Five Things: Israel, AI Salaries, Iran, Dupes, Hotel Swimming Pool
It's Sunday. Read this now.
Hello and welcome back to Five Things!
I just finished a very insightful book called Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations, which was published in 2018 and covers the history of Israel by focusing on the intelligence community in Israel. It helped me better understand the core of the conflict and oftentimes when the name of an operative was mentioned, I thought to myself “wait a minute, that guy was involved in this operation?” - and then later these people went into politics and that’s why I remembered their names. The book ended with the long-time head of Mossad Meir Dagan lashing out at then Prime Minister Netanyahu. He accused him of being a bad manager and always putting his personal interest over the national interest. That was 10 years ago and Israel still has Netanyahu putting his personal interest above the interest of the country. What a great book, you should read it!
Obviously, I didn’t read the book as I have a policy that prevents me from reading anything that’s longer than 200 pages, because I usually don’t finish those books in a timely manner, which annoys me. So instead I listen to longer books, which is just so wonderful. My wife just had to suggest it for a few years and now I’m hooked. My dog sometimes gives me a weird look when our walks just take a bit longer as we circle around the house when I really want to get to the end of the chapter.
Have a great Sunday and read these Five Things now!
Israel Is Fighting a War It Cannot Win
Israel’s current government appears unable to change its approach, even though its principal military objective—to dismantle Hamas’s terror infrastructure—has largely been achieved. The absence of any long-term Israeli vision has left Israel, Gaza, and the broader region in a protracted state of chaos. Wars without a clear political goal cannot be won. They cannot be ended. The longer the vacuum in Israel’s planning persists, the more international actors will have to come together to prevent an even worse catastrophe than the one currently unfolding. They must do so not only for the sake of Israelis and Palestinians but for the region’s stability and their own interests. The war that followed Hamas’s October 7 slaughter was just. Today it is becoming unjust, immoral, and counterproductive, shifting responsibility for the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza from Hamas to Israel.
Netanyahu has to go.
At $250 million, top AI salaries dwarf those of the Manhattan Project and the Space Race
These astronomical sums reflect what tech companies believe is at stake: a race to create artificial general intelligence (AGI) or superintelligence—machines capable of performing intellectual tasks at or beyond the human level. Meta, Google, OpenAI, and others are betting that whoever achieves this breakthrough first could dominate markets worth trillions. Whether this vision is realistic or merely Silicon Valley hype, it's driving compensation to unprecedented levels.
To put these salaries in a historical perspective: J. Robert Oppenheimer, who led the Manhattan Project that ended World War II, earned approximately $10,000 per year in 1943. Adjusted for inflation using the US Government's CPI Inflation Calculator, that's about $190,865 in today's dollars—roughly what a senior software engineer makes today. The 24-year-old Deitke, who recently dropped out of a PhD program, will earn approximately 327 times what Oppenheimer made while developing the atomic bomb.
The race for AGI is just insane. Having said that, I’d take the job for $249 million!
How the Revolutionary Guard stealthily shapes Iran’s economy
Iran has struggled for years with an ailing economy, including persistently high inflation and unemployment, which has fueled popular discontent. Economic experts attribute some of that malaise to Western sanctions and some to the Iranian government’s mismanagement of the economy. The sort of pressure that Armandehi revealed in his post is further exacerbating the private sector’s woes by destroying fair competition and is undermining Iran’s recent efforts to attract more foreign investment, economic experts said.
This article offers an interesting glimpse into the startup ecosystem in Iran. Just imagine how advanced this country could be in a liberal democracy!
Knock it off!
Living among copies of something else is as ordinary an experience as scrolling past three of the same posts, one after another, on any given social media site. The similitude of consumers’ options has even upended certain corners of the legal system, where intellectual property rights holders are trying to fight the speed and scale of the internet with their own — at times flawed — versions of the same. It is dupes all the way down.
This whole imitation is the sincerest form of flattery idea was coined when nobody could foresee how social commerce would evolve.
The Man Who Spent Forty-two Years at the Beverly Hills Hotel Pool
Then Irving would walk out through the glass door at the end of the hallway into the allée of jacarandas and bougainvilleas that led to the Beverly Hills Hotel pool. He would wave good morning to Sven Peterson and his pool crew, who would be scrutinizing visitors from the safety of a small, tollhouse-style booth, and walk down the concrete steps toward the pool itself. One of the pool boys would scamper ahead to “set up” a chaise for Irving—that is, drape a flamingo-colored towel over the chair’s buff-colored vinyl—on the south, or sunny, side of the pool while Irving went over to his cabana, on the opposite side, to change into his swimming trunks. Then he would sunbathe for a few hours on the chaise. At noon, Irving would retire again to his cabana and change for lunch, which he would occasionally eat under an umbrella-shaded table in the Patio Club, or sometimes at the Bistro Garden, on Canon Drive, a favorite spot of his.
This is an older story. But just so wonderful. If I’d start doing a streak like that, I could probably still get in a few decades…
That’s it. Have a great Sunday! If you missed last Sunday’s edition of Five Things, have a look here:
— Nico