A century ago, a minimum wage worker had access to safe walkable streets, sane schools, and a faithful marriage with three kids.

Today, the richest guys alive live in fortified compounds, can't get their kids' teachers to stop actively hating them, and get expensively divorced.

https://twitter.com/signulll/status/1914816668544500071

In 19th century Sweden, this guy founded a successful bank and then fathered 21 children with three women—never divorcing, they just died and he remarried. That was wealth.

I have yet to see a single country with a *great* immigration policy. The UK doesn't try to bring in Canadians or Australians. Italy doesn't try to bring in Argentines and Italian-Americans. No small country can brag its largest new immigrants are Swedes and Japanese. None. I can sit here and come up with all kinds of schemes to increase immigration for various countries that would just straightforwardly work and be better than default, yet no country is even trying to implement improvements. Seems like we are stuck with lazy immigration policy.

Peter Thiel is very skilled at getting tech to handle classic institutional functions that have broken down. So skilled that nobody notices: Palantir is IT consulting, Anduril is defense contracting, and now Founders Fund is doing industrial policy to indigenize nuclear fuel. Techies would normally have a deep aversion to doing this kind of work. But it is actually very important to do and Peter Thiel has repeatedly figured out how to arbitrage techie skills and legacy institutional funding to solve the problem in a way everyone likes.

In a U.S. Navy journal: both Ukraine and Russia claim capacity to manufacture 1 million drones per year—relying on a totally Chinese drone supply chain.

This means China is enabling >2 million drones per year—in peacetime.

The U.S. military currently has 0.01 million drones.

Link to article: usni.org/magazines/proc…

The fact that even Belarus—a quasi-Soviet, Putin-allied, conservative dictatorship—is now importing low-wage Pakistani immigrants (~3 years after Poland, Croatia, and Hungary) tells you demographic collapse and inability to deal with it transcends political or ideological lines.

https://twitter.com/BirthGauge/status/1911078039955394646

Until 2022 or so, Poland, Croatia, Hungary, and Japan were all supposedly staunchly culturally conservative anti-immigration strongholds. Then, suddenly, all at once, they all caved and began importing low-wage labor from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Philippines, etc.

I agree with the general point, but I don't believe this caused Japan's stagnation: in Japan's case, its centrally-coordinated economy ran out of technological industries to copy by ~1980 and then the whole economy saw succession failure as the WWII-era generation died off.

https://twitter.com/AHVanBuskirk/status/1910420509172654176

Japan's growth was driven by a kind of centrally-planned dynamism overseen by a generation of unusual talents and experiences, most of whom were adults before WWII even began.

And they stayed in charge unusually long, and lived unusually long, dying at 90+ years of age.

A lesson of Elon's takeover of this site: the incumbent media clerisy's ideas are in fact deeply unpopular and widely-mocked, and they do not have the gumption to defend them, but they can just leave and take all the legitimacy with them anyway, while the mob devolves into slop. I very much appreciate S*bst**k but I am equally amazed at how quickly they generated an entire new universe of slop content based on aging Xillennials whining about sex and politics.

Reindustrialization will not mean sewing shoes in a sweatshop. It will mean crash courses in entrepreneurship and working with hardware, and lots of careers managing factories, designing physical products and infrastructure, and skilled labor working with robots. A real economy. Reindustrialization will mean every Zoomer and Millennial spinning up their own factory and running a YouTube channel where they show off their latest inventions and products.

This is literally how it works in China right now with TikTok!

An impression I get is the shift to electric vehicles means all auto makers will become obsolete and commodified "wrappers" around batteries, since until now they were more like "engine" companies than car companies. Therefore only battery makers matter now. Right or wrong? The deeply uncomfortable implication of this, if true, is that the only car company that will definitely matter in the future is China's CATL, which is of course a battery manufacturer that supplies half the world's auto batteries. Notably Tesla is trying to make their own too.

The reason college admissions discourse is so emotionally charged is most of the social elite economy consists of cushy fake jobs and those are scarce and just straightforwardly gated and effectively doled out by the top universities. They decide who gets to eat, and how much. In other words, "a class system." It sounds sinister and immoral until you realize it's the default of all human societies; an economically dynamic society with upward mobility where anyone can just "do real work" and reap commensurate rewards is the rare exception.

It seems like the U.S. broke a taboo against using lawfare against political candidates to manipulate electoral outcomes, and quickly Romania and now France are following suit. This used to be typical of the likes of Brazil or Russia, but will now become typical of the West too.

https://twitter.com/Valen10Francois/status/1906658602732990736

We are in the process of finding out that what looked from the outside like a sincere bipartisan commitment to the impartial institutions of democracy in the West was really just a fragile but comprehensive consensus among social, intellectual, and administrative elites...

I don't think subsidizing pubs and small businesses in villages under <2000 people is going to preserve Hungarian social fabric or raise the Hungarian birth rate. In fact it just seems like another social-democratic wealth transfer to the old, but with conservative branding.

https://twitter.com/philippilk/status/1905120026845143339

My critique of Hungary's fertility policies is that they are implicitly and explicitly asking young Hungarians to be low-status: live in a cheap newly-built house in the middle of nowhere, buy a used minivan, and now spend your time at the local government-subsidized pub...

There is no language with as rich a vocabulary as English. It's unfair because, since English has such simplistic grammar, it can and does easily steal new words from every other language. But the result is a tapestry like no other. Other languages barely have synonyms at all.

https://twitter.com/woke8yearold/status/1903169888262181289

What English lacks is a complex grammar that allows for compressing meaning into fewer words, which allows whole new vistas of wordplay and emotion. But the ability to absorb and generate so many more nuanced words more than makes up for it overall.

Progressive, tolerant Denmark has literally already reversed mass immigration: Denmark's population aged 0-19 is *more* Danish than the total population, and 0-4 even more so.

If you include European immigrants, Denmark's babies are currently 85.9% Danish, and 89.7% European!
Unless I've made a mistake using the tables, my calculations are:

Total population: 16.3% immigrant origin
Population 0-19: 15.2% immigrant origin
Population 0-4: 14.1% immigrant origin

Population 0-19: 88.3% Danish or Euro origin
Population 0-4: 89.7% Danish or Euro origin

It's clear that many people just have some kind of unhinged mental illness when it comes to the topic of modern China. They emotionally demand you believe Chinese people are lazy, bad at math, all Chinese economic growth is elaborate smoke and mirrors set up by the CCP, and, finally, we should pre-emptively bomb Chinese squid catchers selling to European markets serving American tourists. Not serious people.

I'll probably stop bringing it up so much because I think my followers get it and the claims have gotten so unbelievably and transparently stupid, but it's worth pointing out every now and again. It's important to be aware of your society's most common and serious epistemic failures and lines of propaganda. The rise of Chinese industry is one of this century's most important events and it demands careful and sober analysis. I don't even consider myself a "China guy." But you don't need to be one to realize how asinine, fossilized, and bitterly belligerent this discourse is.

Getting real tired of the "the only truly real and legitimate economic activity is banking and payments processing" crowd. I'm willing to entertain a lot of weird ideas and arguments, but the idea that manufacturing and industry isn't what fundamentally creates economic wealth.. How many economic ideologies and schools of thought are just financiers and bankers trying to raise their own social status?

What's the real size of China's economy?

In @asiatimesonline, an analyst argues China's economy is twice as big as GDP figures say, because China's government statisticians intentionally minimize services figures, while Western ones include services fraud and waste as output.


@asiatimesonline Western economists and statisticians take a maximally generous view of accounting for "services" "output," going so far as to include theft and gambling as economic output.

Chinese government statisticians do the opposite. But this doesn't mean Chinese services are that bad.

The Balkans are weird because it's acceptable to be like "well obviously the problem with our country is that half of us are irredeemably grugheaded cavemen" and everyone just kind of nods and agrees like, yup, that's it, nothing can be done about it. There is a whole serious discourse about who or what is and isn't "civilized" and who is and isn't a "primitive" (literal translation) or a "villager" in the Balkans. The weird thing is that it's not like we aren't all the same genetically and culturally. Self-hating, I guess.

Watching Elon speedrun the entire development of cutting-edge modern online political theory, at an accelerating pace even, has been fascinating. He went from normie liberal to concerned centrist by 2020-22, by early '24 reluctant Republican, then quickly MAGA and now quasi-NRx. It's not going to be a popular view but I credit about 95% of the "vibe shift" directly and solely to Elon. If you jog your memory a bit and think it through, his extremely vigorous and frequent live player actions are "what has changed." Live players are insanely underrated.

Hard to think of a clearer sign our society has gone too way far in the direction of feminized gerontocracy—rule by risk-averse grandmas and "wine aunts"—than a meme unironically calling four distinguished, grown-ass adult professionals "little boys" who need their mama. Enough!

https://twitter.com/growing_daniel/status/1886288718358564904

"Who are these grandmas? And why are they in charge of our society?

A modern society relies on hard work, risk-taking, intellect, and industry, and is usually run by vigorous young and middle-aged men.

Boys, come get your grandmammies out of our government."

After a few weeks browsing the Subst*ck algorithm, I take back what I said about Zoomers not reading. Zoomers don't read because scrolling TikTok is more dignified than reading endless GenX/Xillennial slop about dating and frivolous culture war drivel. I apologize to Zoomers.

https://twitter.com/mmjukic/status/1873703573940515248

Things I want to read online: new ideas, cool stories, theory, analysis, manifestos, relevant news, funny jokes

Things I am getting instead: slop, drivel, thinly-disguised shilling, navel-gazing, open and proud shilling, advertising, unfunny forced memes