I just returned from the grocery store.
I wanted some cookies to celebrate and it's been a while since I've had oreos, so I decided to take that. First surprise: they sell that shit in small packages now. Forget the huge box with four filled rows of cookies, you are getting some "top-opening" shitty plastic box with two, not even full rows of "cookies."
The price for that junk? $6.29. That's right: six fucking bucks. Plus taxes (15% because fuck you) means it will be $7.25. For some shitty, pre-made, generic cookies. Even to this day, there is a place where I can get a salad+sandwich for that price, taxes included. If I want a bit more, I can hop on some bargain app and get a full large pizza for that price (day old, but still).
I CLEARLY remember when that little packet of cookies came out in 2015. They cost $0.99 on sale. That's right, $1.15 after taxes. Sure, those cookies were not on sale today, but how much are they realistically on sale? 4.99$? $3.99 maybe?
So, what is my point? Well, I read in the news today that inflation in Canada was... 2.3% today. In fact, those people swear to God that inflation since 2015 was only 29% (https://www.bankofcanada.ca/rates/related/inflation-calculator/). That's right: these fuckers say that in the last ten years, prices only went up 29%.
Honestly, I've watched prices go up 29% this year alone. This is despite the price of many commodities (olive oil, coffee beans, etc) plummeting on the market. Did prices go down at the grocery store? No, in fact they went up some more.
I am sick and tired of being lied to in my face. "hurr durr inflation is only 2.3%" yeah 2.3% a month maybe. A fucking 1.54L of orange juice (because we buy orange jugs in 1.54L pack for some reason now) is $7.49. Back in the day, 2L was 2.99$ and maybe less on sale.
Prices of oranges has been plummetting too (down 30% - https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/orange-juice) so why the fuck are the prices so high?
Why the fuck are you trying to tell me prices are only up 2.3% this year? I'm not even talking about houses, gas (floor price is $6 a fallon now for some reason), etc.
Somehow, we are told that inflation is only 2.3%.
I'm so fucking tired of being lied too all the time. Who do they expect will believe this shit? Why are they lying to my face like that and asking me to appreciate it? I can SEE, I can literally SEE that it's not the case. What the fuck, is this one of those 2+2=5 in 1984? I should deny what I see?
Fuck I'm sick of this shithole country
The sleight of hand is "month over month". That 2.3% is probably that...which is fucking awful. Until recently we had the same numbers down in the states.
People are getting tricked over what I like to call the "Double Derivative Tactic"
In physics:
This means that acceleration is the change, of the change, of position over time.
The 2.3%, as you say, is month to month. But it's not a raw number. It's a change. But it's a change of a change with respect to time.
So for example. Let us assume this is the price of widget:
The 1st Derivative, is the total change previous month:
So, quick, what did the rate of the inflation by?!!
3.6%.
Sure, but what did I just ask you?
The definition of inflation is the increase in the money supply, not price increases. However, the vernacular definition of inflation is rate of price increases, which is what the government is hoping to trap you on. The vernacular definition of inflation is the: change in prices.
So, I asked you: what was the change in the change of price? I asked you a double derivative.
So, did prices go up by 3.6% from February to March? No, absolutely not. The change in the change in price increased by 3.6%.
So, prices went up in February to March... by 13.6%. Not 3.6%
And if we were to actually measure prices, the rate of change in prices from January to March is 25%, not 13.6, nor 3.6
So, that's what you have to keep in mind. If someone says, "Inflation went up by 3.6%", it means that prices increased by 13.6% from last month, or 25% from 2 months ago.
This is why I argue for deflation.
This is what most economists would call an economic collapse:
1st Derivative:
2nd Derivative:
Actual Price increase
Hysterical response: "WE HAD 3.3% DEFLATION, THE MARKET IS DYING! IT'S A DEPRESSION!"
That is what it would look like if prices stabilized
This is what most economists would call "The greatest depression in human history"
1st Derivative:
2nd Derivative:
Actual Price increase:
Hysterical response: "EVERYONE IS FUCKING DEAD JIM. THE WORLD CURRENCY IS NOW PROLAPSED BLEEDING ASSHOLES"
That is also what it would look like if prices went back to normal. The Keynsian Monetary system is a monetary system addicted to cocaine and high on bath salts.
Holy shit Gizortnick. You vacillate between deeply knowledgeable and deranged faggot so wildly I just don't know how to feel anymore.
Every time I start to respect you for a detailed, insightful, knowledgeable post like this you follow up by explaining to me that Colonization is, by definition, more evil than Satan's asshole. That you know that all of the colonized African nations are demonstrably, definitively, better off than their uncolonized neighbors, but it doesn't matter because a fax from Mossad told you so; or some shit.
Then you'll explain that the WHO should be run by Jews instead of the Chinese like God intended. Or that reverse colonization is Pure Justice, or something equally retarded.
But I keep giving you chances.
This comment more or less proves he’s just autistic.
Some of my favorite people are autistic.
it's agents switching out the same account - when the loyal but retarded one spouts something that jeopardizes its believability, another more well-trained Smith comes along to save some face.
I'm still me, you retarded faggot.
Well, no, but Colonization isn't inherently good. If it's done in occupied territory it creates demographic replacement and subjugation if integration isn't performed. As you're trying to point out English colonialism (though occasionally brutal) is one of the best forms. But, they're the exception to the rule. Colonization of occupied lands normally comes at the horrible expense of the indigenous people. Chinese colonization (happening now) is a kind of enslavement to communism. Israeli colonization could benefit Arabs, but they'll still be 2nd class citizens in a jewish state, and Israel is not gentle in it's conquests. The French are horrifically violent in their conquests. The Mongols, Ottomans, Romans, were all spectacularly violent. The Mayans and Assyrians might have been just straight up the most evil empires to ever exist. English and American Imperialism are the exceptions to the norm, and both still have their atrocities.
Colonization is currently what is happening to the US and UK. These countries are being colonized through mass migration. This is why our borders should be defended.
For Africa, I don't deny that Rhodesia and British South Africa were better off than they are now, but I also don't think it was worth the effort. Why try to build civilization there into a tribal people who hadn't had it. Does it look like they were grateful? As for the settlers, they hoped the Empire would protect them, but they failed to learn the lesson the Americans learned. The empire protects the core, not the colonies. So, even for them, colonialism betrayed them too.
wut?
Israel engages in colonialism. Well, more Imperialism than colonialism. I've said before that this latest war is basically a Bronze Age conflict in the modern era. Populations are being intentionally displaced for the security of the state. It's never been pretty, and I can't remember a single one that didn't feature atrocities.
Frankly, if Trump gets his way with Gaza, that might be colonialism.
The WHO should be abolished, and everyone on it charged with crimes against humanity? It wasn't run by jews, it was run by a member of the Ethiopian Derg. One of the worst communist regimes in history, and explains it's behavior.
There's no such thing as Reverse Colonization, like with Racism, it's not directional.
Bro, looking at your description of what you think my opinions are, that ain't me you're giving chances to. I don't know who he is, but he ain't me.
Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya and so many more. Compared to Liberia etc.
The last time you spoke to me on the subject, you were pretty clear that colonization was bad by definition. I am not going to go dig up the post.
You gloss over the Romans. They were rough on resisting populations, but they brought law and trade to their conquered lands. They unified people by language. Scotland and Ireland were barbaric shitholes for a thousand years because the Romans decided they were not worth the effort.
All cultures are not equal. Raping children and cannibalism is not of the same value as the rule of law and fair, working courts. Having a big cry because the practice of suttee was stopped is utterly moronic, even if the Hindus really, really want to burn their widows.
I don't think colonization is what is happening to the western world, because the places the British Empire (for example) set up were not even countries yet. Even India was a bunch of tiny states ruled over by petty kings.
The western nation certainly are countries.
Palestine has been systematically murdering every voice of moderation, especially all the Christians, for more than a generation. The entire country is ruled by a theocratic terrorist regime. Even the other Islamic nations in the region want nothing to do with them because any immigrants immediately become militant and start terrorists attacks. Waves of immigrants from Palestine is a major reason as to why Lebanon turned into a religious civil war.
But feel free to go there and tell them to give the Palestinians more cuddles. That might just be what they need.
Anyway, carry on. I promise to more accurately recall your positions from now on.
I agree with myself, so no need. It's always going to be bad by definition. Yes, there are benefits, but it's not worth it. It's not too far off from a regular conquest.
I don't even disagree with your assessment on 'Palestine'. But that's just the thing: it's a Bronze Age fight. Both parties want demographic displacement whether I like it or not. Best I can do is ask my tax money not to fund it.
Did you know that the tribal leader of Ghana asked for the British to colonize the country? They were going to refuse, but his impassioned plea changed their mind. He could see that there were real benefits to European rule and their investment in the land and its people.
Even today Ghana is a much better place to live than the surrounding countries.
Even conquest is not necessarily bad. It depends on the peace after the invasion. The Romans, for better or worse, were a stabilizing and unifying influence that allowed Europe to become civilized. Without them I am sure they would still be petty, squabbling tribes enjoying 'multiculturalism' until the Muslims took the whole of Europe. I would much rather live under Roman rule than Islamic rule.
I don't disagree with any of that. I'm not arguing consequentialism. My problem is with the act itself. In the same way, although it is true that Caesar's genocide of the gaul's created Romanic-Gaul, whose development basically led to the creation of France and their wealth and power for over a thousand years. That doesn't make the genocide good. I'm not willing to accept that his genocide was good because hundreds of years later there was a benefit to the survivor's great x5 grand-children. The genocide was still bad. The consequences could have gone worse, and things could have turned out worse for France. It still doesn't justify the murders.
Similarly, Colonization isn't good either. Yes, Ghana did benefit from being colonized, so did Zimbabwe. One of those isn't grateful, and now "cOlOnIzAtIoN iN rEvErSe" is being treated almost as if Africa is civilizing Europe because somehow colonization was so bad, racial vengeance is the correct answer. I don't think so. I don't really care which colonization has more long term benefits, you have a mass of foreigners coming into someone else's home and doing what they want with it, regardless of what the indigenous people think.
I'd rather we just not. I have no "White Man's Burden" to uplift Africa. That's their thing. They can deal with it. I don't even have that thought over sovereign Native American states in the US. They can simply choose to be outside of civilization if they so desire because they will be over there. (The ones on federal reservations and other US territories just need to be freed of socialist management).
In addition to the math bullshit I want to point out (again) that government can fudge the figures further by saying "electronics got cheaper". If food and energy cost more but electronics got cheaper they can squash the two together to produce one number which is slightly lower at the end.
Even "electronics got cheaper" is a lie. They get better so govt assumes that the same or equivalent product is cheaper when really the price floor stays the same. For example: a year ago the cheapest TV might cost $200 and today the cheapest might still be $200 but they can claim the newer one is better making the equivalent cheaper. Problem is the cheaper equivalent doesn't exist you still need to pay $200.
You're 100% right.
I would suggest taking a look at something you're going to basically buy forever, and making your own kind of "Consumer Price Index" and see the real effect of inflation by looking over your receipts.
The term is called hedonic adjustment. Between it and substitution bias (e.g. beef is too expensive, so you/the CPI replaces it with cat food), it's just more ways for the feds to cook inflation numbers.
They only offer inflation metrics in order to fool people into thinking it’s not so bad. The real numbers would result in more gallows construction.
I thought it was compared year over year by month, ie: inflation in march 2023 (2024?) compared to march 2025?
It depends. Some places will do month by month to confuse it further.
Year over year by month is the traditional method in the US. The same Double Derivative issue is at play.
ah, you were simplifying for the sake of avoiding confusion.
Some days I swear you're a LLM bot with how goddamn wordy you are.
You know, you're not the first person to accuse me of that.
It would save me time, though.
It should be easy to tell I'm human by how many times I have to edit my damn comments after I realized I missed something.
Oh no, I'm well aware you're real if for no other reason than our perpetual bickering, but man if not for that it'd real easy to believe you were churning out LLM responses due to the sheer word count of your posts. I was using one at work today and was just dumbfounded by how a simple query yielded just reams and reams of text.
fascinating read, thank you for this.
No problem.
They tripled the money supply AND reduced all the supply of goods and services. Inflation from that will be at least 200%. The only reason it wasn't that immediately was that velocity also plummeted as everything shut down and people stopped buying things.
It's the most obvious lie, yes.
Look into how they calculate CPI. It's not a stable basket of goods, instead, as good meat and fresh veg become too expensive, what happens is people shift to shit cuts of meat and ramen/rice, products which are cheaper and/or which haven't had the inflation hit them so hard. Which then means they stop weighting meat so heavily in their CPI calculations because people are buying less of it. The inflation is there, but the way they calculate it is designed to hide it.
Weights are fair to a point. If there's a huge cyclone that hits queensland and all bananas here are 3x the normal price, sure, take them out of the calculation for that year. And sure, horse-buggies aren't exactly a huge portion of most people's spending anymore while home computers are. It's fair to occasionally re-evaluate the basket weights. But they way they have it set up will automatically hide inflation.
The shifting basket is probably why there's so much wailing and gnashing of teeth over people fixating on the price of eggs, because it's a stable observable metric that the average person can point to and understand.
"Oh, eggs are three times as expensive as normal and I'm supposed to believe inflation is at 2%? Something must be fishy here."
Yeah and they can't use shrinkage to hide it either. Seen all kinds of quantity shifts, bottles that used to be 200ml are now 130ml and other weird numbers, like going from 8 burger buns in a package to 5.
There used to be a website called "The Consumerist" that had a regular feature listing products that were being shrunk in volume while maintaining the same price. 7 oz of coffee for 3.99 became 6.3 oz of coffee for 3.99, and so on over time. "The Consumerist" is now of course no longer in business.
Giant companies hated the Consumerist and complained to Bezos to shut it down (it was being run by the Washington Post) so he finally relented.
A former Gawker media company, they were. Pretty sure they dissolved before the lunatics really took over. Had they remained, it would 100% be a pro-communism rag today.
Inflation numbers are one of the biggest frauds around.
Quite frankly you'd be crazy to buy brand name products these days. I'm always shocked how tiny the packing and even the products themselves have become in just a few years. The price of course skyrocketed. It's obscene.
And it’s just not that hard to make something like treats/baked goods at home for a fraction of the cost. My wife occasionally makes me brownies. Eggs, butter, sugar, flour. And like 7 minutes of work.
I cringe thinking of eating those boxed mixes where you add like 3/4 cup of seed oils.
I used to think people were a little too paranoid when they said the Mandela Effect was a globolist psy-op used to change the past. Now I think I am a little too paranoid.
You're not paranoid enough really.
Probably true.
If my food was taxed fifteen percent, I would be plotting to murder public officials.
Then it might kill you to know that depending on your race you may be exempt from paying those taxes while whitey still has to.
Thankfully I am not Canadian, Lord be praised.
Although I have a feeling that a lot of them will be happy once we start annexing portions of their territory. Not being taxed for being white would be an improvement.
Oh wow, good thing you're only being taxed 37% on all of your income before you spend it on anything then only 5% when you buy food (more if it's in a restaurant). Oh and don't forget the 15% that's taken out before the first number is even printed on your paycheck, also don't forget to the pay rent er.. i mean property tax on all the things you "own".
So? The average tax rate of Canada is higher than my own, and they have shitty socialized healthcare to boot.
Not that income tax and social security don't need to be abolished and all that, but pretending like I pay more taxes than they do is ludicrous.
Most real food products (fruit, vegetables, meat, dairy, bread, etc) in Canada don't have any tax on them.
Many of the processed foods like soda and chips do.
There are gray areas, like many granola bars having tas on them because of their similarity to candy bars.
There's also some arbitrariness, such as an uncooked whole chicken being tax exempt, but a cooked one from the same grocer's deli may be taxed fully as if it was a restaurant meao.
It's certainly possible that a box of oreos is processed enough to be hit with the 15%.
But if you actually bought the raw ingredients to cook your own homemade cookies - flour, sugar, eggs, vanilla extract, chocolate chips, etc, the actual deconstructed component ingredients are all tax free.
I did a deep clean of the kitchen today. I found a grocery store flyer between the fridge and the countertop from Aug 22nd, 2019.
Prices just before covid were a little above what I would consider normal.
Now they're 2.5x to 3x that. For everything.
I kept a flyer from 1990, mostly for the video games I circled that I wanted to buy for myself. I was only able to get Super C. But I digress.
The food was absolutely dirt cheap back then. 25 dollars would get you what 75 dollars buys now.
I know a lot has happened since then, but it's insane.
Inflation is low… for commercial purchasing. The businesses are holding onto the lockdown scarcity prices to squeeze more money from you, the consumer. It’s why the price of the solo hash brown at McDonalds is $3 in the states but a big breakfast is $8 (in the cheaper states.)
I remember about fifteen years ago I could go to a local Amish restaurant, and for $8 get a breakfast that was so big that the leftovers you took home could fed you through dinner. Their "hash brown" was literally a plate full of diced potatoes.
Even the food court at the mall had an Asian restaurant where for $9 you got what felt like a pound of flavored chicken, a half pound of bbq pork, a pound of rice, and a beverage. And when they weren't serving anyone they were offering free samples on toothpicks to anyone walking by.
Such is life in communist shithole.
Took the family to a birthday party of my kid's friend. They're very normie, and I decided to eat a cookie from a plate they were emptying a package of Chips Ahoy onto it just for whatever and I nearly gagged.
Not only are prepackaged trash food stupid expensive, but also absolute shit quality.
I mean, I get it, pearls before swine and all that. But spending that kind of money for shit is just plain cuck behavior.
It's called goyslop for a reason.
If you thought the stock market was fake and gay, the commodity futures market is even faker and gayer.
I still remember how the prices of some food items doubled overnight after the ruski invasion. Never was more thankful for being born in that shithole...
In the 2010s a 12 pack of Coke was 3/$10.
Now they're $10.
I don't drink Coke anymore, but that's beside the point. Coke inflation at the store is 300%.
Oreos aren't even real oreos since the 90s (I think?) when they switched from using lard to some disgusting "plant based" garbage to make the cream, in order for them to be "kosher". Puke.
I buy Hydrox whenever I feel like having a sandwich cookie. Oreos are too cloy for my palate.
Where do you live? The Yukon?
I buy oreos all the time and they're less than 4 bucks, sometimes even less. Unless you went for the gluten free oreos.. Those are like 8 bucks, which is insane lmao
Everything did the "shrinkflation" and cookies have been pull top for a while now
But yeah, it's shit. We're spending literally like 5k more a year on groceries compared to two years ago. And if anything our eating habits have changed in the direction of trying to spend less through more affordable meals.
Sucks.
It's called 'grab-what-you-can'-inflation. Greed-flation.
All so-called 'top brands' have increased their pricing at a disproportionate rate under the guise of 'inflation', while in reality they're making 20% more profit (in the EU, probably more in Canuckstan).
Oreo's are just one example.
Consumers should make an example out of one of these companies are start boycotting all their products, until they're left to beg on their knees.
But canada was founded on lies. The transcontinental railroad was made via misappropriation of government tax grants. There isn't a thing in the country that doesn't run on lies.
Good… good! Let the hate flow through you!
15 years ago, when I went to university and lived by myself, grocery was between 50$ to 70$ per week.
Now, it's usually between 100$ and 120$ weekly and I'm eating less than I used to.
The numbers are all BS. This country is sick and the only solution politicians offer is to double down on what's causing this mess.
The Dollar Tree now has a five dollar aisle...fucking what?
Look on the bright side, inflation saved you from potential diabetes