The money of the future!
The consumer price index, a broad-based measure of prices for goods and services, increased 8.3% from a year ago, higher than the Dow Jones estimate for an 8.1% gain. That represented a slight ease from March’s peak but was still close to the highest level since the summer of 1982.
Removing volatile food and energy prices, so-called core CPI still rose 6.2%, against expectations for a 6% gain, seemingly dashing hopes that inflation had peaked in March.
The price gains also meant that workers continued to lose ground. Real wages adjusted for inflation decreased 0.1% on the month despite a nominal increase of 0.3% in average hourly earnings. Over the past year, real earnings have dropped 2.6% even though average hourly earnings are up 5.5%.
And the best thing about our inflation numbers is that they’re very poorly constructed and tend to understate inflation as experienced by the median family. For example inflation numbers were low for the 30 years prior to COVID… despite the cost of housing, education, and healthcare rising much faster than inflation and crowding out other forms of spending.
This is what happens when you create an arbitrary basket of goods in a specific year and then leave the weighting of the goods in that basket alone as the % of the median family’s budget each good consumes changes.
It is what it is. Inflation is crazy high right now and for workers in some sectors wages are rising much faster than inflation. In other sectors and for people on fixed incomes not so much.
This whole “work” thing is a fucking religion with some people.
Don’t take the job that lets you work from the beach, or your apartment. Pick a company with a headquarters, and move to the city where it is located. Come into the office multiple days a week, even if the space is two-thirds empty. Chat at the coffee maker. Listen over the lunch table.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/08/new-graduates-office-vs-remote-work/
ETA: That’s the last paragraph. No need to read this.
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Just speaking for me personally but I don’t think it’s a bad argument. I feel so disconnected right now. I get no satisfaction from my work at all. If I was just starting out this would be a disaster.
I get that it’s completely different for people with little kids at home. But that’s not most people just starting in the workforce today. At least not the kind of tech jobs where wfh is an option.
Pre-covid, I’ve quit two jobs where I worked from home full time and had very little to do. A dream for a lot of people. But I was miserable.
As much time as we spend working, the activity needs to be as personally fulfilling as possible imo. For many of us that involves some live human contact. And I’m a pretty big introvert.
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I agree with this but the dynamic is different when 99% of people go to the office (like pre pandemic) vs. when 90% do not (post pandemic
at least for now). If corporations succeed in strong arming a critical mass of employees back to the office then arguably the rest will follow. But there is a big question hanging over that - if the office is so great, why aren’t people flooding back without any need for corporate mouthpieces to sell them on it? It seems like the best outcome for workers would be to avoid ghe natural toxicity if the corporate workplace and build their social support in their own terms.
I can’t spend more than half a day in an office without a Don Draper existential crisis hitting me.
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Well I wouldn’t go back to the office now because there’s no one there. And yeah it’s a push pull thing. My commute was medium-bad by LA standards, bad-bad by most of the rest of the country’s standards. Would I wake up in the morning dying to face that? No. But would I be happier overall if someone forced me to go into the office two days a week, and my coworkers were also there? Probably.
But yeah forcing people who hate the office no matter what sucks. Maybe eventually the landscape will filter into total wfh companies, and sometimes work from office companies. I would actively seek employment with the latter.
Yeah this.
I used to wake up on work from home days feeling like the king of the world. I can sleep in. I can go get breakfast and answer emails while I wait for my food. I can go to the beach. I can do anything! Now that I can do that everyday, it’s fucking groundhog day and I’m miserable.
Note: I do walk to the gym 2 miles each way Monday-Thurs and listen to podcasts. And I walk/hike a lot on the other days. I’m in the best shape of my life. So I’ve found a good routine that wasn’t possible when spending all that time commuting. I just don’t have much human contact anymore. I see an extended group of friends less than once a month and that’s about it.
One thing seems pretty certain to me - working from home to start a career when others are spending some time in the office together, is a disadvantage - to career opportunities and growth on the job. But if everyone’s working from home then I guess there’s no huge advantage.
If I had an idea for the next big social media site or whatever - I think I would want my employees breaking bread together some of the time. I think starting a project fully remote with people who haven’t worked together in the past is doomed to fail. When the shit hits the fan things get a lot uglier if you don’t have that personal connection.
What I’m getting at is I think wfh has a much better chance of success when most of the team already knows each other IRL. So the farther we get from covid, the more teams are strictly wfh and have never spent any time together IRL, it will be interesting to see how that goes.
The thing I miss most about going to the office is skipping out to catch a movie in the middle of the day.
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God I couldn’t disagree enough about WFH. I’ve been full WFH since 2016 and I’ll literally never go back for any reason.
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suzzer how about finding a cafe or deli or park and working from there a few hours each day? That’s what everybody else does. Give it a few weeks and you’ll start having a new work-related social scene.
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Tesla shed a cool $60 billion in market cap today.
This is starting to get painful. Hopefully near the bottom.
When I’m actually programming, replacing 3 monitors and a laptop screen with only a laptop screen really slows me down. But I could do that when I’m doing other stuff.
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It could do that everyday for another week and might be getting close to fair value at that point.
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Pretty wild.
https://twitter.com/awealthofcs/status/1524478437272035329?s=21&t=VVxZV_pdOEVeR_c3Gzo6dQ
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Bitcoin up something like 280% over a similar timeframe.
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not really wild, inflation adjusted CAGR is 6.3% for US large caps since 1972. Inflation adjusted CAGR for US large caps since 2020-April 2022 is 7.45%. I’ll bet the last ten days gets it down to or below 6.3%. So pretty average couple of years!
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The S&P is only 18.3% off the peak. Historically speaking, it still has plenty of room to go. I’d almost be surprised at this point if it doesn’t get down to 3,000.