The metaverse is bullshit

I don't know enough about that data set, but I think that the difference between "general government" and "government enterprises" is the gap between spending and production.

The "data" that demonstrates privatisation most clearly is the sale of government assets. I did a quick search for some reports, here's one but it's about 10 years old:

https://www.oecd.org/daf/ca/corporategovernanceofstate-owned...

Things like prisons, electrical infrastructure, toll roads, rail, educational institutions, are all examples where the government used to own and operate but there has been a shift towards either private ownership or private management or both. I don't think these things show up clearly in "spending" alone, because the amount that is spent may increase as a result of privatisation (a great example of this is that the US govt spends more per person on healthcare than Australia, where I'm from, despite having nowhere near the level of publicly avialable healthcare).

Another example is that NASA pays Spacex to deliver payloads to the ISS. That would still show up as spending by the government, but it has a huge component of profit going to a private corporation, and there's no "competition" to produce improvements for the consumers in that case (us, the public) because of the aforementioned principal-agent problem.

The use of military contractors is another example where govt spending != govt production, and the government can absolve themselves of some of the accountability that would otherwise result from direct management of those forces:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2020/06/30/...

What are you drawing your conclusions re: VR from? Have you followed the research and used the hardware? It seems pretty clear we will have VR goggles that feel effectively indistinguishable from real life in terms of fidelity and optics relatively soon.

Also there are already decentralized exchanges within crypto assets (eg uniswap), but you do need to find a counter party to get out of fiat. It’s being worked on and centralized exchanges aren’t your only option. It would be worth catching up on DeFi.

Edit: btw I meant visual and auditory sensory override - I agree it is a ways off before you have full proprioception etc, if ever. Not necessary to beat face to face social presence tho.

They recently started shooting the prequel... in my home town! I hope it's good, but in any case my friends and I will watch it for the lulz.

The industry output tables I mentioned do not measure "spending" per se, they measure value-add, that is, spending minus purchases of other sectors, so private sector should be netted out.

Conceptually, say you have a government service -- DMV. You have to pay for the building, you pay salaries, you buy equipment, etc. Now the government doesn't make its own pens or computers and it doesn't have its own electricians to service the DMV, it pays for goods and services from the private sector. So you would want to subtract out what it buys from the private sector, which is exactly what the value-add definition for the government sector does. This is to avoid double counting, since these add up to GDP and you want the sales of the computer maker to not be counted twice when you add up the value add of all indutstries to get GDP. Think of this also as the definition of a VAT - value added tax - it's computed as sales net of purchases. Except for government, it would be the budget net of purchases from the private sector, the residual being inferred as "government production". I am not sure how else to objectively measure government production, seeing as how that includes things like social workers, building inspectors, etc.

Therefore I think the data I cited is consistent with your definition, except that it is goods and services (most of what the government produces is services such as education and police, not goods, like roads).

But if you want to look at fixed assets (e.g. the DMV building itself, or the school building), then there is a different BEA table to look at, namely this one here:

https://www.bea.gov/data/government/fixed-assets#:~:text=Wha....

With fixed assets, you have to decide how to value them -- at current cost, historical cost, or real cost -- discussed here: https://www.bea.gov/system/files/methodologies/Fixed-Assets-.... This boils down to valuing that old computer at the DMV based on what it cost to buy deflated by some percentage based on estimated service life or how much you could sell it for today on the open market.

Check out the asset tables: https://apps.bea.gov/iTable/iTable.cfm?ReqID=10&step=2

Using current cost accounting, in 1980 government fixed assets were 2.4 Trillion in 1980 and 16.1 Trillion in 2021, or a growth rate of 671% (a CAGR of 4.9%).

Whereas looking at private sector fixed assets also at current cost, we see it went from 7.1 Trillion in 1980 to 51.7 Trillion in 2020, or an increase of 728% (CAGR of 5.0%)

So it is true that private sector fixed assets increased 0.1% faster than government sector fixed assets over that 40 year period, but that certainly doesn't seem like evidence of mass privatization. This is true even if some things were privatized. E.g. maybe we started contracting with more private prisons but also added 20 new public universities in that period, so the net "privatization" was small.

> A lot of the products and services that were build using Blockchain could just have used a normal RDBMS.

That's how you dismiss the value and can't understand