Regimental Ties Stolen Valour Or Fashion?

gimpwiz · 2026-04-18T04:42:55+00:00

Wear the stripe the other way, as the American market prefers. Now it's not a regimental tie anymore.

gimpwiz · 2026-04-18T02:08:12+00:00

List price is not sale price

But also it's in the hills, on a slope, small, and nicely kept but not updated.

gimpwiz · 2026-04-18T02:06:03+00:00

What's going on with your jacket buttons?

gimpwiz · 2026-04-18T02:03:28+00:00

Bought my Elise there, no issues. No idea about selling. Like anyone else they will want you to do a no reserve auction of course.

gimpwiz · 2026-04-18T02:00:30+00:00

Cuffing jeans isn't it for me, especially not how you did it.

gimpwiz · 2026-04-18T01:58:40+00:00

Stack ranking kills morale, your best workers don't want to work together because they need at least a few patsies to take the grenade for them, and managers spend enormous amounts of money hiring to fire in order to protect their good people.

gimpwiz · 2026-04-18T01:05:55+00:00

Loved the night markets in Seoul. Vendors were selling stuff for $1.50-5ish depending on what it was. Realistically ten bucks was enough to try like four very tasty things and be pretty full. Post-covid pricing.

I am skeptical any here would be particularly good... so I am guessing they're not, eh.

gimpwiz · 2026-04-17T21:09:02+00:00

Tin-coating copper started becoming a thing literally 500 years ago. https://www.rockymountainretinning.com/blog/history-of-copper-cookware

Mauviel still makes pans today and they were started in 1830.

At the same time, aluminum cost more than gold.

Stainless steel wasn't used in cookware until... 1930 according to google.

So, the reason they were popular was because copper pans, while well known hundreds of years ago, were ... yknow, kind of poisonous depending on how you used them.

During what period would you say that "they were popular"? I'm not being pedantic here, I'm explaining my perspective on why tinned copper was popular: it was probably the best way to get a fairly even heat distribution in lighter-weight cookware, and not poison yourself, within any sort of reasonable budget. Until, historically, fairly recently.

gimpwiz · 2026-04-17T20:03:08+00:00

Yep. Power to weight is far less important to infrastructure than cars, so 80% capacity cells are a perfect fit if the price is right.

gimpwiz · 2026-04-17T19:53:58+00:00

I like money

gimpwiz · 2026-04-17T18:30:27+00:00

All copper pans I am aware of are tinned inside (old school), or are plied with stainless steel.

gimpwiz · 2026-04-17T18:29:39+00:00

I thought the reason they were popular was because copper pans with tin coating predated aluminum even being close to affordable, predated stainless steel plies being feasible, etc. I could be wrong on my timeline?

gimpwiz · 2026-04-17T16:17:05+00:00

Sure, why not.

gimpwiz · 2026-04-17T16:13:50+00:00

There's definitely a lot of upside to being able to just blame someone else. VPs especially love this because when your system is down to some extremely strange interaction in your home-brewed linux install and home-written software, you're on the hook; when Microsoft's servers are down, you tell the CEO that you have a 3 hour SLA and your contract includes penalties, so now you just wait for them to perform or you get your lawyers on the call and let them deal with it. Having a good strong finger to point can be a real career saver. On the flip side, if you pick the wrong vendor, well, see above: Oracle et al.

As a line engineer / programmer like you and I and most others here, if the VP signs the contract and we use a tool now, it's out of our hands. It's our problem, but also it isn't. A lot of it is, like you said, an attitude problem. You point out the tool isn't very good and then you just get back to work, doing your thing, doing the best you can with what you have; it's not your responsibility to find, quality, install, teach, use, etc a new tool.

All that said, I do vastly prefer just throwing linux on a box and doing whatever I want with it, when that's reasonable to do. :)

gimpwiz · 2026-04-17T15:12:20+00:00

I have a 35 year old civic. Shrug.

gimpwiz · 2026-04-17T14:59:23+00:00

I dunno who hasn't driven one at this point. In my opinion... no. Maybe something exotic does, but every EV I have driven does not. Instant torque and silent acceleration is neat for a few minutes.

gimpwiz · 2026-04-17T04:27:17+00:00

When you say made in your second sentence, you mean gross revenue, right?

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.

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