So if they only face fines it makes sense for them to weigh up the potential gains against losses - and its not just flat cash.

On top of that bear in mind that high sales figures will allow them to grow faster - you can't fine growth very easily.

And if you extend this out, you start to wonder just how many non-violent crimes ought to be punishable with prison. The shoplifting example, for instance, might be something that should only be a civil penalty rather than criminal, as long as it isn't armed robbery.

It's hard to know where to draw the line, but if you want these people to go to prison, then don't highlight crimes that the majority of Americans now think shouldn't be crimes.

Isn't it sketchy when egg-carton has a chicken freely roaming the grass on it?

Isn't it sketchy to write cage-free when the chicken is in a dark large container clumped together with hundreds of other chickens?

They are selling a product that has to compete with billion-dollar businesses that already have plenty of sketchy and untruthful marketing.

They spent a meager 77k on this and somehow that is unacceptable.

It's just the same if not less worse than what their competition does.

Did you actually read the parent comment? This goes way beyond any deceptive marketing practices.

For the record, I'm one of HN's many (oft mocked) libertarians, but even as a hands-off kinda guy, this is a step too far. They "laundered" the money through their contractor's pay, because they didn't want it to show up on their financial statements.

So it's not the deceptive marketing (you're right that this is more or less par for the course), it's the lies and fraud they allegedly committed to hide the deceptive marketing.

"While Just Mayo is egg-free, Hampton Creek Chief Executive Josh Tetrick also emphasized that it doesn’t use the term “mayonnaise,” only “mayo.”"

It's mayo, not mayonnaise you silly consumers.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/just-mayo-reaches-agreement-with...

edit: You know, of all the things I could comment I talk about eggless f'ng mayo. I wish I could delete this :)

Which is fine; oil is tasty. I'm sure Just Mayo tastes fine.

The misleading marketing (trumpeting health benefits or - like our parent post - less animal cruelty) is fairly ridiculous though.

If the product truly is free of animal products, then it is most certainly reducing animal cruelty compared with mass-farmed chicken egg mayo. Ethics aside, that is an objective fact.

It's actually not an objective fact. Compare two scenarios:

10 acres of rainforest were clearcut to grow palm oil to make the mayo

1/2 acre of grassland in Iowa that was previously used for corn is allocated to raise pastured happy chickens, rotated with market heirloom grains. They are allowed to live out their natural life, and are fed even after they stop producing eggs.

Which of those scenarios has more animal cruelty? In one situation you are essentially committing genocide of an entire microecology, in the other you are giving some animals an incredible life, and eating part of their waste stream, eggs which are not necessary for their survival or happiness, and in fact are over-budgeted in their genetics to allow for predation.

Veganism is an OK heuristic for animal cruelty, but it's far from perfect. It's often better than nothing, but a vegan Whole Foods diet may well cause more animal harm than someone living near the poverty level in, say, Korea, eating some animal products, but also making much more efficient use of land. Vegans love to pretend land use doesn't matter, but land use = animal displacement.

Eating more plants can be a great way to reduce cruelty. But Vegan\ism\ as a hard rule is more about religious purity than it is about animal cruelty.

Signed,

Someone who ate entirely vegan today and most days

While it might be a fun thought experiment to find situations where a non-vegan dish includes less animal cruelty than a technically vegan dish, for 99.99% the people reading this and in 99.99% of the real world situations they ever be in, choosing the vegan dish will mean choosing significantly less animal cruelty.

A common pro-vegan argument is actually less land use for growing feed crops for raising livestock.

And I'm not really impressed by your made up statistics. Again, if you actually cared about animals you would actually care about the numbers, and not just make up fake percentages to make your decisions seem better.

It's not hard to find vegan diets that destroy more habitat per calorie than many meat-based diets. Look at hunting for example, which is often a net positive for animal habitat.

That's pretty fucked up, the only way this could not reasonably be considered cruelty is if you assert animals have no emotions and science seems to disagree with that notion. Free range is much better, the chooks can roam around in the open doing chicken stuff. I eat free range eggs.

Environmental damage from increased farming is only a major factor where specific habitats are being destroyed, eg Palm Oil in Indonesia. Even then, it's a lesser evil than directly harming individual creatures.

In my opinion, sketchiness of the billion-dollar egg-dairy-meat industry is far above Hampton Creek marketing.