One of my favorite stories of the year has to be EU's attempt to convert money into artillery shells. They allocated a bunch of money to this and thought that shells would magically appear. Instead they created a situation where there's a limited supply of a commodity with a market flush with cash, and as anybody with even a modicum of economic understanding could've told them this resulted in prices going through the roof. So shells went from around 2k per shell to 8k per shell. 😂

In October, NATO’s senior military officer, Adm. Rob Bauer, said that the price for one 155mm shell had risen from 2,000 euros ($2,171) at the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion to 8,000 euros ($8,489.60).

The west is run by literal evil clowns.

look understanding that things don't just magically appear at the shop is marxism

but look at all this paper GDP (not even paper it's just 1s and 0s on some computer) we have over China

I feel like, a while ago, we've entered some weird sort of alienation from work event horizon where the people at the top absolutely forgot you need "person who does stuff" eventually. Like it's so many levels and excel spreadsheets and white papers and what have you removed the idea that the people who produce things aren't some aetheric blob but like, actual people doing things, is forgotten.

Only when the last process has been streamlined, the final KPI hit, and the final downsizing accomplished, will we realize we cannot build from money or something