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Comment by skellington | Hacker News Reader

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It was a massive climate change investment.

The only thing that's going to solve climate change is technology. It's the same technology we've had since the 50's. Not turning off our lights, setting the AC to 80, drinking through paper straws, or clearing thousands of acres for solar panels.

Assuming you're talking about nuclear, why do you think it would be cheaper/faster/easier/etc to decarbonize with nuclear than with solar + battery?

Solar is faster in the short term (because people think it's somehow "clean") but not sustainable in long term. It requires too much land and upkeep for not great output. It would be better to go all in on nuclear and surrounding technologies and solve energy once and for all.

I disagree. I'm willing to reconsider though. Here's what I think.

Solar is immensely cheap to the point where it's often cheaper than arbitrary other surfaces. Their maintenance is very low, much more so than nuclear. And land is not an issue for the US or China, the two places where decarbonizing energy is most important. Both have massive swaths of desert that is uninhabited, and where the addition of shade will likely net benefit the local ecosystem.

I agree that solar panel creation produces a fair amount of pollution, but then, so does nuclear power generation. In both cases this can and should be dealt with safely.

Did the climate stop changing?

You say that like it’s a good thing.

Remind Americans their climate change is better when they are paying at the grocery store.

Edit: Yea. That’s what I thought.

Current YoY CPI inflation is at 3%, barely over the long term average, down from a peak of 8-9% before the IRA passed.

It's very possible to construct an argument (certainly I'd believe it) that it didn't actually affect inflation per se and that the inflation burst was transient and would have subsided anyway. It's absolutely not correct to say inflation wasn't "addressed".

The problem is some how a large swath of the general public thinks that lower inflation means lower prices. That obviously doesn’t math.

Inflation can be addressed when my salary goes up the same ratio as perceived inflation lol. And perceived inflation over the last two years is like 50%, and that's being conservative.

> Inflation can be addressed when my salary goes up the same ratio as perceived inflation lol.

Has it not? Mine has. Wages as a whole have. In fact wage growth has been historically robust for the last decade or so. Here's a FRED graph for "median usual weekly real[1] earnings", which correlates well to the kind of working class argument people usually make in this space: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

Note how it has been going inexorably upwards since 2014 or so, and in fact the inflation burst turns out to be the correction to a very rapid spike in wages (due to pandemic assistance) that only corrects downward to the upward curve.

I really wish people who wanted to argue about inflation would do it with more numbers and less "lol".

[1] "Real" means "inflation adjusted" in this context

Lol. You have, what, a 12% increase in salary according to that chart (followed by around 5% dropoff lol) compared to more than 50% perceived inflation. I don't think I need to make any more arguments after that.

I called it out specifically to avoid the mistake, but I think you skipped the footnote. You're misreading the chart. The numbers there are already corrected for CPI. An upwards slope represents higher wealth, independent of inflation. Lol, indeed. This is sort of what I was complaining about. Please, please try to get stuff right before arguing about it on the internet. Economic statistics are extremely well-tabluated and easy to find.

Now compare inflation adjusted income with the cost to rent a one bedroom apartment. That’s been trending down since the mid 80s. As in housing is getting more expensive relatively

> Now compare inflation adjusted income with the cost to rent a one bedroom apartment

And now we're doing goalpost motion. This is how this always goes. Indeed, some things are more expensive and some things are less expensive. And that can change across regions and subeconomies, and even demographically to the extent that different groups spend in different ways. And this is interesting and important.

But it's absolutely not about "inflation" or "wages" and if you come back from an incorrectly-stated argument about inflation/affordability/whatever by saying "OK fine but this is actually about housing policy", you just look silly.

The fact that housing is expensive in some markets isn't a refutation that people are making more money, it just isn't.

EDIT:

But in fact FRED is great, so I generated your chart for you showing the ratio of the CPI urban rent metric to nominal (not "real" this time) hourly earnings: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1qtNi

And.. you're kinda wrong here too. It's true that the chart is going upwards, but only by about 8-9% since 2006 (the earliest date where we have both data points). And very notably:

1. Most of the growth was from 2011-2018 or so, not a recent phenomenon at all

2. There was a huge dip during the pandemic (because of assistance programs, it's the same effect I mentioned upthread) that we've only just recovered from in the last few months. The recent rapid rise of "rent costs as a fraction of income" is just taking back all the boon people got earlier.

3. It's actually levelled off since 2023.

Again, there's data to this stuff, and it doesn't support your position.

Official numbers for inflation vs actual inflation vs perceived inflation are very different numbers lol. Actual inflation and perceived inflation are much closer together and the official numbers are basically cooked up so people don't freak out. A 10% addition to my previous comment doesn't make a big difference to how people feel about the economy and inflation.

What on earth is "perceived inflation"? That's not a thing. You're literally making up a fake statistic because the real one doesn't support your incorrect-but-strongly-held intuition!

It's inflation as perceived by the average person, basically increases in daily expenditure on required goods and services like food, gas, utilities, rent or mortgage. Have you even been reading what I wrote or are you just spouting shit you copy pasted from somewhere else?

> are you just spouting shit you copy pasted from somewhere else?

I'm literally linking to FRED charts trying to have a numerate discussion about this stuff...

Can you cite some research or measurements or anything about this "perceived inflation" metric you're talking about? Like, where are the numbers? I'm pretty sure you just made it up, no?

I'm not linking to numbers lol. I already know how much more I'm paying for groceries. I talked about perceived inflation from the beginning and you are just now talking about it? You haven't responded to anything I wrote. I am pretty sure you just read the word inflation and started some pre-written rant. Either that or you are severely lacking in reading comprehension.

Just linking a bunch of numbers does not make an argument. You have to actually talk and respond to the actual topic being discussed.

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