You Can Learn From Anything #1

Far Too Much Detail On: A Bidenomics Meme

Introduction

I’m often amazed how much you can learn by looking at something really closely.

I’m even more amazed by how often people don’t take the opportunity to do so.

This isn’t because other people are stupid, it’s just because I don’t understand how not to. I have a compulsion, and the compulsion is self-reinforcing.

On encountering some random cultural artifact, which are so often confusing to me, I play around with it, poke at it a bit.

“Really? That much money? Where’s that figure from? Adjusted or unadjusted? Is that a real research paper? Did she really say that?”

And, soon, you pull a loose thread. Soon, you find some insight. Joy. Hidden knowledge feels illicit. So, I keep going.

A really good find, and you start to see every claim made in a badly pixelated photo as a stone to overturn, where the most fascinating bugs might be lying underneath.

(Yes, I was that kid. Yes, I kept them in jars.)

The most fruitful places to dig are what we might call ‘quantifiable memes’: any disposable digital cultural object which lays out a numerical statement of fact. These are my own personal Geoguessr, where I get to play at pathologist, up to my arms in guts.

I’ll show you.

In the wild here...

What a strange, strange thing. If a local restaurant posted it, then in a sane world you’d have a photo of that sign, not of your reproduction of it.

So instead of taking a photo, you’ve have to: remember all the facts, go home, transcribe all of them accurately, print them out on a piece of paper, and then photograph it. What a circuitous choice.

This doesn’t make any of the details wrong, of course. But why don’t we use a reverse image search, and find out where it came from?

Aha! A meme from the best part of two years ago. But, if you look carefully, also a cropped meme. Here’s the full picture:

OK! We have a magnet on the top, and on the bottom; bottom magnet also holds what looks like a band flyer, and potentially a blue Post-It. On the left, a segment of countertop. And a sliver of a grey background.

… this is someone’s fridge.

So they had to remember all the facts, go home, transcribe all of them accurately, print them out, stick them to the fridge, and then photograph it.

(Who else in their house is reading printed-off memes from the fridge??)

But we should also look at the facts themselves. There are three specific claims: frying oil, chicken, cardboard boxes, all got expensive when the meme was made.

Let’s start with fryer oil.

Fried foods can be made with a wide array of oils - tallow (beef fat), various vegetable oils (canola, sunflower, soy), peanut oil, and rice bran oil.

These all have various:

• smoke points (the frying temperature at which they start to degrade),

• price points (cost per liter or gallon)

• flavour profiles

• fat profiles

• availabilities

• treatment possibilities (e.g. hydrogenation)

Bulk frying oil is often mixed vegetable - mixing vegetable oils allows good price and smoke point control. Peanut/soy is popular. But all oils exist in a market where there are mutual substitutions (for instance, any given oil has CPG goods / manufacturing and retail applications as well).

Now, can anyone think of a big disruption to the cooking oil supply recently?

Yep. Putin. Thanks, Vlad.

Russia (sanctions!) and Ukraine (war!) have nearly 60% of the world’s sunflower production. The USDA always has great information on commodities like this, and you can see it split out by agricultural area on the FAS (Foreign Agriculture Service) website.

But that’s just sunflowers. Were other vegetable oils were similarly affected, or, was the sunflower disruption big enough to affect a basket of similarly-used oils?

Yes, it was.

This one is from the UN

I am not a commodities trader but if you asked me to guess: the 2022 spike is a combination of the ‘bullwhip’ effect from COVID, mixed together with local factors (crop failures / low yields), but with a big dose of war.

Great, now let’s do the chicken.

We don’t need to start with Google on this one, even in recent memory there were headlines on this:

There’s a chicken wing shortage. So this chain wants you to start loving thighs.

There was a wild period in 2021 when wings were so expensive that they were listed on some menus as ‘MP’, aka Market Price, as if they were in the same difficult-to-cost-and-source realm as lobster, higher grades of tuna, abalone, etc. These are usually listed on menus at MP, which essentially means ‘ask your waiter and they’ll tell you their market price plus ~60% for that day only’

So what were the prices? Historical figures are a little more annoying, but they are directly built out of broader wholesale chicken prices. And here are those:

Look at that peak! ‘Wholesale Prices’

If it isn’t clear, this is ‘cents per pound’.

Again, this isn’t a direct indicator of chicken wing price. There are different cuts and carcass prices, this is related rather than exactly the same.

OK, progress. How about cardboard? As much as it’s less perishable than oil, and a LOT less perishable than chicken, it still exists in a tight cycle from trees to pulp to paper to boxes to your orange chicken.

Irritatingly, this was harder to get downloadable data on. But there was a strong Plague effect:

• distribution of circulated materials went down (books, magazines, etc), wood prices went up as everyone wanted a larger house, demand for office supplies went completely to shit

• this caused some loss of capacity in the industry, with mills closing amidst the above high energy and labor prices

• eventually, the rebound during The Great Reopening was nasty

At least, that’s what I cribbed from reading about it.

An Interesting Situation

This leaves us with quite an odd scenario: where this meme, as much as presenting it as contemporary is completely dishonest (it’s 2 years old) and complaining that it’s all Joe Biden’s fault (global commodities do not work that way), is totally plausible.

When it was made, circa July 2022, it was during a historically shitty period for price predictability, due to a variety of market mechanics and a strong bullwhip effect.

It is hard to run a small business at the best of times. You have no vertical integration (aka owning the upstream shit you need to do downstream shit), you are completely at the mercy of suppliers - sometimes very downstream suppliers, the last retailers in the great chain of businesses that clack together before they make something that meets a consumer. Sometimes, these suppliers are not only charging what seem like random amounts of money, but also incapable of explaining of why things cost what they do.

And according to these prices, in Q2, 2022 it was historically unpleasant.

If you made me guess, I’d say: someone made a clumsy attempt to put together real circumstances that they were confronted with into a fake meme. It doesn’t make me mad, it just gives me a lot of empathy for the poor gonads who had to manage through this particular period in this particular sector. It would be like being slowly pulled apart, every price increase, every indignity compounding, slowly at first and then far too quickly, one muscle tearing at a time. Awful.

A Broader Point

I do silly exercises like this a lot. Sometimes I do them when I should be doing other things, but less often than I used to.

I think I turned up at the right time for the internet: when it just seemed to present unlimited possibility and free information, everywhere, about everything. It was so far away from ‘five websites, each containing screenshots from the other four’.

This never really wore off. I think the early, weird, crap internet taught many of us to dig, and to play, with information. It is such a relief to understand something, or even just to know enough about it to know when there is a chance to know more.

It is also marvelous mental armor. I have found that there is a narrow band of people who are about my age who all have the same sanguine attitude to The Latest Thing which is either outlandish or shocking, people who are about my age (and I was informed the other day that I was a ‘geriatric millennial’, which is funny enough not to be completely horrifying).

And we just… don’t believe it. Even if it flatters our preconceptions perfectly. The statements go into a kind of liminal space of ‘neither belief nor disbelief’, which shifts only if closely examined.

‘The Terrible Thing Happened!’ ‘Well, maybe.’

‘The Truly Amazing Thing Happened!’ ‘Well, maybe.’

I am sure people who are other ages can do this too, of course. Appropriate skepticism is not age-gated. I am simply asserting that I see it more from people my age.

As we will never have the Old Weird Bad Internet Which Was Good ever again, I hope it’s something other people can learn. To dig, to assemble, to learn, no matter where the journey takes you.

Even for something this stupid, if you have the time and energy.

Even if that means you don’t get to blame Joe Biden.