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Marko Jukic Profile picture
Marko Jukic
@mmjukic
Finding the golden path to interstellar civilization. Senior Analyst @bismarckanlys.
10 subscribers
Apr 1 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
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.
Mar 31 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
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. 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...
Mar 27 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
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. 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...
Mar 23 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
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. 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.
Mar 6 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
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! Image
Image 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
Feb 27 • 18 tweets • 4 min read
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.
Feb 25 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
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?
Feb 24 • 12 tweets • 4 min read
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. Image
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Image @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. Image
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Feb 13 • 20 tweets • 5 min read
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.
Feb 9 • 17 tweets • 4 min read
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.
Feb 3 • 12 tweets • 4 min read
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! "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."
Jan 25 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
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. 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
Jan 23 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Barron Trump is half-Slovenian. Half-Yugoslav. He is a Balkaner. This is underrated and underappreciated. You have no idea what kind of power will be unleashed when a Balkaner is elected President of the United States, someday. You are not prepared for a Balkan POTUS. Nobody is. Barron Trump's grandfather and my grandfather were both members of the same communist party, at the same time, in the same forgotten corner of Europe. What a strange world. Image
Jan 12 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
If the EU and European elite agreed to be collectively about 20-25% less geriatric, insane, and malicious, and go back to the EU and Europe being about antimatter laboratories and Leonardo Da Vinci, the people would be begging, crying, and pleading for more European integration. "We made European integration all about deliberately impoverishing ourselves at breakneck speed in order to... actually we're not sure why, something about justice for the Third World and human rights or global warming or something. We're not sure why this isn't popular."
Jan 10 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Which is why marriage, family, and children historically never relied on the personal foresight and genius of individuals, but on somewhat coercive and restrictive lifelong social norms enforced by society writ large. Romantic love never played more than an ancillary role. Everything in the above is true, which is why the traditional idea is more like that you marry someone and have children as a duty to society that is repaid in a myriad different ways, not a purely beneficial arrangement that you pursue for your individual satisfaction.
Jan 2 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
There is this idea that a major war with Russia or China would be politically unsustainable for the West due to high casualties. I think this view is dangerously wrong. Rather major war would "solve" all of the West's political problems by enabling massive domestic repression. The idea that Western liberal democracies are not capable of heavy-handed domestic repression or heavy-handed mobilization of the population for elite political preferences should have been conclusively disproved by the events of both the pandemic and the war in Ukraine.
Dec 30, 2024 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Zoomers don't read. This also means they don't write, which I find as if not more concerning. What remains of the online thinker world/Blogosphere seems exclusively dominated by Millennials and Gen Xers. I can't think of any prominent Zoomer writers, even rising ones. Boomers also didn't read or write compared to watching television, so this can change with each new generation. But that Zoomers don't read or write is as much of a clear and negative regression as that they don't know how to use a computer properly.
Dec 23, 2024 • 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, 2024 • 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, 2024 • 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, 2024 • 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