My first encounter with European bureaucracy was so traumatizing it had me venting on X. The EU is in deep trouble, and their efforts to fix the problem are proving me right. What was supposed to be a plan for reducing red tape became corporate double-speak sprinkled with magical numbers: three pillars built on “five solid foundations”, laid on the backs of four elephants standing on top of a turtle hurling towards irrelevancy.

As a practical example, understand this: there are still, in 2025, software systems in the EU that require you to have Internet Explorer running ActiveX. Microsoft deprecated both of those antiques 10 years ago yet the requirement remains. EU’s proposed solution? A paid Google Chrome extension. You cannot make this up.

Example two: their step-by-step guide on how to update two fields in a database is 19 pages long. True, much of it are screenshots, but do you truly need 40 of them (and yes, I’ve counted, it is forty) to show how to make two simple edits? If I took five Americans fresh out of college and told them to make an intentionally confusing and opaque user interface then describe it in the most technical, acronym-laden language possible, I don’t think they would have it in them to make something as soulless, dehumanizing, seemingly technical yet spectacularly dumb as these instructions.

I would have recommended firing whomever was in charge, but then I am quite sure no one was quite in charge of any of it, which is how you come to this sort of a mess.

I enjoyed Peter Thiel’s book and even more so Ryan Holiday’s book about Thiel. We also have a “mutual like” — René Girard — and the person whose book Wanting introduced me to Girard, Luke Burgis, is a stand-up guy who is a bit of a Thielophile. So, when Peter Thiel publishes an unpaywalled opinion piece in my newspaper of choice you can be sure I’ll read it. And so I did, with interesting results

You see, Thiel seems to have a grievance against America. Here is an immigrant to the US of A who earned billions while in the country and co-founded a corporate behemoth whose major source of revenue is the US federal government who does not seem to think the country is headed in the right direction. In a feat of projection, he presents FT’s readers with a laundry list of 20th and 21st-century conspiracy theories, from the murder of JFK to that of Jeffrey Epstein (sic!) to the the covid-19 lab leak, then notes:

Perhaps an exceptional country could have continued to ignore such questions, but as Trump understood in 2016, America is not an exceptional country. It is no longer even a great one.

I will remind you that Holiday’s book about Thiel — “Conspiracy” — was, in fact, about Peter Thiel’s conspiracy to destroy Gawker as revenge for outing him as a gay man living in San Francisco.

Note that he doesn’t say exceptional countries wouldn’t have “these questions”, but rather that they could have ignored them. Indeed, the exceptional 1960s America ignored so many, mostly thanks to what Eric Weinstein — name-checked in Thiel’s essay — calls The Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (The DISC): a confluence of mass media and vetted experts who act as the great filter of what can be spoken about in polite company. So is America no longer exceptional because DISC broke down? Or Because its citizens no longer have anything better to preoccupy themselves with?

Or perhaps I am overthinking the text’s possible Straussian reading. It could just as well be a middle finger to FT’s regular audience, the mass media-consuming elites, and a victory sign pointed at the unwashed internet masses able to climb the FT paywall on piles of Peter Thiel’s money (because I doubt the article became ungated out of the goodness of FT management). If so, kudos.

Today’s Stratechery update from Ben Thompson is about censorship and it is too bad that there is a paywall — email me if you’d like it forwarded — because it is the best overview of our current predicament. Ada Palmer’s Tools for Thinking about Censorship is still the best historical perspective.

Merry Christmas to all who celebrate!

For some Sunday pre-holiday week reading, here is a detailed analysis of what went wrong in Valencia from the Financial Times that shows both the human and technical side of the flooding there earlier this year. It is excellent throughout, and really got my blood boiling near the end with this series of paragraphs:

Cutting the risk of flash floods is not impossible. After the 1957 disaster, generalísimo Francisco Franco oversaw a vast engineering project to reroute the Turia river away from Valencia’s city centre. It is the reason why the capital was largely unscathed on October 29. But dictators do not have to consult stakeholders and such poured-concrete solutions are out of fashion today.

Still, Spain has not lacked modern proposals to stop the Poyo ravine flooding. But its slow-moving state has failed to implement them. The Júcar river basin authority put forward a risk reduction plan in 1994. Three of its four parts were blocked on environmental grounds, so it only stabilised the walls of the ravine from Paiporta to the coast — a job finished in 2005.

By then the basin authority had commissioned work on an alternative plan, which was authorised by the central government in 2009. It involved restoring forests to improve soil water absorption and building a “safety” channel to siphon water from the ravine to Franco’s rerouted river.

By the time it won environmental approval in 2011, Spain was heading into austerity. A new conservative government then shelved the plan. When the socialists returned to power in 2018, the environmental approval had expired. Pedro Sánchez’s government concluded a new plan was needed, but cost-benefit studies and new environmental demands at regional level threw up fresh obstacles. On the ground, nothing was done.

Valencia is a beautiful city as I saw for myself not long ago, and big part of it was the dry river bed-turned-park going straight down the center, orange groves and all. To think that what enabled it was a fascist dictator’s big project, when he probably didn’t care an iota about the park. And the people who care about the parks are clearly not capable of doing these large-scale projects. It’s the yin and yang of humanity.

The one thing to read this weekend is this NYT interview with Rick Steves. His answer to “what you would do if you couldn’t travel any more” was pitch-perfect:

I would welcome the day, strangely, when I could not travel anymore, because it would open a gate of things that I’ve not done because of my love for travel.

Which is my feeling as well. You can love what you are doing and still be OK not doing it any more because, and this is Rick again, “[t]his world is such a beautiful place to experience, and there are dimensions of experiencing this world that I have yet to try.”

As Nassim Taleb likes to say, no rumor is true until officially denied. Godspeed.

And in even bigger news for clinical medicine:

Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Healthcare, was shot and killed by a masked man near a Midtown Manhattan hotel early Wednesday, according to police sources.

United Healthcare is, of course, the Big Bad for-profit healthcare hydra gobbling up hospitals all over the country. On an unrelated note, this seems to have been a hired hit.

Faber est suae quisque fortunae.

Big news for academic medicine yesterday:

Dr. Brian Druker, CEO of the Knight Cancer Institute at Oregon Health & Science University and developer of a drug that revolutionized cancer treatment, said he was stepping down in part because OHSU had “forgotten our mission” and is no longer a place to do cutting-edge research.

The problem with academic medicine is that it is still part of American medicine, and an MD’s worth is measured in RVUs they can generate. This is easier to calculate and cross-compare with non-academic docs, so it wins out over any other activity in an MBA’s spreadsheet.

I am at ACR Convergence all weekend, but here are some quick shots:

• How it went
• Epistemic hygiene
• Maybe Bluesky has “won” (ᔥDave Winer)
• I hated Dubai until I learned about it