And $6 for a serving of stew is close to an order of magnitude more expensive than it is if you make it at home.
$5 a meal x 3 meals a day x 30 days a month is $450 a month. That's a decent amount of money, and it's questionable at best whether you would save that much in rent by removing a kitchen entirely from the amenities available to a tenant.
It makes sense that dining out is expensive, but it's weird that premade meals in grocery stores are so expensive, and that there's not a super cheap middle ground where they use economies of scale to have 1 person cook cafeteria slop for 100 and sell it for pennies. Is it a food safety thing? Is it that kitchens are available enough that anyone willing to eat that would just make it themselves?
I guess there's labor in portioning or serving, and a lot of labor on the back end for cleanup? It's an interesting problem, because I know that I can make a ton of food way more easily and cheaply than small individual portions, and when I look at breakdowns of restaurant costs, somehow rent isn't an outlier, labor and materials contribute a lot to the costs. But I feel like having already purchased the necessary equipment (or amortizing it across 100,000 meals or whatever) I could feed 100 people with less than $100 at Costco. But you can't go to a restaurant and get something bad for $5 that fills you anymore, not easily. Where's the money all going?
Eating out is just treated as a luxury good in the US. It’s weird because we’re all aware that food can be made inexpensively in a cafeteria. K-12, some universities, even some workplaces have them.
Of course, luxury food is a fine thing to have. The lack of a basic option is weird, though.
> It makes sense that dining out is expensive, but it's weird that premade meals in grocery stores are so expensive, and that there's not a super cheap middle ground where they use economies of scale to have 1 person cook cafeteria slop for 100 and sell it for pennies. Is it a food safety thing?
Most of what currently ails the restaurant sector can be traced to real estate costs. Even if your food and labor are free, real estate kills you as you have to put your restaurant where your customers can get to you.
And the problem is being exacerbated by private equity having piled into commercial real estate. I can point to all manner of restaurant sites that closed up because the rent got jacked up and then were left idle for 5+ years. Standard landlords simply can't eat that level of rent loss. Private equity, however, will take an almost infinite loss in cash flow as long as they can kick the can down the road indefinitely and never have to pay actual cash.
You're assuming my "concern" is that the OP is wrong. Which is why i specifically took the time to talk about value being up or down.
I get you're just pissed off for whatever reason, but I'll still try to explain more.
My point is not addressed when calculating the consumer price index because i'm saying that a single selection of prices and goods to produce a single price index does not tell a person what the value of their money is unless they just happen to be literally the median consumer.
Are you going to sit there with a straight face and tell me you buy every single item that is used in that consumer price index? In every city? You're just not being serious if that's the case.
You're confusing a price index that minimizes the error in measuring inflation when applied to a large varying amount of people with what i'm advocating which is a price index that's personalized to and minimizes the error in measuring inflation for an individual. Other people's buying habits and prices for things in places where they live don't need to go into a personalized price index.
It's tiring watching people with no idea what they're talking about repeat the same "what about ..." arguments when professionals in the field have spent decades developing and maintaining models that have been proven over that time to be helpful.
It's also not a coincidence that nearly 100% of the people trying to poke holes in those models are people who disagree with the results generated from them, and that nearly 100% of those people don't have a clue about the topic at hand.
Of course a broad based index that is designed to represent the behavior of hundreds of millions of people is less accurate for you (or me, or anyone) personally than a model based solely on an individual's behavior. I don't know anyone on earth who would argue otherwise.
As a reminder, you started off by making a very lazy statement broadly criticizing a post that included well cited economic data showing that the inflation-adjusted median household income has increased substantially since the 1960s, which was in response to yet another terminally online doomer incorrectly claiming that your average American is worse off today than they were then.
You're now claiming that your issue with the provided data showing that people are overall financially better off today than they were in the 1960s is that that data isn't tailored to you (or any other individual) personally? I think that just demonstrates the validity of my original comment, because that's an absurd criticism.
FYI, you don't need to "advocate" for a personal price index. Track your spending over time and calculate it. If you want get much use out of it, you're going to want to incorporate the CPI data for your metro area as well (which exists and is publicly available) so you can both compare your spending to the median and backfill missing data as needed (for example, historical childcare expenses when you become a new parent).
The internet hasn't been a safe haven since the 80s, or maybe earlier (that was before my time, and it's never been one since I got online in the early 90s).
The only real solution is to implement some sort of identity management system, but that has so many issues that make it a non-starter.
The governments like it that way. They want banks and tech companies to be intermediaries that are more difficult to hold accountable, because they can just say “we didn’t feel like doing business with this person”.
At some point, everyone on the internet knew everyone else in person or by reputation. Once that was gone, it was no longer a safe space, if it even was before then.
In another blog post where he uses "shibui" as an example of an untranslatable word, he says, "Saying shibui like that, in a mere second, conveys what would otherwise make a clunky and unnecessarily long digression."
At the root of nearly all the blog posts like this one (basically explaining why they don't agree with a widely held belief) is a redefinition of a term or word into something very specific that contradicts the common definition.
The author of this post goes even further than that: He says to make a list of only what you need, and then flounder while you fail to acquire the items on that list.
The Fed doesn't react to the market, it reacts to inflation and unemployment metrics for the most part.
Consumer spending and employment numbers aren't looking great, so a cut is still likely. All that's happening now is ensuring that there isn't much of a move when the expected cut actually happens.
You mean the 12/14 land borders disputee who settled with PRC ceding 50%+ concessions. Probably very happy because again objectively that is magnanimous by historic standards. For SCS where PRc offers to share but retarded democratic countries can't becausen itd political suicide, even now it's really just PH being a cunt. Otherwise unsettled land borders left is India and Bhutan because bhutan border ratification is linked to India's. So the answer is most of the neighbours think PRC did them a solid. Going rate for free math lesson that PRC has equals/most borders in the world and relations with most neighbours are good is free. Combo free geopolitical lesson that it's not good with the ones with US military cooperation that generates most propaganda.
I get information from everywhere but reality has a china daily bias. This isn't complicated, you ask about PRC relation with neighbours I point out blind spot to of those with poor foriegn policy literacy, i.e. those who don't read enough china daily, that PRC has a lot of neighbours and most of them are in fact settled with PRC majority concessions and now at peace. If we're going to go even more China daily, essentially 100% of PRC disputes were inherited from ROC not only has PRC not caused any of the disputes, they have been borderline treasonous in unwinding through mostly diplomacy and minimum violence.
$5 a meal x 3 meals a day x 30 days a month is $450 a month. That's a decent amount of money, and it's questionable at best whether you would save that much in rent by removing a kitchen entirely from the amenities available to a tenant.
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