LIbertarian, economist, tech and anti-aging enthusiast, Liverpool FC fan; opinions expressed here are my own
Aix-en-Provence, France
Joined June 2009
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Reality is stranger than fiction.
"Shares of On Holding fell 3.6% on Tuesday as Mbappé faced a backlash among Chinese consumers over remarks referencing a "Chinese dictator" in connection with a meme featuring Mao Zedong. Stifel analyst Peter McGoldrick reaffirmed a Buy rating and $41 price target on the stock, leaving his Asia-Pacific revenue and profitability estimates unchanged."
Daniil Gorbatenko retweeted
Is Latin America finally moving up the global high-tech value chain? Some remarkable numbers suggest the region is making progress. A few highlights from a fascinating new @AmerQuarterly piece in collaboration with JP Morgan Private Bank:
• 🇲🇽 Mexico briefly overtook Taiwan as the largest supplier of advanced technology products to the U.S. in 2025. In the first half of 2026, its high-tech exports to the U.S. surged another 47% to $98.3 billion. The U.S. now gets 40% of its server imports from Mexico.
• 🇧🇷 Brazil is emerging as a major hub for AI infrastructure. Already home to 218 data centers, the world's 11th-largest total, Brazil could see its capacity more than double by 2030. Its abundant renewable energy is a major competitive advantage.
• 🇨🇷 Costa Rica offers a compelling model for moving beyond commodity exports. Medical devices already account for roughly 40% of its exports, and the country is now building a semiconductor industry through partnerships among universities, government and multinational companies.
• 🇩🇴 The Dominican Republic is another country to watch. Its electronics exports grew 50% from 2018 to 2023, and its extensive free trade zone network could help it become a significant player in semiconductor assembly and testing.
• 🌎 The bigger picture: Latin America's exports of information and communications technology services nearly DOUBLED from 2020 to 2024. The region has a real opportunity to capture more of the global AI boom—but sustained gains will depend on education, R&D, energy infrastructure and smart public policy.
More from Nur Cristiani and Rich Brown in @AmerQuarterly:
americasquarterly.org/articl…
What a surprise. An archaic politician backed the most by people believing that all life should be organized according to an unreadable archaic book.
I think people like Stephen Davies got it partly right in their predictions of political realignment.
In most developed countries the collectivist, identitarian right is ascendant, close to getting power or is already in power.
Regardless of whether the main political opponents are technocratic centrists like Macron or Draghi or leftists like Biden/Harris and Pedro Sanchez or traditional rightists like Mertz.
The identitarian right has also significantly moved away from pro-market positions, especially on international trade.
However, I think there are two major things Davies and others got wrong:
1) The internationalist, social liberal part of the predicted realignment hasn't really materialized.
The left has failed to genuinely stand for international trade and even legal immigration. They have largely kept focusing on defending the increasingly untenable welfare states and regulatory strictures in the labor markets and industrial and energy development domains in the name of environmentalism.
2) More importantly, the main reason for the ascent of the collectivist right hasn't been that most voters suddenly became conservative identitarians across the board.
Rather, the main reason has been that the bloated governments have gone too far in stifling economic growth and general dynamism. They even increasingly lack the means to adequately respond to international security challenges.
Meanwhile, wildly excessive economic interventionism, coupled with stuff like restrictions on housing construction and the insane attempt to prevent people from taking drugs, has also made it way harder to integrate some immigrants and especially reintegrate people populating the urban ghettos.
It has also prevented former industrial areas from bouncing back economically much more than they would otherwise have, making many people living in them feel deprioritized.
The mostly irrational voters have predictably interpreted all this not as the fundamental failure of interventionism but as the wrong people having been in power for too long.
The siren song of right-wing populists resonates now because they seem to be different and closer to the people and their concerns. Wrong people in power is an explanation so much more pleasant in its simplicity that a structural failure of interventionism.
IMO this is strong evidence that aging is mostly a programmed process.
"Menopause reshapes female physiology, yet current understanding is limited by small longitudinal cohorts that characterize it as a gradual transition. Large-scale biomedical datasets remain underutilized because the final menstrual period (FMP) age is rarely recorded. Here we present a computational framework, inspired by astronomy, that reconstructs FMP-anchored trajectories from cross-sectional data by removing the blurring caused by variation in FMP age across individuals. Applying this to two independent cohorts totaling 300 million laboratory tests revealed a step-like physiological cliff at the FMP including endocrine, skeletal, hepatic, renal and lipid systems."
Why, oh why has economic growth stagnated? Why so much taxes on everyone?
Well, here is the main reason why.
Also, Switzerland and Ireland's figures explain to a large degree why their economies have performed way better than most other developed ones.
Daniil Gorbatenko retweeted
Le problème fondamental c'est que les gens ne comprennent pas que, pour financer un État-providence, il faut s'appuyer sur une base d'imposition très large et taxer la classe moyenne parce que les sommes requises sont énormes et qu'il n'y a pas d'autre choix.
En pratique, ça veut dire que d'une manière ou d'une autre, le financement repose principalement sur les revenus du travail, parce que non seulement c'est de loin la principale composante du PIB dans une économie moderne mais qu'en plus les revenus du capital sont beaucoup plus difficiles à taxer.
C'est pour ça que, dans quasiment tous les pays européens, le financement de la protection sociale repose principalement sur les cotisations et les taxes sur la consommation, qui directement ou indirectement sont principalement alimentés par les revenus du travail.
Même au Danemark, où l'impôt sur le revenu joue un rôle beaucoup plus important qu'ailleurs, l'assiette d'imposition est beaucoup plus large qu'en France et l'essentiel du financement repose aussi sur les classes moyennes, donc en dernière analyse principalement sur les revenus du travail.
Si vous consacrez 1/3 du PIB à la protection sociale, comme c'est le cas en France, vous allez forcément devoir financer ça principalement avec les revenus du travail, parce que c'est près des 2/3 du PIB et que les revenus du capital, outre encore une fois ils sont beaucoup plus durs à taxer, c'est 5 à 6 fois moins une fois prise en compte la dépréciation.
Il n'y pas de réserve de pognon dans laquelle on pourrait facilement taper sans que les classes moyennes doivent payer. On pourrait certes gratter un peu d'argent en taxant le patrimoine davantage, mais dès lors qu'on veut épargner les classes moyennes, ça n'ira pas chier très loin au regard des besoins si on ne réduit pas les dépenses.
Le seul moyen de financer nos dépenses de protection sociale, sachant qu'à l'heure actuelle on le fait à crédit en s'endettant à des taux qui ne font qu'augmenter, c'est soit de travailler plus soit d'augmenter la productivité et, comme on n'a pas de baguette magique pour augmenter la productivité et que ce n'est certainement pas en s'endettant pour financer les retraites plutôt que de l'investissement productif qu'on va le faire, il va falloir bosser plus ou couper dans les dépenses.
Si on continue de ne pas vouloir regarder la réalité en face, tout ce qu'on parviendra à faire, c'est rendre l'austérité encore plus douloureuse le jour où elle sera devenue inévitable parce que les investisseurs ne voudront plus nous prêter qu'à des taux exorbitants et, en attendant, mettre encore plus à l'os les services publics parce qu'il faut bien trouver le pognon pour financer les retraites et les dépenses de santé quelque part.
Quelles sont les "revendications légitimes" des manifestants exactement ? Ils ne sont pas contents parce que le revenu disponible réel n'augmente pas voire recule, mais ce n'est pas une revendication ça, c'est un sujet de mécontentement. Donc qu'est-ce qu'ils proposent concrètement ?
La réalité c'est qu'ils seraient incapables de faire la moindre proposition concrète réaliste. Si on leur demandait, tout ce à quoi on aurait droit ce serait des slogans débiles, plus de pognon qu'on n'a pas et la pensée magique habituelle selon laquelle il n'y a qu'à "prendre aux riches".
Mettons qu'on rétablisse l'ISF et qu'on instaure la taxe Zucman, honnêtement pourquoi pas si c'est le prix à payer pour qu'on puisse faire le reste, ça rapporterait 20-30 milliards à tout péter et il faudrait encore en trouver 100 de plus, donc où tous ces gens avec leurs "revendications légitimes" proposent qu'on trouve ça ?
Daniil Gorbatenko retweeted
The first copies of my book are here!
The result of years of research and writing, 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘎𝘳𝘪𝘮 𝘖𝘭𝘥 𝘋𝘢𝘺𝘴 takes the reader on a tour of a thankfully lost world of bloodletting, filth, destitution, and famine-induced cannibalism.
Pre-order now: a.co/d/0hrciEBm
Daniil Gorbatenko retweeted
Quiz: A French teacher costs ~€85k a year. How much of that goes to him?
~€37k (43%)
How much goes to paying retired teachers?
~€35k
French teachers see less than half of what they make because of the egregious French pensions.
But there's more:
To most people, riots like those that took place in France last Saturday show merely that the police response was a complete failure.
While more could probably have been done, there are serious limits to what can be done against thousands of rioters without causing major injury or death to a bunch of people.
So, in reality, what riots actually highlight is that most of the social order holds not because there are the police, courts and jails but because most of the time the vast majority of people choose not to violate other people's rights.
Of course, this idea is sadly not something that the political process is concerned with... Everyone just wants easy explanations and fixes.
There are two main positions on disagreements over science. One just implies that we should just defer to established science or consensus. The other holds that science is just a pluralistic process where everything always needs to be contestable.
I think both positions are inadequate.
Consider 2 types of potential scientific disagreement:
1) Over whether climate sensitivity to increases in atmospheric CO2 is high.
2) Over whether CO2 creates a greenhouse effect.
In economics the analogues could be:
1) The Great Depression was initially caused by a monetary tightening.
2) Inflation is always about more money chasing the same supply of goods or the same amount of money chasing a lower supply.
Disagreements of type 1 are unsettled research questions at the frontier. More importantly, they are such because in complex, multifactorial, nonlinear systems/orders it's hard to definitively prove that outcome A was due to cause X and especially to what degree.
Whereas disagreements of type 2 are about basic understanding of how the same systems work, not explanation of specific outcomes.
IMO there should be no attempts to invoke consensus/authority in type 1 disagreements but such attempts will typically be fine in type 2 disagreements.
P.S. I suspect that this is still a considerable simplification but it's better than a binary distinction between "Bow to Science" and "Nothing in science is truly settled."
Daniil Gorbatenko retweeted
People mock GDP per capita and economic freedom at their own peril.
People are astounded by the riots alongside the yesterday's protests in France but this probably isn't astounding.
It's of course not about immigration, sorry, JD. Or even about actual protests degenerating into riots.
It's mostly thousands of rioters taking advantage of the situation.
And also, the police (even riot police) are probably of limited usefulness against large numbers (probably thousands in Marseille) of rioters spread over a large urban area.
Daniil Gorbatenko retweeted
All of your comments about why my argument is weak revolve around proving consciousness, when my point is about disproving consciousness.
If someone claims an LLM is conscious, that claim must have testable implications. We can examine its architecture, inspect its mechanisms, run experiments, and test those implications against reality. When they fail, we should discount the premise and/or hypothesis.
We don’t have to accept consciousness as an explanation simply because someone believes it might exist.
Current LLMs fail to demonstrate many of the characteristics we associate with conscious experience. We definitively know this because humans created them. We understand their architectures, training processes, and inference mechanisms.
So let’s look at a few points, together they provide more than enough evidence to disprove consciousness.
1. An LLM has no demonstrated subjective awareness of its own existence. No feelings, emotions, or experienced sense of self. What occurs is computation using static weights, context, and mathematical operations.
2. An LLM’s weights don’t learn, grow, or evolve simply because you interact with it. During standard inference, they’re fixed parameters, not a changing dataset. The model doesn’t inherently remember previous API requests. Continuity comes from context history in subsequent requests. The model doesn’t gain experience, it doesn’t remember, it doesn’t learn. It is completely static, read-only, during inference.
3. Between inference requests, the LLM isn’t thinking. I don’t mean sleeping. I mean there’s no ongoing contemplation, self-reflection, or reconsideration of previous answers. Nothing. The model isn’t sitting around wondering whether it got something wrong or what the meaning of life is, for all practical purposes, it doesn’t exist.
4. These systems were created by people, and much of the underlying technology is open source. You can build your own models, examine implementations, study the architectures, learn how training materials and processes affect how it behaves, and even understand the mathematics behind it. You can see how training produces systems capable of remarkably convincing human-like language and behavior. None of those mechanisms requires consciousness to explain what we’re observing.
5. LLMs are not biological brains. Apples are not oranges, no matter how much you want them to be. Artificial neural networks were inspired in part by biological neuroscience, but their architectures and operating mechanisms are fundamentally different. Similarities in behavior do not establish equivalent internal architectures.
6. Humans are naturally inclined to recognize life and assume humanity in things that behave like us. We’re social creatures, and anthropomorphism comes naturally. But an LLM isn’t life. It can convincingly emulate feelings, care, and understanding without experiencing any of them. That doesn’t diminish the technology, that is what it was programmed to do.
I appreciate your perspective as a doctor and researcher, but without a solid understanding of LLM architecture and inference, it’s easy to confuse sophisticated emulation with conscious experience.
But don’t fall for it!
Let's take apart @gmkurtzer's arguments shall we?
(Even though I agree with the overall direction).
Why take apart their argument if we agree?
1. bc we can.
2. bc although I do not believe LLM's are conscious, I do not have enough data to say LLMs are not conscious. so we only partially agree.
3. bc i like sound arguments & i enjoy exercises in formal logic.
4. bc flaws
So @gmkurtzer wrote a whole lot of words just to say
1. me human, yes conscious-> bc I experience it
2. LLM no conscious-> bc no evidence experience it
Effectively all else in the quoted tweet below is noise... those two points are carrying your entire remonstration...
Why its weak:
1. we don't have proof of human consciousness either. you cant prove a subjective internal experience.
2. there is no experiment that can directly prove phenomenal consciousness in an LLM, because phenomenal experience is not externally observable
3. nothing empirically accessible would prove that an LLM feels consciousness
4. the strongest attainable conclusion is that feeling conscious becomes the best explanation after observing a sufficiently rich and convergent set of internal and behavioural evidence.
Daniil Gorbatenko retweeted
The biggest, and stupidest, myth in European politics, particularly popular in France, is that Europe suffers the consequences of "austerity" and "neoliberalism". In the biggest 5 countries in Europe, more than half of the population makes its income from the state, less than half from the private sector. This is what makes the problem of reducing the welfare state so impossible: more than half of the voters are net recipients. No surprise that Italy's budget has not been balanced in 100 years, France's in 50 years (ooh la la, l'austérité!!):
-France: 30 million from the state versus 21m private sector workers. State spending is 57% of GDP, taxes more than half the economy. The budget hasn't been balanced in the lifetime of most French (since 1974).
- Germany: 35 million adults from the state, versus 34 million from the private sector. 10% of the population is registered as severely disabled. Public spending is over half of GDP. Germany has had a continuous budget deficit since 2019.
-Italy: 23 million from the state, versus 20.5 million private-sector workers. Public spending is 51% of GDP. Italy has had a budget deficit every year since 1925, for 100 years.
- Spain more people get their income from the state since 2024: 18.21 million from the public sector versus 17.9 million people working in the private sector. Since 2025, Spain also had more government employees than self-employed workers (autónomos) for the first time in history. State spending is at 45%, budget has not been balanced since 2007.
- UK: 54% of households now receive more in state benefits than they pay in taxes. State spending is 44.5% of GDP, taxes (40%) are at their highest since 1950, the budget hasn't been balanced since 2001, and 1 in 5 new cars is paid by the government through a bizarre state disability scheme (Motability).
Daniil Gorbatenko retweeted
Wow. I woke up to an impressive number of upset people who apparently don’t understand how LLMs work and can’t cope well with me pointing it out.
An LLM is a statistical next-token prediction model. That’s how it works. It’s an extraordinarily sophisticated calculator performing math you could theoretically do by hand (if you were sufficiently masochistic).
Math doesn’t know what it’s calculating. Pi doesn’t spend its evenings contemplating the nature of circles, and c doesn’t ponder the relationship between matter and energy.
That doesn’t make the results any less accurate, impressive, or useful.
Between inference requests, an LLM isn’t sitting around thinking. It isn’t reconsidering its answers, wondering whether it made a mistake, contemplating its existence, or questioning whether it’s conscious. Its weights remain fixed (it doesn’t learn), and computation resumes when it receives input.
We know this because we designed these systems. The architectures, mathematics, implementations, and research are extensively documented. You can study them yourself.
Of course, some people immediately lean into comparisons of biological intelligence or philosophical debates over consciousness because that is what they know.
But biological intelligence and artificial neural networks are fundamentally different systems. Similar outputs don’t establish equivalent internal experiences.
I experience consciousness directly. I infer that other humans do too because we share biological structures and processes. We don’t have equivalent evidence for an LLM, and nothing about its known operation gives evidence of conscious experience.
Which brings me back to my original point.
To me, understanding is conscious comprehension. It means being aware of information, recognizing its meaning, and experiencing that comprehension. If I wasn’t conscious I could not understand.
We can perform actions unconsciously. We can produce correct results without knowing why they’re correct. But I distinguish those capabilities from consciously understanding what we’re doing.
An LLM can solve complex problems, explain difficult concepts, and produce remarkably accurate information. I give it full credit for those capabilities.
But producing an answer that we rationalize as understanding isn’t the same as experiencing understanding.
You don’t have to agree with my definitions. We can debate functional understanding versus conscious comprehension all day, but that won’t establish whether an LLM actually experiences anything.
The right debate is this…
Could machines exhibit something different from human consciousness, something measurable, meaningful, and worth studying?
I think so, absolutely!
I’m entirely open to discussing “machine consciousness” in terms of observable, testable computational properties. We built these systems, we can instrument them, examine their internal mechanisms, and investigate what they’re capable of.
That seems far more productive than endlessly arguing over whether a machine experiences life the way humans do.
So here’s my question:
How would you define machine consciousness, and more importantly, how would you measure it?
Daniil Gorbatenko retweeted
No se me ocurre tuit más estadounidense que este
If you were at Six Flags in Atlanta on October 12, contact my office IMMEDIATELY.
If you had blood splattered on you from the incident, you have a case.
If you were on Goliath when it malfunctioned, you have a case.
If you were physically impacted at all, you have a case.
Do NOT wait for evidence to be lost.
CEO Lawyer will work for you on a pure contingency, and we will make sure to hold Six Flags accountable.
What would have been science fiction just 20 years ago has arrived in biotech.
"The epigenome, the system that helps control which genes are turned on and off in our cells, can become disrupted during aging and disease. Epigenetic restoration is based on the idea that some of those changes may be reversible, and that restoring the epigenome could help cells return to a healthier state to treat a variety of age-related diseases. Life Biosciences (Life Bio) is testing that idea in humans with an epigenetic restoration therapy called ER-100.
Today, at the American Academy of Ophthalmology Annual Meeting, the company announced the first results from its Phase I safety and tolerability trial: all three patients with glaucoma tolerated the treatment without adverse events or problems related to ER-100, and two of the three showed improvements in vision."
Daniil Gorbatenko retweeted
En la Comunidad de Madrid hay hoy 1,11 viviendas por hogar. En 1995 había 1,27. En el mismo periodo, el metro cuadrado, en euros de 2026 (es decir, ya ajustado por la inflación), ha pasado de 2.273 a 4.069.
Me centro en la Comunidad de Madrid y no en toda España porque, efectivamente, en España hay mucha vivienda, pero en zonas donde, por un motivo u otro, la gente no vive. Tener cien casas vacías en el concejo de Taramundi no tiene ningún efecto sobre el precio de la vivienda en el barrio de La Paz de Madrid.
El número de viviendas por hogar suele ser superior a uno porque tenemos viviendas vacías, viviendas destinadas al uso turístico, familias con dos viviendas y viviendas destinadas a negocios (aunque no clasificadas como oficinas), entre otros motivos.
El número de viviendas por hogar arranca en 1,27 en 1995 y sube ligeramente a 1,31 en 2002. Desde entonces ha bajado, casi sin pausa, hasta alcanzar el mínimo actual de 1,11.
Dos motivos explican esta caída. El primero, más obvio, es el gran aumento de la población residente en la Comunidad de Madrid, de 5,1 millones en 1995 a 7,2 en 2026, sobre todo por la inmigración, que no ha venido acompañada de un incremento suficiente de la oferta de vivienda.
El segundo, del que mucha gente se olvida, es el cambio en la estructura familiar. La familia que en 1995 tenía dos padres y dos hijos y ocupaba una vivienda ha sido sustituida por la madre viuda, que sigue viviendo en el mismo piso familiar, y los dos hijos, cada uno en su propio piso: uno soltero, sin hijos, y el otro divorciado, con un hijo que vive con él. De cuatro personas ocupando un piso a cuatro personas ocupando tres pisos.
No es este un ejemplo extraño. En Madrid, el tamaño medio del hogar ha pasado de 3,1 personas en 1995 a 2,6 en 2026. Uno puede argumentar que parte de esta reducción se debe al aumento del precio de la vivienda (por ejemplo, debido a una menor natalidad), pero la experiencia en otras partes de España muestra que la evolución del tamaño medio de los hogares ha seguido un patrón similar. En Castilla y León, donde el metro cuadrado cuesta hoy, en términos reales, lo mismo que en 1995, el hogar medio tiene 2,2 personas. Simplemente, somos una sociedad distinta, de mayor edad y con familias más pequeñas. Aunque la Comunidad de Madrid tuviese hoy exactamente el mismo número de habitantes que en 1995, necesitaríamos aproximadamente un 20% más de viviendas.
El precio del metro cuadrado, en términos reales, ha seguido el camino opuesto: de 2.273 euros en 1995 a 4.069 euros en 2026. Ha aumentado la demanda de vivienda y, con ella, el precio del metro cuadrado. No tiene mucho secreto.
Vemos, sin embargo, en el medio de la serie, el efecto de la burbuja de 2001 a 2007, cuando el metro cuadrado alcanzó, en términos reales, valores incluso más altos que los de hoy: 4.453 euros a comienzos de 2007. Y eso con 1,24 viviendas por hogar, no las 1,11 actuales. ¿No prueba esta burbuja que el precio de la vivienda no depende de su escasez?
No. Los que argumentan de tal manera olvidan que la demanda de vivienda no depende solo del número de hogares.
De 2001 a 2007, cada hogar demandaba más vivienda porque los tipos de interés reales se habían hundido. Y la subida de precios que esto provocó generó, a su vez, expectativas de nuevas subidas insostenibles.
La burbuja no carecía, en su comienzo, de cierta razón: la población subía, el tamaño de los hogares caía y, con tipos de interés reales más bajos, el precio de la vivienda tenía que ser más alto (piense en el precio de la vivienda como el valor descontado de los servicios habitacionales que esta suministrará: tipos más bajos hacen que esos servicios futuros se descuenten menos). Estos motivos eran suficientes para que el precio del metro cuadrado alcanzara, en ausencia de suficiente construcción, unos 3.000 euros. Los últimos 1.500 euros de subida fueron pura especulación.
Incluso en plena burbuja, las viviendas por hogar cayeron, de 1,31 en 2002 a 1,22 en 2008. En esos seis años, la Comunidad de Madrid sumó unos 400.000 hogares y solo unas 310.000 viviendas. No hubo burbuja porque se construyera mucho; hubo burbuja porque el crédito barato disparó la demanda más deprisa de lo que se podía construir, incluso al ritmo alocado al que íbamos.
Luego, la crisis financiera hizo que el precio del metro cuadrado cayera por debajo de donde debía estar: los 2.569 euros de 2012 eran tan espejismo como los 4.453 de 2007.
Pero si uno elimina el componente especulativo de 2001 a 2007 y la crisis financiera, se encuentra con una sólida tendencia positiva en el precio de la vivienda en la Comunidad de Madrid, que es el espejo de la caída de las viviendas por hogar.
Al final, nos enfrentamos a una restricción de metros cuadrados. Aunque se socializara toda la vivienda, como en la Unión Soviética, el Gosplan madrileño se enfrentaría al reto de que tenía 1,31 viviendas por hogar en 2002, pero ahora solo 1,11 y, como explicaba antes, incluso en el mejor de los casos, uno siempre necesita más viviendas que hogares por decenas de motivos. Y esta restricción no se soluciona con ninguna medida legislativa que solo ataque los precios, como los dos decretos fallidos de la semana pasada.
España se enfrenta a una decisión fundamental. Podemos dedicarnos a pelearnos por quién ocupará las viviendas existentes en la Comunidad de Madrid, o podemos apostar por la abundancia de viviendas.
