Interesting to read this and think about how the future of AI might turn out if the google microsoft cartel comes into being like they're trying to.
The cartel that controls the US meat industry
31–40 of 171 posts
Re: The cartel that controls the US meat industry
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not a better excuse than what they had before. The question is why didn't competition undercut them to keep prices low as it had before. Food company excuses don't matter, people will continue to buy the product they perceive as having the best value.
> The question is why didn't competition undercut them to keep prices low as it had before. This question is answered by the title of the article.
Not really. The article doesn't have any evidence of collusion at all. 4 competitors should be more than enough to prevent abuses of market power.
Re: The cartel that controls the US meat industry
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
You should see the cartel Monsanto has on agriculture This is just one more reason we should push for sustainable farming, including meat products. livestock naturally bring nitrogen and other nutrients back into the soil when grazing. Then use that land to grow plants, move the animals where plants pulled the nutrients from the soil, rinse and repeat. Also reduces the need for harmful fertilizers that impact the eco…
("We" below refers to the US, and an increasing proportion of the world that is adopting US farming practices). There's a good-natured argument to be made that plant-based diets are more sustainable, because we don't generally farm meat sustainably and ensuring that your meat was farmed sustainably is difficult and expensive. But it's important to underline that sustainable is an insufficient target in the U.S. in 20…
Alan Savory? Regenerative holistic farming? It's mostly bullshit (not my words), apparently.
Re: The cartel that controls the US meat industry
#34I was really interested in the figure that shows prices going up while input costs decrease. But this doesn’t reflect all inputs just the price of meat procured. There are many other input costs, mostly labor. So this diagram is really frustrating as it makes me want to reach a conclusion (wtf, what an unnatural difference) without giving me enough information to know anything. It would be like showing that household…
> In general, I don’t know if they answer properly if profits increased because of inflation or if inflation increased because of inflation. Since the cartel existed before the shift, I would like to know what they think made companies suddenly get greedier. That's my big question too with all this "greed driving inflation" discourse. I don't doubt it at all, in fact, from everything I see it seems like the likeliest…
The price of inputs is going up, but so are interest rates (and expected future interest rates). So where money was cheap, it's going to become more expensive. I suspect it's understandable a business would want to increase its margins given the expectation of higher rates -- as opposed to the personified "greed" narrative.
Re: The cartel that controls the US meat industry
#35RFK put out a video explaining how this consolidation occurred in the pork industry: https://twitter.com/RobertKennedyJr/status/16865387973102428...
It was basically a case of a politician, Wendell Murphy, who helped pass 28 laws making it illegal to sue a factory farm, then left office and went into partnership with Smithfield Foods, a Chinese-owned company (which according to Wikipedia was "the largest Chinese acquisition of an American company to date"). Smithfield and Wendell used the factory farming model to undercut and put out of business almost all of the smaller pork farms. They now control 80% of pork US production and put 28,000 independent farmers out of business.
I personally do not understand why China controlling 80% of pork production in the US is not a national security issue. But, that aside, this seems pretty bad for the country.
*Edit, I remembered the video wrong, they control 80% of pork production _in North Carolina_. They control 26% of all US pork processing and 15% of pork production. They also have been found guilty of price fixing: https://www.reuters.com/legal/pork-consumers-75-million-pric...
Re: The cartel that controls the US meat industry
#36A reminder that Tyson is abusing the legal system to force people in the American south into working in their chicken plants for free: https://revealnews.org/article/they-thought-they-were-going-... I don't know every brand that uses Tyson products, but when I discover something is coming from a Tyson factory I stop purchasing it.
Wow, this is atrocious
Re: The cartel that controls the US meat industry
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
You should see the cartel Monsanto has on agriculture This is just one more reason we should push for sustainable farming, including meat products. livestock naturally bring nitrogen and other nutrients back into the soil when grazing. Then use that land to grow plants, move the animals where plants pulled the nutrients from the soil, rinse and repeat. Also reduces the need for harmful fertilizers that impact the eco…
But animal ag is far from sustainable, unfortunately. Climate change, resource depletion, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, pollution, overpopulation, soil erosion, and overfishing are all symptoms of ecological overshoot. Agriculture is a key culprit in most of those symptoms, and animal ag accounts for 80% of all agriculture. Animal ag is directly responsible for majority of deforestation, is a major driver of b…
Those sources are cool and all but I like cheese /s
Re: The cartel that controls the US meat industry
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In general, I don’t know if they answer properly if profits increased because of inflation or if inflation increased because of inflation. Since the cartel existed before the shift, I would like to know what they think made companies suddenly get greedier. That's my big question too with all this "greed driving inflation" discourse. I don't doubt it at all, in fact, from everything I see it seems like the likeliest…
The price of inputs is going up, but so are interest rates (and expected future interest rates). So where money was cheap, it's going to become more expensive. I suspect it's understandable a business would want to increase its margins given the expectation of higher rates -- as opposed to the personified "greed" narrative.
Thank you, that's actually the first interpretation that makes total sense to me. If you know that sources of financing are drying up and will stay that way into the foreseeable future, raising prices to make up for it does seem like the most obvious thing to do.
Re: The cartel that controls the US meat industry
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same. This is about meat, although since a lot of our land is used to grow feed for livestock, subsidies for plant agriculture are indirectly subsidizing inefficient animal agriculture.
Calling meat agriculture inefficient makes no sense, when meat is a vital, and necessary food. Most of the world grazes meat animals, no crop feeding, and do so on land utterly unusable for crops. If you want to dive into weirdo anti-meat statements, at least be sensible. We could just eat raw vitamins and eat bacteria paste too, instead of "inefficient" fertilizer driven crops.
It is still unclear if the land that is used for grazing could be suitable for growing crop that could be used for human consumption. Where do you think the grazing land comes from? Clearing natural habitat. And no, except for extreme conditions (like people living in extreme cold), meat is not a necessary food. An average human living in a city/village with moderate temperatures (especially when most of their time is spent inside buildings) does not need meat, they only want it.
Re: The cartel that controls the US meat industry
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