Cool idea! The string matching seems a bit brittle on the names I tried -- "Beatles" turns up no results, but "The Beatles" works. Same goes for "Rolling Stones"/"The Rolling Stones".
Raising prices would reduce the volume of customers, so the restaurant could maintain its quality standard, but Stanich felt his mission was to give back to the local community of regular diners. He didn't want to price out regular, repeat customers from the neighborhood and have only tourists eating there.
Others in this thread have suggested that the restaurant give locals a 'locals card', which would allow them to purchase food at a more reasonable price.
Burger pass. $30 for a burger pass. Gets you burgers for $4 for the rest of the year. or pay $20 for a burger now. You can secretly give out burger passes to locals when the tourists aren't looking.
I live in a touristy area with lots of great, but high demand and correspondingly high priced, restaurants.
Several of the local places do "frequent diner/visitor" loyalty cards, where the 5th or 9th meal (for restaurants), coffee (coffee shops), etc are free. This offsets the otherwise high prices charged on menu items.
Also, once a year (during the off season, of course), the local high school sells a booster card that gets a percent discount off for the entire year at numerous local places.
This is of course not unique to a touristy area, but I find myself using them far more often than in other places I've lived.
This sounds like a super good idea to me, I really love it. Seems pretty simple but just makes a lot of sense.
Any person travelling just coming by for the "best burger" probably would not want to spend $34 and not use that card anymore so $20 sounds great. Any regular would probably be super cool with paying that extra $30 knowing they can get a burger once a week or whatever for $4. This works out for the restaurant and the regulars, and like you said they can just hand out those cards to anyone for any reason.
Well, sure, but having the customer flash a card to the employee would save more time than having the customer hand over the card for inspection by an employee.
...but it would invite a secondary market for these cards. The logistics of fabricating them would suck, and you have to look at an ID to judge if a card should offered anyway.
Plus having special cards feels corporate, not homey. Looking at an ID for locals discount is pretty well trodden ground.
> but it would invite a secondary market for these cards
There are already markets for fake IDs, so unless you're suggesting that small local restaurants purchase scanners to confirm the authenticity of each ID, it would be relatively easy to circumvent this check too. (Some states require IDs to be scanned for selling alcohol, but many, e.g. in Oregon, do not, and the only check is some employee looking at a card in their hands for a couple of seconds)
> Plus having special cards feels corporate
Not at all. Plenty of local restaurants in my are (Portland, OR) have rewards cards, where you get stamps and a free meal after some amount of stamps.
The high prices would be to ward off these one-time customers who are only there for the single instagram photo. If someone is invested enough to make a fake ID just for cheaper burgers, presumably they're going to be repeat customers that develop a relationship with the restaurant, which is what he wants.
The point is, there are ways to distinguish between locals and non-locals. There are merits and drawbacks to having your own ID card vs. using a state ID card.
Also... he was just burned out. An experience many here may identify with. That's why the place is still closed.
It's possible there was something he could have done to make things good again... if he wasn't too burned out by the experience to figure it out and carry it out.
What about raising prices (at the exclusion of the locals), and then using the increased revenue to philanthropically give back to the community in a meaningful way?
There are some things in a capitalist society that are the domain of philanthropy, and some things that are not. A school or library might be a suitable target of philanthropy, but a burger place or pub or barber shop isn't; there's no way to fund it and have it end up the same sort of place it would be on its own.
At best, it can be a target of a GoFundMe or something - but that's just to pay operating costs. The store itself has to operate like a normal capitalist store for the concept to work, accepting customers, charging money, etc. There is no concept in our society of a non-profit burger joint.
I think daveslash was suggesting the burger joint runs as the for-profit entity that it already is and that it is the source of the philanthropy, not the target.
To give an example, charge exorbitant prices for burgers knowing there are still people desperate enough to try the burger that paying $30 is fine and then use the extra revenue to give back to the community, possibly by paying for the local soccer club to get a new clubhouse, or possibly by providing free/subsidized burgers at local events where the crowd will be local. In this way the business stays open and isn't overwhelmed by the demand, while not completely isolating itself from the local community that the owner wants to give back to.
Yes, that is how I understood 'daveslash. My claim is that this fails to accomplish any of the goals of the burger joint's owner: he wants to provide a burger joint for the community, not a soccer club for the community. Saying "Why don't you run a fancy burger place and help the community in other ways than you wanted" isn't actually a solution to anything.
I love this idea: zero profit capitalism. Sure some people would abuse savings accounts more than others, but taxing standing profits on a gradually increasing scale the longer they stand (sure the market already does this at a minute level, but it's not enough to deter wealth hoarding) seems like an effective way to solve the wealth extraction problem corporations introduce.
Apparently the researchers collected dead Greenland sharks accidentally caught in fishing nets, and examined their eye lenses for traces of C-14 from 1950's nuclear tests. Any shark with none must have been born after 1963. This allowed them to estimate how fast the sharks grow in their first ~= 50 years of life. They also applied other radioisotope dating methods (not fully explained), in addition to an extrapolated "growth curve", to estimate the biggest shark caught had been 390+-120 years old.
There are several good points in the speech that many of today's companies could benefit from: Help the best employees grow so they don't leave and take your organizational memory with them; build processes for long-term success instead of optimizing short-term financial metrics; let managers "go and see" the details of the problems that rank-and-file workers are having; favor leaders who are expert in the field over professional managers.
The Feynman Technique is basically alternating between writing a description of a concept on paper from memory, and looking up whatever you couldn't remember.
It's not my method, I was recalling something I learned elsewhere. I've told lots of people about it, so I recall the points that mattered for telling people. I haven't practiced recalling the study authors and name of the study, so I can't recall that stuff.
I read a few Head First books when I was first learning to program (Java, SQL, and Design Patterns), and I know what you mean about the books trying too hard to be funny, with lots of silly stock photos, word search puzzles, and the like.
Even so, Head First Java in particular is a good introduction to object-oriented programming for someone with no prior background in it. I feel like any beginner who can look past the silliness of the Head First style could learn efficiently from this series. I wouldn't use a Head First book now, but they are good for people without much background to build on who want an easy learning curve.
The article seems light on explaining the reasoning behind the law. Its proponents clearly want to increase the average female-male ratio on corporate boards. But that doesn't mean that a few boards being nearly all-male is necessarily bad. There must be a better, less blunt way to encourage companies to open more board seats up to women.
It does explain, but unfortunately the justification itself is light:
> "despite numerous independent studies that show companies with women on their board are more profitable and productive"
The scourge of biased 'social science' strikes again. The politician believes that science has shown that women make companies better (but oddly, men don't make companies with all female boards better).
I've encountered a few studies over time claiming to show this. Every single one was junk. Common problems are:
1) No ability to replicate, e.g. citing private databases and then just asserting the outcome. This is a frequent problem with studies that come out of management consultancies and other such groups.
2) Dropping data points. One study I read that concluded women on boards = more profit started by excluding all the unprofitable companies from the analysis.
3) Confounding variables. It's typical for such studies to simply compare profitability against gender without controlling for other factors. For example they look at firms in the middle east (all men) and say, look, western firms are more profitable, it must be because of women. This is especially problematic when they include countries in the analysis where there are already laws forcing women onto boards - invariably it's the richest countries that do this i.e. those without bigger problems to worry about.
I have never encountered a study that showed with any scientific validity that companies make more money when they have women on the boards. Yet now these faux 'studies' are causing major law changes throughout the world.
This is of course exactly what the (invariably female) authors of these studies wanted in the first place. It is sickening and may eventually result in severe blowback.
Hasn't happened so far but I'm sure they're taking suggestions. Feel free to raise some, and take it up with your legislature. But at least they're trying something.
Fair Trending basically differs just in the log() part, substituting (fractionUpVotes * views) for (upVotes - downVotes). This could change the ranking if a lot of people view without voting either way.
