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.
The problem with anything Cringeley writes is it is tainted by his baseless past claims that IBM will be laying off most of its workforce. He has been wrong every time. He'd be more interesting to read if he wasn't trying to act as some Nostradamus to IBM who keeps repainting the IBM death portrait each time his predictions don't turn into reality.
That book is not good. Its filled with factual errors, gross misstatements and pure speculation. It fits well with author's anti-outsourcing/immigration agenda.
It jelled with what I know anecdotally. Their Indian outsourcing is terrible, bad compensation, nothing close to Google or other tech companies in India. This is from a few years back.
> 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.
>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?
Okay, let's replace beer with cars. How many people wait until someone else has driven the car off the lot to buy it? In 2010, 2.5x more used cars were sold than new cars. Imagine if no one bought new cars, though. Eventually, no one would be able to buy used cars either.
Beer is a bad example because it's cheap enough that people don't do the math. Once you get into very large purchases, like cars, houses, or productive capital, companies can (and do) factor inflation/deflation into their profitability calculations. If a refinery will cost half as much next year, and the amount of money it will produce for you this year is less than half its price tag this year, you will wait to buy it until next year. Otherwise, you'll end up less profitable than the person who bought in a year later, who can then out-compete you, only to be out-competed by the person who bought in the year after that, and so on.
> 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.
"Solved" is a strong word - inflation matching growth is the most practical solution currently. You could produce a more "correct" solution by giving each commodity its own currency, but that's clearly impractical.
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.
The AdBlock Plus guy gets paid by companies to put their site on the "unobtrusive ads" list -- those ads don't get blocked for the majority of AdBlock Plus users.
