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Try getting one from eBay, I hear they do sell them. ;) It is probably a decent sized chunk of it, when you account for all of the people that go into the movie consumption experience, from valets to the actors. Those actors also consume more services than your average person, IMO. Not really...

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...

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...

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...

Personally I use cost of living comparison sites to do research: Bulgaria vs Germany: Cost of Living & Salary comparison https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?country1=Bulgaria&city1=Sofia&country2=Germany&city2=Frankfurt&displayCurrency=EUR Also, do keep in mind that tax...

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.

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...

A lot of linertarians have, IMHO gone full "Mug GDP" cult, and they are willing to disregard the fact that said GDP growth is financed by rampant deficit spending, money printing, malinvestment in bubble green tech forced by government dictate, and the importation of large numbers of low...

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...

Caplan's "Myth of the Rational Voter" was pretty good, but the stuff he started churning out later sounds like trolling or him going off the deep end.

James Burnham.

Yeah, but that is probably internalised white racism and myhsoggyknee.

That is actually not that uncommon as an idea. A lot of conservative writers from Burnham to Fukuyama have raised similar concerns. Burnham in particular was very unhappy how the liberals and their third world oligarchic buddies forced the issue. Although the third world potentates are the ones...

Yeah, it we could perhaps roll this intelligence, nature vs. nurture debate into a sperate thread and stop derailing this one, that will be great. Personally, I have encountered materials supporting both theses, but the one that mainly comes to mind, namely The Better Angels of Our Nature by...

I am pretty sure that Orthodoxy has prohibitions against cousin incest as well. Islam though, and especially some Islamic states are far more willing to tolerate it for various reasons and it has its downsides. On the other hand, Ashkenazi Jews who are supposed to have the highest group IQ are...

You are both missing the point that a lot of your backwards areas are in very temperate zones - Greece, Spain, Southern Italy. A nice, warm climate and abundant access to food makes people lazy and does not force them to think ahead all that much. The protestant work ethic and the alleged...

It is not controversial here, but the view is that the USSR should have cut off the more troublesome countries, like Poland and Hungary, and focused on China-style economic reform, and it is pretty common, btw. Simeon being a bad tzar by being obsessed with the Byzantines and trying to push too...