Diocletian Sez!

In 301 AD (1700 or so years ago), the Roman Emperor Diocletian issued an edict in an attempt to control inflation in the price of just about everything sold in the Empire. I ran across a quote from the edict* and found it appropriate to our times too. Maybe our inflation isn't that high, and maybe the powers that be have learned, with repeated lessons over and over again through time, that they can't rob the common people of everything, but, I dunno, it still seems appropriate.

By User:MatthiasKabel - Photographed by myself in Pergamonmuseum Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link
Part of the Edict's list of maximum prices from the Pergamon Museum in Berlin

Shrink and Skimp!

I've been thinking about the economy recently. How it's not that good for the 'little' people, and how we small people have been really experiencing it, no matter what the officials and their numbers about the economy say (Here's an article from Big about this - Strikes and Bidenomics, it was republished as a shorter, but mostly the same, article on the Lever - The Missing Inflation Data). One of the things I've encountered a lot of is shrinkflation.

Shinkflation is something I think we've all seen (recent BBC article on it). The package of a product we want, say a breakfast cereal, gets smaller but the price stays the same. So we are actually paying more for the product, by weight or quantity measurement, but we supposedly don't 'see' that because the overall price is the same.

My favorite kind of ice cream... Now in a smaller package! Image from
reddit.