On the Mr Beast & consultant stuff: there was a lot of weird discussion on Twitter about this. Some people saw 'consultant' and immediately assumed 'McKinsey', and had the usual (for Twitter) negative reaction to the implied association. Others understood Mr Beast to mean 'person with specialized knowledge to be used for a short period of time' (his large cake maker, for example). The latter interpretation is obviously correct; the former is an odd artifact of Twitter's bizarre culture.
Re collecting up plates. My vague recollection from when I worked in a restaurant in my youth was that you'd go around looking for dishes and silverwear when you had a half full load in the dishwasher, or the kitchen was having a quiet time so had capacity to wash them. So maybe that's why, it's responding to internal "demand" to get it cleaned which avoids future bottlenecks.
For reasons I never understood no restaurant ever has significantly more than they could be using atbajy given time, so getting enough clean you the next set of guests was a constant task.
Restaurants operate on thin margins and excess inventory is expensive. So restaurants won't buy more dishes, glasses, silverware than they think they need, even if doing so would provide a cushion.
Same with calling excess people into work, which is eve more noticeable in busier restaurants. Cheaper to have 8 chefs at 90% of their max output than 9 chefs at 80%, which only drives more of them to pick up habits like smoking. Price margins on drinks however, are insanely lucrative.
Nice dishes and such are actually expensive, so you don't want massive extra stock.
More speculatively, it's not obvious if you can buy matched replacements piecemeal as they break. So a restaurant might be squeezing as much utility as possible out of an existing set before replacing the entire thing. That would be at higher end places of course.
> Tyler Cowen essentially despairs of reducing regulations or the number of bureaucrats, because it’s all embedded in a complex web of regulations and institutions and our businesses rely upon all that to be able to function. Otherwise business would be paralyzed... I would still expect, if a new President were indeed to do massive firings on rhetoric and hope, that the result would be a giant cluster****.
Politicians might want to incentivize civil servants to help them. Here's one way that occurs to me. Politicians propose a bill for deregulation. Civil servants in the relevant department are likely to be unhappy because their jobs may be at stake. (Also, many of them like the regulations. Various causal paths here.)
So the politicians survey the civil servants on whether the proposed bill is going too far (or missed some bad regulations) according to the politicians' own values. Civil servants who convince the politicians to change the proposed bill by making reference to the politicians' own values get a large bonus - say, the 10 civil servants whose advice most matches any changes the politicians make, get bonuses of 100%, 90%, etc. of their annual salary. It might elicit some tacit knowledge about how the bureaucracy functions. Otherwise, civil servants might gleefully hide what they know, hoping that chaos will discredit the reform and get it largely/entirely reversed.
Giving politicians the ability to offer cash bonuses to civil servants seems like a great way to undermine the political independence of the civil service.
I would be curious to see a group of US civil servants who behave in a politically independent manner when their jobs (or entire department), and the self-esteem they tie to the (nominal) mission of those jobs, are both on the chopping block. Maybe in the military, the sense of duty is that strong, but I struggle to imagine any other departments like that.
You might say I'm using a different definition of "political independence" from you in that first sentence. I'm eliding the definitions for a reason: "political independence" is often used to imply neutrality, but I think this is mostly inaccurate. And without that hypothetical neutrality, I don't think "political independence" has much, dare we say, independent value.
That's why I lean in favor of making civil servants more responsive to the results of elections.
I don't really get Shakespeare, like literally I don't get it. The last time I tried to read some Shakespeare about 15 years ago it was like reading a different language. Seemed like every other sentence I just couldn't parse or it had three antiquated words I've never heard before. Am I wrong? Just stupid?
If you never read poetry and never read anything else from before 1900, jumping back to poetry and the 1590s simultaneously is going to be tricky—some words are completely unknown or changed meaning nowadays, many are uncommon, poets are allowed to play with word order, there’s a lot to learn. You can get an annotated edition to cover the most widely confusing bits and then I’d just suggest to take your time; might be more satisfying to read some of the sonnets since it’s only 14 lines at a time. You could also read some of the 19th century poets like Keats as a smoother transition.
My neck hurts from looking down at this post all morning thanks. One note is that I really enjoyed the classic books you should pick one up and read it again a lot of them are really good.
I imagine the main reason you got pushback on the Airport departure listings is a lot of places have done the departure time order for a while. Even major ones like Heathrow and Schipol. The main advantage I see of it is if you are flying to a destination with many flights a day its mentally easier to look for your time (which you know) and check the destination where it will be lodged between Lisbon and Berlin rather than seeing 10 entries for London Heathrow and finding the right row.
Both are irritating when you are at a busy airport, made even worse when at airports like Frankfurt where you will have Gate, Terminal and Hall all as letters all in a row.
I think you are being a bit hard on consultants. Almost none of my clients pay enough for consulting ex-ante, and they all pay far too much post-facto.
Very few companies (but perhaps _all_ your employers!) can even remotely afford, nor should they want to, be experts in every regulatory or operational issue that they will confront. Not necessarily even ones they confront frequently!
They should spend relatively freely on ensuring that they get people who do know the rules, who almost never need be "the expert", to advise them ex ante on what they should do and how.
Consultants should be a really good deal for a lot of companies, particularly smaller companies or when dealing with certain things (regulations) infrequently.
Having someone on staff to deal with something is expensive, but so is not dealing with it at all. Owners/managers should be spending their time running the parts of the business that make money, not constantly learning some small thing.
Society doesn't seem to question hiring an outside accountant or someone to check the fire extinguishers, but other domain experts seem unwanted.
I think the problem here is we use consultant to mean at least 4 things.
1. Expert on [weird government regulation].
2. Industry Expert
3. Efficiency Guru (Ratbert with a liver strapped around his waist).
4. Service Provider
Efficiency Guru is almost always a waste, especially for small companies. Hiring an Efficiency Guruis a sign that you know you have bloat, but would probably be better off firing people involved in hiring an efficiency expert/workflow expert than doing any of the their nonsensical suggestions.
When you need an Industry Expert, you need them, but this falls into a sort of middling issue where do you really need one for .3 FTE? Why only that amount and not full time? Is this is a one off side project?
Expert on Government is a pretty common and sensible hire at all levels, and (IMO) more lawyers would be better served calling themselves consultants and bringing in people willing to buy pure advice vs "legal services".
Service Provider flummoxes me, people call themselves consultants when they are (the business equivalent) of hiring a trades person or a surveyor. The "cachet" of the term seems really bedded in the 90s and pretty dead now, so I'm wondering if some other term arises to distinguish Service Providers from Efficiency Gurus.
We call all of these Consultants, but (apart from Efficiency Gurus) they all have strong use cases on occasion in almost all business sizes. Yet the market is saturated with Efficiency Gurus and when someone opines on consultants they're probably thinking at least 51% about completely useless, no work experience, no industry experience, no life experience Efficiency Gurus coming in at 600/hour.
OTOH 600 an hour is cheap for a regulatory expert 😄
But yes I agree that efficiency experts are probably the lowest value add, in a tight competition with poorly skilled regulatory "experts", of which there are many.
I read somewhere that the Michelin Star issue was at least partially regression to the mean - same as the supposed "Sports Illustrated curse" actually just describing the fact that athletes tend to appear on Sports Illustrated at the peak of their career because of course they do.
I really appreciate the restaurants that let you pay by QR code at any time. I'm not sure what the classiest way to publish the code would be, but encourage restaurants to experiment with it.
I think the nostalgia thing and the paying for restaurant reservations thing are actually connected.
One thing people are maybe nostalgic for is a world with more friction, less inequality, and where rich people get less special treatment. (The second and third points are of course related.)
In the past, through the operation of friction, imperfect information, and locality, lots of things like restaurant reservations were effectively given out by lottery. Winning a lottery feels nice, and lotteries are egalitarian. Putting in the high bid in a public auction for a reservation slot feels less nice and obviously is less egalitarian.
Same with what Tyler was talking about with the perceived ease of getting into good live events in the past. It used to be that if you happened to stumble across information about the event, that was half the battle. Now the information is the easy part. So you’re competing with the whole damn world for Taylor Swift tickets, which sucks, and it’s always easy to know about lots of events you can’t afford to attend.
This also applies in a different way re: Tyler’s point on Amsterdam etc. Charming tourist spots are a Tragedy of the Commons deal, and those get worse with better information, lower friction, and more potential participants.
Interesting that the MrBeast document is, well, a document, and not a video. I guess the unstated implication is that he knows that video is good for entertainment (his product, basically), but not actually a good communication tool, for certain kinds of messages at least.
Man, fuck Nadu. This guy in my work pod played him as a joke one time, a deck mostly filled with filler commons that just happen to have a target effect...and he *still* largely curbstomped the competition. Target Nadu for removal -> draw into counterspell -> fuck that noise. Only managed to not make a totally embarrassing showing by playing my untargeted drain game deck, which got Nadu's player to within lbolt range before I lost, and then the remaining player...topdecked lbolt. Justice Prevails! But what a nightmare.
The new lands are an interesting powercreep. There were already a small number with that type of effect, now it's a full cycle...I feel like the equilibrium over time is slowly shifting towards "run no basic lands at all". There's just too many good nonbasic ones these days, including the bevy of MDFCs from MH3. Most of the time I'm still running classic ramp staples like Sword of the Animist and Terrain Generator, and it's definitely sad when a deck can't capitalize on those...but taking care of manafixing with mostly dual lands, most even fast? More and more doable, and not a ridiculous reach in 3-colour anymore. Even in mono decks I increasingly find my basic land count dropping over time. Kinda surprised prices for stuff like Sakura-Tribe Scout and Blood Moon have been fairly stable, they get better every year. Perhaps in the future Wotsee will counterbalance by putting out more benefits for basic lands specifically, like Virtue of Strength...
> Wegovy and other GLP-1s are more cost effective than many things we already cover
We aren't allowed to use cost-benefit or cost-effectiveness analyses in healthcare decisions. Doing that will get your policy branded as "death panels".
"Following an acrimonious health care reform debate involving charges of "death panels," in 2010, Congress explicitly forbade the use of cost-effectiveness analysis in government programs of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act." https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21595324/
On the Mr Beast & consultant stuff: there was a lot of weird discussion on Twitter about this. Some people saw 'consultant' and immediately assumed 'McKinsey', and had the usual (for Twitter) negative reaction to the implied association. Others understood Mr Beast to mean 'person with specialized knowledge to be used for a short period of time' (his large cake maker, for example). The latter interpretation is obviously correct; the former is an odd artifact of Twitter's bizarre culture.
Re collecting up plates. My vague recollection from when I worked in a restaurant in my youth was that you'd go around looking for dishes and silverwear when you had a half full load in the dishwasher, or the kitchen was having a quiet time so had capacity to wash them. So maybe that's why, it's responding to internal "demand" to get it cleaned which avoids future bottlenecks.
For reasons I never understood no restaurant ever has significantly more than they could be using atbajy given time, so getting enough clean you the next set of guests was a constant task.
Restaurants operate on thin margins and excess inventory is expensive. So restaurants won't buy more dishes, glasses, silverware than they think they need, even if doing so would provide a cushion.
Same with calling excess people into work, which is eve more noticeable in busier restaurants. Cheaper to have 8 chefs at 90% of their max output than 9 chefs at 80%, which only drives more of them to pick up habits like smoking. Price margins on drinks however, are insanely lucrative.
Nice dishes and such are actually expensive, so you don't want massive extra stock.
More speculatively, it's not obvious if you can buy matched replacements piecemeal as they break. So a restaurant might be squeezing as much utility as possible out of an existing set before replacing the entire thing. That would be at higher end places of course.
Podcast episode for this post:
https://open.substack.com/pub/dwatvpodcast/p/monthly-roundup-22-september-2024
The reason they wait so long to bring you the check is because they're trying to upsell you on desert.
> Tyler Cowen essentially despairs of reducing regulations or the number of bureaucrats, because it’s all embedded in a complex web of regulations and institutions and our businesses rely upon all that to be able to function. Otherwise business would be paralyzed... I would still expect, if a new President were indeed to do massive firings on rhetoric and hope, that the result would be a giant cluster****.
Politicians might want to incentivize civil servants to help them. Here's one way that occurs to me. Politicians propose a bill for deregulation. Civil servants in the relevant department are likely to be unhappy because their jobs may be at stake. (Also, many of them like the regulations. Various causal paths here.)
So the politicians survey the civil servants on whether the proposed bill is going too far (or missed some bad regulations) according to the politicians' own values. Civil servants who convince the politicians to change the proposed bill by making reference to the politicians' own values get a large bonus - say, the 10 civil servants whose advice most matches any changes the politicians make, get bonuses of 100%, 90%, etc. of their annual salary. It might elicit some tacit knowledge about how the bureaucracy functions. Otherwise, civil servants might gleefully hide what they know, hoping that chaos will discredit the reform and get it largely/entirely reversed.
Giving politicians the ability to offer cash bonuses to civil servants seems like a great way to undermine the political independence of the civil service.
I would be curious to see a group of US civil servants who behave in a politically independent manner when their jobs (or entire department), and the self-esteem they tie to the (nominal) mission of those jobs, are both on the chopping block. Maybe in the military, the sense of duty is that strong, but I struggle to imagine any other departments like that.
You might say I'm using a different definition of "political independence" from you in that first sentence. I'm eliding the definitions for a reason: "political independence" is often used to imply neutrality, but I think this is mostly inaccurate. And without that hypothetical neutrality, I don't think "political independence" has much, dare we say, independent value.
That's why I lean in favor of making civil servants more responsive to the results of elections.
I don't really get Shakespeare, like literally I don't get it. The last time I tried to read some Shakespeare about 15 years ago it was like reading a different language. Seemed like every other sentence I just couldn't parse or it had three antiquated words I've never heard before. Am I wrong? Just stupid?
Just go see a production
Like it’s much easier to understand with visual cues
Seconded, although I do like reading them as well
If you never read poetry and never read anything else from before 1900, jumping back to poetry and the 1590s simultaneously is going to be tricky—some words are completely unknown or changed meaning nowadays, many are uncommon, poets are allowed to play with word order, there’s a lot to learn. You can get an annotated edition to cover the most widely confusing bits and then I’d just suggest to take your time; might be more satisfying to read some of the sonnets since it’s only 14 lines at a time. You could also read some of the 19th century poets like Keats as a smoother transition.
One issue with listing by destination is that sometimes destination names aren't standardized. For example:
* OAK can be "San Francisco Bay / Oakland", or just "Oakland"
* BUR can be "Hollywood Burbank", or just "Burbank"
* SNA can be "Orange County" or "Santa Ana"
* EWR can be "Newark" or "New York - Newark" (which are at least close together alphabetically).
When listing by time, flights should always be listed by scheduled departure time, which I would guess is what is done at LGA also.
My neck hurts from looking down at this post all morning thanks. One note is that I really enjoyed the classic books you should pick one up and read it again a lot of them are really good.
I imagine the main reason you got pushback on the Airport departure listings is a lot of places have done the departure time order for a while. Even major ones like Heathrow and Schipol. The main advantage I see of it is if you are flying to a destination with many flights a day its mentally easier to look for your time (which you know) and check the destination where it will be lodged between Lisbon and Berlin rather than seeing 10 entries for London Heathrow and finding the right row.
Both are irritating when you are at a busy airport, made even worse when at airports like Frankfurt where you will have Gate, Terminal and Hall all as letters all in a row.
I think you are being a bit hard on consultants. Almost none of my clients pay enough for consulting ex-ante, and they all pay far too much post-facto.
Very few companies (but perhaps _all_ your employers!) can even remotely afford, nor should they want to, be experts in every regulatory or operational issue that they will confront. Not necessarily even ones they confront frequently!
They should spend relatively freely on ensuring that they get people who do know the rules, who almost never need be "the expert", to advise them ex ante on what they should do and how.
Consultants should be a really good deal for a lot of companies, particularly smaller companies or when dealing with certain things (regulations) infrequently.
Having someone on staff to deal with something is expensive, but so is not dealing with it at all. Owners/managers should be spending their time running the parts of the business that make money, not constantly learning some small thing.
Society doesn't seem to question hiring an outside accountant or someone to check the fire extinguishers, but other domain experts seem unwanted.
I think the problem here is we use consultant to mean at least 4 things.
1. Expert on [weird government regulation].
2. Industry Expert
3. Efficiency Guru (Ratbert with a liver strapped around his waist).
4. Service Provider
Efficiency Guru is almost always a waste, especially for small companies. Hiring an Efficiency Guruis a sign that you know you have bloat, but would probably be better off firing people involved in hiring an efficiency expert/workflow expert than doing any of the their nonsensical suggestions.
When you need an Industry Expert, you need them, but this falls into a sort of middling issue where do you really need one for .3 FTE? Why only that amount and not full time? Is this is a one off side project?
Expert on Government is a pretty common and sensible hire at all levels, and (IMO) more lawyers would be better served calling themselves consultants and bringing in people willing to buy pure advice vs "legal services".
Service Provider flummoxes me, people call themselves consultants when they are (the business equivalent) of hiring a trades person or a surveyor. The "cachet" of the term seems really bedded in the 90s and pretty dead now, so I'm wondering if some other term arises to distinguish Service Providers from Efficiency Gurus.
We call all of these Consultants, but (apart from Efficiency Gurus) they all have strong use cases on occasion in almost all business sizes. Yet the market is saturated with Efficiency Gurus and when someone opines on consultants they're probably thinking at least 51% about completely useless, no work experience, no industry experience, no life experience Efficiency Gurus coming in at 600/hour.
OTOH 600 an hour is cheap for a regulatory expert 😄
But yes I agree that efficiency experts are probably the lowest value add, in a tight competition with poorly skilled regulatory "experts", of which there are many.
I read somewhere that the Michelin Star issue was at least partially regression to the mean - same as the supposed "Sports Illustrated curse" actually just describing the fact that athletes tend to appear on Sports Illustrated at the peak of their career because of course they do.
I really appreciate the restaurants that let you pay by QR code at any time. I'm not sure what the classiest way to publish the code would be, but encourage restaurants to experiment with it.
Some of those restaurants also let you order by QR code as well. Waiters are going to have to really sweat to earn their tips now.
I think the nostalgia thing and the paying for restaurant reservations thing are actually connected.
One thing people are maybe nostalgic for is a world with more friction, less inequality, and where rich people get less special treatment. (The second and third points are of course related.)
In the past, through the operation of friction, imperfect information, and locality, lots of things like restaurant reservations were effectively given out by lottery. Winning a lottery feels nice, and lotteries are egalitarian. Putting in the high bid in a public auction for a reservation slot feels less nice and obviously is less egalitarian.
Same with what Tyler was talking about with the perceived ease of getting into good live events in the past. It used to be that if you happened to stumble across information about the event, that was half the battle. Now the information is the easy part. So you’re competing with the whole damn world for Taylor Swift tickets, which sucks, and it’s always easy to know about lots of events you can’t afford to attend.
This also applies in a different way re: Tyler’s point on Amsterdam etc. Charming tourist spots are a Tragedy of the Commons deal, and those get worse with better information, lower friction, and more potential participants.
Interesting that the MrBeast document is, well, a document, and not a video. I guess the unstated implication is that he knows that video is good for entertainment (his product, basically), but not actually a good communication tool, for certain kinds of messages at least.
Man, fuck Nadu. This guy in my work pod played him as a joke one time, a deck mostly filled with filler commons that just happen to have a target effect...and he *still* largely curbstomped the competition. Target Nadu for removal -> draw into counterspell -> fuck that noise. Only managed to not make a totally embarrassing showing by playing my untargeted drain game deck, which got Nadu's player to within lbolt range before I lost, and then the remaining player...topdecked lbolt. Justice Prevails! But what a nightmare.
The new lands are an interesting powercreep. There were already a small number with that type of effect, now it's a full cycle...I feel like the equilibrium over time is slowly shifting towards "run no basic lands at all". There's just too many good nonbasic ones these days, including the bevy of MDFCs from MH3. Most of the time I'm still running classic ramp staples like Sword of the Animist and Terrain Generator, and it's definitely sad when a deck can't capitalize on those...but taking care of manafixing with mostly dual lands, most even fast? More and more doable, and not a ridiculous reach in 3-colour anymore. Even in mono decks I increasingly find my basic land count dropping over time. Kinda surprised prices for stuff like Sakura-Tribe Scout and Blood Moon have been fairly stable, they get better every year. Perhaps in the future Wotsee will counterbalance by putting out more benefits for basic lands specifically, like Virtue of Strength...
> Wegovy and other GLP-1s are more cost effective than many things we already cover
We aren't allowed to use cost-benefit or cost-effectiveness analyses in healthcare decisions. Doing that will get your policy branded as "death panels".
"Following an acrimonious health care reform debate involving charges of "death panels," in 2010, Congress explicitly forbade the use of cost-effectiveness analysis in government programs of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act." https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21595324/