cost differential

[jwg]

Somehow it struck me odd that I just bought a bag of 8 lbs of potting soil for $6 and a 1gb SD memory card for $12.

The memory card is for my camera.

The potting soil is for some plants. When I moved into my current house 40 years ago, a friend's mother who came over to help clean brought over a little Swedish ivy, a small spider plant, and a coleus. Some years later during a winter heating failure while we were away the coleus died (a pipe burst too) but the others survived. No, my plants aren't 40 years old, I've rooted cuttings several times and thus have descendants of the Swedish ivy and the spider plant.

Comments

[rsc.livejournal.com]

And I keep trying to figure out if there's a way to determine whether 1gb is more or less then 16 lbs.

[trawnapanda.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, that works out to $1.65/kg. Does that count as "dirt cheap"?? Still more expensive than milk -- or gasoline, for that matter.

[ruth-lawrence.livejournal.com]

My, your potting mix sure is expensive: many times the price here.

Congarats on keeping the lines of the Swedish Ivy and spider plant going, though :-) !

[drevilmoo.livejournal.com]

Look at it this way, for the same amout of money, you would get 16 pounds of dirt to grow things in, or less than a gram (probably way less) of sand.

apropos of very little

[arfur]

do you think your userpic will ever be fully topped off?

[jwg.livejournal.com]

I did buy it in the local hardware store and maybe they made a mistake in the price.

[ruth-lawrence.livejournal.com]

Umm...big mistake?

On sale I can get 12kg for $A2...

[jwg.livejournal.com]

It's still a lot cheaper than a 12 oz bottle of water in Fenway Park for $3.

[trawnapanda.livejournal.com]

holy bat, f*ckman!

and you voluntarily and repeatedly go there. oh my. keep your hand on your wallet.

quantity discounts

[trawnapanda.livejournal.com]

if you buy small numbers / amounts of anything, you always pay more per unit. the good folks at my science project worked this out for condom prices -- $3.99 for three, but they're less than 10c each if you buy in bulk.

Re: quantity discounts

[ruth-lawrence.livejournal.com]

:::nods:::

Of course hundreds may be needed in the name of Applied Science.

The price I quoted for potting mix is an on-sale unit price...but I think it's soil-free and made with stuff we have in abundance (brown coal, ground pine bark), or that comes in cheaply (palm oil tree 'peat' from Asia).

[nooks.livejournal.com]

I had no idea a gigabyte was so cheap, and I *do* need an SD card. Thanks for the heads-up!

[xlerb.livejournal.com]

I dimly recall that some thermodynamic relation can be derived between bits and energy (though it may depend on the temperature), and thus mass. See “reversible computing”.

But it's been a while since I had to know about the relevant scientific principles, and likewise for computing the wavelength of the bag of dirt.