Taking whatever shortcut is available has become common sense to young American university graduates who find themselves with few prospects of productive work.

The result is a pervasive, unproductive economic nihilism.

Read the new article by @JuliaLSteinberg (link below): One of the hottest new software startups uses flamboyant viral marketing to promise to help users "cheat" on everything.

But despite this language, it was borne out of trying to circumvent drudgery imposed by sclerotic institutions. Link to article: palladiummag.com/2025/06/30/eco…

Humanity and industry can be made compatible, not extinguished for AI or degrowth respectively.

The solution is a civilization oriented towards maximum production and challenging megaprojects, rather than consumption.

Read the new article by @mmjukic (link below): South Korea is per-capita the world's most industrially productive and dynamic society. On energy, cars, semiconductors, robots, nobody else is comparable.

Yet there is one thing this society cannot produce: more human beings.

Link to read: palladiummag.com/2025/06/01/the…

The ultimate high ground is one that cannot be divided geographically: orbit.

The threat of stagnant peace under one world government means humanity must once more wrestle with war to thrive.

Read the new article by @curtis_yarvin (link below): The dream of 20th century statesmen was to abolish war and achieve world peace.

But Curtis asks: is world peace good for humanity? The ancients taught that war is the father of all things. Competition among states produces greatness and progress.

Link: palladiummag.com/2025/04/25/the…

South Africa’s corruption and decay is not due to it being a developing country; it is a Western, liberal, modern state.

It is, instead, being intentionally de-developed by a revolutionary, extractive political elite.

Read the new article by Lawrence Thomas (link below): Lawrence argues the defining features of contemporary South Africa are the intertwining of government with organized crime—through both corruption and violence—and the creation of a political economy where extraction, not production, is paramount.

Link: palladiummag.com/2025/03/14/sou…

After fifteen years, Bitcoin has outlasted critics and reached new heights. But what will it mean for the next fifteen hundred years?

It is time to consider whether it unlocks an unbreakable link to our distant future.

Read the new article by @contrarymo (link below!): Bitcoin has gone from a fringe passion project to a widely-held asset whose proponents argue it should be held by governments and central banks; and they are listening.

Dave Birnbaum argues it would be the first incorruptible, mathematical money.

Link: palladiummag.com/2025/02/28/the…

Starship, the biggest rocket ever built will not just transform our current space and satellite industry, but power human civilization all the way to Mars.

The time has come to settle a second planet.

Read the new article by @CJHandmer (link below!): Starship was designed around the difficult constraints of cost-efficiently transporting cargo to another world, because of this it goes far beyond what would be necessary to just dominate the global satellite market.

Link: palladiummag.com/2025/02/14/why…

The "AI doomer" coalition seeks to slow the creation of AI, which it fears will destroy humanity.

But these same activists have only accelerated AI development in the past, and are on track to do so again.

Read the new article by @benlandautaylor here: palladiummag.com/2025/01/31/the… "AI Doomers" is Ben's admitted exonym for the formerly niche but now widely-known position that unregulated development of artificial intelligence technology will inevitably lead to human extinction as increasingly-intelligent machines out-reason and out-compete mere humans.

Giants of the global economy like Intel, Boeing, and Sony have been aggressively mismanaged into irrelevance by executives operating on the wrong theories of the firm.

Great companies have missions, not metrics.

Read the new article by @mmjukic here: palladiummag.com/2024/08/30/whe… Marko cites three case studies when leading high-tech companies made catastrophic strategic errors:

Intel passed on the iPhone. Boeing built a plane programmed to crash itself. Sony gave up on cool new devices.

All three decisions were made by non-technical non-founders.

The joke goes that universities are a hedge fund, sports franchise, and scientific research institution rolled into one, and somehow this is supposed to give teenagers job training.

But this model makes sense for maintaining a dynamic, healthy elite. It's just broken now. 🧵 No serious discussion about universities can begin without acknowledging their original and unique mission which they have retained for a thousand years to the present day:

The purpose of a university is and has always been to pass down knowledge to a society's young elites.

Academia is not just bloated or out of touch, it is committing outright scientific fraud—fake data, doctored images, and all—and normalizing it by not naming and punishing culprits.

Science is in danger.

Read the new article by @benlandautaylor here: palladiummag.com/2024/08/02/the… The scale of known academic fraud is already measured in the billions of dollars and affecting millions of lives.

It took sixteen years to retract a fraudulent paper on Alzheimer's, but only after 2300 other papers had cited it and >$1 billion in grants given based on it.

If China is rising and America stagnating, Europe is gambling with a steep, shocking decline into poverty and irrelevance.

Energy scarcity, aging workforces, and institutional paralysis don't combine to create social-democratic utopia but a closed, deindustrializing society:🧵 Europe has set itself up to lose the two most basic ingredients for industrial competitiveness and sustainability: cheap energy and cheap labor.

You can maybe maintain an industrial society by offsetting one against the other, but to maintain one with neither is ludicrous.

Despite a decade of finally noticing China's economic rise, Cold War clichés about communism and totalitarianism still dominate our thinking.

Modern China isn't the Soviet Union on steroids. It is a consumerist, capitalist, industrial society in many ways imitating America—🧵



Obviously there is one big exception: China's ruling regime is indeed a communist one-party state. But the CCP is just one layer at the top of Chinese society. China is no more its government than America is its.

And China the country has undergone tremendous transformation.

Society educates its members to slot themselves into pre-made life paths: get a job, start a company, run for office. But you cannot change a stagnant society from inside a slot.

Carving a new path isn't as easy as dropping out of society. It requires re-educating yourself.🧵 One of the tricks society plays on us is that it front-loads all the education we get at the beginning of our lives and convinces us we don't need, or even want, any more of it later.

This is why the thoughts, habits, and values we are educated in stick. Inertia.

This is only half-true. America is a former 19th century Latin American Third World country that started working in the 20th—by building the largest, most powerful bureaucracies the world has ever seen.

It's also why who the next president is just doesn't matter much at all. 🧵

https://twitter.com/naval/status/1812649906588598455

What America does have in common with Latin America is a national mythos originating in the 18th century Enlightenment. The political pageantry and aesthetics of all countries in the Americas are basically the same.

A bunch of cowboy rebels taking up the quill for liberty.

America cannot simultaneously be a country in decline and a global superpower on the cusp of a thousand-year "Turbo-America." Yet there is no consensus on which it is!

What's happening is America is increasing its relative share of an empire that stopped growing absolutely. 🧵

https://twitter.com/zebulgar/status/1808622071217598615

The territorial boundaries of Greater America have not substantially changed since 1945 or 1991. By far the most significant addition in a century was Eastern Europe, the former satellites of the Soviet Union.

But industrial capacity, rather than territory, is what matters.

Introducing:

PALLADIUM 14: GREAT CITIES

What does the greatest city of the future look like? And how do we build it? Journey with us from ancient Sumer to Shenzhen, San Francisco, and beyond...

Print edition ships now. Become a member to get your copy: buy.stripe.com/aEUg1X9DydBgb4…
Athens. Alexandria. Xi’an. Rome. Constantinople. Baghdad. London. Paris. Vienna. New York.

When listed, these cities are immediately identifiable as the apexes of unique and different societies. It is wise to ask what the greatest city of our own polemicized age is.

Africa will need hundreds of millions of new jobs in the coming decades to employ its working-age population.

Regulatory arbitrage through special economic zones and startup cities is the most promising source.

Read the new article by @magattew here: palladiummag.com/2024/06/07/the…
The scale of the challenge in fostering a prosperous Africa is immense.

Despite widespread poverty, the working-age population is well over 600 million and growing by 20 million people per year.

What these people need is not more education or aid, but productive work.

America and Europe are equally poor.

Higher wage and GDP figures for the U.S. are overblown and fail to capture America's dwindling public wealth. Europe is now on a trajectory to get poorer, but isn't there yet.

Read the new article by @mmjukic here: palladiummag.com/2024/04/26/ame… Most numbers purporting to now show a devastating U.S. economic lead over Europe are just misleading.

For example, though Europe's nominal GDP has fallen to 2/3 of the U.S.' since 2008, it was also at 2/3 in 2000.

These aren't real changes, just exchange rate fluctuations.

Show trials. Procedural manipulation. Prosecuting technicalities against political enemies. State-run PR campaigns.

It all happened before, in the 17th century.

How the Persecution of Pirates Gave Us Procedural Manipulation by @rmcentush:

palladiummag.com/2024/01/19/how… In 1694, Henry Every began his career as a pirate by launching a mutiny and seizing control of his ship off the coast of Spain.

He sailed towards Madagascar, and, right where the Yemeni Houthis are today attacking ships, Every attacked a Mughal Imperial treasure ship.

You may not know that there is a third option distinct from AI accelerationism or AI doomerism:

"Become the unsafe artificial intelligence you fear to see in the world," in the words of @wolftivy

Let's talk about Wolf Tivy Thought in the New Era of Artificial Intelligence: 🧵 Artificial intelligence is possible and deadly.

This is almost always taken to be synonymous with AI doomerism or safetyism, broadly the @ESYudkowsky position.

But it is not. It is just the starting point from which a serious philosophy of AI could develop.

You Won’t Survive As Human Capital
by @miltonwrites

It was alliances of families that built the bureaucratic organizations that now regulate society. Only new alliances can replace them.

1/10

Read more here:
palladiummag.com/2023/11/24/you… "Much of our life from childhood onward is dedicated to proving our value [as human capital]. No one living today is responsible for this mode of life. Some people more directly enforce its norms, a few try to resist them, and most go along as best they can."

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