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I've been 'into computing' since a '286/20 was described as 'lightning fast'. I've never, ever spent more than 100 dollars on a video card.

Intel 80286 released in 1982. Value of 1982 $100 in today's cash: $220.28.

I'm guessing that was around 1992? According to the Inflation Calculator, that's about $2000 in today's dollars.

According to the inflation calculator, that'd be $1846.03. Big, but not devastating.

This says $2.7 trillion in 1989 = $4.46 trillion in 2007 (no data for 2008 yet).

http://www.westegg.com/inflation/

Really? I thought the very fact that gold kept being mined out of the ground, caused a steady inflation. Except it was uncontrollable and unpredictable.

Then you had stuff like the discovery of gold and silver mines by the Spanish in America, caused some uncontrollable bursts and fits of hyper-inflation in Spain.

I found some data here that comes to inflation between -3% and 4% per year from 1500 to 1650, with an average of about... 0.84% (350% total). Whereas if I go to the first google result for "Inflation Calculator", I see that we've had 360% cumulative inflation since 1976, or about 4% per year.

Recent inflation averages 5 times as high as this "Spanish Hyperinflation" (or if I use the shadowstats numbers about 6% or 7% per year, so 8 times the Spanish hyperinflation).

Or read a bit about the Black Death outbreaks. Unemployment practically disappeared, as there were not enough peasants and craftsmen for the nobles to employ. Prices shot up. There was some _massive_ inflation in the 14'th and 15'th centuries. (Which also provides some early illustration for that curve at work.)

Sure. Fewer people equals more money per person equals higher prices. Fewer people also equals more land (capital) per person which makes it easier to get use of the capital you need in order to work. No causal relation between the inflation and the unemployment, since there's a third change driving them both.

At any rate, heck, your government (assuming you're in a western country) still applies that curve quite successfuly. Again, that's how and why we all control inflation. But, at the very least, there you go, most governments still didn't abandon it at all.

Right, they didn't abandon it. Which means that if it worked, we wouldn't get stagflation and jobless recoveries.

From: http://www.westegg.com/inflation/

What cost $42.95 in 2002 would cost $49.26 in 2007.
Also, if you were to buy exactly the same products in 2007 and 2002,
they would cost you $42.95 and $37.60 respectively.

Umm, I'm pretty sure we aren't on the gold standard any longer so what relevance does the price of gold have to do with anything? Somehow I think if we had 300% inflation in the last nine years that it would be a story..... according to this $20 in 1998 was worth $25.75 in 2007.

The first true portable computer, the Osborne 1, sold for $1795. According to The Inflation Calculator, that's $3352.27 in 2007 dollars. It had a 4 mhz CPU, 65 kb ram, a 5 inch monochrome screen and only took single-sided floppies.

$100, even $500, by comparison is not bad.

While i agree with your overall point, those are relatively poor metrics to base it on.

The vietnam war cost 600B$USD considering 1968 USD.

If you consider inflation based on the first inflation calculator google link that I clicked, plugging in 600B$ from 1968 yields:

What cost $600000000000 in 1968 would cost $3688102617038.20 in 2007.

thats 3.68 trillion in north american terms no?

But the 17% figure you give for the past 8 years actually DOES roughly agree with CPI. In fact, if anything its a bit low. According to the inflation calculator, 1 dollar in 2000 buys the same amount as 1.17 dollars in 2006, thus 17% in less than 8 years according to official figures. Source: http://www.westegg.com/inflation/ Anyway, what this mean is the government's figures are pretty close to accurate, and so the government's conversions from nominal GDP to real GDP and their estimations of growth are actually correct! This means probably we haven't likely been in a recession since the 70's like you claim in your previous post. Unless I'm missing something. Still, it was probably a good call to invest in gold and the euro in the past few years.

Yeah, it's worth updating those prices for inflation between 1982 and 2006:

Missile Command - $28 $59.89.
Zork I or II - $40 $85.55.
Castle Wolfenstein - $24 $51.33.
Wizardry - $45 $96.25.

The United States did not become the world's largest economy until after WWII. The economy in the 19th century was wild, with massive swings in employment, GDP growth, and inflation. It was not uncommon for the economy would grow by 20+% one year, only to contract by 15% 2 years later (1813 and 1815, for example). The average nominal GDP growth for that century was only around 4.5% compared that to almost 7% since then (and that includes the Great Depression!).

This is incorrect. Between 1790-1913, the annualized inflation rate was around .1%, which is very low, but still positive. With only one exception, every deflationary period during the 19th century time corresponded directly with an economic contraction. The exception to this is the years 1866-1878, where there were 12 years of sustained deflation (the longest deflationary period on record) but GDP growth remained positive. This period is an outlier in our economic history, and not a basic rule like you claim.

I have seen that video before, and I do not like it. It is classic conspiratorial propaganda- just enough fact so you can't accuse them of outright lying, but dressed up with the most inflammatory language possible and reaching conclusions not supported by the facts. I found it to be an appeal to emotion rather than to reason, and I don't like that.

There's enough energy available from uranium that $724/pound (2006 dollars, according to the inflation calculator at http://www.westegg.com/inflation/) would not be a show-stopper.

The "airplane" analogies are always pretty dumb as soon as you scratch the surface. Even on the face of them, it's an argument that "Technology A once was poor, and now it's great, so technology B, which is poor, must inherently end up great." They're logical fallacies.

In this case, to put it in perspective, 100,000$ in 1919 is 1.3 million in today's dollars. A realistic price for this mission by small teams is 50-100 million, with a high risk of failure. For that kind of money, you're not going to get a bunch of little teams like you got for the regular X-prize, which was a (proportionally) extremely simple task. You're not even going to get the idealists. The budget rules out the vast majority of them, and the few idealists who love space issues enough to put forth that kind of cash -- like, say, Musk -- are already going to be putting their money toward space in their preferred method (with their own companies) instead of competing for some prize. That kind of money for investment in this prize would have to come from Wall Street, which wants a return on it's investment.

Not going to happen.

You don't get out much, do you? Check out http://www.westegg.com/inflation/, and try the US from 1800-1850, and 1850-1900. Looking at the latter case first, what cost $100 US in 1850 cost $100.10 in 1900 - virtual price stability over half a century! In the former case, what cost $100 in 1800 cost less than $49 in 1850. Now read that last sentence over slowly for maximum comprehension - prices actually fell by half in the years 1800-1850.

From 1900-1950, prices roughly tripled. From 1950-2000, prices roughly went up by a factor of 7. So if you're trying to say that recent inflation has been less than it was in, say, the 1970's, I'll agree with you, but your original statement is pure nonsense.

Now maybe you mean cost of living. Yes that has gone up, but not so much do to increase costs, those have been steadily dropping as well in terms of real dollars, but in terms of people's expectations.

Now, this is truly hilarious. What is the substantive difference between "cost of living" and "inflation"? Here's the Statistics Canada definition of cost of living:

A cost-of-living adjustment is used to offset a change (usually a decrease) in the purchasing power of income. Cost-of-living adjustments modify future benefits, typically on an annual basis, to keep pace with inflation. These adjustments are usually linked to changes as measured by an index of movements in prices; the most widely used is the Consumer Price Index (CPI).

I'll be the first to admit that there are many different ways to measure inflation, although the CPI is often the most common. The "GDP deflator" is another popular measure; it is usually very close to the CPI figure.

Now, since you're clearly economically illiterate, let me fill you in a couple of not so widely hidden secrets. 1) Since both the US and Canadian governments are on the hook for huge entitlement programs, such as welfare, pensions, etc., all of which are subject to annual COLA changes, both governments have a vested interest in the keeping that COLA number as low as possible. Now, in 2003-2004, the average US household spent 34% of its net income on housing, 18% on transportation, and 13% on food; that's 65% of total disposable income. Doesn't leave a whole lot for those "wants" you rant on about, especially when you consider that health care and insurance/pensions eat up another 15% of income. (http://www.bls.gov/ro6/fax/cex_hou.htm) However, whenever you see "core CPI", it's usually accompanied by the phrase "not including volatile food and energy components". Meanwhile, housing expenses have been adjusted down to reflect the low rates people are paying on "teaser" mortgages that offered low initial rates, no down payment, no principal repayment, "overmortgaging" (i.e. providing a mortgage worth $130,000 on a $100,000 house - sweet, you've got $30k to buy a new car!), etc. Now, when those mortgages get reset this year and next (you have been reading about the sub-prime crisis, haven't you?), what do you want to bet that "volatile housing costs" will also be excluded from the government stats?

And that's not even discussing the "hedonic" adjustments, where beauraucrats attempt to divine how much recent improvements in processor speeds, lower RAM and disk costs, etc. have lowered the "real" cost of computing resources. (I'll be the first to admit that the 512k RAM, 10MB disk Mac that I bought for $3,000 Cdn in 1985 was far more expensive in real terms than the Dell Pentium4 running at 2.8 Ghz with 512 MB RAM, and an 80 GB hard disk for $800 Cdn paid two years ago.) However, how do you compute the decrease in the cost of living from having 4 blades on your razor instead of 2? From having 4 or 6 airbags in your car instead of 2? In short, the official statistics are giggered to produce a consistently

This laptops looks like an emate, and an in inflation adjusted numbers costs only a little less.

However, this plan was quickly scrapped and when the system had its national launch it debuted at $649.99

http://www.westegg.com/inflation/infl.cgi

Compared to the neo geo, the PS3 is a flippin bargain.

Games in the $60 range aren't targeted at kids?

I begged an 8-bit Nintendo out of my parents for Christmas in about '89 if memory serves.

I remember saving up for Super Mario 3. List price was $65. I think I got it for $59.

$59 in the Super Mario 3 release year of 1990 was $92.52 in 2006 dollars (most recent data). The MSRP of $65 was $101.93 in 2006.

Source: http://www.westegg.com/inflation/infl.cgi

And, anecdotally, having money doesn't seem well-correlated with handsomeness.

To test this prediction, a sample of 737 male and female MBA graduates from the years between 1973 and 1982 was used to explore how facial attractiveness relates to starting and later salaries. Results indicated that more attractive men had higher starting salaries and they continued to earn more over time. For women, there was no effect of attractiveness for starting salaries, but more attractive women earned more later on in their jobs. By 1983, men were found to earn $2600 more on the average for each unit of attractiveness (on a 5-point scale) and women earned $2150 more.

As always there's the issue of correlation vs causality. But note that "more attractive women earned more later on in their jobs." In other words, their beauty predicted their later raises! But even if wealthier people simply find it worthwhile to spend money making themselves look good, don't you think there's probably a reason?

The Spirit of St. Louis supposedly cost about $10,000 in 1927:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_of_St._Louis

which is about $110,000 in today's dollars:

http://www.westegg.com/inflation/

So I think it is probably safe to say that early commercial tickets were just a bit cheaper than that(depending on what you want to call 'early' and 'commercial', but the non-stop trans Atlantic thing was a 'significant milestone' type of event, so it seems like a nice benchmark).

Just so you know:

Back in the day I bought plenty of games for $25 each. I know this because Electronics Etc. used to send me coupons for $5 off any purchase over $25.

This was probably about 1985, according to my memory of being in about 5th grade.

$25 in 1985 = $46.78 in 2006

according to http://www.westegg.com/inflation/

Well, this is a mercifully short rant at least. Too bad it's totally disconnected and the points are each (separately) developed poorly. If his main point is really what it seems to be (that is, that Apple is making the same mistakes with iPhone as it did with Newton) then here's what I see wrong with it:

1)He compares the pricing of the two devices...but seems only to go as far as saying they both cost "too much." He doesn't seem to put together the fact that the Newton's $700 1993 price tag was almost exactly twice as expensive as the iPhone: $999.48 inflation adjusted. And that's for a much less capable device, with an untested interface that didn't work well.

2)He notes the real reasons why the Newton failed (large size, bad handwriting recognition, completely new product category), but doesn't attempt to claim that these will be problems for the iPhone. They won't, so he simply ignores them.

3)Evidently he considers competition to be a problem that the iPhone has in common with the Newton. This after he notes that the Newton was the first device of its kind, and therefore had absolutely no competition. Strong competition may or may not be problematic for the iPhone, but it certainly won't be a parallel to the Newton.

4)He totally misrepresents the only evidence he cites. Specifically, the study on how many people would buy at what prices. His link says "miniscule number." Yet the survey itself says 26% of respondents said they would be likely to buy it, and 1% of those would buy it at the launch price. Insofar as Apple itself has set a goal of only 1% market share, being able to sell a quarter of that volume for the launch price sounds extremely encouraging to me...imagine if a quarter of Sony's target market had thrown down $600 for a PS3. Also, the study makes specific note of the fact that they don't expect the price to stay that high; business as usual in the cell-phone world, but totally ignored by this author.

Um your inflation figures are off by - by a gross margin.

What cost $100 in 2001 would cost $113.24 in 2006.
Also, if you were to buy exactly the same products in 2006 and 2001,
they would cost you $100 and $88.31 respectively.

From: http://www.westegg.com/inflation/

"The pre-1975 data are the Consumer Price Index statistics from Historical Statistics of the United States (USGPO, 1975). All data since then are from the annual Statistical Abstracts of the United States."

Note: Data not from a fucktard site trying to foist gold on me.

Glad you're not an accountant.

The problem here is, game manufacturers are not making products for the same console for 20 years. Instead, they are forced to design and develop games for a new system every few years. I am not a game developer, but I believe optimizing for each platform is non-trivial. Combine that with changes in development environments and inflation, and you have your magical $10.

from http://www.westegg.com/inflation/
"What cost $40 in 1986 would cost $68.52 in 2005."

As for all games cost the same, I don't believe that is the case. Even the relatively cheap Wii games have a range of $30 (for the lowly Rampage) to $50 for Zelda.

..something you can teach.

When I type in 1945 and 2005 into http://www.westegg.com/inflation/, it shows an inflation of about a factor of 10. Given I don't think they had 1/10 of a cent in 1945, what the hell do we need with either of these stupid coins now? If it were up to me, I'd get rid of the quarter too and use the more sensible 1, 2, 5 progression of the Euro. So we can keep the dime as is, come up with a new design for 20 cents , 50 cents, 1 dollar and 2 dollar and then redesign the paper bills (5, 10, 20, 50, 100) to be telescoping in length as they should have been this last go around.

Dara Parsavand

It's even worse than you think :-) The 3DO cost $700 in 1993 dollars. When you adjust for inflation, you find out that in today's money it'd cost nearly $1,000!

That makes a PS3 look practically affordable ;-)

"If the price of a CD (or vinyl) since 1980 kept up with inflation, wages etc they should be almost 4 times higher than they are now so the big bands are making the label one quarter of what they were."

Holy shit! I didn't know albums cost US$23.63 in 1980! Let's assume the average price of an album today is $15, which actually favors your argument by being on the low side. Ok, let's multiply that by four. US$60 in 2005 is equivalent to US$23.93 in 1980 based on the CPI. So given that you say that CDs should cost four times more in order to have kept up with inflation, albums must have cost nearly 25 bucks back then. And FYI, if the price of something increases 4 times, the profit does not.
Bleh.

What cost $20 in 1800 would cost $216.86 in 2005.

Also, if you were to buy exactly the same products in 2005 and 1800,
they would cost you $20 and $1.84 respectively.

Just to quibble with your numbers...

> 3 bedroom house price increase: 22 times
> 1954 $ 10,250
> 2006 $219,375

From http://www.westegg.com/inflation/infl.cgi, an inflation calculator:
"What cost $10250 in 1954 would cost $70773.86 in 2005."

Therefore, the increase is only about 3 times in real dollars.

Stamps went up to 0.29 in Feb '91, and up to 0.39 in Jan '06. A 33% increase in 15 years.

So, there's more to this story. Like, the USPS is greedy.

What cost $6,000,000 in 1974 would cost $24,945,762.42 in 2005.

One word: Inflation. You can't compare costs in 1980 to costs today (25 years later) without talking in terms of either 1980 dollars OR 2006 dollars. They are not worth the same . A little education goes a long way - check out http://www.investopedia.com/university/inflation/ . A calculator that is useful - http://www.westegg.com/inflation/infl.cgi In comparison to income, prices of games have gone down in a dramatic fashion - $40 in 1980 dollars is worth well over one hundred dollars a game today.

You people need to read "How to win friends and influence people".

Yelling (on the phone) will get you nowhere. I am a CSR and I screw over rude abusive customers.

1. At the start of the call, politely ask the name/ID of CSR (you can use this info if they drop your call)

2. Be nice and polite, but insist they fix your bill or transfer you to a manager. Don't ask for the manager right off the bat. Don't threaten to cancel your account -- the level 1 CSR doesn't care and is not incented to retain customers (they may be trained to, but with no commission they don't care).

3. Write a letter with copies of bills and send it registered mail. This demonstrates you have a litigious mindset, and will get their attention.

Let's use a handy little tool, found at http://www.westegg.com/inflation/. It calculates the value of money corrected for inflation across the years. The Empire Strikes Back, according to the IMDB's list, made $290,158,751 in 1980. Let's just plug that into our little calculator, correcting to 2005...

$736,904,249... Oh, and 53 cents. Just *slightly* more than the $380,268,258.46 that the Passion of the Christ made, corrected for the extra year.

A much more helpful list can be found at http://home.earthlink.net/~mrob/pub/movies/topadj. html. It's the top movies, ranked not by box office statistics (which are both uncorrected for inflation, and are not managed for increasing ticket prices that may or may not outstrip natural Consumer Price Index changes). We can see that Gone With the Wind (#68 in pure box office) and Star Wars (#2 in pure box office), first and second respectively by attendence, blow away every other movie by a huge margin. Your examples? Empire Strikes back ranks 15th, with 101.7 million attendees. Passion? 81st, with 53.7 million, barely more than half.

People will go see Sci-Fi - it just has to be done right.

...than a Dell Optiplex GX520 does today.

So, what exactly is the point?

In 1962 an IBM 7094 cost $3,134,500.

Does that mean that $19,356,198.10 is a reasonable price to pay for a Dell Optiplex GX520 today?

$199 in 1984 dollars is $368.34 in 2005 dollars according to this inflation calculator. (2005 is the latest year for which they have data.)

Don't sweat it if you don't do the inflation properly in your head, neither do I :) I use this calculator.

So, using this, what costs $100 in 1985 cost $177.47 in 2005. Or in other words, if nominal book prices have gone up 35% in that last 20 years, they have declined in real price.

Consoles very well may be more expensive, I don't honestly remember what the nintendo cost, but $100 sounds about right. The point is, a great many things that you *perceive* to be more expensive are actually less expensive in real terms. Even with the consoles, you get a far better product.

Just inflation itself takes the $199 and makes it $280 using a 2005 calculator (http://www.westegg.com/inflation/infl.cgi). So it is about 6% more expensive. Rates went up even higher this year IIRC so the 6% is likely even less. The 360 also uses significantly more components than the snes, including usb ports and an ethernet adapter. So the price is on par at least with the SNES.

Now, if they were able to brute-force decrypt 1000 IPSec connections in real time - this would be something to worry about.

DES cracked in less than 3 days (circa 1999 public knowledge technology).

One of many IPSEC crackers, IKEcrack.

Who knows what is possible with a budget of... oh wait, that's classified, although we do know it was over 70 Million in 1972 ($319,277,570.21 of today's dollars or 1277 of the EFF's 1999 machines.)

I'd say they can.

Accounting for inflation, your $199 NES (from 1985) would cost $354.93 today.
The $200 SNES (from 1991) would cost $282.23

See The Inflation Calculator.

You have written some fairly insightful comments in the past which I have enjoyed, so I will take the stance that you are not trolling as you have been modded, but rather expressing a heartfelt opinion. Likely, you are very skilled with computers/networks or whatever your professional field happens to be. (I don't know what that field is to be honest, I can see that you are a writer from your personal website, but I don't know if that is your full time profession. So, please excuse my ignorance in this matter.)

However, my guess is that you have not learned a similar skill set with people. I could be wrong, but many have commented on the tone of your post, and it may be a valid and true point in the real world.

You can read books to learn how to hack machines and code, and you can also read books to learn how to hack people in (slightly) the same way as you do with computers. There is a difference however, and I don't have the room or time to go into the particular details here.

I *DO* however, have the time to recomend the most profound book you can get on the topic:

How to Win Friends and Influence People By Dale Carnagie. quick summary here.

I have gone through that book four times now, and I feel like an idiot for not having read the book much earlier in my life. In the computing world I made a huge number of interpersonal mistakes with co-workers and others because I was blatenly unaware of the real world protocols that people use. Just like computers, people have protocols - and you have to know what they are, and you can't know what those things are unless you take the time to listen to people.

The suits know this, at least, the good ones do. They also know about the effects of things like first impressions and the like. But the best suits, the ones who are on the top of their game know the material in Dale Carnagies book.

I am willing to bet that if you take the time to read it, your job will become easier as you will become much faster at convincing the suits of the right things to do with your network/code (or whatever it is that you do.)

Just my opinion on the matter.

the dollar of 1800 was equal to the dollar of 1912 minus maybe 2-3%

Can you explain that please? According to a reliable inflation estimate, we had significant deflation: in particular, $1 in 1800 dollars is $0.55 in 1912 dollars, or $10.84 in 2005 dollars.

True. Adjusted for inflation, the Star Wars films cost approx $60 million each. The price of movies has rocketted since 1999. (And you're right about the $4 figure)

They really weren't that much cheaper than systems are today (for just the base system). Once you correct for inflation since 1985, their value new today would be $177.

http://www.westegg.com/inflation/

"What cost $100 in 1985 would cost $177.47 in 2005."

And that included 2 controllers, maybe a gun, and a game your average buyer would actually want to play. Plus that controller was more functional than the Atari 2600's. IMO, it's still more funtional than the N64 or XBox controller. Obviously those have more buttons, but I find them cumbersome and make the game annoying to play... to the point I quit trying to get used to it.

My final pro for the NES is that it came with everything you needed to get started. You didn't have to buy a memory card, or a hard drive, or a fancy $30+ wireless controller, or a stand to set it vertically. Today you could end up spending $500 on a console and all the crap that goes with it before ever playing even 1 game, while a bottom of the line PC might only cost you half that. And maybe the cartridge losing connection was a feature to force kids to take a break from gaming a see some sunshine... Today's version of that is your monthly subscription to a game running out.

It is more than the base console, which is only $300.

$200 in 2002 dollars is $213.49 today, according to the inflation calculator here. So, no, the GameCube was not more than the base X360 console.

The Dreamcast also cost $199 when it was launched in 1999, and that's only $228 today.

The Xbox 360 core system is not really more expensive than most, but it is hardly the cheapest ever at launch.

Here's a summary: http://www.westegg.com/unmaintained/carnegie/win-f riends.html