does anybody else find a prison no one is ever released from just prima facie suss?
no release, no contact with family, no evidence any given detainee is still alive. no one to describe what goes on.
@dvgmacdonald @bun not sure i count, and not sure i know, but i've used convenient sectoral series on FRED, derived from the same BLS data you point to. you can look up CPI for rent of primary residence, shelter (more broadly i guess?), new vehicles, food at home, food away from home, gasoline, medical care, electricity, apparel, airline fares, probably more.
FRED is convenient, a delight to use: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/
@dvgmacdonald @bun PPI, one step remove from consumer prices, what producers pay for their inputs, offers series disaggregrated by industry.
@dvgmacdonald @bun pricestats, which is a commercialization of MIT's Billion Prices Project, is an independent collector of pricing data, which can serve as a check on government series. They too offer sectoral disaggregations, Apparel, Food & Beverages, Furnishing & Household Equipment, Health & Beauty, Energy & Transportation, and Recreation & Electronics. But I suspect access is expensive. https://www.pricestats.com/inflation-series
@dvgmacdonald @bun I don't know how fine grained BLS data would let you go, if you really want to trace the price evolution of a single, reasonably constant, product.
@astonc Make America Great Again!
if they want to onshore manufacturing and remain remotely cost-competitive, you'd think they'd be promoting their new guest worker programs rather than turning the US into an arbitrary detention and perhaps permanent rendition hellhole for our most inexpensive labor pool.
@karlbode.com writes the best precis of the great broadband / bureaucracy / abundance kerfuffle.
(note! i misattributed this excellent piece to @mmasnick earlier. sorry to you both!)
instead of taking sides and tossing molatovs between left and liberal, be a left liberal.
if you render a place completely uninhabitable, population transfer becomes as sad necessity rather than a crime against humanity.
what happens when the quasi-world-government just glitches out and goes haywire?
"The economic problems we face are serious, but this is not a serious way to address them." @rajivsethi https://rajivsethi.substack.com/p/reciprocal-tariffs
here's a handy heuristic!
when a guy says "They're eating the dogs, the people that came in, they're eating the cats…They're eating the pets of the people that live there."
and in fact they are doing no such thing
maybe don't vote for them to become the most powerful person on the planet.
so who do we greet as liberators?
it's such a politically savvy play — now that you feel poorer, the prices of everything will blow up!
@econproph imposing a ten percent tariff on free costs the very steep price of free!
not only does it have the lowest tariff rates, but the penguins aren't unionized.
you gotta understand. if they hadn’ta cut a deal, they’d have had no shot at a piece of this.
from @ddayen.bsky.social https://prospect.org/economy/2025-04-03-theyre-not-tariffs-theyre-sanctions/
Text: But countries are not alone in the boxes; corporations and industry sectors are as well. The phalanxes of lawyers and lobbyists who try to ease sanctions through their contacts at the highest levels of power now have a new target. Companies have been lawyering up for months in anticipation, while enlisting friendly politicians for the task. The White House has fielded hundreds of letters from businesses pleading their case. And it's already working.
so, are they gonna make liberation day a national holiday?
So, is the EU finally going to get serious about replacing US search/social/AI with their own, regulable, firms?
if you want emergency powers, create an emergency (by using the "emergency" powers you already had!)
@admitsWrongIfProven doesn’t the biting go well with some lively exorcism play?