Marko Jukic @mmjukic Twitter profile

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Marko Jukic

9 months

There is only one reason to explore space. It is not economic, scientific, or military. Space exploration is rather a mystical proposition to revolutionize what humanity is. My new, long article in @palladiummag . Read here: A short 🧵 of highlights:

The Only Reason to Explore Space

www.palladiummag.com

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

30 days

Europeans aren't poor. They are illiquid. Much of Europe's wealth is stored in safe streets, nice parks, public transit, "free" healthcare, etc. which, it turns out, are too socially expensive for Americans to maintain. Americans take the money instead. The rest is only natural.

Flo Crivello

@Altimor

30 days

Americans severely underestimate how dirt poor most Europeans are. They go spend their American wages there and are amazed at the “quality of life,” not realizing that they’re taking the equivalent of a trip to Disneyland, and everyone around them is the staff.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

2 months

This is a real aircraft that can actually fly. It is made through glorious government-led pan-European cooperation in industry. No MBAs, consultants, or financiers were involved in the making of this glorious whale-sized airplane. Only bureaucrats, engineers, and espressos.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

1 month

Otto von Bismarck drank wine with breakfast and every other meal, beer in between meals, and drank himself to sleep every single night. He was also a lifelong chainsmoker. While dividing Africa at the Congress of Berlin, "he ate pickled herrings with two hands." Probably drunk.

Samo Burja

@SamoBurja

1 month

You might not like it, but this is how Western civilization ran for a thousand years.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

9 months

We definitely do not talk enough about the insane depopulation of Eastern Europe since 1990. Wars, aging, and emigration. In 1990, Ukraine & Turkey were even. Turkey is now double Ukraine's pop. For many countries this depopulation literally surpasses the death tolls of WWII.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

9 months

Only one country comes close to disrupting U.S. hegemony in global popular culture: Japan. But why them? Because popular culture isn't a subjective art form but an industrial export Japan's military funded for WWII propaganda to defeat Disney. A 🧵 on industrial pop culture:

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

30 days

Americans would kill each other to live in Manhattan, which they treat like a utopia and pay exorbitant prices to live in because it has corner stores and you don't need to drive a car. But that Manhattan-tier density is common for even small and unremarkable European cities.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

8 months

I think the real replacement fertility rate is not 2.1 kids per woman. It's 5.1 kids. A recent Swedish study found that in a generation born 1885-1899, an incredible 25% of people who had 2 kids had *zero* descendants by 2007! For 1 kid? 50%. A 🧵 on long-term fertility:

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

30 days

The EU has triple the population density of the United States and doesn't believe in "suburbs," just "cities." Given how much more space there is in America, it's surprising that the numbers are so close, if anything.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

30 days

I've lived in every major U.S. city and all over Europe for many years each. What Europeans consider "unsafe" would be considered a national paragon of urban policing in America. The homicide rates speak for themselves. America is 3-6x more dangerous.

Pierre Precieux - Commodities ⛏️

@Pierre_Precieux

30 days

@mmjukic When was the last time you were in Europe? Safe Streets are a thing of the past

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

1 month

The concept of "F--- you money" is revealed as transparently fake when you look at how scared everyone in Silicon Valley is.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

30 days

If, in a country, you can live like a Manhattanite for a tiny fraction of the cost and this lifestyle is considered unremarkable, then how is this evidence that Europeans are poor? Isn't it evidence that Europeans are fantastically wealthy?

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

2 months

The fact that outright billionaires are choosing to spend their time being irate online commentators and podcast hosts rather than, like, literally anything else productive, seems like a sign of one of the most important and unspoken sociological facts about modern America.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

9 months

I think far more esoteric technical knowledge was lost with the fall of the Soviet Union than it will ever be fashionable to admit. Much of that tacit knowledge immediately moved to Silicon Valley, New York, or even Israel. Much of it didn't.

zhil

@zhil_arf

9 months

Seems like: 1. LK99 is based on an arcane ancient 20th century knowledge lost during the fall of the Soviet empire 2. Both the Korean professors and Iris (who is also a Soviet tankie) had access to this knowledge

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

2 months

This week, a single pioneering donor gave gifts worth $640 million to hundreds of advocates of equity, environmentalism, public health, and gender justice. Does anyone know how much advocates of space exploration, nuclear power, or good city governance received this week?

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

2 months

You hear a lot of Americans complaining how European bureaucrats are decelerating technological progress. But you don't often hear about how American bureaucrats decelerated European, government-led supersonic flight in the 1970s by outright banning it overland. Look it up.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

30 days

The fact that apparently all food in America is so poisoned that the resulting widespread obesity has been normalized should really count against the idea of America being wealthy. European food is closer to what the kings of old feasted on. Sorry but it's true.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

2 months

Boeing alone used to be 80% of global commercial aircraft manufacturing. Then it gave control to MBAs, consultants, and financiers to improve financial margins. Strangely, now Boeing is losing billions of dollars and its planes fall out of the sky, while Airbus is profitable.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

30 days

I am not aware of any country that has squared the circle of "American-tier private financial compensation" with "European-tier public goods." I'm sure it's possible, somehow, but not without a political revolution. In the meantime, Remote-Americans can just move to Europe.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

30 days

The numbers say America is far wealthier than Europe. But, literally, wealth is not numbers: the numbers are supposed to represent wealth i.e. actual real goods. When you compare actual real goods, most things are comparable and each skews positive or negative on a few things.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

30 days

This America vs. Europe wealth debate resurfaces every few months and I feel compelled to give the final judgment, since I am actually the most qualified person to judge, since I have actually lived in both extensively: America and Europe are roughly equally as wealthy overall.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

30 days

@nic__carter As opposed to the very smart and very different immigration policy of the United States? Haha. Come on. The impact of immigration on European living has been vastly overstated and it is certainly no worse overall than the U.S. policy. So that's a wash.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

2 months

My advice to billionaires: Use your money to generously and widely fund crazy people with unconventional ideas. Not just their startup ideas to get A RETURN. Fund them without strings attached. Write a serious book. Do not start a podcast. Do not tweet. Do not smile in photos.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

5 months

I made an org chart of the de facto U.S. government circa 2023:

Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

5 months

"The elite" is not shadowy or mysterious. America is ruled by technocratic lanky GenX Ivy League white guys who fly under the radar because they are powerful. For example, pictured below are the American foreign minister, information minister, and AI minister.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

2 months

Technological progress and economic growth happen when scientists and engineers are given resources and everyone else gets out of the way. Governments can give resources to engineers and remove obstacles for them. Markets can withhold resources and create obstacles.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

1 month

Just imagine this absolute pug of a man, this absolute German unit, DEMOLISHING pickled herrings WITH BOTH HANDS in front of the horrified French and British diplomats, taking breaks to puff on his cigar and chug more beer.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

30 days

Europeans are definitely low-income and definitely getting poorer overall nowadays. But they have started from an extremely, unprecedentedly high base. That wealth is still there and plainly visible even if not captured in the numbers. Silly to ignore.

Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

8 months

Western Europe is the story of dysfunctional institutions spending down centuries of incredible amounts of accumulated wealth. Such wealth remains highly visible even after decades or centuries of institutional dysfunction, while the dysfunction itself is mostly invisible.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

2 months

#EuropeanDynamism 🇪🇺

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

30 days

In terms of actual real goods i.e. actual wealth, both America and Europe are past their peak and are now getting poorer. We can debate how fast for each, but only America can hide its decline with propaganda and money-printing. Europe just has to rationalize it as "degrowth."

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

5 months

When the USSR fell, Moscow's empire instantly lost -48.6% of its population -38.8% of GDP. For comparison, this is how it would look if the U.S. broke apart with the same ratios today. I think this more than anything explains why KGB officer Putin is so fixated on Ukraine: 🧵

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

7 months

"Wow, how is Israel the only developed country to achieve a 2.9 fertility rate?" Well, for one thing, they are willing to legalize and religiously justify bizarre, quasi-eugenic cyberpunk measures like IVF with sperm from dead soldiers. That's in their Overton Window.

Shashank Joshi

@shashj

7 months

"As the scale of the tragedy from the Hamas onslaught on Saturday became clear... embryologists and IVF specialists report being called to quickly try to perform posthumous sperm retrieval (PSR) on an unprecedented scale."

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

2 months

The man who put Americans on the Moon was a European who spent his whole career working for the government.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

9 months

I think Eastern Europeans are in denial about how bad of a deal EU open borders are for them. You get a few billion dollars in EU money and the intangible prestige of finally being "European." In exchange, WWII death toll percentages of your young population emigrate out.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

10 months

That 100-year-old Henry Kissinger is still flown out to China every few years is a very bad sign for functionality of U.S. diplomacy and future global stability. It strongly suggests that Kissinger's social capital and networks in China have not been passed down to a successor.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

9 months

First, the evidence. Of the 50 highest-grossing films ever, 94% are based on U.S./UK intellectual property (IP). The other 6% are Japanese. No other countries. Japan is also 56% of the top 50 video games and 28% of the top media franchises, including number one: Pokémon.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

2 months

Apparently in America the purpose of having billions of dollars is to have job security for being a full-time podcaster or online commentator about the woke left, which, it turns out, has gone bananas. Billions of dollars to pursue my lifelong dream of being an inflooencer.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

30 days

@absynot Not all costs are financial. Nor is all wealth.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

11 months

Imagination: rustic developing countries with subsistence farmers and exotic wilderness export natural bounty to the city slickers. Reality: industrialized urbanized countries generate so much food that they beg developing countries to import it. A 🧵 on global food abundance:

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

9 months

The first feature-length Japanese animated film is Momotaro: Sacred Sailors, released in 1945. Not after the war ended—before! It’s about how a cute little Japanese boy and his cute puppy and monkey friends complete naval air training then invade Indonesia to oust the British.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

2 months

If you only fund business ideas, you are only ever going to get more useless money. This is a terminal dead end. If you want to change the world, you have to be willing to lose money. The more you lose, the better.

Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

3 months

In the absence of producing its own intellectuals, manifestos, books, magazines, seminal articles, and revolutionary programs, Silicon Valley and the techbros are not "changing the future" by building technology, but just arming their own enemies with better tools.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

1 month

Daily reminder to teach your kids that they can easily find the e-mails and phone numbers of domain experts in any field online (e.g. a medical professor or a niche historian) and literally just politely ask them some questions, gaining priceless expert opinion for free.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

2 months

When the directions of intellectual, ideological, artistic, and cultural philanthropy are lopsided by five orders of magnitude or so in one direction rather than another, it's hardly surprising that society follows in that direction.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

9 months

Animation wasn’t just an art, it was a cutting-edge industrial process requiring specialized equipment and hundreds of skilled laborers to mass-produce frames of animation. Tens of thousands of frames had to be perfect for a complete film. Animation was high-tech *industry.*

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

10 months

With 1.4 billion people, Africa is now as populous as China or India. By 2100, a projected 40% of the world will be African. Rather than lumping all of Africa together, let’s try to break it down and truly understand it. A 🧵on Africa’s economic and demographic geography:

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

30 days

This @bismarckanlys Brief gives an excellent explanation and overview of how European social democracy preserves wealth at the expense of growth (and income). Subscribe and read:

The Family That Finances Sweden

The Wallenbergs are both the benefactors and beneficiaries of Sweden’s political economy. Five generations in, they demonstrate the viability of dynastic owners in an age of managers.

brief.bismarckanalysis.com

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

5 months

"The elite" is not shadowy or mysterious. America is ruled by technocratic lanky GenX Ivy League white guys who fly under the radar because they are powerful. For example, pictured below are the American foreign minister, information minister, and AI minister.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

9 months

No theory of population/GDP can explain this. China and India fail despite population. Germany is non-existent in culture despite its economy. France or Italy have high culture, but nothing in pop culture. Singapore, Qatar—the richest states are also all cultural wastelands.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

9 months

Anime today is 76% of U.S. comic sales. 40 million Americans have a Crunchyroll account (anime streaming). Yet anime originates in imperial Japanese military funding of an unprecedented proof-of-concept for anti-American war propaganda. It was the Manhattan Project for anime.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

9 months

At this point, most default to aesthetic explanations: “Japan just makes uniquely better games/animation. It’s magic oriental spiritism that speaks to the soul.” We like to believe cultural products win on their intangible aesthetic merits. But history tells a different story.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

9 months

Off the top of my head: didn't the Soviets believe that oil had a non-biological origin? They were also the ones who *started* the Space Race. Hard to remember these days, but Russia used to be an intellectual and scientific powerhouse.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

2 months

The modern billionaire will inevitably be expropriated by his hated enemies and lawyers. It doesn't take a genius of political economy to see this coming. The only solution is to pre-emptively self-expropriate by giving away your money to people you actually like and support.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

9 months

A prequel to this film, released in 1943, is about the same army of cute Japanese animals bombing Pearl Harbor. This Momotaro 1 was literally the most-viewed film in Japan in 1943. It was an unprecedented box office hit.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

9 months

Why, in fact, is all pop culture from English-speaking countries? Where is Europe? China? Brazil? Music and books are also almost all U.S. or UK. Our data sources are definitely hopelessly biased towards the U.S. Yet, even then, Japan alone somehow takes a slice of the pie.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

9 months

Modern popular culture doesn’t follow aesthetic or cultural logic, but the logic of industrial production and export! This is because popular cultural products are not only aesthetic concepts, but also always technological products mass-produced by industrial institutions.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

2 months

I believe with all of my heart that by far the most important, potentially transformative, and depressingly underrated field is materials science. The need for better or more exotic materials just keeps coming up in all kinds of diverse areas.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

2 months

More tens of billions of dollars expropriated just through *marriage or divorce* have been used to fund intellectual and cultural movement than perhaps all of the intentional funding of all other tech billionaires combined in history. MacKenzie Bezos and Laurene Powell-Jobs.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

9 months

Like any new industry, it was risky, capital-intensive, and only a live player could pull it off. Walt Disney budgeted 10x a short animated film budget for Snow White, then ended up mortgaging his house and almost bankrupting the company when costs spiraled to 10x of *that.*

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

2 months

Billionaires are poor.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

8 months

In Eastern Europe, you are stifled by mean, lazy bureaucrats in ugly dilapidated socialist blocks. In Western Europe, however, you are stifled by mean lazy bureaucrats in beautiful, ornate 19th-century buildings. The main difference between East/West today is just the facades.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

27 days

Lack of growth *is* a tradeoff that Europe has intentionally made in favor of welfare in the last century. The defining feature of social democracy is preservation of economic elites' arrangements with the state in exchange for welfare spending on the middle/lower classes...

Joey Politano 🏳️‍🌈

@JosephPolitano

27 days

I hate this genre of tweet because it frames lack of European growth as an intentional tradeoff for welfare instead of a recent macro policy failure, thereby excusing it As if having a better subway network is the reason the German economy hasn’t grown in 5 years. Ridiculous

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

9 months

Estimates say the Soviet Union had WWII casualties equiv. to 13% of its 1939 population. Ukraine has lost -28.9% since 1990. Romania is at 4% compared to -18.5%. Hungary at about 6% and -6.8%. Yugoslavia was also at 6% casualties; Croatia has lost -19% since 1990, Serbia -12%.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

29 days

Americans readily admit that "quality of life" is higher in Europe. But they deny that Europe is wealthier than America because the GDP says so. But there is actually no meaningful difference between "quality of life" and "wealth." Americans are just being scammed by "GDP."

Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

30 days

Europeans aren't poor. They are illiquid. Much of Europe's wealth is stored in safe streets, nice parks, public transit, "free" healthcare, etc. which, it turns out, are too socially expensive for Americans to maintain. Americans take the money instead. The rest is only natural.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

2 months

The reason civilization is declining and we aren't getting Martian Technocracy is that you won't pay for your preferred ideological vision of the future, but environmentalist degrowth billionaires etc. *will* pay for theirs. The end-result is obvious.

Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

3 months

@palladiummag Martian Technocracy won't compete with environmentalism, Islamism, and surveillance nanny-stateism on the strength of technology and memes. It will compete on its deeply laid-out vision, intellectual, aesthetic, and philosophy. Which is weak or non-existent right now.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

15 days

Jaywalkers are live players. They understand the principles underlying social scripts (look both ways for oncoming cars) and can act on them. Those who just obey traffic lights are dead players. They can get killed if they don't look both ways but just rely on accepted signals.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

1 month

Hollywood should really just be bulldozed entirely at this point. Streaming didn't make it better, but somehow worse. Salt the earth and start over somewhere else. All I do is study institutional dysfunction and I still can't wrap my head around how bad it is in Hollywood.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

9 months

Like any new industry, there was a shortcut to replicating the live player’s work: state-directed investment as part of industrial policy. And that’s exactly what the Japanese military did during World War II, when it decided to support, fund, and direct Japanese animation.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

9 months

Disney spent 100x the baseline budget for animation on Snow White ($31 million in 2023$). Hollywood thought him mad. His own wife and brother tried to dissuade him. But it was a revolutionary technical, cultural, and financial success. Which others tried reverse-engineering…

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

9 months

But didn't everyone make animated WWII propaganda? In fact, no. Only two countries succeeded at releasing feature-length animated wartime propaganda films: the United States and Japan. How come? Because back then…

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

9 months

This suggests the core reason why some countries have influence in global popular culture today and others do not: early industrialization + persistent industrial policy. Japan industrialized very early, before WW1. It was thus capable of competing with Disney from the get-go.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

2 months

It would cost no more than a few billion dollars at the absolute max, from start to finish, to reform modern society into an expanding spacefaring civilization. Cheap! The bottleneck isn't technological, it's intellectual, cultural, and political:

The Only Reason to Explore Space

www.palladiummag.com

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

2 months

Having more money doesn't make you wealthier or more powerful.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

8 months

According to the study, the probability of no descendants after ~120 years reaches near-zero not at 2 or even 3 kids, but rather at about *5 kids.* So if you were an adult in early 20th century Sweden who wanted great-grandchildren, you should’ve aimed for five kids, not two.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

9 months

World War II was a brief window where the new technology of animation lined up with the propaganda needs of governments, but only the U.S. and Japan took the opportunity to invest heavily in the industry. And so 80 years later, we still watch American or Japanese cartoons.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

9 months

When WWII started, the Japanese military government decided to change this. American animation was banned. The government forced small animator ateliers to merge and consolidate into large studios, then directed them to invent a new style of animation with Japanese aesthetics.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

8 months

Importantly, most of the effect seems not to be poor hygiene causing infant mortality, but adult mortality and permanent childlessness. Some traditionalists might be shocked to learn that it was normal throughout 20th century Europe for 15-25% of women to remain childless!

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

9 months

East European depopulation is even worse than it looks because emigrants are massively disproportionately younger, skilled, smart, working-age people, themselves likely to have kids of their own. The more skilled you are, the exponentially more likely you are to leave!

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

9 months

…but the other was simply that Japan was an advanced industrial economy able to manufacture quality cheap electronic components. Quality cheap electronics were why CEO Hiroshi Yamauchi took Nintendo, originally a toy company, into electronic entertainment in the first place.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

9 months

This was huge back then. The first-EVER animated feature film was Walt Disney’s Snow White, only released in 1937. It blew audiences away worldwide with its quality animation and instantly became the highest-grossing sound film:

Disney’s Board Oversees U.S. Cultural Development

The company founded by legendary animator Walt Disney is now a classic board-run corporation that maintains its intellectual property empire and influence on popular formation of values.

brief.bismarckanalysis.com

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

9 months

Popular culture or values will never change by critiquing them intellectually or aesthetically, but only by creating new engines of industrial cultural production. The lesson is: if you don’t control the means of production, you won’t control the means of value formation!

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

9 months

What we think of as animation is Disney’s innovation in “cel” animation i.e. transparent celluloid sheets that made better animation easier, plus other new techniques with camera depth. Snow White required >250,000 cels and >500,000 photographs of cels.

The Animation Process From 1938

This clip is taken from a 1938 short called "How Walt Disney Cartoons Are Made". I have simply taken out a lot of the footage devoted to publicising the Film...

www.youtube.com

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

9 months

Like the U.S. and Disney, Japan's military commissioned many animated educational films for military training, as well as short propaganda films. Only wartime governments were willing to invest so much in animation. No private customer was. But this funding built the industry.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

8 months

The 2.1 number seems intuitive and is taken as moral or life advice. Two is good enough to sustain populations. More would dilute investment in each child or cause overpopulation. But it is actually just a statistical artifact that varies considerably based on mortality.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

9 months

Toei Animation made the first anime film screened in the U.S. and employed Osamu Tezuka, the “godfather of manga” and creator of the first anime TV series shown in the U.S. Toei also animated Transformers, Digimon, Dragonball Z, Sailor Moon… & launched Hayao Miyazaki’s career.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

9 months

Tezuka, “Japan’s Walt Disney,” not only worked at Toei. He was inspired to enter animation after he saw Momotaro in 1945 as a boy! All the later traditions of knowledge in animation can be traced back to this early period of innovation and scale-up under military patronage.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

9 months

In 1930s Japan, animation was dominated by foreign films, especially Disney. They had sound/color while Japanese animation was silent and monochrome. Japanese animators were lone craftsmen with little funds or distribution. Often their work wasn’t even screened in theaters.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

10 months

Uber was supposed to be better, faster, cheaper than taxis, and on an app. Over time, we've lost better, then faster, then cheaper... now it's just taxis on an app. Many "tech" companies just became rentier middlemen after a brief grace period. @SamoBurja talks about this.

Philip Pilkington

@philippilk

10 months

Uber has made a profit of just over $300m after $31.5bn (!) of total losses. How? Have you noticed Uber prices are no longer much cheaper than taxi prices? They used cheap capital released by QE to artificially lower prices and capture market share - then jacked prices. 🚕

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

2 months

A billion dollars in tech or finance is pissing in the ocean, a negligible amount forgotten in the next red candle. A billion dollars in ideology or art is a once-in-a-millennium, epochal event that changes the course of civilization forever.

Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

2 months

It would cost no more than a few billion dollars at the absolute max, from start to finish, to reform modern society into an expanding spacefaring civilization. Cheap! The bottleneck isn't technological, it's intellectual, cultural, and political:

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

8 months

Suppose you aren’t interested in playing your small part in statistically replenishing an entire population to the next generation, but rather interested in replenishing your own family dynasty or lineage over the long-term. What’s the real replacement fertility rate then?

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

9 months

Celluloid was expensive! This deliberate consolidation allowed pooling of resources, larger crews, and division of labor, just like Disney. This wasn’t coincidental either: they thought Disney animation was military-grade propaganda technology that Japan needed to win WWII.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

2 months

George Soros wanted philosophically-consistent global liberalism. He paid the high price for it and he got it! As always, we have a @bismarckanlys Brief for that:

The Legacy of George Soros’ Open Society

For decades, George Soros has implemented and shared a unique philosophy. But left without an aligned successor, his empire will be subsumed by more conventional players.

brief.bismarckanalysis.com

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

11 months

@PaulSkallas In NYC they have subway ads for real estate apps. You don't see that anywhere else. In LA they have billboards for new TV shows. In SF they advertise apps. In DC? New master's degree programs. Each city has a type.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

9 months

This trend can still reverse, given the borders are still open, but only if Eastern European states provide a reason to return. For Poland or Czechia, it has maybe gotten easier to do that since 1990. But for Croatia or Ukraine, it has maybe become too hard to ever achieve.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

9 months

After the war, this advanced industrial propaganda machine wasn’t destroyed. It was repurposed for civilian uses! The animators who made Momotaro, including Kenzo Masaoka and Mitsuyo Seo, would immediately in 1945 found what would become Japan’s key post-war animation studio…

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

9 months

In conclusion: popular culture is a function of technological/industrial capacity, with deliberate policy by live players or governments to export it. Japan’s pop culture is influential globally because of industrial policy going back to WWII—not [only] because it’s kawaii.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

9 months

Japanese success in video games is a cousin, not a son, of its animation. Nintendo alone saved video game consoles from an early death after Atari and the early 1980s video game bubble. Part of the story was the aesthetic and business sense of Nintendo’s execs and designers…

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

9 months

Britain seemed to have had all the ingredients for success, but simply failed to care about animation at all. Perhaps they just preferred to watch Disney. Britain's first animated feature film, 1954’s Animal Farm, was directed and funded by the CIA.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

2 months

A tremendous number of people seem to think that investing in businesses or working on technology balances out this kind of philanthropy somehow. But better businesses and technology don't make a society's need for intellectuals, culture, art, or ideology go away.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

8 months

The guardians and workhorses of the human species are high-fertility parents. It is the *additional* child who defeats death and grows population, not the first child. And each child is a potential ancestor to hundreds or even millions of future people on a long enough timeline.

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

21 days

If Germany or France became 51st states, they would get paid in U.S. dollars, Airbus or BASF would overnight become some of the most important companies in the U.S., Paris would become more popular than NYC, and in the end they would likely be ranked as wealthy as Massachusetts.

Saagar Enjeti

@esaagar

21 days

Appears I’m not the only Indian American guy who is catching on to the euros

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Marko Jukic

@mmjukic

9 months

But I predict South Korea will have a surprising impact on popular culture in the future. It is not ideologically disfavored by the U.S. or Europe and is still a growing center of industry. We will see more of K-pop, Squid Game, and so on. New popular cultural products as well.

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