141–150 of 270 posts
I did not realize the egg crisis was found to be price fixing operation. As I recall during the whole thing the news was non-stop about how it was related to broad-based inflation, chicken culling for avian flu, etc. Seems like all that was a lie, or at least merely a half-truth.
Never let a good crisis go to waste, or so the saying goes. The consolidation of food production in the US is a risk to us all.
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> What do you think the chances of being caught shoplifting is? If it's less than 50-33%, then you have the same problem as the OP where it makes sense to shoplift. Don't we already? Police and DAs at least here in California are not serious about punishing shoplifters AFAICT. I hear people say this is specifically because of the 2014 Proposition 47 (raising the threshold for felony theft from $400 to $950). Not sure…
>Don't we already? So clearly we should... make it even more lenient? That's what OP was implying.
I think the current situation is not great, but I'd want to fix it by investigating why we're seemingly unable/unwilling to impose the punishment currently on the books. I think it would be plenty if we did—to me, more than six months jail time for stealing <$950 would be excessive. We could increase the fines and decrease / take away the jail option, but does it matter? It's not happening anyway.
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I call it 3 scams in a trench coat pretending to be a real economy. Though obviously there are more than 3 going. You kinda have to be in one of the grifts in order to pay the costs of the others, like work in military contracting in order to pay for healthcare. That’s why crackdowns on fraud, collusion, and other such grifts, rackets, and anticompetitive actions in the US is doomed to fail, those who benefit from it…
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I'm not typically a fan of government intervention in markets but Canada's marketing boards do stop this sort of concentration, so while we have higher average prices we do not get massive swings in prices, nor the physical conditions that come directly out of production consolidation that lead to events (or justifications) like avian flu at the same scale.
It's exactly the opposite as you say though, no? Canada has much more market concentration than the US, probably a major cause of the higher prices: https://alphabridge.co/economy/canadas-oligopoly-one-big-cou...
It is a form of farming subsidy that was specifically structured to avoid passing money through the government, and structured to control price volatility.
This is separate from the commercial market concentration in Canada, which is definitely real. To a degree, this is just the reality of being a smaller market. The depth and breathe of the American economy is definitely at play here.
If you compare Canadian super market consolidation vs Germany or UK (for example), you find a much more similar situation.
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The major egg supplier for most of the grocery stores decided not to buy as many pullets to replace the ones they culled from Avian Flu, and then the second and third largest also followed suit. As a result there was a bug supply crunch that coincided with Avian Flu cullings. Unless Biden was there making command decisions about how many pullets to buy that year he had nothing to do with it.
Not disagreeing, but all I heard was Biden-flation (or whatever they called it) was why we needed a new President.
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If you think that denying a specific treatment (justified or otherwise) is comparable murder for hire, then I don't think there's anything worth discussing between the two of us.
Yeah, in my opinion an unjustified and profit motivated refusal to save a life is the same as intentionally taking that life. It's just the trolley problem and you're arguing that there is some innate nobility in refusing to touch the switch.
Even if criminal charges are a slap on the wrist, civil damages could easily get into the billions. And good luck finding a jury that doesn't remember the national outcry about egg prices back then.
I think the craziest part of the story is how brazen the execs were. Although what they were doing (price steering in an illiquid market) might well not be illegal, it pretty blatantly is in a grey (dark grey) area and they themselves obviously knew they were exploiting the system for themselves.
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The major egg supplier for most of the grocery stores decided not to buy as many pullets to replace the ones they culled from Avian Flu, and then the second and third largest also followed suit. As a result there was a bug supply crunch that coincided with Avian Flu cullings. Unless Biden was there making command decisions about how many pullets to buy that year he had nothing to do with it.
Not disagreeing, but all I heard was Biden-flation (or whatever they called it) was why we needed a new President.
Please invest in some happy backyard chickens if you are able. We did, and it's amazing.
I guess that depends on your interpretation of "invest." I don't know of anybody who claimed to save money on eggs by raising their own chickens. It's more of a lifestyle decision than a financial one.