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Comment by latchkey | Hacker News Reader

Name something that costs less in 2021 than in the 2000s?

Anything related to storage or compute? I couldn’t image having a 2tb drive 20 years ago, but having a 2tb ssd in my laptop is kind of amazing

compute? GPUs used to basically top out at $400, now the cheap ones go for more than that.

A modern GPU is literally millions of times more powerful.

The FLOPS/$ aren't even comparable though.

In MSRP, sure, but cost/performance? Keep in mind there's a second-hand market, my $200 Rx 580 works just fine for 1080p gaming even for recent releases (without maxing settings). That's after accounting for Ethereum over-charging the demand-side.

And how many orders of magnitude more performant are GPUs today? Houses don’t fundamentally change level of luxury (or whatever other apples to oranges comparison you want to draw) every few years.

On-die GPUs you get for free with the proc are more powerful than 2000s GPUs. Hell, CPUs are so much faster now you can do the same effects as a 2000s GPU in software.

when? the nvidia 8800 GTX launched in 2006 at $599 MSRP. it wasn't even the top card of that generation. that would be the 8800 ultra which launched eight months later at $829 MSRP. unless I'm mistaken, you would have to go back to the Ti 4600 to find a flagship GPU that launched at/under $400. that was in 2002.

ten years after the 8800 GTX, I bought a 1080 ti not long after launch for about $650. that card is more than 2000% faster, for roughly the same inflation-adjusted price.

As an aside, as an owner of a x1950 pro at the time it's fun to read old reviews of how sick the 8800 GTX was at launch and think reminisce about thinking of maybe buying a $400 almost as good 8800 GTS someday, while now they're $20 on eBay.

I'd rather have a $1200 GPU than dick around with triple SLI.

You can get GPUs as powerful as the ones from 2000 for like $10.

Almost everything. Important exceptions are housing, health care and education, which have large impacts on COL. But most else is cheaper.

So basically all the important stuff, but hey, at least you can get a 50 inch flatscreen for 100 bucks on Black Friday.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/blogs/lookout/fed-official-heckle... (March 2011: Fed official heckled: ‘I can’t eat an iPad’)

The real answer to inflation is to start constructing homes from iPads and flatscreen televisions.

Incidentally also the three areas where the government is most directly pouring money into, via FHA/USDA loans, Medicare/Meidcade, and Pell Grants and Loans respectively.

Those sectors (except construction) are also very well defended by interest groups against foreign workers in the usa.

It’s okay to hire an Indian fresh off the boat (with a visa) to code at Facebook (probably after an older or more expensive domestic worker is unhired) without a license but it is unthinkable that say public school teachers face the same competition.

Not sure about that either.

e.g. housing: https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2021/03/what-if-housing-pri...

The federal minimum wage to hire someone is worth less now than in the 00s.

Sigh, so true!

Clothes, this is observed in the stats too: https://www.officialdata.org/Apparel/price-inflation/2000-to...

This is just general apparel, of course. Likely prices have dropped due to cheap factories that have higher production capabilities and sweatshops.

Your mortgage.

https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2021/03/what-if-housing-pri...

A barrel of crude peaked above $140 in July 2008 and has been lower ever since.

There are just all kinds of things people don't need to buy anymore bc of smartphones. I think on balance life is cheaper now. The main exceptions are things like housing if you live in a big city.

Lumber will be there in Q4:

https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lumber

Text messages

Solar panels

That's a good example! The technology hasn't really improved that much (it has, but not like TVs), but the cost to deploy solar panels has gone down significantly likely due to manufacturing improvements.

Hmm, not sure if I agree with that. I think the best panels back in 2000 were ~11% efficient. Today we are closer to ~24%? I mean, it isn't a fast improvement, but production for a given area has more than doubled in 20 years.

And 11% was vastly better than just 10 years or so before that.

Anything not heavily regulated like housing, education, or healthcare.

CRT displays and floppy disks

SSD drives, anything producing white light with LED, Lufthansa shares :D

Medicines with expired patents that had generics become available.

Almost everything that isn't a necessity.

Airline tickets.

Not necassarily in Europe. There was a sweet spot of cheap flying after massive expansion of EU in 2004 and lasting the entire decade. Flying was cheaper than commuting to the airport and "security" measures weren't that absurd yet.

Clothing

Cell phone services

Televisions.

If you compare with the relative cost of the advancements, that's not true. A fancy 8k tv today is still very expensive.

That's not how you compare prices.

How do you compare prices?

You compare like-to-like. You compare the same kinds of bread, not cheap white bread to artisanal. You compare a 27" 1080 TV to another 27" 1080p TV, not an 8k TV.

But like-to-like isn't just "resolution" and "size". I'd never buy a tv with a comparison like that.

My comparison would be as if I took a "low/mid/top end tv" in 2000 and compared it with a "low/mid/top end tv" in 2021. In that case, it is still about the same price, especially adjusted for inflation.

In that case the way you compare things is not the way most people do. Most people care more about what they’re getting then where it falls in the product stack.

Web hosting

music

cannabis

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