It’s more complicated than that. Electronics and appliances are the obvious examples of things that have inflated much slower than average (or even deflated). Apparel and tools have inflated much slower. Energy generally has inflated much slower than average, but has shown a ton of volatility. Food and cars have inflated slower than average, but individual items might have followed their own path. Healthcare, education, and housing have gone up much faster than average inflation.

And the ratios don’t stay consistent over time. When I was a kid, burger meat was cheaper than similarly sized chicken breasts. Now the ratio is flipped. A plane ticket between New York and London is much cheaper today than in the 70’s. Even a tank of gas for driving from one state to another is way cheaper today than in the 70’s, in large part because of better fuel efficiency.

And anything labor intensive is inherently at tension with itself. A seamstress or tailor can only make so many items of clothing per week. Those clothes will have to cost enough to justify their pay, and the raw ingredient textiles used to make the garments. So if their pay hasn’t kept up with inflation, then the labor-intensive items they make probably haven’t kept up with inflation, either. Ideally, increased productivity would allow raises to not be absorbed into the price of whatever is being produced, but that doesn’t always happen.

Looking at old menus and catalogs shows that some things have gone up a lot in price, while others didn’t experience the same effect.

I think it’s healthy for opposing viewpoints to be expressed

Yeah, that way the community can get inoculated with these ideas and learns how to respond to them, and over enough time the response gets faster and more efficient so that the body as a whole builds up a resistance against whenever those types of comments show up.

That’s the joke. It’s why the price keeps getting marked down.

Beef is a bad example. It used to be cheaper than chicken and similar to pork, but the real cost of that land use policy that would allow such grazing in the west, and then the subsidies that make factory farm feedlots possible, wasn’t properly borne by the ranchers themselves. Today’s cost of beef is a better reflection of the true cost of raising that meat, that inefficiently.

If you do the same analysis with chicken or pork, you’ll find that we can and do afford to eat a lot more of those particular meats than we used to.

I fully expect beef to go like tuna, and slowly become a luxury item only for the rich within my lifetime. That is more of a trend with beef itself than broader trends in inflation generally.

Housing, education, and healthcare costs have grown much faster than inflation.

Food, energy, cars, appliances and home goods, furniture, apparel, and other durable goods have generally grown slower than inflation, at least between 1980 and 2020. Much of the last 5 years of inflation, though have eaten away at some of those gains of the previous 30-40 years in those categories.

Electronics, technology, entertainment, most services have generally gone down in price.

So the basket of what we buy is different, with different ratios. A time traveler from the 80’s would be shocked to learn just how many ready made rotisserie chickens or pizzas you could buy for the wage equivalent to one hour of warehouse work, or how many big screen TVs you’d need to pay the average monthly rent for a 1-bedroom apartment. Plane tickets between New York and LA are basically cheaper than one month’s rent in the cheapest possible home you can find in either of those cities. The ratios are all different than before.

But with housing costs high, it kind of puts all of the effort into that single basket. When it used to be that 1/3 your income could comfortably go into housing costs, now in many cities it’s closer to half, even for people up the income scale, because the rest of life beyond having a roof over your head is just cheaper in comparison to that very basic need for shelter.

GDI is supposed to be basically equivalent to GDP, so it’s not a better number to use. Sometimes the numbers diverge (see here for a discussion of this issue in 2022) because they use different methodologies to determine the number, but that’s usually a sign that some kind of measurement is off, not that there’s some kind of actual divergence in the true numbers of what they purport to measure.

And we moved away from Gross National Product/Income to Gross Domestic Product/Income because it was a better look at the domestic economy. We care more about the production/income within national borders rather than the production/income of a particular nation’s residents.

Nah, I’ve litigated against the government before. Lots of emails and IM systems (including Lync or Skype for Business, before Teams took over) have lots of casual communications between government employees. Think the “Brian’s Hat” sketch from I Think You Should Leave.

The specifications described in Borges’ original short story implies there are 25^1312000 books, which is unfathomably large but technically still finite.

You kill them?

Yeah, refusing to buy a Tesla is the same as killing Elon Musk. That’s the level of nuance and detail in my post, and you’ve distilled it perfectly.

I’m not a fan of treating trumpers horribly

I agree with you, at least with people who simply voted for Trump. But I do think that people who campaigned for him, who run messaging on his behalf, who implement his orders, and otherwise actively take part in advancing his agenda, are fair game for active resistance. And those who are unrepentant about supporting Trump and continue to support Trump don’t need the benefit of our friendship.

Thanks. I wanted to organize into the four parts that I did, because I assumed that each part would be harder and harder to find a home for. But the Part 1 stuff that is clearly legal and an exercise of one’s own rights should still be communicated on as many platforms as possible.

And no, these aren’t normal times. The entire structure of how we talk about politics goes out the window when all the guardrails in political power itself are gone.

That’s what I mean by “lobbying.” If you have direct contact to a member of Congress, great. That’s better than most. Start that two-way conversation, making sure that the elected officials know what the constituents feel, and how these sweeping, broad actions translate into specific instances of pain in their district, in their own families. And make them come back at you to test and examine whether their own actions miss the mark or are being understood by the voter as a fight on their side. It’s two way persuasion.

But it’s every lever we can pull. If you know elected officials, talk to them. If you know their staffers, talk to them. If you know lobbyists or donors or family members or friends of the people who hold power, tell them. Many are out of touch, but flooding every channel of communication will force them to at least hear what is being said.

Yeah, I’ve changed it up to be more bullet point oriented. It looked OK on the default desktop browser interface, but some mobile apps really smushed things together.

The mass exodus from the Facebook platform has already happened. The others are in progress.

It’s already happened to Facebook. And it’s happening to Twitter. And Reddit. This stuff takes time, but the character and feel of each service has shifted considerably.

when he emigrated to New York

New York City?!?

To whom?

All the creditors, as an entire body.

The victims seem fine getting less money

To be clear, it’s only some of the victims that have said they’re fine with less money. The trustee has a responsibility to make sure that the creditor body as a whole gets the most money. If some subset of creditors (the families willing to reduce their claims if the Onion buys the assets) are willing to reduce their claims as part of the bid, great, they should add that money to the pile and consider it as part of the bid.

But the families that do agree to take less money can’t force the other families to take less money. It has to be voluntary for everyone.

And it sounds like the Jones-affiliated bidder is complaining about the auction procedures. If they followed the already-approved procedures perfectly, there’s not much to talk about there. But if they changed the procedures at the last minute, or if the actual auction followed procedures that weren’t described in the approved procedures (such as accepting creditors’ reduction of their claims as part of the bid, or not allowing “topping bids” after the sealed bids were submitted), then it’s normal to hold a hearing to make a decision on whether the auction followed the right procedures.

20 years ago it was the people who worshipped Jack Welch, not realizing (or not caring) that he was running GE into the ground.

Enshittification isn’t always driven by a conscious person or organization with an agenda, much less one with an agenda of short term financial gain. Sometimes the aggregation of a bunch of individual decisions causes something to get shittier. Or better. Or just different. 4chan is not at all like it was 20 years ago, but it wasn’t because of corporate influence. The culture just changes.

So if the question is whether the fediverse might someday suck, I think the answer is probably yes. It remains to be seen how it will suck, who will have caused it to be that way, and whether there will be other nice things about it.

What are the oceans if not one giant salt lake?