Robert Cringley has a recent book about the decline of IBM - http://www.cringely.com/2014/06/04/decline-fall-ibm/ - I found it pretty interesting. His thesis is that IBM's management has consistently goosed short-term profits by making cuts that hurt it long term. It off-shored technical work, under-invested in quality, tooling and automation, laid off older more experienced workers, etc. I don't have any first hand of experience of IBM, so I cannot vouch for how true Cringley's story is.
> But what if you know that next year there will be 20 cans of beer? Then you don't buy any beer this year, because each beer you buy this year costs you two beers you could have had next year. If the number of beers goes up year after year, then it is always advisable to wait to buy beer.
Do you realize that this makes no sense whatsoever? How many people do you know that would give up beer for a year if they knew that beer was going to be twice as cheap next year? And if we look at the recent history of technology, the prices of devices, the prices of processing power, consistently drops year-over-year yet that has not hindered the business at all. Lots of people buy stuff because they desire the utility of the product, and do not want to forgo a year of that utility. Some people buy the newest model on the first day, some people wait for a year or two, it all works itself out.
To the extent you have a point, is that high inflation overall encourages consumption over saving. This is hardly a good thing though. And if you inflate really high, you may just get the same net amount of saving/hoarding, it will just be hoarding in gold or real estate rather than in dollars.
> Deflation is a prisoner's dilemma that is solved by printing money to match, as closely as possible, the rate of economic growth.
This doesn't make sense, because each product has its own growth curve: https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/620814301289316352/photo/1 So even if you inflate at the average growth of all prices, you still are not accurately tracking any particular product.
Alternatively, it would be good if extensions could have a whitelist and/or blacklist of sites that they are enabled on, with most extensions having a default blacklist of all financial sites, banks, brokerages, email accounts, etc. Perhaps also create a way for corporations to blacklist their intranets. It makes me very nervous that if some extension owner sells out to the wrong person, suddenly they could see my private information.