2025-05-09 22:37:59
2025-05-07 19:29:39
There's a fun and popular game of looking at a store that seems economically implausible – say, it only sells expensive candles, and not very many of them – and asking yourself, how the hell does that thing stay in business?
I was discussing this with friends recently and was surprised to discover that not everybody shares my answer/assumption: that the shop is losing money, but the store-owner has a wealthy spouse or parent, and the shop is cross-subsidized by the spouse-or-parent's finance/tech/industrial money.
I realized that this assumption has been lodged in my brain for years, but that I don't actually know how true it is. And that I also don't know of any way to test it: I searched online and couldn't find either data or case studies.
For me, part of the background here is a broader question about whether you can infer that something is a "good business" from seeing that other people are doing it and not (seemingly) going bankrupt. And this is very much impeded if lots of businesses you see are actually cross-subsidized by something else: that means you can't learn from their ongoing existence that the business is profitable, they're just willing to lose money that you might not be.
Of course, cross-subsidization can exist within businesses as well as across them, so the same argument applies at fractal scales: just because a business is doing a certain project, doesn't mean the project makes sense, they may just have other projects inside the business cross-subsidizing this one.
Anyway. This blogpost doesn't have a conclusion, it's meant more as a batsignal: if you know of any data about cross-subsidization of businesses, or any ideas about how I could find such data, please send it my way.
2025-05-05 17:52:34
One of my favourite genres of books is about a character discovering – in the moment of truth – that he's a coward. My personal pantheon is The Caine Mutiny and Beware of Pity, though I think Lord Jim is supposed to be the classic. (It's probably not a coincidence that these books are from 1951, 1939 and 1900 respectively).
People talk a lot about the benefit of Reading Fiction in learning to empathise with the experiences of others. A special element of reading Coward Fiction is that you're learning to empathise with an experience that will be yours. There's a high chance that sometime in your life you will be faced very suddenly with a demand for bravery, and (just statistically!) it's incredibly unlikely that you'll live up to it. Until it happens, it'll be hard to believe, or understand. I don't think reading about it actually makes you understand it, but at least maybe gives you a glimpse of it.
2025-05-02 22:07:59
Thank you for everyone who responded to our survey last month! It was lovely for us to hear from you, so we're doing the same for April.
If you enjoy (or hate) the blog, truly the number #1 thing you can do to support (or change) it is to let us know what you think at this 3-question survey, by email or in the comments. Thanks so much for reading, it's truly what keeps us writing.
p.s. if you'd like to comment on any blogpost anonymously, or just don't want to log in, reply by email and we will (usually, at our discretion) add those comments from our side.
p.p.s. some highlights from the March mailbag:
I like most of the 80/20 pieces! Generally I find advice content is limited by the tendency of people write about stuff they're really into, and then they assure you that you really should be trying to maximize results. More people should take the time to explain how to do stuff half-assedly.
In fact, I think a lot of the skill of living well is deciding where to place your limited energies. If I remember college philosophy, that's what Aristotle thought virtue was. So he and I agree, and even if you don't that's two against one.
Various commenters appreciated the brevity/unfinishedness:
I always look forward to your content because I like that it sometimes feels unfinished. It's just ideas or interesting things.
I appreciate that the posts are much more succinct than most substacks I read. Leaves me wanting more, which I consider to be a good thing
I love your shorter posts, and I like your weird shower thoughts.
but we equally appreciate the person who felt the exact opposite:
A lot of your thoughts are interesting but are hard to give the full justice to in the bitesize format. I would be happy with less frequent posts that were more expansive and contemplative
2025-04-30 19:33:50
Imagine a society that regularly practices torture. What kind of person becomes a professional torturer? Let's just say that lots of people who were qualified for torturing will decide that's not how they want to spend their Saturdays, and go do something else instead. The profession becomes filled with the kinds of people who were psychologically and/or morally willing to do it.
Many years pass. The government and/or Cesare Beccaria decide they want to abolish torture. The torturers are not excited about this; sure, torturing has some problems, and there's a few bad apples in the profession, no doubt about it. But a lot of the bad press that torture is getting lately is (frankly) based on misapprehensions, and the thing about these anti-torture pamphlets is that they're all written by people who don't truly get torturing, because they've never actually been involved in it first hand. We need to listen to the experts, the men in the arena.
I'm obviously using the example of torturers to prime your intuition in a particular way, but I think it gets at a deep and genuine problem for many modern social issues. It can simultaneously be true that:
1) there are elements of most professions that you can only understand by practicing them yourself,
2) the only people who continue practicing a thing are the ones who can (at the very least) tolerate its flaws and failures
I'm not subtweeting any one profession here: at different times and places, this dynamic applies to doctors and lawyers and academics and hairdressers and bureaucrats and pharmacologists. (Basically the only people who are entirely beyond reproach are bloggers).
To me, this is a genuinely difficult problem with no easy answer: experts really do have knowledge that lets them see why things are not as simple as outsiders think; however, to become an expert in a given field means being the kind of person who was willing to put up with that particular field's particular BS for long enough to gain that knowledge.
2025-04-28 17:18:25
Chefs wear a chef's hat. Soldiers wear a beret. BUT WHY?
Please note: this is a topic I have ~0 preexisting knowledge about; I found one reasonable source for each hat then stopped, so ~any information listed here may be wrong.
The excellent Daniel Engber did a New York Times Magazine piece about this in 2014. Apparently the revolution was started by Antonin Carême in 1822.
While working for the British ambassador in Vienna, Carême got the idea to insert a round piece of cardboard inside the floppy cap that was then standard headgear in the kitchen.
“A cook should present as a man in good health,” he explained, “and our regular hat suggests a state of convalescence.”
Insert your own entendre, frankly. Carême provides this helpful comparison:
Note the chef at left is wearing what we would now consider a night-cap. In the long run, a round muslin toque won out, but more in our imaginations than in actual modern kitchens, where I think people just wear hair-nets. Why the tall muslin toque, though? Engber tells us:
This remains a mystery. Some scholars have suggested that the toque derives from the headgear of Ottoman soldiers. A military model does fit with the fact that hat size in the kitchen connotes rank. “Only the highest people in the hierarchy wear the toque, not the prep cooks and the dishwashers."
Insert your own entendre indeed; I prefer friend-of-the-blog S's explanation that if chef's didn't wear such tall hats they'd have no place to hide a racoon.
Look, I just always found it kind of ridiculous that soldiers wear the same iconic hat as artists? To demonstrate this absurdity, please see this image of our blog's mascot, Atticus von Bittendorf, wearing two hats:
I feel like this explanation is not truly satisfying, but it's the best I can find:
Berets have features that make them attractive to the military; they are cheap, easy to make in large numbers, can be manufactured in a wide range of colors encouraging esprit de corps, can be rolled up and stuffed into a pocket or beneath the shirt epaulette without damage, and can be worn with headphones
More satisfyingly but less relevantly, this blog has the distinction of 1) being only about berets, 2) being on blogspot in 2025, 3) having posted seemingly-daily for over 15 years. It's a marketing funnel for this beret vendor, which I wouldn't normally advertise, but honestly look at this range of beret options:
p.s. as a bonus, here's a great article about bishop vs pope hats: the pope is also the bishop of Rome, and if you're an amateur pontiff-spotter you may well be confusing his bishop's hat for a pope hat: https://www.exurbe.com/spot-the-saint-the-four-doctors-saints-hats/