I think you’re right, however, I think the person you’re replying to may also.
And is shorthanding “everyone without direct experience of the influential power of market forces” into “most of us.”
I think it’s fair to say that the fact that more or most people _don’t_ understand that and _do_ think it’s “all just leadership” explains much of the sentiment about capitalism generally.
As a quite successful shark, I was initially pretty cynical and amused at the idea that “marine biology experts” with no shark experience had anything of merit to say.
What brought me around was when I actually looked at some of their observations and realized that an outside perspective actually had unique and meaningful points for me to ponder that I don’t think I could have arrived at on my own, stuck inside my shark-preferential perspective.
(Now substitute shark : entrepreneur and marine biology : sociology)
What’s your point? Personal spiritual beliefs are bad because they encourage people to speak out in defense of potential life?
Having personal spiritual beliefs automatically qualifies you as, and lumps you in with every other, “unhinged religious nut bag,” no matter what you’re trying to do as a result of those beliefs?
So, I made this last night. Having no clue what proportions you typically use, I just winged it.
Turned out not bad. Not quite beef stew, maybe
more like a soupy shepherd’s pie.
I did end up with a considerable amount of unnecessary broth. I made a batch with 5lbs of beef, maybe another pound of veggies, 1.5 lbs tomatoes and 4 large gold potatoes. I filled my dutch oven and my crock pot with the layers and used 4.5 cartons of stock to get the liquid just over the potatoes. So it cooked in the liquid, but barely absorbed any, and I separated out the solids to pack in the freezer, adding back enough of the broth to hit a sloppy-joe ish consistency.
If you have a recipe with measurements, would love to compare. As it stands, looking to eat well for the next couple weeks. Cheers!
Warning: potentially biased opinion. Speaking only for myself, but informed by my job.
There are lots of problems with scraping-based approaches.
One, yes, you need some really good tech to scrape data from menus, which, even though they are “structured”, next time you’re at a sit-down restaurant, pay attention to all the subtle discrepancies in formatting between different sections/categories on the menu.
Two, if the menu isn’t html, but is an image or a pdf upload, now you need some strong OCR on top.
Three, the website is generally not likely to be current with what’s actually on offer in the establishment itself. Specials, seasonal dishes, or items that are out of ingredients (“86’d”) will still appear on the menu. That’s going to lead to complaints, refunds, or generally bad customer experience from whoever’s consuming your data / using it to buy food.
Four, you’re going to want to to be paid for all this tech and customer support you’re electing to intermediate between the end purchaser and the restaurant, as a service, and so you’re going to tack on some fees and either jack the price up on the consumer or try getting the restaurant to pay you a finder’s fee, cutting in to their already narrow margins.
Five, if you’re trying to provide ordering service and not just menu data, you still need to submit the order into the store itself, somehow. Which either means calling it in, robo-submitting an online order (if you’re lucky), or sending a courier to place the order and wait. And then, on the other side, whoever’s taking orders for the restaurant has to punch in the request to the register to actually complete the transaction. Which means the system you really want to talk to isn’t the website, it’s the point-of-sale.
Good luck with all that.
Source of bias: I work for a company that helps restaurants enable online ordering and POS integration so they can pay much less in fees and focus on making exceptional food.
Individual performance isn’t the critical attribute for a company / hiring manager though. You can be an exceptionally talented developer and still be a complete asshole no one wants to work with.
You can also be someone who just doesn’t have the rest of the skill stack to deliver really outstanding products. Technically intricate and high performance, sure - but how about easy to use, valuable and cherished, insanely great?
Funny enough, Google’s own HR division did a huge longitudinal study of what makes teams great; Project Aristotle. What they found was that the sum of individual performance is nowhere near as important as having psychological safety in the team - high trust, high empathy, high openness and vulnerability and feedback without blame.
> The researchers also discovered which variables were not significantly connected with team effectiveness at Google:
Colocation of teammates (sitting together in the same office)
Consensus-driven decision making
Extroversion of team members
Individual performance of team members
Workload size
Seniority
Team size
Tenure
Interesting that you know it as the SSC community, because Scott (TFA’s author)’s original site was Slate Star Codex. The new Substack where this was posted is Astral Codex Ten. Both are (near)anagrams for his nom de plume, Scott Alexander.
Anyway - I’ve lurked both for ~6-7 years. The best summary I can give is that Scott is an excellent and insightful author at his best, prone to certain idiosyncrasies, but who attracts a pretty thoughtful and generally pleasant commenter community.
The bias in astrange’s position is grounded in some factual truth, but I would argue that Scott’s commenter community is not entirely in the “rationality” camp, even if that’s a big part of how Scott reached his audience. The bigger part, imo, are the incredible series of articles he wrote circa 2014-2016 on a breadth of topics, many that still hold up.
I’d say check it out for the articles and see how you feel about the comments. Take astrange for what it’s worth, with a liberal dose of salt
There can be cost bloat in all of those services, and if additional spend in those areas nets marginal or negligible additional outcomes, they might be “overgrown.”
There’s an analogy here to code bloat and minimum viable product, I’m sure.
3-4x higher sounds like a good bit of the distance between $1500 and $9200. Maybe you implicitly agree with the premise, and are mistakenly thinking TFA is talking about Austin when it’s not?
If you aren’t willing to look at the data, and are admitting you’re closed off to even considering the idea (“I have no interest”), how do you know your head isn’t fully in the sand, or that you’re not part of the problem?
Rereading the thread, perhaps we’re both agreeing with each other? The data wasn’t there at the start, was there three months later, and that’s when updated decision making could occur?
I think I mistook you as agreeing with the GP that we had no chance to improve the outcome with the info at hand.
And is shorthanding “everyone without direct experience of the influential power of market forces” into “most of us.”
I think it’s fair to say that the fact that more or most people _don’t_ understand that and _do_ think it’s “all just leadership” explains much of the sentiment about capitalism generally.