One other thing to compare is business and health regulations. Compliance with that is certainly more involved and costly today than in 1940 and would account for part of the price.
Unfortunately no mention of prices, so increase in portion sizes might be below inflation; and I suspect the former could be a strategy of compensation for inflation by making it seem less drastic ("yes it costs more, but we also made it bigger!")
One time when I was a kid and my dad and I were in line at Fuddruckers, we overhead someone else in line say "I don't think I could eat a third of a pound, so I'll have to get a half a pound instead. It's still a reference we laugh about over two decades later.
Restaurant portion sizes have definitely increased - a lot - since the 1940s-50s. Maybe some minor pullback the last few years but still way larger than back then. A McDonald's Quarter-pounder was considered very large, that was in 1971, many sit-down restaurant burgers today are 5-8 oz.
These prices adjusted for today's value seem off though. I'm guessing you'd be hard pressed to find a diner burger for $5.14 anywhere. No, fast food joints are not the same here and not part of this discussion.
Where is the discrepancy? I've never really trusted these "adjusted for inflation" type numbers. I'm not an economist so I have no idea how they are calculated, but they've always just felt off to me. Usually, the numbers are for something esoteric to me, but these are about something I have some familiarity. In my experience, the adjusted burger price is about half the actual cost of today.
A good rule of thumb is to ask "are you paying mostly for human labor or for machine labor"? The former is likely to be more expensive now than it was in the past and the latter is likely to be less expensive, all relative to general inflation prices.
A hot dog / hamburger at a diner is mostly human labor, so you'd expect it to be cheaper in the past.
Labor is typically around 30% of the final cost of prepared food in a restaurant.
Remaining 70% is 30% food costs (which has dropped drastically since the 50s), then 20-30% operations. Profit is whatever is left.
So a diner burger is not mostly labor but I honestly have no idea what these costs were 70 years ago. I'd love to know, seems like something is missing.
Food cost hasn't dropped because you can't even get the food they used to have. You have something that costs less now, but is worth even less than what it costs. And now that Sysco has completed it's eradication of all variety and competition, it doesn't even cost less any more.
Things just don’t really convert neatly because the shape of what people spend money on in life hasn’t evolved uniformly.
Food appears somewhat cheaper, housing much cheaper; but clothing and tools/appliances were much more expensive. Things like student debt and healthcare costs are also interesting to compare and wildly differ over time & place.
Also common for the average middle class person to spend a sizable percentage of their income on travel/vacation today; as I understand it that was quite uncommon before the mid 20th century.
Well, the $5.14 figure is using the generalized inflation number derived by tracking the price of a specific basket of goods over time, across the entire country. This is a reasonable number to pick.
If you narrow down to Food for all Urban Consumers[1], it shifts to more like $5.24. If you look at "Food away from home in New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ-PA, urban wage earners and clerical workers, not seasonally adjusted" that number moves to $7.60. Which confirms your intuition: restaurant prices are way higher than the overall inflation rate predicts.
How do we explain the difference? A variety of ways. Maybe the burgers you get are "better" in some way. Bigger. Better cut of meat. More veggies and toppings. I wasn't around in 1959 and never ate at that specific diner, but it's a real possibility. In fact, this is explicitly called out in the FAQ[3]:
> Specifically, in constructing the "headline" CPI-U and CPI-W, the BLS is not assuming that consumers substitute hamburgers for steak. Substitution is only assumed to occur within basic CPI index categories, such as among types of ground beef in Chicago. Hamburger and steak are in different CPI item categories, so no substitution between them is built into the CPI-U or CPI-W.
There's also some other complicating factors to account for, like coupons and bundling. Like consider Applebee's Really Big Meal Deal deal. "NEW Big Bangin’ Burger with unlimited fries & soda, still just $9.99" Or you can order just the burger for... $15.99[4]. I don't even know how BLS copes with that and am sorta guessing they just take the a la carte prices for consistency, even though that likely overstates price levels consumers actually pay?
There are two diners near me (in NYC) where a burger is $5.25/$5.50 respectively.
(I don’t disagree with you directionally though; I think a nontrivial aspect of this is shifting expectations/norms around what passes for food service. Americans broadly want their food - even diner food - to be upclassed beyond a plain hamburger on a white bread bun.)
Counter service family joints absolutely in the $5 area for standard ol' boring 1/4/lb. Maybe your definition of diner is different? There's a place by me with diner in the name that has a burger for $4.99.
The Market Basket used to calculate the BLS CPI changes over time, which can make long range comparisons difficult.
I’ve read of political influence on the market basket to lower the reported rate of inflation by the incumbent party, but I’m not educated enough on the topic to give an opinion on if it happens.
> Simple inflation adjustment gives us x but the real price is more or less than x. Why is that?
Restaurant economics are a function of ingredient costs and labour. I suspect ingredient costs are close to OP's estimated multiples. But real wages are way up since the 1950s. Anything with a large labour component of costs will have tended to rise faster than inflation, which is an average of goods and services.
(There are specialised metrics if you actually wanted to dig into this question.)
Are you saying the prices listed were just for the ingredients and not the actual cost to the person ordering? They mentioned they saw the price in a photo which suggest it is what the person would be charged. I get that labor costs would cause an increase of raw ingredient price comparisons for total prices. But if you could pay buy a burger for a nickel but now need $10, there is a definite issue in just a "simple" adjustment that suggests you'd only need $5. If the numbers are that far off because the simple needs to be more advanced, what's the point of the simple numbers? Bad data is worse than no data.
That may be true, but I suspect that it’s also hard to compare apples to apples. A burger in 1959 is hard to compare to a burger today. Today’s burger almost certainly has twice as much meat. The invention of (and ubiquitous advertising of) the quarter–pounder means that everyone had to make their burgers larger to match. Sides are larger, drinks are larger, etc, etc.
Inflation is a measure of change in overall purchasing power.
What a specific purchase costs is highly dependant on the inputs, the cost of its labour (which might grow faster or slower than the average wage), and a lot of other factors.
Food is way more expensive today than it was 50 years ago. Airplane tickets are way cheaper. Everyone has a cellphone now, and middle class families have multiple cars, but a trip to the doctor will mean that ~15% of the population will be on the verge of not paying their bills. On the other hand, I have access to ~every major piece of music ever made for ~$15/month, so that's something.
I believe you, but in my own experience I've met more people who say this than who mean this.
Usually it's situational. People might genuinely like to be wrong when the novelty is fun or useful, for example in lab work or in low stakes classwork. However, they despise it with politics, their job, or anything else that might have actual consequences in their lives.
"In 1969, Schenck was largely overturned by Brandenburg v. Ohio, which limited the scope of speech that the government may ban to that directed to and likely to incite imminent lawless action (e.g. a riot)." - Wikipedia
Amazon employs around 900,000 people in logistics. The crude annual mortality rate in the USA is around 911/100,000. If there are 900,000 employees working eight hours a day then around seven people a day are dying of natural causes on their shift. This is without considering that they are being worked to the bone.
This only works if you assuming the mortality rates are evenly distributed. Most of the people who die are not working right until the end—and the conditions which lead to them dying usually aren’t compatible with a demanding job.
You are correct that it is a rough estimate but my point stands. While most of us will never experience the shock of someone dying at work, it is an every day occurrence at the scale of Amazon.
You have provided no evidence supporting that belief and brushing aside the obvious challenges makes it hard to believe you have done the math. I’d also note that if this was actually true, it would be more surprising that they didn’t have a policy for dealing with it and had to improvise on the fly.
The utter contempt you express for human life is abhorrent. Cloaking it in math only exacerbates your cruel disregard for, well, lacking shame in expressing such mental illness in public. I’d recommend therapy but you probably have a formula to justify not going to that either. Disgusting.
When I saw the article I recalled a doctor who worked at the sports stadium. Probably every stadium has a doctor on duty because there are medical emergencies any time you get 50,000 people together. Sometimes people die while they are still on the premises.
So I wanted to know how approximately how many people you would expect die of natural causes per day in a group of people as large as Amazon warehouse workers.
If you expect people to die every day while working in an Amazon warehouse and there was no cause of death disclosed for the unfortunate person referenced in TFA then the fact that he died is not news.
> spherical harmonics can have uses beyond lighting
This math is also used in Ambisonic surround sound though newer techniques use planewave expansion.
For games, the full-sphere encoding of Ambisonic B-format can be decoded for arbitrary speaker locations and the soundfield rotated around any axis. I'm not sure if its ever been used for a game though.
I noticed that (similarity between the graphs and the shapes of atomic orbitals), and assumed that was what the article was about. And it wasn’t, and never brought it up, so I was thinking maybe I was confused about the similarity. So thank you for showing me I was not.
A single Ambisonic B-format recording can be shipped and at runtime decoded into any coincident or near-coincident stereo pair pointing in any direction or into any surround sound format. It is a universal format that encodes the direction and intensity of arriving sound over a full sphere.
> It should also be said that they could do anything at all to prevent these professional scalpers from scooping up all the tickets at once
Oh they did something about it. The ticket brokers can't scoop up all the tickets because many of the best ones are now only released as "Platinum" tickets at 2-5 times the price.
The only "fair" ways are to have a lottery for non-transferrable tickets, or have something akin to a dutch auction so that the band/venue captures all of the value - meaning tickets would be astronomically priced.
The artists think it is fair that they are now getting some of that money that used to go to scalpers. Very few are opting out of the dynamic pricing and "Platinum" tickets that are driving prices up.
A reasonable opposition party would declare the pardons invalid. Is that a valid interpretation of pardon power, does that undermine the legitimacy of our laws? Maybe, but not nearly as much as not punishing obvious and proud criminals does. That's the point of the rule of law, remember? It creates legitimacy, and therefore stability.
> A reasonable opposition party would declare the pardons invalid. Is that a valid interpretation of pardon power, does that undermine the legitimacy of our laws?
No, in the USA the pardon power belongs to the President. Only a constitutional amendment could invalidate pardons.
As we are finding out in real time, the President has the power to try to do a million things, legal or illegal, constitutional or unconstitutional, and then whichever ones don't get pushback defacto become actual powers. Throw something at the wall, if it sticks, then it's a Presidential Power. If it doesn't, there's no consequences. Just shrug and throw something else at the wall.
Which ultimately doesn't matter. If the president tries to do something, and no court actually stops him, then it doesn't matter whether or not it's in the Constitution, whether or not it's written down in law, or whether or not it has been litigated in the past. He tried to do it, nobody stopped him, therefore he can do it.
We are finding out in real time that the president can actually do a lot of things, simply because nobody is stopping him.
If you want to prosecute someone who has previously been pardoned, then you'll have to figure out how to get the courts (that is, the people who would be doing the actual prosecuting) to ignore some of the highest rules by which they operate.
I'm not saying that that could never happen, but a) it sure sounds like an uphill battle and b) it's not the same thing as the president (one person) doing whatever they feel like regardless of the law.
I don’t think these blanket pardons are a good thing at all, but an amendment is needed to fix it.
We have somehow made it a habit to ignore the inconvenient parts of the constitution when they create problems, rather than going through the enumerated process to amend them. Yes, it’s hard to amend the constitution, but that’s the point!
Fair, but I don't think it's likely that SCOTUS would invalidate any of Trump's presidential pardons, assuming a future president decided to prosecute someone he pardoned. I doubt even the liberal members of SCOTUS would want to touch that.
Only a constitutional amendment could allow the executive to declare war, or regulate trade, or control funds, or countless other unenumerated or explicitly disallowed powers. But if those rules are broken, we should still follow the rule that says the executive is immune from punishment and can declare anyone else forgiven? If that's the case there's actually only one rule: the executive is king. You can wipe your ass with the rest of the constitution.
There would still be a valuable public record produced by the investigation and court proceedings. Going after pardoned criminals is absolutely something the next administration should do. (We have zero precedent for preëmptive and blanket pardons in our courts, for example.)
“The power of pardon conferred by the Constitution upon the President is unlimited except in cases of impeachment. It extends to every offence known to the law, and may be exercised at any time after its commission, either before legal proceedings are taken or during their pendency, or after conviction and judgment.”
Nobody is going to waste their time investigating crimes that can't be prosecuted.
The current USA opposition party doesn't really do anything when they actually obtain power. They bark a lot when they're out of power, but as soon as they are back in power, they just go limp, forgive and forget, for the sake of unity or something.
> The companies could also be assessed penalties. In addition, sanctions could result in court orders that they divest themselves of some entities, including venues such as amphitheaters that they own.
I cannot imagine how they came up with that number. If it were under $2 per ticket it wouldn't have been worth pursuing. This happened because they were taking tens of dollars for no other reason than that there was no alternative.
The jury in this case is required to rule by preponderance of evidence (= more likely than not given the evidence). One of the economic experts calculated this number as being overcharged based on internal ticketmaster documentation.
Cases aren't always about the actual problem, they're about what you can prove in court.
Sounds about right. The attorneys take $1.52 and leave the victim with $0.20. And then nothing actually happens that would restore a competitive marketplace.
The June 1940 photograph along Hwy 1 in Maryland had $0.05 hotdogs ($1.17) and $0.10 burgers ($2.34).
The Feb 1959 photograph from the NYC diner advertises a $0.45 burger ($5.14) and probably a $0.75 steak sandwich ($8.57)
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