Did you read the article at all? Unless you were buying meat with personal loans the issue of whether or not interest expenses should be included in CPI has no relevance to correct measurement of food inflation.
"Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that.""
You are completely mathematically illiterate if you think that annual inflation is 3-5 times higher than the reported value. The average annual inflation since 1960 is 3.7%. If the real annual inflation were 3x that (11.1%) then we would have seen 85000% cumulative inflation since 1960. A gallon of gasoline cost $0.30 in 1960, so it would cost $250 in 2024 under 850x inflation. In reality a gallon of gas costs $3.60 today, which is not far off from the 10.5x inflation the CPI measures over that time frame (the same CPI you claim is massively understated).
You're running around this thread smugly declaring yourself too smart to fall for the government's lies while failing to spend a few seconds doing the trivial arithmetic that would disprove all of your deeply held beliefs. Which of your other political or economic beliefs will fall apart with a little bit of middle school math?
Your account has been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly and we have to ban that sort of account, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules from now on (regardless of how wrong anybody else is or you feel they are), we'd appreciate it.
Are you seriously insisting that the average product has gone up in price by 850x since 1960 and that gasoline is a huge outlier that has appreciated much much less than everything else?
I suspect the person you’re responding to is not really talking about truly low paying jobs - more likely entry level out of college jobs. (Not that I expect those are in aggregate underwater either.)
I remember from even better days than today, but the entry job out of college had become an unpaid internship.
Which effectively limited them to people that already had very stable and financially supportive family situations.
Part of the reason that class mobility is going down. Although I think most of the production in class mobility is due to the disappearance of the high paid blue collar job in manufacturing
Supposedly manufacturing will be re- onshored in the next decade depending on who you talk to. So the tide may be turning?
Meaningless when housing costs have soared. They've made wage gains because it's literally not worth it to work for $8/hr anymore and companies were unable to find workers.
Wages for the lowest quintile have gone up in real terms, meaning adjusted for inflation (including shelter costs). None of your economic beliefs are grounded reality, you just make up beliefs that flatter your politics and downvote everyone who disagrees with you.
It would be good to get real numbers, the problem is inflation does not hit everyone equally; for example my house is paid off, the housing components do not affect me at all. So if they are growing faster than the rest of the basket it does not reflect in my life.
So real gains may or may not exist without looking at the individual or individual cohort you are talking about.
If you're drowning in the ocean 100 ft below the surface, saying you managed to go 80 ft so you're still 20 ft below the surface is remarkably stupid and fails to appreciate the gravity of the situation.
Why are inflation truthers so resistant to spending even the tiniest amount of time learning how inflation is computed instead of repeating nonsensical conspiracy theories that match their ideological priors? Replacing porterhouse with hanger steaks in the basket simply means giving the change in price of hanger steaks a higher weight than the change in price of porterhouse steaks in the basket. It does not mean recording the difference in price between a porterhouse and hanger steak as a decrease in the price index. If porterhouse and hanger steaks both go up by 5% then switching from porterhouse to hanger steaks will not lower inflation, even if hanger steaks are cheaper. And of course that’s the correct way to compute inflation, if people stop using typewriters and start using computers why would you still include typewriters in the consumer basket.
It’s not even true in general that the trend has been switching towards lower quality products. Despite all the ahistoric whining about how much better the old days were, Americans have gotten richer over the past several decades and have been buying bigger cars, dining out instead of eating at home, spending more on travel etc.
> nonsensical conspiracy theories that match their ideological priors
People's lived experiences in many parts of the country don't match what they're being told. If macro trends go one way but microtrends all over the country go the other way, then the macrotrend analysis is functionally meaningless for millions of people. That's not a conspiracy theory, and hand-waving so many people's lived experiences away because it doesn't match YOUR ideological prior is not taking the discussion seriously and fundamentally and possibly wilfully misunderstanding the issue. Insisting that people everywhere saying life is harder than it was pre-pandemic or 10 years ago or whatever are wrong "because the charts say so" is silly.
I think people get too hung up on the aggregate numbers which can hide large populations experiencing things differently. Wage growth may have been higher than inflation for some quintiles overall, but for literally millions of people in those quintiles who didn’t job hop and got typical raises or got laid off or whatever, the average experience wasn’t their experience. And when prices are obviously going up, most people will feel like they are falling behind even if they objectively are treading water.
The official inflation numbers have shown high inflation over the past few years. If you feel like prices have gone up a lot the CPI does not contradict your lived experience in any way.
They must be the 7% of the population not covered by BLS stats when working out the CPI, assuming they're from US, or living in a remote area. Agree that overall, the population has been growing richer for several decades. But what about us folks who subsisted off of GPUs and used cars in 2021-2022? The reality for us is way different.
Rulers want the social status that they derive from ruling over millions of people. If they were no people to rule over they would have zero status, even if all their material needs were met.
Western ones don't particularly want that anymore, IMO. It's the pursuit of wealth and power. And by power, an army of robots works just as well as an army of subhuman commoners.
Trump does seem like an old school egomaniac who wants to be loved and rule people and have statues of himself. But his kind isn't so common in the west and he is not well liked by the more typical ones who take the cold, scientific approach to wealth extraction and don't seem to care in the slightest how the commoners view them.
If you truly believe in the principles of free speech, no matter how offensive and evil and cynically motivated, then the logical conclusion of that belief is that adversarial foreign governments have the right to propagandize in America and to Americans. If you abandon your principles the moment someone invokes the foreign menace then you don’t really have principles.
People like to think of themselves as being pro-freedom because it’s hip and cool and they are brainwashed from a young age to be proud to live in “the land of the free” but the moments you interrogate those beliefs a little they start to fall apart. It’s more of a political aesthetic than a true belief system.
I don’t think freedom of speech should be given to any collective. Individuals should enjoy it as an absolute right, but a corporation is a legal construct undeserving of such natural rights.
A similar example, people should be able to freely assemble, corporations should not be able to form cartels.
Freedom of speech isn't a blanket everything-goes. The government can impose time and place restrictions on where and when you can express yourself. So to me, getting rid of TikTok is restricting place. You can very well express yourself on other platforms if TikTok is removed from the U.S. marketplace.
> If you truly believe in the principles of free speech, no matter how offensive and evil and cynically motivated (...)
No, nobody truly believes that. Whoever is trying to sell that is trying to manipulate you. We have exceptions, provisions and considerable case law which adds a lot of *) to the first amendment. The 'principles' you're referring to have never actually been a thing outside of political emotional speeches and Republican rallies.
None of us have been alive when America was in a hot war to see exactly how far free speech stretches when actual lives are at stake. We're in a cold war right now and people should adjust their expectations. I'm not shedding any tears when a foreign corporation has its 'free speech' rights restricted. If it wants free speech it should move to the USA.
If you believe that the constitution protects inalienable rights that cannot be taken away by the government then how can those rights be denied to non citizens? The government gets to decide who is and isn’t a citizen, which would mean they can decide who is or isn’t eligible for so-called “inalienable” rights.
If you really believed in that interpretation—that the bill of rights guarantees equal and identical liberties to everyone regardless of citizenship status—then what's the argument that those same rights extend only within the borders of U.S. geography? Why would we not, for example, enforce the second amendment right to bear arms on the benighted people of Australia, who don't have it? If we wanted our actions to be 100% consistent with that interpretation of the language of the constitution, wouldn't that be the outcome?
So, I think the answer to your question is that it's not feasible, practical, or desirable to be 100% consistent, and that the law is mostly cobbled together, full of edge cases, hammered into something that sort of works most of the time, and makes sense if it's dark enough and you squint.
Yes, a government is generally in charge of granting citizenship for the population which it represents. This is a mechanism that seems to work for every functioning country in the world.
What's the alternative you're suggesting, exactly?
> The government gets to decide who is and isn’t a citizen
That's your quote which I'm referencing. I think that arrangement makes perfect sense, it seems as if you're in disagreement.
I'll ask again, what's the alternative arrangement you're trying to champion here? If you don't have answer I can only assume this argument's being made in bad faith, I'm trying my best to interpret your comment charitably but unless you're more clear about what you're presenting, I'm going to read it as it was presented.
> If you believe that the constitution protects inalienable rights that cannot be taken away by the government then how can those rights be denied to non citizens?
I was not stating an opinion as to which way it should be. I was describing reality, and stating that I'm not sure which parts of the Bill of Rights apply to foreigners and which don't.
"Inalienable rights" is a phrase that does not appear in the Constitution, and the courts hold the Declaration of Independence to have no legal force whatsoever. Where I was talking about actual jurisprudence (like it or not), you seem to be attacking a straw man.
> The government gets to decide who is and isn’t a citizen,
Yes, but within some pretty tight limits. Persons born on U.S. soil to persons who are subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S. have birthright citizenship, and this cannot be taken away by statutes or bureaucratic acts. Others can naturalize according to statutes.
> which would mean they can decide who is or isn’t eligible for so-called “inalienable” rights.
It wouldn't be a country if everyone in the world had all the same rights as the country's citizens. Some rights have to be reserved to the citizens. De minimis the right to permanently reside and vote in that country. If you don't have a right to reside permanently in some country, then there must be other things which you are not allowed to do in that country.
Autarkies are impoverished, societies that trade freely are wealthy. Your economic
impulses are deeply misguided. If everyone only bought local the world would be much poorer. It’s better (consumer choice, comparative advantage) to buy from the world and to let the world buy from you. The money doesn’t disappear when you spend it outside your locality, it flows both ways.
I’m sorry, but by whose definition are “they” “impoverished”? And what constitutes “autarky” and “local”? I’m not advocating to abolish global trade or whatever, if you think I was gesturing in that direction.
Buying (food, especially) locally means supporting a robust food chain that’s less dependent on refrigeration, global shipping, and a geographic arbitrage on agricultural labor. It’s better for the environment and connects you to your community and sense of place and seasons.
It means I can know what went into the food, in terms of soil, labor, and pesticides — something that I have no knowledge of at the grocery store.
A pound of apples, meat, or whatever from 1-2 counties away is more financially expensive, but if you can afford it there’s many non-financial benefits.
I’d rather purchase from a CSA than a national grocer, because that money mostly goes back into my local community.
You’re right the money doesn’t disappear when you spend it outside your locality, but it comes back in ways that are increasingly exploitative and/or depressing (chain stores offering no meaningful careers or opportunities for ownership, rent-seeking financialization, warehouses that bring noise pollution and packaging waste, etc.).
Again, if you can afford it, IDK why you wouldn’t prefer to spend the marginal dollar locally (i.e. private / family-owned businesses in a few counties’ radius).
It’s consumer choice and comparative advantage that actually lead people like me to shop locally...
