Fifty years ago today, Air France Captain Michel Bacos showed the world what true moral courage looks like.
When Flight 139 was hijacked by Palestinian and German terrorists and flown to Entebbe, the non-Jewish passengers were eventually released. Bacos and his crew were also offered their freedom.
However, Bacos, who also served in the French army under DeGaulle, refused to leave his Jewish passengers. All his crew also refused, without exception.
Instead, they chose to remain alongside the 94 Jewish hostages, fully aware of the danger they faced. As Bacos later said, abandoning his passengers was simply "unimaginable."
Days later, they were freed in the legendary Israeli rescue mission, Operation Entebbe, led by Yoni Netanyahu, who would die in the battle.
For his extraordinary courage, Bacos was honoured by both France and Israel. Yet his greatest legacy was not the medals he received, but the example he set: that decency, duty and humanity must never yield to terror or antisemitism.
Michel Bacos was a true hero. May his life, his courage and his memory forever be a blessing and an inspiration.
The post-scarcity era is as foolish an idea as perpetuum mobile was to the Middle Ages.
Heatwave in Europe. Paris Charles de Gaulle terminal. Starbucks. The handler at the counter shouts to the dehydrated passengers: “We ran out of ice!” QED.
Here in old twit of mine: https://t.co/GUBaTCW5Nr
Elon Musk just described the end of money.
Not a recession. Not a policy shift.
The complete erasure of scarcity from human civilization.
Musk: “If you’ve got an AI robotics economy that is anywhere close to a million times the size of the current Earth economy, literally any need you possibly want can be met. If you can think of it, you can have it.”
A million times.
Global GDP sits at roughly $100 trillion. Multiply that by a million and you get a number that stops being economics and becomes something closer to physics.
Every price falls to zero. Every dollar in every account on Earth becomes an artifact of a species that used to need things.
Musk: “I think things will just be free in the future.”
Ten words. Possibly the most radical economic statement any living person has ever made.
Money is not just currency. Money is the language civilizations invented to negotiate survival. It is how humanity decides who eats, who gets shelter, who receives medicine, who gets to dream.
Remove that language and you do not reform the economy.
You dissolve the foundation every human system was built on.
Government exists to distribute scarcity. Politics is the fight over who gets what. Law is the codification of ownership. War is what happens when the negotiation collapses.
Every one of those systems stands on the same invisible assumption.
There is not enough.
Musk is saying there will be. For everyone. For everything. Permanently.
Musk: “Anyone could have a trip to Saturn. It won’t be just a few people. If you want it, you can have it.”
He referenced Iain Banks and the Culture series. That reference landed harder than most people realized.
Banks did not just imagine a post-scarcity civilization. He spent an entire body of work examining the one thing abundance could never provide.
Purpose.
The Culture had unlimited energy. Unlimited material. Ships the size of worlds. Lives measured in centuries.
And the question running beneath every novel was always the same.
What do you do when there is nothing left to need?
Banks understood something at the center of this entire conversation.
Scarcity is not just an obstacle. It is the engine behind every meaningful thing humans have ever built.
Every cathedral was raised by hands that were hungry. Every symphony was composed by a mind trying to outrun something. Every invention, every company, every act of defiance in the entire human record grew from the same soil.
The space between what someone had and what they wanted.
That space is where all of human meaning lives.
Wanting is not a flaw in the design. It is the design. It is the gravity that holds identity together. The reason consciousness feels like it has weight.
Musk is not just building toward abundance.
He is steering the species toward the deepest question it has ever had to face.
Not whether we can build a world where no one needs anything.
Whether we can still recognize ourselves inside it.
The post-scarcity era is as foolish an idea as perpetuum mobile was to the Middle Ages. Heatwave in Europe. Paris Charles de Gaulle terminal. Starbucks. The handler at the counter shouts to the dehydrated passengers: “We ran out of ice!” QED.
Here in old twit of mine: https://t.co/GUBaTCW5Nr
Reminder:
Phantom trinity of ideas occupying minds of tech-utopians and cynical politicians - r not merely false and in fact self-contradictory - but can be shown also to be logically equivalent:
1. "End of Scarcity"
2. Singularity: machines transcend humans
3. Perpetuum Mobile
@muskosophy Apropos the ridicules “poverty is [merely] an engineering problem” - either trivial adds noting to discussion or outright false - here is my old twit on the high bar the rich set to the poor..
https://t.co/826gdRlOZ8
It is not that the moral bar the elites set as a standard to “production floor” people to comply with is too high but that it is rather too damn expensive..😎
Reversal is the logic of forward progress.
A sentence is written forward and understood backward.
The writer moves without knowing the end. The reader begins with the end and reconstructs the path that led there.
Dialectical thinking operates through reversal: the result is taken as given and the process is reconstructed from it.
But the deeper move is simultaneous negation. Not A versus ¬A, nor the succession from one to the other, but the negation of both at once.
When the opposition itself is negated, a new dimension is created. What appeared as two contrary directions now becomes a single structure viewed from a higher level.
Forward and backward cease to be rivals. Reversal joins them.
https://t.co/cifFG2OuCn
No-Gap Theory of Truth
Truth and sense are instantiated simultaneously - the paradox unfolds as a truism (PI &95)
Abstract
Truth is the stopping rule of sense: the point where meaning, after manifesting and passing through its own negation - figure/background reversal, mutually exclusive gestalt readings of the same picture - remains the same picture
This invariance - the fixed point of reversal - is the anchor of the No-Gap..
What I love about football—this is how we call it—is the brotherhood of young men.
On the field, as on the battlefield in darker times, one finds the same bonds of trust, loyalty, and shared purpose. Sport allows us to witness these virtues in their noblest and most peaceful form.
Behind the competition lies something deeper: the brotherhood of men, where respect is earned, character is revealed, and greatness is built together.
What I love about football—this is how we call it—is the brotherhood of young men.
On the field, as on the battlefield in darker times, one finds the same bonds of trust, loyalty, and shared purpose. Sport allows us to witness these virtues in their noblest and most peaceful form.
Behind the competition lies something deeper: the brotherhood of men, where respect is earned, character is revealed, and greatness is built together.
@RealAdiBarLev@ShikmaBressler ואם באמת רוצה להתמודד מציע להקשיב. דרך אגב אמרתי זאת בצורה כזו אחרת כבר עם כניסתי לפוליטיקה ונאומיי בכנסת. נפלתם שולל - לא רק אתם כמובן - אלא גם המרכז שמאל הבטחוני כולו שהעמיד את השרירים המבצעיים להונאה ההיסטורית הזאת. זמן ליקיצה הכרחית
https://t.co/x6RiiJIORg
Teaching Logic in Columbia U. I used as prototype example to Grammatical Proposition the simple "Cost is Value". Students would rebuke with: Air is most Valuable, Yet Cost Nothing! Their wittiness missed on their tacit subscription to Money as the final Value Arbiter #ICantBreath
What a strange statement to utter…
P.S. Or, as one of my poetic friends once commented on the intelligence of AI experts, dismissing it as merely: “Artificial…”
To all my AI friends and AI Utopians:
We design machines that think like us and then we think like these machines.
What a tragedy.
To think after all is to rethink.
#AI#ChatGPT
https://t.co/f8IsVxG7o8
Sam Altman said "a kid born today will never be smarter than AI, ever"
that sounds crazy until you think about it
> we grew up learning how to use computers
> they’ll grow up learning how to think with AI
one day they’ll probably look back at us the same way we look at people who worked without the internet
so maybe "being smart" won’t mean knowing more than the tool
it’ll mean knowing how to think with it better than everyone else
what skill do you think matters most in a world where everyone has AI?