U.S. Reels to a Meat Shortage and Prices Are Getting Weird
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Food falls under the economy, the economy isn't just the stock market or things rich people do rich people things in. The economy is the vast network stretching across the globe that works to supply goods and services in the places they are needed, when the economy starts shutting down so do a lot of things we need for daily life. All the government stimulus in the world isn't going to help anyone if there aren't goods to purchase.
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 is horrible, and is much more dangerous than mild inflation.
4. The printed money is currently chasing investment assets (Mostly stocks), not flour and ground beef. Our previous experience with QE did not result in the prices of commodities inflating - only the prices of investments.
Inflation is not the problem.
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.
Gold is a commodity, not a currency. I can't pay my tax bill in gold.
It was actually a currency longer than Federal Reserve notes were in existence. Not sure why you'd pay your taxes in gold, but you can, only it would be based on the face value of each gold coin.
Is there actually a mathematical equation that proves this or is that your conjecture?
There's ~20 Trillion of it.
Hyperinflation is, by definition, 50% monthly, ~600% annual inflation.
The Fed has, so far in this crisis, printed ~2 Trillion that is staying in the economy (The rest goes into very short term liquidity). It's not a hyperinflationary scenario, even if they print another 2, or 4, or 6 trillion.
If they printed 20 trillion, that would be another story.
And we're almost definitely seeing inflation in the finanical markets. It's not great that valuations are so divorced from fundamentals.
The meat plants have largely stayed open as essential businesses, only closing or even putting in controls when there's a number of employee cases that can no longer be ignored. So in this case, we're not looking at the trade-off between closing companies preemptively to save lives and economic output, but instead the trade-off between closing companies in response to severe sickness throughout the workforce vs. whatever economic could remain in these conditions.
I -do- think in a lot of jurisdictions, e.g. the SF Bay Area-- we are going too far. We've had slowly declining ICU occupancy for the past 3 weeks (a trailing indicator behind disease) and now even case counts are falling noticeably even though testing has improved. We should be -slightly- easing controls and seeing if we can keep the disease load constant or falling. Instead we won't even talk about it until May 4th, and I worry we'll either take too much of a step at once or make a tiny movement much later than we should have tried it.
The problem is we STILL don't have enough equipment for healthcare workers if that ICU starts filling up.
Part of the reason for the lockdown was to give time for all the equipment industries to spin up. Unfortunately, the US federal government squandered that.
Until the hospitals can deal with a New York scenario and not have the healthcare workers contracting it due to lack of equipment, we shouldn't relax.
Frequent, small changes are good. Not big steps and milestones.
Population behavior has further changed in beneficial ways, too-- e.g. mask wearing. Step back to the initial health order -now-. In a couple weeks, consider opening a slightly larger chunk of retail. After each step, watch what happens.
The US had been losing actual Hospital capacity every week, even with empty beds.
When those beds fill in wave 2, get ready to donate your rain ponchos and industrial garbage bags.
On the other hand, a whole lot of measures seem to be consuming PPE at a fixed rate-- per personnel-day when COVID is present. That is, PPE usage is not strictly proportional with disease load, because the virus imposes a large fixed load.
https://abc7news.com/health/the-surge-that-never-came-leads-...
It wasn’t an accident. The equipment was stolen (“seized”) by the DHS en route to hospitals and then funneled to friends of those in the federal government to be resold on the open market: look up “blue flame medical” if you want to know more.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/skbaer/coronavirus-ppe-...
1. Meatpacking, and its supporting supply chains is an essential business. No state in the US has lifted a finger to shut it down.
2. These plant shutdowns are caused by people working in meatpacking plants getting sick, and being unable to work.
I don't understand how you can blame this on an economic shutdown. If anything, without the shutdown, the meatpackers would have gotten sick sooner, and in greater numbers.
There has been slowed production due to inadequate workforce, but I don't think many plants have -closed- for this reason.
The markets have cascading effect, even if individuals don't own equity. Unemployment is a huge factor in what people generally refer to as "the economy."
It's all intertwined and I think most people realize that.
Then, just within food itself, what of people with allergies and special needs, and separating the "real" from the "I think gluten free means healthier" types.
It's the kind of dependency complexity that economists would drool over, but during good times it's probably a far less profitable area of research than those that cause economics to be looked down upon as part of the problem.
There aren't any. If you grow food, you're essential. If you ship food, you're essential. If you fix the trucks that ship food, you're essential. If you fix the air conditioner in the auto shop that fixes the trucks that ship food, you're essential. If you make screws for the air conditioner that gets installed in that auto shop, you're essential.
Read the shutdown orders. They enumerate essential industries, and the list of them is incredibly broad. In Washington state (Which has one of first, and furthest reaching shutdown orders), if you make literally anything that the military uses... You're essential. The list is incredibly broad.
These disruptions are caused directly by the virus getting people sick, and taking them out of work (And their workplaces, until people can get tested, and their workspace can be sanitized) - not the shutdown.
The shutdown actually serves to keep these facilities open, because it has reduced the virus's spread through the population.
> The shutdown actually serves to keep these facilities open, because it has reduced the virus's spread through the population
Yes, in total agreement. I'm in favour of the shutdowns because I can see far enough ahead to know how much worse things would be if they didn't happen. Those who bemoan the damage to the economy strike me as either incredibly short-sighted or selfish or both. Admittedly, however, I'm coming from the lucky and mightily privileged position of not having lost my job (at this point), although I do have "that Damocles feeling" fairly constantly.
i'm not a vegetarian but if the choice is between people living and me having access to pork i choose the former.
But seriously, it's never going to be a binary thing. 100 years ago, people ate far less meat, because it was relatively more expensive and scarcer. While avoiding shopping, I've not been eating meat on a daily basis. Once a week or so is fine.
the person i responded to is portraying it as a necessary dichotomy i.e. some sort of catastrophic disruption to the food supply chain. the article in particular discusses pork, not even chicken or beef.
This isn't a problem specific to meat at all; the same kind of interruption to supply chains can occur anywhere through the economy. So you don't necessarily have the option of falling back on veggies.
Vegetables have a longer shelf life than meat and grains a longer shelf life still. So you're just wrong.
Grains are better in that regard since there's much more automation.
If you think about it, meat plants are the wet markets of the US. Albeit with sanitary standards, refrigeration, etc, but if there was going to be another zoonotic crossbreeding event, where the human coronavirus from a sick plant worker merges and mutates with a bovine coronavirus within dying slaughterhouse animals - you could be looking at a worse event.
These plants are not shutting down because of precautions, they are shutting down because the plant workers are sick and test positive.
I'd love to see some rich people forced to work in meat packing plants alongside men and women infected with this coronavirus.
It's inherently immoral to force people to work at great risk to themselves and their families just because "the economy", as would be the case in states where the abhorrent practice of at-will employment is law.
We obviously don't shut everything down because of 1 in 1,000,000 risks. We don't shut everything down for 250 in 1M risks (the flu).
Here we have what's likely to be a 1,800 in 1M risk, based on the latest infection fatality rate numbers and the estimate of how many people would be infected before herd immunity. It's 7x worse than the flu. It's also not a risk that it's clear we'll be able to avoid. So here it gets hard to reason about what's right to do.
And, of course, we obviously can't act to protect people at a level that will result in worse outcomes, like starvation or famine or collapse of public order.
Meat-packing plants are an essential service, so they are allowed to remain open, but they are temporarily shut down once it becomes evident that a few workers have been infected and the risk of infection for the other workers rises to... as you put it "unacceptable".
Sadly, in at-will employment states, only the rich get to decide what is an acceptable level of risk.
And, of course, any at-will employee is free to choose to not work in an environment that they personally consider to be too high of a level of risk, even if their employer and local public health officials disagree.
I'm in an at-will jurisdiction-- there's a whole bunch of people here who want to work but have been precluded from doing so because of public health orders.
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-getting-wrong-about...
Covid testing blocked because of equipment regulations:
No, because half the business world thinks that we're going to all re-open in two weeks, and isn't willing to spend money on any kind of retooling/restructuring for such a short period of time.
They've also briefly had shitty 1ply commercial toilet paper with big plastic bag and twist-tie packaging.
After all, we could use robustness as our optimization criterion.
> After all, we could use robustness as our optimization criterion.
It's almost impossible to optimize for "robustness". You are always optimizing some measure. You would have to deoptimize for all measures, and that's just silly from an engineering perspective.
The only thing you can do is to simply not optimize to the last 0.1%.
The whole toilet paper fiasco is a good example. Toilet paper is such a low-margin business that everybody optimized it to hell and back. Lines are already running 24/7 even in normal times. The consumer and industrial production is split so they can optimize them independently to squeeze those last couple fractional percentage points out by making commercial toilet paper even shittier.
Consequently, there is zero ability to absorb the demand shock that occurred when lots of commercial usage transferred to consumer usage.
(Eg, it might be possible to make to make space access more robust by spending the next 100 years of the world's combined effort to build a space elevator. But that's not going to happen because there's no perceived need to have that extra robustness given how much human focus is required.)
Forward error correction systems are designed to improve signal robustness in the face of noise - based on a given noise model. It can be made more robust by assuming a much higher noise than what actually exists.
This would probably require more transmission time. But the robustness level, by any usual quality measure, would increase.
"The whole toilet paper fiasco is a good example" ... for my clarified version, yes. That system was was optimized for profit extraction, probably also with the expectation that the government would throw money at them if things went really bad. ("Socialized risk.")
It was not at all optimized for an efficient transition to a widespread shelter-at-home world.
It could have been at least somewhat optimized for that, which is why I think your original statement was too broad. But it wasn't, because it was maximizing for profit, not social stability or happiness or other more nebulous criteria.
In the US, we have a free market that has resulted in the cost of milk production falling below the break even price for a lot of small dairy farms: https://www.jsonline.com/in-depth/news/special-reports/dairy...
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 lock down only consists of half-measures and the crisis is prolonged there aren't enough supplies to take another shot at it. Scarily, I'm seeing a whole lot of half-measures right now.
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 tighten again if it looks like we're going to run out of ICU capacity.
As bad as New York's response has been, treading right next to disaster/health care overload, they may have attained a magical proportion of the population where Rt is greatly reduced. I'm betting that when we have the serology study, we'll find 15-30%, or even more-- of the population of NYC has antibodies-- a good chunk of the way to herd immunity and enough to greatly reduce the amount of control measures needed to control the virus.
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.
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.
Doubtful or you'd see waves of death in children from cold viruses. Common cold viruses have had lots of time to evolve so that they transmit well but don't kill very much.
Presumably it's also why our immune systems don't waste time building up permanent immunity against them. There's much more of an evolutionary pressure to be permanently immune to something that can kill or maim you, if you survive.
We don't see waves of death in children from COVID-19. The juvenile immune system is different. Children right now have the opportunity to pick up SARS-COV-2 antibodies without a whole lot of personal risk. Elderly adults, not so much.
> Doubtful or you'd see waves of death in children from cold viruses. Common cold viruses have had lots of time to evolve so that they transmit well but don't kill very much.
Everyone assumes that viruses evolve towards lower virulence, but this is only one direction that things can be pressured to evolve. COVID-19 manages to have a very high R0 by a high latent period. Producing a higher viral load enhances spread / R0 but also causes eventual severe illness.
COVID-19's fatality rate is only a disadvantage inasmuch as it causes population-wide behavior changes. It doesn't make people get excessively sick and stay home in a way that they spread the disease less, so we can't really be sure that it will evolve towards lower pathogenicity/virulence.
> There's much more of an evolutionary pressure to be permanently immune to something that can kill or maim you, if you survive.
We have plenty of things we don't build permanent immunity to that kill or maim us-- including SARS-COV-2, MERS, malaria, etc. I doubt this is mankind's first encounter with a really nasty coronavirus.
But it's not like the spigot is turning off / we're stopping all production. What's it falling to? If it's 85% of typical demand, that storage will stretch for awhile, especially because many people may be choosing cheaper staples to consume.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/food/amp/Impossible-Burger-comes...
The question is why is the price so high, is it scale, inherent costs or just a virtue tax?
I've been reading HN for six years, and near as I can tell the vast majority don't support any health care rights, let alone universal health care. It's generally acceptable on HN that companies can fire people for being sick for too many days. There's no federally mandated sick leave at all. HNer's don't care about that.
I have more sympathy for HN interns who have lost their internships, except about 10 seconds later I remember just how young they are. They'll be fine.
And there are all the delivery persons, sacrificing more than most anyone that has the luxury of reading or writing here.
Very little is made on HN about how disproportionately health care workers are sacrificing family, sanity, health, and their lives. For no extra pay. They don't tend to get things like bonus pay at the end of the year, common among the HN crowd. Essential workers, most especially the ones stocking grocery stores full of jerks who refuse to wear masks or socially distance, likewise have no health care rights. They don't get bonus pay. If they get sick and are out of work for two months, they aren't assured they will be paid for time they didn't work. HN doesn't care about that. Routinely arguing against "socialist" laws that should try and make life actually fair, as contrary to the free market. Whatever that is.
And very little is recognized on HN about the consequences about "reopening" or "resuming" the economy on health care workers. It is a defacto demand: we own you; you are our slaves; you must work to protect us; work harder; sacrifice your lives; and above all, when the inevitably higher case load explodes you will choose who lives and dies. That is your job. To decide. And live with the scar of having chosen who lives and who dies. Deal with it. That is the demand behind every single "reopen" argument.
Maybe let's try to avoid freaking out about maybe not having dead pig on our sandwiches? It's degrading.
Those workers at shut down plants? They should have unemployment benefits pay them in the vicinity of 80%, at the least. That is not the system we have. HNer's don't care about that. It would be a competitive disincentive to free markets if the government were to compete with shit jobs no one really wants.
You know, and then there's the minority who consider universal basic income and universal health care from time to time. And I'm not talking about them. They're they minority on HN, near as I can tell.
South Korea has twice the population of NY state, and yet NY state has 62x the deaths. ROK and the U.S. had their first confirmed cases a day apart. It should humiliate every American what has transpired. Federal, state, parties, free market - across the board the result of deaths proves a culture wide incompetency. It's embarrassing.
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).
The case studies presented in the documentary are accurate and credible, with numerous historical facts.
As for bioavailability, the difference isn't very huge and you'll get more then enough amino acids from plant based sources without all the carcinogens that come from animal based sources.
Animals do Not make their own protein. They all get it from plants. Plants make the protein. Then the animals eat it. When you eat an animal, your just eating recycled protein. So, why not just cut out the middle man.
Meat has many problems. Dr. Milton Mills a stanford doctor, explains it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nti7JrBOQAk
Also, the people who live in the blue zones (the 100yr+ zones) typically eat very little or no meat/dairy.