Alex Mayyasi

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“Restaurant Pricing Seems So Outdated”

August 29, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In “Why Don’t Restaurants Charge for Reservations?” Alex Mayyasi’s really interesting Priceonomics post about the mysterious policies of dining establishments, we learn why some dishes are “loss leaders” and why meals cost the same whether they’re served at peak or off-peak hours. An excerpt about start-ups trying to disrupt the reservation system, which is usually based on social rather than monetary capital:

“One reason entrepreneurs keep trying to sell reservations is that restaurant pricing seems so outdated. Airlines charge significantly more for tickets on weekends and charge much less for flights that depart at 5am, yet all dinner reservations are the same price (free) and with the exception of a few special holiday menus, prices are the same on Tuesday at 6pm as Saturday at 8pm. 

At the very high end of the restaurant business, that may be changing. Nick Kokonas is the co-owner of three expensive, celebrated restaurants in Chicago. He now charges for reservations using a system he developed — one that restaurateurs may actually like.

When customers reserve a table at one of Kokonas’s restaurants, they pay for their entire dinner. The restaurants have a fixed price tasting menu (although at a more casual restaurant that does not, customers’ reservation charge is a credit toward their bill), so a reservation is actually a pre-paid ticket for a meal at a set time. 

They system can benefit everyone. It overcomes owners’ and managers’ primary objection to charging for reservations, as diners pay for their meal rather than for a table. It also eliminates the need for reservation staff and prevents no-shows.”

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“If San Francisco Had The Same Population Density As Manhattan, It Could Be Home To Around 3 Million Residents Instead Of Its Current 800,000”

August 13, 2014 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’ve read that if New Hampshire had the same population density as Brooklyn, every American could live in the state. In a Priceonomics post about San Francisco devoting more than 2% of its land to golf courses when it’s so squeezed for space that burying the dead within city limits isn’t permitted, Alex Mayyasi spells out how sparse the population is and why:

“To the extent that the surprising prevalence of golf courses in San Francisco has relevance to the city’s debates over gentrification, it’s likely as a reminder that the city’s small, constrained size — a commonly cited culprit for high rent prices — is not to blame. If San Francisco had the same population density as Manhattan, it could be home to around 3 million residents instead of its current 800,000. But in order to protect San Francisco from change, its residents have consistently voted for zoning laws that prevent developers from building taller commercial and residential buildings — even downtown. Similarly, a great public transport system could allow people to enjoy San Francisco’s employment opportunities and cultural capital while living outside the city limits, but the Bay Area Transport system has not ‘had a significant upgrade in San Francisco since 1976.‘“

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“Today Famous Figures Endure The Galella Treatment On A Regular Basis”

August 8, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

There was a time when paparazzi and stars were predator and prey, but it’s more complicated now.

Deals are struck, contracts signed, and a paparazzo is hired to “stalk” a star to assure a Q rating remains copacetic. Sometimes a tabloid photographer does get a scoop, an embarrassing one, but these are free-marketers, not muckrakers, and they’ll gladly sell the photos back to the celebrity if they’re willing to pay more than the press. The two sides are in predetermined cahoots or open to such an ad-hoc arrangement, the idea that famous people can’t get away with what they used to, overstated. Those who get caught with their pants down are mostly pols and celebs dense enough to text their own incriminating images to strangers.

Alex Mayyasi of Priceonomics acknowledges some of these points but has a different take. The opening:

Before John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, the handsome, young president had a public image as a doting father and as the man who called Americans to public service. In his private life, he was a serial adulterer. Historians have all but confirmed Kennedy’s involvement with women ranging from Marilyn Monroe to two White House interns who skinny dipped in the presidential pool and flew on Air Force One so that, as Caitlin Flanagan puts it in The Atlantic, “the president could always get laid if there was any trouble scaring up local talent.”

If a current president acted like Kennedy, reporters from every paper would seize on rumors until his presidency ended in shame. But the early 1960s were a different time; the American public remained ignorant of Kennedy’s affairs because no one reported on them. In his biography of Kennedy, Robert Dallek writes that Kennedy “remained confident that the mainstream press would not publicize his womanizing.” Even more incredible than the press’s self-imposed censorship is Dallek’s observation that when gossip columns began speculating about JFK and Marilyn, he sent a friend and former journalist to “tell the editors… that it’s just not true.” Apparently it got results.

After the JFK assassination, Jackie Kennedy lived in New York. She remained in the public eye as a fashion icon and as the widow of the fallen president, but she harbored no great secrets. Nevertheless, a Bronx resident by the name of Ron Galella would not leave her alone. Galella followed Jackie Kennedy Onassis incessantly, snapping pictures of her around the city and leading the former first lady to go to court to win a (largely ineffective) restraining order against Galella. 

‘Today famous figures endure the Galella treatment on a regular basis. Galella is the progenitor of the modern paparazzo who takes pictures of celebrities “doing things,” as he puts it, which is now so common that photographers struggle to get a good picture of Brad Pitt grabbing takeout because so many other paparazzi are crowding him to get a shot.

The proliferation of media devoted to covering famous figures, omnipresent paparazzi, and a change in the culture of how we treat celebrities — from adoring them from a distance to seeking both familiarity and the exposure of all their secrets — has led to an increase in the price of fame. Whereas Kennedy could trust the press not to expose his affairs, modern celebrities must design their lifestyle around avoiding cameras whenever they eat out. Over time, the public has come to expect a certain amount of transparency around famous people’s personal lives. We are all paparazzi now.•

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“The U.S. Is Still Catching Up From Missing The World Cup From 1950 To 1990”

June 19, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

In his Priceonomics essay, “Why Are Some Countries Good at Soccer?” Alex Mayyasi lays out some of the reasons why the U.S. doesn’t have a pretty record at the beautiful game without touching on the most obvious one: Our best athletes lack financial incentive to commit to the sport. Imagine our team if Lebron James and Billy Hamilton and Calvin Johnson played only soccer from when they were young. That’s what would happen if they were raised in countries where that sport is king, but it’s not the case in America, where more immediate monetary rewards come from other athletics. While a soccer salary in Europe can be stratospheric, there’s a lot of distance a talented American youth athlete would have to travel, figuratively as well as literally, to secure one. Their odds for winning the lottery are better if they concentrate on sports that are popular domestically. From Mayyasi:

“Current U.S. head coach Jurgen Klinsmann has cited the lack of soccer culture in the United States as an obstacle, saying that ‘One thing is certain: The American kids need hundreds and even thousands more hours to play.’ FiveThirtyEight recently reviewed the work of Stefan Szymanski, author of Soccernomics, which found that the best predictor of a country’s success in the World Cup is the number of games the national team had played. According to Szymanski, this means the U.S. men’s national team not only has less experience, but it has missed out on adapting strategy from the rest of the world by playing significantly fewer games — the U.S. is still catching up from missing the World Cup from 1950 to 1990.

After all, the thesis of the 10,000 hour rule, as debated by psychologists, is not merely that masters need lots of practice, but that the type of practice matters. Klinsmann, the U.S. head coach, has placed  on recruiting Americans who play in European leagues and face ‘the best competition in the world on a daily basis instead of only a few games every few years,’ as is the case for MLS players on the World Cup team.

Similarly, aspects of the U.S. youth soccer system seems to keep young players from engaging in ‘deliberate practice’ as much as their peers elsewhere. In America, young players compete in dozens and even hundreds of games every year — games that crowd out time that European youths spend practicing skills and fundamentals. ‘It’s counterproductive to learning,’ John Hackworth, the former under-17 national team coach, tells the New York Times, ‘and the No. 1 worst thing we do.’ And while foreign teams prioritize development by giving star players extra attention and allowing them to play with older and better players, the American focus on winning and the team keeps youth soccer in America from shaping future stars of the national team.”

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“They Flock To Movies Depicting A Relentlessly Depressing View Of The Future”

May 21, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Film | Permalink

Are we attracted to dystopic novels and films because they caution us or because they titillate us? Deep inside humans, along with an impulse to create, is one to destroy. Some get more joy from the seconds it takes to topple an elaborate sand castle than the hours it takes to build one. Perhaps these stories of decline and doom are psychological outlets for destructive tendencies, the way sports can be a safer outlet for aggression than war. Of course, sports has not ended war nor gave apocalyptic books and movies stopped us from trying to extinct ourselves.

Excerpts follow from two new pieces about dystopian art.

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From “Let’s Go to Dystopia,” by Diane Johnson at the New York Review of Books:

“Maybe there are people who read dystopian tales for self-improvement the way people used to read sermons, or for amusement—people who can edit out the very details that have most preoccupied the person who made them up, and read for the story alone. The stories, boiled down, are usually at bottom just the good old stories. Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, set in London, is basically the same story as Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, set in the dystopian world of a mental institution; both Alex and McMurphy are forced into conformity and docility by institutional powers.

There are quest stories or love stories—a quest runs through Margaret Atwood’s trilogy about Crake and Oryx. Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea is both a quest and a love story—a girl searches for her lover and for her brother, and so on. There’s no missing the appeal, especially for adolescents, of another common structure of these tales: a protagonist, often a teen, somehow preserved from the brainwashed docility of most people in his or her society—a rebel—solves some personal or social problem afflicting everyone (Hunger Games), and escapes from the future into what we recognize as a more normal world.

Utopias of course are just variations of dystopia, the reverse side of the same coin, in which a traveler from somewhere better tells about a distant society whose humanity and wisdom throw into relief the practices of our own, as in Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, or William Dean Howells’s A Traveler from Altruria, when the disingenuously leading questions that the suavely persuasive traveler asks his American host expose American laws, tastes, and manners as a kind of dystopia next to the traveler’s ideal Altruria. Through three hundred pages, America is indirectly portrayed as a dystopia of hypocrisy and self-delusion, the way Brobdingnagians, Yahoos, Lilliputians, and Houyhnhnms threw light on Swift’s and Gulliver’s England.”

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From “Why Hollywood Loves Dystopian Science Fiction,” by Alex Mayyasi at Priceonomics:

“Neal Stephenson knows a thing or two about science fiction. The author of thick, best-selling novels that cross genres but slant toward sci-fi, Stephenson also writes about technology and has worked part time on a private space company.

He is also tired of dystopian science fiction movies and video games. ‘A few weeks ago I think I actually groaned out loud when I was watching Oblivion and saw the wrecked Statue of Liberty sticking out of the ground,” he tells Morgan Warstler in an interview. 

A proponent of the thesis that we have ‘lost our faith in technology to bring progress’ and ‘lost our ability to get important things done’ on an Apollo mission scale, Stephenson sees the ubiquity of dystopian visions as a cultural expression. Whereas it was once ‘refreshing, and extremely hip, to see depictions of futures that were not as clean and simple as Star Trek,’ we now experience ‘a strange state of affairs in which people are eager to vote with their dollars, pounds and Euros for the latest tech [like iPhones], but they flock to movies depicting a relentlessly depressing view of the future, and resist any tech deployed on a large scale, in a centralized way.’“

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“Mathematicians Have Spent Time Calculating How Long It Would Take A Monkey To Write A Copy Of Hamlet”

April 2, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Monkeys hitting random keys on typewriters (or tablets) would take eons to write Hamlet but not quite as long to write something better than Hamlet. It’s logical, even if it’s almost completely useless information. From Alex Mayyasi at Priceonomics:

“Mathematicians have spent time calculating how long it would take a monkey to write a copy of Hamlet (even if they perform better than the macaques in England, the answer is a really long time — orders of magnitude longer than the universe has existed). But Borges’s Total Library idea suggests an important corollary to the Infinite Monkey Theorem: a monkey hitting random keys on a typewriter would mostly likely write something superior to Shakespeare long before it produced a copy of Hamlet.

The logic is simple. The odds of a monkey writing an intelligible sentence are low, but the odds of one writing a sentence from Hamlet are astronomical because there are many possible intelligible sentences but a limited number of sentences in Hamlet. In the same way, there are a limited number of works by Shakespeare, but there are an almost infinite number of plays and books that are better than Shakespeare ranging from a copy of Hamlet with one small, superior tweak to yet-to-be-written sci-fi novels to George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones series.”

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“For Thieves, The Ubiquity Of A Product And The Presence Of A Large Illicit Market For It Is More Important Than Its Actual Retail Value”

March 27, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In “Why Thieves Steal Soap,” Alex Mayyasi of Priceonomics explains the strategy of stores that keep cheaper items under lock and key while not protecting more expensive goods with the same ardor. An excerpt:

“Products like cigarettes and soap perform some of the major functions of money very well. Since there is a consistent demand and market for them, even when they’re not on store shelves, they retain their value. (Unlike an iPod, they never become obsolete.) Since they have standard sizes, they can also be used as a unit of account. You can pay for something with one, five, or ten packs of cigarettes depending on its value. In areas where fences or other buyers are always willing to purchase stolen products like soap, it’s just as good as money.

For thieves, the ubiquity of a product and the presence of a large illicit market for it is more important than its actual retail value. Small time burglars can’t keep stolen goods in warehouses, waiting for a buyer and marketing products to people willing to pay a premium for a unique item. It may seem surprising that Walgreen keeps some of its cheapest items locked up, until you realize that thieves care more about an item’s ubiquity in illicit markets more than its retail price.”

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“Technologists And Science-Fiction Writers Have Speculated About A Future In Which Humans Meld With Machines”

March 12, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Some aren’t looking to defeat the robots but to join them. They want no confrontation.

Members of the Grinder subculture aren’t waiting for science and technology to perfect and normalize the melding of humans and machines but are instead taking matters into their own hands, one magnetized fingertip at a time. From “Who Wants to Be a Cyborg?” Alex Mayyasi’s Priceonomics post which begins with an anecdote about early adopter Rich Lee:

“If you ask Lee why he did this, as we did, he’ll reply, ‘I realized that if I want to be a cyborg, I have to do it myself.’

Lee recognizes that this ‘is not a goal that everyone has now.’ But he is not alone in his ambition. Lee associates with a loose-knit community of ‘grinders,’ people interested in augmenting their human bodies with implanted technology. Other enthusiasts have implanted magnets in their fingertips so that they can feel electromagnetic fields, placed a device that sends biomedical data to the Internet via bluetooth under the skin of their forearm, and built hardware that allows them to experience color as sound.

For decades, technologists and science-fiction writers have speculated about a future in which humans meld with machines. New technologies like Google Glass, meanwhile, lead to comparisons with The Terminator and speculation that it is the first step down the path to an augmented reality.

The grinder community, however, is not waiting for the future to arrive; they’re building it by tinkering with their own bodies. And their first, do-it-yourself steps toward becoming cyborgs show that humans can already modify or augment their experience to a surprising degree.”

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“The Attitudes That Put Lion Cubs On Store Shelves Is Not Completely Gone”

February 20, 2014 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

Private zoos have existed almost as long as abodes themselves (here and here) and Animal Planet and the like have only persuaded Americans to take on pets they’re unable to wrangle (scroll down to second entry). Of course, the trade in illegal animals and the staging of private hunts goes beyond national boundaries–it’s a global problem. The opening of “The Exotic Animal Trade” by Alex Mayyasi at Priceonomics:

“According to a popular story, when Ronald Reagan called the Animal Kingdom pet shop at Harrods, the luxury London department store, and asked if the store sold elephants, the agent on the line replied, ‘Would that be African or Indian, sir?’

As of this year, the world famous store closed the Animal Kingdom to make way for more racks of women’s apparel. A London tabloid dubbed its closing the end of ‘one of the most extraordinary eras in retail history.’ For decades, Animal Kingdom was a fantasy come to life. The above story appears to be a myth — Reagan actually received a baby elephant from Harrods as a gift from the exiled crown prince of Albania, who lived in California when Reagan was governor. But wealthy Harrods customers did buy lion cubs, rare birds, and even an alligator. The Daily Telegraph quoted a patron: ‘It’s a great shame, it’s a London institution and an amazing place to go.’

Animal rights groups cheered the news, although no more than the closing of any pet shop. (They prefer responsible breeders and rescue operations.) The Animal Kingdom lately featured mostly a pet spa and overpriced animal collars. Due to increased animal welfare concerns and legislation such as the Endangered Species Act (passed in 1976 in Britain), more commonplace dogs, cats, and hamsters long ago replaced lions and elephants on the store shelves.

Patrons and store representatives described Animal Kingdom as emblematic of a past that contrasts with today’s concern for animal welfare and appreciation of endangered species. Yet the attitudes that put lion cubs on store shelves is not completely gone. The most well known example for Americans is the former boxer Mike Tyson, whose ownership of 7 tigers inspired jokes in the movie The Hangover. Rather than being an outlier case of an eccentric celebrity, however, the purchase of exotic animals is a multi-billion dollar industry straddling the border between legal and illegal.”

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