Marko Jukic Profile picture
Mar 11, 2024 12 tweets 3 min read Read on X
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.
Billionaires are poor.
Having more money doesn't make you wealthier or more powerful.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

George Soros wanted philosophically-consistent global liberalism. He paid the high price for it and he got it!

As always, we have a @bismarckanlys Brief for that: brief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/the-legacy-o…
It would cost no more than a few billion dollars at the absolute max, from start to finish, to reform modern society into an expanding spacefaring civilization. Cheap!

The bottleneck isn't technological, it's intellectual, cultural, and political: palladiummag.com/2023/08/16/the…
Give me $1 billion and I will take humanity to Alpha Centauri. I guarantee it on God.

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More from @mmjukic

Apr 2
There is really no way to explain the U.S. government's decision to launch this Iran War the way it did without reference to extreme ignorance, stupidity, or recklessness. It seems like not one relevant person actually understood the consequences of Iran closing the Strait.
If a single relevant person truly grasped the magnitude of what they were doing, they would have had shouting matches with everyone until it was decided against. Even if somehow not, there would have been crystal-clear messaging and five contingency plans ready to go from day 1.
This isn't some unpredictable third-order effect. Any economics or foreign policy halfwit could have told you that Iran is dangerous because it threatens to close the Strait and even a brief investigation would have confirmed this beyond all doubt.
Read 5 tweets
Mar 8
97% price reduction? 16% deflation year over year on durable consumer goods? We should put the people who make plasma TVs in charge of the government. That means we need to elect the *opens book* wait a second *flips pages* oh no *sweating profusely* oh no no no not like that Image
Do I want to simp for China? No. But China is run by the "97% price reduction" party. Europe and America are run by the "increase the price of housing and education by 500% party," with brief interruptions by the "let's accidentally blow up the world's oil and gas supply" party.
You would think (a) don't blow up the world's supply of oil and gas and (b) if you're sitting on your hands, just build nuclear plants until the cost of energy is zero would be table stakes. For some incredible reason however only the Chinese communists manage to clear this bar.
Read 7 tweets
Feb 24
If DeepSeek (160 employees) can somehow smuggle huge numbers of scarce, cutting-edge chips into a secret AI facility on the Mongolian steppe in violation of the strictest U.S. government export controls ever, and thus build the AGI before we do—they basically deserve to win.
Nobody seems to notice that the overwhelmingly obvious implication of all this breathless fulminating about Chinese AI labs getting any kind of access to Nvidia chips is that, if China had unrestricted access to said chips, they would have left U.S. labs in the dust years ago!
Imagine thinking you are going to win the future of the lightcone by tripping up your rivals with wordcel government regulations and restrictions rather than honorably shape-rotating technology into being. Then getting mad they ignore your wordcel spells.
Read 7 tweets
Feb 24
I love these posts because they present a cold mathematical fact then try to soften the heavy blow with some non-sequitur pop psychology. No, the real meaning is that no matter how much agency you exercise, everyone older than early 20s is already basically a walking corpse.
Here are some actual implications to take away: (1) children and the young deserve any resources far more than decrepit delusional olds (2) olds begin at 30 (3) school robs us of most of our perceived life, that's how evil it is.
In my opinion, positions of power, wealth, authority should be given to 13-year-olds, so they can use them wisely and profitably until they retire at 29, right about the time they can begin schooling and work after 30 years old when the drudgery doesn't matter anymore anyway.
Read 6 tweets
Feb 13
The West has two kinds of elites. Those who earn their money from suspiciously skyrocketing asset prices. And those who earn it from fraudulent nonprofits with government contracts. The former wants to audit the government. The latter wants a tax on unrealized capital gains.
As a Western elite, these are basically your two options to actually cash in on your hard-earned status. In practice you either end up owning enough infinitely-growing tech stocks to never have to work again, or you end up with a suspiciously highly-salaried fake nonprofit job.
In some other time and place, our elites could cash in on their status with grants of landholdings, appropriately labeled government sinecures, or active ownership of a productive factory.
Read 6 tweets
Feb 11
A bad AI future nobody is currently modeling is we approximate AGI but never create it, resulting in largely automated economies with huge unemployment, redistribution, and demographic decline, but fail to maintain themselves without human expertise and collapse by 2100 or so.
Any automated AI economy outcome that falls even one-tenth of a percentage point short of true AGI will require large amounts of human expertise and labor to maintain itself. But the closer it gets, the more it incentivizes the human race to give up even harder on living.
If AI progress hits true AGI, the human race is over. If it just gets 99.999% of the way there, it only turbocharges all of the terrible political economy incentives that have plagued the human race since we first climbed the techno-industrial ladder in the late 1800s.
Read 10 tweets

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