2026-11-12 22:40:35
Workers in the digital industry are having an existential crisis.
With AI, it’s becoming ever easier to make images, video, write articles, code… AI is tackling healthcare, education, law, consulting… All intelligence-related jobs are seeing the same trend: People who spent a lifetime developing their craft are at the same level as newcomers. Their skillset is now a commodity, and with it their status… and their income.
Writing and translation are already suffering deeply.
It’s not because digital jobs are disappearing:
It’s because they’re seeing the writing on the wall.
Digital workers are simply scared that, whatever they can do today, an AI will be able to do it better than them, at a fraction of the cost and time, very soon. That’s reflected in their job security:
The mechanism is simple: AI can do most tasks better than they do. It codes better, it draws better, it specs better, it gathers user feedback better, it notices more things… Many workers are limited to prompting the AIs over and over, letting them do most of the work. Then, they realize that the AI can prompt better than them, at which point they end up just clicking on Proceed every time the AI asks them something. It’s not hard to project into the future and realize that maybe they still have a job because their bosses haven’t managed to string the AIs together in the proper configuration to replicate their work. Yet.
If AI can do most individual tasks that an intelligent worker can do, and now we’re learning to string them together with agents, how long before almost all of these jobs disappear?
It’s not just that AI will drop the costs of employees by replacing them with AI, and big companies will become super rich. Look at what happened to Adobe:
Soon after this tweet, the same team published 17 apps open source. How much can Adobe’s stock withstand this type of attack?
Now bring that to the entire economy:
And this is not just true of employees, it’s also true of entrepreneurs: What kind of company can you build if anybody can one-shot1 you?
I have that same concern across all my endeavors: Right now, AI can’t write at the level of depth and insight that writers like me do, but how long will that last? I can build the best space animation—something as good as anything that came before, and make it near free instead of $30 per month. But what stops anybody from doing that to my own software? From asking Claude: “Please copy this entire simulation”? What about any other type of software? Are there any protections? How much time do we have until that world comes down on us?
To answer that, we must walk every step of the process, starting with the first victim, SaaS2:
Entrepreneurs (mostly solo-preneurs, or small teams) start copying and releasing all types of software.
First, they copy, rebuild, and improve SaaS, since the software already exists and it’s easier to copy.
Tech companies and SMBs all start to abandon their SaaS providers: Why pay $5,000 per year when you can pay $10 per month?
Early on, big companies don’t switch, because these subscriptions don’t cost them much in the grand scheme of things, and stability matters. But the next time the contract is renegotiated, they won’t sign a 5 year agreement, it will be one year, and it will be for much less: They now have alternatives.
But as these contract renewals come up, they’ll wonder: Why not build it ourselves? They don’t worry as much about the cost in terms of cash. They worry about the coordination cost: They’re hostages to the provider’s knowledge of their problems and willingness to change their code in a minute. Why would I pay Salesforce $10M per year for a software that I can’t easily understand or modify, when I can pay a team of three people internally $1M in total and get a custom tool I can modify any way I want, at any time, insanely fast?
With this competition, the price of every SaaS product craters. 90% reductions are easy to consider, because virtually the entire cost of SaaS is building the product, not servicing it.
This means the number of users of SaaS increases, but not by 10x. For example, what share of the businesses who needed an HR tool had a dedicated one that they paid for, as opposed to free Google / Excel spreadsheet? The ones with HR tools before are definitely going to switch to cheaper alternatives—let’s say 10x cheaper. But what about the ones with Google Sheets / Excel spreadsheets? Are they going to switch to paid software? Or open source? Or will they build it themselves? I assume few will go to a paid service now, and if they do, it’s certainly not going to increase the market by 10x to counterbalance the 10x drop in price. The result is that the overall revenue in the industry shrinks.
As it does, margins erode dramatically. SaaS companies lay off anybody they can. Most go out of business, some survive through dramatic headcount cuts.
The winners of all this are bootstrapped founders and incumbents who move fast and break things. The losers are complacent SaaS incumbents.
So that’s for SaaS. But what will follow SaaS? Well, everything is about to be SaaSified:
If you’re one of these tech companies seeing AI replacing so many services, the next question you’ll ask is: What other costs can I automate with AI? Since the vast majority of costs for these companies are tech workers, they will be next—especially because software developers are intimately aware of the work that their peers do. Designers, developers, product managers, data analysts, product marketers… They will work on automating each one of these positions—even if none will actually say so, because the social backlash would be ferocious.
But even these companies are at risk: If I’m an entrepreneur and I want to hire a product manager AI, now I need to explore all these tools, understand which one is best, compare pricing, and sign up with one of them, which will then cost me $100/month, or $1,000, or whatever.
Or I can just build it myself, which might take me a bit more time to get right, but it will cost me substantially less per month, I can then multiply my product managers at will, I can put them in my own servers… So whether I choose external providers or internal depends on how good my AI is at copying these other services, which in turn depends on how much of a moat these companies have in crafting the very best product manager replacement—that is, it depends on their moat.
But don’t think this will end with tech workers. Next come these types of workers in non-tech companies. Because millions of companies hire marketers and sales people and business analysts, and all of them will be replaced.
Next come the other jobs that are further from tech, but are nevertheless based on intelligence: tax advisors, financial advisors, medical doctors, teachers…
These all have some sort of government protection, so they won’t simply be replaced, but the mechanism of their obsolescence is pricing, like we saw before. For example, an entrepreneur and a tax advisor meet and build an AI for tax advice. The AI puts together everything, and the tax advisor reviews and signs off. Knowing that the tax return will be better than what he was ever able to dream of before, he’ll go from managing, say, 50 customers before to 500. Now the entrepreneur hires other tax advisors. Each one goes from 50 customers to 500 customers, so the software is 10xing their productivity. Since many companies do the same, now the market is flooded thanks to a 10x improvement in productivity. Let’s imagine that in the past tax advisors were in short supply and they could only serve, say, 20% of the customers who wanted advice. Now, they can serve everybody twice over. This oversupply means tax advisory firms start competing for customers, and prices plummet. With lower prices, people who didn’t get tax advice before flock to get it. So what wins, the reduction in price, or the increase in volume?
Well, if we take tax returns as an example, tax professionals e-file 88M returns every year in the US, out of a total of 166M filings, so at most the number of customers could increase by 89%. A drop of 90% in price would result in an overall revenue drop of at least 81% for the industry.
In the grand scheme of things, this is good! More people can afford the service, and those who already do can save more money and use it to do something else. The problem is when it happens to all industries at once.
To understand what happens to each job, the crucial question is the Jevons Paradox, where a drop in prices can make a product so affordable that the volume of new customers more than offsets the cut in prices. I started looking into specific jobs here and was surprised by what I found. I’ll share more in a premium article what will likely happen to jobs such as bookkeepers, insurance claims processors, recruiters, admins, translators, salespeople, business analysts, management consultants, lawyers, architects, teachers, private tutors, diagnostic physicians, psychotherapists…
This will not just happen to employees. Entrepreneurs will face the same problem: cut-throat competition for their services. Prices will collapse while opportunities multiply.
We will have tens of millions of entrepreneurs building these SaaS companies, and hundreds of thousands of millionaires will be minted as a result, even some billionaires. But the vast majority will not make this money. They’ll be left vibe-coding app after app with zero success, bringing the prices of everything down as a result.
There are also vast consequences for investors, I’ll talk about them in another premium article.
The question becomes: What moats are left? What can you build that will withstand the AI deluge? What areas should you start specializing in? What companies should you join? What investments should you make?
These are the 16 moats I found in academia, people’s discussions, and thinking about this myself. How defensible is each, really?
2026-11-10 23:29:39
How can you do better research? Work with AI faster? Create great images and videos? Build software to fulfill your everyday needs? Create a company of bots working for you? This is what I want to help you learn today, by sharing how I do it.
I’m figuring out these things as I go, so it’s a super practical guide to what I do, so you can do it yourself, starting from zero knowledge. Since many of you are probably learning the same things, please share in the comments any improvement, advice, or tip you have, so we can all get better together. Many of you will, in your areas of expertise (or just by playing), be much more advanced than I am. That’s great! The rest of the readers and I would love to learn from you! Share your tips!
ChatGPT is my main partner here. I pay the $200/month subscription, and I have never yet run out of credits, despite having a dozen conversations with it a day, sometimes very long ones. You probably don’t need to spend as much if you don’t spend hours researching topics every day, but you do want to pay something for it because otherwise you don’t get full access to the most important feature: the level of intelligence.
Whenever I talk to somebody who’s underwhelmed by ChatGPT, the first thing I ask them is: “What level of intelligence are you using?”. The answer is virtually always the same: ”What are you talking about?”
The Thinking Effort is the biggest drive of intelligence.
Instant is like asking a knowledgeable person to blurt out the first thing that pops into their mind. It’s OK for something quite quick and well-known, but it will fail if the knowledge is niche, recent, or requires some thought for a human.
Conversely, Pro is for when you need something very thorough, with lots of sources, where the AI reasons through its arguments heavily, discusses the question with itself, doesn’t take things at face value, and reaches several layers of depth in its answers. It’s like asking the same person as before to take a week to think about the project before coming back and presenting it to a committee.
Most people use Instant, but should try others. The more you use different levels of thinking, the better a sense you’ll get of which one to select for any given query. For example, if I want to know something well known but for which there’s still a lot of debate amongst humans, I’ll ask for a bit more thinking. Or if the topic is a bit niche.
The other key way to extract good research is with the depth of a prompt.
I frequently write prompts that are longer than other people’s articles. This is one for the article Will AI Save France from Bankruptcy? I’m adding it not so you read it, but so you can get a sense of how long they can get.
AIs are actually quite good at understanding your intent, but the more information you give them, the more you prime them in the right direction, the better they answer what you need.
One way you can harness this tendency to really understand your intent is to ask it to give you a better prompt. For example:
“I want to study all the important elements about the US election and its ramifications in detail. Please write me a prompt that I can use with an AI to extract as much fascinating insight as possible.”
This is one of the most important learnings you can get from working with AI: We’re used to doing work ourselves instead of having minions work for us, so we’re trained to remain close to the intellectual work of a single worker. But an AI can be any intelligent worker, so you could not just talk with it as if you were its boss, but as if you were the boss of its boss, or the boss of the boss of its boss. You can always go one level higher. This becomes exceedingly important in the last section, agents. We’ll get back to this then.
Every time you start a big endeavor that requires lots of AI conversations, you must put it in a Project.
Within a project, every conversation shares all the others as context, as well as all the same resources and attachments.
Otherwise, your AI will forget the other parts of your project, you’ll have to repeat yourself, it will invent things…
Most people just use Chat and don’t know what Work can do.
Chat is just for a conversation. For UT, it could be: What is the tectonic structure of Tokyo? How was gravity discovered? What will happen to France when debt climbs too high?
Work is when you want specific tasks done. Here are the last few examples for me:
Creating a catalog of all the UT articles and their main insights
Gathering a list of potential sponsors
Collecting municipal data for a map of Brazil
A benchmark analysis of space games
Build a database for an article on the history of the military
Assemble lots of data to create a thesis on the origin of European topography
Investigate 30 jobs that are most likely to disappear because of AI
The difference is that chat is to go deep understanding a concept, which could be achieved in a conversation with an expert. Meanwhile, work is something you would have asked an analyst to go and make happen, usually in a day, a week, or something like that.
The difference matters because Chat is lazy. If you ask it to catalog all the UT articles, it might browse the site and come back with “I found 10 articles on the home page”. If you retort: “What about the 500 others?”, it might say “OK alright let me fetch more. I now have 30, but I haven’t read them yet.” It’s exactly like having a conversation with an expert: If you ask her to read UT’s articles on the spot, it won’t interpret “Read all of them right now as we speak.”
Work won’t balk, it will do it. But just like an analyst that might go perform an analysis, it might come back in 3 days with a completely wrong direction, and you might need to start over. That doesn’t happen in a chat.
As we tackle ever more ambitious articles in UT, we will be using Work more.
I use Claude, but not for research. I find it inferior to ChatGPT, and the way it writes is unbearable. I haven’t tried Gemini in a long time. But Grok and NotebookLM have their own specific use cases.
Grok has two handy uses compared to other chatbots.
First, it’s the only LLM that has real-time access to a social media’s content. This means it’s much better than any other LLM at ingesting large amounts of current events and perspectives. For example, an article like the one on France’s riots would be impossible to write without Grok, as only it was able to make sense of the millions of tweets written on the topic every day. Otherwise, you’re gated by traditional media, which is slower, shallower, and more biased than the aggregate of tweets.
Bias is the other aspect. I’ve met people who think mass media and other social media like Facebook are neutral, while Twitter is right-wing, so they conclude that Grok is right-wing too. This is not what researchers found when they looked into this.
What makes Grok unique is that it agrees with some very right-leaning perspectives, even though it disagrees with more. It’s also an outlier in that it disagrees with a majority of very left-leaning positions.
But it’s important to take a stance (which Gemini never does, and Claude avoids), because that’s where information lies. Otherwise, you’re just a people-pleaser, which means you prioritize harmony over truth. Meanwhile, it looks like the best way to reach the truth is to have Grok debate ChatGPT, which is basically what I do1 whenever I face politically-loaded topics. I’ll cover this type of thing later on, in the Agents section.
NotebookLM is a Google product that takes in (or collects in response to a prompt) a selection of articles about a research question. It then only gives answers based on those and doesn’t go back to the Internet unless you ask it to. The idea is that it will only refer to the collected articles and won’t hallucinate if there are gaps, making it more reliable than a general search with an LLM.
It’s pretty good at gathering a bunch of sources and digesting them, giving you the specific places where some claims are made. It’s ideal as a first stab to make sense of a bunch of papers and articles you might have gathered on a topic.
Elicit is pretty useful if you want to dig into the academic research on a specific topic. It’s better than a traditional literature search because it can highlight the parts of papers that talk about your topic of interest so you don’t have to parse pages of irrelevant and dense text and figures. It has a bunch of great features for scientists to use in their research. I use its free version.
This is probably the most underrated AI tool. Outside of articles, about 60% of my writing is dictation. This includes most prompts, messages, parts of emails, etc. Why? Because dictating is ~3x faster than writing.
ChatGPT’s dictation tool is nearly perfect. It can switch from one language to another seamlessly.
Personally, I use Wispr Flow though. It’s even better than ChatGPT at transcribing both in English and other languages, and it has plenty of useful tools, such as a keyboard shortcut for starting and stopping dictation (which I use dozens of times a day), a personalized dictionary, correction of filler words…
If you read part of the long ChatGPT prompt above and were surprised at the writing, that’s because it wasn’t writing.
I don’t dictate my articles (and don’t think I ever will), because the process of typing every letter is what allows me to think about every word with deep intent, improving the reasoning and shortening the text.2
I happily pay the pro subscription ($15/m, $12/m when paid annually), and I don’t think I could live without it anymore.
The shop is live! We have some seriously amazing posters, with images never seen before, like this one:
We’ve built a map engine specifically to be able to build maps like these, inspired in UT articles—in this case, Why New York Is So Big. This map exists nowhere else, and shows why the most important city in the world is where it is.
I generate a lot of images for Uncharted Territories.
Here’s my workflow.
First, I tend to work with ChatGPT to come up with a good prompt. We brainstorm artistic styles, references, composition, etc.
Then, I use Midjourney ($10/m) to produce amazing visuals.
Sometimes I give it free rein to explore ideas, other times I constrain it a lot. This is for example my exploration of one of the pictures for the French Riots topic.
However, Midjourney is infamously bad for editing and detailed control.3 For that, I go back to either ChatGPT or NanoBanana, in Google Gemini (which comes for free with a paid gmail account), to whom I can ask for precise little changes and they do them.
The next step here is to follow the advice of your editor Shoni and connect Claude to your favorite image editing tool. She uses Affinity, which apparently is a kind of free Photoshop4. I just downloaded it and will use it next.
Making an image is the first step before you animate it into a video! We’ve been doing a lot of that in Uncharted Territories lately, creating videos with AI and posting them on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. Here’s an example:
We’re just starting out, trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t, what I need to do vs what other collaborators or AI can do, while always maintaining accuracy, truthfulness, deep insights, and entertainment.
I had invested in the company Poolday,5 an AI agent that generates videos from scratch. You can treat it a bit like ChatGPT, except it has specific video skills, it learns from you and adapts to your own brand and needs. You can tweak any element with a follow-up prompt or by pointing at it. This is great for Uncharted Territories as we had zero experience making videos ourselves.
One of the things that blew my mind is that you don’t just ask it to change the videos, but you can actually ask it to make tools on the fly! So for example if you’re used to iMovie or Adobe Premiere, you can ask it to give you similar controls, and it will build them inside the tool itself so you can make some tweaks.
I tried it when the CEO sent an investor memo saying their churn was 0% in the first couple of months, which is pretty crazy. I begged him to give us credits to try. If you’re interested in investing, reach out to me and I’ll make an intro.
The other tool I’m playing with right now is Hyperframes, a free software by US company Heygen. Here, you need to have a script and the footage, but you can drop it into the tool and it builds the video for you. Pretty neat!
As we speak, we’re exploring other approaches to ramp up both quality and quantity: Magnifik, Higgsfield, Seedance directly or via Claude (or just Claude for code-based editing… I’ll report back if you’re interested.)
I mostly use Claude for this, $200/month. It’s phenomenal. This is how we made the space simulator.
I tried vibe-coding two years ago with Replit, and I couldn’t make it—although I did invest a bit in the tool. I love what they do, it was just not yet ready for me. I tried a few more times, also with Claude Code and ChatGPT Codex, but it didn’t work for me until a month ago, when I tried it again and I think it finally got good enough.
You download Claude on your desktop, click on Code there, and start describing what you want. In my personal life, I’m using it for educational games for my children. In one afternoon I coded a math game with several “worlds”, which I shared with you.
This is what the actual games look like:
You can play both games here:
I built a biology game, including a 3D rendering of the human body, in another afternoon.
I asked my daughter if she preferred to play them or study traditionally, and her eyes told me: Are you mad? Of course this!
My younger son got in on it too and, unprompted, spent half an hour playing a level that he hasn’t even been taught in class. I showed it to my nephews and they didn’t want to stop. The neighbor has been asking me if the new version is ready.
This is the end of education as we know it. It’s the end of textbooks, and of some teachers’ tasks. I’m pretty sure my children can learn 2-10x faster with this, maybe even 100x. In light of these, I’m not surprised that companies like Alpha School claim they can teach 2x faster on 2h/day.
Meanwhile, my wife used Claude to connect Google Classroom with my daughter’s school emails and study books, and every day my daughter has a personalized session telling her what she has to study: current curriculum being studied, exercises to complete, upcoming exams, and the relevant content to work on.
I’m now in the process of building my agent system with Grok Bot.
The idea is that, instead of doing stuff, you can build a system of agents that do that thing. Properly designed, the entire system can work like an entire organization.
For example, people post 600 million tweets a day, but only a few are relevant for me to see and react in order to grow my audience. It would be a full time job for me to find these tweets and reply to them or quote them. Instead, I can build a system where one agent is constantly updating my body of work, then passing it to another agent that identifies the accounts and tweets that are relevant on the topic, alerting of new viral tweets, which another agent can assess to decide whether in fact it is a viral post, that another agent then assesses to see if it’s on a topic that I have expertise on and something to add, at which point they can put all of this together and send me every day a list of a few tweets that I can react to, along with my insight and a proposal of something to say, including an image.
Then, once you have that system working, you can have another agent analyze this process, suggest improvements, and execute them, in a constant loop so that the system gets better by itself.
You can do this across many different jobs, with agents coordinating other agents, finding areas prone to optimization and then optimizing them.
I had to upgrade to the $30/m version of Grok to do this, and I ran out of credits in 24h, so now I’m trying the $200/m version, I’ll let you know how it goes.
The most important takeaway from this is the approach: You have to stop thinking that AI is an intelligent person. It’s an unbounded intelligence. It’s as many intelligences as you want it to be. Don’t conceive of a task for the AI. Don’t even conceive of AI as a person who can carry out a project. Think of it as an organization. Design not the task, or the person who will achieve a task, but the organization that can make the job.
Here’s another example to really drive this home. When I design a game now, I’m not saying anymore “Build a game according to the following specifications”, but rather: “You are the head of the videogame. We are going to design together your team, and how they will work together. You have the Art Director, the Head of Game Design, the Head of QA…”. The AI then spins up dozens of agents that work together to build the game, and they only stop to ask for the most valuable elements: art direction, game mechanics, learning objectives, etc.
But when you design your agents, be careful. Don’t give them unbridled access to your email, bank accounts, or the like. It will likely misuse them.
Create a dedicated email account with its own access to documents, and assume this is an external person who could betray you, so keep that in mind when giving them access to stuff.
So that’s how I’m using AI tools today across research, coding, dictation, video, images, and agents. I hope you learned some things you weren’t doing yet, especially this last insight about thinking of AI like an organization, not a person. I’ll be writing much more about AI and how we can use it and navigate it in the coming weeks and months.
What about you? What are you using right now? What should I or others learn from your workflows?
Manually so far but I’m realizing I should automate this.
Except maybe a sentence here and there when I know exactly what I want to say.
Your editor Shoni added this: For real detail control, you should be taking the images to Affinity (free software), plugging in Claude via the MCP and telling it what you want (assuming you don't know how to use illustrating software). That's how you avoid the issues with grime when you generate too many times. I'm not sure if coding tools will be able to do this better without the software across the board or not. Apart from details, in this way you can change the resolution so you're not stuck with low-res, generated images which don't always serve your purpose.
The Adobe tool, but mixed also with InDesign and Illustrator. Canva bought the company that built it and made the software free.
A seed round 2 years ago.
2026-11-07 02:43:13
This week's premium article: The End of Paris
I have two incredibly special things for you today. I can’t WAIT to see what you think of them.
First, instead of telling you how something works, we’re going to show you. We’ve built this space simulator, so you can get an intuitive sense of space: How the universe formed, galaxies, the Milky Way, where the solar system is, its planets and asteroids, day and night, the seasons, the moon’s phases, eclipses, tides… Play with it and tell me what you think!
You’ll notice there is another game there too. If the topic is interesting to you, I’d love to hear what you think about it, what other topics you’d love to see treated like this, and what other game mechanics or ideas you have.
After obsessing about the shop for months, it’s finally ready!
In Uncharted Territories, we always try to go deep, far beyond the shallowness of other media, so we’ve tried to do the same with the shop. We wanted each thing we put out there to be truly special, and represent the insights of the UT spirit and its articles.
That’s why we have several posters from the winner of the challenge, Igor Brajković - Brala. Each poster draws on one article, painstakingly capturing its details and nuances. Looking at some of them is like looking at an illustration that never stops giving.
It’s why we have a poster about São Paulo with a map that has never been seen before, anywhere: We’ve built a map engine specifically to build these unique maps.
Then, we have clothing items—for all ages and sexes—representing some of the most iconic articles, like Assholes All the Way Down, which we’ve opened to everybody for the launch.
We have a million other ideas, and if you enjoy the shop we’ll add them in the future, but we wanted to open the shop today so that you can order for Christmas: Depending on where you are in the world, the shipping might take a bit of time, so order soon if you want the items as gifts for Christmas! The shipping takes long because we sourced the items all over the world, wherever we could find the producers who could create the dedicated products we wanted.
As for pricing, we don’t see the shop as a way to get rich. I’m not even sure we will break even. Most of the money goes to our partners for production, or shipping (which is included in the prices). Hopefully we’re wrong, you guys enjoy the shop, it makes tons of money, and we can produce many more unique items for you.
We’re so excited to hear what you think of both of these launches! Let us know!
2026-11-02 19:20:12
430 BC. Athens commands a maritime empire stretching across the Aegean’s islands and eastern shores.
Tributes flowed into a city building the marble Parthenon. It invented rhetoric, debate, and democracy. Socrates questioned Athenians in its streets, his mentee Plato founded its Academy, and his mentee Aristotle trained a pupil who would b…
2026-10-30 16:15:44
It’s 2035. France faces bankruptcy. The French president has called a secret emergency meeting of Euro zone presidents. The air is so thick they can swallow it. Standing in the middle of the large room, disheveled, the French president pleads:
🇫🇷: It’s true. We’re broke. So I come to you today to beg for your help. Please, without you, tomorrow we’re either defaulting on our debt or missing our pension and civil servant salaries. All hell will break loose.
🇩🇪 Germany: But why are you about to default?
🇫🇷: It’s the Capitalists! They won’t buy our debt anymore. They’re demanding ridiculous interest payments!
🇮🇪Ireland: Well yeah, they don’t trust you’re going to repay them. They lost confidence in you because your debt keeps growing and they think you’re going to default.
🇧🇬Bulgaria: But why does debt keep climbing?
🇫🇷: It’s because…
🇳🇱 Netherlands: Because you keep overspending!
57.5% of GDP… You’re worse than the USSR! A Communist country!
🇫🇮Finland: Actually, you can spend as much as France, or even more. We do it. That’s not the problem, the problem is that that spending is not covered by income. France has a massive deficit. France has lost money every year for 50 years!
🇨🇾Cyprus: Just raise your taxes
🇫🇷: I wish we could… They’re already the highest in the world.1
🇫🇷: We tried to raise them in the past and it didn’t go well. We had a wealth tax and had to withdraw it in 2018 after rich taxpayers left. We replaced it with a real estate tax only, as land can’t emigrate, but that was much less income.
🇲🇹 Malta: Then cut your spending.
🇫🇷: We’re already cutting to the bone! So much so that people are getting poorer!
🇬🇷Greece: You haven’t cut shit! You’ve only scratched the surface! We really cut to the bone. At one point, our GDP per capita was 25% below the peak. That’s sacrifice! Not your café-croissant austerity!
🇫🇷: But didn’t you see the news? The riots every time we say we will cut spending?
🇧🇪Belgium: That’s bullshit. Your problem is your pensions. Pensioners don’t go to the street. You must cut pension costs.
Yeah? Then they will just vote for the populists, who will run on early retirement, will revert the reforms, and make everything worse.
🇩🇪 Germany: So let me get this straight. You spend 57% of GDP on stuff, and 5.4% of that is deficit. There are 4 ways to reduce a deficit:2
Cut costs
Increase revenue by raising taxes
Sell debt to cover the gap
Print money
On (1), you say you can’t cut costs because people get angry and they will just vote you out.
On (2), you say you can’t raise taxes anymore because they’re already too high.
On (3), debt is what you’ve been doing to close the gap, but the music has stopped, and youn can’t do that anymore.
But of course you can’t (4) print money, because you belong to the Euro zone, so the rest of us have to print that money to bail you out? You want to cause inflation everywhere in Europe so that you can keep spending?
🇫🇷: If you don’t do it, the populists will win! Do you want a French Hitler?
🇦🇹 Austria: What about all the austerity WE had to go through? We all had to increase our retirement ages, we all had to lower our unemployment benefits! Such chutzpah to come to us saying we had to do it, but you can’t, threatening us with another Hitler!
🇮🇹 Italy: Come on guys, let’s not be so aggressive. It can happen to anybody. We’re in this together, right?
🇭🇷 Croatia: Only when we all do our share. France has not, and it’s a massive country, risking everything for everybody!
🇵🇹 Portugal: Guys guys guys, let’s not jump to conclusions. We need to think! If France defaults, the entire Eurozone will be sent into a tailspin. Our banks will default because they’re holding French bonds, the financial system will break, people will lose their savings, there will be runs on the banks, companies won’t be able to finance anything…
🇱🇻 Latvia: Yes, but if it doesn’t default, nothing will change! People will continue dancing in the streets while our citizens have to work! How can I go to my voters and say: “You have to work 40h per week until you’re 70 because the French only want to work 35h until they’re 61?”
🇪🇪 Estonia: And not all buyers are exposed! Only the ones that allowed the party to continue by buying it again and again over the decades, making a quick buck trusting that we would bail them out if push came to shove.3 I think they must learn the lessons. Let France fail!
Suddenly, the voice of the the president of 🇱🇺Luxemburg emerges from the back, in half darkness, reciting in perfect French:
For decades, the French lived like kings,
On borrowed gold and lavish things.
Spending fortunes never earned,
Laughing as their debts returned.
One day, they found themselves in plight
When debt came knocking overnight.
Not a single euro more
Could be borrowed as before.
They went crying in despair,
Seeking neighbors' wealth to spare,
Begging them to lend some gold
Till the crisis lost its hold.
“We shall pay you,” said the French,
“When we're out of this deep trench,
Principal and interest too,
We'll pay both, we swear to you.”
The Europeans would not lend;
Their patience found its end.
“What did you do all those years?”
They asked, unmoved by Frenchmen’s tears.
“We spent decades, night and day,
Working less and raising pay.”
“You worked less? How very nice.
Now it's time to pay the price.”
This is where France is heading—unless AI saves it.
2026-10-23 21:52:23
Over the last few weeks in France, tens of thousands of people have vandalized and burned schools, cars, official buildings, shops, markets, people…
How did we get there? Initially, students were complaining about their terrible conditions: There’s not enough money for schools and teachers. They said it’s because there’s too much austerity. Is it?
Others say it’s the immigrants—especially Muslims—who wreck everything.
Or the opportunities of non-Whites.
Others say it’s the islamo-leftist alliance.
Or the police, because they’re too violent.
Or the justice system, which doesn’t imprison agitators enough.
I didn’t know, but I wanted to find out, especially as a veteran of French education (I did all my primary and secondary schooling in the French system and got one of my undergrad degrees from a Parisian university). So I did. The following is a detailed account of what has happened, and why I think it happened, based on plenty of videos and data.
This is one of these articles that are very hard to write because of their political load. I think it’s important to push back against all biases, so it was pretty serendipitous that Ground News gave me access to their tool, after I reached out to them. It helped me get a sense of the left and right perspectives on this story.
Ground News is sponsoring this article and has given Uncharted Territories readers a 40% discount for their subscription. You can redeem it here:
It all started in Créteil, a poor Parisian suburb, with 23% of its population in substantial economic deprivation and 26% of its population immigrants1.2 One week after the beginning of this school year in September, teachers at a school there went on strike because of three unfilled teaching positions (out of over 130, so ~2%) and some unfilled staff roles.3 Teachers’ unions supported them, the far-left party La France Insoumise (LFI) joined, and a day later, so did students.
The strike spread from high school to high school in the region of Paris, from there to the rest of the country, and from high schools to universities. 55% of French people approved of these strikes.
But they became violent.
A 15 year old lost a hand, allegedly after grabbing a dispersion grenade thrown by the police, another student suffered a broken jaw, another one lost the sight in one eye.4
Why were students so upset?
Maybe the worst issue is this: 7.5% of instructional hours were lost through unreplaced teacher absences in 2024–25, with another 2.3% lost through school closures, for a total of nearly 10% of classes.
Another reason is the poor condition of schools. Here’s an example:
Another complaint is too many students per class:
Another is racial discrimination: A large recruitment experiment found that North African teacher candidates received 31% fewer callbacks from their applications than did native French people (although other studies show hiring biases are against all foreign-sounding candidates).
So what exactly are students demanding? Here are a couple of specific lists from student unions:
Renovate education buildings
Hire more teachers and admin workers
Start school at 9am instead of 8 or 8.30, and study on Wednesday afternoons (when schools are typically not in session)
Guarantee €1 lunches
Eliminate fees paid by non-EU students
Less violence from the police, and more accountability
Less social and ethnic discrimination in university admissions.
The General Confederation of Labour (CGT), one of France’s largest unions, called for lower prices, higher pensions and boosted wages for school staff.
In other words, there are three issues here:
Funding
Discrimination
Justice / police brutality.
Whenever you’re trying to figure out what causes something, you first need to compare the situation to that in similar places. What’s happening in France right now is not happening elsewhere, so it must not be caused by similar situations in other countries.
France spends $13,787 per pupil per year, more than the OECD average, and more as a share of GDP per capita than countries like South Korea, Australia, Germany, Canada, Italy, Spain, or Switzerland.
The French state spends 4.6% of GDP on education, to the OECD’s 4.2% (nearly 10% more).
And the spend has been pretty stable as a share of GDP.
So whatever the cause of this unrest, it can’t be the total spend on education: Other countries are spending much less, but these countries aren’t up in flames.
Similarly, despite the numbers above, France doesn’t stand out dramatically in class sizes, teacher absenteeism, teacher shortages (0.4%), attrition (1.9% vs 6.4%)…5
Also, funding for primary school infrastructure comes from municipalities, for secondary education, from the region, and for teacher compensation, from the state, so it’s not like poor areas are getting less funding than richer ones. And England found that 700k of its students attend schools requiring major refurbishment, but you don’t see English schools reduced to ashes.
So although the state of education is not perfect in France, its condition doesn’t justify massive riots. What’s happening, then? Maybe the funding is not going where it’s most needed?
France's education ministry allocates ~32% of its budget to pension contributions. A third!! A standard teacher costs ~€85k to the state. Of that amount, how much does this person bring home? €37k! How much goes to pensions? €30k!
And then after that, the teacher still needs to pay about 10% of that to income taxes, and about 10% to VAT! So in reality, he keeps just €31k of the €85k, or ~36%!
I tried to get a breakdown from ChatGPT, and this is where we landed:
Why are pensions so outrageously expensive? Because the French retire early and comfortably.
This lady says she is 90 years old, retired for 25.
She receives €3,000/month from the state—which, if you’re tracking, is about what a working teacher receives!
Indeed, French pensioners are among the most highly paid in the world. They make 90% of the average worker—similar to public school teachers. But public school teachers are paid more than the average worker, so the result is that the average retired teacher makes more money than the average pensioner, or even the average French worker!
And they retire super young! The average French person retires at ~64, but civil servants, including teachers, retire at 62! Some, even at 61!
Is this true across all public services in France? Not quite. Pension contributions are an outsized share of all public salaries in France, but they’re particularly egregious for teachers.
Note that the spend on pensions (angled lines) as a share of all personnel expenditure (blue) is nearly identical across all these jobs? ~28-35% of the compensation of every job goes to retirement spend.
What would the spend on education look like if you took away pensions?
The spend as a share of GDP has actually gone down a bit, from 5% to 4.26%, while other spends have been more stable over the last two decades. It’s still not enough to justify country-wide riots, but it explains some of the concerns.
When I first arrived at university in France, I was flabbergasted to receive every month the CAF6, ~€150 per month for housing. “Great!” I thought. Of course, I didn’t think about where that money came from.
In 2004, we could go to the Restaurant Universitaire and eat a full meal for €3 or so. During COVID, that amount was reduced to €1 for financially vulnerable students, and in 2026, has been extended to all students.
So why are students complaining?
They’re complaining that now there’s not enough staff, nor enough food in each portion, and that they have to wait too long, since demand for these lunches has increased by 48%!
Rather than reducing meal prices, I think it would make much more sense to provide scholarships to students who can’t afford their studies—which would cover food, too—and let the market work elsewhere.
It doesn’t look to me like France has an education funding issue. It has an entitlements issue, especially regarding pensions. The way to solve it is not to support more entitlements, but fewer, especially reducing pension spending, which is quite simple: Instead of retiring at 61-63, push retirement to, say, 72 to get full benefits7— the French live until 83, and teachers until 85. With this change, the entire French budget gets rebalanced overnight, the government can lower taxes, improve the economy, increase investment and spending, more jobs appear, and everybody is richer. Of course, the French riot when this is proposed, they want to have a cake and eat it too.
42% of French students report that classmates do not listen to the teacher, compared with 30% across the OECD. French teachers spend 20% more time maintaining order, they are 10% less satisfied with their jobs, lose 10% more of their time to student interruptions. French public schools see 4x more serious incidents than private schools.8 20% of teachers are apprehensive about going to school every day, 47% don’t think school rules are respected. Just last week, unrelated to the riots, a 14 year old shot a principal and a teacher.
If you ask a French person, about half will tell you it’s the fault of Arabs or Muslims, by which they’ll mean Maghrebins (mainly Algerian, Tunisian, and Moroccan), and some sub-Saharan Africans (primarily from Senegal and Mali).9 But this opinion is much more common in older generations than the new ones. For example, Islamophobia is 50% lower in the 18-24 than in the 65+. This bias leads to the type of complaints about discrimination that we mentioned before. That’s why students are demanding:
Elimination of fees paid by non-EU students for university access: Because these are easy to pay for non-Muslim, non-African students, who tend to be richer, they select against them.
Less violence from the police, and more accountability: These immigrants and their descendants are less privileged, more often victims of racism, and more prone to violence, so the police are more violent with them.
Less social and ethnic discrimination in university admissions: Most demographic data is scrapped from university admission systems to avoid discrimination, but not the high school they come from. Why is this retained? Because some high schools are more generous with their grades than others, yet the grade counts for the French Baccalaureate results. Having access to high school origins helps universities normalize performance. But it can also be a blunt tool to profile racially, as some schools are near universally native French while others are largely comprised of African immigrants and their descendants.
But France has less immigration than Canada, yet more problems with it.10 Why? Why are immigrant students in France underperforming?
We’ve looked into this in the series on immigration: It’s not unique to students. French immigrant populations tend to have more unemployment, occupy more public housing, and more poverty.
Why? There are at least two causes. One is that, as North African immigrants were concentrated in suburbs in the 1960s and 1970s, many of these became ghettos, where crime became rampant and economic opportunities scarce. Africa is the biggest source of immigration in France today, especially from Muslim countries (primarily Morocco, Algeria, Tunis, Turkey, and Senegal), and these immigrants have had a particularly difficult time integrating.
Another cause of underperformance of immigrant students is that immigrants from these countries are, on average, overrepresented in all numbers we have for crime and fiscal cost across the EU.
A third reason is self-selection: As I’ve described in my series on immigration, Canada's point system for immigration is much better than France’s, whose massive welfare state self-selects the immigrants who want welfare rather than the ones who want to work. Their children are now in French schools.
All of this doesn’t mean that all, or even a majority of immigrants from these countries, are problematic. It just means that the average immigrant will underperform, among other reasons because there is a much higher share of disruptive people from these countries.
Unfortunately, these three factors (and maybe others) combine to create a vicious cycle: The worse that immigrants of a certain background perform, the fewer opportunities they will have, the more they will stay in their ghettos, the angrier they will get, and the more crime they’ll commit. When others notice that African and Muslim immigrants underperform, they add fuel to the fire through racism. As the immigrants and their descendants stay behind, they notice that what they have in common is their African ancestry and Islamic religion, and they form an ethnic identity.
And this is one key reason why Palestinian, Algerian, and other Muslim flags are more common than French flags at the strikes and riots.
Whether the root cause is urban ghettoisation, self-selection, racism, human capital, or anything else, the result is that immigrants and their descendants, especially those of Muslim or African background, underperform in education and are overrepresented in strikes and riots. According to this French report on the 2023 riots:11
75% of the suspects were born in France, while 25% were born abroad. According to the Paris Police Prefecture, within its jurisdiction, a large majority of the rioters arrested were young French nationals of immigrant descent (second- or third-generation), primarily of North African (Maghreb) or sub-Saharan African origin.
We don’t have more details about the country origin of the French citizens of immigrant descent, but we do for the 25% born abroad: 40% were from Algeria, 13% from Tunisia, and 21% from other African Muslim countries.
Do we have anything more representative? The French state can’t easily collect ethnic or national origin data, but the share of immigrants in different schools is accessible. The violence in these schools is public data, too. So I asked Claude to correlate these two numbers:
Other groups of immigrants came to France that were even poorer and had the same opportunities, such as the Vietnamese or Chinese, and these groups also formed their own ghettos, but they are not underperformers today in terms of economy, education, or crime.
The Chinese are considered to be a community where things go well, where people manage on their own and are quiet—compared to other immigrants, who are much more demanding, and consider themselves as victims and might consider this Chinese community as competition.
This is the explanation of this young man on why Chinese shops were rampaged:
The Chinese have become too rich in France. I think it’s unfair. They’re now in the category of people with nice clothes and big cars.
I’ve written at length about this topic in the past, and my conclusion is this: There is a serious problem around 1st and subsequent generation immigrants in Europe in general, and France in particular. It starts with a lower human capital from some specific countries and ethnicities, which makes them commit more crime and contribute less economically, but kicks off a vicious cycle of underperformance, racism, violence, discrimination, more crime… Both sides of the political aisle speak some truth, but they’re not listening to each other. For the Left, the entire problem is discrimination and lack of opportunities, and it’s true, but not all the truth: These minorities are overrepresented in all crime and economic statistics across all of Europe, and how immigrants from other countries (even poorer, like Vietnam decades ago) don’t have this problem. For the Right, the entire problem is simply that these immigrants are bad, which flies in the face of evidence that the majority of these people are law-abiding, productive members of society, and that whether they want it or not, today, European economies need immigrants to be sustained.
What started as a valid protest has long since slid into illegitimate riots. There are currently 3x more demonstrations in France than usual, and 24% of strikes have become riots (vs 2% normally).
About 10,000 people have been arrested. What went wrong?
Student unions and the LFI think peaceful demonstrators are being attacked by the police, using disproportionate and indiscriminate violence, so strikers have become violent in retaliation. They also claim that most violence is not actually carried out by demonstrators, but casseurs (“breakers”), who join in for fun and looting.
The Right complains that there is not enough police repression of violence, and that casseurs don’t go to jail often enough.
So which side is right?
A common claim is that demonstrations are initially pacific but are then joined by casseurs: young men, older than students, who are interested in violence and looting and are frequently organized as Black Blocs: rioters dressed in black, hooded, and with masks, so they’re very hard to tell apart from each other and use the anonymity of the crowd to evade identification and arrest.
But this is not quite what happened here. In the first riots, in early October, 87% of those arrested were minors—mostly students12—for what crimes? Resisting arrest, participation in an unlawful assembly, intentional property damage, violence against public officials, and incitement to unlawful assembly.
YOUNG MAN: We’re here to demonstrate, ma’am.
REPORTER: Against?
YOUNG MAN: I don’t know, but we’re here to demonstrate. We’re not listened enough for the new reforms. We come here to show our joy and humour.
REPORTER: And what’s your message?
YOUNG MAN: Break everything!
CROWD: YEEEEES!
I think this video particularly illuminating because it was taken in Belgium, not France. Belgium doesn’t share the same policies as France, so the complains can’t be the same, yet the riots spread there anyways. But only to the French side, not the Dutch-speaking Flanders! Which shows that the main driver of the spread of the riots was not student demands, but cultural spread.
Later, by last weekend’s riots in France, only 27% were minors,13 so young men had joined in the vandalizing and looting, just like in the 2023 riots, which were caused by 18-25 year old men.
I spent six or seven hours in the middle of that shop window, and not once did I hear any political demands. There were plenty of insults, lots of laughter. It was all about the sheer pleasure of it.—Shopkeeper whose shop was vandalized.
From a police union, there are two profiles:
Young people from “sensitive neighborhoods” [code word in French for poor suburbs where Africans are overrepresented, especially Maghrebis] who vandalize and loot, and radical elements of the extreme left.—Hubert Gimenez, police officer and union representative.
According to the police, in Paris, these profiles account for 80% and 20% of cases respectively.
So what we have here are demonstrations that were already turning violent before older men joined in, escalating the vandalism and looting. But did this violence originate with the police?
That’s the main complaint: The police are too violent, so people react with even more violence to protest. This is a compilation I found online:
When I first saw this, I thought: “This is bad!” But then I noticed that in all these videos, we only see the police’s reaction, but never what the action was. What happens when we look at the actions?
For me, the violence can be summarized with this video:
INTERVIEWER: Can you explain what you were trying to achieve?
STUDENT: I went to ask the police why they were using so much violence against students.
But of course, the video shows her pushing into the policeman, not the other way around. And if she had been so scared of their violence, would she have done this?
Until October 14th, the list of injured included 937 policemen, 250 students, and 150 education professionals. That means over 70% of those injured are policemen.
An additional 1,000 policemen were wounded (7 of them severely) during the weekend of October 17th.
I think it’s important to have a measured reaction. The police can’t use overwhelming force against pacific demonstrations, but there are not all pacific demonstrations. But after looking at all this footage, I think it’s possible that the police is not violent enough: Demonstrators don’t appear scared of them, rioters attack people, buildings, and the police with impunity, they loot and destroy… That’s at least what the police union Alliance thinks, as it will sue the French state for risking lives due to unclear and contradictory guidance on how to react to the violence.
When you look at governments that truly abuse violence against demonstrators like in Iran, what you see is police shooting people dead, police motorbikes going through the crowds with guns, police cars running over people, and little violence on the side of the protesters, for they know what will happen to them if they are caught.
Because that’s the next step.
It’s not enough to stop violent riots or arrest their instigators. You also need to make sure that there are consequences, which usually means prison time.
Every drop in that funnel is a problem:
If only 1% of looters are ever arrested, the risk of looting seems worth it.
If most are not declared guilty, they’re not dissuaded from crime.
They also will not be dissuaded if a sentence is delayed, commuted or suspended.
And of course, if it’s short.
In the 2023 riots, 8.5% of rioters were arrested. We don’t yet have nation-wide data this time, but data from Marseille suggests the chances that rioters will be arrested is around 1%. This is impunity.
Short sentences might actually be counterproductive, because prison has both positive and negative effects:
Deterrence: People fear being locked up, so they commit less crime
Incapacitation: While in jail, you can’t commit a crime
Rehabilitation: While in jail, you get trained to not commit crime, either ethically or through learning a profession to earn an alternative source of income
Crime training: You meet more criminals, who become your network and teach you how to become a worse criminal, while you lose your job, your family, and your friends outside, since they moved on without you and you
So what types of sentences are people getting? Here’s a list of sentences from this weekend’s cases. Here are a few to get a taste:
Ylan, 18, Toulouse. Threw a lit Molotov cocktail toward police officers (without an explosion). Maximum: 10 years in prison. Sentence: 12 months suspended, 140 hours of community service, and loss of voting rights for 3 years. [so, no prison for throwing an explosive at the police]
Three men, aged 20–27, Lille (two undocumented immigrants): Arrested carrying bags of merchandise looted from Micromania and Calzedonia. Maximum: 5 years. Sentence: 10 months in prison, with immediate detention, and a 2-year ban from French territory for the two undocumented immigrants. [how is that a 2-year ban instead of a permanent ban and immediate expulsion?]
Sahel W., 19, Reims. Looted a Carrefour Express supermarket. Maximum: 7 years. Sentence: 105 hours of community service.
Mohamed, Lyon. Undocumented immigrant who looted a Louis Vuitton store. Maximum: 7 years. Sentence: 6 months in prison, with immediate detention, and a 2-year ban from French territory [why not expelled and banned from France?]
Hugo M., 20, Reims. Looted clothing from a boutique. Maximum: 7 years. Sentence: 4 months under electronic monitoring
Unnamed Tunisian delivery worker, Rouen. Looted a gold-buying shop, carrying €16,000 worth of jewelry. Repeat offender. Maximum: 14 years. Sentence: 8 months in prison, with immediate detention, plus activation of a previously suspended 6-month sentence.
Anthony, Rouen. Homeless man who looted a Courir store. Repeat offender. Maximum: 14 years. Sentence: 6 months in prison plus 6 months suspended.
Unemployed man, 26, Rouen. Looted a Micromania store. Repeat offender. Maximum: 14 years. Sentence: 6 months under electronic monitoring.
Cheima, 30, Lyon. Looted a JD Sports store. Maximum: 7 years. Sentence: 8 months suspended.
Sophia, 27, Lyon. Looted a JD Sports store. Nine previous convictions, including theft. Maximum: 14 years. Sentence: 12 months under electronic monitoring.
You can read more examples in the footnote.14
Initially I was surprised at how much sentences include electronic tracking and community service instead of prison, but after looking at the evidence it makes sense. Electronic tracking seems to be better than a short sentence, because it still deters and slightly incapacitates, without providing crime training. Community service also seems comparable to short term sentences in recidivism.
What does surprise me is that there are a lot of recidivists here receiving very lenient sentences. Studies show that the vast majority of crime is committed by recidivists, and that it’s hard to get them to stop, so you simply want them off the streets for as long as possible.
Also, why aren’t illegal aliens who commit additional crimes expelled?
French lawmakers agree that legislation is too indulgent, and just before the strikes they approved the RIPOST law, which among other things increases sentences for people carrying firework mortars out of festivities contexts, frequently used as weapons in riots.
Another law to be debated next week includes:
Joint accountability, so that demonstrators police each other, as each member of a group is liable for the behavior of every other member.
Easier recovery of riot damages money from rioters.
Easier access to compensation for victims.
Victims who were not properly informed of a criminal hearing can still pursue civil compensation.
Rioters lose certain welfare benefits.
Family allowances and housing benefits, normally protected against seizure, could be used to recover court-ordered damages, subject to legal safeguards.
And during the riots, a few new project laws were added, mostly to keep casseurs more accountable by demanding full compensation for what they destroy, forcing debt collection even when the state or insurance companies don’t want to, and making parents economically accountable for their minor’s activities.
All this evidence suggests policing and sentencing might not be strong enough to deter rioters, so looters take advantage of demonstrations to convert them into riots. But are they the only force behind this radicalization?
Students and teacher unions have standing to demand more resources for education. What they can’t do is ask for more resources for education and pensions. But that’s exactly what they are doing, joined by the extreme-left party La France Insoumise (LFI). To them, the French government is not sufficiently taxing the rich, nor spending enough on education and pensions. Is this true?
The LFI escalated the strikes to the national level, which is consistent with their goals: They want to publicize the bad state of affairs, so that they get more votes in the next election in April 2027.
And the LFI has been instrumental in turning the strikes into riots. Remember that the first round of arrests had a majority of minors. What does the LFI have to say about them? It always defends the demonstrators, whether violent or not. According to them, they’re never at fault. They’re either reacting to police violence, or when they start violence, it’s because they’re so oppressed that it’s the only way they can make their voices be heard. The LFI mayor of a poor suburb (investigated for embezzlement) said violence was legitimate.
This is not typical in French politics. Unions and politicians know that violence is very bad for their movements, so they take extra care in policing their own. Nobody is allowed to commit violence, and everybody must watch out to identify and turn in any violent person.
This is where the youth factor might have been important: Students are not as organized or experienced, they’re more excited about the adventure, and they might have been bad at policing their own—or might have even welcomed the adrenaline, not foreseeing the consequences.
The bridge between politics and violence became obvious when the far-left group La Jeune Garde, endorsed by the LFI and whose leader is a parliamentarian for the party, was declared illegal in France after it was proven to have physically attacked political opponents, organized patrols to intimidate and expel opponents, prevented political opponents from demonstrating, trained members for violent confrontations (under the pretense of self-defense), and promoted and legitimized political violence.
Why escalate strikes into riots? For votes, of course. They allow more visibility for their demands and provoke the police into violent confrontations, thereby playing into their hands. Great for increasing turnout in the upcoming election, pushing other left parties to match their demands, and destabilizing the existing government. That might be bad for students, teachers, and society in general, but it's good for getting more votes.
And who are they trying to attract? Of course, extreme-left voters, but not only those. Between 20% and 60% of the LFI’s voters are Muslim. This is what people call the Islamo-Leftist alliance, which turned really bad for leftist Iranians in the 1979 Revolution, as they carried the revolution in 1979, only to be side-lined, massacred, and then forced into submission by the Islamists. The French center-right magazine Le Point has drawn connections between the illegal Muslim Brotherhood,15 the Muslim Student Organization, and LFI, via organizations like Jeunes Gardes, RED Jeunes and Generation EDR, with supporting coverage from Qatar-funded Al Jazeera.
Why are there riots in France?
Students are suffering from a shrinking spending on education in real terms, which they can feel through poor infrastructure, classes with many students, and missing teachers.
These conditions are not dramatically different to those in other OECD countries though
However, the spending in education has been growing, not shrinking. But students and teachers are not seeing that money, because it goes to existing pensioners, who account for a third of the budget.
Other entitlements may be even more ridiculous, including CAF and €1 lunches for all students.
And France can’t increase its taxes much more. It must reduce its entitlements, especially its pensions. It can be easily done by delaying the age of retirement, exactly the opposite of what the Left demands.
There is discrimination in France, and it applies to all immigrants, but especially Maghrebis.
This discrimination, however, reflects reality, as the immigrants that go to France frequently commit more crime and contribute less economically than natives, or other immigration origins.
I understand the complaint about the high school of origin in the admissions system. However, this information is transparent virtually everywhere else in the world, and people don’t complain about it. My main hypothesis is that there’s real information there, because of the previous point.
Maybe a solution could be eliminating high school, but then all baccalaureate results should be normalized based on the performance of each school’s students: A student coming from an easy-grade school should get a worse grade than a hard-school student.
Other measures seem legitimate to me, including higher tuition fees for foreigners, as in fact you do want to select against the immigrants who can’t pay them. There should be a separate scholarship system based on merit.
Demonstrations do get penetrated by older people (mainly men) who want to vandalize and loot.
This is in part due to the youth of students, who don’t police their own.
However, the older looters are not the only culprits. Students also increased violence that escalated the demonstrations into riots
They were supported in this endeavor by unions and the extreme-left party La France Insoumise
LFI has an electoral incentive in maximizing the publicity to the demonstrations, and will always defend Muslim demonstrators and rioters no matter what, as about a third of its electorate is Muslim
Although police brutality might not help in de-escalating the situation, it looks like their substantially higher numbers of wounded suggest their response is actually not violent enough
The police doesn’t identify and arrest enough looters, so the impunity encourages them
Sentences might appear light, but in many cases that’s reasonable because the alternative—prison—might actually train the imprisoned to become more professional criminals.
However, light (or non-existent) prison sentences for repeat criminals are bad. These people should be locked down for a long time, because for them deterrence doesn’t work as well. You need to incapacitate them as long as possible.
Resident immigrants that commit these types of crimes should lose their status immediately and be deported along with the illegal immigrants.
So what can France do to solve these problems? I’ll cover that in the next article, along with a look at the massive wild card that can change everything here: AI.
Or children of at least one immigrant. 3rd generation descendants of immigrants are not counted in these stats, but there was a fair amount of Algerian immigration into France following the independence of Algeria, and many of their grandchildren today are 3rd generation.
In my youth when my soccer team played against teams like those of Créteil, we joked that we had to stay together before, during, and after the game, for protection. As the French would say, “Ça craint”. This fear was legitimate.
A deputy headteacher (proviseur adjoint), a director of vocational and technological training, a head of the business relations office responsible for coordinating vocational placements, a full-time school nurse, a full-time social worker, and additional disability-support assistants.
One policeman was accused of sexual assault. I’ll let you be the judge.
It has 7.5% unreplaced teacher absences, 21 students per primary education class (OECD levels), and 26 in secondary (10% higher than the OECD’s 23).
Caisse d’Allocations Familiales
It’s an example. I haven’t published on pensions yet, but I have a long draft on the topic. My short take on this is that the retirement age was fixed when life expectancy was decades shorter. It was meant more as disability insurance than funding for decades of holiday. We don't realize that everybody is poorer, including retirees, because of this massive spend on pensions that come too early. Increasing the age of retirement or changing the system completely to depend on something other than age would probably solve these problems.
On a per high school basis. 2% of HS suffer from such serious incidents every year.
The 14 year old shooter’s mother is Ethiopian.
14% of the French population is born abroad (21% if you count their children), but these numbers grow to 15-33% of school-aged kids in France are immigrants or their descendants, and they tend to fail at school. According to the OECD, in France 16% of students are immigrants, but in Canada it’s 34%. So France has half the number of immigrants as Canada, but 48% of these immigrants in France are socioeconomically disadvantaged, compared to only 28% in Canada. In Canada, immigrants outperform natives in international scores by 12 points, but in France they underperform by 51 points.
After a French-Algerian adolescent was killed by the police. The riots lasted one week and started in the suburbs of Paris, before spreading nation-wide.
The data actually refers to minors, not students. But in France, school is mandatory until 16, and from then until 18 people must either study or work, so the vast majority of those under 18 are students.
The 87% is nation-wide, the 27% is Paris, but data from other cities suggest the pattern is the same.
Man, 43, Pau. Threw projectiles at police officers. Maximum: 5 years. Sentence: 6 months under electronic monitoring.
Physical education teacher, 24, Nîmes. Threw projectiles that injured a police officer, resulting in three days of medically certified incapacity for work. Maximum: 5 years. Sentence: 18 months suspended with probation.
Ten defendants, aged 18–43, Grenoble. Looted telephone and perfume shops after smashing display windows. Maximum: 7 years. Sentences: Between 4 months suspended and 8 months of immediate imprisonment. One defendant, previously given a suspended sentence in June, received an immediate custodial sentence.
Unnamed undocumented immigrant, 32, Tours. Received or possessed stolen goods from looted shops. Maximum: 5 years. Sentence: 4 months suspended [why is he not expelled?]
High school student, 19, Tours. Received or possessed stolen goods from looted shops. Maximum: 5 years. Sentence: 3 weeks of community service.
Four men, aged 19–28, Nantes. An undocumented immigrant, a self-employed worker, a high school student, and a university student. Involved in looting stores, including Fnac and Foot Locker, or violence against law enforcement officers. Maximum: 5–7 years. Sentences: 4, 6, or 8 months suspended.
Two related women, ages unspecified, Agen. Dressed entirely in black, assaulted and insulted a police officer and damaged a police vehicle. Maximum: 5 years. Sentence: 6 months suspended plus a citizenship education course.
Three men, aged 23–24, Bobigny. Possessed a replica handgun, fireworks mortars, balaclavas, and materials for making Molotov cocktails. Maximum: 7 years. Sentences: Ranging from 10 months suspended to 7 months under electronic monitoring.
Edmondson G., 21, Paris. Former firefighter arrested before a demonstration carrying Molotov cocktail materials in a backpack. Videos on his phone reportedly showed him throwing a Molotov cocktail the previous day. Maximum: 7 years. Sentence: 2 months in prison, with immediate detention, plus 6 months suspended.
Andy M., 23, Paris. Security guard who fired a fireworks mortar toward law enforcement officers on the Champs-Élysées. Maximum: 5 years. Sentence: 12 months suspended, with an order excluding the conviction from the relevant criminal-record extract.
Father, age unspecified, Lille. Attempted to break into a store using a crowbar. Maximum: 7 years. Sentence: 10 months in prison, with immediate detention, and a 3-year ban on participating in demonstrations.
Man, 23, Lille. Fired fireworks mortars toward law enforcement officers. Maximum: 5 years. Sentence: 12 months under electronic monitoring and 140 hours of community service
Nicolas (garbage collector) and Zakaria, Rouen. Threw projectiles at police officers and verbally insulted them. Maximum: 5 years. Sentence: 12 months under electronic monitoring.
Adam, 19, Lyon. Swiss national described as a foreign Black Bloc participant. Arrested leaving a looted Monoprix store; also convicted of resisting police. Maximum: 7 years. Sentence: 12 months suspended.
Man, 20, Perpignan. Threw a construction barrier at two police officers. Maximum: 5 years. Sentence: 6 months under electronic monitoring.
Man, 21, Perpignan. Threw projectiles at police officers and damaged public property. Carried ski goggles, an improvised face covering, and reinforced gloves. Maximum: 7 years. Sentence: 10 months under electronic monitoring.
Amazon delivery worker, 22, Perpignan. Stole a scooter after a demonstration, with accomplices, forced entry, and a concealed face. Had a previous conviction. Maximum: 10 years. Sentence: 8 months under electronic monitoring.
Woman, 20, Limoges. Participated in looting shops and City Hall, which was subsequently destroyed by fire. Maximum: 7 years. Sentence: 6 months in prison, with immediate detention, plus 18 months suspended with probation.
It’s not banned in France, but only because it has no presence. All associated organizations have been dissolved.
