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The American Hogwarts Houses

So, reports of an unprecedented egg “shortage” are exaggerated. Nonetheless, egg prices — and egg company profits — have gone through the roof. Cal-Maine Foods — the largest egg producer and the only one that publishes its financial data as a publicly traded company — has been making more money than ever. It’s annual gross profits in the past three years have floated between 3 and 6 times what it used to earn before the avian flu epidemic started — breaking $1 billion for the first time in the company’s history. All of this extra profit is coming from higher selling prices, which have been earning Cal-Maine unprecedented 50-170 percent margins over farm production costs per dozen. Taking Cal-Maine as the “bellwether” for the industry’s largest firms — as people in the egg business do — we can be pretty confident that the other large egg producers are also raking in profits off the relatively small dip in egg production.

High persistent profits are an anomaly for the industry. Historically, egg producers have responded to avian flu epidemics—and the temporary rise in egg prices that often accompanies them—by quickly rebuilding and expanding their flocks of egg-laying hens. “Fowl plagues”—as these epidemics used to be called—have been with us since at least the 19th century. Most recently, large-scale avian flu epidemics hit egg farms in 2015 and 1983-1984. The egg industry responded to both of these destructive events by sprinting to rebuild and expand the egg-laying hen flock — something which checked price increases and ultimately made sure prices went back to pre-epidemic levels within a reasonable time.

As Cal-Maine Foods explained in its 2007 Annual Report: “In the past, during periods of high profitability, shell egg producers have tended to increase the number of layers in production with a resulting increase in the supply of shell eggs, which generally has caused a drop in shell egg prices until supply and demand return to balance.”

This time around, however, that’s not happening. Despite high profits, the egg industry has somehow maintained a stubborn deficit in egg production capacity. Hatcheries — the firms that supply hens to egg producers — have throttled the pipeline of hens instead of expanding it. According to the Egg Industry Center, the size of the flock of “parent” hens — the hens used by hatcheries to produce layer chicks for egg producers — plummeted from 3.1 million hens in 2021, to 2.9 million in 2022, to 2.5 million hens in 2023 and 2024.

Meanwhile, hatcheries have been hatching significantly fewer parent chicks to replace aging ones — nearly 380,000 (or 12 percent) fewer in 2022 compared to the year before, and even fewer parent chicks in 2023 and 2024 — leaving the parent flock older and more likely to produce eggs that fail to hatch. That could explain why, although hatcheries reported producing 125-200 million more fertilized eggs to the USDA in each of the last three years compared to 2021, the number of eggs they’ve placed in incubators and the number of chicks they’ve hatched from those eggs has either declined or stayed basically steady with 2021 levels in every year since.

As for egg producers themselves, you may be surprised to learn that they have added between 5 and 20 million fewer pullets to their farms in every one of the last three years than they did in 2021. As the USDA observed with some astonishment at the end of 2022, “producers—despite the record-high wholesale price [of eggs]—are taking a cautious approach to expanding production[.]” The following month, it pared down its table-egg production forecast for the entirety of 2023 on account of “the industry’s [persisting] cautious approach to expanding production.”

In other words, the only thing that the egg industry seems to have expanded in response to the avian flu epidemic is windfall profits — which have likely amounted to more than $15 billion since the epidemic began (judging by the increase in the value of annual egg production since 2022), and appear to have been spent primarily on stock buybacks, dividends, and acquisitions of rivals instead of rebuilding and expanding flocks. When an industry starts profiting more from *not* producing than from producing, it’s a sign that something isn’t right. It could be an innocent bottleneck. But when it lasts for three years on end with no relief in sight, it's usually a sign of something else that’s pervasive in America — monopolization.

As the coming installments in this series will detail, the fundamental problem in the egg supply chain today is the simple fact that every industry involved in turning an egg into a chicken and turning a chicken into an egg—from the breeders and hatcheries that create the hens to the producers who use the hens to make eggs—has been hijacked by one or two financier-backed corporations, with the incentives flipped from competing entities seeking to produce more eggs to an oligopoly trying to restrain the production of eggs.

On one end of the egg supply chain, you have two companies who control chicken genetics, the billionaire-owned Erich Wesjohann Group and the private-equity-backed Hendrix Genetics. Headquartered a short car trip apart in Cuxhaven, Germany, and Boxmeer, Netherlands, these private firms have systematically gained control over the supply of egg-laying hens to American producers over the past two decades by buying out or suppressing rivals and challengers. Today, no egg producer in this country can expand the number of hens in its flock — or even replace the hens it already has when they age out or die — without the cooperation of this duopoly. And, since the value of hens rises with the price of the eggs, when the price of eggs is high these two barons have a clear interest in keeping the supply of pullets to producers on a tight leash — so the high prices stick.

On the other end of the egg supply chain, you have the largest egg producer in the country and the world, Cal-Maine Foods.

Matt Stoller from his monopolisation/cartel report; something that has clicked recently is the way that business seeks to maximise profit margin over volume, which often leads to reducing production, brittle supply chains, high prices, and ultimately shortages.

in principle this isn't supposed to happen under capitalism, because someone earning high profit margins should be outcompeted by new entrants willing to earn slightly lower profit margins, until (in the perfect frictionless market) the rate of profit should be whittled down to the rate of risk free return (government interest rates?) plus epsilon (a little bit).

obviously this does happen in reality for a number of reasons, and the Problem of Profits is a fun question to dig into, but the problem of persistently high profits is a more concerning issue and appears to be growing across multiple industries.

antitrust law is supposed to prevent market concentration that leads to this outcome but has been toothless since the '90s, allowing dramatic consolidation across dozens of old industries (groceries, agriculture, pharmacies, television, newspapers) and of course new industries (tech giants).

government regulation often ends up favouring incumbents, but it seems that contractual arrangements between suppliers and industry bodies and buying agents to form tight cartels are a bigger problem: if egg prices are high you might think to start an egg farm, but you need to find someone who will sell you chickens and someone who will buy your eggs, when the industry is using every means at their disposal to cut off market access to new entrants.

and of course if you have access to the gargantuan amount of capital required to attempt a serious challenge to an established cartel, why exactly would you want to start a price war with them when you can instead find some other unprotected industry to buy up and establish a cartel of your own?

capitalism seems to have entered a phase of its development equivalent to WWI, where defensive operations by incumbents are more successful than offense by new ventures, keeping the battle lines frozen in place (presumably the soldiers dying in their millions would be workers and consumers in this analogy).

I love how you're completely ignoring the fact that the grand jury pored over every piece of evidence available and still made the right decision. Officer Wilson was protecting himself from a thug that wanted to kill him.

Mike Brown was shot six times, including twice in the head which breaks standard protocol for self defense

Multiple eyewitness accounts of the murder of Mike Brown, all stating that the murder was unprovoked and that Michael was unarmed and had his hands up

Owner from the convenience store that Michael allegedly stole from (which is often used as a justification for his murder) stated that no one from his store called the police on Mike, and nothing was taken

First hand account from a friend of Michael’s who was with him during his murder, as well as more accounts from eyewitnesses all refuting Darren Wilson’s claims

‘Officer Wilson was protecting himself from a thug that wanted to kill him' 

Most feminist U.S. president ever?

With President Obama, I KNOW my fave is problematic (drones, lobbyists working for WH, etc., etc.), but I believe that you would have to add up 3-5 other presidents to equal the good that he’s done for this country, especially on the topics of women and the LGBTQIA+ communities.

A LONG List Of President Obama’s Accomplishments (With Citations)

Updated! A List of 276 Accomplishments by President Obama so far… With Citations

Some great feminist Obama moments 

The #1400challenge - How to turn stimulus checks into collective power | Inhabit

The last year has demonstrated just how razor thin our margin of survival is—from the brutality of the police to the viciousness of the virus, from the absurd ups-and-downs of the economy to the glaring incompetence of the government.

Now that they’ve been forced to send some cash our way, we’d like to propose a little something they maybe didn’t expect. The idea is simple: what if we took our stimulus checks and put them towards collective use?

In recent weeks Inhabit has been collaborating with groups around the country to put together a series of kits called the #1400challenge. The result is a handful of introductory guides for a variety of collective projects—from soundsystems and meshnets to pop-up dwellings and community gyms.

Each project is based on a proven and replicable idea, a working model that has already seen action in the streets and in neighborhoods. And each could be a jumping off point for new designs, new skillsets, new encounters, and newly expanded frontlines in the battle for the future.

No doubt many of us will have to spend our checks on necessities like groceries, rent, medical bills—all the bullshit it takes to stay alive in this bullshit world. But for those who can, and especially for those who want to pool resources, the opportunity is clear: invest in collective infrastructure that increases our shared capabilities, that augments our ability to live and to fight.

Here’s our wager. We have to translate isolated, temporary solutions to individual problems into the material and ethical basis for building collective power. We need autonomous solutions that scale at the level of neighborhoods, cities, and regions. Our power together unlocks more potential than we have alone.

It’ll take more than a stuck container ship to break the hold of the economy over our lives. Design and build new ways of living together, that lessen our dependence on their system at the same time that we cultivate trust in one another. Leverage all the means at our disposal—including their cold hard cash—to bring out the beauty, dignity, and creativity of our shared existence.

Read more…

If you want even more ideas, check out my #practical tag

I'll believe that governments want to "empower disabled people to achieve employment" when they actually:

Legislate broader work-from-home abilities for jobs that don't actually require in-office presence

Strengthen employment discrimination laws so employers stop thinking that the easiest way to get around having to accommodate a disabled employee is just to fire them

Actually create systems where they, the government, monitor and enforce accessible environments and building codes. The onus shouldn't be on us to get the money to hire a lawyer and sue our own workplaces to get our basic access needs met.

Include disabled people in minimum wage legislation, instead of leaving legal carve-outs where "substandard workers" can be paid subminimum wage.

Allow disabled people to keep savings accounts of our own, which we don't need anybody else's approval to create or spend

Let us form supportive households, relationships, and marriages without taking away our benefits (especially because this means we have no money of our own if we want to leave those relationships)

Until then, nuh-uh. Fuck off. You're not "empowering" us. You're just pushing us further out onto a perilous ledge because you think you can use inspirational supercrip narratives to force us to perform or die.

Do you have any interesting tidbits about everyone’s favorite hungry little guys, shrews?

we know these tiny mammalian terrors are hungry, but the question remains: why?

well, it's because these little guys are always running around DOING stuff, is why! shrews are constantly on the move, and their tinier-than-a-mouse size and short fur means that they lose body heat fast while they scamper around capering wildly, so to compensate they've developed one of the highest metabolisms on earth.

shrew hearts beat up to 1000 times per minute, fueling a body temperature of over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, but this takes a LOT of energy to keep up. shrews are essentially burning their candle at both ends and also in the middle, so is it any wonder that they need to eat up to 3 times their own body weight per day just to keep themselves going?

I honestly don’t understand why there aren’t more people who, when given the platform to discuss minimum wage, don’t simply distill it to the simplest of facts:

A forty hour work week is considered full time.

It’s considered as such because it takes up the amount of time we as a society have agreed should be considered the maximum work schedule required of an employee. (this, of course, does not always bear out practically, but just follow me here)

A person working the maximum amount of time required should earn enough for that labor to be able to survive. Phrased this way, I doubt even most conservatives could effectively argue against it, and out of the mouth of someone verbally deft enough to dance around the pathos-based jabs conservative pundits like to use to avoid actually debating, it could actually get opps thinking.

Therefore, if an employee is being paid less than [number of dollars needed for the post-tax total to pay for the basic necessities in a given area divided by forty] per hour, they are being ripped off and essentially having their labor, productivity, and profit generation value stolen by their employer.

Wages are a business expense, and if a company cannot afford to pay for its labor, it is by definition a failing business. A company stealing labor to stay afloat (without even touching those that do so simply to increase profit margins and/or management/executive pay/bonuses) is no more ethical than a failing construction company breaking into a lumber yard and stealing wood.

Our goal as a society should be to protect each other, especially those that most need protection, not to subsidize failing businesses whose owners could quite well subsidize them on their own.

Hey. Look at me. Please leave yourself a note somewhere you'll see it later that says "it is going to take years if not decades to get the United States government to the level of functionality it had in November of 2024." If we elect a democrat in 2028, we are not going to be up and running by 2032.

Please make sure you have a reminder in your phone reminding you to not look at 2028/32/36 Democratic candidates and say "why are they not promising/delivering Cool Shit?" because you are going to understand that to get Cool Shit we must have competent people running a decently funded government, and we are not going to have that.

We are not getting UBI. We are not getting single payer healthcare. We are not getting free college or free preschool. We are not redistributing wealth on a large scale. We are not getting free internet. We are not getting ranked choice voting.

If we are lucky, we are going to get an IRS that can collect taxes, qualified schoolteachers, research grants, Social Security, and a government that thinks maybe it should be a priority for people around the worlds to not have AIDS, malaria or TB.

Congratulations to Remington Richardson DDS, Chad Hannibal DDS, Tyler Thompson DDS, Taylor Sims DDS, and Demont Davis DDS.