The cost of cocoa, chocolate’s main ingredient, has been increasing all year, hitting a record high just before Valentine’s Day and again this week, when it was priced at more than $10,000 a tonne – meaning it is currently more valuable than several precious metals,
Journalists and numbers again.
gold, silver, platinum, palladium, rhodium, iridium, osmium, rhenium, and ruthenium
$10k a tonne is something like 30 cents an ounce (1,000 kg in a tonne, around and about 30 ounces in a kg (or, around 30 grammes in an ounce, either way)).
And absolutely none of the precious metals are priced at tens of pennies per ounce.
Methinks our scribe has got confused somewhere in ounces and tonnes, prices per.
Basic arithmetic that I learned in primary school. In my head I make it one cent per gram, if I’m getting my decimal point in the right place. In any case can’t journos even use a calculator now?
Stony, they can’t use a spellchecker, thesaurus or encyclopaedia either!
It’s the Graun. Their writers are carefully vetted prior to hiring. Any trace of numeracy or political ideals to the right of Stalin ensures they are kicked out of the room within the first 3 nanoseconds in case they contaminate the interviewers…
I doubt the journo is even at this level: https://xkcd.com/2913
The headline: “Easter egg prices soar as cocoa crops are hit by climate crisis …”
More evidence of the standard of arithmetic behind belief in a climate crisis.
Paul,
Bad Weather=climate change
Good Weather=it’s weather, not climate. Learn the science, denier.
Presumably all these climate professors made bank from buying into cocoa futures a few years ago, as they knew this was coming, right?
I do find it fascinating that Tim strays into ounces for precious metals. They’ve been pricing in grams since I started working in them 50 years ago. The only people use ounces are those make those bullion lumps. And there’s a gram price for them. Even the gold market’s quite happy in kilos.
Troy ounces is how the metal market folks think about them. Tho rhenium is a bit odd, pricing in that market is usually per kg Re contained in ammonium perrhenate. From memory, 80% and summat or less summat.
Slightly PT but I was looking up student numbers the other day, and there are over 47,000 studying ‘Media, journalism and communications’ (source- https://www.hesa.ac.uk/news/25-01-2022/sb262-higher-education-student-statistics/subjects)
These courses should be first for the chop.
“What’s four orders of magnitude between friends? Wait, you’re not my friend?”
I suspect the author’s next article will be about the new hydrogen economy.
Oh the City slickers in their suits! Most of them are about as numerate as Guardian journalists these days. Cocoa’s a consumable. Metals are consumables. People buy/sell either think metric.
These courses should be first for the chop.
Nah. Useful courses. They identify the morons. Always worth knowing which the morons are. Then you can avoid them.
https://twitter.com/went1955/status/871262816199639040/photo/1