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[MrRoboto75]

Making your own bread can be cheaper under very specific circumstances. But usually it's not the case.

The circumstances being when you can't eat regular bread (like me, as I've discovered an allergy to wheat).

IME usually when home cooking is cheaper, like how I can make dirt basic pasta with about 2-3 bucks, it produces way more servings than I really need. (Granted, usually I'm just trying to feed myself, one person)  And then leftovers spoil because I tire of eating the exact same meal over three or more days.

[Frumple]

Ha. Scrub. I've ate the exact same lunch more or less every day since around August (though the days I'm not working I tend to just not eat lunch, so...). Six chicken nuggets with a bit of teriyaki sauce, one apple-cinnamon nutri-grain bar knockoff, and some water.

... you can get used to it, basically. Helps if you corral the practice to only one or two meals of your day instead of all of them, though. So long as you're getting some variation it's not so bad to otherwise be pretty samey for the rest of it.

For stuff like you're talking about, I usually dump the leftovers into something else (maybe other leftovers) and stir. Just because you have several days worth of the same leftovers doesn't mean you have to eat them the exact same way every time, y'know? It's actually pretty good incentive to experiment, I find.

[scriver]

Swedish cuisine is basically just "these are ten ways to make use of that one meal's leftover and number nine will disgust you!"

[smjjames]

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/24/18188532/government-shutdown-trump-senate

You know, maybe what Trump really wants is a line of giant repeating cardboard letters spelling out the word WALL, like some sort of real life manifestation of placeholder graphics. That seems like the best interpretation of the whole situation because while Trump wants something he calls a wall, he can’t decide just what he wants, or even knows what he wants there.

@mctraveller: 10 acres is... how much space? You’d also have to consider that there’s only so much space in suburban areas unless you decide to commandeer part of a park or something. Urban areas are even worse because unless you do rooftop* farming, you’d have to demolish something.

*itd have to be hydroponics because soil adds too much weight and roofs generally aren’t designed to support rooftop gardens.

[Reelya]

This is both a facetious and a real question: why is our system set up so that it's so difficult for people to self-sustain if they have no other options?  Why is that you have to have a job to get by, instead of work for yourself?

It's not our system. It is all systems, just an inescapable fact. Modern comfortable life is possible only because we leverage economies of scale and the per-person productivity that allows. Sure, you can be 100% self-sufficient, if you're willing to be satisfied with a pre-1800s subsistence level of existence. Don't expect a modern wage level if you're not part of the modern economic system. Everyone in business for themselves would collapse the economy back to a pre-industrial level since productivity relies on interlocking economies of scale.

People who are "individually" successful small-businessmen have just worked out how to pick up the crumbs along the side of the road of the mega-corps. That strategy relies on the continued existence of the mega-corps. For example, a "successful" "independent" car-wash owner can only exist because of huge corporations that make modern cars, the companies that have the economies of scale to make the car-wash equipment for all car-wash owners, and the government-industrial complex than maintains the road network. And that's only mentioning a few of the big-business things that must exist before the niche "car wash owner" can even exist - people with cars who work for every other major industry that need cars washed.

Entrepeneurs are pretty low-productivity due to poor economies of scale, but they find niches that are too small and scattered for the big players to be interested in. You often see statements such as that in South Africa, they have a high entrepeneurial spirit. That's because productivity is low in places like South Africa, so it's easy to eke out a profit while being relatively inefficient. In a highly developed country, everyone is more productive, so you need to be more productive too, to compete in the market and earn money. That DIY spirit stuff just won't cut it in the USA because you'll provide an inferior service for the same price as the next guy.

[smjjames]

That’s not very different from ecology and ecosystems though isn’t it? You need the big players that make up the key supporting parts before you can have the specialists, be it car wash owners or cleaner shrimp.

Obviously ecosystems are far more complex, but the same thing still shows up, in an ecosystem that is damaged or lacks the big players, you’re going to see more generalists because there aren’t enough scraps to go around to specialize. I may be oversimplifying, but the same point about niche availability still applies.

[Kagus]

Small-time shrimp wash owners are really feeling the strain of today's economy.

[scriver]

I want to make a sumprunkare joke but there's too few Scandiveges in the America thread

[Trekkin]

That’s not very different from ecology and ecosystems though isn’t it? You need the big players that make up the key supporting parts before you can have the specialists, be it car wash owners or cleaner shrimp.

Obviously ecosystems are far more complex, but the same thing still shows up, in an ecosystem that is damaged or lacks the big players, you’re going to see more generalists because there aren’t enough scraps to go around to specialize. I may be oversimplifying, but the same point about niche availability still applies.

The principal difference with ecosystems is that there isn't really a biological analogue to "big players" in the sense Reelya means, at least not without human intervention; environmental variance, genetic drift and differential disease resistance all encourage genetic diversity to correlate with population size, and over a large enough area that leads to speciation. Plus which, species don't coordinate the way corporations do, so the dynamics don't track the same way. There's no equivalent to the kind of centralized innovation and administration that helps drive economies of scale because every mutation has to spread reproductively rather than via communication. By contrast, a big international chain can spend large amounts of money to develop small improvements in efficiency, for example, because they can then sychronously implement them across the board and see the effect applied to their entire economic throughput -- and, even more crucially, they can absorb the costs of reorganization and failed risks in a way that individuals can't.

All of which is to say that while, in broad terms, specialists enter the economy when there's enough need for their output to support people doing it full-time, mutualism and similar biological specializations don't have the same critical (bio)mass thresholds.

[Reelya]

Dammit I had a response all typed up and fat-fingered a keyboard shortcut. WTF chrome does not even have an option to enable warning before closing a tab if you have entered content!

trying to recreate...

So yeah - the "ingredients costing more than the finished product" thing is what I meant by systematic issues.  Economies of scale work great when you are "part of the economy" and terrible if you aren't, because the barrier to entry to getting enough resources to take advantage of that scale are terrible.

It still works out in your favor. Let's just assume the cost of flour is the only cost in bread for simplicity's sake.

A bag of flour costs a lot less now, in relation to wages, than it ever did in the "good old days". But, think about it. You might buy a 20-pound bag of flour, and that would be really pushing on how much flour one person can keep around and deal with. A pallet can hold around 4000 pounds, and the big bakeries are buying flour by the pallet, not the bag. It's just much cheaper to ship 4000 pounds of flour to one person than to bag up 200 x 20 pound bags and sell them by retail to individuals. You could match price with the bakery, but only if you buy the 4000-pound amount of flour and turn your house into a flour warehouse for life.

Consider an equivalent scenario: a guy bought a lot of vegetables and sold soup to 20 people. Would you claim you were missing out, because you couldn't buy 1/20th the amount of vegetables for the same price he made one bowl of soup? Or, if you bought ingredients for one pizza, but your neighbor bought ingredients for 20 pizzas, and offered to sell you one pizza for less than the cost of your ingredients.

That's the same scenario as the bread. "systematic issues" doesn't make any sense. It's just the logic of economies of scale. One big bakery making a lot of bread for everyone is just much more efficient than lots of people getting the ingredients and making bread just for themselves. The cost of flour vs bread reflects that the lone-bread-makers are expending more actual resources than the big bakery.

[Trekkin]

Meanwhile, Roger Stone has been indicted and, apparently, arrested.

[WealthyRadish]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Dammit I had a response all typed up and fat-fingered a keyboard shortcut. WTF chrome does not even have an option to enable warning before closing a tab if you have entered content!

trying to recreate...

So yeah - the "ingredients costing more than the finished product" thing is what I meant by systematic issues.  Economies of scale work great when you are "part of the economy" and terrible if you aren't, because the barrier to entry to getting enough resources to take advantage of that scale are terrible.

It still works out in your favor. Let's just assume the cost of flour is the only cost in bread for simplicity's sake.

A bag of flour costs a lot less now, in relation to wages, than it ever did in the "good old days". But, think about it. You might buy a 20-pound bag of flour, and that would be really pushing on how much flour one person can keep around and deal with. A pallet can hold around 4000 pounds, and the big bakeries are buying flour by the pallet, not the bag. It's just much cheaper to ship 4000 pounds of flour to one person than to bag up 200 x 20 pound bags and sell them by retail to individuals. You could match price with the bakery, but only if you buy the 4000-pound amount of flour and turn your house into a flour warehouse for life.

Consider an equivalent scenario: a guy bought a lot of vegetables and sold soup to 20 people. Would you claim you were missing out, because you couldn't buy 1/20th the amount of vegetables for the same price he made one bowl of soup? Or, if you bought ingredients for one pizza, but your neighbor bought ingredients for 20 pizzas, and offered to sell you one pizza for less than the cost of your ingredients.

That's the same scenario as the bread. "systematic issues" doesn't make any sense. It's just the logic of economies of scale. One big bakery making a lot of bread for everyone is just much more efficient than lots of people getting the ingredients and making bread just for themselves. The cost of flour vs bread reflects that the lone-bread-makers are expending more actual resources than the big bakery.

The flour example doesn't actually hold consistently. I bake bread every other day, and each loaf costs around $0.80 for over a pound of bread, which is significantly less than the cheapest market price and far less than the price for bread of similar quality. Where the difference in efficiency lies is in the effectively free labor; it takes about 15 minutes of work to bake a loaf of bread at home (assuming you're around to do the few small tasks that are spread out over a few hours), and so that's a virtual cost of around $2.50 in wages if you were to somehow scale this up and bake bread continuously. In reality, this virtual cost is completely insignificant, because that 15 minutes of work is practically a leisure activity itself that is freely accessible to anyone that spends a few contiguous hours at home and visits grocery stores anyway. So even the virtual labor cost is effectively nothing at that small of a scale, even if it would break down completely at anything much more than a few loaves a day. Commercial operations also have costs in marketing and distribution, alongside requiring a profit for every middleman involved, which makes the comparison difficult and can add to the favorability of self-production, even when the industrial process itself is many orders of magnitude more labor (or rather wage) efficient.

[smjjames]

Air traffic controller staffing shortages force three major airports to delay flights, and a ground stop at one of those. Trump is seriously taunting Murphy here since the longer this goes on, the higher the chance of something bad happening that resulted from shutdown effects, or even something bad happening that they can't effectively respond to.

[Telgin]

Meanwhile, Roger Stone has been indicted and, apparently, arrested.

Another witch found in the witch hunt.

On another Trump note, rumors are circulating on the major news outlets that the white house has started drafting that emergency declaration to get money for the wall.  Fun times ahead.

[Folly]

Trump has finally budged on his demand for $5.7b in wall monies, now saying he will accepted a pro-rated wall payment relative to the duration of the government being reopened.

Dem's are standing firm on their refusal to negotiate while the government is shutdown, so the standoff continues.

Reportedly there are multiple hard-stops in the way of Trump's planned wall emergency declaration, so it will indeed be interesting if he tries to pull the trigger on that one.

I found it amusing in Trump's speech yesterday when he spent several minutes emphasizing how it is completely impossible to stop illegal immigration without a wall. He then immediately transitioned into talking about the multiple migrant caravans of tens of thousands of people(all of whom intended to enter the US illegally, of course) which his administration had stopped in recent years.
But how did they stop all those illegal immigrants without a wall? That was supposed to be impossible...