Technology has always been deflationary. But you don't put off buying a computer because it will be cheaper next year. Nobody seems to be putting off buying GPUs despite scary depreciation and a blistering pace of new product introductions that are ever cheaper faster and better.
only really faster and better if you don't use them for gaming, unfortunately. Upscaling and frame generation is not a better GPU, it's one with a band-aid applied to hide the fact that it actually did not get much faster.
RTX doesn't count to me either, because that's some bullcrap pushed by gpu manufacturers that requires the aformentioned upscaling and frame generation techniques to fake actually being anywhere close to what gpu manufacturers want gamers to believe.
> when prices go down instead of up. It is generally considered harmful: both because it is usually brought on by something really bad (like a severe economic contraction)
Or, you know, technological improvements that increase efficiency of production, or bountiful harvests, or generally anything else that suddenly expands the supply at the current price level across the economy. Thankfully, we have mechanisms in place that keep the prices inflating even when those unlikely events happen.
Deflation is about all prices going down. Just a few decreasing is normal.
Anyway, WTF, economics communication has a huge problem. I've seen the article's explanation repeated in plenty of places, it's completely wrong and borderline nonsense.
The reason deflation is bad is not because it makes people postpone buying things. It's because some prices, like salaries or rent just refuse to go down. That causes rationing of those things.
See "price stickiness" and what is simplified as "menu reprinting costs"; there's usually a cost associated with changing prices, and a cost associated with renegotiating prices for everything that's not being sold on a spot market. People cannot buy housing at spot, and while spot-labour pricing is definitely a thing for some services it's so socially destabilizing for anything skilled that most workforces operate on salary.
The reverse of this is that high inflation tends to cause a lot of strikes, because salaries refuse to go up and very high levels of inflation need salary repricing every month or even week.
Rent and salaries don't like going down because of debt. Debts are denominated in currency units and go up with inflation (interest rates have a component to correct for inflation) but they don't decrease if the currency gains value over time (this would need negative interest rates). I suppose that's something that could be done with regulation.
Does anyone else agree with this the premise of this article? Is it sensible to put off building things now because it will get even cheaper and faster later?
Maybe the time value of time is only increasing as we go.
I agree. I had several projects lined up and I delayed one because it used same tech as another significantly smaller project, so I learned the tech on the smaller simpler project and then used the knowledge on the bigger project. It was beneficial to not do the bigger project first.
The conclusion that you should wait to build anything is an illustration of the danger of economic inflation that the author started with. I'm not sure why he thinks the economic version is toxic but the technological version is a good idea though.
The answer to should we just sit around and wait for better technology is obviously no. We gain a lot of knowledge by building with what we have; builders now inform where technology improves. (The front page has an article about Voyager being a light day away...)
I think the more interesting question is what would happen if we induced some kind of 2% "technological inflation" - every year it gets harder to make anything. Would that push more orgs to build more things? Everyone pours everything they have into making products now because their resources will go less far next year.
Technology has always been deflationary. But you don't put off buying a computer because it will be cheaper next year. Nobody seems to be putting off buying GPUs despite scary depreciation and a blistering pace of new product introductions that are ever cheaper faster and better.
only really faster and better if you don't use them for gaming, unfortunately. Upscaling and frame generation is not a better GPU, it's one with a band-aid applied to hide the fact that it actually did not get much faster.
RTX doesn't count to me either, because that's some bullcrap pushed by gpu manufacturers that requires the aformentioned upscaling and frame generation techniques to fake actually being anywhere close to what gpu manufacturers want gamers to believe.
Some people do put off buying cellphones and laptops when they know a new model will come out every year.
> when prices go down instead of up. It is generally considered harmful: both because it is usually brought on by something really bad (like a severe economic contraction)
Or, you know, technological improvements that increase efficiency of production, or bountiful harvests, or generally anything else that suddenly expands the supply at the current price level across the economy. Thankfully, we have mechanisms in place that keep the prices inflating even when those unlikely events happen.
Deflation is about all prices going down. Just a few decreasing is normal.
Anyway, WTF, economics communication has a huge problem. I've seen the article's explanation repeated in plenty of places, it's completely wrong and borderline nonsense.
The reason deflation is bad is not because it makes people postpone buying things. It's because some prices, like salaries or rent just refuse to go down. That causes rationing of those things.
See "price stickiness" and what is simplified as "menu reprinting costs"; there's usually a cost associated with changing prices, and a cost associated with renegotiating prices for everything that's not being sold on a spot market. People cannot buy housing at spot, and while spot-labour pricing is definitely a thing for some services it's so socially destabilizing for anything skilled that most workforces operate on salary.
The reverse of this is that high inflation tends to cause a lot of strikes, because salaries refuse to go up and very high levels of inflation need salary repricing every month or even week.
Rent and salaries don't like going down because of debt. Debts are denominated in currency units and go up with inflation (interest rates have a component to correct for inflation) but they don't decrease if the currency gains value over time (this would need negative interest rates). I suppose that's something that could be done with regulation.
I agree. It's super common that the price of vegetables goes up and down arround the year, in particular due to the harvest season.
>It's because some prices, like salaries or rent just refuse to go down.
a common argument, but one that doesn't bear out in the absence of regulation enforcing that.
Does anyone else agree with this the premise of this article? Is it sensible to put off building things now because it will get even cheaper and faster later?
Maybe the time value of time is only increasing as we go.
Actually yes. I wanted to get into UI programming with GTK 2 and right now im waiting for GTK 6 to stabilize so i can commit to it.
Knowing that GTK (n-1) will soon be obsolete is enough reason to not put effort into learning it.
I agree. I had several projects lined up and I delayed one because it used same tech as another significantly smaller project, so I learned the tech on the smaller simpler project and then used the knowledge on the bigger project. It was beneficial to not do the bigger project first.
The conclusion that you should wait to build anything is an illustration of the danger of economic inflation that the author started with. I'm not sure why he thinks the economic version is toxic but the technological version is a good idea though.
The answer to should we just sit around and wait for better technology is obviously no. We gain a lot of knowledge by building with what we have; builders now inform where technology improves. (The front page has an article about Voyager being a light day away...)
I think the more interesting question is what would happen if we induced some kind of 2% "technological inflation" - every year it gets harder to make anything. Would that push more orgs to build more things? Everyone pours everything they have into making products now because their resources will go less far next year.