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It's this part. When I can see how my purchasing power has fallen in the past decade, or how it's gone off a cliff compared to what my parents had in 2000, I don't see much merit in arguments that life is great because Big Line Go Up and phones/weed/gambling/porn.
Indeed. There's something grimly funny in the guy who wrote "Getting Eulered" willingly getting Eulered.
"Inflation is actually fairly low" is a good example of this; the official measure of inflation is year over year rate of change; i.e. we're using the 1st derivative as the true measure of what's happening. The rate at which things are getting more or less expensive can be a useful thing to know, but it's not the whole story, especially in times of dramatic shocks to the market, like Covid. During Covid, particularly the lockdowns, we saw a massive spike in the costs of goods due to supply chain issues. Once these issues were resolved, the prices should have come down, but they did not! But because the official inflation rate went back down to normal levels, we are told that our worries over inflation are unfounded, never mind that I can look at what I am able to put in my shopping cart now, and what I was able to put in the cart just 5 years ago (usually, for even less money), and see there's a problem.
We did see the spikes due to supply chain issues get alleviated. What didn't go away was the price increases caused by the stimulus bills, nor would it be expected that they did so.
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