How do they get calculated?

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The CPI consists of a family of indexes that measure price change experienced by urban consumers. Specifically, the CPI measures the average change in price over time of a market basket of consumer goods and services. The market basket includes everything from food items to automobiles to rent. The CPI market basket is developed from detailed expenditure information provided by families and individuals on what they actually bought. There is a time lag between the expenditure survey and its use in the CPI. For example, CPI data in 2023 was based on data collected from the Consumer Expenditure Surveys (CE) for 2021. That year, over 20,000 consumer units from around the country provided information each quarter on their spending habits in the interview survey. To collect information on frequently purchased items, such as food and personal care products, approximately another 12,000 consumer units kept diaries listing all items they bought during a 2-week period that year. This expenditure information from weekly diaries and quarterly interviews determines the relative importance, or weight, of the item categories in the CPI index structure.

The CPI represents all goods and services purchased for consumption by the reference population (U or W). BLS has classified all expenditure items into more than 200 categories, arranged into eight major groups (food and beverages, housing, apparel, transportation, medical care, recreation, education and communication, and other goods and services). Included within these major groups are various government-charged user fees, such as water and sewerage charges, auto registration fees, and vehicle tolls.

If you want to see the current makeup of the basket of goods whose prices are tracked, and their weights in the index, here is Table 1 of the most recent report. And if you want to follow the price of a specific category over time, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis keeps a really helpful interactive chart service for almost every public economic stat. Here is Table 1 of the CPI report.

It’s a lot of data collection on prices across a lot of transactions, and a lot of list prices, and a lot of locked in contract prices, to determine how much people are spending on different types of things, whether the quality of those things is changing over time, and what percentage of a typical household income gets spent on those types of things.

1 oz = 28.35 g

Maybe that 1/3 of a gram is shorting someone, but a single ounce is closer to 28g than to 30g.

Obviously depends on the specific item.

Here’s the national averages for:

Flour

Milk

Boneless chicken breast

Or an entire table of food items they’ve been tracking monthly prices on for years.

The Five Dollar Footlong was a promo created in 2003 when the normal price of a footlong was $6, by a single franchisee. By the time the promo went national, supported by the chain itself (and a national ad campaign), in 2008, that became a big enough deal to really move sales. And they watered it down at some point (by late 2010 when I was working next to a Subway and no other lunch options, I remember it only being a specific sandwich that rotated monthly, with all other footlongs regularly priced). And it was eventually discontinued in 2012.

It’s hard to pin this particular promo and call it totally representative of all pricing in the mid 2010s.

$5 in April 1980 dollars is the inflation adjusted equivalent of $20 in December 2025:

https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=5.00&year1=198004&year2=202512

Resistance takes many forms.

Completely lawful resistance can include social pressure or ostracism, economic influence (boycotts, refusal to serve as customer, etc.), messaging/speech/persuasion, protests, strikes, etc. Keeping the cameras rolling, telling them how you feel about them being in your neighborhood, warning your neighbors about them.

Civil disobedience goes up the ladder a bit, and can cause disruption and might be nonviolent, but might at times actually be illegal. Generally speaking, this type of resistance is designed to clog up the system without being violent, and doesn’t even require anonymity or evasion from authorities.

Sometimes simply playing dumb can slow things down without actually committing a crime of putting yourself at much risk. Apply for a job at ICE with 1000 of your closest friends so they waste resources on your application. Forget to put in their order when you’re their waiter, or give them the shitty hotel room when they check in at your hotel, and program their keys incorrectly. Give them the wrong bay/spot when they’re renting a car from you. Call in tips for everything you see and flood their lines with bad information.

Most people jump from that category to outright violent resistance, but there are other tactics available, too. Sabotage, property crimes, plain old financial crimes, fraud, impersonation, hacking or denial of service, even things like theft, embezzlement. Locking a fence with a bicycle lock, blocking a driveway with a van, flooding a field with mud, impersonating their boss and giving them fake orders, sending them on a goose chase with a bad tip, etc.

If you shoot an ICE agent you might turn them into a hero. Steal their badge or ID when they’re drinking at the bar, though, and you might actually hurt them in ways that they won’t feel like a martyr, and will actually sap resources from their management.

Everyone is in a different situation, with different capabilities. Every war has plenty of roles, many of them nonviolent. There’s probably something you can do today to contribute to the cause, from your unique position.

We’re just going to have to agree to disagree.

I think that’s right. To summarize, here’s where I think we agree and disagree:

We agree: GDP is not a particularly good metric for measuring international economic influence.

We disagree: You think adjusting GDP by PPP makes it better for this context, and I think that adjustment makes it even worse.

We agree: Exports matter for discussing economic power on the international stage.

We disagree: I think imports and investment also matter. You clearly don’t, by dismissing them as mere consumption and financial engineering.

We agree: United States economic power overseas is in decline, including in the hegemony of the US Dollar, and its importance/influence through organizations like the World Bank, IMF, WTO, or even things like the SWIFT banking network.

We disagree: I think the United States is still much, much stronger than China on global economic influence. The lines may cross, where China overtakes the United States, but I think that would be in the future, whereas your comment suggests you believe those lines crossed in the past.

In the end, a country like Venezuela wants to sell barrels of oil to buyers, for a good price. That means things like U.S. sanctions (especially when enforced by the entire west) will hurt more than Chinese aid helps. At least as of 2026.

Makes me wonder about the wheel’s rotational inertia, too. In theory, a hubless wheel could be lower mass overall without the need for a center axle/hub and spokes connecting the outside to the center. But that’s all weight saved in the center of the wheel with lower effect on overall rotational inertia. Visually, the picture that makes the thumbnail in this post shows that the brake disc has to be further from the center of the wheel, which I imagine adds a lot more weight (more material necessary for the overall brake disc being a larger circle) and a lot more rotational inertia (further from the center).

Maybe the whole design itself can save weight in certain places that make up for the weight added in other places. But I just have a ton of questions, and am overall pretty skeptical of the long term potential of this design.

Looks cool, though, I guess.

The hubless wheel is on their current models. It’s basically their signature differentiator.

There’s reason to be skeptical of the company and its claims as a whole, but at least that particular feature has shipped and has been test driven by reviewers:

https://thepack.news/11000-km-in-2-months-marc-travels-rides-the-verge-ts-across-europe/

We are far beyond the GDP vs. GDP(PPP) that started this.

No, you started talking about PPP in response to a news story that described the United States and China competing over influence over the Venezuelan economy: Chinese aid and investment in response to United States sanctions. Those are essentially going to be dollar denominated, and PPP doesn’t matter. I’ve been saying from the beginning that you were wrong to bring PPP into the discussion, because this discussion, in this thread, isn’t about domestic consumption in either China or the U.S.

The US’s main problem is it’s lack of industrial production.

Again, when talking about the effects of sanctions and foreign aid and investment, we should be talking about transactions that occur in the currency at issue. If China wants to provide aid to Venezuela in RMB, Venezuela will either need to spend that on Chinese producers or exchange for another currency to spend elsewhere (including Venezuelan Bolivars being spent domestically). If there’s going to be a currency exchange, then PPP of the aid providing nation doesn’t matter. A million USD from China is worth the exact same amount as a million USD from the U.S.

On the world stage, as an economic power, the US is losing to China.

I think if we’re talking about on the world stage, as an economic power, the interconnected West is best understood as a power bloc. U.S. inconsistency and unpredictability on things like Russian sanctions actually show the limits of U.S. unilateral power while still showing the power of the broader Western order. Yes, China and Russia want to provide the world with an alternative multipolar order, and fragmentation of the Western powers may open up opportunities for that vision, but that competition is playing out along alliances, not isolated nations. In any event, PPP doesn’t have anything to do with that particular competition.

If we’re not comparing the ability of a citizen to buy things with the fruit of their labor. What are we comparing?

In this particular case? I think we’re comparing Chinese and American ability to project economic influence (from trade or aid, to outright bribes or coercion or boycotts or sanctions or everything in between) over Venezuela.

The normal person

But the normal person has nothing to do with governments dealing with other governments on the global stage. And that’s what this story is about, Venezuela being caught between two competing visions of their future in the international order.

If a country wants to build an airport in their capital city using the resources of foreign governments seeking to influence them, the question isn’t about how many eggs the citizens of those countries can buy in their home turf, but about how much concrete and steel and heavy machinery those other countries can provide in the country considering offers.

No serious economist uses GDP as a metric for actual economic production. Can we please at least use GDP (PPP)?

In terms of flexing on foreign countries on the international stage, though, raw GDP (or at least imports and exports) is pretty important.

The PPP calculation comparing China to the United States may tell us a lot about how much a resident of either country can expect to experience using the local currency domestically, but if we’re talking about influence over a third country, in that third country’s local currency, then I think each respective PPP back home doesn’t matter as much.

Yeah, circumcision is near universal in Muslim-majority countries:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prevalence_of_circumcision

Allah = God (Islamic)

Are you under the impression that Muslims don’t circumcize? In many Muslim societies, they make sure the boys are old enough to remember the mutilation, with circumcision around the age of 7.

The fundamental difference between Chinese commune policies and, say, American sharecropping or Cuban sugar plantations is that the workers had no title to their land, not that they couldn’t leave it.

I’m not talking about Chinese commune policies. I’m talking about the hukou system, and its effects on how children were raised in China between 1990 and 2010. As in, the lived experiences of Chinese people between the ages of 15 and 40 today.

It’s absolutely relevant to people today, not least of which was the original comment you were responding to, a firsthand experience of what happened to that commenter’s migrant family in Guangzhou as recently as 2010.

It’s weird to raise this as a concern relative to the history prior to the revolutionary era.

It’s different because this affected the people who are still alive today.

The reform being talked about started in 1980, and didn’t become available to the broader population until pretty recently. Even today, children aren’t allowed to attend public schools outside of their ancestral home town.

So if you were born in 2000 to parents who had moved to Shenzhen, they’d still have to send you back to whatever rural village your grandparents were from, and didn’t have access to schools or healthcare otherwise. Now, you’re 25 years old and lived most of your life seeing your parents once a year, and still have an internal passport-like document tying you to that ancestral village.

There are more reforms on the horizon, but trying to explain just how pervasive the hukou system still is (and how much it affected the people who are alive today) is really hard to grasp for people not familiar with the system.

When a team loses a basketball game by 1 point, literally every missed shot or turnover (or blown defensive coverage leading to an easy basket for the other side or foul leading to made free throws) could be pointed to as the “cause” of that loss.

So yeah, if she were an actual better politician she probably would’ve won with the cards she was dealt. But there were also dozens of other causes that would’ve made her (or an alternative candidate) win, all else being equal.

And it’s hard to see how a better politician would’ve ended up in that position to begin with. The circumstances of how Harris ended up as VP probably wouldn’t have happened if not for the specific way that her 2020 campaign flamed out.

I mean today ICE even tear gassed a bunch of Chicago cops who were trying to clear a path out for them. The ICE thugs are cowards and will turn on local police in a heartbeat. (See also capitol police beaten on Jan 6.)

People like to use the example of Crassus’ fire brigade as an analogy for how corporate interests extract value from regular people in society. Crassus and his fire brigade would go around buying burning houses on the cheap, and then put out the fire for the benefit of Crassus, the new owner. There were some who believed that Crassus was setting the fires himself, but the extractive playbook here works whether he was setting them himself or not.

Are agricultural megacorps buying up farms with depressed values and then fixing them so that the values increase? Probably not. They’re in basically the same boat with the price of commodities, in terms of the inputs (water, fertilizer, labor, equipment and machinery, fuel, energy) and the outputs (wheat, corn, soybeans, etc.). It’s a problem for them, too.

Maybe they have deep enough pockets to ride out the current crisis and will have more to show for it in the end, but for now, they’re in the same boat.

why were highly skilled Korean engineers working “illegally” in USA to begin with?

Most of them say they had valid visas or work authorization.

The U.S. has a visa waiver program where people can come into the U.S. without a visa, and have certain rights similar to visa holders. Many of the South Korean workers have taken the position that the visas they had that allowed them to work for 6 months, or the visa waivers they had entitled them to do temporary work for less than 90 days, and that they were within those time windows.

The lawsuits being filed also allege that immigration officials acknowledged that many of the workers did have legal rights to work, but that they were deported anyway.

So no, I don’t think it’s been shown that the workers did anything illegal. It really sounds like ICE fucked up by following a random tip a little too credulously.