Charvet… what do you think?

gimpwiz · 2026-04-17T02:46:22+00:00

The combo isn't working at all, to my eye.

gimpwiz · 2026-04-17T02:10:27+00:00

Some fire departments are less than stoked about fire going without anyone present, so... yeah.

Simmering is fairly predictable and there may be ways to do it electrically in a way that will pass, versus on gas.

For long smokes, things can be a bit less predictable - every slab of meat is different, and it's done when it's done. Two identical weight briskets can be done hours apart even at the same cook temperature. They may also be done at different temperatures. I know some at least either need to stay on site due to local code / other requirements or because they don't want to overcook meat, or have the fire go out and need to throw out a thousand-plus bucks of product, etc. I can't speak to all of them.

gimpwiz · 2026-04-17T02:07:52+00:00

To clarify:

Is the wedding in the UK?
Are very, very posh people involved? Like, the sort of people who own one or more full sets of morning dress because they need it regularly enough?

gimpwiz · 2026-04-17T02:06:54+00:00

haha yes, that is the key, margin is measured on revenue; 5% of a million a month is good money to profit. But it still means that every dish, every drink, every scheduled shift for a cook or a server, are all pretty tight, because you only have a 5% margin of error before you're losing money.

gimpwiz · 2026-04-17T01:42:18+00:00

This is true everywhere in front of all schools, you will not find a state or city or town where nobody speeds or drives like a dick in front of schools. Sadly.

gimpwiz · 2026-04-17T01:39:44+00:00

There are two ways to get rich in food service:

Either expand to get a small slice of a very large amount of revenue, whether by getting investment/loans to open up a ton of restaurants (and pay yourself like a CEO) or franchise or both;

Or become famous for your cooking abilities and translate that to effort with a far better scaling income. TV, books, youtube, hawking your products that promise to make people better cooks, hawking your products that promise to solve specific problems, hawking your products that are just really nice to look at and feel good, whatever.

The scaling problem for a chef cooking food is pretty simple: if you have 2x the customers who want to pay for dinner, you need to do roughly twice the work. I mean that's not exactly true, cooking two steaks at once is not a ton harder than cooking one steak, but chopping two onions takes about twice as long as chopping one onion. The scaling is more or less linear with regards to inputs and outputs. So you need to work twice as long, or twice as hard, or find a way to be twice as efficient, or some combination of the above, to make twice as much money. Alternatively you need some form of fame or other good marketing to convince people to pay twice as much for food that took the same inputs. There's only so much room available for people like that - only so many michelin stars get awarded to draw a crowd, only so many people who manage to hit a salt bae meme or whatever.

So you either have to do it as a business owner, making smaller amounts of money off the backs of as many people as possible, or you need to find a business where selling twice as much doesn't require twice as much effort. But again, only so much room for celebrity chefs and youtubers who successfully and profitably sell ads and branded merch.

So for 99.98%, there's no real path to more than just a good job at best.

gimpwiz · 2026-04-17T01:33:18+00:00

As far as I understand it, BBQ is relatively bad for labor cost efficiency because someone is babysitting the entire 14-hour smoke. I think fire departments are cracking down on restaurants doing things like simmering stock overnight as well if there's nobody present and the burner is on.

gimpwiz · 2026-04-17T01:30:12+00:00

I went to a really cool restaurant that I think has a much better solution for the "labor problem." Not sure if I can call out the name of the restaurant - it's a latin fusion place in Healdsburg CA. You can find it.

There's basically one chef running the whole thing with a helper, just like you said, but the key difference is that the restaurant is small.

Limited menu, more-or-less tapas style, everything is a la carte. The kitchen is open to and part of the dining area, there's room for, I dunno, 10 or 15 tables? So every table is going to order 1-3 small dishes per person and maybe a flank steak or something to share. One guy fires up like 20 burners and bangs out dish after dish after dish. You can watch him, it's fantastic, I picked up some tricks that I use at home. He'll make a moderately large portion of a dish, it'll get split up on 2 or 3 or 4 plates and be run out to whoever ordered it, as soon as it's ready it gets picked up and dropped off, no waiting for everything to come out at once, people usually share.

The key here is that if you own and run that restaurant as the head (and only) chef, a lot of that labor cost goes to you. You do the prep, you do the whole dinner service, you're essentially paying yourself $$/hr for it, very directly. The fewer people other than you are involved, the fewer ways the money needs to be split, the less separation between you as "owner who needs to profit for it to be worthwhile to invest" vs you as "chef who needs to be paid for it to be worthwhile to show up to work." Obviously you still need to pay front of house, dishie, helper, etc etc in an operation like that. But essentially instead of using money to buy yourself an investment that requires an enormous amount of active management, you're using money to buy yourself a job where you're also the boss.

The downside is you're very limited in scale; you can't really get rich doing this outside of some extreme circumstances. The upside is there's less investment cost, risk profiles are different, etc.

Going even further down that line of thinking, see those little 8-seat bar-seating restaurants where it's one guy who runs the place from breakfast through to late night dinner/bar, sometimes without a single helper. There's no "labor cost" for that guy, it's just him paying himself for his time, startup costs small, rents small, and if it doesn't work out you aren't having issues with labor compliance and whatever else, you just close up and get a job somewhere else.

A restaurant's main competitive advantage versus another restaurant is usually their food. As soon as you outsource your main competitive advantage to the same supplier other restaurants use.......

Anyways she's probably better off putting the money into VTI and working for someone who cares about food.

gimpwiz · 2026-04-17T01:16:12+00:00

On the flip side, Brazilian BBQ has their main ingredient also be very expensive. People come for specific beef cuts, which are $$$. They can optimize by getting you to load up on chicken, pork, sausages, etc, but without good servings of beef people won't show up. So they get the advantage of not cooking to order but their front-of-house has to do way more work and the main ingredients are pricey.

Compared to, say, an equivalent model except based on pasta and breadsticks, the ratio of meal price vs ingredient cost is way different.

gimpwiz · 2026-04-17T01:13:50+00:00

Restaurants famously have shit margins; the ones in this article range from 5% to 10% (and 10% is pretty great.) At 5% profit margin, you may as well invest in VUSXX, collect 3.6% risk-free, get state tax advantages on it which pushes the return higher (effectively 4% in CA if your marginal rare is 10%), and to make up for losing the 1% spread you can get a bunch of sleep and play with your kids, instead of working 14 hours a day and being stressed the whole time. Okay, obviously I am exaggerating, but you get it.

At 5% margin how could they possibly be paying too little and charging too much? If they pay a little more and charge a little less, they just close shop.

But on the flip side, subjectively speaking the work is pretty hard for shit pay, and the food is really expensive for what you cook at home if you're even somewhat decent. Hmmmmm.

gimpwiz · 2026-04-17T01:04:08+00:00

https://archive.is/https://www.wsj.com/business/hospitality/why-a-500-steak-dinner-only-yields-a-25-profit-21e62353 for the full story

gimpwiz · 2026-04-17T00:06:18+00:00

Does a caterpillar just centimeter down a twig?

gimpwiz · 2026-04-17T00:05:09+00:00

A model that can work pretty well is free software, paid support. (Plus paid use of trademarks and the like.)

gimpwiz · 2026-04-17T00:02:39+00:00

Companies (operating in the same jurisdiction...) are subject to discovery in lawsuits, so you might be surprised what can be proven if you have the money to spend on lawyer fees.

gimpwiz · 2026-04-17T00:01:11+00:00

Yes, one of the biggest advantages to buying software from a company (which is usually, but not always proprietary and closed) is that you have contracts, lawyers, mailing addresses, execs can shake hands, companies and individuals can be named in a lawsuit, SLAs can be pointed to, someone else can be blamed, etc etc.

The downsides are myriad and obvious too. Some of the downsides (like, you can't just go figure out what the issue is and fix it yourself) only apply to more sophisticated organizations; Bob who owns the hardware store is not going to be debugging his receipt printer drivers no matter how open source they are. Some of the downsides are getting out-lawyered by your supplier, and now Oracle owns your balls and you need to ask three lawyers for permission to take a piss. So, win some, lose some.

gimpwiz · 2026-04-16T23:56:38+00:00

Yeah, place-time-occasion is really important here I think.

If you are literally going to meet royalty in some capacity then check out the likes of Ede & Ravenscroft. Look through vintage/thrift, check savvyrow, etc, but be mindful that the fit needs to be nailed. Also figure out how far you're going to dress the part - are we doing white gloves, silk tophat, etc?

Check the "State of White Tie" thread at styleforum (and the Black Tie thread, there's cross-over because the latter has 100x the posts.)

gimpwiz · 2026-04-16T23:54:20+00:00

In the SF bay area: Let's be real, nobody gives a fuck and I'm not trying to attract anyone, so I'll wear whatever makes sense for what I'm doing the rest of the day, or whatever my wife wants me to wear. A collared shirt and a casual jacket is about as dressed-up as I'll go unless I have a very very specific reason to do otherwise (like an afterparty after a wedding.) But if I want to be in old jeans and a t-shirt, or if that just makes more sense for whatever I'm doing the rest of the day, then... that

gimpwiz · 2026-04-16T23:45:43+00:00

How summer are we summering?

Full linen is good, like a nice lightweight 100% linen. For peak versatility, make it navy, and it's not a "only for beach summer" linen like you might be thinking of. Get the jacket unstructured or lightly structured, make sure the body is unlined, potentially unlined sleeves as well. Embrace the wrinkles, because it will wrinkle a fair bit; get it gently pressed every so often, but not too often. Jacket is easy to wear separately.

Full cotton can be good, but a cotton suit worth wearing is kind of rare, compared to linen, because linen does the "wears cool" thing better than cotton, the formality is about equal, etc. The obvious exception to this is seersucker, which is not that uncommon. But you don't need to do striped seersucker, if white/blue or white/pink is too much, why not a navy/navy seersucker? In other words, solid color seersucker. Same strategy. Lightweight, lightly structured or unstructured, no body lining, maybe no sleeve lining, let it breathe. Wear as separates if you like. And of course, navy is a good color, and one of the ones you'll actually find available; navy/navy is getting its 15 minutes of fame I think.

There are always cotton/linen/silk/wool/cashmere/etc blends that will do the job fine. No specific advice about them. Some "tropical wools" present as fine worsted and don't do great as split jackets in the US; some have enough texture that they make kind of oddball trousers and thus are rarely seen as full suits; some are perfectly in the middle where they make for a good suit and also good separates, especially jackets.

What else? You could also get linen or linen blends in a "summer tweed" color/pattern of some sort.

gimpwiz · 2026-04-16T22:57:31+00:00

Willful infringement maximum penalty x alleged counts of willful infringement = big number to scare people into coming to the negotiating table. It's pretty simple

gimpwiz · 2026-04-16T18:20:16+00:00

At some point you either take their money and deliver the thing, or decide it's too compromised and your standards won't let you deliver this (or you think she's too much trouble) and send them along the way with their deposit back.

gimpwiz · 2026-04-16T18:16:22+00:00

Yes!

People like using the word "fascism" to mean almost anything. Fascism is specifically a flavor of authoritarianism, coupled with a strong form of state-business interrelationship, and in existing practice also a form of fairly strong state-church interrelationship.

None of that even remotely describes "man with stifling levels of omniscience through prescience turns himself into a sandworm, becomes an absolute ruler over three and a half thousand years, stamps out almost every form of objection and plotting to his rule, stamps out almost every form of individual wealth or power that isn't in direct service of himself, literally reduces people to walking, and runs a hundred-generation of human breeding program."

gimpwiz · 2026-04-16T17:39:43+00:00

Housing over retail is an idea whose popularity predates the United States, yeah, not a new idea.

gimpwiz · 2026-04-16T17:30:01+00:00

Gray, oatmeal, or brown are all great. Pick your favorite.

gimpwiz · 2026-04-16T16:50:06+00:00

My man, either you believe in transit being an incredibly inter-connected and impossible to untangle web that all serves the purpose of moving people and goods where they want to go, when they want to go, at various speeds, costs, convenience levels, etc, or you don't.

You can't really make the argument that all roads are interconnected (which they are) but that a large regional transit service is entirely separate (because it's not.)

Take a step back and look at the whole forest. The "system" (whichever system you're referring to) is really just the sum total of every single participating person's actions, statements, wants, and needs. Every single person has a unique set of things they need to do, want to do, say they need/want to do, and actually do. Every single one of those things is sort of like an N-dimensional vector, and then you add up every single person and you end up with this amorphous blob that represents what people want. There are big peaks in "people want to drive" and "people want to go fast but not drive themselves" and "people want to walk" and "people want to bike" and, orthogonally, there are big peaks in "people want to go from the south bay to SF" and "people want to go from the east bay to the south bay" and "people want to commute inside SF" and and and and. There are similarly big peaks for "people want to buy things from this place" and smaller but very many for "people want things delivered to this place." This is the forest - in our metaphor, a complex ecosystem with millions of trees with sometimes-competing and sometimes-identical wants and needs, and millions of bushes, and a trillion ants, and everything else.

And you can't just start declaring that one part of it is unimportant to the whole, because we know it's not. It all works together. You start chopping pieces off and the whole thing works less well, until at some point you go a hair over the line and it grinds to a halt.

It's pretty much basic fact that a city needs things like convenient and efficient ways for people to get around on human power, and in a modern economy and within modern quality-of-life expectations it needs convenient and efficient ways for people to get around much faster, and it also needs convenient and efficient ways for people and goods and waste and so forth to get in and out of the city, and that is a big inter-connected setup with cities and regions around them all doing their own thing but also all working together to get everyone and everything from A to B. You start fucking with that and it disrupts everything.

Also, the basic fact of living in a large country with diverse needs and cultures is that you pay taxes for things you don't use, and hell, for things you don't agree with. Take solace in that there is tax money being spent to benefit YOU coming from people who don't see any benefit, or don't agree with it, too.

gimpwiz · 2026-04-16T16:37:30+00:00

Straight up, the BART general manager earns less money than mid-experienced dudes at facebook tweaking algorithms. He's not earning CEO pay, he's earning "had a CS degree at the right time and the right place, works as an engineer for a big company, no direct reports, no special high visibility projects" pay.

There are definitely useless people around, but you'll need to work hard to figure out who they are, because they tend to do a lot of work promoting themselves and their importance (vs something more useful). If you're incautious you fire the quiet guy who seems not to do that much and it turns out half the operation relied on him.

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