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this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2026
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Really Shitty Copper
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A community dedicated to making fun of Ea-Nasir, a Sumerian merchant circa 1750 BC, who sold exceptionally poor quality copper.
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Huh, today I learned steel is cheaper than chips.
Manure is also cheaper than chips, but i'm gonna snack on the chips. ;-)
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).
Okay, but that's cheating, that's WAY too many chips. Look at how big it is compared to the steel.
Ref: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fC2oke5MFg
I think they may have meant chips as in crisps. The trash food some of us occasionally get cravings for. Which are like 10-30 euros a kilogram these days. More expensive than steel, which is quite a bit more useful.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Absolutely. I would imagine the rest of the difference is comprised of:
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.
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.