Weekend Reading
Writing worth reading - 5th/6th October 2024
Are We Too Impatient to Be Intelligent? by Rory Sutherland
“This is fascinating. Because to a physicist, they’re exactly the same. But when I present the information about time and distance in a different way, your reaction is now completely different. What it effectively says is: going quite a bit faster when you’re going slowly is a really big gain. Going very fast when you’re already going fast is the action of a dickhead …”
Michel Houellebecq: ‘People who have humanitarian ideas are a catastrophe by Magdalena Miecznicka
“The author of Atomized (1998) is France’s most praised — and hated — novelist. His characters break taboos, expressing politically incorrect and often outrageous thoughts on an array of subjects, from immigration to the role of women. Citing Dickens and Balzac as his influences, and often employing speculative fiction, he portrays society without sentiment — and sometimes, one would hope, with distortion. He has sold millions of copies worldwide …”
Trump’s call for a bitcoin strategic reserve is a very bad idea’ by Vitaliy Katsnelson
“A reserve currency is a global story. Many people in many countries, who may or may not have visited the US or done business with it, bought into the story that it was a democracy and that its capitalist, free-market economy made it the strongest in the world. And hey, we were responsible with our finances — our debt was manageable, and though we ran budget deficits, they were not huge …”