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

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.

"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.

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!

2/n

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.

Read the new @bismarckanlys Brief here:
brief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/chinas-laggi…

1/n 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.

2/n

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.

Read the new @bismarckanlys Brief here: brief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/egypt-tries-…

1/n 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.

2/n

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.

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.

Read the new @bismarckanlys Brief here: brief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/tiktoks-stru…

1/n It is hard to understate the scale of TikTok’s success, especially among young people.

Reportedly 67% of U.S. teenagers use TikTok regularly, more than any other social media app or site except YouTube.

Only 32% use Facebook regularly.

2/n

A single Chinese company accounts for 80% of civilian drone sales worldwide and 54% of the U.S. civilian drone market.

DJI launched the global drone industry, but is now a target of U.S. sanctions.

Read the new @bismarckanlys Brief here: brief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/the-chinese-…

1/n 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.

2/n

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.

Read the new @bismarckanlys Brief here: brief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/the-king-of-…

1/n 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.

2/n