 Bombs away The US attack on Iranian nuclear facilities over the weekend was a remarkable feat of logistics, with B-2 stealth bombers flying 6,000 miles to drop several 15-ton bombs to crack open underground bunkers. The damage to Iran’s uranium enrichment capabilities will not be clear for some time, wrote the former Australian General Mick Ryan, and the longer-term effects are even more uncertain: “How might the American attacks unify the Iranian people for a longer, broader struggle against Israel and America that plays out over months and years?” And what will the implications be for geopolitics? Iran is, after all, part of a loose grouping with other authoritarian states, including China, North Korea, and Russia. Russia will likely be pleased; more focus on the Middle East means less on Vladimir Putin’s military atrocities in Europe, and if munitions are diverted from Ukraine to Israel, so much the better for him. But China may have a more ambiguous response. Given its own economic woes and how central Iran is to its oil supply, it may be keen to see the conflict end; on the other hand, “every ship, every missile, every bomb, every aircraft” deployed to the Middle East means a reduction of US deterrence over Taiwan. Crime and punishment There is a commonplace response to concern about crime. It goes something like: You have never been safer. Crime has been falling for decades; we have a PR problem, not a crime problem. “This is partly true,” says the writer Martin Robbins, “but entirely wrong.” It is, he says, irrelevant whether crime numbers are lower than they were in 1990. “People’s right to complain about a problem is not somehow abrogated by the fact that it used to be worse in the past,” he says. “Should I also be grateful that I can travel from London to Watford without having my stagecoach routed by highwaymen?” It is true that — at least in the UK, where Robbins lives, but in other Western countries too — crime is way down in recent decades. But the experience of crime has, in important ways, worsened. If someone steals your phone or car, you can often literally see where it is via GPS, “yet if I provide this gift of omniscience to the police they do absolutely nothing with it.” There is a cast-iron rule for any organization, Robbins says: If your numbers and your users disagree, then you shouldn’t ignore your numbers, “but you definitely shouldn’t ignore your users,” because they’re almost certainly telling you something that your statistics aren’t capturing. Service with a smile Restaurants run on a strict rhythm. Your table might be penciled in for a two-hour slot, with perhaps a 15-minute buffer. If you’re booked for 6:30 it means someone else is probably lined up at 8:45. You turn up at 7:03, take half an hour choosing between burrata and bone marrow, then linger over your last glass of tempranillo. “You’re annoyed I’ve just asked you to start wrapping up,” writes the British restaurateur Dan O’Regan. “I’m annoyed you made me ask. Neither of us says it out loud.” But this is the bit diners don’t like to think about: The restaurant is a clockwork operation, and if a table runs late, it throws the whole mechanism off. The “biggest myth in modern dining,” says O’Regan, is “take your time.” Servers say the line because it puts diners at their ease, but it’s conditional. “You don’t want to feel like you’re on a stopwatch [and] we don’t want to rush you,” but restaurants also need to plan, and be fair to later bookings. Good hospitality can mean saying no to a guest, and being a good guest doesn’t mean tipping big: “It means understanding that your night out is one of many we’re trying to deliver simultaneously… Because we’d rather give you 90 great minutes than three hours of flustered, resentful chaos.” |