Samo Burja Profile picture
Sep 17 3 tweets 1 min read Read on X
The U.S. should use make it a condition of free trade and military protection that Canada, Australia, and Europe adopt the First and Second Amendment.

Free speech and guns can save Britain, Germany, and Canada. They can't hurt Italy, Japan, and France.
The opinion of the people of those countries is irrelevant. It's not like most of those places chose democracy in the first place either.

Democracy was U.S. imposed.

The U.S. can impose a political software update. A necessary patch given the suffering of their people.
Call it neo-neo-conservatism. But it would work.

I'm tired of pretending there is any political agency left anywhere in the Anglosphere or Europe worth discussing.

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More from @SamoBurja

Sep 17
The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) has now instructed companies to cease testing and orders of Nvidia chips.

This policy means the growing Chinese AI industry will instead be feeding the Chinese semiconductor sector directly. Image
This news confirms our analysis in the @bismarckanlys Brief from two weeks ago on the strategic importance of the DeepSeek and Huawei partnership.

Unfortunately, these policies and partnerships mean that in the long run the advantage of the U.S. and Taiwan in high end chips over China will end.
Read 4 tweets
Sep 3
Offering a superior option to China’s stifling universities, DeepSeek's Liang Wenfeng has harnessed the country’s mathematics talent and founded an AI lab capable of advancing technology.

Read the new @bismarckanlys Brief and the first in our new AI series (link below): Image
DeepSeek is a Chinese AI lab that rose to prominence in January when it matched OpenAI's most advanced model at a price thirty times lower.

A small company, it has open-sourced nearly everything and quickly become popular in China, even causing other AI labs to open-source too. Image
Some have claimed DeepSeek's success is due to undisclosed computing power, but this is unlikely.

The more parsimonious explanation is its founder Liang Wenfeng, an engineer, has collected China's top math and computer science talent at his firm, creating real advances. Image
Read 6 tweets
Aug 20
Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, is the second-richest man in the world.

He is applying his fortune and his company to making fast progress in medicine and biotech using artificial intelligence and health data collection.

Read the new @bismarckanlys Brief! (link below): Image
Ellison's fortune derives from his 40% stake in Oracle, the enterprise software company he founded in the 1970s and which is worth $700 billion today.

Like IBM or Palantir, Oracle essentially provides the software and IT expertise that most organizations are too rigid to learn. Image
Despite being 81 years old, Ellison is still the chairman and CTO of Oracle, though he has delegated operational responsibilities to his long-time deputy Safra Catz.

He remains a spry and lucid person, with a formidable network and flashy, intense hobbies like yacht racing. Image
Read 6 tweets
Jun 11
Northrop Grumman is the third-largest U.S. defense contractor makes unique weapons like the B-21 stealth bombers and silo-launched nuclear missiles.

It is unfortunately another example of a dead player in defense contracting.

Read the new @bismarckanlys Brief! (link below) Image
Formed in 1994 when California-based Northrop Corporation, acquired NY-based Grumman, the company inherits a technological legacy in stealth.

Northrop developed the B-2 Spirit’s iconic curved surface shape, which better redistribute the electromagnetic energy of radars. Image
They develop drones such as the RQ-180 stealth drone, which is set to replace both the Global Hawk and the U-2 spy plane that are scheduled to be retired in 2027.

The defense prime is entirely dependent on U.S. government contracts, which in 2024 represented 86% of total sales. Image
Read 6 tweets
Mar 17
As far as I can tell, the most notable political science results of the 21st century is democracy cannot work well with low fertility rates.

All converge on prioritizing retirees over workers and immigrants over citizens escalating social transfers beyond sustainability.
I think this means we should try to understand non-democratic regimes better since they will represent the majority of global political power in the future.
It seems to me that the great graying and mass immigration simply are the end of democracies as we understood them.

Just as failure to manage an economy and international trade were the end of Soviet Communism as we understood it.
Read 4 tweets
Jan 23
Such institutional selection theories are completely wrong.

Corporations don’t evolve through natural selection. That requires heritable variance under differential fitness. The culture, technical knowledge, and structure of organizations is captured by personnel not bylaws.

Unless personnel persists, corporations have nearly no heritable variance. This is perhaps a case for why we should clone exceptional employees but has nothing to do with organizational structure.

The origin of successful companies lies with exceptional founders who know how to assemble these organizations. These founders are the inventors of relevant social technologies.

Does this mean creative destruction doesn't have a role? No, not at all. The personnel and machinery in dysfunctional institutions are indeed wasted. They should be reallocated to functional firms. Everyone is better off when they do!

But it is a conceptual and empirical error to think this is the mechanism that creates such firms in the first place! It isn't.

Regardless of the particular measure we use, exceptional institutions do exist, but they are rare. Most things fail. Things that exist have avoided failure—so far. Institutions that we do see are functional enough to persist.

Those who aren't capable of social technology invention are at best making photocopies of functional organizations. The mistakes they make far outweigh any learning. Failure doesn't teach that much.

Dead organizations of the type Dwarkesh is describing make decisions by committee and try to iterate towards local optima. Live players who found and run functional institutions are capable of seeing, considering, and working toward a much broader range of outcomes and working toward novel global optima.

First principle companies lead by live players like SpaceX will *always* outperform bureaucratic or committee driven organizations like Boeing. We've seen this in hundreds upon hundreds of company case studies at @bismarckanlys.

In fact Apple is an instructive case. It is more profitable than ever. It faces no competition. Remember under perfect competition profits fall to zero. Yet, after the death of Steve Jobs it simply and persistently failed to innovate at the same level. Its vast profits are a market failure not a market success: they represent vast misallocation.

It is in fact a dead player, and a slowly decaying functional institution can keep on winning—until it breaks. Which Apple will one day. Unless taken over by a live player.

No committee ever appoints a live player if they can help it, simply because that's how committees work. It has to be somewhat of a hostile takeover like what happened to old Twitter when Elon took it over or what Carl Icahn did back in the day.

What does this mean for politics?

It is precisely because the stakes are so high, and because there is no inherent check on the sovereignty of great powers, that we must work very hard to avoid dysfunctional and extractive institutions in government.

It means we should have much much more creative destruction in politics. Because in politics too machinery, personnel, and, yes, territory are distributed inefficiently. Here too we should embrace first principles thinking and live players.

Great nations and the peoples of countries like the United Kingdom, France, and Germany are today misgoverned in a way very reminiscent of Boeing or RTX or Lockheed Martin or a dozen other companies run on the "portfolio theory of the firm." Those companies and governments are not at all like Nvidia, OpenAI, Anduril, or SpaceX.

And the world is poorer, less technologically advanced, more violent, and less free because of it.

Let's fix all dysfunctional institutions, be they private or public. Out with the portfolio theory of government! In with first principles thinking.
Make sure to read the Boeing study as well:

brief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/the-decay-of…
Read 4 tweets

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