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Notes -
Nudge towards Just(ice/ Egg)
As some may be aware, Europe has stricter non-trademark restrictions on what one is allow to call their product. In the EU a cheese may only be called a Feta or Parmesan if it is produced according to specified procedure in Greece or Italy, respectively and contains specfied ingredients. This geographic restriction even includes pastry such as Kalakukko. That a consumer might not taste the difference (or even find the johnny-come-lately superior) is irrelevant in the eyes of the law.
The stated reason of making sure that the consumer is certain that the product matches what he imagines it to be, is also behind the recent push to ban animal deficient and even wholly lacking products, on cashing in on the perception of taste created by centuries of butchers and milkmen.
A maiori ad minus as "plant-based protein" products do not even taste the same, let alone contain the same nutrients as non-human animal derived ones, while cheddar-style cheese unapologetically made in the Green Mountain State and West Country Farmhouse Cheddar are similar in taste and nutrients, it stands to reason that restrictions on usage of meat-related names should be at least just as onerous as those related to geography.
An even better argument would be a survey asking consumers if foods with names such as: "malk", "chick'n nuggets", "just mayo", "beyond sausage", "chik'n apple sausage" [different brand than the previously mentioned nuggets], "chilli sin carne" contain milk, meat or eggs or if they have in the past been misled into buying vegan products which usually aren't clearly segregated, thinking they are omnivoric.
The latest news on this front comes from also one the biggest supporters of restrictions on usage geographic indicators, France. After a court voided an attempt last year to curtail cultural appropriation of companies like Beyond Meat™, the French government has on monday taken another swing at it.
That it falls to the country of de Gaulle and Pétain, and not the organization of Altiero Spinelli and Konrad Adenauer (which one would expect, given how involved the EU is with consumer rights) is due the latter abdicating this aforementioned duty.
Opponents of restricting what may be labeled a steak, burger, sausage, mayonnaise, or milk, claim that nobody is being misled and that consumers might be more easily convinced to purchase "Chick3n Nugg3ts" than "Breaded Soy for Frying", "Malk" than "White Oats Concoction". The argument goes that people might be reluctant to try new things and that they would be unfamiliar what to do vegan neologism-labeled products. That overcoming this reluctance, by hook or by crook, is necessary not only for the benefit of soy farmers and Impossible Foods™ but for the whole of humankind as replacing meat with vegetables reduces the risk or severity of climate crisis.
Yeah, it's clear that the thumb has been on the scale to benefit the producers of fake meat-like products. Imagine if you took some cheap meat, processed and dyed it, and then labeled it as "heirloom tomatoes". That clearly wouldn't fly and neither should the opposite.
There was a weird amount of hype for these things a few years back, with Impossible and Beyond burgers being touted as tasting just as good as meat. They don't, and furthermore, they are terrible for your health.
Going further, Beyond (BYND) was a pump and dump stock scam, and now trades at 95% less than its peak 2019 price. Despite Beyond burgers being ungodly expensive, the company has gross margins of zero. Factoring in overhead, they lose 50 cents for every $1 in revenue. Cash reserves have dwindled from 1.1 billion to 200 million which means that bankruptcy could be looming in the next couple years. I'm sure some insiders got rich while index fund holders paid the tab.
Just kill this Frankenfood already.
Agree with everything except the financial market bit. Our IPO market is broken (make me the head of the sec lol) but it’s not insiders cashing out. It’s just trader versus trader and supposedly some win and some lose.
Historically firms only IPO a small float for a very good reason that public markets are different in how they analyze things than private markets. They look for countries hitting metrics and often have portfolios with many stocks versus focused funds. So they don’t know the companies that well at first. It trades for a while and then has some earnings reports and then insiders/private investors slowly add shares. For things with billions in market cap the public markets are just not able to absorb the entire float at one ipo. So they float 10% of the company typical though sometimes less. And all the insiders and private investors are usually banned from selling any shares for 6 months.
Now we have all these algo traders plus especially since COVID dumb retail money that have zero fundamental analysis. If the algo guys detect retail punting they bid it up crazy. And then you have that dude Huang who did the retail game at scale. And short selling is basically impossible in these names. Some thing blows up as a meme and it’s up 500% (happens all the time now) will blow up the shorts. They also changed a bunch of short borrowing stuff to prevent shorting without a borrower but then your borrow rate can blow out crazy.
Those first 6 months of trading are basically fake prices. Insiders aren’t allowed to sell. Shorts are too dangerous. And IPO stocks don’t just enter etfs (potentially some IPO etf but those often wait 6 months plus). Things like Tesla were public for I think a decade before they entered majorly etfs like spy.
It’s basically just a little Vegas part of markets without a ton of real investment. I find it embarrassing when stocks like VFS has a $150 billion market cap but I believe they only floated 1% of their shares so even the mark to market peak only had a $1.5 billion worth of shares on the public market. I wish they would find a way to fix this issue because I find it embarrassing when people like you say what Wall St idiots valuing this shithole at this price. Everyone does in fact know it’s crap but it’s not like you can short it and make money.
That's why shorting bitcoin so much better than shorting stocks. No manipulation with the floats, less $ from hedge fund manipulation. Stocks can easily be manipulated by management , whereas this is not possible or harder to do with bitcoin. Crypto is one of the most overhyped things ever, yet nothing but downhill since 2021 despite endless hype still. It would seem there does come a point where no amount of hype can help an asset class. Commodities overall , which crypto is more commodity-like than stock-like, tend to be better short candidates compared to stocks due to absence of earnings , buybacks, etc.
My experience is different - broad community consensus is that there are whales and brokers that go hunting for liquidity, massacring shorts and longs. The technical term is 'scamwick'.
Interesting. I'm not really a crypto guy (read Satoshi's whitepaper when BTC were going for pennies), or a trader, but I know a little bit about technical analysis. The "wick" here is the wick of a candle chart, which shows the open & close, high & low, for a given trading period. The delta between open and close forms the body of the candle, while the high and low (which necessarily equal or exceed the open and close) form the "wicks" (upper and lower) of the candle. A so-called scamwick is a recognition of suspicious price movements which indicate price manipulation.
My prior on "price manipulation" is that most manipulators lose in the long run, at least for deep markets, but that the attempt to manipulate prices is an important part of price discovery and akin to "random noise" which motivates the true price.
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