Washington Pizza Index (1998) | Hacker News Reader

Washington Pizza Index (1998)

washingtonpost.com

80 pointstosh57 comments

To counter the Washington Pizza Index, I propose that the United States establish a Strategic Pizza Reserve. Daily pizza orders from Domino's will be stablized at slightly above average demand. Excess pizzas will be frozen and stored in the Reserve, possibly stacked in former missile silos. During peak demand periods, pizzas will be released from the Reserve to supplement the stablilized daily supply. The government may also release pizzas from the Reserve to aid survivors of natural disasters.

While sounding reasonable on first glance, I caution that this strategy might impose risks for national security: There is substantial difference how much satisfaction a fresh pizza can cause vs a frozen, stored and reheated pizza. So by restricting consumption to reheated pizzas, you might end up with unhappy, overstressed staffers. Unhappy staffers will make worse decisions, and worse decisions might potentially cause a government crisis to spiral out of control.

So for the sake of world piece, do not reheat the pizza.

For the life of me, I cannot fathom why somebody would ruin leftover pizza by heating it.

State secret: Reheat leftover pizza with a skillet. https://www.dropbox.com/s/4kj2348rt1n4l82/reheat-instruction...

I've used an air fryer with good success.

I avoid leftovers at all costs...

But a proper convection toaster oven does wonders too. Problem there is if it's a cheesy or greasy slice.

Air fryers and convection (toaster or not) ovens are essentially the same thing.

While I prefer my leftover pizza cold, I don't see how reheating pizza in the oven ruins it.

Pizza French toast

The best way is to reheat it on low temperatures in an oven. Heats it just enough without ruining it.

There is no food that is not made better by cooking it twice.

The Strategic Pizza Reserve idea is centralized and obsolete. Instead there should be a decentralized Web3 pizza reserve policy where people store a few pizzas in their freezers for situations where they are needed. Policy compliance can be arrested and verified on the blockchain.

Pizzas are not all made equal my friend. Instead of serving monotonous frozen pizzas, let us bake pizzas with non-fungible toppings. A large supply of unique, all-American pizzas is all that stands between us and anarchy itself.

> let us bake pizzas with non-fungible toppings.

Not all of us are that averse to mushrooms.

It's times like this that I'm grateful for the blockcheese.

SPDN. Strategic Pizza Distribution Networks.

How can we be sure a President with poor approval ratings won't release a bunch of pizzas right before an election? Politically motivated pizza parties seem like a cynical abuse of power.

Especially if the President eats their pizza slice in a non-standard manner.

see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Asv7EB1btok

And what type of pizza is placed in the Pizza Reserve? New Yorkers would have conniptions if Chicago-style deep dish pizza found its way into the Reserve.

see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBLVjyTtkMc&t=207s

Check out the global strategic maple syrup reserve (https://www.ediblegeography.com/syrup-stockpiles-wine-lakes-...)

I'd strongly urge consideration of a decentralised failure- and surveillance-resistant food distribution network.

The first node pair has already been well-documented: <https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_...>

Be patriotic and buy a large chest freezer and fill it with pizza!

>To counter the Washington Pizza Index, I propose that the United States establish a Strategic Pizza Reserve.

Sir please don't even JOKE about the strategic pizza reserve, some knowledge was meant to stay esoteric.

I still remember at Derbycon when they thanked us hackers for spending more money than the Kentucky Derby despite the event being one day fewer in length.

I've quit drinking since then, and also come out as like... queer or whatever.

What will really blow your brain is the same staffers who used to always order an extra large cheese pizza because it clouds how many they are dining with and for how long (because it's freezable) would go on to do things like lobby for information that would have previously been considered CPNI (that's "customer protected network information") to be able to be sold to third-party marketing firms without first securing the affirmative consent of the customers of the pizza shop.

You haven't truly lived until some absolute moron figures out you tend to freeze a pizza when you suspect the nukes are gonna fly, then again I also had a period where every time I tried to go into the local park to smoke weed, folks would show up and start shooting softcore pornography -- I nearly gave them the same "just because it's legal to strip down nude in the portland airport doesn't mean you should" speech that I gave one of Ron Wyden's staffers before he uh... definitely didn't get fired from the ACLU.

(I'm being a little passive aggressive in this comment, but the last time I called the IRS they made some smartass comment about if I was taking notes for "my" senator. I felt like going, hey, you dumb bitch, I know how to crash the internet and we used to joke the high school looks like an airport and it's also got a rapist out front -- they're all my senator, since the running joke has always been I'm not a cultural fit for the FBI because they don't want to let me anywhere near firearms.

Anyways, that was the last time I tried to deal with anything related to federal taxes -- I will not be abused on the phone by some fed. Their model is to fear interaction, mine is to show up five goddamn years later in the samn damn "Bernie 2016" shirt, red eyed, openly amused many of my enemies have shot themselves with their own weapons, and feel guilty I'm gonna throw out some of the pizza I didn't freeze because I fear it's sat in the fridge too long.

(Did every Catholic elementary school hold you in for recess if you didn't eat all your food, or was that a hyperlocal thing? Either way, pizza day was fun. Peace out!!)

As an extension, I propose the Normalised Pizza Index as:

  npz := (pizza sales to government staffers) / (pizza sales to media workers)

I think if the pizza index for congress/white house/pentagon/etc staffers goes through the roof while the media is still in business as usual mode, then is the time you really need to worry.

Wow. This would be an interesting derivative/ hedge fund driver.

Wait, wait, wait...

DC is awash in local pizza chains that are quite good. Manny and Olga's will deliver until dawn. Bestolli's greek pizza was inspired by Athena herself to be the Platonic ideal of crisis comfort food. The pentagon has more nearby pizzerias than tanks, and that's not including the recent surge of fancy artisan pizza.

Why on earth would you order Domino's?

Now there are, but not at the time the article was written. DC has had an amazing culinary renaissance, with Jose Andres leading the way, but at the time it was mostly noted for steak houses for lobbyists.

Even today, the immediate vicinity of the Capitol and office buildings is kinda weak on food. There's a nice set of restaurants on Pennsylvania Avenue, but the food trucks are all over at L'Enfant, and the real mass of restaurants require a trip to Penn Quarter/the-area-formerly-Chinatown-but-now-all-chains.

I do, however, highly recommend We The Pizza a few blocks away. Silly name, but really fantastic fancy-artisan-pizza by noted local chef Spike Mendelsohn.

> DC has had an amazing culinary renaissance, with Jose Andres leading the way, but at the time it was mostly noted for steak houses for lobbyists

It’s not a renaissance if there was nothing there of any quality before. For a rebirth there men’ needs to have been a birth.

They had an emergency pizza analyst on site and Domino's had the best price/performance and quantity/delivery time ratios at the time.

And once again, everything broken in government starts with procurement.

Don’t shade on Domino’s. They have worked hard on getting from least-common-denominator pizza to halfway-Ok pizza.

Dominos is dirt cheap. Around me a large pizza from an independent pizzeria can be $30 or more, while dominos will sell a large pizza for under $10.

Of course, the quality is as low as the price, but some people aren't sensitive to pizza quality.

Because you need 30 pizzas with cheese, pepperoni and mushroom delivered in 55 minutes after the lunch plans got shifted to deal with a crisis.

Yes, there are better. But quantity and JIT delivery are virtues of their own.

Manny and Olga's is so bad as to not qualify as food. I've heard that We The Pizza is where they get it on the Hill, now. Andy's is great.

>Why on earth would you order Domino's?

Bravo, someone's finally asking the right questions around here.

To play devil's advocate, perhaps GP's rationale had to do with the fact that when you freeze cardboard, it still tastes like cardboard when thawed. There's very little loss there.

Sounded like they order everywhere, local artisan pizza places as well as national chains. I imagine Domino's was just an easier target to interview. Or maybe the effect is easier to notice if you can aggregate the sales from a large number of restaurants - so large chains have an advantage here compared to individual restaurants or small chains.

... or maybe the article was sponsored by Domino's, who knows :)

Yeah. The article quotes the guy who owns sixty dominoes stores in DC. He's going to have much more data at hand than a mom and pop store.

He probably also has accounts set up for various departments, whereas a small shop would probably just tell an office to use a corporate card, and have more difficulty tracking the order volume.

the office catering equivalent of "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM"?

Manny and Olga's is gross.

Those in the know hit up Wiseguy.

Never had a domino's - heard people say they're expensive but good but you disagree? Ur views welcome (am in the UK if that makes any difference).

The cost is on par (and sometimes under) frozen pizzas from the grocery store. The quality is okay, if you have a fairly low standard for what you want out of your pizza. The thin crust is utterly terrible. Honestly, I'd rather get a frozen pizza and cook it myself given the option, or going literally anywhere else for pizza (except maybe Little Caesar's).

Dominos is very cheap if you order one of the items they have on perpetual sale, but very expensive for the quality otherwise.

In the US, they're known for having lots of coupons and specials, and being cheap. The cheese has a weird consistency, to me at least.

They're the McDonald's of pizza restaurants.

Pretty sure I've never had a maccy D's either, but I get what you're saying, thanks.

For me, it’s cheap, consistent, guilty pleasure!

Kinda sorta related, the New York Pizza Principle:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza_Principle

Tldr: a slice of pizza in NYC matches subway fares.

Related: I heard, from people who are not me, that in any area, the hourly rate of sex-worker escorts matches that of lawyers.

Makes sense, they both do the same thing, no?

Haha! Cynically speaking, yes.

But to be serious, I would say they’re both labor-intensive jobs with high barriers to entry that have to be recouped in the hourly rate.

High barrier to entry to be a sex worker?

Yes, you have to take the bar.

I used to live in a neighborhood that had a slug line to the Pentagon. You could do a similar analysis of "something is going down with the military" by judging the number of cars left in the park and ride area after rush hour.

I'm guessing with the rise of Uber like delivery services this may be harder to measure as the number of places that can ship food has increased greatly muting the steep rise in pizza places.

I'm not so sure. If the idea is that politicians order a bunch of food to get through late nights during a crisis, there aren't many other foods that work as well as pizza in so many ways. It's way easier to get vague suggestions for toppings than to pick individual entrees for everyone present, it stays tasty when cooled off, it's at the very least generally inoffensive and usually quite popular, and you can just hold a slice while eating it, no utensils required.

Also, even if not, you could just track delivery orders instead of individual food sales to get the same result.

Maybe it'd even be easier -- could you register as an Uber Eats and Door dash driver and monitor the apps directly?

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