"Four will do the trick." She hasn't touched the only menu on the table and pushes it in his direction and goes back to tapping.

He doesn't really have opinions about the best Voan fusion. He glances at it, looks at her instead. 

He decides he is in love.

Four minutes later she looks up. "Laha says you're an economist."

"Yeah. Not allowed to actually run a business, see, it's the next best thing. But you get - predictable sorts of blind spots - in an academic field made up of people who've never run or even worked in the entities they're trying to describe and design policy for."

"What do you want to know?"

"If you set tax law what would it look like? How much does the regulatory environment actually affect hiring decisions - how well do you know it, how is that sort of information learned and from who, why'd you pick furniture, what's the single most annoying regulation, are there policies with obvious perverse effects if you're actually in business but which don't seem to be acknowledged as having them -"

"Standardized. I have three people, one per major site, who are there just to make sure everyone's taxes are sorted out so we don't have auditors sniffing around or lose people to inadvertent tax fraud sentences. It should be simple, not because people are too stupid to understand deductions for using in-province schools if they tried but because if you're going to steal someone's paycheck you shouldn't also steal half a dozen evenings of time and attention and executive function from tired hard-working people. If you'd sent these in writing I'd remember what your other questions were -"

He emails them. 

She peers at her pocket everything. "What do you mean by regulatory environment -"

"The full set of rules about workplace safety, wages and benefits, import and export permissions, fraud and out-of-caste-income and illegal-worker reporting - in other words, all the laws a business has to follow to be sure that even if audited by someone in a bad mood you'd be in the clear -"

"I can't hire nearly as many foreigners as I'd like to without ridiculous rigmarole. I told my staff I wanted to open up a factory in Svaro - it made sense on the face of it, land's cheap there and since they shut down half the fishing industry to avoid driving things extinct there's lots of out of work purples and it's on excellent shipping lanes for expanding east - and they said sure but I had to staff it with all Anitami workers and I'd have to pay Svaro for their visas and - it was insane, I wanted to send a translator and a standards manager and a hiring manager and call it done, it wound up not being cost-effective. I have staff figuring out the details like that for me, when I first started I found out that if I had less than a certain amount in profit per season I was too small to be audited no matter what I did so I lived with my parents and reinvested everything I made and kept nothing and ignored every other rule until I could afford savvy yellow types who got that sort of thing in school."

Notes notes notes - "do you think lots of businesses stay small because they want to avoid becoming auditable and getting in trouble for things they couldn't realistically have complied with -"

"Possibly, although I found out about that rule very nearly by accident, it was a plot point in a story. To a point it encourages useful reinvestment but only to a point and wouldn't do anybody any good if they needed to live off their work sooner than that." Glance at pocket everything. "Furniture because it seemed easy to standardize. People like their furniture to be different, but not in the ways that matter for manufacturing it, not most people - so the pattern for the sofa covers are free on the internet, anyone can sell a sofa cover that perfectly fits my sofas in any fabric they like, and then they can all look different but the bones are the same and everyone gets creative with the covers so they need to buy the sofa from me to get that cute one with cats or whatever that they saw on the internet."

He beams at her. "Have you attempted to get exemptions or waivers for onerous regulations, or lobby to have them changed -"

"Every now and then I am sufficiently enraged to write an essay, which I make Laha turn into a letter to the appropriate regulatory agency. This has never accomplished anything, so I haven't scaled it up."

Nod. "And you don't, personally, know any blues, it's all official channels and those are yelling into the void -"

"Right."

For some reason he looks somewhere between furious and gleeful. "Single most annoying regulation."

"The hiring foreigners thing - not even just in foreign locations of operation, it's all but impossible to import them, the other countries should be paying to get rid of them and free up their seats on the train but they don't help at all, I have one imported green from Evalee who works on the assembly gadgets and that's all I've needed badly enough."

Type type nod.

"You're writing a paper or something?"

"No - I mean, yes, I write papers for a living and it seems valuable to have this in the right journals said with the right vocabulary words, but 'read about entrepreneurs until one intrigues me and then go get lunch with her' is not proper research practice - I just wanted to know - I estimated once that we were losing a percentage point of GDP annually to regulatory burdens and now I'm thinking it's even more than that -"

A waitress brings her a plateful of spicy things. She pops one into her mouth. "Are you actually going to get lunch?"

"Recommend something?"

"Do you like spicy?"