Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

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Interesting note at the end:

"Don't think decontenting is limited to just cars. Next time you're at the grocery store, stop by the freezer case and check out your favorite carton of ice cream. Most brands have quietly gone from a half-gallon (two-quart) container to 1.75 quarts--without changing the price."

I'm pretty sure I've seen the higher-end brands dropping to 1.5 quarts now. Sodas are pushing 1.25L and 1.5L containers when it used to just be purely 2L. There are a lot of four-packs in the beer aisle. A fair number of meats are being sold in fixed-sized packages, invariably less than one pound per package, rather than being sold by the pound.

At least it's clear enough if you look for it. In the SSD case, it sounds like they're making important alterations to things that aren't discussed in the specs. Of course, you shouldn't buy something depending on anything that isn't listed in the specs, but if all the manufacturers have the same crappy set of incomplete specs, you don't have a lot of choice.

Worse yet, some ice-cream brands (e.g., Breyer's) are also reformulating their recipes to use cheaper ingredients -- meaning they no longer meet the standard to be called "ice cream", but instead must be called "frozen dairy dessert": http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/17/dining/remembering-when-br...

An upshot of this is that staples like ice cream, mayonnaise, and cheese are some of the most label-regulated industries. The existence of terms like "processed cheese food" is a good thing.

Ice cream, mayo and cheese are staples? I'm guessing you're based in North America. :)

Maybe that fake cheese they eat on pizzas and the like.

Can't pass up that chance to take a cheap shot at an entire continent of people! After all, everyone knows that people who live in North America are all fat, lazy, and too stupid to know it!

That's a case of the labeling law working nicely though.

I like it when package prices have to be shown next to sensible unit prices, it really simplifies the comparison, regardless of any psychology that has been built into the packaging.

This really makes me hate the half-assed use of the metric system in the US. It seems like my local stores go out of their way to use different imperial units for different products, making it harder to compare. Unit prices are great, but when one package is $/oz and another is $/gallon, it defeats much of the purpose.

Oz is weight and gallon is volume. This is not a metric vs standard issue.

Oz most certainly can be used for volume. It's called the "fluid ounce".

But both oz and gallon are still imperial units. In metric they would use liters. So this isn't caused by half-assed use of the metric system, but rather by not using it at all.

In your rush to be pedantic, would it kill you to engage your brain for a few seconds first?

The US uses the metric system in many places. However, adoption has been half-assed, and non-metric units remain in common use in many situations. I buy soda and wine in liters but milk and juice in gallons, for example.

The fact that any non-metric units remain at all is due to the half-assed nature of metric system adoption in this country.

What's with the hostility? I was pointing out that WalterBright was down voted for the perfectly valid point that the problem you spoke of is not caused by half-assed use of the metric system. No matter how much I use my brain, it won't become such either. There may be other problems caused by that (I wouldn't know; I'm not American), but you specifically brought up one that is not related to metric in any way.

The hostility comes because you're going out of your way to interpret what I said in a way that makes me wrong, rather than seeing how I'm right.

And you're doing it again. Did you just ignore my explanation above, about how any use of non-metric units in the US is ultimately due to the half-assed adoption of the metric system in this country?

Hey, I understand what you are saying. But he did have a point, why use hostility? You could have made the same comment without the first line saying 'use your brain' and kept everything civil. Even if you are right, do you need to denigrate others who have gotten something wrong?

Pedantry is an inherent part of nerd-dom. It's often a good thing. Computers and other such things don't work on "well, you know what I meant".

However, there's a nasty subset of pedantry which basically consists of pattern-matching words without truly grasping the meaning and using that as a launching point for a "you're wrong" reply. This kind of pedantry derails conversations and wrecks communities.

That's the kind of pedantry I got above with this nonsense reply about how "in metric they would use liters". As if I didn't know that! A moment's thought would indicate, hey, maybe this guy is not a complete idiot who doesn't know anything about metric, and he probably already knows that neither ounces nor gallons are metric, so let's figure out what he actually meant instead of doing a mindless pattern-matching "you're wrong" reply. That is hostility too. Especially when you keep on going even after the guy explains it.

And of course I get the usual internet double standard, where it's perfectly OK to to write a really bad comment as long as you don't outright use upsetting words, but calling that behavior out is criticized.

I don't subscribe to this idea that "civil" is equivalent to "use nice words". To me, "civil" is about how you behave. If you curse but treat other people with respect, that's civil. If you use nothing but benign words arranged in a way that treats other people without respect, that's "not civil".

I suppose any argument in the internet can feel hostile if you care about the subject, but my apologies for any distress I may have caused anyway. My message is not intended to be about whether you are wrong, but whether the example you gave is valid. I did read your explanation, and I find it mistaken. Let me rephrase my argument, and you can point out the part you think is wrong.

If we say that a problem is caused by half-assed adoption of X, it implies the problem can be solved in two ways: (1) Properly adopting X, or (2) Reverting back to no adoption at all. The example you gave can only be solved by 1, because it is an inherent problem of the imperial system. If you take metric out of the equasion, the situation is not affected. While you may have meant to say "the imperial system has problems, let's use metric", one can also understand it as "the transition to metric is causing problems, let's stop it".

Your mistake is thinking that any statement of the form, "I hate X, for example because Y" implies that Y can be solved by any action that eliminates X.

For example, "I hate how they're serving a 50/50 mixture of coffee and urine, makes the coffee taste like urine." This does not imply that the problem can be solved by eliminating the coffee.

The grocery store I usually visit shows the price for all of its products both per unit and (much smaller, below it) in price per kilogram. I look at that all the time, and it's often surprising which of the products is actually the cheapest, and how large the differences can be between seemingly very similar products.

> I like it when package prices have to be shown next to sensible unit prices, it really simplifies the comparison, regardless of any psychology that has been built into the packaging.

This is standard consumer protection law in many places such as the EU and Australia.

You know, I have just been noticing this from a lot of "ice cream" brands in the grocery store: some of their flavors say "ice cream" while others say "frozen dairy product". Mind you, these are different flavors from the same brands, so you can't just go for a specific brand and assume you're getting ice cream, you have to read the fine print.

Keep in mind this is a brand-specific change. Unilever, the owner of Breyer's, is the worlds largest ice cream manufacturer and also owns Ben & Jerry's, Klondike, Popsicle, Magnum, and a host of other brands. Breyer's being one of their non-premium brands, it's one of the few they have that's so price sensitive that they'd risk so blatantly using filler substitutes.

My father told me that before and during the Depression there was a chocolate bar that sold for a nickel. The price stayed the same, but the size of the bar varied with the changing price of chocolate.

That actually seems like a good idea - as long as they market as "one nickels worth of chocolate".

found a link: http://www.hersheyarchives.org/exhibits/default.aspx?Exhibit...

It's not clear why, but the fourth wrapper in the link (1906-1911) actually says "10 cents" (possibly the wrapper is slightly larger)

Part of this is for cost, and part is for consumer taste. Starting in the early 80s through 90s, consumers started seeking out products based on the amount of fat per serving, leading to the rise of "fro yo" and low-fat high-sugar formulations which had to move away from creamy, low-overrun ice creams. Ice cream is defined by high butterfat content and low air injection (overrun), but as people have started to recognize that sugar is as bad for you as fat, perhaps the market will tilt again.

Can we stop already with this fat is bad for you? There is so much nutrition misinformation that no wonder there is an obesity epidemic... Fat is not bad for you, in fact it's critical to living a healthy life. Sugar is much easier to abuse because it's absorbed too quickly (which is why fruit juice is bad, no fiber slowing down the absorption) and provided in such vast quantities.

We need to real governance here, bring back some real nutritional science in to the consumers attention and make organisations legally liable for spreading dangerous misinformation. It could save more lives than stopping smoking/alcohol/drugs, gun violence, wars and car accidents combined.

Saturated fat is bad for you - and dairy has saturated fat.

Canola = OK Butter = Bad

There is no evidence Saturated fat is bad.

Go get the current issue of Tine Magazine[1]. This thinking was never backed up with good science 40 years ago and has been totally debunked in literature in the last decade. Saturated fat is very much a part of a healthy diet.

1. No, I don't consider that the "literature", but it's a good jumping off point to start learning what is true in nutrition versus what is dogma.

Dietary Fat is not bad for you, neither is it the same thing as body fat which is an indicator for excessive energy intake (most often from sugary drinks) and being generally misinformed (99% Fat Free? Awesome! Nevermind that added sugar to cover the lack to flavour we took out). What is bad for you is too much, EXCESS. Except this goes for everything. Such as too much sugar, protein, hormones, almost any drug & water can be a detriment, even lethal to you. I'll only give you that trans-fat is terrible.

The market hasn't and never will teach you that moderation is healthy because it's against their business model of selling excess. See meal portion sizes and how they have increased over the last few decades. I hope you're not taking fish oil supplements as well. Anything with this much marketing behind it should be cautioned with much skepticism.

Edit: I stand behind my criticism of anti-fat culture.

It is more likely that you are down voted as you went on a rant about fat to a parent who was talking about consumer tastes I the 80s and 90s. It would feel that both these replies are likely noted as off topic to the general conversation going on here.

Consumerist has been tracking this for years:

http://consumerist.com/category/grocery-shrink-ray/

http://www.mouseprint.org/

I remember noticing this as an 10-year-old with bags of chips -- $0.79 bags would become bigger $0.99 "big grab" bags with a big exclamatory balloon, then the size would later go down to before, but the price would stay the same.

Even as a kid, it seemed kinda sleazy

I agree, but I think it's just a way for the producers to mask inflation. My gut feeling is that people are more likely to consciously notice a price increase of 20% than a 20% decrease in volume/weight.

Sometimes these shrinkings are (accidentally) synchronized. In the early 2000s almost everything available from big manufacturers in Brazilian groceries shrunk while keeping the same prices (e.g. cookie bags going from 300g to 290g).

Last year and a half yogurt not only shrunk but started vanishing from the malls, being replaced by almost identically-looking bottles of "fermented milk", as the new formulation did not met the mandatory labeling standards to be called "yogurt". Of course, the prices were kept or raised.

That's everywhere.

Intellectually, I know that "fermented milk" is a perfectly accurate way to describe cheese, yogurt, and similar products, but I don't know if I could bring myself to buy and eat something that had it right on the label....

How about fermented grape juice or fermented grain?

Oddly, I have no problem with those. Something about fermented milk specifically sounds bad. Even though I'll happily eat all sorts of cheese.

For what it's worth, I decided this might be because I've had far too much experience with disgusting sour milk that sat in the refrigerator too long, while my only experience with rotten grain or grapes is with the nicely packaged kind where it was done on purpose.

I've seen this with assorted products offered in "new and improved" packaging that offers less than before, while the price stays the same.

The new "E-Z pour" bottle is an excuse to reduce the contents.

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