12 Comments

Such a well written article!!

Expand full comment

Thanks! Do you have friends and/or family in provincial/rural Italy? The situation must be similar there, perhaps even worse, given that Italy has had virtually ZERO growth since adopting the euro twenty years ago.

Expand full comment

Yes, very many, area I am from is rural, so.....

Expand full comment

This is France as I remember it when I fell in love with it.............thank you for your sensitive protrait.

Expand full comment

Very nice.

Expand full comment

Thank you, sir! How are things in rural Normandy these days?

Expand full comment

Wines, cheeses and breads. It could be worse, as we watch the collapse of Western empire.

Expand full comment

Mind you, our price range for a good French wine is €2.50-4.00. No need to spend much.

Even cheaper in Portugal!

Expand full comment

Listened to part 2 of the discussion with Ramin yesterday. Really good. Pity about the sporadic audio hiccups. Hope you have better connection next time. Bought the epub version of his book, now slowly reading it. A revelation, esp. that material on Napoleon.

Expand full comment

France has 1980s communications. We just got fiber in our village last year, suffering through ADSL before. Cities like Bayeux, Cherbourg and Caen in our region are still 75%-100% copper wire ADSL. That day with Ramin, we had a lot of rain, and since the amount of fiber run is the bare minimum, moisture really makes it bad. I also realized afterwards that my wife was watching TV downstairs, sapping what bandwidth we get, so I'll have to be more careful.

After you read his book, be sure to read Vincent Cronin's "Napoleon". Absolutely mind-blowing. He truly was a socialist who always served the 99%.

Expand full comment

Thanks for the reading tip! Been reading some of the reviews of that book on Goodreads, it looks like just the ticket. Will see if I can find a copy.

I still have copper ADSL; my neighborhood in the center of Amsterdam hasn't been wired for fiber yet. Thankfully its the latest reiteration, called VADSL2, and is pretty fast, 100mbs/30mbs. 2010s technology, I suppose.

Expand full comment

Great stuff. Many thanks!

Expand full comment