Other luck-based factors are things like when you start your company (the timing feels sort of right but is the market really ready for your product? or maybe you've already missed the boat? This obviously isn't all luck but to a large degree it is, sometimes the difference between the winner and the also ran can be that the winner had a slightly crappier product but ever so slightly better timing) and minor marketing choices (your research shows both advertising campaigns should result in a 20-50% increase in sales but the truth is that six months down the line one will give you a 200% increase in sales, the other will only get you a 20% increase, which one should you pick if all the research shows them to be equal? What if I told you a factor is a random celebrity making some statement on TV two weeks after you've chosen which one to pick? Didn't make it easier now, did it?).
I don't think there are stupid people. Just people who are smart in different ways,[...]
Someone clearly didn't work in tech support when he/she was younger.
Six months of that and it should be pretty clear to anyone with a couple of neurons still firing that yes, there are stupid people. In fact, stupid people are very likely to call tech support, not just because their internet connection is down but because the power is out, they don't like their neighbor or they just plain feel like yelling profanities at someone who works for a company they have no relationship to.
Yeah, as another Swede I'll have to chime in here and point out that I would never move somewhere where I didn't have a choice when it came to my ISP. Or, more specifically, I wouldn't move somewhere where my choices were "FTTH from an association-approved ISP" or "crappy DSL".
In an ideal situation the OP should just get the entire condo association hooked up to an open city net.
Of course, in a lot of places (like the US), this is rarely an option.
Thing is, every time some new measure to identify and track anything related to people comes up there are a handful of xtian crazies who scream about it being "the mark of the beast" (I'm not saying ALL of them, I'm saying a handful) and how this is a sign of the end times and all that.
And in a similar vein a few of the wackier anti-government people always come out of the woodworks as well, in their case to rant about how the evil gubmint is just doing this so they can implement some crazy scheme involving various three letter agencies, they get bonus points for references to zionism, ethnic cleansing of white people or extraterrestrial lizard men (one of these days I need to design a few conspiracy theory bingo boards).
I'm not saying these people will post comments on this/. story but I am saying that somewhere a few of them are already foaming at the mouth after hearing about this. And in the past I have seen "mark of the beast" comments on/..
I'm guessing at least a few christians will rant about this being "the mark of the beast" and a few tinfoil-hat types ranting about how this is the governments way of finding out things about you which they already knew...
I'm pretty sure the virtual tailor service thing could be done quite easily with less than 200 Mbps.
Take lots of photos from different angles but in the standard "relaxed standing" pose used when doing 3D modeling. Use this data to create a 3D model of the user and to create and map textures. Take a few extra shots/some extra video in certain poses or with certain movements to determine rigging data. Send the data to the tailor.
The bandwidth needed wouldn't be very much at all, in total I'm guessing you could get pretty damn good results without transferring more than 20-30 MB of data.
But yeah, "background music", either via speaker or headphone, is otherwise usually about as conducive to productivity as leaving a television on within visual range.
When I work from home I actually tend to fire up VLC with a bunch of episodes of some TV show I've already seen plenty of times before. I don't actively watch it, half the time the window is barely visible under all the other windows, but I've found it to be a "better" distraction than a lot of other stuff. Sure, I might take 30 - 60 seconds to actively watch it when I need to zone out for a minute but most of the time it's just familiar background noise (I could never deal with leaving a movie or TV show I haven't already seen on, I'd either miss it completely and have to re-watch it anyway or I'd lose focus on work).
The same is true for music, new music generally distracts me a lot more than familiar music where I know what's coming.
Where I work headphones are banned for all employees. Why? Because it would be "unfair" to the customer service staff if everyone else was allowed to wear headphones and they were unable to.
On a related note, when I worked tech support years ago lots of us would have headphones, the moment you weren't on the phone you'd swap your headset for headphones (if you were handling emails or some other non-phone task you could have several hours of music instead of listening to your co-workers talking to customers). Someone figured out how to force the software we used to not mute other software and at that point most employees just switched to listening to music while taking calls as well, a few guys would even watch movies or TV shows while taking calls (that's what happens when you put a bunch of people qualified to develop software or administer servers professionally, pay them $12/hour and make them tell people to try turning it off and on again for eight hours per day).
They need to talk to him just to finish the investigation? Is Sweden not a country where people have the right to remain silent? They must have difficulty finishing their investigations when suspected criminals refuse to answer police questions...
Oh, you have the right to remain silent, but you still need to show up. Common advice to those who get busted for minor narcotics charges is to answer all questions with "inga kommentarer" ("no comments") since you will gain nothing from saying anything to the cops, better to have your story straight for court (especially since, just like all cops, Swedish cops have been known to get the interrogation reports way wrong and will then claim that what's on paper must've been what you said because it's what they wrote, and courts always assume police officers are more reliable than regular people). Still need to show up though.
I'm pretty sure the Somalian market is pretty damn unregulated.
Of course, what is the definition of "Just Works" here? If the answer is "just keeps going and generates the maximum profit in absolute terms", ok, maybe you have a point. But once we take other factors into account (such as wealth distribution and giving everyone a fair chance. How are you free if being born to the "wrong" parents has more influence on the course of your life than any other factors? And that still happens with the rules we currently have, rich kids with no brains who coast along and do just fine and smart poor kids who wind up in jail because that's the course in life that they were put on) it's not so simple anymore.
If suddenly I could live for another 500+ years I don't see what harm it would do if I spent some of that time enjoying myself.
I would still be able to read more books, study more things and be more productive than I ever could have if I only lived to be 80 or so.
The argument you're making is hardly unique and when taken to its logical conclusion is that we should all sleep on the ground, work all waking hours and eat mass-produced nutrient slurry because anything more than that would be decadent and wasteful indulgences.
Well, obviously a lot of the people I know are people I have met in various places over the years, a few through work, others through other friends, some that I've just bumped into somewhere and somehow we became friends.
My point was more about those who use work as their primary source of social interaction and mostly have "friends" that are also coworkers. Whenever I've left a job I can safely say I've only kept in touch with maybe one in ten of my coworkers, not because I disliked them but because to be honest the only thing we really had in common was work.
By comparison, I have plenty of friends I have never worked with who I share interests and hobbies with, things that we have in common that we both care about rather than something we have in common because neither of us wants to be homeless and starving on the street.
That sounds like a good reason for getting a social life outside of work.
I rarely socialize with coworkers outside the office, I have "real" friends. (real in quotation marks to distinguish them from those "friends" some people have through work who are really just people they hang out with because it's convenient).
I actually did some number crunching on record-keeping for all of humanity. We have plenty of capacity.
You really don't need more than 64 bits for a unique identifier, so that's 8 bytes.
You'd probably want to store the date of birth, even as an inefficient date + time string that's no more than 16 bytes for a simple ISO8601-formatted string.
Names might be a good idea, this doesn't have to be perfect for everyone, just limit it to say, 128 bytes and that'll cover most people's names even with UTF-8.
Place of birth can be encoded as coordinates or an address, no way you'd need more than 16 bytes for the former or say, another 128 bytes for the latter.
Home address including country, once again, another 128 bytes or so at most for enough info to be able to find the person easily.
Now, even with this horribly inefficient setup we could easily fit enough storage for basic data on the whole world's population in a single rack. You could even put hourly GPS coordinate snapshots for everyone over the last 24 hours into the system and still have it fit in a rack. Now imagine some optimizations. A unique identifier, leave most of the personal data in national databases that you can query from your own db and instead have say, current coordinates, hourly snapshots for the last 48 hours and 3-4 snapshots per day for the last couple of weeks. You could track everyone.
There are definitely those who would find such a system very useful.
When the war in Afghanistan was just starting up (this recent one with direct US, NATO and UN involvement) I actually thought "this time it might be winnable". But, I suspect the main problem for us is that we're not willing to go to the same lengths as the soviets were. Sure, some people like to trot out claims of carpet bombing and collateral damage, but the point is that the soviets fought their war in Afghanistan a lot more like a proper war. And did pretty decently considering that they were fighting an enemy which was getting supplied weapons by another superpower.
I suspect what's really needed is a strong military push combined with an equally strong, and immediate, effort to modernize and rebuild the country. Give the population a clear impression of safety, comfort and working infrastructure being something that will arrive with the international forces and the Afghan army. Make them want the taliban gone. From what I've heard that's one of the areas where there have been a lot of screwups (with even ISAF soldiers complaining about how roads that were supposed to be paved months ago still barely qualify as dirt roads on a good day).
Another option they could go for would be globally available streaming/download at the same time (synced with whenever they air them) and actually letting people pay for the content they want to watch.
As for channel "packages"? How about per-season packages where you pick the shows you want to follow? If you only want one show you pay $X/season, next package up is "pick your favorite three shows" and pay $X * 2.5/season, next step up is "pick your favorite ten shows" for $X * 6/season. I'd be willing to pay for a package like that.
The complaint isn't "american viewers are ruining the experience for australian viewers", the complaint is "why is the licensing so messed up that for half the world the convenient and sane option is to download the show illegally?"
The problem with the timing tends not to be the network that produced the show but rather with the ones paying to get exclusive rights in another country. Here in Sweden it's not uncommon for shows to be artificially held back several weeks just to "buffer" for breaks in the US TV seasons which don't traditionally exist in the Swedish ones.
Of course, the whole exclusive geographic licensing thing means I can't just stream the show legally from the US (or download it from iTunes), my choices are basically brought down to:
Wait patiently like a good consumer until the show airs here.
Wait even longer until the show comes out on DVD/Bluray (after the end of the season, if they're feeling particularly shrewd they'll hold back the Bluray release until after the DVD release).
Regional licensing. Don't know about the parent but I live in a country that only recently (last six months) got movies in the iTunes store. TV shows? Hah! We've been begging for that for ages. Foreign TV networks won't let us watch shows via their websites ("This content is not available in your region at this time") and local TV channels clearly don't have the right licensing agreements to stream foreign shows (even more infuriating when they list all shows they air on their website but only a handful have the little "stream this show now" icon next to it).
At this point I've just given up. I don't even own a TV anymore, just a 1080p projector and my computer. I use a couple of RSS feeds from private torrent trackers to download the few shows I want to watch whenever they become available (normally within hours of airing in their country of origin). My only problem these days is that I catch myself talking about stuff that happens on the shows weeks or sometimes months before my friends (since they watch the "imported" broadcast on TV).
I think it depends a lot on what you're doing. I've seen tech support/helldesk/IT types handle IRC + Facebook and other stuff just fine despite being "online" all day long simply because their jobs often have lots of short periods of "nothing to do, might as well check FB/IRC/<Some forum>".
Hell, as a developer I've found that doing something "recreational" between various sub-tasks I'm working on really helps me stay focused (as opposed to jumping straight from one thing to another).
I think the problem appears when you have people who give Facebook more time and higher priority than work.
A serious problem with this is of course different usage patterns. While Greta, the 63 year old in accounting who's generally terrified of computers and barely knows how to "click open the internets" might only keep Facebook open when she's actively looking at it chances are the company's developers, engineers, IT staff and pretty much anyone young enough to not remember the days of Windows "multitask at your own peril" 9x are likely to keep a browser tab with Facebook open all day long. They might even check it every fifteen or twenty minutes, click "like" on someone's status update and then get back to work, all in less than ten seconds. Meanwhile Greta spends two hours per day on Facebook (most of her one hour lunch plus three twenty minute breaks). Of course, if someone looked at the logs they'd get the impression that Greta was using it less than the aforementioned groups (because her usage isn't "constant" over the whole day).
Traffic analysis is tricky, especially since people are people and not all exactly identical with identical usage patterns.
And if you're outside the US that seems to cover approximately 90% of all media. Hell, as a Swede I've even come across Swedish media that was only available in other countries. That's regional licensing at its best (most likely the local company that produced it licensed international distribution to someone else but put a "stay the fuck out of.se" clause in the contract. Of course, locally you can only get it on DVD or through broadcast TV).
A Marabou 200 gram chocolate bar has 545 kCal/100g which comes to 1090 kCal, that's for the regular milk chocolate ones. I know I've seen higher figures for the ones that have various types of other candy or nuts in them.
Yeah, my point was mostly that people don't realize just how much energy is in the food they eat. And the "health experts" employed by various magazines and other media outlets don't help, they spout things like "Nuts are much healthier than candy". Right, except the energy density is about the same as chocolate so 100 grams of peanuts or cashew nuts will do approximately as much damage as 100 grams of chocolate (if you're trying to lose weight), and since people think nuts are "healthy" they eat a lot more of them than they would if it was chocolate...
I suspect one contributing factor is that in the past (100+ years ago) food simply wasn't as abundant as it is today, not to mention that in the 19th century you couldn't just pop a microwave pizza weighing in at 1200+ kCal, wait two minutes and then eat. Cooking took time. Just look at candy, on my way home from work I pass by a grocery store, right next to the checkout they have candy, large 200 gram candybars each packing 1200 kCal or so worth of energy, and they're being sold for less than SEK 20 (~$2.8), even if your income is low that means an hour's worth of work will buy you a lot more than the energy you need in a day.
I don't even want to know how much energy is in proper pizza from a pizzeria but I doubt it's less than 2000 kCal...
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Those are great examples of luck-based factors.
Other luck-based factors are things like when you start your company (the timing feels sort of right but is the market really ready for your product? or maybe you've already missed the boat? This obviously isn't all luck but to a large degree it is, sometimes the difference between the winner and the also ran can be that the winner had a slightly crappier product but ever so slightly better timing) and minor marketing choices (your research shows both advertising campaigns should result in a 20-50% increase in sales but the truth is that six months down the line one will give you a 200% increase in sales, the other will only get you a 20% increase, which one should you pick if all the research shows them to be equal? What if I told you a factor is a random celebrity making some statement on TV two weeks after you've chosen which one to pick? Didn't make it easier now, did it?).
I don't think there are stupid people. Just people who are smart in different ways,[...]
Someone clearly didn't work in tech support when he/she was younger.
Six months of that and it should be pretty clear to anyone with a couple of neurons still firing that yes, there are stupid people. In fact, stupid people are very likely to call tech support, not just because their internet connection is down but because the power is out, they don't like their neighbor or they just plain feel like yelling profanities at someone who works for a company they have no relationship to.
Yeah, as another Swede I'll have to chime in here and point out that I would never move somewhere where I didn't have a choice when it came to my ISP. Or, more specifically, I wouldn't move somewhere where my choices were "FTTH from an association-approved ISP" or "crappy DSL".
In an ideal situation the OP should just get the entire condo association hooked up to an open city net.
Of course, in a lot of places (like the US), this is rarely an option.
Thing is, every time some new measure to identify and track anything related to people comes up there are a handful of xtian crazies who scream about it being "the mark of the beast" (I'm not saying ALL of them, I'm saying a handful) and how this is a sign of the end times and all that.
And in a similar vein a few of the wackier anti-government people always come out of the woodworks as well, in their case to rant about how the evil gubmint is just doing this so they can implement some crazy scheme involving various three letter agencies, they get bonus points for references to zionism, ethnic cleansing of white people or extraterrestrial lizard men (one of these days I need to design a few conspiracy theory bingo boards).
I'm not saying these people will post comments on this /. story but I am saying that somewhere a few of them are already foaming at the mouth after hearing about this. And in the past I have seen "mark of the beast" comments on /..
I'm guessing at least a few christians will rant about this being "the mark of the beast" and a few tinfoil-hat types ranting about how this is the governments way of finding out things about you which they already knew...
I'm pretty sure the virtual tailor service thing could be done quite easily with less than 200 Mbps.
Take lots of photos from different angles but in the standard "relaxed standing" pose used when doing 3D modeling. Use this data to create a 3D model of the user and to create and map textures. Take a few extra shots/some extra video in certain poses or with certain movements to determine rigging data. Send the data to the tailor.
The bandwidth needed wouldn't be very much at all, in total I'm guessing you could get pretty damn good results without transferring more than 20-30 MB of data.
But yeah, "background music", either via speaker or headphone, is otherwise usually about as conducive to productivity as leaving a television on within visual range.
When I work from home I actually tend to fire up VLC with a bunch of episodes of some TV show I've already seen plenty of times before. I don't actively watch it, half the time the window is barely visible under all the other windows, but I've found it to be a "better" distraction than a lot of other stuff. Sure, I might take 30 - 60 seconds to actively watch it when I need to zone out for a minute but most of the time it's just familiar background noise (I could never deal with leaving a movie or TV show I haven't already seen on, I'd either miss it completely and have to re-watch it anyway or I'd lose focus on work).
The same is true for music, new music generally distracts me a lot more than familiar music where I know what's coming.
Where I work headphones are banned for all employees. Why? Because it would be "unfair" to the customer service staff if everyone else was allowed to wear headphones and they were unable to.
On a related note, when I worked tech support years ago lots of us would have headphones, the moment you weren't on the phone you'd swap your headset for headphones (if you were handling emails or some other non-phone task you could have several hours of music instead of listening to your co-workers talking to customers). Someone figured out how to force the software we used to not mute other software and at that point most employees just switched to listening to music while taking calls as well, a few guys would even watch movies or TV shows while taking calls (that's what happens when you put a bunch of people qualified to develop software or administer servers professionally, pay them $12/hour and make them tell people to try turning it off and on again for eight hours per day).
They need to talk to him just to finish the investigation? Is Sweden not a country where people have the right to remain silent? They must have difficulty finishing their investigations when suspected criminals refuse to answer police questions...
Oh, you have the right to remain silent, but you still need to show up. Common advice to those who get busted for minor narcotics charges is to answer all questions with "inga kommentarer" ("no comments") since you will gain nothing from saying anything to the cops, better to have your story straight for court (especially since, just like all cops, Swedish cops have been known to get the interrogation reports way wrong and will then claim that what's on paper must've been what you said because it's what they wrote, and courts always assume police officers are more reliable than regular people). Still need to show up though.
I'm pretty sure the Somalian market is pretty damn unregulated.
Of course, what is the definition of "Just Works" here? If the answer is "just keeps going and generates the maximum profit in absolute terms", ok, maybe you have a point. But once we take other factors into account (such as wealth distribution and giving everyone a fair chance. How are you free if being born to the "wrong" parents has more influence on the course of your life than any other factors? And that still happens with the rules we currently have, rich kids with no brains who coast along and do just fine and smart poor kids who wind up in jail because that's the course in life that they were put on) it's not so simple anymore.
Define 'waste', please.
If suddenly I could live for another 500+ years I don't see what harm it would do if I spent some of that time enjoying myself.
I would still be able to read more books, study more things and be more productive than I ever could have if I only lived to be 80 or so.
The argument you're making is hardly unique and when taken to its logical conclusion is that we should all sleep on the ground, work all waking hours and eat mass-produced nutrient slurry because anything more than that would be decadent and wasteful indulgences.
Well, obviously a lot of the people I know are people I have met in various places over the years, a few through work, others through other friends, some that I've just bumped into somewhere and somehow we became friends.
My point was more about those who use work as their primary source of social interaction and mostly have "friends" that are also coworkers. Whenever I've left a job I can safely say I've only kept in touch with maybe one in ten of my coworkers, not because I disliked them but because to be honest the only thing we really had in common was work.
By comparison, I have plenty of friends I have never worked with who I share interests and hobbies with, things that we have in common that we both care about rather than something we have in common because neither of us wants to be homeless and starving on the street.
So why are we building so much other, even less useful, crap?
That sounds like a good reason for getting a social life outside of work.
I rarely socialize with coworkers outside the office, I have "real" friends. (real in quotation marks to distinguish them from those "friends" some people have through work who are really just people they hang out with because it's convenient).
I actually did some number crunching on record-keeping for all of humanity. We have plenty of capacity.
Now, even with this horribly inefficient setup we could easily fit enough storage for basic data on the whole world's population in a single rack. You could even put hourly GPS coordinate snapshots for everyone over the last 24 hours into the system and still have it fit in a rack. Now imagine some optimizations. A unique identifier, leave most of the personal data in national databases that you can query from your own db and instead have say, current coordinates, hourly snapshots for the last 48 hours and 3-4 snapshots per day for the last couple of weeks. You could track everyone.
There are definitely those who would find such a system very useful.
When the war in Afghanistan was just starting up (this recent one with direct US, NATO and UN involvement) I actually thought "this time it might be winnable". But, I suspect the main problem for us is that we're not willing to go to the same lengths as the soviets were. Sure, some people like to trot out claims of carpet bombing and collateral damage, but the point is that the soviets fought their war in Afghanistan a lot more like a proper war. And did pretty decently considering that they were fighting an enemy which was getting supplied weapons by another superpower.
I suspect what's really needed is a strong military push combined with an equally strong, and immediate, effort to modernize and rebuild the country. Give the population a clear impression of safety, comfort and working infrastructure being something that will arrive with the international forces and the Afghan army. Make them want the taliban gone. From what I've heard that's one of the areas where there have been a lot of screwups (with even ISAF soldiers complaining about how roads that were supposed to be paved months ago still barely qualify as dirt roads on a good day).
Another option they could go for would be globally available streaming/download at the same time (synced with whenever they air them) and actually letting people pay for the content they want to watch.
As for channel "packages"? How about per-season packages where you pick the shows you want to follow? If you only want one show you pay $X/season, next package up is "pick your favorite three shows" and pay $X * 2.5/season, next step up is "pick your favorite ten shows" for $X * 6/season. I'd be willing to pay for a package like that.
The complaint isn't "american viewers are ruining the experience for australian viewers", the complaint is "why is the licensing so messed up that for half the world the convenient and sane option is to download the show illegally?"
The problem with the timing tends not to be the network that produced the show but rather with the ones paying to get exclusive rights in another country. Here in Sweden it's not uncommon for shows to be artificially held back several weeks just to "buffer" for breaks in the US TV seasons which don't traditionally exist in the Swedish ones.
Of course, the whole exclusive geographic licensing thing means I can't just stream the show legally from the US (or download it from iTunes), my choices are basically brought down to:
Guess which option most tech-savvy users go with.
Regional licensing. Don't know about the parent but I live in a country that only recently (last six months) got movies in the iTunes store. TV shows? Hah! We've been begging for that for ages. Foreign TV networks won't let us watch shows via their websites ("This content is not available in your region at this time") and local TV channels clearly don't have the right licensing agreements to stream foreign shows (even more infuriating when they list all shows they air on their website but only a handful have the little "stream this show now" icon next to it).
At this point I've just given up. I don't even own a TV anymore, just a 1080p projector and my computer. I use a couple of RSS feeds from private torrent trackers to download the few shows I want to watch whenever they become available (normally within hours of airing in their country of origin). My only problem these days is that I catch myself talking about stuff that happens on the shows weeks or sometimes months before my friends (since they watch the "imported" broadcast on TV).
I think it depends a lot on what you're doing. I've seen tech support/helldesk/IT types handle IRC + Facebook and other stuff just fine despite being "online" all day long simply because their jobs often have lots of short periods of "nothing to do, might as well check FB/IRC/<Some forum>".
Hell, as a developer I've found that doing something "recreational" between various sub-tasks I'm working on really helps me stay focused (as opposed to jumping straight from one thing to another).
I think the problem appears when you have people who give Facebook more time and higher priority than work.
A serious problem with this is of course different usage patterns. While Greta, the 63 year old in accounting who's generally terrified of computers and barely knows how to "click open the internets" might only keep Facebook open when she's actively looking at it chances are the company's developers, engineers, IT staff and pretty much anyone young enough to not remember the days of Windows "multitask at your own peril" 9x are likely to keep a browser tab with Facebook open all day long. They might even check it every fifteen or twenty minutes, click "like" on someone's status update and then get back to work, all in less than ten seconds. Meanwhile Greta spends two hours per day on Facebook (most of her one hour lunch plus three twenty minute breaks). Of course, if someone looked at the logs they'd get the impression that Greta was using it less than the aforementioned groups (because her usage isn't "constant" over the whole day).
Traffic analysis is tricky, especially since people are people and not all exactly identical with identical usage patterns.
And if you're outside the US that seems to cover approximately 90% of all media. Hell, as a Swede I've even come across Swedish media that was only available in other countries. That's regional licensing at its best (most likely the local company that produced it licensed international distribution to someone else but put a "stay the fuck out of .se" clause in the contract. Of course, locally you can only get it on DVD or through broadcast TV).
A Marabou 200 gram chocolate bar has 545 kCal/100g which comes to 1090 kCal, that's for the regular milk chocolate ones. I know I've seen higher figures for the ones that have various types of other candy or nuts in them.
Yeah, my point was mostly that people don't realize just how much energy is in the food they eat. And the "health experts" employed by various magazines and other media outlets don't help, they spout things like "Nuts are much healthier than candy". Right, except the energy density is about the same as chocolate so 100 grams of peanuts or cashew nuts will do approximately as much damage as 100 grams of chocolate (if you're trying to lose weight), and since people think nuts are "healthy" they eat a lot more of them than they would if it was chocolate...
I suspect one contributing factor is that in the past (100+ years ago) food simply wasn't as abundant as it is today, not to mention that in the 19th century you couldn't just pop a microwave pizza weighing in at 1200+ kCal, wait two minutes and then eat. Cooking took time. Just look at candy, on my way home from work I pass by a grocery store, right next to the checkout they have candy, large 200 gram candybars each packing 1200 kCal or so worth of energy, and they're being sold for less than SEK 20 (~$2.8), even if your income is low that means an hour's worth of work will buy you a lot more than the energy you need in a day.
I don't even want to know how much energy is in proper pizza from a pizzeria but I doubt it's less than 2000 kCal...