djm

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.