And you'd be wrong. It's not even difficult to understand why. Uncontrolled inflation is bad. Deflation is much, much worse. You do not want deflation. It rots your economy and nukes lend and spend. We trade a small amount of inflation to avoid the nuke that is deflation.
This is, like, one of the few things economists -- even most of the crazy ones -- agree on.
That's an oversimplification. Demand-side deflation can be bad for the economy, but it's also because our modern economies are basically reliant on inflation to manage our insane debts. Typically, critique of inflationary principles is coupled with a broader critique of MMT and how our economies are run. Deflation is fine or even beneficial when it comes from increased productivity (supply-side). Heck, we have deflation in some sectors of our economy (eg. technology) and consumers greatly benefit from it. Unfortunately the good type of deflation we see in our economies is overshadowed by the money printer going brrrrrrr.
Deflation is bad for the elites and politicians, and good for consumers. When the former are running the show, of course they will claim that deflation is the worst thing ever, despite the immense harm inflation inflicts on the average person. And if you spend like 5 minutes pondering the justification for why that is, you'll see it's mostly BS.
> that's why you can trade and barter random objects...imagine having an exchange currency that literally never inflated... that's GOOD. We have been hoodwinked into thinking that we need inflation to keep up with goods and services, literal stockholm syndrome
Gahhh. Stop taking your economics advice from bitcoin bros and goldbug weirdos. They don't know how anything works and don't want to learn. It's like taking legal advice from sovereign citizens. It's not even that difficult to understand why it's a terrible idea!
High inflation is bad, sure. Deflation is an economic nuke. You know those people who spent like a whole bitcoin buying pizza way back when? "If I'd just held onto it, I'd have $HUGE_NUMBER now".
Yeah. If your money goes up in value, you have a huge incentive to stockpile it and not buy pizza. It's not just Dominos that loses out. All of the people and suppliers that go into pizza do, too. You need people to spend and lend to have liquidity and money flow.
> we find more gold every day, so there is an easing already happening naturally
That's not how that works. You're tying your entire country's economic growth to the production output of a single mining industry. Gold is not distributed evenly across the globe, either.
And yeah, we did all that in the past, and it caused deflation, which caused numerous financial panics [0], broke the British economy [1] and after two world wars, the US ended up with like 70% of the world's gold [2].
TL;DR: Tying your entire country's economic growth to the production output of a single mining industry is stupid and we don't do it for very good reasons. Everything is a conspiracy if you don't know how anything works.
I do find it rather ironic that economists can pretty much universally agree on this concept. And yet when you point out the very existence of the billionaire class inherently causes the exact same issue you're suddenly a communits.
How is it good for an economy to have a small subset of individuals hoarding wealth through property, artwork, and offshore bank accounts - not spending it in the economy from which they extracted it? "Job creators" is a farse, the subset who you can point to who ACTUALLY create(d) jobs a-la Page and Brin have long since stepped away from that job creation and have joined the ranks of: number go up.
Ok, and a lot of -- maybe most -- people won't have their mailto handler set up correctly. I don't even know if I do on my current laptop and I have email old enough to vote
Oh god. Tell me you've never dealt with those in real life without telling me lol
Usually the very best you can do IRL is "probably fine" or "maybe not fine" and that's just not good enough to justify blocking customers. Email is an old tech and there's a lot of variation in the wild.
The flip side of that is now you're running old software and CVEs get published all the time. Threat actors actively scan the internet looking for software that's vulnerable to new CVEs.
Yup. As someone who's been on both the eng and security side, you cannot improve security by blocking the product bus. You're just going to get run over. Your job is to find ways of managing risk that work with the realities of software development.
And before anyone gets upset about that, every engineering discipline has these kind of risk tradeoffs. You can't build a bridge that'll last 5,000 years and costs half of our GDP, even though that's "safer". You build a bridge that balances usage, the environment, and good stewardship of taxpayer money.
xz has dozens of contributors and two active maintainers. It was the actual example I was thinking of. The code was submitted by a third party and not a result of a developer machine compromise.
left pad wasn't a security incident. It was a capitalism incident.
This is, like, one of the few things economists -- even most of the crazy ones -- agree on.
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