Sywert van Lienden

retired political animal | vader van 👫🏼 I katholiek I muziek I boeken I zeilen I open to work I open to DM

[Sywert van Lienden @Sywert]

Go girls 👍🏻

[Persian girl 🌞🦁 @iPrsian]

This is what the decline of Islam in Iran looks like. The situation is getting so out of control that the mullahs are losing their grip.
They’re trying to pass a law to punish anyone who refuses to wear a hijab in public.Gen Z is running Islam over with a steamroller in Iran.

[Sywert van Lienden @Sywert]

@SanderSassen Ach wat een horror. Veel sterkte gewenst. Opmerkelijk dat er idd niet iemand een rondje meerijdt om te kijken hoe iemand daadwerkelijk rijdt..

[Sywert van Lienden @Sywert]

Als dit een betaalbare schoonheid oplevert met meer reliëf en detaillering: let’s go 🔥

[Salar al Khafaji @salar]

Our robots built this in the city of Almere: curved walls, different types of bricks and bonds, indented text.

Real world deployment, insane complexity, 100% of every brick done by our robots, with another 15 houses to come in the coming weeks.

[Sywert van Lienden @Sywert]

😅

[Politics UK @PolitlcsUK]

🚨 WATCH: Kemi Badenoch responds to John Healey's Budget

"The Prime Minister came in promising to reverse 40 years of neoliberalism. Instead, we got 4p off gherkins"

#Budget

[Sywert van Lienden @Sywert]

75% afschrijving - goede deal 👍🏻

[Wall St Engine @wallstengine]

A 300-rack AI supercomputer powered by 9,600 Nvidia A100 GPUs is listed on eBay for $59.7M.

That’s 1,200 GPU compute servers with 384TB of combined GPU memory and roughly 1.4 petabytes of system RAM.

Each compute server connects eight A100 GPUs through $NVDA's NVSwitch technology.

More than six years after A100 launched, The seller is offering these systems refurbished for new AI training and inference deployments.

[University of Austin (UATX) @uaustinorg]

People keep telling us they wish they could audit a UATX class.

We heard you. Every lecture of the Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome with UATX Professor Isabella Reinhardt is now free, filmed live in the classroom.

Pull up a chair, and watch the full series: https://t.co/iwb02yUuTB

[Sywert van Lienden @Sywert]

Anderen veroordelen omdat ze hun klassiekers kennen. Haha wtf

[Mediacourant.nl @Mediacourant]

Matthijs van Nieuwkerk krijgt draai om oren: ‘Elitaire, enge zooi!’ - https://t.co/j49MmsMRGA

[Sywert van Lienden @Sywert]

Het niveau daalt en daalt maar. Echt wel zorgelijk.

[Sywert van Lienden @Sywert]

@AndreasKinnegi1 Top - ga ik lezen 👍🏻

[Sywert van Lienden @Sywert]

Treurig dat het CDA dit laat gebeuren

[NRC @nrc]

Brede steun op rechts voor SGP-motie van afkeuring tegen VVD-minister Hermans rond abortus, irritatie bij coalitie https://t.co/ICH5dA9TND

[Sywert van Lienden @Sywert]

Gift article: https://t.co/c9sBNrecVB Growth in every postcode? What the UK economy really looks like

[Ewald Engelen @ewaldeng]

Impressive production from the FT
https://t.co/s3bFowkH5V

[Sywert van Lienden @Sywert]

Fijne aflevering van Close Up over Monet: https://t.co/LMLLW28YWf

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

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 (https://t.co/IdJ5X7OO12).

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 (https://t.co/deNRNevIwq) - 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 (https://t.co/zTa4RnVOmT), and they turn out far more than anyone else (https://t.co/34V2xzs9jH).

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 (https://t.co/d2RPAqLJGR).

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 (https://t.co/WrJOhpWqYR), 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.

[Sywert van Lienden @Sywert]

Leestip: https://t.co/OVxI3aM5lk

[Luis Garicano 🇪🇺🇺🇦 @lugaricano]

Outstanding, thought-provoking, beautifully written piece by @nfergus, @lisaklaassen @ericschmidt on AI as an imperial technology. "AI also has an inherent center-periphery structure. Control of frontier AI and its rewards are concentrated in a handful of firms in China and the United States. Everyone else is a
dependent user, whether a government running public services on a model it cannot inspect
or a firm building products on an interface that can be repriced or withdrawn overnight."
https://t.co/yM437MPMH2

[Matt Strickland @MattForVA]

Kanye is actually sharp. He knew before all of us.

[Sywert van Lienden @Sywert]

Gecorrigeerd voor de hoeveelheid muesli die ze eten is er echter niks aan de hand. Zegt Leo Lucassen.

[GeenStijl @geenstijl]

The Economist: 'Seksuele misdaden VK buitenproportioneel gepleegd door immigranten' https://t.co/UBvbAU3gv8

[Sywert van Lienden @Sywert]

Er worden ca. 200 'influencers' actief ingehuurd door de Rijksoverheid om burgers te beïnvloeden met campagnes. Namen als Vic Clee, Apson, meester Hidde, Qucee, Charbon, en Pieter Valley treden vaak namens de overheid op. https://t.co/Ll0LCxewWy

[Sywert van Lienden @Sywert]

@Sid_Lukkassen Ach, wat is het verschil met communisten en kapitalisten binnen één sociale orde? Feministen en gereformeerden? Moslims en vrijdenkers? We have been here many times before.

[Sywert van Lienden @Sywert]

@IJzendoornV @GBNEWS Dat dit nog altijd niet gedaan was, verbaasde mij tbh. Ligt zo voor de hand.

[Sywert van Lienden @Sywert]

Bam!

[News to Remember @allchronology]

I believe this will be considered one of the most important videos in US history from this time.