Mauricio

[Salvadoran Pride @SalvadoranPride]

Moving to El Salvador completely changed this dad's outlook on life. It turns out you can stay productive without letting work take over every waking moment. 🇸🇻☀️

[Chris Lakin @chrislakin]

what your risk-aversion costs you

[Gaurav Dalmia @gdalmiathinks]

Over the weekend, had read this beautiful article on marriage.

[Aporia @aporia9n]

The EU is on an irreversible slope, taxes will only get worse from here, whether on income, wealth, death, anything you can think of. And yes, EU exit tax and worldwide taxation will come next

Advice to all EU citizens here, start diversifying now across residence, passports, assets etc. as currently available windows might not stay open forever

Yes i'm attached to France, the UK, European values, have a sense of patriotism etc, but when you have a state deliberately playing against you, you have to act and protect yourself and your family first

Also i'm increasingly drawn to many countries who are welcoming, deliberately pro-business/entrepreneurship, that have more high-agency people like me, that might not share exactly the same European values (for now), but who are happy to have you and serve you (vs the other way around)

[Fiona @FionaSmall]

Stop signs saying Arrêt in Quebec while they say Stop in France

[Fabian S. @fabianschmid_09]

the lone wolf will never make it. used to think that I'm better off alone, turned out I became a lonely loser rotting away at home all the time. you need to socialmaxx.

[Conor Rogers @conorjrogers]

The only way to travel with a group of friends is to have dinners and go out together, and that's it.

If someone doesn't want to wake up for breakfast? That's fine. If three people want to go to the museum of orange juice and five other people want to go to the art museum, split up! People eat breakfast, lunch, and even sleep all at different times.

Use said dinners to discuss what you did that day and what you're planning tomorrow, you can pair up with likeminded people for the next day, or learn from another group member about some secret building or whatever they found and you can go see it the next day. No pressure, no compromises, no Forced Fun, no changing your schedule for others.

Just take everyone's traditional dinner time, average it out, and plan the rest of the trip around that.

[Financial Dystopia @financedystop]

This guy argues that 2–10 PM is actually a better work schedule than the traditional 9–5, and he makes a surprisingly solid case

[Alessandro Palombo @thealepalombo]

The paradox is that the safest countries tend to be the ones that tax the least. I agree that the real problem is not taxes per se, but the correlation to services that many high-taxing countries today seem not to be able to offer in a reliable manner.

How can this be fixed?

[Aporia @aporia9n]

If you’re in your 20s (and ambitious) do everything to move to those 4 cities

Yes people will mog you for paying extortionate rents for such little comfort but who cares, you’re not everyone, you’re on a mission, you’re here for greatness

London/NYC/Paris/SF are basically the golden 4. They’re not just big cities, they’re global sorting machines. People move there from all over the world because they want sth badly enough to accept all the downsides. The guy born in London can be lazy. But the 26yo Frenchman, Indian, American, Italian, Nigerian, Lebanese etc who voluntarily accepts the tiny flat, shit commute and absurd rent to be there has already self-selected pretty hard

And that selection compounds. I felt it instantly moving from my hometown in France to London. Growing up I was always “the ambitious one” in my friend group. Then you arrive in London and suddenly you feel extremely average. Everyone is trying to do sth. Completely changes your reference point for what a normal person can achieve

The other thing is just how many serious games are happening at once. If you know at 22 that you’re going to be a semiconductor engineer forever, maybe there are better specialised places. But most ambitious 24yos have absolutely no clue what game they’ll eventually want to play. In London/NYC/Paris you can accidentally become friends with people in PE, startups, politics, law, media, fashion, pharma, academia etc. Your finance friend dates someone in fashion, their roommate is building a startup, you meet someone in politics at dinner. Suddenly 5 completely different lives feel plausible

That’s insanely valuable when you’re young precisely because you don’t yet know which people / industries / opportunities will matter to your 34yo self

SF is the weird exception because it’s basically one giant concentrated bet on tech/AI. Much narrower than the other 3, but that game is so asymmetric rn that it deserves its spot. If you want to build at the frontier there’s probably no other place where your reference class changes that aggressively

And yh everyone keeps saying the internet made geography irrelevant. Maybe for information. Definitely not for trust/friendship. Anyone can learn from the same people online now, send the same cold DM, follow the same accounts. Much harder to replicate being the guy someone has had 20 dinners with, worked with, travelled with, introduced to friends and randomly bumped into for 5 years

When you’re 24 and nobody knows who tf you are, geography can do a lot of the work for you. You get invited because your colleague knows someone. You end up at a dinner because your friend needs a +1. Someone you met 3 years ago leaves and starts a company. Another moves to NYC. Another becomes a partner somewhere. Most of the ROI is completely impossible to predict upfront

Basically before you have your own gravity, borrow the city’s

At 45, if you’ve built the company / reputation / money / audience / network, you can go live in Tuscany, Mallorca, South of France or wherever and people will come to you. At 24 no one is coming lol. You should probably be where everything is happening

And tbh if you have the ability to move I wouldn’t spend 3 years waiting for the perfect job / apartment / timing. Get the shitty room, accept being poorer for a while, figure it out once you’re there. Your 20s are probably the cheapest years of your life to tolerate inconvenience anyway

You can optimise sqm, weather and comfort later

At 24 I’d rather maximise how many possible lives are available to me

[Magnus Vigsø @MagnusVigso]

Fertilitymaxxing for him and her:

[Alejo @bjs_alejo2]

No sé quién sos, pero sos un héroe

[The Kobeissi Letter @KobeissiLetter]

BREAKING: President Trump's capital gains tax cut discussions include "indexing" capital gains for inflation BEFORE taxes are calculated.

This would mean that taxes would be applied on gains adjusted for inflation.

For example, if you purchased a stock for $100,000 and sold it 5 years later for $200,000.

Under the current system, you would owe capital gains taxes on the full $100,000 gain.

But, if cumulative inflation over those 5 years was 20%, your inflation-adjusted cost basis would rise to $120,000.

This means you would only owe capital gains taxes on the $80,000 REAL gain, rather than the $100,000 nominal gain.

Trump has also suggested exemptions for sales of homes worth $2 million or less from capital gains taxes.

We expect more details soon.

[Aporia @aporia9n]

Be like lions. Hunt, feast, rest, then go hunt again.

No need to be in permanent "grind mode". Just recognise when there is actually sth worth hunting, go absurdly hard for a while, then force yourself to feast/rest/recover instead of immediately chasing another objective.

Ambitious people massively overrate being permanently “on”, all year-round. Opportunities aren’t evenly distributed, so effort probably shouldn’t be either.

If a great person asks you to build sth, a weird market window opens, you find a project you can’t stop thinking about, go completely insane for 2-3 years. Let work swallow most of your life for a while.

But then actually feast. Travel for 6 months, spend a summer doing basically nothing with friends, be around while your kids are young, take the stupidly long lunches, disappear somewhere for a bit, actually enjoy some of what you built. There’s no prize for immediately turning every win into a new source of pressure.

Then if sth genuinely worth hunting appears again, size back up. That’s the part I like about thinking in seasons: you don’t have to grind until 35 and then spend the rest of your life protecting what you accumulated. You can chill for a while and go completely insane again at 40 if the opportunity deserves it.

Feel ambitious people are generally very good at hunting and increasingly terrible at feasting/resting. We somehow turn every feast into preparation for the next hunt.

Probably healthier + more fun to have periods where you go completely insane, then periods where you barely care, than spend 40 years permanently optimising every metric at 70%.

[Aporia @aporia9n]

Also think a lot of the obsession with “balance” comes from copying people’s post-success lifestyle as if it were their pre-success strategy.

People see the 38yo founder who trains every morning, sleeps 8h, spends loads of time with family, travels constantly, angel invests a bit, reads for 2h and somehow only does 4h of “real work” a day.

What they don’t see is the 8 years of 80-hour weeks, the holidays half-spent on a laptop, the dinners constantly cut short, the period where friends basically assumed they’d cancel, the years of one city, one company, one obsession and not much else.

Same with creators, artists, athletes, investors, etc. Once the main bet has paid off, diversification suddenly makes loads of sense. There’s money, reputation, distribution, network, maybe a bunch of equity worth protecting. The marginal return on another 20h of work is lower, while health/family/time suddenly become much more valuable.

So yh of course the portfolio gets more balanced. The mistake is looking at someone’s post-success allocation and assuming that was the strategy that produced the success in the first place.

And successful people often make this worse themselves. They go on podcasts and give advice based on the bottleneck they have now, not necessarily the one they had at 25. The founder with $20m tells you to protect your time. The guy with 3m followers tells you not to obsess over growth. The person who spent a decade working nonstop tells you balance is everything.

Social media makes this even worse cause before, young ambitious people used to read long biographies which explained the struggle, the boring years, the long path before the success. You saw the sequencing. Now you open Instagram/TikTok and basically only see the post-success lifestyle of those founders (morning workout, nice house, family lunch, podcast, angel investing, etc.) Nobody posts: “year 6 of doing the exact same thing in a small office.”

The balanced life is what you can buy with the proceeds of an earlier overallocation (ie dividends). Don't chase the post-liquidity lifestyle pre-liquidity.

[Saul Sadka @Saul_Sadka]

Expect the collapse in diamond prices to accelerate substantially over the next few years. The natural-diamond market is shrinking in both size and value and circling the drain following the commoditisation of its product by modern technology. The same thing happened to pearls 100 years ago, but it will be much worse for diamonds: they will become a signal of bad taste rather than wealth, just as pearls went from high society to a matronly cliché within 50 years.

I have been telling friends in the diamond industry to find a new line of work for ten years. It was clearly only a matter of time before lab-grown diamonds became a mass-market commodity, sold at some small premium over production costs—which would themselves continue to plummet.

Since they are identical to natural diamonds, and buyers actually have multiple reasons to choose them instead—no “blood diamonds” and supposedly greater environmental friendliness—most buyers will not care.

Attempts to differentiate the products using $20,000 machines will not help: they are indistinguishable in real life.

There was always going to be some multiple that people would be willing to pay for “natural” over “lab,” but it did not really matter whether that multiple was 2× or 10×. Once lab-grown diamonds can be made for next to nothing, even ten times next to nothing is still very little. People will pay more—perhaps much more—for an identical product because of its backstory, but not infinitely more.

The reason natural-diamond prices have held up reasonably well over the past four years—“only” falling by around 50% in real terms—has more to do with supply cutbacks. Production has been reduced by about 20% over that period, from 120 million to 98 million carats, in a desperate attempt to support prices as the natural and lab-grown markets diverge. If production returned to its previous level, prices would fall even faster.

But it is going to get much, much worse. A trip to Miami will explain why: people who look like gangsters walk around wearing enormous tennis bracelets that would have cost a million dollars 20 years ago but can now be purchased for the price of a used Rolex.

Diamonds are going to become a sign of tackiness—as, frankly, they always should have been—rather than class or exclusivity. And then the game will be up for everyone in the diamond industry.

[Cole Jaczko @colejaczko]

https://t.co/MAAlKpCYF0

[Alex Slater @aslater]

fuck around and find out

[Alex @ HispanicNomad | Freedom Based Lifestyle @hispanicnomad]

Spanish speaking countries have two options and only two

Option one: start acting like a bloc. I'm not talking about becoming one single country, or building a new empire; this is not about nobody ruling anybody

But we could have separate sovereign states that actually coordinate. Trade, capital, universities, media, movement of people...

Option two: irrelevance, permanently

Because look at what we have right now

Spain is a mid-sized member of a union where the real decisions get made in Berlin and Brussels. Spain shows up to be informed of the outcome, and keeps being treated as the holiday resort of Europe

Latin America has been in Washington's back garden for over a century and gets treated accordingly. Sometimes gently... but most often not

600 million people. The second most spoken native language on earth. The same legal tradition, the same religion, the same humour, the same way of arguing at a dinner table...

And collectively we carry less weight in the world than one country of 80 million that speaks German

That isn't bad luck but a choice we keep making every decade

Every empire that has ever dealt with us understood the thing we refuse to admit: twenty weak countries that don't talk to each other are far easier to manage than one bloc that does

Neither Brussels nor Washington wants this to happen

That should tell you enough about whether it's a good idea

[doomer @uncledoomer]

single women, single men, and married women earn roughly the same, and it's just married men that out earn everybody else. insane. what could possibly cause a married man to want to earn more money so badly he will do anything to make it happen? it makes no sense.