I've been fiddling around with the Albertsons API for fun. It's kind of neat to see a whole year's worth of purchases in nicely formatted JSON.
I have half an idea to create something like a personal inflation tracker, but I'm still thinking about it.
It's entirely possible that these goons will start fiddling with official statistics around things like unemployment and inflation to tell us that inflation is not actually happening any more and that therefore we must cut interest rates, or some such.
You may be interested to know MIT did a project called ["The Billion Prices Project"](https://thebillionpricesproject.com) to scrape the web and calculate CPI.
Sorry to all the tinfoil hats, it closely matched official CPI.
Trump's last administration drew on a NOAA hurricane map with a sharpie to try to convince people he was not wrong about a hurricane path. Changing data is his style.
Both are bad. Trump was wrong because he was speaking on outdated information but he wouldn't accept that he was wrong so his administration created some data so he could say he was right.
I don't think there was ever any information, outdated or otherwise, that suggested that the hurricane was going to hit Alabama. The theory I've heard that the makes the most sense is that Trump saw a report about the damage it was going to inflict on the Bahamas, mixed up Alabama and Bahamas, tweeted condolences to Alabama, and the administration tried to defend his mix-up by concocting fake information to explain it.
(In many respects, if he had just quietly dropped the matter, it would have been largely ignored since it was cleared up pretty quickly; it was the childish response to try to justify why it wasn't a mistake that made it such an issue.)
> It's entirely possible that these goons will start fiddling with official statistics around things like unemployment and inflation to tell us that inflation is not actually happening any more and that therefore we must cut interest rates, or some such.
in the end statistics is a science, and results can be cross-referenced with independent sources.
you may get away with a bit, but not with much [1].
Don't rely on this. It works when bad actors are isolated and hoping nobody will notice, but not so well when there are tens of millions ready to repeat the official line, whether they believe it or not.
It's apparently an API, although it's both difficult to find, and apparently only available through an email request to Albertsons. The website is here:
> It's entirely possible that these goons will start fiddling with official statistics around things like unemployment and inflation to tell us that inflation is not actually happening any more and that therefore we must cut interest rates, or some such.
Like when the BLS overstated payrolls by 818k!! in March of last year, the largest negative revision in 15 years? And then the Fed did an emergency 50bps rate cut in September just as payrolls unexpectedly went up 250k and inflation seems to be coming back.
The unemployment and inflation data has been inconsistent for a while now.
I have half an idea to create something like a personal inflation tracker, but I'm still thinking about it.
It's entirely possible that these goons will start fiddling with official statistics around things like unemployment and inflation to tell us that inflation is not actually happening any more and that therefore we must cut interest rates, or some such.