Live data from Hacker News

What Coke Contains

medium.com

91–100 of 142 posts

Re: What Coke Contains

#91
post #64
post #38

An obvious omission: salt.

Well, salt being common (now, not historically) is probably sourced close to production to reduce its transportation costs. There is a large salt mine within 35 miles of my house, and they are located all along the gulf coast in salt domes, a by product of oil exploration.

You make a good point about it not fitting the international narrative, but then water can be sourced anywhere and they mention the word twice.

Re: What Coke Contains

#92

> on the Murray River in Western Australia called Pinjarra always jarring to read something you know to be so obviously false so early in a piece. *waves to fellow Sandgropers

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing http://www.smh.com.au/news/Western-Australia/Pinjarra/2005/0... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_River_%28Western_Austral... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinjarra,_Western_Australia

Re: What Coke Contains

#93
This sounds something like an astroturf for a brown chemical drink which sure as eggs is eggs will rot your teeth and kill you sooner than if you drink clean water (or moderate amounts of wine for that matter). We can make the globalisation and connectedness point a lot more clearly and ideologically neutrally without promoting useless Lowest Common Denominator products that merely waste our resources and do not add to the total sum of human happiness.

Re: What Coke Contains

#94
post #13

eh, I just don't feel like the writer understands or cares to explain how that whole process is actually detrimental to the world despite the fact that it "unites" it. Coke is just addictive sugar water that does nothing for anyone. When has coke given you something other than diabetes? Kevin Ashton fails at pointing out the impact of this collaboration. Couldn't all of these talented people that made such a sophisti…

Look at yourself - you belong to the elite of our species. You are educated enough to know how to read and write. You are fortunate enough to have a computer,and be connected to the internet. You are fortunate enough to speak one of the most widely used languages in the world. This all implies that you are at the top of our evolutionary ladder. And yet with all this power in your hands, and with the limited time we h…

and you? You castigate a poster for doing exatly what you are doing yourself. Ironically recursive.

It's important that the elites of this world understand what harm they and their tribes are doing, intentionally or not, because awareness comes before action!

Re: What Coke Contains

#95

I am a lead pencil—the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write. http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html

I find it unfortunate that an otherwise interesting story is used to convey some silly neo-liberal ideas. Try that getting-stuff-over-the-ocean-cheaply trick without harbors.

OK, I'll bite: which are the silly neoliberal ideas?

Re: What Coke Contains

#96
post #92

> on the Murray River in Western Australia called Pinjarra always jarring to read something you know to be so obviously false so early in a piece. *waves to fellow Sandgropers

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing http://www.smh.com.au/news/Western-Australia/Pinjarra/2005/0... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_River_%28Western_Austral... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinjarra,_Western_Australia

It's jarring because there's a much more famous Murray river "over east".

Re: What Coke Contains

#97
post #47

a great example of capitalism. think about that the next time you have a knee jerk reaction towards business.

Private enterprise != capitalism. And planned economies have done this kind of thing, too.

They have, but not as well as a rule.

Plus, not every country has every resource. Even the vast internal resources of the USSR needed to be supplemented by goods and services purchased on the open market (and vice-versa, the USSR got most of its hard currency by selling oil).

Re: What Coke Contains

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it unfortunate that an otherwise interesting story is used to convey some silly neo-liberal ideas. Try that getting-stuff-over-the-ocean-cheaply trick without harbors.

OK, I'll bite: which are the silly neoliberal ideas?

"Have faith that free men and women will respond to the Invisible Hand."

/curtains

Re: What Coke Contains

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow that's awesome. We live in a society where one person takes credit for something and in this case a Coke can is comprised of many inventions as are many things. You never hear about the guy who helped shape the process of creating the bottom of soda cans or the tab on them. I wonder who invented that piece of plastic that holds store bought bread together?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floyd_Paxton

Great sleuthing work my friend!

Re: What Coke Contains

#100
post #9

Ok, bit of a bragging moment here: my grandpa, with two other gentlemen, created the process for machining seamless cans that is described here. Before them, cans had a lead seam in them. They discovered that you could draw down the aluminum and stretch it to form cans in one piece. He also invented the process for creating the bottom of soda cans, and his friend invented the modern tab on the top of soda cans.

Wow that's awesome. We live in a society where one person takes credit for something and in this case a Coke can is comprised of many inventions as are many things. You never hear about the guy who helped shape the process of creating the bottom of soda cans or the tab on them. I wonder who invented that piece of plastic that holds store bought bread together?

Loaves of bread were sold unsliced until 1928, when a guy named Otto Rohwedder figured out how to slice bread without crushing it. Rohwedder then wrapped the bread and inserted U-shaped pins on both sides of the loaf to make it look similar to an unsliced loaf. Sliced bread became a hit because you no longer had to worry about cutting pieces of similar thickness when you made a sandwich.

That's where the expression "the best thing since sliced bread" comes from. Obviously, people had been slicing loaves of bread for ages, but pre-sliced bread really is a relatively recent business innovation. The NYT magazine had a page about this in this week's issue.[1] Also, here is a Google ngram of the phrase "since sliced bread". You can see that the saying started in the 1950s. [2]

[1]http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/magazine/who-made-that-sli...

[2]http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=since+sliced+br...

Post reply on HN