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The book the 'Growth Delusion' has some great examples on this as well. To quote the FTs[1] review of the book.

"The official protocols define the scope of GDP as measuring all monetised activity between willing parties in a given period. It is a pragmatic definition, but leads to some counterintuitive results. The sale of stolen goods for cash contributes positively to GDP, for example — so theft is good for growth. A parent’s housework and childcare, however, being unpaid, are excluded — resulting, by one recent evaluation, in a $3.8 trillion underestimate of the size of the US economy."

I vaguely remember a similar one around traffic jams as well.

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/b6182440-f21e-11e7-bb7d-c3edfe974...


There is also a book called "Mismeasuring our lives" that makes some similar points about the overreliance on GDP as "the" measure of economic health.


The UK is just starting official statistics that include the value of household self supply. I do not know whether there is good enough historical data to compare it with.


I've found Kaitai struct to be an absolute joy to use on things like EEPROM dumps from car computers.


Has anyone found anything incredible for arbitrary UTF-8 data?


Honestly, VIM.


There's also an attempt I made, https://github.com/theozaurus/jsurlify which tries to keep the usage as terse as possible. It would be great to see what strengths / weaknesses all these different libraries have and try to join efforts where sensible.


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