Ex-Bloomberg/Reuters/Dow Jones. Author, "Broken Republik". Wahlberliner from the US. Opinions my own.
Berlin
Joined August 2012
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Germany can turn itself around if it really understands its issues. We lay it out in our new book "Totally Kaputt?" (out now in German):
amzn.eu/d/hy05nza
Here's the first review 👇
swr.de/swrkultur/literatur/c…
This is interesting and raises more questions about Trump letting Russia off the hook on sanctions.
🇮🇷🇷🇺 Despite Washington's recent assertions that Moscow is not backing Tehran, confidential Russian defence records tell a different story. Dallas Analytics publishes primary industrial documents proving conclusively what the export code "K-10" designates: Iran.
🕵️ State plants built specialised missile-launch hardware – arming the forces now strangling global energy transit in the Strait of Hormuz – alongside a wider pipeline spanning Yak-130 trainers and helicopter upgrades.
Read our investigation and examine the original schedules: dallas-analytics.com/russia-…
Chris Reiter 📯 retweeted
Dear dozens of new economic populist members of Congress,
You’ll face fast pressure to deliver economic results. How to do it? Subpoena CEOs. A shocking amount of time, they'll change what they are doing long before you pass a bill or actually cut off their federal funding. So:
- Subpoena Google for cramming AI down our kids throats. Threaten to amend the FAR to prohibit contracting across the U.S. government with any company forcing kids to use AI.
- Subpoena the private equity managers enshittifying hospitals, dialysis centers, your local vet, your local primary care provider. Name individuals, not just companies. Shame them. Show the public (and public pension funds) how they make their money.
- Subpoena health insurers who use AI to auto-deny valid claims, triage mental health emergencies, or upcode diagnoses. Make them stop that.
- Subpoena the airlines for systematically denying cash refunds to travelers. (“Here’s a voucher instead!”) Show your hand – threaten the subpoena now, before Thanksgiving.
- Subpoena Brazilian meatpacker JBS for literally anything. For child labor, for getting fat and rich off of cattlemen, for making their workers work so fast their hands curl into claws, for persistent hygiene allegations.
- Subpoena corporate landlords. Show the public how they get rich off of hidden fees and not fixing their apartments.
- Subpoena any company that has been slow to issue tariff refunds to small business owners. I bet they’ll get their checks a lot quicker!
Will it work? See what happened when Instacart was exposed as secretly marking up your grocery cart... Yes, it can work.
P.S. If anyone tells you “No, you can’t do that” or “No, there’s a process for that,” ignore them. You know what time it is.
Chris Reiter 📯 retweeted
FC Augsburg believes it's quite terrible to have 17 other Bundesliga clubs sitting on a bunch of the league's limited supply of points.
This sounds like shared prosperity by design and should be standard. No company or entrepreneur succeeds in a bubble.
Mamdani: At City Hall, we believe that when the public invests in new technology, the public should benefit from its success. That is why we have developed a first-of-its-kind governing agreement for the QFAB with our partners at NYU, one that will give New Yorkers both a stake in the future revenue of the technologies made here and a say in what those technologies are.
First, when new technologies are developed in the QFAB with tools that the city helped to fund, the city will receive 15% of NYU Central Administration’s revenue.
And second, the city will have three seats on the QFAB Executive Advisory Board to ensure that the voices of working New Yorkers shape quantum technologies for decades to come.
This sets a new national standard, or as we say in the industry, a standard model, for economic development in emerging industries. One in which the betterment of New Yorkers’ lives is not a footnote, and where economic justice and innovation go hand in hand.
This is why we need a coalition across borders to force some accountability on AI.
We can't rely on the apparatus.
See my latest here... chrishreiter.blog
I'll say it again for the AI risk experts in the back:
We've already run a real life, large scale experiment on what happens when a superintelligence is unleashed on a narrow objective.
Look no further than U.S. capital markets.
Millions of investors, analysts, traders and algorithms, backed by trillions of dollars and wired together through prices, all chasing one goal: the highest risk-adjusted return on capital.
And it is spectacularly good at its job. It funds the best ideas, punishes the worst ones, and turns new information into prices faster than any of us can react. No individual can out-think it. 99+ percent of professionals can't beat it.
But look at what else it's done along the way:
- Optimized the measure instead of the intent. Quarterly earnings became the scoreboard, so companies learned to manage the scoreboard.
- Treated anything without a price as free. Pollution, addiction, obesity, depression, political fragmentation, fragile supply chains, the long-term health of the communities it operates in.
- Found every gap in the rules, then paid lobbyists to help write the next set and pull up the ladder behind incumbents.
- Remade the world around its objective. Companies, pension funds and our retirement accounts now answer to the S&P 500.
- Made itself impossible to switch off, because everything else now depends on it.
None of this required malice. Nobody sat in a room and chose these outcomes. It's simply what a very capable optimizer does when its objective is a narrow proxy for what we actually care about.
And note that we never solved this alignment problem. We've managed it, imperfectly, with regulation, taxes, disclosure rules and the occasional crisis to show us where the guardrails were missing. Over time, the market has captured the instutions designed to constrain it. We've been at it the better part of a century, and the misalignment is the worst it's ever been.
So the next time someone tells you AI is only dangerous if it "wants" something bad, or if its goals are mis-specified, point them at the S&P 500. It doesn't want anything. It just optimizes.
That's the whole problem.
In case you missed this amid all the euphoric Unity Day celebrations in Germany (#sarcasm), the far-right AfD is now at 30% and Merz's conservative bloc is 12 points behind.
Just half of Germans support the center (CDU/CSU, SPD, FDP and Greens).
BUNDESTAGSWAHL | Sonntagsfrage INSA/BILD am Sonntag
AfD: 30% (+1)
Union: 18% (-1)
SPD: 14%
GRÜNE: 14% (-1)
LINKE: 10%
BSW: 4% (+1)
FDP: 4%
Sonstige: 6%
Änderungen zur letzten Umfrage vom 26. September 2026
Verlauf: whln.eu/UmfragenDeutschland
#btw29
ALT Säulendiagramm zur Umfrage
Let's go Europe! This looks fun. And so much more constructive than ethnic nationalist navel-gazing.
We are launching an editing competition, 60 sec for Europe. 🇪🇺
This is the most epic editing competition Europe has ever seen, with prizes including €500 and merch from @prototype_cap, one of our partners.
Theme: EUROHYPE!
Submit before 15.11.2026. for Europe!
Golf to solar is the adaptive reuse you love to see.
In one of the world’s most densely populated and mountainous countries, developers are running out of sites big enough to host major solar projects.
Golf courses, which multiplied in Japan during the boom years of the 1980s, are some of the last tracts of open land available. bloom.bg/3VgxYFV
📷️: EDP S.A.
Sounds important 👇
The Russian Azov Optical-Mechanical Plant, hit in today’s strike, is far more important than it may appear.
🕵️ Documents obtained by Dallas Analytics show that the facility is embedded in the production chain of seven Russian missile programmes, including two designed to carry nuclear warheads.
Internal correspondence, state contract references and component cooperation schedules reveal the facility’s role in Russia’s missile production network.
🔍 Read the full investigation: dallas-analytics.com/aomz-st…
Hey @ElifEralpBerlin, when is something like this coming to Berlin?
Nice work! At the Enjoycleaningup Foundation in the Netherlands we're building its bigger brother. Lets connect enjoycleaningup.com/innovati…
Hey @ElifEralpBerlin, how about something like this for Berlin?
An absolutely massive move on housing:
@NYCHousing is demolishing its offices at 100 Gold St., an outdated building from the 1960s, and turning it into *4,000* units of housing. 1,000 units will be permanently affordable.
This is more new housing than some entire cities build in a year.
Project will also include a new senior center, a 40k sq ft gym open to the public, and lots of public realm improvements around the site. HPD will get a new home in a separate, modern building.
This is the kind of big, bold project we need much more of.
Chris Reiter 📯 retweeted
I want to briefly explain why I joined Abhijit Banerjee, Peter Diamond, Esther Duflo, Paul Krugman and Joe Stiglitz in signing the letter on the California billionaire tax: ft.com/content/94ec0fee-53ab…
In principle, I am not convinced that permanent wealth taxes would be necessary if the tax-transfer system were designed optimally.
But the US tax system is very far from optimal, and has been for decades. As I have documented in my research (for example, here: mitsloan.mit.edu/shared/ods/…), labor income is taxed much more heavily than capital income.
This asymmetry creates two distinct problems.
First, it makes the tax system highly regressive at the top. The very rich, who receive much of their income from capital or can use accounting tricks to reclassify their income as capital income, pay remarkably little in taxes. For example, a business owner who runs their own company should receive a significant part of their income as labor earnings for their work as CEO. Instead, they can take their compensation in stock and borrow against those holdings to finance whatever consumption they desire, minimizing their tax obligations. Even their heirs may avoid paying these taxes.
Second, the asymmetry distorts automation decisions: it effectively subsidizes machinery and AI relative to hiring workers (for example, here: brookings.edu/articles/does-…).
These distortions have allowed a small number of people to amass vast fortunes without paying their fair share of taxes, and have fueled excessive automation.
The resulting inequality is a problem in its own right. It is all the more dangerous today because our institutions have become fragile, allowing the very wealthy to exert growing control over the political process.
A temporary wealth tax can therefore be justified on three grounds: (1) it partially reverses the effects of more than two decades of tax avoidance by the very wealthy; (2) it acts as a brake on their growing dominance over the political process; and (3) it may pave the way for more comprehensive tax reform at the federal level.
The California billionaire tax is not perfect. For example, a federal tax would lessen risks related to capital flight, and removing the rigid earmarking of the revenues for specific purposes would enable the proceeds to reduce the national debt. Nevertheless, with few other options on the table, I believe the California proposal deserves support.
Chris Reiter 📯 retweeted
We’re paying more money for worse versions of everything so communities are coming together to reject the system:
We need community shops like this in every city and every neighborhood.
Posted this quick little walkthrough on IG, and already at 1 million views in a couple hours.
These guys came up to me at @MainStSummit a few days ago. They offered to give me a tour. Wow.
I think we’re about to see a huge surge in these types of business models as AI continues to disrupt the economy and makes us reevaluate the meaning of work, and working with our hands.
What other crafts and activities could you build a membership experience around?
- blacksmithing
- garment making
- 3d printing
- greenhouses
- kitchen
- pottery
a few ideas…
Chris Reiter 📯 retweeted
With Germany’s political struggles high on the news agenda this evening, well worth reading @chrishreiter and @WillWilkesNews superb Broken Republik, which highlights how the country’s problems have grown over the years.
Chris Reiter 📯 retweeted
There's a lot of talk about cutting welfare in Germany at the moment - but how about cutting this? cleanenergywire.org/news/ger…
Hey Berlin, you paying attention? Greenery are welcoming public spaces are kinda chic.
Reminder: Berlin is going for a concrete bunker look for Checkpoint Charlie.
