Sony Group is Japan's most valuable consumer technology conglomerate.

It famously led global innovation in electronics for decades. Succession failure has made it less than the sum of its parts.

Read the new @bismarckanlys Brief:


1/n brief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/sony-suggest…
Sony is the world leader in image sensor semiconductor manufacturing, the largest video game company by revenue, the second-largest music publishing company, and the fourth-largest film studio.

2/n

Intel, the leading U.S. chip designer and manufacturer, missed multiple major technological opportunities.

Its recent pivot to contract manufacturing is heavily backed by the U.S. government.

Read the new publicly-available @bismarckanlys Brief:

1/n brief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/the-attempt-…
The vast majority of Intel's business is designing and manufacturing central processing units (CPUs) for personal computers and servers.

These are all based on Intel's proprietary x86 instruction set architecture, long giving Intel a global quasi-monopoly in PC CPUs.

2/n

This remains one of the best essays on the practice of rationality. Warmly recommend reading it!

paulgraham.com/identity.html Taking this essay seriously has only yielded benefits over the years. It is the main reason I've refused to join or identify with a movement for the last decade.

People who implore you to join one, point to the benefits of group strategies.

99% of smartphones and mobile devices rely on processors using the designs of one semiconductor company: Arm.

But the British firm, now owned by SoftBank, faces a long-term tradeoff between profits and viability.

Read the new @bismarckanlys Brief:

1/n brief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/arms-long-te…
Arm is a small company with a big role. It designs central processing units (CPUs) using the ARM instruction set architecture, patented intellectual property which it also widely licenses.

Over 280 billion chips have been shipped using ARM architectures.

2/n

The storied U.S. defense firm Raytheon builds everything from long-range radar installations to guided missiles.

But today it is just one of a few distinct subsidiaries in a dead player's portfolio.

Read the new public @bismarckanlys Brief here:

1/🧵brief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/raytheon-is-… Since 2023, Raytheon is no longer an independent company, but a subsidiary of the newly-named RTX Corporation.

Raytheon is one of the company's three distinct "business units": aircraft components manufacturer Collins Aerospace, engine maker Pratt & Whitney, and Raytheon.

The Google subsidiary Waymo has deployed self-driving taxis in multiple American cities.

Neither regulators nor hardware costs are likely to impede its slow but steady progress.

Read the new @bismarckanlys Brief:

1/n brief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/google-leads…
Waymo's technology relies on reference mapping and a suite of expensive sensors including lidar. This limits the vehicles' operational areas.

This is a contrast to, for example, Tesla's self-driving which focuses on mimicking human vision with machine learning on cameras.

2/n

U.S. manufacturing is in deep trouble because modern U.S. executives treat firms as financial products rather than firms.

Artificially balanced "firms" optimized to look good on financial metrics do not sustain traditions of knowledge nor infrastructure. They are dead players. The theory of the firm by Robert Coase nicely explains how a for-profit company can be a functional institution.

In contrast the amorphous corporation that does everything and nothing, cannot even in principle solve either component of the succession problem.

Heavy subsidies have made wind turbines a growing share of electricity in developed countries.

But since wind cannot meet the needs of modern industry, it will contribute to deindustrialization.

Read the new @bismarckanlys Brief here:

1/n brief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/wind-cannot-…
From the physical fundamentals, wind is not suited for powering modern cities or industry, which require continuous, predictable power on land.

Wind is highly variable and reaches its highest natural speeds over the seas and oceans. Unsurprisingly it was used for sailing.

2/n

Earth's mass is 5.972 × 10^24 kg. So almost six billion trillion metric tons. There are unimaginable quantities of iron, aluminum, copper, and so on.

We have a mere eight billion humans.

Why do we have any material scarcity at all?

1/5 One answer is that it takes a lot of energy to extract and process these resources.

But our first planet isn't just a chunk of metal and rock, it is very hot. There is nearly three thousand times more thermal energy in the crust than there is chemical energy.

2/5

More market mechanisms will not solve the problem of a political economy oriented towards extraction and stagnation.

There is no way to re-industrialize Western countries or accelerate technological growth without changing the political economy to something that favors them. This is why there can't be a conservative solution, or even a thoughtful incrementalist solution.

This is why conventional economists might as well be silent, they are either conservatives or ignore questions of political economy.

They bore me, they should bore you.

The U.S. military estimates that drug cartels now control around 30-35% of Mexican territory.

But overall, the drug lords bolster rather than undermine government elites in the country.

Read the new publicly-available @bismarckanlys Brief here:

1/n brief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/mexicos-drug…
Since 2006, the Mexican military has participated in domestic law enforcement duties against Mexico’s drug cartels.

Mexico's homicide rate has more than tripled since 2007 due to violent intra-cartel disputes and battles with the police and military.

2/n

Boeing is the flagship of U.S. airpower and aerospace. But in recent years, its planes have fallen out of the sky. Why?

Boeing is decaying due to succession failure in engineering and on the factory floor.

Read the new @bismarckanlys Brief here:

1/n brief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/the-decay-of…
There are only two companies in the world capable of building and exporting the largest type of civilian aircraft, the "jumbo jet": Boeing and Europe's Airbus.

Since 1992, Boeing has gone from enjoying 70% market share to falling behind Airbus in orders and manufacturing.

2/n

After the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, U.S. and EU sanctions aimed to collapse the Russian economy.

The sanctions have failed primarily because of China's vast, increasingly advanced manufacturing base.

Read the new @bismarckanlys Brief here:

1/nbrief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/sanctions-on… In April 2022, both the IMF and S&P Global forecasted an 8.5% annual decline in Russia's GDP.

Biden administration officials predicted that, due to the sanctions, Russia would go back to "Soviet style living standards from the 1980s."

This has obviously not happened.

2/n

The CIA's venture capital arm funds startups with tools and projects near completion that could be useful to the U.S. government.

This goal has made it unusually effective at government procurement.

Read the new public @bismarckanlys Brief here:

1/n brief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/the-cias-ven…
In-Q-Tel is both an intelligence outpost in Silicon Valley and a software outpost in Northern Virginia.

Its most high-profile investment is probably Palantir. But it also invested in what would become Google Earth, as well as GitLab, MongoDB, Wickr, and Databricks.

2/n

The revolutionary weight loss drug Ozempic/Wegovy is the result of decades of basic science at the now-$500B Danish company Novo Nordisk.

It probably won't be the company's last advance.

Read the new publicly-available @bismarckanlys Brief here:

1/nbrief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/ozempic-prob… Novo Nordisk is unique among big pharmaceutical companies:

It is scientifically specialized around a single area: insulin, diabetes, and endocrinology.

The research on what is now Ozempic began in the 1990s!

2/n

This isn't the case because Romans employed Hellenistic Greek experts they employed made use of exact mathematical models to describe the natural world.

Heron isn't the contemporary of Plato or Aristotle, rather he stands on the shoulders of Archimedes and Eratosthenes.

https://twitter.com/n00rdung/status/1747929254237495550

And the technological fruits of this theory are apparent:

Roman and Greek engineers did make use of pistons!

https://twitter.com/n00rdung/status/1747933878826774865

In 2024, Japan will operate its own aircraft carriers for the first time since 1945.

Despite a pacifist constitution, Japan has built up a large and technologically advanced military in all but name.

Read the new @bismarckanlys Brief here:

1/nbrief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/japan-is-a-g… Formally, the Japanese constitution forbids a Japanese military, the states's "right of belligerency," and "other war potential."

Yet Japan has nearly 250,000 uniformed "self-defense force" service members with jet planes, warships, missiles, and a defense industrial base.

2/n

The world’s largest modern city is not San Francisco, New York, or Tokyo.

It is the Chinese megalopolis in Guangdong, where 85 million people manufacture electric vehicles, semiconductors, and much more.

Read the new @bismarckanlys Brief here:

1/n brief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/the-worlds-l…
The Pearl River Delta or “Greater Bay Area” spans Hong Kong, Macau, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou, all in Guangdong province in southern China.

Once known for being a cheap labor hub, it has rapidly progressed into high-tech manufacturing and even software.

2/n

Japan turned off its nuclear plants in 2011 after a devastating earthquake. But since then, it has slowly turned them back on.

Japan won’t denuclearize because it has an arsenal of unassembled nuclear weapons.

Read the new @bismarckanlys Brief:

1/n brief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/the-return-o…
Japan has no oil or gas reserves, so it needs nuclear power for its industry.

The elite coalition behind Japan’s nuclear industry consists of the economy ministry, the industrial conglomerates, and the Liberal Democratic Party, through which Japan is a near one-party state

2/n

Visa is the middleman between thousands of banks, millions of merchants, billions of credit/debit cards, and $12 trillion of payments in 2022.

But the company is a dead player subservient to U.S. banks.

Read the new @bismarckanlys Brief here:

1/n Visa and its competitors are like tech companies that rely on network effects. The more merchants and consumers on a card network, the more valuable that network is to them.

But since banks store the money of merchants and consumers, Visa also needs to appease banks.

2/n

Few economists bite the bullet that if immigration is good for the countries gaining people, emigration is bad for the countries losing people. There is a war of rich on poor: Depriving developing countries of the human capital they need to develop while simultaneously depriving them of cheap energy in name of environmentalism.