Wednesday, December 13, 2023

Meat


Winter in the Northern Hemisphere has barely started, and already more of the European Continent is under snow cover as of the first week of December than in any year for more than a decade. Many members of the planetary emergency rescue elite on their way to the summit were stranded in Munich, where a snowstorm dumped 17 inches of the white stuff and canceled most outbound flights. 
Good thing COP28 was held in Dubai.

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The Constitution divided power in large part to protect propertied people from the predations of the masses or a dictator. This vigorous protection of property not only encouraged entrepreneurialism at home, because people had a reasonable certainty of keeping their gains, it also encouraged foreign investors to put their money in America on the grounds that they wouldn’t see their capital stolen and their contractual rights ignored.--Greenspan

Think of this when you see Moore v. U.S.

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Once you understand this, the rational way to consume news is to constantly ask yourself questions like: “In a well-functioning society of 8 billion people, how much bad stuff would be reported anyway?” I never sympathized with BLM, but when I learned that the total number of unarmed blacks fatally shot by U.S. police in 2019 was 14, even I was astounded by BLM innumeracy. Hundreds of kids drown in U.S. swimming pools every year, but there will never be riots about that. Nor should there be.--Caplan

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Meat

Why do so many significantly revolutionary ideas have such difficulty getting traction? Usually, it's from a collision with the practical. Here's a piece on the anti-meat clique.

Transitioning from pandemic-era policies to a more typical economic environment, firms again need strong business fundamentals to survive in a competitive landscape.

Among the casualties are a growing number of plant-based meat substitute companies that initially garnered substantial investor interest but have since grappled with low and diminishing consumer demand. In June of this year, UK-based Meatless Farm shut its doors not long after Heck, a maker of meatless sausages, announced that it would substantially reduce its consumer offerings. Nestlé-owned Garden Gourmet also pulled its vegan offerings from UK shops in March 2023. Canada’s Very Good Food Company, a vegan food producer which soared 800 percent on the day of its public offering in 2020, recently collapsed after revealing it had never been profitable.

By far the biggest turnabout has occurred in the most prominent plant-meat substitute enterprise, Beyond Meats. The corporate flagship of the sector conducted its IPO in May 2019 priced at $25 per share, opening at $46 and rising to as high as $72 on its first day of trading. By July 2019 the stock price briefly surpassed $230 per share, spiking above $150 per share several times during the pandemic. But since mid-2021, the stock price fell from over $100 to recently close below $6. For six consecutive quarters, the company has reported negative sales growth amid not only a loss of market share but a contraction in the size of the fake meat market. Nearly one-fifth of the firm’s non-production workforce was laid off early in November 2023. Financial analysts have characterized the firm as in survival mode, with its financial deterioration bringing about a “going concern” risk.--from AIER

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