wolframhydroxide comments on PC cooling manufacturer Der8auer got scammed by a copper supplier

[–] wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works 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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[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 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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[–] wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works 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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[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 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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[–] wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works 1 point 8 months ago (1 child)

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

the aforementioned potato cabal (it really exists. Theres a fun Half-as-interesting video on how it affects the price of fries)
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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[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 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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