I'm coming from France, from Europe — and for god's sake, don't do that.
I've already watched this movie. I know exactly how it ends. Let me run the tape for you.
We started at the same line. In 2008 the EU economy was actually bigger than the US — about 110% of American GDP. By 2023 it was down to 67%. Over that window the US grew 87%. Europe grew 13.5%.
Per capita it's uglier. European income was ~76% of American income in 2008. Today it's 50%. France — Descartes, the Concorde, the nuclear program — now has a GDP per capita below Arkansas, the 48th poorest US state. Germany sits around Oklahoma. Of the 50 largest tech companies on Earth, four are European. Four. No Nvidia, no Google, no SpaceX, no OpenAI. What we built instead is a regulator that writes a 383-page report explaining why we have no champions — and then implements 10% of its own recommendations.
This isn't bad luck. It's a system working exactly as designed.
Hayek explained the mechanism in 1944 and Europe didn't listen. The Road to Serfdom isn't a slogan, it's a machine. You start with the nicest intentions — fairness, equality, security. To deliver them the state has to plan. To plan, it has to override prices, contracts, individual choice. And when the plan fails — it always fails, because no central planner holds the knowledge that millions of free actors hold — the lesson is never "planning was the error." The lesson is "we didn't plan hard enough." So it takes more power. Then more. Every failure becomes the alibi for the next seizure. Socialism never arrives at its destination. It just never stops paving the road — and the road only goes one place.
Europe didn't go full Soviet. It went soft. It chose comfort over greatness, redistribution over creation, safety over risk — and the result is a continent that is rich, gorgeous, and quietly dying. Managed decline with excellent cheese. The wealthiest museum on Earth.
Now the part Americans need to hear, because you think you're immune. You're not.
Peter Thiel keeps warning about the Antichrist, and people imagine a movie villain. Wrong. The Antichrist never arrives promising war and tyranny. He arrives promising peace and safety. He's the universal manager who will protect you from every risk — climate, inequality, AI, each other — in exchange for one small thing: that nobody is ever again permitted to do anything new, anything dangerous, anything great. He's one-world stagnation enforced by fear. The final committee.
Socialism is his vehicle. It's the ideology that says risk is theft, that excellence is unfair, that the cure for every problem is more central control. It's the perfect on-ramp to a planet-wide regime of safety and stasis.
And here are the stakes nobody says out loud: America is the last engine. The frontier of compute, the people still trying to make us multi-planetary, the builders who'd rather escape the trap than manage it — almost all American. The product of the one place left on Earth that still rewards builders over bureaucrats. If America picks the European path, there is no second America to bail the species out. No frontier left. The engine of human progress switches off — not in a century, in a few years.
Why am I this certain? Because socialism doesn't merely slow you down. It rots everything it touches. It rots the economy — see the numbers. It rots incentives: punish building and reward grievance, and your best people stop building. It rots the culture: a society that resents winners eventually produces none. It rots the spirit: you trade the dignity of agency for the comfort of dependence and you call it progress.
I'm not throwing rocks from the outside. I'm writing from inside the wreckage, watching the most talented continent in human history vote, year after year, for its own anesthesia.
America — you are the control group. You're the thing the rest of us point to when we need to remember what's still possible. Do not become us.
For god's sake. Don't do that.
Worried about “space congestion” with satellite megaconstellations? Let’s put 1 million satellites in perspective.
If you evenly spread 1 million satellites in a typical LEO shell (~550 km altitude), each one gets ~600,000 km² of orbital sphere area.
That’s like the size of France + Spain + Germany… per satellite. 🚀
Reverse it to Earth: At that same super-low density on our planet’s surface (510 million km²), you’d only need ~850,000 people total worldwide.
Each person would have their own ~500,000–600,000 km² territory — bigger than many countries.
3/ For context: Earth has 8.3 billion people right now.
Satellites are incredibly sparse up there, even at large numbers. Real constellations use smart shells, planes, and tracking to avoid issues.
Space is vast. Congestion is real in popular orbits, but perspective helps. Thoughts?
#Space #Satellites #Starlink
@sethjlevy This is what most people don't understand. In addition, Iran selling unsanctioned oil plus the desire for gulf nations to recapture lost revenue will lead to a glut.