Only a relatively smaller number of breeding hens laying ~275 eggs each per year

Yep that's about right. I think it's roughly 7B new male chicks and 7B new female chicks each year. The population of egg-laying hens (~8B) is a big higher than the number of chicks because they each live for a bit longer than a year on average (though that's partly offset by 5-10% annual mortality on egg farms). 

Thanks Manuel! TED will post this on its YouTube channel in the next few weeks. (They stagger out posting talks across the year, and typically post them for a few weeks just on TED.com before they go on YouTube.)

Thanks for doing and publishing this study! It's so helpful to get a clearer picture on this, even if we don't like the answers. As a validation of your findings, in 2015, Chipotle told Vox that sofritas were 3.5% of sales, very close to your 3.8%. 

Thanks Lizka and Ben! I found this post really thought-provoking. I'm curious to better understand the intuition behind discounting the post-AGI paradigm shift impacts to ~0. 

My sense is that there's still a pretty wide continuum of future possible outcomes, under some of which we should predictably expect current policies to endure. To simplify, consider six broad buckets of possible outcomes by the year 2050, applied to your example of whether the McDonald's cage-free policy remains relevant.

1. No physical humans left. We're all mind uploads or something more dystopian. Clearly the mind uploads won't be needing cage-free McMuffins.
2. Humans remain but food is upended. We all eat cultivated meat, or rats (Terminator), or Taco Bell (Demolition Man). I also agree McDonald's policy is irrelevant ... though Taco Bell is cage-free too ;)
3. Radical change, people eat similar foods but no longer want McDonald's. Maybe they have vast wealth and McDonald's fails to keep up with their new luxurious tastes, or maybe they can't afford even a cheap McMuffin. Either way, the cage-free policy is irrelevant.
4. Radical change, but McDonald's survives. No matter how weird the future is, people still want cheap tasty convenient food, and have long established brand attachments to McDonald's. Even if McDonald's fires all its staff, it's not clear to me why it would drop its cage-free policy.
5. AGI is more like the Internet. The cage-free McMuffins endure, just with some cool LLM-generated images on them.
6. No AGI.

I agree that scenarios 1-3 are possible, but they don't seem obviously more likely to me than 4-6. At the very least, scenarios 4-6 don't feel so unlikely that we should discount them to ~0. What am I missing?

Thank you! I'm not aware of any US certifiers using CCTV, though I know several use unannounced audits to follow up on farms with bad prior audits or allegations of abuse. My sense is that most European certifiers are similar, though I may be wrong.

Sadly both audits and CCTV footage are almost always kept private. My sense is that there's not yet a big enough carrot (i.e. price premium on certified products) or stick (i.e. reputational harm from refusing public CCTV) to push certified farms to agree to this. My guess is it would require a retailer to say "we'll only sell your products if you install CCTV and share the footage." I hope they'll eventually get there. 

Thanks Neil. Good catch, and sorry I'm only replying now -- I hadn't checked the Forum over the break. I assumed that the original article was referring to all cage-free production because:

• The 15% cage-free immediately follows a claim referring to all Brazilian production: “This type of production did not exist in Brazil until 2017. Mantiqueira was the first one. Seven years later, [cage-free] production represents almost 15% of the total."
• The next sentence reads: "We were a driving force." This implies they were a driving force in an industry-wide change, and doesn't really make sense if it refers to their production, i.e. "We were a driving force in getting ourselves to go 15% cage-free." 

But I think this could be a translation issue. And I don't have any other sources, while the sources you found seem more likely to be accurate. So I suspect you're right that sadly Brazil has made less progress thatn we thought.

Thanks for flagging that Hugh. I wavered on whether to include that grant given its inclusion of insect-based protein, which I agree is concerning.

Thankfully most alternative protein grants don't include insects. (And, as CB points out, GFI doesn't include insects in their definition.) But the term is increasingly contested, as insect producers -- with the backing of the pet food and aquaculture industries that are their primary customers -- are pushing for alt protein funds to cover them.

Thanks Fai! Yes I'm trying to express more often the deep appreciation that I feel for the incredible donors and advocates in our space. I'm glad to hear you find it encouraging :)

Hey Lucas, thanks for engaging with the newsletter. A few quick replies:

1. Rethink's 8-20% support in a national poll seems consistent with the 36% result in Denver because (1) Denver is very liberal and very urban, which I expect are the two strongest predictors of support for a ban, (2) as Jason notes below, there are a lot of reasons why people might not want a slaughterhouse in their city, but would oppose banning them nationally, e.g. NIMBYism, (3) a lot of the campaign focused on things unique to this one slaughterhouse, e.g. its uniquely bad animal welfare and environmental record, and (4) this was a lamb slaughterhouse and lamb is both a niche meat and comes from an animal with more public sympathy (vs., e.g., banning a chicken slaughterhouse).
2. We're not sitting on the biggest pile of animal-advocacy cash on the planet. One of the funders of the Denver slaughterhouse ban is. But you're right that, presumably like them, we didn't think this was the best use of marginal funds to help animals.
3. I'm sorry I missed the Berkeley initiative. Had I seen it I would have included it. I'm skeptical though that we can take a lot from a symbolic vote on whether to allow factory farms in a dense urban area that has no factory farms.
4. I agree that history is full of radical shifts. My personal read of history is that they involved lots of smaller wins and progress before advocates reached the point where they could achieve women's suffrage or abolition. But I appreciate that I'm unlikely to persuade you there, and I agree this is a good debate for our movement to continue to have on strategy.