An interesting look behind the scenes:
Go into the kitchen of a Taco Bell today, and you’ll find a strong counterargument to any notion that the U.S. has lost its manufacturing edge. Every Taco Bell, McDonald’s (MCD), Wendy’s (WEN), and Burger King is a little factory, with a manager who oversees three dozen workers, devises schedules and shifts, keeps track of inventory and the supply chain, supervises an assembly line churning out a quality-controlled, high-volume product, and takes in revenue of $1 million to $3 million a year, all with customers who show up at the front end of the factory at all hours of the day to buy the product. Taco Bell Chief Executive Officer Greg Creed, a veteran of the detergents and personal products division of Unilever (UL), puts it this way: “I think at Unilever, we had five factories. Well, at Taco Bell today I’ve got 6,000 factories, many of them running 24 hours a day.”
It’s as if the great advances of human civilization, in everything from animal husbandry to mathematics to architecture to manufacturing to information technology, have all crescendoed with the Crunchwrap Supreme, delivered via the pick-up window.
As Bill Whittle wrote a few years ago, an ancient Egyptian Pharaoh would marvel at a 7-11. We don’t realize what an age of miracles we live in, or how fragile it is.
And to continue Tyler Cowen’s “There Is No Great Stagnation” series, I’ve noticed that these days McDonalds, at the drive through, has a little machine that preps and fills drinks automatically, in the correct order for distribution.
New invention, both freeing up a human being to do something less drudge-y than filling up an endless number of soft drinks, and also reducing waste caused by error.
We do, indeed, live in a golden age.
(It’s sad, I think, that so many – mostly on the left these days, but some on the right – would disparage the entire thing…)
LOL I thought this post was about girls on rollerskates.
But the marvel of efficiency doesn’t stop at the drive through, shortly after ingesting your Crunchwrap Supreme it can be deposited in the proper receptacle. Your body doesn’t need to waste hours or days digesting food to get nutrients.
I thought this post was about girls on rollerskates.
That’s not drive through — that’s drive in.
Kind of related to the comment about the Pharaoh: let’s hope our cheap fuel doesn’t run out – imagine that I offer to pay you to push my car (2,500 lbs) about 30 miles… I’ll give you about $3.50 to do it.
I usually have a rant about the Left here, but this time, my rant is equally directed. Actually, it’s more of a rant at the Right.
The reason people assume the best is over is partly because of the Leftist neo-Luddite environmentalist whackjobs. They constantly predict one catastrophe after another, from the population bomb to acid rain to global warming, and they all turn out to be BS, but people are so inundated with gloom that they don’t notice it.
Still, that in itself is not enough to cause this gloom. Notably, the actual environmentalist programs don’t poll well. People don’t like paying high prices for energy.
The reason they are nevertheless able to sap the American people’s hope is that there is a subtle neo-Luddism on the Right as well.
Basically, it stems from the millennial aspects of fundamentalist theology. While most Republicans aren’t knee-deep in that theology, the politics of trying to win them over ends up with a sort of hybrid of Randian romantic view of capitalism on the one hand, and a belief on the other hand in a sort of non-drug version of “tune in, turn on, drop out.”
The Republicans at least aren’t trying to undo existing technology like nuclear power and the automobile, the way Democrats are. But they seem oddly fixated on the technology of the past. They’ll romanticize the captains of industry of the 19th century, but never commend the private space industry today.
This may be partly because the politics of private space are no more dependably conservative than the politics of any other corporation. But it’s also because many conservatives think of space as an egghead utopian dream, rather than a means of making the rich richer and the poor richer as well. And this is largely due to the fact that the fundamentalist influence is always there saying that we should be eschewing big dreams right now and getting good with God, because the End is at hand.
I remember when Thomas Frank came out with What’s the Matter With Kansas. The book was typical lefty crap, saying that the middle class workers just don’t know what’s good for them. What struck me, though, was just how easy it would be to strike down Frank’s arguments, and how most of the conservative rebuttals missed this hanging curve ball. Rather than point out that low taxes and low regulations bring down prices and unemployment, most of them seemed to accept Frank’s dubious economics, and then go on to talk about God and social issues.
If the GOP would put away its gloom about the coming End, it could really inspire people to take part in the adventure of technological advancement, instead of always playing a rear-guard action against socialism. Ronald Reagan understood this. I wish the modern-day conservatives did as well.
I don’t know how common this is but many of our local McDonald’s franchises use a remote call center to handle their drive thru orders. One call center can handle quite a few restaurants, lowering labor costs and helping keep prices under control. Just remember the warning from “Lethal Weapon II.”
“But it’s also because many conservatives think of space as an egghead utopian dream,…”
I know LOTS of conservatives and NONE of them think that way.
“We don’t realize what an age of miracles we live in, or how fragile it is.”
Truer words were never spoken.
If he thinks it’s a factory NOW, he shoulda seen it when we MIXED our own syrups, water and CO2, peeled our own potatoes, hand cut them for fries and blanched then by the 100’s of pounds per day, BEFORE we fried them for your burger sides!!!
Fast food used to mean how quick it took to GET the order, NOT how quick it was to COOK it.
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AND on a Similar Note:
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When I was a Dominoid, (back when that term referred to the long time, die hard, employees of Dominos, it was not some goofy TV gremlin THING) we made, cut or chopped ALL the supplies in a local Commissary.
I’m not sure what the ratio was any more, but for every 10 to 25 stores(? I told you my memory was fuzzy) you had a commissary that made all the dough, sauce, cut all the veggies, sliced all the meats, chopped all the cheese, etc.
If anyone ever wondered why the chain pizza draws a huge vacuum now, that’s IT. You simply cannot take a recipe that makes about 40 qts of sauce, (anybody’s sauce NOT just Tom Monaghan’s) ramp it up to get 300,000 gallons a day, and have the SAME quality and flavor.
The same goes for dough and other stuff.
How fresh is an onion, green pepper or olive, green or black, that got sliced 8 days ago, 500 miles away, versus one sliced yesterday across town? And as bad as most people HATE them, the Big Pizza Guys do NOT carry anchovies!!!
I don’t care if NOBODY EVER ORDERS them!!! You are NOT a real pizza establishment unless you have ANCHOVIES on your shelf!!!
The nerve!!!
Balls! You engineers that actually produce things get a distorted view of America! The journalists, economists, lawyers, bureaucrats and politicians all agree that…oh, wait…
Flip it around and look at health care, which has vastly more technology but is still highly specialized craft work.
“Well Mr. Simberg, it sounds like you want a Taco Supreme. I’m going to refer you over to a colleague who specializes in sour cream.”
Rand takes his taco (now with lettuce, after two hours in the waiting room) over to Annex B, third floor, where the sour creme need is confirmed. A few minutes later a nurse provides him with two coffee-creamer sized containers of it. Then he drives to a Super-Walmart to stand in line for his cheddar cheese prescription because hospitals won’t dispense that directly. Soon, he will have his taco.
You are all marvelling at the operation of a 7-11. You should see the construction of an new McDonalds or Quik-Trip. I’m told that the time from permit granted and slab poured to selling the first item is somewhere in the neighborhood of six or eight weeks.
Actually, interestingly enough, I’ve been watching them demolish, and then rebuild our neighborhood Taco Bell, for reasons that are a mystery to me. It has moved amazingly quickly.
Prolly had to make the bathroom 1″ wider for ADA compliance…
Rand, I once talked to a research chef for Ruby Tuesday, who said their initial buildings were temporary structures made mostly of foam. In the restaurant business, location is critical and they’d found that sometimes even moving the buiding one block would make a huge difference. So after the first or second year they make an evaluation, and either close it, move it, or rebuild it with a permanent structure.
My local Taco Bell was torn down and rebuilt last year. It’s also laid out a bit different and has an updated look. If you think of them as little factories it makes even more sense. Every several years a factory or assembly line makes a major retooling, changing many pf the machine tools, conveyors, and processes to make the plant more efficient.
In follow up to my previous comment, when was the last time you saw an industrial engineer doing a time and motion study in a hospital?
When I first moved into my house about a decade ago all we had was a: Brookshires grocery store, Ma’s Chicken and Gizzards, a McDonalds, and a Subway. The Subway was part of a gas station.
Within the last few years we got a: Walmart, Chili’s, Waterburger, Sonic, Pizza Hut, Dominoes, Chicken Express, Taco Bell, Panda Express, Chik-fil-a, Wing Stop, Crazy Super Chinese Buffet, Jack-in-the-Box, and Little Caesars pizza. Each of them seemingly spring up over night. By the time you could identify what kind of establishment it was going to be by the outside decor it they were flipping the “We’re Open” sign on and were open for business within a matter of weeks. By far the biggest fanfare was with the Chicken Express. Line of cars wrapped around the store, down the street, and through a intersection. Local PD had to direct traffic so everyone could get their chicken tenders on.
I can’t recommend this too highly. It should be required viewing in every high school, and no one should be hired to teach high school — not even English — until he has proven he has made at least one useful object from reasonably raw materials. Both to show he’s not an entirely castles in the clouds ungrounded theoretician, and to make him appreciate how much easier and cheaper and safer technology makes the manufacture of things.
“Crazy Super Chinese Buffet”
This place sounds amazing. How could anyone resist trying it out?
@meb:
Too bad you can’t find people willing to concede that, in order to have a road to push that car along on, they actually have to pay for that road surface, too.
The backlash against toll roads and gas taxes in this country is pretty amazing. Everyone wants the convenience of automotive travel, but few are willing to pay for it. Reminds me of that video from the other day about “How much money would it take for you to give up the internet for life?”. Everyone concedes that it would take hundreds of millions of dollars to give up the internet, yet none are willing to pay nearly that much.
You can’t really have it both ways, folks.
So after the first or second year they make an evaluation, and either close it, move it, or rebuild it with a permanent structure.
This one had been there for over twenty years. When they first demolished it, I was kind of shocked, thinking that it must (finally) not have been doing good business, but I was even more surprised when they almost immediately started to rebuild it from the ground up.
I’ve seen McDonalds do that with a number of restaurants. The biggest reason for demos in the last 10 years was the changeover to “made-to-order” burgers in the late 90s and early 2000’s, so a number of the older stores with the large banks of warming trays between the kitchen and registers were remodeled or rebuilt to accommodate the change in kitchen layout.
Also, most McDonalds have dual-lane drive-thrus and “pay at Window #1” nowadays, which in some cases only requires minor pavement work.
But, in a number of cases, the remodeling is so drastic that it’s easier to accomplish by just demolishing and rebuilding, especially if code compliance and code updates become a part of the whole thing.
Carl, are you suggesting “Education” majors should get their hands dirty? Oh, please! I know SPWL all like to think of themselves as creative but not that kind of creative: with their hands actually…creating things. No, it’s more like “Hey, I’ve just ‘created’ this model for society that would work perfectly, but the buck-toothed Palin-worshiping hayseeds in fly-over country would never go for it, so my brilliance will go unrecognized…/swoon”
It sounds like that Taco Bell building was nearing the end of its useful life, considering that their newer layouts will yield greater efficiencies and probably have lower support costs, especially on the electronics.
It reminds me of one of my friends who is a civil engineer working on college dorms for some big hotel chain (I can’t remember whether it was a division of Hyatt, Hilton, or what). Apparently the chain goes to colleges and gives them an intereting sales pitch.
Point 1: The hotel industry knows how to run accomodations efficiently, with maid service, maintenance, security, and a very clean environment, because the field is highly competitive. When they design a hotel they know it has only a twenty year life, since pushing beyond that just becomes a maintenance and support nightmare. Heavily trafficked buildings wear out, and then they start looking like worn out buildings, which would describe most college dorms.
Point 2: Academia has no business trying to run cheap student housing. They have absolutely no expertise and it has absolutely nothing to do with their mission.
The points they probably don’t bring up are that the result is a vast and incompetent bureaucracy, high costs, and students living in 50-year old buildings that were bad enough when they were new (cramped, un-airconditioned, with two outlets per room and showers down the hall) and are now ratholes. The university constantly throws money at them just to keep them serviceable.
Universities are insitituionally unable to tear down something, no matter how outdated, except to make room for some crazy new project funded by an alumnus who wants his name on a building. Otherwise they’ll try to use a structure forever. They don’t plan for obsolescence and their long-term campus plans consist of adding new buildings in between all the old ones. They’ll try to “repurpose” 80-year old fire traps, turning dorms into faculty offices or a chemistry lab into a lounge, as if a building is a special interest group that must be catered to.
The universities don’t allow for convenient parking and think it’s okay if their entire customer base (the students) and employees have to walk two miles in the rain to get to class or find food. They’re about the only institution in America that tries to make equal use of a new building and one built in the early 1900’s. You won’t see Ford or Boeing clinging to a factory with crumbling brick chimneys, a rusting tin roof, and glass skylights that looks like a relic of the Civil War, but you see those buildings on many a college campus.
When it comes to managing such tasks, they have no business sense whatsoever, and thus, they should unload their entire “housing” mission to private sector companies with a proven track record of expertise and specialization in that area.
I’m sure Taco Bell could make the same points about many old restaurants, which is why one day all restaurants will be Taco Bell.
@Wodun:
I know, just one bite and your like, “Wow! This place, IS CRAZY!!”
Our local Taco Bell did that too demolish and rebuild. They wanted it to have the newer Taco Bell look.
@George Turner:
The University of Iowa took your points to heart back in the 70’s, and decided to get out of the housing business, other than what dorms they had already built, and left the rest of the housing needs up to the market to take care of. There are still a few 80’s apartment buildings still up and running in the city, but most of them get replaced as needed. The University has only built a few residence halls since 1980.
Of course, the City of Iowa City wasn’t a huge fan of the idea after a while, and is constantly trying to pass new zoning regulations to curb “student slums”, but that’s an entirely different discussion.
Yes, I believe I am, T. I can only conclude that either they or I will be first into the re-education camps, depending on who wins the revolution.
John B, consider the possibility that the resentment is focussed around toll booths — massive traffic jam creators, not to mention the need for fishing for quarters between the seats. My impression around here is that a fair number of people are pretty happy getting one of those radio toll collectors. I’ve got one, and I’m therefore much more inclined to take the toll road, because I can just use it freely without slowing and without carrying exact change. Unfortunately the tolls are rather steep — $4 for a 10-mile strip of the 91 — and I do wonder why. It might just be congestion pricing, which is fine by me, or perhaps there are economies of scale at work here, and the tolls generally would fall if the major fixed cost of toll collection were spread over many more miles of road.
Personally, I would definitely favor replacing the gasoline tax with tolls on roads collected by a radio transponder. I like the idea of paying for the roads I drive on, and not paying for roads I don’t, although I am sure a certain amount of subsidization is necessary.
Interesting point, George, thanks. Surely it would be possible, however, for some compromise? My daughter is in a 120-year-old dorm, and she is delighted by the 19th century architecture. Less so by the 1920s heating and utter absence of air conditioning. But surely there is a way to update the interior of the building to allow for improved service efficiency without tearing it to the ground?
@Carl: If the building is that old it has historic value and is probably worth saving. It just needs Bob Villa. But that’s when banks and university buildings were really built to last and be architectural icons, with real hand-carved stonework and such. But then you hit the 1920’s Art Deco buildings, the 1930’s WPA buildings, the 1940’s wartime buildings, the post WW-II GI boom buildings, the 1950’s Ozzie and Harriet buildings, the 1960’s modernistic buildings with Sear’s appliance green panels and windows that don’t open, and the 1970’s buildings that are just strip mall architecture and whatever Jimmy Carter’s latest fad was, and subsequent buildings that seem to defy a coherent purpose. And of course a university sits them all side by side, perhaps as an asthetic assault experiment run by the psychology or architecture schools.
The result is students living in an environment “designed” by a committee of tweed suited academics who couldn’t find gainful employment, think the presence of physics and engineering majors is debasing the university into a glorified tech college, think a conference on whether Shakespeare was gay will enrich the intellectual development of society, and will sponsor no-show pretend-professor job for anyone in the Obama White House.
Of course these are the same people that preach Marxism without realizing than in any such world they’d be lined up against a wall and shot for crimes against coherent architecture, being a useless eater, and wearing glasses.
Eloquent. It sounds like you’re talking about a big sprawly public school. Most of the schools I know are actually concerned about how the architecture fits in, and they fuss about it. Not, I hasten to add, with necessarily pleasing results, the appalling library tower at UMass Amherst springing immediately to mind — but they do think about it. In fact, I can think of two places (UIUC and UCB) that went to enormous expense to build a new undergraduate library underground because they didn’t want to ruin the esthetics of the land where it had to go.
I dunno, though. Isn’t the idea that they should spend money on architectural consistency, or at least sanity, in tension with the idea that they should be economical with the tuition money?
Well Carl, since they’e spending other people’s money the law of _insert_law_here_ applies. They will compromise on architectural consistency and economics by spending the maximum amount of money they can get their hands on.
It will be a compromise between vanity (my campus is gorgeous), presitige (my campus is better designed, more wholesome, historic, environmental, etc), and cost (this is the most the alumni will spend, and who cares about a cost/benefit ratio, because his money comes free!).
Why else would you build an undergraduate library undergound, unless you though undergrads were troglodytes, subhumans servitors whose mere existence stains the hallowed towers of academia?
These architectural decisions are definitely not customer driven, and if they have any connection to competition it’s no deeper than teenage fashions, as new recruits swap Facebook pictures about which campus has more ivy growing up the walls.
Given that high-school seniors are the new customer base, and that they are, in reality, shamelessly pandered to, it’s shockingly odd how academia can hold itself on such lofty heights, seemingly above us all, when they refuse to realize that they have been, and always will be, competing for attention and recruits with the Paris Hilton school of butt-thong design.
Sure, everyone would like to think they’re elite, but compare the number of offered courses in hypersonic reentry vehicle design to fashion merchandizing, gender studies, ethnic studies, and pop music. Univerisities have lots of professors with serious and hard subjects to teach, and those are probably the same people who don’t waste their time beating their head against a wall about the shape of the new student cafeteria, badly outnumbered by professors from architecture, English studies, and _studies_ studies who are supporting a reflection of the latest fad, retro fad, or artistic monstrosity that has “meaning.”
Heavens, George, what makes you think students are the customer base? Just because they slave away in the halls? You might as well argue enlisted swabbies laboring in the bowls of USS Carl Vinson are the customer base of the Navy.
The customer base of the university is (1) the Federal government, which provides the bulk of the string-free revenue available to a modern research university, (2) the state, which provides a fair chunk of the rest for public institutions, (3) big business, which in a few short years usefully transforms penniless embittered new graduates into nostalgic alumni donors, and (4) wealthy parents, in the case of smaller colleges with less research overhead.
Why else would you build an undergraduate library undergound, unless you though undergrads were troglodytes, subhumans servitors…?
You’re missing the point: why put the building underground, where it could not be used to demonstrate the university’s puissance with its elegance, bulk, obvious expense, carved gargoyles? That was the decision pondered. No questions related to undergraduates entered anybody’s head, because the people concerned with such things are barely aware that undergraduates even exist. You might as well wonder whether they pondered how the local urban-dwelling animals — raccoons, squirrels, robins, cockroaches — would react to the edifice.
I couldn’t help but mentally extend the concept from Taco Bell locations to Manned Launchers.
Time to tear it down, redesign it all, and rebuild it cheaper and more efficient.
Nice to see that finally happening.
Univerisities have lots of professors with serious and hard subjects to teach
Nonsense. I see you are not familiar with the guild rules of academia. Generally, those serious and hard subjects to which you allude in math and science — calculus, Newtonian mechanics and Maxwellian E&M, thermodynamics, general and organic chemistry — are taught either by part-time lecturers hired on a per-semester basis and paid squat plus documented on-orbit expenses, or by newly-hired junior faculty being tested for their time-management skills (they split the teaching with grant-writing, but must not forget which is more important).
My observation is that it’s better in engineering, but I would from personal experience estimate that the fraction of Academic Senate professors teaching serious and hard subjects is between 2 and 5%, perhaps a dozen at most major universities.
Although..now I think about it, I have failed to include the foreign language department, and I must disagree with myself: teaching foreign languages is serious and hard work, and those departments are so cash-poor they very often do work their tenured professors pretty hard at it. So add them in.
Carl, my only feeling that the students are the customer base is that the students, or their parents, can choose a different univeristy in the blink of an eye. I assume the reason this doesn’t show up in dramatic swings is that most students go to a college that is close, go to their parent’s university, or go to support an athletic team.
But if no high-school graduates pick university A, university A will have no freshman class. Obviously that’s pretty much never happened in the history of universities, and I’m sure universities would point to it as evidence that they’re all competitive. But what kind of competition must it be if thousands of new start-ups jump in but none fail?
Perhaps it’s a bit like high school. You throw a generally similar pile of books at the kids and four years later they are measureably more informed and capable than junior high graduates, and all the kids are above average.
I’ll grant the foreign language teachers. That’s a brutally difficult job that I assume is overlooked because there’s no obvious heirarchy, no way to prove genius, and no miraculous results.
I knew a college music professor (a classical pianist) who observed that mastery of piano opens up only two jobs. You will become one of the dozen or so concert pianists in demand or you will become a piano teacher.
As for engineering, they stopped most hand-on training back in the early to mid 1900’s, apparently because the other professors (philosophy, religion, English literature, law, etc) regarded the engineering professors as glorified grease monkeys teaching machining. So the engineering professors quit teaching the students how to run machine tools and make parts and focused on abstractions, graphs, and anything else that didn’t dirty the hands. As a country I think we’ve suffered from that choice.
My company hired an electrical engineer with his masters degree, and a few years later I had to patiently explain to him what the base of a transistor does. So I had to draw a diagram of a transistor and explain about current gain, base current, and such. He said that he’d forgotten it because they only covered it in a couple of days before moving on to other things, and he just crammed for the test. I’m shocked that we let people graduate high school without a basic understanding of a bipolar transistor, much less mint people with an MS in EE who don’t have it.
This is why a year as an apprentice can beat four years in college.
George, you’re assuming the point of a college degree is an education. It’s not. It’s a credential, a door-opener and not that often much more.
In principle students (or rather parents) could choose a school that did a better job educating — but, first, how would they know? This is the ultimate pig in a poke. They people buying the thing (education) have no way of knowing whether it works or not until long after the purchase. You can’t take your BS for a test-drive, like Dr. McCoy putting on the “teacher” in Spock’s Brain of unlamented late memory, and experience what it’s like, briefly, in the show room, to know what you’ll know after four years at Whatsa Matta U. The case is better when child is going to the parent’s alma mater, studying in the same field for the same career choice, but how often does that happen?
Secondly, few seek knowledge for its own sweet sake, it’s usually a ticket to salary or career. So the empirical proof that it’s worthwhile is whether the graduates get good jobs — but, quite often, that is a question of reputation and groupthink as much as is genuine quality of product. If (say) MIT can get its graduates interviews at Google based largely on Larry Page’s reverence for the research work published by the AI lab, then it doesn’t much matter if MIT actually teaches far better than NC State.
I submit you can see the nature of a college degree as a credential more than a product by the fact that the supply remains fairly constant even as demand has grown with population. Admission to “the best” colleges is much harder now than 30 years ago, because while the population has grown 50%, what are considered “good schools” hasn’t grown at all.
Why is that? The admission rate to Harvard is now something like 4%. Why doesn’t some entrepreneur buy some cheap land in piedmont Virginia, put up some stately buildings, hire 500 faculty recently denied tenure at Harvard, Yale and MIT — and eat Harvard’s lunch? Because no johnny-come-lately school, no matter how good, is going to compete with Veritas and Condita 1636. It’s a social credential, pure and simple (although they may also do a decent job teaching, for all I know). That’s why people like Reynolds argue darkly it’s a bubble in the making, like Owning Your Own Home.
Even to the extent it’s not just a social credential, the argument has been made (most notably by Murray and Herrnstein 30 years ago) that it essentially just functions as a very expensive intelligence test that allows employers to weed out people of mere double digit IQ. You could, in this case, teach people anything at all — Sanskrit, how to compose for the digeridoo, astrology, Quenya and Sindarin — and it would serve the same essential purpose of proving a minimal level of g. Furthermore, good teaching is in some sense antithetical to this function, or at least indifferent. The same expectations with bad teaching provides a better test of student IQ.
Finally, I will tell you from direct personal experience that no one knows how to teach. It’s not a science. It may not even have enough predictability to be called an art — it’s more like witch doctoring, or alchemy. We do not know how to get knowledge efficiently into the heads of students. All we can do is present it, and test it, and add in various stories we hope will help learning.
But we can quantify learning abilities, and even though we can’t reliably identify good teachers we can easily identify good students. So any univesrity that somehow, by hook or by crook or 480-year-old reputation, manages to attract and admit a very high q
…(oops) …quality of student will ipso facto produce excellent learning and bright, clever, well-educated graduates. You don’t need to particularly worry about the quality of teaching — because you’ve guaranteed the quality of learning.
And even those students and parents who twig to this won’t then refuse to go, because sharing the reputation of all those other smart people who go there is, objectively, useful, and being in the company of other smart quick learners does make your own learning more efficient.
Carl, I agree 100%. In addition, people who go to the top schools (who are from top families) meet other people at the top school and network, so the system reinforces itself. Obviously you have the rare case of the Facebook founder dissing his classmate twins, but by and large you could send an idiot to Harvard and they’ll end up in some bizarrely lucrative job that could be done by the average sanitation worker.
The assumption now (since the SAT and ACT) is that the semi-retarded children of a Harvard alum can’t get in, and that anyone who does get in is there because they’re brilliant. In an old book called “Class” by Paul Fussell, in which an Englishman explains the American class system, he answered a few random questions in the back. Some lady wrote, “My son went to U of bumfuck state, drives a VW, but slapped a Harvard sticker on the back window for job interviews. Is that ethical?” The author wrote, “It’s completely unethical but positively brilliant.” The quotes are from memory, and may be a bit inaccurate, but there it is.
The sad part is that we’ve found it more convenient, when it comes to judging brilliance and potential, on the perpetually dim clock punchers inhabiting the admissions department of any college instead of first-hand interviews. Nobody who contentedly spends 20 years working in college admissions could even understand what a truly bright kid says.
“So his math scores seem okay, but he says he’s almost proved the Taniyama–Shimura conjecture on elliptic curves so he can beat Fermat. Sounds like some skate park thing. Let’s find someone a little less X-games.”
Okay, So to test this hype by Taco Bell that their most complex item in the Double Decker Taco Supreme. I just ordered 4 of them….*removes belt*; I will report shortly as the outcome.
Not quite the crunchwrap but I figure it will get into the hands of their vaunted — SERVICE CHAMPION!
Oh and I posted this after I ate the first one: it went down like candy.
Number 2 met a similar and equal fate….
Not bothering to sully the first 2 with sauce I went for the full hot this time. Quite nice, tomatoes soaked it up quickly — vegetables layered quite well and consistent throughout. Oops one more… further testing must resume….
Wait, why was I writing this; nevermind, I just noticed the outer soft wrap nearly equal the hard inner shell every time. Sort of a, soft taco texture with the rigidity of a inner yummy shell core. The ultimate taco? I hope not but the path is certainly laid clear!! 😀