This is just... I guess the emotion you feel when reading the last paragraph defines you as either technical guy (outrage / resignation, depending on your age and experience) or managerial guy (pure delight).
I am guessing there is a switch that makes it sort properly, you know, for VIP?
The contract stipulated that the wheat would contain something like <1% sand. US wheat at the time had effectively no sand at all, so they mixed in 1% of pure sand, staying just within the contract terms.
(I heard this from a friend whose friend knew something about it; in searching I can’t find a source online, so the story might be apocryphal. I also might be off on the precise percentage.)
I think you'll find neither story is true.
Like most Urban Legends it's a bit silly, people are people whatever the culture. They have common sense.
This is to prevent over-reliance on the measured SLO rather than the stated SLO in upstream services.
I'd say that feeding humans or even livestock is more important than profits. Or at least, it ought to be.
"Trafigura, Vitol and BP exporting dirty diesel to Africa, says Swiss NGO
"Traders blend cheap fuel with sulphur levels many times the European limit for sale in African countries, says Public Eye"
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/15/trafigura-vito...
http://www.fda.gov/Food/GuidanceRegulation/GuidanceDocuments...
Turns out that unrefined sugar is kept in gigantic open barns, and moved around with bulldozers --- not a clean process. Of course, birds and animals get in, and frequently die there, and then the sugar does... sugar things... to them.
As a result there is apparently a legal limit as to the maximum permissible number of crystallised parrots per tonne in Australian sugar.
Further, I'm guessing that there will always be some trace amounts of heavy metals, poisons and such in any grains so it's necessarily about setting a limit and optimizing the mix for the largest clean yield (in itself an interesting problem since the regulations are not for each grain but instead for all of the grain taken together).
Like, if you look closely at a 100 year old house, you'll find details like "the awnings over the window are just long enough to shade the window in the summer and short enough to get sun in the winter" that basically don't make it into modern homes.
1. you're suggesting that the machine has a zero percent false positive rate, which I believe given the circumstances is physically impossible. for this type of machine, there must necessarily be some increasing function relating false positive to true positive rate. perhaps doubling true positives from (making up some numbers) 0.0001% to 0.0002% only wastes 0.01% of the available grain, but either way, I refuse to believe that increasing the true positive rate is truly "free".
2. you're effectively stating that the grain processors take out most of the bad grain, then dump it back in. given that the allowable percentages of "bad material" are (as far as I know) quite low, I don't really see why they would bother reducing the amount thrown away from, say, 0.0001% to 0.00008% to save that tiny amount of money.
I haven't seen the machine but I envision a panel of knobs you can turn to adjust the acceptable levels of mercury, ergot fungus, mildew... ;-)
