One-quarter of the world’s pigs died in a year due to swine fever in China

A recent one that comes to mind is a thread that was talking about nuclear reactors, within a few hours (I think within the first hour) someone that actually designs nuclear reactors for a living was in the thread clearing up misconceptions and answering questions.

One sterling example of what makes a great trader came when he was woken up to news of Chernobyl. Like most people aware of the disaster, he was thinking in terms of fear, long term effects of radiation and nuclear anxiety. His trader friend called him with a tip to buy potatoes. He called back to say also diapers.

The trader correctly identified market trends in reaction to both nuclear radiation on global food stocks, and human behavior aggregates to nuclear anxiety (which in 9 months leads to higher demand for diapers).

It's a state of mind not entirely human, but understanding human behavior.

The host has a libertarian bias but is pretty upfront about it so you know where he's coming from. I don't agree with him on everything but his podcast is almost always interesting.

Seconded. They're the same price in Canada and the taste of the Beyond patties is often better than the meat ones. It's a good change of pace if I'm not seeing pure protein (in which case whey powder is probably better anyway).

https://www.danishcrown.com/en/contact/our-locations/danish-...

Danish Crown UK Ltd

Activities:

Sales to retailers, meat processors, wholesalers, foodservice, independent retailers and butcher shops.

Production of premium hand salted Danish bacon and bespoke foodservice pork and beef.

Nationwide distribution.

Products:

Cured pork (gammon and bacon), pork, beef, chicken, lamb, burgers and sausages.

They did, and it’s one of the key reasons centrally planned economies always fail (really their resistance to failure is only determined by their people’s endurance for suffering). In a free market, value is set by supply and demand, bad decisions and bad ideas don’t survive, and you have some reasonably decent metrics to measure success. In a planned economy, value is set by the planning committee. As a decision maker in such a system, your value is determined by how successful you are at convincing those higher up the chain that you have good ideas and make good decisions. Every decision maker in the chain of command is incentivized to lie to their superiors, and the ultimate authority is incentivized to lie to the public. Small failures and course corrections are not possible under such a system, so for a failure to be acknowledged, it has to overcome the ability of the person who’s responsible for it to conceal it. It becomes essential for anybody with any power to control the “truth”.

You can see the same dynamics at play in any sufficiently large organisation (generally scaling proportional to the slowing feedback loop between decision and outcome, and with any form of complexity that would obscure the direct relationship between decision and outcome), though usually on a much smaller scale. China allows enough free market activity to take place to allow it to survive, but you can see the failures of its planning committees everywhere.

Nobody has talked about the mandate of heaven for at least a hundred years, orientalist historiography notwithstanding. Historically, compared to other peer societies over the same periods, China has been very stable for long periods of time. It is only in the extremely myopic recent that the so-called "developed world" has seemed more stable and prosperous, and even that's highly debatable in aspects. On the other hand, when it does happen, rebellion or discontent for basic food safety reasons has no unique Chinese angle to it because it happens all the time all over the world, so I'm not sure what there is to gain by injecting something Chinese into it, except knee-jerk ideology.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/04/business/china-food-price...

Wisdomtree ETF which tries to track US hog futures prices (with some drag)

Not sure about CVGW. Might be too small a market.

Sounds like a legit strategy, but it also sounds like part of it is actively not competing with them.

doesn't sound like the world of "tiny volumes", but something that moves pretty big markets, which is hardly an under-the-radar trade.

I noticed a stock was up ~60% one morning not too long ago, and when I looked for news, it turned out that they just had their drug approved by the FDA. But it continued to rise throughout the day, and eventually leveled off at about triple what it had been the previous day.

The approval of a drug is about as clean and discrete a piece of market moving information as you can get, and yet anyone who could put it in context had hours to buy. That shouldn't make people go "oh, there are always exceptions", but "hmm, maybe a fundamental assumption somewhere is wrong".

I mean, presumably people are using ML and inside information to the hilt, as much as they can, in today's market. But the consequences aren't what people think.

Difficulty? It is all relative... I know 30+ computer languages, but can barely speak english (haha). =) So for me, both would be impossible. Vietnamese is tonal + context and I just don't hear the tones at all.

A few other ways to look at things... yes, I miss out on a lot by not knowing Vietnamese, but at the same time it is a low value language in all other countries. I won't need it elsewhere and I'm not sure I want to live here forever.

Not knowing the language has made me tune my other senses more... I can usually pick up on what people are talking about just by gestures.

The other thing I've noticed is that I just don't have much in common with people who don't know english... there is just so much that you miss out on in the world that cultural values and judgements tend to be vastly different.

Travel. Live in other countries. Pay attention to what is around you. It really gives you immense perspective that you don't get otherwise.

You must have misread what I wrote because I never claimed that they were. I put quotes around "plant diseases" because the two major outbreaks that everybody thinks about weren't plant diseases, they were animal-related.

When the Europeans started crossing oceans to contact very different civilizations they brought the diseases which themselves committed genocide because the new populations hadn't had the same difficulty or interactions with animals and diseases.

The diseases I'm referring to here are the ones that are making humans sick on a large scale, like E. coli for example. I'd think it was obvious given the context. But then again this is hackernews so being pedantic about everything is par for the course.