Yeah the problem with espresso is once you have good espresso you really can’t go back to drip coffee. It just tastes like bitter colored water :(
But you also make a good point, Starbucks sells a ton of different drinks but the shot that goes into them is always the same. If you put in a little time to experiment and dial in it’s easy to find something that fits your taste even better.
I’d throw a couple more bucks at the grinder, but I’ve had moka pot coffee and it’s surprisingly good. Granted I’m only a low-level coffee snob but I’ve always been of the opinion do what works for you and screw the haters. And while someone might make fun of your setup, from where I sit you are getting a cup of coffee you like better than Starbucks for less than €1 per cup. Sounds like a win to me!
Look at the wording- ‘premium experience’. He’s not selling coffee, he’s thinking big picture of the whole experience from the moment you walk in the store. He’s not even wrong here. This is good business management- that he’s taking charge of everything about the store from the decor, the furniture, the colors, how the employee talks to you, etc. That’s all part of the experience.
What’s wrong is that people keep going. Most people don’t give a fuck about the experience, they just want a tasty coffee. Our economy is based on competition and free choice. If he makes his coffee cost $8 or $9 or $15 or $50 that’s his right and his company’s right. Just as it is your right to go elsewhere, which you should be doing anyway.
The thing is- IMHO, Starbucks coffee isn’t worth anywhere near $9. Here’s a challenge- go to Starbucks and order a double espresso shot. Now find a local artisan coffee place, like the type with a chalkboard that says where the beans they’re brewing today were grown. And get a double espresso from them also. Compare the two.
What you’ll notice about Starbucks is that it’s burnt. And that’s because it’s literally burnt- the typical Starbucks bean is roasted MUCH darker than average, so the resulting coffee flavor is dominated by a burned smoky bitter-ish flavor.
Compare that to your local artisan coffee place- you’ll notice it’s NOT burnt, the flavor is NOT dominated by smokiness, but you have a lot more layers of flavor. Then order whatever drink you want- better coffee in means better drink out.
Keep in mind also most of what Starbucks sells isn’t really coffee, it’s milky sugary drinks that incorporate a few drips of espresso. So you’re paying $9 for a sugary calorie bomb made from overly roasted coffee that just makes you fat.
Also- if you usually order the same thing at Starbucks- just learn to make it. Even if you throw $1000 at a nice fully automatic espresso machine, taking the per-coffee cost from $9 to $1 means you’ll break even on the machine in 125 coffees. For most people that’s less than a year. And you can do it yourself- next time you order, watch what the barista does. They are not wizards and nothing behind the counter is magic. An espresso machine and a blender will make like 95% of the menu. Here’s a guide
Google for ‘perfect fit content’. Spotify was and potentially still is aggressively pushing AI content in some of their curated playlists because it’s cheaper for them to play it
100%. The kitchen nightmares UK version was way way way better because it wasn’t overproduced and dramaed up, it was focused on the food and the restaurant which is way more interesting to me than a bunch of idiots yelling at each other.
There’s stupid from top to bottom here.
The company is stupid for allowing an AI full root access to their entire setup.
The provider is stupid for only generating full-access API keys. They’re even stupider for storing backups with a volume, so deleting the volume (zero confirmation via API key) also insta-deletes the backups. And they’re stupidest for encouraging users to plug AIs into this full-trust mess.
And the company is absolute stupidest for having no backups other than the provider’s builtin versioning.
The problem is it’s not just ‘form a union’. In most cases unionizing means joining a much larger union that covers many hundreds of companies. And it will mean that all questions of compensation or discipline then have to go through a union contract. It means more paperwork and less flexibility.
If there is trust between workers and management, then workers often don’t see much benefit to going through all this. And that’s why the guy said every shop that went Union deserved it, because those shots all tried to save money by screwing their employees and so the employees fought back and unionized which ended up costing the company more than if they had just paid the workers correctly in the first place.
In most cases here unions are fairly large organizations where the larger union covers dozens or hundreds of companies. So it wouldn’t be like ‘Bob’s maintenance shop union’ it would be like ‘international brotherhood of machinists union chapter #1234’.
And when that is done, the relationship between the workers and the company changes. The union will negotiate a specific contract with the company which all workers and all jobs then are covered under. This provides a lot stronger protections for the workers, but can also be less flexible in some cases. And of course the worker has to pay dues to the union, it’s usually not that much but it’s not zero.
Point is, if the workers are happy and have good relations with management then they often see no reason to go through all this.
On the other hand when management starts turning the screws and tries to make more profit out of the worker compensation, then it’s absolutely time to unionize and workers are even more seeing that.
I once was on a tour of a non union maintenance shop, in an area where most similar shops were union. One of the people on the tour asked the manager about this.
His answer- ‘Every shop around here that’s gone union, has deserved it. I pay my guys above average, I don’t flip out when they take time off, and we have decent health insurance. My workers are happy- when the union comes calling it’s the workers who tell them to get lost.’
If WotC is going union, they probably deserve it.
The name has been there for almost 20 years. If harm was going to happen, it would have already happened, would already be happening.
Consider drugs- if I invent a new drug, I have to run studies to ensure it’s not harmful. But if the drug’s been on the market for 20 years with many millions of doses consumed, I can look at the people who’ve taken it to see if it’s harmful.
What you’re saying is the drug’s been on the market for 20 years, there’s no reported harm in that time, but we should pull it off the market anyway. That makes no sense.
Can you find one single person anywhere at all who’s said ‘I’m disabled and the name GIMP is offensive’? Surely if the name hasn’t caused offense in the last two decades, it’s unlikely to cause offense in the next two decades?
You misunderstand me.
If someone with a physical impairment says that using this word in software is harmful TO THEM, I will ABSOLUTELY believe them at face value and probably agree with the name change.
Can you find me such a person? THAT is what I was saying in my post. I don’t see any evidence of actual offense happening. I see people trying to avoid offense, but no actual disabled people taking offense.
You want documentation that gimp is offensive?
‘Gimp’ as referring to someone with a disability, is offensive. That’s not the only use of the word.
Or are you on the camp that we should rename IDE connections ‘master’ and ‘slave’ because a dark-skinned person might have a problem with that?
Pretending to not understand when an acronym spells a word
I understand exactly what it means. I am pointing out that it has more than one meaning.
The point of my original comment (which you apparently missed) was that GIMP has been called GIMP for years/decades… if in that time nobody has actually been offended by the name, then why is it important to change it now?
Let me give you an example- let’s say I make a piece of software called Web Output Parser, or WOP. Obviously ‘wop’ is a potentially offensive term, as it was once a slur that refers to people of Italian descent.
If my WEb Output Parser is used by millions over 15+ years, and not one single Italian-descent person reports offense, am I under some obligation to change the name to avoid a future offense that hasn’t occurred in almost two decades? Does the fact that the pejorative use of the word has gone out of common vocabulary make any difference?
That’s why I say it’s performant. Renaming GIMP would cause a problem for millions of people who use, modify, and distribute GIMP, all to avoid an offense that hasn’t happened in almost 20 years.
Do we have any actual documentation of anybody who might be called a ‘gimp’ actually being offended by the name? Or is this just more performant bullshit?
Every time one of these changes is made it creates confusion for thousands or millions of people. And it creates a reload on other software packages and dependencies to change the name.
It is no different than software changing and interface for the sake of changing it. You are forcing your users to relearn something they already know which has a real cost in time and potentially in dollars.
Gimp does not refer to people with movement disabilities. It stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. You want to make things less offensive, double down on what the acronym stands for rather than changing it.
This is absolutely a thing. I remember reading a story about this, this was years ago, but this guy worked for the air force of some nation in heavy conflict. One of the most used weapons in this war was an anti-radiation missile, it would loiter for some time until it detected an emissions target then lock on and destroy it. Whenever they needed to use radar, they would hotwire a bunch of microwave ovens to work with the door open, then plug them in with like six extension cords plugged together. The missiles would lock right onto those microwave ovens and blow them up. He was joking about how the enemy would boast they destroyed 15 aircraft that week on the ground, when his force only had 10 aircraft to begin with.
Please understand that this is not due to any sort of bubble. Especially not with memory.
OpenAI has themselves purchased a significant percentage of the world’s memory production for 2026. The negotiated in secret with two different manufacturers, announcing the deals on the same day. Neither manufacturer was aware of the other, and both have said if they were they would not have made the deal as it sent a significant percentage of the world’s memory production to one customer.
More interestingly, the deal was not for memory chips. It was for finished wafers, which themselves have to then be sliced into hundreds of individual chips, which each need to be tested and packaged in the black casing we call a chip. As far as I am aware, OpenAI has no capability to do this. Which means they may have purchased a significant percentage of the world’s memory output only to throw it in the garbage and keep it from their competitors.
My understanding however is that this deal was for 2026 production. Go to next year, there may be an improvement.
Amen to this. There’s a very few couple of good ones, but for the most part the Old guard Democrats really need to go enjoy their long overdue retirement and let some new people with new ideas and new energy carry the torch.
The old playbook isn’t working anymore. It doesn’t resonate with voters. It doesn’t address the major problems with our country.
This is why software patents were a horrible idea. We were all warned.
Still, I thought the whole objective of AV1 was to avoid any incumbrances.
Thing that bothers me is these guys are claiming to have patents over AV1.
The whole point of av1 is it supposed to be free of this bullshit.
I don’t understand. I learned in school that America is the only important country in the world.
Microsoft one would be:
Microsoft: Microsoft Copilot