They're not necessarily "cooked," (but they certainly can be). Inflation is genuinely hard to calculate since it's different for everyone, goods and services purchased drift over time, and as you mentioned, that exact good also changes over time. CPI (and others) are more useful in a MoM or YoY context. At 10 years, it's better viewed as best guess cost of typical living rather than an economic indicator comparing apples and oranges.
> housing
This is actually the hardest to get right because it's the largest, and 2/3 of Americans own homes, so part of their costs are fixed.
No it's cooked. For high tech items, they assume that improved technology means you are getting more for your money even if the price goes up, so they discount it. It's true that you get more for your money, but it ignores threshold effects, like you just can't buy an equivalent phone for $10 even if todays phone's are 200x better.
Then there's the "owner's equivalent rent" BS and this is 25% of CPI. It answers the question "If someone were to rent your home today, how much do you think it would rent for monthly, unfurnished, and without utilities?" It assumes rental price and housing costs are somehow linked when in reality asset prices have far outstripped rent.
> it assumes rental price and housing costs are somehow linked when in reality asset prices have far outstripped rent
It's pricing the cost of shelter. Renting a home is buying shelther. Buying a home is buying shelter and buying a financial asset. OER is the way you separate the last two components. Otherwise, you'd have to only look at rents to determine housing prices, which would be rubbish in a country where most households live in homes they own.
Suppose you want shelter. It used to be that you could buy a house for a reasonable price and move in. But now that's unaffordable, so instead your have to pay rent. In CPI thinking these are equivalent forms of shelter, but I bet if you asked most Americans, they would not agree with you.
Which flows through to owner-equivalent rent, in part.
> In CPI thinking these are equivalent forms of shelter, but I bet if you asked most Americans, they would not agree with you
It really doesn't. When measuring rent, you directly measure rent. For OER, you're measuring the housing price and imputing shelter cost from that. They're similar, but different. Sort of like how renting and owning are similar, but different.
Also, given the variance in housing affordability across the country, you'd almost certainly have to strip out any financial-asset component anyway to meaningfully compare the resulting number.
why should the asset prices matter in OER? the aim is understanding cost. BLS no longer questions homeowners but samples local rents to estimate OER since homeowners could've been wrong in their guess. of course, someone may have locked in a low interest rate so their expense is overstated. counterargument is that you are consuming a more valuable service by occupying the unit even though market rent exceeds your costs so it doesn't matter if your cost is assumed to be the market rent. note there is a 6-month sampling lag of rents, which doesn't help the perception gap in the inflation figures.
I feel like the modern, more relevant version is being Doom-complete...which is essentially that any fast enough device with a screen can run Doom, and someone will eventually make it run Doom.
There's a well-known story about a man who escaped a murder conviction because he was at a Dodgers game when the murder happened, and there just happened to be a TV show filming at the stadium that just happened to record him there.
There are also individual-level risks. If you capture everything, you might capture bank account numbers when setting up direct deposit or credit card numbers from corporate purchases (these are clearly valid uses of company equipment). In a only slightly less valid use, you might submit a medical claim (using a company benefit), and surveillance software gets part of your medical record.
There are underappreciated liabilities companies take on with this monitoring.
Yeah; without Dennard Scaling, cooling becomes an issue, they're useless to laptops, and you can only double or triple density vs a regular chip before they draw too much power for a home outlet.
> you cant even buy kidney friendly cat food without an expensive Rx from a vet and tons of controls
There are a few law suits over this. Essentially, the claim is that they call it "prescription," but it has no prescription medications in it and isn't approved by the FDA to treat anything. So if you have an extra bag and sell it, this is OK since it isn't actually a drug, it's allegedly a price fixing scheme between vets and pet food makers.
> housing
This is actually the hardest to get right because it's the largest, and 2/3 of Americans own homes, so part of their costs are fixed.
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