After watching that, I developed the following opinion:

Any time somebody is evaluating you (for investment, for a job etc) they are going to have an idea in their head of what they want. They will put you through a filtering process and decide whether or not to let you through.

What most people don't consider is that the filter is not just there to help the decison maker, it's there to help them too. You get to present yourself however you want so you can choose the inputs to the filter.

If you don't want to have an investor who would think your choice of clothing is important, don't wear a suit. If you don't want to work somewhere that chooses to interview people based on the amount of bullshit in their CV, don't put bullshit in yours, and so on.

edit: I forgot to address the question with regards to customers. In that case the answer seems to be "whatever the customer expects" since you presumably don't want to put a barrier in the way of them buying your stuff.

You could keep flagging to get rid of abuse and adjust the rate with the story upvote so that time on the main page is still a function of popularity.

On the other hand, low-scoring "show" submissions might especially stand a lot to gain from constructive feedback, something (as noted) they probably don't get when they don't make it to the main page.

Separating show submissions to a new tab allows you to use upvotes appropriately and distinctly. I would upvote startups as "news" in a different way than I would upvote startups as "review-worthy."

I see how spammers would create fake 'review my startup' posts to try and game the amount of front page time they got but if flagging is still applied to these posts then they would disappear quickly as people recognise that the submissions do not fit the 'review my startup' criteria and flag them.

Maybe I'm missing something obvious.

Perhaps an alternative might be reducing the amount of upvotes that a 'review my startup' post requires to get on the main page in the first place. Or perhaps some combination of the two.

Actually welfare benefit rates have already been frozen. Couple that with an increase in prices in food/utilities etc and benefits claimants are already being hit hard.

These rioters seem to be primarily young people in areas of high unemployment so it is reasonable to assume that a substantial percentage of them may have experienced financial difficulty recently.

However, the alternative (inflation) would have the same effect. See 1920's Germany/Austria for example - 'When Money Dies' by Adam Fergusson is the book on this.

I don't think this is necessarily true. Pre-euro, Greece devalued the drachma several times in order to manage its debts and trade balance (by around 15% each time in 1983, 1985, and 1998), but it didn't lead to rioting in the streets.

Inflation in relatively small amounts is only going to really hurt savers so I guess if the population distribution is skewed towards more people with debt than with savings (isn't it always!) then a government might be able to use it to reduce the likelyhood and scale of unrest.

As long as the UK government emits gilts in pounds, they will never become unable to pay the resulting obligations. So: where exactly is the problem? Where are the Emperor's clothes?

2. What makes you believe that unusually high inflation would result if the UK government reversed its austerity stance and implemented some kind of public works program?

Inflation is largely the result of the normal processes in the economy whereby the relative valuation of different goods changes, and different actors in the economy strive to increase their share of the total income. If you actually look behind the scenes how the various inflation measures are computed, you will see that the different types of goods in the baskets used usually show quite different behavior. Most of the time, a few goods and services will be decreasing in price while the majority increases in price, though at (often vastly) different speed. So what you are really seeing is changes in relative price, which reflects changes in how goods are valued. Without this process, the market could not function properly.

This process is biased towards larger nominal prices on average for a number of reasons - mostly because it is rare that somebody voluntarily decreases their profit - but there is nothing inherently bad about that. You could think of it as the Red Queen Hypothesis of economics.

It is clear that, beyond those processes, inflation can be pushed higher by excessive aggregate demand or by increasing resource prices - price increases in the last months were dominated by energy prices.

So I could rephrase my question as: What makes you believe that turning away from austerity would create excessive aggregate demand in the UK? Keep in mind that the current context is one of high unemployment and idle factories, i.e. there is more supply capacity than is currently being used.

As a final note: I think it is quite disingenuous to jump directly from "there could be higher inflation" to "1920's Germany". Those scenarios are entirely different beasts.

First of all, I think we are working on different definitions of 'inflation'. There seems to be two schools of thought on this: some people think inflation is driven by prices and some people think prices are driven by inflation.

Your comment suggests you are in the first camp and I am in the second. I define inflation as simply being 'when the government prints more money'. Prices increase when the money supply increases. Businesses have to raise prices when this happens because otherwise they will reduce the buying power of their profit.

I wasn't talking about the UK specifically. I was just trying to say that, in general, I think the outcome in terms of social unrest is going to be about the same whether you reduce the amount of money you give people or whether you give them money that is worth less.

To be clear, I didn't say that reversing the austerity measures would result directly in hyper-inflation or that we'd end up like 1920's Germany. I'd agree that that kind of scenario is a long way off.

I would posit that this definition is useless in a fiat currency. Under a gold standard, the government printing money was relevant because that increased the amount of money, which in turn had some meaning because of the gold-to-money ratio. But in a fiat currency no such meaning exists.

Furthermore, has whether the government printed more or less money actually ever affected you directly, provably in your personal life? I bet that it hasn't. [1] But I bet that the Consumer Price Index does affect your personal life. So CPI as measure for inflation is actually useful, unlike your definition.

Finally, it would be nice if you used clearer language to describe what you are talking about. I'm sure that it is obvious to you that the government literally printing money is completely irrelevant. But your use of such language makes it hard for me to understand what you are actually talking about (I just appreciate a clear conversation on the matter).

Are you talking about the government spending more money? Clearly you can't be saying that government spending is always inflationary, can you? And if you did, I hope you'd at least acknowledge that it's just the spending part that matters, i.e. it is irrelevant whether we're talking about government, foreign, or private spending.

Are you talking about the Fed increasing the size of the Monetary Base, as happened with Quantitative Easing? In that case, hasn't that QE/QE2 demonstrated clearly enough to you that there is no causal link from the MB to Consumer Price Indices?

Are you talking about the government increasing the amount of money in terms of M1-M3? In that case, you'd be woefully misinformed, since that amount largely depends on bank lending, and so the government has basically no direct influence over it.

Are you talking about something else that I've missed?

I wasn't talking about the UK specifically. I was just trying to say that, in general, I think the outcome in terms of social unrest is going to be about the same whether you reduce the amount of money you give people or whether you give them money that is worth less.

There is actually an interesting technical argument against that stance that dates back to the days of Keynes. Basically, what progressive economists were (and still are) arguing is that for most people, X% inflation is better than an X% decrease in income. The reason is that most people have long-running contracts forcing them to pay nominally fixed amounts, such as rents or mortgages.

Here's an illustrating computation with very simple numbers. Say I earn 1000# per month, of which 500# are committed to such contracts. 500# are available for "discretionary" spending (food, clothes, etc.). I now have the choice between 10% inflation and a 10% reduction in income.

In the case of 10% inflation, I still have 500# available for discretionary spending, only it's worth the equivalent of 450# of the old money.

In the case of 10% reduction in income, I earn 900# with my contractual commitments remaining the same, so I only have 400# left for discretionary spending.

Clearly, inflation is better for me. The situation is different for people with significant net financial assets of course, but the majority of the population does not fall into that category.

[1] Unless by printing money you mean spending money and you are a government contractor.

No, this is not the reason Keynesians argue for inflation. Keynesians believe that nominal wages are sticky - people will not work at a nominal wage lower than their pre-crisis wage.

Inflation is a way of reducing real wages (a necessary step in the recovery) while allowing people to maintain their prior nominal wage.

Strangely, a large number of people who support Keynesian economics also support measures aimed at increasing wage stickiness (unionization, minimum wage laws, etc). This last fact is something I can't figure out.

There really isn't a conflict between being supporting Keynesian-style anti-cyclical government behaviour (this is what most people mean when they say they support Keynesian economics) and resisting nominal wage decreases.

From YC's perspective investing in several startups doing the same (or very similar) things increases the chance that at least one of them might get somewhere with it.

When you fire up rebol, perl, ruby, python, awk for the first time, they don't send you off to poke around in preference screens. Type and go.

I wonder how they are repaired when broken. If you can fix them with wood glue they might be of more interest because it's easier/cheaper than getting somebody to weld it back together for you.