But that said, I don’t believe this author is complaining that students generally don’t attend lecture. They’re complaining that absenteeism has increased, implying that it has increased substantially recently. And that this sudden increase in the delta is a cause for concern.

I now just generate masked email addresses with Fastmail. Much less noise now.

Something I wonder is if an uncut sheet of $2 bills would be considered extraordinarily lucky, because it’s a bunch of $2s in nearly mint condition. Or if it would be considered incredibly unlucky because those kids would have no easy way of cutting them perfectly.

Since then, I always use at least two 2FA apps at the same time.

(I'm sure a determined enough attacker will eventually find an agent willing to accept the former excuse, but if it reaches that point, I think I've already lost this battle.)

Interestingly, the other 2 big banks—Citigroup and Bank of America—are missing. They both do support RTP though (which apparently is a different network operated by the same entity that backs ACH). Unsure if RTP is meant to compete with FedNow.

Temperature is controlled in two ways: direct heat input (e.g. gas flame heating the outside of the rotating drum) and air flow (moving air through the roasting drum to the exhaust). It's not 1 measurement though: there is bean temperature (measured by a probe stuck into the pile of beans) and air temperature.

As far as time goes, when keeping the end temperature equal, spending more time in the roasting process means that the difference between interior and exterior of the bean are closer in temperature. When you plot air and bean temperature against time, you can derive additional information: how much energy is in your roasting drum and the rate at which the bean temperature is changing.

I'm going to preface this by saying that this is an ongoing field of research. We're still learning about what is happening in a coffee bean at various stages of the roasting process. For example, we're not quite certain exactly what is happening at "first crack" (the first time you can start to hear the beans popping), or why some coffee beans simply don't have as audible of a first crack.

We can attribute the first "rules" established for consistent coffee roasting to Scott Rao, who published some of his observations in a book in the early 2010s. Some of those rules were: (1) ensure that the rate of change of the bean temperature ("rate of rise") is constantly decreasing, and (2) prepare to adjust your roast as you begin first crack to prevent the "crash and flick" (a sharp decrease followed by a sharp increase in the rate of rise). The current thinking is that the release of moisture during first crack causes the temperature to crash, and the removal of that moisture causes the temperature to uncontrollably rise back up again. Not handling this properly often results in undesirable hollow and bready flavors; this is frequently referred to as "baked coffee".

As far as vegetal goes, that is often because of roasters cutting their roasts too short (and perhaps roasting too quickly). In this case, the bean does not get hot enough for sufficient flavor development, so it more or less retains a lot of the undesirable flavors of essentially "raw" coffee.

Note that these are "rules" instead of rules because there are a plethora of edge cases out there.

This is why roasting is really really difficult. And why even some of the best roasters out there end up leaning a lot on blends and their milk drink business.

And sorry, I gotta call out everyone who suggests this: most of your home-roasted coffee is gonna taste like ass lol. I tried home roasting a bit with a fancy setup and with a Fresh Roast. I sure saved a lot of money per pound of coffee, but I always got a fraction of the quality and the flavors were never consistent. But what I gained was insanity and the realization that home-roasting isn't for me.

Roasting well in general is already quite challenging and is a lot more than just arriving at a certain bean color or temperature. Vegetal flavors are very much a roasting mistake that's being passed off as an inherent characteristic of a light roast. Combine that with techniques better suited to brewing (or pulling shots of) darker roasted, and you have a recipe for a dull, astringent, sour cup.

That being said, a sour espresso shot is always possible regardless of dark the coffee is, so I'd argue it has a lot to do with a cafe owner's willingness to train themselves and their staff to work with lighter roasted coffee.

It's arguable whether Vanguard should allow this, and whether it'd matter at the end. Vanguard is for retail investors who want to invest their money as cheaply as possible without thinking hard about it. Delivering proxy ballots, even electronically, does have a cost, and would likely make such funds slightly but noticeably more expensive. And to what benefit? After all, most retail investors don't care to vote. If you strongly care about your shareholder voice, the better solution is to buy shares in the company directly.

That said, Vanguard now lets you select from some broader voting methodologies (e.g. Vanguard's default, ESG, or "good corporate governance"). But nothing specific like "good corporate governance, except screw Musk over/always favor Musk".

* Musk will vote, for obvious reasons.

* Big institutional funds almost always vote with the board of directors recommendations. They very rarely rock the boat for a lot of mostly good reasons.

* Private shareholders with a sizable stake likely will vote.

* Retail shareholders (i.e. you and I) are notorious for not voting. Case in point: AMC is mostly held by retail investors at this point and had to go through all sorts of shenanigans to be able to increase the maximum number of shares they could issue, because that typically requires a shareholder vote that simply wouldn't ever get enough total votes to pass.

The new BART fleet is much nicer than the old fleet in many respects, except for one very big issue: when a few drops of water fall onto the track, they have to slow down all the trains traveling through affected parts of the system. Worst case in my experience, this increases my travel time by 33%, which really adds up on the longer distance rides. My understanding is that in the rain, the new trains are just too good at applying brakes to all the wheels when they detect the wheels slipping on the tracks, and as a result, the wheels grind against the track to create flat spots. The current mitigation is to slow down the train, and it doesn't sound like they've figured out a long term solution yet.[0]

Your point about the system having a "nonstandard wheel profile and corresponding rail profile" stood out to me here. So I'm wondering, just how nonstandard is that? And is this wheel flat problem something exclusive to BART (and, perhaps a result of this nonstandard wheel profile)?

[0] https://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/bart-wet-weather-b...

To give a further clarifying example, if I were planning to take the shinkansen round-trip between Tokyo and Osaka, the price is JPY 28000. Back when the JPY was stronger, the price of the 7-day pass was JPY 29650, so the pass would have been a no-brainer. Today, even though the 7-day pass costs JPY 50000, the currency is much weaker, so the USD price has increased only a little bit. However, the price of that train trip in JPY has not changed much, if at all. Therefore, because JPY 28000 (USD 184) is significantly less than JPY 50000 (USD 330), it makes no sense at all to buy the pass today if this is the only JR trip I'm planning to make.

That said, the pass is still only for those with a tourist visa (15-90 days for sightseeing), or for Japanese citizens who have lived abroad for at least 10 years.

Others have pointed out the currency conversion, which helps in keeping it affordable. But it's worth pointing out that individual train fares are also priced in JPY, and therefore are also cheaper in USD because of the same currency conversion. Compared to the huge increase in price of the pass, train fares themselves have stayed relatively stable. As a result, while the pass itself may still be affordable to those of us using USD, it's even more likely nowadays that it just makes more sense to pay for the individual train fares than for the pass.