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Failed Imagineer posted:Are you just ignoring the existence of cartels and price-fixing? Beat me to it - collusion is also a major problem.
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May 9, 2023 23:08
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Failed Imagineer posted:Are you just ignoring the existence of cartels and price-fixing? I think that, where they exist, they would fit neatly into the parts of my post that I'll underline here: Main Paineframe posted:Well, my point is that price gouging doesn't usually work. Consumers will respond to price increases by changing their buying behavior, and competitors will respond by taking the opportunity to undercut the gouger. In a case where all of the major players in a market conspire to fix prices, we don't say "the price is going up because of corporate greed", we say "the price is going up because of a price-fixing cartel". Sure, that's a result of greed too, but like I said, it's not a very useful thing to say because corporations are always* greedy, but they're not always in a price-fixing cartel. *see the footnote in my previous post
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May 9, 2023 23:12
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Tucker Carlson to relaunch his show on Twitter. Only planned right now, but Musk can easily pay more than the $20M/yr that Fox was offering.
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May 9, 2023 23:24
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Piell posted:https://twitter.com/briantylercohen/status/1656050429644673026 It is almost 100% the allegations that he was using campaign funds to pay his rent for his "campaign headquarters" (which was a townhouse he also happened to live in), pay his utilities for his "campaign headquarters," and his incredibly obviously suspicious FEC filings that everyone was wondering about back in January where he was somehow paying $40k in air travel expenses to random places around the country for "campaigning."
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May 10, 2023 00:03
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Main Paineframe posted:Well, my point is that price gouging doesn't usually work. Consumers will respond to price increases by changing their buying behavior, and competitors will respond by taking the opportunity to undercut the gouger. Well, there were several forces that made gouging effective, at least temporarily. You had the avian flu outbreak, which did cause Tyson's production costs to rise, but not proportional with how much they raised prices. This becomes a convenient excuse to tell consumers, making it more likely for them to accept higher prices. Likewise, you have the ongoing rise in inflation, and for a lot of Americans the idea of that is that Biden pressed the big red "inflation go up" button and now everything costs more. Finally you have Tyson's wide control of the market, which makes it harder for consumers to change what brands they buy and for other brands to undercut them, at least initially. And it's not so much writing it off as corporate greed as it is clarifying it as such. Because, again, the purveying narrative is that Biden pressed the inflation button so it's all his fault.
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May 10, 2023 00:23
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Shooting Blanks posted:Tucker Carlson to relaunch his show on Twitter. I’m picturing musk yelling down the hall at the lone finance person left at Twitter who hadn’t been fired or quit that they need 20 million dollars quickly.
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May 10, 2023 00:25
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Part of the problem with “chicken inflation” is that you can just not eat chicken. Chicken thighs $10/package? Time to dig on some pig!
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May 10, 2023 00:26
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Cartels also usually don't work in a competitive enough market. I think the magic number is like 5 or so major participants.
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May 10, 2023 00:32
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Main Paineframe posted:"the price is going up because of a price-fixing cartel". A hypothesis, in a similar manner to corporate residential rental pricing going up because of the use of third party pricing algorithms. For large branded suppliers (think Pepsi or coke here as the best example) those suppliers are able to often dictate prices and sales to retailers. For smaller items the retailers can either internally or by a third pay service optimize algorithmically both prices and what to stock. optimizing for maximized total sales. All that said somebody writes the objective function. The objective functions of these algorithms can be written to act as a price-fixing cartel with a veneer of false objectivity. We should treat the growing and already wide spread use of these algorithms to be de facto cartel pricing as we would treat explicit cartel pricing.
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May 10, 2023 00:44
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LATimes has an interesting editorial based on a vegan student trying to get liquids other than milk included in federally funded school lunches. Cliffs: * The milk industry has successfully convinced the Ag Dept. to not include any other drinks but milk to qualify for school lunches. * Lactose intolerance is rife among non-white populations. * The majority of California students are non-white. quote:Got milk? Remember the catchy ads featuring celebrities with milk mustaches from the 1990s? The advertising campaign by the California Milk Processor Board has been revamped for the 21st century using social media influencers targeting younger generations, specifically Gen Z. (Mods, please let me know if someone reports this for insufficient Cliffs & I'll add to it. I've also bolded what I consider to be the highlights but please let me know if that isn't satisfactory.) Willa Rogers fucked around with this message at 00:55 on May 10, 2023 |
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May 10, 2023 00:53
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I'd like to address something that came up over the last day, namely where the whole idea of a 10% rate of return on stocks comes from. I believe, even with the recent stock market turmoil that the basic rate of return on like a S&P500 or DJI index fund over the last 30? years has averaged 10% or something pretty close to that. 10% used to be a rule of thumb for retirement accounts in terms of income planning and was revised down to 8% I think after the GFC. I know the bull run from 2009 to 2021 trended slightly above that, in one of the more lower inflation environments in living memory so low overhead returns were pretty easy to obtain if you had the money. Obviously not all equities delivered the same rate of return, bonds and other fixed rate securities did not perform as well in the low interest rate period of the 2010s for example but the speculation in the stock market that got a lot of attention and made a lot of billionaires certainly makes it reasonable to think that those kind of consistent returns are expected.
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May 10, 2023 00:56
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XboxPants posted:This one? https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/17/us/politics/migrant-child-labor-biden.html As much as it upsets me I appreciate you posting this article. I'm really intensely interested in what proportion of overall child labor is this sort of migrant situation. My gut says "vast majority" but even in its current majestic size, my gut is not a substitute for quasi-reliable data.
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May 10, 2023 02:00
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Doctor Yiff posted:Basically what kzin602 said, I'd add is because the people with the most money, whom capitalism is intended to benefit most, want to be able to acquire more money without having to perform any labor. Their primary income isn't wages, it's dividends or proceeds from selling or renting their investments, or interest from loans to banks or companies or individuals. The only way for this to happen is endless, unsustainable, rapacious growth at all costs. dividends do not require infinite growth in a properly designed system where the workers own the company and get the dividends, it's theoretically possible to achieve a good solid steady state; the obvious rebuttal is that workers would like to have more money rather than less money so this model just shifts the desire for infinite growth forever from billionaires (bad) to worker coops (less bad, still not infinitely sustainable)
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May 10, 2023 02:07
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rscott posted:I'd like to address something that came up over the last day, namely where the whole idea of a 10% rate of return on stocks comes from. I believe, even with the recent stock market turmoil that the basic rate of return on like a S&P500 or DJI index fund over the last 30? years has averaged 10% or something pretty close to that. 10% used to be a rule of thumb for retirement accounts in terms of income planning and was revised down to 8% I think after the GFC. I know the bull run from 2009 to 2021 trended slightly above that, in one of the more lower inflation environments in living memory so low overhead returns were pretty easy to obtain if you had the money. Obviously not all equities delivered the same rate of return, bonds and other fixed rate securities did not perform as well in the low interest rate period of the 2010s for example but the speculation in the stock market that got a lot of attention and made a lot of billionaires certainly makes it reasonable to think that those kind of consistent returns are expected. 10% is the average annual return of the S&P500 over a 30-year period. It doesn't mean that it is realistic for every single company to expect at least 10% growth every single year, though. It means you should invest in an index fund if you want an average return over 30 years. Otherwise, you're going to be gambling for way more or way less for any individual company.
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May 10, 2023 02:16
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Google Jeb Bush posted:dividends do not require infinite growth
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May 10, 2023 02:16
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Willa Rogers posted:LATimes has an interesting editorial based on a vegan student trying to get liquids other than milk included in federally funded school lunches. The lawsuit is actually from Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. If you've guessed that's a front organization from the name, you're right-they're an animal liberation group, part of the PETA constellation, though less honest. As with a lot of the activity in this area over the last few years, it's likely the VC behind the plant-based products industry is backing it since they know they're not getting the product labeling rules they wanted from FDA. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 02:51 on May 10, 2023 |
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May 10, 2023 02:32
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Eiba posted:The idea that everything and everyone wants infinite increases in their status forever is a really capitalist one. For most of human history most people cared about stability and keeping what they had, not constant improvement. If, somehow, workers coops were in the drivers seat of the economy, sure, they could still be set up to demand infinite growth. Or they could, just maybe, respond to the human concerns of the workers instead. Taking human concerns into account is not even an option with the current finance system that is obligated to increase shareholders profits. The thing is they're separate issues, you still need to regulate coal mines and desert farms regardless of who owns them. The Aral Sea disappeared because the Soviet government diverted all the water from the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers to grow cotton in Uzbekistan for export. I mean there are plenty of good reasons to want workers to have more power, but it doesn't fix every single problem on its own.
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May 10, 2023 02:59
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Discendo Vox posted:The lawsuit is actually from Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. If you've guessed that's a front organization from the name, you're right-they're an animal liberation group, part of the PETA constellation, though less honest. As with a lot of the activity in this area over the last few years, it's likely the VC behind the plant-based products industry is backing it since they know they're not getting the product labeling rules they wanted from FDA. Well. That's. Not a great reason. But accidentaly getting good things is better than not getting good things at all.
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May 10, 2023 03:15
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Yeah, I'm not troubled by an animal-rights group sponsoring a lawsuit against the milk cartel for the correct reasons, as in this instance. It's not actually a rebuttal against the legit reasons to not force milk to be the only liquid covered under federal funding for school lunches (aside from the cumbersome process of obtaining an alternative), especially given the impact of lactose intolerance among minority communities. And it's a strike against the regulatory capture of the USDA, which regulatory capture I think we would all agree is not a positive thing.
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May 10, 2023 03:30
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The dumb thing about milk is that it doesn’t to have lactose. It’s not expensive to make it lactose free.
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May 10, 2023 03:38
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Discendo Vox posted:The lawsuit is actually from Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. If you've guessed that's a front organization from the name, you're right-they're an animal liberation group, part of the PETA constellation, though less honest. As with a lot of the activity in this area over the last few years, it's likely the VC behind the plant-based products industry is backing it since they know they're not getting the product labeling rules they wanted from FDA. Isn’t this a bit of an ad hom, as far as objections to industry capture of public schools goes? There’s nothing here suggesting why it’s bad that somebody’s trying to open up alternatives to milk to a captive population.
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May 10, 2023 03:40
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Some extremely brief background for those not familiar with one relevant distinction here: the shorthand to remember is that "animal rights" groups tend toward functioning as a grift with actual animal wellbeing secondary to raising money, and "animal welfare" organizations actually try to improve animal welfare. This is a broad brush and there are other relevant factors, but it's the difference between ASPCA and PETA, for example. This all gets really messy because there's so much grift throughout the field.I AM GRANDO posted:Isn’t this a bit of an ad hom, as far as objections to industry capture of public schools goes? There’s nothing here suggesting why it’s bad that somebody’s trying to open up alternatives to milk to a captive population. Willa Rogers posted:Yeah, I'm not troubled by an animal-rights group sponsoring a lawsuit against the milk cartel for the correct reasons, as in this instance. It's not "sponsoring a lawsuit". It's their lawsuit. You should be troubled by a group like this touching anything, they're scum and extremely disingenuous (which is why considering the source is important; knowing the motivations and context of an argument isn't an ad hominem). The key thing here is that the backing groups are a competing industry with the same resources as dairy- and in particular, with the plant-based groups, they're a particularly well-heeled and insurgent set of actors with a pattern of trying to bulldoze regs they find inconvenient. They're not actually trying to "open up alternatives"; they're trying to get the nutritional requirements applicable to school meal beverages thrown out. There's plenty wrong with USDA and regulatory capture, but I promise you they're completely mercenary; the plant based people could easily (and almost certainly are, judging from recent dietary guidelines developments) working the capture and checkoff organization angles on their own. There'll probably be an amendment to the law within a decade to cover plant-based fluids, but the thing they want is to get rid of all the requirements associated with it (and, but for other recent rulemaking, just have their products labeled as "milk"). The statement of facts in the lawsuit is similarly pretextual; the student's communications (actually the attorneys) were attempting to get the school to punish her to establish a cause of action, but the school didn't do so, so they canceled the anti-dairy event she was pretending to set up and claimed harm on that instead. The school district also didn't cite to (and probably wasn't even thinking of) the regs that the plaintiffs are trying to get axed; they were likely trying to respond to what they saw as an effort to spread misinformation targeting students (which I can tell you is a common tactic from the animal rights groups, I used to keep a display of the poo poo they spread around college campuses), while responding to communications obviously coming from a legal team. Bar Ran Dun posted:The dumb thing about milk is that it doesn’t to have lactose. It’s not expensive to make it lactose free. To wit, the law and the regulation explicitly cover lactose-free milk, e.g. 42 U.S.C. § 1758 (a)(2)(ii); there's no requirement for a doctor's note to get that (though school districts may or may not automatically have it available). To make the racial disparity argument, the folks advocating for the lawsuit ignore this. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 05:03 on May 10, 2023 |
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May 10, 2023 04:23
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Google Jeb Bush posted:dividends do not require infinite growth Would the workers want to have more money than they know what to do with, regardless of any cost or consequence though?
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May 10, 2023 05:09
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…yes? Do you think greed only happens once you reach a certain bank balance?
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May 10, 2023 05:24
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Main Paineframe posted:Well, my point is that price gouging doesn't usually work. Consumers will respond to price increases by changing their buying behavior, and competitors will respond by taking the opportunity to undercut the gouger. People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. - Adam Smith Take the oil business or big ag as examples.
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May 10, 2023 05:31
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The worker cooperative coal mine isn't going to stop mining coal because it pollutes and the worker cooperative pharmaceutical company isn't going to sell medicine at cost out of social responsibility. That isn't a point against worker cooperatives, it's just problems that they don't solve.
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May 10, 2023 05:34
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re: shady campaign finance stuff in the US, is it a super-common thing that just frequently never gets prosecuted? I'm trying to wrap my head around why these people who are fighting too and claw against each other to stand under the microscope that comes with holding state- or nation-wide political power, are also choosing to do blatantly illegal stuff that doesn't aid them in obtaining that political power but is clearly visible to anyone looking through that microscope.
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May 10, 2023 12:20
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Eiba posted:The idea that everything and everyone wants infinite increases in their status forever is a really capitalist one. For most of human history most people cared about stability and keeping what they had, not constant improvement. If, somehow, workers coops were in the drivers seat of the economy, sure, they could still be set up to demand infinite growth. Or they could, just maybe, respond to the human concerns of the workers instead. Taking human concerns into account is not even an option with the current finance system that is obligated to increase shareholders profits. Really going to need a stronger supporting arguement/evidence for the assertion that greed is a recent development and uniquely or principally capitalist idea. People wanting their status increased infinitely is just basic greed and as far as I can tell pre-dates recorded history. If there is anything unique in that regard about capitalism is that it gave more people the opportunity to increase their status without limit compared to previous feudal systems.
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May 10, 2023 12:21
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They had debt jubilees for a reason.Slashrat posted:re: shady campaign finance stuff in the US, is it a super-common thing that just frequently never gets prosecuted? I'm trying to wrap my head around why these people who are fighting too and claw against each other to stand under the microscope that comes with holding state- or nation-wide political power, are also choosing to do blatantly illegal stuff that doesn't aid them in obtaining that political power but is clearly visible to anyone looking through that microscope. Because it benefits no one in power to discourage anyone from giving them money.
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May 10, 2023 12:24
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I'm not talking about donors giving money when they aren't allowed, but politicians funnelling campaign funds, which I understand have restrictions on how they can be used, into their own private bank accounts, which seems to be what was going on in this latest news story. Yeah, there's a motive of greed, but if you're aiming to advance you political career into national office, why are you stealing the money that is intended to get you there to spend it on other things?
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May 10, 2023 12:39
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They think they won’t get caught
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May 10, 2023 12:41
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Discendo Vox posted:Some extremely brief background for those not familiar with one relevant distinction here: the shorthand to remember is that "animal rights" groups tend toward functioning as a grift with actual animal wellbeing secondary to raising money, and "animal welfare" organizations actually try to improve animal welfare. This is a broad brush and there are other relevant factors, but it's the difference between ASPCA and PETA, for example. This all gets really messy because there's so much grift throughout the field. So twice now you have commented about PETA which you seem to hold in especially terrible regard. I'm wondering how you've come to the conclusion that they are "functioning as a grift" with fundraising as their primary goal? Your answer is especially interesting to me given your direct comparison to ASPCA. Looking at their most recent 990s, PETA spent 10.7% of total revenues on fundraising activities, while ASPCA spent 19.2%. I'm well aware of the challenge in getting 100% accurate and comparable fundraising expense numbers from 990s, but it would surprise me if ASPCA and PETA were using radically different standards for 990 compliance. It seems like your problem with PETA is their tactics rather than their mission or use of fundraising, and calling them out as an especially bad actor seems like it warrants more than a couple passing insults. To make my position clear, I am strongly in favor of nonprofits that have demonstrable mission success spending money on fundraising and do not generally like when organizations who do so are criticized for "prioritizing fundraising". And to make my bias known, I work in nonprofit fundraising.
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May 10, 2023 12:43
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Are you unfamiliar with literally anything PETA has said or done? Their parody video games were sometimes pretty fun I'll admit.
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May 10, 2023 12:52
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Slashrat posted:I'm not talking about donors giving money when they aren't allowed, but politicians funnelling campaign funds, which I understand have restrictions on how they can be used, into their own private bank accounts, which seems to be what was going on in this latest news story. The thing to know about a lot of these power hungry assholes is a decent chunk of them also aren't very smart or know how to not get caught.
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May 10, 2023 12:54
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Sub Par posted:So twice now you have commented about PETA which you seem to hold in especially terrible regard. I'm wondering how you've come to the conclusion that they are "functioning as a grift" with fundraising as their primary goal? Your answer is especially interesting to me given your direct comparison to ASPCA. Looking at their most recent 990s, PETA spent 10.7% of total revenues on fundraising activities, while ASPCA spent 19.2%. I'm well aware of the challenge in getting 100% accurate and comparable fundraising expense numbers from 990s, but it would surprise me if ASPCA and PETA were using radically different standards for 990 compliance. PETA's history of killing the animals they "save" is pretty well known. Or backing Autism pseudoscience. Are you a PETA activist out of curiosity? Do you work for PETA? The reason I ask is the way you answer reminds of how Scientologists online defend themselves against attacks against them.
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May 10, 2023 12:56
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Mooseontheloose posted:PETA's history of killing the animals they "save" is pretty well known. I am not a PETA activist, not a donor, not a vegan, do not work for, and never have worked for PETA. I am aware that their tactics are controversial and that they have a questionable history in some places, and I am not defending PETA per se, I am asking why they are being singled out as a "grift" where fundraising is the primary goal. What raised my curiosity is DV's explicit comparison to ASPCA (which I am a donor to) who has been been repeatedly called out in the animal welfare community for their fundraising practices and for failing to support local groups that do substantially similar work.
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May 10, 2023 13:12
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PETA is dedicated almost entirely to high-visibility stunts and weirdo rhetoric, but I wouldn’t call them sinister, exactly. Counterproductive to the point of poisoning the very ideas of animal rights and animal welfare, certainly. But their participation in a lawsuit doesn’t automatically mean the lawsuit is bad or that the usda policies regarding milk in schools are good. That kind of taint by association is the same kind of thinking you see with people who are antivax because vaccines are made by demonstrably evil corporations.
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May 10, 2023 13:16
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I AM GRANDO posted:PETA is dedicated almost entirely to high-visibility stunts and weirdo rhetoric, but I wouldn’t call them sinister, exactly. Counterproductive to the point of poisoning the very ideas of animal rights and animal welfare, certainly. But their participation in a lawsuit doesn’t automatically mean the lawsuit is bad or that the usda policies regarding milk in schools are good. That kind of taint by association is the same kind of thinking you see with people who are antivax because vaccines are made by demonstrably evil corporations. Right, they explicitly exist to take up the radical end of the Animal Rights spectrum. I don't agree with their tactics for the most part, either, but that doesn't make them grifters.
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May 10, 2023 13:17
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Eiba posted:The idea that everything and everyone wants infinite increases in their status forever is a really capitalist one. For most of human history most people cared about stability and keeping what they had, not constant improvement. If, somehow, workers coops were in the drivers seat of the economy, sure, they could still be set up to demand infinite growth. Or they could, just maybe, respond to the human concerns of the workers instead. Taking human concerns into account is not even an option with the current finance system that is obligated to increase shareholders profits. Most of human existence, not history. Can't really amass wealth beyond what you can carry as a hunter gatherer, and what is the point when wherever you go will have more stuff than you can carry, anyway? After agriculture, permanent settlement and land starting to have worth, I don't think anyone would have refused to have more of it.
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May 10, 2023 13:22
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Yeah I kinda don't care if the lawsuit is from PETA, regardless of their history. (btw I am not a member, have never donated, etc, and don't have a great view of them personally) Lactose intolerance isn't the only issue with dairy milk; dairy allergies are also common, and lactose-free milk doesn't address that. Growing up, I had a dairy allergy that has since faded and terrible allergy induced asthma and I would have been THRILLED if I could just get the same regular food as the rest of the kids and didn't have to bag lunch it. The bigger issues to me, though, are the environmental concerns, as seen here:  https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impact-milks (Data is based on the largest meta-analysis of food system impact studies to date, from Poore & Nemecek's 2018 study. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaq0216) The cattle industry is an incredible burden on our very stressed environment and I'm not sure how anyone can argue differently. I don't care if that's not the reason for the lawsuit. There are very, very good reasons to push back against the dairy industry, without even getting issues of animal rights. Though, to be transparent, animal rights are also a concern for me, and in response to DV, I don't think it's fair to criticize animal liberation groups for failing to focus on animal welfare. That's not their concern. It would be like criticizing a prison abolitionist group for failing to focus on getting better funding for prisons so that their prisoners can be treated more nicely.
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May 10, 2023 13:46
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