81 comments

[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 72.9 ms ] thread
awesome website!

looking forward to see websites for $uicideboy$, C-Note, 2 Chainz, maybe Lil $1

(comment deleted)
> Based on 50 Cent's name being coined

I see what they did there.

the images at the top is the best part, we get a little over 2 50 Cents. Makes it so much easier to understand inflation
I love it. If you track your mouse over the graph, the image of 50 Cent expands with inflation.

It reminds me of another great interactive rapper graph: "rappers, sorted by the size of their vocabulary":

https://pudding.cool/projects/vocabulary/index.html

Blackalicious near the top of the pack checks out.
I'm surprised Twista isn't much higher, if you listen to his lyrics he's always busting out different words like a thesaurus (I think he's one who mentioned reading one as a kid or something?) but I guess this just means he's not released as many songs. I do like that MF Doom is listed as well, big respect to him, I never listened to him heavily.

One thing to note, you don't need every word on the planet to convey amazing lessons with lyrics, some of the more profound lyrics (I can't remember, but it certainly felt that way to me 15+ years ago) were by artists somewhere in the middle of your graph for me.

Just looked up Tech N9ne on there, really surprised he's in the middle. Immortal Technique more to the right with the list of people who really use an insane amount of words in their lyrics, not surprised honestly.

Edit: Just realized its the first 35,000 words... Man... this needs to do its best to get all of them. Unfortunately, there's songs by artists I can't find on ANY lyrics sites, so I fear this list will never be 100% but a close enough ballpark.

Would love to see playboi carti on here.
NF being there right at the back needs to be shown to the NF fans
Of course that's where Busdriver would be!
1994? The artist 'made it' in 2003.

88 cent in 2025.

Not great, not terrible.

I miss the era when the internet was more fun like this
I would argue that valuation of '50 Cent' (real name Curtis James Jackson III) was essentially flat leading up to immediately before the release of Get Rich or Die Tryin', his debut album released February 6, 2003.

Which, undeniable, is an * all-time banger * that substantially increased the valuation of 50 Cent to something far surpassing US dollar inflation.

Seriously, go listen that that album again; total game changer. Top cut: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5D3crqpClPY

Since 50 Cent worked with Robert Greene to co-author The 50th Law, maybe now he and Peter Thiel can co-author Zero to 109 Cents.

Or, you know, something about rap and the Antichrist.

hi, i made this. thank you for posting.

unfortunately due to the government shutdown, the BLS inflation data for September 2025 is delayed from October 15 (as it normally is) until October 24[1], so please check back then to see if he is >109 Cent.

assuming future stability, the site will automatically update on the 15th of every month.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/bls/092025-cpi-reschedule-notice.htm

You should extend it into the past. Hapenny hit hard.
Love it. I think there's an off-by-one calculating the images at the top. (100-cent gives a single pixel slice of the third image.)
It would be even funnier with exceedingly long fractionals.

EG, 109.453452 cent or 109 113363/250000 or some such.

A currency being worth half it's value in 25 years is absurd. The US despreately needs to make it's money a stable unit of measure.
How would that work? You have a claim to a past output that no longer exists. If the nominal value of the claim stays the same, the real value of the denomination unit must change.

People don't understand that money is a time and location bound object and pretend it is infinitely liquid and fungible when it isn't. Money is kind of like electricity. When you borrow it into existence and spend it, it travels a path through society, but it must then travel along a return path back to the source. Inflation could be thought of as a form of resistive loss, where current stays the same but voltage drops.

There's a reason why demurrage (or its ugly brother inflation) is a necessary bitter pill if you want a working money system. It forces money to travel down the return path sooner than later.

It's not absurd. And there's no automatic way to make money perfectly stable. That's not how money works.

And deflation is much worse. So we target a small 2% yearly inflation so that if it's 1% or 3% it's not a big deal. Whereas if you target 0% and wind up with -1%, you've got problems.

Username is "CS Mastermind". Evidently not an economics mastermind.
Economist here. No, you don’t want that.

Inflation is annoying, but deflation is destructive. When that happens, people hold on to money as an investment and it doesn’t flow in the economy. The Great Depression was caused by deflation. (See Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz’s A Monetary History of the US.)

As a result, central banks try to have a little inflation, so that random mistakes don’t push us into deflation. The Fed’s target is 2%. I think it should be a little higher. (See Fischer Black’s “Interest Rates as Options” and the shadow short-term rate.)

No one should be holding inflating dollars over the long term. That money should be invested in loans (bonds, mortgages, …) or equity (stocks, real estate, …). We have good ways of comparing investments over time by removing the inflation. These are CPI or the GDP deflator.

I wonder how the data is updated. I dont see any network calls so I guess it's provided on build. The latest datapoint is August. Do we just not have data for the last few months? I suppose you could have github action or whatever to pull in the latest and republish on change.

edit: i see elsewhere in the comments the author explains this. github action indeed.

It's remarkable how over this time frame how inflation in the UK and the USA has been so similar.

https://www.rateinflation.com/consumer-price-index/uk-histor...

https://www.rateinflation.com/consumer-price-index/usa-histo...

Both approx +110%

Yet over that time UK GDP per capita is up only 46% compared to the US which is up a massive +223%. Depressing.

I went back to get an Econ masters and studied international currencies. Some exchange rates are very stable over time and we don’t know why.
2.6% per year inflation. Fed did a decent job.
Chamillionaire was another rapper who pivoted into tech investing and venture capitalism and did 50x to his net worth. I think he still posts here.
Didn't he make more money from his stake in Vitamin Water being acquired by Pepsi or CocaCola than from rap?
How many 2025 dollars will it cost me to take a nice lady to the candy shop?
(comment deleted)
(comment deleted)
(comment deleted)
(comment deleted)