Results for “food”
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Saturday assorted links

1. Thingifying the world.

2. Late nights make the President angry on Twitter.

3. Many experts downplay or even sneer at the preexisting immune response idea when “the kooks” bring it up (e.g., Fauci vs. Rand Paul, for one), but the evidence for it is growing.  Its relevance now seems quite likely.

4. Law Firms Pay Supreme Court Clerks $400,000 Bonuses. What Are They Buying? (NYT)

5. Could Einstein get published today? (WSJ)

6. NLRB Files Complaint Against Socialist-Themed Vegan Meat Company That Fired Union Organizers.  The company is called No Evil Foods.

7. Raj Chetty during the pandemic (Bloomberg).

Thursday assorted links

1. Claims about how to cook the perfect dosa.

2. The Supreme Court will not wreck Obamacare.

3. Some guy something to do with golf something or other something.

4. New survey on pre-existing immunity.  And yet some additional results.

5. NYT on cases vs. deaths in Europe.  And the FT on the Finnish success.  And FT on the Madrid second wave, and a contrast with NYC.  Doesn’t settle the key issues, but a good overview.

Diminished choice in your neighborhood supermarket

Contactless shopping and the elimination of free samples. Less browsing and “product discovery” and more focus on the expediency of repurchasing. These are ways the novel coronavirus has changed how Americans buy groceries. The pandemic has altered what products people purchase, when and where, who is buying them, and how much time is devoted to the endeavor.

Americans are spending more, yet increasingly they are being offered fewer choices, both online and in person, slowing a years-long trend toward innovations that put “good for you” and “environmentally friendly” spins on established and much-loved products.

The winnowing — what one expert calls a “Sovietish” reduction of choice — is also solidifying eating patterns, for good or for ill. With customers’ selections reinforced by online advertising, repeat ordering and other algorithms, the food system is becoming bifurcated as consumers who have expressed enthusiasm for healthful or artisanal foods are offered more of the same, while those with a penchant for highly processed comfort foods are inundated with opportunities to restock.

There is a gender effect as well:

He says more men are claiming to be the primary shopper during the pandemic, and “they do buy different things and buy differently.” Men, Baum says, tend to favor efficiency: shopping club stores for bulk purchases, convenience stores and online. They report making fewer, larger, quicker trips for a narrower range of items.

This part surprised me, though I wonder if they have done a full data check:

This “narrower range” is not just a brick-and-mortar constriction. As the pandemic accelerates the shift to online shopping, the number of packaged food products available to purchase on the Internet fell 21 percent globally from January to May, according to Euromonitor International, a London-based market research company. It found that nine out of the 10 biggest countries by retail sales saw a drop in the number of unique SKUs available online.

Here is more from Laura Reiley, note this also is another reason why actual rates of price inflation are somewhat higher than what we are measuring.

Saturday assorted links

1. Bidet sales: the current countercyclical asset.  It’s not just suburban real estate, Big Tech, and food service delivery.

2. “U.S. officials have for the first time approved a design for a small commercial nuclear reactor, and a Utah energy cooperative wants to build 12 of them in Idaho.

3. 1955 University of Chicago Ph.D. price theory exam, chaired by Milton Friedman.  Can you guess who got the best grade?  How well would you do?

4. ““Nothing says white privilege like trying to orchestrate your own cancellation,” tweeted Sofia Quintero, a writer and activist from the Bronx.”  Link here.

5. “”Statistically, one in three houses in Queensland, Australia, has one [a python] in their roof,” Brown said.”

6. The origins of wheelchair basketball.

The quality-adjusted rate of price inflation is much higher than measured

Higher ed on Zoom, fear of going to the hospital, and long lines at the DMV bring us to one part of my latest Bloomberg column:

Education, health care and government are pretty big parts of our economy. If you add on the lower quality of restaurant visits, reduced sports performances (your ESPN cable package is worth less), and an inability to take preferred vacations and trips, you have many more negative quality adjustments that don’t show up in measured rates of inflation.

And:

The Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Fed and other institutions have declined to make formal adjustments for these changes in the real standard of living. That is the politically practical way to proceed, if not the technically correct decision.

Inflation measures work best when the consumption bundle is roughly stable over short periods of time, and that just hasn’t been the case this year. Because so many government payments depends on rates of indexation, debating “the true degree of inflation” this year would become an unending political football, with all the major institutions involved, including the Fed, losing credibility. (Just exactly how much worse is that Zoom lecture?) Besides, implicit price inflation from restricted opportunities probably should, for purposes of policy and benefits indexation, be treated differently than price inflation resulting from more expensive food and rent.

One implication is that, at least for the time being, price inflation rules just aren’t that meaningful any more:

…price rules and other forms of inflation rules don’t really work in times of pandemic. The very measurement of price inflation becomes arbitrary, and dependent on inertial measurement conventions from normal times, so the numbers don’t have enough actual economic meaning to guide policy.

There is more at the link.

The FDA Burns

If you think the FDA has been slow at approving new coronavirus tests just look at their process for approving sunscreen products.

EWG: The FDA first began working to update sunscreen regulations more than 40 years ago. In February 2019, the agency at long last issued a proposed set of final rules, but they were never adopted.

According to EWG, the Environmental Working Group, the FDA has been too slow to test old ingredients for safety and too slow to allow new ingredients on the market thus leaving us with sunscreen products which are neither as safe nor as effective as they should be. In particular, Europe has better sunscreen protection than the United States. Here’s EWG:

Americans have fewer choices and notably poorer protection than Europeans do from ultraviolet A rays in their sunscreen options. Although most U.S. sunscreens prevent sunburn effectively when used correctly, they aren’t as good as European sunscreens at preventing the more subtle skin damage produced by lower-energy UVA radiation. UVA rays have less energy and don’t burn the skin, but they can cause the skin to age, suppress the immune system and contribute to the development of melanoma.

…Between 2003 and 2010, sunscreen makers applied for FDA permission to use eight sun-filtering chemicals developed by European companies. Four of these – Tinosorb S, Tinosorb M, Mexoryl SX and Mexoryl XL – appear to be more effective than avobenzone, the most common UVA filter permitted by the FDA. The FDA’s failure to respond to these applications prompted Congress to pass the Sunscreen Innovation Act of 2014 (FDA 2014). This act requires the FDA to review new applications for sunscreen active ingredients within 300 days, but it doesn’t relax the standards companies must meet to prove new ingredients are both safe and effective.

In 2015, the FDA responded that the companies involved had not submitted enough information to prove their chemicals were, in fact, safe and effective for use (FDA 2015). The agency asked for more data, including complete study results, measurements of ingredient levels in people’s blood, and long-term studies on systemic toxicity and potential endocrine system disruption. The FDA has also proposed that all sunscreen ingredients, including those already in use, need to have adequate safety testing data.

Some information the FDA wants, such as complete copies of studies, might be easy for sunscreen makers to produce. But in other cases, the companies could take years to satisfy FDA requests. In the meantime, Americans are being shortchanged.

I first wrote about this issue in 2013 and seven years later, despite Congress passing a law in 2014, the FDA still has not acted.

My rule is very simple. I don’t think the FDA is better than the EMA so if any drug or device is approved in Europe it ought to be available for purchase in the United States with a label saying “Approved by the EMA. Not approved by the FDA.” (By the way, we do have reciprocity type agreements with Canada and New Zealand for food so this would not be unprecedented.)

Hat tip: John Thacker.

Addendum: You should actually get more sun to avoid vitamin D deficiency which is bad for a variety of reasons including, in my estimation, greater susceptibility to COVID.

The polity that is San Francisco

If you were hoping to cure your cabin fever with a quick jaunt to San Francisco to eat a $200 dinner in a geodesic dome next to a homeless encampment, it looks like you’ve missed your chance. The San Francisco Chronicle reports that after a surprise inspection, the city’s health department has ordered Japanese fine dining spot Hashiri to take down the fine dining domes that have made it internationally famous…

Hashiri opted to erect three plastic garden igloos on the sidewalk and reopened for dinner on August 5. The structures, which cost $1,400 apiece, immediately generated controversy, as the restaurant, which caters to the ultra-rich, happens to be located in an area where people experiencing homelessness congregate.

“Mint Plaza is a phenomenal space, it’s just sometimes the crowd is not too favorable,” Matsuura said to the Chronicle. “There are people who come by and spit, yell, stick their hands in people’s food, discharging fecal matter right by where people are trying to eat. It’s really sad, and it’s really hard for us to operate around that.”

The restaurant began receiving hate mail prior to last Thursday’s surprise inspection, which Matsuura suspects was the result of anonymous complaints to the Department of Public Health. The domes were ordered removed “due to the enclosed nature of the structure, which may not allow for adequate air flow,” per the inspection report.

Not enough air flow?  I wonder how many kitchens would pass that test?  Here is the full story, via Air Genius Gary Leff.

Shoring Up the Vaccine Supply Chain

Supply chains were hit hard early in the pandemic. Disinfectant couldn’t be produced because of a lack of bottles, tests couldn’t be processed because nasal swabs or PPE wasn’t available, the decline of passenger air traffic hit commercial delivery and so forth. I worry about forthcoming stresses on the vaccine supply chain. Billions of doses of vaccine will be demanded in the next year and a lot will depend on complicated supply lines including cold storage, air traffic, styrofoam, vials, bags, needles and many other inputs. Companies and the awesome team at CEPI (give them all a Nobel prize) are planning for vials and needles and other inputs but there are many non-obvious inputs higher up in the supply chain that also need shoring up.

Shark livers–they make vaccines better! From https://www.dutchsharksociety.org/do-you-have-a-shark-on-your-face/

Writing in Bloomberg, Scott Duke Kominers and I look at some of the odder inputs to vaccines like horseshoe crab blood, shark livers and the vaccinia capping enyzme, VCE. We are actually not too worried about horseshoe crab blood and shark livers as these are used in other industries. Shark livers, for example, are used to produce a lot of cosmetics so we should be able to divert supply as needed. VCE, however, is rarer.

DNA and mRNA vaccine technologies have shown promising results, and two of the leading vaccine contenders, from Pfizer Inc. and Moderna Inc., use mRNA technology. But mRNA has never been used to produce a commercial vaccine for humans, let alone at scale. And scaling these technologies may not be easy. In particular, mRNA degrades rapidly. To prevent this, it must be “capped” by a very rare substance called vaccinia capping enzyme.

Just over 10 pounds of this VCE is enough to produce a hundred million doses of an mRNA vaccine — but the current manufacturing processes for VCE require so much bioreactor capacity that making 10 pounds would cost about $1.4 billion. More important, global bioreactor capacity cannot support production at that level while also producing other vaccines and cancer-fighting drugs.

If we work hard now, we may be able to find more efficient means of producing VCE. Expanding bioreactor production and repurposing bioreactors from existing large-scale industrial applications will also help to lessen the pressure on the supply chains for multiple types of vaccines.

In addition to supply chains per se we also face the problem that companies are not raising prices enough. Ironically, this means that we need more public investment.

Of course, we might think that private companies would have incentives to coordinate supply chains themselves — and to some extent, they are doing so. But many have pledged to keep their vaccine prices close to costs, both out of altruism and because they may fear public backlash (or legal action) if they’re perceived as “price gouging” in the middle of a pandemic. And if companies don’t stand to profit much from Covid-19 vaccines, then they don’t have much incentive to invest in increasing capacity. In short: If prices can’t rise, then the only way to encourage companies to invest more in production is to reduce their costs — and that means we need public investment.

More generally, it’s not too late to be building more vaccine capacity and to repurpose bioreactor capacity from non-GMP sources, perhaps including veterinary and food sources. There are lots of vaccines in development. The science is promising. We need to take action now so that we can deliver on that promise.

Read the whole thing.

Sunday assorted links

1. Assorted links on progress studies.

2. James Altucher is bearish on NYC. Not my view, but worth a hearing. Of course I would never live there, but that has always been the case.

3. Arbitrage with stolen books?

4. Manufacturing vaccines, excellent piece (Bloomberg).

5. “A restaurant in central China has apologised for encouraging diners to weigh themselves and then order food accordingly.

6. Professional sports already increase influenza mortality (shh!).

7. NYT piece on Covid and immunology.

8. “When minimizing deaths, we find that for low vaccine effectiveness, it is optimal to allocate vaccine to high-risk (older) age-groups first. In contrast, for higher vaccine effectiveness, there is a switch to allocate vaccine to high-transmission (younger) age-groups first for high vaccination coverage.

Probabilistic profit from UFOs?

Let’s say the rest of the market was undervaluing the chance of UFOs being “something interesting.”  What might be the proper trade?  David S. emails me, and I will dispense with further indentation but what follows are his words not mine:

“Some potential food for thought:

– Going long volatility or long defense stocks seems like the most conventional answer.

– An even more conventional answer would be that it wouldn’t matter since any apocalypse means that even a correct bet is unlikely to have material redeemable value.

– Rather than framing the payout event as the binary of an actual UFO invasion, an alternative framing would be to bet on further government leaks causing the market to move it’s probability of invasion / apocalypse from 0.00% to 0.01%.

  • Should you at least shorten the duration of your holdings on the margin? With interest rates near zero and record(-ish) high PE multiples, shouldn’t you be (marginally) less willing to pay for far-out cash flows? Could this finally fuel a resurgence of the value factor vs the growth factor?
  • To take it a step further, should people consume more today and invest less given that the EV/NPV of these payouts will be somewhat lower?
  • Other than high-dividend stocks and cash, what other trades are short-duration without going to zero if the apocalypse fails to arrive on time?

– My contrarian approach would be to go very long due to the underrated potential of technology transfer and overrated potential of apocalypse (especially in the near-term).  For instance, if we found intelligent life on a planet like Mars (but less intelligent than humans), it would likely be decades between first contact and when humans would muster a military force to extinguish or fully dominate the other species (if ever).  Also, based on the continued existence of thousands of species (many of which are flourishing) on earth in parallel with human existence, its not clear why we would assume that a more intelligent form of life that engages with humans would even try to extinguish. Per Steven Pinker, more intelligent species would likely also be more moral and therefore less likely to be focused on zero-sum extinction.”

TC again: Obviously many short positions would be in order. In terms of longs, my intuitions would be to buy a very diverse bundle of natural resources.  Presumably the aliens have not brought many minerals with them, and they will need some minerals to do…whatever it is they plan on doing.  Maybe lots of minerals.  But you don’t know which ones.

How not to fight modern-day slavery

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:

The Slave-Free Business Certification Act of 2020, introduced last week by Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, sounds unobjectionable, maybe even worthy. As the U.S. engages in a worthwhile and necessary reassessment of the role of slavery in its history, the bill would force large companies to investigate and report on forced labor in their supply chains.

In fact, the net effect of the bill — contrary to its stated intent — might be to increase slavery worldwide.

As a general principle, companies should cut off commercial relations with any known sources of slavery. Yet this law calls for mandatory corporate investigation and auditing, backed by CEO certification and with significant penalties for non-compliance. The investigatory process is supposed to include interviews of both workers and management in the supply chain.

Such a get-tough approach has a superficial appeal. Yet placing an investigative burden on companies may not lead to better outcomes.

Consider the hypothetical case of a U.S. retailer buying a shipment of seafood routed through Vietnam. It fears that some of the seafood may have come from Thailand, where there are credible reports of (temporary) slavery in the supply chain. How does it find out if those reports are true? Asking its Vietnamese business partner, who may not even know the truth and might be reluctant to say if it did, is unlikely to resolve matters.

It is unlikely that businesses, even larger and profitable ones, will be in a position to hire teams of investigative journalists for their international inputs. Either they will ignore the law, or they will stop dealing with poorer and less transparent countries. So rather than buying shrimp from Southeast Asia, that retailer might place an order for more salmon from Norway, where it is quite sure there is no slavery going on.

…for every instance of slavery today there are many more opaque supply chains that will be damaged and disrupted if the burden is on large companies to root out labor abuses.

Here are a few points of relevance:

1. The law penalizes opaque supply chains rather than slavery per se.  That is unlikely to be an efficient target.

2. Judgments about slavery are put in the hands of businesses rather than the government.  Why not just have the U.S. government issue sanctions against slavery-supporting countries when sanctions are appropriate and likely to be effective?  What is the extra gain from taxing businesses in this way?

3. There are many forms of coerced and exploited labor, and it is not clear this legislation will target slavery as opposed to simply low wages and poor working conditions as might result from extreme poverty.  You also don’t want the law to tax poor working conditions per se, since FDI, or purchasing flows from a supply chain, can help improve those working conditions.  You might however wish to target employment instances where, due to the nature of the law, additional financial flows toward the product will never rebound to the benefit of foreign labor.  This law (which I have read all of) does not seem to grasp that important distinction.

Tuesday assorted links

1. “My thought is that the fact that we consume contemporary media in isolation has made made people more receptive to demonization, with its totalitarian characteristics. This is probably accentuated by the virus-induced isolation, which increases our use of contemporary media and reduces our social interactions.”  More here from Arnold Kling.

2. Did Southeast Asian fish sauce come from ancient Rome?

3. Indian Matchmaking.  Note that foreign exoticization, and thus partial concealment of anti-PC attitudes and pproaches, is one response to “things being cancelled.”  For instance: “Let’s remove this thing from the status games being fought by white people, and maybe they won’t care very much.”  And they don’t.

4. This Kevin Lewis link about whether hedonism leads to happiness was first sent to my spam blocker.

5. DNC Platform Committee decisively defeats Medicare for All as a proposal.  POTMR.

6. Why has the Spanish response to coronavirus been so poor?

7. “Divergence dates between #SARSCoV2 and the bat #sarbecovirus reservoir were estimated as 1948 (95% HPD: 1879–1999), 1969 (1930–2000) and 1982 (1948–2009), indicating that the lineage giving rise to SARS-CoV-2 has been circulating unnoticed in bats for decades”  Link here.

Hey Thomas Nagel: bats argue a lot about where the best restaurants are!

Let’s not give them Twitter:

They found that the bat noises are not just random, as previously thought, reports Skibba. They were able to classify 60 percent of the calls into four categories. One of the call types indicates the bats are arguing about food. Another indicates a dispute about their positions within the sleeping cluster. A third call is reserved for males making unwanted mating advances and the fourth happens when a bat argues with another bat sitting too close. In fact, the bats make slightly different versions of the calls when speaking to different individuals within the group, similar to a human using a different tone of voice when talking to different people. Skibba points out that besides humans, only dolphins and a handful of other species are known to address individuals rather than making broad communication sounds.

Here is further information, here is the original research, via the excellent Samir Varma.

Ocean Grove, New Jersey travel notes

Having not visited the New Jersey shore since I was a kid (and then a very regular visitor), I realized you cannot actually swim there with any great facility.  Nor is there much to do, nor should one look forward to the food.

Nonetheless Ocean Grove is one of America’s finest collections of Victorian homes, and the town style is remarkably consistent and intact.  Most of all, it is an “only in America” kind of place:

Ocean Grove was founded in 1869 as an outgrowth of the camp meeting movement in the United States, when a group of Methodist clergymen, led by William B. Osborn and Ellwood H. Stokes, formed the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association to develop and operate a summer camp meeting site on the New Jersey seashore. By the early 20th century, the popular Christian meeting ground became known as the “Queen of Religious Resorts.” The community’s land is still owned by the camp meeting association and leased to individual homeowners and businesses. Ocean Grove remains the longest-active camp meeting site in the United States.

The pipe organ in the 19th century Auditorium is still one of the world’s twenty largest.

Ocean Grove, New Jersey - Wikipedia

The Auditorium is closed at the moment, but they still sing gospel music on the boardwalk several times a night.

The police department building is merged together with a Methodist church, separate entrances but both under the same roof.

Ocean Grove remains a fully dry city, for the purpose of “keeping the riff-raff out,” as one waitress explained to me.  To walk up the Ocean Grove boardwalk into nearby Asbury Park (Cuban and Puerto Rican and Haitian in addition to American black) remains a lesson in the economics of sudden segregation, deliberate and otherwise.

Based on my experience as a kid, I recall quite distinct “personae” for the adjacent beach towns of Asbury Park, Ocean Grove, Bradley Beach, Seaside Heights, Lavalette, Belmar, Spring Lake, and Point Pleasant.  This time around I did not see much cultural convergence.  That said, Ocean Grove now seems less the province of the elderly and more of a quiet upscale haunt, including for gay couples.  As an eight-year-old, it was my least favorite beach town on the strip.  Fifty years later, it is now striking to me how much the United States is refusing to be all smoothed over and homogenized.

What are fungi?

I don’t view this as a formal answer, but it is interesting nonetheless:

Mycelium is how fungi feed.  Some organisms — such as plants that photosynthesize — make their own food.  Some organisms — like most animals — find food in the world and put it inside their bodies, where it is digested and absorbed.  Fungi have a different strategy.  They digest the world where it is and then absorb it into their bodies…

The difference between animals and fungi is simple: Animals put food in their bodies, whereas fungi put their bodies in the food.

…to embed oneself is an irregular and unpredictable food supply as mycelium does, one must be able to shape-shift.  Mycelium is an living, growing, opportunistic investigation — speculation in bodily form.

That is from the new and excellent book by Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, & Shape Our Futures.