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Comment by shakna | Hacker News Reader

I really don't like how they repeatedly try to merge the numbers of Lamb Weston with McCain here. Especially as McCain is a private family-run business, and Lamb Weston is a publicly traded company. They are not remotely the same entity.

"Lamb Weston and McCain alone control 70 percent of the market" hides that McCain holds about 30% of the US market.

McCain treat Simplot as their main rival in most jurisdictions, and have been involved in multiple legal fights with them - one of which is a patent issue that started in 2002 (no. 6,821,540), and is still ongoing. (Currently favouring Simplot).

There's a lot here that feels like... Bad statistics. Not to say that there's no truth in the accusations - but they don't seem to be acting in good faith, and that will wreck them when it comes to the court.

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>"Lamb Weston and McCain alone control 70 percent of the market" hides that McCain holds about 30% of the US market.

What exactly is objectionable about this sentence? The two companies are clearly outlined as separate in the article, and the fact that one company holds about half as much market share as both combined is... not surprising or misleading. Would you rather have the 40-30-20-7 split more explicitly outlined, and why do you think that has a big impact on the reader's takeaway from the article?

For that particular line, only those two companies are combined, the others are seperated.

I would not say that elsewhere, the two companies are clearly outlined as separate. Weston is referred to on their own, but McCain tends to be prefixed with "Lamb Weston and".

The Jacobin is an un-serious publication

https://x.com/AlecStapp/status/1876319458362556647

It's Jacobin, they have zero issue with writers torturing statistics to make their point.

I had subscribed to Jacobin a while back in the hopes of balancing out my Economist subscription's viewpoints but wow the quality was not there.

The Economist has value because any prediction they make is 180 degree off what will happen, they're like a delusional oracle, but they still have the gift of prophecy. Jacobin though is just a case of "by embittered leftists, for embittered leftists" and there's no point engaging with it.

Well, look at the source. It’s not surprising.

> There's a lot here that feels like... Bad statistics. Not to say that there's no truth in the accusations - but they don't seem to be acting in good faith, and that will wreck them when it comes to the court.

Well…

There are a couple of cases here:

* 1:24-cv-11801, Northern District of Illinois (class action with Radner's Markets as lead plaintiff)

* 1:24-cv-11816, Northern District of Illinois (class action with Alexander Govea as lead plaintiff - a person who bought frozen potato products at supermarkets)

The complaints were filed only two days apart, by different lawyers; I wonder whether a lot of firms were looking into frozen potatoes and these two ended up first to file?

I hope one or both of these lawsuits goes far enough that we can get to discover and will get to see some emails. That's always the fun part.

Jacobin's entire raison d'etre is looking at the world from a certain very left-wing point of view, and every article of theirs I've ever read slants things as badly as their right-wing counterparts.

You say this, but no Marxist country has ever had a french fry problem. In properly Marxist countries, everyone has always waited patiently in the bread line for their weekly ration.

In this country we call them "food banks".

> no Marxist country has ever had a french fry problem

No food, no food problems (head tapping meme guy pic)

I think when McDonald’s first opened in Soviet Union and Yugoslavia the problem was workers didn’t want to work that hard for that little money. Sort of like semiconductors in USA today.

Except the party members of course, they got theirs delivered, usually.

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