It’s more complicated than that. Electronics and appliances are the obvious examples of things that have inflated much slower than average (or even deflated). Apparel and tools have inflated much slower. Energy generally has inflated much slower than average, but has shown a ton of volatility. Food and cars have inflated slower than average, but individual items might have followed their own path. Healthcare, education, and housing have gone up much faster than average inflation.

And the ratios don’t stay consistent over time. When I was a kid, burger meat was cheaper than similarly sized chicken breasts. Now the ratio is flipped. A plane ticket between New York and London is much cheaper today than in the 70’s. Even a tank of gas for driving from one state to another is way cheaper today than in the 70’s, in large part because of better fuel efficiency.

And anything labor intensive is inherently at tension with itself. A seamstress or tailor can only make so many items of clothing per week. Those clothes will have to cost enough to justify their pay, and the raw ingredient textiles used to make the garments. So if their pay hasn’t kept up with inflation, then the labor-intensive items they make probably haven’t kept up with inflation, either. Ideally, increased productivity would allow raises to not be absorbed into the price of whatever is being produced, but that doesn’t always happen.

Looking at old menus and catalogs shows that some things have gone up a lot in price, while others didn’t experience the same effect.

I think it’s healthy for opposing viewpoints to be expressed

Yeah, that way the community can get inoculated with these ideas and learns how to respond to them, and over enough time the response gets faster and more efficient so that the body as a whole builds up a resistance against whenever those types of comments show up.

I could sell you a virtual deed to the Golden Gate Bridge right now, you could buy it but it doesn’t really mean anything.

Yeah, that’s possibly the most famous scam in history (people selling deeds to the Brooklyn Bridge), enough to where “I’ve got a bridge to sell you” is a figure of speech for calling someone gullible or naive.

And then despite the world knowing about the Brooklyn Bridge scam, the cryptobros actually went and found a bunch of suckers to fall for the exact same scam, only with blockchains instead of notary seals.

Don’t paparazzi make plenty of money off of selling unauthorized photos of celebrities? Celebrities can control some uses of their likeness, but not all of them.

No, the Red Lobster insolvency was driven by declining sales and increasing debt, amid some shady corporate shenanigans with their finances. When they filed, they were about $30 million in the hole (even assuming their high valuations for their intangible assets).

Private equity owners (Golden Gate) made them sell off the land they owned, only to lease it back at above market rates. Then sold the chain to its biggest seafood supplier (Thai Union), who used the restaurant as an outlet for their wholesale seafood rather than as a standalone profitable business (which resulted in huge quality drop off and declining sales).

They were headed in the wrong direction, and the $11 million they lost on endless shrimp didn’t make a big difference. It was circling the drain anyway, based on big strategic errors (or just plain old private equity fuckery).

That’s the joke. It’s why the price keeps getting marked down.

Oh wow, windows! I don’t think I can afford this place.

Relatively speaking? Appliances are cheaper than they were before.

Here’s a Sears catalog from 1991. Appliances are at the end, past page 800 or so. Stoves are $400 or $500. Washer is $400, and a dryer is $300.

By official inflation numbers, things are about 2.3x as expensive now as in late 1991.

Median rent, the rent that the average person was paying, was around $450. Median rent today is about $1500, more than 3 times as much.

Today, a stove that looks like one of those things in the 1991 catalog costs about $500, maybe $600. Washing machines cost about the same. That’s only a 25-50% increase, when overall prices have increased by 130% and rents have increased by 200% since 1991.

So yeah, when a stove was worth a whole month’s rent, it was comparatively a bigger deal than today, when a stove is worth less than half a month’s rent.

The same is broadly true of furniture and other home goods, too: prices have gone up slower than inflation, so in theory we could store more stuff in our cramped homes.

Beef is a bad example. It used to be cheaper than chicken and similar to pork, but the real cost of that land use policy that would allow such grazing in the west, and then the subsidies that make factory farm feedlots possible, wasn’t properly borne by the ranchers themselves. Today’s cost of beef is a better reflection of the true cost of raising that meat, that inefficiently.

If you do the same analysis with chicken or pork, you’ll find that we can and do afford to eat a lot more of those particular meats than we used to.

I fully expect beef to go like tuna, and slowly become a luxury item only for the rich within my lifetime. That is more of a trend with beef itself than broader trends in inflation generally.

Housing, education, and healthcare costs have grown much faster than inflation.

Food, energy, cars, appliances and home goods, furniture, apparel, and other durable goods have generally grown slower than inflation, at least between 1980 and 2020. Much of the last 5 years of inflation, though have eaten away at some of those gains of the previous 30-40 years in those categories.

Electronics, technology, entertainment, most services have generally gone down in price.

So the basket of what we buy is different, with different ratios. A time traveler from the 80’s would be shocked to learn just how many ready made rotisserie chickens or pizzas you could buy for the wage equivalent to one hour of warehouse work, or how many big screen TVs you’d need to pay the average monthly rent for a 1-bedroom apartment. Plane tickets between New York and LA are basically cheaper than one month’s rent in the cheapest possible home you can find in either of those cities. The ratios are all different than before.

But with housing costs high, it kind of puts all of the effort into that single basket. When it used to be that 1/3 your income could comfortably go into housing costs, now in many cities it’s closer to half, even for people up the income scale, because the rest of life beyond having a roof over your head is just cheaper in comparison to that very basic need for shelter.

GDI is supposed to be basically equivalent to GDP, so it’s not a better number to use. Sometimes the numbers diverge (see here for a discussion of this issue in 2022) because they use different methodologies to determine the number, but that’s usually a sign that some kind of measurement is off, not that there’s some kind of actual divergence in the true numbers of what they purport to measure.

And we moved away from Gross National Product/Income to Gross Domestic Product/Income because it was a better look at the domestic economy. We care more about the production/income within national borders rather than the production/income of a particular nation’s residents.

Black Panther - the villain is an extremist with a point. Killmongers desire for revenge and modes go too far. He should be better, like the royal family are. Luckily Killmonger inspires the legitimate authority to make a choice to do more and be more benign. Maybe he just should have trusted in the legitimate authorities all along and stayed inside the social bounds… Which had not made change until his use of force and theft?

That basic theme and tension is present in a lot of black American discourse, of how much to work within the rules of the system and how much to actually violate the rules of the system in order to effectuate change. You can place a lot of the black civil rights icons onto the spectrum of how to use law breaking or violence as means to protect or advance black rights.

During the abolitionist era before the Civil War, David Walker called on slaves to physically overpower and literally kill their masters, and Henry Highland Garnet advocated for violent rebellion to overturn slavery.

Post-emancipation, anti-lynching advocate Ida Wells called on black families to arm themselves, to provide the protection that the law would not. Malcolm X also advocated for self defense, and predicted violence as the inevitable consequences of continued oppression of black Americans (which some took to mean he also advocated for initiating violence to advance black rights “by any means necessary,” but I personally think those views ignore nuance and context).

Each of these controversial figures often had a more nonviolent contemporary who advocated for less violent means to win hearts and minds.

Black Panther’s writer and director, Ryan Coogler, definitely knows all of this. He’s steeped in black history, both the history itself and the history of the art and literature and discourse around those topics. Placing that conflict and tension at the center of a freaking Marvel movie, designed to be a high budget blockbuster, was basically a work of genius.

The movie itself ultimately takes the side that coexistence is a better goal than reversing the subjugation, to oppress the former oppressor. But that doesn’t really much fit within the debate of this original comic, of whether the superhero movies advocate for preserving the status quo.

1987: Black Monday

That one didn’t really matter that much to regular Americans. Less than a third of Americans owned stock back then, and that crash didn’t have an obvious cause from actual economic fundamentals. And the Fed managed to contain the liquidity crisis, as your linked Wikipedia page describes, so that the broader economy was largely unaffected.

Recessions matter. Stock market crashes only matter when they are caused by, or are the cause of, an actual recession in the real world.

That’s what I’m getting at in my first comment. Any explosive is inherently in a state of high stored chemical energy. That energy will want to come out somehow. And if it isn’t released, it will always stay there, ready to be released at any time.

It’s the equivalent to stacking a bunch of really heavy objects on really high shelves above where people walk. When that energy gets released, it’s going to be really destructive. And if that energy gets released in an unsupervised, unplanned way, people are gonna get hurt.

slowly release the chemical energy to the ground

In what form? Like a really hot rock that warms the earth around it for a few decades? That’s dangerous in itself, and, like my example about electrical batteries, susceptible to their own runaway reactions that cause fires or explosions.

That’s just not how chemistry works.

Every bomb, grenade, or other munition will have some kind of explosive substance, which contains a large amount of chemical energy that is ordinarily released very quickly as kinetic energy and heat, in a big explosion. These weapons are designed to where the explosive is resilient against accidental or incidental detonation. So there are a ton of safeguards in place to prevent these things from blowing up unexpectedly.

The problem is that the energy contained within those chemical bonds is still always going to be there. And there’s not an easy way to gradually release that energy. That’s why unexploded ordnance is usually disposed of by blowing it up, in place, with an external explosion. The deterioration of the safeguards around accidental detonation makes the whole thing less safe, so the safest thing to do is to detonate it in place.

Even chemical batteries, which are designed for gradual release of the stored chemical energy, can sometimes overheat and cause a runaway reaction of a battery fire. Deterioration of the device is bad for controlling how that immense quantity of stored energy gets released.

So if you have a device that is hard to accidentally detonate, how will you make it so that the explosive degrades over time, without causing an explosion at an unexpected time?

Am I crazy or are the comments in this thread all about different ages? Well, I’ll defend the existence of children’s music.

Children’s music is great for teaching young children (under the age of 2) the basics of music. A clear melody (often in C major), simple rhythm, some basic song structure, rhyming lyrics, and lots and lots of repetition gets children listening and singing at an age before they can form coherent sentences. These are skills they learn to encourage not just later composition and performance of music, but also basic human functions like speaking and listening.

They’re doing it with their books, their TV shows, and their games, too. Developmentally appropriate material is important for learning that category of art or culture, and provides a basis to build on after that.

The CEO who implemented it also was the guy who basically created the Apple Store, and thought that the very successful approach for Apple would translate into a more premium experience for a mid level clothing retailer. Important lessons were learned about how consumer behavior may differ between different items, even if the consumers are largely the same people.

Property costs money to maintain. And it can only earn as much as someone is willing to pay for it, so if everyone’s poor they won’t pay enough rent to make up for the holding cost.

But they might be able to hope for the selling price in the future to be worth a lot, right? Unless it looks like they have to lock up their money in that investment, doing nothing, for a decade or more while other investments (stocks, bonds, etc.) do much better.

Investing in real estate is tricky, especially at scale. A mistake can cost a huge percentage of the investment, if not wiping out the investment on specific properties.

Or the economy crashes to the point where prices drop and the fed lowers interest rates to try to stimulate the economy, but the economy is so bad that you don’t have a job to be able to qualify for a loan.