1. Lots of debate in this MR comment thread between Campbell, Spolaore, and Wacziarg. Fireworks.
2. Many consumers can’t pick the right health insurance plan, paper here.
3. Tom Sietsema rates America’s ten best food cities, I say LA is number one, in any case I am happy to see NYC downgraded.
4. Tracking down Jimmy Page the holdout. And the Ewoks are dead: all of them.
5. Why 2015 is the tale of two shipping sectors.
From number 5 – ‘Last week the US moved to end a 40 year ban on oil exports, which “adds a new and exciting dynamic to the tanker market”, says Frode Mørkedal at Clarksons.’ The dynamic of American ‘exports’ remains a bit strange, in light of this figure –
Nov. 27. 2015 – weekly imported oil 7,747,000 barrels – https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=WCRIMUS2&f=W
It says something about how delusional certain aspects of American society has become when anyone talks about America ‘exporting’ oil. This is much like how the U.S. ‘exports’ refined petroleum products – first, the crude is imported, then the refined product is ‘exported,’ politely glossing over the reality that without the crude imports, no refined product could be produced for ‘export’ in the first place.
And those 40 year old export limits where in relation to Alaskan oil, and its delivery to American users. Now that the Alaskan pipeline is reaching the end of its major usefulness, the idea of sending some of the remaining Alaskan crude to Asian markets is looking attractive to a deficit ridden economy. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Alaska_Pipeline_System#Future_of_the_pipeline
Sort of like how Japan “exports” steel when they have to import iron ore and coal, eh?
Or Germany fraudulently ‘exports’ cars made of imported Chinese steel, eh?
So, China used Australian ore and coal to make steel that goes to Germany that is fueled Mexican petroleum refined in America.
and the turn signal made in Taiwan of plastics made from Indonesian oil in Singapore is not used.
Mentally challenged Minnesota representative Rick Nolan has introduced legislation to forbid the import of foreign steel: http://nailheadtom.blogspot.com/2015/11/us-representative-rick-nolan-is.html
Just say you find economics confusing. Save everybody a lot of time.
It’s quite a while since I saw such a foolish comment on this blog. Even the sarcastic comments tend to contain better sense.
Not all barrels of crude oil are identical. The US imports a great deal of heavy (i.e, containing a lot of long-chain hydrocarbons) Canadian crude oil via pipeline. The price of this oil per barrel is far cheaper than the international Brent light sweet index. US refiners have invested a great deal of capital to extracting a good product yield from a difficult heavy barrel.
Meanwhile, US oil wells in South Texas produce a lot of very light barrels which US refiners have a much lower comparative advantage to refining. It may make more sense to send those light barrels by water to Latin America than to back out imports of medium sour crude from Saudi Arabia.
Also, the US is a big country. It makes more sense to export a barrel from Alaska to Asia and import a different barrel from the North Sea to Philadelphia than to try to ship that barrel directly from Alaska to Philly.
It’s almost as if companies add value to raw materials at multiple steps in the supply chain!
The thing about Southern California is that there is a lot of good food .. but it isn’t always near-by. People who are impatient with LA want good Lebanese or Ethiopian within 10 miles of where they stand. Not always possible.
I am going to Garden Grove today. I wonder what I’ll eat .. maybe just grab a bánh mì đặc biệt. (What a crazy alphabet.)
Make sure to get your tones right or you’ll be ordering an extra firm coil spring mattress.
When I was working in Vietnam my mispronounciations always seemed to end as as some kind of sexual innuendo, apparently.
Maybe you’re just good looking.
I’ve lived within twenty miles of it for thirty years, but have never said “I am going to Garden Grove today”. Which is NOT to say it’s a place to avoid, but just to point out that LA is filled with multiple places to find your fix of whatever. But yes, you must drive or ride.
Marginal Counterrevolution Graph of the Day:
http://bit.ly/1TfvCfc
Dunno why Tyler keeps deleting it.
#2 This is one area where I wonder about free markets – not that they are not good, but that some people have major issues in choosing plans. Or saving for retirement. Or the person with student loans of $100,000 at age 57 who is making $5 payments on them, etc.
I almost could see the government not providing programs for them, but instead having them sign away their rights and having agents handle their affairs, giving them a monthly pocket money in cash.
This would allow less regulation to be needed for everyone else, and allow progressives to enjoy full-scale nanny state opportunity of those who maybe need it.
Who knows, if you do a good enough job, competent people would sign up, too.
It would be good for the elderly as well.
Until the agent was found taking bribes to sell you poor financial products.
The amazing thing to me is the number of people who group-thought the opposite. When house and stock prices only (mostly) went up, the Wealth Effect was strong. Many over-estimated their own wealth. Many over-estimated their employability in their 50’s and 60’s. Many under-estimated Social Security and Medicare as a shock-absorber. Many said “get the government out of the way, and we’ll be fine.”
Many of these same people now say “we’ll work until we die.”
Huh?
This is completely backwards. There’s a large wealth gap between people who used 401(k)s etc and people who didn’t. It’s a major engine of inequality in some sense – the conscientious benefited from it tremendously.
If you want to do something about wealth disparity (not that you obviously should) the first step is to make something like tax-differed retirement accounts mandatory.
I was speaking, though looking back I wasn’t clear at all, about the circa 2000 “privatize Social Security” movement.
Which, in retrospect, was a massively good idea that would have benefited us all, right?
And it’s a terrible shame it didn’t happen, right?
Are you even vaguely aware of the last 15 years?
I suspect you are reading me backwards.
Harun talked about people in bad straights, and made the argument that I thought would catch all the attention. That is, that some people need to sign over their affairs, etc. Social Security, as a backstop is a little like that, but not so extreme, and applies evenly to all of us. It helps any of us that make bad decisions (or just have bad luck).
I talk about being “amazed” that people wanted to take that away, and that indeed they would have fared really badly in the last 15 years.
So you agree that privatizing SS in 2000 would have been massively good for most everyone? That just about any of the proposals floating around would have left those “privatized” massively better off, and left the rest with a government in a much healthier financial position to meet their obligations?
I mean, sometimes history shows people were just wrong, and people who opposed Social Security privatization in that time-frame were terribly wrong and caused immense harm.
I want to be clear, some of these people are not even necessarily in bad straights. They just appear unwilling or unable to get their shit together in some areas of life. They may be excellent physicians, but not have saved a cent for retirement, vs. the guy who makes $40k but saves 15% of his paycheck since age 18 and is fine for retirement.
(Two more examples from a radio call in show on finance.)
I also don’t think government programs really help as much as a life coach.
I’m pretty sure my life coach would tell me to stop wasting time commenting on blogs and get back to work.
You’re going to have to fill in the blanks Lord Action, I’m not following what happened in the 2000-2015 period that was such a disaster for SS, and how that would have been ameliorated through privatization.
I’m not a huge fan of SS, so I want to hear your argument.
I am amazed. You are presenting a really crazy idea as a fait accompli.
Feel free to stop arguing rhetorically, and show exactly what kind of privatization you mean (full, meaning people may choose not to save?) or partial (with a few percent of the Social Security contribution pealed off for user-directed management?), and then calculate returns.
I note that:
“According to the latest 2014 release of Dalbar’s Quantitative Analysis of Investor Behavior (QAIB), the average investor in a blend of equities and fixed-income mutual funds has garnered only a 2.6% net annualized rate of return for the 10-year time period ending Dec. 31, 2013.
The same average investor hasn’t fared any better over longer time frames. The 20-year annualized return comes in at 2.5%, while the 30-year annualized rate is just 1.9%. Wow!
The average investor exclusively investing in just fixed-income funds has had an even worse experience. The annualized return is 0.6% over 10 years, 0.7% over 20 years, and 0.7% over 30 years.”
“I’m not following what happened in the 2000-2015 period that was such a disaster for SS”
We’re 15 years closer to Boomer retirement, large tax increases, and big budget cuts.
“how that would have been ameliorated through privatization.”
The financial obligation to everyone retiring now and in the future would have been taken care of. That strikes me as something I wish we had.
I believe substantially all of the proposals circulated around 2000 stipulated index funds and would have been tax deferred (essentially, some percentage of the SS inflow would be diverted to an IRA-like account invested in an S&P 500 index fund like vehicle – the plans differed largely on the percentage diverted, index details like whether some fixed income component was included, and where the money for the shortfall would come from). Even if they had allowed general mutual fund investing, they’d still have been better than the “return” on Social Security, right?
Dollar cost averaging into the broad market over the past 15 years worked astoundingly well.
There was obvious reluctance to allow active management of such a large sum of “government” money. That control issue was one of the major discussion points at the time.
Privatizing social security would mean a large new pool of investable capital for the US economy. That’s bound to have a positive impact on economic growth.
Privatizing social security would mean a large new pool of investable capital for the US economy.
No. It wouldn’t.
The government would simply have to borrow elsewhere, which would draw out of financial markets an exactly equal amount of money.
This goes for democracy as well, which is effectively the free market in politics.
“allow progressives to enjoy full-scale nanny state opportunity” to provide them with cushy over-paid jobs that allow them to order people about.
Or the person with student loans of $100,000 at age 57 who is making $5 payments on them, etc.
________
Actual example from a radio call in show. Person worked in human resources, went back to school, and had a 4 hour commute. She had $80,000 in a 401K, and wanted to retire at age 59.5.
2. It’s interesting that people who oppose Social Security privatization support the exchanges and vice versa.
We should teach the kids to consider Social Security as one component of their portfolio, and then that they should get busy building the rest of it. I mean, if you need to “privatize” your Social Security contribution to come up with investable money, you aren’t saving at a high enough rate.
(The exchange part of the insurance mandate is kind of orthogonal to that. To bring it in-line we should reduce the mandate to core, major medical? I’d be open to that if testing or modeling showed better return on health for costs.)
For a rich person in Gen-X or later, social security is a really bad part of your portfolio. Even for a middle class person, it’s a pretty bad part of your portfolio. And that’s assuming that it pays out according to schedule, even though the accounting says that won’t happen, and progressives want to make it a worse deal by removing the income cap, and conservatives want to make it a worse deal by making it means-tested.
+1
Easily the worst investment I have made, but in my defense I had a gun to my head.
Personally, I’m thinking of it as “bonus money”. Assume you’re going to retire without it, and be pleasantly surprised that you get anything back.
what an ignorant comment. 15% of your income up to the limit is a decent retirement savings rate.
When actual private investor returns are less than 3% and retirement may last 30 years?
They probably are sad that the risk corridors were capped, too.
Re #2, it’s not at all clear how they determined that “employees chose health plans that were inferior to other available plans, regardless of their eventual health outcomes”. They cite examples that show what you would expect: choosing a cheap plan is good if you are going to be healthy, choosing an expensive plan is good if you are going to be sick. Did they assume people knew this beforehand? Or did they make the opposite error of assuming people had no idea beforehand, so they only compared actuarial values? Did they take into account features like which doctors were in-network? (I would read the paper, but doctors apparently still haven’t solved the problem of making all papers freely available to all readers — a problem physicists solved 25 years ago.)
#2 If the couple accurately anticipated needing little medical care, the best option, the Bronze plan, would result in $3,648 of total spending, which includes their premium and out-of pocket costs. However, had they instead chosen a Platinum plan, they would have been faced with more than double the costs, at $8,748.
On the other hand, if the couple anticipated a relatively poor year of health exceeding the spending limits set by the ACA (e.g., they required a short hospital stay) the couple would face total costs ranging from $11,184, had they chosen a Gold plan, to $17,292 had they instead chosen the Silver plan. In this way, the authors suggest, the choice of plan can significantly influence a consumer’s costs and these potential differences in costs also apply to those eligible for the ACA’s premium tax credits.
Well DUH. You buy more insurance if your risk is high, and you buy less if your risk if low. And if you guess wrong about your risk level, you end up spending more money. The problem here is not that people are too stupid to understand the complexities, but that human beings can’t predict the future. Yet the authors seem to think that someone else should do the predicting for them.
Moreover, if we explicitly tell people which plan will likely result in the lest cost to them, aren’t we essentially telling them how to game the system? I thought the whole point of the ACA was to get low-risk people to spend too much money on insurance.
But … The platinum plan wasn’t the best option even with ‘poor’ health.
You’re misreading the article. The platinum plan was the most expensive option for the couple who anticipated “needing little medical care”.
Unless there’s something in the full (paid) paper.
The paper appears quite interesting (can’t seem to find a free version – for the complete analysis), but as usual, the data it is based on is not available. I am getting tired of not having access to the data. I guess we’re just supposed to believe the authors – after all, they are famous. So, it is hard to tell whether they are really conducting a fair analysis of what people would pay for different plans ex ante or ex post.
Yes it’s strange that everyone *except* actual scientists posts their research online for free. It’s largely responsible for the vast amount of misinformation on subjects like GMOs and vaccines. You can find the theories of paranoid activists for free, but the peer reviewed science is behind a paywall.
Also, the current peer-review process might be expensive, but millions of people participate in Wikipedia for free. It’s hard to imagine the scientific community couldn’t come up with some sort of wiki-like process for vetting research (maybe limit access to people with prior publications in a field) in order to allow it to be freely available. (Not to mention that you’d have more than three reviewers, so it might even be a more rigorous process)
“the couple would face total costs ranging from $11,184, had they chosen a Gold plan, to $17,292 had they instead chosen the Silver plan.”
Sounds like gold was the least expensive not platinum.
Hard to say. The article writer could have selected those options at random.
My reaction also. Maybe, the press release just does a poor job of explaining the results. One indicator that consumers do know what they’re doing: the risk of death spiral seems to be rising [http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-11-19/obamacare-insurers-are-suffering-that-won-t-end-well-]. That would be the expected result of combining informed consumers with community rating and required converage of pre-existing conditions. After all, wouldn’t we expect that a system that mandates arbitragable plans would get arbitraged?
Right, exactly. The whole system is defeated by consumers behaving rationally and choosing the plans that are likely to cost them least. if all the high risk people buy Platinum plans and all the low-risk people buy Bronze plans, then the Platinum plans will tend to be priced according to the actuarial risk of the high risk people, making them less of a good deal to the high risk people. Unless there is something in the law the forces the bronze plans to cross-subsidize the platinum ones…
I have read this blog for more than 5 years and throughout that time have waited for the moment when I would be roused enough to comment. I was hoping that I would have had something important to say regarding political matters, but, alas, I have been agitated by another issue. I am thus sorry to have to play my cards on this hand. Nevertheless, my concern:
Enough already with the lauding of the DC restaurant scene. To say that DC is one of the premier dining destinations in the nation is preposterous!
I have lived in DC, New York, San Francisco, and Boston, and the latter three are situated at a culinary elevation that is several degrees higher than that of the capital.
Admittedly, the DC metro area does have some excellent and very noteworthy ethnic food, much of which I discovered through Tyler’s writing. When it comes to the more haute cooking in the region, however, I just cannot understand where the praise comes from.
First off, none of the city’s well-respected establishments are going to leave you ooh-ing and ah-ing if prior to experiencing them you’ve ever put something delectable on your tongue. Most DC establishments offer mediocre mimics of trends that have taken off elsewhere. They are funded by people with enough cash to engage in culinary arbitrage, the selling of sub-par imitations to a customer base who doesn’t know enough to discriminate.
Second–and more important–I will speculate that a survey of the sheer number of new, restaurants opening up in DC relative to the other metros I’ve mentioned would show that DC is way behind in the game. Yes, DC’s commercial business is growing incredibly, but we need to compare specifically the growth of it’s allegedly truly good restaurants with the same growth elsewhere. At the risk of being accused of standing up too strongly for Boston–where I currently live–I think comparing DC and Boston would be extremely revealing. For all the praise that DC gets, I have been so much more impressed by the volume of very good restaurants opening up in Boston, nearly all of which have eclipsed even my best dining experiences in DC. What’s more, the diffusion of good places to eat in Boston has extended to the suburbs, and I think this move also shows where DC is lacking. Whether you travel, for instance, to Lincoln, Winchester, Newton, Arlington, Gloucester, Hingham, or Wellesley, you can have a memorable meal. (Fine dining is popping up in non-wealthy towns too!) In the DC area, you might find a gem somewhere in horse estate Virginia, but you’ll be hard-pressed to make a good case for traveling outside the city consistently to eat the kind of meal you’d consider top-notch. In sum, I think someone should keep a tally of the number of restaurants that are very good (not sure how to ever make a fair rating system) in the major cities so we could learn that it just doesn’t make sense to have DC up there with the other heavy hitters. I’d like to conclude by pointing out that the Boston area has about 2 million fewer people than DC, yet I will claim that it has significantly more restaurants that would please your palate.
Even the ethnic food doesn’t compare to NYC (mostly Queens) or Vancouver (for Chinese) or LA (for Mexican).
As a resident of Horse-Estate Virginia, sadly I must agree. Although there are some great farm to table restaurants out here (Ex. The Restaurant at Potowmack Farm, Harrimans Virginia Piedmont Grill, Hunter’s Head), not to mention the ubiquitous roadside pit barbeque joints, it’s really hard to find quality ethnic food. There really isn’t a single decent Lebanese or Ethiopean restaurant, or even Chinese.
Other cities couldn’t compete with NYC French haute cuisine so they improvised, appealing to diners with less discriminating palates with offerings of overly spiced and overly priced “ethnic” food. Was there any better experience than La Grenouille in the days when operated by Mr. and Mrs. Masson, the beautiful and delicate flowers on the tables complementing the complex and delicate French sauces(pronounced “sooooses”) on the plates. French cuisine doesn’t appeal to a generation that abjures complexity, in books, film, or food.
I’m not at all surprised that a guy from San Francisco that moved to the East Coast has spots number 1-3 on the west coast and number 4-5 in flyover. He should go see a doctor about having that chip on his shoulder removed surgically.
“First off, none of the city’s well-respected establishments are going to leave you ooh-ing and ah-ing if prior to experiencing them you’ve ever put something delectable on your tongue. Most DC establishments offer mediocre mimics of trends that have taken off elsewhere. They are funded by people with enough cash to engage in culinary arbitrage, the selling of sub-par imitations to a customer base who doesn’t know enough to discriminate.”
This could be the best description of the DC dining scene that I have ever read.
#1. This would readily be resolved if the replication data for the original paper had been shared.
Correct.
So what can we infer from the fact that the authors of that paper continue to refuse to share that data? The most natural inference seems to be that it is not in their interest for the problem to be resolved. In other words, that Campbell has them bang to rights.
Based on the week I spent in New York City in October, I have no problem with the notion that Portland is a more interesting place to eat than Brooklyn or Manhattan. Most of the places that seemed innovative for New York were a lot less exciting than places I visited elsewhere in the US this year. Too much effort is wasted on chasing Wall Street money and not enough is spent on figuring out how to cook vegetables properly.
On the other hand, it’s a joke to say that Portland beats LA at anything other than mid-price sit-down places. Portland simply doesnt have the depth of cities that have had strong dining scenes for more than 10 years. On the mutant third hand, though, Portland is a whole lot easier to navigate than LA or Seattle.
Another West Coaster with a complex.
Portland has good food, but to say it’s the best food city is just laughable.
To say any city is the best food city is pretty laughable. But even more laughable, is traveling to “more than a dozen” cities then making a top-10 list based on that. LoL.
Agree, another way to say this is pretty much any sizable city will have plenty of good and varied places to eat. Sort of axiomatic. Obviously there will be some homogenous, poorer cities that fall short (Jacksonville, Baltimore) but even those surely have dozens of interesting places to eat. Extreme foodies crack me up, but they are harmless.
Isn’t Baltimore known for excellent sea food?
Portland is a great great food city, and should be in any conversation about quality/interesting dining scenes, but a Top 10 list is a bit silly. There is no objective measure for ranking, so why bother? Saying it’s great will suffice.
Is Portland the whitest city in America other than Salt Lake City?
not sure where you are going with that…
Portland’s ethnic food is a joke, because there’s no native community to hold them to high standards. Read “An Economist Gets Lunch” for the details.
I’ll give you decent mid to high market food with a strong sourcing options for local ingredients. But with little ethnic and not much very high end it isn’t a great great food city.
you sir have strong opinions. The “ethnic” food as you call it is easy to find if you just look. Plenty of Korean, Salvadorian, Japanese, Mexican, Vietnamese cuisine to choose from, tucked in strip malls shared with burner stores and used video game shops. And places that experiment with traditional cuisines and recipes that don’t come off as pretentious. You should come visit some time and look around.
Re: 3, I feel as if the corners of the country are consistently overlooked in these lists. Boston, Seattle, Miami, and San Diego are all good eating cities. I blame a combination of bigger or trendier “neighboring” cities (3 of the 4, anyway) and geographical isolation (so the writers travel there less often).
5. Yep, the Ewoks are dead. Unless the rebel fleet immediately interposed itself between the Death Star and Endor to shoot down and shield against its remnants, Endor got wrecked by all that high velocity debris.
There is a small glimmer of hope for the Ewoks. The Death Star may not have been as close to Endor as it appeared when it exploded. Although the exploding Death Star seemed very close when viewed from the ground on Endor, this may have been from Han Solo’s point of view and in the latest movie, The Force Awakens, we are shown that Han Solo can see five planets exploding at the same time, which for all we know may not even be in the same Star System he is in. Perhaps Han Solo can see tachyons, which should mean he was seeing the planets explode before they exploded. But how ever it works, it appears that Han Solo has some kind of magic explodo-vision that enables him to see planets or moon sized objects exploding at vast distances. It even enables him to see planets that should be separated by at least light minutes all exploding at the same time. Presumably, if he hadn’t been travelling through hyperspace at the time, he would have been able to see Alderaan explode. So there is the possibility that the Death Star was far enough away from Endor at the time it exploded not to result in its destruction.
Brett December 22, 2015 at 4:23 pm
5. Yep, the Ewoks are dead.
People say that like it is a bad thing.
Personally I am rooting for the Empire. They seem a lot nicer and even more democratic. Also I suspect they have a really good health care plan.
#4…Ewoks? I enjoyed the new Star Wars movie, but I gave up on trying to make sense of the series long ago. The new film confirms for me that this was a wise decision. I could never understand why Yoda and Obi Wan didn’t conduct some sort of guerrilla war against the Empire instead of sitting on their asses hiding in caves and swamps. Now, in 7, we’re expected to credit that, if the Resistance can get one Jedi knight who’s sitting on his ass to join the fight ( At least he’s got better digs ), this will win the war for them. Huh?
And, after all, Luke is a screwup. He let his nephew drift to the dark side, got all of his Jedi students killed, and then ran away to hide while millions were being killed. Plus, if Rey is his daughter, that means Luke has a wife who left him, and that he left his daughter on awful planet to fend for herself as she grew up. He’s hardly Husband, Father, or Uncle of the year material, let alone a savior. Interesting things do happen to this family, but I’m not sure it has anything really to with them. Better just to enjoy the ride they’re on for what it is, an unnerving run of bad luck, and constantly being chosen for jobs they can’t finish.
#3 does not have much credibility. NYC can be an unpleasant pain in the ass but it has far and away the best food scene in the country. It has more 3-star, 2-star and 1-star Michelin starred restaurants than all of the other cities on the list combined (Portland has zero). NYC has more top-100 world restaurants (7, 8 if you include Stone Barns) according to “World’s 50 Best Restaurants” than the rest of the US combined (Portland has zero). And it happens to be the biggest and most diverse city in the country (Portland is not even in the top 100 in diversity) and only trails SF, Seattle and Boston in terms of restaurants per capita (per Bloomberg). We can gripe that these measurements are imperfect but no other place comes close.
Umm “diversity” has shit little to do with good food. See Japan.
Really? This needs to be explained to you? Having numerous large immigrant groups means more and better ethnic cuisine. Good ethnic food may not be “necessary” to be a great food city but it helps enormously.
Oh for God’s sake. Having eaten plenty in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Memphis, New Orleans, Austin, and a hundred other cities while consulting, there are only places with more restaurants and fewer restaurants. Some dives are great, and some “Michelin 22 star” places I wouldn’t waste the time, let alone the money, on.
Quality is subjective, and the best meal I’ve ever eaten was at a place two blocks away that appears on no lists. And my favorite restaurants are two other places within two blocks of home.
If you live in New York, or Portland, or wherever, I hope you’ve also found some places where you like to eat. And if you’re done consulting, I hope those places are nearby.
As for me, I’m 100% happy with the food in St. Louis. Heck, I don’t have to leave Dogtown to get any of 100 different great meals – more than I’ll eat in 5 years.
Also, “authentic” is a red herring. Does it matter that they used the “wrong” kind of cabbage? Really? I thought it tasted great both ways. Maybe even better the inauthentic way. I’m happy to try both again to make sure.
Reminds me of people turning up their noses at certain mass-market American beers. And of the billion people worldwide happily consuming them and their imitators. Seriously? All those people just don’t know any better?
Eat and drink what you like. Try new things to see if you like them, too. Or don’t – whatever… Just stop trying to tell me that your favorite is better than mine. I’ll come have a N’Guango L’ish Troffl’e when I’m in town, but if you’re hungry you have to have the OMG So Great Smoked Meat Salad when you’re here.
There is NO good Mexican food in New York.
Yes, I’ve often been told, what about this place? What about that place? But I’ve tasted plenty of “Mexican fusion” and then finally sitting down to a ceviche appetizer in San Diego, it was clear. You can get better Mexican from corner stores. Heck, give me Taco Bell in California to Texas over some of the fancy sit-down places.
And a panaderia? Ha.
That’s true. Mexican food in NYC is a weak area. But if you haven’t been out to Elmhurst where the highest concentration of Mexicans are in the city than you haven’t given it a fair shake.
Seems like a lot of people are comparing Manhattan south of 96th street plus Williamsburg to other cities’ entire metro area (including “horse country”).
#3.
Food rankings are inherently nonsense. “The best Thai restaurant in North America,” “The best food city in the US,” etc. These are ridiculous, despite Tyler’s addiction to them.
There are good restaurants, great restaurants, and a lot of so-so restaurants, just as there is good, great, indifferent, and poisonous street food. Ranking these, as opposed to identifying them, is pretentious and foolish.
# 4: I am currently staying in Lencois in Brazil, in the same street where Jimmy Page has a house. Locals even refer to the street as “Rua Jimmy Page”. But he hasn’t been seen here for years (which is a shame because Chapada Diamantina is a beautiful national park).
#3) Tyler’s spot on regarding LA at #1. In fact, if expanding beyond city limits to LA/Orange region, this region is, by far, better than the rest of the planet put together (i.e., better Chinese than all of East Asia (and rest of the world), just in West San Gabriel Valley). The San Francisco Bay Area (including Napa/Sonoma) and Tokyo give LA a run for it’s money. Other than that, Seattle, then, maybe Portland and NYC. DC? Really? Infinitely better Indian food just in either Sunnyvale or Berkeley California ALONE.