IME with government contracting there is so much tedious oversight and paperwork that the cost is magnified by a factor of about three. There needs to be a better way of making sure the government is getting what it paid for.
I'm sure it's right that we all see this through the lens we want to, but I'd lay a lot of blame on the hollowing out of the public sector and the entrusting of even basic planning and oversight functions to consultants.
2 sounds right to me. That's definitely what happened in a recent local fiasco (Green Line extension). Outsourcing oversight is a recipe for disaster.
I wonder how much of it because we have a fuckton of different governments at all levels. For example, there are 130 municipalities in this county, plus the county government.
5: Although we're a tremendous outlier there--IIRC we have the second highest number of incorporated municipalities per county in the nation, after Cook County.
And we have really bad roads. The buses aren't bad, but the trains are comically narrow.
Surely we can leverage public private partnerships to fix the problem!
This is a weird situation where there's obviously a huge problem, but it seems really non-obvious what exactly the problem is. NYC tunnel prices are just so wildly out of line, but I don't understand at all what makes NYC different from London.).
(As opposed to say healthcare, where a magic wand for changing policy could easily solve many of the problems: single-payer with negotiating authority, cheaper and shorter doctor education, more doctors but lower doctor compensation, etc. Rural care would still make US care more expensive than comparable countries, but nowhere near the current magnitude.)
Hm. Local governments per 100,000.
US: 29
CA: 12
NY: 18
IL: 54
PA: 38
FL: 9
MA: 13
MN: 68
MT: 126
OH: 33
OR: 40
TX: 20
WI: 55
ND: 384 (highest)
HI: 2 (lowest excl. DC)
healthcare, where a magic wand for changing policy could easily solve many of the problems
Could, but not necessarily would. Everyone starts from a baseline. Single-payer in the US would not retroactively impose reasonable spending growth limitations we failed to achieve over the past 50 years.
Single-payer in the US would not retroactively impose reasonable spending growth limitations we failed to achieve over the past 50 years.
Nationalization of the pharmaceutical industry would go a long way.
Could we do that in such a way that they still give me money?
How does Canada compare? There's supposed to be a train coming to my in-laws city 2 hours from Toronto, and I don't think it will ever get there.
The 401 (the enormous toll road in Toronto) was privatized by Liberals, and it's now crazy expensive. Those same Liberals at the provincial level in Ontario want to privatize Hydro-electric.
Canada seems to get a lot right, but it's not exactly Barcelona.
We've still got a ways to go to figure out exactly what the problem is here. For example, the Romans built roads that are still in daily use in Europe 2000-plus years later. But we can't build one that can go 20 years without needing to be resurfaced. What's the real difference? Maybe that the Romans used slave labor?
1 et seq are presumably right, but the US is even worse at private home construction. the average Japanese construction worker currently produces about 37 per cent more new housing than the average American construction worker.
(FT Alphaville. Free, but they make you register).
9: I think a lot of the problems are actually the same as with healthcare, substituting "engineers" for "doctors."
Don't we have bigger houses, that is.
The haves do have bigger houses than the have-nots, it's true.
17: I'd imagine needing it to be smooth enough to drive cars over at speed without them coming apart is a major added constraint.
The major constraint is that a semi-truck weights much more than a Roman farm cart.
As usual, Moby is right. Japan:
The average number of rooms per unit of housing was 4.77, the average total floor area was 94.85 square meters (28.69 tsubo; 1,021.0 sq ft) and the average number of people per room was 0.56.USA:
floor space per capita (from approximately 400 to 800 square feetI make that 35m^2/person in Japan, 72.2m^2/person in the US.
But of course that's where shit gets sticky, because building a smaller house won't necessarily be easier or more efficient than building a bigger one. And if the Japanese houses tend to be on smaller lots, and more likely to be more than one floor (both of which I think are true. Ume?), then Japanese construction would be substantially more difficult.
Don't know how much of a difference it makes, but I know Japanese houses are usually built with the floors at least 50cm off the ground to be ready for floods.
I have a not-well-founded belief that Japanese houses are built to deprecate very quickly, or at least more so than in America.
It's true! They insult you as soon as you walk in.
From the first link (quoting someone else):
it's hard to believe that countries such as France would be so willing to pave over their natural beauty and slaughter endangered species that their trains would cost only half as much as America's as a result
I've gotten the impression that European countries, at least in the western part, have a different conception of nature from the US, probably owing to a longer history of development basically everywhere. This doesn't translate into paving over everything, but I bet the lines are drawn differently than in the US when it comes to environmental review.
What's the status of endangered species in Europe anyway? Are they reintroductions of species hunted to local extinction or what?
But yes, Japanese houses are built on the assumption they'll be demolished within 30 years or so.
I've read that many Japanese houses don't have central heat, I guess because it's warmer. That's got to be a big savings, but not really possible in most of the U.S.
31: I don't think that's the point the person speaking was making.
30: I meant that the houses declare themselves obsolete, obvsly. Presumably via the toilet speakers.
34: I read recently that the EPA set up cameras to monitor the speed of construction trucks working on the SFO airport BART extension because protected species are in the area and might cross the roads. Do they do that in France?
On the other hand, Europe has antiquities laws that probably make it difficult to do tunnel-based construction. An Italian friend was telling me a story about someone keeping quiet about stuff they found digging a basement expansion somewhere in Rome because they didn't want to trigger an archaeological review.
The heterogeneity of construction projects makes it hard to identify and weight these influences, but Teicholz cites the following possibilities:- Unique work products built by varying teams under varying site, regulatory and weather conditions
- A procurement system based on competitive rather than collaborative teams
- Poor use of data based largely on paper documents produced by a highly fragmented team
- An economic environment characterized by declining real labor prices
- An industry characterized by many very small firms that perform a significant percent of the work
- An industry where significant output consists of remodel and renovation of existing facilities as opposed to new work
The stuff later on in the article about project management/design/consultants seems pretty convincing. Of course, in our delightful political system, evidence that the government isn't able to do effective planning and oversight often gets turned into reasons for the government to do less planning and oversight.
It's pretty remarkable how consistent the construction costs are for underground rail in non-English speaking countries. I blame the language.
It would make more sense to blame the common law; but apparently eminent domain is weaker in Japan, so that's not enough. NIMBYism? Suburbia is apparently very similar across the Anglosphere.
But Japanese law is based on Prussian,* which is Napoleonic,* which is shared by pretty much all non-Anglo developed countries.*
*I think.
It would be interesting if these costs were somehow an artifact of the underlying legal system.
It would be nice if we had access to people with relevant knowledge. Lawyers, or architects, for instance.
I'm going to outsource my remaining comments on this thread, if I can get funds allocated for it in the next budget.
fake outsourcer @31
"I've gotten the impression that European countries, at least in the western part, have a different conception of nature from the US, probably owing to a longer history of development basically everywhere. This doesn't translate into paving over everything, but I bet the lines are drawn differently than in the US when it comes to environmental review."
Different conception of wilderness, maybe, but probably not nature. The German Alps, for example, have paths to a fare thee well plus what they call huts but you and I would probably call small restaurants, all most conveniently located. So there's plenty of nature, but basically nothing that would count as wilderness.
German land-use regulations, however, are fierce. They're the reason all of those cute villages and small towns turn instantly into picturesque fields and woods.
"What's the status of endangered species in Europe anyway? Are they reintroductions of species hunted to local extinction or what?"
I would expect that there are EU guidelines on both species and habitat protection, though I have not looked into this. Probably more developed legal framework, almost certainly more developed cultural attitudes in Western Europe than in Central and Eastern Europe. For larger threatened/endangered species, changing patterns in human habitation will be having the greatest effects. As an example, the largest number of wolf sightings in Germany have happened in parts of the former East Germany where human populations have dropped by half or more since 1989. The wolves come over from Poland, where I presume that the Bialowieza Forest and perhaps the High Tatry provided habitats through the centuries.
The European bison was hunted to extinction in the wild (World War I was the last straw), but was conserved in zoos and has been reintroduced in the wild since 1951. There are free-ranging herds in about a dozen countries, with the largest in a preserve on the Poland Belarus border.
10 is pretty amazing.
The local government district I live in has 300,000 people in it. And that's the lowest level of government. The one I grew up in in Scotland, which is a mix of rural and middle sized urban towns, was 150,000.
So the average number of local governments per 100,000 is less than 1.
10 struck me too. I remember having the Bosnian governmental system explained to me and thinking "no wonder this place is a mess". They have:
a national government, with
-- a three-person rotating presidency
-- a prime minister and cabinet
-- a bicameral parliament
two sub-national entities, the Federation and the Klingon EmpireRepublika Srpska, and the jointly administered Condominium District of Brcko
The Federation has:
-- a president
-- two vice-presidents
-- a bicameral parliament
-- a prime minister and cabinet
-- a constitutional court
The RS also has
-- a president
-- a prime minister
-- a unicameral parliament
-- a constitutional court
And the Federation is further divided into ten cantons, each of which has
-- a prime minister and cabinet
-- a unicameral assembly
And the cantons (like the RS) are further divided into municipalities, a total of 143, each of which has its own local government.
And the entire bloody country only has three and a half million people, most of whom, I can only assume, work as cabinet ministers.
But I think ttaM is underestimating the number of local governments in the UK. London is a bit different, but elsewhere, especially outside the cities, you might live in a parish (which could be very small), within a district, within a county, within a region of England.
Quick count gives, for England, 10,449 parishes, 269 districts and boroughs, 33 counties, 55 unitary authorities, the GLA, the Isles of Scilly, the City of London Corporation, nine combined authorities and nine regions. So that's 10,827 governments for 55 million people, or 19 governments per 100,000 people. Below the US average, but not that far below.
re: 50
I am forgetting parish councils, since I basically don't ever remember they exist.
London: doesn't have any.
Scotland: doesn't have any.
And when I lived in Oxfordshire, I don't recall any kind of interaction with the parish at all, even though (googling now), there was one.
49: oh, I forgot to mention that there is an unelected Austrian bloke called Martin who can overrule any part of that government, including court verdicts, at will.
London: doesn't have any.
Scotland: doesn't have any.
These loom large in my head as basically, 'the civilised world', or 'the bit of the UK that's not orcs/Tories'.*
* grossly unfair to the 'North' but I've never lived there.
51: Scotland has community councils, apparently, which would probably count.
49: I conclude that Bosnia will be a global leader in finance and precision manufacturing c.2094.
re: 54
I though Scotland was all unitary. I had no idea those even existed.
Do parish councils have any meaningful powers? I used to live in a place with parishes, and I don't recall the local one ever doing anything other than putting on events at the village hall. Looking at Wikipedia, they mostly seem to be things like providing public toilets. They can't even do streetlights without the permission of higher government.
Parish Councils in Britain have effectively no infrastructure budget. They don't, for example, levy any taxes. To the extend that they do, it's to decide what kind of hedgerow to plant at the top end of Letsby Avenue.
Significant projects (outside London) in England are funded and managed either Central Government or District/Metropolitan Borough, which are equivalent levels of government and are "the Council" for practical purposes. Presumably in the other countries the devolved governments can do something. This will change if the Tories' dream of devolving financial responsibilities to entities like Greater Manchester and West Midlands ever takes off, but it hasn't yet.
The main central infrastructure project currently in the pipeline is HS2, a high speed rail link between London and the northern cities. This is already a nightmare, but for political rather than economic reasons, because ground hasn't been broken yet. If nobody has the sense to cancel it, expect overspend in the region of 100%.
Local government oversight is as good as the local government officers responsible, so it varies from perfectly competent to "somebody should go to prison but probably won't". Understandably the best people usually fuck off into central government or the private sector within a few years. Political decisions at local level can make bad worse: in Sheffield the council approved a £2bn (mostly EU money) contract for road improvement with no provision for oversight at all.
I don't know that this is the answer, or really that it's a factor at alll -- I don't have a clear sense of what things are like in other countries. But I have a vague impression that we are really unusually litigation-happy: that decisions that in other countries are made by bureaucrats and tend to stick, in the US are very likely to take a several year detour through the courts, at which point they get decided by a random confused layperson (nothing against judges, but they don't know much specific.)
Like, environmental review wouldn't be so much of an obstacle if it were just an agency saying Yes/Absolutely no/Yes but you have to do it differently. The obstacle is that however the review is done, the party who's unhappy about the outcome gets to put the project on hold for a few years while the courts decide if it was done right, and that happens almost literally every time there's any disagreement about a project.
I don't understand exactly what should be done about this; it's the system I've always worked in, so it's hard to figure how to change it for the better without trampling people's rights. But it is really expensive and slow, and I don't think it's like that everywhere.
Britain has reintroduced red kites extremely successfully, and is currently trying with European beavers, along with most of the rest of the continent, as they were close to extinction. There is some discussion of a limited reintroduction of grey wolves, which were hunted to extinction in the 16th century, but there's a lot of resistance and I don't expect to see it in my lifetime.
The main central infrastructure project currently in the pipeline is HS2, a high speed rail link between London and the northern cities.
I'd be interested to see a procurement efficiency comparison between HS2 and, say, the California high speed rail projects. Certainly HS2 is going to cost overrun massively, at least compared to pre-contract forecasts. But it has very different route constraints and political considerations (eg this Meadowhall kerfuffle).
57 was me.
re: 60
That isn't that uncommon here. A friend's boyfriend is an environmental consultant, who works on planning etc for things like wind-farms. He's about 5 years in on one project, and it goes to a very high court indeed, soon. I don't think they expect to see anything working within 10 years of the project start.
Which may explain why UK costs are closer to US costs.
Also, it seems like the common denominator between countries that are crap and expensive at major infrastructure is the post-1970s neoliberal gutting and ripping off of fucking everything.*
* you can tell I'm an economist.**
** totally not.
You can certainly draw pretty direct inferences in certain cases. Eg the London Underground PPP, whose sole rational justification was to provide for a degree of budgetary certainty over a long enough timeframe to make sensible investment and maintenance decisions. And so, solely to ward off against arbitrary cuts, they constructed this massively expensive and inefficient contractual edifice, spending £500m on lawyers and consultants in the process, only to have to pull it apart at taxpayers' expense within a decade because it didn't work and at least on the Metronet side there was zero incentive to do anything efficiently.
Obviously the actual justification was Blair keeping the Underground out of Livingstone's hands, but I guess that falls under neoliberal fucking of everything too.
The wolves come over from Poland
The wolves hunt their natural prey, Polish plumbers, and the balance could have been restored without Brexit.
The wolves are very aggressive because of all the lead contamination.
You were supposed to make a joke about PVC.
Possibly relevant: In Cambridge, there is such a thing as too much pizza
The saga of a pizza place trying to move into a currently unoccupied storefront in Cambridge (might be paywalled). Excerpt:
Harvard Square already has plenty of pizza, board chairman Constantine Alexander declared, and though a majority of the board signed off on &pizza's plans, approval required a four-vote supermajority. Citing the existence of five supposedly similar pizza joints in the area, as well as concerns about traffic congestion, a potential "change in established neighborhood character," and even the color of the restaurant's proposed signage, Alexander and cochair Brendan Sullivan dissented.
This may be a classic example of bikeshedding, but seriously, the color of the signage? Traffic congestion? Change neighborhood character? One wonders if these people even live in Cambridge.
I don't know. Is there a university nearby?
the common denominator between countries that are crap and expensive at major infrastructure is the post-1970s neoliberal gutting and ripping off of fucking everything.*
I would kind of go along with this, actually. And you see it in high-end defence procurement as well, which is pretty similar inasmuch as it involves constructing very small numbers of very expensive custom-made things like aircraft carriers.
If you think about what would be required for a project (any project in which some public sector customer employs a private sector contractor to build or do a thing) to be run well, cheaply and on time, it would be things like:
1. the person in charge on the customer side is experienced and competent at running major projects
2. they are going to stay there until it's built
3. the spec and the size of the order are agreed on in advance and won't change
4. there is clear accountability for both the customer and the contractor
Now, 1 and 2 generally aren't true. And because 2 isn't true, 1, 3 and 4 aren't true - how's he going to get any experience if he gets moved on to another job? When the new chap comes in, he'll probably change the spec. Because 3 isn't true, 4 is even more not true because when it's late or over budget, the customer and the contractor just point fingers at each other. Also because 1 isn't true, 4 is really not even remotely true. Because all this means that projects are late, that in turn makes 3 even more likely to be not true, because there's more time for needs and budgets to change. And because all this means that projects generally overrun budgets, 4 is even less true because we're just used to overruns.
And the solution is, of course, to _bring project management responsibility back in-house_. And if that means the civil service recruiting vast numbers of highly-paid civil engineers and senior contractors as permanent employees (NOT as short-term contractors), so be it - it'll pay for itself if it cuts even 10% of typical cost overruns.
I wonder if part of the problem is that people only want to pay the marginal cost for effort, not the fixed* costs. For example, there are plenty of jobs that I can do in about 15 minutes that would take a few hours or days for somebody who hasn't been on this same job for ten years. If your estimate of how much some bit of code should cost is based on me replying to your email in an hour, you're going to be very disappointed about how much this kind of work costs when the person who has paid for me to get that ten years of experience isn't telling me do respond to your queries.
* That's not the right word, I think. I've been forgetting economics terms.
73 hits the nail squarely on the head.
Also, if you outsource your PM, then (assuming that you have any in house oversight, which is probably reasonable if you're talking aircraft carriers, but not necessarily light rail bridges) you create another needless single point of failure because you have to build in an assumption of good communication and mutual comprehension between your contractor's PMs and your in-house monitoring team. Which is not to suggest that projects start with these people at cross purposes, but politics and budgets can bring it about alarmingly quickly.
10 et seq: I wonder how much suburbia is to blame here. From this paper (PDF) cited in 38 above, (which I'm not equipped to evaluate):
Larger cities have lower housing productivity, much of which seems attributable to greater regulation. These regulatory costs are, at best, weakly associated with a higher quality of life for residents. Thus, land-use regulations appear to raise housing prices more by restricting supply than by increasing demand. On net, the typical land-use regulation reduces well-being by making housing less affordable.They appear to take their data from the US, based on Combined Statistical Areas, which AIUI are cities defined broadly, thus including all their sprawl, and therefore all the hundreds of petty jurisdictions writing at least some of those regulations. I'd love to hear from JRoth on all this.
On net, land-use regulations that make housing less affordable are working exactly as intended. For example, you can't legally say you don't want to allow anybody making less than $100k/year to live in your area. However, you can require a 2 acre lot and a 3,000 square foot house which make it impossible for anybody without that income to live there.
You can also block any kind of public transit to make sure that nobody who can't afford a car for every member of the household can live there.
After Trump gets a few more Supreme Court judges, maybe they'll just go back to developments with covenants that say you can only sell your house to white people.
77-9: Yes. I just read Crabgrass Frontier (rec Thorn) and that's making me wonder specifically about the government fragmentation thing. Jackson says suburbs are basically unique to the Anglosphere, but only goes into the US. I think Anglo suburbs happened mostly because those countries got richer earlier, but maybe there's other stuff, like relative ease of forming local governments, or suing people, or whatever, that multiplied the effect.
That list includes entities that aren't really governments at all. I represent an irrigation district for various matters. It's not really very different from a ditch company, for most purposes, but it's counted there. I had a case a couple years ago representing citizens of a town trying to withdraw from a hospital district (because the hospital is located in the county seat, farther away than a large city with a better hospital). It's government, sort of, but not really.
The full chart, if you click through, tells the story: we have 125.9 "governments" per 100k, but only 18.2 "general purpose governments." That's still a lot, but with 1 million people spread over an area the size of Germany, you're going to have to have a higher ratio than small dense places like the UK.
I've long thought you could consolidate our 56 counties down to 10 or so, but while that's going to create some efficiencies, I'm not sure it'd make a material difference for infrastructure purposes.
England has the advantage of a more or less unitary set of laws, with at least theoretical deliberations what the different levels of government are responsible for. When we replaced the big bridge here, the design needed buy-in from federal and state transportation departments, federal and state fish/wildlife, cities on both sides of the bay, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, the EPA, Army Corps of Engineers, Navy, Coast Guard, Bay Conservation and Development Commission, National Marine Fisheries Service, State Lands Commission, State Historical Preservation Office, and Bay Water Quality Control Board. And then when they all came to an agreement Mayor Brown joined up with the Navy to try to make an end run around it!
I don't think it's just regulations and administrative hurdles. It the huge misallocation. You have concentrations of people without the ability to pay taxes and large needs for public goods and infrastructure. A relatively modest amount of public spending can produce huge quality of life gains (like water without lead or something). And you have people with the ability to pay taxes using that income to move out into farmland in order to build a house somewhere that they don't need to concern themselves with the former group. The huge infrastructure costs that allow that type of movement don't show up in the spreadsheets of the people moving to the exurbs because of very large federal subsidies for the types of roads that move people into and out of cities.
83: Comity, and Jackson talks about all those things too. I'm just thinking more narrowly about the possible causes of overhead costs.
And it was once the norm for cities to annex in concert with development so they stayed coherent economic units... right until to the era of Black migration to the cities. Funny about that.
I don't know anything about those. I guess my own "indirects" are 50% of costs. That seems high, but that's because most funders don't pay them at all.
86 to 84.
85: In Pittsburgh, that stopped well before black migration picked up. The merger with what was then the separate city of Allegheny was brutal.
But, to take a common example most people know about, Lincoln chomps up a few hundred acres of farmland every year in a reasonably well-controlled plan to keep the city growing at a steady rate that matches job growth.
49: Amusingly, the multiple layers of government and ancient enmities means that they can't even come up with a name for one of their cantons.
multiple layers of government and ancient enmities
"Ancient" in this case meaning "since the early 1990s", remember. In pre-breakup Bosnia, intermarriage between ethnic groups occurred at a higher rate than you would expect from random sorting.
80: Actually, I think 78 is something that distinguishes UK suburbs from American ones (can't really speak to the rest of the Anglosphere). Not that there isn't massive nimbyism and conflict between city and suburbs over public transit, but generally speaking the conflict is that efforts to improve city transit are thwarted by suburban governments/politicians, who fear it will jeopardise their transit (eg more stops on commuter rail) or otherwise consume budget. When the Manchester Metrolink was built, they started by linking some of the poshest suburbs. And UK suburbs often push for transit to come to them. That said, if comes at the expense of cars, eg with the West London Tram, then that's another matter.
it seems like the common denominator between countries that are crap and expensive at major infrastructure is the post-1970s neoliberal gutting and ripping off of fucking everything
Belatedly, this shows US construction productivity stagnating from 1964, so there's other stuff going on too.
72 is good.
But, I think:
3. the spec and the size of the order are agreed on in advance and won't change
is unrealistic unless the order in question is a completely known quantity.
The problem with 3 is a big part of historic origin of the various software development methodologies/project management-styles.*
* cults
80.: Wooooo! Tonight I'm starting a class mostly on Habermas and I'm afraid I'll mostly just badly paraphrase Crabgrass Frontier, which is relevant to everything. (I probably won't complain that I feel guilty about not knowing German because probably my classmates won't all have that in addition to Greek, Latin, and French, so I don't want THEM to feel bad. But I do.)
Having read Habermas was not entirely unrelated to my lack of finishing graduate school. Or my rants on Germans.
The class is at a distillery, Moby. You'd still manage to have fun.
"Riff Distilling" seems like it should be in the urban dictionary for something really obscene.
I'm being paid $250 not to go drinking tonight. Stupid neoliberalism.
106: It was good! I talked probably more than anyone else, but it was appropriate. I'm not over the childhood thing of fine if no one else will answer the question I suppose I can, apparently. More women than men, more beards gab not among the latter. One person I already knew and I've figured out connections to a few more. It's a good distraction and feels good to be thinking at least a little.
||
More evidence for my hypothesis that the defining characteristic of American popular cuisine is "slap some cheese on it".
It's worth pausing to note how serious a paradigm change Taco Bell credits DMI with causing: The company's innovation team once regarded cheese and sour cream as mere garnishes. Now, dairy is often the focal point. Cheese use at the chain has increased 22 percent since the beginning of the DMI partnership. "Beef and cheese are the most important ingredients to our consumers," Matthews says. "But really, cheese." For proof, consult a menu. Eight items currently have the word "cheese" or "cheesy" in their name, vs. three with "steak" or "beef." Breakfast items get a fancy cheddar shred; tacos get a three-cheese blend. Most of the chain's 7,000 U.S. locations also carry nacho cheese sauce and a spicy queso dip--the first in the company's 55-year history--introduced to great fanfare last November.
38% of all items on Dunkin' Donuts menus have a variant of cheese in the name. A donut and coffee shop.
|>
Cheese is the best food ever. I could be a vegetarian who eats dairy far more easily that I could give up dairy but still eat meat.
Just don't melt cheese on apple pie and give it to me.
On second thought, go ahead. I'll just eat the pie without the top crust.
I had a toasted teacake(Do Americans have teacakes?) with melted strong cheddar on it for breakfast today. Food of the gods.
113: This American has not had a toasted teacake. Would have been nice if you saved me a bite.
I could pretty happily never eat cheese again.* I like it just fine, and a nice piece of cheese on a cracker, or whatever, is great. But ... it'd be about 200th down the list of foods I wouldn't want to give up. I regularly go weeks without cheese, months even. I bought some last week for the first time in 3 or 4 months.
* one of the ironies of being a fat person, is that I don't actually like really fatty or heavy foods very much, and apart from milk in coffee, I don't eat much dairy.
I could pretty happily never eat cheese again.* I like it just fine, and a nice piece of cheese on a cracker, or whatever, is great. But ... it'd be about 200th down the list of foods I wouldn't want to give up. I regularly go weeks without cheese, months even.
Same. I'd certainly give up cheese ahead of almost any meat, or any other dairy. It's rare that I go months without cheese, though. I have raclette about once a month.
Oddly enough, I'd give up almost any other main source of protein before cheese- meat, fish, beans are OK, but... And yet I could do without any other form of dairy. Milk just bores me, cream is OK with fruit but dispensable, yoghurt etc. I quite like but I don't think I could go a week without hard or blue cheese.
Huh, I associate cheese more strongly with European cuisine than American. Maybe because yinz have better cheeses than us.
I don't drink milk, except in coffee. Cheese and butter are the essentials.
I gave up meat about 20 years ago and don't miss it but I could never give up cheese.
I said it already: Moby is always right.
I don't eat huge amounts of meat. I eat it regularly, but it tends to be relatively small quantities most of the time, cooked in a meal -- some bacon in a sauce, or chicken in a curry with a load of veg/chickpeas -- rather than the central focus of the meal. But I'd really struggle to stop.
I mostly grew up vegan, too, so it's not because I can't envisage a life without meat. It'd just be very high up my list of classes of foods I'd miss if I didn't have them.
I've seen what Scotland does to meat.
re: 123
Heh.
That's what poor Scottish people do to meat. Rich (or foody) Scottish people have access to all the grass fed beef and venison of Halford's wildest fantasies.
I was there in the early 90s and try to find meals that cost about two pounds or so.
To put it another way, I have no idea what rich/foody Scottish people have access to. I've just been in a chippy and figured sausage and chips is much cheaper than fish and chips, so I should try it. Don't do that. (To be fair to Scotland, that was true in England also.)
re: 126
Haggis and chips is a much nicer meal. Not just saying that out of national pride, but deep-fried chip-shop haggis is a lot better than the sausage equivalent.
But yeah, chip-shop sausage is horrible 99 times out of a hundred.
Mince pies* are usually really greasy but also nicer than sausage most of the time.
* Scottish variety - made with hot water crust pastry and lamb/mutton.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotch_pie
The steak and kidney pies started to worry me, not because I was eating kidney, but because I couldn't tell which bits were kidney and which were steak.
Have I mentioned that Moby is always right?
Huh, I associate cheese more strongly with European cuisine than American. Maybe because yinz have better cheeses than us.
Europeans eat more cheese, but outside of American imports and a handful of specific dishes*, they generally eat it as cheese in its own right. My hypothesis (as first expounded here about five years ago) is that Americans are far, far more likely to slather cheese on top of arbitrary dishes, or be attracted to inherently cheesy dishes like pizza.
I guess Italy is a bit of an outlier, but even there, a sprinkling of parmesan is qualitatively and quantitatively different from covering something in a thick layer of nacho cheese.
*eg the aforementioned raclette, tartiflette.
Isn't "The Cheese Stands Alone!" an American song?
Based on m grandma's pizza, cheese (except for the sprinkling of Parmesan) isn't inherent in even that.
132: Grandma Hick was ahead of her time. You haven't lived until you've shared a cheeseless pizza from Pizza Hut with a bunch of vegans from Farm Sanctuary.
Her first language was some Sicilian dialect.
Also, couldn't you have at least gotten Donato's?
135: This was in upstate New York in the early 1990s.
Sometimes I go most of a day without eating cheese. But not most days.
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Nate Silver tries to imagine what things would look like if Clinton had narrowly won the election. It's well done, depressing, and imagines a presidency which is as frustrating, and divisive as the campaign was, only without the possibility of victory at the end*.
* It fits the ethos of fivethirtyeight to attempt the exercise based as much as possible on extrapolation from the previous tends.
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Roman concrete was much better than modern Portland cement.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jul/04/why-roman-concrete-still-stands-strong-while-modern-version-decays
I detest cheesy foods, though I do occasionally eat a bit of cheese on pizza or some well-deserved to the point of grittiness cheddar.
"In my dad, nobody in the store just let you buy cheddar. You had to go in day after day and ask for it. One day, if you kept asking, they'd sell you some."
D'oh. I hate making typos when I'm making fun of other peoples' typos.
I've eaten cheeseless pizza in Napoli. Damn good too, but anything with that sausage would have been damn good.
In Britain cheese is often a separate course at a meal, after or instead of dessert. I imagine that must be in imitation of French practice, because even good British food is usually adapted from somebody else.
145: it is. The French have cheese and then dessert; the British (since 1815 and the advent of service francaise) do it the other way round. I always assumed this was because the French like to linger over dessert wines and digestifs, and the British prefer to linger over port.
I think you mean the advent of service a la russe. Service francaise was the prior tradition, in which cheese appeared as part of the dessert course, and apparently included the option of butter, regarded as a form of cheese. I also understand that service a la russe has as much to do with Russia as Chinese whispers has to do with China.
142-3: In your dad, it's too dark to buy cheddar.
This would have been a good thread for me. I honestly am not clear on why our construction industry is so inefficient. The quality is so low and the portions so small!
100/107: what's the syllabus - just "Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere", or other stuff too? We could all read along!
151: Other stuff too! Last week was a tiny bit of Locke and Kant and another Habermas article I accidentally didn't read but mostly remembered from college, which surprised me. If you google the name of the teacher and course you should get it with links to the readings or else I can email, but I'd feel weird if I linked and then he checked his stats and found me here.
