#Industrial Agitators Market

[robertemma27-blog]

Trends and Insights in the Industrial Agitators Industry

The industrial agitators market is expected to reach USD 3.2 billion by 2028 from USD 2.6  billion in 2023, at a CAGR of 4.0 % during the 2023–2028 period. 

The major factors driving the market growth of the industrial agitators market include increasing demand for homogeneous mixing, growing need for energy efficient mixing equipment in pharmaceutical, chemical and food & beverage industries, and growing adoption of customized agitators for several applications.

Key Players:

SPX Flow, Inc. (US),

Xylem Inc. (US),

Ekato Group (Germany),

Sulzer Ltd. (Switzerland) and

NOV Inc (US).

Portable agitators is expected to account for the largest share of the industrial agitators market during the forecast period.

Portable agitators are designed for easy installation and can be quickly and easily attached to vessels using a variety of mounting options. These agitators are designed to be easily moved from one location to another, making them ideal for applications where the mixing process needs to take place in multiple vessels or in different locations. By using a portable agitator, the mixing process can continue even when vessels are being cleaned or maintained, reducing downtime and improving overall efficiency.All these factors are expected to drive the market for portable agitators during the forecast period.

The chemical industry is projected to account for significant share of industrial agitators market during the forecast period.

Agitators help to prepare, mix, and refine the liquids (chemicals) for use in the chemical industry. Due to the availability of plenty of organic and inorganic raw materials, the chemical industry is an important end-user industry for industrial agitators. The need for increased crop production in the existing land area leads to the requirement for pesticides, which come under the chemical segment. The chemical industry also includes oil and petroleum and water and wastewater treatment sectors. Agitators help in maintaining the viscosity, specific gravity, and chemical composition in mud mixing, thereby saving time and investments in mud mixture at plants, thus increasing their importance in the oil and gas industry. 

Asia Pacific is expected to register the highest CAGR during the forecast period.

The growing chemical and pharmaceutical industry in Asia Pacific region is expected to drive the industrial agitators market. With the Japanese chemicals makers shifting their focus toward differentiated and specialty chemicals in markets such as electronics, automotive, life sciences, and greener chemistry, there will be a resultant focus on innovations and expansion in its chemicals sector. This will present opportunities for industrial agitators companies. Industrial agitators are used in these industries for materials processing and manufacturing operations. In China, food processing is done on a large scale, as the country exports various agricultural goods. 

#Industrial Agitators Market

[roseaa11]

Data Bridge Market Research analyses the industrial agitators market will exhibit a CAGR of 6.20% for the forecast period of 2022-2029. Data Bridge Market Research report on coating additives market provides analysis and insights regarding the various factors expected to be prevalent throughout the forecast period while providing their impacts on the market’s growth. The rise in the demand for the various applications is escalating the growth of coating additives market.

#Industrial Agitators Market #Industrial Agitators Market Demand #Industrial Agitators Market Share #Industrial Agitators Market Forecast #Industrial Agitators Market Trend #Industrial Agitators Market Segment #Industrial Agitators Market Overview #Industrial Agitators Market Growth

[marketstudyinfinium]

#Vietnam Industrial Agitator Market #Market Size #Market Share #Market Trends #Market Analysis #Industry Survey #Market Demand #Top Major Key Player #Market Estimate #Market Segments #Industry Data

[prabha194]

Industrial Agitator Market surging demand with 4.0 % CAGR by 2028

According to our latest market study on “Industrial Agitators Market Forecast to 2028 – COVID-19 Impact and Global Analysis – by Power Rating, Mounting Type, Mixing Type, and End-Use Industry,” the market is expected to grow from US$ 1,931.8 million in 2021 to reach US$ 2,638.6 million by 2028; it is expected to grow at a CAGR of 4.0% from 2021 to 2028.

Small and medium enterprises play an integral part in the growth of any country’s economy. In these emerging economies such as China and India, the SMEs contributes more than 60% and around 40% to the GDP, according to Statista data 2021 and SME Chamber of India data. With fast changing technology scenario and growing number of small and medium manufacturers, the demand for innovative industrial agitator market is growing continuously. In addition to the developing companies, the revenue growth rate of middle market companies in developed countries such as the US, Canada, Germany, and the UK has been surging at a consistent pace and it is expected to outperform various economic segments in these countries.

Request Copy of Industrial Agitator Market Growth Report https://www.theinsightpartners.com/sample/TIPRE00005699/

Key Findings of Study:

The industrial agitators market is segmented based on power rating, mounting type, mixing type, and end-use industry, and geography. Based on power rating, the market is segmented into less than 50 HP, 51 HP - 85 HP, 86 HP - 130 HP, and 131 and above. The less than 50 HP segment represented the largest share of the overall market in 2020. In terms of mounting type, the market is segmented into top-mounted, bottom-mounted, and side-mounted. In 2020, the top-mounted segment accounted for the substantial share of the market. Similarly, based on mixing type, the market is segmented into solid–solid mixture, solid–liquid mixture, liquid–liquid mixture, and liquid–gas mixture. The liquid–liquid mixture segment represented the largest share of the overall market in 2020. Further, in terms of end-use industry, the market is segmented into food and beverages, paint and coatings, chemical, mineral, pharmaceutical, cosmetics, and others. In 2020, the paint and coatings segment accounted for the substantial share of the market. Geographically, North America held the largest share of the industrial agitators market in 2020, followed by Europe and APAC. Further, the market in APAC is projected to witness the highest growth rate during the forecast period.

Industrial agitator market operates in a highly-competitive marketplace. As leading companies in this market continues to broaden its addressable market, by expanding its current product portfolio, diversifying its client base, and developing new applications and markets, all the prominent players faces an increasing level of competition, both from regional as well the leading global technology and industrial companies in the world. Market is consolidated at global level with major six to seven players comprising one-third of the market share, whereas at the regional level it is highly fragmented with several local players serving the SMEs.

About Us:

The Insight Partners is a one stop industry research provider of actionable intelligence. We help our clients in getting solutions to their research requirements through our syndicated and consulting research services. We specialize in industries such as Semiconductor and Electronics, Aerospace and Defense, Automotive and Transportation, Biotechnology, Healthcare IT, Manufacturing and Construction, Medical Device, Technology, Media and Telecommunications, Chemicals and Materials.

Contact Us: Contact Person: Sameer Joshi Phone: [phone]

#Industrial Agitator Market #Industrial Agitator Market Research #Industrial Agitator Market Insight #Industrial Agitator Market Trends #Industrial Agitator Market Forecast

[correlance]

Remember that one fan theory I wrote about Alastor having a rivalry with Thomas Edison in the 1920s? Well, I decided to do a bit more research; it turns out that, not only was I right, but Edison really hated radio. He loathed it so much that he wrote not one, but several articles railing against the "radio fad" in 1926, to the point where an anonymous person wrote "letters to the editor" to argue with Edison.

Gee, I wonder who it could be doing that in the Hazbin-verse? /s

GIF and art originally by karumkin on Twitter/X (2019).

There was also a slew of increasingly aggressive telegrams sent back-and-forth between Edison and radio proponents, with Edison penning thinly-veiled insults that offended even mild critics of the "Wizard":

"The radio is a commercial failure, and its popularity with the public is waning. Radio is impractical commercially, and ethically distorted, and is is losing its grip rapidly in the market and in the home. There is not 10% of the interest in the radio that there was last year.

Radio is a highly-complicated machine in the hands of people who know nothing about it. No dealers have made any money out of it. It is not a commercial machine, because it is too complicated. Reports from 4,000 Edison dealers who have handled radio sets show that they are rapidly abandoning it; and, as for its music, it is awful.

I don't see how they can listen to it. Thousands of people have signed a petition asking that sopranos be kept off the air. Of course, most of them don't know that the soprano voice distorts the radio. The phonograph is coming into its own because people want good music. The fact is that the radio never had a high peak of popularity.

In towns where 25 or 30 dealers were handling radio sets, only one or two are now handling them. A farmer 5 miles from town buys a radio, perhaps on the installment plan. A wire becomes loose. The dealer has to arrange to fix it. This happens time and time again. The business becomes unprofitable for the dealer to engage in. He does not make any money out of it. None of them has. They are giving it up as fast as they can. It is not a commercially successful machine, because it is too complicated.

Static is awful, and the difficulties of tuning out--and now, they're stealing each other's wavelengths! It is too bad that the radio has to be too complicated. It was a big and interesting thing, and the people responded to it, but they want good music, and they found it is not to be had on the radio. That is why the phonograph is reclaiming its own."

Quote from "Edison and Radio", Radio News, December 1926, "in which the Editor takes issue with Mr. Edison's claim that radio is a failure; yet it is pointed out that the radio industry owes Edison a great debt; wherein facts are figures are given to show that radio is on a steady increase; granting that neither radio, nor the phonograph, is yet perfect; how the interest in radio is steadily increasing, and radio dealers are now making good money":

"Since the publication of the famous interview with Mr. Edison, the press, and particularly the radio press across the entire country, has been more or less agitated...I do believe that Mr. Edison has not been recently in-touch with radio sufficiently to appreciate fully the tremendous advances that have been made. Mr. Edison is a busy man, and a tremendously busy inventor. It would be well-nigh impossible for him to be in-touch with all of the various commercial phases of radio all over the country; and, like other executives, he obtains his reports from his subordinates, and such reports often as not may be highly colorful, and even wrong...[thus, the radio industry is unwilling to accord Mr. Edison anything]...as to Mr. Edison's remarks, the statements that follow are facts, which can be checked up by anyone who is unbiased."

Imagine Alastor and Vox with "Stayed Gone" in Episode 2, and Alastor and Lucifer with "Hell's Greatest Dad" in Episode 5, but happening entirely over letters and telegrams, because mass media and television didn't exist yet. The closest musical numbers would likely be "Farmer Refuted" and "Your Obedient Servant" from Hamilton.

Per the book The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World by Randall E. Stross:

Page 276: "[Edison's] phonograph business faced a challenge in the 1920s unlike any that had come before: the advent of commercial radio stations, and the wide availability of free music broadcasts and other entertainment. By the end of 1921, an estimated 1 million listeners had access to radios, and listened to programs broadcast from the Eastern seaboard. A single station in Roselle, New Jersey, which offered the voices of operatic stars among its musical programs, had a broadcast range of a thousand miles, covering New England and the mid-Atlantic states, and reaching as far west as Missouri. A contemporary newspaper account explained to readers not yet acquainted with the phenomenon that those who owned radio sets could enjoy entertainment that was 'literally as free as the air'. Charles and Theodore Edison [proposed a combination phonograph-radio]...their father need not feel slighted because the vacuum tube, a key component of the radio set, was a modern descendant of Edison's experimental work on the incandescent lightbulb. Edison did feel slighted, however; such, at least, was the opinion of Thomas Cowan, a former Westinghouse employee...[who conducted experiments in radio broadcasts with the aid of a phonograph Edison was willing to loan him in 1921]. Cowan had several conversations about radio with Edison, who became upset and recalled the loaner when he heard the Westinghouse broadcasts...[Edison's sons were embarrassed, humiliated]."

"Edison calls radio a 'failure for music', thinks phonograph will regain its own": The New York Times, 23 September 1926. Underlining the usefulness of radio for purposes other than musical programs, Edison did tune in to a radio broadcast of the Dempsey-Tunney fight in 1926, which he was too deaf to hear. He had to rely on family members [usually his wife, Mina] to summarize what had transpired at the end of each round.

"Radio satisfactory on bout, Edison says": The New York Times, 24 September 1926. Defending the quality of musical broadcasts, the radio industry offered expert testimony to rebut Edison's claims [in the next week's newspaper]. See: "Broadcasters disagree with electrical wizard", The New York Times, 3 October 1926.

The "radio fad": A few months later, [after much outcry from the radio industry], Edison was willing to grant that radio might not disappear, but he had a new criticism: listeners' aesthetic sense would be damaged. "Undistorted music, in time, will sound strange to those brought up on radio music," he predicted, "and they will not like the real thing." See: "Thomas A. Edison sees a menace for music in the radio", Musician, January 1927.

"Edison's fears [about the Edison Company not succeeding in the radio business] were realized, though it had been Edison's intransigence (refusal to change one's views) that put the company at such a great disadvantage as a late entrant...on 9 October 1929, Charles Edison prepared a report for his father that showed a loss of $1.3 million due to start-up costs for the [Edison] radio...he could not know that, two weeks later, the stock sell-off would begin with Black Thursday, on 24 October, followed by Black Monday and Black Tuesday...a few days later, Thomas A. Edison, Inc., announced that it would cease producing [music] records [altogether], and refit the factory for the production of radios. The announcement was accompanied by a mention of regret, as the phonograph was 'one of Mr. Edison's favorite inventions'."

"An employee reported observing Harvey Firestone tearfully explaining to Edison that the collapse of business due to the stock market crash of 1929, and the Great Depression, meant that he could no longer continue to financially support Edison's laboratory. Edison was heard, sneering, 'He's a Goddamned lightweight.'" ("I saw your fiasco on the picture show, and I just couldn't resist. What a performance! Why, I haven't been that entertained since the stock market crash of 1929, hahaha! ...so many orphans.")

Edison's death at the age of 84 on 18 October 1931 was also, ironically, commemorated through radio broadcasts: "[The next] night, two radio networks, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and the Columbia Broadcasting Company (CBC), jointly broadcast an 8-minute tribute that ended on the hour, when listeners were asked to turn out the lights. The White House did so, and much of the nation followed, more or less together, some a minute before the hour, others on the hour. On Broadway, 75% of the electrified signs were turned off briefly. Movie theaters went dark for a moment. Everything seemed connected to Edison: the indoor lights, the traffic lights, the electric advertising, everyone connected via radio, which Edison now received credit for helping to 'perfect'. In the simple narrative that provided inspiration for posterity, one man had done it all..."

Some numbers provided for how much radio was making:

1922: $46.5 million (~$860 million in 2024)

1923: $120 million (~$2.2 billion in 2024) (156% increase)

1924: $350 million (~$6.3 billion in 2024) (186% increase)

1925: $449 million (~$8 billion in 2024) (27% increase)

1926: $520 million (~$9.1 billion in 2024) (14% increase)

Overall, per another source:

1922: $60 million (a little more than the previous statistic)

1929: $842.6 million

From here, we can tell the biggest gain was in 1923-1924. Per another source: "Total cost was about $120.00 to buy a new radio in 1926; in today's money, that is about $1,500 to own a radio." That would mean that 7.6 million radios were sold by 1926; an impressive feat, considering that the United States only had a population of a little over 117 million people at the time.

Percentages of United States households with radios:

1925: 19% (5 million households)

1929: 35-40% (200% increase)

1930: 12 million households

1939: 28 million households

The number of licensed broadcast stations surged from just 5 in 1921 to 500 by 1924, per yet another source. In the early years, household radio ownership was highest in the Northeast and on the West Coast. In large sections of the South, Midwest and Great Plains, stations and radio sets were scarce. However, there were notable exceptions.

There were 732 radio stations total across the country by 1927, and the average radio was on 2 hours and 25 minutes per day. People who couldn't afford radios purchased them on installment loans, through which the full price of a new radio could be paid over time. Radios had even more advertisements for washers, dryers, and refrigerators, causing people to use even more merchant credit and installment loans to purchase these shiny, new technological devices.

However, radio sales also took a hit with the Great Depression, as average income levels fell from $3,270 per year in 1920 ($53,300 in 2024), to $2,300 per year by 1929 ($41,500 in 2024), then to $1,500 per year by 1932 ($35,500 in 2024). However, buying a radio also became cheaper, dropping from a costly $200 ($3,200 in 2024) in the early 1920s, to just $35 ($630 in 2024) by 1929-1930.

By the time Alastor died in 1933, 3.6 million radio sets were sold that year alone. By the mid-1930s, 67% of American households had radio sets, and by 1939, about 80% of Americans—over 100 million people—owned radios. Radios were in almost every house, and some Americans even had radios in their cars. The Golden Age of Radio lasted from the 1930s to the 1940s, before being eclipsed by television in the 1950s. Radio hosts went from being paid $10 per broadcast in 1921 ($180-200, 1-2 hours per night, 3-4 nights a week, for a weekly salary of $720-800; monthly salary, $2,900-$3,200; annual salary, $34,800-$38,400; modern-day annual salary range for a radio show host is $30,000-100,000, depending) to making triple-figure salaries in the later 1930s.

Another source lists the following salary ranges for radio hosts:

$2,500-2,700 a year to be an announcer in 1927* (~$45,000-$48,000 range in 2024)

$2,400 a year to be a dramatic director (~$43,000 in 2024)

$4,000 a year to be a program director (~$72,000 in 2024)

New Orleans' first radio broadcast was on 31 March 1922, with WWL. The station wasn't started as a commercial one; but rather, "more of an experiment, started as an interest in wireless communication picked up nationally". The station did not go commercial until 1929, meaning that Alastor also probably had at least one other side job.

Also see:

"Early Radio Announcers Invented Their Profession in the 1920s"

"The History of the Radio Industry in the United States to 1940"

"'A Godlike Presence': The Impact of Radio on the 1920s and 1930s" by Tom Lewis

American Babel: Rogue Radio Broadcasters of the Jazz Age by Clifford John Doerksen (see excerpt here)

Race and Radio: Pioneering Black Broadcasters in New Orleans by Bala James Baptiste (Note: The earliest Black broadcast in New Orleans was in 1945, meaning Alastor was white-passing.)

"Golden Age of Black Radio - Part 1: The Early Years" (Note: The first Black radio announcer, Jack L. Cooper, hosted in 1929.)

"How African Americans Entered Mainstream Radio" by Bala James Baptiste, the author of Race and Radio: Pioneering...

#hazbin hotel #alastor #hazbin hotel alastor #hazbin alastor #alastor hazbin hotel #alastor hazbin #alastor the radio demon #radio demon #thomas edison #long post #i did a lot of research for this okay

[mostlysignssomeportents]

For 40 years, Big Meat has openly colluded to rig prices

On October 7–8, I'm in Milan to keynote Wired Nextfest.

Noted socialist agitator Adam Smith once wrote, "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices."

Smith was articulating a basic truth: when an industry grows concentrated, it grows cozy. Cultural differences between dominant firms are homogenized as top executives move from company to company, cross-pollinating attitudes and approaches. Ambituous, firm-hopping workaholic top brass make all their friends at the office, and so their former colleagues from one or two jobs back remain in their social circles.

Once an industry consists of half a dozen firms, the people running those companies constitute an incestuous financial polycule. They are executors of one anothers' estates, best men and maids of honor at one anothers' weddings, godparents to each others' kids. They play on the same softball teams and take family vacations together.

It would be heartwarming if it wasn't so costly to the rest of us. Remember Smith's maxim: "the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices." Class solidarity among corporate executives forms a united front to screw us in every conceivable way, from corrupting our politicians to maiming and cheating workers to gouging buyers.

That's the basis of American antitrust law. When Robert Sherman was stumping for the passage of the Sherman Act, America's first major antitrust law, he thundered "If we will not endure a King as a political power we should not endure a King over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/

Or rather, that was the basis of American antitrust law – until the Reagan era, when the fringe theories of the Nixonite criminal Robert Bork were elevated to a new orthodoxy. Under Bork's conception of antitrust, monopolies were evidence of excellence. If a company puts all its competitors out of business, that must mean that it is "efficient."

In Bork's fantasy world, the only way a company could attain dominance is by being so beloved by its customers that every competitor withers away. Governments that bust monopolies aren't protecting the public from "autocrats of trade"; they're overthrowing the winners of an election where you "vote with your wallet" to pick the best company.

But Bork and his co-fantasists couldn't quite manage all that with a straight face. They grudgingly admitted that a certain kind of bad monopolist could hypothetically exist, one that used its "market power" to raise prices or lower quality. Only when these offenses against our "consumer welfare" occurred should the state step in to protect its people.

This may sound good in theory, but in practice, it was a dead letter. The consumer welfare test isn't as simple as "If prices go up after a merger, punish the company." Instead, the government had to prove that the price raises came from "market power," and not from an increase in energy or labor costs, or some other "exogenous factor," like Mercury being in retrograde:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/10/you-had-one-job/#thats-just-the-as

And wouldn't you know it, it turns out that the mathematical models prescribed to distinguish greed from unavoidable circumstance inevitably "prove" that the monopolist wasn't at fault. Surely, it's just just a coincidence that the priesthood that understood how to make and interpret these models were Chicago School Economists who sold model-making as a service to companies that wanted to raise prices.

Pro-monopoly economists insist that this isn't true, and that their theory still has room to prosecute bad monopolies and cartels where they occur – more, they say this is already happening. In particular, they insist that "greedflation" can't be real, because it would require the kind of conspiracy that Smith warned of, and that their sickly antitrust enforcement is sufficient to prevent:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/11/price-over-volume/#pepsi-pricing-power

This strains credulity. After all, the CEOs of giant companies in concentrated industries openly boast to their shareholders about how they've used the covid and Ukraine invasion shocks to hike prices to increase their profit margins – not just cover their additional costs:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/23/cant-make-an-omelet/#keep-calm-and-crack-on

While excuseflation is new, open, naked price-fixing by industry cartels is not. Take the meat-packing industry, dominated by a tiny handful of giant corporations whose executives literally ran a betting pool on how many of their workers would get covid each week while working in their cramped, unventilated factories:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55009228

These companies have seen their margins soar – up 300% over the lockdown – while their payments to ranchers and growers cratered:

https://www.reuters.com/business/meat-packers-profit-margins-jumped-300-during-pandemic-white-house-economics-2021-12-10/

All this might leave one wondering whether there isn't something a little, you know, "conspiracy against the publick"-y going on in Big Meat?

Let me tell you about Agri Stats. Agri Stats has been around since 1985. Every large meat packer pays to be a "member" of Agri Stats, and they each submit weekly, detailed statistics about every aspect of their business: all their costs, all their margins, broken out by category. Agri Stats compiles this into phone-book-thick books that each member gets every week, telling them everything about how all of their competitors are running their businesses:

https://www.agristats.com/history

The companies whose data appears in this book are anonymized, but it's trivial to re-identify each supplier. Tyson execs hold regular "naming process" meetings where they go through new books and de-anonymize the data. A Butterball exec confirmed that he "can pick the companies for rankings with 100% certainty."

As David Dayen writes in The American Prospect, these books are incredibly detailed: "bird weights, freezer inventory, and 'head killed per operating hour.'" Within the cozy meat cartels, Agri Stats acts as a clearinghouse that allows every business in the industry to act in concert, running the entire meat-packing sector as a single company:

https://prospect.org/power/2023-10-03-lawsuit-highlights-why-meat-overpriced/

As interesting as the list of Agri Stats members is, the groups that don't get to see Agri Stats' "books" is just as important: "farmers, workers, or retailers." Agri Stats also offers consulting services to its members. As an exec at pork processor Smithfield put it, Agri Stats advice boils down to four words "Just raise your price."

Agri Stats ranks its members based on how high their prices are – they literally publish a league table with the highest prices at the top. Meat packers pay bonuses to their execs based on how high the company's rank is on that table. Agri Stats meets with its members throughout the year to discuss "price opportunities" and to advise them to "exercise restraint" by restricting supply to keep prices up. When one Agri Stats member considered leaving the cartel, Agri Stats wooed them back by telling them how to make an additional $100k by raising bacon prices.

The reason Dayen is writing about Agri Stats now is that the DoJ Antitrust Division has brought an antitrust suit against them. This is part of a wave of antitrust actions brought by Biden's DoJ and FTC, who, along with his NLRB, are shaping up to be the most pugnacious, public-interest force against corporate power since the Reagan administration:

https://www.meatpoultry.com/articles/29124-doj-sues-agri-stats-for-complicity-in-meat-market-manipulation

All this enforcement isn't a coincidence. It comes from an explicit rejection of neoliberalism's core tenets: inequality reflects merit, monopolies are efficient, and government can't do anything. In Biden's DoJ, FTC and NLRB, they're partying like it's 1979:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/party-its-1979-og-antitrust-back-baby

What's amazing about the Agri Stats conspiracy to raise prices is that it's been going since the Reagan administration. It's a smoking gun proof that "consumer welfare" never cared about price-fixing and robbing the public (can a gun still smoke after 40 years?). There was never a time when consumer welfare antitrust cared about consumer welfare. It was always and forever a front for "a conspiracy against the publick," a "contrivance to raise prices."

Big Meat has been robbing America for two generations. Some of those stolen funds were used to corrupt our political process. The meat sector gets $50 billion in public subsidies and still gouges us on prices and rips off its suppliers:

https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news/2022/02/usda-livestock-subsidies-near-50-billion-ewg-analysis-finds

Which means that it's possible that we're simultaneously being ripped off with meat prices and that meat prices are artificially low. Try and wrap your head around that one!

The do-nothing, pro-monopoly neoliberal antitrust is a virus that spread around the world. The EU's antitrust laws were reshaped to mirror American laws after the war through the Marshall Plan, but since the late 1970s, European lawmakers and enforcers have ignored their own laws (just like their American counterparts) and encouraged monopolies as "efficient."

This Made-in-Europe oligopoly, combined with energy and grain shocks from Russian invasion of Ukraine, created the perfect storm for European greedflation. As food prices spiked across the EU, Austrian hacktivist Mario Zechner set out to investigate Austrian grocers' pricing. Using the grocers' own APIs, he was able to compile and analyze a dataset of prices at Austrian grocers:

https://www.wired.com/story/heisse-preise-food-prices/

When Zechner open-sourced his project, collaborators showed up to expand the project across other EU countries, and an anonymous party donated a huge database of prices stretching back to 2017. The data reveals clear collusion among the grocers, who raise prices in near-lockstep, and use gimmicks like cyclic price drops to hide their collusion:

https://github.com/badlogic/heissepreise

Not every grocer has an API, and even the ones that do have APIs could easily block Zechner and co from accessing their data. When that happens, they could – and should – turn to scraping to continue their project. They should also scrape grocers elsewhere, including in Canada, where grocers rigged the price of bread:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/25/deep-scrape/#steering-with-the-windshield-wipers

Because Big Meat's "conspiracy against the publick" isn't unique to meat. It's in all our food, it's in all our goods, it's in all our services. The fact that the meat industry was able to rob American buyers, ranchers and farmers for two generations under a 200' tall neon sign that blinked "AGRI STATS AGRI STATS AGRI STATS" night and day is frankly astonishing.

But there's never just one ant. If the meatheads running Big Meat were able to do this in broad daylight since the NES years, imagine what all the other industries were able to get up to in the shadows.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/04/dont-let-your-meat-loaf/#meaty-beaty-big-and-bouncy

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

#pluralistic #meat #monoopoly #price fixing #antitrust #austria #mario zechner #scraping #adversarial interoperability #greedflation #price inflation #market power #david dayen #agri stats #meat packers

[yourtongzhihazel]

The labor theory of value, which did not originate from Marx, forms a central pillar of Marx's analysis of the capitalist mode of production. In short, it's this: labor adds value to a finished product which makes its final value greater than the sum of its raw materials and poduction costs. It is through this fact that profit can exist. Suppose a capitalist hires a worker at an hourly wage at market value, such that they are paid 10 monies per product made in an hour, to make a product that costs 20 monies in raw material and production costs but sells for 100 monies, then the worker has generated 80 monies of value through their labor but is only compensated for 10 monies of that generated value, letting the capitalist pocket a profit of 70 monies. So profit, then, is the excess value generated from labor which, instead of going to compensate the worker for the full value generated, is pocketed as surplus value. The ratio of compensation to profit is known as the rate of profit or rate of exploitation. Bear in mind that this ratio is different in every industry, firm, country, and community but generally follows that profit must be maintained due to the logic behind the capitalist mode of production: maximizing profit.

In our example, we see a worker compensated with a market wage of 10 monies per product (abstracted). In this example, the worker is "fully compensated" for the value of their labor in the market sense. That is, they are paid what the market agrees is a fair amount for their labor; the market price of the worker selling their labor for that job in that industry. However, there exists cases where this does not happen. Instead, the worker is paid significantly less than the "fair market value" of their labor. This process is known as super exploitation. In super exploitation, the worker is paid less than the market value of their labor and which allows the capitalist to pocket even more profit. Examples of this include plantation workers in Latin America, sweat shoo workers in Southeast Asia, ship crews across the maritime industry, and more. Note that while the vast majority of these examples are from the global south. Indeed, super exploitation is a key aspect of imperialism. Global south workers are paid significantly less than their imperial core counterparts due to several factors largely stemming from a weakened working class under the domination and control of imperialist powers through hard (e.g. coups or invasions) and soft (e.g. sanctions, "free trade" agreements, loans with restructuring, etc.) power methods. The reduced cost of labor in the global south makes them attractive to imperial core firms who seek to profit more and reduce labor costs. So, while global south capitalists benefit from super exploitation, they do not have the market power that imperial core countries have which allows them to truly reap the benefits of super exploitation. This is how bananas at a while foods in san francisco can cost a mere 19 usa cents per banana.

Here I must note that though super exploitation happens most commonly in the global south, it can also happen in the imperial core. Migrant or undocumented workers are exploited far more than their "native citizen" counterparts largely due to their vulnerable political-economy. Migrant farm workers in california, for example, work long hard hours for less than minimum wage solely because they do not benefit from the protections of labor laws. These workers are largely unable to agitate or organize against these exploitative practices because their political-economic position allows the bourgeois state to deport, detain, or otherwise halt their organizing. You'll also note, this is also a great case of liberalism in practice: the exception of certain groups from accessing the "universal rights and liberties" espoused by liberalism.

SN: AZ49

#super exploitation #mmp #AZ49

[lokiondisneyplus]

After the climactic release of the historically successful Avengers: Endgame – the 22nd film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the penultimate release in their “Infinity Saga”, the culmination of 11 years of brand-building, the second-highest-grossing film of all time – Marvel decided what the world really needed was more Marvel.

Armed with classic Hollywood hubris – the misguided conviction that the public would never tire of what they were selling – Marvel Studios rolled television production into their main business model, with “Phase Four” delivering more television shows than movies. The effect was a flooding of the market and a dilution of the brand, not to mention the release of the worst MCU movie, Eternals.

Forcing narrative crossovers between television shows and movies had the adverse effect of turning the former into homework and the latter into ads for the former. This practice was an act of artistic self-sabotage, ruining what could’ve been Marvel’s most sublime film, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, by burdening it with a host of tonally-off, studio-obligated B-stories crowbarred in to promote upcoming television titles.

After a run of disappointing films that weighed down once-fun franchises with po-faced gravity – Spider-Man: No Way Home, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 – and a slew of ordinary television shows – The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Moon Knight, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, Secret Invasion – we’ve officially reached a state of Marvel fatigue, with questions looming around the state of the superhero industrial complex.

It’s in this cultural moment that Loki, the acclaimed solo show for the titular character, arrives for a second season. It doesn’t just have to live up to an inspired first season but also has to push back on all the bad vibes, a difficult task given the heavy presence of Jonathan Majors, the breakout star who was arrested in March on domestic violence charges.The great charm of this season is that it cultivates the feeling that it could head anywhere and be anything. Loki doesn’t just explore free will as a theme, it actually feels as if it artistically possesses it.

The good news is that, whether or not it can be spun as state-of-Marvel narrative correction, season two is a worthy successor. Blessed by the fact its titular character, Tom Hiddleston’s charismatic God of Mischief, remains a slippery figure, Loki is allowed to move forward with no clear lines drawn between good and bad, protagonist and antagonist, hero and villain. Characters hold convictions until they don’t, make choices that will have ramifications, agitate for themselves, then for the greater good, and try to navigate a world whose rules shift beneath their feet.

It’s largely set, once again, in the Time Variance Authority, a comic bureaucratic labyrinth charged with policing multiversal time lines. Offering obvious symbolism at a time when Marvel is struggling to retain coherence in the midst of its “Multiverse Saga”, the TVA prizes the one true “Sacred Timeline”, pruning infinite possibilities back for the sake of cosmic narrative purity.

The TVA is an inspired retrofuturist space steeped in Eastern Bloc mid-century design and early Terry Gilliam films, satirising the pernickety dictums of workplaces and government offices – “limit your lunch break to 17 minutes!” proclaims one poster. From its dated tech – ’70s-style computer monitors, reel-to-reel tape machines, chrome hi-fis – to its curved surfaces, coloured floor tiles and lurid-emerald key lime pie, it’s a rare work of inspired production design by a studio otherwise synonymous with green-screening its way to rush-job eyesores built by an army of non-unionised offshore digital effects artists.

Everything in the TVA looks shabby and neglected, evoking its place as an office lost to time. The plot machinations of season one found an Avengers-adjacent Loki commandeered by the authority – Agent Mobius (Owen Wilson), upper-management Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and others – to pursue a variant of himself, Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino), through time and space.

It ended with an explosion of multiversal time lines and revelations about the true history of the TVA: its top-down system of authority a matrix of illusion, its mind-wiped employees existing in a state of suspended limbo, its time line-culling operation seeming a lot like a morally questionable act of mass slaughter.

In the fallout from that climax, season two finds characters questioning whether the TVA is an entity worth preserving or destroying, not to mention the meaning of their own existence and the ramifications of choice. It’s a study of free will and moral responsibility, housed in 45-minute episodes of action-oriented television. Its chief writer, Eric Martin, both lionises liberty and weighs up its gravity, while happily dealing in the all-American fear of governmental oversight.

The collapse of the TVA’s artificial reality – “everything you’ve been doing is wrong and all your gods are dead”, Mobius deadpans in classic Wilson fashion – leads characters to their own convictions. Mobius seeks peaceful resolution. Renslayer seeks to preserve her power and the authority’s agency (“all that matters is order versus chaos”). The once-bellicose B-15 (Wunmi Mosaku) has a moral reawakening. The dogged Dox (Kate Dickie) is more committed than ever to the cause. The weaselly X-5 (Rafael Casal) wants to explore his new-found independence and maybe become a movie star. The oddball tech guy with the on-the-nose name, Ouroboros (Ke Huy Quan), is there to both provide comic relief and to save the day from a temporal calamity that may destroy all worlds, or something to that effect.

Loki’s playful riffing on time means every benign use of the word pops – “it’ll take some time”, “remember that time”, “take your time”, “time to go” – and its first four episodes dance along the Earth’s time line at various points of history – 1868, 1893, 1977, 1982 – with plentiful hijinks, dabbling in genre tropes, meta use of Loki’s skills of illusion and misdirection, and creepy fast-food-franchise sponsored content.

Looming over all is the presence of the big bad of Marvel’s Phase Five, Kang the Conqueror, played still, to this point, by Majors. He’s seen here in two variants: a squirrelly 19th-century nutty professor named Victor Timely and the all-powerful end-of-time figure met at the end of last season, He Who Remains. These twin characters are connected but separate enough that they symbolise the series’ focus on free will. One may be fated to become the other, but does that mean that he – and the future – can’t change?

The great charm of this season is that it cultivates the feeling that it could head anywhere and be anything. Loki doesn’t just explore free will as a theme, it actually feels as if it artistically possesses it. While it may not be enough to combat the waning influence of comic-book screen output, this season does feel like a disarming counterpoint to recent Marvel Studios product. Rather than feeling conscripted or forced, a puzzle piece that exists solely to build a bridge between branded content, Loki remains its own thing: a nimble exploration of big themes in a colourful, comic, oddball package.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on October 21, 2023 as "Changing times".

#loki #opinion

[communist-manifesto-daily]

The Communist Manifesto - Part 3

[ ◁ First | ◃Prev | Table of Contents | Next ▹ ]

The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.

[ ◁ First | ◃Prev | Table of Contents | Next ▹ ]

#the communist manifesto #communist manifesto daily

[askvectorprime]

Dear Vector Prime, does Thunderhoof exist somewhere in the Viron cluster?

Dear Cervine Centurion,

Thunderhoof was one of the many influential Predacons in the employ of the Predacon Council—while his cyborg moose alternate mode and its ability to unleash seismic shockwaves made him a formidable fighter in his own right, Thunderhoof rarely took to the battlefield. Instead, Thunderhoof presented himself a wealthy business tycoon who’d built his personal fortune in the galactic shipping industry; supposedly, he’d abandoned the Predacons during the civil war and become a Maximal, receiving amnesty in exchange for turning over notorious Predacon criminals like Gnashteeth, Overhead, and Polar Claw.

In truth, however, this was all a lie: Thunderhoof was an ambitious Predacon—one with deep connections to the Cybertronian underworld—and he’d used his fake “defection” as a means to eliminate some of his most notorious business rivals and expand his own criminal empire into their vacant territory. In his new position in high Cybertronian society, Thunderhoof uses his connections to smuggle black market arms shipments from offworld Predacon colonies through to the Cybertronian underworld, where they inevitably find their way into the hands of clandestine cells of Predacon agitators. For his services, Thunderhoof receives a handsome fee from the Predacon Council—and Autobot port inspectors with too much integrity to take a bribe inevitably receive a “visit” from some of his employees.

#ask vector prime #transformers #maccadam #robots in disguise 2001 #thunderhoof #predacon council #gnashteeth #overhead #polar claw #alex-lemonds-93

[haggishlyhagging]

The business of marketing and selling to women literally depends on creating and then addressing female insecurity, and part of the revelatory potential of women's lib involved rejecting the marketplace's sweet-talking promises about life-changing face creams and shampoos—not to mention the entire premise of women as decorative objects. There was good reason for industries that sustained themselves on the self-hatred of women to dread the potential reach of feminist movements. Co-opting the language of liberation to sell their products allowed them to have it both ways, celebrating the spirit of the movement while fostering a new set of insecurities ("Natural-look" cosmetics, anyone?) and a new aspirational archetype.

Charlie, a perfume "for the new woman" that launched in 1973, was the first American fragrance to become a blockbuster, in part because it was Revlon's first to target women under thirty-five. Charlie's iconic ad was a major part of its appeal: in it, model Shelley Hack jumps out of a Rolls-Royce and strides confidently down the streets of New York City in a kicky pantsuit, embodying all the freedom and confidence of the women's movement with none of the baggy clothes or scowling. The accompanying jingle assured potential buyers that this was the fun kind of liberation: "Kinda young, kinda now, Charlie!/ Kinda hip, kinda wow, Charlie!" As Revlon's twenty-point marketing profile of the "Charlie girl" pointed out, their customer was "Irreverent and un-pretentious," "Can be tough, believes rules are secondary," "Can be very soft, but is never passive," "Is very relaxed about sex," and, interestingly, "Is not a Jewish princess." (Here's where I note that my own Jewish mother worked in product development at Revlon until shortly before Charlie's time.)

Indeed, the Charlie girl didn't so much reflect the new vision of young, liberated white femininity as it did present it as a superior alternative to actual feminist activism. In her 2013 book Wonder Women: Sex, Power, and the Quest for Perfection, Barnard College president and self-described former reluctant feminist Debora Spar testifies to the power of Charlie's decontextualized liberation: "Feminists were loud and pushy, strident, and unfeminine. Charlie, on the other hand, was gorgeous, ladylike, and successful, a working woman and a mom. Who needed feminism if you could have Charlie?" For women like Spar, Hack's embodiment of liberation was much more alluring than the real-life agitators who made her possible. And that attitude, goosed by the product and embraced by its consumers, helped lay the groundwork for today's marketplace feminism, in which image is removed from theory and the fun kind of liberation is the most valuable.

-Andi Zeisler, We Were Feminists Once

#andi zeisler #womens liberation #feminism lite #capitalism and feminism #amerika #performative femininity

[roseaa11]

Data Bridge Market Research analyses the industrial agitators market will exhibit a CAGR of 6.20% for the forecast period of 2022-2029. Data Bridge Market Research report on coating additives market provides analysis and insights regarding the various factors expected to be prevalent throughout the forecast period while providing their impacts on the market’s growth. The rise in the demand for the various applications is escalating the growth of coating additives market.

#Industrial Agitators Market #Industrial Agitators Market Demand #Industrial Agitators Market Share #Industrial Agitators Market Forecast #Industrial Agitators Market Trend #Industrial Agitators Market Segment #Industrial Agitators Market Overview #Industrial Agitators Market Growth

[marketstudyinfinium]

#Vietnam Industrial Agitator Market #Market Size #Market Share #Market Trends #Market Analysis #Industry Survey #Market Demand #Top Major Key Player #Market Estimate #Market Segments #Industry Data

[sharpened--edges]

[The] distinction between the legal code and the unwritten popular code is a commonplace at any time. But rarely have the two codes been more sharply distinguished from each other than in the second half of the 18th century. One may even see these years as ones in which the class war is fought out in terms of Tyburn, the hulks and the Bridewells on the one hand; and crime, riot, and mob action on the other. […] The commercial expansion, the enclosure movement, the early years of the Industrial Revolution—all took place within the shadow of the gallows. The white slaves left our shores for the American plantations and later for Van Diemen's Land, while Bristol and Liverpool were enriched with the profits of black slavery; and slave-owners from West Indian plantations grafted their wealth to ancient pedigrees at the marriage-market in Bath. It is not a pleasant picture. In the lower depths, police officers and gaolers grazed on the pastures of crime—blood-money, garnish money, and sales of alcohol to their victims. The system of graduated rewards for thief-takers incited them to magnify the offence of the accused. The poor lost their rights in the land and were tempted to crime by their poverty and by the inadequate measures of prevention; the small tradesman or master was tempted to forgery or illicit transactions by fear of the debtor's prison. Where no crime could be proved, the J.P.s had wide powers to consign the vagabond or sturdy rogue or unmarried mother to the Bridewell (or “House of Correction”)—those evil, disease-ridden places, managed by corrupt officers, whose conditions shocked John Howard more than the worst prisons. The greatest offence against property was to have none. The law was hated, but it was also despised. Only the most hardened criminal was held in as much popular odium as the informer who brought men to the gallows. And the resistance movement to the laws of the propertied took not only the form of individualistic criminal acts, but also that of piecemeal and sporadic insurrectionary actions where numbers gave some immunity. When Wyvill warned Major Cartwright of the “wild work” of the “lawless and furious rabble” he was not raising imaginary objections. The British people were noted throughout Europe for their turbulence, and the people of London astonished foreign visitors by their lack of deference. The 18th and early 19th century are punctuated by riot, occasioned by bread prices, turnpikes and tolls, excise, “rescue”, strikes, new machinery, enclosures, press-gangs and a score of other grievances. Direct action on particular grievances merges on one hand into the great political risings of the “mob”—the Wilkes agitation of the 1760s and 1770s, the Gordon Riots (1780), the mobbing of the King in the London streets (1795 and 1820), the Bristol Riots (1831) and the Birmingham Bull Ring riots (1839). On the other hand it merges with organised forms of sustained illegal action or quasi-insurrection-Luddism (1811–13), the East Anglian Riots (1816), the “Last Labourer's Revolt” (1830), the Rebecca Riots (1839 and 1842) and the Plug Riots (1842).

E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Vintage, 1966), pp. 60–2.

#e. p. thompson

[themedicalstate]

F.D.A. Set to Propose Lower Nicotine Levels in Cigarettes, Likely to Face Fierce Industry Opposition

The Food and Drug Administration is planning to require tobacco companies to slash the amount of nicotine in traditional cigarettes to make them less addictive, a move intended to reduce smoking, according to a notice posted Tuesday on a U.S. government website.

According to the notice, “this proposed rule is a tobacco product standard that would establish a maximum nicotine level in cigarettes and certain finished tobacco products. Because tobacco-related harms primarily result from addiction to products that repeatedly expose users to toxins, F.D.A. would take this action to reduce addictiveness to certain tobacco products, thus giving addicted users a greater ability to quit.”

The proposal would put the United States at the forefront of global antismoking efforts by taking an aggressive stance at significantly lowering nicotine levels. Only one other nation, New Zealand, has advanced such a plan. The headwinds, though, are fierce, with a powerful tobacco lobby already indicating any plan with significant reductions in nicotine would be untenable and with conservative lawmakers who would consider government overreach that could spill over into the midterm elections.

Asked about news reports on a new policy on Tuesday, the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, reminded reporters that agencies routinely post agenda plans on the website for the Office of Management and Budget. And in this case, she said no policy decision had been made.

Few specifics were released on Tuesday, but an announcement has been expected. Last week, Dr. Robert Califf, commissioner of the F.D.A., told an audience he would be speaking more about reducing nicotine addiction soon.

Similar plans have been discussed to lessen Americans’ addiction to products that coat the lungs with tar, release 7,000 chemicals and lead to cancer, heart disease and lung disease. Nicotine is also available in e-cigarettes, chews, patches and lozenges, but this proposal apparently would not affect those products.

“This one rule could have the greatest impact on public health in the history of public health,” said Mitch Zeller, the recently retired F.D.A. tobacco center director. “That’s the scope and the magnitude we’re talking about here, because tobacco use remains the leading cause of preventable disease and death.”

About 1,300 people die prematurely each day of smoking-related causes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, adding up to about 480,000 deaths per year.

The obstacles to such a plan, though, are immense and could take years to overcome. Some plans have been floated that would require a 95 percent reduction in the amount of nicotine in cigarettes. That could toss U.S. smokers, an estimated 30 million people, into a state of nicotine withdrawal, which involves agitation, difficulty focusing and irritability. It would send others in search of alternatives such as e-cigarettes, which are not included in the proposal.

Experts said that determined smokers might seek to buy high-nicotine cigarettes on illegal markets or across the borders in Mexico and Canada.

The F.D.A. would likely have to overcome opposition from the tobacco industry, which has already begun pointing out the reasons the agency cannot upend an $80 billion market. Legal challenges could take years to resolve, and the agency may give the industry five or more years to make the changes.

Other major tobacco initiatives outlined in the landmark 2009 Tobacco Control Act have been slow to take shape. A lawsuit delayed a requirement for tobacco companies to put graphic warnings on cigarette packs. And the agency recently said it would take up to another year to finalize key decisions on which e-cigarettes might remain on the market.

Cigarette makers have already warned that the F.D.A. would be overstepping its authority to regulate cigarettes by requiring a product that’s impossible to produce or unacceptable to consumers.

“Both an express and a de facto ban would have precisely the same effect — both would eviscerate Congress’s expressly stated purpose ‘to permit the sale of tobacco products to adults,’” according to a letter in 2018 from RJ Reynolds’s parent company, RAI Services, to the F.D.A. about an earlier proposal.

The effort to lower nicotine levels follows a proposed rule announced in April that would ban menthol-flavored cigarettes, which are heavily favored by Black smokers. That proposal was also hailed as a potential landmark advance for public health, and it has already drawn tens of thousands of public comments. The F.D.A. is bound to review and address those comments before finalizing the rule.

Five years ago, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the agency’s commissioner at the time, released a plan to cut nicotine levels in cigarettes to a minimally or non-addictive level. The proposal took shape in 2017, but did not lead to a formal rule during the Trump administration.

At the time, the F.D.A. said a model predicted that sharply reducing nicotine in cigarettes would spur five million people to quit smoking in one year.

Among the 8,000 comments that poured in on a 2018 proposal, opposition emerged from retailers, wholesalers and tobacco companies. The Florida Association of Wholesale Distribution, a trade group, said the proposal could result in “new demand for black-market products, and result in increased trafficking, crime and other illegal activity.”

RAI Services, the parent company of RJ Reynolds that is one of the biggest tobacco businesses, said in 2018 that the F.D.A. had no evidence that the plan to cut nicotine levels would improve public health. The agency “would need to give tobacco manufacturers decades to comply,” and figure out how to consistently grow low-nicotine tobacco, RAI said in a letter to the F.D.A. What’s more, the letter stated, the agency had no authority “to force tobacco farmers to change their growing practices.”

The tobacco company Altria also warned in 2018 that a standard that degrades tobacco “to the point of being unacceptable to adult smokers” would be considered a cigarette ban that would violate tobacco control laws.

The Tobacco Control Act of 2009 gave the F.D.A. broad powers to regulate tobacco products with standards “appropriate for the protection of the public health,” although it specifically outlawed a ban on cigarettes or the reduction of nicotine levels to zero.

Low-nicotine cigarettes are already available to consumers, albeit in a limited fashion. This spring, a New York plant biotech company, 22nd Century Group, began selling a reduced-nicotine cigarette that took 15 years and tens of millions of dollars to develop through the genetic manipulation of the tobacco plant. The company’s brand, VLN, contains five percent of the nicotine level of conventional cigarettes, according to James Mish, the company’s chief executive.

“This is not some far-off technology,” he said.

To earn its F.D.A. designation as a “reduced-risk” tobacco product, VLN was subjected to a raft of testing and clinical trials by regulators.

For now, the company is selling VLN at Circle K convenience stores in Chicago as part of a pilot program. Mr. Mish described sales as “modest” — retail prices are similar to premium brands like Marlboro Gold — but he said the proposed F.D.A. rule would most likely accelerate plans for a national rollout in the coming months. That said, the company’s long-range business plan, he said, was largely predicated on licensing its genomic engineering technology to Big Tobacco.

Dr. Neal Benowitz, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, who studies tobacco use and cessation, first proposed the idea of paring the nicotine out of cigarettes in 1994.

He said one key concern was whether smokers would puff harder, hold in smoke for a longer time or smoke more cigarettes to compensate for the lower nicotine level. After several studies, researchers discovered that the cigarette that prevented those behaviors was the lowest-nicotine version, one with about 95 percent less of the addictive chemical.

Dorothy K. Hatsukami, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Minnesota who studies the relationship between nicotine and smoking behavior, said a growing body of evidence suggested that a rapid and significant reduction of nicotine in cigarettes would provide greater public health benefits than the gradualist approach that some scientists had been promoting.

A 2018 study led by Dr. Hatsukami that followed the habits of 1,250 smokers found that participants who had been randomly assigned cigarettes with ultra-low nicotine smoked less and exhibited fewer signs of dependency than those who had been given cigarettes with nicotine levels that were gradually reduced over the course of 20 weeks.

There were, however, downsides to slashing nicotine in one fell swoop: Participants dropped out of the study more frequently than those in the gradualist group and they experienced more intense nicotine withdrawal. Some secretly turned to their regular, full-nicotine brands.

“The bottom line is we’ve known for decades that nicotine is what makes cigarettes so addictive, so if you reduce the nicotine, you make the experience of smoking less satisfying and you increase the likelihood that people will try to quit,” she said.

A recent study offers a cautionary tale, though, on the degree of public health benefit lawmakers can expect from tobacco-control policy. While there is no other nation to look to for experience with a low-nicotine cigarette mandate, there is for the menthol flavor ban.

Alex Liber, an assistant professor in the oncology department of Georgetown University’s School of Medicine who studies tobacco control policy, examined Poland’s experience with a menthol cigarette ban instituted in 2020.

The study he and others wrote found the ban did not lead to a decrease in overall cigarette sales, Mr. Liber said, probably because tobacco companies cut cigarette prices and also began selling flavor-infusion cards (for about a quarter each) that users can put in their cigarette pack to add back the flavor.

“They know how to sell and make money and they will make more and more as long as they have wiggle room,” he said. “I just expect nothing less.”

Image Credit: Taylor Glascock for the New York Times. Source: Christina Jewett and Andrew Jacobs (The New York Times). 

#science #medicine #news #health #medblr #academia #healthcare

[donnerpartyofone]

When I expressed my anxiety about how I need to get a job again, after frittering away my savings while doing higher-end hobbyistic writing that is public and vaguely pays (an extreme luxury to do this, I know), my dad's response was basically that I should just become a writer instead of going back to work. Of course I'm the biggest underachiever in my family and the only person who isn't published either through upper level academia or proper mass media, and all my life it feels like somebody has been saying to me "Why don't you just become awesome and famous" as if that's a career choice that has nothing to do with luck, charisma, and ability; as if I'm not sort of a mess with certain handicaps that no one else in the family shares. Unfortunately, this time my father had one piece of concrete advice that didn't just involve vaguely being special for a living, which is that my fancy brother is close friends with a successful editor at [redacted]. I do have at least one topic with potential mainstream appeal that I could pitch if someone tells me how the hell to do that, but the friend is, in my estimation, kind of a sociopath. One October he reached out to me about horror movies, and what I got out of that conversation is that he has no trouble digesting things like CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST full of real human abuse and animal torture, but he becomes angry if he sees anything with more challenging and inobvious intellectual content. The last time I saw him in person he was all agitated because he wanted to do a deal with Jordan Peterson, which a lot of his colleagues were scandalized by, and his only response was "It's gonna make money so what's the problem?" His interest in Jordan Peterson bothered me less than his weird, blank-faced ignorance of the fact that this might bother some people, his acting like that was a big surprise seemed to me to be really a bad sign. His wife is one of the more awful people I've met in person, one year she took up most of our Christmas dinner spewing some Sofia Coppola-type nonsense about the difficulties of being a beautiful poetess, before endlessly describing the sex practices of her polyamorous friends despite the many efforts of an elderly in-law to change the subject. Like anybody really needs to be thinking about all her buddies' played out dicks and pussies while we're trying to eat. Not that I would have to listen to her practice her needy, tacky self-marketing spiel if I worked with her shady husband, and it's not like I'm so naive that I think I can get around working with creeps in media industries, but it's harder to move forward when you know in advance how someone is specifically gross going in, it's not just an abstraction about the perils of business, it's That Guy. As usual my selective moral squeamishness is holding me back in life!