I think that there are roughly 4 causes:

• As you mentioned, people promoted all the way up to the first position they are truly incompetent at, i.e. the Peter Principle
• Nepotism and cronyism - people are getting the jobs because who they know (i.e. “the old boys network”) or who their family are, not competence.
• People get the job because they’re good at personal image management and social networking - they mingle with the right people and project the right impression with things like speaking in a firm confident manner about things they know nothing about - which are fine skills to have and even applicable to some of the job of management (at the mid and above management levels), just not enough for the rest of the job of management, and that part missing is in most management positions the biggest chunk (and includes the stuff for recognition of risks and accounting for them).
• Upper level managers hire people like themselves to work under them. This partly overlaps with number 2 but goes further. When said upper level management is incompetent because they got in due to one or more of the other 3 problems, they hire people the same profile as themselves even if not due to those reasons directly (a simple example: managers who look and behave posh because they attended a posh private school will tend to hire managers who look the same hence are likely to have attended such schools themselves - this isn’t directly cronyism but ends up producing a similar effect as they’re selecting people from their social domain even if they don’t know them personally)

I would say that nowadays in management the first one is a pretty small fraction of it (except maybe in the less prestigious and less paid low level management positions) because people are rarely “promoted from the ground floor” nowadays and hiring for more prestigious positions is very heavy on the impression people project, so most of the problem are numbers 2 and 3 plus a bit of number 4.

Number 4 is especially pernicious because it means that once an institution is managed at the top level by people who do not recognize the importance of certain skills in management (like caring about and understanding risk analysis) it tends to mainly hire people who are the same for other management positions and even for replacements for the top job - people who don’t think a certain skill or mindset is important for the job are not going to have as a hiring criteria that candidates have such skill or mindset.

Yeah, even having learned to explain this shit in the IT Consultancy language of “supply contracts” and “mission critical”, it’s still not guaranteed that I’ll convince a manager to avoid or at least account for the higher exposure to outside risks when subcontracting certain things.

Nowadays, with 3 decades of experience in the Industry, I honestly think that the majority of managers, no matter how high in a company, are either incompetent as fuck or simply manage with as priority maximizing their next bonus in the full knowledge that they’re leaving traps for the next one to solve and if they do blow up during their own time, they’ll still personally end up better off by going for bonus-today-problem-tomorrow than refraining from doing so.

Risk analysis in IT Management nowadays is spectacularly bad.

If you become dependent on a 3rd supplier then their survival as a company is now a risk for you. It doesn’t matter how good the reliability you have contracted with them - if they go under whatever penalities in the contract for failing to deliver said reliability will never be paid.

You might even be at risk of them simply chosing to close that division - small company signing a service supply contract with a big company: good luck getting a contract where the parent company (rather than whatever paper company they spun up for that business area) actually has to pay you stiff penalties if they fuck you over.

As soon as mission critical anything is outside your company, a lot of otherwise irrelevant things become operational risks for your company.

This is why you don’t put your mission critical anything on an external Cloud supplier.

You know, stuff like the only copy of 70 years of TV history that’s actually just 50TB and would’ve fit a bunch of Hard Disks or Backup tapes.

For many years when I lived in Britain I had a good friend and for a while work colleague who came from Russia. At least when he studied there (so, 30 years ago) their educational system at least for Science and Mathematics was no worse than those in Europe. In fact it’s one of the few good things the so-called “Communist” countries tend to do - they invest heavilly in Education.

Beyond that, there are two different things:

• One is a country’s capabilities to have sizable industries operating at a certain technological level.
• The other one is finding a handful of specialists for very specific design projects in highly controlled environments where making a profit is no concern.

Whilst it makes sense that Russia has trouble in the first case of actually doing high tech as a business, in size and profitably, because they at least did have a very good educational systems in Science and Mathmatics it also makes sense that they do have people with the know-how there which they could gather for specific high tech design projects were “money is not a problem” since they did train techies as good as the rest of Europe and it was not that long ago so those people are still alive.

Actually the story of the 1960s family with 5 kids, a car and a good house on a worker’s salary is from Britain:

• A journalist in The Guardian discovered that his university educated daughter’s salary was the same salary inflation adjusted as his factory worker father’s salary, yet wasn’t enough for even a small appartment in London whilst hist father’s salary paid for the above mentioned house, car and family of 5, so he wrote an article about it.

Mind you, we see some version of this in plenty of other countries in at least the West - the story of how two university educated people need to work full time in a white collar job now to afford what a single blue collar salary paid in the 1970s is pretty common, though the difference from peak to through isn’t as large as in countries which were wealthier back in the 60s.

Even in my own native Portugal which was under a Fascist dictatorship until 74 and thus had no prosperous 60s in any way form or shape (in fact by then the country was so poor it was the recipient of Food Aid from the rest of Europe) and only really rose to normal European standards after the 74 Revolution, you see that effect between the 80s and present day - it now takes the salary of 2 university white collar workers to buy what my father’s single blue collar worker salary bought in the 80s.

People’s purchasing power is way down even though according to official inflation figures it’s supposedly not.

Note that official inflation figures are used in calculating GDP, were they deflate the Raw/Nominal GDP to make the Real GDP (the official one) and the more the inflation the less the Official GDP - in other words, the less the official inflation the more politicians can claim to have “grown the GDP” - ever since polticians started harping in the Press all about the GDP grew under their government there has been a strong political motivation to understate inflation (which is probably why the official inflation figures don’t include house price inflation).

Oh, yeah, Gold seems to fail miserably as a trade token in a growing economy.

However I’m not making the case that Gold should replace fiat currencies, I’m making the case that Gold is a good long term store of value in times of large political risks such as the ones we seem to be going through in the West right now (most notably in the US, though the explosion in wealth inequality and growth in the Far-Right is far from only there) as well as during economic crashes with global impact (such as what’s likely to happen when the AI bubble blows), whilst even the currencies of major stable countries are much less so.

There’s not going to be a “Brexit” impacting Gold as Brexit impacted the GBP or an end of the dominance period of the nation issuing Gold as there is sure to be for the USD.

You need a citation for the Physics of the creation of elements in the Periodic Table?!

Two points:

• We don’t have a fixed money supply in the modern system when banks can issue debt. Not even close. I suggest you read the Bank Of England’s paper called “Money Making in the Modern Economy” which I mentioned.
• We’re talking about different things here. I’m not suggesting Gold as a trade token, I’m not even suggesting Gold as a store of value for stable times, I’m suggesting gold as a store of value against things like large economic crashes (the upcoming AI bubble crash, possibly with a Realestate bubble crash) and those times when the dominant Imperial Power in the World is being replaced by a now one (such as it seems to be the case new ones, as now with the US decaying and China rising). I’m suggesting that, purely because Gold has way less exposure to Politics and human mismanagement in general than even major currencies.

I think I failed so far at explaining myself mainly by talking too much.

My point is simple: gold and fiat currencies are roughly the same, but gold isn’t issued by anybody and isn’t managed by anybody whilst fiat currencies are, so gold is less exposed to the risks inherent to greed and corruption of those who issue and manage currencies - there’s not temptation to “issue more gold” because it’s not at all possible, there is nobody deciding “gold interest rates” because there is no such thing (to have interest you need to have more money tomorrow than you have today, as today’s loan will be repaid tomorrow plus interest and you can’t really make more gold any faster than mining it)

Gold has less exposure to Politicians and Central Banks - that’s it, that’s the important difference.

In stable times when living in mature Economies, that difference is pretty much irrelevant, in times like now it can make a huge difference which is probably why the GLDUSD exchange rate took of with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and accelerated even more with Trump’s second mandate as POTUS.

Either:

• Fiat currency has no value because it’s literally useless to do anything with and gold has a tiny bit of utility value due to its industrial uses.
• Fiat currency has value from its utility as a trade value token and wealth store, whilst gold has value as a wealth store, both only because and as long as people are willing to exchange them for things which do have a more utilitarian value.

I’m talking within the second value framework, so where trade tokens and wealth stores only have valuable as long as people think they have value and their value only is as much as people think they are worth - in other words their value derives from people’s trusting them to have value.

My point is entirely that there are more people in this world capable of reducing and even destroying the trust (and hence how much people are willing to exchange for them) on fiat currencies than there are of gold - fiat currencies are issued and controlled by governments, hence are a lot more subject to political interference than gold which is not issued or controlled by any government.

(My entire perspective is basically a financial risk exposure analysis on fiat currencies and gold as if they were assets just like all other assets, which concludes that gold has smaller political risks than even the major and most stable currencies. Whilst for major currencies usually the difference is too little to matter, in times like now with a bunch of bubbles - like the AI bubble - at the brink and the US Economy in a consistent downwards trajectory, that higher exposure of fiat to such risks is a lot more important - mismanagement of the crash or even as we see now with Trump of international confrontations is likely to hit fiat currencies much harder than gold)

One can think within the first value framework, but that’s pretty useless in modern society because that’s not how humans are operating, though it would make sense for a society with bartering only.

My talk about inflation was just an attempt at providing a mathematical perspective on it because I have some experience in Finance and a background in Science hence tend to see and explain via the perspective of Mathematics, but I guess that only made things more confusing.

In all fairness I only saw evidence of that for Great Britain because a journalist of The Guardian actually notice that his daughter’s salary and his father’s salary were the same when inflation adjusted yet bought way less now, so he wrote an article about it.

I’ve read things that led me to believe that there is a similar situation in the US but I don’t know specifically how far the difference is in the US.

Again, you stopped your logical analysis before you got to the end of the logical chain.

Gold differs from fiat currencies in that it cannot be inflated away by politicians and central bankers.

That’s it.

It’s everything as you wrote AND gold’s value over the mid and long term isn’t really controlled by politicians or central bankers because they can’t issue more of it, which they can with fiat currencies - since the end of the Bretton Woods system, Gold in average just putters along losing 1.2% of value a year, not really caring about the quality of politics in any country.

So holding Gold rather than EUR, USD, GBP or so on is really just trying to protect oneself from Economic mismanagement of currencies.

Everything as you wrote applies and anybody thinking that Gold will hold value if society collapses is a fool.

You could do the same protection against political mismanagement in your own native currency by holding your savings in other currencies, but that comes with the extra work of having to track the quality of politics and Economic management in the countries issuing those currencies (as by holding those currencies you’re now exposed to the political fuckups there), plus main currencies tend to be highly positivelly correlated during big Economic Crashes (like in 2007 when all main currencies suffered and maybe only the CNY didn’t suffer as much), whilst Gold is not and just does its thing.

As it so happens putting my savings in Gold has already done exactly that: when I lived in Britain I put my savings in Gold and then Brexit came and the British Pound crashed 20% and suddenly my Gold would buy me 20% more British Pounds. It wasn’t really Gold going up in value, just the pound going down. Mind you, my savings in EUR did the same, but that wasn’t a major international Crash, were the EUR would suffer as much as the GDP or the USD.

Just like there was no Brexit effect on Gold, there is no Trump Effect on Gold or Realestate Bubble effect - the price of houses in GLD has actually been pretty stable, might even have fallen a little bit.

That’s the point of it, nothing else. All the bollocks about Gold replacing fiat currencies and so on is just fanboyism from goldbugs - Gold is just an investment class that has less correlation with the quality of Economic management in the largest nations than the currencies of those nations or anything listed in those currencies (such as stocks or realestate).

If there is more gold, it’s value should go down. The price should only go up when supply becomes limited, or some new thing demands more than usual.

You’re thinking of Gold as a consumer good, I’m thinking of Gold as a currency which is what traditionally gold has been. Even nowadays very little gold is actually consumed (it’s used in small quantities for things like wiring inside a microchip package the pads of the dies to the package pins).

When a cross-currency exchange rate changes all that you know for sure is that the relative value of a currency has changed vs that of a different currency - maybe one currency went up in worth, maybe the other currency went down in worth, maybe both at the same time, maybe both went down at different speeds, maybe both went up at different speeds.

It’s exactly because “if there is more gold, it’s value should go down” AND gold has being up in quantity by about 1.2% per year due to mining, that I’m saying that the movement of the cross-currency exchange rate of the GLDUSD pair is more easilly explained by the fall in value of the US Dollar rather than by some greater worth of Gold.

It makes sense that the currency that nowadays is mainly created when banks lend money (as explained in the Bank Of England paper “Money Creation in the Modern Economy”) would lose value way faster than the currency that’s created when more of it is mined and mining only adds around 1.2% to its amount in human hands per year.

I’m actually saying that Gold is going down in value, it’s just that the Dollar, Euro and most other paper currencies are going down in value even faster so the cross-currency exchange rates between Gold and those currencies are such that the same amount of Gold can buy more of those currencies.

Gold has a lot of practical use, but because it’s value is hyper inflated it is almost always more cost effective to use a cheaper material.

Well, you see, you got the consequence right but you didn’t go back enough enough in analysing the causal chain to get to the root causes - gold price vs the price of inferior alternatives for many of its uses, such as Copper, is at its root what it is because there is way less Gold in the Earth’s crust that we can mine than there is Copper as you can see here (note that the vertical scale is logarithmic).

Copper is between 100,000 and a million times more abundant than Gold.

Per your logic Gold should be at least 100,000x more expensive than Copper, not just 10,000x.

In Human History stuff that is rare and doesn’t decay tends to become a store of value - at one point even Aluminum was a store of value because it was rare since the process to extract it from Bauxite handn’t been invented yet.

This also means that if suddenly some way to mine way more Gold is found (say, asteroid mining), its price will collapse vs things that don’t benefit from it, similarly to what happened to Aluminum when the process to get it from Bauxite was invented.

It’s the modern government issued currencies whose tokens are not themselves rare materials (the so-called “paper currencies”) or a stated guaranteed IOU for a rare material (such the USD was during the Gold standard when the USD was legally tradable for Gold by the US Government at a fixed rate) that are in Historical terms unusual and very recent (less than a century old). For me it makes sense that any weird movements in the exchange rate between Gold and government issued currencies is more likely explained by issues with these “recent” inventions rather than issues with what was a currency for millenia.

The alternative view is that the real value of government issued currencies has fallen and Gold just kept going along with its 1.2% yearly inflation due to gold mining.

That the official currencies buy less and less (as I pointed) leans more towards the view that the value of government issued and controller currencies is being inflated away much faster than the value of an ancient currency which is not controlled by any government and only devalues by more of it being mined.

In other words, at medium and long time frames Gold is not an investment asset, it’s a store of wealth outside the control of politicians.

There are in fact more reasons that that.

For example the amount of money in circulation has grown massivelly ever since the 70s, because digitalization means that most money is just numbers in databases and most payments are just bits and bytes rather than actually issued paper currency. In the modern era most money is created by private banks as loans, not issued by central banks (here’s a Bank Of England paper on that to show I’m not bullshitting) to the point that over 90% of all money in circulation wasn’t issued by a Central Bank.

Then within that context, there’s the fall in interest rates which were supposedly temporary reduced by Central Banks after the 2007 Crash to help with the recover but never really went back to the historical average - lower interest rates mean people can take bigger long term loans and still pay the same per-month, which is especially relevant for things like housing because it meant higher house prices that would otherwise be unaffordable were affordable with those lower interest rates. This also affected things like corporate bonds prices - companies could easilly do things like get ultra cheap money buy issuing bonds with very low interest rates or directly from the Money Markets and use that money to buy back their own shares (thus increasing share prices) which large numbers of publicly traded companies did helping push up the Stockmarket.

And then, of course, there’s how the concentration of wealth in fewer hands (largelly due “the rich not being taxed properly”) meant way more money in the hands of people that don’t spend almost any of it in Consumption (because it’s way more than what’s needed for that) but instead Invest it, so they bid the prices of any and all Investment Assets, including stupid shit that would never otherwise be treated as worthy of investing in (such as Crypto).

It’s a big, ultra distorted Economic system, very much purposefully made so to put lots of wealth in a small number of hands (Finance - and hence those who own it - has captured A LOT of wealth way beyond the value they bring to Society) and we’re shamelessly lied about all of it.

That further points towards the idea that it’s not Gold going up in price, it’s government issued currencies going down in value.

And with those permissions they can also do it themselves whenever they see fit from their systems without asking you about it or informing you about it.

Mind you, the really juicy stuff that can be used to make money from is all the information about anything and everything you might be doing in Discord which can be sold to, amongst others, advertisers, rather than the active management stuff.

Somebody in Blizzard activelly decided that merelly letting you post in and read posts from Discord via Battle.Net wasn’t enough and it’s pretty valid to wonder if the decision path was “let’s do a full Discord client in Battle.Net to make it even better for our customers and for that we need permissions for just about everything in Discord” or “let’s get access to information about just about everything our customers do in Discord and we need to make a full Discord client in Battle.net to justify that”.

I know that the answer I would bet on 2 decades ago before the enshittification era isn’t the same I would bet on now.

Just look at the long, long, LONG list of American and European companies helping Israel murder little children…

It makes sense to use Machine Learning technology (not the Generative crap, the actual pattern recognition stuff) for terminal target recognition.

The surprise would be if Russia did not use AI in their newest cruise missile design - just because their society is fucked up and their leadership is a socipathic, disconnected autocrat surrounded by yes men that put his own personal pride above the lives of millions of his countrymen, doesn’t mean Russia doesn’t have the people with the technical knowledge to design systems with AI (though certainly far fewer of those than they had before they tried to invade Ukraine, since a ton of the Russians with the highest qualifications left).

I mean, given them another 50 years or so in their current trajectory, but for now they’re probably still capable of creating their own high-tech solutions in focused applications.

Oh, yeah, permission to manage a person’s friends list in Discord and even block them is a totally “reasonable request”.

/s

Yeah, pretty much the same.

(Mind you, I personally went into Gold at around 2013 after having experienced the 2007 inside the Finance Industry, and back then I used British Pounds, and Gold did not give a shit about Brexit but the British Pound sure did - by crashing 20% - so in pounds Gold is actually a bit better than vs USD or EUR)

That said, I look at it the other way around - Gold is the original currency and one that can’t be devalued at will by governments (its only inflation comes from gold mining, which increases the amount of gold in circulation by, last I checked 1.2% a year), so it’s not Gold price going up, it’s the value of government issued currencies going down vs the more traditional currency that’s not controlled by any one government which is Gold.

Certainly this seems closer to how people have felt inflation in at least the major paper currencies - back in the 60s a single blue collar salary was enough for a good house, a car and the expenses of a familiy of 5, now a white collar salary it’s barelly enough for a single person to live in a small appartment in a city, even though according to official inflation those two are equivalent amounts: it looks a lot like the purchasing power of gold has roughly remained steady whilst the purchasing power of government issued currencies has steadilly fallen and done so faster than official inflation figures for those currencies say it did.