There's never been an immortal society. Figuring out why. Founder of @bismarckanlys.
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Jul 3 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
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.
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Jul 1 • 25 tweets • 8 min read
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?
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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.
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Jun 27 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
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.
May 8 • 14 tweets • 5 min read
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:
Mexico's homicide rate has more than tripled since 2007 due to violent intra-cartel disputes and battles with the police and military.
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Apr 18 • 20 tweets • 7 min read
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.
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Apr 3 • 12 tweets • 5 min read
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.
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.
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Jan 18 • 12 tweets • 4 min read
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.
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.
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Nov 22, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
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.
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Oct 25, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
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.
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
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Sep 20, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
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:
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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.
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Aug 10, 2023 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
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.
Jul 12, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
"The US is a manufacturing superpower" is the new DC comintern official party line.
Industry after industry, after nearly two hundred cases studies, we at @bismarckanlys find no evidence of this.
What we find is relative decline and absolute stagnation. Technological progress is happening but it isn't outpacing deindustrialization.
Jul 12, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Brazil has all the natural fundamentals to be a world power. Despite 200 years of high hopes, it still isn’t one.
Brazil is a case study in how dysfunctional political institutions squander great potential.
Read the new @bismarckanlys Brief here:
1/n https://t.co/szEAVG40jwbrief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/the-roots-of…
Brazil might be the world’s largest contiguous breadbasket. The country is vast, warm, and fertile, with many rivers, and Brazil is unsurprisingly one of the biggest exporters of cash crops.
Brazil’s 200 million people get 64% of electricity from hydropower!
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Apr 5, 2023 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
Whether China becomes a global military superpower will depend on the functionality of its state-owned defense industry.
It is underperforming in quality and quantity compared to China’s civilian economy.
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Unlike Western defense co.’s, China’s state-owned enterprises get most of their revenue from civilian business!
This is a legacy of Deng, who corporatized arms factories and directed them to make consumer goods, in hopes expertise and technology would build up faster.
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Mar 29, 2023 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
Egypt is awarding tens of billions of dollars in contracts for weapons, infrastructure, and a new capital city in the desert.
The spending spree is an insecure government’s attempt to maintain legitimacy.
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Egypt has a lackluster economy but plays an outsized role in global trade because it hosts and runs the Suez Canal.
Over $1 trillion passes through Suez each year, about 12% of global trade. The canal is especially key to trade between Europe and Asia.
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Mar 29, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The tech layoffs show a pessimism about the future.
If there is a formidable startup lurking behind every corner big tech hired to keep talent away from competitors.
If actually this is now a mature sector, well why not layoff 10-30% of your workforce?
I hear funny conspiracy theories by my programmer friends that the layoffs are due to the big companies already automating code away.
First, big orgs don't move that fast. Second, partial automation increases demand for skilled labor.
IF there were more things code could do.
Mar 22, 2023 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
TikTok has been downloaded >3 billion times and has 150 million users in the U.S.
It is the first Chinese tech company to defeat U.S. tech companies on their home turf. The U.S. government wants to ban it.
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DJI’s story would sound familiar to founders in Silicon Valley. Frank Wang started making drones in his college dorm room.
His role model was Steve Jobs. He got seed funding from a family friend and his university professor. Wang wanted to make the best drones in the world.
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Mar 8, 2023 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
The King of Thailand is the wealthiest monarch in the world, personally worth anywhere from $30-70 billion.
He also backs Thailand’s military government, which has strengthened the monarchy in return.
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Similar to Egypt or Pakistan, the military is the dominant political faction in Thailand. A former army commander has been Thailand’s prime minister since taking power in a coup in 2014.
Rather than external enemies, the military focuses on domestic patronage and security.