The freedom we found there was impossible to harvest and bring home

We haven't even explored the drink options

Isn't picking a place to get lunch just the worst? It sure is.

Here's an idea to quell your doldrums -- what about a place called "The Lunch Place" where the only thing they serve is lunch. You walk in, step to the counter and say "I'll have one lunch please", and then you hand them like $6 and they give you lunch. You don't choose what you're eating, and you don't tell anyone about your allergies or to leave off the spicy mayo. You just get a lunch, and it's just fine, and you eat it, and get back to your day.

I like to focus on the core myself

Nuclear power is probably the safest most efficient way to produce energy that we have. I can't really back that up with any facts, but please just roll with me here. Despite being so massively efficient, nuclear has a branding problem, because people are somewhat terrified of the word "nuclear" and probably assume that anywhere you put a nuclear plant is going to turn into a radioactive wasteland, despite tons of evidence to the contrary.

Here's a free idea for anyone looking to clean up the environment with safer modern energy sources like nuclear. Find some real estate developers looking to build new housing projects out in the suburbs. Attach an offer of "local rate minus fifty percent" for energy to every new house they build, and put a small nuclear plant in the middle of the housing development. Incorporate the entire thing as a condo association which shares the revenue from the nuclear plant with you, and sell the excess capacity back to the local power company.

The home owners win because they have cheap locally produced artisanal nuclear power; the real estate developer wins because he retains some ownership in the condo association and has created a passive income source from the nuclear energy; the local power utility wins because they can purchase cheap energy to resell that they didn't even have to invest in themselves; the nuclear plant builder wins because they are keeping part of the revenue; and the environment and local communities win, because there's less coal and oil being burned as a result.

Flavored syrups are definitely not food

For a long time there was a trend of using a metaphor like "did you know that for the price of one cup of coffee per month, you could instead be buying our service which does whatever". The point here was that the listener was probably "throwing away" this trivial amount of cash each month and thus could easily afford to buy whatever your product was.

I think a lot of people have stopped using that metaphor because it became a very common metaphor and it's not that clever anymore. I think some people stopped using it because it makes you realize that a service which is priced so low is probably also not that valuable. What I don't know and am not sure how we'd measure or confirm is how many people had to stop using that metaphor because a cup of coffee now costs more than their service and it didn't work factually anymore.

A thing I learned from a podcast

On a recent podcast the hosts were talking about how various people react to "good ideas" which they did not come up with, in group settings. They made the point that some people get into a "no roll" and refuse to acknowledge the good idea -- because it was not THEIR good idea. Other people see that it's good and embrace it - even to the point where they will try to "steal" the idea and claim it was theirs.

They made the point that despite the perceived "theft" of the good idea in the latter scenario, that is probably the net positive situation, because the good idea actually gets done, and at some level the people involved know where it really came from. The idea stealer gets some credit and a good result. The idea originator probably gets called back to the next meeting, and asked for more ideas.

Making demographics work for you

The common wisdom and advice is that stereotyping and judging people based on prejudices is a bad idea, and possibly ethically or morally wrong.

This guidance makes sense on the surface and I believe the intentions of those who would issue this advice are in the right place -- but taken to it's logical extreme this would be a completely insane approach to life. Humans are massive consumers of information about each other, and we're constantly integrating in new information about new people into our database of prior information about prior people, and coming up with predictive guesses based on those experiences. Purposefully or not, you've assembled a catalog of guesses about what might happen next based on what just happened, and this is a tool you'd be foolish to put down.

I think that using this information to establish and detect patterns of behavior is massively useful; but turning this information into a set of rules for which there are no exceptions is over the line.