[alecst]

I think you might have been a little harsh on Walter. Perhaps the answer is more of a "yes and no" depending on your point of view. It does seem like inflation/deflation kind of canceled each other out before moving off the gold standard.

https://www.businessinsider.com/chart-inflation-since-1775-2...

> It is probable that in 1913, while financial panics were not uncommon, high inflation was still largely seen by the founders of the Fed as a relatively rare phenomenon associated with wars and their immediate aftermath. Figure 1 plots the US price level from 1775 (set equal to one) until 2012. In 1913 prices were only about 20 percent higher than in 1775 and around 40 percent lower than in 1813, during the War of 1812. Whatever the mandates of the Federal Reserve, it is clear that the evolution of the price level in the United States is dominated by the abandonment of the gold standard in 1933 and the adoption of fiat money subsequently. One hundred years after its creation, consumer prices are about 30 times higher than what they were in 1913. This pattern, in varying orders of magnitudes, repeats itself across nearly all countries.

Not my area of expertise and no skin in the game, just wanted to point this out.

[tombert]

I am harsh on Walter because he tends to argue in bad faith in order to support some weird pro-business libertarian world view. He's super active on HN (as am I) so I have argued with him and there are multiple times he has said things that are outright dishonest (like once claiming that incompetent workers immediately get fired from corporations, a post I can't find quickly but is in my history somewhere, or trying to paint me as some alien-believing UFO fanboy which I am not).

So when he makes absolutist statements like "there was no inflation in the US before 1914", which is a typical springboard for libertarians to start complaining about the federal reserve and propose some idiotic Ayn Rand nonsense, I have trouble not being literal here.

[WalterBright]

The Fed is the cause of endemic inflation. Look at the chart I linked to.

By the way, I have never read Rand nor quoted her.

[tombert]

> By the way, I have never read Rand nor quoted her.

Fair enough. I tend to use Rand interchangeably for libertarian stuff.

[throwmeaway222]

There is nothing wrong with being a UFO fanboy - anyone that is not these days is psychotic. There have been so many leaks at this point, if you don't believe that's dangerous.

You're all waiting for Trump to claim it or something? It's already been announced.

[tombert]

Kind of off course for this convo, but no I do not think that recent "evidence" of UFOs is very compelling. Feel free to believe what you'd like but I do not think it's extra-terrestrials.

Even if we do some phenomena that we cannot explain as of right now, that does not imply aliens, it only implies that there's something we can't (yet) explain. A lot of the videos that were being hailed as smoking guns seemed to be a combination of camera artifacts and just optical parallax and stuff like that. It doesn't pass my metric for aliens yet.

The thing is, I would absolutely love to be wrong on this. It would be insanely cool to be part of the first humans who found extra-terrestrial life, so if anything I'm biased in favor of these things being aliens, but as of right now I am not convinced.