Most countries have key disclosure laws[1] which require you to provide keys or passwords to law enforcement. Not being able to remember the password is not a defense unless you can somehow prove it (which is impossible), and people can and have gone to prison for this[2].
Its not a case of not being able to remember the passwords if an AI is the only entity that knows them's. Technicality of law.
As for people going to prison I know how fascist the UK state can be, I've had it all my life since primary school and they go on about the Uighurs in China! LOL. Reminds me of the IRA petrol bombs and the Ukrainian Petrol bombs going on today.
I've had court request letters telling me to go to the wrong courts in the hope they can convict me of speeding in my absence, if I wasnt aware of court procedures which isnt my day job.
I'm well aware you dont run a country by being nice.
I don't disagree, but "the poor people who clean them" are doing that because it pays better than they could get elsewhere, otherwise they wouldn't do it (assuming no coercion on the billionaire's part, which would be illegal).
If the billionaires magically ceased to exist and poor people owned the apartments, I don't think they'd be paying the other poor people as much to come clean them.
On Chrome on Android (whatever is latest on the Play store) in portrait mode, the bottom letters are off the bottom of the screen. If I rotate everything is small but I can see it.
Internet connections cost poor people nothing in 1970 because they weren't necessary and could happily live their lives without one. The real item we're looking at here is *communication*, which was cheap: the stamp you needed to send in the form for your taxes cost a few cents. You could get away with using payphones for the few phone calls you absolutely needed to make.
In 2021, internet connections and cellphones are both expensive and mandatory if you want to participate in modern society. Your minimum wage job probably texts you your schedule, so if you don't have a cell phone, you can't even work. Many government forms have been moved online, with legacy options either unavailable or poorly services. Payphones are all but gone. If you're lucky to have a local library then maybe you can get some time on a decrepit computer with slow internet access, but the majority of the poor rely on their cellphone for internet access.
An internet connected smartphone is not equivalent to the postal service (plus a pay phone or landline I guess). It may be that you use a computer or something else for the things that most people use smartphones for, wand so don’t realise how much they cover.
You also didn’t mention having to go to the library (distance + fuel/car/travel costs + more time) for information, finding jobs from newspaper advertisements or word of mouth.
But the claim I was disagreeing with is that most Americans are worse off now than in the 70s and the description “most Americans” does not match the sort of very poor people whom you describe. So I feel this comment is only partially relevant
Poverty is not just about absolute purchasing power adjusted for location and time. There is also very much an unspoken social context, sometimes even codified into law.
In 1970, obviously nobody expected you to own a smartphone because it didn't exist. Noone had access to such a thing. Not so in 2021 western Europe. The example very much holds in that sense. You could fully participate in society without that expense.
I'm not speaking of keeping up with the Joneses here. I'm speaking of pervasive implicitly embedded demands on people's lifestyles.
What do you think about the effects of the way housing insulation requirements are often written?
What do you think happens when you invite someone to a party at your place in the countryside that is only reasonably reachable by car?
One of the best ways to get a feel for this kind of thing is to go live in an area with significantly lower median purchasing power for some time, a place where the average trustworthy hard-working person has difficulties making ends meet. I've done so. Even if I lived a lifestyle of relative luxury myself, it helped widen my perspective. I can absolutely recommend the experience!
Seems like you are talking about social inequality (a zero sum game) vs poverty (a non zero sum game)
The idea that no one was expected to own cell phones so they didn’t enrich our lives is clearly false.
Can apply this to any technological advance. So for eg. in the 1800s no one expected you to own a car. So the invention and subsequent technology driven deflation of car prices didn’t make everyone’s lives better.
> Seems like you are talking about social inequality (a zero sum game) vs poverty (a non zero sum game)
The two are not opposed. There is significant overlap significantly in many ways, even in the way government treats the very definition of poverty. In most countries, you'll find that poverty is defined as a percentage of median income.
Let me try to rephrase to make this more tangible. The minimum of things and services I need to procure to get minimally acceptable social inclusion is lower in some contexts than in others. 1970 versus 2021. Silicon Valley versus rural Latvia. I hope you get the point.
> The idea that no one was expected to own cell phones so they didn’t enrich our lives is clearly false.
I was certainly not claiming that! Cell phones or cars can clearly enrich the lives of those able to afford them. Their existence also creates a potential gap between haves and have-nots though.
Or to formulate it more sharply, you couldn't be poor because of not being able to afford a cell phone in 1970. You can be poor because of not being able to afford a cell phone in 2021. Does that mean a cell phone is a bad thing? Of course not!
> Or to formulate it more sharply, you couldn't be poor because of not being able to afford a cell phone in 1970. You can be poor because of not being able to afford a cell phone in 2021. Does that mean a cell phone is a bad thing? Of course not!
So.. how does that imply that people are worse off now than in 1970? Your entire thesis seems to be that the jealousy people will feel from seeing others have things they don't will outweigh all of the material gains of the last half century.
>So.. how does that imply that people are worse off now than in 1970? Your entire thesis seems to be that the jealousy people will feel from seeing others have things they don't will outweigh all of the material gains of the last half century.
As an American, I don't subscribe to that thesis. At all.
What I do see (as someone in his mid 50s) is that the biggest difference is that folks back then believed (and it actually happened for many) that they would be better off than their parents.
That's no longer the case. There are a variety of reasons for this, not least of which are the systematic[0] changes to our economy that pushes wealth and resources to the top, at the expense of those at the bottom.
This didn't happen by accident, and I'm not really surprised that folks here on HN aren't focused specifically on that issue -- primarily because most of us are beneficiaries of said systematic changes.
The worst part (IMHO) is that these changes will only benefit those at the top for a limited time. Given that 70% of the US economy is consumer spending, taking purchasing power away from the vast majority of consumers is a recipe for a bad economy.
Increasing wages and safety nets makes good economic sense, as it broadens the market for consumer goods, makes it easier for folks to act in entrepreneurial ways, and in the medium to long term expands the economic pie, creating a healthier, more resilient economy.
Pushing wealth/resources to the top just doesn't do that at all. How many yachts/houses/cars/dresses/suits/pizzas/kale smoothies/etc. can one person reasonable purchase/use?
Even if you spread the money around more broadly, the wealthy will continue to be wealthy, and the rest won't have to work two or three jobs just to feed their kids boxed macaroni and cheese five times a week.
? I absolutely agree with you. Inequality nowadays is quite bad, overall welfare could be much better if we weren't hamstrung by it.
But I don't see how this means I'm ideologically committed to the absurd thesis that we haven't seen quality of life improvements for the average person in the last half century - going from a time where we had only recently eliminated actual starvation in the US, schools were still basically segregated, inflation rampant, a draft, etc. etc.
>But I don't see how this means I'm ideologically committed to the absurd thesis that we haven't seen quality of life improvements for the average person in the last half century - going from a time where we had only recently eliminated actual starvation in the US, schools were still basically segregated, inflation rampant, a draft, etc. etc.
I don't believe my comment even implied that.
Rather, I was providing my own take on your assessment of markvdb's comment[0], which I don't disagree with, I just wanted to address the elephant in the room (the systemic changes pulling more wealth/income to the top at the expense of those at the bottom) that hadn't been addressed.
That's not to say you didn't make a good point. You did. But I felt there was more to say.
> So.. how does that imply that people are worse off now than in 1970? Your entire thesis seems to be that the jealousy people will feel from seeing others have things they don't will outweigh all of the material gains of the last half century.
The point is that there are many things you are now required to have to meaningfully participate in society, that were just not required in 1970. For example, to get vaccinated in my country for COVID, you need to access a web page, sign up using email, and you'll get an SMS notification when your registration is accepted.
So, without an internet connection and mobile phone, you have to rely on someone else who does own one of these.
The conclusion being: someone who can't afford a mobile phone and internet connection may be poor in 2021, even if people without an internet connection or mobile phone were perfectly well off in 1970.
> to get vaccinated in my country for COVID, you need to access a web page, sign up using email, and you'll get an SMS notification when your registration is accepted.
I guarantee you that if you live in the developed world there are alternate pathways to getting vaxxed.
> someone who can't afford a mobile phone and internet connection may be poor in 2021, even if people without an internet connection or mobile phone were perfectly well off in 1970.
Funnily enough, a greater proportion of people have smartphones in the house today than had landlines then (60s & 70s), so even by this (absurd) metric where having a smartphone is equal to having a landline in terms of utility/welfare, we still have seen material improvements.
I am surprised that this has prompted such an argument here. I am curious as to the ideological motivations behind denying any progress in the last half century, this sort of rhetoric didn't seem nearly as popular even a few years ago.
> most Americans are significantly worse off since the 1970s
This statement seems obviously false to me and is what I was disagreeing with. This entire conversation was spawned because many people felt the need to defend this statement.
>This statement seems obviously false to me and is what I was disagreeing with. This entire conversation was spawned because many people felt the need to defend this statement.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I don't disagree with your point at all.
Materially we've got more stuff, sure. The issue I pointed up (and perhaps that others were alluding) is that social mobility has been negatively affected over the past 50 years.
And the prospect that one won't be able to "succeed" (whatever definition of success you want to use) because the deck has been systematically stacked against you in favor of those who are already wealthy is definitely a factor in why folks feel they're not as well off as they'd like to be.
What's more, it's been getting harder for the poorest Americans to make ends meet for quite some time. And that situation has been making its way up the economic ladder too. That result is no accident either.
As such, it's no wonder many folks wonder why they can't get ahead even if they do what they're told is necessary to make that happen.
That's a cultural and economic problem that has been growing for a long time. And one that cheap gadgets and technology can't fix.
What could help is sharing the economic benefits of the increased productivity enabled by technology. But we're not doing that, are we?
> social mobility has been negatively affected over the past 50 years.
I'm really not at all confident this is even true, unless you are restricting your sample to white people & men.
Seems like social mobility for women, who comprise half the population, is markedly better than it was 50 years ago.
I don't think it is true that it has been getting "harder" for people to make ends meet for quite some time. Again, in the time period we're comparing to, people were quite literally starving to death/dying from malnutrition at times. Nowadays, people have their ends met well enough that this does not happen in America.
This is in spite of rampant inequality, but still - measurable improvements on pretty much all measures. Really, many of the bigger causes of early death now are due to self-destructive things people can do with more material abundance.
I get what you're saying and I absolutely think the invention of phones, the internet, etc. made everybody's lives better.
But it's also true that these things become necessities when everybody is expected to have them. There is a low but non-zero level of "keeping up with the Joneses" you have to do just to keep living your life reasonably, because things change around you. Job applications are done over the internet now. Most higher education requires a good computer, webcam, and internet connection. You hail a cab with your phone. People suck at giving directions because they assume you have GPS. Stuff like that.
So I think it is fair to price some of these "luxuries" into the cost of living even though in the past people got along just fine without them.
> The idea that no one was expected to own cell phones so they didn’t enrich our lives is clearly false.
It's not like everyone in the 70s was walking around completely depressed waiting for some breakthrough in computing technology so they could carry a computer in their pocket and ease all their ills. People could be content and maybe even happy without access to technology that didn't exist. Many Americans would likely be happier if they got rid of the "smart" part of their phones.
Well happiness and material wealth are two very separate things.
People can be very content and happy with very basic necessities. Some of the happiest people on the planet are renunciate monks and nuns based in brain scan research (for eg mathieu richard)
And of course people can be depressed even to the point of being suicide while being wealthy. (Any number of high profile cases)
Affording Internet access and a cell phone is no problem for me, but the only reason I have either is because they're de facto required for my work, for my spouse's work, and for our kids' school. I do use it for other stuff since I have it anyway, but I absolutely see it as a ~$140/mo tax on participating in the economy. Stuff like streaming services only makes sense because I already have to pay that "tax"—it'd be way cheaper to just buy all the media I want otherwise. $140/mo + (cost of streaming services) buys a lot of movies, books, TV shows, and music.
Overall, I think having the Internet makes my life significantly worse except for how it makes it possible for my family to participate in the modern education and the modern job market. It's a benefit mainly because you're shut out from things that previously did not require it if you don't have it.
[EDIT] ~$140/mo is my home Internet service and roughly what it costs for Internet service on two cell phone lines. I'd probably keep phone + SMS service even without the societal requirement to have Internet service.
>I absolutely see it as a ~$140/mo tax on participating in the economy
* for most people they'd be paying for the internet/cell phone regardless of whether it's required for their job or not. I doubt the pandemic pushed up internet adoption rate by much.
* $140/month seems to be on the high side. are you really paying that much for the bare essentials? Or are you paying for gigabit home internet and a 25GB/month cell plan?
Um good luck finding the car of your choice these days. Even before pando/trade war an in-demand model took weeks or months while other cars sit on lots.
We can’t argue that quality of life is sooo much better when production is such a mess. The only reason we hear the complaints is because of quality of life.
People with money can handle $1 more for an order of pretzel nuggets but make them wait and extra 2 minutes for it and the labor shortage is all over the news.
> “We can’t argue that quality of life is sooo much better when production is such a mess.”
Not for nothing, but I’d bet my crispest dollar that our quality of life is still outrageously good. If you have to wait a few months for the $60,000 custom build F150 of your dreams, so be it. If someone’s gotta wait 5 minutes for their McNuggets, it’ll build out their patience.
Sure the system is under stress, but the problem is and always was us. The wealth inequality exacerbates it all and we’ll all eventually act like animals over it.
It is also in part due to the explicit tie in of the dealership system by which we buy cars. Dealerships can't go away because they have baked the law around them. Automotive manufacturers are forbidden from building their own stores. Though this is a state by state issue, and Tesla is the manufacturer skirting this rule.
We also have franchised dealers in the UK. They have show-rooms and help you design the model you want and sort finance if you’ve got limited funds, and then they get it built and shipped.
Same thing - only difference is they don’t have cars in stock. It’s done on demand.
The reason is actually that it costs the factories more money to shut down and wait than to keep things running. So they keep producing cars and trucks without chips, and letting them sit in lots. I know this first hand with family and close friendships with folks in production management within General Motors, Dana Corp.
The dealership and lot model has been the case in the US for many decades - it isn't anything caused by the pandemic or anything to do with the chip shortage.
That’s what I did with my new car just a few weeks ago (Ford). Built and ordered online. People like shopping in person so it makes sense to have that “mall” like experience. And having the car available to test drive on the spot must make for more sales
Not all dealerships let you order the trim you want, even if it's ok to sell in your state.
Chrysler pulled this on me so I substituted the good with one from another maker. Months later Chrysler called with all trims magically available. This was well before the panorama but during the trade war.
Exactly. Somehow there is this impression that software engineers are having it really hard and they face worst job requirements/interviews.
I'd imagine software/IT might be only place where people who have delivered a couple of toy sized, half-assed webapps are now experts commenting on 'engineering challenges' and 'industry trends' with profundity.
> For example, if the price of tea rose dramatically during one year, consumers might switch their spending towards coffee, making it necessary to adjust the expenditure weights accordingly in the following year.
Or put another way, if fuel goes up astronomically and people buy less of it, they will adjust its weight downwards, limiting the effects of its price increase on the headline inflation.
It's not that statisticians and economists are fooled. The methodology works assuming that people have spare money and can choose to spend or not. But the reality is that things have got so expensive that most people are living paycheck to paycheck and spending everything they have, so their attempts to eradicate the bias of choice ends up just measuring how much money people have to spend (i.e. wage growth).
Let's run that scenario in a simplified manner of how CPIs are likely actually going to be calculated.
First, they have to determine the conceptual basket of goods to track. Ok, that's comparable to your 1000 "highest volume" items methodology (albeit yours is a bit simplified too, we'll ignore the problem that good or volume is complicated for everyone). Generally stats bodies do this by looking at what consumers actually spend things on. This seems emminently sensible to me, and no offense intended, superior to a top 1000 volume method. Fuel, presumably, gets included in both.
Then they need to assign a weight for every good to determine how much its mixture of quantity + price movements contribute to the CPI figure. I put it to you this is necessary. Every item shouldn't be equally weighted even in your methodology (the distribution of volume of relative goods purcahsed/consumed is guaranteed to not be uniform across all 1000 goods, and it makes no sense for no. 1 to be given an equal weight to no. 999). Stats bodies do this too. This is what is meant by weight adjustment in this context. And both you and stat agencies should be doing it.
At some point, your "top 1000" goods is going to change and you're going to have to figure out what is in a new basket at a new time. So too does the CPI basket of goods. You both need to do this. Note that your methodology does not actually fix the fuel-budget-substitution issue. Price movements in your method that invoke a strong enough substitution or consumption effect result in fuel dropping out of your top 1000 as well.
By keeping your basket constant for a given period of time and just tracking the good's prices, you track expenditure somewhat consistently for a given period. That's a good thing. There's no reference to changes in a consumer's budget. But...CPI calculating stats agencies do this too for a set basket of goods just like you do. They fix the basket and track it over time, adjusting, like yours, only for re-inclusion the basket of goods under consideration.
Lastly, comes the hedonic quality problem. Changes in quality of consumption/goods over time. Some substitutions seem just because of taste or culture (see for example, relative consumption of antimacassars over time, or certain culture's preference for certain foods or items). Others are obviously qualitative in nature (i.e. computer processing power), and most things are a complex mix of tech/economy/culture/price/quality. This is the part that captures and tries to control for your qualitative substitution problem (it's not without its controversies, but I argue that your method needs it as well because it suffers similar problems, and indeed all ones which try to standardise subjective consumption of a national economy into a single figure). Relevant to 'fuel' is its price, but also substitution to other new fuels that turn up (hydrogen, LPG, lithium-ion), but also technology efficiency gains that have changed the consumption to utility ratio. Again, stats agencies try to control for this too.
Aside from the definition of the basket of goods (a weakness and methodology shared by your "fix"), there is generally no explicit reference to consumer's budget or assumed spending patterns when tracking within a given basket. There is nothing inherently equivalent to "assumed spare money or choosing to spend or not". (I suppose I'm happy to be proven wrong on this for a given countries methodology). it's not just a simplified survey of median households or expenditure.
Now, you can (and many people justifiably do) take issue with ideas and quantification of hedonic quality problems: but it's a universal problem, your method doesn't fix it, and I think you're generally misconstruing how CPIs are calculated around the world. The problems you mention are already attempted to be tackled and controlled for in methodology, and the official methodology is already generally superior to your suggested replacement.
Edit: it's also not like stats/economics agencies are doing this WITHOUT an accesible measures of nominal wages (that is wages and resource flows without inflation taken into account) available to them.
edit 2: in the real world, further considerations like geography, seasonality, population, etc is additionally controlled and adjusted for. And many stat agencies, in my experience, offer additional breakdowns of other price series, such as geographical and categorical indexes, or various additional weightings and combinations, so if you take issue with headline CPI you can investigate other more appropriate measures for your specific use cases.
> Or put another way, if fuel goes up astronomically and people buy less of it, they will adjust its weight downwards, limiting the effects of its price increase on the headline inflation.
What problem do you see in that approach? That looks exactly like the expected behavior from the average consumer.
If your goal is to track the prices of goods and services actually consumed by the population, isn't it appropriate to lower the impact of goods and services that are consumed less by said population?
The goal is to track the relative price of goods consumed (the "Consumer Prices Index").
But if the way you're doing that basically ends up as "everyone is spending all of their wages", then your numerical value degrades to "how much wages do people have?".
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law [2]: https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-security-password...