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These days canned food often seems like a good investment

That’s an interesting question.

Actually, a follow up. PII leaks are so common, I guess there must be millions of identities out there up for grabs. This makes me wonder: we’ve got various jurisdictions where sites are legally required to verify the age of users. And everybody (including the people running these sites) knows that tons of identities are out there on the internet waiting to be used.

How does a site do due diligence in this context? I guess just asking for a scan of somebody’s easily fabricated ID shouldn’t be sufficient legal cover…


These ID laws typically require a solution to be "commercially practical" or similar. The standard is not "impenetrable and impossible to circumvent"

That's why some of them don't even ask for ID but just guess the age based on appearance. That's good enough per the law, usually.


Unless there’s some funny unit issue going on (I know there are short and long tons…), it looks like Germany consumed around 5000KT of potatoes in 2022.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/potato-co...

> A farm in Saxony has been left with 4,000 tons of potatoes in what Berliner Morgenpost is calling “a story about the absurdities of our food system”.

I dunno; it doesn’t seem too absurd, better to have too many than too few potatoes.


I'm having hard time to visualize it, can you convert them in adult elephants and TV Tower height? Bear in mind I only saw asian elephants in zoo.

A ton is a big bag (yes, they get delivered in bags and that’s the name for them), which is pretty exactly a cubic meter. 4000 tons is hence a 2x2meter tower, 1km high. Or 20mx20m, 10m high.not sure how high you can stack TV towers or Asian elephants. The conversion is left as an exercise to the reader.

> which is pretty exactly a cubic meter

That would be if we were talking about water (and at 4ºC if we want to be "exact"), but potatoes have a different density and cannot fill the space entirely due to their irregular shapes. Are you saying that those two things cancel themselves out and the result is that 1 cubic meter of potatoes is "exactly" 1 tone?


Pretty much. See the FAQ here https://4000-tonnen.de/faq.html

> Wie werden die Kartoffeln geliefert? Die Kartoffeln werden per LKW direkt an Ihre angegebene Adresse geliefert. Die Lieferung erfolgt in einem Big Bag, in das ca. 1000 Kilogramm Kartoffeln passen.

Standard Big bags are roughly 1x1x1m


They are not as volumetrically efficient, but it's probably not too far from the approximation plus 10-15% I think. Potatoes are mostly water.

> Linux users should hold their OS vendors to a higher standard than accepting that a user should become QA.

Yeah I’m going to demand my money back next time I break X.


Just because something is free. It doesn't mean you can call out unprofessional behavior. Since macos is free should all macos users ask for a refund when they encounter something they don't like?

MacOS is included with the price of Apple hardware.

I’m glad the Linux community doesn’t engage in too much professional behavior. It would be really annoying if Linux was as locked down as a proprietary OS is, and I suspect contributors would find the whole thing less fun, so they’d share less code as a result.


That would be offset by a larger number of people contributing as part of their job. Take a look at the Linux kernel itself as an example of this.

He was a slave at some point, right? Maybe he was just trying to get people to chill out about their cups, to save some of his former peers an unpleasant time.

Is margin profit/revenue or profit/costs? I think it is the former, so it should be “effectively 100%” right?

Anyway, this isn’t really a meaningful quibble argument-wise, it is obvious what you mean!


When a business doesn’t have a business model, I worry it might be an investor-funded startup or something like that.

  > When a business
My point.

How many people would 15,000 EUR employ in your area? That’s significantly below a living wage for one person in the US…

Maybe an incredibly lean organization could make it with 150,000 EUR? All digital, 3-4 really devoted employees.


> How many people would 15,000 EUR employ in your area?

3-4 people easily, probably closer to 5-6 in reality. Minimum salary in my country is around 1200 EUR/month, but we also have free health care for everyone and other anti-democratic things.


Ah, I had a brain-fart, was thinking yearly instead of monthly. Sorry!

Others have given specific examples, but in general it seems like a weird thing that eating out is almost always more expensive than cooking in. You’ve got a place run by professionals, and they can prepare the meals in bulk, overall it should be possible to run it cheaper than an individual. But that would be more like a cafeteria type situation than the super-customized experience we usually get…

That’s because home labor and quality often aren’t priced in:

- a chef is faster

- a chef will produce better quality

- but a chef charges for their time

A restaurant often is paying half the price to ingredients and half to overhead; which means you can get it “cheaper” despite paying more for ingredients — since 150% as much on ingredients is still only 75% cost, once you don’t count personal overhead.

You need a lot of efficiency on the professional side to offset that cook time and kitchen space are “free” on the home side of the equation.


I wonder what we’ve lost, with the loss of human computers. It seems like it would be a nice job that rewards diligence and intelligence. Nowadays pretty much all intellectual work rewards creativity, almost exclusively… the machines are infinitely diligent, so it doesn’t provide much value add when the human is too.

I dunno. It just seems kind of sad, in a way, like we’ve dropped a whole entire way of being seen as intelligent.


A large part of accounting is intellectual work that rewards diligence and intelligence, but not creativity so much. A lot of QA/certification jobs are like this too. It's important stuff that involves a lot of "checking".

I expect it would have been a very dull job.

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