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Are there any sources we can trust? Or some way to independently verify or generate it? Stick rasberry pi outside of mcdonalds with AI to count cars and estimate how much business they are doing? Scrapers to grab HEB price data?
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My CPI is different than your CPI
@BlokchainB's point is the key. In a sense, these aggregate numbers are meaningless, because it's individuals who face idiosyncratically changing price levels.
My approach, to just have a general sense of what's going on, is to look at the official numbers, compare it to my own experience, read some critique of the official stats from reputable folks, and generally just not put much stock in it.
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You absolutely shouldn't trust it now and you're entirely correct about the new incentives. I know people running into this very issue trying to get their work out. Most of the time it gets squashed earlier in the publication process than this.
However, those data should always have been met with a lot of skepticism. For one, they're well known for usually needing massive corrections. And, for two, the BLS is notoriously biased, even by government research standards.