This will not be popular but oh well.

The cause of inflation is: getting something for nothing. One can see how this notion would be unpopular, because, well, literally anyone would like to get something without working for it/for free. And some people are better than others at doing that, with varying definitions for “better”, “people”, “something”, and “nothing”.

The classic example of inflation is the one everyone knows: a store that raises prices because of theft. A skateboard maker builds skateboards, a skateboard gets stolen, the price goes up to cover the loss of the things that went into the skateboard (materials, labor, etc) so the builder can still eat. The price of skateboards has inflated because of theft; the thief got something for nothing. Fact of life.

Inflation in currency is caused by fractional reserve banking; the ability to lend more currency on paper than actually exists physically. You actually have to print more money in order to keep the system from grinding to a halt. The inflation would eventually resolve, but when interest is applied to the lent money it does not. Why manipulating the interest rate is related to combatting inflation lays in here. Find a decently long YouTube video about how fractional reserve banking works to find out more. I’d provide a link but I can’t find the good one right now. Suffice to say, inflation went up, because the banking system got money for having money. Fact of life.

Prices way over the cost of the good due to corporate greed is another one, pretty similar to the classic theft example, just modified. The price of something goes up, not to cover a loss, but “just because” someone wants more money, when it comes down to it. You can quarrel all day about the fine details on that. Suffice to say inflation went up because they got more money for something by essentially doing nothing more. Fact of life.

The interesting thing about that last one is that the problem is compounded by (what could be considered the “excess”) money going back into the fractional reserve banking system, especially without there having been any real work done to justify the added cost. You can kind of get a glimpse of how the interest rate is tied to inflation, and why raising it also doesn’t fix everything; cheaper money means people don’t care about the needlessly higher price of things as much, so if you raise the cost of money people have to be concerned again. But by raising the rate, the banking system is getting more money for no “real” reason, so…

So I suppose, knowing what we know now, it might be better to say, rather than “something for nothing”: receiving something for less than it is genuinely worth, or the flip side, selling something for more than it is genuinely worth, or maybe just simply, getting value without working for it.

If this all sounds insane to you, and you are thinking of replying, before you do, you really should learn about how fractional reserve banking works. It is the thing that underpins everything in modern life, and is the literal foundation of our world economy. Not knowing how it works is like not knowing why you get sick from drinking still water on the ground. You can still get along without knowing it, but if you know, it sure helps you to navigate the world better. Do watch the most detailed video or something you can find.

Dude, you are the greatest of all time. Thank you for posting this.

Edit: do/have you ever used sausage anywhere in there?

making a carbon copy

Is making it difficult?

Might be this dude; it is not free, just very affordable in their market. It turns out making it affordable also brings in a lot of revenue.

https://youtu.be/44Do5x5abRY

O.C.: Have you consulted about this “tables” approach with other Lua developers?

I.T.: After that, I went back to Dmitry and asked him if my understanding of “everything is a table” was correct and, if so, why Lua was designed this way. Dmitry told me that Lua was created at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro and that it was acceptable for Pontifical Catholic Universities to design programming languages this way.

Lol what? Is there some kind of inside joke about Catholics and tables?

“Do you have any bovine lactations?”

So you’ve got me thinking about a potential dark browser pattern relating to this that I think was introduced by Google in Chrome.

Wayyyy back in the day, you might have a page full of animated gifs all doing their thing, and what you could do once the page was loaded was to hit the stop button (or hit the stop button twice if the page was still loading), and all of the gifs would stop animating. Today you couldn’t do that, because the stop button has been intertwined with the refresh button; once the page loads, the stop button turns into the refresh button.

I bring this up, because there used to be a simple universal mechanism to indicate that you wanted to stop things from moving/animating, and it would do so, but now there isn’t. Funny how that mechanism has been subtly removed from an advertiser’s browser, where it is in their best interest to keep the ads blinking and changing to draw your attention to them.

It’s too bad that there is no longer a mechanism that is as simple and universal that can stop movement. Now every site has to devise its own way to handle stopping movement, and there will be competing standards and methods, and it will no doubt end up being a pain intentionally, just like cookie popups.

Maybe browsers should bring back universal stop for animated gifs, SVG, video, and (some) CSS, with an event to notify the page script.