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time flies and I'm here again

Schopenhauer, Fahreneit, Copernicus... what do these people have in common? Besides me having to copy and paste all of their names.

Author

Micael Balioni
May 14, 2026

THE MUSTS

World

cried myself an ocean, trying not to drown in it

 Global suicide rate has fallen

The global suicide rate has fallen by around 40% since the 1990s. Our World in Data reports that the age-standardised global rate fell from about 15 to 9 deaths per 100,000 people between the mid-1990s and 2023.

  • What's behind the decline? The drop didn't happen by accident. Researchers point to a combination of greater awareness and support for people at risk, improvements in mental health treatment, and restrictions on certain methods of suicide — including, notably, the banning of highly toxic pesticides in low-income countries, which removed one of the most common means. Global economic development and expanded access to care for depressive disorders also played a significant role. In other words: when societies decide to treat mental health like any other public health issue, people live.

One last thought. In a world where the news rarely stops feeling heavy there is something quietly meaningful in this number going down. Fewer people, every decade, are reaching a point where leaving feels like the only option. I don't know exactly what that means. But it makes me think that somewhere, in ways that don't always make the headlines, something is moving in the right direction.

What else in on

  • Oman: has cut maternal mortality by more than half since 2019. The Ministry of Health said maternal deaths fell from 17 per 100,000 in 2019 to 8 per 100,000 in 2025, a drop that officials attribute to better maternal care, stronger follow-up systems and expanded preventive programmes. (Read)

  • Brazil: The country was the third-largest destination for foreign investment in 2025, attracting $77 billion—a 22% increase year-over-year. Trailing only the U.S. and China, the country received $40 billion for the construction of a wind-powered artificial intelligence data center during that period. (Read)

  • UK: The United Kingdom has ended prosecutions for women who terminate their own pregnancies, as well as approving pardons for women convicted of doing abortions illegally, and expunging the police records of those arrested and investigated over illegal abortions. (Read)

  • United States: The U.S. government has authorized executions by firing squad and reinstated methods such as lethal injection, gas, and electric chair for death penalty cases. The measure aims to expedite sentencing and standardize execution procedures, which until now had varied by state. (Read)

  • Turkey: joins the list of countries that passed some form of law banning children under 15 from accessing social media. (Read)

 

Economy & Business

i guess my bonus was lost in the mail

The company with no CEO that out-earned JPMorgan

A firm with 3,500 people just beat one of the biggest banks in the world — with 1/60th of the staff. Meet Jane Street, Wall Street's most interesting company that most people have never heard of.

In 2025, Jane Street pulled in $39.6 billion in trading revenue, surpassing JPMorgan. It then split the profits: total employee compensation reached $9.38 billion — roughly $2.68 million per person. For comparison, that's seven times what the average Goldman Sachs employee made.

What makes this even more unusual is how it was split. Jane Street has no CEO. No top-down hierarchy. Governance sits with a group of equity-holding partners, and every employee is paid based on the firm's overall performance — not individual metrics. One pool, shared by all.

How did they get here? Jane Street was founded in 2000, starting with the unglamorous work of trading American depository receipts before moving into ETFs and eventually becoming one of the world's largest market makers — connecting buyers and sellers across equities, bonds, and financial assets. They recruit mathematicians and puzzle solvers, not traditional finance types. And since 2016, the firm's internal equity has grown by nearly 2,000%, reaching $45 billion — a war chest that lets them fund operations without relying on outside investors.

Now zoom out: While Jane Street is sharing $2.68 million per employee, the rest of corporate America is moving in the opposite direction. The CEO-to-worker pay ratio has gone from 21-to-1 in 1965 to 281-to-1 in 2024. In 2024 alone, CEO pay at S&P 500 companies grew 7% — while median worker pay grew just 3%. At the extreme end, the 100 largest low-wage employers in the US had an average CEO-to-worker pay ratio of 632-to-1.

So is Jane Street a model — or an anomaly? The honest answer is probably both. Their structure works in part because they operate in a high-margin, talent-dense environment where collective performance is easy to measure. You can't run a retail chain or a hospital on the same logic. But the question it raises is real:

❝

In a world where worker dissatisfaction is rising, unions are growing, and inequality keeps widening — how long can the 281-to-1 model hold?

 Jane Street didn't set out to prove a point about corporate structure. They just wanted to make money. But in doing so, they accidentally made one anyway.

What else is on:

 

Technology & Science

should I be worried?

Anthropic releases a report attempting to answer the question of the decade

If our parents used to ask, “When will we have flying cars?”, now the big question has become, “Will artificial intelligence take my job?”

Anthropic — the company behind Claude — has just published a report that offers a good glimpse into the current landscape and what the future may hold.

  • There is still a huge gap between AI’s capabilities and how it is actually used. In jobs in the fields of Computer Science and Mathematics, for example, the technology could handle 94% of tasks, but actual usage stands at 33%.

In fact, the jobs most at risk are those of programmers, financial analysts, and customer service representatives. Fields such as Management, Administration, Finance, and Law are where AI is most capable of performing tasks.

Most workers “at risk” are older, better educated, and better paid. However, the trend is that high-risk jobs are not laying off employees, but simply stopping hiring.

The hardest-hit are recent graduates (junior analysts), who are four times more likely to be adversely affected by technology. Hiring of people aged 22–25 has fallen by 14% since the launch of ChatGPT.

On the other hand, interestingly, the safest jobs are cooks, motorcycle mechanics, lifeguards, bartenders, and dishwashers—in practice, the more manual jobs that AI cannot automate at the moment.

Talking about that:

  • China bans companies from replacing their employees with AI: A court in China has ruled that Chinese companies cannot fire employees to replace them with artificial intelligence for the purpose of cutting costs.

    • The ruling came after a company attempted to replace a technology supervisor and demote him to another position, with a 40% pay cut. When he refused, he was fired.

    • China currently has the largest labor market at risk of automation. To give you an idea, about 250 million jobs could be affected by AI by 2030. The country also faces a youth unemployment rate of nearly 17%. (Read)

       

EDITOR’S RECOMMENDATIONS

Books

there are so many hidden miniature break-ups within a big break up

 Good Material by Dolly Alderton: This one came to me through a friend, during a recent trip to Switzerland. As I've been trying to read more fiction, his enthusiasm was enough to convince me. I'm glad it was.

Dolly Alderton is best known for her sharp, witty writing on modern love: she's a columnist for The Sunday Times Style, has written for GQ, Marie Claire and Grazia, and her memoir Everything I Know About Love won a National Book Award and hit the Sunday Times top five in its first week. But for Good Material, she did something deliberately different — she put her own experiences aside and wrote from the perspective of a heartbroken man. That choice alone made me curious.

Andy, our main character, is 35, a struggling stand-up comedian, and he's just been dumped by the love of his life, Jen — without a clear explanation. Blindsided and in full denial, we follow him through the messy aftermath: the drunken nights, the social media stalking, the rebound attempts, the long conversations with friends who are slowly running out of patience. It's funny and tender and, at times (at least for me) almost painfully familiar.

  • I'll be honest: Andy isn't always easy to like. His self-absorption, especially in the first half, occasionally borders on unbearable. But Alderton earns the discomfort — because that's exactly what grief looks like from the inside.

Which brings me to the ending. The novel closes by shifting to Jen's perspective, and it's a brilliant move — not a twist, but a reframing. Suddenly the story you thought you understood tilts slightly, and everything rearranges. It doesn't offer a tidy resolution, but it offers something better: the quiet recognition that there are always two sides, and that both can be true at the same time.

I devoured it in a week, which for me — known for my slow reading habits — says everything. Good Material is the kind of book that's easy to read and hopefully hard to forget. You won't regret it. (Rating: 8.5/10)

WHAT ABOUT ME?

Micael

Żyli długo i szczęśliwie

Hello tanamesars, hope you’re doing well.

I just returned from Poland, where I attended the wedding of a very dear friend from my ING trainee days. This was my second wedding in six months — and the question is becoming increasingly hard to ignore: am I entering the wedding phase?

She's Polish, he's Greek, and the whole thing was full of Dutch people, because she lives in Amsterdam. Plus a generous handful of other internationals, because of course. I spent the day feeling genuinely grateful — not just because the wedding was beautiful, she looked stunning, the food was fantastic, and Polish vodka is absolutely one of the best on the market (confirmed, personally, multiple times). But grateful for the rare experience of spending a day where so many cultures just coexist. We had traditional Greek dancing, Polish games and traditions, and I learned to dance like them — which should surprise none of you, given my well-documented reputation as a very talented dancer.

  • After the wedding, I continued the trip with a couple of friends. We spent a few days in Gdańsk before heading to Kraków, where I wrapped up my visit while they carried on to do hikes and couple things. As one does.

It had been a long time since I visited a country for the first time. My recent trips have mostly been to places I already know well — and there's something genuinely wonderful about arriving somewhere completely new. Learning about the food, doing the walking tours, absorbing the history. You won't remember everything… but if you retain even 20% of what you see and learn, imagine how much that adds up over a lifetime of travel.

Poland, it turns out, is a country that has spent much of its history disappearing and coming back — and somehow never losing itself in the process. It was divided between Prussia, Russia, and Austria in the 1700s and vanished from maps for 123 years. It regained independence in 1918, only to be invaded again in 1939 from both sides — the Nazis from the west, the Soviets from the east. (Gdańsk, by the way, is where the Second World War began) After the war, decades of Soviet-era communism followed, until 1989, when Poland became independent again — and hasn't looked back since.

Today it's one of the fastest-growing economies in the EU and, honestly, one of the most underrated travel destinations in Europe. Kraków in particular feels like a city that got away with something — deeply historic, incredibly beautiful, and somehow still affordable.

My version of experiencing all this involved eating an irresponsible amount of Pierogi, drinking things with a high alcohol content while talking with my friends, and wandering through the old city debating how many famous people were actually born in Poland that we had absolutely no idea about. (Names are in the newsletter subtitle. You're welcome.)

It was a wonderful trip, with wonderful company. I can't wait for the next one.

Who's coming with me?

With love,

Micael.

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