sethg

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391.
by sethg 16y ago
I'm pretty sure the era from 1860-1900 was generally deflationary in the USA, and I don't think that there was much of an issue with people taking cuts in nominal wages. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1873 http://en.wikipedia.or
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by sethg 16y ago
As an adult engineer, I feel myself in status competition with other engineers : I want to be recognized as a better engineer than they are. The salespeople just aren’t on my radar.
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by sethg 16y ago
A 1990 Cornell survey of young Americans had 14.4% of women describing themselves as lesbian or bisexual, compared with 5.6% of men describing themselves as gay or bisexual. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_sexual_orientat...
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by sethg 16y ago
If you’re straight, and you’re the sort of man who treats every woman he encounters as little more than a potential sexual conquest, then the thought of another man treating you in that way is a little scary. Reflecting on this emotional
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by sethg 16y ago
You’re assuming that in a deflationary environment, your hypothetical family’s nominal income will stay constant over a 20-year period. Nice work, if you can get it. If I work in a widget factory and the price of widgets goes down becaus
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by sethg 16y ago
A less ambitious goal would be to patch some of the widely-used higher-level applications so that they would run on Plan9. E.g., if I could get a virtual Plan9 machine with Python/django, PostgreSQL, and lighthttpd, I would have a starti
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by sethg 16y ago
Engineers and salespeople generally have different personalities, don’t enjoy hanging out with one another, and look down on one another’s interests, but that doesn’t make it a versus thing. As adults we are no longer competing directly
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by sethg 16y ago
If your employer considers you “fungible, unskilled labor”, then you have a lot more to worry about than inflation.
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by sethg 16y ago
Returning to my earlier example: suppose I spend 30% of my income on a mortgage with fixed payments, and 70% on Stuff. If I have wage inflation of 7%, and the price of Stuff goes up by 10%, then I have to spend a higher proportion of my in
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by sethg 16y ago
By assuming away wage inflation, you’re really stacking the deck in favor of your argument. You are also treating “ability to save or pay off debt” as a generic thing, rather than considering fixed-payment debts (e.g., fixed-rate mortgages
401.
by sethg 16y ago
If you are in debt at fixed (or capped) interest rates, then inflation is good for you, since your income goes up while your monthly payments do not. If you depend on a fixed nominal income, then inflation is bad for you, since the prices o
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by sethg 16y ago
I also wondered how many of those millionaire educators are widows of men who had more lucrative professions.
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by sethg 16y ago
...or someone in Country X’s embassy decided that this guy was more likely to be a nut or an agent provocateur than someone in a position to offer really useful intelligence, and therefore there was no downside to turning the fellow in to
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by sethg 16y ago
In the US, things that you buy and use for your job are tax-deductible (no doubt the IRS has a very detailed definition of “use for your job”). If your employer buys them for you, then the employer gets to deduct them as a business expense
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by sethg 16y ago
The US government already provides massive incentives for nuclear power, but even with those incentives, nobody is building. Maybe the American nuclear industry just has such an awful record of cost overruns that investors don’t want to gi
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by sethg 16y ago
During the Great Depression, Japan, Britain, Germany, the US, and France all went off the gold standard, in that order. The countries that abandoned the gold standard sooner were also the ones whose economies recovered sooner. ( http://kr
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by sethg 16y ago
From the article: The US Federal Reserve still continues to print dollars to finance skyrocketing government debt. The fact that this erodes the value of the US currency is something that the Americans seem not to care about. What erosion
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by sethg 16y ago
According to the CIA World Factbook, Mexico has 5.5% unemployment, public debt 37.7% of GDP, 3.6% inflation, and it’s a net oil exporter. So Mexican sovereign debt looks like a reasonable investment, as these things go.
409.
by sethg 16y ago
...and now that Brazilians are no longer so spooked by inflation that they spend money as soon as they receive it, three Brazilian banks are among the world’s top ten credit issuers. ( http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/10/04/130329294/li
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by sethg 16y ago
The people who are asking for more inflation in the USA are asking for something in the 2% range, or (for those who are truly bold) asking for prices to rise to the level they would be at if inflation had remained in the 2% range for the pa
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by sethg 16y ago
If you’re a politician, it’s easier to admit your ignorance when your five predecessors who claimed to know what they were doing got brutally mugged by reality.
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by sethg 16y ago
If someone could buy a prepaid debit card for cash without showing ID, and add money to it without showing ID, and spend from it without showing ID, then Alice could buy a card, Bob could load $5000 onto it, and Carol could read the card nu
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by sethg 16y ago
I assume it’s a process of “the people I hang out with, who are in my economic class, are all driving BMWs and Lexuses, and I feel silly parking my Subaru next to their cars”.
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by sethg 16y ago
Sure, we like to talk about ideas, but some ideas are more enjoyable to talk about than others. I would absolutely disagree that intelligent people “realize social standing is often an illusion and not overly worth worrying about”. Humans
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by sethg 16y ago
I refer you to Brad DeLong (an economics professor who used to work in the Clinton Administration): Back in 2000, the U.S. government's long-term budget was out of balance--although not by all that much. The government had, you see, made p
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by sethg 16y ago
This. Nothing in the essay says “being poor is thinking that absolutely nobody in the world is worse off than you are”.
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by sethg 16y ago
When girls are taught in high school how they, too, can cultivate glorious, full-bodied beards, we will see gender balance in the hacker community.
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by sethg 16y ago
Do Groupon’s salesmen have an incentive to get shops to sign up for uncapped Groupons?
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by sethg 16y ago
I am reminded of a certain Christian organization that I studied in college. There is an idea in Protestant Christianity (going back to Jesus or to Martin Luther, depending on whom you ask :-) that you don’t actually earn a ticket to heaven
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by sethg 16y ago
If you’re trying to get a PhD and your advisor expects you to work 60-hour weeks, then you either work 60-hour weeks or you consider a different path in life. That speaks volumes about what it takes to impress your superiors in a semi-feud

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