Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

UK: Food inflation rises to 18.2% as it hits highest rate in over 45 years

grocerygazette.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

951–960 of 1001 posts

Re: UK: Food inflation rises to 18.2% as it hits highest rate in over 45 years

#951

Post by apexalpha »

samstave wrote: post #561
lepus wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't know anyone who thinks about everyday purchases like this then you're in a social bubble. This is a normal concern for a lot of people.

Funny anecdote: Jeff Bezos was interviewed in Pay Pal days after making many millions, and as they drove across the GGB, was asked why he was still driving his beat up honda - he said "Why, just because I have some money? Its still a good car!" FF 2020: Jeff Bezos builds worlds most expensive yacht, and is having a municiple bridge dismantled so it can pass through, and local residents want to throw eggs at it as it…

>FF 2020: Jeff Bezos builds worlds most expensive yacht, and is having a municiple bridge dismantled so it can pass through, and local residents want to throw eggs at it as it passes by!

As someone from the country you're referring to: this is an internet meme... The bridge that was dismantled is meant to be dismantled for such a thing.

Jeff Bezos did not and also cannot order bridges to be dismantled.

Re: UK: Food inflation rises to 18.2% as it hits highest rate in over 45 years

#952

Post by juniordev7 »

okeuro49 wrote: post #317
juniordev7 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

War ends sooner or later but Brexit and it's effects are here to stay forever.

The UK will last longer than the EU. The EU has a fundamental schism of a shared monetary policy, without a shared fiscal policy (see euro sovereign debt crisis). It also has a problem regarding the population becoming increasingly sceptical of freedom of movement, voting for more socially conservative parties. Hopefully the EU can be reformed to go back to a trading bloc, with a liberal visa regime for member states…

[flagged]

Re: UK: Food inflation rises to 18.2% as it hits highest rate in over 45 years

#953

Post by pharmakom »

dukeyukey wrote: post #912
smarnach wrote: post #868

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inflation (in general, not food inflation specifically) in the UK is worse than in, say, Germany and France. The reasons for that are specific to the UK, and they do include Brexit. I think it's not myopic to point that out. We shouldn't give a free pass to people who have wreaked economic havoc to the UK just because there are some geopolitical factors that happen to wreak even worse havoc at the same time.

Absolutely not. But Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, Czechia, all have comparable or worse inflation. Brexit was and continues to be a shit show, but the UK isn't uniquely in trouble here.

Question isn’t how Brexit UK compares to other countries, question is how it compared to hypothetical UK without Brexit. The government is spending a lot of money keeping inflation down through the energy price cap.

Re: UK: Food inflation rises to 18.2% as it hits highest rate in over 45 years

#954

Post by pharmakom »

kaanski wrote: post #198
_Wintermute wrote: post #87

For reference, that's a fairly average value for Europe at the moment. Not sure why the UK is being singled out. https://i.redd.it/8hbhiqhowjpa1.png

In general there seems to be a weird zeitgeist of negative exceptionalism in the UK at the moment. Not sure why but generally journos seem to write about issues like they are only hitting the UK when a simple google search shows they aren’t. It does come across like a weird concerted effort to paint the UK as collapsing since leaving the EU. The majority of journos seem to be able to write only negatively about UK cu…

On the flip side, recent strikes in France received more coverage in mainstream UK press than the recent strikes in the UK!

Re: UK: Food inflation rises to 18.2% as it hits highest rate in over 45 years

#955

Post by pharmakom »

Veen wrote: post #234
kaanski wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general there seems to be a weird zeitgeist of negative exceptionalism in the UK at the moment. Not sure why but generally journos seem to write about issues like they are only hitting the UK when a simple google search shows they aren’t. It does come across like a weird concerted effort to paint the UK as collapsing since leaving the EU. The majority of journos seem to be able to write only negatively about UK cu…

> In general there seems to be a weird zeitgeist of negative exceptionalism in the UK at the moment. Especially on Hacker News. I tend to avoid UK-based posts on here because the content is fairly predictable: the UK is going to shit and Brexit is to blame, repeated ad nauseam in the absence of any evidence that it's true. If I wanted thoughtless UK doom mongering, I'd read the Guardian or the NYT.

There is some evidence:

- Governemtn forecast 4% lower GDP than without Brexit

- UK car industry significant decline in output since 2015 (around 30% IIRC)

- People who immigrated here for work (and have the right to stay) are choosing to leave

- Low investment compared to comparable regions / countries

- Turmoil around NI

- Banking migrating to Europe and New York in particular

- Trade deals not materialising

It’s not what “project fear” warned us of, but it’s certainly not good. Many of these effects are playing out across years so haven’t really hit home for people yet.

Re: UK: Food inflation rises to 18.2% as it hits highest rate in over 45 years

#956

Post by illiac786 »

mateo1 wrote: post #902
pindab0ter wrote: post #873

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same in the Netherlands. Except I'm not so sure about the 'minor' part.

I would be funny if it wasn't horrifying. We're all shooting ourselves on the foot while other countries can only dream of achieving the industrial, technological and economical progress we've made. Deindustrialization 30,40,50 years ago was a side effect. But destroying our own energy infrastructure, industry, and now even agricultural sector? This is totally mad, and despite turning a blind eye this will come back…

Which one is "shooting ourselves in the foot"? Pumping more nitrogen fertilizer in the environment or cutting it?

I think it depends who is "we" and what's the timeline for shooting ourselves in the foot, short term or long term.

In both cases it sucks. I have a preference for the better long term strategy, at least I don't have the impression or driving into a wall (or I feel like we trying to swerve/break).

Some day it's hard not to feel overwhelmed, looking at the global prospective. Keeping our planet habitable will require us to: * Sacrifice individual benefit for the common good * Trust each other * Think long term (like multiple generations)

All things humanity has a horrible track record at.

That does not put me in an optimistic mood.

On the up side, if we kill everything including ourselves maybe in millions of years the next intelligent race will find remnants of our apocalypse and learn from it? =)

Re: UK: Food inflation rises to 18.2% as it hits highest rate in over 45 years

#957

Post by andy_ppp »

fknorangesite wrote: post #707
jlengrand wrote: post #661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, incidentally that very chemical is a major part of the recipe! My bad, English isn't my native language. I guess I meant additives?

> My bad Nah, it's just that the comment you're responding to is being insufferably pedantic. Your colloquial use of "chemicals" here is perfectly well understood.

Exactly, I despise people who say things like "everything is made of chemicals" or "vegetables are carbohydrates" when they perfectly know exactly what I mean.

Re: UK: Food inflation rises to 18.2% as it hits highest rate in over 45 years

#958

Post by cesarosum »

wahern wrote: post #933
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #915

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have learnt to unpack a few things here. Firstly cooking from scratch is absolutely a life skill and nominally cheaper. But food is also a class issue. Those with time to spare (ie rich) can indulge in for example "stuffing a mushroom" - Shirley Conran famously recanted twenty years of writing cookery lifestyle books exhorting women to become corden bleu cooks by saying life was to short to stuff a mushroom - and t…

> Firstly cooking from scratch is absolutely a life skill and nominally cheaper. > But food is also a class issue. If we put these two beliefs together (and I think we're of similar minds), I think we should amend the first to be "meal planning and preparation is a life skill". Unfortunately the cooking craze over the past few decades has done nothing to improve, let alone restore, that life skill. > I mean Gordon bl…

If you're not shy of a few swear words, Nat's What I Reckon has some great recipes that are straightforward. Here's link to his bolognese - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw_Ze9zIafM

Re: UK: Food inflation rises to 18.2% as it hits highest rate in over 45 years

#959

Post by andromeduck »

MagicMoonlight wrote: post #891
Nifty3929 wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fix is to produce more stuff. It's that simple. It might not be easy though. It would require us to focus on production, remove barriers, streamline regulations, encourage and actively celebrate production. It seems these days we're ambivalent toward the production of stuff, or even antagonistic to it in many cases. So we have less stuff. Combine this with giving people more money and you get inflation.

Yes yes fellow consumers. We should remove consumer protections and lower corporation taxes! Then I’m sure the companies will treat us better!

Let's tax our way out of a famine.

Re: UK: Food inflation rises to 18.2% as it hits highest rate in over 45 years

#960

Post by pharmakom »

dazc wrote: post #132
908B64B197 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels Europe is becoming increasingly poor and unsafe, and the situation in the UK has worsened quite a bit since the start of Brexit. Anecdotally, seems there's a lot of British and European expats here in the Valley and they don't seem too keen on returning. We've been getting a lot of international applicants (but work from home was supposed to mean Europeans could avoid moving to the "dangerous" US but work fo…

Brexit was 6 years or so ago. Then we had 3 years of trying to reverse it, then Covid, then Ukraine and, to top that, a Govt that decides fracking for gas is unacceptable and then goes and imports fracked gas from the US. Maybe best to sum things up as a run of bad luck compounded with gross incompetence?

The formal notice was 6 years ago but they still haven’t implemented it fully and keep deferring decisions.
Post reply on HN