fairenough42

Thanks for the detailed reply!

Some of your point sounds a bit like this (please correct me if I'm wrong): "Deflation is always bad because it could be hyperdeflation." Namely, if deflation is significant enough that it incentivizes me foregoing a purchase for a few months (and then another few months, etc) it's _significant_ deflation. But why not make the equivalent argument "inflation must be bad because we can imagine hyperinflation" as well?

But instead of hyperdeflation, if we had -0.1% risk-free interest rates, would people really forego all purchases? I don't see why. If I need a new toaster, or some clothes, or gas for my car, I would not delay the purchase for 6 months to save 0.05% on the purchase. This seems like a realistic number if the deflation is caused by a population contraction in a country with an advanced economy.

It seems real-world encounters with deflation (at least since the inception of central banking and planned expansions of money supplies) have come largely during periods of _sharp_ economic contraction. But is such a scenario really comparable to a slow decrease in population?

Moreover, if monetary policy can offset deflation, what creates the need for immigration to offset the deflation? Why isn't the monetary policy enough?

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflation#Effects, it sounds like it would _increase_ the incentive to lend, but would decrease the incentive to _borrow_. Inflation, conversely, seems to decrease the incentive to lend (the inflation-adjusted return is less than the nominal rate). Naively, it's not clear to me why the latter is better for the economic system we live in (would that be free-market captialism? or something else?). Can you elaborate?

Either way, both of these seem different from eliminating the incentive to loan or borrow. People know how to consider inflation-adjusted rates of return and invest accordingly. Soon these same lessons will be applied in negative interest rate scenarios, which I guess counts as deflation.

Tangential question: why is deflation "jail"? As a follow on, is deflation caused by a declining population different from deflation caused by a sudden recession?

Are they moving into ads as the hardware business dries up for them? In my personal experience, many people don't replace their phones as often as they did, say, 10 years ago. A similar story played out earlier with laptops. There's no obvious new hardware category for Apple to pivot into so maybe software is their next play.

https://google.aip.dev/ gives lots of advice for structuring a gRPC API. What you say is mostly in line with that, with some exceptions. For example https://google.aip.dev/135 suggests that a delete operation on a resource should normally return google.protobuf.Empty. Of course, this is implicitly a sum type; you either get an empty response or an error message. If you needed to return anything else, you're not just implementing a delete. Two exceptions they call out are soft-deletes (not just a delete...) returning the resource itself, and a delete that's a long-running operation.

Remind me of the relationship between the Senate and testing for college admissions.

Why do you feel the need to name white people specifically?

Or a new normal? We'll see in the coming days and weeks how functional the US is.

Did you have retry logic that triggered when Sheets started failing requests? Maybe that looked like a DDoS attack while the problem persisted.

Perhaps not a mistake at all. Maybe it's been the point all along but it took a while to get there.