🛒 The True Price of Everyday Life

👋 Welcome! Has life really become more expensive—or just different? Today’s issue looks beyond prices to explore how daily living, comfort, and opportunity have changed over the last fifty years.

Cyberattack Cripples Multiple London Councils — A suspected ransomware hit shut phones, websites, and services at the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, Westminster City Council, and the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham. Officials triggered emergency plans while probing whether any data leaked.

Opera Neon Turns Browsers Brainy — Opera Neon adds a research agent that hunts sources, delivers citations, and kills tab chaos. Switch between Gemini 3 Pro and Nano Banana Pro mid-task, then let the Do agent write and edit Google Docs automatically. Your browser stops browsing and starts working as researcher.

Who Controls AI’s Rulebook Now — Washington wants one national AI rulebook while states rush their own safeguards. Big Tech warns a patchwork slows innovation and the China race; lawmakers fear consumer harm without federal standards. With bills stalled, power struggles are playing out through executive drafts.

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AI May Shrink Your Office — New survey says half of executives feel overstaffed, as AI absorbs routine work in finance, HR, and support. Within three years, nearly half expect 30–50% excess capacity. Companies are rethinking roles, betting on human-AI workflows while racing to retrain workers for higher-value skills..

Rewriting Go-To-Market Playbooks — OpenAI and Google say AI is reshaping go-to-market by automating lead discovery, hyper-personalizing outreach, and speeding experimentation. Teams still need domain craft, but curiosity matters more than specialization. The edge goes to teams combining advisors with speed and data.

Being Liked Won’t Make Leaders — Searches for leadership are spiking, but Experts says craving approval weakens teams. Respect comes from clear feedback, not vibes. Like athletes reviewing game tapes, great managers debrief wins and failures, helping coworkers grow faster and avoid repeating mistakes in remote workplaces.

Why Coffee Prices Just Exploded Again — Store-bought coffee is up 41% year over year after bad harvests, tariff shock, and futures doubling. Beans from Brazil and Vietnam were squeezed by drought and floods, while U.S. import duties pushed costs higher. Tariffs are gone now, but prices lag and won’t fall fast.

Gold Bulls Eye $5K Next — Surveyed investors at Goldman Sachs see gold’s rally continuing, with 36% betting on $5,000 by end-2026. Central-bank buying, inflation hedging, and rate-cut hopes are fueling demand after a 58% surge this year. Only a sliver expects a pullback, signaling conviction the metal’s run isn’t done.

Meesho IPO Signals E-Commerce Boom — Meesho set to list in a $606M IPO, becoming India’s first major horizontal e-commerce debut. Early investors trim stakes, but SoftBank and others hold firm, signaling confidence. The platform’s value-first model pressures Amazon and Flipkart as online retail demand swells nationwide.

When you hear people say “everything costs more than in the past,” there is data to back some of that up. For instance, using a standard inflation calculator for the U.S., $2,000 in 1975 would be equivalent to about $12,043.72 in 2025 in terms of purchasing power. That suggests, broadly speaking, a five- to six-fold increase in prices over five decades. Similarly, more specific essentials have seen sharp rises: tuition at public colleges rose from an inflation-adjusted ~$3,519 in the 1970s to about $9,750 in 2023. Like many people feel, many things — housing, education, some goods — are significantly more expensive now than they were decades ago.

But the picture isn’t just one of simple price explosion. Over these same decades, many aspects of life have improved in quality — goods are vastly different (higher quality, safer, more feature-rich), consumption baskets have changed, and our standards of living have shifted. A recent 2025 global analysis introduced a new measure: the Global Ease of Living Index. This index suggests that, across many major economies, quality-of-life factors such as infrastructure, services, public goods and social amenities have improved — meaning that higher nominal costs may come with better outcomes and convenience.

Moreover, not all expenses have increased at the same rate. Things like apparel, some electronics, and certain services may even cost less relative to their value compared with decades ago — thanks to technology, globalization, mass production, and economies of scale. And sometimes what matters most isn’t just the sticker price, but what you get in exchange: more comfort, better safety, improved efficiency.

So: is life truly “much more expensive” today than 50 years ago? The honest answer is yes — in many ways, costs have increased significantly. But also no — because in many dimensions we get more value for the cost, and quality-of-life has changed class. What’s “expensive” on paper doesn’t always translate into “worse.”

Ultimately, whether life feels more expensive—or richer—depends on how you compare what you get, not just what you pay. If you measure only dollars, inflation, or tuition hikes, the past looks cheap. But if you measure comfort, access, quality, and services, today’s higher prices don’t always translate into lower quality of life.

Actionable Insights

4,150

dollars is what some buyers have paid per pound for Panama Geisha coffee from the Elida Estate — making it one of the priciest beans ever sold!