1\ Last night I chatted with the manager of a popular new taco place in the neighborhood. COVID-19 was never an issue here, but the hysteria has been intense, and they are already considering shutting the restaurant down.
Here are all the ways they're affected:
2\ Seating at 50% capacity (previously 25%). No business with fixed costs can survive this rule, but they had imagined they could fund their losses during a brief lockdown. With no end in sight, they're reconsidering.
3\ They have to have a dedicated person at the door to take meaningless, inaccurate temperatures and to dispense hand sanitizer. So, perversely, their staffing has gone *up*
4\ All tableware is now disposable, which is more expensive for them. So, again, they are forced to add costs even while being forced to turn business away.
5\ No alcohol sales are allowed past mid-evening. Obviously booze is their highest margin product, so this is devastating for profits.
6\ The combination of an early booze ban and a local curfew means that they can no longer stay open late. But they also can't ask staff to work 1.5 shifts, so to make staffing work, they also have to *open later*
7\7 Summary:
Open later
More staff per shift
More tableware cost
Turn fewer tables
Sell less booze
Close earlier
Science!
8\7 Oh yeah, and she mentioned inventory inefficiencies that I didn't understand. I would guess something to do with fewer volume discounts, more spoilage, etc.
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Reading about Ram Air Turbines after the Air India 171 crash and came across this puzzling picture of Pakistan International Airlines Flight 8303. How is the aircraft airborne after "both engines and generators failed due to a belly landing"?
Ok, they landed without landing gear, skidded for 18 seconds, and decided to take off again for a go around. How does that happen?
The aircraft was twice as high as it should have been for its approach, the pilots were making decisions without talking to each other, and in a weird show of braggadocio the Captain decided to "surprise" ATC by continuing to land rather than go around
Simultaneously across the West, "Mental health" has emerged as the free money glitch. Australia has free home retrofits for kids with "ADHD". The UK gives parents free cars. In the US there's a "1 in 5" mental health "crisis" conveniently tied to the employment of ed specialists
The private school in my neighborhood hired a woman to run it, acquired a DEI department, and abandoned all academic rigor. Preteen boys are soporized with schoolmarm slop, and when their marks suffer, they're "diagnosed" and referred to specialists
Basic school functions get outsourced to remedial programs at 10x the cost. E.g. a friend's kid has sloppy handwriting because drilling in class has been deemed declasse. So he's seeing a *physical therapist* who for $600/mo watches him practice his letters. It's an industry.
Some good descriptions of what today would be called "virtue signalling" in this chapter on Ursuline nuns. Previous passages also capture the sexual fantasies, somewhat adjacent to hybristophilia, that ironically attended chastity.
This sort of gal is instantly recognizable today, disowning MAGA family members or marching for tr*nnies
Extremely right wing friend talks about what it's like on the inside to be a successful Ashkenazi financier. Says that beyond the intelligence, the characteristic traits are a somewhat neurotic hyperactivity and a bit of disregard for social convention...
I watched him rise meteorically in his 20s, and it was true. He has a manic, self effacing good nature, and his days seem to be one long laugh. Twice he arrived in a new city, pressed bumptiously and good humoredly in every direction, and within months knew everyone
He thinks the key non-Gentile trait is a willingness to look foolish, to ask the possibly dumb question at a pitch dinner that nobody else will. Thinks a sort of dispositional gravity therefore leads Ashkenazim toward places where the *social* fabric of a market is broken...
It goes under remarked-upon that British colonial subjects were immediately granted civil rights
The British didn't know how to govern a possession (Ascension Island) of 380, so they declared it to be a ship and left it to the Admiralty
"How is it that these pale-cheeked exiles gave security to a race of another hue, other tongues, other religions which rulers of their own people have ever failed to give"