That's a common misunderstanding.

Agreed.

But the main drivers of the inflation right now are energy and food costs. Those costs are not rising because profiteering companies are buying up tons of those. Speculation does play a big part here, but that's more the area of the financial industry. Which is an industry whose profits will grow even further when hiking interest rates, in fact.

There's also the supply chain that's still not running smoothly and random China lockdowns hampering production, but again those are unrelated to big businesses having lots of money to spend, and hiking interest rates is not going to help with that either.

Here's another economist arguing why central banks raising interest is not going to help, and in fact only going to make things worse.

The main point is that the current inflation is not there because people have too much money to spend. And raising interest rates is not going to address any of the actual causes of inflation, while it is indeed going to result in a world of hurt. Not just for bitcoin gamblers, but also for people that used to get by only just, and now are at the limit of their spending because of rising gas and food prices, and will be pushed under if their mortgage gets way more expensive on top of that.

Because companies that are forced to treat their employees decently overall perform worse?

I recently read another article (in Dutch) about salt-based energy storage, although in this case it was heat rather than electricity.

The basic principle there is:
* you have a salt that has an exothermic reaction with water, so add water and you get heat. The heat gets recuperated by a heat exchanger.
* when you want to 'recharge' the salt, you boil it until all absorbed water is gone

As long as the salt is kept dry, it keeps its (chemical) energy and hence there's no storage loss over time either. The main challenges were finding a salt that could be reused many times without the crystals shattering or becoming one big blob, and a compact and efficient way to extract the heat when rehydrating.

All hail to salt-based energy storage!

Current inflation is barely driven by consumers having too much money and overly spending it. It's mainly driven by high energy and grain prices because of the war, disrupted supply chains because of covid, and still some disrupted production due to covid. You can't stop the war by raising interest rates, you won't reduce energy prices by raising interest rates, you won't restore supply chains by raising interest rates, and you won't restore production by raising interest rates.

All you will do is make it harder for people with variable interest rate loans to pay them back, make new consumer loans more expensive, make growing production more expensive (by making loans for companies more expensive)... Basically increase inflation even more. All that while many people already have trouble paying their bills.

In other words, saying you will fight the inflation by hiking interest rates/making money more expensive is saying that people who already have trouble to pay their bills for basic needs should be forced to reduce their needs further and/or be pushed into greater poverty. But hey, if all you have is a hammer, what else can you do but bash in heads?

That problem is not limited to senators though, and should be covered under sharing insider information (which is illegal). It's true you cannot block that by construction (unlike holding shares), but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to fix the most glaring issues. It's a general thing with corruption, or crime in general: you can never have airtight regulation that solves it all. But this doesn't mean that all regulation is useless (nor that more regulation is always better, of course: at some point it can become counterproductive or the side-effects may start outweighing the benefits).

I'd argue that decent people with a brain would divest from companies they regulate. And allowing this may entice less decent people (with or without a brain) to enter into politics for all the wrong reasons.

Dirty bombs turn out to be not really more dangerous than regular bombs (except to the extent that they can cause more panic): https://youtu.be/wuNxKDVG1Uk?t...

And that reminds me of Winsongs 95.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Not necessarily. If they'd been stirring up controversy left and right until now, you might have heard from them as well.

That's one indication they were doing their job well, I'd say.

The blog post to which I linked literally describes that in the "Tables 6,7,8...N+5" section. This is incidentally the post in the series that describes how you would actually implement an ECS system.

Have you talked to any gameplay programmers about ECS? I have (I work in a game development company), and while the composition is certainly considered to be a nice-to-have, the things they really salivate about are the performance implications of reducing cache misses and the parallelisation opportunities. Even before switching to ECS, our game objects were already split into small "hot" and large "cold" sections since forever in an attempt to optimise cache hits. This is by no means an issue that's limited to Playstation, or something that only provides big wins on a platform like that. On modern CPUs, effective cache usage is paramount to get any kind of decent performance.

You can just publish things for everyone to see, like the person who did the original blog post on ECS did. Of course that won't stop patent trolls and others from trying to patent it anyone (and to occasionally succeed), but then again neither does patenting. I wouldn't want to feed all owners of overlapping patents in the world.