Prices are a function of supply and demand, largely. New money being created and spent is only an issue when it durably creates more demand than supply can absorb. This is where inflation happens. With covid we had across the board stimulus that didn't care too much if supply was matching, but we also had supply disruptions everywhere.
This is incredibly hard (impossible?) to do in practice, but imagine that you create new money and use it to buy goods where supply can be perfectly adjusted in regards to demand. Now your money creation has zero effect on prices.
On top of that, a low level of inflation is actually a policy target. Low, but not null, because public policy wants to incentivize productive investment and not hoarding cash. And because deflation is much harder to curb (hello Japan) than inflation for a reasonably developed and productive economy.
Let's say we have X amount of dollars. Time passes. The population increases, productivity increases, and now the economy (measured in actual stuff) is twice as big as it was. How many dollars should we now have?
If we have X, then each dollar is worth twice as much stuff (or, put differently, everything costs half as much). That's not a great outcome if, for example, you borrowed money to buy a house, and that loan specifies repayment of a fixed number of dollars. On the other hand, if you hid some dollars under your mattress, it's great. But it's unclear why society should want hiding dollars under your mattress to be the ideal investment strategy. That's not going to be optimal for society as a whole.
Or, we could have 2X dollars. Then each dollar will buy the same amount of stuff as before. That seems more reasonable. To do that, though, we have to increase the number of dollars in proportion to the growth of the economy as a whole.
(It's not that simple, of course. The velocity of money also matters. And the Fed is trying for 2% inflation, not zero.)
Inflation is not simply a matter of the government adding more money to the supply (although that's one of the actions that can help reduce the value of currency)... the flow of money (and power) is immensely complex, and inflation as a measure is a procrustean bed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrustes)
Go do some reading about inflation vs deflation and also how bank loans actually work in reality. These topics are much too complicated for it to be worth my time here.
The argument they're making is that because the original value of the dollar is worth X amount of gold, until the 70's (where we got off the gold standard), the "actual", gold backed value would've been a constant multiple of the price of gold today (since gold's value is stable under this assumption), and thus, the dollar lost a bunch of value.
i don't buy it, because the amount of possible goods/services purchasable today is much higher than back in the 70's.
I'm worried about a complete crash that would plummet everything. Imagine if every year the stock market represented real industry and work and value. It would be strong and sturdy. But with this money being so loose. It's similar to if I just gave you decks of cards year after year and said build, build, build. That house of cards is not going to be great and can collapse.
What happens in 80 years when milk is $34 a gallon?
I could be completely wrong about this, but the counter side of this is that when stock prices goes down (due to interest rates or whatever else) the value destruction is not equal to the money transacted. If you buy 1000 shares of TSLA for $1000 your position was $1m. When I buy 1 share for $5 after the crash you've lost 99.5% despite not transacting a penny. Hey presto! All that inflation disappeared!
This is why more seasoned traders pay attention to trading volume. It is also how many players manipulate the naive traders into thinking a stock is crashing or booming.
> I think it's better to correct for inflation. The money supply can grow and it doesn't necessarily cause inflation (see the 2008 monetary response to the Great Financial Crisis as an example).
I may be a layman but I'm pretty sure that was just one type of inflation.
> I'm not sure this is true. In the 70s, inflation was high and stock returns are low. In the 90s, inflation was low and returns were high. In 2021, inflation was high and returns were high.
I'm not exactly talking about returns. I mean prices. In my eyes when you look at the S&P 500, every time there's money printing it's like a rolling snowball. It just gets bigger and bigger. But it's weird because that growth itself is not reflective of companies doing things but just them investing money or buying back stocks.
I think there's a subtle bit that a lot of people don't see about the stock market, that it's trading dollars for bits of companies. This says something about the value of those companies, but also about the value of dollars. I think a lot of what we've seen over the past two years makes little sense if you think about it in terms of the value of American companies, but from the perspective of the value of a dollar (to those who have easy access to them) it's all a lot more logical.
Not everybody has the same sensitivity to this 'jarring' component of the Linux desktop, I'm well aware. But I think it would really help the desktop forward if the group that is sensitive to it would be catered to more, like Elementary is trying to do.
It means making it more enjoyable to use for everyone, both for those that are more and less sensitive to the aesthetics. Everyone is sensitive to it to some degree.
I don't understand. I run linux on an IBM Thinkpad T40 for the better part of a decade.Then I moved to a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon which also runs Ubuntu fine.
IN fact installing linux takes at most 20 min and I am done. Drivers and everything are all automatic.
Windows on the other hand can take hours to install from scratch. God forbid you need a service pack or to find a driver that's not easily found anymore.
People have a cognitive dissonance about what it takes to run Linux. It's by far much easier than people lead on. Yes if you need to get into the underneath of things then maybe it becomes more difficult. But I don't think that's been part of the story for average users for a long time.
>> Yes if you need to get into the underneath of things then maybe it becomes more difficult.
IMO Windows is even more difficult when you want to get into underneath of things. Fiddle with registry settings, services and at times deleting AppData\App folder to get something fixed.
At least in case of Linux you get good set of answers to your Google queries, but that is not as good in case of Windows. Also, Windows and the ecosystem of software around it has a huge reliability and performance problem still unsolved. Freezing, crashing are still rampant with Windows 10. If I boot my laptop after a week Windows Update holds me up for at least half an hour. Every update restarts the OS several times.
That's because it's a Thinkpad. The T-series had been the Red Hat company issue laptop for years, and has had boatloads of internal support as a result.
You're right in that a Thinkpad will mostly work out of the box long as you don't want that Nvidia GPU to work, but everyone else? Good luck. My XPS 15 was a lost cause, losing three quarters of it's battery life under Linux and with countless video problems.
And on a desktop? Hah! Roll the dice baby, and keep rolling them with every update, because sooner or later something's going to break. It always does.
That XPS laptop of yours probably isn't great with OS X either. Yet nobody blames Apple for that.
It's a bit of a double standard. If you want a pain free workhorse, go with something that's supported out of the box. Don't buy that Nvidia GPU if you intend to use it for a Linux desktop, where it is unlikely to be of much use anyway (unless you are one of those CAD people in which case you use what your vendor supports).
Personally I settled for Thinkpads many years ago (the T- and X-series, not non-Thinkpads that Lenovo tries to peddle under that brand name) and they haven't given me any trouble yet. Seeing how Windows laptops sometimes doesn't wake from sleep properly makes me suspect that that's not much better tested either. If it boots, ship it.
Nvidia is more trouble only that you need to install the proprietary driver rather than using what comes with the kernel. You also need vdpau if you want hardware decoding of video.
Has Linux changed a lot? Last I tried installing it years ago, I had to find each driver individually and had to get some stubborn ones working. At the time I thought to myself - no average Joe would figure this out, no wonder nobody uses Linux (and by nobody I meant non-devs)
Had less problems with Linux tyan with Windows for about 10 years now.
Installation is quicker.
No bloatware/scareware to uninstall (bundled McAfee etc).
I've spent more time hunting for drivers on Windows than on Linux the 10 last years.
Linux is also significantly faster for some of my workflows (git commits, anything with maven or node).
For me (partially colorblind, never cared much about fonts, everything is an improvement from what I grew up with) I also find certain Linux DEs a lot nicer and easier to use than Windows and even MacOS. Again this is my personal opinion, but I have used Windows for years before I switched to Linux and I've also been enthusiastic about Mac and Apple and have used it for years, I just happen prefer KDE or a well tuned Gnome, Cinnamon or elementary
The downsides? In my experience Linux is slightly less stable. And there exist stuff that is only supported on Windows (an old scanner I have. Although I should add it is not great under Windows either.)
I did. I like VueScan and had a paid license at that time IIRC. But that particular scanner just didn't work which was a shame since it was supposed to be a good with photos and negatives. And as mentioned above it was good on Windows either.
Edit: I actually looked it up now on the VueScan website and here is what is says:
"VueScan is compatible with the <my scanner model> on Windows x86, Windows x64 and Mac OS X."
Absolutely. I've installed Linux on quite a number of computers, and I've yet to run into a missing driver. It just works. Whereas I've also installed Windows on a lot of computers, and that's far more likely to have issues with drivers...
99.9% of drivers are in the kernel nto downloaded from random spots on the internet. The big exception is proprietary gpu drivers which user friendly distros provide packages for in the repos.
The big issue is thus. If you intend to run linux don't buy random hardware and hope it supports linux then complain linux is hard to make work. This is a natural course because people have all sorts of existing hardware and no real desire to buy new. It's also reasonable to try because linux does support a lot of hardware. Try it and if you like how the environment but not how works with your machine buy your next machine with linux in mind.
Linux issues are not about hardware support anymore (well mostly). The guy was talking about ui inconsistencies and overall ugliness of some distros (there are of course exceptions).
I have run exclusively Linux and mostly on laptops for 15 years and it's been about 10 years since I have had problems with packages clashing, except for python pip. (I don't use python though)
It doesn't work well. I use my 2016 MBP with an external monitor and once a month or so I need to hard reboot it after sleeping because it gets confused and won't display anything on the internal screen.
My system76, with vanilla Ubuntu LTS does this perfectly for years. As did my thinkpad before this and the thinkpad before that. Always Ubuntu LTS, without big modifications.
The last time I had 'sleep' issues was with MySQL crashing when it woke up, and it found the os time changed without its internal clock moving forward. IIRC that was over ten years ago.
My main computer for last few years has been an Asus X305 laptop, using Ubuntu 14.04 with the i3 tiling window manager (i.e., there is no desktop). It's best computing environment I've had since I started out on a TRS-80 in 1979.
My i3 setup is not tweaked to auto-sleep on lid close. I'm sure it would have been easy to set up when I installed i3 back in 2015, since the sleep-on-close worked with Ubuntu's Unity desktop. Instead, when I installed i3 I attached sleep function to a hotkey, so before I close the lid I press the hotkey (if I want system to sleep). It is totally not a big deal. The system does autoresume when I open lid, which it also did in Unity environment. But if it didn't that would also not be a big deal.
To me the idea that someone would reject a superior system if it didn't auto-sleep (or auto-resume) on lid close/open is bizarre. I actually prefer to manually control with a hotkey.
My HP Pavilion laptop did this perfectly several years ago, at which point I didn't even know how "lucky" I was that it all worked. Fedora/KDE was the distro.
Can you give us details of laptop and distribution used? Seems hardware is still difficult i.e. trackpads, WiFi, screen resolution, external displays, etc.
I’m on an XPS 13 9370. I like the idea of a Thinkpad but I wanted a laptop that came sold with Linux hence the Dell.
So far hardware support seems pretty good. Not sure my Ubuntu 18.10 install is getting the most out of the GPU but everything works including Bluetooth audio and suspend.
The only issues I have are with the trackpad and the silly keyboard layout.
Trackpad: it’s small, a bit twitchy and not sensitive at the edges when moving inwards but is moving outwards. Driver issue I think.
Keyboard: who thought it was a good idea to split the left and right keys with PgUp and PgDown? Someone who doesn’t touch type would be my bet. The old layout was better.
I think of it as a replacement for an 11” MacBook Air as it’s about the same size but with a 13” screen and a quad-core i7.
Oh also, I got a 4K display and that was a mistake. Raw terminal text is tiny and Gnome currently doesn’t mix monitor resolutions very well. So dual screening with a 1440 monitor is not easy. Ordering again I’d get FHD instead.
I'm running the same laptop with Manjaro and do not have any trackpad issues. So either you're right and there is some driver issue on your system or maybe it's a hardware issue.
Only problem I've encountered so far is that if I unplug my usb/hdmi/ethernet hub while it's in standby then X crashes as soon as I wake it.
Curiously after you asked me this I also tested my trackpad a bit more and it turns out that if I go slowly from off the trackpad onto the trackpad it doesn't register the touch at all.
Not sure if that's some kind of feature intended to prevent accidental touches or a bug. Never noticed it before in my ~7 months of use.
I’m pretty sure it’s a software thing whatever it is because I don’t get the same behaviour in the BIOS pages. The trackpad is pretty choppy there for me but it is sensitive at the edges.
Thinkpads and Dell Latitude series (5xxx something). Currently Thinkpad X220 and L440. Wifi non-free drivers but in most distros, trackpad on L440 seems to recognise multiple finger use for scrolling &c. I admit that I tend to use at most one external display - projector - and that seems to work, I know that the newer hires external displays pose issues around scaling &c
Or I have? Everyone has a different workflow. I've been linux only for 12 years about. I rubbed the license key off my laptop and when I went to re install and I just couldn't afford it. Been using linux ever since.
Weird argument. Because I have given Linux systems to the elderly before. People with little to no experience with computers. Guess what they were all fine.
My mother was a long time windows user. Kept getting viruses. She was converted to Ubuntu and has used it for over a decade now without issue.
Linux is far easier for people than you think. My mother is a senior citizen now and this is her second computer.
The UI concerns you bring up are just silly, They are about the same as you buying a new hammer and it having an inconsistent wood grain or a metal burr.
What you call silly others might call "fit and finish". Or simply "doing an adequate job".
With a kitchen if there were a few mm difference in height between wall unit cupboards, or wall sockets, it would not affect your use of the kitchen one iota. Yet everyone would likely notice such an amateur and slapdash job and employ a different contractor for their own home. Same with the difference between a table made by assembling a flat pack and something craftsman made.
There's a reason Apple put so much score into the user interface guides and specifications for icons, interface and such.
Yeah I notice the little touches such as Bluetooth on/off toggling. On the Mac when I reboot it’s in the same state as I left it. On Ubuntu it resets to on unless I edit a text file.
Over all that may not be a big thing but it does illustrate one of the rough edges.
(macOS has its own warts too of course. Such as not having keyboard shortcuts for split view or weird little pop up windows you can’t close without a mouse.)
I find Ubuntus and for that matter most DE font system superior to OSX's. Apple touts accessibility but on OSX you can't even change the font size system wide. You literally have to go into each and every app and change it specifically. Let's hope that the app supports it. Many don't.
On Ubuntu you can just change the font size and it changes everywhere without having to decrease your resolution so you take advantage of what your hardware provides.
Yeah same experience here. Installed gentoo on our home computer for my mom and dad and once i showed them how to open Firefox, they were happy as clams. The only issue was when my dad wanted to install tax software
Basically, they'll be okay as long as they only use the browser.
When they need to edit a MS Excel file, or use their digital signature (mandatory for companies in my country), or use some accounting software... or anything like this, you understand that Linux isn't as ready for the mainstream desktop as we think it is.
Some are compatible, some aren't. And even if yours is technically compatible, if you run into problems with the website or program where you need to use it -- and you will -- you're on your own.
My dad was happy with OpenOffice.org Calc (now LibreOffice), and he loved excel. But, yeah, obviously Linux doesn't run accounting or signature software that is not built for it. That's not a technical issue with Linux of course (see Android), but a lack of proprietary software that runs on GNU/Linux.
I installed it for them. It was more than a decade ago, and I chose gentoo because it was one of the first distributions to support amd64. Chose gentoo over debian because it had newer kernel versions that I needed for that particular computer.
We just finished a project in rural communities in Panama and gave laptops (ThinkPad 13) with Mint 19 Cinnamon to people with very little experience with computers. However, we kept Windows 10 in one of the computers and guess what, that's the only one that gave us trouble, when the user got all scared and confused with the Office trial version telling them they needed to pay. All the other users had no major problems at all with the user experience.
Oh, so the same reason people are paying for iPhones, BMWs and haircuts? Look, you wanted less hair, you got it! Ppppppplease... people pay for details and the products and brands that deliver them are obviously doing something right.
