The world depends on a collection of strange items. They're not cheap
Why Hacker News recommends it
Whenever NIST's pricey peanut butter or reference materials come up, commenters point to this as the clear explanation of why they exist.
What it is
Veritasium visits NIST to explain Standard Reference Materials, the carefully characterized items such as peanut butter used to calibrate instruments and keep measurements consistent. It covers why they exist and why they are expensive.
Recommended by 6 HN commenters across 4 different months, 2023 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Recommends slowmovintarget · 2023-03 · on “Why Poverty Persists in America”
You're forgetting the NIST. They operate at a net profit, selling things like Standard Jars of Peanut Butter for equipment calibration ($1,069 per unit). There's a cool Veritasium video on it: [this video]
Recommends seritools · 2023-10 · on “NIST Standard Peanut Butter – $1,107”
Probably the one linked above by Tom Scott, or this one by Veritasium: [this video] The Veritasium one mentions NIST peanut butter specifically, even.
Recommends V__ · 2023-10 · on “NIST Standard Peanut Butter – $1,107”
Veritasium [1] did a video of exactly this and explains why it exists [at 2m35s]: > An ordinary jar of peanut butter costs less than $5. And on the label you can see the ingredients and the amounts of different nutrients like protein, fats, sugar, and sodium. Those values have been measured by the manufacturer using different machines and analytical techniques. But how do you know those results are accurate? Well, this is where the government's standard jar of peanut butter comes in. It is mixed up so carefully and thoroughly that each jar contains exactly the same substance. > "We take great pains at homogenizing these things. Make sure it's consistent." > Then scientists at the National In
Recommends jwestbury · 2023-10 · on “NIST Standard Peanut Butter – $1,107”
Correct. Veritasium actually did a video on exactly this set of items last year[0]. The tl;dr is that NIST has a large collection of items which are rigorously produced and tested, with detailed documentation about their composition and test results, which allows companies to test their own products to very specific standards. For instance, peanut butter has aflatoxins -- known carcinogens. NIST's standard peanut butter has known levels of aflatoxins. By purchasing this peanut butter and testing it on your own peanut-butter-aflatoxin-sensing machine, you can calibrate your machine to detect aflatoxins in peanut butter to a reasonably high precision. 0. [this video]
Recommends 0xC0ncord · 2025-01 · on “Going Nuts over NIST’s Standard Reference Peanut Butter (2016)”
Veritasium has a great video[1] on NIST's Standard Reference Materials including their peanut butter. It talks about some of the other aspects of NIST's business in selling these items, their history, why they exist, and some of the other interesting ones like their standard reference cigarettes. [1] [this video]
Recommends prophesi · 2026-04 · on “NIST gives up enriching most CVEs”
Assuming this is in reference to the great Veritasium video[0] going over what these reference materials are used for and why they're so expensive. [0] [this video]
Cites crzyman · 2023-05 · on “”
I find this to be a close cousin of Tom Scott's "Making an international standard cup of tea" video ( [LINK] ). And very related to Tom Scott's "The US government will sell you freeze-dried urine" ( [LINK] ) and Veritasium's "The world depends on a collection of strange items. They're not cheap" ( [this video] ) They bring forward the idea that standard/pure/repeatable items aren't intrinsically "good" or "enjoyable". But that doesn't make them not useful or valuable in other contexts. It also offers some food for thought when it comes to what metrics we decide to put value in. We may like the idea of a particular metric, or what we think it represents, but that doesn't make it worth optimizing f
Cites 8note · 2023-07 · on “Food companies ‘sweetened the world’ and increased the risk of disease”
You're the one making up the idea - that's not an idea people have. Regulators and middle managers provide me with limited options for each of those thousand choices, and I, without having to think much, can pick one of them safely. For each of my choices, various regulators and managers have all gotten many says already. Some bureaucrat does manage my diet, and your diet too, but they don't micromanage it, and nobody is saying they should micromanage it It's perfectly feasible for regulators to identify when companies are adding sugars - look at the recipe, inspect the factory, put things in bomb calorimeters. Thats not at all absurd, and there's already standards maintained for basically e