All markets are free, but some markets are freer than others.
The Onion Futures Act
61–70 of 79 posts
Re: The Onion Futures Act
#62On a side note, I hovered the cursor over "Onion" and was surprised to find out it's classified as a fruit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion
"Intelligence is knowing tomatoes are a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put them in your fruit salad"
Re: The Onion Futures Act
#63Someone listed to NPR's Planet Money Onion King episode
https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor...
Re: The Onion Futures Act
#64>This led to the emergence of new leadership who pioneered a different strategy, expanding the exchange's traded products to include futures contracts on pork bellies and frozen concentrate orange juice ...and we all know what happened to the FCOJ market in 1983.
Planet Money had an episode on this
The Eddie Murphy rule/what happens at the end of Trading Places
https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor...
as well as on the onion King (https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor...) which I assume is where op found out about this story.
Re: The Onion Futures Act
#65Laws should have an expiration date. Otherwise in 100 years there will be 1 million laws.
yeah man, every 100 years we should have to re-abolish slavery
FOH
Re: The Onion Futures Act
#66Laws should have an expiration date. Otherwise in 100 years there will be 1 million laws.
Laws need diffs and refactoring.
This is why Programmers shouldn't be legislatures
/s but sort of no /s
Laws aren't clean enough for diffs.
refactoring isn't a bad idea but is quite difficult.
Laws aren't written and can't be written as exactly specified specs.
Laws are written to be interpreted loosely by human judges and applied to a bunch of difficult real world messiness. Not clearly defined interfaces and types.
Re: The Onion Futures Act
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Try Freakonomics if you haven't already. I did the full back catalog on both.
At the risk of derailing things and spiraling into off-topic chatter... is anyone else really bothered by the background music on the Freakonomics podcast? They seem to use the same tracks every episode. Ten years ago that wasn't particularly grating, but as production values in podcasting have gone up listening now I feel like I'm hearing a marketing video thrown together on fiverr.
I'm bothered by the fact that they have background music at all. I listen to a lot of BBC podcasts and none of them have background music. Only a few use music at all, mostly as a kind of punctuation and emphasis for dramatic parts.
I find most podcasts that I have tried that originate in the US unlistenable because of the background music.
Re: The Onion Futures Act
#68There seems to have been some wider failures in the market here. The article states that prices rose elsewhere, whilst crashing in Chicago. Why did no one arbitrage. Why did the farmers feel pressured to buy the oversupply. Cornering the market like this /shouldn't/ have worked.
I'm actually kind of surprised there isn't some law somewhere banning primary producers buying their own product. Think about a mine buying in raw ore and then selling it, could make the mine look more successful than I actually was. Considering investment by the elite before the 19th century would have been direct into these kinds of operations, I'm surprised enough weren't burned to push for a law change.
Re: The Onion Futures Act
#69"In the 2000s (decade), onion prices were significantly more volatile than corn or oil prices. This volatility led the son of a farmer who initially lobbied for the ban to advocate a return to onion futures trading." This is the important part -- ag futures are insurance for farmers. You don't have to get it, but it limits your downside when you do, which is extremely important in low-margin, capital-intensive indust…
Isn’t there then just the option of traditional split-risk insurance?
Re: The Onion Futures Act
#70On a side note, I hovered the cursor over "Onion" and was surprised to find out it's classified as a fruit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion
"Intelligence is knowing tomatoes are a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put them in your fruit salad"
Unless you are talking botany, calling a tomato a fruit is falling for the fallacy of equivocation and too many people do this and have the pretension that they are being smart. The word "fruit" has multiple definitions, a tomato is a fruit by definition 1, but not a fruit by definition 2.
What most people understand by the word fruit is definition 2.