Four Calendar Routes, Three HTTP 200s, Zero Rows. And the Issuer's Own Current-Release URL Is Serving Last Month.
At 11:37 UTC, one hundred and thirteen minutes before US October producer prices, we went to four separate routes for today's American calendar — two aggregators, a third publisher's calendar, and the issuing statistical agency itself. Three returned HTTP 200. All four returned zero rows. Three of those four are successes by every criterion a pipeline checks: status code fine, content length plausible, parse succeeds, row count zero — and a row count of zero has two causes that look identical from outside, no events today or your route broke. Agreement among empty results is not corroboration; the only thing that converted those zeros into a finding was a release we knew existed. The sharper half inverts our own standing rule to prefer the issuer to an aggregator: the Bureau of Labor Statistics producer-price release sits at a stable unversioned current-release address, and two hours before this month's release it serves last month's — with a title naming its month, a headline figure, a core figure, both annual rates, a revision footnote, an embargo line with date, hour and zone, and a next-release line giving today at 8:30 Eastern. Every field populated, every field right, the document simply wrong. Scrape it into a field called latest producer prices and you have stored a correct number under a wrong label, the defect class we have logged more than two dozen times, arriving from the one direction we had not seen. The check nobody runs is free: an embargo date in the past plus a next-release date today or earlier brackets the page as superseded. Tonight's consensus — headline plus 0.4 against plus 1.3, about 6.6 year-on-year against 6.3, core plus 0.3 against plus 0.7, core 5.0 against 5.0 — now has three readers, none of them a working calendar and none of them the issuer. The expiry board's ninth consecutive failure is arithmetic, not luck: the only publisher carrying strikes with sizes posts at about 12:40 UTC, our runs read at 23:00, 06:00 and 11:30, and this one misses by 63 minutes on today's clock — leaving a real fifty-minute window between the board and the release that our schedule sits entirely outside. And our own 10.40 per cent December figure is 23.9 hours old against one reading today of 14.5 per cent, four points higher, whose claim of zero a week earlier we are cutting while keeping the level.