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PC cooling manufacturer Der8auer got scammed by a copper supplier (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/reallyshittycopper@lemmy.world
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https://youtu.be/as2KoDtsS_0

https://invidious.nerdvpn.de/watch?v=as2KoDtsS_0

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[–] 29 points 8 months ago (26 children)

Is copper more expensive than steel?? Why else would you do this?

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  • [–] 75 points 8 months ago (13 children)

    Steel is roughly $0.30-$0.60 a pound

    Copper is roughly $5-$6 a pound

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  • [–] 24 points 8 months ago (10 children)

    Huh, today I learned steel is cheaper than chips.

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  • [–] 17 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    you should also consider the volume of a pound of each. the density is a big factor, depending on what kind of chips you refer to (a pound of crisps chips is a lot vs. a pound of steel, for example).

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (6 children)

    Iron is in rocks, potatoes have to be lovingly nurtured over a few months. That still doesn't seem like enough to make up the difference, though. Preparing chips must cost more than smelting. I guess shipping is also a factor unless you're near a chip factory.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (5 children)

    It's also about scaling. For relatively little other than electricity and the price of some big slabs of brick and metal, you can make a foundry. To make potato chips, you have to have a lot more care, and the processes are much more finicky.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    Well, there's a lot more to foundries than that. Safety with a liquid that explodes anything moist including people on contact and can start a fire remotely is a big one. Liners and molds are usually disposable too, and you generate several tons of spent material for every ton of product. But yes, heat, reducing agent (usually coal, increasingly hydrogen) and common minerals are the basic things involved.

    Then again, nothing about the process is delicate, and you don't have to worry about sanitation or spoilage.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago* (3 children)

    Absolutely. I was being reductivist. The point I was attempting to make was that, whereas potato chip scaling must, at some point, involve quality control very close to the per-chip level, quality control at the foundry level can be applied to a batch which scales to whatever size you can pay for. Iron is iron, and that iron is largely similar to any other iron. It's the same reason why chemicals which can be processed in a vat can be made much cheaper by just... Getting a bigger vat to synthesise more at once, while produce is a finicky business, because each item is not only individual, but unique, and thus must be handled at the individual level at some point in the process, even if it's just a computer vision algorithm sorting which potatoes have already gone bad. Is that an inaccurate assessment?

    A sort of "juice is cheaper than the oranges you use to make it" deal.

    Of course, I also left out the price-fixing cabal which artificially inflates the prices of potatoes grown in the US.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (2 children)

    No, it's not. Although honestly we're reaching the end of my knowledge about potato chip factories. And orange juice. Obviously the inputs to the process have to cost less than the outputs, but it does get pretty cheap.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (1 child)

    Absolutely. I would imagine the rest of the difference is comprised of:

    1. the aforementioned potato cabal (it really exists. Theres a fun Half-as-interesting video on how it affects the price of fries)
    2. Insane chip profit margins, because of the consumers' willingness to pay. Consider a meal containing meat. Sure the manufacturer is making a profit, but can you imagine how much more profit they would be making by selling you a meal with the same amount of calories, but made of potatoes or corn? The consumer is willing to pay, say, $10 for a simple meal containing some meat, but what about half a meal? Maybe $3-5? Well, here come potato chips. They act like they're half a meal, but they're actually just cheap oil and a spud. The consumer will still pay more for it, so the companies can charge that much and make a huge profit from the willingness to pay of their dupes.
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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago*

    the aforementioned potato cabal (it really exists. Theres a fun Half-as-interesting video on how it affects the price of fries)

    Farmers do love a good cabal. Here in Canada there's literally a state agency that does all the buying and selling of dairy products. Drives the Americans crazy.

    Insane chip profit margins, because of the consumers’ willingness to pay. Consider a meal containing meat. Sure the manufacturer is making a profit, but can you imagine how much more profit they would be making by selling you a meal with the same amount of calories, but made of potatoes or corn? The consumer is willing to pay, say, $10 for a simple meal containing some meat, but what about half a meal? Maybe $3-5? Well, here come potato chips. They act like they’re half a meal, but they’re actually just cheap oil and a spud. The consumer will still pay more for it, so the companies can charge that much and make a huge profit from the willingness to pay of their dupes.

    I mean, you can go and look at how much money they (Utz for example) end up making. It's not different from the next publicly traded corporation, so there's got to be expenses somewhere in there.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    I mean we got grades of steel. Purity of copper? Is that how copper pricing works or is it length of the wire (longer=more expensive in a way that scales slightly faster than weight/mass )

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

    Copper has chemical properties such that you can dissolve it, and then electrolyise it back out of solution ridiculously pure. More reactive metals stay in the solution, less reactive metals like gold, silver, cadmium and platinum form a nice little lump of sludge beneath your anode that's absolutely worth collecting.

    It's valued per weight, like anything else. Wire will cost around as much as the copper inside does, plus a little for the cost of extruding and coating it.

    TL;DR no, in the 21st century pure copper is just pure copper. If you make bronze then sure, there's many different kinds.

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  • [–] 26 points 8 months ago

    Basically always has been since the industrial revolution, it's also the reason why it gets recycled at much higher rates/more effort goes into gathering for recycling than steel (or rather how restricted the supply of new ore is compared to iron).

    (Why we don't recycle both & design products with that in mind is another matter.)

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  • [–] 10 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

    Vastly.

    It's in the same column of the periodic table as silver and gold, and while less rare than the other two, still isn't exactly common. Bronze, like a bronze medal, is just copper with a little bit of something added for strength. On the other hand, iron is one of the typical things rocks are made of. (Edit: Oh look somebody already linked Wikipedia)

    I'm surprised you haven't heard of copper theft. Cutting wires out of things is kind of an infamous way to pay for your next fix of drugs. The power lines near me all have signs warning that they're just copper-coated.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    I have heard of copper theft but I never looked into the profit margins on it. Since it's usually mentioned in the context of drug addicts, like you've done, I thought it was shit money that only the truly desperate would stoop to.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago

    Per the other commenter, it's about 10x what steel costs. That's closer than I was expecting, TBH. Maybe that it comes in easily-cut wire form is a big part of what makes it desirable for thieves.

    Margin is a funny way to put it, though, since there aren't really any fixed expenses. Like a lot of criminal goods, supply is restricted more by risk of getting arrested than anything else.

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  • [–] 7 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (5 children)

    Iron is stupidly abundant. That's awesome because steel is super fucking useful for boring hard duties like construction and tool making and basically all steel is majority iron by mass. It's also reasonably safe and easy to extract in a moderately pure form with modern techniques unlike other super abundant elements like silicon. There are special steel formulations that can be wildly expensive, but there's a handful that are dirt cheap because they're easy to make and widely useful.

    Copper isn't like, rare, but it's no iron. It's also often mixed up with other stuff that makes copper mines ecological and health nightmares (at least here in the us). It's also become rapidly more and more in demand as the world is shifting towards replacing fossil fuels with electricity, causing higher demand for more and more copper for wiring and motors.

    For real though iron is just crazy abundant

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (4 children)

    Good reply, but one nitpick:

    It’s also reasonably safe and easy to extract in a moderately pure form with modern techniques unlike other super abundant elements like silicon.

    Silicon smelting is arguably easier. If you have excess quartzite in your furnace it won't form silicon carbide, while steelmaking involves being really careful to not get too much or too little carbon in the melt. Silicon becomes expensive for electronics because the industry wants 99.9999% purity absolute minimum. What comes out of the arc furnace isn't read except for use in other metallurgy.

    I'd also like to point out other elements can do the same basic all-around-skookum-alloy job as iron, like nickel or titanium. It's just that none of them are everywhere.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago* (3 children)

    That's fair. At the end of the day, however you cut it, we live on a planet made primarily of iron, and though it's most concentrated in the core, it's still very abundant and at a very high abundance * usefulness * ease of processing to usefulness value

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (2 children)

    Yup.

    I should probably mention silicon is a terrible metal for anything structural, as well, so that was never an option. It's below carbon on the periodic table and brittle like it.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (1 child)

    Does silicon even form metallic bonds? Silicate minerals however are structurally useful as are carbonate minerals, they just can't do what structural metals can. It's not like we'd be totally fucked if the only abundant deposits of structurally useful metals in our planet were in the core (without a liquid ferromagnetic core we would be fucked), but we'd be relying pretty heavily on wood and stone for building which would prevent the massive structures that define our current artificial environment

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    One thing that would have been really tough would be high-temperature pressure vessels, like for heat engines. Other materials with good tensile strength exist (as do wood skyscrapers!), and so do refractory materials, but if you need both at the same time you're looking at either high-tech ceramic composites or metal.

    Does silicon even form metallic bonds?

    Uhh, not sure. The band structure of the crystal lattice supports conduction like a metal, but not without an impurity to introduce the initial carrier, which is the whole thing behind why it's useful for electronics.

    IIRC bond type is kind of a continuum.

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