Prev I thought good leaders don't matter (and musk is still bat shit crazy) but plenty of times now I took care of stuff (a team, a product) and made it good.
But keeping it good needs still attention or someone taking over.
That Elon was/is hands on was.critical.
With him spending time on Twitter too, stupidest thing he ever did.
I'm also from a farm, I'm quite familiar with farming efficiency and I'm not aware of anything big happened in the last 20 years which reflects any real growth.
Germany didn't get more land in the last 20 years.
And I myself as a software engineer probably added to the growth of the bip in Germany.
If you are not even able to bring your point across, why do you believe so strong in economcial growth?
It feels to me that we will not go far in this discussion tbh.
For me the growth means a mix of things like being more productive, increasing life standards etc but we have great life standars.
Japan has a high living standard too and no to negative growth.
Either there is some magic economic model you will not be able to explain to me in this format (wall of text / necessary university degree/ just too much) or I will not change my opinion on this rat race thing.
Your point of other countries outbidding us on resources is that really the main argument for necessary economy growth?
At least for software engineering that's not true.
Farming probably hasn't changed that much in the last 20 years either.
The growth discussion is for me as shitty as all those news about share prices. Random stocks get mentioned in the news for random reasons while apparently the best way to invest in shares is to not bother with daily trends at all.
The matter expert of AWS will click a few vms and a managed database in a few minutes enabled snapshots and is done (and not really an expert)
The matter experts in a self hosting company will setup something. They might know how to do it right but probably not.
And just because I can do it myself very good, a lot of people can't.
The DB experts in my experience were to 80% people barely even getting databases right and the last 20% were the real experts keeping the shit running
And even in big companies I have seen shitty infra teams. Old software versions of the management tool, missing features, exorbitant cross charging, not enough hardware etc.
Is self hosting cheaper? Yes.
Should you do it?
Yes if you can afford good people and take it serious.
Don't blame cloud. You are not on cloud if you would be smart enough and capable enough of doing so anyway.