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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (85465)	1/1/2012 8:24:52 PM
From: Cogito Ergo Sum	Respond to of 218055

Real food is incredibly cheap in America. By real food, I mean, rice, beans, vegetables, meat, fish, fruit, nuts. It is pricier up here but if one is buying real food, not processed crap.. you are right for Canada also,...

To: Ilaine who wrote (85465)	1/1/2012 8:33:32 PM
From: TobagoJack	3 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 218055

believe the discussion was primarily centered on reliability of bls vs shadowstats (which uses discarded or otherwise 'improved' bls stats to be 'reliable' in the sense that one can count on the consistency, it is important to refrain from continuously 'improving' the tallying methodologies and stay well away from ever more subjective processes whatever one may wish to say about shadowstats, one has to rank its consistency as high to very high, and not so with bls #s unsure that the cited cat food vs lobster was central to the discussion except to note that it is very subjective when one chooses to use chain-dollar to conjure up 'objectivity' re whether beef, pork, chicken, fish or cat food is to be served up and account for substitution effect especially as the substitution effect is continuously and always a down-ward substitution - the result of using such a technique to massage cpi would at some juncture substitute all away from froi gras and caviar to cat food, even if one can somehow adjust up the quality of the cat food comprised of free-range organic lobsters w/o fillers via hedonic technicalities the trouble w/ bls #s is that they are borne of a continuously 'improved' methodology, and does not conform to everyday experience of cost-of-living per supermarket shopping bags per hour worked the merit of shadowstats is that whatever the levels indicated for unemployment, cpi, etc, at least the #s are in a consistently generated time series the crux is much more about consistency as opposed to levels, although the levels doubtlessly fall somewhere in between given the measured basket's mix differences - i.e. walking out of the supermarket with a bag full of duper premium ice cream sandwiches is obviously not the same as a super duper saver's drum pack of lesser cream that is iced, and a bar of margarine is certainly not comparable to a stick of triple-cream raw butter as the two are completely different products that can only be 'substituted' in the 'share of stomach' sensibilities. there should be little doubt that for ss recipient tagged to cpi, living standard has been dropping, and the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th derivatives of the drop velocity have been rising