The Glade 4.0

Can someone give me the nutshell version of the evidence for inflation being significantly higher than official stats indicate?

Whenever I hear this, it's usually due to people assuming that all manufacturing gets more efficient every year, so if say food prices go up by 3% that's actually evidence of a much higher value of inflation than 3% because the food also got much cheaper to manufacture in constant terms.

RangerDave:

Milk, cigarettes, and gasoline vs. income.

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Food and Energy are excluded from core inflation, and they are increasing at a much faster rate than the inflation rate would have you believe. Food has steadily been increasing in cost at about double the core inflation rate, while fuel at 7 or 8 times the core inflation rate.

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Except when it comes to consumer price index it doesn't really track Consumer Prices.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

So it basically comes down to the measured basket of goods not accurately reflecting typical household purchases, particularly with respect to food and energy? I was aware of that measurement critique, but I thought there were other, more theory-based arguments.

Real estate prices maybe?

It's not a theory-based criticism; it's a procedural criticism of a bad metric. You'll also need to keep in mind purchasing power marginalization caused by bookend taxation in the United States, particularly since our taxes do very little to regulate the cost of living.

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Frankly all 3 of those things are items that people should be using less to zero of, so can't really say I'd be worried about it.

Aizle:

You probably should, actually, since Milk, Cigarettes, and Gasoline are pretty useful benchmarks. They used to track pretty consistently through the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Things started change in the mid to late 80s, then some of the variance became more prominent in the 1990s, the 2000s, and more recently. Nevertheless, they are consumer items and represent actual spending habits. Following their aggregate demand, markets, residuals, and other ancillary data actually produces a far better picture of the economy than the composites currently used.

It's curious how quick you are to dismiss something because of your political positioning, without considering the applicability of the statement. Gasoline is fantastically useful as a spending and consumption benchmark, particularly since the vast majority of the United States is vehicle dependent. Fossil fuel and energy consumption in general are a truly significant portion of the static expense burden most American's face. Incidentally, it's subject to opaque taxes that the average user doesn't consider.

Milk is related to dairy, livestock, and general animal husbandry, plays off the transportation angle of gasoline and diesel, and represents a steady supply of relatively healthy, cheap protein, calcium, and other necessary minerals. Might be the state of our over regulated milk is unhealthy and that's an issue, perhaps. Once again, an incredibly useful metric for tracking real inflation and the cost of derivative goods and products. Whey protein is in everything.

Cigarettes should be pretty self explanatory. Tobacco allotments are fantastic. And cigarettes are pure consumerism with excessive built in taxation. You can learn a lot about purely satisfaction based spending from the trends and patterns and use groups.

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Cool, thanks.

Khross's description is also simplified.

Dairy (which we should NOT be purchasing less of, not sure where that even factors in, Aizle) doesn't factor in meat, produce, grains and cereals -- food in general is running at 3-4 % inflaction.

Food and gasoline should really be the staples of judging the inflation rate, since they have the single biggest impact on cost of living for the average person. I'm okay with leaving tobacco off - it's a toxic "luxury" that shouldn't even exist. But gasoline and food are basic needs for people. The poor don't have the money to get hybrid or electric vehicles...that's a luxury only the wealthy can afford, so we can't exactly be telling people they should use less gasoline.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Nor is there any reason people "should" use less of them. It constantly amazes me that people still actually think everyone is going to really sit down and say "gee, I should consciously make life more difficult for myself, because if everyone else does, then we'll all be better off in the long run." It's not reasonable to say that individuals should do something because if everyone else does it, things will be better. That's essentially just saying "everyone should do what they should do". That isn't the case, so what individuals should so is based on the conditions that actually exist, not those that theoretically could.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Also, hybrid vehicles aren't more energy efficient. You just pay en electric bill rather than a gas bill.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Eh. Depends on how you generate the electricity Corolinth. I agree, to some extent but the single biggest waste of fuel in a car is the brake pedal. Hybrids & Electric cars actually capitalize on that and return some of that energy to the car when braking (converting the cars kinetic energy back into electricity via dynamo), so in that sense, they are more efficient.

Brakes that generate electricity are a great idea. Forward momentum is energy, and braking is energy lost. Getting up to speed again is where efficiency is at its lowest. I love the idea of converting the forward momentum of all that mass back into useable energy. It's great.

If the cars that utilized them were economical, it might even become commonly used.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Um, I take it you meant to say "electric vehicles"? Because hybrids definitely are more efficient, and they run entirely on gasoline.

Hybrid vehicles are not really more efficient. Mazda's SKYACTIV engines are entirely combustion and tend to outperform equivalent hybrids for both power and fuel efficiency, despite the supplementary power returned through regenerative braking on some hybrids, and they are far, far cheaper.

EDIT: Huh. It seems Mazda has a prototype Mazda3 Hybrid in Tokyo that uses a SkyActiv high efficiency combustion engine to power the generator that powers the electric motors on the wheels. That could end up being the fuel efficiency champion...

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Regenerative breaking is an area of research. The efficiency on it is ****. Part of the problem is it adds a significant amount of weight to the vehicle which reduces fuel efficiency.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

There's just no good way to build light magnets or batteries...

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That is a part of the problem, but only part. It does mean that regenerative braking systems are dubiously useful because any energy savings they provide are counteracted by their own weight. They are currently being developed for performance racing not for the efficiency they might provide, but to recapture the stored energy for a burst of acceleration for passing.

It involves the use of additional motor-generators placed on the wheels to recover and deliver energy. Your first bottleneck is the efficiency of those motors. The system can be no more efficient than they are. You then have to deliver that energy to a DC storage system, require voltage regulation and protection. It is also likely to require conversion from an AC waveform. These things consume energy. To actually use that energy, you have to send it through a circuit that converts it back into a waveform that will run the motor. This is not as simple as sending it backwards through the original circuit, although elements can certainly perform double duty. Additional requirements involve a system to monitor the position of the rotor so that the motor doesn't bind or slip. That also consumes energy.

It seems like a great idea to recover heat lost due to friction in the brakes. It looks like tons of free energy. If you use 1/2 m*v^2 to calculate the kinetic energy of a car traveling at city driving speeds, the number is large. The reality of the situation is the number that finds it's way back to the wheels when the light turns green isn't nearly so large.

Then, once you've reused that energy, you must contend with the additional weight that your regenerative braking system adds, and the negative effects it has on the efficiency of the vehicle under normal driving conditions. You also have to factor in the increased cost of design and manufacture.

In a purely electric vehicle, regenerative braking systems are more appealing because they can be tied in to the normal drive and energy storage systems of the vehicle. This reduces energy losses considerably, and greatly simplifies design. Batteries are terrible, their recharge time is slow. To fully implement them requires the capacity to drive them around while they are plugged in to the grid the way some light passenger rail works. A blending of the following projects would be one possible means to achieve that result:

http://www.solarroadways.com/intro.shtml
http://www.witricity.com/

Finally, as stated earlier, no Amanar, hybrid vehicles are not entirely more fuel efficient than their traditional counterparts. They are more efficient than some of them, less efficient than others. The list fluctuates annually depending on which new year models have been reworked for efficiency.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Assuming a certain level of efficiency, the mass of the Regenerative Breaking System shouldn't matter. The mass of the system means that there is more energy (from the momentum of the vehicle) for the regenerative breaking to recover, and it takes more energy to accelerate again, so the increased mass should actually be neutral. However, the efficiency of the energy recovery is not great.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Oh homophones, how you brighten my day.

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Great, now I have this mental image looping in my head:

"Regenerative Breaking"

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Did I get damnyouautocorrected? So I did.

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