Holy crap. You are now formally and officially my hero. I hope I'm that resilient when I'm 48.

If people modded your post as a troll simply because they disagreed with you, I sympathize with you - that would make Slashdot no better than (shudder) Digg.

However, if people modded you down because the quality of your post was poor, which it was, then more power to them.

This is the guy who has said he'd bring a new level of transparency and efficiency to government purchasing, and it turns out that his direct subordinates were crooks. Keep in mind that Kundra claimed that, in weekly meetings, he went over every detail of the requisition process as DC's CIO. I guess the "new level" is a new, lower level, if that's even possible.

Oh... you're one of those.

Sorry, I don't have access to the super-secret ultimate-insider's econometrics that you do, so I can't really evaluate those statements. And while gold has gone up, gold isn't exactly in the typical consumer's basket, is it? And for good reason - it's a speculative commodity. If not for that, gold would cost the same as copper. Speaking of which, have you seen the price of copper lately?

Wow. Just.. wow. Your post is rife with inconsistencies and evasions. Let's look at just a few:

The instantaneous cost of the commodity isn't what's at hand here, only the price obtained for the finished good relative to the commodity when it was purchased. The raw materials only cost 0.97 now? That's fantastic, until you realize that deflation still exists. Deflation is a trap for the producer that cuts into earnings. Also, I doubt many Chinese manufacturers are making a 47% margin.

I never said they were synonymous. In China's current manufacturing climate, though, deflation will erase any profits from many manufacturing concerns.

Again, you're focusing on the instantaneous cost of the raw materials, which is, well, immaterial. Lower material costs are good for producers only if they are lower relative to the price of the finished goods. Why is that so hard to understand?

... and increasing the manufacturer's labor costs, reinforcing my point.

... which you countered with very specifically crafted and rather unrealistic scenario. I remain unconvinced.

You are the very first person I've ever heard attribute the current financial crisis to monetary inflation. At best, you could ascribe it to asset inflation, i.e. the housing crisis, but even that is a proximate cause. Inflation has been quite low over the past decade. A more immediate problem is the insane leveraging of financial institutions coupled with a serious lack of regulation.

Surely you're not suggesting that manned spaceflight is a... a... waste of money?

Let's say you're a Chinese manufacturer. You buy 100 yuan of raw materials, and you plan to turn them into 100 widgets and sell them in a month for 110 yuan. In the meanwhile, deflation is gripping your country, so while you're running your assembly line, the market price for widgets drops from 1.1 yuan to 0.98 yuan. So now, you have to take a loss on your manufacturing operation. Why would a company even bother in that kind of environment? Answer: they wouldn't - they shut down instead.

This is a pretty fundamental observation of economics, but if you can refute it with something besides "you're a brainwashed sheep," I'd be interested to hear your argument.

If quality control was so low that they couldn't even rotate it correctly, it probably wasn't anything to worry about. Besides, it had a well-known small thermal exhaust port, right below the main port...

Actually, China has been hit worse that most countries, especially the US, and it's just going to keep getting worse. The Chinese government announced that over 7% of all domestic companies went out of business over the last year, and that China is now experiencing deflation. For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, deflation is very, very bad, espeicially for a manufacturing-based economy.