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A man feeding a remote Alaska town with a Costco card and a ship

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Re: A man feeding a remote Alaska town with a Costco card and a ship

#181

Post by makeset »

madengr wrote: post #36
joncp wrote: post #10

The scarcity of flour, especially bread flour piques my curiosity. I haven't heard about anyone eating vastly more bread than before the quarantine. It's just that everyone is making it at home instead of buying it with meals at restaurants. One would expect the flour not being shipped to the restaurants would be redirected into the retail supply chain but that doesn't appear to be the case. The only explanations I c…

Flour isn’t the problem now, it’s yeast. Fortunately my mother in law traded us a few packs for an old iMac, so my daughter can now make pizza dough. Joking aside, we did give her an iMac, but you can’t find yeast anywhere.

She can make those packs go a LONG way, given enough rising time, with superior flavor to boot. E.g. the pizza dough with poolish in Ken Forkish's book "Flour Water Salt Yeast" uses 0.4g dry yeast per 1kg of flour.

Re: A man feeding a remote Alaska town with a Costco card and a ship

#182

Post by dogma1138 »

kolla wrote: post #179
madaxe_again wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Small, but the transport network isn’t necessarily reliable. Mountains are a big obstacle. Croatia, like most of the balkans, is really mountainous. When it’s not mountains it’s islands. Nightmare for transport infrastructure development. A lot of rural Europe has laughably poor mountain infrastructure - dirt roads, often badly damaged, are sometimes the only way in or out of a village, and when it rains, the guy wit…

Quite different from rural Norway which has the same landscape issues but perfect infrastructure.

Money, that said it wouldn’t surprise me if Norway has villages that aren’t that accessible.

Iceland has quite a few villages (like 3-4 buildings in size) that are connected by compounded earth roads rather than paved ones.

Re: A man feeding a remote Alaska town with a Costco card and a ship

#183

Post by _n_b_ »

Bayart wrote: post #171
Scoundreller wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rural Croatia too, except it’s a truck that comes to all of the villages 3x/week with staple items. Plays ridiculously stereotypical Croatian music through a loudspeaker to announce his arrival. And then a meat truck once a week and a fish truck more irregularly. Took requests as well. I think of it like villages having Amazon Prime starting in the late 90s.

That's not uncommon in (very) rural France. We had a bakery-grocecy truck where I grew up.

Baguette vending machines are one of my favorite parts of visiting remote places in France.

Re: A man feeding a remote Alaska town with a Costco card and a ship

#184

Post by kaybe »

madaxe_again wrote: post #176
Joe-Z wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The places you choose to live in sound pretty interesting. And diverse! May I ask: Is this work-related that you live country-side in so many different places, or are you a restless soul? :)

Sample bias - I’ve lived in my fair share of big cities around the planet - but over the last few years, after burning out from chronic stress after a decade of building my business, I’ve made a focus of examining slower ways of living, closer to nature - I still do tech consulting, and off grid living suits my skillset handily.

How do you choose where you live? How often do you move? Tell us more, that sounds interesting!

Re: A man feeding a remote Alaska town with a Costco card and a ship

#185

Post by joking »

pinkorchid wrote: post #70
koyote wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting! I would have thought Croatia to be small enough to not need such a system; i.e. supermarkets not further than half an hour drive away. Or is it just a matter of convenience?

A very similar system is also common in small towns (population in the low hundreds or fewer) in Spain. Every few days a baker will come driving their van and selling bread, or a truck with fruit, etc. Even doctors and priests follow a similar pattern. It's likely that one could drive for 30 minutes and find an even better selection. That assumes car ownership and the ability to drive, which is not widespread in the…

Now they even accept request by WhatsApp. You can go to the nearest big town, but it’s much more convenient when they bring it to your door, and a van can serve 10-15 small towns each day.

Re: A man feeding a remote Alaska town with a Costco card and a ship

#186

Post by kaybe »

wongarsu wrote: post #149
propogandist wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow... how does this sort of delivery network work? Is it inexpensive enough to manage food takeout? I've never heard of takeout food delivery across 100s of kilometers, especially same day! I really need to visit Korea

The German Railway used to deliver packages with the regular high speed rail system. You bring it to the train, it gets put in a cargo room, and you arrange for someone to pick it up at the destination station. It was expensive of course since it was the fastest way to move stuff (trains are faster than cars), but I imagine that at cost it would be cheap enough for takeout.

They still have a courier service:

https://www.bahn.de/p/view/angebot/zusatzticket/ic_kurier.sh...

Delivery can also be done to Paris, Vienna, Basel and Amsterdam along with the ICE trains travelling there.

Prices I'm shown ~0,22 EUR/km, 33€ to and from the station each and a surcharge of 33€ for night or holiday transport, so ~300€ for crossing the country, and it takes less than a day. Maybe there are rich people out there paying that much for takeout?

Re: A man feeding a remote Alaska town with a Costco card and a ship

#187

Post by jon-wood »

tasuki wrote: post #162
kungato wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people don't own a car because they can't afford it or are too old to drive it. Owning a (registered) car costs with gas yearly about 1 net monthly salary. Croatia is small but even so very sparsely populated. 1/4 of population is in the capital metro area

> very sparsely populated That's very relative. With 72 ppl/km^2, I wouldn't call Croatia "sparsely populated".

Looking at nationwide statistics can be misleading, often you'll find that while on average you get a figure like that, almost all of it is centred on a few large cities with anything outside those cities consisting of scattered small villages a few hundred people living in them.

Re: A man feeding a remote Alaska town with a Costco card and a ship

#188

Post by phyzome »

aasasd wrote: post #178

> “The town might have a 100-gallon swing in demand for milk from one week to the next without any explanation of why. One week, nobody wants whole milk; the next week, everyone wants 2%.” IIRC it's a known phenomenon, but I can't remember the name right now. Buyers overestimate the demand, then the next cycle they have stock left, then again buy double because the shop might not have the thing next time. So the dema…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_distribution_game

Re: A man feeding a remote Alaska town with a Costco card and a ship

#190

Post by arethuza »

jon-wood wrote: post #187
tasuki wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> very sparsely populated That's very relative. With 72 ppl/km^2, I wouldn't call Croatia "sparsely populated".

Looking at nationwide statistics can be misleading, often you'll find that while on average you get a figure like that, almost all of it is centred on a few large cities with anything outside those cities consisting of scattered small villages a few hundred people living in them.

Looking at land use in places like can be surprising - e.g. a great er percentage of the UK land area is peat bogs than is built on:

https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/news/nr/land-cover-atlas-uk-1.74...

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