U.S. Reels to a Meat Shortage and Prices Are Getting Weird • Hacker News Board

Re: U.S. Reels to a Meat Shortage and Prices Are Getting Weird

#31

Post by tastygreenapple » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 1:43 AM UTC

vkou wrote: post #9

empath75 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact, government stimulus will just cause hyperinflation as more money chases less goods and services.

1. We would need to print quadrillions of dollars to get hyperinflation. Hyperinflation is a boogieman, unless this administration completely loses its mind. 2. Recessions cause the destruction of money (Due to defaults, and lack of new loans). This causes deflation. If the new money created by the printing press does not exceed these deflationary pressures, you won't even get inflation, let alone hyperinflation. 3.…

Deflation isn't horrible unless you have a lot of debt, it rewards savers. It's probably less efficient for central banks to try to 'hack' inflation than just deploy fiscal policy.

And we're almost definitely seeing inflation in the finanical markets. It's not great that valuations are so divorced from fundamentals.

Re: U.S. Reels to a Meat Shortage and Prices Are Getting Weird

#32

Post by perl4ever » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 1:45 AM UTC

flomk wrote: post #13

I wonder if a meat shortage that causes people who previously hadn't eaten plant substitutes, will be enough to let plant substitute companies take a bigger chunk of the meat market for good.

The products you're referring to started out more expensive; why do you think they will become relatively cheaper? And why would people who prefer meat not just eat smaller quantities? If butter becomes more expensive, I'm not going to substitute margarine.

Re: U.S. Reels to a Meat Shortage and Prices Are Getting Weird

#33

Post by mlyle » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 1:47 AM UTC

tastygreenapple wrote: post #31

vkou wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. We would need to print quadrillions of dollars to get hyperinflation. Hyperinflation is a boogieman, unless this administration completely loses its mind. 2. Recessions cause the destruction of money (Due to defaults, and lack of new loans). This causes deflation. If the new money created by the printing press does not exceed these deflationary pressures, you won't even get inflation, let alone hyperinflation. 3.…

Deflation isn't horrible unless you have a lot of debt, it rewards savers. It's probably less efficient for central banks to try to 'hack' inflation than just deploy fiscal policy. And we're almost definitely seeing inflation in the finanical markets. It's not great that valuations are so divorced from fundamentals.

Deflation punishes investing in anything. Deflation rewards hoarding cash.

Re: U.S. Reels to a Meat Shortage and Prices Are Getting Weird

#34

Post by empath75 » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 1:47 AM UTC

vkou wrote: post #9

empath75 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact, government stimulus will just cause hyperinflation as more money chases less goods and services.

1. We would need to print quadrillions of dollars to get hyperinflation. Hyperinflation is a boogieman, unless this administration completely loses its mind. 2. Recessions cause the destruction of money (Due to defaults, and lack of new loans). This causes deflation. If the new money created by the printing press does not exceed these deflationary pressures, you won't even get inflation, let alone hyperinflation. 3.…

If there isn’t ground beef and flour being made, the price will go up.

Re: U.S. Reels to a Meat Shortage and Prices Are Getting Weird

#35

Post by bsder » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 1:48 AM UTC

mlyle wrote: post #22

IIAOPSW wrote: post #17

One pet peeve I have with this article is that it doesn't explicitly state the cause of the shutdowns are Corona virus infected employees until half way through. I was 90% sure, but there was still a chance of coincidence. Anyway the meat industry isn't special. The whole economy needs to run on stocked up supplies and skeleton crews for a while. That's why its so important to get this right the first time. If the lo…

That's not how it's going to work. There's no reasonable way to extinguish this in one swell foop. We need to move (ASAP) in jurisdictions where the virus is largely under control, to half-measures that are hopefully sufficient to prevent another large incident wave and that provide economic output/lets us "stock up again". This will allow a slow reduction in population susceptibility. And we need to be ready to tigh…

> a good chunk of the way to herd immunity

Herd immunity isn't a solution if your immunity only lasts 6 months. This is NOT a flu virus--this is a Coronavirus--immunity is generally limited for Coronaviruses(virii?).

If it's under 12 months, every flu season will likely also be Covid-19 season.

Cornavirus immunity seems to top out at about 24-36 months--if you're lucky. SARS seems to be 24, IIRC.

Re: U.S. Reels to a Meat Shortage and Prices Are Getting Weird

#36

Post by pascalxus » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 1:49 AM UTC

It's not commonly known but Vegetables, Grains and Beans are extremely excellent sources of protein. Most of them have between 10-20% or more of their calories from protein. if you want exact numbers, check out this: https://kale.world/c

And, if people reduce their meat consumption form these shortages, it could have excellent results on people's health. The last time a country went completely without meat or dairy was in durring the world war, when the Nazis took all the dairy and meat from Sweden. Their rate of heart disease went down dramatically for many years. As soon as the war ended and meat returned, the rate of heart disease sky rocketed back to the original numbers. (source: Forks over knives, a netflix documentary).

Re: U.S. Reels to a Meat Shortage and Prices Are Getting Weird

#37

Post by 0x8BADF00D » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 1:50 AM UTC

mlyle wrote: post #12

vkou wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. We would need to print quadrillions of dollars to get hyperinflation. Hyperinflation is a boogieman, unless this administration completely loses its mind. 2. Recessions cause the destruction of money (Due to defaults, and lack of new loans). This causes deflation. If the new money created by the printing press does not exceed these deflationary pressures, you won't even get inflation, let alone hyperinflation. 3.…

Some stimulus measures are creating money to chase flour and ground beef-- the paycheck protection program, etc, are borrowing (and re-lending) in order to preserve pay to consumers. But I agree it's not most of it.

You won't see it until it's too late. Inflation is a backward looking measure. Expected inflation can be inferred by nominal interest rates. If you look at the corporate debt market those rates are already quite high.

What happened in the oil market could easily happen in the gold market, but in reverse. Nobody wanted to take delivery on oil, but a lot of people are going to want to take delivery on gold, because there's a shortage of it. At what point does COMEX go bankrupt when nobody is honoring their word to deliver gold upon expiry?

A high gold price would be very bad for dollars, because gold is an alternative reserve currency to dollars. Instead of buying a tbill, someone can just buy gold, hold it, and sell a small portion when they need to buy dollar denominated assets, mainly crude. And crude prices are at historic lows, so you don't need to buy as many dollars as you did before.

Re: U.S. Reels to a Meat Shortage and Prices Are Getting Weird

#38

Post by perl4ever » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 1:50 AM UTC

ZainRiz wrote: post #23

More stories about how covid19 is really screwing up other parts of the supply chain Farmers being forced to pour milk down the drain: https://twitter.com/freshairfarmer/status/124787620556452659... Retail toilet paper manufacturers not setup to handle load from people pooping at home instead of work (and corporate TP factories don't know how to sell to grocery stores): https://marker.medium.com/what-everyones-gettin…

Obviously you got to distinguish between problems that are going to get better over time and those that are going to get worse. It seems like people are just randomly assigning things to those categories. I mean, switching products from B2B to B2C (toilet paper, milk, flour, etc) is obviously something that can't happen instantly, but must be taking place as fast as humanly possible, right? So if you're writing an article about impending doom in the coming weeks and months, surely you need to pick a different topic, I would think.

Re: U.S. Reels to a Meat Shortage and Prices Are Getting Weird

#39

Post by ortusdux » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 1:51 AM UTC

I am concerned that efforts to mitigate the damage from Covid-19 might open a window for African Swine Flu to spread to the US. China has culled 40% of their 440M pig population fighting the virus. There are promising vaccines in the works, but until they come to market a domestic pork viral outbreak could easily get out of hand while we are focused on C19.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00742-w

Re: U.S. Reels to a Meat Shortage and Prices Are Getting Weird

#40

Post by mlyle » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 1:52 AM UTC

bsder wrote: post #35

mlyle wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how it's going to work. There's no reasonable way to extinguish this in one swell foop. We need to move (ASAP) in jurisdictions where the virus is largely under control, to half-measures that are hopefully sufficient to prevent another large incident wave and that provide economic output/lets us "stock up again". This will allow a slow reduction in population susceptibility. And we need to be ready to tigh…

> a good chunk of the way to herd immunity Herd immunity isn't a solution if your immunity only lasts 6 months. This is NOT a flu virus--this is a Coronavirus--immunity is generally limited for Coronaviruses(virii?). If it's under 12 months, every flu season will likely also be Covid-19 season. Cornavirus immunity seems to top out at about 24-36 months--if you're lucky. SARS seems to be 24, IIRC.

I think a reasonable somewhat pessimistic (but not worst-case) assumption is that immunity is similar to common-cold coronaviruses; lifelong partial protection, total protection for 24-36 months, some degree of cross-strain reactivity.

Kissler et al published a really good analysis of kinematics and transmission dynamics in Science based on what we know about human coronaviruses, cross-immunity, etc. (Now that we are beginning to believe infection rates are even higher in comparison to case counts than we believed before, it looks pessimistic in various ways).

The research I've read on SARS-COV-1 shows a slower fall in antibody titers than other human coronaviruses. Though, unfortunately, I'm unaware of any study that followed patients past 3 years.

I believe that if you took one of the existing common cold coronaviruses, and introduced it to an immunologically naive population, you'd get a huge incident wave and a whole lot of excess death.