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In related news, diesel is $7/gallon, and peets coffee is $25/lb, and computers (hardware and cloud) are up 25-50%. The official numbers claim 3% inflation. D
by hedora 8mo ago
In related news, diesel is $7/gallon, and peets coffee is $25/lb, and computers (hardware and cloud) are up 25-50%.
The official numbers claim 3% inflation. Does anyone actually believe that? We were seeing 30% YoY before Iran here in California.
The discrepancy is so large, I’m wondering if there’s an official explanation or some reasonable explanation, or if they’re just not bothering anymore.
- happyopossum 8mo ago> We were seeing 30% YoY before Iran here in California. We didn’t even see that across the board during the height of Covid-flation. What metrics are you using to get that number?
- hedora 8mo agoFood, fuel, utilities, insurance, electronics, services and digital goods.
- imperialdrive 8mo agoEntry level Dell servers that used to cost 1,700 US are now going for 17,000!!! I'm talking absolute basics with 16GB of memory etc. Wild times.
- manarth 8mo agoCitation please? > £2,751.70 PowerEdge R260 Xeon® 6315P 2.8GHz 1x16GB DIMM 2x2TB HDD SATA https://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/dell-poweredge-servers/sr/servers?sortBy=price-ascending https://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/dell-poweredge-servers/sr/se...
- _ache_ 8mo agoWell, I only tried ~~one~~ two servers: T560: Priced £3,505 in may 2025: https://web.archive.org/web/20250702124754/https://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/dell-servers-storage-networking/dell-poweredge-t560-tower-server/spd/poweredge-t560/emea_pet5604a https://web.archive.org/web/20250702124754/https://www.dell.... Now at £13,979: https://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/dell-servers-storage-networking/dell-poweredge-t560-tower-server/spd/poweredge-t560/emea_pet5604a https://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/dell-servers-storage-network... It's a 10k£ increase or about x3. I also just tried with R360, x2 in price only, from $4,959 dec 2025 to $17,142 today. dec 2025: https://web.archive.org/web/20251210154822/https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/servers-storage-and-networking/poweredge-r360-rack-server/spd/poweredge-r360/pe_r360_15330_os_vi_vp https://web.archive.org/web/20251210154822/https://www.dell.... Today: https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/servers-storage-and-networking/poweredge-r360-rack-server/spd/poweredge-r360/pe_r360_15330_os_vi_vp https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/servers-storage-and-networki... Edit: Add another one with US dollar.
- dyauspitr 8mo agoThis administration is America slitting its wrists.
- Gud 8mo agoMore like randomly shooting itself causing non-lethal injuries, but in aggregate, enough blood loss to die.
- wartywhoa23 8mo agoAs randomly as number 17.
- largbae 8mo agoDiesel is $5 in the Southeast, what kind of supply chain issue could cause 40% diff? Should we hire some tanker trucks and arb this?
- joering2 8mo agoNone. But you don't put a non refined cruide oil in your diesel, it not only has to be refined but DELIVERED to your country. Depending where that country is, delivery could be even 60% of the final price. And when, you know, tankers with oil explode due to drone attacks, you will see quick large spikes in pump price. EDIT: also, oil is a commodity traded worldwide, and downside of this is the price of oil is directed by future contracts bet on said oil. In other words, if enough people assume there will be future upticks related to raising cost of transportation insurance, they buy more futures. If they buy more of this virtual contract on price going up (called "long") then eventually real price of oil catches up. Sure, this is upside down, but markets live in this setup for many years now where tail wags the dog.
- erikerikson 8mo agoCheck taxes
- bobthepanda 8mo agoMost oil production and refining capacity is east of the Rockies and transported to major population centers using pipelines. The Rockies, Sierra Nevada, etc. make pipelines much more cost prohibitive since you have to pump it over the mountains; trains and trucks are a lot more expensive to use for transport; and tankers would have to use the Panama Canal, which besides being a much longer distance also has usage fees.
- phendrenad2 8mo agoI dug up walmart ads from 8 and 16 years ago. In the first 8 years, a case of pepsi went up 5%. In the last 8 years, it went up 200%. Make of that what you will.
- randomNumber7 8mo agoDrinking more water would be healthy for most americans.
- wartywhoa23 8mo agoSure, but did water remain at the same price or got cheaper?
- phendrenad2 7mo agoThat's true. Do you have something to say about inflation, though? Because that's the topic here.
- dgoldstein0 8mo agoso every inflation number has to be understood by following (a) when is it measuring and (b) what is it measuring. For when: a lot of economic data is lagging indicators, e.g. last quarter - and inflation is usually % more year over year, whereas a lot of people seem to care about inflation on the 2-5 year time frame instead of just 1 year. For the what - we'd have to dig into whether it's national averages, state averages, or local; what percentage of the measurement is rent vs housing prices vs groceries (and what grocery items) vs clothing vs computers vs utilities etc etc. It's very likely that the idealized basket of goods that they are measuring the cost of doesn't actually match your expenses or even the average household expenses for your area. Or possibly even, for the whole country. The meta problem is that price data - assuming we can even reliably observe it - is super high dimensional, and we're trying to reduce it all to a single number.
- stopbulying 8mo ago[dead]
- PowerElectronix 8mo agoCPI is kept artificially down by claiming that items that increase a lot in value are sudendly "higher quality" so that their price is adjusted down to equalize for "quality". They will just take those items off the basket, put in different ones and claim that those are better quality so the actual price increase is in line with expectations.
- _heimdall 8mo agoI wish I could find the analysis now, but someone proved this out by comparing magazine prices to CPI's calculation of magazine prices. I believe they uses Time as the example because the covers are archived and have the price printed right on them. They went back a few decades and the inflation difference was quite large. I want to say the real sticker price change was multiple times higher than CPI's claim of magazine prices, but I can't remember the exact numbers.
- pas 8mo agothere are frequent claims by semi-crackpots that the hedonic adjustment of inflation calculation is hiding a lot of inflation. there was the famous shadowstats site, but it seems it shut down, or at least stopped publishing new stuff in 2023 publicly. (probably reverting to a good old affinity scam [5]) (fun trivia, noticed by a reddit user 11 years ago, that even though the guy claimed high inflation but the subscription fee remained the same over 10 years, and in the last post it was also "six months at $89.00".) and there are many posts [3][4] explaining why these alternate measures are very unlikely to be more correct than either the BLS' CPI or the BEA's PCE. ... the BLS does a lot of work to have useful numbers for a lot of goods and services [0], down to computer parts [1] and there are a lot of things that usually are now more fancy (and more expensive, of course), but don't have value adjustment in the list. (Matt Yglesias writes about the spa-ification of services, everything is nicer, fancier, from movie theater seats to barber shops, yet there's no adjustment for "haircuts and other personal care services"[2]) [0] https://www.bls.gov/cpi/quality-adjustment/home.htm https://www.bls.gov/cpi/quality-adjustment/home.htm [1] https://www.bls.gov/mxp/publications/additional-publications/computer-facts.htm https://www.bls.gov/mxp/publications/additional-publications... [2] sorry, behind a paywall https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-spa-fication-of-everything https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-spa-fication-of-everything [3] https://www.economonitor.com/dolanecon/2015/03/31/deconstructing-shadowstats-why-is-it-so-loved-by-its-followers-but-scorned-by-economists/ https://www.economonitor.com/dolanecon/2015/03/31/deconstruc... [4] https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/inflation-is-up-but-the-inflation https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/inflation-is-up-but-the-inflat... [5] https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-long-con https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-long-con
- Lewton 8mo agoSome of the cpi data is synthetic, based on best guess, the ratio of synthetic data has gone up sharply https://www.apolloacademy.com/the-quality-of-the-cpi-data-continues-to-deteriorate/ https://www.apolloacademy.com/the-quality-of-the-cpi-data-co...
- wartywhoa23 8mo agoThe explanation is that the world economy has been controlledly flown into terrain, nearing the day when those who used to express their cognitive dissonance by issuing cuckoo signs towards conspiracy theorists, finally own nothing and are happy making cuckoo signs in front of their rented mirrors.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- energy123 8mo agoWe should make different inflation baskets, representative of the bottom quartile, the median person, and the upper quartile. The bottom quartile has a large % of the CPI basket composed of housing rent, for example. The upper quartile has 0% of the CPI basket composed of rents. This should be doable quite easily, it's not like the spending habits of different socioeconomic groups are a secret.
- manarth 8mo agoI guess the typical inflation basket doesn't include rental income, which the upper-quartile are rather more likely to have than the lower quartile. Wonder how that might impact figures if residual/passive income were included?
- nickff 8mo agoConsumer Price Inflation (CPI) is about spending on consumer goods, and not about wage or investment income.
- energy123 8mo agoA separate index could be independently useful: The amount you gain/lose just from existing, so spending + capital gains + ... It's not a fully baked idea, but something like this.
- manarth 8mo agoConsumer Price Index (inflation/deflation being the change in CPI), but I get your point, thanks