u/Anomander

I think this is unintentional. Cool, sure, and it may stick around if it’s not too consistent. But it presents a way to get way more enchants than is intended, and availability of sodas gives players more opportunities to fish for desirable enchants.

I think that players weren’t using this mechanic because they didn’t know about it, and it could get pretty problematic if everyone knows and starts taking advantage of it.

None of those appear to have any relevance to this community, can you explain what happened here?

Maybe...? That's a new one to me, I've not seen or heard of that. If you're still during cooking tutorial, it may prevent removing items - but otherwise you should be able to just remove the items and try a different combination.

No, you weren't. That's not what you said at all, that's not even implied in that comment. It's a completely new point, made up fresh.

Your comment was just arguing with several points I didn't make while referring to our new premier by his first name like you're buddies and referencing some past remark of yours like I know who you are and follow what you say.

So accusing me of being "defensive" is pretty weird. What I said wasn't "defending" anything. I don't think there was anything I needed to defend. I was asking why you were talking like a weirdo and trying to debunk strawmen. I'm going to ask the same question again.

All this bizarre preachyness about reading your telework agreement and "fear mongering" and ... dude, chill. I think that finger you pointed at me was more of a confession than an accusation, it seems like you're real unhappy - perhaps one might even say "defensive" - that anyone might be at all concerned that there may be an RTO mandate in our futures. While tying in to your claims about entitled and ... it's super weird to even indirectly argue that people concerned for their employment are "entitled" for wanting to keep their jobs.

If you're copping downvotes, I'd suggest it's more due to your social skills than your point, whatever that actually is.

...Did you mistake me for someone else?

Where "Lorne" is from isn't really pertinent to why people are concerned, and he's far from the only person among the Conservative party who informs policy. The province didn't elect a dictator to rule through whims and personal biases.

Yes, a return to "local offices" is included within that potential RTO mandate people are concerned about. No one was thinking the entire BCPS would be ordered to relocate to Victoria and that's not what anyone was worried about.

Why is whatever you said about an agreement something you're bringing up like that's totally reasonable to expect me to remember? I don't think we've ever spoken before. I don't know the possible relevance of something you may have said to someone else some time in the past, and I'm not combing over your account history to figure it out.

Hey /u/ColdViolinist835, you were just warned against posting "questions" as an excuse to drop links to your polling site.

Given the pointed disregard for the warning, that those posts are pretty much all your account seems to do, and the follow-up content-devoid "test" post you made in addition - appearing to be checking if your site has been blacklisted yet - I'm going to ban you and blacklist your site.

Hey folks. Mood of the room seems pretty clear; I have instituted account age / karma requirements.

Submissions or comments from accounts that are too new will be automatically removed, without notice. I don't want to tip the bots off they're getting culled, and don't want to need to set the bar higher to catch them if they try just waiting longer between account creation and spamming.

"We" "all" do not necessarily think that.

However, many folks are concerned - and they're not really unreasonable in that. Conservatives have talked in the past about reducing the size of BCPS, have platform items that sound like workforce reductions but phased with spin, and past conservative governments have been responsible for the biggest past cuts to BCPS.

As far as RTO, members of conservative party have individually spoken in favor of RTO mandates and conservative movements in general have historically opposed WFH in other areas, while the conservative party appears 'in tight with' business and commerce groups lobbying for RTO mandates because they want government staff as 'captive markets' for businesses located near government offices, most notably the Downtown Victoria Business Owners Association.

Similarly, RTO can serve as a "soft layoff" by forcing people back to office and counting them 'resigned' if they fail to comply, while dodging expense of proper layoff or workforce reduction procedures. It was used that way in the private sector during/following Covid, and seems to have been used in that manner by Federal during the financial crunch that Carney inherited.

Neither is guaranteed - but neither is the kind of thing they're going to put into platform even if they fully intended to implement, and their platforms and promises have given folks little reassurance that's not things they might want to do once they're up to speed and making changes.

This isn't faintly the sort of content this community is intended to host, please.

Personal attacks of this sort are not appropriate for this community, please.

He should have let that happen, honestly. Let the optics of forcing an election fall on the opposition.

Enough people voted against the NDP to punish them for calling a snap election to swing results decisively against them; if the same election happened at the same time, but forced by the opposition, it would have been survivable. It was a massive and idiotic unforced error, to somehow completely forget that voters hate snap elections.

Stolen from here. OP has been banned, content bots are unwelcome in this community.

Yes, someone has probably made a chart.

No, there's no authoritative chart - because while anyone can put anything anywhere on a chart, it's still just preference and opinion. There's no real rules about which roast is best for which method, or what origins should be brewed in whatever way. Someone else's opinion about why a coffee is "better" or "worse" for a given method may well be the opposite of what you like or want from coffee.

Just mess around and try things.

The only exception is beans sold "for espresso" are going to have been developed and QA'd for espresso - and may not work as well on other methods as a result.

Do not use this community to advertise your business, please.

We're not a venue to advertise, please.

• Beans with a roasted date is a must. I am not very rigid about dates, but I want to know the dates I'm working with.

• Brew when I want to, not particularly rigid about degas periods; I find beans will be reasonable to work with 4 days after roast and additional degas from days five to ten is just luxury.

• Keep using them until the bag is done. Generally I'm drinking enough coffee that bags won't spoil before they're finished unless I buy like three or four at the same time. If a bag falls off so hard it's not fun anymore, I'll either pitch it or try some project to use it up.

While I know there's people who advocate for 'aging', I don't really find value in the practice. I find that the losses due to age are greater than any benefits from aging, and while I don't hold for hard lines or dates I find that most coffees start falling off at about a month and typically a lot of what makes a nice coffee fun and exciting have mostly vanished by two months or so.

I avoid keeping coffee for much longer than that.

The last one seems wasteful.

Yes, if taken too firmly as some sort of hard rule. But also no, if taken as a loose guideline that guides my buying patterns. As long as I don't buy too much coffee too often, I drink enough coffee that it's not like I'm throwing coffee out due to spoilage very often. The 'worst' that happens is I'll focus on killing an older bag because I can taste decline, and not drink as much variety for a couple days.

Following the "standard advice", I'd have to use only small bags (half or 1/3 of a pound/200-300g), right? The per gram cost on those is crazy.

Yup. Prices are kinda nuts, to be sure. To me, my coffee is a luxury, and the main luxury that I spend money on; I don't need coffee, I just want it. So from that frame of reference - I'm fine choosing to spend 'more' on nicer coffee and making some less financially-efficient purchases in order to get things that I like and enjoy them while they're at their peak.

You're missing the hundreds of standout cafes that launch and then fail because "standout" means different things to different people and a lot of versions of "standout" are simply worse businesses, even if some of them make better coffee than the pack for the few months they manage to stay open.

Not unless you can concretely connect it in a more credible way than spurious conspiratorial inferences and racist propaganda talking points.

Because the logic here relies on taking for granted without proof or evidence a way bigger and way bolder claim that has no meaningful evidence supporting it and reframes everything that is 'known' from evidence about the protests into some grandiose fantasy narrative.

Like, your source - as dodgy as it is - only really concretely establishes that churches were burned in 2024 and doesn't allege, doesn't support, and certainly does not prove that churches were burned due to "anti-Western sentiment". You just kinda made that up and said it like it was a completely reasonable thing to claim on your own credibility. It mentions some were burned in riots in overseas French colonial holdings - but shops and carparks get burned too. Even in the current riots, whole lot more business get burned than churches. But those are harder to tie to the fairy-tale so we're just skipping them? Or are those "the West" too? How have you eliminated the possibility that rioters burn buildings, and tend to target big important buildings, without any grand geopolitical motives tied to which buildings they torch?

Hell, even superficially, how a church might represent "the West" needs its own essays worth of content and discussion to try to establish, and it's still a herculean uphill argument to mount. Christianity is biggest in decidedly non-West parts of the world, while the West is consistently trending increasingly secular.

...But pause for a moment - can you name any groups who like to imagine that white Christian people are "the West"? 'Cause every name I come up with is people I don't want to associate with or sound like I'm getting ideas from.

Separately though, I think your specific idea proposal has some big pitfalls that it doesn't read like you're aware of.

Putting a cafe in a park is, in almost everywhere I'm familiar with, much harder than you make it sound. There's tight controls on putting any sort of "business" into "explicitly non-commercial public land" even if that business might arguably serve a mutually beneficial role to the park. People are going to be real concerned about you and your cafe getting to use "public land" as your own business' extended dining room area, even just on principles alone. Today it's your small-business locally-owned idealist cafe doing good works - but tomorrow, your foot is still holding the door open and you've set a precedent for McDonalds to set up shop at the scenic hilltop lookout. It's easier to prevent you from opening that door at all than fight someone like McDonalds in court to prevent them from following the example you set.

You seem to assume you are getting that space for below market rates. No explanation how you achieve that. Giving a cafe the sort of placement you're describing is providing one specific business with a captive market and the right to extract private commercial value from public land. City hall or parks board know what that's worth. Any price attached is not going to be "less than it could be" - in most cases, you're paying for potential, not even real capacity at the time the lease is signed. Rent is set based on how lucrative your spot could be if it's incredibly successful - not based on the park being unused and empty today. In a lot of places, they can't afford the optics of giving anything vaguely resembling a 'sweetheart deal' that uses public resources to grant advantages to a private business.

Down the road, even if you somehow lock that in, and somehow make the park/cafe successful ... what about when your lease runs out? Parks board turns around and leases that space to someone making a better offer, or you gotta pony up extra to match the bid and keep your plot. Maybe Starbucks sees what you done and decides they want your spot. Can you outbid them? Parks board in most places has a fundamental duty to the public to take the deal that maximizes benefit to the public, and that is almost always going to be the offer with the biggest number attached - getting more money into public coffers is huge and direct benefit to the public. For clarity, your business isn't "the public" in that setting, even as a small business owned by a community member. When it comes time to negotiate the next lease, you're just another corporate overlord relegated to the same playing field as Starbucks.

While as far as making it appealing and drawing people into the park ... steep hill to climb. It's a big "draw the rest of the owl" in your plan that it sounds like you're somewhat taking for granted, "obviously the cafe will be popular and attract people to the park" - but I don't think that's a safe assumption.

Assume you succeed: You're probably now hyper-seasonal. Depending where you are, there's probably huge portions of the year that are Not Park Weather. While you might sell some drinks to some people then, in a lot of places park concessions and similar close up shop for the off-season because it's so dead that they're losing money by opening. But of course, you're still paying Parks Board to reserve your plot. It's not like you get a discount because business is slow, you're paying full value of what you have, whether or not you're able to generate income or not. So you need to ensure that the busy season when people use parks, you're making money to cover the whole year - so where I am, parks with concessions or vendors, prices are massively inflated. Park-goers are a captive market. They know you're not gonna leave the park and drive 20 minutes to the next nearest cafe. Flipside though ... they're paying ridiculous leases for the use of public land, so they have to exploit their captive-market advantage to stay afloat.

We return to mugs and I sincerely - no hyperbole, not doing a bit - have to ask how much you think a paper cup costs? How much do you think the mug initiative will save, per-sale? From my side and with my experience, I don't understand how this is something you're presenting as some huge economic boon to the cafe. Are you factoring in breakage, theft, dishwashing and staffing for dishwashing? This is an outdoor cafe, it's not even like patrons have to smuggle the mug out your front door - sounds like they're encouraged to wander off and enjoy the park. Never mind deliberate theft, you'll have people nick your mugs solely because it's easier to walk to the car still carrying the mug than trek back to the cafe to return it.

And the mugs gets referenced in terms of squeezing funds to pay the baristas appropriately, you make a few other references to cutting other unnamed unnecessary expenses and ... similar to the paper cups, I'm wondering how much "unnecessary expenses" you think there are that effectively every other cafe must be wasting money on? Like, money is tight as shit already - cafes are not throwing money around like a stockbroker buying cocaine. There's not that much 'waste' to cut, even if some exists. Last few places I've been around on management side, there wasn't sufficient waste to meaningfully change anyone's pay. So it kinda feels like "waste" is kind of an aspirational magic wand here, that lets the business/staff make more money, sees farmers get paid more, and also keeps prices from rising.

Where you're talking about streamlining menus to avoid 'attracting the wrong kind of people' - that is restricting your customer base. Optimistically, say you save $100 by not buying four kinds of syrup once a month - you're also losing out on a month's worth of syrup drinks that are priced to profit from the drink. If you need to buy that much syrup per month, you are also making more than $100 per month from those drinks; you make more than $100 per month in ingredients + staff overhead related to preparing those drinks and maintaining those menu offerings. In general, most cafes make more from those drinks than from selling the 'basic' drinks. So when you say you then "charge correctly" for the basic drinks ... why does it sound like you think those prices go down? You've excluded a sizable portion of potential customers, you've cut the products with the best margins from your menu, you've located your cafe in a park that you say no one really uses ... how are you keeping the balance sheet in the black?

And continuing with trimming syrups and similar ... that's a business model that works OK when you're a cafe in a fairly developed area with reasonable local coffee culture and have competition offering those items. It's a conscious branding decision to focus on coffee in order to appeal to customers who want a cafe that focuses on coffee in very competitive marketplaces. A park isn't really that. If you have Specialty nerds travelling to the park for quality coffee - your cafe is competing with every other Specialty cafe in equivalent commuting distance from their starting point, and you have the hurdle of the walk to your cafe compared to a Specialty place in town they can park behind or walk to from their flat. The 'captive market' of park-goers who would stop for coffee at your spot are typically not Specialty nerds and are the kind of folks willing to pay extra for a fancier sweeter drink - and who may choose not to buy coffee at all if you don't offer anything that really appeals to them. Trimming the menu to select for Specialty nerds is a mis-read on your main customer demographic, while failing to fully leverage this cafe's biggest advantage or cater to the realistic customer base it will attract.

I think a lot of what you're talking about here are things that have been tested and are not nearly as successful and viable as you phrase them. There are cafes in parks in some places. They typically pay staggering rents compared to desirable locations in commercial districts, and need to tailor their model to seasonal business and typical park-goer demographics and menu expectations. There's cafes that have cut to-go cups. They're not pulling cash so hard their good example is revolutionizing the industry - and if it was a huge savings and a great source of profit, everyone else would be copying them. There's cafes that have cut 'fancy' drinks and only offer basics. There's lots. There's lots of failures. It only works in a very narrow range of settings and doesn't allow for drink prices to drop or margins to increase, it's not a change that's set to 'save' the industry. While in your idea, the combination of multiple changes all of which represent risk and

Lastly though ... even if everything I've noted as challenges and barriers above is overcome and it totally works, there's a limited number of parks this could work in. It's not like this idea is going to save Specialty and fix everything that's wrong and challenging for cafes everywhere else, or fix so much of the larger pricing issues within Specialty that it resolves shrinkflation and ensures everyone involved gets paid fairly. Your park in your city may well be the unique unicorn that this could work in - but most parks worldwide aren't.

So to be clear and fair - I think you picked up on it but it's worth spelling out: Some of my hyperbole above is hyperbole, and was done in service of three things: pointing out the absurdity of some of things you did actually say, making my response more fun to read, and making my response more fun to write.

In that vein, while I don't really dispute that you do understand broad-strokes relationships between price and quality - the throughline was still that good coffee is "too" expensive and there's corporate interests lining their pockets from an unfair or unreasonably high price. So while my intention was not to hold you to the literal statements of what you exactly said and debunk those things to "prove!!!" you wrong - making light of some of the contradictions and being silly about conspiracies still communicates that there's market and demand forces in play your actual point wasn't accounting for, while being a lot more fun to write and hopefully more entertaining to read than a response in similar detail that stuck to dry facts and mundane tone.

When the actual premise was still kind of "corporations and business are making us do these things" - addressing that like you're conjured up coffee illuminati is still addressing the premise itself and still pointing out that the actual premise is pretty absurd. The point was that they're competitors, not colluders, catering to market demand and not creating it; and that competitive nature of the market means the level of collusion required for your real point, from all the independent competing business actors, borders on a suggestion that is nearly as absurd as actual coffee illuminati.

What I'm proposing, as stupid as it sounds, is a business model where maybe the conventional isn't favored.

That's the current market. The future is now. The market both hugely incentivizes innovation in general - while hugely punishing unsuccessful specific innovations.

Someone starting a coffee business is strongly motivated to find some innovation, some angle, that will allow their cafe to stand out from preexisting cafes and win over market share that's already claimed. They need to have a reason people will choose them over their competitors. At the same time, if their innovation makes the cafe worse at being a business, the business will very likely fail. Corporate Darwinism, if you will. Businesses are pressured to innovate in order to compete, innovations that help a business succeed are transmitted to other businesses and become common, while innovations that hinder a business' success result in dead ends and dead businesses.

One hallmark example is the model of cafe best represented in "Central Perk" from Friends. Customers want a cozy neighborhood hangout cafes you can go to and chill in for hours, and where there's crossover between strangers and it's a social, "second living room" kinda space that's welcoming and inviting and ... People try to start that cafe all the time. Customers want it, it's a cool vibe, it's the kind of community space and third place the market seems to want - yet none exist. There's no competition for a clear void in the market. Opportunity ahoy!

Then they launch, bleed money for a few years, and go belly-up.

Turns out it's not that it's an unserved niche just waiting for an enterprising cafe to fill. Instead, despite how much customers and communities want that cafe to exist, it's so bad at being a business that it cannot survive. It cannot generate income necessary to cover rent, customers don't actually want to end up 'hanging out' with near strangers, and the core model and brand identity do not result in sufficient turnover to make the volume of sales needed. While any pricing necessary to cover costs at realistic paces simply price the cafe out of the market by a staggering margin. Like covering costs with an average customer sitting and chilling for a few hours requires $30 cups of brew and $60 muffins. Central Perk has been tried hundreds of times and there's a very small number that have survived for any length of time, most of which due to some very specific circumstances that are impossible for someone somewhere else to replicate.

While oppositely ... Starbucks was innovative and new at one point in time. Things like minimalist menus and clean spacious-feeling interiors were once new, so too offering syrup drinks, or having a food menu beyond a few cookies and a croissant or two. All newfangled radical innovations in their day. Things that are "conventional" now were innovative at some point in the past - today's innovation becomes tomorrow's conventional. So viewing today's "conventional" as a fixed point that is overwhelmingly favored, as if people are not constantly trying innovative business models and conformity is somehow enforced ... is kind of missing that all those things were innovations once, and all the innovation you're not seeing is due to Corporate Darwinism.

So if you think your model proposal is a good idea - gather together the dosh and make it happen. Test the waters on your specific business mutation and see if Corporate Darwinism rewards or punishes the innovation. I'm not gonna argue against innovation in general. Just keep in mind, successful innovations are built on top of veritable mountains of unsuccessful innovations - the majority of which cost someone a significant, life-changing, amount of money. Many business owners choose "safe" models and minor innovations because they can't afford to gamble their retirement fund on a risky long-shot.

Bottomline is, we might be able to fix things but we're not questioning enough or we're too comfortable living with what we're told is the "right way to do things". Maybe if as a community we focus on using the practices of the third wave and the breakthroughs its provided and applied them into trying to create an ecosystem where we help each other out, we could create maybe not a fourth wave, that could be ambitious, but a variant of the third wave.

While I don't dispute that solutions may exist and we should keep seeking them ... who is telling us these things? Why don't "they" want to make more money, or want cafes to be more profitable, why don't "they" want Specialty to be sustainable? This is the kind of setting where I make light of coffee illuminati, because this is conspiratorial logic - there are, there must be, easy solutions where everyone gets what they want ... and the obstruction isn't practicality or implementation, it's instead that there's some nefarious authority or internal cabal that prevents the righteous people from discovering the true solution.

Cause like ... there's people like me who say things are probably bad ideas in theory, or other ideas have been tested and keep failing. That doesn't prevent someone from trying those things - trust me, I've given plenty of people advice and had them do something else - but if experience and track record held different results, people like me would give different advice. The industry is not telling new cafes How To Be and dictating some monolithic vision from the top - the market is encouraging innovation, culling failed innovation, and what remains is fairly homogenous because those three or four "versions" of cafe are the most effective and viable business models that exist, so far, for an industry with an extraordinarily high failure rate and very slim margins. There is no One Right Way to do things - different models of cafe suit different locations. You don't put a high-society ultra-Specialty place in a industrial park, but a more casual and more 'common folk' cafe can thrive in that same location. You don't put that 'common folk' cafe on hipster central Main street, but an ultra-Specialty place can thrive there.

Although I'm having fun being somewhat derisive about cabals and illuminati and all that ... to call out the core here, it reads like you're coming at this from a place of sincere, but unrealistic, optimism. Assuming that it must be possible to sell better coffee for cheaper while paying more to staff and farms, and hoping that the reason no one is already doing that is some simple failure of imagination or creativity, or a mere overabundance of conformity. The backhand of that is that you're somewhat failing to consider that if something seems obvious to you - it must have seemed obvious to other people too.

If it really was as easy as you make it sound, why did no one else try it already? Or did they, and there's a reason you can't see them now.

And to be fair, I think from the outside looking in - you may not be familiar with the industry from the business side for reasonable time period, and so have not followed the rise and fall of multiple businesses within it. It's hard to know that an idea has been tried and failed when you look at your local scene, now, and ... you can't see the businesses that don't exist anymore. If you don't have a lens behind the curtain, you don't know why this or that business did fail. I'm not saying you're unreasonable in your perspective, but I am saying that perspective seems to be missing a lot of ongoing innovation and experimentation, while not recognizing past innovations that have become so mainstream they don't seem innovative anymore.

You can argue that, but you should argue that somewhere else.

It's irrelevant when it clearly has no connection to the protests, and the insertion into discourse about protests 'as if' it supports the claims that churches are currently being burned by protestors reads as deliberate misrepresentation.

If anything, the evidence that churches were already being burned anyways provides a layer of reasonable doubt in connecting any more recent church burnings to the protests and protestors.

that anti-Christian acts in France fell in 2024, while attempted arson attacks and fires targeting places of worship increased

… yet again, unrelated to the protests. Protesters now are not time-travelling to burn churches two years ago.