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"Mom, how did we get so rich?"
"Well, when Huang's wang banged his spook thang Huang's 'tang, the Nanchang gang sang, the news harangue sprang, and the stock pang rang, so your dad bought the $NVDA overhang before the boomerang."
"Daaang!"
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Contra Saxbe @jmrphy argues it's hard to look at the data and see men as "wired" for infant care. Rather, men can adapt to infant care, but it's not easy.
For @unherd @jmrphy reviews the book "Dad Brain," which doesn't say what its author thinks it does...
unherd.com/2026/11/is-childc…
It has been discovered that in Sweden, men with higher lifetime incomes have more children.
Also that men with the lowest IQs have fewer.
Now a new one: Swedish men rated as better leaders during military service have more marriages and more children.
A thread on the IQ and income relationship with male fertility in Sweden and the Nordics:
xitter.twitterapi.xyz/Scientific_Bird/status…
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A fascinating 4-minute clip from the @dwarkesh_sp interview with Jensen Huang in April 2026.
Asked why he's so keen to sell GPU chips to China, Huang is evasive, defensive, deflective, and irrational, going off on bizarre tangents and insults -- and refusing to answer the key question.
Dwarkesh: Why would we want to sell China the materials for a serious cyberweapon? It's like selling them nukes with a casing that says 'made by Boeing' and claiming that's good for the US
Jensen: Comparing AI to nukes is lunacy. Enriched uranium is a lousy analogy. It's an illogical analogy. What we have to recognize is that AI is a five-layered cake.
The dogma: Nations and ethnicities are malleable and highly changeable. Recently made up, or imagined, or invented. Thus easily phased out, abolished, replaced by something else.
Replies to this academic give much evidence that the dogma is false.
What is this English ethnicity that "simply exists"? The Saxons? The Normans? Did you know that the term English was applied to the low-born who were ruled after the Norman conquest? Did the English know that they were English before the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries?
I know this is Twitter and that everything goes. It so happens that there are people who have devoted their whole career to the study of these issues too here, so I suggest you read a few history books before making absurd claims on an eternal English essence. I can suggest a reading list if you want.
Patterson: a Yamnaya genius invented the wheeled wagon.
This gave his clan enormous advantage. Later Yamnaya then descended from this clan.
Evidence: a 3500 year ago genetic bottleneck of 1-200 hundred, and later all the men have the same Y chromosome.
Nick Patterson | The Origin of the Indo-Europeans
youtube.com/watch?v=9TD9KStl…
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Growth depends on elite buy in. Countries cannot grow unless their elites want them to grow.
Stephen Kotkin is one of the great historians of Eurasia. In a new series for Works in Progress, he tackles the biggest question of them all: what went wrong between America and China? In the first part, he explains why we shouldn’t expect China to go the way of the Soviet Union. Beijing’s leaders have internalized the obvious lesson from Moscow: No Gorbachev. But they have also done something subtler: fix the incentives that made Soviet elites think that they had something to gain from ending communism.
worksinprogress.co/issue/sov…
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2nd generation immigrants and violent crime.
Very important new data from Denmark. Possibly the best ever released about the criminality of 2nd generation immigrants in Europe.
It is known that immigrants from the Middle East and Africa to Europe have exceedingly high rates of violent crime. But some people have claimed that this is because of trauma and lack of integration or other such reasons, and that subsequent generations who grow up in Europe will be less criminal.
Now we have this high quality data from Denmark showing us that this is not the case. The 2nd generation is overall at least as criminal as the full population from these places. And likely future generations will be as well.
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We're looking for business writers!
Works in Progress is expanding into coverage of business and finance, and we're looking for freelance authors for extended feature-length pieces of 2,000-6,000 words. We will eventually be hiring full-time employees on this beat.
Find the most interesting company in the world, a brilliant financial model, or a telling and relevant piece of business history. Tell us why we should be fascinated by it too.
It could be the geography of an industry, like how Morocco grew to become an massive exporter of cars, or why Bangladesh can do in electronics what it has done with its massive textiles industry. It might be a piece on a new kind of business, like the firms trying to perfect proof of personhood in a world of super-powerful AI. You could write about unsung but vital pieces of hardware, like compressed air and industrial gas, which keep the most advanced manufacturing sites in the world going.
The subject can be lighthearted or momentous, but the piece should cover something you haven't seen everywhere else, which advances an argument and marshals strong evidence. It should be relevant to a broad group of intelligent readers, and enduring rather than short-lived. And we're absolutely definitely not looking for traditional PR pitches. A sense that you've read and understand something about WIP's output goes a long way.
If this sounds like your kind of thing, please send us 1-3 short paragraphs summing up your idea. If we're intrigued by your idea we may ask you for an outline over a page or two. We pay competitive rates to authors.
Email us at wip-pitches@stripe.com and mike@worksinprogress.co.
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El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele has shared additional photos of Salvadoran soldiers conducting patrols in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s platform.
Notably silent on immigration, while vocal and detailed on handouts, taxing the rich, ending nuclear power, and so forth.
Why? Is it too unpopular to mention more immigration even for a far left politician?
🇫🇷 FLASH - LFI a dévoilé le programme de Jean-Luc Mélenchon pour la présidentielle de 2027. Parmi les propositions :
- Autoriser jusqu’à 3 jours d’arrêt maladie autodéclaré, sans consulter de médecin.
- Accorder 7 jours de congé après le décès d’un ami.
- Porter le SMIC à 1.700€ net par mois, soit une hausse de 220€.
- Ramener l’âge de départ à la retraite de 64 à 60 ans, avec une retraite à taux plein après 40 années de cotisation.
- Réduire progressivement la durée du travail à 32 heures par semaine.
- Instaurer un service écologique obligatoire de 9 mois pour les moins de 25 ans, rémunéré au SMIC.
- Faire rembourser les soins à 100% par la Sécurité sociale.
- Prendre en charge les séances de psychothérapie des moins de 26 ans.
- Fixer un plafond de 12 millions d’euros pour les héritages.
- Augmenter les APL de 10% pour aider à payer les loyers.
- Bloquer les prix de certains produits essentiels afin de limiter les hausses excessives.
- Revaloriser les salaires des fonctionnaires.
- Garantir un revenu minimum aux jeunes grâce à une allocation.
- Proposer aux étudiants des repas à 1€.
- Limiter à 1 pour 20 l’écart entre les rémunérations au sein d’une même entreprise.
- Soumettre les aides publiques aux entreprises à des engagements sociaux et écologiques.
- Rétablir l’ISF afin d’accroître l’imposition des grandes fortunes.
- Mettre en place la taxe Zucman pour taxer davantage les milliardaires.
- Répartir l’impôt sur le revenu en 14 tranches pour augmenter la contribution des plus riches.
- Engager une sortie progressive du nucléaire.
- Atteindre une production d’électricité issue à 100% des énergies renouvelables d’ici 2060.
- Interdire les vols entre 23h et 6h.
- Suspendre les zones à faibles émissions (ZFE), qui restreignent la circulation des véhicules les plus polluants dans certaines villes.
- Passer de la Ve à la VIe République en donnant davantage de pouvoir aux citoyens.
- Supprimer le 49.3, qui permet au gouvernement de faire adopter un texte sans vote.
- Intensifier la lutte contre les discriminations, notamment au sein de la police.
- Reconnaître comme crime d’État le massacre des Algériens du 17 octobre 1961.
- Renégocier les traités européens et refuser l’application de certaines règles européennes jugées incompatibles avec le programme.
- Quitter progressivement le commandement militaire intégré de l’OTAN.
- Soutenir la création d’un État palestinien aux côtés d’Israël.
