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The true costs of inflation in small-town Texas

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Re: The true costs of inflation in small-town Texas

#221

Post by noirbot »

rafaelero wrote: post #56
noirbot wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Odd that what you call a "luxury industry" is essentially something that poor people have been doing for over a century. I generally agree that trying to eat less meat, especially beef, is a fine idea, but farming, ranching, and BBQ are all industries that are about as far from luxury as you can get. A lot of these foods are based around cooking the cheapest and least edible meats that poor communities could afford t…

What is odd is how meat became such a cheap product. The ratio between calories of grains (to feed the cow) to calories of meat is what, 10:1? It is a luxury item. Humans started consuming it in large amounts only in the last 50-100 years.

Isn't that because calories aren't really directly relevant to how people shop for food or consume it? I can't just replace a hamburger with 10x that amount of grain, or even 1/10th of that amount of grains and get the same nutritional values. For the most part, feed grain for cattle isn't even grains that most humans would eat without plenty of calories of processing by other humans put into it.

In general, I feel like you're conflating "modern" with "luxury" in a way that doesn't feel reasonable. Just because we haven't being doing something for long, or that it requires effort/inefficiencies doesn't mean it's innately "luxurious". Certainly not everything modern is good, but almost everything about food even in non-western countries is calorie inefficient and relatively modern as we invented new ways to cook and farm, and spices and cooking methods became more diverse.

Re: The true costs of inflation in small-town Texas

#222

Post by RC_ITR »

lend000 wrote: post #220
RC_ITR wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The final caveat being the second point I made about people holding onto their cars longer as inflation rises / changing their preferences, not necessarily because the cars are holding up better. I’m sorry but the idea that “we used to junk cars sooner because new cars were cheaper” is a very big stretch to support your bias (much moreso than the concept of hedonic adjustment)

> we used to junk cars sooner because new cars were cheaper This is not obvious to you? Look at how many things (especially plastics and electronics) are wasted today while they still function because they are so cheap. How many times have you replaced your smartphone while it still worked fine? The point, again, is that we can do reasonable mental gymnastics to more or less counter-act any hedonic adjustments (which…

> This is not obvious to you?

It is very much not obvious to me because it’s not true. Critical safety features like airbags (required by US law in 1999) and ABS (required by US law in 2000) were not standard in cars back then, which is a huge incentive to junk a car.

Since then, mandatory safety features include traction control (2011) and backup cameras (2018), and idk about you, but I’m fine driving a car without Either of those things, but not ABS or Airbags.

Honestly, if you’re going to have such strong opinions about cars, maybe do research into them.

And to your amortization point, literally amortization means “cost over useful life” so we agree?

And please look at the link on my other comment [0] because that is not how car prices are adjusted by the BLS

[0] https://www.bls.gov/cpi/quality-adjustment/new-vehicles.pdf

Re: The true costs of inflation in small-town Texas

#223

Post by thfuran »

RC_ITR wrote: post #222
lend000 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we used to junk cars sooner because new cars were cheaper This is not obvious to you? Look at how many things (especially plastics and electronics) are wasted today while they still function because they are so cheap. How many times have you replaced your smartphone while it still worked fine? The point, again, is that we can do reasonable mental gymnastics to more or less counter-act any hedonic adjustments (which…

> This is not obvious to you? It is very much not obvious to me because it’s not true. Critical safety features like airbags (required by US law in 1999) and ABS (required by US law in 2000) were not standard in cars back then, which is a huge incentive to junk a car. Since then, mandatory safety features include traction control (2011) and backup cameras (2018), and idk about you, but I’m fine driving a car without…

Do you think most people wouldn't get new cars more often if they were free?

Re: The true costs of inflation in small-town Texas

#224

Post by lend000 »

RC_ITR wrote: post #222
lend000 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we used to junk cars sooner because new cars were cheaper This is not obvious to you? Look at how many things (especially plastics and electronics) are wasted today while they still function because they are so cheap. How many times have you replaced your smartphone while it still worked fine? The point, again, is that we can do reasonable mental gymnastics to more or less counter-act any hedonic adjustments (which…

> This is not obvious to you? It is very much not obvious to me because it’s not true. Critical safety features like airbags (required by US law in 1999) and ABS (required by US law in 2000) were not standard in cars back then, which is a huge incentive to junk a car. Since then, mandatory safety features include traction control (2011) and backup cameras (2018), and idk about you, but I’m fine driving a car without…

It's possible to have many correct points but miss the forest for the trees/argue past each other. I didn't mean that last comment to be condescending, by the way.

To my original post (the second part), the BLS primarily measures the spending of people who never save a substantial portion of their income. Vehicles are a necessity for most of these people, so they are going to stretch out the lifetimes of their vehicles if the prices increase relative to their wages. Furthermore, people who might have bought a Camry with some upgrades in 1998 might be relegated to a stock Corolla in 2020. Sure, things are getting nicer all the time, but it's getting easier to make things all the time, too. Technology goes both ways, and at the end of the day, it's still a car. If they took out the rear airbags and removed all of the cheap microcontrollers, would the price really drop 40%?

The way the BLS does its survey does not account for preference changes due to price increases. When wealth inequality is constant, it's probably a decent measure. But even then, it's a political metric and the Big Mac index is the best, simple metric we have for true inflation (which has been consistently higher than CPI for decades).

Re: The true costs of inflation in small-town Texas

#225

Post by dublin »

chomp wrote: post #66
nostromo wrote: post #51

I’ve seen some people showing actual price increases they’ve seen in their local communities. For a lot of folks it’s much higher than is being reported. Here’s one from a person in Seattle: https://preview.redd.it/max54wqv9kb91.png?width=1112&format=...

I'm super skeptical of posts like this because they seem cherry picked, or at best, have local price increases that aren't reflected elsewhere in the country. Half of those are restaurants, who have had challenges for the past 2 years outside of inflation. Gas has its own challenges, a head of lettuce at my local grocer is $1.52 which is cheaper than that person's 2021 price. Notably not included in that post is thin…

Anything is potentially cherry-picked, but there's no question that superinflation is real now (inflation is really much higher than the officially reported), and we stand on the precipice of hyperinflation. Later this year, the dry, hot summer (that's just weather, folks, not global warming, but the timing sucks), in conjunction with skyrocketing costs of fertilizer, diesel fuel, and hay/feed will drive real food prices higher than they've been in the lifetime of all but our oldest citizens. Food will become a very significant part of family spending.

It's no better on the industrial side - I've got a client in light manufacturing (oilfield sensors) - they can't get critical components, they can't get wire, they can't get adhesives and chemicals. They can't even get some of the blocks of metal that they start machining with!

They have orders that have been sidelined waiting for parts for a year now. Most vendors have stopped quoting delivery and now just say "52+ weeks", since they have no idea when they'll have product to sell again. Their customers are furious, but they can't deliver what they don't have.

This cannot end well. Our economies, worldwide, have been deliberately destroyed in a very intentional set of moves that are not nearly over yet. This is going to get a lot worse before it gets better, unless there's a massive uprising. Canadian truckers and the farmers of the Netherlands are just the beginning of the unrest that's going to happen.

Prepare for something much worse than the Great Depression, because our governments sure appear to be colluding to make sure it happens. The only thing good about this is that social media and tech companies will be the hardest hit. People need food, they need manufactured products, but no one NEEDS Facebook... (We're already seeing people drop expensive unessential subscriptions (Netflix, etc.), and even seeing enough late payments to AT&T that they have to call it our in defending their falling earnings.) The Great Reset is here, and it's likely to turn bloody before it's all over...

Re: The true costs of inflation in small-town Texas

#226

Post by thfuran »

spaetzleesser wrote: post #208
thfuran wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that sounds like a good idea if what you're trying to estimate is the cost of maintaining a certain quality of life.

If you push this far enough then you can argue inflation away from almost anything.

So what? The goal of measuring inflation isn't to compute the biggest, scariest number, it's to track changes over time.

Re: The true costs of inflation in small-town Texas

#227

Post by quickthrower2 »

pj_mukh wrote: post #196
quickthrower2 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One day the economic reaper will come for the software developers: will be kinda fun even though I am one because the the roll out of bed and get $200k/y lifestyle and the entitlement to that will vapourize.

The climate reaper is already here and it’s the Texans featured in this article that will feel the heat first. The 200k/yr developer will comfortably whisk themselves off up the hill. Maybe this is more complicate than you think it is?

Maybe more complicated than you think it is. High paid ICs in a corporate lead world are the exception not the rule. The rule is low level workers get enough to survive.
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