I'm not an economist, I'm far from it. It sure seems like the big three these days are housing, food, and gas. Housing is complicated, because it's less elast

I'm not an economist, I'm far from it. It sure seems like the big three these days are housing, food, and gas. Housing is complicated, because it's less elastic. Moving sucks, is expensive and kind of emotional. It's sorta sticky because it's such an ordeal, so (I think) there's some scalping, charging a bit more because making a switch is just a pain in the ass. Food is weird. if you can put together a hotplate and a sink, food can be relativly inexpensive, and tasty, but time consuming. If you can't it's pretty ugly. Personally, I'd probably just go with multivitamins and beer. Dual duty as calories and entertainment. That's a disaster long term though. Gasoline sucks because it's a magnifying effect. Take a bag of rice. the rice gets trucked somewhere to get packaged. the bag gets trucked from a factory, the plastic gets trucked to the factory. Every step has a transportation cost, and it compounds. I'm not rich. I could take a long break from work if I needed to, but I gotta work. I'm very lucky to be where I am. CPI makes a lot of sense for me. I think it's not so great because a cop and a teacher couple with no kids, totally reasonable professions, damn near a Rockwell painting, struggle. I don't think it'll ever be easy for everyone. but damn. does it have to be so damn hard at the bottom? I think the CPI doesn't really work out for the bottom N% and I'm not really sure of the value of N. I hope N is still kinda small, because if N gets big, things get really ugly for everyone. I dunno. CPI is a metric. it has a meaning. mean median and mode have meaning, but they don't tell the whole story. I think CPI highlights some things, but don't think for a second it's the whole story.