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Contrarian opinion:

Harvard devaluing their diploma is good because smart people will get off the credential treadmill and do something productive instead.


Not as contrarian as you think. It's not healthy that basically all of the US's ruling class comes from a few schools.


The number is way low. Housing/rental costs are the largest expense and that's up 20% in many places. Used cars are up 40%.


Many food items like milk, eggs, meat are almost 50%~100% more expensive.


See also Polygon (MATIC), ZK-STARKs. And ETH 2.0 is due next year.


Granted, but every new technology goes through this and the tools and best practices are improving. The code is open source too. I don't know why people, technologists especially, aren't recognizing this.

It's also worth examining the current system. How happy are you with your bank's 0.01% interest rate? Which is actually negative when you factor in inflation that's eroding the value of our dollars faster than ever, and increasingly transferring wealth to the top 1%? How happy are you about bank CEO compensation and bailouts? No one in crypto is asking for a bailout, even when it crashes 80%. And what about the fact that bank's charge poor people the most or flat out deny service? Or the fact that it's all closed source and behind closed doors.


Anyone want to do a web2isgoinggreat.com version of this?


Ha, it was available and I was about to snag it but held back. Someone else grabbed it now. I hope they do amazing things with it.



Web 2 is centralized big tech serving ads. You are the product and you own nothing. They own your content and can change the rules at will (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/13/technology/instagram-hand...).

Web 3 is nothing like that.


Bill Gates and Steve Jobs yelled at employees a lot. Whether they did so as an intentional technique or a byproduct of having a short temper, I don't know. Any insight into that?


Bill Gates is just an incel with an unusually large brain so no big surprise. And Steve Jobs was an entitled lying cheating stealing fuckboy so no big surprise there either


I addressed this issue directly on page 151 of How To Destroy A Tech Startup. I've just posted some photos of 151/152, if you'd like to read that:

https://demodexio.substack.com/p/psychopaths-versus-good-bos...


Thanks! Your formulation makes a lot of sense.



I've seen this chart blasted around the mainstream media and I feel it is sort of cheating. The categories below the 0% line: Cellphone Service, Software, Toys and TVs all benefited mainly from one miracle innovation: Moore's Law. Other than that, have they really done anything else innovative to keep prices that low? If you eliminate anything that mainly benefited from Moore's law then you can derive a very different picture from the chart.

I guess we should be thankful to Moore's law and figure out how to apply it to Childcare, College, and hospital services? I guess thats where Elon Musks's robot comes in to play. It can teach you skills to get a job, take care of your kids, and then perform your surgery. Problem solved! :)


This is an under appreciated point about web3. We can get away from the ad-based business model. Web2 has an adversarial relationship with the user, web3 is much more aligned with the user.

https://www.jonstokes.com/p/web3-the-rise-of-the-aligned-web


Zoidberg voice Why not both?


This is in part because they changed how CPI is calculated in the 80s and 90s, which, as luck would have it, lowered the rates. You can see what CPI looks like with the older formulas here to compare:

http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts


A take down of Shadowstats from 2011:

* https://www.pragcap.com/why-is-there-deflation-in-hyperinfla...

And then again in 2017:

* https://www.pragcap.com/theres-still-deflation-hyperinflatio...

And November 2021:

* https://fullstackeconomics.com/no-the-real-inflation-rate-is...

Seriously, these guys are garbage.

If you want to verify the official numbers yourself MIT has some code:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Billion_Prices_project


Shadowstats is one of the dumbest websites on the internet. It doesn't remotely compare to the older formulas, it just applies a random consistent number to US stats and says "They're undercounting!". If they really "recalculated" it wouldn't be a mirror of the official numbers.

Think about it logically, per their dumb chart, inflation has averaged ~10% since 2000? and something like 7% in the 1990s? That easily gets you to over 1,000% total inflation in the past 30 years. Are you paying 10x for anything compared to the 1990s? TVs? Computers? Food? Gas? Furniture? Cars?


Look at healthcare, college, housing, childcare, equities.

Also look at shrinkflation: https://www.reddit.com/r/shrinkflation/

Also look at ingredient swaps in food, like HFCS.

Also look at products that have swapped in cheaper materials.

Also look at artificially cheap labor.


> equities

The "C" in CPI stands from consumer, not assets. It is a measure of the cost of goods and services that people consume. Assets are not consumed so therefore not in the CPI.

> Also look at shrinkflation

Contrary to popular opinion, the people who calculate the CPI are not complete morons. See StatCan's (who do the CPI in Canada) handbook:

> 7.10 Quantity adjustment entails accounting for changes in the quantity (e.g. package size, number of tissue ply, etc.) of observed POs. This is another implicit method of quality adjustment because it is assumed that the quality per standardized unit is the same over time.

> 7.11 Quantity adjustment is the default treatment for nearly all of the POs in the food major aggregate as well as some of the products in the household operations, and personal care supplies and equipment aggregates.

* https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/62-553-x/2019001/chap-7-...

* https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/en/pub/62-553-x/62-553-x2019...

* https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/en/catalogue/62-553-X

The boffins are aware of shrinkflation (and good substitution, which is mentioned in (IIRC) Chapter 9).


Even in the most expensive cities in the US, rents are "only" up something like 250% in the past 30 years. And in most of the country, it's a small percentage of that.

https://paragonpublic.blob.core.windows.net/dash-v2-blog-ima...

Childcare's up by maybe 100%?

Tuition maybe 150%?

Not even sure what to do with equities.. they're a financial instrument not a good or service..


Do you think that the economy has shrunk in half in real terms in the last 20 years? Because that’s essentially what it would mean for those numbers to be true.


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