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Trung Phan Profile picture
@TrungTPhan
Sep 30, 2020 • 27 tweets • 8 min read • Read on X
Found an incredible Reddit thread, "What's a rule that was implemented somewhere that massively backfired?"

Here are the best ones 🧵

1/ Alcohol bans at college football games led to increased intoxication problems b/c fans were getting really drunk before entering the stadium.
2/ When @dominos said all pizzas would be delivered in 30 minutes or less OR your pizza was FREE.

The delivery drivers kept getting into car accidents to get your pizza to you on time, so it wouldn’t come out of their pay check.

The promotion didn't last too long. Image
3/ "English law in Wales set the death penalty for stealing a sheep. Welshmen caught stealing sheep would claim to be making love to them.

They would get a lesser penalty for beastiality. The consequence of this is Welshmen gained a reputation as 'sheep shaggers'." 🐑
4/ Employees at one company were getting a bit liberal with lunch time, so their boss made everyone text when they started and ended lunch.

One dude started texting every detail: start time, order, price, address, end time, random emotions.

They cancelled the policy. Image
5/ In 209 BC, a band of 900 Chinese soldiers were marching to defend a city in Northern China. A flood stopped them halfway.

Qin law dictated that the government would execute anyone that was "late" for government orders. Rather than face execution, the soldiers rebelled. ⚔️
6/ “‘You have to eat whatever you touch’ was a rule in my kindergarten which led to all the children touching all the food to call dibs on it.” 🥦

(Editor's Note: I definitely remember this one hahahahah)
7/ Washington State made it mandatory for schools to drop their room temperatures to save on electricity.

The result: teachers brought their own heaters into their offices and use of electricity increased. 🌡️
8/ In Athens (late 80s), the government tried to limit pollution by having odd-numbered and even-numbered license plates drive on alternating days.

Result: everyone bought a second (shittier and with worse emission) car as their backup. Streets stayed clogged, pollution worse. Image
9/ In Alberta, strip club patrons must keep a 2m buffer from dancers The only currency that can travel that far are metal loonie ($1) & twoonie ($2) coins:

"The goal was to protect the safety & dignity of dancers but the dancers have become reduced to fleshy coin toss targets” Image
10/ A college bar had a happy-hour promotion: $0.50 a beer until anyone in the bar peed.

Some crazy shit started happening: 1) people wore adult diapers; 2) others would covertly pee in trash cans or hidden corners.

The bar cancelled happy hour. 🍺
11/ One city had an issue with loud bikes, so they installed decibel readers as a deterrent.

People started driving up to the machine and revved up their vehicles to see who could “win” by being the loudest.

The city took the reader down.🚗
12/ INSANE SOCCER STORY PART #1

Barbados played Grenada to qualify for the 1994 Caribbean Cup. Per tournament rules, a goal in extra time would be worth 2x goals for qualification purposes.

@ end of regulation, Barbados was winning 2-1 but it wasn’t enough goals to qualify...
13/ INSANE SOCCER STORY PART #2

...to get to extra time (& chance for 2x goal), Barbados scored an own goal. Then Grenada did the same.

For the final 7 mins, each team defended the OTHER team’s net to stop own goals. In the end, Barbados got to extra time & netted the 2x goal! Image
14/ Here's the original Reddit piece (more good stuff at the source):

reddit.com/r/AskReddit/co…
15/ Design your rules and incentives carefully people.

As Charlie Munger always said... Image
16/ Smash that FOLLOW for glorious future tweet storms on the meaning of life.
17/ wow @mrpilko says throwing coins at dancers is called “biffing a twoonie”. I love Canada 🇨🇦
18/ I'm getting roasted for not including the OG "rules gone bad" case study: The Cobra Effect, so here it is...

19/ This is a good one!

20/ Another banger!
21/ Unsurprisingly, there's more than one good Soviet example of rules gone wrong:
22/ Crypto rule gone bad
23/ The canonical example from Freakanomics:
24/ Just wow
25/ An economist who literally wrote a paper on this picks his fave:
26/ VERY recent example:
27/ Getting a lot of "hey, I don't think this Athens car thing is real"...thank you @argyris haha

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More from @TrungTPhan

Trung Phan Profile picture
Sep 19
PayPal’s bland logo redesign was inevitable
Image
If you are the person that did the un-aligned letters for the previous eBay logo, please contact the research app team. We are huge fans of how un-aligned the “e” is with the “y”.Bearly.AI
This article offers up reasons for popularity of simple font logos (mostly Sans Serif):

— Easier to standardize ads across mediums
— Improves readability (especially on mobile)
— The “brand” matters more than the logo velvetshark.com/why-do-brands-…
Read 4 tweets
Trung Phan Profile picture
Sep 1
Berkshire Hathaway board member Chris Davis once asked Charlie Munger why Costco didn’t drop the membership card.

Let anyone shop and raise prices by 2% (still great value), thus making up for lost membership fees (and more).

Munger said the card is important filter:

▫️“Think about who you’re keeping out [with a membership card]. Think about the cohort that won’t give you their license and their ID and get their picture taken.

Or they aren’t organized enough to do it, or they can’t do the math to realize [the value]…that cohort will have a 100% of your shoplifters and a 100% of your thieves. Now, it’ll also have most of your small tickets.

And that cohort relative to the US population will probably be shrinking as a % of GDP relative to the people that can do the math [on Costco’s value].”▫️

I have a membership but have been guffing on the math for a few years tbh. They keep telling me to upgrade from Gold to Business but I’m too lazy (even if the 2-3% Cash Back on Business pays back after a few trips).

This is a long way of saying Costco’s membership price hike effective today — its first in 7 years — is annoying but when I decide to do the math in a few months, it’ll be worth it.

***

Chris Davis’ remarks from this episode of The Knowledge Project: open.spotify.com/episode/6fJYHF…Image
Anyway, here is something I wrote about Costco’s $9B+ clothing business my affinity for Kirkland-branded socks and Puma gym shirts. readtrung.com/p/costcos-9b-c…
Two notes:

▫️Meant “Executive” (not “Business”) membership
▫️Chris Davis was doing a pure thought experiment. Costco membership obvi high margin (on~$5B a year) and accounts for majority of Costco profits. Retail margin is tiny on ~$230B of annual sales (Costco would need like another $150B+ from letting anyone shop to make up membership profits)Image
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Read 5 tweets
Trung Phan Profile picture
Aug 15
One of the Team USA rowers who won a Gold Medal is an investment banker and actually did the “B2B SaaS Sales” joke on Linkedin. Legend. Image
Here’s the rest of the post (perfectly formatted to show up in the feed as a shitpost): linkedin.com/feed/update/ur…
Image
Justin if you’re reading this and are available for consulting, the research app team would love to engage your B2B SaaS knowledge for our Q4 sales roadmapBearly.AI
Read 4 tweets
Trung Phan Profile picture
Aug 7
Explainer video on science of why the 400m sprint is considered the most painful track & field event.

And why “no person on the planet can run the 400m all out from start to finish".

The race pushes the way the body creates energy to the limit:

▫️0-50 meters: ATP-CP (energy system for very short and explosive movements; used up after 5-10 seconds)

▫️50-200 meters: Anaerobic glycolysis (burns glucose without oxygen, leading to lactic acid buildup and muscle fatigue)

▫️200-300 meters: Aerobic energy (uses oxygen to break down glucose, but cannot keep up with the demand)

▫️300-400 meters: Anaerobic energy reserves tapped while aerobic energy is too slow to fill the gaps (lactic acid buildup is going HAM)

Track athletes can pace for longer distances and shorter ones are just over quicker (obvs).

The Olympic record is a blazing 43:03, set by South African runner Wayde van Niekerk in 2016 (and 2024 Final race is tomorrow).

***

Full video from Outperform:
Usain Bolt ran the 400m early in career but then said training was “too hard”.

The 400m Hurdles is a world of pain too for similar reasons — Vox has a good vid on it:

Here is a great breakdown of Wayde van Niekerk’s record run:

Image
The 400m is also tough because you don’t get the benefit of an absolute baller like Bottle Klaus keeping hydrated
Read 5 tweets
Trung Phan Profile picture
Jul 20
The amount of work Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli team put into a film is mind-boggling.

Each typically has 60k-70k frames, all hand-drawn and painted with water color.

This 4-second clip (“The Wind Rises”) took one animator 15 months to do. Insane.
The docu “10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki” shows him talking to the animator (Eiji Yamamori) after its done.

It’s so good:

Miyazaki: “Good job.”
Yamamori: “It’s so short, though”
Miyazaki: “But it was worth it.”

The animator gets a second of joy (he’s pumped) but on to the next.
Miyazaki doesn’t use digital FX or computer graphics. He believes “that the tool of an animator is the pencil.”

On a related note, here’s something I wrote about another Japanese legend dedicated to the craft (Ichiro Suzuki) and the art of mastery: readtrung.com/p/jerry-seinfe…
Read 4 tweets
Trung Phan Profile picture
Jul 9
New York City paid Mckinsey $4m to conduct a feasibility study on whether trash bins are better than leaving garbage on the street.

The deck is 95-slides long and titled “The Future of Trash”.

Some highlights:

▫️The official term is “containerization”, which is the “storage of waste in sealed, rodent-proof receptacles rather than in plastic bags placed directly on the curb.”

▫️Two main types of containerization: 1) individual bins for low density locales; 2) shared containers for high-density.

▫️NYC needs to clean up 24,000,000lbs of garbage a day

▫️Containerization has only become the norm worldwide in major cities in the past 15 years.

▫️New York City first considered containerization in the 1970s but never conducted a feasibility study until now (Mckinsey’s sales team has been dropping the ball)

▫️Key considerations for container viability:

• POPULATION DENSITY: NYC has 30k residents per square mile (more dense than comparable big cities)

• BUILT ENVIRONMENT: Few places to “hide” containers due to history of infrastructure development.

• WEATHER: Snow creates challenges for “mechanized collection” in the winter.

• CURB SPACE: Mostly taken up by bus stops, bike lanes, outdoor dining and fire hydrants.

• COLLECTION FREQUENCY: NYC needs to double frequency of pick-up for estimated speed of trash that bins would accumulate.

• FLEET: A new garbage truck will needs to be designed to collect rolling bins at scale.

▫️ The proposed solution (literally garbage bins and shared containers) covers 89% of NYC streets and 77% of residential tonnage.

▫️The three case studies — because you gotta have solid case studies — are Amsterdam, Paris and Barcelona.

▫️There is a slide called “Why containerization matters” and three reasons are “rats”, “pedestrian obstruction” and “dirty streets” (the 21-year intern that did this slide billed at prob $10k an hour is my hero).

The study is actually pretty interesting.

I have no idea if $4m is a rip-off to learn that “yeah, we should put garbage in bins so rats don’t eat it” but I would have happily done it for 10-20% of that budget (and come to a similar conclusion).Image
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It is actually an interesting deck. Just the thought of a 20-year old newly grad getting billed at an obscene rate to say”rats get to garbage” is kinda funny

Four more solid slides:
— By the numbers (daily garbage = 140 Statue of Liberty a day!!)
— City comparison
— Container comparison (looks like they did select the “scalable” trash bin)
— Curb side analysis

Full deck here: dsny.cityofnewyork.us/wp-content/upl…Image
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Think Mckinsey telling NY to “put garbage in bins so rats don’t eat it and people can walk” will work out better than when it told AT&T in 1981 that cellphones would be “niche.”

That cost AT&T $13B and one worst business predictions ever as I wrote here: readtrung.com/p/the-worst-te…
Read 6 tweets

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