morganth

Honestly? Just their basic tacos. Maybe the Doritos version if they still have those. But just get a couple of the hard tacos with some Fire sauce. If you like those, you may like other things on the menu; if you don’t, you probably won’t like any of it. They’re Taco Bell distilled.

This is an obnoxious answer, but Gordon Ramsay yells so much about everyone else getting Beef Wellington wrong, I’d like to have his Beef Wellington, but made by him under the exact same conditions where the contestants got it wrong, with no special privileges.

See, I thought it was mildly infuriating because the images aren’t “many types of airplanes”, they’re only a few types of airplanes repeated at different sizes or different angles.

I feel like the cafeteria is the best scenario, because there isn’t an imbalance of needs like this. Pay a flat fee per year and get a lunch every day, or every work day, or whatever. Economy of scale would mean that it would save the subscribers money.

…huh, this could actually work. The one downside is that people nowadays expect variety in their food and cafeteria food tends to be samey. But if you could solve that, this is a good idea.

Here’s the problem. Let’s say you have a doctor club, where everyone pays the same amount regardless of how often they use the doctor. For people who need the doctor a lot, that’s great. They pay a lot less than they would if they had to pay per visit. For people who just need one checkup a year, they end up paying a lot more than if they just paid for their annual checkup. And they would quickly figure that out, and drop out of the program.

So now the people who are all basically healthy aren’t in your pool anymore. They’re paying for their annual checkup at another doctor. So only the people who need the doctor a lot are paying in. So you have to hire more doctors and increase the cost of the program, because everyone who is in it needs a lot of doctor time.

But then the same thing happens again. People who need more visits a year are getting more out of the program than they are paying in, and people who need fewer visits a year are getting less than they are paying. So the people who need the fewest doctor visits drop out. And so on as the cycle repeats.

You get the idea. There’s a game theory term for this that I am forgetting, but the result is spiraling costs and more dropouts. This is why the ACA (for you non-Americans, that’s the Affordable Care Act, which was attempting to reduce US healthcare costs) had a health insurance mandate. Requiring everyone to be part of the program is the only way to make something like this work.

They’ll probably bring a sad cup of water that used to be boiling and a Lipton tea bag. NYC, USA.

I occasionally take the bus from NYC to a town in the Finger Lakes, and this is so true. I have been through so many towns that check off every one of these boxes.