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Marko Jukic Profile picture
Marko Jukic
@mmjukic
Finding the golden path to interstellar civilization. Senior Analyst @bismarckanlys.
10 subscribers
Dec 23 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
Been reading about an extremely dynamic hardware manufacturing startup that has had massive success releasing superior, cheaper products across dozens of categories, with a cult following, led by a founder who is a genuine maker.

It isn't a Silicon Valley company. It's Xiaomi. I'm not even going to bother listing all of Xiaomi and its founder @leijun's mind-boggling achievements of quality, speed, and startup dynamism. You can read the inevitable @bismarckanlys Brief for that.

Suffice it to say if Xiaomi was a U.S. company, it'd be worth $3 trillion.
Dec 19 • 21 tweets • 5 min read
$2 billion. In 1 year. All to advocates of social justice and environmentalism. Just imagine if donors who supported space exploration, nuclear expansion, and quality governance gave $2 billion to intellectual workers on their own side, rather than yelling at them to write code. If intellectual work is fake and has no impact, then why are we all so upset at $2 billion going to such advocates? Why do such advocates succeed at altering government policy and social norms to the point that someone like Elon Musk feels a need to launch emergency politics?
Dec 16 • 17 tweets • 3 min read
Europe since the mid-2000s is ruled by Germanic authoritarian socialism-lite busybody grandmas who can barely use email and think TikTok and Bitcoin are bad guys from Star Wars.

This more than anything explains the ridiculous risk aversion of European leaders. The authoritarian grandmas ruling Europe are as intrinsically uncurious about and scared of new ideas and technology as any fat Boomer dictator from the Third World who might be parodied by Sacha Baron Cohen.
Dec 7 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
There is currently no ideology that will justify a government to award free 7-seater luxury Chinese electric SUVs to young families with 3+ children.

At best, a small grant to buy a dirty old used minivan. Hardly aspirational, then they wonder why fertility incentives fail. Image
Image Things governments are willing to use as fertility incentives: less income tax (but not social security tax), used cars nobody wants, loans with good rate for you my friend to build houses in rural areas, discounts on vaccines...

Things they are not: anything high-status
Dec 5 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
There is no plan. There is a gaping vacuum of vision, strategy, forward-looking ideology, and leadership at the helms of developed democracies, with the result that we are squandering the capabilities afforded by industrial society and on a path to collapse our own civilization. The idea that everything is going well or fine because [insert speculative technology here] will fix it is actually an indictment of how poorly we are running our civilization. It's easier to imagine wacky deus ex machine tech than necessary reform.
Nov 27 • 23 tweets • 6 min read
Elon's secret is that he just picks the institutional and organizational low-hanging fruit that everyone else is too blind or apathetic to pick. Taking a personal org census of 5 minutes per employee or asking what parts cost to build from first principles—everyone can do this. There isn't alien superintelligence or complex mathematical modelling behind all this. These are things that when you hear them you should go "d'oh, duh" and immediately implement the same principle in your own work and organization.
Nov 22 • 13 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.