CPI is kept artificially down by claiming that items that increase a lot in value are sudendly "higher quality" so that their price is adjusted down to equalize for "quality".
They will just take those items off the basket, put in different ones and claim that those are better quality so the actual price increase is in line with expectations.
I wish I could find the analysis now, but someone proved this out by comparing magazine prices to CPI's calculation of magazine prices.
I believe they uses Time as the example because the covers are archived and have the price printed right on them.
They went back a few decades and the inflation difference was quite large. I want to say the real sticker price change was multiple times higher than CPI's claim of magazine prices, but I can't remember the exact numbers.
there are frequent claims by semi-crackpots that the hedonic adjustment of inflation calculation is hiding a lot of inflation.
there was the famous shadowstats site, but it seems it shut down, or at least stopped publishing new stuff in 2023 publicly. (probably reverting to a good old affinity scam [5])
(fun trivia, noticed by a reddit user 11 years ago, that even though the guy claimed high inflation but the subscription fee remained the same over 10 years, and in the last post it was also "six months at $89.00".) and there are many posts [3][4] explaining why these alternate measures are very unlikely to be more correct than either the BLS' CPI or the BEA's PCE.
...
the BLS does a lot of work to have useful numbers for a lot of goods and services [0], down to computer parts [1]
and there are a lot of things that usually are now more fancy (and more expensive, of course), but don't have value adjustment in the list. (Matt Yglesias writes about the spa-ification of services, everything is nicer, fancier, from movie theater seats to barber shops, yet there's no adjustment for "haircuts and other personal care services"[2])
CPI is personal (renting vs home ownership), very hard to have a good definition for (expenses tracked and weights), and more useful over short windows because the standard of living changes.
I can understand a certain amount of switching in the basket - e.g. a washing machine or dishwasher was once a "luxury good" in a market such as USA, but is now (for the most part) an everyone-appliance.
Interesting to consider the alternative case though, an "everyone basket item" becoming a "luxury good".
Democracy, maybe? But I don't think they've put that in the CPI basket - yet! :-P
It's more like, refrigerators are now way more expensive, but because they are also more comlonly equipped with led fixtures and have more style (no joking here, they somehow are measuring style as a metric) then it's all good and they have actually just increased around 2% with respect yo the base model (that cost like a third in dollars back in 1995)
FYI everyone can check the model used for hedonic adjustment for fridges
style is important, because stylish things are more in demand (that's why they are considered stylish), and the abstract property of style by definition is a "value quality" that doesn't affect the temperature keeping properties, whereas things like are there drawers or shelves does (as cold air is kept better by drawers - but of course they are less convenient)
that said, the style here seems to be simply a catch-all term for the organization of the inside, and the access methods (eg. doors).
Yes, I don't think anyone truly wants it to be like this. But it's just what happens.
You of course cannot access and empty out someone's bank account this way, you're safe in that regard. But you need to dispute the invoices as soon as possible to show that it is fradulent, so you don't end up needing to actually pay for it. Or get debt collectors after you.
Yeah, they didn't expect iran to fuck everything up and now the dudes that sell oil in dollars because of security guarantees and their ships are being bombarded and running out of air defenses.
Iran has no choice. They've been observing how US destroyed and / or co-opted all their neighbours, one by one, over the decades and have been preparing for their turn for a long time. The undeclared US-Israeli strategy against Iran, and Tehran’s counter-strategy - https://english.almayadeen.net/articles/analysis/the-undecla...
No matter how much resources a society has, natural selection pushes everyone to keep trying hard to get more, as those that don't end up without resources.
In a society, the fastest way to get resources is to provide something in exchange to other members of the society. The most common thing we have to exchange for resources is work.
From those two things we can see that no matter what society you have or how wealthy it is, people will work as much as they can, or else they get behind in the rat race.
Nope, it falls more under trade secrets than copyright.
If you do something that requires stealing the code (publishing it, selling it, etc) the company can legally fuck you up.
Now, once it's in tbe wind, it becomes almost impossible to pursue from a practical point of view, as any implementer can claim trade secrets to avoid showing you the code.
It looks like a maintenance nightmare with those clutches to decouple the blades and the mechanisms to have them folded during cruising. Does it even improve substantially in anh metric over the V280 to put money into it?
All military aircraft are maintenance nightmares. They're also extraordinarily loud and devour fuel. These are not intended to entire commercial service where they need to turn a profit for the operators.
Maintenance is an issue for more than just profitability. More maintenance means fewer sorties in a given time period, heavier reliance on and utilization of supply chains, and fewer platforms that can be serviced by a given set of mechanics and facilities.
Just look at WW2: Germany had some fantastic equipment, but they couldn't field it because they didn't have the fuel, spare parts and the maintenance capabilities available. A tiger could kill 10 Shermans, but the Americans could always bring up an 11th Sherman.
For decades we have been able to afford complacency - we strike when we're ready against people who mostly can't strike back. We can afford to be wasteful because we have so much more than anyone we would go up against. No one is seriously threatening our ability to keep our military going. But militaries need to be prepared for peer conflicts where someone could give us a run for our money.
> A tiger could kill 10 Shermans, but the Americans could always bring up an 11th Sherman.
Supply is one part, being able to repair is another. The tiger was a massive pain in the dick to fix. It had a weak gearbox that took _hours_ to get to.
Plus most of the parts were bespoke, which means lots more tooling needed to service everything. The other thing is that germany wasn't actually that mechanised compared to the french, or english
The comparison in tech is apt, but the countervailing argument is that the discrepancy in economies doomed the Nazis in WW2. German was a little powerhouse considering the size of its population, but it only had half the GDP of the US, not to mention the other Allies. Combine this with a smaller population, and it really didn't matter what the Germans did in terms of equipment. They were destined to lose unless they struck gold with a wunderwaffe like the atomic bomb.
In today's world, the US outspends the next 10 countries combined. In normal times, it values the lives of its servicemen, and is willing to spend quite a bit to ensure dominance. So it will often have boutique gear that other countries could never afford.
That's not a countervailing argument, that is the argument. The side able to apply more industrial power defeated the side with more capable but less useful equipment.
The US outspends the next 10 countries combined in peace times. By comparison, Germany outspent the US on its military by a factor of 20 on the eve of WW2. Obviously once the war got going, the US' immense industrial capacity (along with the other Allies; the British Empire and the Soviet Union had the number 2 and 3 GDPs) was unstoppable.
We no longer live in the age where the US represents half of the world GDP and the bulk of that is manufacturing. China's has a larger economy in terms of Purchasing Power Parity, it has extensive manufacturing capacity, and a vast population. If push came to shove, we wouldn't be able to simply outspend them. In that hypothetical conflict we are the germany with a bunch of questionably useful wunderwaffe.
You're right: we would simply starve them (in addition to strategic bombing of all of these manufacturing centers.)
They do not possess the food calorie production to sustain their population, nor do they have the arable land to magically begin to do so.
> we are the germany with a bunch of questionably useful wunderwaffe.
We have outstanding fast attack submarines which can't be stopped by ASBMs: exactly zero freighters carrying food from South America or crude oil would be permitted.
That was literally Nazi Germany's strategy for defeating Britain. Use advanced submarines to stop trade cutting off supplies of food and fuel from abroad. The Allies just made ships faster than they could be sunk.
Today the US has 55 fast attack submarines, each of which can carry about 50 torpedos at a time. So with 100% of your subs deployed you can sink maybe 250 ships. The US has an inventory of about 1000 torpedos so you can do that about 4 times. Shanghai alone receives 230 ships per day. So The US submarine force is roughly capable of shutting down the equivalent of 1 chinese port for a few days. Realistically, your not even going to get anywhere near that. 30% of your subs are going to be out of service at any given time, more will be transiting between service bases and the war theater, only a portion of those can be spare for commerce raiding, it takes time to locate targets, and you will suffer attrition to ASW. After those first few days it becomes a race between US torpedo production and Chinese ship building. The US can produce 10 torpedos per month; China produces 15 ships per day.
Of course China isn't an island - it can import food from its neighbors by land connections. Nor is it even deficient in domestic food production capability. It grows 700 million tons of grain per year which is enough to sustain 3.8 billion adults. It imports a lot of food in peacetime because people want more than bare subsistence, and certainly interdicting trade will piss them off quite a bit, but it's not going to bring them to their knees.
The idea that in a peer war it will only be them suffering - their trade will be interdicted, their industrial centers will be bombed - and they won't have any means to strike back is exactly the complacency I was referring to. Maybe if war broke out tomorrow it would go that way, but that's merely an argument that China is not yet truly our peer. We must plan under the assumption that somebody, and it might not be China, will in the coming decades reach the point where they can tank a hit from us and hit back.
> That was literally Nazi Germany's strategy for defeating Britain.
And this strategy was enormously effective. Absent U.S. intervention, Europe was fucked.
> The Allies just made ships faster than they could be sunk.
Not "the Allies" - just one Ally, separated by an entire ocean. No such separation exists today.
> Today the US has 55 fast attack submarines, each of which can carry about 50 torpedos at a time. So with 100% of your subs deployed you can sink maybe 250 ships
We had torpedo bombers in 1940, as well, submarines aren't the only ASW mechanism that exists. How many sunken ships in each port will bring them to a grinding halt? Are they magically going to tug millions of tons of steel out of these harbors?
> China produces 15 ships per day
When their shipbuilding operations aren't strategically bombed into oblivion, sure.
> it can import food from its neighbors by land connections
Now it's a World War - why would this be allowed?
> grows 700 million tons of grain per year
With several hundred million of those tons of grain (along with vast amounts of other relevant food calories - livestock, etc.) being grown in the Yangtze basin, courtesy of the fact that the Three Gorges Dam is allowed to exist. Why would the U.S. allow that dam to remain intact? This one structure is a cheat code: knock out 50% of enemy food production, displace or kill hundreds of millions of people creating a mass humanitarian crisis and subsequent Cultural Revolution, and hobble huge amounts of industrial production. Short of theoretical attacks like EMP, no such non-WMD single-point-of-failure exists anywhere in the United States.
Nuclear response is truly the only thing keeping the peace.
PRC has CONUS conventional strikes now, bump 20 refineries and US lose 50% of oil, everything down stream from transportation to industry to agriculture, comparable to to hypothetical three gorges. Hypothetical because US doesn't have munitions to penetrate gravity damn as thick as three gorges (gbu57 included), nor any survivable platforms that can deliver fires at scale to PRC. Ultimately, US MIC not remotely calibrated for PRC sized adversary. So the real answer is now that PRC can conventionally hit US, given PRC have 4x more concrete to crack, varied energy mix vs CONUS dependence on oil, US more strategically vulnerable (from energy to input for calories). At peer war scale, 1 dam might as well as be 20-30 refineries. Extrapolate to other CONUS targets, boeing, f35, spacex manufacturing, data centeres, payment processors... i.e. strategic infra US spent 50 years to sustain hegemony. US more to lose from less set targets and less ability to reconstitute. PRC loses most of PLAN they can rebuild in a few years, US loses most of USN and it will take decades. PRC has 4x more nodes for same relative level of homeland disruption, arguably has better fire projection than US in actual shooting war, as in none of US projection assets can likely survive to deliver fires at scale, vs sheltered PRC global strike missile complex that skips middle men delivery platforms. TLDR global strike = CONUS is Japan now. PRC is also Japan, but PRC is 4 Japans.
I was on a film shoot that was interrupted by a pair of F-18s going low and slow on burners that took forever for audio to give the all clear. The killer part was we were in a downtown park, and could not determine why in the world they would have been performing that maneuver there. There were more than windows shaking.
Comanche was cancelled, and even it was loud and gulped fuel. The "stealth" Blackhawk derivative used in the Bin Laden raid might be quieter, but it definitely gulped a ton of fuel. Fuel consumption is just an accepted issue with helicopter technology.
The V280 is designed to be cheap (a very relative term here).
Reading between the lines, I suspect "fast, but also expensive" was a design option that popped up and was not chosen earlier in the V280 program and now Darpa wants to pay to see where it goes.
I've had to eat some humble pie and moderate my assessment of the F-35. It still does have a lot of issues, for sure, but it turns out if you divide an eye wateringly large number by another impressively large number, the result can be a lot better than I thought it would be.
It's lot more about operational costs and project deliverables than plain sticker shock, and it is turning out to be a capable platform.
> I've had to eat some humble pie and moderate my assessment of the F-35
Same for me. I was surprised to hear that it actually competes favorably on price. And aside from early griping that it couldn't beat an ancient F-16 in a dogfight, it seems pretty capable in that regard too. Saw a demo at the last airshow I went to and that plane was defying physics. I love the 16, always will, but I definitely don't think it would hang with an F-35.
In a real fight, the F-35 smokes the F-16 beyond visual range before the F-16 even knows there is a problem. The radar and electronic warfare capabilities are incredible.
Isn't modern tactics to not use onboard radar but to be driven in by airborne radar from AWACs? Or is it used once in the furball as the jig is up at that point?
My very amatuer understanding is that modern combat for the US is based on a 'combat network', which creates a massive situational advantage by connecting all sensors - on satellites, planes, drones, ground radars, from intelligence, etc. - in a network and sharing the data across the network.
The F-35 is designed as a node in that network, and afaik is one of the most advanced sensor nodes. It also receives data from the network, but it is a major contributor (partly due to operating in front, often in enemy territory, etc., afaik).
Part of using the network data is having an onboard computer that can make sense of it. Even in older planes without the network input and with smaller sensor areas, pilots faced cognitive overload from trying to interpret relatively raw data from a half-dozen or more sensors each on their own output device (screen, etc). - what's a bird, what's an ally, what's a non-combatant, what's an enemy and what's a missile - all while piloting a plane, being shot at, etc. F-35's have a computer that integrates the inputs, refines the data, identifies objects, and displays that in a unified UI on ~1 screen.
Another reason for the investment in its sensors is that situational awareness is considered by far the most decisive factor in air combat. Whoever sees and shoots first tends to win. Also, it needs to survive and be effective if cut off from outside communications.
Modern tactics are to use every radar around via datalink (AWACS, Ground Station, stealthy drones flying ahead). The onboard radar is last resort, but still very capable.
Useless tidbit about myself: Back in the mid-90s I was in the USAF in the 552nd Air Control Group, and the team I was on specifically did the 'external test' of the data link. Spent a lot of time in a simulator pushing buttons pretending to be an AWACS guy on a plane while recording all of the data, then later painstakingly comparing that data to the manual log and radio recordings.
I would be interested to see how far they've brought the technology in the intervening, uh ... 30 years. Damn. That old computer (old by technology, ours was pretty new in practical terms) was the only mainframe I've ever used. Booted it up by loading a tape reel and programming registers. I still remember that the 'happy' code was something like 0B00BE in between cycles, anything else and it had crashed.
The US is stuck with older F-16s than the current export models with advanced radar. They're gradually being upgraded with some Block 70 components. That requires the new cockpit so it isn't just a quick part substitution.
all these cost assessments are numbers on a spreadsheet. let's see what the numbers look like after 20 years on the line, with SrA mechanics and most flight hours by new Lt's and Captains.
if they over-estimate the engine rebuild time, or if it really takes 2 hours instead of 30 minutes to remove and replace an avionics box (as was forecast), the calculation can veer in the other direction quickly.
i predict the F35 will be the most expensive by flying hour of any (line) aircraft that has come before it.
Right, that may well all be true, but the capabilities it brings to the table could still be worth it. I'm not saying I know the answer, but it's a lot more of an open question than I thought it would be a few years ago.
The sticker price is competitive but the cost per flight hour and the availability factor is pretty horrifying. Factoring in the cost of flying and the availability makes the Grippen about half the cost.
I wonder if the flight hour cost of F 35 includes the maintenance it's undergoing when it's not available.
The Gripen is a fantastic jet, but you're basically describing the difference between a fourth and fifth generation platform. When Saab and Embraer roll out their own fifth-generation jets, they will also have to contend with expensive RAM coating and complex internal hardpoints.
Putting aside the export market, it's a small miracle that the F-35 turned out as well as it did. Having a mostly-common fighter airframe shared between the Navy, Marines and Air Force was a pipe dream in the 90s. America is lucky the program didn't collapse entirely.
4th generation platforms like Grippen are not survivable in a modern air defense environment without complementary 5th generation platforms to establish air superiority. You can't avoid having a fleet of something like F-35 to gain control of the airspace.
There is an argument that all manned fighters are already obsolete thanks to the proliferation of cheap drones and that establishing air superiority is a very different task now.
There is no such argument among people who actually know how this stuff works. Cheap drones might work pretty well for trench warfare in Ukraine but it's impossible to build a cheap drone that would be effective in a conflict with China over Taiwan. The distances alone mean that aircraft must be large just to get there, and thus not cheap regardless of whether there's a crew onboard.
Autonomous flight control software is still only able to handle the simplest missions. Maybe that will change in a few years but for now anything complex requires a remote pilot, and those communication links are very vulnerable.
Torpedo boats didn't make Battleships obsolete. Aircraft carriers did. Because they could do the same role but better.
AntiTank rifles didn't make tanks obsolete. Neither did anti-tank mines. Nor anti-tank rocket launchers, nor anti-tank artillery, nor really freaking good anti-tank missiles, nor anti-tank helicopters etc etc. Turns out, putting a box of steel around soldiers is pretty much always better. IFVs are even less survivable than a tank in all cases and they have only become more important and prominent because what capability they provide is what matters.
Artillery and Air power did not make the army obsolete. Air power did not make Artillery obsolete though the USA wanted that reality.
Submarines didn't make any boat obsolete.
SAM systems did not make planes obsolete. Hell, America decided the solution to missiles aimed at your planes was fly planes at the missile launcher! And it works because war is stupid.
"Cheap drones" only work against things that haven't yet adapted to cheap drones in the exact same way that Navy had to adapt to anti-ship missiles. With EW, those "cheap" drones get less cheap. With any sort of advancement in protection, those drones get less cheap. War is about achieving physical control, and you can't really do that with cheap drones. There's always back and forth in weapons systems. We still use bayonets in the right circumstances!
Cheap drones cannot establish air superiority, and certainly not air supremacy. Actual air combat drones are far more expensive, involved, and in development than quadcopters.
The primary power drones bring is ISR, making the entire battlefield utterly transparent, including at nighttime. That's insane, and really really bad for any of us who might be forced to fight in the future, as lethality to the average soldier is likely to go up.
There really is not, this argument was a total discredit of Elon Musks opinions on anything military. Case in point, Iran has been a major user of these drones yet they’ve been out of the game against an enemy with a real air force
Wildly dependent on your definition of "modern", which mostly depends on your potential adversary. The Russia/Ukraine, and the new war in the Gulf have shown numerous ways in which 4th generation jets, and more importantly cheaper missiles and even more cheap drones can perform supression of enemy air defences and/or air support. Unless you're fighting the US or China, 4th gen jets are plenty. And even against US and US defended locations, cheap drones and missiles have been able to influct some pretty serious damage to critical infrastructure (like extremely expensive and rare radar systems). An adversary not crippled by extreme sanctions and corruption for decades might have been able to achieve even more, even with the total lack of airpower.
4th generation aircraft are not sustainable in modern combat without a wide array of assistance from EW etc. The losses of aircraft in Ukraine on both sides are horrifying. The only reasons the Ukrainians persist is because they have no choice. The Russians can sit outside of the Ukrainian engagement range and lob semi-smart bombs, or air to air missiles at any Ukrainian aircraft that show up on their radar.
The real reason stealth is needed is as a counter to GBAD. Modern anti-aircraft missiles are incredible lethal.
"4th generation aircraft are not sustainable in modern combat without a wide array of assistance from EW etc. "
But isn't that true of the F35 as well?
On it's own, I doubt it would survive much longer on the eastern front in Ukraine.
In Iran the F-35 also did not fly around freely while the ground radars were active. They had to be taken out first. For that stealth was probably useful (and in general it is).
But it is not making them invisible - and cheap sensors and AI is likely to counter it soon. Because sensors and analysis will get better over time and sensors also better and cheaper. But the stealth will remain largely the same. It cannot really be upgraded for existing jets.
The F-35 is one of the most advanced EW platforms currently flying. That’s the main reason everyone wants it. It has an exceptional ability to detect modern threats and self-protect against them.
By all accounts the F-35 did fly freely over Iran but the weaponry for killing ground radars are all long-range stand-off weapons so that 4th gen aircraft can use them. Many times those weapons are cued by stealth aircraft within range of the ground radars but launched by 4th gen carrying them from farther away. This is pretty standard US doctrine.
The F-35 specifically was designed for environments like Ukraine. The combat there is shaped by the lack of capability like that from either side.
> cheap sensors and AI is likely to counter it soon.
The burning question is what decision would AI make in Pearl Harbor. Would it have said flock of birds? Would it be keying in on flocks of birds instead?
That's my point. Any battlefield today is "modern", but militaries operate with what they have. From Russia to the Houthis passing via the Houthis, we've seen insane amounts of damage done on "a modern battlefield" with anything from Cold War era equipment to cheap drones assembled by a terrorist group living in the mountains with no industrial base.
Yes, if the US wants to fight China, and vice versa, it needs 5th gen jets. Everyone else doesn't need them. They're nice to have to make your job easier (like Israel vs Iran), but don't guarantee you anything (like Israel vs Iran).
4th generation jets are not designed to survive denied airspace. They're still useful; both sides in Ukraine are using 4th gen jets for air patrol, SEAD, escorts, intercepts and standoff munition launches.
Presuming that state of affairs will persist though is fraught.
It's quite likely that in about 5 years most military installations will have a mix of weapons to intercept those systems - and depending on a number of factors you could easily end up back at low performance drones being so reliably intercepted as to be a waste of munitions to deploy.
WW1 after all was based on exactly this thinking: surely the volume of an army would overcome the machine gun.
> It's quite likely that in about 5 years most military installations will have a mix of weapons to intercept those systems - and depending on a number of factors you could easily end up back at low performance drones being so reliably intercepted as to be a waste of munitions to deploy.
That's unlikely. Anti-drone defences will only improve, yes, but autonomous drone swarms numbering in the thousands to tens of thousands are doable today, and few weapons systems can handle the rate of launch/fire required to combat that. Especially if there are follow-up waves mixing drones and heavy missiles against which your anti-drone defences wouldn't be enough.
> WW1 after all was based on exactly this thinking: surely the volume of an army would overcome the machine gun.
But building a cheap kamikaze drone costs much less than building a human.
Define cheap and multiply by thousands. Ukrainian front line drones stopped being DJIs years ago.
They're now much closer to $3000 USD+ at the low end for an ISR vehicle. $8000+ for the more capable FPV kamikazes is the estimate for Russian models.
Which is comparable to a 155mm artillery shell. But with a lot less payload.
There's already literally millions of drones being produced and used per year in that conflict - and they've made a big impact, but the stability of the frontline also reveals that the impact of "swarms" is hardly overpowering (the obsession with them is also weird - if you had thousands of assets in the air, the last thing you'd do is put them all close together).
As Iran shows, you don't need overpowering. You need to hit the enemy where it hurts them, like strategic infrastructure.
> "swarms" ... (the obsession with them is also weird - if you had thousands of assets in the air, the last thing you'd do is put them all close together)
On the contrary, a swarm allows you to overwhelm the enemy air defences, which allows you to hit targets, including those same air defences, without having to disable them first. Cf. Iran destroying a THAAD radar.
Right - until anti-air measures designed to deal with voluminous relatively low performance threats get deployed. There's a reason Ukraine has been rolling out old school anti-aircraft and flak guns, and the modern variants are now starting to be produced - i.e. area effect microwave weapons and high energy lasers. Systems which aren't very useful if your adversary is highly capable, but which are effective if your adversary is relatively fragile. Again: volume turned out to be relatively useless in WW1 when the adversary had well placed machine guns.
But it's also an apples to oranges comparison: THAAD is in no way designed to intercept drone threats. The story here is closer to the US started a fight without actually investing in the sort of defenses which would deal with it - i.e. with a rack of Ukranian interceptor drones as part of the air defenses, the THAAD radar likely makes it.
it also has stealth. This is a complete disaster. The only purpose of this stealth ship is to steal leaders and or go inside cave lairs and blow them up.
They will just take those items off the basket, put in different ones and claim that those are better quality so the actual price increase is in line with expectations.
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