There's never been an immortal society. Figuring out why. Founder @bismarckanlys.
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Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang created the chips that enabled today's AI technology. He is neither an AI doomer, singularitarian, or China hawk.
This live player's next goal is a transformation of the economy with robotics.
Read the new @bismarckanlys Brief (link below):
Samo Burja retweeted
Early Bird tickets are SOLD OUT. That was fast.
There are still however plenty of Standard tickets. Get yours now: luma.com/palladium-talk-spac…
THE TOUR CONTINUES: I will give a talk on why interstellar expansion is the only way to preserve industrial civilization and high technology on Thursday, November 5th, in Washington, D.C. with @JoinFAI for @palladiummag.
Get your tickets here ASAP: luma.com/palladium-talk-spac…
A good point. This is why to have a political mind, that is a mind capable of politics, you have to build out this ability intentionally.
This is ultimately what also allows highly effective live players in politics.
The older you get the more you realize that politics are psychology: the vast majority of people believe what they do as an extension of their ingrained personalities.
They don’t reason from first principles, or adjust policy based on data: they’re woke lefties or tradcons or AI doomers or accelerationists because the political shoe fits the mental foot. Few ever change sides, and if so only after contact with the results of their politics (and usually not even then).
Because to do so wouldn’t be updating an opinion, but changing their entire self, and nobody intentionally casts themselves into that confusing abyss.
Samo Burja retweeted
THE TOUR CONTINUES: I will give a talk on why interstellar expansion is the only way to preserve industrial civilization and high technology on Thursday, November 5th, in Washington, D.C. with @JoinFAI for @palladiummag.
Get your tickets here ASAP: luma.com/palladium-talk-spac…
Samo Burja retweeted
The advantage of having an internally complete supply chain and a steep wage gradient is massively underrated
Europe and America are structurally disadvantaged from being able to do that, since the lower end of their labor market is shielded from international competition in the service sector, but exposed in manufacturing sectors
The global clearing wage for a barber may be $5k, but in Europe it could be $50k, since they are shielded from 3rd world barbers
But $50k doesn’t work for manufacturing goods for export if the global clearing wage for that manufacturing job is $5k
Cutting domestic working class living standards down to $5k is not politically feasible, since they’ll demand redistribution in a democracy, and the welfare payments alone may be more than $5k, so nobody will want to take a $5k job
Importing 3rd world migrants also won’t work, but only because Europe and America give migrants and their children full political rights, which means they’ll start demanding welfare and won’t take those $5k jobs either
The only real solution to the labor cost problem is a UAE style migrant worker scheme where cheap labor can be imported on work visas without political rights or birthright citizenship (the working class in the West will still complain about the wage competition, but the alternative is losing those industries altogether. The citizens can potentially be paid off tho with welfare that migrants won’t be entitled to, just like UAE)
(Automation won’t be sufficient either, since any job that Europe or America can automate, China can automate too, while supplying cheaper labor on the parts that haven’t been automated)
I suspect China will eventually adopt a UAE style migrant scheme too as their labor gets more expensive, since they care a lot about maintaining sovereignty over their supply chain (which I suspect is why @SamoBurja predicts why China might accept mass immigration in the future)
I'm noticing the growing possibility that Europe becomes very poor in the course of the next 10-20 years. You have the following factors:
- Heavy industry totally uncompetitive against China, automakers etc. rapidly losing ground
- Services industry totally uncompetitive against AI
- No natural resources, or regulatory hurdles making their extraction impossible
- No access to the new economy (no AI, no data centers, uncompetitive energy sector)
- Client states caught in one-way welfare ratchets, spend reallocation + investment well-nigh impossible
This seems under-contemplated. And we're talking really, seriously dirt poor: taken to its logical conclusion, many countries will have much, much smaller services and manufacturing industries -- economies may become much more heavily skewed toward natural resources and energy markets, where Europe has made it impossible for itself to compete.
And I'm not saying that this is likely to happen, it's an extreme case. But the probability is greater than zero and appears to be growing. The EV of that is so negative that it's surprising to me that it's not coming up more.
Samo Burja retweeted
Perhaps our most important Brief yet for understanding the AI landscape.
Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang created the chips that enabled today's AI technology. He is neither an AI doomer, singularitarian, or China hawk.
This live player's next goal is a transformation of the economy with robotics.
Read the new @bismarckanlys Brief (link below):
Read the whole Brief here:
brief.bismarckanalysis.com/p…
To read the full analysis of Jensen Huang, subscribe to Bismarck Brief here: brief.bismarckanalysis.com/s…
We invite you to subscribe and join us on this ongoing exploration into the global power landscape.
The AI revolution is also a fossil fuel revolution. Demand for oil and gas will only increase.
Companies like Oxy are pursuing new carbon dioxide-based methods to increase the oil recoverable from U.S. shale wells.
They could potentially grow the oil supply by 50%+ and extend U.S. energy independence from the Middle East.
Read the new @bismarckanlys Brief (link below):
As we scale AIs swarms, we will be greatly surprised to learn which social phenomena are specific human behaviors, and which are not.
At least as much social science insight to be gained here as we gained from researching animal sociality.
Samo Burja retweeted
Paraphrasing again here, but still thinking about @SamoBurja point that we have written fragments from only 13% of the ~2,000 ancient Greek authors we know by name. And that's just what was written down, not counting the immense amounts of tacit knowledge lost forever.
Makes you wonder how many breakthroughs civilizations have discovered, lost, then rediscovered throughout history.
How much further along would humans be if none if it had to be reinvented? Or maybe the reinventing is the whole point? A new civilization being handed all the answers wouldn't be the same as one that figures it out on its own
Paraphrasing slightly, but this gave me chills
“If an artifact from the Bronze Age were found it would have ended up in a Roman villa and then get melted down in the 4th century. How much of what we have in the Louvre or the British museum will suffer the same fate?” @SamoBurja
Samo Burja retweeted
The real monopoly on violence in France—and other Western countries—is not held solely by the official police and army but also by the unofficial protester-rioters mass-mobilized and protected by elements of the state and elite, perhaps similar to Venezuela's political militias.
A lot of people are responding to this by saying that the French government should just use force to put down the riots, but I don't think it's realistic and I want to explain why.
Before you get angry at me and accuse me of being a pussy, you should know that I personally think a building such as Limoges's town hall is worth more than most human beings and certainly more than the brainless thugs who burnt it down, but it doesn't matter what I think.
We have let things rot for so long that, at this point, relying primarily on force to restore order would require a degree of violence far greater than what people realize and what is politically feasible.
It's possible to contain a riot using only moderate force when the number of police officers is high relative to the number of rioters, but when riots are so widespread and involve so many people because you have allowed this kind of things to happen for so long, that's just not possible and you have to use extreme violence to make up for the lack of manpower.
I know people on the Internet will say that it doesn't matter and that we should just do it, but the reality is that most of the people in charge are not prepared to use that kind of force and neither would most ordinary people if they saw videos of 16-year-old kids having their brains blown out by cops.
I doubt even Le Pen would do that and, if she tried, she would quickly backtrack because of the backlash it would inevitably generate.
When you start shooting rioters after years or even decades of letting them run amok with impunity, it will initially result in even more violence, because repression is no longer credible and they will assume that you will cave in the face of the outrage.
So it's not enough to shoot people once, you have to keep doing it until your credibility is restored and nobody will even want to test your resolve anymore, which in turn means that you have to kill a lot of people.
And you have to be confident that, as you do that, your subordinates and political allies won't get cold feet and desert you because they anticipate that you'll lose and will not want to be on the losing side, giving rise to a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I'm sorry but that's just not going to happen. The Soviet hardliners didn't have the stomach for this kind of carnage in 1991, which is why the August coup failed almost immediately, so frankly the idea that French elites in 2027 will is just delusional. As I say below, there are things we can and should do, but we have our work cut out for us and it will take a long time.
Samo Burja retweeted
Paraphrasing slightly, but this gave me chills
“If an artifact from the Bronze Age were found it would have ended up in a Roman villa and then get melted down in the 4th century. How much of what we have in the Louvre or the British museum will suffer the same fate?” @SamoBurja
