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I have a question for you all:

When you're building something and you notice one of your dependencies has a bug or is missing a key feature that you need, do you (a) PR the fix into the dependency and then try to "harrass" the maintainer into merging it for you, (b) publish your own fork of the dependency with the necessary fix, (c) inline the source code for the dependency into your project, effectively taking it on as if it's your own code, (d) completely rewrite the dependency either as a separate package you control or built directly into your own project, or (e) code around the problem / do a hack?

I find that often maintainers are so over-worked that it's practically impossible to get a merge in a timely manner, and this leads me to rely on a fork until the PR eventually gets merged. However, I think creating a new package under either your own ownership or the company you work for is often really bad as it can become a kind of hidden technical debt. Nowadays, I definitely consider inlining as a way to capture ownership of the technical debt in a way that is highly visible, but this can add 100s or 1000s of lines of code to a project and if eventually the upstream project moves on you don't get the benefits of their changes without removing the inlined code and untangling any changes that were made to it.

The only other approach I've seen is the 'hack' approach, in which you try to dodge the bug or semantic issue. Honestly, that might be the right thing to do in some situations, but it isn't very hygienic within a long-term project (unless you carefully maintain a TODO list of things that need 'correct' solutions).

Of course inflation is "just" businesses increasing their prices, how else would prices increase - they are decided by humans after all. It's STILL the fault of loose monetary policy. Do you understand that?

Many people mention corporate profits drive inflation like that's the end of the conversation. It's the equivalent of saying your house got flooded because the door broke open (allowing the raging hurricane outside to get in). It's pointing at a barely relevant proximal cause to ignore the real issue (the raging hurricane).

The economy is a system of individual actors. Everyone is constantly trying to raise their price (employees and employers included). When you do the equivalent of doubling the money supply in under a year, combined with covid supply chain issues, you create an environment where actors in the economy are able to dramatically increase their prices - often out of necessity because their competitors and suppliers are doing the same. The consequence is inflation. This happens if and only if you dump massive amounts of money into the economy above and beyond what can be absorbed by the rate of production.

In a sense, both are technically true: inflation is because Biden among other world leaders flooded the economy with money, and the economy aka the system of individual actors reacted to this and found they were able to raise prices because the economy could sustain that. The difference is that one of these is a massive unforced error with easily foreseen consequences that caused significant suffering, and the other is human nature (wrapped up in a prisoner's dilemma).

The blame is still rightfully entirely on people like Biden who greenlit this objectively terrible policy.

Well, you have to come up with a reason for why now -- the profit motive has been there forever.

There's also a question of why high margins don't induce new entrants to these markets, or why consumers responding too cleanly to higher prices by buying less. There's been a variety of factors at play and I think if you want to pin it on profits you gotta put in the legwork to rule out or at least quantify the dozens of other factors.

And like, if Nintendo wants to charge an extra ten dollars for Zelda[1], I don't think thats any kind of call for EU/UK regulators to step in.

[1]: https://www.gamesradar.com/zelda-tears-of-the-kingdom-is-get...

Well the question they are asking is: why now? Were companies not wanting to maximize profits 5 years ago?

Because the basic economic argument against this theory is pretty sound. Companies can't arbitrarily raise prices because market competition drives profits down. It's why highly competitive industries like the restaurant sector aren't profitable, everyone competes for the same consumers, and the lowest cost provider will win.

Inflation doesn't actually change anything about this so if companies can just collude and make up prices the question is why did they only start doing it three years ago