Wednesday links

Europe's high severance costs, Claudecrastination, Pinker on pessimism, new book on operation Paperclip, how to become a good speaker

• Why Europe doesn’t have a Tesla, by Pieter Garricano. “High severance costs create a fundamental incentive for European businesses to avoid innovative areas and concentrate on safe, unchanging ones. In the long run, this is a recipe for decline.”

  And: “Europe’s companies have immense, specialized knowledge. The problems happen when radical innovation is needed, as in the shift from gasoline to electric vehicles. The great makers of electric cars have either been new entrants, like Tesla and BYD, or old ones who have had their insides stripped, like MG.”

• Jasmine Sun on the agony and ecstacy of using Claude Code ⁠”The second-order effect of Claude Code was realizing how many of my problems are not software-shaped. Having these new tools did not make me more productive; on the contrary, Claudecrastination probably delayed this post by a week. […] What’s actually tough about my job is coming up with novel frames for important ideas and devising sentences that are equal parts sharp, lively, and true. You can have the best Deep Research reports in the world, and still lack a unique point of view.”

• Steven Pinker on pessimism: “one part of the explanation is there’s a widespread pattern in polling that people are much more optimistic about their own lives than about the country as a whole. Reliably, if you ask people about the quality of schools, they’ll say the quality of schools in the country is terrible. What about your kid’s school? Oh, it’s actually pretty good. If you ask them, is the country safe? They’ll say, no, there’s crime everywhere—muggings and knifings and shootings. You say, what about your neighborhood? Do you feel safe? They say, well, yeah, I feel pretty safe. So partly there’s a dissociation between people’s vision of the whole country and their own lives.”

• New book on Operation Paperclip by Annie Jacobsen.

• How to become a good speaker