> We shouldn't have to choose between principles and food on the table.
I am increasingly convinced that these are the only true kind of ethical decision. Painless/straightforward ethical decisions that you make every day - they probably don't even register on your radar. But a tough tradeoff does.
I encourage you to get clear on your goals for a project like this. There is a political and social dimension to this work aside from the technical challenge.
For example, ordinary people already know whether they're being squeezed or not. They don't need a CPI report. If you want them to believe your CPI report over the government's, then you have to do a lot of marketing. On the opposite side, government decision makers are generally moving away from a "technocrat" data-driven approach to decisions, towards a "great man" theory of decision making: giving them better CPI data won't suddenly make them care about using data again. A lot of people are putin in work to dismantle American government capacity, and there are worse problem than inflation tracking.
My personal opinion is that it doesn't make sense to create a community-driven CPI as a direct alternative to the government CPI. But it does make sense to collect a lot of this data for other uses (ex: to highlight illegal collusion among merchants, archival).
From a technical perspective, here are some thoughts from a Canadian lens:
* CPI calculations are already fairly transparent. You can read about the work that goes into them (click TOC on upper right: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/62-553-x/62-553-x2023001...)
* Government-collected raw data is not open to the public, because merchants wouldn't have give the govt' access to their POS data if it were otherwise. The Canadian government made a tradeoff: it gets very accurate data, in exchange for it being hidden from the public.
* As WheelsAtLarge mentioned, data collection and analysis takes effort and money. Especially when you're doing it for the long term. You'll have to think of funding and keeping people motivated to do the work.
* Scraping data might be a lot harder than you expect. I compile the largest open dataset of grocery prices in Canada, and have 20 months' worth of data. Its very difficult to average prices across merchants (because many don't reveal product UPC codes). And prices vary by geography. None of this is insurmountable, but it takes effort and money. Go ahead and play with the data to get a feel for how easy/difficult this is (https://jacobfilipp.com/hammer/)
In terms of a blind date, an escape room is a large time committment with no built in "out" in case a participant is not feeling it. Try to create an environment with escape hatches.
I'm going to second this: if a book doesn't grip you and get you to be curious, then this indicated it is badly written (applies to both fiction and nonfiction). Give yourself permission to skim books or stop reading halfway - life is too short to read something that's not enjoyable or useful.
We desperately need a high-tech solution to disengage from the torrent of AI slop. I have found a form of photosynthesizing plant that grows in the soil of many places where humans live. Apparently, touching this with the palm of your hand creates a kind of protective endorphin effect that coalesces conflicting versions of reality into the one you're actually experiencing. It'll take a lot of money to advertise this to the general population, but I'm fundraising as hard as I can: this approach will be called "Touch Grass" and I hope to see you all when we do it together.
I looked around for you - the best I could find is a listing for the magazines at the British Library at https://www.bl.uk/. It appears that they have a copy of all the issues and they are available by request for physical viewing.
I regularly go to BL and had planned to go in the next couple of weeks, except I just got an email suggesting a strike might mean there are limited facilities available from Monday for a couple of weeks.
That said, I'm happy to go and try and pull those copies (it's sometimes hard to get physical copies), and send the OP scans of his contributions (if they're in there!), when I go in mid-late November.
OP - if this is a useful help to you, let me know and we'll find a way to connect!
Hello there! I had sent this HN submission in a few weeks ago and I thought it had disappeared off the "new" page with only one comment. I came back on today and happened to notice some activity and HN had reposted my piece five days ago.
I have since contacted the British Library and they have the eight issues I was looking for, but I live way up north and it would take a little planning and spending whole day to get there, but if you'd be willing to do that, yes please. I've narrowed it down to these eight which are in the right timeframe and are missing from the archive.org collection. I do remember my mention was right at the end of that month's column, right before the usual sign-off and the address in Bath to send in contributions.
Thanks very much. That’s a generous offer. If you do find time to check, I’d be grateful. I’ve narrowed it down to eight issues that aren’t in the archive.org scans. My submission was mentioned near the end of Wilf’s column, just before the usual sign-off and the postal address in Bath.
(You might meet PaulRobinson while you're there, looking for the same issues!)
Thanks again for even considering it. Much appreciated! My email address is my HN username at gmail.
The Library of Congress has tons of books from foreign publishers. I have gone there many times for their extensive collection of German and Russian scientific and technical monographs. They also have a ton of obscure foreign publications and periodicals.
Unfortunately, their catalog does not list this particular magazine as far as I can tell.
Not in the UK, would someone be interested in working with the library to get them scanned for the Internet Archive? What would the cost and logistics look like?
If I end up going to London myself, my intention was to scan Wilf's column of those eight issues for archive-org. Two other HN users have offered to go look for me and I can't really ask them to do extra work to do if they're already doing me a favour.
Random Sweden-based person here. I was using it fine yesterday & it's up and available today as well. Are you perhaps using some DNS provider that's blocking it? Or a VPN or something that's blocked from the other direction perhaps?
Do you know if there are any hoops to jump through these days? My understanding was that a reader card used to require an academic referral or at least a write-up of the research you planned to conduct.
FWIW I was only ever there for the café or the bookshop though, neither of which required a card :D
Very impressive, especially the interactive chats! I encourage you to make even more projects like this.
I think the actual experience would be more kafkaesque - less acqnowledgement that "there is a problem", ineffective for-profit middleman agencies that only exist to collect a government grant.
I am increasingly convinced that these are the only true kind of ethical decision. Painless/straightforward ethical decisions that you make every day - they probably don't even register on your radar. But a tough tradeoff does.
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