The September Dispatch
Sometimes it's easy to forget about the woes of the world. For a little while anyway.
It was a gorgeous day when I returned to Europe. I dropped off my bags at home and went to meet my husband at the Biergarten, where he was hanging out with our daughter and her friend.
I can get exasperated at the lack of alarm I notice among the general public considering the global state of affairs. But sitting there looking at the trees with an ice-cold Radler Maß, the pleasant murmur of the Biergarten surrounding me, I, too, see how easy it is to forget about everything and feel that all is right in the world.
But I snapped out of it and went apocalypse readiness shopping. I'm a secret prepper (and I had a 25x Payback coupon for a local bio grocery store chain), so I got our three days of emergency food supplies, boxed them up and stored them in our basement. You should too, this guy has a good list.
Today also wrapped up Bavaria's biggest tech conference, Bits & Pretzels. I usually avoid it, but I went this year because I wanted to see what the vibe was around defense and energy transition.
I took a ton of notes and plan to write more about it next month. Some random takeaways:
→ Bavaria is emerging as one of Europe's top industrial deep tech hubs; there are a LOT of robotics, aerospace, defense and safety-critical systems companies and start-ups here
→ I heard the term 'Total Defence' for the first time at a talk about protecting critical infrastructure (mostly from drones). One panelist stated that the general public does not grasp the level of threat we're living under (not me! Look in my basement!)
→ Arthur Mensch, CEO and co-founder of Mistral, was impressive. I was skeptical and ready to not like him. When he frankly stated that the OpenAI breaches were nothing more than simple negligence, he won me over.
→ European politicians need to up their communication game. I'm sure I'll have more insights after next week's conference.
→ There was an encouraging amount of optimism and a lot of explicit rejection of 'doom narratives' about Europe.
This month I wrote about how Europe's future depends on an energy transition.
ICYMI:
TongueTied, a multi-lingual game for word-game nerds
Links:
An excellent essay on Europe's identity crisis and how to get out of it.
Andy Burnham's Labour conference speech. It lives up to the hype. Very worth watching. Also: will the UK be the next 'Associate' EU member?
A thoughtful breakdown of what really happened at Ceuta and the disastrous response by EU politicians.
