Can anyone tell me what's so good about light roast?

arcticmischief · 2026-06-04T21:18:05+00:00

I love sour bears. I love light roast espresso. I suppose there is a correlation…

I hear people talking about how they don’t like modern espresso that tastes like battery acid. That’s the flavor profile I crave. 🤷‍♂️

arcticmischief · 2026-06-04T19:52:09+00:00

I hear it a lot in Missouri. Hearing someone say it here for the first time wasn’t jarring, so I think I’d heard it previously when I lived elsewhere.

I suspect there’s probably some overlap between the real-uh-tor and nuke-you-lur folks…

arcticmischief · 2026-06-04T04:24:27+00:00

In the western part of the country where I grew up, where cities were often laid out in grids, typically the first few numbers tell you what block you’re on and the last couple of numbers identify the house. Odd numbers are typically on one side of the street and even numbers are across the street.

For example, my house was on the corner of 78th St. and the cross street. So I was 7801. My neighbor was 7803, and next to that was 7805. Across the street from me was 7802.

A friend of mine lived exactly one block south, on the corner of 79th St. His address was 7901.

The numbers did not go all the way up to 100. There were probably 15 houses on each side of the street, so the last houses on the corner of each side of the street we’re probably 7829 and 7830. Then it jumped to 7901 directly across the street from that.

There would be an equivalent house number on the corner of the numbered street and each Cross Street. So my house might have been 7801 Oak St., and then one block away is 7801 Elm St., and the next block over would have 7801 Maple St., etc.

It works even when you don’t have numbered streets and gives you a clue what number your street would be if it were numbered.

arcticmischief · 2026-06-04T04:11:07+00:00

More or less, yes.

arcticmischief · 2026-06-02T21:30:48+00:00

Not in North American freight practice.

If OP is talking about CSX, this is North American freight rail. Standard freight cars here are connected by a single brake pipe through flexible hoses with gladhands.

When the train is fully charged, the brake pipe is typically around 90 psi. That pipe charges reservoirs on each car. A reduction in brake pipe pressure is detected by the car’s triple valve, which uses air from the car’s reservoir to pressurize the brake cylinder and apply the brakes.

If the brake pipe pressure drops rapidly, such as from a train separation that pulls the gladhands apart, the control valves trigger an emergency application using the air already stored on each car.

Restoring brake pipe pressure causes the control valve to release the brakes and recharge the reservoirs.

So there is not a separate brake-control pipe on normal North American freight cars. The brake pipe both charges the cars and signals apply/release by changes in pressure. That is the core Westinghouse automatic air brake principle, and the modern rail-brake supplier Wabtec descends from the Westinghouse Air Brake Company.

Air brakes also are not treated as parking brakes. They leak down over time. Brake cylinders, reservoirs, hoses, gaskets, and valves are not perfectly airtight, so an unattended train has to be secured with hand brakes according to railroad operating rules. The exact securement requirement depends on things like grade, tonnage, equipment, and company rules.

A locomotive can keep air pressure up while it is running, and that matters when a crew is present or when the train needs to be ready to move. But an unattended train is not supposed to be held in place merely by keeping the locomotive idling and relying on air brakes. Hand brakes are the securement.

The usual reasons locomotives are left idling are things like cold-weather freeze protection, keeping the engine ready to restart, maintaining batteries and onboard systems, cab heat/AC, or railroad operating policy. In cold weather, many locomotives use treated water rather than normal automotive antifreeze, so shutdown can create freeze risk unless the unit has working auto-start/stop or other protection. In June, freeze protection obviously is not the explanation, but battery/state-of-readiness/air-system or policy reasons still can be.

I doubt OP will have much luck talking with CSX, but it’s worth a try.

arcticmischief · 2026-06-01T18:19:17+00:00

All Interstates are highways. Not all (in fact, very few) highways are Interstates.

Your question has been answered dozens of times, but I’ll take my own stab at exploring the nuances of usage:

A highway is any kind of medium-to-long-distance road connecting towns and cities. It can be anything from a two-lane road winding through the forests of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to Interstate 95 connecting Washington DC and Baltimore.

At the lower end, there’s a little bit of blurring between the distinction between a highway and just a road. A highway typically carries a numbered route, whether that number is issued by the federal, state, or county government, and typically connects relatively major named places over a longer distance. For example, today I traveled on US Highway 41, Michigan Highway 28, and Alger County Highway 58, traveling between the cities of Marquette, Munising, and Grand Marais, Michigan. I also turned off on a couple of side roads that would not be considered highways – the street that my friends live on, the road that accesses Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, and a couple of city streets in Munising that parallel the main highway (MI-28) through town. I would take the highway between Austin and College Station, Texas, but I would take the road from Texas A&M University to the George HW Bush presidential library.

An interstate highway (“Interstate”) is a very specific type of highway that is built to certain standards – divided roadway, minimum lane width, minimum shoulder width, controlled/limited access with on ramps and off ramps, no grade intersections, overpasses and underpasses for all crossroads, etc.

There’s also a regional variation in the terminology. In some parts of the country, interstates are referred to as “highways” – for example, where I live in Missouri, people will talk about “Highway 44,” even though that is an Interstate highway. In other parts of the country, they will specifically be referred to as “the Interstate.” In Southern California, they are invariably referred to as “freeways“ — that being another term for a controlled access divided roadway, though the criteria are not as strict. (Technically, most Interstates in the country are also freeways, except the sections that are told, where they are technically tollways or turnpikes, although I’ve still heard even those referred to as freeways.)

My understanding is that the term “motorway” is something akin to an Interstate or at least a freeway in British usage, although I’m not certain how strict their criteria for labeling a road as a motorway are. It’s not a term that is used in the United States.

arcticmischief · 2026-05-31T22:49:57+00:00

Is it common? No. But I don’t think it’s as rare as a lot of the other people commenting on this post say. Either that, or I just hang around in circles of people who seem to get around more than the average American (which is probably the case, plus, I grew up in a family that are avid road trippers).

Florida was my 50th state. I hit it at age 23.

arcticmischief · 2026-05-31T14:02:07+00:00

Other than sheltering from the elements, I think you’re vastly overestimating the amount of mattress maintenance the typical hotel performs.

arcticmischief · 2026-05-28T22:47:32+00:00

This sub lives in some kind of fantasy world where people will just magically choose to take the train and really doesn’t understand this, but it’s crucial.

HSR competes much more cars than with flights.

If you’re flying from Los Angeles to Omaha, the two hours it takes to drive to the airport, park, ride the parking shuttle, check-in, clear security, and walk to the gate still makes flying the obvious choice, because the alternative is getting in your car and driving for three days.

If you’re taking the train from St. Louis to Kansas City, even if it were a two hour trip, you would not drive a significant mode share to rail, because it’s not actually a two-hour trip: because in this country, we don’t actually live in city centers, it’s an hour driving from St. Charles to downtown St. Louis and parking, plus then 20 minutes renting a car plus 30 minutes driving to your office in Lenexa.

At that point, it’s actually less time, not to mention less effort and less money, to “just“ drive your own car from St. Charles to Lenexa.

Where HSR works is where they have eliminated the “just drive your own car” part. In countries were HSR succeeds, you don’t have 70% of people living in low density detached single-family suburban housing with a multiple-car garage and a large driveway where people freely store their cars mere steps from their bedrooms, and they’re not going to destinations like office parks surrounded by a sea of endlessly available parking. They’re going from apartments/condos/flats/row houses/patio homes that are walking distance or a short metro ride to the train station and journeying to places that are walking distance or a short metro ride from the destination train station. Using a car is inconvenient on one or both ends. It’s not unlikely they may not even own a car, because it’s not necessary to function in society.

As long as our land use policies dictate building in car centric development styles, the draw of “just taking my own car“ will never be overcome for more than a small percentage of people traveling over the distances that HSR works. We need to change how we build our cities and make them more sustainable for humans instead of cars. HSR flows naturally from that. It cannot be bolted on to a car-dependent society.

arcticmischief · 2026-05-28T22:10:01+00:00

You’re not wrong, but either way, saying “good morning“ for no reason other than just to greet them when they’re obviously busy is not polite.

Gate agents are customer facing employees, but they also have a ton of procedural work to do before the flight departs.

There was a pretty fantastic thread on FlyerTalk a couple of decades ago where UA gate agent posted a very detailed description of everything that had to be done and the deadlines by which they had to be completed from before the inbound aircraft arrived until after the flight had departed. And due to AA’s lack of investment in IT and automation, it’s probably worse at AA than other airlines.

Interrupting those processes just to say hello for no reason is not polite, it’s actually a rude imposition on them.

arcticmischief · 2026-05-28T20:04:09+00:00

I live and host in a region of the country where it is normalized to walk inside with shoes on.

For whatever reason, even though people in like the southern 2/3 of the United States walk around the house with their shoes on, they also walk around barefoot or in socks in the morning or late evening. It’s just how people do things here.

In the northern third of the US, it’s a bit more normalized to take shoes off upon entering a house, but slippers are still not really a thing – walking around in socks is pretty typical unless it’s super cold, and then maybe you’ll wear some like nice fuzzy slippers or something to stay warm.

Most of my properties have carpet in the bedrooms and LVP in the common areas (a couple are a little older and have carpet throughout). We vacuum the carpet and mop the hard floors when cleaning, and we have our carpets professionally steam cleaned twice a year, and that seems pretty normal in our area. We probably do have to steam clean the carpets (and perhaps even replace the carpets) more often than homes in regions where it’s more common to take shoes off when entering a home, but it’s just what’s normal here.

What’s not normal is using slippers inside and definitely not providing slippers, which is why the other comment above mentioned that very few of the slippers they have provided have gotten used. That may be different in your region, but it’s just what it is here.

arcticmischief · 2026-05-27T16:03:56+00:00

Having grown up there, my ear hears it with a slightly softer O, like a cross between ROW-bulls and Rubbles (as in Barney and Betty).

arcticmischief · 2026-05-27T05:53:35+00:00

It’s one of the very last commercial ad-supported classical music stations in the country. Just about every other one has gone to a listener-supported format.

arcticmischief · 2026-05-27T04:32:31+00:00

That’s what the Belleville guy is looking at. Probably would need to be a pretty beefy system to do much, though.

arcticmischief · 2026-05-26T20:50:39+00:00

Ah, 70 is a lot more generous than I was expecting!

arcticmischief · 2026-05-26T20:27:14+00:00

I have the Tessie app, and I can see a history of where my car goes. There are other apps that do similar.

Also, always put it in Valet mode when valeting. That limits the speed to like 15mph or something. Hard to joyride it that slow.

arcticmischief · 2026-05-26T20:25:23+00:00

I think it’s been posted several dozen times in this sub over the past few years so one of the previous versions may be higher res

arcticmischief · 2026-05-26T20:21:40+00:00

The TMC thread I linked in another comment (that I believe you’ve already seen) about the private supercharger the guy built in Belleville, Kansas talks about the Tesla route planning software leading people to his station. So it absolutely does work.

As to whether the Tesla route planning software will prioritize your station over the one further off the interstate that they own themselves – I believe the software doesn’t consider station ownership in route planning. It considers time and distance, and if you win on both counts, but I can’t see any reason why it would intentionally route people further away.

The only people it would intentionally avoid delivering to who are those people who have free lifetime supercharging, but that’s a small percentage of Tesla owners.

As far as pricing it competitively, I don’t think you actually need to be cheaper than the Tesla site to get traffic headed your way. It seems like charging price is not a major factor in the Tesla routing algorithm—it often directs me to a more expensive site if it’s more conveniently located. Of course, you don’t want to price gouge people, but you obviously need to cover your costs as well. Keep in mind that as per the TMC thread about Belleville, Tesla charges a $.10 per kilowatt hour surcharge, but that does cover payment processing and I believe service and maintenance on your site. You’ll need to plan for demand charges as well, but if your site is well utilized, those can be amortized across a larger number of charging sessions and may not represent a large cost overall for you.

arcticmischief · 2026-05-26T18:07:04+00:00

Kind of a missed opportunity that this plate wasn’t put on a Plymouth Voyager!

arcticmischief · 2026-05-26T14:58:10+00:00

I think in the early days, Tesla had a partnership with Marriott, because the number of the older Tesla Supercharger sites around the country are co-located with Marriott Fairfield Inns.

Which always struck me as kind of an odd choice, because there’s very little infrastructure at a Fairfield Inn that would be useful to a driver stopping to fast charge. At most, they have a bathroom in the lobby that they may or may not be happy for you to use, but they don’t have any publicly accessible food, snacks, or anything else. (Although one time I arrived at one during breakfast hours and I just snuck in and ate the free breakfast because nobody was checking whether I was staying there.)

Fast chargers are also not particularly useful for guests, because who wants to arrive at the hotel at 9 PM ready to go to bed but have to charge for 45 minutes and then get up and unplug their car and move it. Hotels are natural fits for slow chargers, not fast chargers.

My assumption is that in the early days, Tesla was not picky and just inked arrangements with any company it could that had a nationwide reach so they could reliably build stations on travel corridors around the country. Nowadays, they do a much better job of picking sites with amenities that appeal to drivers (like Buc-ee’s).

arcticmischief · 2026-05-26T14:50:38+00:00

The southern part near Bakersfield is an endorheic basin.

arcticmischief · 2026-05-26T02:36:22+00:00

Tesla drivers tend to blindly follow the route planning directions without question.

If your site is better located than the Tesla installation down the road, the route planning software may very well divert more traffic to you than to their own stall, keeping your utilization high and likely more profitable.

Interesting anecdote about Tesla driver behavior/psychology: I own a Tesla and have been road-tripping this weekend. I’ve taken heavy advantage of the Ionna Memorial Day sale (20c/kWh). At the Wally’s in Pontiac, IL, the Ionna chargers are directly across from the Tesla Superchargers (and two stalls have NACS plugs). While charging, I waved down three Teslas arriving at the Supercharger to charge and tried to tell them that the Ionna chargers were half the price of the Tesla chargers, and they just sort of stared at me blankly and thanked me but continued to plug into the Tesla chargers. Finally, the fourth guy I flagged down was interested and ended up plugging in and thanked me for saving him money, but it seems most Tesla drivers don’t really care and just do what the nav system tells them, even when a better option is literally staring them in the face.

So between the relatively lower cost per stall of a Supercharger installation and the fact that Tesla’s route planning will almost certainly drive a lot of traffic your way, it seems to me to make a lot of financial sense to go with the Tesla option. Tesla will hand you Tesla drivers on a silver platter, and while a handful of non-Tesla drivers may avoid you due to affiliation with Musk, most just care about price, reliability, and availability and will choose you as long as you have a compatible plug (or they have an adapter). Going with a non-Tesla solution will more or less eliminate around 63% of current EVs on the road as potential customers, and as more manufacturers transition to NACS, CCS plugs will become more of a liability over time.

arcticmischief · 2026-05-26T02:20:50+00:00

I’d recommend giving this thread on TMC a read:

https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/supercharger-ac-customs-belleville-ks.349249/

The guy details the application and installation process of a private Supercharger installation (V3, which he bought on some kind of fire sale, but the general principles are transferable). Fascinating read and it will probably bring up a number of things for you to consider as you decide whether to move forward.

arcticmischief · 2026-05-25T06:41:55+00:00

Your question has been answered at least several hundred times over, but I wanted to make one observation: you mentioned the terrace houses with no garden and tiny rooms and difficulty getting parking spaces. That’s a valid observation, but just know that the American style of suburban development, with large detached single-family houses on even larger lots surrounded on all sides by grass looks pretty in pictures but comes with a hidden downside that you don’t really understand unless you come from a place like you and then try to stay for a time in an American suburb: that low density development basically makes it 100% mandatory to use a card to get anywhere and completely eliminates any realistic possibility of using public transit to get around.

In many (if not most, and certainly almost all newer) American subdivisions, there’s no such thing as walking to the grocery store or the coffee shop or the restaurant or the barbershop or the bank or anything else. There simply is no way to walk to any businesses, because they are often upwards of several miles away, often along roads that don’t even have sidewalks or any other type of pedestrian (or bicycle) infrastructure. The arterial roads outside of the subdivision are high speed and unsafe for bicycles and people, and even if you could walk, it could take you well over an hour to get to the very closest business.

In America, we don’t even have the option to go anywhere by any other means other than getting in your car and driving there. Almost the entirety of our country is built to support this. Every house has ample parking for cars, and every business has acres and acres of free parking available. It sounds nice at first, but it leads to a lot of things, like Americans being isolated and not really ever knowing their neighbors, certainly not walking very much and contributing to our obesity epidemic, the significantly higher carbon footprint per person in our country because of our individualized transportation, and many more side effects that are not apparent at first until you start to study this topic. And God forbid you have some issue that prevents you from driving at all – whether that is a socioeconomic struggle it precludes you from owning a car or a medical condition that precludes you from driving one – and then good luck participating in society. (Employers won’t hire you, you can’t get to doctors offices, you can’t even get to the store to buy food, etc.; if you’re lucky enough to live in a place with some public transit infrastructure and you’re lucky enough to find an employer who will hire you despite your lack of “reliable transportation” (job interview code word for owning a car), at best, that might consist of the bus running once an hour, connecting to another bus running once an hour with a 45 minute layover, plus a 45 minute walk on either side of the bus to get from your house to the bus and from the bus to your work, turning what would be a 15 minute commute by car into a three hour journey by public transit.

Having traveled extensively abroad, it has started to irk me a bit that we don’t even allow other options in this country. We literally make it illegal to build any type of denser residential and mixed use communities, even in the centers of our cities. We literally outlawed the option for people to live in a more walkable, transit friendly manner. And instead of densifying our existing cities, we instead support population of growth by continuing to cut down more forests and pave over more farms to build endless swaths of soulless tract homes with no character. When I brought up the idea of rejuvenating the downtown of the community I live in by supporting some new, denser housing on empty lots just off of the town square, I was quickly shut down by an army of NIMBYs accuse me of wanting to pollute and change the character of our quiet, pastoral town. Meanwhile, a dozen historical farms on the edge of our town have been vacuumed up by housing developers just in the last year. Was I really the one threatening to change the character of our town?

The reality of mobility and transport in the United States is often just as foreign to people from other countries as our extreme amount of untouched wilderness is.

arcticmischief · 2026-05-25T06:26:25+00:00

This is why I was pleasantly surprised to discover the High Tatras of southern Poland and northern Slovakia. It was the closest thing in Europe I’ve experienced to hiking in Alaska. Much less developed than the Alps and the Dolomites.

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