Hacker News Reader

Comment by nba456_ | Hacker News Reader

25,000 lbs is .0000007% of the 35,000,000,000 lbs of chicken consumed in the US each year.

OP really should have just shared the USDA website annoucment[1]. Regardless this comment reminds me of a fictitious but expositiory scene from a Theodore Roosvelt Documentry. Where he served a steak dinner to a bunch of food lobbyist and read the excepts from the Jungle. It might be a shockingly small amount but for the 20K people eating bad meat it matters, and having tainted/uninspected meat floating about is bad. These are not computers that are facing downtime they are people. People who could be subjected to crippling food born illiness. I commend the adminstration (a rare occurrence but earned)

[1] https://www.fsis.usda.gov/recalls-alerts/shanghai-ravioli-co...

Fun story: for my final project in my high school junior-year history+literature class, I did the same: my friends and I grilled and served hotdogs to our class, and then proceeded to read the chapter of The Jungle that describes all manner of foul material falling into the sausage machinery. The reactions of my classmates still makes me grin 30 years on.

Half of a single truckload

Thank you! This was the very first question that popped into my head. My gut said it had to be a fraction. I did not realize just how small a fraction.

How many people eating bad 25,000 lbs of chicken can get sick? If 10% so 2,500 people. Would that be too small a number to matter?

from those numbers it's actually 0.00007%. you missed shifting the decimal by two places when converting to a percentage.

35 Billion lbs of chicken? 100 lbs of chicken per person per year?

Dayummmmm!

Comparing it to the amount of chicken consumed in a year seems disingenuous. How long does chicken last after it's slaughtered? The meaningful number you could have provided is what % of the current chicken stock is contaminated.

Yeah came here to say this. Drop in the bucket.

You mean drop in the clucket.

Might be a family bucket.

Can we stop pretending people health is insignificant because it is statistically insignificant?

How many people will consume this, how many people will get sick?

How many more product will be dangerous. Are we waiting for more death to just have bare minimum safety measures?

Let us know when you've completed construction of your perfect world.

You people are crazy.

Post a article about a C++ program and the entire world is coming at you saying Rust is better because it's safer and you are crazy to use such language is 2026.

Post about food safety. And suddenly safety is negligible because it's not that much.

Keep going guys.

>How many people will consume this, how many people will get sick?

This can't be inferred from the 0.00007% figure? Or are you hoping to use the rhetorical tactic of doing "huge number * small percentage = big number" to shock readers? eg. "0.0001% chance of getting stuck by lightning * all americans = 300 people per year hit by lightning. That's enough to fill an auditorium!"

Just stop. No one in this thread ever said that human health was insignificant. At worst we implied that the severity of the recall was heavily exaggerated.

Enough to make 50k very sick. Not a problem.

Oh hey, that's the same percentage as the new-hire equity grant for most SWE roles nowadays!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com