Deflation makes economic activity halt. If something you want is going to be cheaper tomorrow, will you buy it today, or tomorrow? Sure, some items will have to be bought - there are certain necessities to life after all.

For most people, most things they buy are necessities, and most of the rest can only be postponed in emergencies. As a general rule, if the money is not going to an investment, neither deflation nor inflation affects its movement in any way.

Think of deflation as a sale. For example, 1% yearly deflation is equivalent to a 1% off sale starting a year from now. Would you wait for one? Perhaps, put probably not. Anymore than you put off your spending to invest the money for a year and pocket the profits now.

But even if deflation was actually economically ruinous, it doesn't explain why it gets singled out like it does. Every other economic idea, no matter how dumb, gets inflicted on people and nations without a second thought, so why is this one taboo? Who derives power from it being so?

That's why we moved to fiat currencies - economic growth was being limited by the available supply of gold - if we couldn't mine more, we couldn't pay people more, so existing stock got more valuable and people stopped spending, stalling out the economy.

And this is another thing. Economy is a system of production and distribution. If people are demanding less, they should put less pressure on economy, not destroy it. What should happen is the production resources not utilized to see to the people's needs are available for other, long-term projects, like space exploration or basic research. Not spending today should be rewarded, since it allows the production line a chance to spit out starship engines rather than your iWhatever, but it doesn't currently work that way. Capitalism can't handle this situation, which is understandable since it predates Industrial Revolution, but it's a flaw that must be somehow fixed, otherwise our societies continue to struggle on the brink of collapse from here to eternity.

The hope is savings, if labor saves and invests its money (especially in the stocks of companies benfitting from the progress) labor can survive and even come out ahead. If ou dad and mom blew their savings however, we have far more competition than they did to achieve the same asset base.

If the labor saves and invests its money, that money is not going towards shoring up demand. Less demand means people get laid off, which causes less demand, which causes layoffs, and so on - in other words, a depression like we have now.

But never let logic get in the way of victim-blaming. Can't let any part of the fault land on the robber barons looting the economy. After all, that might mean bad things happen to undeserving persons - perhaps even to you.

Instead of just another thoughtless blaming of the current economic situation in the developed world on employers, you should ask what are the incentives that cause employers to try to squeeze more of existing labor than to employ more people?

Simple: they're trying to maximize profits. At current productivity levels availability of labor is not the main limiting factor for production, thus unemployment exists; since unemployment exists, the law of supply and demand makes it possible to pay less and demand more from employees, thus the employers do just that.

Something causes prosperity and progress even in the presence of greedy people - figure that out and duplicate the conditions.

Give social security generous enough that not working becomes an okay life strategy. Force employers to actually compete for employees, even for McJobs, and wages will rise and business models only profitable by exploiting desperate people will collapse due to lack of such people. Simultaneously, use toll barriers to protect against offshoring and tax all income generated within the country, no matter where the corporate headquarters are nominally located.

...should you not defend yourself?

Sure. The problem is, in the absence of an impartial referee everyone can submit to without losing face, things tend to get out of hand. You think someone's been unjust to you? Retaliate! Someone might be planning to attack? Attack them first! Someone's getting dangerously powerful? Take them down while you still can!

Just look at world politics: areas with functioning hegemons, even completely impotent ones like the EU, have issues settled through legal battles, while areas without them, like Africa, have an endless supply of militant groups. The hegemon doesn't necessarily have to be a Leviathan, to produce obedience through fear of themselves, they just need to have general recognition as the legitimate ruler so that anyone willing to defect over any particular issue is put back into line by the others for fear of anarchy.

when you give people the simplified choice of, should this tragedy have happened, or do we prevent it in the future, they will always pick the "lets prevent this in the future option". Because they are not writing the budges, they are not directly taking money out of schools or medical care. They are not deciding exactly what rights to trampled on.

Yes, it's the dumb public who's at fault. Except... for some strange reason the police don't behave this way in, say, Nordic countries, despite them being openly and officially huge-government welfare nanny states straight from Ayn Rand's worst nightmares. So perhaps, just perhaps, the problem behind the police acting like an occupying force is not the public but the police themselves?

US Dollar is not worth its weight in paper.

According to Wikipedia, a dollar bill weights around 1g. According to Alibaba, a ton of offset printing paper costs around $600 per ton. That means paper costs around 0.06 cents per gram, or put another way, a dollar bill is about 16 times its weight in paper.

Unregulated currency FTW

Bitcoin's not unregulated. Its regulations are simply enforced by technical rather than legal means. Or are you perhaps confusing currency regulations with regulations against extortion?

What is the value of get around the law technology?

When the law is for sale to the highest bidder, technology that lets everyone else get around it is quite valuable indeed.

Other than greed, I can't understand why they don't just make an agreement with Google or Mozilla - preferably both - to have one of their browsers automatically installed with Windows.

Control. If it's delivered by Microsoft then Microsoft gets the blame when something goes wrong, and rightly so. Also, giving up competition entirely means giving up control over the future of the Net. Finally, having a browser means being able to test net-facing code before implementing it on server.

You mean "script kiddies"

Terrorists. There are bound to be a few muslims in an international group like that.

Tyson shouldn't clarify his statements to appease people who are offended, because it's implying that he "may" be wrong. It's hamstering, and that's not what men do.

Obviously they do, since Tyson did and is a man. Why should he, or anyone for that matter, care what someone else thinks their particular configuration of genitalia obligates them to?

Be a hamster or be macho, but if you're either just to fulfil other people's expectations, you're really nothing but a puppet.

That also reduces the ability of the company to coordinate your purchasing information (though your name and address are probably relatively unique, unless you also use single-use versions of those, like random apartment numbers for your house.)

I smell a business opportunity for an anonymizing postal service! Go to their site to create a fake (but real-looking) address, give that to the shipper, and have the package delivered to your real address.

I think a story like this belongs, because it can bring together knowledgeable people who can speculate on possible technical issues that may have been the cause of a problem...

Not to mention speculate about the worthlessness of those lost.

The cause of the crash was almost certainly being hit by a thunderstorm, rather than a technical issue, seeing how the plane was last heard of when it asked for permission to dodge.

And how exactly is the NSA going to crack into my self-signed certs, with the CA sitting on a box with no connection to the Internet? Short of breaking into the location where the computer is, I'd say with reasonable certainty that the NSA cannot crack the certs that are used for my interoffice VPN.

Malware. If your machines don't get updated, they're vulnerable due to unpatched holes, and if they do get updated, they're vulnerable to malicious code insertion through those updates.

If we do it, people say that no one loses anything if you make a copy, and that sharing has been part of human culture for ages. These people should have nothing to whine about if Sony then goes to do the same thing.

Sony has been one of the advocates for de facto life-ruining punishment for copyright violation. They will almost certainly continue being that in the future too. So why shouldn't they get hoisted by their own petard when it turns out they're not just cruel but also hypocrites? Avenge their victims and dethrone the malefactor.