Digital sovereignty The National Gendarmerie runs an X account with a million followers, a formalized communication doctrine, polished hashtags, and a budget of nearly eleven billion euros a year funded by the taxpayer. The #FastAndFourrière hashtag, borrowing from American action cinema, turns every traffic stop into marketing content, in a complete break with the French military tradition of restraint. It isn’t the mission that’s at issue, nor its legality: it’s the posture, and above all what it reveals by contrast. Because while the institution tweets its speed cameras and its impound lots with emojis, its 2024 report devotes only four pages to the use of lethal force, and its internal reports rose 28% in a year. You don’t congratulate yourself for doing your duty.
Economy When a lawyer claims that out of a hundred euros of toll paid on a French highway, thirty-three end up going to shareholders in the form of dividends (once the debt is repaid, the operating charges paid and the taxes levied), you can shrug and see it as a militant approximation. Except that the figure […]
Democracy Le multiculturalisme ne peut pas fonctionner dans le cadre d’une démocratie libérale. Ce n’est pas une question de dosage, de bonne volonté ou de moyens. Appelons ça une loi, si le mot gêne les puristes : une tendance lourde, une constante empirique que trois continents et un siècle d’expériences reproduisent sans exception. Putnam l’a démontré malgré lui : plus un quartier est culturellement diversifié, moins les individus se font confiance, pas seulement entre groupes différents, mais au sein de chaque groupe. Quand le “nous” commun s’effondre, les individus retournent à leur appartenance primaire, l’élection devient un recensement ethnique, et le perdant ne reconnaît plus la légitimité du vainqueur : il conteste celle du système.
Hardware Linky, Itron and Landis+Gyr meters equipped with a TIC output let you integrate your real-time electricity consumption data into Home Assistant. Two technical solutions face off: the ESP32-PoE-ISO with the EthTInfo shield favors the robustness of a wired Ethernet PoE link, while LiXee’s ZLinky v2 bets on simplicity with self-powered Zigbee communication. This technical guide compares the architecture, installation, budget and reliability of the two approaches to help you choose the solution suited to your home-automation setup. Whether you have one or several meters to connect, find out which method best matches your priorities between maximum performance and ease of deployment.
Economy At the Berchem Ouest service area, Europe’s largest service station by revenue, using the toilets costs 50 cents. The rebate-token system (recoverable against your purchases) has a certain coherence, but it conditions access to a biological function on a commercial act. What strikes you more is the apparatus: a machine to change your bills into coins, a terminal to pay, a turnstile to filter and, as a last resort, an ATM if you don’t have change. An industrial infrastructure running 24/7, in a place that handles millions, to collect 50 cents per entry. You can find that reasonable. I find it indecent.
Culture The Strait of Hormuz may be six thousand kilometers away, yet for two months it has been dictating the price of fuel at the pump and promises to weigh for a long time still on food prices and plane tickets: France, which imports 29% of its diesel from the Middle East, is the willing hostage of a dependence it has refused to reduce for fifty years. Macron sent the Charles de Gaulle there, a sovereign posture that poorly masks a short-term survival policy. But reducing this conflict to a question of barrels would be a convenient way of not looking at what lies behind it: Hormuz is the economic symptom, Beirut is the heart of the war, and the 2,454 Lebanese dead in six weeks aren’t a geopolitical abstraction. Manon Debs, Vernis Rouge, a French-Lebanese artist evacuated from Lebanon in 2006, has just released a song because she’s afraid for her own and because writing is the only way she knows to feel useful. Two Frances facing the same conflict: one watches the price of a liter, the other waits for news of a street it knows by heart.
Digital euro On April 21, 2026, the BPCE Group announced with great fanfare the first Wero e-commerce transactions in France. The same day, Netzpolitik.org revealed that EPI had been forced to admit that Wero runs its critical infrastructure on the servers of Amazon Web Services. In November 2025, this same EPI was torpedoing the ECB’s digital euro in the name of sovereignty: a project that, by construction, would have rested on the natively sovereign infrastructure of the Eurosystem. Building Wero on AWS is like building a European Defense Ministry on land leased from a foreign power: the owner always has a spare set of keys, and can cut off the water whenever a federal judge asks him to. Without a public roadmap for migration to a SecNumCloud infrastructure, the slogan “strong and independent solution” remains a fine poster stuck on an American wall.
Softwares After four years of patience in the face of the promise of a “modern PrestaShop”, I migrated my entire client fleet to WooCommerce. The trigger didn’t come from a catastrophic bug, but from the loss of confidence in the project’s trajectory: governance blur between “Project” and “Edition”, the absurd coexistence of two template engines (Smarty and Twig), and updates that turn every minor maintenance into a risky operation. When a product-page change takes 4 hours on PrestaShop versus 1.5 hours on WooCommerce, the opportunity cost for the client becomes unsustainable. I developed a WooCommerce Multisite + API-first architecture (via my StockSync tool) that offers more robustness than PrestaShop’s native multistore, with no dependence on direct SQL writes. PrestaShop may have gained Symfony, but it has lost its field ambassadors.
Economy Far from being a mobility solution, paid parking is a disguised tax whose national revenue jumped 84% after the 2018 reform. In Saint-Marcellin as elsewhere, the “squatter car” argument is just a smokescreen for rolling out automated LAPI surveillance and handing enforcement to private interests. This forced-turnover system eases nothing: it multiplies pointless trips, suffocates small retail, and taxes residents right up to their own front door. By turning public space into a financial product, elected officials prefer easy profit over the courage to enforce the existing Highway Code. It’s an institutionalized scam that hits the most vulnerable first, under a thin coat of green varnish.
Real Estate & Wealth Management The first contact filters out 90% of problematic profiles, but the remaining 10% require observation during the showing. Punctuality without courtesy, the questions asked (or not asked), systematic playing-the-victim about past tenancies, and early negotiation with no supporting documents all reveal behavioral patterns that will persist throughout the lease. Watching how a candidate behaves in a space that isn’t yet theirs (whether they respect boundaries, take ownership of the space, or ask permission) predicts their future behavior. These observations aren’t a matter of arbitrary judgment but of empirical correlation seen across hundreds of rentals. The showing is your last chance to observe before you hand over the keys: use it methodically.