I hope Republicans are enjoying this. This is the economy they wanted. This is what they voted for. The nice black woman told this is what would happen when you put a demented felon that bankrupted casinos back in charge of the government. But would you listen? So with that, I hope you all have the day you voted for.
Kamala would have been a million times better, but considering she was VP of the admin that was supporting Israel's genocide in 2023-2024 I don't think calling her a "nice lady" helps your point
I don't think you can expect the patrons of r/Economics to consider Palestinians as human beings, nor to be critical of the complicity in genocide both parties have in order fulfill the desires of the bourgeoisie.
Because they wanted what they were told would happen, not what actually happened.
I think that's an important thing to keep in mind. I really don't believe most Americans are actually opposed to the tarrifs, to ICE, to the Iran War, they're just unhappy that these things aren't going as well as advertised.
So in 2, maybe 6 years when someone promises they're going to do similar things but they're going to work this time guys, honest, voters are going to believe them.
There was literally no reason to think he would be better for the economy based on his "policy" (if you'd even call it that) proposals.
It's just so wild to me that inflation and rates were on a downward trend, and literally everything he said he would do would increase those things, yet people still voted for it. It's honestly remarkable.
> I really don't believe most Americans are actually opposed to the tarrifs, to ICE, to the Iran War, they're just unhappy that these things aren't going as well as advertised.
Most Americans are, in fact, opposed to these things, precisely because of how predictable the negative consequences are.
If they were so predictable, they were predictable in 2024. And yet two thirds of Americans either voted for them or couldn't be bothered to vote against them.
Right, but can’t any of you accept the fact that people were lied too? Not everyone is a genius and saw this betrayal coming. There’s a huge difference between saying people actually voted for this vs they were lied too and got tricked
> Not everyone is a genius and saw this betrayal coming.
You don't have to be a genius to realize that a lifelong cheater, fraud, and conman who told 30,000+ verifiable lies during his first campaign and term is still a liar the second time.
this comes down to more of a larger issue with American society willing to listen to a celebrity and all the glitz and glamor that comes with him rather than actually doing the leg work of reading analysis of what polices will actually do
I mean, people tried to warn them, and were met with rejection and sneers. What’s stopping them from “getting tricked” the next time? Will they ever learn from their mistakes and finally take accountability?
Trump's whole career is based on lies and frauds and exaggerations. A few idiots may have genuinely believed him. The rest just believed that he would lie and fraud and exaggerate against the "others"
They already had 4 years of evidence. So no, I can’t really accept that. There’s being betrayed and there’s being willfully ignorant. Two different things.
People voted for the guy who blindly thrust the world into a war with Iran without a plan for dealing with the consequence. This was predictably the sort of thing that happens when you vote for a narcissitic idiot who seems clinically incapable of thinking about other people than himself or more than one step ahead.
Vote for idiots, get stupid results. Womp womp, this is what they voted for.
They didn't do the 5 seconds of thinking that would be required to see that this would happen if they voted for Trump. Or, they cared more about their "tribe" and culture wars and hating people that look different from them that they didn't care what he did.
So yes, they absolutely did vote for him to do this.
The job market is more than just outsourced white collar jobs. But undoubtedly there would be more of those too. At a minimum, there'd still be 300,000 more government workers. Then you factor in cuts made everywhere else, but healthcare especially which is absolutely in dire need no small part due to aging boomers. You add in constructions and builders. You can go on and on.
That's Ok. Musk is almost a trillionaire and then there's alll those tech people amassing hundreds of billions of dollars. And Trump & Co are raking it in too. Why do us peasants need a job or to pay our bills? /s
So all of a sudden inflation is lower than expected and unemployment is higher then expected? I'm sure this has nothing to do with recent rate decision.
Rate changes take weeks at best and months on the long end to filter through to the broad economy. It's possible some amount of signaling from the Fed impacted firm decisions, but the actual material impact of a rate change did not.
Also, the inflation figures you're seeing are from August, so they're not impacted at all, this jobs data has only about two weeks of info post rate hike, and revisions tend to have more later week info.
Regardless, the lower PCE print coupled with weaker jobs does certainly push the Fed towards an October pause, we'll see what PPI and CPI prints look like come mid month, unless they're pretty hot my bet is the Fed pauses for October to wait for more data.
Certainly not. Full impact takes months, lending is repriced within hours - which immediately changes credit availability and firm decisions. How that filters through to employment is nuanced, and of course full impact requires time, but the immediate effects are there.
For example, MBS adjust to new short rate cadences in advance, anticipating Fed decisions, this immediately flows through to mortgage costs, which immediately impacts homebuying decisions. That's just one example.
Here's one on the anticipatory impact on the term structure of long rates: https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff_reports/sr99.pdf
And sensitivity of long rates: https://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/2005/200529/200529pap.pdf
And corporate credit availability/term premia: https://www.nber.org/papers/w20224
But you said "months on the short end", it's months for full impact, which is what I said above, but the short end is pretty near immediate as you can see.
The effects on interest rates do immediately impact activities, the filtration to the labor market takes time, aggregate demand can be observe to start moving in a fairly short window.
“Months on the long end”, as you initially said, would mean that the effect of rate changes filters through to the broader economy within a couple months. That isn’t the common understanding of how rates impact the economy.
> “Months on the long end”, as you initially said, would mean that the effect of rate changes filters through to the broader economy within a couple months. That isn’t the common understanding of how rates impact the economy.
That is literally the understanding of rate changes. IDK what's got you so twisted up here, but there's piles of research on this. I'm not sure what you think "common understanding" is, cuz a lot of y'alls common sense is just nonsense, but read this:
Couple this with what I gave you above, then reconsider what you're trying to debate here, because you're objections really don't make any sense - and are at best inconsistent.
For instance, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta President Raphael Bostic wrote in November 2022 that “a large body of research tells us it can take 18 months to two years or more for tighter monetary policy to materially affect inflation.”
9
In contrast, in a January 2023 speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, Federal Reserve Gov. Christopher Waller stated his view that, more recently, lags tend to be nine to 12 months.
Yes, I know what these say, as I've read them, which is what informed my comment.
We're like four comments deep and you're not articulating your gripe at all, it's just vague "you're wrong, it's this" then naming something that is in no way incongruent with my statements. Can you wrap this up and clearly articulate what specifically has you all twisted up here?
e: kneejerk downvoting every reply makes it seem like you're just trying to find something to argue about rather than trying to understand the topic lol.
Sorta, these indexes are constantly being revised, the one in question here is just moving PCE's calculus for technology hardware closer to CPI's methodology.
There's revisions like this almost every year, as agencies examine how closely statistical modeling and data sampling approximates actual lived experiences.
It's nuanced, in some areas it could be a bit much, but overall the adjustments do mirror improvements in quality. Broadly much of the actual deflation in tech based items within CPI are reflective of actual price drops over time. Absent the recent surge in Ram/GPU components, tech hardware has been deflating in general.
Also - the adjustment you mentioned earlier was PCE, not CPI. These are two different measures.
Yes I am aware there are overall improvements, but you aren’t able to get the same kiloflop machine with a kb of ram or storage from the 1960s and have it be useful today
Can you point me to this research? I’ve always just assumed any change in methodology would likely understate inflation because there is massive incentive to do so. Beyond just the political incentives, a huge portion of federal entitlements is indexed to CPI so in order to inflate away the debt they’d need CPI to lag actual inflation.
Yes you can buy a used office desktop with the power of a 1980s flagship computer for $50 on eBay* (more like $150 due to current memory shortages) but you can't take that desktop with you to quickly scan the QR code to download the mobile app that you need to get a reasonable prices or simply function in more and more places, including fast food restaurants, supermarkets, and even government services.
Either you go with the times and spend more or you get to enjoy some extra inflation everywhere else, courtesy of the inflated prices you pay when not taking advantage of selling your shopping data for a 15% to 30% discount, depending on how much prices were inflated for everyone not participating.
There is a minimum level of computational capacity that is demanded of everyone, and that effect is not taken into account by hedonic adjustments that assume everyone is ok with still writing emails in MS-DOS text mode and using ftp to download images and text instead of running a full-fledged web browser running dynamic content and all the baggage that brings with it, which is a basic requirement to retrieve any information at all these days if you don't want to sit in front of an empty page saying "turn on JavaScript" or "this browser is not supported".
* Incidentally, the used market is not the economy. Things break eventually and someone has to buy new. The cheapest, least powerful but still fully functional computing setup (no DIY Arduino boards) bought new available in the market today will still run you hundreds of dollars.
This comment is just completely and fully detached from how quality adjustments work as well as how inflation in tech hardware is measured lol. You guys are just writing fanfiction out here. Also the relative importance of all tech items in CPI is like 1.7%. Seems like a lot of very intentional misunderstanding going on here.
BTW you can cross compare with C-CPI and see the delta - but spoiler alert, removing the quality adjustments in CPI makes the print about 25bps lower over time. Most research concludes that quality adjustment in aggregate creates an upwards bias in CPI, which is also why most research concludes that CPI overstates inflation by a bit.
> The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) uses hedonic regression models to decompose a product’s price into the implicit values of its specific characteristics, such as processor speed, memory, or screen size.
> When a product is replaced by a newer model, the model calculates what the new item would have cost if it had been available in the previous period based on its features. The difference between this estimated price and the actual new price represents the pure inflation or deflation, stripping out the value of the quality upgrade.
Explain to us, oh wise one, how this contradicts what I said.
> Also the relative importance of all tech items in CPI is like 1.7%.
And why is that, I wonder? Explain, in excruciating detail, how low relative weight of something disproves that same thing being artificially low.
> Explain to us, oh wise one, how this contradicts what I said.
I'm not sure that trying to be condescending is the move for you here boss.
Hednoic regressions and substitutions add around 30bps to CPI in aggregate. Add, as in they make it higher.
And hedonic regressions in no way imply price indexes presume you're walking around with an 80s era computer, or that the two are even being compared. All that's doing is putting on parade how little you understand hedonic regressions.
>And why is that, I wonder? Explain, in excruciating detail, how low relative weight of something disproves that same thing being artificially low.
It doesn't, I don't know what lack of reading comprehension lead you to think it does. And it's not artificial, you just don't understand it. Probably would be better to lead with trying to learn rather than whatever this is.
You just say "A is not B" and present numbers without providing any tangible information attached. The generic link you provided is easy to find for anyone and I've seen it many times before. I'm not going to work through 100 pages worth of material to try and decifer what you could possibly be trying to say, so I'm going with the summary of, once again,
> characteristics, such as processor speed, memory, or screen size.
> When a product is replaced by a newer model, the model calculates what the new item would have cost if it had been available in the previous period based on its features. The difference between this estimated price and the actual new price represents the pure inflation or deflation, stripping out the value of the quality upgrade.
I have bolded some words to point you to features that have grown tenthousandfold over recent decades, which makes the numbers such that we are all walking around with computers in our pockets that would have cost a million dollars in 1990 and this entering into the calculation of CPI. Explain to me how this doesn't immediately lead to you being laughed out of the conversation.
Unless you can explain in plain English why this isn't true without just saying "you are wrong" or pointing to a hundred-page pile of historically accumulated mess on the BLS website, you are saying absolutely nothing of value. Based on your historical contributions to this sub I'm not getting my hopes up.
It's probably more that companies have frozen hiring due to uncertainty. Nobody is hiring entry level workers in a bunch of fields because they are desperate for their AI solutions to show savings.
There it is folks. Fed raised rates in the face of more disinflation and cracks in the labor market. Chances we see another rate hike are slim to none. 10yr yield will have a 4 handle before the end of the year.
One thing the unemployment numbers for corporate, tech, and finance don't fully capture is the rise of "voluntary" separation agreements. Instead of a straight layoff, companies increasingly offer a severance package that often pays out slightly more than unemployment would. Because the separation is technically voluntary, employees who sign may lose eligibility for unemployment benefits, so these departures can go uncounted in claims data and understate how much job loss is really happening.
Even if they can, that work is 100x worse. Not just for the work itself, having people around who know how to do things helps no matter what. It’s more people that can correct errors, train new people, etc. Theoretically there’s probably people who can do their co-workers job on top of their own, but just because they can doesn’t mean they should. Instead of getting two people for the price of one, you’re stretching one person and you’re lucky to get half a person’s work out of them for each job.
Yeah, you sound exactly like a programmer type who is, to put it plainly, pretty ignorant about the rest of what business activity entails, and what factors lead to long-term success in a business.
Y'all always think AI is going to replace everything because it's replacing part of YOUR job. It's not, because the majority of what makes people successful in business, and what makes a business successful, is interpersonal relationships. Not tasks, not even outcomes. Relationships. And AI is terrible at that. And programmers typically are as well lol
I am sitting in meetings all day where the "relationship" people tell us how much their business is changing. It is on us to try and accommodate them. I don't walk in and say "let's automate your bond trading desk" 🔥
I'm surprised you didn't add more useless buzzwords in there. Probably should be asking an AI to make these posts for you, I mean, why can't we automate your output here as well?
SaaS are starting to bake them into contracts as mandatory. Our ServiceNow contract is basically requiring it in the base tier, on top of existing licensing. Lots of companies can’t just up and leave quickly. I imagine in 2-3 years there’ll be larger changes. Supposedly at Microsoft Ignite this year there will be large changes on how licensing is changing too, at least what was hinted at in a call with Microsoft. Didn’t really clarify.
But yeah, I’m already able to cut dev hours by leveraging Claude to do things I’d normally have to wait for a full dev to do for me. It’s good and bad though.. short term we can deliver more but long term we’re building more that we may not have capacity to support in 2-3 years for when we need to do updates against those implementations. Going to worry about that later I guess though!
We've already spun up our own server and replaced our own Atlassian/Jira system with one we built using Claude. We've also cancelled our Salesforce subscription.
We've found we can readily replace expensive SAAS products with solutions of our own making - which do exactly what we want without all the bloat of features we don't need.
A lot of developers and creatives don't want to hear it, but AI is here and it is here to stay, and it is really fucking good at what it does, and it is only going to improve from here.
It will be a massive disruption, as every technological revolution has been. But you either adjust early, or you engage in denial and get run over by it.
Story of my life working in a very technical field.
It’s seriously over at this point. LLMs keep improving and will soon replace most white collar jobs. Opus 5.5 is probably good enough to replace tens of millions of jobs already, just in America alone. Probably hundreds of millions globally.
PMOnTime-807 | 8 hours ago
I hope Republicans are enjoying this. This is the economy they wanted. This is what they voted for. The nice black woman told this is what would happen when you put a demented felon that bankrupted casinos back in charge of the government. But would you listen? So with that, I hope you all have the day you voted for.
FJ-creek-7381 | 5 hours ago
Ikr I had people tell me they voted for Trump because he was better for the economy? wtf are u talking about smh def brainwashed by Fox News
Keebskeep | 3 hours ago
They're not even keeping track. They go off vibes when Trump is in office.
SpitefulSeagull | 6 hours ago
Kamala would have been a million times better, but considering she was VP of the admin that was supporting Israel's genocide in 2023-2024 I don't think calling her a "nice lady" helps your point
bullhead2007 | 7 minutes ago
I don't think you can expect the patrons of r/Economics to consider Palestinians as human beings, nor to be critical of the complicity in genocide both parties have in order fulfill the desires of the bourgeoisie.
SubjectCode1940 | 8 hours ago
Nobody wanted this crap
Substantial_Hat_5442 | 8 hours ago
Why would they vote to have it then?
EnamelKant | 7 hours ago
Because they wanted what they were told would happen, not what actually happened.
I think that's an important thing to keep in mind. I really don't believe most Americans are actually opposed to the tarrifs, to ICE, to the Iran War, they're just unhappy that these things aren't going as well as advertised.
So in 2, maybe 6 years when someone promises they're going to do similar things but they're going to work this time guys, honest, voters are going to believe them.
FlatwormBig5514 | 4 hours ago
Tarrifs don't increase prices?
There was literally no reason to think he would be better for the economy based on his "policy" (if you'd even call it that) proposals.
It's just so wild to me that inflation and rates were on a downward trend, and literally everything he said he would do would increase those things, yet people still voted for it. It's honestly remarkable.
EnamelKant | 4 hours ago
I didn't say tarrifs don't raise prices.
I said people wanted tarrifs because they were told other people were going to pay for them.
And they're still going to want those kind of tarrifs the next time they're on offer.
DutyBusy9905 | an hour ago
Yes, we already know that Trump's supporters are quite possibly the dumbest people in the history of our species.
EnamelKant | an hour ago
Well, I've got some bad new for you.
The world just hit a new highest number of dumb people today.
Breaking yesterday's record.
AlmanorDiscard | 4 hours ago
> I really don't believe most Americans are actually opposed to the tarrifs, to ICE, to the Iran War, they're just unhappy that these things aren't going as well as advertised.
Most Americans are, in fact, opposed to these things, precisely because of how predictable the negative consequences are.
EnamelKant | 4 hours ago
If they were so predictable, they were predictable in 2024. And yet two thirds of Americans either voted for them or couldn't be bothered to vote against them.
SubjectCode1940 | 7 hours ago
Right, people voted for Trump so he would turn the country into shit. Fucking genius
wsb_crazytrader | 7 hours ago
"Well, they did sign up for it actually, and this is what I campaigned on." Trump in 2026 at ABC news.
SubjectCode1940 | 6 hours ago
Right, but can’t any of you accept the fact that people were lied too? Not everyone is a genius and saw this betrayal coming. There’s a huge difference between saying people actually voted for this vs they were lied too and got tricked
AlmanorDiscard | 6 hours ago
> Not everyone is a genius and saw this betrayal coming.
You don't have to be a genius to realize that a lifelong cheater, fraud, and conman who told 30,000+ verifiable lies during his first campaign and term is still a liar the second time.
Unique-Egg-461 | 6 hours ago
this comes down to more of a larger issue with American society willing to listen to a celebrity and all the glitz and glamor that comes with him rather than actually doing the leg work of reading analysis of what polices will actually do
We knew what trump was gonna do and a lot of economics threw up red flags that we ignored
"the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter" -NOT Winston Churchill
dancinbanana | 5 hours ago
I mean, people tried to warn them, and were met with rejection and sneers. What’s stopping them from “getting tricked” the next time? Will they ever learn from their mistakes and finally take accountability?
devliegende | 5 hours ago
Trump's whole career is based on lies and frauds and exaggerations. A few idiots may have genuinely believed him. The rest just believed that he would lie and fraud and exaggerate against the "others"
Lemurians | 4 hours ago
They already had 4 years of evidence. So no, I can’t really accept that. There’s being betrayed and there’s being willfully ignorant. Two different things.
mclumber1 | an hour ago
> Not everyone is a genius and saw this betrayal coming.
Trump loves low IQ people
RashmaDu | 6 hours ago
People voted for the guy who blindly thrust the world into a war with Iran without a plan for dealing with the consequence. This was predictably the sort of thing that happens when you vote for a narcissitic idiot who seems clinically incapable of thinking about other people than himself or more than one step ahead.
Vote for idiots, get stupid results. Womp womp, this is what they voted for.
Qeltar_ | 7 hours ago
They didn't do the 5 seconds of thinking that would be required to see that this would happen if they voted for Trump. Or, they cared more about their "tribe" and culture wars and hating people that look different from them that they didn't care what he did.
So yes, they absolutely did vote for him to do this.
innominateartery | 6 hours ago
How else are people going to settle for manufacturing jobs?
devliegende | 5 hours ago
Lol. The T shirt factories will reopen when Dixie is dirt poor again
WeekendAtMadoffs | 7 hours ago
ahahaha like she could prop up the employee as a meaningful use of company cash in an offshoring and AI era?
Companies got to buy Tokens not play people stand around and talk in meetings.
procrastinator67 | 7 hours ago
The job market is more than just outsourced white collar jobs. But undoubtedly there would be more of those too. At a minimum, there'd still be 300,000 more government workers. Then you factor in cuts made everywhere else, but healthcare especially which is absolutely in dire need no small part due to aging boomers. You add in constructions and builders. You can go on and on.
WeekendAtMadoffs | 5 hours ago
"but healthcare especially which is absolutely in dire "
small hospitals are closing in rural areas as we prune back the welfare state.
"You add in constructions and builders."
illegals who we deported.
Gamer_Grease | 6 hours ago
All the people who stand around and talk in meetings are keeping their jobs. It’s the people producing actual deliverables being let go.
One-Emu-1103 | 8 hours ago
That's Ok. Musk is almost a trillionaire and then there's alll those tech people amassing hundreds of billions of dollars. And Trump & Co are raking it in too. Why do us peasants need a job or to pay our bills? /s
atape_1 | 8 hours ago
So all of a sudden inflation is lower than expected and unemployment is higher then expected? I'm sure this has nothing to do with recent rate decision.
RIP_Soulja_Slim | 8 hours ago
Rate changes take weeks at best and months on the long end to filter through to the broad economy. It's possible some amount of signaling from the Fed impacted firm decisions, but the actual material impact of a rate change did not.
Also, the inflation figures you're seeing are from August, so they're not impacted at all, this jobs data has only about two weeks of info post rate hike, and revisions tend to have more later week info.
Regardless, the lower PCE print coupled with weaker jobs does certainly push the Fed towards an October pause, we'll see what PPI and CPI prints look like come mid month, unless they're pretty hot my bet is the Fed pauses for October to wait for more data.
fx2600 | 7 hours ago
Months on the short end
RIP_Soulja_Slim | 7 hours ago
Certainly not. Full impact takes months, lending is repriced within hours - which immediately changes credit availability and firm decisions. How that filters through to employment is nuanced, and of course full impact requires time, but the immediate effects are there.
For example, MBS adjust to new short rate cadences in advance, anticipating Fed decisions, this immediately flows through to mortgage costs, which immediately impacts homebuying decisions. That's just one example.
Here's one on the anticipatory impact on the term structure of long rates: https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff_reports/sr99.pdf
And sensitivity of long rates: https://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/2005/200529/200529pap.pdf
And corporate credit availability/term premia: https://www.nber.org/papers/w20224
fx2600 | 7 hours ago
There are obviously immediate effects on interest rates but the question was time to filter through the broader economy
RIP_Soulja_Slim | 7 hours ago
But you said "months on the short end", it's months for full impact, which is what I said above, but the short end is pretty near immediate as you can see.
The effects on interest rates do immediately impact activities, the filtration to the labor market takes time, aggregate demand can be observe to start moving in a fairly short window.
fx2600 | 7 hours ago
“Months on the long end”, as you initially said, would mean that the effect of rate changes filters through to the broader economy within a couple months. That isn’t the common understanding of how rates impact the economy.
RIP_Soulja_Slim | 6 hours ago
> “Months on the long end”, as you initially said, would mean that the effect of rate changes filters through to the broader economy within a couple months. That isn’t the common understanding of how rates impact the economy.
That is literally the understanding of rate changes. IDK what's got you so twisted up here, but there's piles of research on this. I'm not sure what you think "common understanding" is, cuz a lot of y'alls common sense is just nonsense, but read this:
https://www.frbsf.org/research-and-insights/publications/economic-letter/2024/04/how-quickly-do-prices-respond-to-monetary-policy/
https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-economist/2023/may/examining-long-variable-lags-monetary-policy
https://www.ijcb.org/journal/v9n4/transmission-lags-monetary-policy-meta-analysis
Couple this with what I gave you above, then reconsider what you're trying to debate here, because you're objections really don't make any sense - and are at best inconsistent.
fx2600 | 6 hours ago
From your source:
For instance, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta President Raphael Bostic wrote in November 2022 that “a large body of research tells us it can take 18 months to two years or more for tighter monetary policy to materially affect inflation.” 9 In contrast, in a January 2023 speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, Federal Reserve Gov. Christopher Waller stated his view that, more recently, lags tend to be nine to 12 months.
RIP_Soulja_Slim | 6 hours ago
Yes, I know what these say, as I've read them, which is what informed my comment.
We're like four comments deep and you're not articulating your gripe at all, it's just vague "you're wrong, it's this" then naming something that is in no way incongruent with my statements. Can you wrap this up and clearly articulate what specifically has you all twisted up here?
e: kneejerk downvoting every reply makes it seem like you're just trying to find something to argue about rather than trying to understand the topic lol.
DeArgonaut | 8 hours ago
They also changed how they calculate inflation
RIP_Soulja_Slim | 8 hours ago
Sorta, these indexes are constantly being revised, the one in question here is just moving PCE's calculus for technology hardware closer to CPI's methodology.
There's revisions like this almost every year, as agencies examine how closely statistical modeling and data sampling approximates actual lived experiences.
DeArgonaut | 7 hours ago
Personally, not a fan of the hedonistic adjustment CPI uses for tech hardware, undercounts the cost of living
RIP_Soulja_Slim | 7 hours ago
It's nuanced, in some areas it could be a bit much, but overall the adjustments do mirror improvements in quality. Broadly much of the actual deflation in tech based items within CPI are reflective of actual price drops over time. Absent the recent surge in Ram/GPU components, tech hardware has been deflating in general.
Also - the adjustment you mentioned earlier was PCE, not CPI. These are two different measures.
DeArgonaut | 7 hours ago
Yes I am aware there are overall improvements, but you aren’t able to get the same kiloflop machine with a kb of ram or storage from the 1960s and have it be useful today
RIP_Soulja_Slim | 5 hours ago
I'm not sure how this relates to inflation measures?
DeArgonaut | 5 hours ago
Cuz the official inflation gauges don’t accurately indicate cost of living, but a lot of people conflate the two
RIP_Soulja_Slim | 5 hours ago
Yeah, it is true that most research shows CPI overshooting inflation by a bit.
ImaginaryHospital306 | 5 hours ago
Can you point me to this research? I’ve always just assumed any change in methodology would likely understate inflation because there is massive incentive to do so. Beyond just the political incentives, a huge portion of federal entitlements is indexed to CPI so in order to inflate away the debt they’d need CPI to lag actual inflation.
DeArgonaut | 5 hours ago
As in overstating or under? Cuz it’s def under for cost of living
CrayonUpMyNose | 6 hours ago
Yes you can buy a used office desktop with the power of a 1980s flagship computer for $50 on eBay* (more like $150 due to current memory shortages) but you can't take that desktop with you to quickly scan the QR code to download the mobile app that you need to get a reasonable prices or simply function in more and more places, including fast food restaurants, supermarkets, and even government services.
Either you go with the times and spend more or you get to enjoy some extra inflation everywhere else, courtesy of the inflated prices you pay when not taking advantage of selling your shopping data for a 15% to 30% discount, depending on how much prices were inflated for everyone not participating.
There is a minimum level of computational capacity that is demanded of everyone, and that effect is not taken into account by hedonic adjustments that assume everyone is ok with still writing emails in MS-DOS text mode and using ftp to download images and text instead of running a full-fledged web browser running dynamic content and all the baggage that brings with it, which is a basic requirement to retrieve any information at all these days if you don't want to sit in front of an empty page saying "turn on JavaScript" or "this browser is not supported".
* Incidentally, the used market is not the economy. Things break eventually and someone has to buy new. The cheapest, least powerful but still fully functional computing setup (no DIY Arduino boards) bought new available in the market today will still run you hundreds of dollars.
RIP_Soulja_Slim | 6 hours ago
This comment is just completely and fully detached from how quality adjustments work as well as how inflation in tech hardware is measured lol. You guys are just writing fanfiction out here. Also the relative importance of all tech items in CPI is like 1.7%. Seems like a lot of very intentional misunderstanding going on here.
BTW you can cross compare with C-CPI and see the delta - but spoiler alert, removing the quality adjustments in CPI makes the print about 25bps lower over time. Most research concludes that quality adjustment in aggregate creates an upwards bias in CPI, which is also why most research concludes that CPI overstates inflation by a bit.
CrayonUpMyNose | 4 hours ago
> The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) uses hedonic regression models to decompose a product’s price into the implicit values of its specific characteristics, such as processor speed, memory, or screen size.
> When a product is replaced by a newer model, the model calculates what the new item would have cost if it had been available in the previous period based on its features. The difference between this estimated price and the actual new price represents the pure inflation or deflation, stripping out the value of the quality upgrade.
Explain to us, oh wise one, how this contradicts what I said.
> Also the relative importance of all tech items in CPI is like 1.7%.
And why is that, I wonder? Explain, in excruciating detail, how low relative weight of something disproves that same thing being artificially low.
RIP_Soulja_Slim | 4 hours ago
> Explain to us, oh wise one, how this contradicts what I said.
I'm not sure that trying to be condescending is the move for you here boss.
Hednoic regressions and substitutions add around 30bps to CPI in aggregate. Add, as in they make it higher.
And hedonic regressions in no way imply price indexes presume you're walking around with an 80s era computer, or that the two are even being compared. All that's doing is putting on parade how little you understand hedonic regressions.
Learn yourself something: https://www.bls.gov/cpi/quality-adjustment/hedonic-price-adjustment-techniques.htm
>And why is that, I wonder? Explain, in excruciating detail, how low relative weight of something disproves that same thing being artificially low.
It doesn't, I don't know what lack of reading comprehension lead you to think it does. And it's not artificial, you just don't understand it. Probably would be better to lead with trying to learn rather than whatever this is.
CrayonUpMyNose | 3 hours ago
You just say "A is not B" and present numbers without providing any tangible information attached. The generic link you provided is easy to find for anyone and I've seen it many times before. I'm not going to work through 100 pages worth of material to try and decifer what you could possibly be trying to say, so I'm going with the summary of, once again,
> characteristics, such as processor speed, memory, or screen size.
> When a product is replaced by a newer model, the model calculates what the new item would have cost if it had been available in the previous period based on its features. The difference between this estimated price and the actual new price represents the pure inflation or deflation, stripping out the value of the quality upgrade.
I have bolded some words to point you to features that have grown tenthousandfold over recent decades, which makes the numbers such that we are all walking around with computers in our pockets that would have cost a million dollars in 1990 and this entering into the calculation of CPI. Explain to me how this doesn't immediately lead to you being laughed out of the conversation.
Unless you can explain in plain English why this isn't true without just saying "you are wrong" or pointing to a hundred-page pile of historically accumulated mess on the BLS website, you are saying absolutely nothing of value. Based on your historical contributions to this sub I'm not getting my hopes up.
PoopyisSmelly | 7 hours ago
Tell me about your understanding of how they calculate inflation?
Test-NetConnection | 3 hours ago
It's probably more that companies have frozen hiring due to uncertainty. Nobody is hiring entry level workers in a bunch of fields because they are desperate for their AI solutions to show savings.
dually | 4 hours ago
It's the same mistake ECB made in 2008 and 2014, raising interest rates because they mistakenly thought high oil prices would cause inflation.
And the results were disastrous with Uncle Sam having to bail out Europe in both the GFC and the Euro-Banking crisis.
Powerful-Analyst8061 | 8 hours ago
There it is folks. Fed raised rates in the face of more disinflation and cracks in the labor market. Chances we see another rate hike are slim to none. 10yr yield will have a 4 handle before the end of the year.
Jazzlike_Relation705 | 3 hours ago
Wanna bet?
Foxxthegreat | 36 minutes ago
One thing the unemployment numbers for corporate, tech, and finance don't fully capture is the rise of "voluntary" separation agreements. Instead of a straight layoff, companies increasingly offer a severance package that often pays out slightly more than unemployment would. Because the separation is technically voluntary, employees who sign may lose eligibility for unemployment benefits, so these departures can go uncounted in claims data and understate how much job loss is really happening.
WeekendAtMadoffs | 7 hours ago
Employee counts are being right sized for the AI Era.
One employee with good prompting in Anthropic can do the work of 10 white collar workers.
SAAS seat businesses like Salesforce and Microsoft better learn how to sell seats to AI Agents, or they won't exist.
Wellontheotherhand1 | 7 hours ago
> One employee with good prompting in Anthropic can do the work of 10 white collar workers.
Yeah, no. No deep explanation, no long narrative necessary here about how you're wrong. Just a flat no. They cannot.
Signed, someone with actual experience
NGS_King | 6 hours ago
Even if they can, that work is 100x worse. Not just for the work itself, having people around who know how to do things helps no matter what. It’s more people that can correct errors, train new people, etc. Theoretically there’s probably people who can do their co-workers job on top of their own, but just because they can doesn’t mean they should. Instead of getting two people for the price of one, you’re stretching one person and you’re lucky to get half a person’s work out of them for each job.
WeekendAtMadoffs | 5 hours ago
We have clients who used to pay people to copy data into excels, in Manhattan office space, a phone, health insurance, PTO, etc.
Copy data into excels.
Your experience is competing with innovation. What little work society need from people can be done offshore now.
Wellontheotherhand1 | 5 hours ago
Yeah, you sound exactly like a programmer type who is, to put it plainly, pretty ignorant about the rest of what business activity entails, and what factors lead to long-term success in a business.
Y'all always think AI is going to replace everything because it's replacing part of YOUR job. It's not, because the majority of what makes people successful in business, and what makes a business successful, is interpersonal relationships. Not tasks, not even outcomes. Relationships. And AI is terrible at that. And programmers typically are as well lol
devliegende | 4 hours ago
Im looking forward to the day we replace all the nerds with AI. Starting with Zucks and Musk.
WeekendAtMadoffs | 5 hours ago
Companies are going lean and mean.
This could be ADP or it could be a NFL team.
Less workers, more data, more automation.
I am sitting in meetings all day where the "relationship" people tell us how much their business is changing. It is on us to try and accommodate them. I don't walk in and say "let's automate your bond trading desk" 🔥
Wellontheotherhand1 | 5 hours ago
I'm surprised you didn't add more useless buzzwords in there. Probably should be asking an AI to make these posts for you, I mean, why can't we automate your output here as well?
devliegende | 4 hours ago
Im looking forward to the day AI replace meetings
poorleno111 | 6 hours ago
SaaS are starting to bake them into contracts as mandatory. Our ServiceNow contract is basically requiring it in the base tier, on top of existing licensing. Lots of companies can’t just up and leave quickly. I imagine in 2-3 years there’ll be larger changes. Supposedly at Microsoft Ignite this year there will be large changes on how licensing is changing too, at least what was hinted at in a call with Microsoft. Didn’t really clarify.
But yeah, I’m already able to cut dev hours by leveraging Claude to do things I’d normally have to wait for a full dev to do for me. It’s good and bad though.. short term we can deliver more but long term we’re building more that we may not have capacity to support in 2-3 years for when we need to do updates against those implementations. Going to worry about that later I guess though!
Constant-Plant-9378 | 3 hours ago
We've already spun up our own server and replaced our own Atlassian/Jira system with one we built using Claude. We've also cancelled our Salesforce subscription.
We've found we can readily replace expensive SAAS products with solutions of our own making - which do exactly what we want without all the bloat of features we don't need.
A lot of developers and creatives don't want to hear it, but AI is here and it is here to stay, and it is really fucking good at what it does, and it is only going to improve from here.
It will be a massive disruption, as every technological revolution has been. But you either adjust early, or you engage in denial and get run over by it.
Story of my life working in a very technical field.
getmeoutoftax | 8 hours ago
It’s seriously over at this point. LLMs keep improving and will soon replace most white collar jobs. Opus 5.5 is probably good enough to replace tens of millions of jobs already, just in America alone. Probably hundreds of millions globally.