But the broad inflation that drove up prices across the economy won’t reverse, even though the rate of increase has eased greatly since peaking at 9.1 percent in mid-2022.

The most recent consumer price index showed annual inflation at 3 percent. Still, prices overall are 25 percent higher than they were at the start of the pandemic.

Ironically, falling prices can both signal a recession and trigger one.

“Think about what would happen if the price of all goods would drop to the pre-pandemic level,” said Francesco Bianchi, who chairs the economics department at Johns Hopkins University. The inflation of recent years also has driven up workers’ wages. If wages stay high but the price of goods fall, companies won’t make enough profit to pay their employees. “That would make the cost of hiring workers extremely high, and that might trigger a recession — and then the recession creates even more expectation for lower prices. This is why economists are very concerned about deflation.”

Laura Veldkamp, a professor at Columbia Business School, said even the expectation of lower prices can trigger a recession. “If I thought that was going to cost less tomorrow, why would I buy it today? … As soon as we believe the prices are going down, demand will plummet and we’re likely to immediately have a recession,” she said. “Price declines are typically associated with really severe negative outcomes.”

And while Americans might be clamoring for lower prices, surveys suggest they don’t actually expect it to happen. According to the University of Michigan’s Survey of Consumers, most respondents expect inflation to go higher in the next year.

Veldkamp likened the economy to a car speeding on the highway. “The solution is not to stop and throw the car in reverse,” she said. “Under no circumstances should somebody try to make that happen.”

Copied and pasted the actual reasoning from the article since it was paywalled. I was expecting the headline to be rage/click bait, but the article was just as bad.

The emphasis above is mine. The reasoning provided was because “companies won’t make enough profit to pay their employees.” Lol. Lmao even. That has never, and will never, be true. Basically just corporate gaslighting.

I also found the assertion that the expectation of lower prices later would cause people to stop spending absurd. Excuse me, what? People aren’t complaining about the cost of yachts going up. They’re complaining about the cost of essentials: groceries, gas, utilities, etc. Do they really think people are going to stop eating while they’re waiting for groceries to get cheaper?! This comes across as tone deaf and completely disconnected. Clearly that professor and the author of the article are so far removed from the experience of the working class that they can’t even understand why high prices are causing problems for working class people.

To save you a click, here’s the list:

• Austin, Texa
• Dallas, Texas
• Seattle, Washington
• Las Vegas, Nevada
• Sacramento, California
• Houston, Texas
• San Francisco, California
• Charlotte, North Carolina
• San Antonio, Texas
• Atlanta, Georgia
• Orlando, Florida
• Washington, D.C.
• Tampa, Florida
• Kansas City, Missouri
• Raleigh, North Carolina
• West Palm Beach, Florida
• Phoenix, Arizona
• Portland, Oregon
• Denver, Colorado
• Chicago, Illinois

An here’s the methodology:

Methodology: Data is from customer requests on the Thumbtack platform from October 2024 to October 2025 for holiday light installations. Rankings were based on the relative frequency of such requests adjusted for the population of state and metropolitan areas.

So not only does this seem like a really bad way to measure a city’s ‘festivity’, but it also appears to be marketing for a handyman app…

For the FAANG companies, they do it in part so they can then turn around and make those flashy claims you see in headlines like “95% of ours devs use [insert AI product they are trying to sell] daily” or “60% of our code base is now ‘written’ by our fancy AI”.

Maybe we will lose low effort artists but gain great music by passionate people.

This is such a bizarre take.

I wouldn’t characterize musicians who depend on some financial return as “low effort” at all. Almost all the best musicians, going back to classical music and beyond, were dependent on their music as a source of income.

If anything, the people who do music as a side hobby are usually more “low effort” than those who actually make it their main career. And if artists can’t make money of their music anymore, we’ll really only get music from rich people who can afford the lessons, instruments, recording studio, production, etc. as an expensive hobby rather than a source of income.

This isn’t really an answer to the ‘universal negativity’, but for a somewhat reasonable analysis of the pros and (surprisingly high number of) cons as well as some interesting grey areas, there’s an old LWT episode on this topic: https://youtu.be/AJm8PeWkiEU

Any company that pays for ads closely tracks the efficacy of ads and can more or less prove that the ads are worth it. There’s no guess work.

Wow, that is an insanely impressive engineering feat. Stuff like this is why I still love the internet. Thank you for sharing it!

Agreed, but I don’t think the video is about busses vs. light rail. It’s about which update to the bus routes will work best with the new light rail routes.

Very grateful to Louis Rossmann for spearheading the opposition to this:

• https://youtu.be/g4vL1ERdZ9Y
• https://youtu.be/5kkAo9faois

Oh, nice! Thanks for explaining that. I didn’t realize there was a way to run a cluster without HA.

I’m not sure how well that works if the cluster is only designed to be temporary, since removing a productive node from a cluster is a bit risky

Good callout. Just did some reading on the concept of maintaining a quorum, which I didn’t know about. Definitely need to be careful if I go with that approach, but it does sound interesting! I’m not entirely opposed to leaving the old laptop as a node and then using it for experimental stuff or maybe running just one specific standalone service on it after moving the critical stuff to the new server.

Sounds pretty straightforward. Thanks for the info!

That’s a fair point, but I kind of want to tinker around on the laptop without worrying too much about breaking things and figure out what all I actually want to self-host. That will help me figure out what sort of hardware I need.

I wouldn’t call myself a frequent flyer, but I fly at least several times a year, and I’ve taken a lot of different airlines. To your point, I honestly haven’t seen much difference in terms of cancelation or delay between budget and regular airlines. There are 3 main differences in my mind.

First is that budget airlines nickel and dime you. Carry-on isn’t free, it’s an add-on. Your backpack size is thoroughly checked. And if you mess any of that up and they catch it, the upcharge is huge.

The second point is sort of a continuation of the first: on-flight service. Depending on the duration of the flight, non-budget airlines will give you some snacks and drinks for free. Budget airlines charge you for them. (I once had a budget airline try and charge me for water when I was fighting off a headache…) Some of the nicest airlines will even have entertainment consoles built in to the seats, even in economy.

Third is seat space and comfort. The seats on the nicer airlines have noticeably more leg room and more cushion. A lot of them have adjustable headrests and recline a bit. Sounds like a small thing, but I have pretty long legs and a bony ass, so it makes a huge difference to me.

For shorter flights/trips, I’ll still do budget airlines sometimes. For longer flights or if I have a lot of luggage, I usually have a strong preference for the nicer airlines. Of course, depending on how big the cost difference is, I’ll occasionally go against my preference.

Idk, I’ve played a lot of Eve Online, and I usually try to be kind to players that are new or friendly. Sims on the other hand…

Thanks for the source. After watching the video, the “Mr. Japan” bit was honestly much less noteworthy than the completely incoherent rambling about sending letters to countries congratulating them on the privilege of being able to “shop in the USA”. He just kept repeating that and then naming random percentages. It felt like I was having a stroke trying to understand what he was even trying to say.

I once wasted an hour trying to figure out why a CLI command straight from a project’s README wouldn’t work, only to figure out that they had em dashes instead of regular dashes in their example. Ended up opening a PR to hopefully save someone the same pain in the future.

Looking forward to seeing this exact headline on NotTheOnion in a few months.