Marko Jukic Profile picture
Finding the golden path to interstellar civilization. Senior Analyst @bismarckanlys.
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Jun 6 18 tweets 5 min read
Still waiting for any investigative journalism outlet to write the piece explaining how and why every single country in Eastern Europe and Japan overnight decided to begin mass-importing low-wage laborers from the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia sometime in 2022-23. As far as I can tell the Potato-Shaped Boomers visited Dubai and discovered that the only thing they love more than grandstanding about immigration and nationalism at home is undercutting wages and getting a new roof installed for even cheaper than before.
Jun 3 4 tweets 1 min read
The best tourists are Germans: despite their tastelessness, they are Olympic cheapskates interested only in nudism and ice cream. The worst by far are Americans whose infinite demand for "fusion tacos" and other atrocities—plus tip—turn idylls into circuses of scams and garbage. When Americans with too much money and negative taste begin arriving in droves, you can kiss any sincere and authentic atmosphere or establishment goodbye. What's the point? They'll pay ten times more for garbage from the freezer that costs ten times less—and tip you too!
May 27 5 tweets 3 min read
It appears that since 2024, Putin has pursued a bold new strategy for Russian government reform: simply find the most handsome and least potato-shaped Russians around, and then appoint them to high positions to replace the positions filled by the most potato-like officials. Image
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Attention all Eastern European leaders: DO NOT select your high officials from "Alexander Lukashenko's eldest son" type of Slavic man. DO select your high officials from "Alexander Lukashenko's youngest son" type of Slavic man.
May 26 7 tweets 2 min read
Is 95% of modern awe and prestige of the medical profession just stolen valor from late 19th century sewage and sanitation engineers who finally built cities with streets that weren't literally swimming in feces? Mid-19th century medicine was so bad that they not only dismissed the idea of washing their hands but mocked the guy who suggested it to the point he was committed to and beaten to death in a mental asylum. To be fair, I guess he was technically a doctor too! Image
May 15 5 tweets 2 min read
Nothing puzzling about it. Communism fell because of exhaustion and institutional annexation to the U.S. bloc, not revolution. Therefore elite turnover was partial at best and communist elites and institutions are now "democratic" elites and institutions in many countries still. Many even found it natural and relaxing to simply switch from taking orders from impersonal institutions in Moscow to taking cues from impersonal institutions in Washington, and joyfully imposing both on their populations, whom they view as primitive cavemen that need uplifting.
May 14 4 tweets 1 min read
"Immigration," "debt," and "tourism" should be curse words with the same status as "corruption." All three are fundamentally ways for failing and incompetent governments to sell out the country. The cure for the disease has a wholly different name: industry. Oh, and "real estate." Let's not forget that one.
Apr 29 5 tweets 1 min read
It has been remarked by @mr_scientism that elites actually do not care about development for its own sake and maybe never have. This is because advocates of development have failed to make the moral, spiritual, and anthropological case for development—only an economic one. @mr_scientism The economic case is an instrumental one. This means if elites find non-economic and non-developmental ways to achieve their moral, spiritual, and anthropological goals, they will forget about development. The battle to be fought is one over truth and value, not instrumentality.
Apr 28 6 tweets 2 min read
Daily reminder that, by default and absent major political, institutional, and economic reforms, both Europe and America are going to be de-developed, poor, Third World countries by 2100. Crossing your fingers and praying for AGI is not going to cut it as a solution. We all have a collective responsibility this century to do the intellectual, cultural, institutional, and ultimately political work to reorient and repair our civilization.
Apr 28 12 tweets 4 min read
I don't see a single anti-woke billionaire on the list of most generous philanthropists of 2024. The ratio of dollars going to progressive causes versus any other kind of cause has got to be at least 1000-to-1, maybe 1,000,000-to-1.

Then they wonder why "the culture" changed. Image
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"The culture" changed and will keep changing because progressives can and do spend all day figuring out new ways to persuade people of their cause and mold society in their image—but everybody else gets a job.
Apr 24 4 tweets 2 min read
Car manufacturing in Western countries has completely collapsed in the last 25 years. Down -19% in the U.S., -28% in Germany, -65% in Italy, -71% in France.

But in China, it's grown 16x over.

The legacy auto industry isn't going to be destroyed—it's already been destroyed. Image It's not just because of moving production around to neighboring countries. North American production is down -8% and EU+UK production is at least -15%, but in reality much more because the EU in 1999 didn't include Eastern Europe, but today does. Image
Apr 24 5 tweets 2 min read
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. 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. Image
Apr 21 10 tweets 2 min read
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.
Apr 15 4 tweets 1 min read
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.
Apr 14 6 tweets 2 min read
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. Image
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Link to article: usni.org/magazines/proc…
Apr 12 9 tweets 2 min read
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. 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.
Apr 11 6 tweets 2 min read
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. 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.
Apr 11 11 tweets 2 min read
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.
Apr 8 11 tweets 2 min read
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!
Apr 5 7 tweets 2 min read
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.
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...