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Comment by thebooktocome | Hacker News Reader

These increased food and fuel costs are largely not transient.

The town itself might very well not be viable anymore. I’ve seen this happen in my own neck of the woods. It’s sad, but the death of small towns like this is just a reality of the economic policy we’ve chosen to pursue here.

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I'd be fairly surprised if we don't see gas under $3/gal sometime in the next decade. There's a reason several key economic indicators exclude food and energy (due to the much higher volatility of these categories).

Let’s see, they opened in 2001.

So their original business model assumed gas would be around 1.40/gal (1.90 inflation adjusted).

When do you think gas will fall that low again?

You can’t reasonably predict a specific future price-at-time of a volatile commodity (that’s the whole point of excluding its transient excursions).

Dev 2008, Feb 2016, spring 2020 were all times with retracements back near the 2001 levels (adjusted for currency devaluation/inflation).

I expect we’ll see them again in my lifetime, but you can’t reliably predict exactly when. (If you could, you could retire quite quickly via commodity speculation.)

this is just a reality of the economic policy we’ve chosen to pursue here.

Now who is "we" in this scenario?

American citizens collectively.

But also the general development of the world

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