fuels mental health problems, and leads young people to decide against having children.
For a long time, I tried to maintain the utmost respect for climate scientists. But it’s time we confronted a paradox: experts are often not the best guides when it comes to assessing the dangers within their own field—and even less so when it comes to deciding which policies should address them.
The same goes for AI, where even the field’s pioneers are now recklessly speculating about their “p(doom)”—the probability of human extinction.
Years of specializing in a single domain can narrow your perspective until everything else pales in comparison. Climate change—or AI—becomes the existential threat to humanity, eclipsing every other danger we face.
Self-selection plays a role, too. If you choose to specialize in a field because you believe humanity’s future depends on it, you’re hardly a representative sample of people who think the threat is manageable, or that the real dangers lie elsewhere. Those people are less likely to pursue a career in climate science or AI safety in the first place.
And, I’m sorry to say, there’s also a certain narcissism inherent in this kind of doomsday rhetoric: the belief that the fate of the entire world hinges on your particular area of expertise. That you possess privileged knowledge and occupy a central role in humanity’s existential drama.
Luc Van Braekel retweeted
Not much Hollywood mileage in movies telling the ugly truth about Communism, but I recommend the 2019 Czech TV drama series "Bez vědomí" (The Sleepers) which clarifies that the "fall of Communism" was managed by East Bloc security services.
Luc Van Braekel retweeted
Belgium has gone from rapidly closing and destroying its entire nuclear fleet (half of its power before 2023) to quickly relicensing and returning a few of them to the grid because the Belgian Government is smart enough to understand that energy security trumps energy transition.
Need a crumb of hope about Europe on a Saturday?
Belgium has gone from rapidly closing and destroying its entire nuclear fleet (half of its power before 2023) to quickly relicensing and returning a few of them to the grid.
PM @Bart_DeWever is trying to save as many as he can.
ALT A photo I took of Doel nuclear plant in February 2025, the day another one of its 4 reactors was closed.
Luc Van Braekel retweeted
Elon Musk claims that Ukraine allegedly violated Starlink's terms of use and used the system on combat drones.
As someone who was inside the process at the Ministry of Defense, I can say with certainty that this is not true.
In February of this year, whitelists were introduced. Stationary terminals could be registered by both military personnel and civilians.
But for any satellite terminal to work while on the move, it had to be added to a special list and connected to the military Starshield system. Otherwise, no satellite communication terminals in Ukraine would work.
In other words, using civilian Starlink for drone missions was technically impossible. All drone missions that required satellite communication could only be carried out using Starshield.
We are very grateful to the United States and SpaceX for access to critically important satellite communications. Ukraine did not violate the terms of use.
Luc Van Braekel retweeted
In political debate, the claim that France is suffering from “austerity” is one of the most absurd that can be made.
France is a structurally socialist country. No single centre-right government can change that.
Fifty-seven per cent of the country’s GDP is consumed by public expenditure. Fifty-seven.
The scale of the French welfare state is enormous - even by Nordic standards.
The tragedy is that France finances most of this through debt.
That debt will one day have to be paid by the young people now marching in the streets. They will wake up to a brutal reality.
Virtually every affliction France suffers from is the product of socialism - not of cuts.