Usually inflation is more of a slow thing that you don’t notice so much until you think back to the time when a burger was only a dollar. Prices increased much faster over the past few years though. For Bloomberg, Reade Pickert and Jennah Haque zoom in on the everyday items that are noticeably more expensive. Basically everything. I just wrapped up travel in a high cost of living area. The sticker shock on a simple grocery bill was brutal. Tags: Bloomberg, cost, inflation ..read more

Welcome to The Process, the newsletter for FlowingData members that looks closer at how the charts get made. I’m Nathan Yau. Every month I collect tools and resources to help you make better charts. Here’s the good stuff for the month. Become a member for access to this — plus tutorials, courses, and guides ..read more

For the Wall Street Journal, Joe Pinsker reports on income and happiness, or more specifically, on the raises people said they needed to be happy. The more people have the more they need. Tags: happiness, income, Wall Street Journal ..read more

Twitter has a Community Notes feature that attempts to flag posts that contain misinformation. This might work well in theory, and the notes are often informative, but it works slowly and is often not enough to stop the spread of misinformation in a viral tweet. Bloomberg shows the spread through the lens of a single tweet. Tags: Bloomberg, misinformation, Twitter ..read more

For Associated Press, Christina Larson and Nicky Forster examined the growing population and the land required to feed all the people. A map shows spreading farmland over the centuries and at some point there won’t be enough land to grow food if we continue what we’ve been doing. Tags: agriculture, Associated Press, population ..read more

Using GPS data processed by Replica, Lydia DePillis, Emma Goldberg, and Ella Koeze, for The New York Times, show how commutes have changed post-pandemic. The roads in major cities are a little bit less congested and the traffic moves a bit faster. The line chart above shows average speeds in 2022 relative to 2019. So you can see in most places people driving faster and more so during rush hour. Tags: commute, New York Times ..read more

For The New Yorker, Angie Wang draws parallels between toddler learning behavior and training large language models, but more importantly, where they diverge. They are the least useful, the least creative, and the least likely to pass a bar exam. They fall far below the median human standard that machines are meant to achieve. They are so much less than a machine, and yet it’s clear to any of us that they’re so much more than a machine. Tags: AI, children, illustration, New Yorker ..read more

This doesn’t have labeled axes, so I assume it only shows a zoomed in portion of the earlier years. The slope of the top line starts to level out at older ages, because my lines are about to cross. See also: Closeness lines over time. Tags: humor, parallel ..read more

Tipping seems to be in a confusing spot right now. On the one hand, customers want to support workers, but on the other, tip suggestions seem to be rising towards uncomfortable rates and in places where people don’t usually tip. Pew Research surveyed 12,000 U.S. adults to see how we’re all feeling about the current state of tipping. Tags: Pew Research, tipping ..read more

About 15% of working Americans make at least $100,000 of income per year as of the 2021 American Community Survey. As you’d expect, many who fall in that 15% spent more years in school and spend more hours at work. But you can also earn a six-figure income without working all the time. What about those people? What do they do? Read More ..read more