agotterer

Most meals include at least one alcoholic drink as well as soft drinks. Anything not included can be purchased a la carte and paid directly to the restaurant. A couple of dinners have been BYOB if the venue doesn't have a license and there's no fees for that.

The first dinner was all 1st degree friends. Then it turned into friends of friends of friends. The 4th or 5th dinner was a big turning point. We had a minimum of 55 to hit for a popular restaurant we wanted and we were trending short (we actually would have ended up hitting it) and for the first time opened the dinner up to people who weren't directly connected. We posted an invite in a popular Long Island food Facebook group and after that we never had a problem selling out a dinner again. Last month Newsday wrote an article about us which added hundreds of Instagram followers and close to 100 new applications for membership. We sold out 48 seats for our April dinner in under and hour and ended up working with the restaurant to add a second night.

https://www.newsday.com/lifestyle/restaurants/dead-chefs-soc... (https://archive.is/w9Z1A)

I'm happy to share my experience and lessons, but its a bit too much to type. If you are serious about starting one feel free to shot me an email (address in my profile).

What I will say is that I think the timing was right. My co-host and I lived in Manhattan pre-pandemic and regularly took advantage of the restaurant variety there. Our dinners are hosted on Long Island and our theory is that people who move from Manhattan to Long Island over the last 20 years started to expect higher quality food and a larger variety of ethnic options. Over the past decade or so the variety and quality of Long Island restaurants has greatly improved from what was here 25 years ago when I was growing up.

Post pandemic we saw an appetite (pun intended) for people to just get out of the house, be around other people, and have an experience. Quite a few people who come to the dinners say that they keep coming back because their partner/family aren't adventurous eaters so they never get to try new foods or typically wouldn't order some of the things we put on the menu. We aren't going for a fear factor vibe, but we do try to get people out of their comfort zone. We have a large number of solo guests who enjoy meeting new people and sharing a like-minded experience. Initially the group skewed heavily towards males in their 30's, which was our friends. Today its a very diverse group of people.

I “think” I understand what you’re trying to get at. But it’s an unfortunate and limited perspective. Sure, New York isnt Thailand and the restaurant didn’t source their ingredients from a Bangkok market at 4am that morning. But that doesn’t mean the chef didn’t cook, study, or live in the region previously. So does that mean the only thing that makes a dish authentic is its local ingredients and there’s no credit given for the chefs experience? Also, how do you know the chef didn’t import any of the ingredients or spices from the place you’re expecting for it to be authentic?

Edit: dishes authentic to a region cooked as close to authentic as the chef and ingredients allow.

The cost per plate is negotiated with the restaurant ahead of time. We collect all of the money at time of RSVP which includes our margin. We then pay the restaurant and keep our fee.

A friend and I host a monthly dinner club for people interested in ethnic cuisine. We work with a single restaurant each month to create an 8-12 course all inclusive price fixe menu. The food is served family style and is authentic to the region we are hosting. We typically host the dinners on a Tues or Wed when the restaurants in our region aren’t too busy and could use the extra business.

So far we’ve hosted 12 dinners over the past year. Growing from out first meal with 13 friends to as many as 80 guests for this months meal. Our mailing list has over 400 people on it and we’ve sold out every event since our 4th. Sometimes we end up hosting multiple nights.

It’s not a very scalable business as it exists today. For now is just a passion project that makes a few bucks, allows us meet interesting people, and provides the opportunity to discover new foods and restaurants.

Posted April 1st. Don’t trust the internet or anything you read on April Fools day.

Edit: apparently not a joke! See below for study link.

As someone who worked for a daily deals business not long after Groupons inception, I can tell you that it’s a tough model. It trained customers to wait for deals or targeted the wrong type of customers. In some cases businesses took losses or razor thin margins in the hopes of attracting what they thought would be new recurring business. But the reality was that the customers attended/purchased once and then moved on to the next deal. Businesses were often just giving away product for free. The timing for Groupon was perfect. It was 2008 when businesses were struggling and customers were price sensitive. But ultimately I just don’t think it was a good marketing tool for businesses.

I’d love to see a comparison of the average cost to use this with the OpenAI API versus subscribing to chat-gpt plus.

Maybe I’ll have to try this for a month and see if it end up costing more than $20. Thanks for creating it!

I also thought it would be interactive and then realized it was just a screenshot. Would be cool to have an interactive demo right there at the top.

I’ve seen a huge reduction in bots over the last 2 months. I hardly get tagged by them anymore and I rarely see them in my feed.

Edit: grammar

I wonder if we will see more non custodial staking being introduced to protocols. Love them or hate them, that’s one thing Cardano got right.

I keep everything in the cloud as well. Documents are either in GDrive / Dropbox and photos are in iCloud. For sensitive documents I created an encrypted disk image that I store in Dropbox and mount when I need access to it, which is pretty infrequent. I periodically backup content to a NAS and I backup the NAS to B2.

Depositors get deposits back because their deposits are wrapped up in SVB assets. Once those assets are liquidated they get what is theirs. This could end up being less that 100% if the assets end up being sold for less than the total deposits.

The FDIC insures that no matter what you are covered for up to $250k. Let’s say the bank had zero assets then all deposits would get their $250k and likely nothing else since there’s no other assets to sell and distribute. This could have been the case if SVB had larger losses or turned out to be cooking the books or something. But that’s not the case here. They have the depositors money, it just happens to be in illiquid assets that they could’t liquidate fast enough to cover the bank run withdrawals.

I’ve carried a USB-A Yubikey in my pocket for 7 years and it’s never broke. I also keep one time login passwords encrypted and available in the cloud in the event I lose the key.

I’ll save the next person some googling - it is a hit song from 1981 by Tommy Tutone.

https://youtu.be/tHL2XeuA6Yg

Here’s a few examples of what happened to people who had that number:

In 1982, WLS radio obtained the number from a Chicago woman, receiving 22,000 calls in four days.

In 1982, Southwest Junior High School received up to two hundred calls daily asking for Jenny in area code 704.

More examples on Wikipedia - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/867-5309/Jenny

Thank you for adding this. I should have included this in my original comment.

These fast food chains are using the meatless options as a marketing ploy for people to believe there is a healthier option. It likely is healthier than the 840 calorie fried chicken with fries, but that doesn’t mean it’s healthy.

People like to believe they are health conscious. That’s why they order a 1200 calorie salad when they go to Apple Bees.

I believe the target market for this sandwich is larger than just vegan/vegetarian and should include the general health conscious crowd. I imagine there’s a number of people who don’t eat Chick-fil-A because it’s not healthy. This sandwich be a way to tap into that audience. I personally eat meat, but often eat veggie burgers and other plant based burgers because (most of the time) it’s healthier (and I enjoy the taste).

I would also recommend this book. Andy tells the raw truth about what it’s like to have a manic depression and how it manifested in destructive behavior inside and outside of work.

Before that it was DIVX, Digital Video Express (not the codec), who in the late 90s tried to create an alternative to video rentals: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIVX.

There’s a great book called The Coddling of the American Mind. It talks about play grounds safety, cancel culture, and many of the topics covered in this article and thread. It tried to use data to back up its claims and identify the causes for America’s shifting mindset. One interesting takeaway from the book was how the creation of the Americas Most Wanted tv show may be responsible for some of todays parental fears. However, statistically this is the safest time to be an American child. I recommend the book to everyone, but especially parents.

I live in New York and didn’t own a proper winter jacket until I was in my 30s. I always wore a warm jacket that in hindsight was more appropriate for the fall. I bought a Quartz jacket and it made being outside in the winter so much more fun and tolerable.

Long Island. I didn’t want to assume people knew where that was and I wanted to be clear that it was downstate. I know Buffalo has had a real winter and has had tons of snow.

I live outside Manhattan and noticed today that some of my perennials started to sprout. I’ve never seen them this early in the season. It’s been an incredibly mild winter here. We’ve seen flurries once and the temp has been mostly 35-45f for weeks. I’ve worn my winter jacket only a handful of times.

Also loved the vibe. One of the web ring sites goes to http://cyber.dabamos.de/88x31/ which was an absolute blast from the past!

It’s small in the grand scheme of things. But when I want something from Amazon that I don’t need immediately I leave it in my cart. I’ll build up my cart for a few days/weeks so that more of the items shop together.

Fair. I updated my comment to be more specific and exclude people who are part of protected classes.

If that’s the case, how far should they be allowed to go with a ban? What happens if they decide that fans of an opposing team shouldn’t be allowed to attend games? Or people who have been oppositional towards ownership or management, like the press. What about banning everyone who works for a vendor or partner because they are sour about a deal going bad or relationship ending? What about politicians or people with opposing views (I don’t believe that’s a protected class?).

Edit: updated to use examples that aren’t part of protected classes.

I echo the sentiment of this article. Im nearly 40 and for most of my adult life I’ve found that most things are frustrating to use, have unnecessary tech bolted on (and that’s coming from a technologist), and in many ways barely work.

My fancy Bosch dishwasher can’t clean a dish if there’s a tiny bit of food on it. My GE dryer takes two cycles and at least 1.5 hrs to dry some cotton clothes. Don’t get me started on Bluetooth headphones. My coded garage opener takes 3 or 4 attempts each time because I guess the button push don’t register? When I want to watch TV sometimes I need to sit through a system upgrade which means I have to wait to watch. My town voted that cell phone towers are ugly, so there’s basically no cell service anywhere and most calls have between 1 and 5 drops (I live on Long Island, not in rural America). Every year there’s at least $1-3k of maintenance on my 4 year old “luxury” car. My smart lock works well as long as my fingers are perfectly dry and perfectly aligned. I replace my towels once every year or two because they completely fall apart. My “learning thermostat” doesn’t seem to learn anything even though I’ve been setting the temp at the same every night. I replace my jeans at a similar rate to the towels because they get holes in knees and pockets. Holes develop at the same rate in a $25 pair and a $125 pair. Self checkout at every store is a horrendous experience and I’ve never successfully checked out without the support person scanning their badge to fix some absurd error, like the weight of the item placed on the bagging area scale not being the weight the machine expects it to be.