Yeah, that's why when I go out for a day at the beach, the sunscreen I put on blocks radio waves as well as UV light.
Wait, no it doesn't - because non-ionizing radiation doesn't cause cancer at noticeable rates.
Look, you're right that non-ionizing radiation may, in rare circumstances, cause some sort of harm to the DNA in a cell.
However, that doesn't matter! Humans are accustomed to wandering around underneath a gigantic, broad-spectrum electromagnetic transmitter (we like to call it the Sun). Your DNA is assaulted all the goddamn time, by pretty much everything in your environment.
And you know what your body does? It kills cells that are acting funny. It does this quite frequently. It's essentially a Nazi about genetic purity. If there's the least little bit of derp in a cell, it will kill that cell and everything in the area.
All this means that even though non-ionizing radiation does occasionally damage the DNA of a cell, your body will fix it pretty quickly - and even in your post you admit that it such an occurrence is particularly rare (that's why they call it non-ionizing, after all). The reason why ionizing radiation can be bad is because, as you said, almost every particle causes an ionization event - if it messes up your cells to the point where your body misses something (and this can take literally years of sunbathing), you get cancer.
If you're concerned about getting cancer from non-ionizing radiation, and you care at all about being consistent, you should also be searching out sunblock lotions that block in the microwave and radio spectrum (good luck finding that).
You just don't seem to realize that the sort of damage a phone could cause is the sort of damage your body deals with all the time, without you noticing - and cell phones don't put any more strain on the body than walking around in the sun for a while.
The NASA data says our models are wrong. Big fucking deal. We know that!
What this data doesn't change is the more important graph, this one right here. This is the graph that says "We're screwed"; we use models to calculate the magnitude of the screwedness. If it turns out we're not that screwed, then great! We should still make changes, but we've got time to do it in. If it turns out that we are screwed, then we need to speed it up.
Fundamentally, models predict the future. We know about AGW because of data that has been gathered in the present, about the past. Yes, the models are imperfect and incorrect, but that doesn't change the solid foundation of data that AGW rests on - and hey, as this article shows, we're continually improving the models too.
But I did read them, and I saw no evidence of foul play. The editors of Nature agree with me, so I'm not just crazy (it's always nice to have some confirmation); however, it's entirely possible that I've missed something, and since your opinion differs from mine I was wondering what led you to form your opinion.
This is why I asked for a specific link; none of the e-mails I read show a "the ends justifies the means" philosophy among the CRU leadership. I assume you've read some e-mails that I haven't, and thus would be able to point me towards the ones that led you to this conclusion. The archive is still available here, if you change your mind; surely you remember some key words or phrases from the e-mails you read, and would be able to find them quickly?
Your first link is to a general Slashdot posting about the fact that the e-mails were leaked; that's not a specific e-mail referencing "an ends justifies the means philosophy", as the original poster promised. I hope we can all agree that the leak happened, and that this fact is not in doubt.
Your second link is another Slashdot posting about the fact that the e-mails were leaked, referencing a blog post at Watt's Up With That. The referenced blog post pulls out a few e-mails:
1. Someone mentioning that in a class of journals it is customary to release data and (presumably source) code, but then saying that their legal department believes (I'm guessing from IPR) intellectual property rights associated with such things do not allow such a release. Which, interestingly enough, is topical! The reason why there's a "virtually all" in the title of this Slashdot article is because some countries refuse to let their data be released - they claim ownership of the data and do not want it in the public domain, for whatever reason.
2. The infamous "Mike's Nature trick" e-mail, which has been discussed ad nauseum and does not reference any foul play (if it had, wouldn't Nature have retracted the paper originally referenced by "Nature trick"? They haven't - as your third link mentions later)
3. An e-mail from a scientist who is uncomfortable getting directly involved in politics by signing a letter to the Senate; he recommends letting the AGU (the American Geophysical Union) do it, since they are a political body. His primary concern is that this is not something scientists should be doing as individuals, and cautions other scientists to not jump in without the support of their co-authors.
None of these are indicative of any sort of foul play or even concerns about global warming. There are a thousand comments after that, so hopefully you didn't mean there was evidence somewhere in there? Presumably the editor of the blog would have pulled better e-mails up into the main body of the post if such things were noted in the comments.
Your third link, much like the first, mentions no specific e-mails, but funnily enough references another Slashdot article that you left out of your list; perhaps it is because the article is about the journal Nature reviewing the e-mails, and stating that they do not form a "substantive reason for concern." As a sibling poster said, the rest of the article is about the way the leaked e-mails were used to trump up a baseless witchhunt.
So, I have to wonder - if these emails suggesting questionable motives and practices exist, why can't you link directly to them? If you're having trouble finding the archive online, there's a copy right here.
If I don't see those e-mails despite looking for them, perhaps it is because they just don't seem to exist?
I really hope you're right, though; I would very much prefer to live in a world where everything looks fine and there is a global conspiracy of scientists to make us think it isn't, than in a world where things are looking scary and scientists are trying to warn us about it, but we're mostly ignoring them.
The issue was that disclosed emails brought into question the motives of the leadership of the CRU who expressed an ends justifies the means philosophy.
Really? I don't remember seeing anything like that in the CRU e-mails. Since they're freely available, do you mind pointing out where that's stated?
A decade later, Sega is out of consoles, Sony is in trouble, and Microsoft is finally #1 in console sales, having passed Nintendo this year.
They might be #1 in sales, but that's only because everyone who's ever entertained more than a passing desire for a Wii has one already. And I bet you anything that this is Xbox 360 sales including things like the current promotion where if you get a Windows computer worth at least $700 you get a "free" Xbox - something Nintnedo never did.
I'm on my phone right now so I won't look it up, but I bet you that the Wii still has the Xbox 360 beat on number of units sold over the product's lifetime - and even more, I bet it still will when both consoles are retired.
Yeah, people seem to forget that if the whole Microsoft thing hadn't worked out, all Bill Gates would have had to fall back on is the million dollar trust fund his parents had set up in his name.
Ramsey is a multi-millionaire and has a terrible credit score. Why? Because he doesn't participate in the system, not because he doesn't have money.
Well yes, that's true to a point - he does have a terrible credit score, in part because he doesn't participate in the system. However, non-participation won't get you a "terrible" credit score, just a bad one.
Want to know what will get you a terrible credit score? Something like this:
One of Ramsey's largest creditors was sold to a larger bank, which began to take a harder look at Ramsey's borrowing habits. The bank demanded he pay $1.2 million worth of short-term notes within 90 days, forcing him to file for bankruptcy relief.
So yeah. He abused the credit system and got burned, and now people are less willing to give him credit. Who'da thunk it.
Let me get this straight...a party where mostly liberals are signing up so far is centrist...because they say so? And they are viable...because TFA says so? Anybody else see the problem here?
Hey, if they split the liberal vote and get a conservative elected, that's like being centrist, isn't it?
Dude, there was an article on Slashdot just two ago saying that the media corporations had suppressed a study showing that B is effectively true for music and video (the study showed that pirates are better customers than non-pirates, which implies that pirates in general are likely to purchase the things that they pirate given that they 1. pirate a lot of stuff and 2. buy a lot of stuff).
Why would you assume that games are be any different?
When I tell people that, those who treated the game like a test almost laugh (some say they finished in 5 hours, which I'm not even sure is technically possible), while others say they explored every nook and cranny and it took them 15 hours or more.
The people who tell you they finished it in five hours are relying on the Steam "time played" count, which is notoriously bugged and basically has no idea how long you've really been playing the game.
And anyway, the reason why you would use NAND as RAM instead of the current DRAM if they could work out the kinks is because NAND doesn't need power to maintain state. This means that you could be doing something on your computer, kill the power without any sort of warning at all, and then plug it in later and resume exactly where you were before. It would lead to, for instance, near-zero battery usage sleep in mobile devices; they would be able to almost shut off when you're not using them, using only very little power to do wireless upkeep type stuff.
It will be awesome when they get it to work, and believe me it's only a matter of time; once SSD technology becomes more stable, the fabrication capacity and experience will exist to make even more expensive and delicate NAND ram.
How were they overpriced? They sold at the same exact price any other brick and mortar book store sold new books at - the price stamped on the back by the publisher. You want used books - go to the Strand.
A little example:
When the Borders near me was going out of business, they had progressive sales (as those places do). Book prices dropped by 10%, 15%, and eventually 30-40% (though the 40% was pretty much for one item in the store which someone else had already bought, honestly)
At the 30% price range, I went in and bought a copy of Surface Detail, by Iain M. Banks, and I Shall Wear Midnight, by Terry Pratchett. See the Amazon links there? At Amazon, the books are always at least 30% off. If you're not on Amazon Prime, you can still get free shipping if you buy at least $25 worth of stuff (which ends up being two hardcovers or three or four paperbacks).
That's how Borders was overpriced; their books weren't significantly more expensive than brick and mortar stores, but they weren't competing with brick and mortar stores - they were competing with Amazon. And compared to their competition, they were overpriced.
The only place they won was on time to delivery, but honestly people who buy books tend to be the patient sort.
Thinking that nature thinks, and that if it does it cares at all about our survival, is pretty much the stupidest thing I can imagine.
Nature doesn't give a shit about us, or about anything. It just is - and if, in the process of nature taking its course, humanity is wiped out in the most horrific way possible, then nature doesn't care at all.
So yes, we can know better than nature - because nature doesn't know anything at all.
Am I wrong here? I know I'd have to simply close up shop if a law required me to keep track of all 48 states' tax laws and all the tax intricacies of the various towns and sections of those states. I can't imagine I'm in the minority here.
Honestly, that sounds like an awesome business opportunity - just pay $X/year to subscribe to our webservice, then put the recipient's street address and the type of goods being purchased in one end and the local tax rate comes out the other end.
Though honestly it's not the sort of thing that should be provided by a private company, the individual states should be responsible for making local tax rates readily available in an automated fashion if they wish to have out-of-state stores charge taxes for them.
Fundamentally, the problem is that there is nobody whose incentives are aligned with the defendant. The public defenders that they are normally assigned are overworked and not willing to put effort into the case unless it's clear the defendant is innocent, but the prosecution gets to pick and choose cases that it thinks it can win, one way or another - and when the prosecutor runs for public office, he can say he was hard on crime if he has a good conviction rate. Nobody in the judicial system "wins" if the conviction rate is low.
Linked lists. Recursion. Calling by reference. Strong typing. Explicit declaration (or at least the need of it). There are some ways around those, but these hacks are even going to warp their minds worse than not learning those things would.
Umm just so you know (since you seem to be having such a good time bitching about it), the normal Stanford undergraduate computer science curriculum does not include CS 101. The first programming class CS majors will take is one of the versions of CS 106, and they'll go on from there - and just guess what's covered in CS 106B/X? (warning: pdf, it's on page 3)
CS 101 is for people who are not computer science majors and who might not ever program again in their lives. Thus, by teaching them Javascript, they're taught something that may potentially become useful - after all, most non-technical people have access to a web browser, but very few of them have access to a C compiler or a Python interpreter.
Re:How about "when software is named by assholes"
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When Software Offends
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· Score: 1
When actually the issue is that the names for these (non-panty-related) software has been picked out by dudes who apparently think that it's hilarious to take pictures up women's skirts without their consent (which is what everyone knows "upskirt" and "pantyshot" mean, on the internet).
No, it's not even "dudes" - there's exactly one dude, Frank Smit, who's been picking all the names involved in this article.
The whole thing is all about this one idiot's obsession with women's underwear.
... and naming it after what is apparently a child famous for pantyshots...
Just to be clear: characters in a comic are not actually real people. Thus, it was not the name of a "child famous for pantyshots", it was the name of a fictional character, who is eleven years old in the context of the fiction, and whose underwear is frequently depicted. I'm not saying that this isn't perverted (there's a reason why it's called "hentai"), but it is worlds apart from an actual child in the same situation.
Furthermore, the way you wrote your post makes it seem like the entire community is being antisocial jerks, when in fact what the community said was "well, we don't like it either, but we're not going to censor it". I mean, just look at this quote from the chairman of the Python Software Foundation:
But even though we agree so much with free speech that we will fight for your right to call your pissy little parser pantyshot or upskirt, we really would rather you grew up and called it something else.
That doesn't sound like the response of a community of anti-social jerks, now does it?
What's going on here is that there is one idiot named Frank Smit who is obsessed with naming projects after things associated with panty shots. He's the guy who originally suggested the "libupskirt" name to someone who didn't understand the connotations, and he's the guy who created the Pantyshot package, and is being a douchebag about it. That's it. That's pretty much all there is to this story.
Although it would seem fair, ultimately it would not be, because rich are much more capable of putting their money in inflation-protecting schemes, whereas the poor are hurt by constantly rising prices. Given these two considerations, I would be very cautious about moving the entire system over to that method quickly.
You think currency trading microtransactions are bad now, just imagine how that shit would go under this system - the US Gov't announces that they're going to inflate the dollar by x%, and suddenly all those microsecond-scale automated systems drop all their wealth into some other currency. Then, once the inflation has happened, the money comes flooding back - it's still worth as much, but the dollar is worth less than it was before, so the total wealth is conserved.
Essentially, unless such an inflationary system was globally coordinated among all markets (hah, good luck), it would be worse than useless.
This is something I've kinda come to realize - whether or not you are successful depends 100% on being in the right place at the right time; it's entirely out of your control. The only thing you can really affect is the magnitude of your success.
It's like surfing, I imagine: it doesn't matter how good you are, if there are no waves all you can really do is paddle around. However, if you are a good surfer, you'll be able to make better use of the waves that do come along.
If Bill Gates wasn't as good of a businessman, Microsoft would still have been a successful company - it just might not have been quite so large. However, if he hadn't (basically) gotten lucky in the early years, Microsoft would have never formed at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, that's why when I go out for a day at the beach, the sunscreen I put on blocks radio waves as well as UV light.
Wait, no it doesn't - because non-ionizing radiation doesn't cause cancer at noticeable rates.
Look, you're right that non-ionizing radiation may, in rare circumstances, cause some sort of harm to the DNA in a cell.
However, that doesn't matter! Humans are accustomed to wandering around underneath a gigantic, broad-spectrum electromagnetic transmitter (we like to call it the Sun). Your DNA is assaulted all the goddamn time, by pretty much everything in your environment.
And you know what your body does? It kills cells that are acting funny. It does this quite frequently. It's essentially a Nazi about genetic purity. If there's the least little bit of derp in a cell, it will kill that cell and everything in the area.
All this means that even though non-ionizing radiation does occasionally damage the DNA of a cell, your body will fix it pretty quickly - and even in your post you admit that it such an occurrence is particularly rare (that's why they call it non-ionizing, after all). The reason why ionizing radiation can be bad is because, as you said, almost every particle causes an ionization event - if it messes up your cells to the point where your body misses something (and this can take literally years of sunbathing), you get cancer.
If you're concerned about getting cancer from non-ionizing radiation, and you care at all about being consistent, you should also be searching out sunblock lotions that block in the microwave and radio spectrum (good luck finding that).
You just don't seem to realize that the sort of damage a phone could cause is the sort of damage your body deals with all the time, without you noticing - and cell phones don't put any more strain on the body than walking around in the sun for a while.
Exactly!
The NASA data says our models are wrong. Big fucking deal. We know that!
What this data doesn't change is the more important graph, this one right here. This is the graph that says "We're screwed"; we use models to calculate the magnitude of the screwedness. If it turns out we're not that screwed, then great! We should still make changes, but we've got time to do it in. If it turns out that we are screwed, then we need to speed it up.
Fundamentally, models predict the future. We know about AGW because of data that has been gathered in the present, about the past. Yes, the models are imperfect and incorrect, but that doesn't change the solid foundation of data that AGW rests on - and hey, as this article shows, we're continually improving the models too.
But I did read them, and I saw no evidence of foul play. The editors of Nature agree with me, so I'm not just crazy (it's always nice to have some confirmation); however, it's entirely possible that I've missed something, and since your opinion differs from mine I was wondering what led you to form your opinion.
This is why I asked for a specific link; none of the e-mails I read show a "the ends justifies the means" philosophy among the CRU leadership. I assume you've read some e-mails that I haven't, and thus would be able to point me towards the ones that led you to this conclusion. The archive is still available here, if you change your mind; surely you remember some key words or phrases from the e-mails you read, and would be able to find them quickly?
Your first link is to a general Slashdot posting about the fact that the e-mails were leaked; that's not a specific e-mail referencing "an ends justifies the means philosophy", as the original poster promised. I hope we can all agree that the leak happened, and that this fact is not in doubt.
Your second link is another Slashdot posting about the fact that the e-mails were leaked, referencing a blog post at Watt's Up With That. The referenced blog post pulls out a few e-mails:
1. Someone mentioning that in a class of journals it is customary to release data and (presumably source) code, but then saying that their legal department believes (I'm guessing from IPR) intellectual property rights associated with such things do not allow such a release. Which, interestingly enough, is topical! The reason why there's a "virtually all" in the title of this Slashdot article is because some countries refuse to let their data be released - they claim ownership of the data and do not want it in the public domain, for whatever reason.
2. The infamous "Mike's Nature trick" e-mail, which has been discussed ad nauseum and does not reference any foul play (if it had, wouldn't Nature have retracted the paper originally referenced by "Nature trick"? They haven't - as your third link mentions later)
3. An e-mail from a scientist who is uncomfortable getting directly involved in politics by signing a letter to the Senate; he recommends letting the AGU (the American Geophysical Union) do it, since they are a political body. His primary concern is that this is not something scientists should be doing as individuals, and cautions other scientists to not jump in without the support of their co-authors.
None of these are indicative of any sort of foul play or even concerns about global warming. There are a thousand comments after that, so hopefully you didn't mean there was evidence somewhere in there? Presumably the editor of the blog would have pulled better e-mails up into the main body of the post if such things were noted in the comments.
Your third link, much like the first, mentions no specific e-mails, but funnily enough references another Slashdot article that you left out of your list; perhaps it is because the article is about the journal Nature reviewing the e-mails, and stating that they do not form a "substantive reason for concern." As a sibling poster said, the rest of the article is about the way the leaked e-mails were used to trump up a baseless witchhunt.
So, I have to wonder - if these emails suggesting questionable motives and practices exist, why can't you link directly to them? If you're having trouble finding the archive online, there's a copy right here.
If I don't see those e-mails despite looking for them, perhaps it is because they just don't seem to exist?
I really hope you're right, though; I would very much prefer to live in a world where everything looks fine and there is a global conspiracy of scientists to make us think it isn't, than in a world where things are looking scary and scientists are trying to warn us about it, but we're mostly ignoring them.
Really? I don't remember seeing anything like that in the CRU e-mails. Since they're freely available, do you mind pointing out where that's stated?
They might be #1 in sales, but that's only because everyone who's ever entertained more than a passing desire for a Wii has one already. And I bet you anything that this is Xbox 360 sales including things like the current promotion where if you get a Windows computer worth at least $700 you get a "free" Xbox - something Nintnedo never did.
I'm on my phone right now so I won't look it up, but I bet you that the Wii still has the Xbox 360 beat on number of units sold over the product's lifetime - and even more, I bet it still will when both consoles are retired.
Why don't we do both and see which one works out better? It's not like the desert can only support one of these things.
Yeah, people seem to forget that if the whole Microsoft thing hadn't worked out, all Bill Gates would have had to fall back on is the million dollar trust fund his parents had set up in his name.
Including The Dark Night movies?
Say what you will, but the recent reboot of the Batman franchise has been handled extremely well.
Well yes, that's true to a point - he does have a terrible credit score, in part because he doesn't participate in the system. However, non-participation won't get you a "terrible" credit score, just a bad one.
Want to know what will get you a terrible credit score? Something like this:
So yeah. He abused the credit system and got burned, and now people are less willing to give him credit. Who'da thunk it.
Hey, if they split the liberal vote and get a conservative elected, that's like being centrist, isn't it?
That, and turning on 3D kills the battery life. Why would I turn on a gimmick when it makes the platform less usable?
Dude, there was an article on Slashdot just two ago saying that the media corporations had suppressed a study showing that B is effectively true for music and video (the study showed that pirates are better customers than non-pirates, which implies that pirates in general are likely to purchase the things that they pirate given that they 1. pirate a lot of stuff and 2. buy a lot of stuff).
Why would you assume that games are be any different?
The people who tell you they finished it in five hours are relying on the Steam "time played" count, which is notoriously bugged and basically has no idea how long you've really been playing the game.
You're very much a question talker, aren't you?
And anyway, the reason why you would use NAND as RAM instead of the current DRAM if they could work out the kinks is because NAND doesn't need power to maintain state. This means that you could be doing something on your computer, kill the power without any sort of warning at all, and then plug it in later and resume exactly where you were before. It would lead to, for instance, near-zero battery usage sleep in mobile devices; they would be able to almost shut off when you're not using them, using only very little power to do wireless upkeep type stuff.
It will be awesome when they get it to work, and believe me it's only a matter of time; once SSD technology becomes more stable, the fabrication capacity and experience will exist to make even more expensive and delicate NAND ram.
A little example:
When the Borders near me was going out of business, they had progressive sales (as those places do). Book prices dropped by 10%, 15%, and eventually 30-40% (though the 40% was pretty much for one item in the store which someone else had already bought, honestly)
At the 30% price range, I went in and bought a copy of Surface Detail, by Iain M. Banks, and I Shall Wear Midnight, by Terry Pratchett. See the Amazon links there? At Amazon, the books are always at least 30% off. If you're not on Amazon Prime, you can still get free shipping if you buy at least $25 worth of stuff (which ends up being two hardcovers or three or four paperbacks).
That's how Borders was overpriced; their books weren't significantly more expensive than brick and mortar stores, but they weren't competing with brick and mortar stores - they were competing with Amazon. And compared to their competition, they were overpriced.
The only place they won was on time to delivery, but honestly people who buy books tend to be the patient sort.
Thinking that nature thinks, and that if it does it cares at all about our survival, is pretty much the stupidest thing I can imagine.
Nature doesn't give a shit about us, or about anything. It just is - and if, in the process of nature taking its course, humanity is wiped out in the most horrific way possible, then nature doesn't care at all.
So yes, we can know better than nature - because nature doesn't know anything at all.
Honestly, that sounds like an awesome business opportunity - just pay $X/year to subscribe to our webservice, then put the recipient's street address and the type of goods being purchased in one end and the local tax rate comes out the other end.
Though honestly it's not the sort of thing that should be provided by a private company, the individual states should be responsible for making local tax rates readily available in an automated fashion if they wish to have out-of-state stores charge taxes for them.
They aren't.
Fundamentally, the problem is that there is nobody whose incentives are aligned with the defendant. The public defenders that they are normally assigned are overworked and not willing to put effort into the case unless it's clear the defendant is innocent, but the prosecution gets to pick and choose cases that it thinks it can win, one way or another - and when the prosecutor runs for public office, he can say he was hard on crime if he has a good conviction rate. Nobody in the judicial system "wins" if the conviction rate is low.
Umm just so you know (since you seem to be having such a good time bitching about it), the normal Stanford undergraduate computer science curriculum does not include CS 101. The first programming class CS majors will take is one of the versions of CS 106, and they'll go on from there - and just guess what's covered in CS 106B/X? (warning: pdf, it's on page 3)
CS 101 is for people who are not computer science majors and who might not ever program again in their lives. Thus, by teaching them Javascript, they're taught something that may potentially become useful - after all, most non-technical people have access to a web browser, but very few of them have access to a C compiler or a Python interpreter.
No, it's not even "dudes" - there's exactly one dude, Frank Smit, who's been picking all the names involved in this article.
The whole thing is all about this one idiot's obsession with women's underwear.
Just to be clear: characters in a comic are not actually real people. Thus, it was not the name of a "child famous for pantyshots", it was the name of a fictional character, who is eleven years old in the context of the fiction, and whose underwear is frequently depicted. I'm not saying that this isn't perverted (there's a reason why it's called "hentai"), but it is worlds apart from an actual child in the same situation.
Furthermore, the way you wrote your post makes it seem like the entire community is being antisocial jerks, when in fact what the community said was "well, we don't like it either, but we're not going to censor it". I mean, just look at this quote from the chairman of the Python Software Foundation:
That doesn't sound like the response of a community of anti-social jerks, now does it?
What's going on here is that there is one idiot named Frank Smit who is obsessed with naming projects after things associated with panty shots. He's the guy who originally suggested the "libupskirt" name to someone who didn't understand the connotations, and he's the guy who created the Pantyshot package, and is being a douchebag about it. That's it. That's pretty much all there is to this story.
Why do you think Egyptian architecture (and Arabic architecture in general) is full of minarets?
You think currency trading microtransactions are bad now, just imagine how that shit would go under this system - the US Gov't announces that they're going to inflate the dollar by x%, and suddenly all those microsecond-scale automated systems drop all their wealth into some other currency. Then, once the inflation has happened, the money comes flooding back - it's still worth as much, but the dollar is worth less than it was before, so the total wealth is conserved.
Essentially, unless such an inflationary system was globally coordinated among all markets (hah, good luck), it would be worse than useless.
This is something I've kinda come to realize - whether or not you are successful depends 100% on being in the right place at the right time; it's entirely out of your control. The only thing you can really affect is the magnitude of your success.
It's like surfing, I imagine: it doesn't matter how good you are, if there are no waves all you can really do is paddle around. However, if you are a good surfer, you'll be able to make better use of the waves that do come along.
If Bill Gates wasn't as good of a businessman, Microsoft would still have been a successful company - it just might not have been quite so large. However, if he hadn't (basically) gotten lucky in the early years, Microsoft would have never formed at all.