Rachel Bui

pov: training everyone’s muse to dance before our launch this week

For those who say it’s time for universal care. I am all for it. It would be nice if we could find a way to reduce the cost of care and make it available to everyone, for anything. But it will take work to get there. Other countries with Universal Care make “Most Things available to All People”. It’s not perfect. In our country, we make “Everything available to Most People”. The question for this country, unlike others, is how we can make the best possible care and therapies, regardless of cost, to everyone ? Read @AbdulElSayed ‘s book on Medicare for All. He wisely had more questions than answers. Medicare for All ? Global Budgets ? Or something else ? It’s a difficult path from where we are to “E4E” Healthcare. ?Everything for Everyone) My hope is that we can put together a Simpson Bowles type, Blue Ribbon Commission. One that includes representatives of all stakeholders. From all different type of patients. Including rare disease parents. Rural and Urban Hospitals. The most expensive hospitals that offer unique care. Pharma companies that offer everything from genetics to Cell and Gene Therapies. You get the point Some people think we can just tell all those working in the healthcare system what to do. That’s the fastest way for this to fail. We need to be as close as we can to being on the same page. And we need to figure out a non partisan manner of running our American version of Universal Care. No reason we can’t start now

The ugly truth about France and some of the other European countries currently in turmoil - and which none of the politicians want to admit because it'd be political suicide - is that you can't solve the problem by going after immigrants (as the right asserts) or the rich (as the left asserts), but you could solve it by going after the old. One extraordinary statistic for you: people over 60 in France, a quarter of the population, own 60% of France's wealth, non-financial and financial (ofce.fr/pdf/revue/2025/3-192…). And here is another crazy statistic: that same quarter of the population, those above 60, receive nearly two-thirds of all social spending by the French government (previssima.fr/actualite/prot…) - which is famously among the highest in the world (France's government spending is an insane 57.3% of GDP). Last statistic: they make up about 40% of voters because they're a third of registered voters (insee.fr/fr/statistiques/266…), and they turn out far more than anyone else (franceinfo.fr/elections/sond…). Put our 3 statistics together and there's almost a bit of an apartheid situation here: the old own most of the country's wealth, collect most of the social spending and have the political power to keep it that way. Which makes them a de-facto rentier class, living off assets and transfers paid for by younger generations. And, of course, at the risk of stating a truism, the future is built by the young. Yet France keeps effectively taking money away from them to give it to those whose working lives are already behind them - and need the money far less since they already own the country's wealth. What about inheritance, I hear you ask? That's the funniest/saddest aspect: given that life expectancy has kept rising, the French now inherit a home at 54 on average. The most common case is someone in their 80s leaving it to heirs in their 50s, in effect the very old transferring wealth to the about-to-be old (insee.fr/fr/statistiques/fic…). You can add this to our earlier apartheid statement: on top of all the rest, even when the old finally let go of their wealth, it stays within their own "camp". That's my personal situation, incidentally: I'm 42, my father is 71 and he is starting to look at ways to pass things on to me and my siblings, when our professional lives are already well settled, so it'll arrive when it changes things the least, which is pretty much the French system in a nutshell. Now, I get that there'd be some unfairness in going after them: they paid into the system their entire working lives, playing by the rules of a social contract that told them if they paid up they'd collect at the end. Changing the rules now means breaking that promise, which is admittedly unfair. But there's no magic wealth tree in any society: you can only take it where it is. That's the way most major societal transformations end up happening. They're often triggered by a catastrophic event (the so-called "four horsemen": mass-mobilisation war, revolution, state collapse, plague) BUT what really drives change is a transfer: wealth gets pried from the privileged class who've been sitting on it and handed to those who'll build what comes next. So, in theory and in an ideal world, you can do without the catastrophic event and directly proceed with the transfer... The fact that in France, and elsewhere in Europe, it's the youth protesting is probably no coincidence - even though they don't frame it as a generational fight. And even though, cruel irony, the left politicians many of them march behind promise to bring the retirement age back to 60 (lcp.fr/actualites/legislativ…), which would make the situation even worse. Let's say they understand intuitively that the system is stacked against them, even if they haven't yet figured out how. And politicians are obviously doing what politicians do, meaning pandering to the people who actually vote, while pointing the young towards easier - and politically convenient - scapegoats. To be clear I'm not saying it's the only problem in France, VERY far from it. I'm also not saying that all old people in France live a lavish lifestyle at the expense of younger generations: there are also plenty of very poor retirees who, if anything, would deserve more. What I am saying is that it's probably the biggest elephant in the room: everyone can see it, nobody dares mention it - no politician, from any side, wants to run on cutting grandma's pension - and it makes every other problem harder to fix.

Hardware looks scary until you break it down into small steps. So I built an app that takes you through Arduino one circuit at a time. Made with Opus 5.5 learn-arduino-red.vercel.app

Michael, you should really encourage others to do the same and invest in the next generation. The best thing the Australian government did for its people is to mandate its people (especially the vulnerable) to save via the form of superannuation.

If you care about biotech and drug development watch this interview with Matt Gline, the CEO of Roivant, a biotech firm that is now worth $24 billion. He talks about why he thinks predictions about AI from people like Anthropic’s Dario Amodei are overly optimistic. “If Dario is right and I'm wrong, and he cures every disease in five years, man, are we all the winners from that outcome,” Gline said. “I think if you work in this industry, it is very hard not to be skeptical of any of those claims. Because, and I've said this in other settings recently too, biotech is a wood chipper that like is built to like ingest souls and shred them. It's just like such a hard business that like someone comes and they're like, oh, but I've built a computer and I'm going to push a button and all of that goes away and it just works. Like that is probably not the way that's going to go.”