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."

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.

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.

https://twitter.com/GerardAraud/status/1878363463824674935

"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."

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.

https://twitter.com/tenobrus/status/1877543503737270741

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.

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.

https://twitter.com/JZ281C/status/1874672228182397074

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.

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.

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.

$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.

https://twitter.com/AP/status/1869512443782742090

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?

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.

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.

https://twitter.com/mmjukic/status/1865491104545800410

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

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.

https://twitter.com/notlouisck/status/1864408565005603263

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.

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.

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.

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.

https://twitter.com/TheMindScourge/status/1859971279459406312

Corollary: what this chart actually shows it that Millennials' economic expectations of self and others took a major blow.

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.

https://twitter.com/hyperdiscogirl/status/1858819620976603224

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.

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. 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.

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.

https://twitter.com/eugyppius1/status/1851654144089633138

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.

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.

https://twitter.com/AlecStapp/status/1849102759783534934

They built eight planes and they flew. But commercial aircraft manufacturing is not exactly a free market where the best man wins.

https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1846222678132199637

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).

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.

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.

https://twitter.com/BirthGauge/status/1832726932552572974

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.