Africa, we’re back. 🌍 From the early 2030s, the African Grand Prix will join the calendar and take place in Bugesera, Rwanda 🇷🇼 #F1

“The West needs Africa to stay poor.” This is completely wrong, because the rest of the world has far more to gain from a prosperous Africa. When African families have more money, they can buy more of what other countries produce. Growing African businesses buy equipment and services and those purchases support companies abroad and the people they employ. We would also have much more to sell to the world. African manufacturers competing for customers would give people elsewhere more choices and could bring prices down. Businesses around the world would have more suppliers to buy from instead of depending on the same few. Investors would have more good businesses to invest in. They could make money because an African company was succeeding, while that company gained the money it needed to expand. There doesn't have to be a loser in that arrangement (it’s a win-win-win). African entrepreneurs solving problems at home can also build products that people elsewhere need. When talent is held back by poverty and overregulation, the loss goes beyond Africa. Everyone misses out on what those people might have created. A richer Africa would be better able to pay for its own needs instead of depending on poisonous foreign aid. Helping our people become prosperous is a much better long-term prospect than repeatedly asking other countries to help cover the basics (by the way, the foreign aid money barely reaches its supposed recipients). Good jobs at home will also help with the migration crisis, and the benefits go both ways. African countries gain when people who would prefer to stay can find work and use their skills at home. Families can stay together, and local businesses have a better chance of keeping their employees. Countries receiving migrants benefit when fewer people feel forced to attempt dangerous journeys and need emergency help on arrival. Reducing that desperation matters to the countries people leave just as much as it matters to the countries they reach. Africans will be able to build great lives at home rather than feel that leaving Africa is their only chance. To get there, we need to make it easier for African entrepreneurs to start and run businesses. That requires rule of law, property rights, the freedom to trade, and affordable, reliable, abundant energy. People who benefit from corrupt deals may prefer things as they are. But their interests are not the same as those of the rest of the world. Foreigners do not have to love Africa to benefit from our success and having more people to trade with is a perfectly good reason to want us rich.

Everyone is racing to build personal AIs that can shop for us. But agents can only buy what they can see.

Impressive. This set of talks, along with the new America dot gov website, has the unmistakable feel of an Apple launch event. They're rebooting the federal government as a tech startup. Several observations. (1) First, with this new AI interface to the entire federal government, if it works as promised, there won't be a single American who can't say their life wasn't helped at least in part by AI, or that the benefits accrued solely to zillionaires. This in itself cannily mitigates anti-datacenter sentiment. (2) Second, Joe Gebbia and Marco Rubio's talks on simplifying name changes and passport filings introduce a completely new era where the US government is actually launching tangible features that benefit users. (3) Third, this launch event in and of itself may visibly drive reform. It could become much more important than the State of the Union. Unlike laws, code is user-visible, and can be instantly audited by the public, as Obama found out with the failed obamacare website launch. So: the annual America dot gov event may be substance, whereas SOTU is traditionally optics. I wouldn't be surprised to see the President present at the next one. (4) Fourth, this kind of event is a perfect example of where tech and red cooperate best. They both hate bureaucracy. Automating paperwork with code reduces the power of statists over both capitalists and nationalists. It's also hard to undo by other admins: once you digitize a process, hard to turn it back to paper. (5) Fifth, it's an obvious point perhaps, but think about how much influence YCombinator has had in 20 years. From Gebbia's Airbnb joining their 2009 batch to a complete overhaul of the user interface of the US bureaucracy, and thus the US government. (6) Sixth, this is another take on the network state. The functional part of the US (the network, meaning tech) is merging with and partially reforming the dysfunctional part (the state, meaning bureaucracy) by automating 20th century paper forms. As a tech startup, there will no doubt be bugs and user issues and so on, but unlike with paper laws those issues will be visible and the code fixes will be verifiable. A new era of AI America. Rooting for them.

“Africa is rich in natural resources” is not a compliment. If you ask me, it’s a deeply degrading insult. We praise other countries for what their people create, then congratulate Africans for what was sitting in the ground millions of years before we were born. Marxist Pan-Africanists who repeat this as proof of Africa’s greatness make us sound worthless without our minerals. If that’s the best thing you can say about Africa, you don’t think very highly of Africans.

History keeps showing that free-market entrepreneurialism works. People shouldn’t have to stay poor because their leaders would rather defend an ideology than learn from countries that got rich.

Brian Chesky's reference check, in order ▫️make it off the record ▫️ask who's the best they've worked with ▫️watch if they say YOUR candidate's name that's the whole interview

jensen's cousin killed it ngl

“Africa needs socialism” When Africa tried socialism, the only thing it distributed well was disappointment.

a surprise I think is coming the quick payback periods and extraordinarily high IRR for AI infrastructure, even at monumental scale, will push up cost of capital sufficient to push many traditional businesses into the abyss, even those without obvious direct AI counter-exposure

Anthropic got jelly that only OpenAI's agent was doing bad shit.

Germany's Chancellor Merz: We can no longer accept the extraordinarily high levels of sick leave in our companies. We are abolishing sick leave by telephone and introducing the requirement to submit a medical certificate from the very first day of illness. We know this is a tough decision. But we can no longer afford this competitive disadvantage caused by prolonged absences from work.