Yes, nobody is disagreeing with physics. But a discussion about weight gain/loss that always has people saying "calories in = calories out" is like a discussion of every business saying "well profit = revenue - expenses". Obvious but not helpful. The interesting thing is discussing how to modify those variables.
The flipside of this is that people generally want to argue endlessly about what are essentially micro optimizations instead of addressing the core issue. Maybe your gut flora are “out of balance”. Maybe your metabolism is a little lower than average. Sure, there are factors that can matter. But if you’re not losing weight you’re not in a caloric deficit. If you’re not gaining weight, you’re not in a caloric surplus (or you’re spewing diarrhea and should talk to a doctor).
Address the core issue first before arguing about minutiae. The emphasis on relatively low impact factors is especially unhelpful and unhealthy because people latch onto all these discussions as justification for why they can’t lose weight. Sure, an obese person might have a low metabolism[1], but if they eat 3500 daily calories and live an entirely sedentary lifestyle, those are probably the major causes.
[1] But they don’t. Study after study have shown that obese individuals have high metabolism because metabolism is tightly correlated with total body mass.
Most people aren't fat because they're lazy. Most people are fat because they eat too much. We have a culture that glorifies food, junkfood more than the rest. Overeating when eating junkfood is absurdly easy. Teaching people how to eat healthier and eat less is the best known way to help people lose weight.
Constantly talking about genetic predispositions, obscure metabolism suppressing viruses or gut flora does about jack shit to help people lose weight.
The minor difference between the weekly calorie expenditure of the average person and the morbidly obese is mostly meaningless. It’s much more about how much they eat.
I recently found one of these in a car's glove box and couldn't believe it implied it was a "Get out of jail free" card. Even seems to imply it has an expiration date given the years written on it.
Obviously these services are useful and can save you time now, but they are, generally speaking, rather expensive. That means you end up saving less and probably will be working for more years rather than retiring early.
I think it's a fallacy to think these "saved hours" translate directly into additional paid work. Most of the folks using these services are in salaried jobs, and don't benefit financially by working an extra few hours a week.
I saw "Ratio" by Ruhlman mentioned below, but also wanted to mention "The Flavor Bible". Technique is half of the battle, and flavor combination is the other. The Flavor Bible is basically a encyclopedia for food combinations. Look up a food and see what goes well with it. Eg apples go well with cinnamon, pork, and nuts. It's based on interviews with chefs, but I've also built a version myself with recipe ingredient analysis.
There's scientific analysis that can be done on flavor compounds in foods as well to find complementary flavors, foodpairing.com is working on this.
The Flavor Bible is interesting (and so badly wants to be a web app). There are things it's amazing at; for instance, if you have one or two base ingredients, The Flavor Bible will generate thousands of plausible soup ideas. I don't find that it informs my cooking all that much though; the most important combinations are also very well-known.
Yep, foodpairing.com is a great tool for this. In the longer term I would prefer to not to need it at all, but for now foodpairing + a set of cooking patterns is what I am concentrating on.
Thanks for the book titles, added to the top of the reading list!
Is Uber more disruptive because of its experience or the fact that it technically violates the rules/regulations in the taxi cab market? Cabs can't compete on price because, the prices are regulated and fixed, and of the cost of medallions and compliance etc are non-zero. Similar remarks for the hotel industry and AirBnB.
Can this/should this be done in other markets? If someone built an equity crowdfunding platform that ignores SEC rules (and the JOBS act) but investors like it/use it, would it succeed? In the cases of Aereo and Silkroad, they didn't succeed in fighting the laws.
The rules and regulations exist ostensibly to "protect" consumers, but we see that when consumers don't agree with them, huge companies get created.
Let's split up the questions and look at them one by one:
Is Uber disruptive? Probably in some places.
Why? Because some free market-liberal cooked up a way to cap the number of available taxis. Ubers skirts these restrictions by loudly proclaiming not to be taxis in various creative ways, thereby lowering their price structure.
How could this be done in other markets? Definitions matter. Could you raise funding by callling it something else? Very unlikely (it's hard to deny why people send you money). Could you sell useless medicine by calling it something else? Very likely (see "homeopathy", "natural medicine").
I think that there is a difference between rules intended to protect consumers and those designed to protect incumbency. In many cases, such as taxi medallions and other types of business licensing, what once was designed to be a light weight way to protect the public because cumbersome and anti-competitive. These are the areas ripe for disruption.
However, regulations that still predominantly serve the public interest, such as those set out by the EPA, FDA and SEC (though not perfect) are much less open.
The rules in the AirBnB world make a lot more sense than for Uber. While homeowners should have some minimal ability to rent out their abodes, there are good reasons why it should be limited to less than a full-time business.
For Uber, I still haven't heard a decent articulation of the need for such rules as is seen in the taxi business.
My understanding is this... In New york, you hail a cab, and you call a car/limo service. Uber operates legally as a car service. The cab companies are upset because uber is faster, whereas car service typically require a long wait time.
I haven't tried Munchery since I live outside SF, but I'm surprised the food tastes good reheated. I've never had restaurant leftovers taste very good, particularly in the proteins where the moisture loss in heat/cool/reheat is significant. And the presentation ends up looking more like a TV dinner than the plated dinner shown on the website.
Does the perception around the chef/dishes contribute more to the positive experience than the actual taste of the food?
I've read all of the comments and believe the consensus is basically:
- It's a lot cheaper for ebay/paypal to let the scammers rip off people than it is to go after them, even when the facts clearly identify the scammer
- Casual sellers are both less able to detect fraud and are more greatly impacted by it
- The feedback mechanism is insufficient "insurance" against fraud
- "Seller protection" and "Buyer protection" are not suitable insurances against the kind of fraud that actually occurs
- The vast majority of transactions are legitimate
- The selling prices on ebay can be substantially higher than Gazelle/Amazon, or other reputable channel
- Fraud will undoubtedly occur in some cases
How about if a 3rd party sold real buyer or seller insurance? They would be in the business of identifying scam-like behaviour from buyers/sellers, help you to avoid fraud it can detect, and ultimately insure you from loss. Not sure how much the premium would need to be in order to make this work, but seems like an interesting idea.
A big problem with casual selling on ebay is you don't know what you don't know until you've already been screwed. I sold some iTunes gift cards and provided the redemption code from the card after I received payment. We both left positive feedback for each other (he already had 18 feedback).
A month or so later, the buyer put a chargeback on their credit card, got their money back from paypal, and I had no recourse. Worse still, Paypal charged ME $50 more because of the chargeback! Despite my sending them the code (which they requested, and through ebays messaging system), I had to have delivery confirmation from a shipper to prove I sent it. Even though they have the messages proving the delivery/receipt, too bad for me. I tried calling paypal, and that got nowhere. They said something like "sorry, it will cost $200 to investigate the chargeback further, so it's probably not worth it". I told them I'd write it off to my not understanding their policy on "seller protection", but at least do something about the scammers account. Of course they said they couldn't, nor could the refund any of the fees.
So now I'm out the $30 for my item, $50 more because paypal incurred a chargeback, plus ebay fees, plus the guy got positive feedback and went on to do this to other people! Totally incredulous.
Instead of blogging about it though, I've decided to build a company to compete with ebay. Wish me luck =)
Bonanza.com (the site I've been building for about four years now) has become one of the largest non-eBay marketplaces by scooping up sellers like you & the OP. We're now up to 25,000 active sellers and 4 million listings by virtue of having seller-friendly policies.
Admittedly, there is enough gray area in marketplace transactions where determining "right and wrong" can sometimes prove difficult. But I like to think that we start from a neutral POV, rather than the "buyer is always right" mentality that eBay has increasingly gravitated toward.
2 years ago I caught a lady selling handbags (that she didn't really have) from your site. I caught her because she was having people pay through an account with our service (nextproof.com).
Guess who had to eat the chargeback fees? I did
Guess who had to call other people, inform them the handbag they ordered as a Christmas gift was bogus, then listen to them cry? I did
All that to say, if you (or anyone else) has a successful marketplace, shady folks will swarm to you and you will have no choice but to figure out buyer and seller protection policies.
Don't make critical purchases from random people on the Internet? We should never blame the victim, nevertheless everyone should be thaught a basic level of "Internet street smarts".
You should work with Brian Armstrong to allow sellers / buyers to use bitcoins on the site. The advantage is that bitcoin does not allow chargebacks. Their interface is very close to PayPal, and makes it much easier to get started with.
With bitcoin you can do some surprisingly complex things. Such as move money into a fund that the other people can verify are there, which only pays out on a trigger condition.
If you ever launch it, let me know and I will do my utmost to promote it.
If you'd launched already I would have happily sold my iPhone through you. There's really no way you could have provided a worse experience unless you actively tried.
>A big problem with casual selling on ebay is you don't know what you don't know until you've already been screwed.
Most of the big online sites (Paypal is the worst offender, but the others aren't much better) favor buyers over sellers. Amazon certainly works that way, and, as a result, I'm mostly use Craigslist to sell computers and cameras/lenses. I don't sell all that much stuff, though I do it for family members, but I'm familiar enough to have an opinion.
Craigslist has its own dangers, but those can be mitigated through meeting in public or in police station lobbies.
I've bought, and sold, many things via Craigslist. I funded a cross-country move by selling the things I couldn't fit into my truck and u-haul trailer using Craigslist.
Having said that, I dislike the meeting-up aspect of Craigslist. For all of the money I've "made" by selling my stuff through them, there have been countless times where the person on the other end of the phone never shows up and leaves me there waiting.
Overall, it's been a positive experience. I'll continue using them for the foreseeable future.
I think the key points are to align incentives, provide authenticity, and make it opt-in.
Dropbox and Groupon align everyone's incentives by offering benefits to both parties and acquiring customers at a much lower cost than traditional ads. They provide authenticity because the folks referring their friends are genuinely using their products.
Many consumers now frown upon affiliate marketing because they feel taken advantage of--the affiliates say whatever they think you want to hear in order to get you to buy, and some make an awful lot of money doing it.
Plaxo was perceived very negatively because they were inviting their user's contacts without their permission.
The book "The Ultimate Question" contends that asking "How likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?" is the single most important metric you should measure in your business. Thus, if you find that you have to offer too large of an incentive to your customers, you should instead focus on improving your product.
We're building a social referral platform right now with these factors in mind that will make it super easy to run different referral programs and find what's best for your business. We're focusing on eCommerce now, but are getting into SaaS and other services very soon.
Send us a note at hello _at_ curebit.com if you're interested in piloting with us.
