People develop drinking problems for two reasons, they have a genetic predisposition to getting more reward from drinking and/or they have untreated trauma that they are medicating. In my family, my grandfathers war trauma was transferred to his kids, who then transferred it to their kids or dealt with the trauma and didn't.
For the genetic side, people often slide into it by culture/habit. For example, it starts with a drink with friends, then a few times a week with friends, then on your own and with friends, after a few years it turns into every night on your own, then a few each night, then you hide how much you are drinking from loved ones, until you (hopefully) realize that you might have a problem. Bill Barr talked about this last year in his standup, for a good example and an example of how you can get ahead of it if you are self-aware. Many people keep going and end up with the physical addiction.
The trauma side is why I think some people have a real hard time shaking the addiction, and tend to go back. The drinking can also cause you more trauma, making it harder.
I also think there is an education gap. People grow up eating processed food and don't learn to cook. People often try to cook, but online recipes are not really teaching you anything and are often far more work than they need to be or turn out bad, so people think or learn that cooking a meal takes a long time, is a lot of work, and doesn't taste as good. Cooking becomes the exception rather than the norm.
In reality you can have a piece of salmon, with a veggie and side in ~20m with 2m of prep and 2m of cleanup. An online recipe would have you cooking down a sauce, making a complicated side, and use some random ingredient that you need to buy for that one meal.
I guess most online recipes assume you're cooking for "special occasions".
I can buy a bag of frozen assorted veggies and a few pieces of frozen salmon in the store across the street, throw them 15 min into a pan and be done. It's mostly what I feed on.
I think the main problem with online recipes is that there's a lot of stuff that "cooks" and "people who cook" learn that carries over VERY STRONGLY from dish to dish that is just totally absent from online tutorials. Things like what done (but not dried out) chicken looks like, and how to position chicken in a pan so the thicker parts get more heat, and why your chicken went right from "looks plain" to burned with no maillard reaction.
I think foods/culinary courses should be mandatory in high school. I took one as an elective, expecting it to be a blow-off class, but I ended up being shocked by how much I - honor student and all that - didn't know about browning hamburger, much less actual cooking. I ended up taking the subsequent 3 classes in the "foods" line.
For all the effort we put into science education, cooking is applied science we do every day. We should start in elementary school and keep at it through high school, in my opinion.
Food quality and options vary significantly with location in the US. In my city I have a Gucci market that gets super fresh veggies and fruit, along with imported cheeses, fish, very fresh meats, and other low processed food, but at a premium price point. There are also 2 other supermarkets to choose from. If you go an hour away there is one supermarket for the area that is "okay." Go to the next State over and the towns have 1/4 the fruit/veggie options and very limited meat options, all at a premium. The veggies are not fresh, no exotic fruits, and you might not find the cut of meat you are looking for.
In general, chefs, and anyone who works in the kitchen, are severally underpaid for the skill and amount of work the job takes. It's long hours in a hot, cramped, very high stress environment for peanuts. Not to mention the terrible hours. I have a very brief stint in the food industry when I was a kid and it was enough for me to say I would never do it as a career.
Is them being underpaid not a function of buyers not willing to pay more for the goods?
I'm not under the impression that most restaurateurs are "raking it in" staff be damned. Sure, at the ultra high end, yes, but for most restaurants a chef pay is function of the market, right?
The restaurateurs might be raking it if they own the real estate. If you pay rent for your location you are probably scraping by, and whipping your staff to bring in the money for your landlord.
A chef's pay is a function of the market, and that's why everybody is exiting the industry right now. Head chefs and restaurant owners are used to decades of low wages and think it's quite insulting that anybody would dare ask for a better wage. Then they wonder why "nobody wants to work anymore". At the same time, chances of advancing your career are very limited. If you manage to stick around for a few years as a chef, you will already be able to manage your own restaurant, but the salary for that will be just marginally higher. Unless you want to strike it out on your own, and take on massive debt for a business with low margins.
Working in a kitchen is the worst career choice a young person can make. If you have that skill, ambition, passion and drive, you will be much better rewarded in any other sector.
You said: "The restaurateurs might be raking it if they own the real estate. If you pay rent for your location you are probably scraping by..."
He may refer to himself as a "restaurateur" or a "restaurateur who is his own landlord" for social status or tax reasons but I am suggesting that this framing is misleading: if his income is primarily as a result of the real estate he owns then his actual occupation is "landlord".
Non-remunerative avocations like, I don't know, building wooden sailboats, painting, community theater, photography, gardening, raising cattle, or managing a restaurant may be intense and rewarding, but if the expectation is that they will have no marginal impact on income one way or the other then they are more like hobbies.
I thought a new means of breaking out on your own are food trucks. A quick search shows that they often net 6 figures, though I don't know if that includes the salaries of the help.
To me that's a whole different game, since the fact of being in a truck greatly limits the quality and variety of food and service you can offer. But I think it can be a good business, with less costs. The main problem with food trucks is that you can't sell alcoholic beverages, so you'll lose the most important part of your income.
Edit: To add to my previous point: A person who can be a successful food truck entrepreneur would probably make a much better return investing his skill and money into a non-food venture. Food trucks are expensive, for the price you need to pay to get that business going, you could buy the equipment needed to start a more lucrative business.
> Food trucks are expensive, for the price you need to pay to get that business going, you could buy the equipment needed to start a more lucrative business
not really, if the skills of the owner is essential to the business (which is true for a foodtruck). You won't be hiring a chef, you will be doing the work yourself.
I would argue food truck business is less capital intensive than opening the equivalent restaurant.
Yes, I also meant for the food truck owner to do the work himself. Still, it's a lot of money to invest, even if it's much less than opening a restaurant. The owner could invest that money and his skills into another type of business and be better off.
I agree. It's already $60 minimum for two people to eat out in the US. What's it going to be in order for everyone to have "fair" wages? $50 a plate for hamburgers?
This is one of the reasons metal roofs a nice, they reflect heat and you don't need to paint them white, they make special paints for metal roofs that help reflect the heat and also look nice.
One issue is that they don't keep writers and show runners around. Each season gets new writers so any magic there was in season one of lost in season two. The tone is the same but you lose something when you bring on me people. The do this because of the lag between seasons and the fact that they don't hire on writers, but rather contract them on a per season basis.
I was literally just talking to a SPAC CEO last weekend that was in a deal with Goldman that got dropped by them. Apparently, there are regulations coming down from the SEC and Goldman didn't want to deal with them and/or the regulations changed the profit calculus.
I suspect that similar to how the "market" has various things "priced in", larger financial firms want to stay ahead of regulation and essentially change their business models around ahead of regulations.
I think they all operate on the principle of being first for everything is more profitable, including exiting poor investments.
The best way to think of "priced in" when you are reading something that someone else wrote is to replace those two words with "I don't know". Nothing is priced in. Everything is priced in. When someone thinks of an idea, by virtue of sharing that idea it's deemed to be "priced in".
It’s really not. “It’s priced in” is just religion at this point and it’s really just surface level useless banter. The market is random and softly guided by macroeconomic forces. Interest rates go up and then the share price of Google goes up? Priced in. They go down and the share price goes up? Priced in. Company has a bad quarterly? Already pride in by the nefarious “market”. Etc. Recognizing things like that is a good first step toward having a coherent investment thesis.
> rates go up and then the share price of Google goes up? Priced in.
Google is profitable and trading at a below-market multiple. It's a poor rates play.
Rates directly influence broad-market multiples, which Google will track, but "market goes down and Google goes up...priced in" isn't an intelligent thing to say.
> Rates directly influence broad-market multiples, which Google will track, but "market goes down and Google goes up...priced in" isn't an intelligent thing to say.
Right.. which is why people should ignore "priced in" comments and instead read them as "I don't know what I'm talking about whatsoever".
There's no such thing as "priced in" - it's a contradiction and only used by people who are religiously inclined to talk about events that are random and don't have an explanation. If someone says "oh that was priced in" that's an extremely clear signal that they do not know what they are talking about.
> Google is profitable and trading at a below-market multiple. It's a poor rates play.
Did you intentionally miss the point or were you genuinely confused about what the discussion was about? It's very clear that I was not providing any sort of analysis about Google and interest rates rising (or lowering) and was talking about how people just say any action is "priced in" once it occurs.
"Priced in" is not explanatory, it is predictive and the prediction is that you cannot consistently beat the market (where you are a generic smart person with no particular reason to have an edge, like most HN commenters).
Can someone explain Goldman's role? What are they underwriting? SPAC's merge with companies with capital that SPAC's already have collected. Was Goldman underwriting the formation of new SPACs when those SPACs are initially collecting money?
> Was Goldman underwriting the formation of new SPACs when those SPACs are initially collecting money?
SPACs are chock full of fees to Wall Street.
When the SPAC goes public, it pays an IPO fee. The bank, having to comply with fewer regulations than in a traditional IPO, makes a healthy profit. When the SPAC negotiates a merger it pays M&A fees. When shareholders are presented with the merger and asked to vote that comes with a fee. If there is a PIPE, there are, of course, more fees.
Later, when the sponsors sell their stock, there will be brokerage fees for the block trade. And I assume, in the final stage of a SPAC’s lifecycle, there will be de-listing, liquidation and/or distressed debt fees.
Only if there is too much leverage and an poor accounting of who owns what
The Federal Reserve bought the shitty mortgage backed securities because they werent that shitty, the banks just had too many of them relative
to the size of their own assets.
Even of subprime mortgages and adjustible apr mortgages only ~7% went into default by 2008-2009
A portfolio of mortgages where 93% are going to pay vastly more interest to you than the home is worth and you still have the home if they really default? Thats a good portfolio
The banks issue at the time was that they were leveraged up 50x, and they didnt even realize they were levered up that much
so a single month of 7% defaulting could bankrupt them
While the fed has an infinite sized portfolio without leverage, and bought all the claims and let them just play out which they have continued to do. Theyre profitable, correctly performing investments.
More transparent accounting fixes the problem with re-collateralized re-securitized assets
Given the cash burn of the classic 2021 SPAC, if they're not riddled with debt yet they may well be as soon as the stock market ATM stops spitting money (which might be about now).
Which reminds me OP omitted dilution/share issuance as a mechanism for banker fees.
> Underwriting fees on SPACs are less than traditional IPO as it is easier to get done
True, but the margins are wider. Most of the documents are boiler plate. The same investors were buying them in comparable chunks from deal to deal. All this before the boatload of the other fees I mentioned.
SPACs themselves need to float before they can make an acquisition. The investment bank provides the primary markets support for this, sets up a syndicate, and markets the spac to the institutional investor community.
There may be a level of underwriting going on also, as is the case with a rights issue or IPO, but it's probably more the marketing and access to the bank's client base that the spac benefits from.
For the genetic side, people often slide into it by culture/habit. For example, it starts with a drink with friends, then a few times a week with friends, then on your own and with friends, after a few years it turns into every night on your own, then a few each night, then you hide how much you are drinking from loved ones, until you (hopefully) realize that you might have a problem. Bill Barr talked about this last year in his standup, for a good example and an example of how you can get ahead of it if you are self-aware. Many people keep going and end up with the physical addiction.
The trauma side is why I think some people have a real hard time shaking the addiction, and tend to go back. The drinking can also cause you more trauma, making it harder.