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Americans Are Using Less Steel, Paper, Fertilizer, and Energy

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Re: Americans Are Using Less Steel, Paper, Fertilizer, and Energy

#231

Post by neltnerb »

chrisseaton wrote: post #228
toast0 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't eat all the ice cream in one sitting. If this random ice cream[1] is an indication, serving size is half a cup, so a half gallon should provide 16 servings. If you like the flavor, why not buy 16 servings at a time; if you live in a household with four people, that's 4 sittings of ice cream. [1] https://www.target.com/p/breyers-original-ice-cream-natural-...

In the UK I don't think even the largest ice cream comes in more than 1 litre. Most is around 0.5 litres. And even that for a family seems like a hell of a lot of ice cream. One litre is a crazy party volume of ice cream. A half-gallon sounds absolutely bonkers. https://www.waitrose.com/ecom/shop/browse/groceries/frozen/i...

Of course, with as much air as comes in the ice cream here, a half gallon is probably only a liter of actual ice cream. They definitely don't weigh nearly as much as they look like they should.

Re: Americans Are Using Less Steel, Paper, Fertilizer, and Energy

#232

Post by chrisseaton »

CapitalistCartr wrote: post #224
chrisseaton wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are two other trends that worry me more. One is visible in the freezer section at the grocery store; a "half-gallon" of ice cream is no longer actually a half-gallon. Many other food items have shrunk. A half-gallon seems like an absolutely obscene volume of ice-cream. That's over two litres! Why would anyone possibly need ice-cream measured by the gallon? Isn't it good that sizes are reducing from that much?

A half-gallon is slightly less than two liters, and is not intended to be one serving. Its a bulk purchase to serve a family, usually multiple times. (Although I have eaten one in one go when I was a young man.)

But why are people buying a rare treat like ice cream as a bulk item to eat repeatedly? Seems like something we want to discourage?

Re: Americans Are Using Less Steel, Paper, Fertilizer, and Energy

#233

Post by mrep »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #182
LoSboccacc wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

case in point - did I say I am not believing that climate is changing? but no, as soon as one contest the wild exponential predictions, he gets scourged.

The pessimistic outcome of climate change isn't "wild exponential predictions", though. There are well-understood mechanisms, the margin for temperature increase beyond which modern society collapses is pretty thin, the exponent comes primarily[0] from our economy which has an assumption of exponential growth built-in and will collapse if it suddenly turns into s-curve, and we also have a model of a runaway warming f…

What climate change effect [0] do you think will cause societal collapse or result in mass horrible deaths?

[0]: https://climate.nasa.gov/effects/

Re: Americans Are Using Less Steel, Paper, Fertilizer, and Energy

#234

Post by dsfyu404ed »

neltnerb wrote: post #231
chrisseaton wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the UK I don't think even the largest ice cream comes in more than 1 litre. Most is around 0.5 litres. And even that for a family seems like a hell of a lot of ice cream. One litre is a crazy party volume of ice cream. A half-gallon sounds absolutely bonkers. https://www.waitrose.com/ecom/shop/browse/groceries/frozen/i...

Of course, with as much air as comes in the ice cream here, a half gallon is probably only a liter of actual ice cream. They definitely don't weigh nearly as much as they look like they should.

You need air in the ice cream. Ice cream without air is frozen flavored cream and you'd need tools more substantial than an ice cream scoop to serve it. The manufacture will vary the air content to dial in a particular hardness.

Re: Americans Are Using Less Steel, Paper, Fertilizer, and Energy

#235

Post by anon1m0us »

scroy wrote: post #195
anon1m0us wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess what I am learning about myself lately is that I have the power to lie to people and convince them to do things they don't want to do or don't know better. People know this about me. They know it almost instantly. I sense it in them. I sense the same about other people. They have that power over me. However, I make an effort not to. Or, when I do, I work especially hard to steer them in the direction of their…

What's Stack Overflow deceiving us about?

It goes back to the very beginning:

https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/

> Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit. It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world.

The key part is "minus the nausea-inducing sleaze" except that their behavior of late is exactly nausea-inducing sleaze.

https://www.wired.com/2012/07/stackoverflow-jeff-atwood/

>Atwood was bothered that the community doing all the work wasn't getting paid...

Yet, the contributors to the stacks don't get paid either. Now the creators and VC are trying to sell the stacks and make money -- exactly what he said his competitor was doing and shouldn't be.

> He and Spolsky decided to create an ad-supported free alternative, and released all answers under a Creative Commons license, so that the users could use the content elsewhere if Stack Overflow ever shut down or started charging for subscriptions.

Now they've decided to retroactively change content users created for them to their benefit.

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333089/stack-exchan...

> we will continue forward under version 4.0 of the CC BY-SA license. This change encompasses all Subscriber Content as described in our ToS including data dumps as well as any content previously made available by Stack Exchange under the terms of version 3.0 of the CC BY-SA license.

Re: Americans Are Using Less Steel, Paper, Fertilizer, and Energy

#236

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

sachdevap wrote: post #122
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have any figures citations since my knowledge comes from when I used to hang out on Precision Agriculture forums, but it's common and getting more so. As drones get less expensive, it's easy to sit in your den and fly over the fields looking for the areas where you should go out and spray some more, or drive over in your UTV and take a closer look at that "weird spot" on the "back 80." Farmers are very aware…

I am sure they are. But a leap from combines to decentralized sensing using drones is a big one, and I'd want to see some numbers to verify this.

Re-reading the post, it seems that he and I might be talking about different things. I'm referring to farmers using remote controlled drones with cameras to check the state of their crops/fields without having to drive over hundreds of acres. That's an actual thing and is quite common.

OP seems to be talking about some kind of automated drone weeding (or just phrased what he meant poorly).

Re: Americans Are Using Less Steel, Paper, Fertilizer, and Energy

#237

Post by anon1m0us »

Nasrudith wrote: post #176
Consultant32452 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm interested in your thoughts on one public policy example of this. Back when AIDS first hit, the community of scientists and public policy makers said that while it was starting in the gay and drug community any moment it would hop into the general population. They knew this was a lie, but told us this because they didn't believe Americans would spend money helping gays and junkies. I've come to understand that to…

I don't think that was even a lie - disease doesn't respect tidy social boundaries of guilt and innocence. Especially with unscreened blood at the time.

Yeah, I don't think it was a lie either. It was an expectation about the future. We worry about diseases jumping demographics all the time, sometimes even from one species to another.

Re: Americans Are Using Less Steel, Paper, Fertilizer, and Energy

#238

Post by dsfyu404ed »

chrisseaton wrote: post #232
CapitalistCartr wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A half-gallon is slightly less than two liters, and is not intended to be one serving. Its a bulk purchase to serve a family, usually multiple times. (Although I have eaten one in one go when I was a young man.)

But why are people buying a rare treat like ice cream as a bulk item to eat repeatedly? Seems like something we want to discourage?

Because

a) when you split it over four people it's only ~two evenings worth of desert.

b) don't tell me what to do with my body.

Re: Americans Are Using Less Steel, Paper, Fertilizer, and Energy

#239

Post by dsfyu404ed »

toast0 wrote: post #226
chrisseaton wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are two other trends that worry me more. One is visible in the freezer section at the grocery store; a "half-gallon" of ice cream is no longer actually a half-gallon. Many other food items have shrunk. A half-gallon seems like an absolutely obscene volume of ice-cream. That's over two litres! Why would anyone possibly need ice-cream measured by the gallon? Isn't it good that sizes are reducing from that much?

You don't eat all the ice cream in one sitting. If this random ice cream[1] is an indication, serving size is half a cup, so a half gallon should provide 16 servings. If you like the flavor, why not buy 16 servings at a time; if you live in a household with four people, that's 4 sittings of ice cream. [1] https://www.target.com/p/breyers-original-ice-cream-natural-...

>You don't eat all the ice cream in one sitting.

Kinda like how you don't drink a twelve pack in one night?

Re: Americans Are Using Less Steel, Paper, Fertilizer, and Energy

#240

Post by zamadatix »

anon1m0us wrote: post #137
zamadatix wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Up to some value of volumeDelta * productCount it actually makes sense to use the same container due to sourcing/manufacturing cost from the variance so I wouldn't say purely disingenuous, there is real reasoning behind some of it... it's just marketing gets in the way of when you should actually add that second container size i.e. it's costing you more to always use the bigger container but the marketing department…

So then why not just keep putting the same amount of coffee in the can? It's on us though. They're lying to us to get our money, our labor, our consent. We let them. Why?

Because demand curves don't work like that unless you have a highly inelastic good. With normal goods keeping quantity constant as price changes puts you on a suboptimal point on the demand curve. Coffee's price certainly hasn't been inelastic and changing can size at every spike would have netted you decent production cost increases instead of savings: http://www.aboutinflation.com/_/rsrc/1368022029715/coffee-vs...

The varying of quantities in the same sized container is not the problem and is certainly not illogical. The problem is when we allow marketing departments to lie/cheat/fool the product onto a different portion of the demand curve instead of letting the $/amount naturally flow back when price decreases or when it makes sense to switch to cheaper containers.

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