The original seeds and farm equipment still exist for the most part. Farmers use GMO patented seeds and no-right-to-repair complex farm equipment "systems" because they're more efficient despite the downsides.
It's weird how certain things have remained the same, or even cheaper when accounting for inflation.
I've bought an $899 MacBook Air. I've bought a $229 65" TV. $20 handheld emulator. A lot of tools and random things from Amazon are still the same price.
But the house I bought was double what the one was in 2018. The car I haven't bought would be up 50%. Insurance costs are way up. Phone bill is the same.
Groceries are way up in general, certain things like meat basically doubled but Yogurt and cheese is still about the same price. Junk food like soda, cookies, and chips are double (thankfully I don't buy much). Potatoes, onions, peppers are still the same price.
> It's weird how certain things have remained the same, or even cheaper when accounting for inflation
Cars for example, at least in the base trims.
• My 2006 Honda CR-V in the lowest trim level with AWD was $23k, which would be $37k today. That's $3k more than a 2026 lowest trim AWD CR-V costs today at my nearest Honda dealer.
• The last new car I bought before that was a 1989 Honda Civic sedan. Its price in today's dollars comes out about the same as a new 2026 Civic.
Some research suggests my experience is not a fluke. Base trims with comparable features (e.g., AWD) have been about the same in constant dollars for at least 40ish years for most mass market cars.
Slowly, global warming will take its toll. There won't be one big disaster, one big crash leading to global famine, but crops failing more and more, constantly, removing first the luxuries (cacao, olives, fruits, etc) and then the staples.
And other non-food related slow-catastrophes. From William Gibson's The Peripheral, on The Jackpot:
> nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves.
Why? If there's one positive it's that global warming is giving us vastly increased amounts of farmland, and in the north and the south (the most productive countries on the planet) Worldwide even.
This seems to me unlikely to lead to famine. We'll need to adapt, because farmland is moving, but we'll have a lot more food, not less.
The monetary base expanded (aka "they printed a ton of money") between 2020-2022, so there were 2 options: the monetary base had to contract again, or the prices needed to adjust.
I think the best non-governmental solution to handling private equity is to take money out of equities and to put it into precious metals and cryptocurrency. In effect it is to take money out of the private-equity controlled dollar system, devaluing their equities. Unfortunately for now, mutual funds, which hold a lot of retirement funds, probably don't support those alternative assets yet.
The one thing I get from these articles, as I suspect the majority of tech workers on here feel, is that I'm grateful for this to not affect me. I have always shopped for sale items, but I've never had to go to several grocery stores to get the best deal. I've never had to choose a cheap spaghetti meal (since college, anyways) because of price. I'm grateful for this
I think I get the gist of what you're saying and I'm also grateful that I'm doing ok, but rapidly rising incoming equality is already impacting many tech workers and a larger and larger percentage of the former middle class will be underwater in the coming years since nobody with the power to do anything is making any real effort to fix the underlying problems.
And this may not be the case for GP, but tech workers (especially programmers) aren’t particularly social creatures and they miss the signs of upheaval. Important things will affect you badly with or without a good income
Been there. So glad I had 3 months savings and was able to find a job within a month. I now keep at least 6 months of expenses liquid because of the paranoia of layoff. It never leaves you
Save as if it did matter, because your advantage could disappear in a blink. If not from a world wide trend, then from a microscopic blockage in a capillary. I wish I had.
I listened to Planet Money from NPR in August[0] where it claimed that inflation was based on feeling rather than data. The summary was that groceries are not a good measure of inflation since they're seasonal and the best way to buy groceries was the same as dollar cost averaging investment - buy the groceries when you need them and the prices will average out.
Readit News
1. Seed prices - there is a lot of patented GMO stuff in circulation and pricing around that.
2. Farm equipment - bigger equipment, more sensors and computers, higher costs (even around fixing things)
It would be great if there was some investigative reporting that covered all the angles.
The alternative is to keep using the same equipment + manual labor
I've bought an $899 MacBook Air. I've bought a $229 65" TV. $20 handheld emulator. A lot of tools and random things from Amazon are still the same price.
But the house I bought was double what the one was in 2018. The car I haven't bought would be up 50%. Insurance costs are way up. Phone bill is the same.
Groceries are way up in general, certain things like meat basically doubled but Yogurt and cheese is still about the same price. Junk food like soda, cookies, and chips are double (thankfully I don't buy much). Potatoes, onions, peppers are still the same price.
Cars for example, at least in the base trims.
• My 2006 Honda CR-V in the lowest trim level with AWD was $23k, which would be $37k today. That's $3k more than a 2026 lowest trim AWD CR-V costs today at my nearest Honda dealer.
• The last new car I bought before that was a 1989 Honda Civic sedan. Its price in today's dollars comes out about the same as a new 2026 Civic.
Some research suggests my experience is not a fluke. Base trims with comparable features (e.g., AWD) have been about the same in constant dollars for at least 40ish years for most mass market cars.
Dead Comment
> nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves.
This seems to me unlikely to lead to famine. We'll need to adapt, because farmland is moving, but we'll have a lot more food, not less.
There’s some fascinating writing on this. It’s really private equity causing the price increases through supply chain control.
Shifting things from one scam economy (private equity) to another (cryptocurrency).
Been saving more since I found another job
Deleted Comment
[0] https://www.npr.org/2025/08/15/nx-s1-5500523/when-our-inflat...
It’s just that you can’t track it by the price of oranges week to week