Michael Katz

Tree hugging Canadian, BA MBA, over 50 years in the Middle East & Asia (living & working in the GCC & Asia expediting projects

[Brad @BradleyKellard]

Nassim Nicholas Taleb walked into Google and explained what Antifragility is and how the world actually works:

1. The opposite of fragile is not robust. That is the first mistake almost everyone makes. Robust means something does not care about volatility. The true opposite of fragile is something that actually benefits from disorder, volatility, and stress. He calls it antifragile.

2. If you are shipping something fragile you write handle with care on the box. The true opposite of that package would have please mishandle written on it. Something antifragile wants to be mishandled. It gets stronger from it.

3. Fragility is always about nonlinear harm. Jumping ten meters kills you. Jumping ten centimeters a hundred times does not. The harm accelerates disproportionately with size. That acceleration is the mathematical signature of fragility and it can be measured precisely.

4. Anything that has survived long enough to exist today must have this property. If harm were linear you would be destroyed just walking to the office. Everything that persists is built so that small stressors barely touch it but large unexpected shocks destroy it.

5. Large size creates fragility automatically. A hundred million pound project in the UK had thirty percent more cost overruns than a five million pound project doing the same thing. The bigger the stone the more the harm. Size and fragility are inseparable.

6. Governments and institutions make the same mistake constantly. They chase perfect stability and call it good management. But something organic requires variability to survive. Greenspan tried to eliminate all economic volatility. He called it the Great Moderation. What he actually did was allow hidden risk to accumulate invisibly until it exploded all at once.

7. Small forest fires clean out flammable material and prevent catastrophic ones. By eliminating small fires you guarantee a massive one eventually. The same principle applies to economies, banks, and any complex system. Suppressing volatility does not remove risk. It stores it.

8. The only way to make something genuinely robust is to embrace bipolar strategies rather than medium ones. Eighty percent of your portfolio in something safe and twenty percent in something highly speculative is more robust than putting everything in medium risk. The average of extremes beats the mediocre middle.

9. Everything organic communicates with its environment through stressors. Your body needs the gym. Your bones need stress. Your immune system needs exposure. Depriving any living system of the stressors it needs does not protect it. It weakens it invisibly.

10. What does not kill me makes others stronger is closer to the truth than what does not kill me makes me stronger. When a system gets stronger under stress it is usually because the weaker components were destroyed, not because the survivors individually improved. The system improves through the death of its fragile parts.

11. Trial and error is not the opposite of knowledge. It is a form of knowledge with a convex payoff. You lose little when you are wrong and gain enormously when you are right. That asymmetry is what makes tinkering more powerful than theoretical planning in unpredictable environments.

12. Most of what we attribute to theoretical knowledge actually came from tinkering that was dressed up afterward as having been scientifically planned. The Romans built extraordinary things for centuries without ever having heard of Euclidean geometry. Technology routinely precedes the science that supposedly explains it.

13. The fragilista is Taleb's name for the person who denies antifragility and causes damage through that denial. Bureaucrats, central planners, academics, and policy makers who overstabilize systems from the top down are fragilistas. They remove the volatility that systems need and call it improvement.

14. Seneca, the wealthiest man in the ancient world, trained himself every day to wake up as if he had lost everything. He would deliberately live as if he were on a shipwreck to ensure he always had more upside than downside. Having more to gain than to lose from random events is the definition of antifragility in personal life.

15. In medicine, convexity matters more than people realize. If you are very ill the potential benefit of treatment vastly outweighs the risk, so you should see ten doctors not one. If you are mildly ill the risks of intervention almost certainly outweigh the modest benefits. The problem is that mildly ill patients are five times more numerous than severely ill ones, which is exactly who pharmaceutical companies focus on.

16. Removing something unnatural from your life has almost no side effects. Adding something artificial always has multiplicative hidden effects. In complex systems less is almost always more. The via negativa, improving by subtraction rather than addition, is consistently underestimated.

17. The real ethical crisis of modern times is that the people making decisions do not bear the consequences of those decisions. Bankers take the upside. Society takes the downside. Economists give broken advice and face no consequences when it fails. Nothing improves in any field where the people who are wrong are not harmed by being wrong.

18. Time is the ultimate detector of fragility. Whatever is fragile will eventually be broken by time. Whatever has survived for a long time has demonstrated antifragility and will likely survive longer still. A book that has been read for three thousand years will probably be read for three thousand more. A technology that is forty years old has at least forty more years ahead of it.

19. The only way to know you are alive and not a machine is that you benefit from variability. If you like variation and gain from disorder you are antifragile. If you require peace and predictability to function you are fragile. It is as simple and as profound as that.

Before you go, can we stay in touch?

I'd love to share one email with you every Sunday that'll challenge how you think about business, money and freedom.

Stay in touch here:
https://t.co/VMTlilB7aq

[Michael Katz @MKAK88]

@tilbury6 @IRanMediaco Yes multiple!!

[Iran News 24 @IRanMediaco]

🇮🇷The Islamic Revolutionary Guards:

“In response to American aggression, the naval and air forces of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps executed a joint operation utilizing missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles. This operation targeted 85 significant American military sites, including Salman Port, the headquarters of the U.S. Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, and Ali Al-Salem Air Base in Kuwait. Furthermore, an American MQ-9 unmanned aerial vehicle attempting to intervene in the operation was shot down.”

[Chaya Eitan @ChayaEitan]

He co-owned Macy’s and could have kept every dollar. Instead, Nathan Straus gave two-thirds of his fortune to a country that didn't even exist yet.
​An American New Yorker, Straus visited Jerusalem in 1904, canceled the rest of his Mediterranean tour, and dedicated his life to the Land of Israel.
​He poured his wealth into:
​Soup kitchens feeding hundreds daily in the Old City.
​Health stations to fight malaria and trachoma.
​A major Jerusalem health center with a cornerstone carved in English, Hebrew, and Arabic—built "for the benefit of all inhabitants."
​In 1912, he was in Palestine with his brother Isidor. Nathan wanted to stay longer, but an impatient Isidor sailed home early on a ship called the Titanic. Isidor never made it back.
​Devastated, Nathan spent the rest of his days giving, famously saying: “Give at death, it is lead. Give in sickness, it is silver. Give in health, it is gold.”
​Today, a thriving coastal city of 250,000 people stands in Israel, built on the land he bet on decades before it was a state.
​It’s called Netanya. Named for Natan.

[Faith Under Pressure @DeenRatio]

Muslims often say "If Boko Haram and jihadists are Muslims, why are they killing other Muslims?"

The question assumes that Muslims killing Muslims is something unusual but history says otherwise.

The third caliph, Uthman, was murdered by fellow Muslims during the Siege of Uthman. Some reports even state he was reading the Quran when he was killed.

After Uthman's death, Ali became caliph. Then Muslims split and went to war against each other.

Aisha, the widow of Muhammad, led an army against Ali in the Battle of the Camel. Thousands of Muslims died fighting fellow Muslims.

Then came the Battle of Siffin, where Ali and Muawiya's Muslim armies fought each other.

Not long after, Ali himself was assassinated by a Muslim from the Kharijite movement. The bloodshed did not end there.

Ali's son, Husayn, was killed by Muslim forces at Karbala. His family members and companions were also killed. Today, Muslims still mourn that event nearly 1,400 years later.

The Umayyads fought other Muslims. The Abbasids overthrew the Umayyads and slaughtered many of them. Muslim rulers, dynasties, sects, and movements spent centuries fighting, imprisoning, and killing one another.

So when people ask why Boko Haram kills Muslims, the real question is:

Why are people pretending this is something new?

[Raph Israël @raphlesioniste2]

🔴 Liban 🇱🇧 | Un opposant chiite au Hezbollah affirme que Jérusalem appartient historiquement au peuple juif.

Lors d’une émission de télévision au Liban, Hajj Hassan Muhammad, chef du Mouvement chiite libre, déclare :

➡️ « Nous sommes des Phéniciens, pas des Arabes. »
➡️ « Jérusalem et Bethléem appartiennent avant tout au peuple juif. »
➡️ « Les musulmans ont envahi Jérusalem. »

Une prise de position rarissime dans le monde arabe, à contre-courant du narratif mensonger dominant.

L’Histoire est plus tenace que les mensonges.
#Liban #Israël #Jérusalem #Hezbollah

[Keren 🇮🇱 @AbitbolKer8544]

History isn't just a narrative; it's in the documents.
In April 1948, a pivotal moment in Haifa changed the course of the Middle East. While the dominant narrative claims the Arab population was driven out by force, declassified British intelligence and historical newspapers reveal a completely different reality.
The evidence is clear: The Jewish leadership begged the Arab population to stay, but their own leaders reiected the truce and ordered a mass evacuation, turning tens of thousands into refugees overnight due to a catastrophic strategic mistake.
Don't just believe the stories--look at the sources.
#israel #gaza

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Taiwan solved tax evasion in 1951 with a trick so cheap it should embarrass every tax authority on the planet.

The problem was an all-cash economy full of small shops. A merchant pockets the cash, skips the receipt, and the sale never existed. Auditors can't catch what was never recorded, and hiring enough of them to watch every noodle stand costs more than the missing tax.

So finance chief Ren Xianqun flipped the incentive. Print a lottery number on every receipt. Draw winners every two months on live TV. Top prize today: NT$10 million, about $310K.

Suddenly the customer and the shopkeeper want opposite things. The merchant wants the sale off the books. The customer wants the ticket. And there are millions more customers than merchants. Every transaction now carries a built-in witness demanding the paper trail.

Year one, reported tax revenue jumped 75%, from NT$29 million to NT$51 million. Seventy-five years later, roughly 70% of Taiwanese still play. Convenience stores redeem the smallest NT$200 prizes at the register, so even a coffee receipt feels like a scratch card.

The elegant part is what the audit force costs. The prize pool runs about NT$7 billion a year, roughly $20 million. In exchange, the government gets 23 million unpaid auditors working every checkout line in the country, forever. No inspector general on earth delivers that coverage at that price.

Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Slovakia all copied it. The most effective compliance tool ever built looks like a game, and that's exactly why it works.

[Anatoli Kopadze @AnatoliKopadze]

Godfather of AI: "If you sleep well tonight, you may not have understood this lecture."

This 47-minute lecture is the best thing I've seen about AI in the last few months.

Hinton built the neural networks behind every AI alive, then quit Google to warn us it's already ahead of us on most cognitive tasks.

Despite that, most people open Claude, type one thing, close the tab and think they're using AI, but they're using maybe 10%.

I turned his talk into 17 Claude features 99% of users never find.

Watch the lecture, then read the article below.

[Captain Allen @CptAllenHistory]

TOP SECRET 1942: The Nazis official written pact with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem — “Yes to Arab independence… and YES to the DESTRUCTION of the Jewish National Home in Palestine.”

This is not hearsay or interpretation. This is the actual English version of a top-secret letter from Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, dated Berlin, April 28, 1942, sent on behalf of both Germany and Italy to Amin al-Husseini.

“Germany is consequently ready to give all her support … for the destruction of the Jewish National Home in Palestine.”

The letter frames it as part of the fight against their “common enemy” until “victory is achieved,” and orders it kept “absolutely secret” until Berlin decided otherwise. It was written while Rommel’s Afrika Korps was advancing toward Mandate Palestine where the Nazis planned to extend the Holocaust.

History did not begin in 1948. The organized Nazi-Arab rejection of Jewish sovereignty and active collaboration in the Final Solution was already on paper in 1942.

The archives don’t lie. Read it. Share it. Never let anyone bury it.

[Trump Girl 🇺🇲🦅🇺🇲 @MAGA__Patriot]

I had no idea..

"This man was born in 1809.
In 1816, at age 7, he was forced to work because his family was expelled.
In 1818, he lost his mother.
In 1828, he lost his sister.
In 1831, he opened his first business and went bankrupt.
In 1832, he stood in the legislative elections and lost.
In 1833, he borrowed money to open another business and went bankrupt again.
In 1835, he met a wonderful woman. He falls in love with her, they get engaged, and she dies.
In 1836, he entered a dark period of his life: deep depression.
He remains bedridden for 6 consecutive months. But he gets up.
He gets up and in that same year of 1836 he runs in the legislative elections and loses again.
In 1840 he presented himself as an elector; he loses.
In 1842, he met the woman he would end his life with.
They fall in love, get engaged, get married and she gives him 4 children and they lose 3 (three).
In 1843, he appeared at the congresses and lost.
In 1845, he appeared again at the congresses and lost again.
In 1850, his son died.
In 1854, he ran for the Senate and lost.
In 1856, he ran for Vice President, he didn't even have 100 votes.
In '58, he ran again for the Senate and lost again.

And in 1860 ABRAHAM LINCOLN was elected President of the United States of America 🇺🇸.
He was elected for two exceptional terms (he was assassinated in beginning of the second term.) He was one of the most respected and impactful Presidents in the history of the United States 🇺🇸.

It's important to tell this story of perseverance because we see the hero, but we don't see the backstage of the afflictions. "

Wow. ...
I think this is a great example of Never Never Never Give Up! 🇺🇸🇺🇸

[Duncan McLean @DuncanMcLean777]

@MosabHasanYOSEF

[𝔉🅰𝒏 Karoline Leavitt @WHLeavitt]

In Pakistan, 32-year-old Abdul Mohamed married 10-year-old Priya — now pregnant — after paying her father just $580. This barbaric child marriage is legal under Sharia law.

Islam is incompatible with all other civilization.

Ban Islamists and deport them all?

A. Yes
B. No

[Vivid.🇮🇱 @VividProwess]

Why is there an underground terror tunnel under a hospital in Gaza?

This is the European Hospital in Gaza, where the IDF found a massive underground terror tunnel belonging to Hamas.

Show me one place on Earth besides Gaza that has terror tunnels under hospitals.

[Hosna ⚖️ בניטה @DOGEQEEN]

In Africa, black Christian kids as young as 4 years old are being sold inside bags as slaves by Muslim slave traders.
The media, progressives, Palestinian protesters, the UN, and even the Pope remain silent.
Why is everyone silent on this?

[Bybit @Bybit_Official]

Your AI, with its own account. Here's how it works 💪
Tap the video and hit **Try Now** to set yours up.

[Rahul Kumar @RahulKu22532718]

My friend makes $1.2 million a year as an Anthropic engineer.

I asked him how he learned prompting so well. He sent me a video that was never supposed to get out. Their core team's prompting playbook.

You won’t find anything better about prompting than this 30 minutes video.

I watched it last night. Halfway through, I realized I've been using Claude completely wrong for two years.

Watch it, then read the article below.

[Maarten Boudry @mboudry]

"This means that almost all Western media outlets have unflinchingly disseminated Hamas propaganda to their tens of millions of viewers, while disregarding Israeli figures almost entirely. The world’s journalists have taken the word of jihadi butchers above the evidence-based testimony of a friendly democracy and shared this narrative with the world.
It is no exaggeration to say that this comprises one of the gravest failures of journalistic scepticism in modern times. The uncomfortable truth is that we have been living through the most intense age of propaganda since Soviet times, made only more appalling by the fact that it has been spread voluntarily within supposedly free societies."
https://t.co/J3Lme482HL

[Nei Giglio🇧🇷🍀🇧🇷 @neideboaski]

Clint Eastwood !!!! ❤️

Aos 96 anos, Clint Eastwood quebrou nossas ilusões sobre envelhecimento. Não ofereceu consolo sobre anos dourados cheios de serenidade. Pintou a verdade: "A luz machuca os olhos. Respirar pode ser um trabalho duro. O teu corpo já não está a cooperar. Cada passo requer estratégia."
Mas o verdadeiro peso da velhice não é físico. É emocional. Ao cruzar os anos 90, seu círculo social diminui. A maioria das pessoas que te conheceram quando eras jovem desapareceram. O telefone parou de tocar. O ritmo dos dias abranda. A pílula mais amarga não é a dor. É a ausência de alguém que queira te ouvir.
Eastwood explicou por que os idosos repetem histórias. Não é para me gabar. É para se ancorar a uma realidade onde eles eram ativos, amados e relevantes. "Você se encontra repetindo histórias, adicionando detalhes, não para convencer ninguém, mas para sentir que você ainda está conectado a algo", disse. "Você tenta transmitir coisas aos jovens, mesmo quando vê o tédio nos olhos deles".
Vivemos em uma cultura que trata a longevidade como um troféu, mas ignora a solidão que a acompanha. Louvamos o rápido e o brilhante. Não deixamos espaço para o ritmo lento dos idosos.
Clint Eastwood é um gigante do cinema, mas suas palavras falam por cada idoso de 90 anos. São bibliotecas vivas da nossa história. Quando os ouvimos, algo mágico acontece. Fechamos o fosso entre gerações. Rugas não são sinais de envelhecimento. São mapas de uma vida plenamente vivida. E é um privilégio ouvir sua viagem.

[Olena Rohoza @OlenaRohoza]

🧐🫂This is Judge Julia Sebutinde of Uganda, the first African woman to serve on the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
During the hearings on accusations that Israel committed genocide in Gaza, she voted against all of them.
Her expression seems to say: “Here in Africa, we know very well what genocide looks like. And this? You call this genocide? Are you out of your minds?”