Hacker News Reader

SocialGradientson Maybe There Was an Egg Cartel After All

It's likely the cartel was only <1% of the egg price increase. It's good to go after, but it wasn't the main cause of price increases.

Some background for the <1% estimate:

- The fine was for 3M vs a 13B egg market

- The only quotation I could find covering how much the cartel raised prices was "placed bids at a price that was two cents greater" from Matt Levine's piece: https://emailshot.io/p/LKaQi73kHN4uv5sVMUbfSXNQdm3ELgy9j. That's ~1% of the Northwest Large White benchmark price of $5.43

SocialGradientson Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

Agreed. Assuming the ~6 month gap stays, by end of year people will be able to train and control hacker-genius swarms that even labs with much stronger safety incentives are unable to keep in check

SocialGradientson Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents

Not to mention, Austin could just make it cheaper to build to offset lower sell prices. Gruber et al estimate permits are 50% of an LA home's price. Fix permitting and rent goes down 50% by your assumptions that developers build until margins are 0.

Assume austin is only half as bad as LA, a 25% rent decrease would be incredible

Gruber's paper: https://evansoltas.com/papers/Permitting_SoltasGruber2026.pd...

SocialGradientson Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents

This is an empirical claim. It looks like new monthly permits are down from ~4k a month in 2021-2022 to ~3k a month. They're still up significantly from before 2020. The building boom has slowed but it's still elevated. Not particularly close to zeroing out.

The data is here: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AUST448BPPRIVSA.