Seems quite predictable that the Irish government is going to spend a lot of political capital defending Aughinish, but ultimately lose. Clearly the smarter political move to do the right thing before forced, to salvage some credit.

i love it when the clock strikes 10:30 every morning and the usual sites publish their 3 infuriating news stories that will drive all discourse today like zookeepers raising the enclosure's gate and letting the seals get into the day's bucket of chum

The idea that Ireland should voluntarily take a €€ hit to limit aluminuim exports to Russia seems compelling to me. We should figure that out. But I’m also fascinated by the campaign behind it. Was it Ukrainian govt? Passionate activists? Journalism? I’d love a long-read on the source of the push.

Sarah Paine is a gift to the world. All her videos are worth watching, including this analysis of the current state of affairs, with a strong call to arms for Europe to once again lead the west. Democracy must come home 🇪🇺 youtu.be/hjtlOd2lbWU?...

The SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI IPOs “will be at least half the value, inflation-adjusted, of all US IPOs since WWII.” 🤯

AI is going to speed run capitalism’s greatest tension: A/ Replacing people with technology is great, because it frees their time up for even better things B/ Replacing people with technology is terrible, because it dramatically reduces their economic power

If you view it as just a media company, then sure, $44bn was too much to pay for Twitter. But if you view it as a vehicle to turn memes into retail demand for shares in your other companies, then the ROI looks very compelling 🚀

Consumer sentiment being lower than the worst of the great financial crisis is… surprising

The big win of the neoliberal era has been the acceptance that most decisions don’t need to be made collectively. The big loss has been the complete lack of new wisdom on *how* we conduct collective decision making. We’ve wasted years debating an all-or-nothing, at the expense of doing it better

If Europe really wants to get on the front foot, we should pursue making the Euro the global reserve currency. The steps are probably: - Trump kills fed independence - Germany agrees to borrow to grow - We implement the digital Euro - Lots of Draghi reforms, esp capital markets - UK rejoins

Over half of Irish people said they would support the Occupied Territories Bill, even if it caused us economic harm. Makes me proud to be Irish. ☘️ 🇵🇸 (From the print version of today’s Sunday Independent)

Watching the development of AI is a reminder of why the permission-less innovation in liberal democracies is so powerful. So many voices so confidently declaring all of the ways in which it can't possibly work. But people are still going to try and we'll all find out what works and what doesn't.

After building a few apps in Cursor, I'm starting to realise that the kernel of the app, the "source of truth" might also be the documentation, in addition to the source code.

In Northern Ireland over 600 men were charged with rape last year (>1,000 for sexual violence). I didn’t see any protests or riots against them. These thugs have zero interest in keeping women safe.

Heartening to see optimism on the economic impact of AI in the EU: “More than 60% of Europeans positively view robots and AI at work and over 70% believe they improve productivity.” employment-social-affairs.ec.europa.eu/news/commiss...

Panda waste will now photograph bin contents and email you if you put general waste in the recycle bin. Likely a big deterrent effect on the minority who abuse the green bins. I wonder if it will nudge regular customers into doing it properly, or to under-use recycling for fear of doing it wrong?

The European Aundance Agenda (weekly newsletter): - Europe is a sleeping giant - Germany lifts the debt brake - Nuclear abundance - Slowing demand for AI gigafactories www.abundanceagenda.eu/p/abundance-...

An incredible finding about elite wealth extraction in this paper (from U of Chicago!) “40% of [share price] increase was attributable to a reallocation of rewards to shareholders in a decelerating economy, primarily at the expense of labor compensation.” www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1...

TIL that Tesla insiders (executives, board members, etc) have sold *1.46 million* Tesla shares over the past 12 months, and bought precisely *zero* www.nasdaq.com/market-activ...

Great piece arguing that we don’t help the country’s growth by artificially limiting Dublin’s population. We need more houses everywhere progressireland.substack.com/p/irelands-p...

6/ There is it. Inter-Con contractor told USIP head of security that "DOGE threatened to cancel every federal contract Inter-Con held" if they didn't assist the break in.

Capital is flowing from the U.S. to Europe. 🇩🇪 🇫🇷 🇬🇧 🇪🇸 @barchart.com

2040: The Greater European Union

I wrote this on young men, and why we need to stop lying about why they're easy prey for reptiles like Andrew Tate. www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle-co...

It's just enormously important to understand that the goal of this tariff policy isn't to raise money or to increase manufacturing in the United States. The goal is to make some of the nation's largest companies subject to Trump's personal discretion and dependent on his favor.

If the EU could seize this moment, and issue eurobonds, “it would tap in to a deep well of willing buyers keen to trim US exposure” www.ft.com/content/4ba5...

Investors are keen to diversify beyond the dollar. Europe would be the obvious place but it doesn't have much jointly-issued debt to offer potential buyers. One to think about as EU leaders ponder a repeat of covid-era joint bonds to fund Ukraine/defence needs. on.ft.com/4iHtsH1

💶🇪🇺 We should set a goal to make the Euro the new global reserve currency by 2030 It’s a prize the US are actively trying to give away. We’re the best placed it the world to take up the mantle and beat the Chinese to it.

There seems to be an important cultural reset underway around ambition which feels important. YouTuber Nathan Zed did “How Trying Became Cool Again” 2 weeks ago: youtu.be/o2jzKo1RqWU?... Then Chalamet openly yearned for greatness: youtu.be/4P50UQeIL4o?...

This is a very good piece by Noah Smith on Elon Musk. It is incredibly important not to underestimate your rivals. The “Trump is an idiot” narrative wasn’t useful in 2016 and “Elon is incompetent” isn’t a useful lens for analysis now. www.noahpinion.blog/p/only-fools...

Mario Draghi barrels into European politicians and leaders for their inaction: "You say no to public debt. You say no to the single market. You say no to create a capital market union. You can't say no to everything...You ask me what's best to do…I don’t know, but do something"

Did you know the most powerful force for climate action is LOVE—for our children, their future, and the world they’ll inherit? That's right! Research shows this message moves hearts 12x more than jobs and 2x more than extreme weather. Source: potentialenergycoalition.org/guides-and-r...

OECD’s new recommendations for Ireland on housing: -Reforming the tax system -increase the supply of serviced land, -improving the planning and permitting process, -increasing density, -improving productivity in the construction sector www.oecd.org/en/publicati...

They are committing too many crimes not to follow all the way through. It would be genuinely unsafe for them to show restraint or stop half way.

In 2004, it took the world a year to add a gigawatt of solar power — now it takes a day

2015: Your commute will become productive because AI will drive and you can work 2025: Your commute will become productive because you can drive while the AI works

as always we need to be careful about what it is that we are using criticisms to actually do in the world and not just what political aesthetic we are trying to express

Worth reading.

It’s amazing to see so many fresh bodies turn up to commit crimes on Trump’s behalf, after so many in his first administration ended up in jail. It reminds me of the John Milton quote that bad men don’t see tyrants as a source freedom, but rather licence

I’ve always been astounded by History’s self-owns, like the the burning of the Library of Alexandria or when the Tokugawa shogunate closed Japan off from the world. I think I can understand how they happened a little bit better these days

📢 Our new paper in Political Analysis explains how to use LLMs like GPT-4o, Llama or Mistral to estimate the ideological and policy position of political texts. Our approach is fast, reliable, cost-effective and reproducible and works with texts written in different languages 1/7 cup.org/4axBEXo

Odd seeing the US tech giants taking such a large stock price hit from Deepseek. “Getting to the future will require dramatically lower CAPEX” feels like an optimistic story for me. Offset by a little less lock-in for the cloud providers, but great for the aggregators.

So if I (a foreigner) own bitcoin, the US Govt will use taxpayer dollars to buy it from me at a high price? Art of the deal indeed

I see people assessing Trump’s wealth from his meme coin by assessing the value of the 80% he still owns, rather than the 20% he sold. The grift isn’t in value of the pile of magic beans you still own, but in the price of the ones you sold.

This is exactly the kind of private sector development you’d hope to see as soon as a new land value tax comes into effect 👏 www.businesspost.ie/article/deve...

My favourite piece of writing this week was from @jeremiahdjohns.bsky.social about the 1 million US teenagers joining RedNote open.substack.com/pub/infinite...

Another interesting proof point that we have capacity problems in Ireland which we can’t solve by throwing money at. Vacancy rates in public sector jobs (via PWC great quarterly digest www.pwc.ie/issues/the-l...)