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- Hacker News
- There should be laws ensuring that every market there should be at least 5-6 players and is free or is declared natural monopoly/monopsony and regulated.
The in between you have all the bad from monopolies in the forms of cartels.
by ReptileMan - My father-in-law grew up on a small-time farm and then went into environmental engineering as a professor, and briefly worked on the Secretary of Agriculture's staff in the Biden administration. He has told me that there are 3-5 (can't remember the number) colossal meatpacking corporations in the US that have laid waste to smaller-time competition, and now that the market is captured their owners and shareholders can skim basically whatever they want out of the enterprise. He also was advocating to have policy written that would stop chronic underpayment of slaughterhouse and meatpacking workers at these colossal firms and was told it was politically inviable.
Unrelated to this, but I have Alpha-Gal Syndrome, the anaphylactic allergy to red meat, which is spreading rapidly as the ticks colonize every square inch of nature in the US. In Arkansas 20% of people tested on a big free testing day were sensitized to the galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose molecule (AGS is sensitization + symptoms, not just sensitization.)
I think that things are going to get weird with beef in the US in the next few decades.
by quacked - Beef prices have become simply insane. The value I get from beef can no longer justify the expense, so I've simply stopped buying it at all. I've largely replaced it with pork. Pork used to be the most popular meat in the US. I wonder if it will be again.by JohnFen
- > And while meatpacking companies have increased the prices they charge for their beef, there is a limit. This is because supermarkets, restaurants – and US consumers – can, and will, simply switch to buying chicken or cheaper imported beef instead.
I think you would be amazed at how cost insensitive some Americans are and how large that cohort is. Ground beef would have to exceed $20/lb before I would consider altering my routine.
If you are buying one cut at a time and not being very efficient with it, the prices are certainly ridiculous. If each gram of beef is carefully prepared and allocated across weeks of meal prep, the economic situation changes pretty substantially. Batching effects can make it easier to afford expensive ingredients.
by bob1029 - The amount of beef eaten per person per year in the USA is absolutely insane anyway:
USA - 37kg/capita
UK - 18kg/capita
We're not exactly shy of roast beef on this island either - the French nicknamed us "rosbifs" for a reason.
by walthamstow - Animal agriculture is a key driver of climate change: https://sentientmedia.org/how-does-livestock-affect-climate-...
Along with the high price, that's one more reason to not buy it.
by markstos - yeah, it's called inflation, it really sucks for everyone except the people who receive the new money early (mainly the banking system, but also people w/liquid assets + finance adjacent industries like housing) we should avoid it oh well i guess a bunch of people will go bankrupt and then get bought up at distressed prices by people with access to new money early wait a second...
- > A new pick-up truck that once cost $40,000 now runs to $100,000. A wooden fence post has gone from about $6 to as much as $19. A quarter-mile roll of barbed wire has doubled, from $60 to $130. Everything he uses day to day, he says, has jumped in price since the Covid pandemic.
I know why pick-ups have gone up in cost (though I don't think it's quite to 2.5x levels like suggested here since the pandemic), but wooden posts and barbed wire, it's less clear why those are so much more expensive now.