Sure, I was just trying to say that while some people will dislike the flavor of the currently vaunted light roasts, even when properly brewed, I think there is a pretty sizeable number of people who would like them well enough, but just find it too much hassle. Especially outside of the specialty coffee scene, where you see more and darker roasts, in my experience

When Costco or someone puts out a dark roast on the shelves, they generally aren’t competing for customers that drink single lot beans from your favorite café, they’re looking to get the people who find McDonald’s coffee or Dunkin Donut’s good enough, but want to save a bit of money by brewing at home.

Plus often they’re not especially skillfully made and I’m pretty sure some people are reacting to very thin acidic, sometimes woody and vegetal, cups and assuming that if they don’t like this,

Another possibility is just that light roasts can just be too fiddly for most people to want to bother with. Between the money for equipment and time spent brewing it, it’s probably just too great an investment for most people to take something from at least acceptable to them to being great, after a while when you get things dialed in and the stars align.

In my experience, it’s not just a lack of reading comprehension, but often some combination of an utter lack of curiosity, laziness and defeatism. Many other things, like video games, have escaped the realm of being reserved only for nerds and gone mainstream, yet computers remain something people just constantly assume are hopelessly complicated.

I know for a fact my mother-in-law can read just fine, as she spends most of her day reading novels and will gladly spend the rest of it telling me about them if I happen to be there. Yet when it comes to her cell phone, if there’s any issue at all, she just shuts down. She would just rather not be able to access her online banking in the Citi bank app for weeks or months at a time, until one of us goes and updates it for her, rather than reading the banner that says “The version of this app is too old, please click here to update and continue using it.” and clicking the damn button. If anyone points this out to her, though, she just gets worked up in a huff and tells us “I’m too old to understand these things, you can figure it out because you’re still young.” She will eventually figure these things out and do them for herself if nobody does it for her for a while, but her default for any problem with her phone is to throw her hands up and declare it a lost cause first. I’ve seen a lot of people have the same sort of reactions, both young and old. No “Hey, let’s just see what it says,” just straight to deciding it’s impossible, so they don’t even bother to check what’s going on.

Perhaps, but they could minimize the damage from that if it was paired with a comprehensive plan to improve living standards that people actually believed would get passed, and following through on that. Meanwhile, the longer they go on denying the reality voters are experiencing daily, the more they undermine their credibility. At best, they come across as out of touch or incompetent, at worst as outright malicious.

If you read the article, it’s defined purely in terms of income:

The poll, commissioned by the National True Cost of Living Coalition, found that around 65 percent of Americans who are considered “middle class,” earning above 200 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL), are in a financial struggle.

In a way, it kind of proves the point that we need to reevaluate what the actual cost of living is in the modern age. For a family of 4 to be considered middle class by this metric, they would have an income of $62,400/year or higher. For a single individual, it’s just $30,120/year. I don’t know anywhere in the US where making $15 an hour means you’re in the middle class, yet the federal government wants to keep acting like it’s the 1980s and you can live it up to an extent on such a meager income.

That being said, financial struggle doesn’t necessarily mean they’re one step away from being destitute. It could just be a struggle to maintain their current standard of life, where is used to be taken as a given that this would improve over time.

I hope they come through for him, because the video of a bunch of his fans being arrested and him hauled out would probably be hilarious.

They don’t even need to worry about looking good, all they need is to be patient and wait it out for people to get pissed off enough at Republicans and for things to swing back their way for a term or two.

I can’t understand why anyone would expect most people to want to have kids. I can hardly afford to take care of myself, things look like they’re only likely to get worse, and all indicators are that if I did have kids, they would be facing an even worse future when they hit adulthood. Why would I do that to them?

The exam software my uni uses for instance only runs on Windows & MacOS.

I would say this segment of @Iceblade02’s post would be the issue, in that people are locked into these systems even if they prefer to use open source software. For example, my university based in the UK requires I submit my assignments in an MS Word format that supports Microsoft’s annotations for the tutor to do all marking up and correcting/commenting on the paper there. There are ways to do the same thing with PDFs, but at least on my modules so far, it hasn’t been an option at all. That’s just for papers and such.

When it comes to exams where you’re supposed to be answering the questions and submitting them as you go, there are schools that insist on you installing monitoring software so they can make sure you aren’t cheating, which only tends to be available for Windows and Mac. I don’t know how common that sort of software is outside the US, but it’s certainly a thing.

I’m sure it won’t happen, but there’s a part of me that would just love to hear that when the negotiations get to Idaho, Idaho is just like “Nah, hard pass, we don’t want you either.”

Yeah, talking about jobs being created without any context on the types of jobs being created is meaningless. Great, there are now more part-time jobs paying minimum wage with no benefits and erratic schedules near me, just the sort of job creation I was waiting for so I could regress in my career.

Where did you pick that nonsense up? Annual US aid amounts to around 15% of Israel’s military budget. That’s $3.8b compared to a GDP of $500b. It is a regional power with or without the US. US aid is in exchange for maintaining a major US military base in Israeli territory and access to Israeli intelligence. Israel spends more money on purchasing US weapons than it receives in US aid. US weapons also rely on technology designed and produced in Israel.

This isn’t just about Israel’s military budget. That helps, sure, but it’s pretty crucial that Israel gets shielded from the consequences of its actions by the US constantly. If Israel were to start facing sanctions or have its saber-rattling no longer backed up by the threat of US intervention, be via sanctions or interceding directly, Israel would be a much less imposing power in the region. Military support is not the only measure of US support for Israel.

Why on earth would Russia or China want to watch Israeli power plummet when they could use it to project power into the Middle East and access it’s resources? Why do you think the US is there?

They could literally do the same thing without a) having to provide Israel ongoing material support and diplomatic cover, b) risk getting dragged into conflicts that don’t benefit them by Israel, and c) alienate their existing allies in the region by backing a hostile power.

Israel provided a convenient foothold for the US half a century ago, when the surrounding Arab nations were more hostile to them. The situation has changed remarkably, and Israel is no longer unique in being willing to work with the US. Israel has, in fact, been a liability in making progress with this until relatively recently. But, sure, let’s piss off the rest of the region so we can get Waze and some Israeli clementines out of things, seems like a good trade on the balance of it.

You want to claim I know so little about foreign policy, but you quite conveniently omit the many drawbacks to supporting Israel, as well as any of its weaknesses.

Israel is only a regional power by virtue of the US propping it up, it cannot maintain that status on its own. Why on earth would either Russia or China want to take that on, when they could just do nothing and watch Israeli power plummet.

Israel is hardly discredited, whatever the hell that means

Israel has no large, international backer that is both willing and able to step up and provide cover for it like the US does, and it lacks the might through its own weight around like Russia or China have long term. Without the constant backing of the US to shield from.the consequences of its actions, Israel would become the pariah state it rightfully should be.

The International community cares about as much about the Palestinians as they do about the Rohingya or the Darfuri, both of which are suffering ongoing genocides that I bet you didn’t even know about.

And a lovely bit of whataboutism to round things out from you. Unfortunately for you, my memory is longer than a news cycle, but cute attempt at sounding like you were digging deep there.

US pulling out of Israel would be the most chaos inducing event in world history.

This is pure hyperbole. The most chaos you could get from this would be from Israel lobbing a nuke before getting taken out, which they already essentially threaten as it stands.

And what US rival is Israel going to find to replace it that has both the desire and means to do so? China and Russia don’t stand to benefit from that, even if they wanted to pump billions of dollars into Israel a year. They already have influence in the region with other powers the US is hostile to, like Iran. Israel is increasingly internationally discredited, so it’s not as though they’re going to get a great diplomatic boost. They already have nuclear weapons of their own and pretty developed intelligence apparatuses. What would be the point of taking on such a massive liability?

And let’s not forget that the region is in turmoil to begin with in large part because the US keeps intervening in it, as well as supporting Israel and other shitty governments in the region that are favorable to the US in some way. Israel itself destabilizes the region.

Maybe I would try an Android version, but Linux would be a pass, nothing they would come up with could displace MPD+ncmpc++ for me at this point.

That sounds more like a reason that western powers should have already nipped this in the bud long ago, rather than a reason to continue to give them carte blanche to commit war crimes. They already dropped the ball on that front, so realistically, they ought to be coming up with strategies to neutralize Israel, rather than embolden it. Perhaps they could take a page from Israel’s book and carry out some strikes preemptively exercising their right to self-defense and dismantle the Israeli military and government.

Israel’s unchecked existence is a liability to everyone, but it’s not going to get any better by letting them go even longer.

You can set general options for all compilations in /etc/makepkg.conf, and package specific options would probably be best handled by just downloading a PKGBUILD for the package in question and editing it to include the option you want to enable. makepkg won’t ask you about options by default when building something, but it’s not that complicated to edit the PKGBUILD prior to calling makepkg.

abandoning Israel would be a disaster for everyone.

How would this be a disaster for anyone but Israel? Worst case scenario, it’s a disaster for Zionists, the US military industrial complex profitting off them, and whatever portion of Israel’s population opposes Israel’s apartheid ethno-state, and I’ve only got sympathy for the last of them. At worst, it’s an inconvenience for the US with Iran. Other than that, let Israel get rocked by sanctions and smacked around by their neighbors they’ve been antagonizing for decades with US support. Let Israelis go be refugees if necessary and there’s an actual threat of loss of life. Otherwise, whoop dee doo, cutting off Israel means they get what they’re due for. Israel is not some essential nation that the world would fall apart should it cease to exist in its current form.

It’s a rolling release with minimal changes to packages from upstream, and generally the latest versions of available software in the repos. I guess you could go through and rebuild the whole system from source if you were determined to, but a quick look at the ABS wiki page doesn’t make it seem like it’s set up to make doing so all that easy. For other software not in the repos, the AUR makes it easy enough to build them from source, though there’s often binary options available as well. The base install is pretty simple, so you can build upon it as you’d like if you really want to go wild on a minimal, highly customized system. Or you can go wild installing what you’d like and trying all the things.

When your justification is an uncertain investment, it isn’t that hard of a concept to realize you’re wrong. You’re literally the only person I’ve ever seen advocating for the lump sum payment as the financialyl sound move when it quite nearly halves 100% sure income.

Inflation is also much less of a concern when you’re talking about literal millions of dollars, unless you’re talking about the Zimbabwe national lotto. If you’re living in a way that your ability to live with $15,000,000/year towards the end of a 30-year annuity payout has materially changed, you have bigger issues than inflation going on.