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“The closer to the train station, the worse the kebab” – a “study”

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Re: “The closer to the train station, the worse the kebab” – a “study”

#291

Post by hinkley »

einpoklum wrote: post #280
jclulow wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is generally to recover cents on the dollar from money you can't otherwise use. Imagine you have a network of people moving illegal drugs. They collect money from their customers, and they need to pay it to you, the supplier. Arrange for them to eat a lot of food at your restaurant. Maybe they shout their friends. The money goes into the restaurant, and is mingled with other money. That money is used to pay…

Requiring your henchmen to eat a lot of Kebab all the time is not at all a scalable money laundering scheme. It's also self-defeating since they will become fat and sickly from too much Kebab :-(

The more common thing that comes up in hypothetical conversations of the sort “you acquire $5M through less than legal means. How can you spend it?” is owning a bar.

Buying the liquor gets a bit fuzzy as to where the money comes from. But the bigger thing is you can have imaginary customers and either drink “their” alcohol, pour it down the drain, or use it for gifts and bribes, all while booking receipts for people who never came into the bar at all.

It’s not that the henchmen spend every ill gotten dollar in the restaurant, it’s that the restaurant looks busy enough for that level of revenue to look even remotely plausible.

Re: “The closer to the train station, the worse the kebab” – a “study”

#292

Post by numpad0 »

maeln wrote: post #256
lqet wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did you include metro stations in your study? The original quote only included train stations. The metro originally largely replaced a tram network, so the metro station density in Paris is higher than for other underground systems. I think it is very hard to find kebap shops in Paris that are not within 500 m of a metro station. This kind of dilutes the significance of your study, because I never really noticed…

I would second this. In Paris, but I find it to be true in most European city, the area surrounding train station is usually not very nice. It is usually surrounded by cheap hotel for 1-night traveler, overpriced fast food (hence the initial theory) and social housing / cheap building (a lot of people don't want to live next to a train station due to the nuisance, so poor people often get stuck there). On the other h…

As a non-Parisian: the hard distinction between "metro" and "train" can be non-obvious, even perplexing, depending on which train systems one is accustomed with. Some systems just don't have it, in manners that if said in Paris terms it might be train to Lyon arriving next to Line 6 Westbound.

Re: “The closer to the train station, the worse the kebab” – a “study”

#293

Post by tinco »

robocat wrote: post #270
tinco wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have money you can't explain to the IRS how you got it, that's dirty money. Now you use some clean money to buy a kebab shop. Every day you give your dirty money to the kebab shop, the kebab shop prints fake receipts. Now the IRS can be convinced the money came from cash in hand customers.

Does the IRS somewhat encourage dirty money to be taxed? I'm guessing they would prefer to have it highly taxed but perhaps getting some tax is second best. In New Zealand "Income that is earned from illegal activities needs to have tax paid on it." however they do try to deter money laundering, tax evasion and tax fraud. In New Zealand it is getting harder to launder money because cash is not used as much as it used…

Well yes, in the sense that Al Capone famously got nailed on not filing income taxes. But of course, if Al Capone had told the IRS that he got his money through extortion and illegal liquor, gambling and drugs or whatever it was he did then the IRS would gladly give that information to whoever was investigating him, so I don't think the IRS would profit much from it either way.

And I imagine card payments do make it harder, but the schemes just become more difficult, which might press on the margins a little. You could always buy your kebab shops overseas. Sell your drugs for Bitcoin, send the Bitcoin to Berlin, exchange them there for Euros, cash them in at your Kebab shop, and then wire them back to New Zealand, bam you're an international investor in the eyes of your government.

Re: “The closer to the train station, the worse the kebab” – a “study”

#294

Post by phist_mcgee »

vidarh wrote: post #285
vanderZwan wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this is a nice selection of European cities to compare! Having lived in Berlin and Stockholm (and a few other cities), I'd say Stockholm has by far the worst kebab options of all places I've lived, while Berlin was the best one. I'm curious whether this is reflected in local reviews, or whether the locals just lower or heighten their standards based on the what the average food quality is like.

Kebabs are one of the foods (like Chinese cuisine) that morphs depending on a combination of which kebab-eating group brought it to the country, and local cuisine. I'm not sure about Stockholm, or Sweden in general, when it comes to kebabs, but kebabs in Norway bear little resemblance to the kebabs I get in London. And the UK now has a chain serving "German" kebabs, which again are significantly different from the ke…

Kebabs in Australia are basically a different food to the one you get in continental Europe.

Good, but different.

Re: “The closer to the train station, the worse the kebab” – a “study”

#295

Post by sebastiennight »

Symbiote wrote: post #277
maeln wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would second this. In Paris, but I find it to be true in most European city, the area surrounding train station is usually not very nice. It is usually surrounded by cheap hotel for 1-night traveler, overpriced fast food (hence the initial theory) and social housing / cheap building (a lot of people don't want to live next to a train station due to the nuisance, so poor people often get stuck there). On the other h…

You would need to further filter for the largest railway stations, perhaps by number of platforms ≥ 6 or 8, otherwise you will include many urban and suburban stations that serve essentially the same purpose as metro stations.

There are not a lot of stations that a Parisian dweller would consider to be a "railway station" AND "inside Paris".

I'd say mostly Montparnasse, Gare de Lyon, Gare de l'Est, Gare du Nord, and Austerlitz.

RER, Transilien, Metro and Tramway stations would not count as "train stations" in the eyes of a Parisian/French person, and places outside of the Périphérique (the ring road that follows the old defensive "Thier walls" of the city) would not count as "Paris" for this kind of conversation.

Re: “The closer to the train station, the worse the kebab” – a “study”

#296

Post by s0fasurfa »

vanderZwan wrote: post #282
randomcarbloke wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

please do berlin, london, and stockholm.

Yeah, this is a nice selection of European cities to compare! Having lived in Berlin and Stockholm (and a few other cities), I'd say Stockholm has by far the worst kebab options of all places I've lived, while Berlin was the best one. I'm curious whether this is reflected in local reviews, or whether the locals just lower or heighten their standards based on the what the average food quality is like.

Berlin shouldn't be a surprise, because the Kebap Sandwich was invented here (at least according to some sources: https://berlinexperiences.com/was-the-doner-kebab-invented-i...)

Before that, Kebap was a dish served on a plate, taken in a seated manner.

Re: “The closer to the train station, the worse the kebab” – a “study”

#297

Post by TeMPOraL »

percevalve wrote: post #290
JmsPae wrote: post #86

Hi there, "OP" here. First off, it's been fun to see this post spread across the interwebs since I first wrote it one caffeine-fueled day just over a week ago (first Menéame, now here) and for the heck of it, I thought I would clarify a few things; This post was (sortof) a meme. Sure, I "understood the assignment" and performed the quick "study" ("analysis" might be more fitting) for the sake of the original post ove…

That looks like a typical collider bias to me... There should be no correlation between location and quality... But as you are looking at restaurant that are still "in business" you are introducing a bias. If you simplify, a restaurant can have : - good/bad location - good/bad food If your restaurant has bad location and bad food, it is not going to stay in business very long. After that you can have a mix of all, bu…

> if you remove the "bad/bad" restaurant there is a correlation that appears, but it is due to the collider bias.

This sounds like the correlation appears because of you throwing away some data, but the way I see it, that correlation is real - you're not removing the bad/bad restaurants, the market is.

I've been reading up on collider bias on Wiki and pondering the examples[0] - restaurants, dating, celebrities - and the way I see it, the biased statistics is still true for whoever is doing the classification (person visiting fast-food restaurants, or looking for a date), and if their selection (taste) generalizes, it might also carry over to the general population.

I feel the restaurant example from Wiki, with its associated image below, is worth discussing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox#/media/Fil...

"An illustration of Berkson's Paradox. The top graph represents the actual distribution, in which a positive correlation between quality of burgers and fries is observed. However, an individual who does not eat at any location where both are bad observes only the distribution on the bottom graph, which appears to show a negative correlation."

This feels wrong to me. Why is the regression line nearly horizontal when, eyeballing the graph, a nearly vertical one would fit better and capture an even stronger positive correlation between qualities of hamburgers and fries? In fact, I'm tempted to even throw away the leftmost and rightmost points on the lower panel as outliers.

Anyway, this example assumes the bad/bad restaurants are not visited by the subject - however, if we take your scenario where bad/bad restaurants quickly go out of business, then it's the market that creates the correlation between those two hypothetically independent qualities, so as long as we're talking real world and not some imaginary spherical restaurants in frictionless vacuum, it would be fair to say the correlation exists (and that the causal mechanism behind it is market selection).

--

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox

Re: “The closer to the train station, the worse the kebab” – a “study”

#298

Post by throwup238 »

gamedever wrote: post #192
tialaramex wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but you can clearly see that the bottom-right quadrant of the plot is basically empty, which is an important insight. I don't think so? It's mostly a result of the fact that (obviously) the best place to sell food is where there are people, which is also the best place to put a metro station. So on average the kebabs are pretty good and on average they're near a station. In Figure 9 one of the worst reviewed restau…

> but the way you can tell it's the best place for a kebab is how late it's open every night That logic definitely does not apply to SF Bay Area. Most of the places that stay open are all pretty meh. A few pizza by the slice places, Dennys, Grubstake, Orphan Andy's, Mel's. Oakland and LA (SoCal) are no better. AFAIK most places have no interest in staying open late. Maybe they don't want to stay up. Maybe they don't…

I miss Sparky’s.

Re: “The closer to the train station, the worse the kebab” – a “study”

#299

Post by randomcarbloke »

vidarh wrote: post #285
vanderZwan wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this is a nice selection of European cities to compare! Having lived in Berlin and Stockholm (and a few other cities), I'd say Stockholm has by far the worst kebab options of all places I've lived, while Berlin was the best one. I'm curious whether this is reflected in local reviews, or whether the locals just lower or heighten their standards based on the what the average food quality is like.

Kebabs are one of the foods (like Chinese cuisine) that morphs depending on a combination of which kebab-eating group brought it to the country, and local cuisine. I'm not sure about Stockholm, or Sweden in general, when it comes to kebabs, but kebabs in Norway bear little resemblance to the kebabs I get in London. And the UK now has a chain serving "German" kebabs, which again are significantly different from the ke…

The author is Swedish, and having asked some Swedes they basically consider the kebab to be the goto "local" cuisine.

London of course has the two styles, |Turkish| and Turkish via Germany.

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