cotton candy & buying stuff



Hello everyone, xxxjoppiesausxxx back at it again with another half baked article of which I question if my website is the right home for it!

I have a hard time buying stuff. For me, everything I buy must have a good reason. I think I have this a little too much. I think a lot before I buy something. But today was not that day.

I bought cotton candy for 5.50 euro. Money that could have been used to fund research for terrible diseases, build bridges, construct houses, grow crops, has instead been used for some weird fluffy substance.

5.50? I can hear people with an average income rage. First protests, than riots. "I'm not paying that much for Cotton candy stall 1!" the crowd yells. I see cotton candy stalls, on fire. An assasination of a politician. Riots get out of control, a revolution begins, leaving everyone off much worse than before.

Oh, I got distracted again. ingredients: a wooden stick, pink coloring substance, sugar.

No idea what a wooden stick costs. Let's say 10 cents. Let's say sugar costs 500 EUR/ton. In other words, it costs 50 cents/kg. this thing weighs about 20 grams I think. 20 grams = 0.02 kg. multiply by 0.5 EUR, we get one cent. coloring substance is not expensive. 1 cent. one minute of labor. Let's say the employee earns 20 EUR gross / hour. This is a safe guess. which means 33 cents of labor. Power is 0.23 EUR/kWh(for residents), that thing can never be more than 1 kW, which means I am not going to take this into account since it's much less than one cent and I have taken safe guesses for the rest. this means we come at 45 cents for the whole thing. 5.50 EUR includes 9% VAT(which hopefully the seller pays because I paid cash and I got no receipt), so what the seller gets is ~5.05 EUR. Substract the cost, we come at 4.60 EUR. However, this was at a fair. The seller had to come here, pay rent etc. Also the seller has to live, and pension, etc. So I doubt the seller will be rich. As far as I know, they probably do this next to their main bussiness of operating a ride.

When I took it on the bicylce, it was hard to hold because the wind blew it away. It is very light. When eating it, it dissolves like dissolved girl in your mouth. It feels warm, because it just got out of the machine. and there's a lot of air in it. it's nice.

This is how it looks like under a cheap 30x microscope:

cotton candy under 30x microscope

I didn't eat everything, I left some on the stick to see what happens when you keep it for a longer period of time. After roughly twelve hours it looked like this:

the cotton candy after 12 hours

I did not expect this result. It has shrunk and now consists of brittle pieces of sugar.

Anyways, perhaps me not liking to buy stuff also has benefits. I am more resilient of impulses to buy (consumable) goods. Because of this I accumulate money more easily, so I can afford more stuff I actually want to buy. Such as a good chair, a good matress or a computer.

well, this was an unique experience. I am probably never going to do it again.

have a nice day!!!!!!!(breaking news: exclamation mark inflation rates through the roof!)