Fair, but it has also lost its connotations with being an insult over the decades.
Being a geek and/or nerd became economically useful when we moved into the information age, and thus is now considered in high regard. The average Joe is now envious of geeks and nerds. Most people would love to be able to trade places with Bill Gates or Elon Musk.
Geek and nerd had negative connotations when geeks and nerds were commonly poor, but then things shifted and, notably with the rise of the Information Age, being a geek and/or nerd turned into being useful in becoming wealthy. Now it is a compliment.
True of all insults, really. Same reason, for example, words with associations to slavery are considered insults. Or those related to the sale of sexual favours. The implication is that one is poor. Any words you can throw at someone who is rich will be something most people will want to wear as a badge of honour.
Is it the biting a chicken’s head off thing? I’m not really sure how that translates to an insult, though. Maybe you are ashamed of biting chicken heads? But if that’s the case, stop biting chicken heads?
It was, but we also saw deflation in 2009. It is less common for us to see than inflation, to be sure, but it is far from something that never happens. On average, we experience it about once every decade. No doubt it will be twice this decade by the time we reach the end.
It’s actually a lot better to just go to the news sites.
Not true at all. Being from a small community, news is pretty well only reported by the local CTV news reporter. Said reporter was maintaining his own Facebook page, and through that I could zero in on his content that is relevant to where I live.
If I go to CTV directly, there is no way to get only the local news. It’s mixed in with news about places hundreds of kilometres away. News about a place hundreds of kilometres away has little relevance to my life. If you dig deep you can find the local news somewhere in there, but unless you work as a full-time researcher, who has that kind of time?
Maybe said reporter will create his own website in the wake of this – but at the same time, maybe he doesn’t have means to do so. There isn’t a lot of money in being a small town reporter. Facebook made that accessible to most with little investment and to those with little technical knowhow.
Maybe CTV will smarten up and build a website that is more usable. But not likely, as why bother trying when you can just go crying to the government?
But as it stands right now, the only thing keeping us abreast in the local news is that he is posting to X. But presumably it will go the same way, or, more likely, end up bankrupt in the near future.
the grocery industry is much more…peculiar, or at least idiosyncratic than most
In what way?
Inflation is only concerned with the value of the currency. Like everything on the other side of the transaction, food has its own independent value. One that has risen, largely due the Ukraine conflict reminding people how vulnerable the food supply chain is, and them now seeing food as being more valuable than in the recent past. They are willing to pay more – much more, in a lot of cases – because of that.
Let’s not forget the farm gate price peaked in 2022 at around ~100% over 2018 prices – for a number of reasons, but the EU fertilizer plant shutdown quickly followed by loss of access to Russian fertilizer being a primary driver. That is what you’re currently feeling at the grocery store. The farm gate price is now down ~50% off the peak. You will start to see that roll into the grocery store within the next year. Remember, wholesale food is largely purchased on futures contracts. You, at the store, are mostly buying what the farmer sold in 2021-2022 right now.
Frankly, the grocery industry is one of the least idiosyncratic markets around.
The buyer sets the price. Inflation tells half the story, but the other half is that the people generally believe that things like food are worth more now. When the Ukraine conflict began, people started seeing famine as a real threat, which put them in “Oh shit, I’d better not take this thing for granted anymore!” mode.
Inflation is not prices, it’s a rate of increase of prices.
Inflation attempts to measure the decreasing value the of currency as observed over time. The change in price across a certain basket of goods is the proxy used to determine that.
Even if Inflation is at 0%, prices won’t decrease
All else equal, a decline in value of the currency means that price will rise. However, there are two sides to every transaction. The thing on the other side may also decrease in value. If that other thing decreases in value faster than the currency, then it is possible for inflation to be >=0% and for the price to still fall.
We saw deflation as recently as 2020. Prices do not always go up.
Moreover, every single high inflationary period in history, save one time, has seen deflation occur soon after. Why do you think this will be the second outlier, especially when the driving forces are closer to every other time and quite unlike that one unique time?
El Niño typically brings rain. In fact, as you know being a farmer, several weeks ago there was drought panic in the market – but with that cycle starting to set in the rains finally came and the prices came tumbling down again thereafter.
Commodity prices are 30-50% of what they were last year. The grocer price remains high only because it takes a while to work through the system. Next year things will look quite a bit different.
Drought has crushed yields over a vast area of Canada’s agricultural land.
We’ve mostly recovered here in Ontario, but true that things don’t look so great in the west. However, the markets aren’t terribly concerned. Wheat, for example, is down 10% in just a couple of weeks. Canada isn’t that significant of a producer in the grand scheme of things, really.
What won’t plummet is the consumer price of beef, I can almost guarantee it.
Well, it is certainly volatile right now. The dumping is visible as you can see beef being sold for half the price of the day before if you go to the store at the right time, and then it jumps back up soon thereafter. But, overall, beef lags corn. It will take several years to work its way through the system, just like in 2013. Eventually it will return. It always does. We’ve been here a million times before.
And I shudder to think of what grain and bread prices could be by the end of this year.
All us farmers would love to go back to last year’s market, I’m sure. But for the consumer, the rains came at just the right time in the most important places, so things are going to almost certainly going to become cheaper still.
To preface, there are two sides to every transaction: Something being offered, and something being traded in kind. Exchanging parties must feel that both sides of the transaction are of equal value in order to see a transaction carried out. The unit of measure used to determine where that equalization point is found is known as price.
On one side of the transaction, the value of what is being offered had been declining in value at a rate not seen in a long time. This means that it takes more of that thing to equalize the other side of the transaction. COVID factors has lead people to not see this thing as being as valuable as they once did. While that decline has pretty much settled down now, it does partially explain why prices have risen up to this point.
On the other side of the transaction, the value of what is being offered has been increasing in value at a rate not seen in a long time. This means that it takes less of that thing to equalize the other side of the transaction. The Ukrainian conflict suggesting that famine is a real possibility has reminded people that they shouldn’t take this thing for granted, and as such they now consider it more valuable. This explains the remainder of the price growth.
they are showing some of the content from the article itself.
They are showing the content found in the og:description meta tag, you mean. The “og” bit stands for Open Graph, which is a protocol developed by Facebook so that news sites can define the content they want Facebook to show.
If news sites don’t want Facebook to display this information, they could stop providing it via Open Graph. Again, Open Graph was created exactly to give publishers control over what Facebook shows when linking to their resource. A quick check of the major sites in Canada reveals that Open Graph use is omnipresent and that they are quite welcoming of Facebook using their work.
Fair, but it has also lost its connotations with being an insult over the decades.
Being a geek and/or nerd became economically useful when we moved into the information age, and thus is now considered in high regard. The average Joe is now envious of geeks and nerds. Most people would love to be able to trade places with Bill Gates or Elon Musk.
Of course, it wasn’t always that way.