Results for “food” 2089 found
Does natural resource wealth imply technological stagnation?
Peter Thiel tells us:
Look at the Forbes list of the 92 people who are worth ten billion dollars or more in 2012. Where do they make money? 11 of them made it in technology, and all 11 were in computers. You’ve heard of all of them: It’s Bill Gates, it’s Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, on and on. There are 25 people who made it in mining natural resources. You probably haven’t heard their names. And these are basically cases of technological failure, because commodities are inelastic goods, and farmers make a fortune when there’s a famine. People will pay way more for food if there’s not enough. 25 people in the last 40 years made their fortunes because of the lack of innovation; 11 people made them because of innovation.
I also liked this bit:
One of the smartest investors in the world is considered to be Warren Buffett. His single biggest investment is in the railroad industry, which I think is a bet against technological progress, both in transportation and energy. Most of what gets transported on railroads is coal, and Buffett is essentially betting that after the 21st century, we’ll look more like the 19th rather than the 20th century. We’ll go back to rail, and back to coal; we’re going to run out of oil, and clean-tech is going to fail.
This very useful post collates and presents all of Peter’s evidence for his view that modern technology has been stagnating. It is both “interesting throughout” and “self-recommending.” It is from this blog by Dan Wang.
I very much liked Peter’s new book, Zero to One: Notes on Start-Ups, or How to Build the Future.
A simple rule for making every restaurant meal better
This one is so simple it is stupid, yet you hardly ever hear it. If anything it is mocked, but I will go on record:
Eat at 5 p.m. or 5:30.
The quality of the food coming out of the kitchen will be higher. Only the very top restaurants (and even then not always) can maintain the same quality at say 8 p.m. on a Saturday night. It is also the easiest time for getting a reservation.
The best time to eat at @ElephantJumps is 4:20 p.m. They’re all just sitting around, waiting to cook for you.
Oyamel is a good example of a D.C. restaurant which can be quite iffy, but is tasty and consistent first thing in the evening.
There is a beauty to having a restaurant all to yourself. And if you don’t like the timing, have no more than an apple for lunch.
This is also a better system for getting work done, if the nature of your workplace allows it. Few people who do the 7:30 dinner work through to 11 p.m. If you have dinner 5-6:30, you are ideally suited to get back into the saddle by 7:15.
But please, I hope not too many of you follow this advice. The funny thing is, you won’t. You will leave the low-hanging fruit behind, you strange creatures you.
Assorted links
1. The Milky Way is a suburb (no wonder it has good ethnic food).
2. Marginal revolution. Really.
3. Emmanuel Todd on the new German empire and those who do not like Russia (in French). The map is here large-scale.
4. Baidu’s “smart chopsticks” can (partially) test the safety of your food.
5. Michael Heise in the FT with the case against QE for Europe (not my view but a good piece). And background on the European ABS market.
Cochabamba notes
It is very charming here, but no one can tell me exactly what they export. Grain is a thing of the past. There are many universities in town. Trees, birds, and flowers are all first-rate.
I feel like I had never tasted a green pepper before. For silpancho, go to Palacio del Silpancho. The only item on the menu is…silpancho. I also recommend the street tamales with corn and cheese and the street food more generally, most of all at the comedores at the market 25 de Mayo. The “nice” restaurants are good and cheap, but not materially better than the Bolivian food you get in Falls Church, Virginia. Viva Vinto, about forty minutes out of town, served the best meal of my trip, the taxi will wait for very little money. Cochabamba provides one of the world’s best culinary micro-tours, although it requires a working knowledge of Spanish.
You can buy a quality Andean sweater for $12. The potatoes are the best I have eaten, ever, both purple and otherwise.
Quechua hats are not like Aymara hats.
People smile much more in Santa Cruz. The hotel electrical sockets use a different form here, and it would not be hard to convince somebody they were two different countries.
Assorted links
1. The benefits of early work experience are declining, especially for men.
2. Interview with Pete Best, who is happy and still alive.
3. 38 maps of the global economy.
4. How the Japanese messed up Pearl Harbor.
5. Very good (and complex) FT Alphaville post on long-term unemployment this time around; “…about 10 per cent of men who are laid off en masse are never employed again. Intriguingly, the overall health of the economy at the time of getting laid off does not seem to play much of a role, although age does.”
6. Carrying costs > liquidity premia, unsheared sheep edition. And can a panda fake pregnancy for better treatment?
Santa Cruz notes
The town square is lovely, even though they removed the sloth for fear he would electrocute himself. The population is friendly, the weather is perfect, and there are few sights. Unlike in much of South America, danger is not a concern. The small children who hang out in the central square seem to think that a full embrace of a pigeon is a good idea.
The food is excellent and yet you never hear about it. Try El Aljibe for local specialties (peanut soup, or duck and corn risotto, with egg on top), and Jardin de Asia for Amazonian Andean Peruvian Japanese Bolivian fusion. It is hard to find the Cochabamba version of Bolivian food that has made it over to the U.S. The steak here is decent but not as good as Argentina or Brazil.
The taxi equilibrium is that you do not ask in advance what the fare is, because that indicates you do not know. Be confident, and you will be surprised how little money they ask for.
If you had to pick one city to represent South America as a whole, Santa Cruz might be it. You can feel elements of Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, and yes even Bolivia here, all rolled into one. The proportions of fair-skinned, mestizo, and indigenous people mirrors the Continent as a whole more than the Altiplano. The secession movement here seems to have failed. Amazonian indigenous peoples and Guarani are common here.
Arriving at the airport at 3:30 a.m. involves a nightmarish wait. There is not much air pollution. I didn’t meet a single person in the service sector who spoke English. People in Santa Cruz seemed fairly happy relative to their per capita income.
You can study the economic development of China by visiting Bolivia.
My favorite things Bolivia
Yes, violinist Jaime Laredo is from Cochabamba, but that does not sum up what is special about Bolivia. I’ve been to maybe ninety countries, and often I think Bolivia is the most exotic and wild of them all. For a simple contrast, so many aspects of Yemen have fed into streams we are familiar with, and Yemeni food is instantly recognizable, even if you have never been to the Arabian peninsula.
The main strands of Bolivian indigenous life — which I estimate to represent sixty percent of the country or more — have barely touched America or Europe. It is all strange. It is (mostly) deeply beautiful, like visiting another planet. The sky is intense, and the potatoes and corn taste much stronger than what we we Americans are used to. “I went there to eat a purple potato” is a coherent and indeed a wise sentence. Llama jerky is a major dish.
There is a three-toed sloth in the Santa Cruz park. Pink flamingos and lithium on the other side of the country. La Paz is set in a bowl of sorts where you can look either up or down and see homes carved into mountains. The altitude (in some parts of the country) never ceases to feel like a strain, and the Andes are the world’s largest mountain range. Some of the indigenous politicians have run against the Western Enlightenment. On the Altiplano I encountered some of the most miserable-looking people. The beautiful women have an intensity and a heartiness. The bowler hat remains in style.
Most of the hotels aren’t very good. The country has been landlocked for some time, and has lost territory in three different wars. There are over thirty official languages and it is the number four country in the world for number of butterfly species. You will not find a higher percentage of expressionless, stone-faced petty merchants.
Due to hydrocarbons, the country is growing at over six percent a year. My favorite movie set in Bolivia is Even the Rain, a Spanish production I believe.
I strongly recommend a visit to Bolivia.
But as for Santa Cruz, well…that is something altogether different.
Saturday assorted links
Department of Uh-Oh
When it opened in 1990, the McDonald’s on Moscow’s Pushkin Square was a symbol of thawing relations with the U.S., attracting long lines and later becoming the fast-food chain’s most visited outlet world-wide.
On Wednesday evening, it stood empty, closed by Russia’s consumer-safety regulator amid the Kremlin’s most-serious confrontation with the West since the Cold War. The agency cited sanitary violations as it said that it had closed four McDonald’s Corp.’s restaurants in Moscow.
Analysts said the move was more likely the latest shot by Russia in response to U.S. and European sanctions over Moscow’s role in the armed conflict with its former Soviet neighbor, Ukraine.
Food inspectors “have been instruments of Russian foreign policy for years,” said Stephen Sestanovich, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He cited earlier bans on Moldovan wine and U.S. chicken.
Ferguson and the Modern Debtor’s Prison
How does a stop for jaywalking turn into a homicide and how does that turn into an American town essentially coming under military control with snipers, tear gas, and a no-fly zone? We don’t yet know exactly what happened between the two individuals on the day in question but events like this don’t happen without a deeper context. Part of the context is the return of debtor’s prisons that I wrote about in 2012:
Debtor’s prisons are supposed to be illegal in the United States but today poor people who fail to pay even small criminal justice fees are routinely being imprisoned. The problem has gotten worse recently because strapped states have dramatically increased the number of criminal justice fees….Failure to pay criminal justice fees can result in revocation of an individual’s drivers license, arrest and imprisonment. Individuals with revoked licenses who drive (say to work to earn money to pay their fees) and are apprehended can be further fined and imprisoned. Unpaid criminal justice debt also results in damaged credit reports and reduced housing and employment prospects. Furthermore, failure to pay fees can mean a violation of probation and parole terms which makes an individual ineligible for Federal programs such as food stamps, Temporary Assistance to Needy Family funds and Social Security Income for the elderly and disabled.
A new report from Arch City Defenders, a non-profit legal defense organization, shows that the Ferguson municipal courts are a stunning example of these problems:
Ferguson is a city located in northern St. Louis County with 21,203 residents living in 8,192 households. The majority (67%) of
residents are African-American…22% of residents live below the poverty level.…Despite Ferguson’s relative poverty, fines and court fees comprise the second largest source of revenue for the city, a total of $2,635,400. In 2013, the Ferguson Municipal Court disposed of 24,532 warrants and 12,018 cases, or about 3 warrants and 1.5 cases per household.
You don’t get $321 in fines and fees and 3 warrants per household from an about-average crime rate. You get numbers like this from bullshit arrests for jaywalking and constant “low level harassment involving traffic stops, court appearances, high fines, and the threat of jail for failure to pay.”
If you have money, for example, you can easily get a speeding ticket converted to a non-moving violation. But if you don’t have money it’s often the start of a downward spiral that is hard to pull out of:
For a simple speeding ticket, an attorney is paid $50-$100,
the municipality is paid $150-$200 in fines and court costs, and the
defendant avoids points on his or her license as well as a possible
increase in insurance costs. For simple cases, neither the attorney nor
the defendant must appear in court.However, if you do not have the ability to hire an attorney or pay
fines, you do not get the benefit of the amendment, you are assessed
points, your license risks suspension and you still owe the municipality
money you cannot afford….If you cannot pay the amount in full, you must appear in court on that night to explain why. If you miss court, a warrant will likely be
issued for your arrest.People who are arrested on a warrant for failure to appear in court
to pay the fines frequently sit in jail for an extended period. None of the
municipalities has court on a daily basis and some courts meet only
once per month. If you are arrested on a warrant in one of these
jurisdictions and are unable to pay the bond, you may spend as much as
three weeks in jail waiting to see a judge.
Of course, if you are arrested and jailed you will probably lose your job and perhaps also your apartment–all because of a speeding ticket.
As a final outrage, consider this story which ties together Ferguson, the courts, and the arrest of parents, often minority parents, for leaving their kids to play in parks (just as my parents did).
According to local judge Frank Vatterott, 37% of the courts responding to his survey unconstitutionally closed the courts to non-defendants. Defendants are then faced with
the choice of leaving their kids on the parking lot or going into court. As Antonio Morgan described after being denied entry to the court with his children, the decision to leave his kids with a friend resulted in a charge of child endangerment.
North Carolina discounts for praying customers
A North Carolina diner that offers discounts to praying customers has ignited an internet firestorm across the US.
For the past four years, Mary’s Gourmet Restaurant in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, had been surprising customers with a 15% discount if they prayed or meditated before meals.
“It could be anything – just taking a moment to push away the world,” says Mary Haglund, the owner. “I never asked anyone who they were praying to – that would be silly. I just recognised it as an act of gratitude.”
However, it wasn’t until customer Jordan Smith shared her receipt with a Christian radio station on 30 July that the diner and its discount went viral.
“There was no signage anywhere that promoted the prayer discount. We just ordered our food and prayed over it once it arrived,” says Smith. “It wasn’t until the end when they brought the bill over and it said 15% discount for praying in public.”
The story is here, and for the pointer I thank Felix Morency-Lavoie. By the way, the discount may violate the 1965 Civil Rights Act.
Is Washington, D.C. America’s “coolest” city?
It turns out we are getting our own branch of Momofuku. And Forbes recently decided DC is the coolest city in the United States. As an act of apparent satire, they followed up by naming Bethesda #19. I say Bethesda is about the least cool town around, Annandale should have done better.
What do I think? Well, Washington would be cooler if it were breeding its own Momofuku equivalents; northern Virginia did produce or at least refine or perhaps drive crazy the unreliable Peter Chang. David Chang, the Momofuku guy, did grow up in northern Virginia and ate in the “American-Chinese” restaurants of Vienna, VA, before striking out on his own in New York City, rated by Forbes as the eleventh coolest city in America (doesn’t NYC have to be either #1 or “totally not cool at all”? Can you really sandwich it between #10 Dallas and #12 Oakland?).
You know, I very much enjoy and admire quite a few Forbes writers, most of all Modeled Behavior. So I don’t mean for what follows to cast any aspersions on Forbes, but…you know…Forbes itself isn’t actually all that cool, not in the world of media at least.
Can we agree that…Washington really does deserve to be Forbes’s idea of the coolest city in America?
(I thank J.O. for a useful conversation related to this blog post.)
Assorted links
Assorted links
1. Maps of cultural centers, a new research tool, fun too.
3. “Scientists reconstruct speech through soundproof glass by watching a bag of potato chips.”
4. Marathon finishing times have reference-dependent outcomes. And bumble bee cognitive individuality.
5. Good review of the excellent David Eimer book on Chinese minorities. And the strike that is Hong Kong. And who will end up owning New Zealand farms?
6. Early Mediterranean containerization.
7. Chefs, critics, solve for the equilibrium with four-letter words.
8. Serenading the cattle with my trombone (music video).
Assorted links
1. NFL players height and weight over time.
2. Why are start-ups slowing down?
3. Some material goods can make you happy.
4. On the Saudi-Israel “alliance.”
5. Mankiw on a reader on Sowell on sincerity, a very good point.
6. Lawyers without law school.
7. Really bad food markets in everything, potato chip edition.