Economy For two years now, my Logitech PRO X 2 headset, connected over Lightspeed to an Apple Silicon Mac mini, has been dropping out without warning, in total silence, taking the machine’s entire audio subsystem hostage along the way. Cross-referencing other users’ reports, the conclusion is beyond dispute: it is neither my bad luck nor my setup, but the collision of two fragilities, Logitech’s proprietary wireless and the macOS USB audio stack, made worse by its G Hub software layer. The January 2026 expired-certificate fiasco, which paralyzed G Hub on macOS alone, is the glaring proof. The Bluetooth fallback offers relative stability, but at the cost of latency and quality, which is to say a confession of failure dressed up as a feature. At 300 dollars, that is a disappointment that has cured me of the Astro A50 X and made me hesitate over my future MX Master 4.
Democracy Only a few years ago, a truck used to come down your street. You set the bin out the night before, and by morning it was empty. The service was delivered, paid for by the household waste collection tax, and written in black and white into the intercommunal budget. That truck is slowly fading from […]
Digital euro On June 23, 2026, by forty-three votes to fourteen with one abstention, the European Parliament’s Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs adopted its position on the digital euro. Its chair, French MEP Aurore Lalucq, hailed a “historic day” for the Union’s monetary sovereignty. The plenary vote will follow in early July, then comes the trilogue, […]
Digital sovereignty Qobuz has just announced 45.7% growth and a move into the black, a fitting vindication for a French company that bet on uncompromising quality rather than ad-funded free tiers. As a loyal user of its purchase-and-download service alone, I see in it both an aesthetic pleasure and an act of sovereignty. Yet thirteen years after paying for it, the very “Hotel California” that introduced me to the platform is now denied to me for re-download, its rights revoked by the label, its invoice vanished along with it. This mishap raises the real question, that of a “purchase” that is in truth only a revocable access license, and it reminds us that a digital good slips from our grasp the moment an intermediary holds it in our place. The only ownership that counts is the kind you bring home and hold physically in your own hands.
Cryptocurrency A crypto trading bot seduces the developer because it weds technical mastery to the promise of passive income, and that is precisely what should raise a flag. The decorrelation argument has collapsed: the correlation between Bitcoin and equities now peaks during crashes, exactly when you would want it to vanish. The supposed edge of an amateur bot does not exist against algorithmic firms, and paper trading systematically lies upward by ignoring the slippage and taker fees that devour the alpha on every round trip. Even when justified, a crypto sleeve is sized in a risk budget and falls to 1 to 3 percent of capital, a stake utterly out of proportion to the engineering effort a bot demands. That leaves only the honest question: are we after a technical hobby or a wealth-building tool, since automated DCA and rebalancing by API serve real capital where the bot serves only a fantasy.
Economy 780 arrests, two deaths, bus shelters in flames: every big match now replays the same ritual, in which winning is little more than a pretext. A good moment to think back on 1998, the most fully realized World Cup down to its smallest detail, and the last one you could watch anywhere, in the clear, with no subscriptions to stack. Back then soccer was a commons, and the elation spilled into the streets without setting them alight. Twenty-eight years on, the spectacle has been walled off behind a paywall, and the celebration has slid into mere venting. Scrambled on one side, burned on the other: in between lay a kind of soccer you could still love without paying twice.
Digital sovereignty The PEA was created to finance European companies, and yet millions of French savers use it to bet on the S&P 500. The key to this paradox lies in a little-known contract, the swap, which lets a fund hold European shares while paying the saver American performance. Far from a makeshift, this arrangement exploits an American tax quirk that often lets it beat physical ownership, but it rests on three dependencies you do not control: a bank, a foreign tax authority, and a regulatory framework. The replication is excellent and the returns are there, but you do not own America: you are leasing its performance. And that distinction, painless as long as all goes well, takes on its full meaning the day something seizes up.
Economy Michelin isn’t a company that’s dying: it posts 1.7 billion euros in profit, announces a 2-billion share buyback, and in the same breath eliminates up to 1,500 jobs in France, two-thirds of them white-collar. This isn’t bankruptcy, it’s arbitrage: employing people in France has become a cost line that a champion in perfect health coldly optimizes. When the CEO himself points to a punitive regulatory environment, this is no longer about the economic climate, it’s a verdict. You don’t feel the debt, but 1,500 jobs in Clermont, you feel. The country doesn’t collapse all at once: it empties out one announcement at a time, cleanly, politely, voluntarily.
Economy At the corner newsstand, a front page catches my eye, I hand over a few coins, and I walk off with the paper, with no one asking me to commit for twelve months. Online, that instinct hits a wall: the article I want, I can’t buy, I’m offered only a subscription at “1 € for the first month,” an auto-renewal trap calibrated on my forgetfulness. Yet the willingness to pay is there, and so is the micropayment plumbing; if it isn’t offered to me, that’s not technical incapacity but commercial calculation. The rare platforms that tried pay-per-article didn’t die for want of readers: they were smothered by publishers bent on protecting their subscription funnel. So I take a pass, every time, and each locked paywall loses the euro it could have collected on the spot.
Cars Two euros to inflate your own tires is air resold at forty times its cost, a markup of nearly 4,000%. The richest part is that the motorway network, no stranger to easy rents, guarantees free air precisely where safety demands it, while your corner station bills you for it. You can invoke maintenance, real estate, or razor-thin fuel margins all you like: between a defensible few dozen cents and two euros collected, the gulf stays wide open. A small, barely approximate calculation of the most discreet racket on the forecourt.