The prices of oil, transportation, food ingredients and other raw materials have fallen in recent months as the shocks stemming from the pandemic and the war in Ukraine have faded. Yet many big businesses have continued raising prices at a rapid clip.
Some of the world’s biggest companies have said they do not plan to change course and will continue increasing prices or keep them at elevated levels for the foreseeable future.
That strategy has cushioned corporate profits. And it could keep inflation robust, contributing to the very pressures used to justify surging prices.
PepsiCo, the snacks and beverage maker, has become a prime example of how large corporations have countered increased costs, and then some.
Hugh Johnston, the company’s chief financial officer, said in February that PepsiCo had raised its prices by enough to buffer further cost pressures in 2023. At the end of April, the company reported that it had raised the average price across its products by 16 percent in the first three months of the year. That added to a similar size price increase in the fourth quarter of 2022 and increased its profit margin.
“I don’t think our margins are going to deteriorate at all,” Mr. Johnston said in a recent interview with Bloomberg TV. “In fact, what we’ve said for the year is we’ll be at least even with 2022, and may in fact increase margins during the course of the year.”
The bags of Doritos, cartons of Tropicana orange juice and bottles of Gatorade drinks sold by PepsiCo are now substantially pricier. Customers have grumbled, but they have largely kept buying. Shareholders have cheered. PepsiCo declined to comment [the good 'ole KYMS tactic].
For much of the past two years, most companies “had a perfectly good excuse to go ahead and raise prices,” said Samuel Rines, an economist and the managing director of Corbu, a research firm that serves hedge funds and other investors. “Everybody knew that the war in Ukraine was inflationary, that grain prices were going up, blah, blah, blah. And they just took advantage of that.”
But those go-to rationales for elevating prices, he added, are now receding [hence the need for the KYMS tactic].
KYMS = keep your mouth shut; a common tactic in politics, commerce and religion to deal (or refuse to deal) with inconvenient facts, true truths and/or sound reasoning
So when one experiences radical right Republicans ignoring major causes of inflation and instead blaming socialist Democrats, evil Joe Biden and pandemic spending for inflation, one can rest assured that the allegation is standard radical right lies, slanders and irrational nonsense. Corporations know two things for certain about the radical right. One, the radical right in congress will ferociously defend big corporate interests. Two, bad corporate behavior will be ferociously ignored, denied and/or rationalized. After all, corporations bought and paid for those precious defenses. That's just called free speech in action.
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The NYT reports that some prominent experts in artificial intelligence will release a 1-sentence long open letter warning about AI. The warning is short to keep the core message from being diluted with details:
A group of industry leaders is planning to warn on Tuesday that the artificial intelligence technology they are building may one day pose an existential threat to humanity and should be considered a societal risk on par with pandemics and nuclear wars.
“Mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war,” reads a one-sentence statement expected to be released by the Center for AI Safety, a nonprofit organization. The open letter has been signed by more than 350 executives, researchers and engineers working in A.I.
The signatories included top executives from three of the leading A.I. companies: Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI; Demis Hassabis, chief executive of Google DeepMind; and Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic.
Well, now that we have been properly warned everything will be just fine. Or maybe not. We all know how this is going to play out before we get to see if AI will make us go extinct or not.
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Tales from the brutal land of cynical Christian nationalism (CN): The WaPo writes about some brave parents who decided to send their child to public school. This illustrates how years of vicious, slandering CN propaganda has cynically trapped, deceived and betrayed tens of millions of American adults. It takes guts to break away from a cult. Breaking away can come with some very high costs. The WaPo writes:
Aaron and Christina Beall had never attended school when they were children. Until a few days earlier, when Round Hill Elementary held a back-to-school open house, they had rarely set foot inside a school building. Both had been raised to believe that public schools were tools of a demonic social order, government “indoctrination camps” devoted to the propagation of lies and the subversion of Christian families.
At a time when home education was still a fringe phenomenon, the Bealls had grown up in the most powerful and ideologically committed faction of the modern home-schooling movement. That movement, led by deeply conservative Christians, saw home schooling as a way of life — a conscious rejection of contemporary ideas about biology, history, gender equality and the role of religion in American government.
Christina and Aaron were supposed to advance the banner of that movement, instilling its codes in their children through the same forms of corporal punishment once inflicted upon them. Yet instead, along with many others of their age and upbringing, they had walked away.
Aaron and Christina Beall pose with their daughter, Aimee, then 6,
on her first day at Round Hill Elementary School in VA on Aug. 26, 2021
Like all rebellions, this one had come with consequences. Their decision to send Aimee to the neighborhood elementary school — a test run to see how it might work for their other kids — had contributed to a bitter rift with their own parents, who couldn’t understand their embrace of an education system they had been raised to abhor. And it had led Christina, who until that summer day had home-schooled all of their children, into an existential crisis.
“I never imagined sending you to the local elementary school instead of learning and growing together at home,” she wrote later that day in an Instagram post addressed to her daughter. “But life has a way of undoing our best laid plans and throwing us curveballs.”
Christina did not describe on Instagram how perplexed she and Aaron had been by a ritual that the other parents seemed to understand; how she had tried, in unwitting defiance of school rules, to accompany Aimee inside, earning a gentle rebuke from the principal.
And she did not describe what happened after their daughter vanished into a building they had been taught no child should ever enter. On that first day of school — first not just for one girl but for two generations of a family — the Bealls walked back to their SUV, and as Aaron started the car, Christina began to cry.
Through their influence, a practice with roots in the countercultural left took on a very different character. Among conservative Christians, home schooling became a tool for binding children to fundamentalist beliefs they felt were threatened by exposure to other points of view. Rightly educated, those children would grow into what HSLDA [Home School Legal Defense Association] founder Michael Farris called a “Joshua Generation” that would seek the political power and cultural influence to reshape America according to biblical principles.
Christina, 34, and Aaron, 37, had joined no coalitions. They had published no memoirs. Their rebellion played out in angry text messages and emails with their parents, in tense conversations conducted at the edges of birthday parties and Easter gatherings. Their own children — four of them, including Aimee — knew little of their reasons for abandoning home schooling: the physical and emotional trauma of the “biblical discipline” to which they had been subjected, the regrets over what Aaron called “a life robbed” by strictures on what and how they learned.
Aaron had grown up believing Christians could out-populate atheists and Muslims by scorning birth control; Christina had been taught the Bible-based arithmetic necessary to calculate the age of a universe less than 8,000 years old. Their education was one in which dinosaurs were herded aboard Noah’s ark — and in which the penalty for doubt or disobedience was swift.
“It’s specifically a system that is set up to hide the abuse. ... At some point, you become so mentally imprisoned you don’t even realize you need help.” — Christina Beall
This raises some serious questions. Who is being indoctrinated or brain washed here? Children brought up under lies, intolerance and hate-filled CN "education", or children who go to secular public schools? Exactly what are the lies and subversion tactics of Christian families that CN elites tell the rank and file comes from public schools?
Presumably, the hated secular lies and subversion tactics prominently include (i) being woke, (ii) acknowledging and tolerating non-heterosexuality and secularism generally, and (iii) the unpleasant aspects of actual American history, instead of the false, comforting narratives that White CN elites falsely assert are historical facts and truths. On thing that cannot be a guiding biblical principle is thou shalt not lie. CN dogma and narratives are loaded with lies and slanders.
Qs: Is it reasonable to argue that, compared to standard public school curricula, CN dogma, lies and slanders is the main source of damaging indoctrination of false beliefs and bigoted intolerance?
Exactly what are the biblical principles that the CN movement want to impose by social coercion and force of law on American politics and society?
Is it reasonable to feel seriously threatened, insulted and/or disrespected at the aggressive attitude that theocratic CN has for secular public education and people who want to live secular lives free of Christian coercion, bigotry, oppression and biblical principles, e.g., in the form of Christian nationalist forced birth laws and tax subsidies (worth tens of billions of dollars each year) for politically aggressive anti-democratic Christian theocracy that everyone supports?
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