Financial & Travel Musings

We heard recently from Wendy’s Mum that things are very quiet in the shops in Australia at the moment, right at the time that they’re normally buzzing in the run-up to Christmas.

Over this side of the world the sales are already starting which is a really bad sign as it indicates that the shops just aren’t getting the pre-Christmas sales that they’d normally be expecting. What we may may be seeing is the earliest stages of deflation.

Now, you may be thinking that deflation (ie falling prices) is a good thing, after all it has to be better than inflation, hasn’t it? Well, it depends. The problem is that with deflation coming after decades of inflation is that people start to expect prices to fall and therefore hold off on purchases until they really must buy whatever it is they want. Thus, we see house prices falling and some houses sitting no matter how much the owners reduce the prices. Similarly with goods in the shops.

With this situation, factories start to shut down eventually unless they can transform their product into some “must have” item. Clearly that’s not good as the bulk of non-perishable products are never really going to be “must have” items thus people just lose jobs as sales dry up.

The computer market shows that people can adjust to deflatation: by now most people wait to buy another computer until they need one rather than rushing out and buying one before the price goes up (which never happens) and the only rushes are when something becomes a “must have” like the new netbooks. However, the time which would be required for normal products to adjust to deflation would be considerable and that period would be very painful for all concerned. Taking just the car industry as an example, there could be untold thousands unemployed if people decided to delay their next purchase until the price dropped just a little more.

Popularity: 28% [?]

One of the downsides of looking in on some of the online courses around these days (of which Yales Open Yale is probably the most accessible) is that the hypochondriacs amongst us can have a real field day.

We probably all know that working around asbestos isn’t a good idea, bringing in its wake all kinds of diseases with weird names like mesothelioma and the like. However, did you know that if you’d a cat in the house when you were in the womb that you’ve a higher chance of becoming schizophrenic? Yales couple of sessions on mental illness are a real gold mine of such off the cuff remarks that you’d not ordinarily come across and yet which were presented in a very accessible form.

What’s probably not a good move is to leave through the mental illness diagnostic manual as the small sampling that I heard about courtesy of the Yale psychology course covered oodles of mental diseases, many of which had fairly “normal” symtoms.

Popularity: 26% [?]

One of the wonders of technology these days is that heated mattress pads have moved on from just being used on beds and now extend to all kinds of heated clothing that let you carry on various pastimes well into the coldest days of winter when you’d otherwise have to lay off ’til the spring.

As with the electric mattresses that you leave on overnight you need to be careful with the wiring of these though as the outdoor clothing obviously isn’t run from the mains you don’t get the issues of being electrocuted that you could potentially have with the indoor stuff. Even so, it makes sense to avoid treating these items roughly as you’re just going to wear them out otherwise.

Popularity: 13% [?]