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srmann

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Beat the Fed 11 years ago

A popular modern economic theory is that if prices rise slowly over time, people will tend to purchase today instead of saving money to purchase tomorrow, since they believe the price of what they want will be higher tomorrow. If prices drop slowly over time, people will tend to save as long as possible before purchasing, since they believe the price of what they want will be lower tomorrow. Since simple economic productivity is measured by summing the amount of dollars spent, the theory is that for these reasons low inflation leads to productivity.

Beat the Fed 11 years ago

This "game" seems to allow me to modify the outcome of the Fed's policies, and not the inputs. Unless it's advocating price controls as a means to economic prosperity, I don't see the relevance.

Am I missing something here?

The idea of lowering the learning curve for website development has fascinated me for the past 10-ish years during my employment in the content management system industry. Every once in a while the idea that a tool can replace a developer surfaces, energizes a few people, and then falls flat for one reason or another. Yet it always resurfaces, likely due to the revolutionary nature of a successful solution.

The most common reason for failure I've seen seems to stem from the idea that a website requires a developer due to a website requiring massive amounts of meticulously written text in an esoteric language; by replacing this text with a graphical interface, a website no longer requires a developer who understands how to write this text. Experience leads me to believe a developer serves a much different purpose in building websites.

Consider applying this logic to another problem, such as writing. If one builds a tool allowing non-writers to drag correctly spelled words and punctuation onto a page, then a non-writer now has the ability to write gripping novels, impactful research papers, and influential editorials -- and they can do this without knowing how to spell. This doesn't make sense, of course, since writing a book requires a certain understanding of how to communicate effectively, an achievement demanding a much more clever tool.

Much like writing a book, writing software also demands a much more clever tool than a graphical, drag-and-drop interface. Developers understand more than how to write text in odd languages; they understand how to solve problems. Creating a graphical interface for building websites doesn't remove the necessity of a developer. On the contrary, it creates more jobs for more developers who specialize in building applications using a drag-and-drop interface.