It says that companies try to keep it to a minimum. But surplus means "more than needed".

So companies stock more than needed. In part to compensate for demand fluctuation, in part to optimize procurement costs, in part to provide the customer with a pleasing visual experience.

Sadly, to sell 10 apples we currently "need" a stock of 13.

Then, i'm not your mom, nor your boss. You are free to have your own opinion on procurement strategies of grocers. Not every retailer works the same way, some are more virtuos than others.

But as a matter of fact the western world wastes about 1/3 of its food pipeline.

I am telling that this is not due to incompetence of supply planners, but due to deliberate planning. We accept an inefficiency there for a positive outcome in another point of the chain.

Should you disagree with my opinion, you are welcome to. I will believe you to be naive in thinking that losses of this magnitude are not accounted for accurately, but I will respect your position.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/stevensavage/2022/10/12/a-company-offers-an-alternative-to-food-waste-at-the-grocery-store-level/amp/ you can check Forbes for some data.

If you buy an apple for 1 and sell it for 5, you can easily afford wasting 1 apple in 3, if it nets you more sales.

Also you can afford to loose something in the fruit department, if you compensate with increased sales on a high-end product.

Ofc the small shop run by Roberto close to my parents' cannot afford this mindset, but big chains can.

Very thourough exaplanation of your opinion. Thank you for your constructive feedback, that directed me to sources that improved my knowledge of the topic

Sadly there is ALSO a marketing reason:

People are more willing to buy when a store is well stocked, rather than an half empty one.

Thus any big grocer is willing to sacrifice a chunk of inventory, in order to maintain a good facade.

This is not sustainable, and promotes bad consumer habits... But this is how we want our world to go 'round.

Better to have everything ready at my fingertip, than to accept a more sustainable way of consuming.

EDIT: added the word ALSO for clarity

One big issue, is that energy is an abstraction

It tells you a lot of useful things, with very simple math, but you can't ever measure energy directly. So you should give up the idea the energy is a actual "thing" but more of a "label".

So heat, is just the label that we give to a body whose particles move in a disorderly fashion. The more they move the more heat they have. (Actually to be precise heat is how much of the movement of the particles is/can be transferred to another body, but the point stands)

If you consider one single particle, it can't move disorderly, because relative to itself it always moves straight, so for a single particle we prefer to use the label kinetic energy, because a body whose particles move in an orderly fashion is simply a moving body and not an hot one.

Once again, heat and kinetic energy, are functionally the same thing, just two different names for two facets of the same phenomenon.

Consider that in nuclear physics there are "magic numbers". I can remember 2, 4 and 8 being some of them, but at the moment i can't remember the rest.

These numbers are linked to very stable layouts, against unstable ones.

(Tritium is much less stable than deuterium for example) I don't think we have a definitive explanation as of how and why they work, but rember (as a very basic intuitive approach) that an even number of things can be easily arranged in symmetrical ways, and some arrangements are much easier to obtain than others (for example there are 8 evenly distributed vertices in a cube)

To add on this. You and a friend are astronauts in space, holding hands. We are a system. Our center of mass is between us. If you push on your friend, no EXTERNAL force acted on the system you + friend, so your center of mass shouldn't change its state of motion. For this to happen, a net force of 0 should happen between you two. Ergo, any force you apply will be reflected back to you.

But then wouldn't stuff never ever move? If forces were always equal to 0? The point is that the system you + friend experience 0 external forces, and no motion. But if you look at the system only friend he experienced an EXTERNAL force (you pushing) And if you look at the system only you, you experience an EXTERNAL force equal to your push reflected.

Each of you moves, but the overall system does not change.

I don't know sorry.

But i can try with an analogy:

Alexa/siri/whatever use AI to perform speech recognition. Nowhere in their software or hardware is anything that works remotely like the human ear or brain, but their response is human like. This human-likedness could be enough to open us to new understandings of the world.

Another one could be:

birds and planes, by no means the use the same processes to fly, still both do

Edit: It doesn't explain much, but consider that i have no idea what i am talking about, these are suppositions

Because AI will not find out anything. It is not a sentient being.
AI is a tool that can be used to support our study of complex and intricate problems. With its data we can get to better understand our world.

It is not a brain, it is a "simulator" that delivers an output starting from an input that would be very similar to what a human would do with that same input, but AI does not think, feel or elaborate.

Almost instantly. Consider that most grids are designed to work in a way that power generation and consumption MUST always be equal.

This means that we constantly fine-tune the power output of power generation plants.

We loose this, we stop receiveing energy in our homes.

We would still be able to generate it, but our grid wouldn't be able to work with it.

This need will be compensated in the future with solid energy storage systems spread across the grid. Consider that the unpredicatability of renewables concurs in this balancing complexity.