Month: June 2013

The Recipe For Revenue

Alex Mayyasi reveals where restaurants make their money:

The best profit margins in the restaurant industry come from drinks. Beverages offer 80% profit margins or more in a business where 4% or lower margins are common. That’s why they represent, on average, 30% of restaurants’ revenues.

Dunkin Donuts recently relabelled itself a “beverages company,” acknowledging that revenue-wise, it is actually in the coffee business. Without admitting it, many restaurants are an overpriced drinks company in disguise. While restaurants could use profits from drinks to subsidize great food, you need to be on the lookout for restaurants that lavish their time and money on bartenders, unique drink menus, and a venue that makes you feel okay about spending $12 for a cocktail.

The Meaning Of Zombies

Do they represent terrorism, or consumerism?

Meanwhile, the release of the Brad Pitt blockbuster World War Z causes Michale Vlahos to consider the success of the novel and the meaning of zombie culture in general:

Like Tolstoy, the main purpose of World War Z is the celebration and reinforcement of collective meaning and belief. Tolstoy was building a narrative of Russian identity that would transcend the venality and ruling impoverishments of his time. He hoped it would show the way to something true and beautiful for all Russians. Max Brooks does this for us in World War Z, offering a believable path to reclaiming ourselves. For Americans this path has always been about sacrifice and the rediscovery of civic virtue. At novel’s end, those remaining Americans, whose way of life is now back to something like 1920, are yet better Americans for their privation and sacrifice.

But most important, the Americans in World War Z have cast off their former narcissism, today’s it’s-all-about-me mentality. The faux elective wars and their remorseless cheerleading too are over.

The Facts On Fertility

Jean Twenge corrects widespread misinformation about women’s fertility. She notes that fertility “does decrease with age, but the decline is not steep enough to keep the vast majority of women in their late 30s from having a child”:

The widely cited statistic that one in three women ages 35 to 39 will not be pregnant after a year of trying, for instance, is based on an article published in 2004 in the journal Human Reproduction. Rarely mentioned is the source of the data: French birth records from 1670 to 1830. The chance of remaining childless—30 percent—was also calculated based on historical populations.

In other words, millions of women are being told when to get pregnant based on statistics from a time before electricity, antibiotics, or fertility treatment. Most people assume these numbers are based on large, well-conducted studies of modern women, but they are not. When I mention this to friends and associates, by far the most common reaction is: “No … No way. Really?”

Surprisingly few well-designed studies of female age and natural fertility include women born in the 20th century—but those that do tend to paint a more optimistic picture. One study, published in Obstetrics & Gynecology in 2004 and headed by David Dunson (now of Duke University), examined the chances of pregnancy among 770 European women. It found that with sex at least twice a week, 82 percent of 35-to-39-year-old women conceive within a year, compared with 86 percent of 27-to-34-year-olds. (The fertility of women in their late 20s and early 30s was almost identical—news in and of itself.) Another study, released this March in Fertility and Sterility and led by Kenneth Rothman of Boston University, followed 2,820 Danish women as they tried to get pregnant. Among women having sex during their fertile times, 78 percent of 35-to-40-year-olds got pregnant within a year, compared with 84 percent of 20-to-34-year-olds. A study headed by Anne Steiner, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, the results of which were presented in June, found that among 38- and 39-year-olds who had been pregnant before, 80 percent of white women of normal weight got pregnant naturally within six months (although that percentage was lower among other races and among the overweight). “In our data, we’re not seeing huge drops until age 40,” she told me.

Kryptoshite

Paul Fairchild applauds Zack Snyder’s new film for forgoing the glowing green rock, calling it a lame trope and reviewing its increased abuse in the comic series:

Red kryptonite was a lump of the good, old-fashioned green stuff that passed through a radioactive cloud of some sort on its journey to earth. Every piece was different. In one issue it caused Superman to endure psychedelic, mind-bending hallucinations. In another it morphed the hero into embarrassing shapes. Each piece of red kryptonite affected Superman for only a day, at which point he returned to his normal state (no doubt because his writers couldn’t find a graceful exit from these crappy plots). … Author and comic writer Peter David put the nail in the lead coffin of kryptonite’s absurdity with his invented send-up in Supergirl #79: pink kryptonite, which makes Superman gay. …

For us mortals, “kryptonite” works without the cape and the big red “S.” It’s a moral weakness, a character flaw. It’s the idea that we’re powerless in the face of this vice or that guilty pleasure. It sounds cool when we describe our shortcomings this way, appropriating Superman’s virtue for ourselves: “cigarettes are my kryptonite.” This kryptonite is metaphorical, a weaker, abstracted copy of a space rock that serves as a totem. But it makes more sense as a metaphor than as an object that’s just a cheap, flimsy deus ex machina.

Recent Dish on Man Of Steel here and here.

What Is Big Brother Watching For?

Alex Tabarrok maintains that everyone should be worried about excessive government surveillance because “no one is innocent”:

Have you ever thrown out some junk mail that came to your house but was addressed to someone else? That’s a violation of federal law punishable by up to 5 years in prison. Harvey Silverglate argues that a typical American commits three felonies a day. I think that number is too high but it is easy to violate the law without intent or knowledge. …

If someone tracked you for a year are you confident that they would find no evidence of a crime? Remember, under the common law, mens rea, criminal intent, was a standard requirement for criminal prosecution but today that is typically no longer the case especially under federal criminal law. Faced with the evidence of an non-intentional crime, most prosecutors, of course, would use their discretion and not threaten imprisonment. Evidence and discretion, however, are precisely the point. Today, no one is innocent and thus our freedom is maintained only by the high cost of evidence and the prosecutor’s discretion.

Sweet Innovation

Corby Kummer praises the business practices of Tcho, a chocolate company:

What sets Tcho apart from other chocolate makers is that it doesn’t just scout the equator looking for cacao farmers it can admire, hoping they’ll grow great beans that might make wonderful chocolate. The company does something new: it provides growers with all the tools they need to have chocolate tastings during harvesting and processing, the crucial period that determines the price a cacao farmer’s crop will command. Tcho combines coffee roasters, spice grinders, and modified hair dryers to equip “sample labs”—pilot plants that produce tiny lots of chocolate right where cacao is grown. The company gives cacao farmers customized groupware so that they can share tasting notes and samples with chocolate makers. In this way, the farmers can bring entire harvests up to the standards of Tcho or any other buyer.

This is a huge change. Just as some coffee growers have never drunk coffee made from their beans, some cacao growers in remote areas have never tasted chocolate made with theirs. (Since chocolate is much harder to make than coffee, some may have never tasted chocolate at all.)

James Wimberley zooms out:

We often underestimate the importance and the difficulty of ensuring that markets have good information about quality as well as price. A price has one dimension; even a simple product like a carrot has at least six dimensions of quality – weight, size, shape, colour, crunchiness, sweetness, acidity. (Carrot connoisseurs will add some more dimensions of flavour.) A complex product like a car or wine has dozens of qualitative dimensions. Some of these can be assessed intuitively with sufficient accuracy, like the carrot’s crunchiness; others measured, like the car’s turning circle. But in many cases we have poor intuitive judgement, like the comparative weight of bags of staple foods; and in others measurement is problematic, like the bouquet of a wine.

A well-functioning market has to address these problems, and they are not easy – and only some are reliably self-regulating.

Are Energy Drinks That Dangerous?

Tom Laskawy relays the latest development in the battle over beverages:

[The American Medical Association] began an aggressive turn against soda last year when it passed a resolution at its annual meeting that singled out soda for its role in obesity, and included tepid support for a soda tax to fund anti-obesity efforts. And this year, the group announced its support for restricting the use of food stamps (aka SNAP benefits) on sugar-sweetened drinks. Those past actions pale in comparison to the group’s new demand for a ban on marketing energy drinks to young people, however.

It’s a bold move, given that junk-food marketing is such treacherous political territory. Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move anti-obesity effort famously foundered in that area. Consider, too, that energy drink companies have built their brands on testosterone fueled extreme sports that have great appeal for teens and adolescents. …

The question is whether the [Federal Trade Commission] will listen to the doctors. I suppose the better question is whether the FTC can hear anyone other than the food companies that have shouted down every mention of the words “restrict junk food advertising to children.” So far the answer has been no. Perhaps doctors’ efforts combined with the possible acute health risk from high-caffeine energy drinks — the suggestion that someone with a pre-existing heart condition, diagnosed or not, can actually drop dead from drinking them — will be enough to get the government’s attention.

Why Shouldn’t Gays Give Blood?

The American Medical Association voted this week to oppose the long-standing ban on gay men donating blood. Nora Caplan-Bricker suggests alternatives:

There’s another way to keep the blood supply safe. In 2010, the AIDS advocacy group the Gay Men’s Health Crisis released a report that recommended, among other things, surveying all potential donors for risky behavior. That way, a heterosexual donor who has unprotected sex with multiple partners gets flagged, while a homosexual man who has been in a monogamous relationship for 20 years gets to give. The report notes a few countries that screen donors this way. In Sweden (which also has a one-year deferral policy), donors are deferred for three months after sleeping with a new partner; in France, a person is automatically deferred four months for having unprotected sex. And, both of these windows align with the timeframe of an HIV test, which is considered fail proof at about three months—no need to wait a year.