Cracked Up
Eggs
2022 was the year of Talking About Inflation, both around these parts and in the news media writ large. Though there are early signs of inflation easing this year, at least one commodity continues to increase in price: eggs. Why?
This year has brought the worst bird flu outbreak in US history, and there are no signs it’s going to relent soon. Some 57.5 million birds in the US — mostly egg-laying hens — have died as a result of bird flu outbreaks surpassing the previous record of 50.5 million in 2015, and it’s not letting up. Over 4.3 million birds died last week alone.
As if a tripledemic carving through our human population wasn’t bad enough, the US is in the midst of an unprecedented bird flu outbreak among broilers (meat) and hens (eggs). Grocery store egg prices have nearly tripled as a result, and may remain there for awhile as the poultry industry grapples with a new strain of avian flu.
We’ve talked before about the industry’s refusal to take the necessary steps to eradicate dangerous salmonella in our meat supply - the TL;DR is producers are more concerned with profits than sick Americans. When it comes to bird flu, however, the meat and egg supply is at risk, and poultry producers are motivated to protect their bottom lines.
What are they doing with the sick birds? Killing them in the most shocking ways possible, obviously:
The two most common cull methods are suffocating birds with foam, and employing “ventilation shutdown,” in which the birds are cooked alive by closing off vents so temperatures inside the barn rise and the birds slowly die by heatstroke. This particularly inhumane method was used as a last resort in the 2015 US bird flu outbreak, but has become a much more commonly used method in this year’s outbreak.
Cool cool cool. Love thinking about entire barns full of chickens slowly suffocating to death or being broiled alive. Extremely ethical meat industry we’ve got.
There is a humane solution to the problem, and you’ll never guess what it is: vaccination! There are multiple vaccines on the market, many can be delivered into eggs to protect chicks the day they are born, and they are 80 to 100 percent effective against bird flu for five months. Big drug companies like Merck offer their own versions. None are USDA approved, however. Huh?
Countries fear that importing eggs or slaughtered meat from vaccinated birds in countries where the virus is circulating could inadvertently spread it within their own borders by introducing the virus to wild or domesticated animals through discarded raw meat. That means that big poultry exporters like the US — which sends 18 percent of its poultry abroad — don’t vaccinate, for fear they’ll miss out on a huge part of their revenue: international trade.
[…]
And without international coordination and predictable vaccine use, it doesn’t make economic sense for vaccine makers to invest in developing vaccines that protect against the bird flu.
It is challenging to determine via testing whether a bird has been vaccinated or is infected with flu, and since there has been no international coordination for vaccination or health standards, the USDA and the US poultry industry are refusing to vaccinate birds for fear of losing export business to other countries. It is cheaper to genocide chickens than pass laws to protect them. Truly a metaphor for our times.
Sure, it would cost farms money to vaccinate all their eggs, but would it triple the price of eggs every few years, like we’re doing now? Who knows, and we’re unlikely to find out any time soon. The EU has agreed to develop a bird flu vaccination strategy, but even pro-vaccination groups concede the issue is more political than veterinary.
The 2015 bird flu outbreak cost the US poultry industry an estimated $3.3 billion dollars, and this one is on track to cost billions more - perhaps their windfall profits over the last couple years will offset some of it! What’s more sickening - pun intended - is our government’s complicity in this needless campaign of profiteering and mass death.
Britain
We talked about Britain’s looming energy and cost of living crisis last year. The popular narrative that sent Liz Truss packing after a few brief weeks was that her government’s economic policies would rain down misery on a country already suffering from the policies of her predecessors. Economic markets and the Pound tanked, pension schemes scrambled to remain solvent, and Britain suffered a mini economic shock that was corrected somewhat with the election of a new government.
It may have been a band-aid on a shotgun wound, however. New data from the Financial Times details the UK’s slide from world power to distressed nation, and it is not pretty:
The effects of the Conservative austerity programme during the Cameron-Osborne years have been steadily accumulating over the past decade, but this winter that trickle has become a torrent.
[…]
Twelve years on from the start of austerity, the data paint a damning picture, from stagnant wages and frozen productivity to rising chronic illness and a health service on its knees.
Wages in the country are below where they were 18 years ago, life expectancy is the worst among developed countries - excluding the US, of course! - and cuts in health spending left Britain woefully unprepared for a pandemic and a poorer, aging population.
Labour governments were able to improve upon some quality of life factors, but recent Conservative governments undid those gains and pushed the country deeper into stagnation:
It is reassuring to know that we aren’t the only country with a right wing dead set on making life more miserable (and deadly) for the poor and unhealthy. One need not look far to find examples of austerity setting back both economic and societal progress around the world. It’s a lesson economists, central bankers, and conservative politicians seem incapable of learning. Austerity doesn’t work now, it didn’t then, and every place it’s attempted is much worse off for it.
It’s naïve to think data or charts will have any impact on political outcomes in the US or UK, but it’s necessary work. We can only hope our ancestors look back at this time in history and wonder why we thought numbers in spreadsheets were more important than ensuring good lives for our fellow humans.
Africa
While we’re talking about human misery at the hands of the British government, let’s talk Kenya! You may recall Facebook’s content moderation woes in Africa, because while it invested heavily in user growth on the continent, it outsourced the job of moderation to contractors who had little hope of success on a continent with thousands of languages and hundreds of cultural conflicts. At the time I wrote:
The problem with moderating Facebook by outsourcing the brain-damaging work to contractors creates the same perverse incentives we’ve seen elsewhere - when the sheer volume of bad and dangerous posts is so great you need a single worker to look at hundreds a day to keep up, you can’t possibly balance that with their mental health.
It turns out the company providing most of Metabook’s African content moderation agrees with me, and is pulling out of the relationship:
Sama blamed the decision on the “current economic climate,” and said it would entail letting go of approximately 3% of its staff, mostly from Nairobi.
A Meta spokesperson confirmed the end of the contract in a statement. “We respect Sama’s decision to exit the content review services it provides to social media platforms. We’ll work with our partners during this transition to ensure there’s no impact on our ability to review content.”
That should be easy, since the company’s ability to review content in Africa has been largely nonexistent. It is a grim warning of what can happen when a company with Facebook’s virtually unlimited resources pushes content reviewers to the breaking point - countries facing economic and civil turmoil will end up with social media platforms more toxic and dangerous than ever.
George Santos
We had to talk about it at some point, didn’t we? I’m speaking, of course, about Republican Congressman (!) George Santos of New York, who has been the trending topic on politics Twitter for weeks now. It’s been revealed he lied about, well, basically everything during his campaign. He did not attend the colleges he said he did. He did not work at the companies listed on his resume. He did not lead a volleyball team to an NCAA championship. He’s not Jewish. His mother didn’t die on 9/11. His fabrications are so comprehensive it’s safe to say he is probably a pathological liar.
This could be an asset to a freshman Congressman, entering a legislative body full of grifters and charlatans, but Santos appears to have elevated his deceit beyond résumé fluffing into full blown fraud.
Campaign finance violations? You bet:
The alleged wrongdoing includes masking the true source of his campaign’s funding, misrepresenting his campaign’s spending and using campaign resources to cover personal expenses.
[…]
He reported loaning his campaign more than $700,000 in the 2021-22 cycle despite having only $55,000 in earned income during his previous run for Congress in 2020, according to a financial disclosure.
US campaign spending laws require receipts for purchases over $200 dollars. Santos had a…workaround for this:
The complaint also accuses Santos of misrepresenting his campaign’s spending. It notes that his campaign reported “an astounding 40 disbursements between $199 and $200, including 37 disbursements of exactly $199.99,” thereby eluding requirements to keep a receipt, invoice or canceled check for all spending above $200.
Hiding small hotel and meal purchases sounds like the behavior of a candidate who was so wealthy he ‘loaned’ his campaign $700 thousand dollars.
That money probably came from some dark money swamp creature(s), but Santos applied his penchant for deception to traditional fundraising:
A member of George Santos’ political team had a plan to raise money for the Republican congressman’s campaign: Impersonate the chief of staff of now House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
[…]
The lies and embellishments helped Santos and his allies raise nearly $3 million for his winning 2022 campaign to represent New York’s 3rd District.
I am not arguing it should be illegal to fleece the sort of person who donates hundreds of thousands of dollars to political candidates, but at least we can enjoy their embarrassment and outrage.
A common theme among con men (and women) is the inability to turn it off and act appropriately in normal society. A con artist doesn’t save their pièce de résistance for, say, a Congressional run. They do frauds, petty and otherwise, because it is a compulsion they can’t control. Santos’s rise to public office has led Brazilian officials to reopen a dormant check kiting case against him from 2008, for instance.
And there’s the matter of whether Santos was receiving payouts from a Florida-based Ponzi scheme:
Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.), who has admitted to fabricating key details of his biography, received payments as recently as April 2021 from a financial services company accused by the Securities and Exchange Commission of a “classic Ponzi scheme,” according to a court-appointed lawyer reviewing the firm’s assets.
Uh oh! This was going on during Santos’s first unsuccessful run for Congress, and the company running the Ponzi announced his employment in the most Santos way possible:
Harbor City was formed in 2014 by a Florida entrepreneur named J.P. Maroney. In July 2020, the company announced it had hired Santos to serve as regional director of the company’s New York City office. The news release referred to Santos, who was then in the midst of his first congressional campaign, as George Devolder.
They’ll never know, George! And, in fact, no one seems to have caught on until recently, when a trustee involved in the case brought it to light. Santos was - allegedly! - tasked with securing clients for the Ponzi in New York, while also running for Congress.
Did Santos make a bunch of Ponzi money to lend himself to win a Congressional seat? Did it come from some other financial criminal political donor? Who knows! Typically I would wait for this circus to play itself out so we could talk about what actually happened, but at this point it is too much fun to speculate.
Short Cons
WSJ - “U.S. workers lost more than $200 million from employment-related scams in 2021, up from $133 million in 2019, agency data show.”
OCCRP - “Not long after imposing sanctions on wood imports from Russia and Belarus, Europe saw an influx of wood supposedly coming from Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.”
Web3 - “A scammer spent a month setting up a con in which they stole fourteen Bored Ape NFTs belonging to one individual.”
WSJ - “WeWork chief executive Sandeep Mathrani said in an interview that the company has enough resources to make it through next year, even if its occupancy drops by 10 percentage points.”
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