Why the food in airports isn't coolJul 30, 20204 min readUpdated: Aug 30, 2020Unlike nearly every other space I enter, airports seem to hold little ability to purchase food that is in any sense "cool." Coolness is the action that accompanies the perception of a given trend. Much of the of the food that an individual with discretionary income chooses to eat above what is mere sustenance (and sometimes what does fall into the category of mere sustenance) are food items that signal some degree of coolness. Whether its Frutta Bowls two years ago or Starbucks a decade ago, signaling coolness with food purchases is something that many people consciously or unconsciously do. For some reason it seems to occur with far less prevalence in airports. It's not just that cool food choices don't happen in airports because we're all in too much of a rush or too tired to take the time to signal. Cool signals through food purchases can't happen in airports due to their structure.Cool is nuanced. It changes with location, demographic, and age. It matters with varying degrees to different groups yet exists almost everywhere. The nuance that constructs cool is in near-constant flux with factors which have changed by the time someone can verbally identify precisely why they are cool. In spite of this flux, there are two almost universal factors that steady the flow of what is trendy and they both fall under the umbrella of a constructed scarcity.The first determinant of this constructed scarcity when it comes to cool is price. If an item becomes ubiquitous through its low price it will very rarely be considered cool. If one considers the most trendy restaurants in his or her city, almost all will invariably be overpriced. A high ticket price is axiomatic to cool. Price alone is not enough to open the way for cool products to exist. There must also exist an alternative that is inexpensive enough that some number of reasonable buyers will choose to pay less for an equivalent, uncool product instead of signaling. For fashionable choices to exist their must always be a choice to not pursue them in favor of a less cool option that is appealing for some other more concrete reason which is usually fiscal in nature. Air Jordan's cultural popularity in the 90's doesn't really work without it making more financial sense to buy a pair of New Balances instead.The second factor that necessitates scarcity is location. While price constructs or accompanies scarcity within a given area, the logistical access to an item defines the scarcity between areas. There's a long held debate between those of the South Jersey area about which Philly cheesesteak place is the best: Pat's or Geno's. I was on the Geno's side of the aisle. Any Philadelphian overhearing the debate would be quick to point out that the correct answer is neither and that only an outsider would tolerate the two in the conversation. That didn't matter to high schoolers from New Jersey because we had to cross a bridge, pay a toll, and navigate through unfamiliar streets to get to the shops. Logistical scarcity made Pat's and Geno's cool to us. The debate shifted when Philadelphia International Airport placed a Geno's Steaks in a concourse cafeteria. Geno's became accessible to a swath of new people who otherwise would have had to travel far out of their way to get to Geno's. Any traveller with a layover could experience what seemed so cool as a high schooler. I don't consider going to Geno's much anymore. It's just not very cool. These two factors dictating constructed scarcity of cool food choices, price and location, shift strangely in airports and cause cool purchasing options to disappear almost entirely. The graph below represents the array of food decisions an individual can make ranging by price and logistical access. The blue area in the upper left of the graph represents where most cool purchases exist. Not everything within the area is considered cool, but an overwhelming percentage of all cool thing exist within it. The green represents other food options which most likely do not constitute cool.Compare this to the food choices that exist within an airport. The bottom left quadrant disappears. There is no cheap food to speak of and location scarcity hardly exists within an airport. The reason I say that there is no scarcity in location is because if a food venue exists within an airport it is highly accessible to the point of being within walking distance and if it does not exist within the airport it has an accessibility of almost zero. You can't reach it without having to go through security again and potentially missing your flight; it might as well not exist if it isn't in the airport. The new graph of where cool may be in an airport is represented by the following graph:The red shade in the graph are the areas from the old graph which do not exist in the airport. The airport's controls on logistical access prevent it from being an option. Low location, low price venues nor frequent location, low price venues exist in an airport. The number of options in venues to eat drops sharply in the airport and the financial and locational makeup becomes very homogeneous. What does this mean for cool?Cool as determined by scarcity vanishes because all the purchases available become a default. Expensive Italian coffee isn't very cool if its the only option within walking distance. For cool to exist there must be the option to not be cool. There has to be a Dunkin' Donuts around for the fine Italian coffee to signal anything. Cool food does not exist in a vacuum and airports are food vacuums. The rampant existence of default choice neuters cool in the airport and the traveller will just have to wait to arrive at his or her destination if they want to signal their perception of a trend.
Blanco Brown, Carne Asada Cheese Fries, and Gen EdsJul 11, 20204 min readUpdated: Jul 30, 2020In episode 8, season 4 of Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History, Gladwell argues that the most interesting food and music tend to be in the meeting point of two very different styles. If you think deeply about the claim, it rings true. Exciting novelties in food and music tend to, at the outset, seem like a venture in trying to mix oil and water. Rewind 50 years and describe Blanco Brown's music to the average country music and hip hop fan, I doubt they would find your description of country music and hiphop branded "TrailerTrap" enticing. Carne Asada fries, which fuses marinated beef, cheese, and french fries, would still certainly not occur to many who like both french fries and carne asada, yet here they are. Blanco Brown and the chef behind carne asada cheese fries didn't invent any truly new competency, but they still managed to bring about an innovation that not many others would have thought to. In Lewis Mumford's The Myth of the Machine, the importance of wandering competencies is briefly explored: "The generalist's competence lies not in unearthing new evidence but in putting together authentic fragments that are accidentally, or sometimes arbitrarily, separated, because specialists tend to abide too rigorously by a gentleman's agreement not too invade each other's territory. Although this makes for safety and social harmony, it ignores the fact that the phenomena studied do not hold to the same principles. (emphasis mine) Such 'No Trespassing' laws, if observed by the generalist, would halt his cross-country excursions, and prevent him from performing his own special function - one oddly similar to that of those Polynesian traders and interpreters who have a license to escape tribal taboos and wander freely over a wide area."The sentiment is not particularly revolutionary or controversial. I would wager that the average person agrees with the above statement. It has been enacted to an extreme degree by colleges. If a student does not exempt their university's required general education requisites using AP credits, they will spend the better part of two full years completing an eclectic mix of psychology, mathematics, economics, foreign languages, religion, sciences, and philosophy. In spite of the agreement on the issue of being a generalist, students tend to regard general education requirements as a glorified racket designed to nickel and dime them and extend their time in the educational transaction for as long as possible. Its a near universal college experience to bemoan the fact that one needs to spend a semester learning defunct Freudian theories from professors who seems a bit too tenured to care.Colleges have over applied the generality that Mumford stresses as being important to innovation. Colleges provide an impotent amount of many different competencies. Compare this to the skill set of Blanco Brown. He's generalized, yes, but he's also a fantastic musician and expert in the two genres he brings together. Federal Donuts of Philadelphia has to have a proficiency in frying both donuts and chicken in order for the business to function. Generalism cannot be employed to the extent that it ignores the expertise required to utilize the general knowledge. Colleges very rarely convey useful capability in general education courses. They are cheap (figuratively), birds-eye-view exposures that don't give students any skills to usefully induct what they learned in a course into their normal major of study. A single "Intro to Psychology" class is not enough to equip a student with the tools to employ psychology in his or her engineering career, but five psychology classes might. The mathematician Richard Hamming was a lifelong proponent of the proverb "Luck favors the preferred mind." He was adamant that, in addition to sheer chance, innovation hinges on the aggregation of experiences that allow the innovator to draw lines between seemingly unrelated things to form new ones. Current general education courses do not "prepare" minds well. For classes to prepare students for the lucky innovations, they need depth of knowledge. The depth of knowledge acquired in college is gained through the compounding of lessons during various iterations, increasing in detail, regarding the same subject and its components. The current format of gen ed requirements does not meet this end and instead aims to bring about a nebulous well-roundedness whose use is questionable.Entertain the statement "gen ed requirements are a sham and an inefficiency" as absolutely true for the remainder of my argument. If the administrators and accreditors of universities were to come around to this way of thinking they would be left with three broad courses which they could take in response to this knowledge. The first and arguably the course already plotted would be to do nothing, continuing to charge inflating tuition rates in exchange for two years of useless classes and espousing "well-roundedness". The second would be to scrap the idea of general education entirely and allow students to acquire their diplomas after the two years it would take to complete their actual course work. College administrators might do this when they get around to lowering tuition rates and thawing out Hell. The third option is to maintain the four-year course while limit the scope and number of gen-ed subjects and pivot to multiple specializations. The average minor requires the completion of 15 credit hours in a particular subject. Unobstructed by gen-eds, a theoretical student could complete three to four minors during their time in undergrad, depending on their major. Minors, unlike gen-eds, accomplish the iterations of learning required to create a depth of knowledge in a given subject. How much more valuable would a prospective employee, co-worker, or boss be if they could back up the assertion that they have a functional knowledge of electrical engineering thanks to their major, and then bolster that skill with five courses each in economics, computer science, and philosophy? That person would be demonstrably well rounded to a degree which a current student could never certify in spite of his or her wealth of general education credits.Colleges are theoretically breeding grounds for innovation and education but as long as general education requirements are constructed with such tremendous inefficiencies they will have a hand tied behind their back. Administrators and accreditors should take a note from Blanco Brown and create an environment where the cusps of seemingly different, but well understood competencies collide, creating new things.
Prescient TakesJul 8, 20201 min readUpdated: Jul 8, 2020Recently finished Battle Leadership by Captain Adolph Von Schell who cut his teeth during WW1. The whole thing is worth the short read and is full of pithy advice. The most interesting bit was when he surmised the state of the German army in 1932 and then juxtaposed the American army of 1932 to those of Europe:Regarding the German army of 1932: "...We have built ourselves a new house and this house stands firm and safe."In the next chapter he states that "The American doesn't need to worry about a sudden invasion. He doesn't have to let his enemy dictate the moment when he must defend himself. He reasons: 'Today I'm not ready to go to war, but I shall be later on. I shall not be ready to fight for six months, therefore I will not start fighting until then. (Emphasis mine) I, not the enemy, will decide decide the day I throw my army into battle. I shall always have just as much time for preparation as I consider necessary.' How different the situation in Europe!"This was a prescient take on what would unfold during the next world conflict. As much as everyone loves a freezing cold take, its fascinating to see an accurate depiction that was played out accurately over the course of the following decade.