food_and_drinks

How Often Do You Cook?

Nice, hust curious to know how most people eat food. 

One of those things that you can easily assume everyone does just like you, especially if you’re eating at home a lot.

between the two of you counts too, i’m mostly interested in the ratio of cooking at home to going out for food

HealthAndFitness

The Best Workouts Don't Feel Like Workouts

yeah it’s a very sharp and very long blade, bad news for intruders

How many meals in a typical week do you cook/prepare at home?

news

Toronto New Home Sales Down 89% from 10 Year Average

Historically, new home sales for a typical April in the GTA would be 2,750 units based on the previous 10-year average, this April there were only 310 new home sales.

The other day [I learned how to use a scythe](https://youtube.com/shorts/MJ5npQe4OYI) to cut grass. I spent a good 6 hours outside chopping away at the grass, and started to get the hang of it by the end of the day.

There are lots of benefits to scything (no noise, no dust, no engine, no fumes, no fuel, lower cost), but the workout is one of the best ones. The most efficient scythe operators rotate with their core instead of getting power out of their arms, and they're basically doing the same side-to-side core rotation for hours on end.

But since it's so satisfying to watch the blade tear through grass, the time really flies. It's the kind of exercise that someone might only do for 60 seconds in a gym before getting bored (like throwing a medicine ball against a wall), but one that can be done for many hours without boredom when you're outdoors doing something productive.

Since my day of scything, I've also been standing and sitting with a noticeably better posture without forcing anything, will see if the posture improvements persist.

Overall, 10/10 experience. Would recommend.

Design

This Dutch Oven Has A Secret Feature

AskSN

Who Do You Trust More? A Smart Friend or AI?

Wow, basically nobody picked AI. 

Curious to see if this changes over the coming years...

If a smart friend tells you something that ChatGPT or some other AI tool disagrees with, who do you instinctively trust more?

Let’s assume you don’t have the time to dig into the issue and probe for follow up questions… who do you trust more in the moment?

Let’s also assume the smart friend is talking about a topic which you consider them to be knowledgeable.

Can You Outperform an Apple Tree?

Yeah if you venture into value added products like sauces, dried fruit, and jams, you’ll be taking on more labor but also getting more revenue.

Probably lowers the return on a percentage basis though.

This is the correct answer. 

Black walnut trees outperform apple trees over the long run. You get valuable nuts annually and valuable timber many years down the road.

Sure, let's assume you're using marginal land for one tree. As long as you have soil and some sunlight, you're set.

You can also take this investment idea to your neighbor if you can't afford land, and split the profits with them.

There are a lot of sophisticated investors on this site, but I suspect few have ever bought a financial asset that outperformed an apple tree.

Let's do some quick math using rough averages:

An apple tree graft costs about $35. It takes 4 years to start bearing fruit, and then has a productive life of 25 years. There are minimal ongoing expenses, mostly watering and mulch. In some cases, these costs can be zero, but let's budget $5/year.

That's a total cost of $160 over the lifetime of the apple tree.

Over 25 years, one can expect an apple tree to produce 7,500 apples, peaking at 400 apples per year. There is a wide variation of 100-800 apples/year for different types of trees in different environments, but let's keep things simple. A decent sized apple is 1/3 of a pound, so that's 2,500 pounds of apples produced from one tree over its lifetime.

Commodity prices for apples are $2-3/lb, and direct sale prices are $5/lb. Specialty or organic varieties can cost more, but let's assume you sell apples for $4/lb.

Let's also assume the apple tree is not treated with pesticides. That means no fertilizer costs, though you may get some apples lost to pests and disease (picking disease-resistant varieties can reduce these losses).

Let's lower production expectations by 20% to account for unexpected losses. That means 2,000 lbs of apples over a lifetime, sold at $4/lb for a grand total of $8,000, or $320/year.

In other words, you're getting a 64x return each year from a $5/year input of water and mulch.

And even when accounting for the upfront cost of the tree, $320 is double the lifetime input costs for your apple tree, and you get it every single year for a quarter of a century. Not bad.

But what about all the labor, packing, and selling related costs?

A typical apple tree can be harvested with hand tools in 3 hours, so let's assume that is worth $100 of your time (the average hourly wage in the US today). If there are another 3 hours spent packing and selling apples, that still produces a $115/year profit.

But what if you don't want to sell your apples? Well, you stand to earn even more money. Recall that a typical apple tree produces 400 apples/year, and 1 apple/day keeps your doctor away.

If you choose to eat your 400 apples each year, you don't have to pack or sell your apples, and the time spent harvesting them simply replaces the time you would have otherwise spent in the apple section at the grocery store each week.

It's true that some varieties of apples don't keep well, but varieties like Goldrush can store well for 6-8 months, and their flavor actually improves during storage. They also have strong disease resistance and top-tier flavor in general.

So you get your full $315/year of profit in the form of grocery bill savings, and since you're not making any direct sales by consuming your own apples, you have no sales taxes to pay as a producer.

So... can you outperform an apple tree?

ideasfromtheedge

What Should Be Scaled Down?

For sure. One thing about most addicting internet apps is that they're global in nature. I wonder if the same problems would exist for a hyper-local social app. I suppose dating apps fall into this category, but what else is out there?


In tech, everyone loves scaling up.

Bigger is almost always viewed as better, and it's the playbook much of the internet has been built on. The idea of scaling also extends beyond the internet of course, but it seems like tech has really embraced scale as a foundational requirement for success.

I'm curious to know what parts of society should be scaled down. In what areas does the idea of 'scaling up' actually produce more harm than good?

Are there any good examples where an industry or some other system has become stronger by scaling down?