Gold is a market where price moves for reasons unrelated to price level. It was stagnant for decades because rich country consumers value it less and now it's on a run as the US weaponizes the monetary system. It's just not useful to represent inflation over the last 10 years.

Housing is even worse. Unlike dollars and gold, every house is unique and in a different location. It's one of the least useful parts of CPI for the same reason it's a worse deflator on it's own.

I use CPI because it's useful, it exists, and it has less problems than the alternatives on a 10 year chart. We're not comparing to a basket of hand sewn shoes and a horse from the 1820s.

I can tell you know the topic well, but we're at the same place CPI criticism always come back to: "It's flawed, but the alternatives are worse, don't exist, or in some way not practical."

Complaining about CPI to defend using nominal values poorly is not improving the article's analysis.

Unfortunately alternative measures are worse. Gold increased in price 37% in the last year. What does that tell me about the price of groceries? Housing prices depend on government committees approving what can be built where. We have no idea what a free market would produce.

Let me inflation adjust that for you: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1XUpo. Even better, as a percentage of disposable income: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1XUpt

> real hourly wages, only 3%

Median usual weekly real earnings: Wage and salary workers: 16 years and over: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1XUpE. Doesn't look so dire to me?

Whenever I see someone quoting economic statistics I look them up on FRED and zoom out a little. Usually I close the article at that point. The "Ongoing collusion" table in this article is interesting, though. Capitalism breaks down without competition.

There's less need to identify the most gullible when AI drops the incremental cost of responding closer to zero.

Is there any way to help the elderly navigate this shift?

Still makes an interesting way for, say, a former employee to poison the results.

What's the incentive for the Chinese labs to continue releasing weights 5 years from now? It's not a stable equilibrium and cannot last.

- The lab spending large sums on research and training does not get the inference revenue to fund those efforts.

- Unlike OSS where a single volunteer can keep a project going, training costs run into the $billions.

- OSS is often a two way street where features and integrations are built that the original author benefits from. Open weight models are largely a one way street because the marginal benefit is so much less than training costs.

In the short term, it means Chinese labs can attract talent and, I suspect, funding from their gov. Similar to every other industry the CCP subsidized to take over.

In the short term it attracts talent and builds brand, but they make little money on inference to support research and training costs. Tin foil hat thinking: it also pulls inference revenue away from Antropic/OpenAI and a financial crises at those organizations improves the relative position of Chinese labs.

Is there a reason to think open-weight models are a stable outcome? Open source software provides a collaboration framework for engineers from many companies to work together. Model weights are mostly a one way street.

Maybe they're both right? Horrible things can happen to oil importing economies without derailing the AI build out that's driving the US economy and stock prices.

I think there's a catch-22 where Trump will hold out as long as the market lets him and everyone in the market wants to look through him throwing in the towel.

The enterprise version never went beyond password management so I'm not sure how this could have generated a viable ROI.