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Comment by jacobolus | Hacker News Reader

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.)

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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.

Do you have a source for this? What kind of material do they add?

Sounds illegal - https://www.gipsa.usda.gov/fgis/grainhandling.aspx

Except -

"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;"

There's also the 'story' of the Japanese firm who included 10 broken 'X's' with the delivery of X, since the contract stated 10 broken X's per 10000.

I think you'll find neither story is true.

Like most Urban Legends it's a bit silly, people are people whatever the culture. They have common sense.

Usually they include 10 Xs more for the broken ones.

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.

This sounds very very odd?

Why ride the line? It'd take one major issue then you're way over you error budget?

For testing/simulations I can see why you'd introduce the errors.

Netflix has Chaos Monkey. The purpose is to find unexpected flaws and risks.

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.

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.

http://danluu.com/google-sre-book/#chapter-4-service-level-o...

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.

Or classical capitalism, because 99 ton of wheat plus one ton of sand is one ton of wheat cheaper than 100 tons of wheat. Sand is heavy and cheap.

Perhaps it's 1% by volume instead of by weight.

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.

[0] http://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=wheat&month...

Unfortunately for some profit is still more important than human health or the environment [0]

"Trafigura, Vitol and BP exporting dirty diesel to Africa, says Swiss NGO

"Traders blend cheap fuel with sulphur levels many times the European limit for sale in African countries, says Public Eye"

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/15/trafigura-vito...

A good compromise would have been to put a small bag of sand in the bottom of the container.

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 :)

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