Francesco

Part-time urban cyclist, proud monkey descendant. Geography, typography, open source. VP Tech @paradigmpubserv | he/him | my opinions (evidence based).

[Swann ☭⚛♬ @Zenone44630814]

Sorry the only scientific way is the Trieste division:

Below Trieste Parallel: Southern Europe

East of Trieste-Rome line and Trieste-Amsterdam line: Eastern Europe

West of Trieste-Rome line and Trieste-Amsterdam line: Western Europe

[Francesco @fradeve]

I'd probably add "austerity" and "brain drain".
Britain starts from _very_ different premises, but it's worth noting that every mistake compounds over the years.

It's never too late to adjust the trajectory

[Marcos Agustín @marcosagusstinn]

Italy is the clearest example of how a rich country can slowly destroy itself through decades of bad management.

Since the late 1990s, Italy has had almost zero productivity growth.

Real wages have stagnated. And public debt is now around 137% of GDP, projected to move toward 139% overtaking Greece as the highest in the eurozone.

It is the result of 25 years of

1. Low innovation and very low adoption of new technologies
2. Family and insider succession in many companies, weakening meritocracy
3. Underdeveloped VC industry, startup ecosystem and R&D base
4. Political capture by lobbies and organised crime
5. Extreme administrative, judicial and business bureaucracy
6. Political fragmentation
7. Demographic collapse

No country can remain rich forever if productivity does not grow, debt keeps rising and politics only manages decline instead of reversing it.

[Ali Spittel @ASpittel]

cron jobs are going through the most epic rebrand

[Francesco @fradeve]

@RobertKwolek Twickenham!

[Paolo Mossetti @paolomossetti]

1996 issue of the magazine Venerdì, featuring a cover story on Umberto Eco and his relationship with the Internet:

“The Internet is the latest craze. But how many people really know how to ‘navigate’? In Bologna they will teach it. The world’s most famous semiotician explains the project.”

“Without intervention by public administrations, these [Internet] media will divide society: a proletariat deprived of information,which must make do with television; a small bourgeoisie of passive users; and a nomenklatura of privileged people who will fully exploit interactive communication.
This is democratic problem to be solved: creating a mass nomenklatura…”

[via @Ivan200001]

[Francesco @fradeve]

@2147mill That's Olympia, right?

[Francesco @fradeve]

@Antonio_Giarr Ho riso più del necessario, ma sempre entro i limiti di legge

[Francesco @fradeve]

@AlexanderEhmann @JamesHenryChard Well done, and definitely exciting!
However without proper cycling infrastructure, most people will still feel too unsafe to make cycling their preferred mode of transport.
Parents and kids in Richmond cycle on pavements because there's really no safe place for them on the street

[Navalism @NavalismHQ]

"Calm the stomach. Move the body. Rest the mind."

@naval

[Todd Saunders @toddsaunders]

The token cost to build a production feature is now lower than the meeting cost to discuss building that feature.

Let me rephrase.

It is literally cheaper to build the thing and see if it works than to have a 30 minute planning meeting about whether you should build it.

It’s wild when you think about it.

This completely inverts how you should run a software organization. The planning layer becomes the bottleneck because the building layer is essentially free. The cost of code has dropped to essentially 0.

The rational response is to eliminate planning for anything that can be tested empirically. Don’t debate whether a feature will work.

Just build it in 2 hours, measure it with a group of customers, and then decide to kill or keep it.

I saw a startup operating this way and their build velocity is up 20x. Decision quality is up because every decision is informed by a real prototype, not a slide deck and an expensive meeting.

We went from “move fast and break things” to “move fast and build everything.”

The planning industrial complex is dead.

Thank god.

[Tom Forth @thomasforth]

Londonmaxxing is a good meme with a strong foundation. Business R&D in London -- especially in digital, data, tech, AI -- has exploded since 2012 on the back of decades of high public sector spending on R&D and enormous investments in great infrastructure. https://t.co/0c2o7FaDyv

[Akin Unver @AkinUnver]

My new obsession: Ottoman-era data visualizations from Cerîde-i Adliyye, “The Justice Gazette,” a Ministry of Justice publication printed in Türkiye in the mid-1920s https://t.co/XfFmJBryJI

[Time Preference @TimePreference_]

the wealth gap isn't widening because of capitalism

it's widening because asset owners benefit from monetary expansion while wage earners suffer from currency debasement

the cantillon effect isn't a market failure, it's a policy feature

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

“The purpose of knowledge is action, not knowledge.”

— Aristotle

[Francesco @fradeve]

You are not really #londonmaxxing until you visit The Counting House in the City for a Sunday pint 😉

[England Rugby @EnglandRugby]

Defeat in Rome.

#GuinnessM6N | #ITAvENG

[Mehdi (e/λ) @BetterCallMedhi]

this right here is the reason China stays quiet on Iran

everyone losing their mind asking where is Beijing while the US & Israel are bombing a major chinese energy partner and the answer is so brutal in its simplicity that most analysts miss it completely, the empire is eating itself alive and China is already building the replacementt

America just dragged the entire Middle East into a war for Israel & now Saudi arabia, UAE, kuwait & qatar are sitting in a room discussing pulling out of US contracts & canceling investment commitments

the Gulf states, the literal foundation of the petrodollar, the system that has kept the US dollar as world reserve currency since 1974 actively discussing the exit and Beijing did absolutely nothing to make that happen…Washington did it to itself

but here's what people miss: china saw this coming years ago and already laid the tracks, literally the belt & road Initiative has quietly wired 150 countries into c’hinese infrastructure, ports, railways, highways, fiber optic cables, power grids…while the western media barely covered it

Saudi Arabia started selling oil to China in yuan in 2023, that alone should have been front page news for a month, the BRICS just expanded to include Saudi arabia UAE and Iran in the samea bloc, China built CIPS as a direct alternative to SWIFT so the entire non western world can settle trade without ever touching the dollar, every single one of these moves was made before a single bomb fell on Iran

and then there's Africa…the youngest continent on earth, median age 19, projected to reach 2.5 billion people by 2050, the largest workforce the planet has ever seen & China understood 20y ago that whoever builds Africa's infrastructure owns the 21st century, while the US was spending 4 trillion dollars destroying Iraq & Afghanistan China was building railways in Kenya, dams in Ethiopia, ports in Djibouti, highways in Nigeria, tech hubs in Rwanda, stadiums, hospitals, government buildings, telecom networks powered by Huawei across the entire continent.. & they did it without firing a single bullet, no regime change, no sanctions, no lectures on democracy, just concrete steel, fiber optic and longterm contracts

so when people ask why China stays silent on Iran the answer is that silence is the strategy, every war America fights for Israel costs trillions, destabilizes energy markets, alienates Gulf partners and pushes the entire Global South closer to a system Beijing spent two decades building

the gulf states pivoting right now has zero to do with ideology, Washington turned their entire neighborhood into a warzone to serve Tel Aviv's regional strategy & then asked them to keep buying treasury bonds with a straight face….the math just stopped working and when the math stops working loyalty stops too

beijing's silencee on Iran is the most patient & most devastating move on the board, China is watching america dismantle its own hegemony in real time while quietly inheriting every alliance washington burns, it just has to keep building & keep quiet

Napoleon said nver interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake, Xi turned that into a 50y doctrine & right now it's paying off faster than even beijing expected

[Francesco @fradeve]

Summarising his approach in 2014, Prokopiou said: “If you are not a risk-taker, you are not in shipping. If you don’t want the risks, you buy US bonds.”

https://t.co/7HcRcxCAS9

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

Umberto Eco, who owned 50,000 books, had this to say about home libraries:

“It is foolish to think that you have to read all the books you buy, as it is foolish to criticize those who buy more books than they will ever be able to read. It would be like saying that you should use all the cutlery or glasses or screwdrivers or drill bits you bought before buying new ones.

“There are things in life that we need to always have plenty of supplies, even if we will only use a small portion.

“If, for example, we consider books as medicine, we understand that it is good to have many at home rather than a few: when you want to feel better, then you go to the ‘medicine closet’ and choose a book. Not a random one, but the right book for that moment. That’s why you should always have a nutrition choice!

“Those who buy only one book, read only that one and then get rid of it. They simply apply the consumer mentality to books, that is, they consider them a consumer product, a good. Those who love books know that a book is anything but a commodity.”

[Francesco @fradeve]

@tropianhs Italy?