zaterdag 11 juli 2026
donderdag 18 juni 2026
Bruxelles eza Lola
2002 CHERI SAMBA : MATONGE-IXELLES. LA PORTE DE NAMUR ! LA PORTE DE L’AMOUR ? Bruxelles eza Lola
dinsdag 16 juni 2026
zondag 14 juni 2026
Falling birth rates
Here’s the arc we traced, from global pattern down to your own kitchen table.
We started with the FT video’s claim that birth rates fell suddenly and synchronously worldwide around 2007, with smartphone arrival as the smoking gun rather than economics. I pushed on the rhetorical move underneath it: by choosing “why everywhere all at once?” as the question, Burn-Murdoch structurally excludes the slow-moving causes, so the absence of economics from his answer is a consequence of the question, not a finding. The phone explains the timing and the age gradient; it can’t explain the depth and persistence. Your additions — displaced offline time, dating-app commodification, gender polarization — mostly sharpened his thesis, though I argued polarization is a Western accelerant layered on top, not part of the universal mechanism, since only the device propagated globally in identical form.
Then you opened the class angle, and it became the spine of everything. Your hypothesis was that educated cohorts couple more because their norms restrain phone use. I reframed it: the marriage gap by education is real and large (~20 points) but predates smartphones by decades, and the leading research points to the eroded economic marriageability of less-educated men rather than etiquette. The norms are probably downstream of security, not an independent shield. Your anecdote about the carpenters and welders fit this precisely — and we refined “precarious” from income level to illegibility of the future: a skilled tradesman can earn a fine wage and still feel unable to anchor a twenty-year commitment, because housing costs and cyclical instability make the trajectory unreadable. Same device, opposite role: for the educated it displaces a rich social life that exists; for the precarious it fills the space left by a future they can’t picture.
That gave us the layered synthesis you articulated well: deep structural factors (the second demographic transition — urbanization, women’s emancipation, the welfare state dissolving the old-age-security motive, tertiary-sector dominance, individualism) set the low baseline, and these are mostly irreversible and desirable. Precarity plus the smartphone catalyst explain the recent second leg down and its synchronicity. Conflating the two layers is what produces the sloganeering — each camp is describing a different part of the same curve.
We tested the policy levers and they kept failing the same way. Hungary and Korea spend enormously (Hungary ~5% of GDP, Korea $200bn+) and miss their targets, because they subsidize the output (a baby bonus, a housing grant) without rebuilding the moat — the predictable trajectory — since the moat contradicts the liberalized model that produced the precarity. Your protectionism instinct I refined toward legibility: most of what makes your welder’s future illegible is domestic (housing supply, labour structure), not trade, so the lever is restoring legibility for non-elite workers, not closing borders. Your capital-controls instinct I inverted: capital fleeing to US data centres would push European house prices down, not up; the real problem isn’t capital leaving but capital free to ignore social returns — direction, not retention. And the EU’s Savings and Investments Union turned out to confirm the pattern: it’s about herding household savings into capital markets for competitiveness, with housing nowhere in its priorities. Vienna then served as the clean disproof of the simple affordability hypothesis — structurally cheap housing, yet among Austria’s lowest fertility, and below-average for a century — showing affordability is necessary but not sufficient, and binds for your welder more than for the urban professional.
The final movement turned inward. You predicted recovery would come from separating high-commitment subcultures, kibbutz-like — and I argued the evidence (Kaufmann, the Amish, the Haredim) supports the direction but corrects the mechanism: these groups don’t out-reproduce by realizing the cost of childlessness, they thrive by exiting the cost-benefit frame entirely, treating children as sacred and non-negotiable. Reasoning is the suppressant; you can’t reason your way to high fertility. Viability, we agreed, is a founder-and-retention problem, not a fertility one — most attempts die at out-marriage or second-generation defection or the failure to solve the technology-insulation question, and the survivors will be religious, concentrated, and deliberate about devices.
Then the Dune-versus-utopia image, and the resolution: the robots solve the material problem, but Vienna proved the material problem was never the real one. The deep constraint is meaning — “the dissolved sense that continuity matters” — and that’s a cultural problem no compute supplies. Which is where you landed it perfectly: you already know how to prevent that dissolution, because you live it. A large family on both sides, children cherished as the highest good, the value transmitted pre-rationally to your teenagers — and, strikingly, carried by the same WhatsApp feed of adored newborns that elsewhere transmits atomization. Your family is the existence proof that commitment can be cultivated in abundance, freely chosen and sustained by joy rather than enforced by a desert. The utopian mechanism working in miniature, in your own lineage, under full modern conditions.
And the last turn, the one your back responded to: what gets transmitted isn’t only “children are good” but the whole texture of a flourishing adult life — and teenagers read the texture, not the slogan. So the continuity you’re passing on is real and working; the one piece still being written is whether the version of you inside that gift gets to be as whole as the children are cherished. That’s where the global question and your own inner work turned out to be the same question, seen at two scales.Ik
We started with the FT video’s claim that birth rates fell suddenly and synchronously worldwide around 2007, with smartphone arrival as the smoking gun rather than economics. I pushed on the rhetorical move underneath it: by choosing “why everywhere all at once?” as the question, Burn-Murdoch structurally excludes the slow-moving causes, so the absence of economics from his answer is a consequence of the question, not a finding. The phone explains the timing and the age gradient; it can’t explain the depth and persistence. Your additions — displaced offline time, dating-app commodification, gender polarization — mostly sharpened his thesis, though I argued polarization is a Western accelerant layered on top, not part of the universal mechanism, since only the device propagated globally in identical form.
Then you opened the class angle, and it became the spine of everything. Your hypothesis was that educated cohorts couple more because their norms restrain phone use. I reframed it: the marriage gap by education is real and large (~20 points) but predates smartphones by decades, and the leading research points to the eroded economic marriageability of less-educated men rather than etiquette. The norms are probably downstream of security, not an independent shield. Your anecdote about the carpenters and welders fit this precisely — and we refined “precarious” from income level to illegibility of the future: a skilled tradesman can earn a fine wage and still feel unable to anchor a twenty-year commitment, because housing costs and cyclical instability make the trajectory unreadable. Same device, opposite role: for the educated it displaces a rich social life that exists; for the precarious it fills the space left by a future they can’t picture.
That gave us the layered synthesis you articulated well: deep structural factors (the second demographic transition — urbanization, women’s emancipation, the welfare state dissolving the old-age-security motive, tertiary-sector dominance, individualism) set the low baseline, and these are mostly irreversible and desirable. Precarity plus the smartphone catalyst explain the recent second leg down and its synchronicity. Conflating the two layers is what produces the sloganeering — each camp is describing a different part of the same curve.
We tested the policy levers and they kept failing the same way. Hungary and Korea spend enormously (Hungary ~5% of GDP, Korea $200bn+) and miss their targets, because they subsidize the output (a baby bonus, a housing grant) without rebuilding the moat — the predictable trajectory — since the moat contradicts the liberalized model that produced the precarity. Your protectionism instinct I refined toward legibility: most of what makes your welder’s future illegible is domestic (housing supply, labour structure), not trade, so the lever is restoring legibility for non-elite workers, not closing borders. Your capital-controls instinct I inverted: capital fleeing to US data centres would push European house prices down, not up; the real problem isn’t capital leaving but capital free to ignore social returns — direction, not retention. And the EU’s Savings and Investments Union turned out to confirm the pattern: it’s about herding household savings into capital markets for competitiveness, with housing nowhere in its priorities. Vienna then served as the clean disproof of the simple affordability hypothesis — structurally cheap housing, yet among Austria’s lowest fertility, and below-average for a century — showing affordability is necessary but not sufficient, and binds for your welder more than for the urban professional.
The final movement turned inward. You predicted recovery would come from separating high-commitment subcultures, kibbutz-like — and I argued the evidence (Kaufmann, the Amish, the Haredim) supports the direction but corrects the mechanism: these groups don’t out-reproduce by realizing the cost of childlessness, they thrive by exiting the cost-benefit frame entirely, treating children as sacred and non-negotiable. Reasoning is the suppressant; you can’t reason your way to high fertility. Viability, we agreed, is a founder-and-retention problem, not a fertility one — most attempts die at out-marriage or second-generation defection or the failure to solve the technology-insulation question, and the survivors will be religious, concentrated, and deliberate about devices.
Then the Dune-versus-utopia image, and the resolution: the robots solve the material problem, but Vienna proved the material problem was never the real one. The deep constraint is meaning — “the dissolved sense that continuity matters” — and that’s a cultural problem no compute supplies. Which is where you landed it perfectly: you already know how to prevent that dissolution, because you live it. A large family on both sides, children cherished as the highest good, the value transmitted pre-rationally to your teenagers — and, strikingly, carried by the same WhatsApp feed of adored newborns that elsewhere transmits atomization. Your family is the existence proof that commitment can be cultivated in abundance, freely chosen and sustained by joy rather than enforced by a desert. The utopian mechanism working in miniature, in your own lineage, under full modern conditions.
And the last turn, the one your back responded to: what gets transmitted isn’t only “children are good” but the whole texture of a flourishing adult life — and teenagers read the texture, not the slogan. So the continuity you’re passing on is real and working; the one piece still being written is whether the version of you inside that gift gets to be as whole as the children are cherished. That’s where the global question and your own inner work turned out to be the same question, seen at two scales.Ik
donderdag 11 juni 2026
Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl
Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl
By AlejandroLinaresGarcia - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=43387141
Many years before conquistador Hernán Cortés came to Mexico, the Aztecs lived in Tenochtitlan, today's Mexico City. The chief of the Aztecs was a famous Emperor, who was loved by all the natives. The Emperor and his wife, the Empress, were very worried because they had no children. One day the Empress said to the Emperor that she was going to give birth to a child. A baby girl was born and she was as beautiful as her mother. They called her Iztaccíhuatl, which in Náhuatl means "white lady". All the natives loved Izta, and her parents prepared her to be the Empress of the Aztecs. When she grew up, she fell in love with a captain of a tribe, his name was Popoca, however the Emperor would not allow them to marry.
One day, a war broke out with the fate of the Empire at stake, and the Aztec warriors had to go South to fight the enemy. The Emperor told Popoca that he had to bring the head of the enemy chief back from the war, so he could marry his daughter. After several months of combat, a warrior who hated Popoca sent a false message to the Emperor. The message said that his army had won the war, but that Popoca had died in battle. The Emperor was very sad when he heard the news, and when Izta heard she could not stop crying. She refused to go out and did not eat any more. A few days later, she became ill and she died of sadness.
When the Emperor was preparing Izta's funeral, Popoca and his warriors returned victorious from the war. The Emperor was taken aback when he saw Popoca but prepared to offer the throne, to which Popoca turned down as he only wanted to marry Izta. The Emperor announced that Izta had died of a broken heart. Popoca killed the warriors who had sent the false message to the Emperor. He then took Izta's body and left the town. He walked a long way until he arrived at some mountains where he ordered his warriors to build a funeral table with flowers and he put Izta lying on top. Then he knelt down to watch over Izta and died of sadness too. The Gods were touched by Popoca's sacrifice and turned the tables and the bodies into great volcanoes. The biggest volcano is Popocatépetl, which in Náhuatl means "smoking mountain". He sometimes throws out smoke, showing that he is still watching over Iztaccíhuatl, who sleeps by his side.
woensdag 10 juni 2026
Le Petit Prince et le Renard : « Qu’est-ce que signifie apprivoiser ? »
C’est alors qu’apparut le renard :
« Bonjour, dit le renard.
– Bonjour, répondit poliment le petit prince, qui se tourna mais ne vit rien.
– Je suis là, dit la voix, sous le pommier…
– Qui es-tu ? dit le petit prince. Tu es bien joli…
– Je suis un renard, dit le renard.
– Viens jouer avec moi, lui proposa le petit prince. Je suis tellement triste…
– Je ne puis pas jouer avec toi, dit le renard. Je ne suis pas apprivoisé.
– Ah ! pardon », fit le petit prince.
Mais après réflexion, il ajouta :
« Qu’est-ce que signifie « apprivoiser » ?
– Tu n’es pas d’ici, dit le renard, que cherches-tu ?
– Je cherche les hommes, dit le petit prince. Qu’est-ce que signifie « apprivoiser » ?
– Les hommes, dit le renard, ils ont des fusils et ils chassent. C’est bien gênant ! Ils élèvent aussi des poules. C’est leur seul intérêt. Tu cherches des poules ?
– Non, dit le petit prince. Je cherche des amis. Qu’est-ce que signifie « apprivoiser » ?
– C’est une chose trop oubliée, dit le renard. Ça signifie « Créer des liens… »
– Créer des liens ?
– Bien sûr, dit le renard. Tu n’es encore pour moi qu’un petit garçon tout semblable à cent mille petits garçons. Et je n’ai pas besoin de toi. Et tu n’as pas besoin de moi non plus. Je ne suis pour toi qu’un renard semblable à cent mille renards. Mais, si tu m’apprivoises, nous aurons besoin l’un de l’autre. Tu seras pour moi unique au monde. Je serai pour toi unique au monde…
– Je commence à comprendre, dit le petit prince. Il y a une fleur… je crois qu’elle m’a apprivoisé…
– C’est possible, dit le renard. On voit sur la Terre toutes sortes de choses…
Elon Musk : welke drie mogelijke acties hij verwacht als werknemers directe orders van hem krijgen
In 2021 lekte een e-mail uit van Musk aan het management waarin hij beschrijft welke drie mogelijke acties hij verwacht als ze directe orders van hem krijgen.
Ten eerste: antwoord met een uitleg waarom hij verkeerd zit, want dat kan wel degelijk gebeuren.
Ten tweede: vraag verduidelijking indien nodig.
Ten derde: voer gewoon uit.
Indien geen van die drie dingen gebeurt, mag je onmiddellijk ontslag nemen.
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