rjett

Collective bargaining can be used to leverage other assets, besides money.

Why is this being downvoted? Perhaps on its face it seems to be anti-technology and regressive, but there's plenty of data to suggest that the industrial efficiencies of modern farms have massive negative externalities in terms of depleted soil health in the form of the narrowing of both macrobiome and microbiome, depleted nutrient content in our plants, depleted health and nutrition of our animals, leading up to depleted health to those at the top of the food chain: humans.

This is slightly off topic since the focus of this article is racial demographics and economic standing in a culture, but it's interesting that Brazil, a country which has whole heartedly adopted chemical agriculture and monocropping practices finds themselves in a place where fertility rates per woman are lower than in the US, which has one of the lowest (and also heavily relies on chemical ag). As an investigative journalism piece, I think teasing out the effects of industrial agriculture from other social factors that contribute to people CHOOSING not to have children and relating that to fertility rates would be a much more substantive article than looking at sperm imports where n=500.

I realize the article is discussing a form of immunotherapy, but I think immunotherapy is also in its infancy, and given the nature of cancer cells and the heterogeneity of its own genetic makeup, immunotherapy still seems like a very blunt weapon in the war on cancer. For a patient who has already been beaten down by rounds of chemo and radiation, it offers a last ditch hope for survival, but its still laden with risks and adverse outcomes.

On the contrast, metabolic treatment is tough from the standpoint that it requires strict discipline by the patient to adhere to the protocol, but the "side effects" may actually enhance overall health at the cellular level. It's a treatment that at the very least could be melded with the current standard of care to achieve better outcomes, and yet there's very little awareness of it, possibly because there's not a lot of money in it for hospital systems.

I'm not a cellular biologist or a doctor of any kind, but I consider myself a reasonably smart person. Reading the book Tripping Over the Truth by Travis Christofferson and tracking the work of Thomas Seyfried and others, it makes me think that a lot of the discussion in the battle for curing cancer is chasing a false paradigm: that cancer is a disease of genetics and if we could understand and edit the genome, we could cure the disease. The case for the Metabolic theory of cancer as laid out by Seyfried is quite compelling and if true, the implications for treatment from a patient standpoint seem to me much more preferential than the current combination chemotherapies which are only getting more and more expensive and only marginally more efficacious. Work on this front is only in its infancy, but my hope is that more people become aware, more funding directed towards metabolic therapy trials, and one day it could at least be incorporated into the standard of care.

My favorite "tea" to make is just chopping up a little ginger, a little turmeric, and some sort of citrus zest, steep in boiling water for 10 mins. You can re-steep it several times also. I drink it every day because it's delicious, as well as calming and anti-inflammatory.

Question from a non-Silicon Valley professional: Where does all that money go? Obviously, some [likely big] portion of it is still on the balance sheet, but does an app like Shazam really cost that much in engineering talent to update it and iterate it and server space to keep it running?

I see that happening only under an employee owned company. Most companies start small though, with 1 to n founders and/or equity owners. I think it takes a special owner and a very special set of employees for an owner to later abdicate control back to their employees.

Owner of a business here... I'm 6 years into owning my own business and things have grown year over year for the company and we are doing quite well. In theory, the democratization of the workplace is a nice idea, and I initially tried to build my business around this idea. But over my time running things, I've realized that hierarchy is necessary, especially when things start to scale up. One of the biggest things I've come to realize is that most people take comfort in structure: what time to arrive and what time they can leave, specific directions on how to do their job and what exactly their job is (or isn't), when they will be paid, etc. As things begin to scale up in a business, it's necessary to create specific roles and specialized work for things to operate efficiently, and while a healthily functioning company relies on everyone doing their job well and working together, every role in the company does not carry equal weight, either because of the skillset or knowledge base required to perform a given task or because of the network and social abilities of a given person might open more doors for the business. People also go through different stages in their personal lives where they might be more or less invested in the work they're doing, and when you're an employee you have the luxury of checking out every once in awhile. For better or worse, good owners are married to their businesses and don't have that luxury.

I'm still learning and I consciously try to value the input of each employee and make myself openly available for criticism when it's called for. I also realize that the temptation is there to siphon off marginal profits into my own check, but I think that's short sighted if you have good employees who do "own" their job and are growth minded. Investing in those types will only pay dividends. There's a balance to be had, and it sounds like the OP needs to find a company where he feels better respected and supported. Maybe pay is a component of that, but communication and a healthy culture are also pieces of the puzzle.

Depends on the person. Angus Barbieri completed a 382 day medically supervised fast in 1966. Depending on body composition and physiology, one might reap a lot of benefit from simple intermittent fasting while another person might continue fasting for longer stretches to help reset their body to more normalized hormone levels.

Cost of production from variety to variety at this farm is going to be fairly consistent. The reason coffee has traditionally been relegated to developing countries is because of labor costs. To get a good harvest with quality in mind, farmers typically have to do several passes through the fields of coffee trees to select the coffee cherries at their optimal ripeness. Altitude also factors into quality as well, since coffee that slowly ripens due to cooler temps typically translates to a better product. Farms at high altitude can have some pretty gnarly topography.

Coffee farms where attention to quality is less important and raw output more important will plant trees in full sun, nice conventional rows, and then send mechanical harvesters down each row to strip pick the trees, harvesting cherries that might range from under ripe to perfectly ripe to over ripe. Yields might be higher and labor costs lower, but quality suffers and these beans are typically sold in the commodity market.

One of the most recent Planet Money episodes, #773: Slot Flaws Scofflaws, explores slot machine design, to some extent. It's a fun listen.

http://www.npr.org/podcasts/510289/planet-money

I would guess any restaurant funded out of the gates with this amount of VC would fail. Call it a food-tech startup if you want, but Sprig and its competitors are restaurants. The reality of restaurants is that their growth is linear, even if they are successful. That's because it takes time to develop trust with the consumer, and even once that is established, people either want variety or their trust can be shattered completely on one off experience. Deploying this much capital on a restaurant concept straight out of the gates would be fine if and only if they managed to execute flawlessly and if VCs were ok not making money for a few years and then churning out 0-15% returns after that. But that's not the VC game.

As coffee ages, especially in the first 2 weeks, it degasses CO2, thus the one way valves on most coffee bags. Since CO2 has a lot to do with crema, it's usually lacking in coffees that go past that 2 week mark. It really depends on the coffee, but I find grinding older coffees at a finer grind setting may help you pull your shot at similar parameters (input/output/time), but more often than not, I prefer updosing by half a gram or so to achieve balance in the shot. Also, this is probably heresy to any Italian reading, but I don't consider crema a super important aspect of the espresso shot. That part of the shot contains many of the bitter compounds of the extracted coffee, which is why espresso shots are commonly served with a demi-spoon, used to stir the shot and incorporate/dissipate the crema.

Perhaps that's true in the ring and on the screen, but the incidence rate of domestic violence involving MMA fighters outside of the ring is several orders of magnitude higher than in other sports. Between the performance enhancing drugs used to train, the head injuries sustained, and SOME of the people drawn to the sport in the first place, I can't watch the sport without feeling somewhat repulsed.

HBO Real Sports did a good segment on violence in MMA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgpdU_uPO34

With many people having the ability now to work remotely, I've seen a big influx into small to mid-sized cities in the last decade. Anecdotally, I moved to Charleston, SC five years ago and since I've been here, I've seen a huge influx of people moving here for quality of life reasons. Charleston is one of the fastest growing cities in the US for this reason. There are opportunities here as well, with larger companies like Boeing shifting a lot of their operations here as well, but more than anything, I think people want to be here because it's a place that offers an incredible food and beverage scene, access to beaches, and a city bathed in history and architectural significance. It's bikeable, walkable, and practically every address could be copied onto a postcard. Most importantly, in my opinion, the influx of people here are younger, optimistic, entrepreneurial types and it's so easy to get to know others in town and to feed off that energy. Roll in cheap, fast direct flights ($100-200 round trip) to almost any northern city (DC, NYC, Boston) and that really adds to accessibility from other cities. I've been doorstep to doorstep from Charleston to my friend's apartment in Brooklyn Heights in under 3 hours. </advertisement>

That said, I've lived in quite a few cities and the most important aspect of anywhere I've lived is the type of people I'm comfortable surrounding myself with. I think that's fairly true for anyone who has job mobility. After that everyone places different weight on a host of other factors (access to fast/efficient transport, culture, outdoors activities, sustainable utility supplies, weather, food, demographics, proximity to family, local school quality, etc, etc).

Coffee shop and roastery owner here... Interesting fact: cold brew acidity as measured by PH, is in the same bandwidth as other coffee drinks: espresso, filter, japanese iced, etc etc... Average usually falls around 4.8.

It is true that brewing with room temperature water doesn't extract some of the acids in the coffee that would be extracted with hot water. With specialty coffee, the purists like Giuliano, want to extract these acids in an effort to showcase the "terroir" of the coffee (where it was grown, the variety, the process after it was picked). There are a lot of cold brew haters in the industry for this reason. I'm not one of them. Saying one is better or worse is a dumb argument to make. Cold brew is great because it does have a really round flavor profile, it highlights sweetness and roast, and it has the body to pair really well with milk, which is how many iced coffee drinkers prefer it.

The Japanese iced coffee is great if you want to highlight the nuances of a better coffee. There's more complexity due to the extraction of these [good] acids. Bonus points for flash chilling a coffee, wherein you brew hot, send the brew through a heat exchanger, and chill without diluting with ice.

That's because they're all starting start ups. Day trading is so early 2000s.

See Hollywood Accounting: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/HollywoodA...

As a free member of the western world, happily able to pursue "the dream," and unexposed to the direct effects of war and humanitarian crimes, what am I to do? If you think about it, the domestic conditions in the US, relative to many of the places in the non-western world, are such that we have no incentive to ACTUALLY do anything to change things for the better. Sure, we get upset about reading articles like this. But is getting upset for 5 minutes, writing an article, making a movie, or even settling into the mindset of being jaded and skeptical about our own country's leadership really the toolset we are left with at the end of the day to cause change? Is there revolution in the modern west? Or are we neutered by the relatively great living conditions we take for granted?

"So the trick, it seems, is to design a world that excites but doesn’t overly assault our faculties with a constant barrage of information"

I just got back from my first trip to Chicago. I've been to quite a few cities, but the variety of architecture and juxtoposition of certain styles throughout the city made for a very enjoyable experience. Not every single building in the city is pretty either. But taken as a whole and hearing how history, art, architecture, and engineering shaped the city was fascinating. I actually did the architectural river tour, which I found to be one of the most enthralling guided tours I've ever been on. Highly recommended.

I was in Chicago all last week and I asked this question of my drivers as well. Every driver prefers to drive Lyft because they make more money per ride, but they end up driving Uber most of the time because there's virtually no downtime. They can pick up the next person within close proximity and almost as soon as they've dropped off the last person.

Rethinking food delivery? Perhaps there's something novel with their real-time routing algorithms, but that's a razor thin edge in food. The food game is an old game. To put that much money to use in a food business, your best hope is to buy distribution facilities where the real estate will appreciate and then convince enough consumers to get out of the mindset of cruising the grocery store freezer isle for convenient microwavable meals. So in the end, you're some premium, made for urban environments, version of lean cuisine. I'm sure there's a market for that, but is it a market worth this much investment?

I suspect the reason business owners don't opt for a service charge in lieu of gratuity for front of house employees is due to payroll taxes. "Adjusting prices accordingly" vs adding a service charge would, in most cases, screw the employee and reward the business owner, who might give a slightly higher wage to his employees, but would be tempted to pocket the difference as profit.

Under the current system, so much gratuity is left unreported/underreported due to cash tipping. Business owners have no incentive to keep track of employee tips paid in cash; otherwise, they would be required to pay payroll taxes on the tips going into their employees' pockets. This is changing, as more and more transactions are conducted via credit instead of cash, so tracking is easier.

Under a service charge model, everything would have to be tracked and reported, resulting in a higher tax burden to the business owner. In the food service industry where profit margins are thin and reputations can be shattered overnight, it's tough to find a comfortable space between tax law, ethical employment practices, and keeping your business afloat.

Interesting. By getting rid of front of house, that eliminates on average 80% of the square footage needed to be a full service restaurant, and they can vie for non-premium properties, so rent will be much cheaper. That said, all else is pretty much the same as any other restaurant business. Delivery drivers replace front of house workers on almost a one for one basis. Kitchen buildout is the same cost. And customers will be customers until they have their first bad experience.

They're playing a volume game. And without alcohol sales, they'll need a lot of volume. So then the question is this: Does "fancy food" from a high end chef like David Chang have a wide enough appeal to solicit the type of volume needed for this to be successful? I suspect it does in pockets of NYC. From a higher vantage point, I'm less optimistic.

Restaurants are about more than food though. Their job is to set a stage with design, lighting, music, background noises, service, plating, and conversation amongst other human beings. That's why people pay $1000 for a bottle of wine, $45 for a New York Strip, or $4.50 for a cup of coffee. If we didn't care about these other things, we would all be getting delivery, making our own food, or eating out of vending machines and paying 75% less to do so.

"That's how democratic access to money policy works; we vote, power realigns in accordance with our votes, and a few years down the road, we do it again."

And therein lies a problem. Under a system like this, policy is geared towards affecting the short term in order to affect the next election cycle and no heed is given to how things play out in the long run.

Disclaimer: I have no clue if what I'm proposing is realistic or not, but:

Perhaps the federal government should step in and gradually step down the level of subsidies given to farmers in California and gradually increase subsidies given to NEW farmers in other, more water rich parts of the country. This would have the effect of moving farms to more sustainable locations in the country. Sure, the types of crops produced would change and consumer demands would have to shift with that, but that isn't the worst thing in the world.

Another solution is to allow utilities to drastically increase water prices for communities that import most of their water anyways.

All in all, both solutions are geared towards population displacement in unsustainable locations. Just as New Orleans is probably destined for another Katrina, SoCal is probably destined to be a desert despite the demands we've put on the land in the last century.

Gastrograph looks very interesting. I run a coffee shop/roastery and the industry has been in need of a tool like this for awhile. I'll be checking you guys out at some point. Glad I saw this!

bovada... not nearly as many players as there used to be when it operated as bodog, but it'll still scratch your itch.

This is complete spit-balling here, but:

Does anyone know whether bookstores like Borderlands sell their inventory on consignment, similar to newspaper/magazine stands? Or does the business purchase books at a wholesale price and hold that inventory on the balance sheet?

If it's the latter, it would seem like a wise move to reduce inventory by x% and re-allocate the space/funds towards the more profitable cafe, where prices have a better elasticity.

Another thought would be to re-orient the inventory towards self-published works (where there's no publisher setting a price), rare edition classics (where there's higher markup due to low supply), and pop-culture best sellers (which have high turnover). I think that a brick and mortar bookstore is as good as the people working there: if you can find one with an employee that's engaging, extremely well-read, and can recommend books, you could conceivably make a bookstore geared towards self-publishers work. Bonus points if you could provide services to self-published authors to print their works in a beautiful, professional, yet economical package.