In the 1970s, the USA sold a large amount of wheat to the USSR in a famous deal.
The contract stipulated that the wheat would contain something like <1% sand. US wheat at the time had effectively no sand at all, so they mixed in 1% of pure sand, staying just within the contract terms.
(I heard this from a friend whose friend knew something about it; in searching I can’t find a source online, so the story might be apocryphal. I also might be off on the precise percentage.)
Grain elevator contracts contain an allowed foreign material allowance. Farmer's bringing in their grain get docked for any foreign material. Then the elevators add foreign material to the grain as train cars are loaded. It's crazy but that's just how the industry has always worked.
"Recombine or add broken corn and broken kernels to whole grain of the same kind, provided, that no dockage or foreign material, including dust, has been added to the broken corn or broken kernels;"
In the Google SRE book they say that if a service has reliability much better than the stated SLO they artificially introduce errors to get closer to the error budget.
This is to prevent over-reliance on the measured SLO rather than the stated SLO in upstream services.
My understanding is that they don't bring the service to exactly the SLO... To prevent overreliance on a service, it can be sufficient to introduce some level of failure, which may still be well above the SLO.
One major issue and you stop artificially inserting errors, which are inserted at a rate such that you could turn off the error inserted within some timely manner and still stay within budget.
That doesn't sound like a very nice thing to do. I wonder if capitalism is to blame, as I would certainly blame capitalism, or good old fashioned egotistical rivalry that I'm told was common in many areas of life then between the USSR and the US.
I'd say that feeding humans or even livestock is more important than profits. Or at least, it ought to be.
I just happen to have bought some sand recently, and it isn't that cheap. Especially not the type of sand that you'd feel comfortable mixing into food.
Where I am, a ton of sand aggregate using in construction is ~$100 per ton. The better sand used in gardens, the brown sand (it's used to repel water so you don't over-water crops) is more than than.
Considering the wheat/ton spot price is $160 per ton at the moment, I don't think the actual prices would be too different.
Though we'd want that to be okay. The Russians might then reject saying you sent us 999 kgs of wheat and 1 kg of sand.
Also, diplomatically, this might be more difficult to defend. Although allowing this would've been in the best interest of both nations. Cue the human condition :)
The contract stipulated that the wheat would contain something like <1% sand. US wheat at the time had effectively no sand at all, so they mixed in 1% of pure sand, staying just within the contract terms.
(I heard this from a friend whose friend knew something about it; in searching I can’t find a source online, so the story might be apocryphal. I also might be off on the precise percentage.)