← Back to context

Comment by thelastgallon

1 day ago

The French seem to be very thoughtful people who solved multiple pesky problems permanently:

1) Guillotine for the super rich

2) Nuclear to power >70%

3) C15 for people, cows, craftsmen, mini house

4) TGV

5) french fries for the fastest carbohydrate delivery, handily beating rice

I wish they bring back the first 3 and do some shorts, market them to the world. Fries are doing fine.

38 comments

thelastgallon

Reply
Lio  20 hours ago

I'm a big fan of the current range of French Renault electric cars.

The 5, 4, Megan and Scenic are just excellent.

I think the Scenic is probably the one I'd buy right now based on the range, 380 miles but the 5 and the 4 have so much character they're probably the first really iconic electric car designs IMHO.

ttoinou  1 day ago

Right now french people are obsessed with ecology and egalitarianism. Those who don't are not well seen in society, or left the country already.

So the best thing I'd see them excelling at in this century, if they can drive their ideology in the right direction, would be producing low-tech solutions solving 90% of problems with 20% of the costs, with open-source like tools / materials / methods everyone can replicate easily. A bit like this article about this old car.

  • jijijijij  18 hours ago

    > Right now french people are obsessed with ecology and egalitarianism.

    Do you have anything to read up on that? This got me a little excited, but I also doubt it due to the rise of right wing populism everywhere else. Man, if France actually got the rare attitude to get shit done in these times, I may move there and help.

    • ttoinou  17 hours ago

      It's just my general sentiment when I see my french peers. It'd be interesting to try to turn this into data for sure, but "right wing" in France has a different meaning / reality than in others countries, not sure the raw stats would explain this difference.

      If you like those kind of ideas you should def move in France and start building with others there little communist enclaves. Just be ready that in France we do think a lot before deciding to act, we don't have the same "get shit done" attitude like in the anglosphere world

eeeficus  1 day ago

French fries is not a french invention AFAIK but belgian!

emtel  1 day ago

> Guillotine for the super rich

Can we not glorify mass executions on HN please? Bluesky is available if that's your thing.

  • aweiher  21 hours ago

    The guillotine remark resonates in today reality because people feel this scam. Tone-policing the symptom while ignoring the cause is naive.

    The C15 thread shows exactly why: It beats modern trucks in pure utility. Today we are paying more for less value.

    It is exactly the wealth extraction Ray Dalio describes in Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order (Stage 5 of the debt cycle), resulting in internal conflict.

  • weli  1 day ago

    When did hacker news become so right wing that saying the French revolution was a good societal movement is seen as "glorifying mass executions"? lmao

alephnerd  1 day ago

> Guillotine for the super rich

You know modern France has the exact same problem of billionaire lobbying and media consolidation that the US has right?

Arnault (LVMH) [0], Trappier (Dassault) [1], Niel (Illiad) [2], Lagardère (Lagardère SA) [3], Bolloré (Bolloré Group) [4] and a couple others have an inordinate amount of control over French politics. It's also why whenever a country like China, the US, India, or others wants to hold the EU by the balls, they end up tariffing Congac, because Arnault's LVMH has a near monopoly on Congac production in France, so he almost always pressures Macron into acquiesing because otherwise he would threaten to back the RN.

Both France and the US are similarly ranked flawed democracies [5] with similar dysfunctions.

Also, immediately following the revolution, the guillotiners ended up doing it for the rich [6], as the French Revolution ended up leading to the re-establishment of authoritarian rule with le Directoire, Napoleon, Napoleon III, and others. The only thing you learn from the French Revolution is the same thing you learn from Tahrir Square - the house always wins, which in political science is modeled via Selectorate Theory [7] and Veto Players [8].

Sadly, it's the same reason why despite mass protest after mass protest, the Iranian regime hasn't fallen - the primary political and economic veto players in Iran (Army, IRGC, Basij, Police, Clergy, Business leadership, SoE leadership, Bonyad leadership) haven't defected because they have more to lose than gain if a revolution succeeded. The moment a handful of these interests think they can expand their presence under a new regime is when you would see Khamenei fall, but the leadership would end up being the same ba***rds anyhow, just like how the Islamic Republic ended up co-opting and rehabilitating army officers and business leadership from the Shah's regime during the Iran-Iraq War and after the cultural revolution.

[0] - https://www.lemonde.fr/en/politics/article/2023/08/07/how-be...

[1] - https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/frances-d...

[2] - https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2022/07/10/u...

[3] - https://www.reuters.com/article/world/macron-and-the-moguls-...

[4] - https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/culture-et-idees/dossier/la...

[5] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/democracy-index-eiu

[6] - https://www.jstor.org/stable/650023

[7] - https://www.jstor.org/stable/4092374

[8] - https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7rvv7

Arodex  1 day ago

The guillotine wasn't for the super rich, but for the privileged by birth. The equivalent would be to guillotine the nepo babies (and the Ivy League administrators who rubber stamp their admission).

Or fix inheritance. And by fix I mean tax as hell.