I guess cigarettes aren’t addictive.. except that this anecdote only shows one thing, not everyone that smokes gets addicted to cigarettes, just like not everyone gets addicted to pot and not everyone gets addicted to drinking. However all three cause addiction in some people

*Interestingly enough my sister has remained a party smoker for about 20 years without ever taking it up as an every day habit, perhaps there is some genetic component.

Prohibition still causes far more problems than it solves. 

As for your last question, I’d say the only reason that pot addicts might struggle more than coffee addicts is the intoxicating effects, especially if they’re the sorts of addicts that smoke a lot of it. However the same is equally true of alcohol, and the consequences of alcohol addiction are far more damaging, but still less damaging than the effects of alcohol prohibition.

Perhaps this article will help inform you. 

Also, once again, I never said that pot is more addictive than any other substance! I will never claim its more addictive than alcohol, or opiates. Stop the god damn straw-man arguments.

Propaganda implies that I’m trying to mislead people. I’m not, I’ll tell anyone that I don’t think pot should be illegal, that I don’t think its a particularly problematic drug, but that like all drugs it does cause some problems amongst some users and that it does have some (minor) addictive qualities.

Producing smokable tobacco isn’t much harder than smokable marijuana, but no one does it because it’s way less convenient than buying it already dried and rolled. 
I think that after a time, most people will come to the same decision for weed as they have for tobacco, that a small amount of convenience is worth an insane markup. We lean this way with most consumer goods that could be produced easily at home.

I would think that maintaining independence from producers and accessing information that people want to know and can’t get from traditional reviews (component suppliers’ labor standards, for instance) will be a serious challenge. 

Plus, it’s a lot less sexy to be showing off your new product with a webpage screenshot of 4.9 stars coloring your thoughts than those marketing images of sexy people in sexy locations being really damned sexy.

It’s like the saddle blanket story. Gent walks into a traders shop and asks for the most expensive blanket in the whole store. Clerk shows him the premium, blah blah blah, thing, best gawddang saddle blanket in the whole county. Gent scoffs and asks for the better one, the one they keep behind the counters. Clerk goes to the back room, grabs the el cheapo everyman saddle blanket and proceeds back to the counter. He shows it to the Gent and explains it’s ‘superiour’ quality. And he explains its price, twice that of the super-premium garbage he just looked at. “Sold!” Bellows the Gent and metes out the required silver. He takes up his cheap-ass everyman saddle blanket and strides out of the shop like a boss. Why? Because he feels like he has the best, and despite the clerks attempts to keep him from it he won out and also finagled the best deal for the best blanket. Too bad he’s still a schmuck. But the problem is that he will never know it because he is an idiot with money. Trust me, I have seen this play out in real life many times. People, especially youth, are idiots for fashion, style and what’s ‘hot’. It’s all bullshit, but sometimes there’s good money in bullshit.

But yes, to answer your question, retail grocers take full advantage of fuel fluctuation to gauge their competitors positions via incremental price changes. With a long historical record of these kinds of changes, you can easily establish a relationship with your competitors without ever actually having a conversation. As an industry you might see over time a spreading realization that undercutting each other on prices hurts everyone, so you start to move your prices into line with your competitors and focus on competing for customers by having fancier looking storefronts and display tables. They’ve established a successful market-segmentation where you have to drive prices way up to actually drive customers all the way across the gap to the wholesale grocery stores that they don’t want to admit having to shop at. 

Ultimately though, this is really just a starker example of the signalling that happens via incremental price changes in all industries. You can have a bit of an indirect conversation with your competitors via incremental price changes without actually colluding to keep prices high. Where you can move to lower the elasticity of demand in response to price changes (i.e. introducing “premiumness” and creating widely separated market segments) the more you can prosper as an industry.

Tax schemes, regulatory structures, import duties, etc… are part of the equation, but I would argue that there’s something fundamentally different at play. I would argue that there’s a different value proposition for the consumer in the markets for tobacco, soda, etc… 

There’s a difference between the way soda and bulk rice have been traditionally marketed to consumers and this affects how much of a premium consumers are willing to pay for a premium brand, even though the product might not really be distinguishable from a generic alternative.

You can see the tectonic shift toward this kind of marketing and consumption. In Whole Foods, you’re seeing extremely sophisticated packaging for basic staples and that is leaking downstream. The more an industry can shift the value proposition toward the presence/absence of some quality that doesn’t really bear on production costs, the more profitable they will be and the more of a buffer they’ll have against the kinds of winds that buffet commodities.

Competitors across all industries are realizing that it makes sense to keep prices widely segmented and to move tightly within each segment, so that they can compete instead on low-cost intangibles.

I would actually expect to see more widely separated segmentation in say, the smartphone market, with each segment tightening itself up. This should happen as competitors get settled in and rack up more historical data about features and pricing. At least until the next major disruption.

As soon as kids at school learn to recognize and laugh at other kids for smoking generic weed, it’ll be an epic win for investors in the marijuana industry.

I’m not certain about the basis/point of your comparison. Are you talking about which drugs drug abusers will use?

More importantly though, is that a low-margin, high volume business is a dog on the capital market. So if it makes it harder to raise funds and the best case scenario is that you gain some market-share but you’re making less profit and you’re stock is flat. It requires no collusion for everyone to arrive at the same conclusion that this style of competition is not a winner.

It’s much, much more profitable to compete on “value-added” (which is a fabulously ironic term). This is like a price war that goes up instead of down, where the competitors all add things at trivial cost that justifies charging more a given product. It’s a truly brilliant method of competition, it guarantees that after the market-share recalibrates from price changes, profits across the board are higher! 

This is a gross oversimplification but think of competing on price and competing on value as opposite ends of the spectrum. If you’re competing on price and you don’t have a serious cost advantage over your competitors, you’re going to take a bath and the capital markets will punish you for making the industry less profitable to invest in. No one wants that, so no one does it. Competing on “value” on the other hand, is better for everyone and there are plenty of incentives to engage in this behavior. 

Again, it’s really important to understand that public companies aren’t sovereign entities, they’re all owned by the same capital market which has the same interest, i.e. higher margins, not lower. The investors in each company aren’t separate teams all rooting for their individual company’s success, most are invested in other companies in the same industry, so, if a board looked like they wanted to get into a price war, the capital market has an incentive to punish them hard enough to avoid it. This is completely legal.

That’s basically the argument I think the two of you are having.

Just remember, it’s a nearly bottomless market. There’s not a shortage of customers.