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Some good testimonials for Bob's product 5 months ago: Breakfast cereal is in long-term decline (wsj.com) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37540770 https
by chubot 3y ago
Some good testimonials for Bob's product 5 months ago:
Breakfast cereal is in long-term decline (wsj.com) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37540770 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37540770
This article is great -- I didn't know the back story behind the company, but a few things stand out.
- He changed careers pretty late in life. By his mid-40s, he was managing a J.C. Penney auto shop in Redding, Calif., when he wandered into a library and ran across a book called “John Goffe’s Mill,” by George Woodbury, which chronicled the author’s restoration of a run-down family flour mill
- He was religious, and not in a superficial way. Mr. Moore eventually began feeling the tug of a lifelong dream: to learn to read the Bible in its original languages, including Hebrew and Koine Greek
As a person who was raised without religion, I've been noticing that it can be a major reason why people make food of "irrational" quality.
What I've been seeing in every area of life, including software, is "optimization" of businesses by owners. It's been taken to new heights in the last 10-20 years by private equity.
They buy up working businesses and lower the quality to the amount that the market will bear, and pocket the difference.
It's apparently optimizing profits for the owners, but it's destroying economic value. Multiply that by M businesses in N different industries and you have a declining country.
So if you want to do something interesting and worth remembering, you need a better reason than being "rational". So kudos to Bob for this -- it seems like his life was its own reward.
- kiba 3y agoSo if you want to do something interesting and worth remembering, you need a better reason than being "rational". So kudos to Bob for this -- it seems like his life was its own reward. You're going to need to define what 'rational' is. Optimizing a certain kind of metric beyond all reason is going to destroy whatever economic engine that is currently providing people their livelihood.
- TaylorAlexander 3y agoDoesn’t seem to be true. Bob’s Red Mill seems to be doing fine.
- banannaise 3y agoI believe they are referring to the modern economist's definition of "rational", which is equivalent to "profit-maximizing".
- cogman10 3y ago> Optimizing a certain kind of metric beyond all reason is going to destroy whatever economic engine that is currently providing people their livelihood. I agree. The general trend of optimizing only for shareholder value has destroyed the livelihood of countless workers. Heck, it's destroyed legacy companies like kmart and sears. It's all but killed off manufacturing in the US. And, were the quality better, it'd kill off the jobs of most HN commenters as businesses would love nothing more than to offshore everything to the cheapest location possible. The economy is a giant prisoner's dilemma. It'd be far healthier if wealth was better distributed yet individual companies and shareholders can make a boatload of money by taking shortcuts and keeping things running at barebones levels.
- pimlottc 3y ago> As a person who was raised without religion, I've been noticing that it can be a major reason why people make food of "irrational" quality. I don’t follow, can you explain how religiosity relates to food quality?
- parl_match 3y agoThere's a certain emphasis, by people of a certain type of religiousness, on focusing heavily on the base needs of a person instead of "worldly" desires. I don't mean this in a condescending way, I'm having trouble expressing how it manifests. It's sort of a focus on the gifts God gave us and the way he wants us to live. I'm not religious btw, but I think I understand the mindset.
- hyggetrold 3y agoWell said - I think of Quaker (edit: I meant Shaker) furniture as a great example of this.
- psunavy03 3y agoIn areas that have them, Amish roofers are known for top-quality workmanship, period dot.
- InitialLastName 3y agoAs a Quaker I appreciate the callout, but you probably mean Shaker furniture. The Religious Society of Friends isn't known for their carpentry.
- Rapzid 3y agoKnown for something even better though; banning a certain practice from their society more than a decade before the Constitution was ratified.
- AlbertCory 3y agoSince my kitchen cabinets are "modified Shaker," I appreciate this. There's something about simple design that you can appreciate without being in any way religious. Christopher Alexander tries to get at it.
- nineplay 3y agoI have a friend who is Orthodox Christian and follows a very strict fasting schedule. I disagree with her about many things but I've always found her very thoughtful when it comes to her religion. She says she sees fasting not as a requirement from God but as a gift from God. It is a opportunity to emphasize with those in poverty. It is a way to truly appreciate every meal - saying grace before a meal take on a real significance. And it is an opportunity to be truly thoughtful about the food you are putting into your body - particularly as the fasts are often "no meat" or something else specific. She is also not surprisingly a very good cook and cooks most things from scratch. If she were to start a food company, I'm sure she'd use the same values.
- user3939382 3y ago> She says she sees fasting not as a requirement from God but as a gift from God It's hard to be in prayer all day. If you're hungry however, you are perpetually reminded and thinking of God.
- orenlindsey 3y agoIt also allows you to focus better, undistracted by the next meal.
- malfist 3y agoUndistracted by the next meal, but maybe by a growling belly
- nekasrbenda 3y agoOrthodox Lent is not about fasting, but about abstaining from certain foods (so probably incorrect to call it a "fast"). You are not supposed to go hungry, just be strict on what you consume.
- hindsightbias 3y agoI looked into one of those Trappist Abbey breweries way back. The monks appeared pretty well fed. Brewing is fun, but getting up at 5am and praying all day...
- chubot 3y agoHm I'm glad this story made it to the top. I'll indulge this train of thought some more, since it's something I've been thinking about. (But still in honor of the person who this article is about) Again, growing up without religion, I always wondered what the deal was with rules like "kosher" and "Halal". To me, it seemed like people were following old rules that didn't make sense in the modern world (though thankfully I never really voiced these opinions). Now, you can argue about the details of these rules, but the point is that there actually have to be rules beyond "rationality", as I said. --- The "rational" thing is to adulterate food, and this has been a big problem throughout history. For example, here's a picture of stamped bread from the first century AD in Pompeii - https://ridiculouslyinteresting.com/2013/07/22/preserved-loaf-of-bread-discovered-at-pompeii/ https://ridiculouslyinteresting.com/2013/07/22/preserved-loa... The stamp apparently being required to identify the baker in case of fraud. One way you can get a sense of the incentive to adulterate food is to look at all the colorful punishments for doing so - http://www.theoldfoodie.com/2011/09/bakers-dozen.html http://www.theoldfoodie.com/2011/09/bakers-dozen.html In Vienna, bakers caught selling underweight bread were put in the baeckerschupfen – a sort of cage which was then plunged into the river several times. In Turkey, a bad baker was stretched out on his own kneading table and the bastinado (foot-beating with a stick) was administered. Perhaps the most public and painful punishment was in ancient Egypt, were an offending baker could be nailed by the ear to the door of his shop, where no doubt his customers gave him even more abuse. More - https://musingsonfoodhistory.wordpress.com/2016/01/12/death-in-the-loaf/ https://musingsonfoodhistory.wordpress.com/2016/01/12/death-... A law in Britain - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Making_of_Bread_Act_1757 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Making_of_Bread_Act_1757 --- So the "rational" thing is to adulterate food, just like the "rational" thing is to spray ads all over web content, and add dark patterns to iOS apps. It makes money, in the short term. But the cultures that survived and took over the world had rules beyond what's "rational". Christians, Jews, and Muslims all have extra rules you have to follow with regarding food. You don't really question why, but the act of compliance is a virtue. So now I no longer think the arbitrary rules are so strange. You can argue with the details, the high level bit is that you don't just optimize for your own business. You have a higher duty. --- If a society has 10,000 food producers, and all of them are doing the bare minumum, then eventually the health of the citizens is going to be the bare minimum too. The neighboring clan with stricter rules - and yes MORALS - will overtake them. --- And my point is that we're back in this situation NOW. Corporations have optimized the production of food for profit, while remaining technically legal. America’s packaged food supply is ultra-processed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20551847 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20551847 - https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2019/07/us-packaged-food-supply-is-ultra-processed/ https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2019/07/us-packaged-fo... America exported this problem to countries like Brazil, which started the recent research on ultra-processed foods: https://www.theguardian.com/food/2020/feb/13/how-ultra-processed-food-took-over-your-shopping-basket-brazil-carlos-monteiro https://www.theguardian.com/food/2020/feb/13/how-ultra-proce... Stories on Hacker News - https://hn.algolia.com/?q=ultra+processed+food https://hn.algolia.com/?q=ultra+processed+food (People who don't think this is real have to answer the question of why men and women weigh 30 or 50 pounds more on average than they did in 1960, etc.) --- Similar line of thought with respect to gambling and crypto - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33910537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33910537. A younger me would have thought that gambling is each person's choice. It's a free country. But if you have a society of 10,000 people where 50% of people are playing negative sum games, then pretty soon that society is not competitive anymore. They're not producing anything. The societies that simply banned gambling are the ones that survived. (And even now I don't necessarily agree with banning gambling, just saying there is a a group selection phenomenon there.) Likewise, imposing burdensome and arbitrary rules on food is probably good in the long term. That has to be a bigger reason for doing things other than making money tomorrow. We might want to bring back some of the colorful punishments, rather than letting corporations make the rules. In tech, we have poisoned our own information supply, which is profitable in the short term, but obviously bad in the long term.
- cupcakecommons 3y agoThis seems like a very cynical take of how private equity optimization works, it may be true in some instances, but it hardly universal as you seem to be implying. There is often a tremendous amount of low hanging fruit for businesses run by individuals that is easy to replicate across businesses and industries. Focus areas like implementing basic accounting and administrative systems are often at the core of optimizing a business when you do it professionally. These things almost always add value and are entirely rational from a market perspective.
- pjmorris 3y ago> These things almost always add value and are entirely rational from a market perspective. From the perspective of efficiency for the ownership, yes. However, every laid off staff member still needs to eat, house themselves, and pay their other bills. It seems to me that the long run effect, apart from good or bad intent, is that the people in society who don't have access to capital wind up having to manage at a subsistence level.
- legitster 3y agoRegardless of how you feel about Peter Thiel, everyone should read Zero to One. He eloquently ties together the concepts of entrepreneurialism and contrarianism Real entrepreneurs only go into business because they believe they know something that otherwise efficient markets do not. So that means you have to be a contrarian and believe in secrets or undiscovered principles. Some of the more interesting data points he includes is the decline in cult membership and belief in secrets. We as a society are generating less iconoclasts, so all that's left in business is an efficiency puzzle.
- ponector 3y agoSounds like someone who want to rationalize being a billionaire. Another funny thing is to learn about "principles" of Ray Dalio. Man has a cult but tries to proof otherwise.
- hindsightbias 3y agoCults and conspiracy thinking just went mainstream. Back in the day, conspiracies were kind of unique and interesting and you could talk to a believer about it for hours about all the details and complications. People put a lot of thinking into it. Today, conspiracies are like everything else - as shallow as the first page of google search.
- wolverine876 3y ago> the decline in cult membership Was that written before QAnon, etc.?
- tharmas 3y ago[flagged]
- rib3ye 3y agoThere are at least two ways to optimize: 1. Max profit for a small group of shareholders 2. A cool place to work with people you like. Try explaining #2 to a PE group. [edit: typos]
- caycep 3y agomaybe it's a commodities mindset? vs. other companies who do a Veblen good type of market targeting, i.e. the point where raising price and quality expands the market/market segment (i.e. LVMH, Hermes, to a certain point, Apple)
- kevmo 3y agoI find it really interesting this went from the top comment to the bottom one.
- dang 3y agoWe downweighted it because it veered off topic and generic. That's standard moderation practice.
- kevmo 3y agoThanks for sharing the internal workings. I am top mod on a few large ("top 1% by size") subreddits and am always interested in those sorts of perspectives.
- dang 3y agoI have zero idea of what that would be like! But FWIW downweighting top comments that are generic tangents, or flamey, is probably the biggest thing we ever figured out about thread quality. I just wish it could be automated.