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Comment by chung8123 | Hacker News Reader

I think it is a bit of a scam but I do think it had good intentions. CPI is used to grade and since it is a scoring product it is manipulated. One thing you will notice with inflation is that goods that can be outsourced have been what is keeping CPI down. TVs, appliances, etc. Housing, Education, Healthcare are all things the US cannot outsource and there you will see a larger impact on CPI. Food is the on in this theory that I am not sure about. The US grows much of their own food so I wonder if it still fits even though you can outsource.

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Food. The technique is to shift from 'locally sourced organic veggies' to 'dorritos made with mass produced GMO corn', because 'consumer preferences have shifted' and both have the same calorie payload. Note how 'preferences have shifted' also discreetly helps to insinuate a moral fault in the people themselves. Anything but 'healthy food has become too damn expensive for the majority of the population'.

That is not even remotely how the food components of the basket work. You're just making things up and obviously haven't read through the detailed list of items or the methodology for how those are updated.

Fair enough, BLS seems reasonable, though devil in (lots of) details. I was extrapolating the 'ketchup is a vegetable' debacle, https://www.foodpolitics.com/2011/11/ketchup-is-a-vegetable-..., where American ketchup is a mix of tomato paste and high fructose corn syrup, see e.g. https://www.nutritionvalue.org/Tomato_ketchup_by_HEINZ_54041...

I'm curious about how the housing crisis is measured here. As homelessness booms, people are "choosing" to not pay rent. Does that zero out their housing expenditures in a survey?

Although I'm sure that outsourcing made some difference, are we sure most of the benefits didn't just rise to the investor class?

TVs dropped in price due to the benefits of adopting moores law. Look into a modern TV and you see a symphony of integration and cost reduction thanks to moores law. I'd imagine the same applies to anything else that jumped on the moores law bandwagon. We need to measure appliances that benefited from this vs appliances that didn't.

The size of transistors has very little to do with TV prices. They are cheaper now because they are built with outsourced exploited labor and because they are full to the brim with ads and stalkerware.

It absolutely does make a difference. As I mentioned in my original comment, it enables consolidation of components and functions. Take apart an old CRT and a modern LCD screen and in the new TV you will see a single IC doing the job of multiple separate boards in the old TV. This is where a lot of the cost has come out of. All thanks to the capabilities of modern ICs...powered by Moores law.

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