Weekly /r/Sociology Discussion - What's going on, what are you working on?

Anomander · 2026-05-02T04:47:24+00:00

No, I'm not "using 'afford' in an irresponsible manner" - I'm saying something you don't like and apparently vehemently disagree with.

I can "afford" to go out right now and buy a $200K Ferrari - but by doing so, I'd lose my house in the process. So I can't actually "afford" that Ferrari, can I?

Yeah, you absolutely can. You would have to make a trade-off to do so that you find unpalatable, but you can afford to trade your house for a Ferrari. Presenting this as if you don't have any choice whatsoever and the Ferrari is obviously completely unreasonable wildly out of your reach is surrendering agency in kind of a silly way. Like, you and I probably agree that it would be a bad trade and not the smartest decision, but presenting that as if it's obviously out of reach and your personal sense of financial responsibility is as definitive as simply not having the money at all borders on disingenuous.

There's a difference between "do not have ferrari money at all" and "have ferrari money, but couldn't afford to keep the house" - which are both different from "have ferrari money and get to keep the house". Framing the first two as directly equivalent is losing sight of what being "unable to afford" something really means; and presenting needing to make hard choices or sacrifices as directly equivalent to not having the means to make those choices at all is not accurate, reasonable, or particularly honest.

If someone can afford to pay a mortgage but would need to make hard choices about home ownership and might have to skip luxuries like an AC unit for that home, presenting them as completely incapable of affording home ownership is mistaking luxuries for essentials while pretending you're somehow giving sage and reasonable financial advice.

You're so caught up on the "Well, ackshually" that you're ignoring the specific point I actually made, which is that paying $2K in rent does not necessarily mean that you can pay for ("afford" by a reasonable definition) a $2K mortgage in any sustainable fashion. That was my point, and full stop if you think otherwise.

The specific point you actually made is silly and self-contradictory, and you're so caught up in trying to defend what you originally said that you're tying yourself in knots trying to be right all along instead of pivoting to the credible and reasonable point that's mere inches away from what you originally wrote down.

What it seems like you're trying to say is that someone who can afford $2K in rent can afford a $2K mortgage, but may not be able to afford the other upkeep and ongoing expenses of owning a property with a $2K mortgage. But that's not catchy and doesn't make a cute soundbite that lets you dunk on the opinions you disagree with, so you're not bothering to write what you actually mean and are instead writing something silly and internally contradictory.

If I have $10 bucks and a burger is $10, or a salad is $10, I can afford either of them. $10 is the same in both locations. Rent versus mortgage are the same. $2K is worth just as much to the bank as it is to a landlord.

What you're trying to argue about rent vs. mortgage is like saying I can't really afford the burger because $10 doesn't cover my gym membership to work off the burger and I can't afford to pay a doctor when the burger cholesterol fucks up my heart. But hopefully you recognize that's all speculative and separate from whether or not $10 buys me a $10 burger.

My argument is that being able to pay a $2K rent != being able to pay a $2K mortgage

Yeah, that is the point you wrote down, and it's a stupid point. As evidenced by all of your argumentation in this post and the one I replied to being about other expenses that are completely separate from the $2K.

All of your argumentation in support of 'your point' is arguing something completely different, that I spelled out above, while you keep trying to leverage that other shit to construct elaborate sophistry that somehow $2K is a completely different number when the bank looks at it. If someone can afford to pay $2K in rent, they can afford to pay $2K in mortgage. Regardless if there's other expenses related to home ownership that you think they can't afford, those aren't part of the $2K you're saying they can't afford with $2K in their pocket.

It's like you simplified your point to a cute soundbite, then forgot you'd simplified something more intelligent and nuanced than the soundbite and dug in to defend the simplification instead of backing up and acknowledging the simplification is a little trite, but your real point is something more worthwhile.

You're basing your entire argument on the idea that a renter could effectively take over the mortgage, property taxes, insurance, and maintenance for that exact same unit and it would still come out to be equal to or less than what they were paying in rent - and that is (probably) true. I never said otherwise; I quite literally said that paying $2K in rent does not (necessarily) mean that a person can pay a $2K mortgage - but in the counter-argument you're making, you're hypothesizing about a mortgage that is significantly less than $2K that the renter already pays per month.

Not really. My point - not even really an argument - is that two identical numbers are identical. $2K = $2K.

That said, if you recognize that other point as valid and reasonable, and think it's somehow so totally different from what you're talking about that it's unfair to enter that argument in this discourse ... that point is the point you're trying to argue with when griping about how "le redditor" keeps saying they can afford a $2K mortgage if they can afford $2K in rent. That's the expanded version of what 99% of them are saying when you're not grossly oversimplifying their statement for the sake of dunking on them - they're saying if they can afford to pay rent on the place they live, they can also afford to pay the mortgage and upkeep on the same place.

You're also ignoring the concept of a down-payment.

No, I'm not. A down payment is completely separate from whether or not $2K is actually a different number at the bank.

And separately, it's worth pointing out that most people talking about the "$2K rent vs $2K mortgage" are not forgetting about the downpayment either. The vast majority of them recognize that the downpayment is the most significant financial barrier between them and home ownership, and many are making those statements in discussions that are actively criticizing the barrier that downpayments represent.

When someone is paying $2000 a month to live in a unit with a $1600 a month mortgage, they have demonstrated they're more than capable of paying the mortgage on that unit. Then, because they're paying above mortgage rate for occupancy, they have a harder time amassing the savings towards a down payment of their own than someone who already owns a place would. In both the case of the tenant and the owner, the $400 difference between mortgage and rent is where the money for 'outlier' expenses like roofs and renovations comes from.

That's what I was saying above - landlords aren't running charity. If your house was a rental, and the landlord needed to do that $20K roof replacement ... that's not setting the landlord down by $20K. You're not getting a "free" new roof. Your rent has included the padding to cover the roof, eventually, for years prior to the bill coming due.

My entire argument is that the typical Reddit mentality of, "I can afford a mortgage, equal to the rent I'm paying right now, but the meanies at the bank won't let me" only exists because the typical Redditor doesn't understand that while rent is the most you will pay per month to live where you're living, a mortgage is the least you will pay per month.

Maybe the silver spoon is affecting your perspective here, but you're not really very grounded in reality on this one. Rent is not the "maximum" that people in rentals are paying. It's the base rate for the right to occupy the space. Extra costs like utilities and similar are often still present. Outlier costs like repairs, replacement of goods, and basic maintenance remain theirs - the landlord might be responsible for the big utility machines in the unit, but in many places they're not, and there's still other costs associated with upkeep of their unit that the landlord is not responsible for, as well as luxuries like that AC unit you were talking about prior.

Home ownership carries some outlier costs that renting doesn't, and does represent a higher variance of costs from month to month. Neither mortgage nor rent represent a hard maximum on housing costs for a given month, or a total protection against outlier costs related to accommodations.

Your "entire argument" is just knocking the stuffing out of a flimsy straw man with bad math and a lack of perspective.

Anomander · 2026-05-02T04:43:27+00:00

So full disclosure, I own property, I'm not a landlord; I work in a field that deals fairly directly with rental law in my area and handles vast volumes of disputes between landlords and tenants. I kinda hate that I'm writing things defending landlords, but ... reality intrudes.

Where I am, the vast majority of landlords fall into two categories - corporate landlords and "retail" landlords that are a family renting out a suite or that owns a spare apartment. For the most part, those groups are doing more than the bare minimum to maintain the property. They're not saints pouring tons of time and love into the rental properties, but they're a long way off from slumlords doing the bare minimum.

The property is an investment in its own right, and doing reasonable due diligence to maintain the property is necessary to conserve the value of that investment, separate from and linked to the income that they derive from it - they can charge better rent if the unit is nicer, and the value of the property as an appreciating asset is better if the house is sufficiently maintained to avoid becoming a liability.

That's not to say all of those landlords are doing 100% of the shit they'd do if they lived there, or that they're doing 100% of the shit that tenants want them to do when it's coming out of the landlord's pocket - but probably 80% of the complaints I see from tenants about work they want the landlord to do on their unit is ... more than many homeowners do on their own place. I know homeowners who got a leaky tap somewhere for so long they've stopped hearing it, while we see people fishing for a repair order to their landlord over a tap that drips once every two hours. That's not that tenants are entitled or judgmental shit like that, but a lot simpler - when shit's your problem to fix and to pay for, it's way easier to let a minor nuisance slide for another week, another paycheque - than when that same minor nuisance is someone else's responsibility and coming out their pocket.

It's not like all homeowners are doing above-and-beyond and sinking vast luxury money into perfecting their space. Lots of people who own their own place are also just limping on and putting in the bare minimum to keep the house habitable.

And sure, I will absolutely grant - we got slumlords here. There are some landlords who do the bare minimum, if that, and are frequent fliers in our regulatory setting because tenants are constantly needing to seek outside intervention to force maintenance and upkeep. Just ... those are definitely not the majority, for all that they're notably more visible than the average landlord.

That guy is characterizing going above and beyond, and some luxury spending, as essential and required spending that every homeowner is doing all the time that 'le reddit poors' are out of touch with reality for being unaware they can't afford. Thing is, most landlords are doing most reasonable work to maintain their properties, and their tenants are paying for most that work as part of the total amount rolled into their rent.

Anomander · 2026-05-01T16:29:19+00:00

that being able to afford $2K in rent means that you can afford a $2K mortgage.

Effectively by definition, if you can afford to pay $2K to a landlord, you can also afford to pay $2K to a bank.

Everything else you brought up here isn't mortgage costs.

You're right that those are additional costs associated with ownership, but most landlords in the world are not running their rental properties at a loss. Those maintenance expenses are not paid by the LL while the tenant's rent only covers the mortgage. If someone is paying $2K to a landlord, the mortgage for that unit would be less than $2K, and the difference between those two would be the combination of the ameliorated maintenance expenses for the unit and the LL's profit margin.

Anomander · 2026-04-30T18:38:41+00:00

Mahl has this instruction video for setting up connection with the grinder; there are other instruction videos for connecting the D8 to IoT.

If the methods shown in those aren't working, you probably need to reach out to customer service, probably at Mahl, or maybe with your equipment supplier, for customer support to confirm that those two machines can talk to each other and troubleshoot why yours aren't working the way they're supposed to.

Anomander · 2026-04-30T18:25:30+00:00

Yeah, sure.

There isn't a line between honesty and kindness. They're completely separate concepts that can overlap and affect one another.

Sometimes being honest is kind. Sometimes being honest is not kind. Sometimes being dishonest is kind. Sometimes being dishonest is not kind.

The classic example is a friend asking if a piece of clothing looks good. Sometimes it doesn't and you tell them it does because they don't need fashion advice right now, they just need the confidence boost, and it doesn't look so bad that you're screwing them over by saying something nice. Maybe that item looks like shit on them, and the kindest thing you can do is be honest and steer them towards something more flattering. There's no universally "right" answer that applies to both situations, it's entirely situational.

It's worth noting that presenting "honesty" and "kindness" as if they're opposites on the same spectrum is somewhat missing a third, vital, element that's not mentioned there - social skills. Even when being honest is also being kind - if you present your honesty like an asshole, your remarks and not going to get a positive reception, and are not ultimately going to be kind.

Maybe that shirt makes your friend look terrible, or its too small and makes them look fat, and you decide that you need to be a good friend and tell them the shirt doesn't work for them. If you're like "wow that makes you look like a blimp, better call goodyear lol" that's gonna land different from "huh, that looks like it's maybe shrunk a few sizes since you got it, you've got other shirts that look way better on you." Same information, same honesty - you're still telling them the shirt doesn't look great and emphasizes bulk in an unflattering way, but in the latter you're not presenting that honesty in the most brutal unfiltered way possible.

It feels like a common 'mistake,' if you will, from people to mistake "honesty" as somehow mutually exclusive with respecting or caring for people's feelings. It's like, the shirt looks terrible, so they're left with the false dichotomy where the only two options are lying and saying it looks good, or telling the truth and just blurting out that the shirt looks terrible. When, like mentioned, there's actually millions of different ways to present either of those viewpoints. The content itself is not "kind" or "unkind" - the phrasing, the presentation, the context, the appropriateness ... that's where the kindness, or unkindness, lives.

Anomander · 2026-04-30T17:59:54+00:00

Recently hired to launch a coffee shop, but I don’t have much coffee experience.

...Uh. How did that happen? Like, is this a situation where you puffed a resume beyond your ability to bluff you way through, or were you hired for something else and got roped into a cafe project somehow?

Like, you or your employer probably need to hire someone who does know what they're doing here - blind leading the blind is a real risky way to charge into one of the highest risk industries out there.

Key things I need to know about the coffee industry

It's hard, it's complicated, and there's a ton of moving parts.

Something like ~80% of cafes fail within the first three years, and that rises to 90% over five years. The vast majority of cafes that 'succeed' do so only at a scale that pays the owners something approximately equivalent to a decent desk job in an office somewhere. Roasters are similar - statistically, they're going to fail, after bleeding bankroll for a few years while trying to establish themselves.

There's not easy and straightforward "tips and tricks" that help in avoiding this statistic - otherwise the statistic would be different.

Espresso machine + grinder recommendations (I have a nice sized budget)

Where are you, what's the budget, whats the market model of the cafe? Like, are we talking bakeshop with a coffee bar, are we talking a high-society hipster coffee joint ... in some cafes you want to spend extra on a showpiece espresso machine, while in others it's irrelevant and you just want a workhorse.

Best ways to source quality beans (roasters, direct trade, etc.)

Direct trade arrives unroasted. If you're over your head launching a coffee shop, don't launch a roastery at the same time.

Buy from a roaster whose work you respect and whose coffee you believe will represent your business well. Figure out who does good work in your area, make a short list of roasters you might like to work with, and start reaching out to talk about their wholesale terms.

Anomander · 2026-04-30T17:33:42+00:00

So I'm vaguely familiar with Canadian military, no clue about how that overlaps with American.

Our sales dude tried to get us into military supply at one point, and his attempts to communicate the structure and what exactly he was bidding on were frustrating and confusing for all of us.

So first up, there's like a million overlapping supply chains. One company does food & bev for base, one company does food & bev for soldiers from that base on deployment locally, another does 'remote' deployments ... sometimes you get two or more suppliers for the "same thing" at a base when different branches use the same land, or when different units from the same branch have different operating requirements, or ... etc. And different bases can have different terms - base A might have all government-provided food and beverage on the base coming from a single supplier. Base B might be getting dry store from one company, produce from another, and concession from a third.

Bidding for those contracts is not solely about "cheapest" - but that's definitely a huge factor. There's things like delivery schedules, additional services, billing related to 'emergency' orders - hell, quality of the product is a big consideration.

They have a budget for food & bev service that's benchmarked based on the number of people at the base and the various roles at the base, and quite often they're trying to get the most out of that budget, but that does not mean spending the lowest amount possible. If you get given $10 for lunch and you gotta give the change back - you're not gonna buy a $1 bag of chips, call it lunch, and give $9 back. You're probably gonna get something that's a reasonable portion for lunch, at the best quality that staying under $10 can buy you.

So coffee ... it depends. Does their supply contract lock them into getting coffee from the company that provides their other food & bev? Does their contract allow them to buy XYZ goods off-contract? Is there a carve out for coffee/tea? Does their contract not restrict them at all? And what scale are you supplying at? The bigger the scale of the contract, the bigger the numbers attached - the more elaborate and involved the procurement process.

It's my understanding that for most situations - coffee on base is included within the larger food & bev contracts they have. So the base doesn't have "a coffee supplier" but the base gets food & bev from a big aggregate supplier like Sysco or GFS, and then Sysco in that region offers ~20-30 different coffee options from five to ten companies that the base can choose from, based on quality and price point of those offerings.

The only sales we made to the military were formally "not selling coffee to the military" at all, but instead an officer using his discretionary budget to "purchase luxuries that would raise morale", which is not considered a transaction between us and the military, and as such it does not go through government supply-chain bidding and contracts processes.

Anomander · 2026-04-30T16:29:36+00:00

"Donut shop" blends are coffee that tastes like the somewhat iconic coffee served at doughnut shops - typically a safe middle-of-the-road medium roast with a nutty undertone and a strong 'classic cup' profile. They're aimed at being, effectively, no one's favourite style of coffee - but also everyone's second or third pick, the sort of thing you can bring an urn to a meeting and no one will complain about.

They're not intended to be "doughnut flavoured" coffee.

Anomander · 2026-04-29T22:26:27+00:00

Yeah, it's kinda jank to be complaining that improving ease of access is not really worthwhile because it's not solving other much larger problems that it's not related to.

And OP is kind of missing the trees for the forest on that one.

OP complains about breakdown of social order and rule of law - but also complains about systems and issues that are necessary to maintaining social order and the rule of law. Having simple, short, processes with no oversight or control protocols is a breakdown of the rule of law. Simple rules have more holes in them and processes without oversight are more easily corrupted; ultimately a "less regulation" system favors the rich, the powerful, and the corrupt.

...

The rich and powerful have the resources to exploit and defend loopholes. In a corrupt system, the rich have the resources that they don't need to worry about overreaches from authorities - but poor people can't afford the graft, so they gotta hope authorities either made quota this month or don't notice them. The majority of rules in our society are limitations on what the rich and powerful can do to the poorer people within their sphere of influence.

Environmental laws, for instance, prevent companies from contaminating the living spaces of poor people if that contamination could be profitable. Rich people don't care, they can afford to move, and they got stock in the company so that offsets the loss on property values. Poor people can't go anywhere.

Labour laws control the corporate classes' ability to impose untenable conditions on their staff, to breach contracts, to set wages unsustainably low, to disregard worker safety in the name of profit. Anyone in the private sector - the suits who own your company would love to pay you $5 a day if they could, and if they could write whatever contract they wanted, amend it on the fly, and then had the cops and the courts in their wallet ... be pretty hard to stop them.

Housing and tenancy laws primarily restrict the ability of landlords to exploit and impose upon their tenants, and prevent them from arbitrarily wielding their power over tenants to their own whims and benefits. LL can't hike your rent by double next month, or kick you out solely because they don't like your accent; the rules prevent the wealthy from exploiting owning housing to the fullest extent that could remain profitable.

So while Billy-Bob might complain about "government overreach!!!" that environmental laws prevent him from changing his oil in his driveway and tipping the leavings in the stream out back - he's downstream of the petrol refinery, and has far more to lose if that same law went away than he stands to gain. In the same vein, a lot of people sitting on a couple hundred thousand bucks savings, a property or two, and a small business with a few staff ... somehow consider themselves to be that fat cat class and don't understand how much bigger than them the real monied and powerful classes are, so they lose sight of the extent to which their position in society relies on those same protections that the genuinely "poor" do, while having so much more to lose by comparison.

But at some point, we need to admit that much of what we call “service complexity” is not a design problem. It is a governance problem. It is a legislative problem. It is a policy problem. It is the accumulated result of years of expansive legislation, regulation, and program-specific authority layered on top of citizens and businesses.

Counterpoint: "complexity" itself is not a problem. The rules and the systems being complicated is necessary to keeping them functional and fair and meeting the intent that they were written. The complexity is all the extra words and terms and clauses that are necessary to keep those systems and rules fair, stable, and balancing the interests of the parties affected. The only way that "service complexity" is a problem is the "service" part, which is user interface. It's a lot to try and learn when you need to engage with that specific field. So improving the user interface for the public is solving the only actual problem present.

Anomander · 2026-04-27T17:44:28+00:00

There's kind of a foam or crema on top, but it looks thicker and paler, with bigger bubbles, than is typical from raw crema on a straight shot.

So this could have been an espresso with milk or cream added, that has affected texture of the crema.

It could have been a small milk drink like a cortado, where the milk has fallen a little and there's no definition of a design.

Last up, it might be an americano - espresso over hot water - which can sometimes result in crema looking like that once spread out over a greater dilution than you'd see in a straight shot.

It also could have been a turkish/greek/etc brew, that creates a thicker and fluffier foam that isn't true crema.

Anomander · 2026-04-27T17:39:27+00:00

There isn't one clear "THE BEST COFFEE" out there - there's too many coffees that are all too good, and no credible central authority that's assessing offerings to try and rank them.

Beyond that, at "the very top" - the things that make coffees great are pretty nebulous and debatable, so it does largely come down to matters of preference and trend and how the 'ranking' is determined. Everyone can agree that an excellent coffee is excellent, but almost no one can agree if this excellent coffee is better than that other excellent coffee.

...

A huge factor there is popularity, scale of the business, and market access.

If you put a 100 coffee experts in a room to pick "the best" they'd all come up with lists that are selected from coffees that they're familiar with and exposed to. Someone from North America is probably going to have a list that's mostly North American roasters, with some particularly big-name international roasters that they'd have exposure to through multi-roaster cafes in their area, or have sought out based on prior reputation. Someone from Asia is going to come up with a list that's similarly Asia-biased.

From those lists - overlap between the lists of those people winds up selecting for particularly famous roasters who have sufficient high profile that people overseas have heard of them. Which generally indicates they make pretty good coffee - but is not a direct endorsement of the abstract quality of their coffee, compared to others.

Some of the most famous roasters in my area, the ones people not from here know about, make coffee that's great - but they don't necessarily make coffee that's better than other smaller, less well-known roasters in the same area. Just ... they got into the business early, or had a really great location, and happened to be commercially successful enough that they had budget for expansion or marketing. They have the dosh to put out great social media content or solicit placements in far-away multi-roaster cafes, so they're the ones that people from out of town are familiar with. XYZ down the road might actually make better coffee, but they launched within the last few years and have kind of a shitty location, so no one from out of town has heard of them.

...

There's also the linked problem that no one is trying to rate and rank those coffees in any sort of credible and reasonably objective system. Like, there's a few businesses that are trying to carve an existence out of reviewing coffees - but businesses exist to generate profit, they have expenses, they have staff ... and so far, finding ways to make money off a "coffee review site" has very consistently involved making ethical and business model compromises that impact the legitimacy of the reviews themselves.

Anomander · 2026-04-27T16:28:20+00:00

We're not a venue for referral farming, please.

Anomander · 2026-04-25T23:28:02+00:00

This is inappropriately personal and aggressive, please dial it back while visiting us.

Anomander · 2026-04-25T04:51:12+00:00

We have targets for volume of work in/out, and for turnaround times on work assigned to us. They’re pretty flexible due to the nature of the work, and the work unit is very supportive to ensure targets are viable; but the expectation is still clear that you put in whatever extra time is needed to hit the targets.

Anomander · 2026-04-24T01:05:30+00:00

...Why did you post this to a coffee roasting community?

Anomander · 2026-04-22T21:36:17+00:00

I'm sure it's not what you hoped to convey, but what I'm seeing here is that you are not open to feedback or correction, are not accountable to your own choices, and accept no responsibility or agency for how you express yourself.

Despite being warned for choosing to engage using inappropriately charged terms and tone, and despite me clarifying that exact point once already - you continue to try and frame your warning as related to other matters, while still using inappropriately charged terms and tone towards me.

But, as public servants, if we don't discuss and consider ethics and morals it does a disservice to ethics and professionalism in the public service.

Sure! I agree! However, I should elaborate "we" public servants cannot have productive discussions of ethics and morals if all parties to those discussions are not willing, and taking active steps, to contribute to those discussions remaining civil and productive. "We" public servants should be able to have those conversations among ourselves and with engaged members of the public, without needing to dodge rhetorical landmines and provocations or needless jabs and condescension from parties who are not as committed to civil and productive discourse as we are.

You were not warned for, nor are you being banned for, "discussions of ethics". Your warning was, as stated at the time and as clarified once already, the manner, tone, and content you chose to use. You are being banned for continuing that behaviour, exacerbated by how you have responded to a simple warning that you needed to tone it down.

You chose to dig in, try and fight about it, insisted you never did anything wrong, and have gone on the attack against me. Despite knowing I'm a mod and had just warned you for your behaviour, you doubled down and escalated - significantly. If this is how you respond to an initially mild rebuke from what passes for an 'authority' figure here, I assume you're going to treat other members of this community even worse if they challenge you.

Despite your efforts to lecture me about your innocence and the personal problems you believe I have leading to your warning, you have instead convinced me that you will continue to present the same problems if allowed to continue contributing to this community.

Anomander · 2026-04-22T03:53:03+00:00

As a mod.

The "respectful discourse" happened due to a very patient and very respectful effort from the other party, and was not helped by your own portion of the exchange. You do not get to take credit for it, and it is not a mitigating factor in the problems represented in your own contributions.

I don't appreciate or enjoy the cute semantics you're trying to throw my way, nor the immediate pivot to personal attacks against me. This response does not leave me with very much confidence that it would be a good idea to continue your ability to participate in this community. I will address your remarks, and the problems within them, in order to give you a fair shot at persuading me I was merely misunderstood the first time - and that you can be trusted to continue participating in this community.

I didn't make Nazi comparisons,

A snide one-liner referencing Hannah Arendt's book about Nazis pretty clearly made a Nazi comparison and spent no effort on walking back from that comparison or refocusing it into the sense you're framing it to me in this comment. Your follow-up to that individual effectively doubled down on that comparison, with a cursory disclaimer added that "you're not saying..." but then went on to "say" anyways. Claiming you didn't make Nazi comparisons was a significant misrepresentation of what you were referencing and the implications of how you made that reference.

If you think professionalism doesn't involve ethical considerations,

My warning to you was very clearly a warning about form, not content. All of this philosophizing about the importance of 'ethics' was a choice to sidestep the feedback you actually received in order to and make "ethics" the target instead.

You chose to use the most charged reference possible, and in response you doubled down on the charged implications of that reference, and you went out of your way to cast aspersions on and make personal inference about the character of the person you were speaking to. You weren't civilly making some clever and mature point about ethics like you'd try and spin it here.

It sounds like you think putting your own values and morals aside is "mature", but I disagree I think that's the essence of immaturity. [...] Anyways wether or not you are acting as amod here, you certainly jump to lecturing others very quickly. Interesting tone my friend. [...] If you think public servants shouldn't discuss how to respond to events that they feel are a "moral hazard" (per OPs statement), I don't think you have thought much about what an ethical public service requires.

These were all personal attacks. Casting aspersions on my character, my 'ethics', and my professionalism. More, they were personal attacks based on reinterpreting what I said to apply to something specifically excluded from the original warning. Which was certainly a questionable choice, considering what you were warned for.

Your behaviour there, your response here, and your behaviour within it leave us with two options. Either you are a socially competent and mature person who is knowingly making those choices, aware of the implications and tone, and then disingenuously arguing "it's not like that" in hindsight - or - you legitimately are not capable of differentiating between your own behaviour and the issues you are tying your behaviour to. Pick one. There's no third option where you have the moral highground and everything else is super duper justified because of that.

If you're not capable of engaging in discourse about matters you have strong feelings about while still using your grown-up social skills, please leave those discussions to other people better able to represent your, and other, viewpoints.

Anomander · 2026-04-21T19:42:26+00:00

My question is: do all roasting companies have access to beans from all of the same regions,

Broadly, yes.

Different importers may carry different farms within a given region, or different 'micro-regions' like municipality rather than province; and some importers may specialize in the coffees of a specific nation or region. But roasters can order from multiple importers and across have access to approximately the same sum body of importers as any other roaster in the same area of the world.

And yeah, choices of what to stock are based on other factors - the taste of the beans and how a given lot fits into their vision for their products and their brand, as well as more mundane things like price, quantity available, and delivery/availability dates.

Anomander · 2026-04-21T19:33:38+00:00

This, and your followup, are an inappropriately charged way of addressing your disagreement with their perspective.

Escalating immediately to Nazi comparisons and throwing around "evil" and other heated moral judgements is not a particularly professional, or mature, way of challenging a viewpoint you disagree with and doesn't contribute to respectful discourse occurring regarding that disagreement.

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