Conversation

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This is also an example of aggregation theory. Generally, I’m in favor of this dynamic. More and cheaper stuff for all. If humans suffer in the supply chain, automate their roles. But in this case, there’s no good endgame for the actual factory-farmed chickens.
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For humane treatment if both humans and animals, the only solution is for the cost of chicken to go up to include the cost of humane treatment of the birds. Ie true free-range etc. You cannot get to humane treatment of workers by continuing to torture the birds.
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This is an unusual example of the general strategy. To compete with the low-cost producer you must differentiate. When your product is chicken, the natural way to differentiate is to treat each bird as a unique living thing that deserves a good life even if you do kill and eat it
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Full disclosure: I’m vegetarian tending vegan. I do eat eggs, but this is one of the rare areas I’m willing to pay bith a price premium and try all substitutes. The eggs we buy cost $6-8/dozen for some assurance of humane. I’ve also swapped in Just Egg and veg proteins a lot.
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Obviously being able to pay 6x for basic protein is a pretty big privilege and not something I expect genpop to do, but in a positive sign, Just Egg and various plant-based proteins have been trending down in cost. We’ll see how far it can go.
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I don’t expect meat-eating to disappear, but I do expect factory farming to. In a few decades I expect cruelty-free meat to be an occasional luxury food, and plant-based protein and lab0grown meat to dominate calories. Like with renewables a few decades ago, it seems crazy now.
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But for other hidden low-cost supply chains, where the end of the line is poorly treated humans working with non-living raw materials — minerals, plastics, whatever — same logic works. Automate away what living pain what you can, differentiate to price right what you can’t.
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“Colin the chicken” logic applied to say iPhones. If you knew the name and a humanizing detail about every human who touched it from cobalt mines to UPS guy, would you think differently about price? There’s already products that work kinda like that... credits roll in movies.
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One of the most best innovations in humanism in the last decade or so is the post-credits trailer scene, teasing the next movie in a franchise. Kudos to MCU. Instead of walking out while a million tiny-font names scroll by, you stay and watch. Takes a thousand Colin-chickens.
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Need more tricks like this to drive humane globalization. Radical localism is simply not an option for the future of the economy. The numbers don’t work. We can reshape supply chains a lot (for eg to favor last mile manufacturing) but not back to pre-modern levels.
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So the way to get globalism to work right is to internalize more externalities so everything gets priced better. The externality that bothers people the most is extractive dehumanization of distant invisible people. We want to humanize every producer the way we do local artisans.
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The cynical view is few people care to do more than virtue signal. 80% want the cheapest thing, screw how their virtue is perceived. Of the remaining 20%, 16% only want to signal care, not pay for actually caring. Leaving only 4% who actually care. I don’t think this is true.
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When corporations pay off politicians and slap on ethics-washing labels of “free range” and “no sweatshop”... yeah, most walk away satisfied, if they cared to begin with. Most of the action has only produced theater over the last 20 years. But it doesn’t have to stop there.
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The first wave of supply chain reform — the ethics-washing theater, 1995-2015 — was largely driven by passionate activist college students paying for overpriced degrees lacking both the competence to go deeper AND the self-awareness to interrogate their ethical impulses.
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But don’t let contempt for the messenger blind you to the validity of the message. The set of “washing” labels produced by the ethics theater era: green, local, organic, cruelty-free, fair-paid, non-sweatshop, carbon-neutral, recycled was merely the MVP. The UI mock-up.
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10 years later, a third of these activist kids turned into social media grifters writing woke-washing clickbait to make rent in overpriced cities. Another third had given up and turned normie or retreated in idealistic depression. But a last third got serious.
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Covid-fragility collapse is vindication of the broad critique of industrial mode capitalism that drove left-anti-globalism activism of two decades. They got most of the details wrong, and their prescriptions (reactionary labor politics) are not even wrong. But credit where due.
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The generation of millennial activist college kids from 10-20 years ago (just a little younger than me) who gave us our current state of play is now getting its first taste of political power. Their first attempts at reform (eg GND) have been mixtures of incompetence and grift.
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BUT, there’s a minority that is doing the actual work. They’ve walked the fake-it-till-you-make-it path. They understand the problems, are interested in more than virtue signaling, and in solutions that go beyond reactionary labor politics and knee-jerk anti-globalism.
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Perhaps most importantly, in the last 4 years, they’ve gotten a first taste of the adult political battles that will shape the rest of their lives: against ethno-nationalist extraction-oriented industrial capitalism. The anti-globalists on the right. Their evil twins.
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The two sides share many elements of the diagnosis (hence the horseshoe-theory flipping between Trump and Bernie support. But otherwise they are poles apart. One side simply wants their shot at extraction. The other side wants a non-extractive approach to the economy.
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This battle will mature, deepen, get 100x more serious, and dominate the next few decades. Chickenification is not an isolated pattern. It’s the fingerprint of global geopolitical and techno-socio-economic futures. Everywhere you see it, the war has arrived for real with Covid.
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We conclude this sermon thread with a very tasty virtue signal. The Just Egg breakfast quesadilla I just made for myself. Repent ye sinners (within your respective budgets). A more virtuous life is possible.
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