The biggest mistake we make is trying to square the way we feel about something today with the way we felt about it yesterday. You shouldn’t even bother doing it. You should just figure out the way you feel today and if it happens to comply with what you thought before, fine. If it contradicts it, whatever. Life goes on.
Short and sweet life lessons from Malcolm Gladwell in The Guardian.
An endorsement: Jacobsen Flake Sea Salt. For seasoning food once it's on the table, I prefer flake salt, usually Le Saunier de Camargue Fleur de Sel. Flake salt, unlike really fine grained table salt or even ground up Kosher salt, doesn't dissolve immediately. The flakes add a nice bit of crunch to a dish, too, and many dishes can use that textural variety.
Jacobsen just tastes good. Also, the asymmetrical flakes are gorgeous, like giant snow flake crystals.
Each residency is a reflection of the demographic the property is going for—the Mirage made a play for the affluent and not-quite-debaucherous late 30s/early 40s crowd with Boyz II Men, these boyz who are now patchily gray men, who remain pure in their desire to romance you, to make gauzy, romantic, sweet, consensual love to you, and quickly retreat when you give the nod, who wear sequined letter sweaters and overestimate the impact their music had on our sex lives (“I bet there are some Boyz II Men babies in here!”). The Venetian very much wants the Midwestern, soft-country audience of Tim McGraw and Faith Hill. Planet Hollywood, with its hot pink accents and movie-themed rooms, was built for the Britney fan.
It’s only late in the evenings that Vegas visibly becomes what the tourism board says it is: young and saturated with sex—and not the Boyz II Men-sanctioned lovemaking kind, either. Out on the Strip, aging women wear shirts that say “Girls! Girls! Girls!” A man working for a competing strip club has a shirt that says “Orgasim Clinic: Accepting New Patients.” (Sic on that tragic typo.) Single-named DJs pump their skinny arms as women in tight tube dresses and Lucite heels they bought online a year ago straddle mouth-breathing men on VIP couches like they just heard there was an asteroid headed toward earth or just took a handful of Ecstasy; platonic girlfriends decide to make out at no urging at all because we’re in Vegas bitchez! One does not have to go far to feel the erection of a stranger in the rear of one’s jeans. It is in these small, handsy hours of the night that Caesars’ hope for Britney was born.
Taffy Brodesser-Akner on Britney Spears residency at Planet Hollywood in Las Vegas.
I enjoyed this economic breakdown from AEG Live president John Meglen before her residency began. It's telling about the economics of Vegas.
“Even if you believe in Britney, that gives you 50 shows [per year], great, what are you going to put in there your other 200 nights a year?” Meglen told me, in his office in L.A. “If all they have in there is Britney Spears and she is sold out for 50 shows, they have failed. They need Britney Spears and the Spice Girls and Jennifer Lopez and Pink or whoever, okay?” That said, even if the theater is sold out and the seats filled, that doesn’t quite fulfill the residency’s mission, which is to say: Vegas may claim to want youth, but young people aren’t actually good for business.
“You have to ask, ‘Are those kids buying tickets yet?’” Meglen continued. “Because most of them still are seven in a carload driving out from Southern California, they all sleep in one room, they spend the day at the pool and at night they go to the clubs. They’re great at using the workout room, that comes with your ticket. They don’t get the body scrubs or the facial wraps, you know? They don’t gamble and they don’t eat at restaurants and right now, in my opinion, it’s fucking tanking the whole fucking city.”
Benjamin Morris posted a good analysis of the value of Billy Beane over at FiveThirtyEight.
To be conservative, let’s just look at the period since Henry made Beane his offer: In the last 12 years, the Red Sox spent $1.714 billion on payroll, while the A’s spent $736 million. We can then break down what it could have looked like if Beane had worked for the Red Sox like so:
- Let’s say it would have cost Boston the same $736 million that it cost Oakland to get the A’s performance with Beane.
- At the hypothetical $25 million-per-year salary I suggested earlier, Beane would have cost the Red Sox another $300 million. (It’s possible that Beane would have wanted more, but it’s even more possible that they could have gotten him for less.)
- The difference in performance between the A’s and the Red Sox over that period (where the Sox were as successful as at any point in the franchise’s history, and the A’s were supposedly stagnating after Beane’s early success) has been about 50 games for Boston. Since we don’t know exactly how good Beane would be at procuring additional wins above his Oakland performance, let’s assume that the Red Sox would have had to pay the typical amount teams have paid for wins in the period to make up the difference. According to the year-by-year price of wins from my calculations above, those 50 wins (taking when they happened into account) would have a market value of about $370 million (though this might have been lower with Beane in charge).
If we combine these — the price of the A’s performance ($736 million) plus Super-Expensive-Billy-Beane’s salary ($300 million) plus the additional 50 Red Sox wins at high market estimates ($370 million) – merely duplicating their previous level of success still would have saved the Red Sox more than $300 million relative to what they actually spent, and that’s with reasonably conservative assumptions. That’s money they could have pocketed, or spent making themselves even better.
Management and ownership are undervalued in sports (though ownership's compensation should include the equity value of the franchise which usually outweighs salary by a lot; it's just that ownership often selects management so they have a ripple effect on franchise competitiveness). It's the reason I have a Cubs jersey with “Epstein” on the back as my profile pic on Facebook. I consider the hiring of Theo Epstein as the Cubs President of Baseball Operations the single most important Cubs hire in my lifetime as a long-suffering Cubs fan, far outweighing the value of any single player. Forget all talk about curses; the Cubs have just been so badly run for so long that even random luck hasn't been enough to deliver a World Series title in over a century.
In December of 2012, Bill Barnwell did a great piece on how Jim Harbaugh was the most undervalued asset in pro football, and in his annual ranking of trade value in the NFL for the year ahead Barnwell still had Harbaugh ranked 49th, the only coach to appear in his top 50 list. Harbaugh certainly turned around the Stanford football program.
Whether it's Beane or Epstein or Harbaugh, of course it's not just their influence but the staff they bring in that matters, too. But that's one thing about bringing in someone like that: their ability to hire great people or bring past teammates with them is one of the keys to their value. Epstein brought in Jed Hoyer and Jason McLeod and countless other people whose names aren't public but who've given the Cubs, in a few short years, the best farm system in baseball. The mantra with the Cubs has always been "wait til next year" but now it feels more like “can't wait til next year.”
The longer I'm a sports fan, the more I think the most important thing if you're loyal to a sports team is quality ownership. In some sports, more football and basketball than baseball, a good manager or coach matters, too. Baseball being a series of individual confrontations, the tactical value of a good manager is less there than that of a coach in basketball or football.
The hypothetical question of how Billy Beane would have done with the Red Sox is an interesting one. On the one hand, as Morris notes, Beane has done a ton with less in Oakland. On the other hand is the well-known phenomenon called the resource curse.
The resource curse, also known as the paradox of plenty, refers to the paradox that countries and regions with an abundance of natural resources, specifically point-source non-renewable resources like minerals and fuels, tend to have less economic growth and worse development outcomes than countries with fewer natural resources. This is hypothesized to happen for many different reasons, including a decline in the competitiveness of other economic sectors (caused by appreciation of the real exchange rate as resource revenues enter an economy, a phenomenon known as Dutch disease), volatility of revenues from the natural resource sector due to exposure to global commodity market swings, government mismanagement of resources, or weak, ineffectual, unstable or corrupt institutions (possibly due to the easily diverted actual or anticipated revenue stream from extractive activities).
Sports has its own version of the resource curse, and even Epstein, who delivered the Red Sox their first World Series in ages, ran into it late in his tenure there, signing a ton of expensive free agents like Carl Crawford. Beane would have had a much larger payroll in Boston, and that might have had him chasing more big name free agents rather than searching for inefficiencies as he has had to with the A's.
Or so the theory goes. Readers here know I'm wary of extrapolating phenomenon across boundaries, of the temptation of metaphor, and taking the resource curse, which is often used to discuss countries with rich oil supplies, and applying it to wealthier teams in baseball draws my immediate suspicion.
What's happening in baseball is that teams are smarter about locking up players for their prime years. In baseball, players become eligible for arbitration after three years of MLB service, and they become free agents after 6 years of service in the major leagues. However, teams can sign players to contracts that lock the player up for their first few years of free agency, as well, and more and more teams are doing so for their star homegrown players to secure more of their highest productivity years. This means rich teams like the Yankees can swoop in and buy with a fat contract are older and further into their career. Older players are more likely to be on the downside of the careers or to suffer injuries. Thus what appears to be a resource curse in baseball, as noted in the ESPN article I linked to above, may just be a temporary phenomenon.
Nothing too new for people already familiar with the Paleo or other low-carb diets and their supposed benefits, but this survey of the low-carb diet trend is a good 10,000 foot flyover.
In the midst of all the claims and counterclaims, there is a single clear piece of common ground. Experts of every stripe ask dieters to avoid refined sugars and grains. ‘Losing body weight on a plant-based diet is much less likely to occur if the diet includes too many refined carbohydrates,’ writes Cornell’s T. Colin Campbell in his book, The China Study , based in part on his Cornell-Oxford-China study research. Esselstyn instructs his dieters to consume only whole-grain products and avoid fruit juice. And McDougall urges his readers to eat complex carbohydrates instead of refined sugars and flours.
In essence, these scientists and doctors are recommending an Atkins diet that replaces the meat and fat with plants and certain complex (but never refined) carbohydrates.
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It’s also safe to say that carbohydrates as we eat them today are indeed ‘unnatural’ for us. Even though our Paleolithic ancestors almost certainly enjoyed occasional treats of honey, they weren’t having Entenmann’s crumb coffee cake for breakfast; the technology to refine grains just wasn't available then. It’s likely that our bodies are not well-suited for such a regimen, either.
So Paleo dieters might be right – we could be more evolutionarily in tune with a diet like that of our ancestors, which almost certainly includes fewer refined carbs. We can’t say, based on today’s evidence, that carbs are the root cause of all our chronic ailments, but scientific evidence suggests that we might stay healthier if we take flour and added sugar off our plates. Still, human nature is a moving target. Cookie by cookie, we might be forging humanity into new evolutionary territory, re‑shaping our genes to handle our new dietary indulgences. Along the way, we will undoubtedly ease our problems with new medicines, technologies and lifestyle adaptations – the supine lifestyle depicted in the 2008 film WALL-E comes to mind. But we will undoubtedly have a smoother road ahead if we change our dietary ways, instead of letting our dietary ways change us.
Less sugar, less refined carbs, sure. But I don't think our paleolithic ancestors had wine or beer, either, and that's a problem for me. After a long day persistence hunting a saber-toothed tiger or wooly mammoth or whatever it was they were chasing, I think my ancient brethren would've appreciated a glass of the good stuff.