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   Bread up, Bro (sickburnbro@poa.st)'s status on Monday, 17-Mar-2025 21:37:52 JST Bread up, Bro
   this is because "purchasing power" is ultimately a lie - one that was fabricated mostly out of people trying to make good decisions with messy data.
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     Bread up, Bro (sickburnbro@poa.st)'s status on Monday, 17-Mar-2025 21:48:16 JST Bread up, Bro

     in reply to

     • jb
     @jb it is literally true; but it's because of how something like purchasing power is calculated. Is a flat screen tv worth 20x purchasing power of a 14" tube? Well, it's 5x as large, uses 10x less power? That seems like a reasonable calculation?
   • Embed this notice
     jb (jb@nicecrew.digital)'s status on Monday, 17-Mar-2025 21:48:17 JST jb

     in reply to
     > much more purchasing power
     How utterly ridiculous
   • Embed this notice
     jb (jb@nicecrew.digital)'s status on Monday, 17-Mar-2025 22:06:54 JST jb

     in reply to
     As the quote goes
     There’s lies, damn lies, and statistics
     Bread up, Bro likes this.
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     Bread up, Bro (sickburnbro@poa.st)'s status on Monday, 17-Mar-2025 22:10:04 JST Bread up, Bro

     in reply to

     • EvilSandmich
     • jb
     @jb @EvilSandmich matt yglesias is both stupid and mostly malicious.
     
     But the more important point is this is an example of a measure becoming a goal.
     
     All you have to do is look at CPI and how they calculate baskets of good, and how that ties into inflation.
     
     It's a hard question, because judging circumstance over decades is tricky, and usually very hard to reduce to a few calculations ( which are almost always valid over ajoining years )
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     jb (jb@nicecrew.digital)'s status on Monday, 17-Mar-2025 22:10:05 JST jb

     in reply to

     • EvilSandmich
     Parents bought a TV in the 50s, my grandmother was still using it in the 80s
     That “smart TV” from Costco will brick itself in less than a decade because it can no longer receive software updates from the cloud
     Clearly the author is blind or intentionally obfuscates the replacement of “durable goods“ with “consoooooomables”
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     EvilSandmich (evilsandmich@poa.st)'s status on Monday, 17-Mar-2025 22:10:06 JST EvilSandmich

     in reply to

     • jb
     @jb @sickburnbro It is ridiculous that those things are equally weighted:
     >"We've turned your women into whores and your neighborhoods into slums, neither of which you can afford even in their wretched state, but at least the TV is big, right goy?"
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     Victor_Emmanuel (victor_emmanuel@poa.st)'s status on Monday, 17-Mar-2025 22:14:33 JST Victor_Emmanuel

     in reply to

     • EvilSandmich
     • jb
     @EvilSandmich @jb @sickburnbro In the Soviet Union vodka was always cheap. In Jew America entertainment is always cheap
     Bread up, Bro likes this.