I’m confused. Do you think it’s bad/a waste of time to examine tricks as a concept, or that I was pretty seriously tricked (while actively looking for tricks), which seems to me like it calls for spending more time on the concept?
elizabeth
Karma: 853 (LW), 0 (AF)
NewTop
Knowing I’m Being Tricked is Barely Enough
Another way of evaluating the fairness of the delivery charges is how much profit the delivery services are making. The only data I could find was this chart. Eyeballing it, grubhub is making ~10% profit- good, but not obscenely so. They appear to be selling pretty close to cost.
I can’t tell if this post is referring to ordering online and picking up yourself (suggested by ” If you would cost your local place $5 to save the cost of a fifteen second phone call...“) or delivery (suggested by the 20% fee and the companies listed). If it is talking about delivery, it’s incomplete without addressing the relative cost of delivery vs dining in.
This is a little messy because rent is an extremely fixed cost and labor is only adjustable on long time horizons, but back of the envelope:
According to the first article I found on Google, table service restaurants spend 30-40% of income on labor, and fast food can get as low as 25%. The service of fast food is about equivalent to what it takes to serve takeout or hand to a delivery service, so let’s assume the labor costs of dining in are 5-15% (which is lower than I would have guessed).
There’s also the physical building. This quora post (which places labor costs at 20-40%) says rent makes up 10-50% of cost. Of course some of that is covering the kitchen, which serves delivery orders as well. Call it 1⁄3.
If delivery services handle the credit card fees, that’s another 2-3% they’re saving the restaurant (grubhub passes on the credit card fee, but charges only 15%).
Then there are smaller costs they’re saving- some utilities, diningware, reduced liability costs from the lack of physical proximity.
So take away/third party delivery costs the restaurant somewhere between 14 and 50 percent less than dining in. Given this, losing 20% to a delivery service doesn’t seem inherently unjust, depending on the restaurant’s cost structure. The real injustice is charging takeout customers dine-in prices.
That’s 30% for delivery, not just taking the order. OP is a little unclear, but a phone call is only a substitute for ordering online, not for delivery.
Burnout: What it is and how to Treat it.
Re: seasoning. Page 19: “Miscellaneous foods including spices generally increased from 10 pounds per capita in 1909 to 13 pounds per capita in 2000. Spices were not added to the food supply until 1918. The use of spices increased more than fivefold from one-half pound per capita in 1918 to 2.59 pounds per capita in 2000 (data not shown).”
Have contacted you out of band with a copy of the paper, which does indeed go into more detail than the abstract.
Huh. Does your experience of taste change depending on how full up you are on a nutrient?
Epistemic Spot Check: The Dorito Effect (Mark Schatzker)
Given that the stereotypes are known to all players and can be manipulated (moreso the baseball cap than race), refusing to believe the signals seems like the correct thing at high level tables where all players can be assumed to have thought through their presentation. Even with something like race, if the 20 year old asian knows you think he’s likely to be aggressive, he can use that to his advantage.
I’d actually be more critical of how SSC fans, rationalists and effective altruists have taken SSC memes like the virtue of silence, or blaming everything on Moloch, to stifle conversation the way the “politics is the mind-killer” meme is often overused.
This feels really disingenuous to me, given statements like “Scott Alexander is a pseudo-intellectual not worth reading.” and ” SSC bungles history and philosophy in general, and the history and philosophy of science in particular”
Yeah, in retrospect that was a mistake. They’re related, but it begins the slippery slope to using “interpretive labor” to mean “all emotional labor”
-Post author
Was veto power over reports your terminal goal, or was it a means to prevent information you viewed as inaccurate going out to customers?
Your point that most self-help books are not peer-review backed is very true, and something more people should be aware of. OTOH, I did trials with a number of self-help books, and how useful they were to me and my friends did not correlate with scientific rigor. https://acesounderglass.com/2018/04/14/self-help-epistemic-spot-check-results/ . Given that, I think it makes sense to put more emphasis on individual testability.
Research Debt
Ineffective entrepreneurship: post-mortem of Hippo, the happiness app that never quite was
this isn’t obvious to me, can you elaborate?
I think this is a cool idea and look forward to seeing it attempted.
This was my bad- I misinterpreted a conversation and thought these were okay for the front page. You’re correct on the policy, thanks for pointing it out.
I agree Zvi and I are talking about the same general principles, but I found this piece’s basis in fear did more harm than good for me in particular. It made me want to push away the knowledge. What I was trying to do here was engage with the specifics of what was happening so I could develop defenses beyond flipping the table over and refusing to play.