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Marko Jukic Profile picture
Marko Jukic
@mmjukic
Finding the golden path to interstellar civilization. Senior Analyst @bismarckanlys.
10 subscribers
Nov 22 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
I cannot think of a single advantage to living in Western Europe over Eastern Europe or a single amenity available in Western Europe that isn't available in Eastern Europe at the same or lower price as of 2024. Not one.

In 2024 the Balkans are nicer than Western Europe. Communism is ancient history now whether you like it or not. Eastern Europe has rapidly caught up to a stagnant and bureaucratized Western Europe and many parts are on the cusp of surpassing it. But nobody has integrated this into their worldview yet.
Nov 22 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
Counterpoint: Gen Z is accurately naming the salary needed to be fashionably well-off in 2024 after inflation of both money and expectations, while earlier generations are just naming the same number they remember from their youth, which is now outdated. Corollary: what this chart actually shows it that Millennials' economic expectations of self and others took a major blow.
Nov 19 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Video calls force you to stare at a person's face, close up and without interruption, which is actually just not at all how conversations in person occur. Audio/phone calls are much closer to natural conversation in person, where you speak and listen while mostly looking away. When was the last time you had an hour-long conversation with someone in person where you both stood one foot apart and talked while staring into each other's faces and maintaining eye contact the whole time? Literally never happens.
Nov 12 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
I can show you in one simple chart why industry wants to flee Europe for America: from 2019 to 2023, electricity prices in Europe skyrocketed, more than doubling in Britain and even Poland, up 50% in Germany and Italy.

Meanwhile, cheap U.S. electricity has gotten even cheaper. Image Not a single European country has electricity cheaper than the U.S. now (6.48 pence per kWh), but the closest are Norway (6.64), Finland (6.81), and Sweden (7.65).

These three countries get almost all of their electricity from hydropower and nuclear power. Image
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Oct 30 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
People call this ideology communism, but it's really far worse than communism. Communism believed in the virtue of technology and industry and sought to raise living standards and tech progress. Communism put satellites in orbit and probes on Venus. This is something new. I am aware of all the failures and atrocities of communism. But the pitch for communism was still never "we are going to roll back technological society and return to living in caves" or whatever.
Oct 23 • 12 tweets • 4 min read
Actually, if I remember correctly, Japan easily succeeded—Mitsubishi builds half the Boeing planes already—they just failed to build it to the arbitrary specifications that U.S. airlines, regulators, unions, etc. demanded, so their airplane couldn't find enough buyers. They built eight planes and they flew. But commercial aircraft manufacturing is not exactly a free market where the best man wins. Image
Oct 15 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
Image By nominal GDP per capita, Japan has stagnated since the 1990s, South Korea has grown 19x over since 1980, and China has grown 65x over since 1980 (while also being thirty times the population). Image
Oct 14 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
The existence of supply chains implies the existence of demand chains. Just as interlocking series of organizations work together to produce final products at scale, series of marketing and advertising organizations can work together to produce the desire to purchase a product. I don't mean only the marketing and advertising arms of businesses. Many if not most nonprofit and governmental organizations are also in the profession of marketing and advertising.
Oct 2 • 30 tweets • 8 min read
A fertility rate below 1.6 means 50% less new people after three generations, say 100 years. Below 1.2 means an 80% drop.

The U.S. is at 1.64. China, Japan, Poland, Spain all below 1.2. South Korea is at 0.7—96% drop.

Mass extinction numbers. There is no indication that birth rates are going to stabilize, let alone recover, anywhere. Only Israel and Georgia (?) look like even half-way exceptions.

Unless they drastically and rapidly change, the 21st century will be the century of unbelievable aging and depopulation.
Sep 22 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Europe's problem is that the whole continent is stuck in dead-end jobs. East Asia's problem is that everyone is an overstressed workaholic. The Middle East's problem is being an unemployed region.

America is doing OK because it's the world's underworked product manager. Latin America's problem is that it's part-time employed. Africa and India don't have a problem. They are hustling and freelancing.

Australia and Canada are spiritually part of Europe.
Sep 12 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
This isn't just a light show. It's a demonstration of futuristic military power. You are looking at an unarmed drone swarm. The same principle applies when a Middle Eastern state shows off its new nuclear plant, or when America shows off its space programs.
Aug 30 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
My latest article on how MBAs, financiers, managers, and accountants can inadvertently destroy great companies like Intel and Boeing through well-meaning focus on profits or social goals, in @palladiummag!

Some additional points that didn't make it into the final piece: 🧵 In stagnant industries, all companies begin to look alike, doing the same or slightly different things and even depending on each other's supply chains despite nominally competing with each other.

Defense is a poster child. Missiles made by three top competitors, together.
Aug 25 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
Pavel Durov seems to be another in the long list of libertarians who, despite obsession with injustices of the state, have very bad models of how to avoid becoming another injustice of the state.

Islamists, Communists, even Nazis way better at evading the state, ironically. Satoshi Nakamoto is the exception that proves the rule.
Aug 21 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
The real story is the decline of institutional functionality of U.S. video game companies. Black Myth Wukong is Chinese. Last year's breakout hit, Baldur's Gate 3, was made by Belgians. Cyberpunk 2077 is Polish.

Starfield was supposed to be the new U.S. hit, but flopped hard. Elden Ring is Japanese. Palworld is Japanese. Helldivers 2 is made by Swedes.

Word on the street is that GTA 6 and Civilization 7, two American classics, are both going to be trash.
Aug 20 • 21 tweets • 5 min read
It's unbelievable how many dynamic companies broke their streaks of engineer-CEOs for the first time in the 2000s, installing their first MBA/finance CEOs, who then promptly made fundamental strategic errors that nixed the company's future, that are now becoming obvious. "He/she was the first CEO not to come from an engineering background" is not something that happened once or twice, it looks like it was an economy-wide trend, not just in the U.S. but Japan too.

Boeing, Sony, IBM, Intel... we will probably find more examples as we research.
Aug 19 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
For anyone theological-minded, this is a powerful argument against FTL travel being possible. Because we aren't angels or demons, but humans.

Positing unscientific FTL lets us fantasize about spreading our unchanged political economy across all creation. Is that what God wants? If FTL is possible, perhaps we don't need to change very much to gain the glory of literally all creation. We just need some more physicists to overthrow Einstein.

If it isn't, we will need to change very, very much to cross and coordinate across interstellar distances.
Aug 12 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
It makes no sense, yet this is literally the exact same phenomenon as Roman coins losing their artistry to become simpler and cruder.

Consider modern art, architecture, "refinement culture," Humans of Flat, etc. ... our society is just no longer capable of affording artistry.

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Image "Technically we could afford artistry, but we are just too incompetent, tasteless, unimaginative, and unable to tolerate artistic license—or some combination thereof—to actually let it happen" is just another way of saying our society can't afford artistry.
Aug 2 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
This totally misunderstands the goals and motivations of space enthusiasts and thus misses the point. The point isn't to colonize some difficult-to-inhabit location.

The point is to colonize space. Because it's space. One step out there is one step closer to the stars. The point isn't to increase the mass of humanity for economic reasons. The point isn't to prove we can survive in difficult conditions.

The point is to discover new worlds and thus transform what humanity is. If Mars was Earth-like, we'd want to go there more, not less.
Aug 1 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
Not all patriotisms are alike. Some express love for country by reverential worship, like France or Russia. Some by wistfully listing all the flaws they look past, like England or Israel. And some by aggressively, madly-in-love unhinged jingoism, like Serbia, Turkey, or America. Just like one can love another person in many different recognizable, archetypal ways, different peoples tend to love their countries in recognizable, archetypal ways. The consequences are that different types of patriots have different types of blind spots.
Jul 13 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
Am I going insane or is CNN actually reporting an attempted assassination of Trump with, you know, a gun, that shoots bullets, in full public view, as "Trump rushed off stage after he falls at rally"?
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Image Is it really so hard to write "apparent gunshots"? Is there some other well-known possibility to explain "loud bangs" followed by a bleeding man? Image
Jul 12 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
People are always trying to tell me I'm wrong and the MBAs and financiers are actually applying based Darwinian capitalist praxis, but then you read what they say they're doing and it's like "bro what if we had a company with 100 products providing exactly 1% of revenue each??" The original sin of all free marketeer or avowedly capitalist economic theory is that it posits that knowledge of economic functionality can never be directly perceived and communicated but only indirectly divined through market mechanisms. It is like economic Taoism or smth.