Favorite quote that I'm not sure why the author included:
“You can’t just put your mouth underneath the nozzle of an ice cream machine and fill your belly,” he says.
Knew the person who ran one of the biggest ice cream factories on earth. Visited one time and there was a chocolate bar on their desk, untouched and melting. When I pointed it out they said they just want the chocolate coating so…
While that facility also didn’t let you put your mouth under the nozzle they did have mini fridges lining the walls so you could just grab some ice cream whenever you felt like. New employees gained weight as soon as they signed the contract.
This indeed the problem. I -love- ice-cream. I'd happily eat it every day. As a child I looked forward to growing up, and being able to.
Now I'm in a place I could afford to do that, but alas, my metabolism can't keep up with the calories. (Sigh).
If I buy it, I eat it, so I don't really buy it anymore. But at least I indulge on special occasions, and even more occasionally make a batch of my own.
Sure, I'm a lot thinner now, which is great. But ice-cream will always be my first love.
> Visited one time and there was a chocolate bar on their desk, untouched and melting. When I pointed it out they said they just want the chocolate coating so…
Read it a few times, think they meant an ice cream sandwich or chocolate popsicle. The employee was drowning in free ice cream, to the point of wasting a full bar (melting and throwing away) just to eat the coating.
> While that facility also didn’t let you put your mouth under the nozzle they did have mini fridges lining the walls so you could just grab some ice cream whenever you felt like. New employees gained weight as soon as they signed the contract.
It was included because it was hilarious. The mental image of a worker ducking under a nozzle and their stomach bloating like some sort of ice cream mosquito justifies itself. (Watch out for the ice cream headache. That may not be covered under the health plan.)
However, I bet it's also a question he gets asked a lot by people: "do you ever just snack on some of the ice cream yourself?" And the reality squashing the dream would be no, that would be unsanitary, often infeasible given the mechanism and scale, and so on and so forth.
It was made clear to me when I worked in a food factory that if I ate anything, I'd be fired immediately.
The exception was when a low pressure hose popped open, and squirted food all over my face. The line manager, who has been fiddling with it, said "please swallow that!" as spitting it out would be been much worse. (Having to clean and discard a lot of stuff.)
Once a week or so there would be leftovers in the canteen.
That seems so silly to me. Even all-you-can-eat doesn't seem like it would even make a dent. Even if they go nuts initially, people will get sick of it, and the Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility will lower demand.
It would be allowed to take food out of the factory area and eat it in the canteen, which is exactly what they did once a week or so. Returning from the canteen to the factory area required putting on different boots, clean overalls and a hairnet, then cleaning boots, arms and hands.
I once lost track of a coworker at a coffee shop and eventually found her sitting on the floor under the bar spraying a tank of whipped cream into her mouth. It had been a long day.
Typically nitrous oxide gas is used to whip cream, not compressed air. Compressed does work, apparantely, but produces an inferior whip with a less stable texture.
> ”The only real cream in an aerosol can Ive ever seen was in Canada”
Aerosol cream (“squirty cream”) is a fairly common product in most countries, in my experience. Usually sweetened with some additives and nitrous oxide propellant, but mostly made from real cream.
Is that really a thing? I can only speak for here in the US, but all the normal whipped-cream-in-a-can I've seen has cream as the first ingredient. Even Reddi-wip.
This is a natural market progression and will happen. Most automakers built higher cost, lower volume "premium" products for less price sensitive early adopters. As the product and market matures, costs reduce and more mass market products are available at lower costs (Model S->Model 3 -> Model 2 etc). Used cars also become available over time to increase supply and lower costs for a different market segment.
Lots of great lines. Enjoyed the highlight of the cognitive dissonance in citing the benefits of "transparency.
>"The retail experience consumers want and deserve," Cooler Screens says on their website. I would admire this turn of phrase if it was intended as a contemptful one. Cooler Screens promise to bring the experience of shopping online, "ease, relevance, and transparency." "Transparency" seems like a poor choice of language when promoting a product that infamously compares poorly to the transparent door it replaces.
A point of clarification.
ASML does lithography, which creates the patterns for the chips. The big players in etch (removing layers of material following the pattern) are Lam Research and Applied Materials, both American companies.
"As they note, it seems like an easy thing to fix if Congress had the will:
Two reforms would help solve this problem: first, district judges should—by law—be randomly assigned to cases and, second, venue in patent cases should be tied to geographic divisions within a judicial district, not just the district as a whole."
Very, very limited data on the Bay Area. Under the "SF Bay Area Actuals" you can scroll all the way to the right you will see what I have been able to find.
California does report them on aggregate, but the purpose of this sheet was to focus on the Bay Area.
The model is oriented around companies, but could be applied to any gathering of people. There may be more sophisticated or accurate models out there, but I found his relatively quick to understand and apply.
Manufacturing costs are roughly similar between generics and brand name drugs (say ~$1/pill as an example). A large portion of costs for brand name drugs are in the development and qualification. Generics avoid these costs.
For a brand name drugs, manufacturing costs are a relatively low portion of the price and margins are high (example: $20/pill, 95% gross margin). For generics, manufacturing costs are a larger portion of the price and margins are lower (example: $2/pill, 50% gross margin).
For generics, because a substantial portion of the price is driven by manufactured costs, margins can be increased substantially by a reduction of the manufactured cost (example: cost $1->0.50, price: $2, margin ->75%, a 50% increase in profitability!). For the brand name drug, the same reduction (example: cost $1->0.50, price: $20, margin ->97%) yields less increase in margin. As a result, there is less incentive for the brand name drug to push for the manufacturing cost reduction (whether or not quality is affected.) And if there is a risk of reduced quality, then the brand name has much more to lose, both in terms of profitability and in the value of it's brand name.
