History What are some of your most contraversial takes on history?

[Abhorsen]

Measuring things by "muh GDP" sounds rather like "delusional greater good shit" to me.

Eh, it's the best measure we have for mass individual good, as it is exactly the net national income, as well as very correlated to a huge amount of good in a society.

It's an argument for libertarianism that wouldn't be made by a libertarian to another libertarian, basically. It's definitely not a moral argument (from a libertarian POV). But arguing for the greater good to get a specific individual good? Yes, we'd do that.

For example, libertarians think zoning and rent control are morally bad because they restrict personal freedom to do what you want with your property. They also harm the economy, which does bad stuff like homelessness, etc. So we might argue for getting rid of the restrictions to reduce homelessness when talking to a regular person/politician of a different party in order to try to get the restrictions gone. Basically, it's using a tactic (albeit an honest tactic) to get a moral bad removed.

It's honestly one of the strong points of libertarianism: capitalism works, it's not just moral.

 

[Agent23]

Eh, it's the best measure we have for mass individual good, as it is exactly the net national income, as well as very correlated to a huge amount of good in a society.

It's an argument for libertarianism that wouldn't be made by a libertarian to another libertarian, basically. It's definitely not a moral argument (from a libertarian POV). But arguing for the greater good to get a specific individual good? Yes, we'd do that.

For example, libertarians think zoning and rent control are morally bad because they restrict personal freedom to do what you want with your property. They also harm the economy, which does bad stuff like homelessness, etc. So we might argue for getting rid of the restrictions to reduce homelessness when talking to a regular person/politician of a different party in order to try to get the restrictions gone. Basically, it's using a tactic (albeit an honest tactic) to get a moral bad removed.

It's honestly one of the strong points of libertarianism: capitalism works, it's not just moral.

The problem with GDP is that it includes services. Services do not create wealth, they redistribute it.

What country would you prefer to live in?
A has a GDP of X and uniform 10% taxes and a government debt of at most 40% of GDP with say 2-3% growth per year, B has 2x the GDP, a messy tax code that levels taxes of over 50% on your income, plus 20% VAT and overall higher prices for everything from services to housing, it has less growth, and what little there is is bolstered by money printing, debt and forcing people to buy inefficient overpriced crap like EVs and by subsidizing illiterate migrants who came in for the gibs.
Also rampant currency debasement.
The public debt is higher than the GDP.
Also a shittier climate which means you pay more for energy because muh green crap and a whiny brat sprouted by two libtard alcoholic swindlers.

Which country is the better choice?

And yes, this is a very real choice for me.

 

[Doomsought]

What country would you prefer to live in?

I'm just criticizing GDP as a metric. I think an economy should be measured by four metrics: Plunder (includes taxes, theft and war reparations), Consumables (production that is used up, food, batteries and fuel), Goods (furniture, toys, cars, housing, etc) and Services (haircuts, news, television, etc).

 

[Cherico]

What country would you prefer to live in?
A has a GDP of X and uniform 10% taxes and a government debt of at most 40% of GDP with say 2-3% growth per year, B has 2x the GDP, a messy tax code that levels taxes of over 50% on your income, plus 20% VAT and overall higher prices for everything from services to housing, it has less growth, and what little there is is bolstered by money printing, debt and forcing people to buy inefficient overpriced crap like EVs and by subsidizing illiterate migrants who came in for the gibs.
Also rampant currency debasement.
The public debt is higher than the GDP.
Also a shittier climate which means you pay more for energy because muh green crap and a whiny brat sprouted by two libtard alcoholic swindlers.

Which country is the better choice?

And yes, this is a very real choice for me.

your better off with the lower real growth.

 

[ATP]

IMO the new states might have worked if not for the world wars.
It is not that hard to brainwash a few tribals into a cohesive state if you have advanced tech and something to glue the society together, namely religion and civic consciousness.
Given a few more generations of assimilation and better treatment of the locals, and the prohibition and rolling back of the type of oligarchic Crony capitalist policies that left much of say, Vietnam's land left in the hands of French colonists, a lot of countries in Africa for example could have become far more heavily integrated into the Metropolis's culture and political system.

Could work in France,according to what i read,they really treated people in colonies as citizens.Worst then true french,but still citizens.
England - not goin to happen,they would always remain wogs/worthy oriental gentelmen/

 

[sillygoose]

Could work in France,according to what i read,they really treated people in colonies as citizens.Worst then true french,but still citizens.

LOL, no. France was just as shitty to their colonial peoples as everyone else, they just treated the upper class colonials who came to France better than average, but hardly as equals.

 

[Agent23]

LOL, no. France was just as shitty to their colonial peoples as everyone else, they just treated the upper class colonials who came to France better than average, but hardly as equals.

Yup, a lot of Vietnamese commies became such because the French and Vietnamese Surete organizations were brutal, dumb, corrupt fuckers.
The same happened in a number of places in Asia.

 

[ATP]

LOL, no. France was just as shitty to their colonial peoples as everyone else, they just treated the upper class colonials who came to France better than average, but hardly as equals.

Well,that was book wrote by french.Forget name,as usual.

 

[Abhorsen]

What country would you prefer to live in?
A has a GDP of X and uniform 10% taxes and a government debt of at most 40% of GDP with say 2-3% growth per year, B has 2x the GDP, a messy tax code that levels taxes of over 50% on your income, plus 20% VAT and overall higher prices for everything from services to housing, it has less growth, and what little there is is bolstered by money printing, debt and forcing people to buy inefficient overpriced crap like EVs and by subsidizing illiterate migrants who came in for the gibs.
Also rampant currency debasement.
The public debt is higher than the GDP.
Also a shittier climate which means you pay more for energy because muh green crap and a whiny brat sprouted by two libtard alcoholic swindlers.

Which country is the better choice?

And yes, this is a very real choice for me.

First, what's the GDP per capita on both countries? That really matters. But also the high taxes really hits you, but the double GDP is a very good argument, as it correlates with a lot. Really, the number that matters to you as an individual is your effective income (nominal income *(1- tax rate [.1 or about .6]) plus the value of government benefits received [public school, direct money, etc, but not stuff like grain subsidies making cheap food unless you are the grain farmer getting paid). Take these two numbers, then factor in both countries' currency values and the two Purchasing Power Parities, which say how much USD you'd need in that country to buy goods equal to what you could buy for $100 USD in the US.

Factor all of this out, and you have, as an individual, what is best monetarily for you. Pretty complicated, which is why people default to GDP: it's a simple shorthand, not some perfect thing. It's not supposed to be perfect, it's supposed to be useful.

The problem with GDP is that it includes services. Services do not create wealth, they redistribute it.

This is objectively untrue and hilarious. The electrician you hire to install a machine? That's creating wealth. The software contractor you hire to build your product? That's creating wealth. IBM hosting your stuff on the cloud, saving you money that you can spend to create other stuff? That creates wealth less directly, but still does. All of that is service economy.

Also, preserving wealth is a thing (IDK if you count that as creation, but without it the wealth wouldn't be there). This includes hiring a plumber to fix a pipe or a janitorial service to keep the place clean.

 

[Doomsought]

This is objectively untrue and hilarious. The electrician you hire to install a machine? That's creating wealth. The software contractor you hire to build your product? That's creating wealth. IBM hosting your stuff on the cloud, saving you money that you can spend to create other stuff? That creates wealth less directly, but still does. All of that is service economy.

No.

Money is not wealth. Only permanent goods are wealth. Preserving goods is not the creation of wealth, nor is the avoidance of opportunity costs.

Building a house in not a service, it is manufacturing. Installation and software contracting are both edge cases.

Cloud services are just a form of tenant and landlord relationship, it does not create wealth, it just distributes it in return for rent. Rental furnature like cloud services also have many hidden costs, and are not wise as Google's marketing team has made them sound.

 

[Abhorsen]

No.

Money is not wealth. Only permanent goods are wealth. Preserving goods is not the creation of wealth, nor is the avoidance of opportunity costs.

Building a house in not a service, it is manufacturing. Installation and software contracting are both edge cases.

Cloud services are just a form of tenant and landlord relationship, it does not create wealth, it just distributes it in return for rent. Rental furnature like cloud services also have many hidden costs, and are not wise as Google's marketing team has made them sound.

You don't seem to understand how wealth works, which is a surprise to absolutely no one. Spoilers: money is wealth. Wealth is a person's net worth... which includes money.

No, installation/software contracting isn't an edge case. It is textbook service industry. Also, going at your stupid definition of wealth, producing non-durable goods doesn't seem to contribute to it either, cause after someone eats it, the 'wealth' is gone. But in the actual economic definition, it isn't, because the person received money for it.

Another flaw in your definition: If I buy a company, that then goes bankrupt a few days later, and all I'm left with is an empty building, by your definition I'm wealthier than I was before the purchase, cause money isn't wealth, but an empty building is.

Cloud services are just a form of tenant and landlord relationship, it does not create wealth, it just distributes it in return for rent. Rental furnature like cloud services also have many hidden costs, and are not wise as Google's marketing team has made them sound.

No, it's very wise as it allows people to specialize in what they do best. There's a reason successful companies focus instead of trying to do everything. And yes, it does make the company wealthier than they would be, as they are able to do more with less now, increasing their profitability/cutting costs.

 

[Agent23]

First, what's the GDP per capita on both countries? That really matters. But also the high taxes really hits you, but the double GDP is a very good argument, as it correlates with a lot. Really, the number that matters to you as an individual is your effective income (nominal income *(1- tax rate [.1 or about .6]) plus the value of government benefits received [public school, direct money, etc, but not stuff like grain subsidies making cheap food unless you are the grain farmer getting paid). Take these two numbers, then factor in both countries' currency values and the two Purchasing Power Parities, which say how much USD you'd need in that country to buy goods equal to what you could buy for $100 USD in the US.

Factor all of this out, and you have, as an individual, what is best monetarily for you. Pretty complicated, which is why people default to GDP: it's a simple shorthand, not some perfect thing. It's not supposed to be perfect, it's supposed to be useful.

Personally I use cost of living comparison sites to do research:
Bulgaria vs Germany: Cost of Living & Salary comparison

Cost of Living Comparison Between Sofia, Bulgaria And Frankfurt, Germany

www.numbeo.com

Also, do keep in mind that tax brackets are graduated and that stuff like social security contributions are mandatory.
Since I make decent money where I am now I see no reason why I should move for more money if I will have to pay double and triple taxes.
Currency is not all that relevant, as we have a currency board that pegs ours to the Euro(originally dollar) and I negotiate my salary in hard currency and only care for the net basis(Around here we all do, makes foreign HR Karens very surprised.)

This is objectively untrue and hilarious. The electrician you hire to install a machine? That's creating wealth. The software contractor you hire to build your product? That's creating wealth. IBM hosting your stuff on the cloud, saving you money that you can spend to create other stuff? That creates wealth less directly, but still does. All of that is service economy.

Also, preserving wealth is a thing (IDK if you count that as creation, but without it the wealth wouldn't be there). This includes hiring a plumber to fix a pipe or a janitorial service to keep the place clean.

The HR Karen making you go through feminist basket weaving seminars and her 5 bosses...
Also, I think you misspelled AWS, I see the name of a company peddling legacy crap, with a cloud that is an insignificant joke.
Also, with the public cloud intermediary firms like IBM's services division become pointless and a waste of money.
Just hiring a few qualified, certified professionals on a temporary basis makes far more sense.

In the cloud world they and HP and SAP are dinosaurs that are trying to start and breastfeed.

 

[Scottty]

Another flaw in your definition: If I buy a company, that then goes bankrupt a few days later, and all I'm left with is an empty building, by your definition I'm wealthier than I was before the purchase, cause money isn't wealth, but an empty building is.

Oh hey, a building you can use for whatever you want?
Just don't be like the guy in the XKCD cartoon.

Anyway, I think people here might be at cross-purposes about some of the basic concepts. Such as: what is wealth?

And is wealth an end in itself, or a means to some other end?

 

[Agent23]

No, it's very wise as it allows people to specialize in what they do best. There's a reason successful companies focus instead of trying to do everything. And yes, it does make the company wealthier than they would be, as they are able to do more with less now, increasing their profitability/cutting costs.

I am pretty sure Standard Oil and J.D. Rockafeller would beg to differ, but he is a special case.

OK, RANT TIME!

First off, being a Cloud/DevOps/SRE what have you stupid newfangled title working under Agile is a lot more varied than the older ways of doing stuff, even if the cloud provides a ton of hosted services.
Go ahead, build your own redundant Datacenters and CoLos all over the globe, pour massive amounts of money into capex before even being able to offer a product, then try and scale it.Set up your own logging and monitoring and alerting and kafka and elasticsearch and Cassandra clusters and Postgres read replicas.Build your K8s control plane with your own two hands.
Oh, and all of that hardware, well you need to buy it, install it and maintain it.
You will get a messy shitshow.
You will get a bunch of silos, with a seperate DB, OS, security, app support, shared responsibility for oddball stuff like Kafka, backup, and network support team and have to pay colo or your own engineers to fix shit in the DC.
Now, you will still need to understand all of that stuff to set it up, plus extensive understanding of each cloud's specifics, pricing and above all elasticity to be effective.
Because that is one of the top reasons aside from cloud being OpEx and having lots of managed services to use it.
Furthermore, old legacy IT structures tend to grow vertically, and to automate less, especially when there is lots of outsourcing involved.
Hell, I have seen developer product owners who could not build their product locally and had to push it to a legacy environment, and of course it was some disgusting monolith using dated junk like JBoss.
Try porting that shit to the cloud and scaling.

You can deploy and scale every single piece of your infrastructure in any AWS/GCP/AZURE region within minutes, even seconds, and a lot of that infrastructure can autoscale on the basis of demand.

How?
Through Infrastructure as Code.

Six Advantages of Cloud Computing - Overview of Amazon Web Services

AWS Well-Architected Framework - AWS Well-Architected Framework

Angry sales pitch/rant over!
Sign this here contract and those pics of what you did with your niece and her puppy will not fall into the hands of your wife and mistresses.

 

[Agent23]

Oh hey, a building you can use for whatever you want?
Just don't be like the guy in the XKCD cartoon.

Anyway, I think people here might be at cross-purposes about some of the basic concepts. Such as: what is wealth?

And is wealth an end in itself, or a means to some other end?

And this is another "hot take" I get flack from by the mainstream idiots.

Wealth is freedom.
Freedom from living in a particular place.
Freedom from following a particular set of norms.
Freedom from want.
Freedom from retarded governments, if properly diversified.
Freedom from the need to go to work and deal with morons and bureaucrats.

The freedom to build wealth and to be financially free is the most important one, IMO.

 

[Abhorsen]

Oh hey, a building you can use for whatever you want?
Just don't be like the guy in the XKCD cartoon.

Anyway, I think people here might be at cross-purposes about some of the basic concepts. Such as: what is wealth?

And is wealth an end in itself, or a means to some other end?

Wealth is a defined term in economics. It's classic redefining a term to achieve an objective, not reflect reality.

The HR Karen making you go through feminist basket weaving seminars and her 5 bosses...

If she works for Ford, then she's not in the service economy, but the manufacturing one. Again, the distinction is mostly arbitrary.

 

[Agent23]

Wealth is a defined term in economics. It's classic redefining a term to achieve an objective, not reflect reality.

I think it is about control of resources, with stuff produced by humans being human resources.
If I have more stuff and can provide more expensive services that I can trade for products and other services than person B then I am wealthier than person B.
If I had a trillion Zimbabwe dollars I would not be rich.

If she works for Ford, then she's not in the service economy, but the manufacturing one. Again, the distinction is mostly arbitrary.

A lot of HRs nowadays are contract agency drones.And frankly, most of them internal or external can be safely removed.
Also, material goods are preferable because they are fungible and can be consumed later on or resold, services are a one time thing.
The value of stuff is more persistent and easy to spot than the value of services, and no one likes whitecollar bureaucrats, public or private.
Most human aspirations are related to owning stuff, not consuming services aside from medical ones and education, which are considered public goods more often than not, and the occasional vacation.
Owning a nice car and a nice house is more of a status symbol than going to some spa or getting a massage once or twice a week.
Also, if we really want to be creative and stretch shit out, is the person installing your AC really part of the service economy, or is he just putting the finishing touch to your goods by integrating them.

 

[Abhorsen]

I think it is about control of resources, with stuff produced by humans being human resources.
If I have more stuff and can provide more expensive services that I can trade for products and other services than person B then I am wealthier than person B.
If I had a trillion Zimbabwe dollars I would not be rich.

All still contained in the definition of wealth. Wealth is net worth. Net worth looks at your trillion zimbabwe dollars and laughs at it, and offers you $5 USD cause it looks cool.

A lot of HRs nowadays are contract agency drones.And frankly, most of them internal or external can be safely removed.

Yep, they are useless. So are a lotta hollywood movies that no one watches, but that's not the service economy either.

Also, material goods are preferable because they are fungible and can be consumed later on or resold, services are a one time thing.

But sometimes you only need it a few times, or the service economy is cheaper. Also, not all the goods are fungible: houses aren't, for example (they are some of the least fungible goods cause of location). And some services are fairly fungible: 1 hour of one janitorial service is probably a lot like 1 hour's worth of another.

Do you perhaps mean durability? Fungible means that the good or commodity isn't special, and is equivalent to another similar thing.

Owning a nice car and a nice house is more of a status symbol than going to some spa or getting a massage once or twice a week.

Having a butler/bodyguard is also a status symbol.

 

[Zachowon]

It also depends on how easy it is to aquire said wealth in said country

 

[Scottty]

It also depends on how easy it is to aquire said wealth in said country

Or to lose it.