It's weird how certain things have remained the same, or even cheaper when accounting for inflation.
I've bought an $899 MacBook Air. I've bought a $229 65" TV. $20 handheld emulator. A lot of tools and random things from Amazon are still the same price.
But the house I bought was double what the one was in 2018. The car I haven't bought would be up 50%. Insurance costs are way up. Phone bill is the same.
Groceries are way up in general, certain things like meat basically doubled but Yogurt and cheese is still about the same price. Junk food like soda, cookies, and chips are double (thankfully I don't buy much). Potatoes, onions, peppers are still the same price.
At 2% inflation prices increase by 40% every 17 years, and it takes 35 years for them to double. At 3% (closer to real inflation), prices would double every 23 years: 1.03**23 = 1.97...
Slowly, global warming will take its toll. There won't be one big disaster, one big crash leading to global famine, but crops failing more and more, constantly, removing first the luxuries (cacao, olives, fruits, etc) and then the staples.
And other non-food related slow-catastrophes. From William Gibson's The Peripheral, on The Jackpot:
> nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves.
The original seeds and farm equipment still exist for the most part. Farmers use GMO patented seeds and no-right-to-repair complex farm equipment "systems" because they're more efficient despite the downsides.
I think this has less to do with policy and more to do with grocery economics: They will raise prices until the public stops buying - basic economics. They've raised the prices and have zero incentive to reduce them. What are you going to do, grow your own food? Buy local?
The monetary base expanded (aka "they printed a ton of money") between 2020-2022, so there were 2 options: the monetary base had to contract again, or the prices needed to adjust.
The one thing I get from these articles, as I suspect the majority of tech workers on here feel, is that I'm grateful for this to not affect me. I have always shopped for sale items, but I've never had to go to several grocery stores to get the best deal. I've never had to choose a cheap spaghetti meal (since college, anyways) because of price. I'm grateful for this
Save as if it did matter, because your advantage could disappear in a blink. If not from a world wide trend, then from a microscopic blockage in a capillary. I wish I had.
I think I get the gist of what you're saying and I'm also grateful that I'm doing ok, but rapidly rising incoming equality is already impacting many tech workers and a larger and larger percentage of the former middle class will be underwater in the coming years since nobody with the power to do anything is making any real effort to fix the underlying problems.
And this may not be the case for GP, but tech workers (especially programmers) aren’t particularly social creatures and they miss the signs of upheaval. Important things will affect you badly with or without a good income
I listened to Planet Money from NPR in August[0] where it claimed that inflation was based on feeling rather than data. The summary was that groceries are not a good measure of inflation since they're seasonal and the best way to buy groceries was the same as dollar cost averaging investment - buy the groceries when you need them and the prices will average out.
A little late on this story, it all happened last year and the years before. Inflation is a monetary phenomenon, when the govt floods the world with free money, the price of goods goes up.
I think the best non-governmental solution to handling private equity is to take money out of equities and to put it into precious metals and cryptocurrency. In effect it is to take money out of the private-equity controlled dollar system, devaluing their equities. Unfortunately for now, mutual funds, which hold a lot of retirement funds, probably don't support those alternative assets yet.
Self-custodied cryptocurrency, if limited to the subset below, using an offline cold wallet, is not scammy at all; it is exactly the opposite, presenting less risk even than a bank account.
Note that there are just a handful of cryptocurrencies that have seen constant appreciation after adjusting for noise. These are: BTC, ETH, XMR, TRX, PAXG, BNB.
by labor pool you mean foreign labor paid under the table at slave wages w/o benefits or tax collection who meanwhile use US ERs as primary care doctors and US schools to feed and watch their kids for them.
If the employees are being paid under the table, they would mean the employers were committing an obvious crime opening the employer to extortion. However, if the employees were Using fake social security numbers, then it would give the employers the benefit of the doubt. It also would mean the employees do pay takes, collected by their employers. From what I’ve heard, the latter is most common.
Even if they pay no other taxes, they do pay sales tax on their purchases at stores, gas stations, and so on. And those taxes go to the state or local government, and help pay for school and other services.
Most undocumented immigrant laborers actually do pay taxes despite not being able to take advantage of what they are being taxed for (eg. social security).
And there have always been aspects of using undocumented labor that are negative and exploitative and I'm all for the US government making real positive changes in this area, but any policymaker coming at this from a non-racist perspective that wanted to make real changes would do it by fining or charging the people who are hiring the immigrants.
Of course, that's not what the Trump administration has done or will do.
Annualized inflation is still lower than the month before he was inaugurated (2.9% < 3.0%). And that 3.0% was a dream compared to most of Biden's presidency.
> U.S. food prices rose by 23.6 percent from 2020 to 2024.
After historic food price roses during a global pandemic and another round of bird flu in four years, you’d think a good president would do things to lower them, not continue to increase them!
I am fascinated your comment is buried down here with absolutely no discussion. Money printing is undoubtedly the biggest factor in this particular inflation spike, but something is quietly steering the narrative away from it almost everywhere.
While the question of alternative actions and outcomes is also valid, this is a literal 10-trillion dollar question that nobody in a leadership position wants to ask or answer.
It's literally reported right in the top "Up 29% since February 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics."
And later "Coffee prices have jumped more than 20% in the last year. And while some of that is due to weather in coffee-growing countries like Brazil and Vietnam, Trump's double-digit import taxes are not helping." if you want to pretend that your boy had nothing to do with it (because global trade wars have nothing to do with rising prices.)
We're also heading for a crash because we invested in financial scams rather than infrastructure that would allow us to make groceries cheaper.
But this is just a submarine anti-Trump piece. Everybody knows that groceries are expensive and why. The idea that annualized inflation rising to 2.9% in October when it was 3.0% in January is a huge failure for Trump is silly when he's actively pursuing policies that are expected to raise prices (tariffs and the deportation of workers that have no rights and are paid trash.)
Trump's failure is that he's simultaneously trying to cut the social safety net because he's a dumb libertarian at heart, surrounded by dumb libertarians, who engineer policy to serve their plutocrat sponsors (who aren't dumb libertarians) whims. They convinced him that he could get rid of the enormous number of illegal aliens to create a wage renaissance without spending a dime, but they aren't easy to get rid of. They're here, and they don't have anywhere else to go because we fucked up their countries. In fact, he's still fucking up their countries because he serves the people he golfs with. Even if you warehouse the illegals, all that's doing is keeping them from feeding themselves, and making them an even larger weight on the citizen economy. He even knows that most of them will have to be made citizens. At least the gate is closed for now.
He needs to put price controls on necessities hard, and start doing stimulus checks so hard that it looks like UBI. His goal is to lower the dollar anyway, print a ton of them and don't give them to the wealthiest people in the country who don't spend (or who "spend" on trash like the metaverse and AI being anything like AGI.) By that, I mean be better than Obama. People will forget that you reigned over the completion of a genocide in the holy land, and remember that you saved the West.
The west is a fear driven fantasy, an escape from deeply rooted insecurities, multi-generational. I urge you too shake that off before we collectively go there again.
Using words like "jumped" in headlines exactly why NPR is continuing to lose public trust. The data is super easy to find. CPI rose slightly last month, and the overall trend looks to have stabilized. I believe the FED targets for ~ 3% inflation.
Am I missing something or are they reporting that prices have "jumped" because they've increased 30% since 2020? That seems like a fair use of the word.
NPR is losing public trust because there's a concerted effort to make the American public distrust any kind of news media.
You are just a victim of that, it's unfortunate because given your comment history it will be really hard for anyone on Earth to pull you out of that deep pit of distrust you fell into.
It's weird how certain things have remained the same, or even cheaper when accounting for inflation.
I've bought an $899 MacBook Air. I've bought a $229 65" TV. $20 handheld emulator. A lot of tools and random things from Amazon are still the same price.
But the house I bought was double what the one was in 2018. The car I haven't bought would be up 50%. Insurance costs are way up. Phone bill is the same.
Groceries are way up in general, certain things like meat basically doubled but Yogurt and cheese is still about the same price. Junk food like soda, cookies, and chips are double (thankfully I don't buy much). Potatoes, onions, peppers are still the same price.
iPhone is screaming: Hello, ahem, I was priced $499 in 2007 and $1100 now
$499 was the carrier subsidized price in 2007, not the true price.
The true price would likely have been around $999. The 6 was $199 with subsidy; the 7 was $699 without.
There has been a marked quality improvement, it’s not apples to apples
Ok.. so $499 was too much back in 2007.
With 2% target inflation prices double every 17 years, so that’s not too far off.
1.02**17 = 1.400..., whereas 1.02**35 = 1.99...
At 2% inflation prices increase by 40% every 17 years, and it takes 35 years for them to double. At 3% (closer to real inflation), prices would double every 23 years: 1.03**23 = 1.97...
iPhone 16e is $599 and would have been the best phone on the market a few years ago.
The stuff you mentioned that remained cheap is coming from China/Asia. It is in fact getting cheaper than ever for electronics.
[dead]
Slowly, global warming will take its toll. There won't be one big disaster, one big crash leading to global famine, but crops failing more and more, constantly, removing first the luxuries (cacao, olives, fruits, etc) and then the staples.
Likely it will mirror Hemingway’s quote about how someone went bankrupt: Gradually, then suddenly.
And other non-food related slow-catastrophes. From William Gibson's The Peripheral, on The Jackpot:
> nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves.
There is a lot missing from the articles on this whole space. The farmers are getting squeezed for things like profits. For example...
1. Seed prices - there is a lot of patented GMO stuff in circulation and pricing around that.
2. Farm equipment - bigger equipment, more sensors and computers, higher costs (even around fixing things)
It would be great if there was some investigative reporting that covered all the angles.
The original seeds and farm equipment still exist for the most part. Farmers use GMO patented seeds and no-right-to-repair complex farm equipment "systems" because they're more efficient despite the downsides.
> Farm equipment - bigger equipment, more sensors and computers
The alternative is to keep using the same equipment + manual labor
Farmers are getting squeezed by $4 wheat and the elimination of the sole buyer of their worthless sorghum crop.
I think this has less to do with policy and more to do with grocery economics: They will raise prices until the public stops buying - basic economics. They've raised the prices and have zero incentive to reduce them. What are you going to do, grow your own food? Buy local?
Too much monopoly in the food industry, trade wars hurting farmers, there are so many problems..
The monetary base expanded (aka "they printed a ton of money") between 2020-2022, so there were 2 options: the monetary base had to contract again, or the prices needed to adjust.
The one thing I get from these articles, as I suspect the majority of tech workers on here feel, is that I'm grateful for this to not affect me. I have always shopped for sale items, but I've never had to go to several grocery stores to get the best deal. I've never had to choose a cheap spaghetti meal (since college, anyways) because of price. I'm grateful for this
Save as if it did matter, because your advantage could disappear in a blink. If not from a world wide trend, then from a microscopic blockage in a capillary. I wish I had.
When I got laid off 2 years back it was shocking how quickly I burned down savings because I had really high consumption habit
Been saving more since I found another job
What were you spending your money on that you considered high consumption?
Love this question so I looked up my credit card statement I just got yesterday (I use one CC for everything)
- $375 coffee
- $752 Amazon
- $124 various streaming subscriptions
- $37 apple in-app payments (not mine :) )
- $427 food outside (restaurants etc)
- $472 home depot / lowes
I think I get the gist of what you're saying and I'm also grateful that I'm doing ok, but rapidly rising incoming equality is already impacting many tech workers and a larger and larger percentage of the former middle class will be underwater in the coming years since nobody with the power to do anything is making any real effort to fix the underlying problems.
And this may not be the case for GP, but tech workers (especially programmers) aren’t particularly social creatures and they miss the signs of upheaval. Important things will affect you badly with or without a good income
I listened to Planet Money from NPR in August[0] where it claimed that inflation was based on feeling rather than data. The summary was that groceries are not a good measure of inflation since they're seasonal and the best way to buy groceries was the same as dollar cost averaging investment - buy the groceries when you need them and the prices will average out.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2025/08/15/nx-s1-5500523/when-our-inflat...
even after adjusting for seasonality inflation can be detected
It’s just that you can’t track it by the price of oranges week to week
A little late on this story, it all happened last year and the years before. Inflation is a monetary phenomenon, when the govt floods the world with free money, the price of goods goes up.
Get ready for statist backlash.
> Avian flu added to the more recent spike in egg prices
There’s some fascinating writing on this. It’s really private equity causing the price increases through supply chain control.
I think the best non-governmental solution to handling private equity is to take money out of equities and to put it into precious metals and cryptocurrency. In effect it is to take money out of the private-equity controlled dollar system, devaluing their equities. Unfortunately for now, mutual funds, which hold a lot of retirement funds, probably don't support those alternative assets yet.
> and cryptocurrency
Shifting things from one scam economy (private equity) to another (cryptocurrency).
Self-custodied cryptocurrency, if limited to the subset below, using an offline cold wallet, is not scammy at all; it is exactly the opposite, presenting less risk even than a bank account.
Note that there are just a handful of cryptocurrencies that have seen constant appreciation after adjusting for noise. These are: BTC, ETH, XMR, TRX, PAXG, BNB.
It's almost like tariffs were a bad idea.
It's happening in Europe too so it's more likely inflation.
If only nearly everyone, everywhere had seen this coming...
That and causing massive sudden disruption within the domestic agricultural labor pool.
I'm sure that somehow this is all Biden's fault though.
The annualized growth rate of CPI food prices from Jan 2021 to Jan 2025 was 5.5%. From Jan 2025 to Sept 2025, it was 2.2%.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIUFDSL#
It's due increase in money supply during Covid stimulus spending.
Covid was years ago. Right now it's tariffs.
by labor pool you mean foreign labor paid under the table at slave wages w/o benefits or tax collection who meanwhile use US ERs as primary care doctors and US schools to feed and watch their kids for them.
If the employees are being paid under the table, they would mean the employers were committing an obvious crime opening the employer to extortion. However, if the employees were Using fake social security numbers, then it would give the employers the benefit of the doubt. It also would mean the employees do pay takes, collected by their employers. From what I’ve heard, the latter is most common.
Even if they pay no other taxes, they do pay sales tax on their purchases at stores, gas stations, and so on. And those taxes go to the state or local government, and help pay for school and other services.
Most undocumented immigrant laborers actually do pay taxes despite not being able to take advantage of what they are being taxed for (eg. social security).
And there have always been aspects of using undocumented labor that are negative and exploitative and I'm all for the US government making real positive changes in this area, but any policymaker coming at this from a non-racist perspective that wanted to make real changes would do it by fining or charging the people who are hiring the immigrants.
Of course, that's not what the Trump administration has done or will do.
Annualized inflation is still lower than the month before he was inaugurated (2.9% < 3.0%). And that 3.0% was a dream compared to most of Biden's presidency.
U.S. food prices rose by 23.6 percent from 2020 to 2024.
> U.S. food prices rose by 23.6 percent from 2020 to 2024.
After historic food price roses during a global pandemic and another round of bird flu in four years, you’d think a good president would do things to lower them, not continue to increase them!
Not even a passing mention of all the money printing that at least could have had an effect on inflation?
I am fascinated your comment is buried down here with absolutely no discussion. Money printing is undoubtedly the biggest factor in this particular inflation spike, but something is quietly steering the narrative away from it almost everywhere.
While the question of alternative actions and outcomes is also valid, this is a literal 10-trillion dollar question that nobody in a leadership position wants to ask or answer.
No, because that started before 2025.
The article is about the cost increase since 2020.
The money printing started before then too.
It's literally reported right in the top "Up 29% since February 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics."
And later "Coffee prices have jumped more than 20% in the last year. And while some of that is due to weather in coffee-growing countries like Brazil and Vietnam, Trump's double-digit import taxes are not helping." if you want to pretend that your boy had nothing to do with it (because global trade wars have nothing to do with rising prices.)
We're also heading for a crash because we invested in financial scams rather than infrastructure that would allow us to make groceries cheaper.
But this is just a submarine anti-Trump piece. Everybody knows that groceries are expensive and why. The idea that annualized inflation rising to 2.9% in October when it was 3.0% in January is a huge failure for Trump is silly when he's actively pursuing policies that are expected to raise prices (tariffs and the deportation of workers that have no rights and are paid trash.)
Trump's failure is that he's simultaneously trying to cut the social safety net because he's a dumb libertarian at heart, surrounded by dumb libertarians, who engineer policy to serve their plutocrat sponsors (who aren't dumb libertarians) whims. They convinced him that he could get rid of the enormous number of illegal aliens to create a wage renaissance without spending a dime, but they aren't easy to get rid of. They're here, and they don't have anywhere else to go because we fucked up their countries. In fact, he's still fucking up their countries because he serves the people he golfs with. Even if you warehouse the illegals, all that's doing is keeping them from feeding themselves, and making them an even larger weight on the citizen economy. He even knows that most of them will have to be made citizens. At least the gate is closed for now.
He needs to put price controls on necessities hard, and start doing stimulus checks so hard that it looks like UBI. His goal is to lower the dollar anyway, print a ton of them and don't give them to the wealthiest people in the country who don't spend (or who "spend" on trash like the metaverse and AI being anything like AGI.) By that, I mean be better than Obama. People will forget that you reigned over the completion of a genocide in the holy land, and remember that you saved the West.
The west is a fear driven fantasy, an escape from deeply rooted insecurities, multi-generational. I urge you too shake that off before we collectively go there again.
Hunh? Nowhere to go? They're happy to deport regardless.
Using words like "jumped" in headlines exactly why NPR is continuing to lose public trust. The data is super easy to find. CPI rose slightly last month, and the overall trend looks to have stabilized. I believe the FED targets for ~ 3% inflation.
https://www.bls.gov/charts/consumer-price-index/consumer-pri...
Am I missing something or are they reporting that prices have "jumped" because they've increased 30% since 2020? That seems like a fair use of the word.
Fed targets 2%, which is very very different from 3%.
The article is compared prices to 2020.
NPR is losing public trust because there's a concerted effort to make the American public distrust any kind of news media.
You are just a victim of that, it's unfortunate because given your comment history it will be really hard for anyone on Earth to pull you out of that deep pit of distrust you fell into.