Marko Jukic
@mmjukic
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Finding the golden path to interstellar civilization. Senior Analyst @bismarckanlys .
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There is only one reason to explore space. It is not economic, scientific, or military.
Space exploration is rather a mystical proposition to revolutionize what humanity is.
My new, long article in
@palladiummag
. Read here:
A short 🧵 of highlights:
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Europeans aren't poor. They are illiquid. Much of Europe's wealth is stored in safe streets, nice parks, public transit, "free" healthcare, etc. which, it turns out, are too socially expensive for Americans to maintain. Americans take the money instead. The rest is only natural.
Americans severely underestimate how dirt poor most Europeans are.
They go spend their American wages there and are amazed at the “quality of life,” not realizing that they’re taking the equivalent of a trip to Disneyland, and everyone around them is the staff.
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This is a real aircraft that can actually fly. It is made through glorious government-led pan-European cooperation in industry. No MBAs, consultants, or financiers were involved in the making of this glorious whale-sized airplane. Only bureaucrats, engineers, and espressos.
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What I hate about the new Dune is that two brief scenes with nothing to do with spice, sandworms, or Paul Atreides utterly outshine the other 98% of runtime.
They felt free to make these villains truly alien and thus gripping, but the heroes must be "relatable" and thus dull.
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Otto von Bismarck drank wine with breakfast and every other meal, beer in between meals, and drank himself to sleep every single night. He was also a lifelong chainsmoker.
While dividing Africa at the Congress of Berlin, "he ate pickled herrings with two hands." Probably drunk.
You might not like it, but this is how Western civilization ran for a thousand years.
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I don't know how "Europe doesn't have software companies" turned into "Europe has no economy," but this is just straight up egregiously false.
Europe is still a powerhouse of manufacturing, esp. high-tech in everything from airplanes to the machines that make computer chips.
Europe only has 4 major business lines:
1. Selling luxury goods to American & Chinese consumers
2. Selling weight loss drugs to Americans
3. Selling tourism services to American & Chinese travelers
4. Taxing American tech co's
Yes, I'm exaggerating, but not by much.
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We definitely do not talk enough about the insane depopulation of Eastern Europe since 1990. Wars, aging, and emigration.
In 1990, Ukraine & Turkey were even. Turkey is now double Ukraine's pop.
For many countries this depopulation literally surpasses the death tolls of WWII.
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Only one country comes close to disrupting U.S. hegemony in global popular culture:
Japan.
But why them?
Because popular culture isn't a subjective art form but an industrial export Japan's military funded for WWII propaganda to defeat Disney.
A 🧵 on industrial pop culture:
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Americans would kill each other to live in Manhattan, which they treat like a utopia and pay exorbitant prices to live in because it has corner stores and you don't need to drive a car.
But that Manhattan-tier density is common for even small and unremarkable European cities.
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I think the real replacement fertility rate is not 2.1 kids per woman.
It's 5.1 kids.
A recent Swedish study found that in a generation born 1885-1899, an incredible 25% of people who had 2 kids had *zero* descendants by 2007!
For 1 kid? 50%.
A 🧵 on long-term fertility:
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We have lived in an effectively post-scarcity society since 1885. Most political conflict since then has revolved around what to do with all the surplus we generated. The modern "services-oriented" economy is the solution we arrived at: give everyone fake jobs to LARP scarcity.
reading a book about daily life in 1800s now and probably the most viscerally alien part of it, relative to current fabric of life, is how much more everyone worked. people would work sunup to sundown, 6 days a week, to barely make enough wage to buy food for themselves
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The EU has triple the population density of the United States and doesn't believe in "suburbs," just "cities." Given how much more space there is in America, it's surprising that the numbers are so close, if anything.
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European cafes are 100% right to ban "coworking" i.e. staring silently at my electronic device screen for hours on end while pretending to work and taking up space in a public place intended for relaxation and socializing.
Don't let Americans turn the cafe bar into an office!
The difference between European and American cafes is so stark
In Europe many don't allow laptops anymore
In America they usually do and people are working on something cool!
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Croatian in America: poor blue-collar immigrant, reliable Democrat voter. In Austria: hard-working subcontractor, votes far-right to limit immigration. In Ireland: remote worker, email job.
Croatian in Chile: despite making up just 3% of the population, Croatians control 87% of
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I've lived in every major U.S. city and all over Europe for many years each. What Europeans consider "unsafe" would be considered a national paragon of urban policing in America.
The homicide rates speak for themselves. America is 3-6x more dangerous.
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The concept of "F--- you money" is revealed as transparently fake when you look at how scared everyone in Silicon Valley is.
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By far my favorite detail from either film was when the Harkonnen gladiatoral announcer pronounces "Vladimir Harkonnen" as, roughly, "Fladim Hakuyye."
Instead of *telling* you Dune is set 20,000 years into the future, you just *hear* the 20k years of linguistic drift. Damn.
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If, in a country, you can live like a Manhattanite for a tiny fraction of the cost and this lifestyle is considered unremarkable, then how is this evidence that Europeans are poor? Isn't it evidence that Europeans are fantastically wealthy?
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The modern economy runs on intellectual dark matter that is rapidly aging, retiring, or dying, and going unreplaced and unsucceeded. As a result, the modern economy will slowly begin to fail for reasons that will seem magical, incomprehensible, or impossible to ascertain.
I very briefly worked at a petroleum engineering ‘AI’ startup right out of college because I wanted to see if I would like non-healthcare/biology work
It sucked
But what I *did* learn was that picking well locations for oil companies is an incredibly challenging problem. To
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The fact that outright billionaires are choosing to spend their time being irate online commentators and podcast hosts rather than, like, literally anything else productive, seems like a sign of one of the most important and unspoken sociological facts about modern America.
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I think far more esoteric technical knowledge was lost with the fall of the Soviet Union than it will ever be fashionable to admit.
Much of that tacit knowledge immediately moved to Silicon Valley, New York, or even Israel. Much of it didn't.
Seems like:
1. LK99 is based on an arcane ancient 20th century knowledge lost during the fall of the Soviet empire
2. Both the Korean professors and Iris (who is also a Soviet tankie) had access to this knowledge
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The U.S. is systematically banning every genuinely innovative and popular Chinese tech company or product because it literally cannot compete with Chinese excellence in free market capitalism.
Huawei, TikTok, electric vehicles, and now DJI drones too. All quality products!
Crazy, the US is passing a bill named "Countering CCP Drones Act" that would ban DJI drones in the US.
I checked, DJI has 90% market share of the U.S. hobby market, 70% market share of the industrial market and over 80% market share of the first responder
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This week, a single pioneering donor gave gifts worth $640 million to hundreds of advocates of equity, environmentalism, public health, and gender justice.
Does anyone know how much advocates of space exploration, nuclear power, or good city governance received this week?
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Emperor Christopher Walken was a massive disappointment. Not a single scene demonstrating his galactic opulence or power, which should be many times greater than the Harkonnens' with their million-man arenas. We know we are *supposed* to be impressed, but we aren't.
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You hear a lot of Americans complaining how European bureaucrats are decelerating technological progress.
But you don't often hear about how American bureaucrats decelerated European, government-led supersonic flight in the 1970s by outright banning it overland. Look it up.
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Giedi Prime and Salusa Secundus are "not the main story," so probably someone was given total creative freedom there, with incredible results. But the result is that I actually just want to watch a 4-hour two-part movie about Giedi Prime and Salusa Secundus, not Arrakis.
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There is zero immersion watching these guys. The casting, dialogue, tone—everything feels like it was concocted at a conference room table to maximize someone's idea of "Zoomer appeal" and "relatable comic relief." Villeneuve's love for desert insurgency aesthetic doesn't help.
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The fact that apparently all food in America is so poisoned that the resulting widespread obesity has been normalized should really count against the idea of America being wealthy.
European food is closer to what the kings of old feasted on. Sorry but it's true.
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I wanted to see the Emperor flanked by Spacing Guild mutants. I wanted to see Paul Atreides take Fremen concubines. I wanted to see the Fremen jihad portrayed without Stilgar being played for laughs as some kind of funny rube. I wanted to see a non-idiotic Rabban.
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Boeing alone used to be 80% of global commercial aircraft manufacturing.
Then it gave control to MBAs, consultants, and financiers to improve financial margins.
Strangely, now Boeing is losing billions of dollars and its planes fall out of the sky, while Airbus is profitable.
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Should they have gone full-weird and put the whole movie in subtitles translating alien languages like The Passion of the Christ? Should they have gone full The Northman and made the protagonist an incomprehensible madman?
Yes. They should have. There, I said it.
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I am not aware of any country that has squared the circle of "American-tier private financial compensation" with "European-tier public goods." I'm sure it's possible, somehow, but not without a political revolution.
In the meantime, Remote-Americans can just move to Europe.
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For two brief scenes, Dune immerses us in an incomprehensibly alien society that is nonetheless deeply human.
But then we go back to focus group-tested diverse Zoomer Resistance versus generic bald bad guys. There is no profundity or alienness, might as well be Star Wars now.
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America only has 4 major business lines:
1. Printing dollars
2. SaaS
3. Forcing Europeans to buy their oil and gas at jacked-up prices
4. Elon Musk
Yes, I'm exaggerating, but not by much.
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The numbers say America is far wealthier than Europe. But, literally, wealth is not numbers: the numbers are supposed to represent wealth i.e. actual real goods.
When you compare actual real goods, most things are comparable and each skews positive or negative on a few things.
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This America vs. Europe wealth debate resurfaces every few months and I feel compelled to give the final judgment, since I am actually the most qualified person to judge, since I have actually lived in both extensively:
America and Europe are roughly equally as wealthy overall.
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@nic__carter
As opposed to the very smart and very different immigration policy of the United States? Haha. Come on.
The impact of immigration on European living has been vastly overstated and it is certainly no worse overall than the U.S. policy. So that's a wash.
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My advice to billionaires:
Use your money to generously and widely fund crazy people with unconventional ideas. Not just their startup ideas to get A RETURN. Fund them without strings attached. Write a serious book.
Do not start a podcast. Do not tweet. Do not smile in photos.
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I made an org chart of the de facto U.S. government circa 2023:
"The elite" is not shadowy or mysterious. America is ruled by technocratic lanky GenX Ivy League white guys who fly under the radar because they are powerful.
For example, pictured below are the American foreign minister, information minister, and AI minister.
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Technological progress and economic growth happen when scientists and engineers are given resources and everyone else gets out of the way.
Governments can give resources to engineers and remove obstacles for them. Markets can withhold resources and create obstacles.
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There are flashes of brilliance like the Atreides veils or mysterious masked imperial emissaries, but they are just flashes. We are never given hints as to the status of women in Atreides society or who all these imperial dignitaries are. Perhaps that would be "too weird."
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Just imagine this absolute pug of a man, this absolute German unit, DEMOLISHING pickled herrings WITH BOTH HANDS in front of the horrified French and British diplomats, taking breaks to puff on his cigar and chug more beer.
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Yeah, that was terrible. Frank Herbert was thinking about medieval Islam, Lawrence of Arabia, the bedouins, etc. when he was writing in the 60s. Villeneuve was thinking about al-Qaeda, George Bush, and the Taliban. Awful 2000s-core vibes.
@mmjukic
The worst part for me was using 2000s war movie aesthetics (which were trying make the desert look as boring as possible).
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Europeans are definitely low-income and definitely getting poorer overall nowadays. But they have started from an extremely, unprecedentedly high base. That wealth is still there and plainly visible even if not captured in the numbers. Silly to ignore.
Western Europe is the story of dysfunctional institutions spending down centuries of incredible amounts of accumulated wealth.
Such wealth remains highly visible even after decades or centuries of institutional dysfunction, while the dysfunction itself is mostly invisible.
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When the USSR fell, Moscow's empire instantly lost -48.6% of its population -38.8% of GDP.
For comparison, this is how it would look if the U.S. broke apart with the same ratios today.
I think this more than anything explains why KGB officer Putin is so fixated on Ukraine: 🧵
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I don't think the movie was supposed to end with Chani in a huff over Paul taking the Emperor's daughter as his wife in an act of politics.
Chani is supposed to be one of Paul's two Fremen concubines anyway; she is from a culture that practices "spice orgies."
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In terms of actual real goods i.e. actual wealth, both America and Europe are past their peak and are now getting poorer. We can debate how fast for each, but only America can hide its decline with propaganda and money-printing. Europe just has to rationalize it as "degrowth."
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"Wow, how is Israel the only developed country to achieve a 2.9 fertility rate?"
Well, for one thing, they are willing to legalize and religiously justify bizarre, quasi-eugenic cyberpunk measures like IVF with sperm from dead soldiers.
That's in their Overton Window.
"As the scale of the tragedy from the Hamas onslaught on Saturday became clear... embryologists and IVF specialists report being called to quickly try to perform posthumous sperm retrieval (PSR) on an unprecedented scale."
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The man who put Americans on the Moon was a European who spent his whole career working for the government.
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I think Eastern Europeans are in denial about how bad of a deal EU open borders are for them.
You get a few billion dollars in EU money and the intangible prestige of finally being "European."
In exchange, WWII death toll percentages of your young population emigrate out.
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That 100-year-old Henry Kissinger is still flown out to China every few years is a very bad sign for functionality of U.S. diplomacy and future global stability.
It strongly suggests that Kissinger's social capital and networks in China have not been passed down to a successor.
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It's mind-blowing how much valor both "America" and "Silicon Valley" are willing to steal from just one neurodivergent South African immigrant.
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These kinds of posts are so absurdly false that they can't possibly be intended to persuade anyone. They are self-serving cope for Americans who don't want to face America's own serious problems with deindustrialization, fake economic figures, and institutional dysfunction.
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First, the evidence. Of the 50 highest-grossing films ever, 94% are based on U.S./UK intellectual property (IP).
The other 6% are Japanese. No other countries.
Japan is also 56% of the top 50 video games and 28% of the top media franchises, including number one: Pokémon.
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It's impossible to speak a foreign language with fluent pronunciation and cadence without constructing and adopting something of a new personality in it, which you become when you speak it. When speaking German, you have to become precise. Russian, non-chalant. Arabic, angry.
My French friends always made fun of my American accent when I speak French
One day I decided to do just the most outrageously over-the-top stereotypical accent when speaking
“Wow Grant your French got *way* better, what did you change???”
The French are a parody of themselves
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It's also pretty bizarre to try and cast a once-in-a-century scientific advance in Denmark, which is then successfully commercialized into a huge export business, including to fat Americans who need it most, as fake or illegitimate or "not tech":
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Imagination: rustic developing countries with subsistence farmers and exotic wilderness export natural bounty to the city slickers.
Reality: industrialized urbanized countries generate so much food that they beg developing countries to import it.
A 🧵 on global food abundance:
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Apparently in America the purpose of having billions of dollars is to have job security for being a full-time podcaster or online commentator about the woke left, which, it turns out, has gone bananas.
Billions of dollars to pursue my lifelong dream of being an inflooencer.
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Europe's huge, diverse, and—yes—sometimes even innovative manufacturing economy is not some kind of esoteric secret, you can figure it out with 2 seconds of Googling.
It's just on top of that, Europe also taxes software companies, sells luxury goods, and has tourism. Ok then?
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I don't know why Croatians are so disproportionately successful and powerful in Chile, I just find it really funny because everywhere else, including in Croatia, Croatians see themselves as disproportionately unsuccessful and disempowered, under various local narratives.
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This is why I don't believe in ethnic-based conspiracy theories.
As a Croat, my people play completely different roles in conspiracy theories just depending on the country we immigrated to.
In the end, it seems to be the country that's the important thing, not the immigrant.
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There is plenty of criticism to be leveled legitimately at Europe, especially on the topic of innovation and growth, but pretending like Airbus, Novo Nordisk, ASML, German machine tools, French weapons, etc. don't exist or don't count seems like the maximally wrong way to do it.
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The first feature-length Japanese animated film is Momotaro: Sacred Sailors, released in 1945.
Not after the war ended—before!
It’s about how a cute little Japanese boy and his cute puppy and monkey friends complete naval air training then invade Indonesia to oust the British.
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Daily reminder to teach your kids that they can easily find the e-mails and phone numbers of domain experts in any field online (e.g. a medical professor or a niche historian) and literally just politely ask them some questions, gaining priceless expert opinion for free.
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Daily reminder that elections do not matter in highly bureaucratized societies like modern Europe. That the colors on this chart shifted almost imperceptibly, like random static noise, in what is anyway an almost explicitly toothless, symbolic parliament, is not worth attention.
With the first national estimates out, this is how the new European Parliament looks.
More updates on our live blog as results continue to be released:
More in-depth country breakdowns here:
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If you only fund business ideas, you are only ever going to get more useless money. This is a terminal dead end.
If you want to change the world, you have to be willing to lose money. The more you lose, the better.
In the absence of producing its own intellectuals, manifestos, books, magazines, seminal articles, and revolutionary programs, Silicon Valley and the techbros are not "changing the future" by building technology, but just arming their own enemies with better tools.
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Animation wasn’t just an art, it was a cutting-edge industrial process requiring specialized equipment and hundreds of skilled laborers to mass-produce frames of animation.
Tens of thousands of frames had to be perfect for a complete film. Animation was high-tech *industry.*
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When the directions of intellectual, ideological, artistic, and cultural philanthropy are lopsided by five orders of magnitude or so in one direction rather than another, it's hardly surprising that society follows in that direction.
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With 1.4 billion people, Africa is now as populous as China or India. By 2100, a projected 40% of the world will be African.
Rather than lumping all of Africa together, let’s try to break it down and truly understand it.
A 🧵on Africa’s economic and demographic geography:
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This
@bismarckanlys
Brief gives an excellent explanation and overview of how European social democracy preserves wealth at the expense of growth (and income). Subscribe and read:
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No theory of population/GDP can explain this.
China and India fail despite population. Germany is non-existent in culture despite its economy. France or Italy have high culture, but nothing in pop culture.
Singapore, Qatar—the richest states are also all cultural wastelands.
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"The elite" is not shadowy or mysterious. America is ruled by technocratic lanky GenX Ivy League white guys who fly under the radar because they are powerful.
For example, pictured below are the American foreign minister, information minister, and AI minister.
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At this point, most default to aesthetic explanations: “Japan just makes uniquely better games/animation. It’s magic oriental spiritism that speaks to the soul.”
We like to believe cultural products win on their intangible aesthetic merits. But history tells a different story.
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Anime today is 76% of U.S. comic sales. 40 million Americans have a Crunchyroll account (anime streaming).
Yet anime originates in imperial Japanese military funding of an unprecedented proof-of-concept for anti-American war propaganda. It was the Manhattan Project for anime.
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For the record, I easily would have preferred 25% less Arrakis and 200% more of non-Arrakis worlds. As it stands, the number of crawling wide shots of empty desert in the movies makes me feel like Villeneuve forgot he was shooting Dune and not Sicario.
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Off the top of my head: didn't the Soviets believe that oil had a non-biological origin? They were also the ones who *started* the Space Race.
Hard to remember these days, but Russia used to be an intellectual and scientific powerhouse.
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The modern billionaire will inevitably be expropriated by his hated enemies and lawyers. It doesn't take a genius of political economy to see this coming.
The only solution is to pre-emptively self-expropriate by giving away your money to people you actually like and support.
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Modern popular culture doesn’t follow aesthetic or cultural logic, but the logic of industrial production and export!
This is because popular cultural products are not only aesthetic concepts, but also always technological products mass-produced by industrial institutions.
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Why, in fact, is all pop culture from English-speaking countries? Where is Europe? China? Brazil?
Music and books are also almost all U.S. or UK.
Our data sources are definitely hopelessly biased towards the U.S. Yet, even then, Japan alone somehow takes a slice of the pie.
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A prequel to this film, released in 1943, is about the same army of cute Japanese animals bombing Pearl Harbor.
This Momotaro 1 was literally the most-viewed film in Japan in 1943. It was an unprecedented box office hit.
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This was, by the way, the stupidest line I have ever heard in any movie by a long shot. Forget about subtle and realistic worldbuilding, this was just an insult to the audience's intelligence.
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Like any new industry, it was risky, capital-intensive, and only a live player could pull it off.
Walt Disney budgeted 10x a short animated film budget for Snow White, then ended up mortgaging his house and almost bankrupting the company when costs spiraled to 10x of *that.*
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I believe with all of my heart that by far the most important, potentially transformative, and depressingly underrated field is materials science. The need for better or more exotic materials just keeps coming up in all kinds of diverse areas.
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In Eastern Europe, you are stifled by mean, lazy bureaucrats in ugly dilapidated socialist blocks.
In Western Europe, however, you are stifled by mean lazy bureaucrats in beautiful, ornate 19th-century buildings.
The main difference between East/West today is just the facades.
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More tens of billions of dollars expropriated just through *marriage or divorce* have been used to fund intellectual and cultural movement than perhaps all of the intentional funding of all other tech billionaires combined in history.
MacKenzie Bezos and Laurene Powell-Jobs.
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Right now, the president of Chile is Croatian, as is the largest private fortune in the country.
In 1970, Salvador Allende ran against a Croatian. In 1989, one candidate was Croatian and another, the winner, was married to one.
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Lack of growth *is* a tradeoff that Europe has intentionally made in favor of welfare in the last century.
The defining feature of social democracy is preservation of economic elites' arrangements with the state in exchange for welfare spending on the middle/lower classes...
I hate this genre of tweet because it frames lack of European growth as an intentional tradeoff for welfare instead of a recent macro policy failure, thereby excusing it
As if having a better subway network is the reason the German economy hasn’t grown in 5 years. Ridiculous
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The above statement is not exactly correct, but directionally correct in an important direction few talk about but which needs to be understood to solve our modern-day civilizational problems:
Long-term, industrial surplus was sunk into fake work, not more real work.
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The picture on the right above depicts a hellish anti-social prison-like atmosphere. In a cafe, I want to hear music, conversation, laughter, and the football game.
It's a CAFE, not a library, not an office, not a university lecture hall. Leave your laptop at home.
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Americans readily admit that "quality of life" is higher in Europe. But they deny that Europe is wealthier than America because the GDP says so.
But there is actually no meaningful difference between "quality of life" and "wealth."
Americans are just being scammed by "GDP."
Europeans aren't poor. They are illiquid. Much of Europe's wealth is stored in safe streets, nice parks, public transit, "free" healthcare, etc. which, it turns out, are too socially expensive for Americans to maintain. Americans take the money instead. The rest is only natural.
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Estimates say the Soviet Union had WWII casualties equiv. to 13% of its 1939 population.
Ukraine has lost -28.9% since 1990.
Romania is at 4% compared to -18.5%. Hungary at about 6% and -6.8%.
Yugoslavia was also at 6% casualties; Croatia has lost -19% since 1990, Serbia -12%.
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The reason civilization is declining and we aren't getting Martian Technocracy is that you won't pay for your preferred ideological vision of the future, but environmentalist degrowth billionaires etc. *will* pay for theirs.
The end-result is obvious.
@palladiummag
Martian Technocracy won't compete with environmentalism, Islamism, and surveillance nanny-stateism on the strength of technology and memes.
It will compete on its deeply laid-out vision, intellectual, aesthetic, and philosophy. Which is weak or non-existent right now.
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The real drawback of Northern Europe is not high taxes, low salaries, or a static economy, but a climate that somehow doesn't see direct sunlight for ten out of twelve months of the year. There's a reason Northern Europeans invented alcoholism and its close cousin, depression.
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Like any new industry, there was a shortcut to replicating the live player’s work: state-directed investment as part of industrial policy.
And that’s exactly what the Japanese military did during World War II, when it decided to support, fund, and direct Japanese animation.
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Hollywood should really just be bulldozed entirely at this point. Streaming didn't make it better, but somehow worse. Salt the earth and start over somewhere else. All I do is study institutional dysfunction and I still can't wrap my head around how bad it is in Hollywood.
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Society did not in fact adapt well to 90% of jobs being eliminated. It adapted by inventing fake jobs paid for by the surplus generated by eliminating all the previous real jobs with real technology. This adaptation is causing the entire human race to lose the will to live.
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Disney spent 100x the baseline budget for animation on Snow White ($31 million in 2023$).
Hollywood thought him mad. His own wife and brother tried to dissuade him.
But it was a revolutionary technical, cultural, and financial success. Which others tried reverse-engineering…
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