http://mathforum.org/kb/message.jspa?messageID=7215948&tstart=0

The above link is relevant to threads I've stored here,
regarding franchising, which in El Norte we refer to as
"chain stores" (as in "a department store chain"). The
word "chain" may sound troubling, if thinking of devices
to deny humans their freedom. In the engineering language
of management, one hopes to communicate a data structure,
suggesting economies of scale.

Along these latter lines, I think the idea of an ancestor
class template, with instantiated objects, makes more sense
than the "chain" metaphor. In Coffee Shops Network (CSN),
there's this idea of a ship's kitchen, or sub's (some naval
craft), as a place to bake and prepare servings. The surrounding
decks are committed to the various purposes of the shop, which,
if you've been reading the CSN blog, have to do with investment.
"Where do we put our profits?" It's a question you ask yourself
on behalf of your vendors.

Anyway, the gist is: to map the object oriented language
metaphors inherited from a recent chapter in computer science,
to the challenges of "business science" (yes, the allusion to
"bs" is deliberate, have to expect a lot of hand waving when
it comes to intra-human affairs). We already have "agile
management styles" so this isn't going to be a "new thing"
-- conservative and traditional, just like 'critical path'
from operations research and the same maritime tradition.

How might these management philosophies be applied in a Fast
Food Free Zone (F3Z) such as Havana or small hill town in Italy?
The "slow food" movement is pretty wide-spread by the way,
already a known quantity on the tourist circuit.

And I quote:

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If you want a stronger spatial geometry component than the neighborhood
flatlanders care to offer, open a franchise along those lines. Franchises
are well understood in El Norte but not *just* in El Norte. Even if we keep
Havana a fast food free zone (one of the current plans I've seen favored),
socialism and capitalism both appreciate "cookie cutter" economies of scale
and the lower marginal costs associated with not re-inventing the wheel
every time. Portland has a coffee roaster that delivers on bicycle, Havana
has ice cream delivery cycles. Portland has Ben & Jerry's (European, so
immune from the boycott), Havana has lots of coffee drinkers (but no
Starbucks, and why not keep it that way, as people pay good money to get
away from home and what could be more exotic than no Coca-Cola? Bhutan and
North Korea have similar commercial advantages).

In these era of the Global U, I think it's pretty safe to predict that Pycon
/ Havana, like Pycon / Tehran, will feature much the same content, i.e.
Django for truckers with PostGIS. Economizing on fuel in the age of peak
oil, by optimizing delivery schedules, is a standard problem in
transportation engineering yet is of no use to anyone if it stays bottled up
in universities. Executable math languages (so-called "programming
languages") are where it's at, as every philosophy student well knows.

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