Many of the cups I've had at Dark Matter in Chicago are decidedly on the darker side, and they have Starry Eyes which is specifically sold as their dark roast. I don't think they post exact roast curves, so I'm not sure there's an objective way to denote what qualifies as a "real" dark roast, but I'm guessing most people who like a more classic dark roast would at least find it acceptably close. Roasters in Atlanta like Chrome Yellow, Dancing Goat, or Portrait also tend to be on the darker side, though I'm not sure if they have mainstay coffees.

It's not as if I've never had a cup of Lavazza or Folgers or Cafe du Monde to compare to. I grew up on basic coffeemaker grocery store French Roast all day every day.

There's also a third axis in brew technique - most old-school espresso is only vaguely the same brew method as what you'd get at a third-wave shop where the newer machines have fairly precise temperature, flow, and pressure controls, as well as more consistent grinds with less fines.

Both sides can be pretentious. Dogmatic attachment to tradition can be pretentious just like overzealous modernism. I certainly wouldn't order an espresso in Milan and then be upset that I dislike it, but I would find it annoying that it's difficult to find a cup of coffee I do enjoy, just like my British friends find it difficult to find a cup of tea that meets their preference, which I also think is a sub-par way to prepare a drink.

Plus, the espresso fad is kinda already long-dead in America. Sure, there's Starbucks, but no one's really getting a black coffee or espresso shot there. If anything, America's contribution to coffee that has persisted for decades is drip coffee and more recently handbrew pourovers (though Japan and others also contributed a lot there). There's a reason the Americano is essentially just espresso made to taste like drip coffee.

The issue in my mind is the dogmatic orthodoxy of people who enjoy French or Italian espresso saying that anything else is borderline immoral, or at best "pretentious". I happen to prefer more modern espresso styles, but there's also joy in a good traditional Italian shot.

Just because a specific style has been around for years doesn't mean it's the only valid style that's not "pretentious".

People are used to the specific flavor that, for instance, commercial Bunn coffee makers that haven't been properly cleaned for decades tastes like. There's not really any way to emulate that outside of intentionally buying bad equipment.

I'm still honestly confused that people have a hard time with the menu. I literally seek out going to the best and most fancy-ass coffee shops in the world when I travel and most of them will still serve you a normal Americano or Espresso if you order it. Some don't have drip/carafe coffee because that requires specific equipment and I could see that being complex, I guess, but then that's because you went to a especially high end coffee shop. I often have to go out of my way to find a shop that does pour-over. A lot of the world doesn't do drip or pour-over at all until recent times. Ten years ago, I had to go to the British expat bar in Prague to get a drip coffee because every other shop in town was espresso only and looked at you weird if you wanted an americano.

The options even then aren't usually all that complex unless you're into espresso, and then you should be used to ordering a latte/cappuccino/double shot if that's what you want. Your "black coffee" options are almost never more complex than various origins of drip coffee, where if you literally do not care, you can just order the cheapest. I'm perplexed by people who look at a menu of 4 options for drip coffee and seemingly have a mental breakdown due to complexity. The most number of drip/pour over options I've ever seen at a coffee shop was 8 and it was at the central roastery of one of the best coffee roasters in the world.

You can still buy coffee at McDonalds or 7-11 or plenty of other basic places! It's not like that was outlawed!

A lot of critiques of modern coffee are based in a sort of silent "but I got used to the benefits of imperial colonialism and exploitation. How dare these new people make me consider where my drinks are from and what should be paid for them." I'm certainly not claiming that's a conscious thing - status quo bias is a big thing here, but it's odd how often "paying a living wage" and "caring about sustainable farming" is decried as decadence and depravity that's destroying the old and more honorable ways of living.

Having a preference for a traditional status quo blend is still a preference!

If you really want a basic coffee with the cheapest beans you can find, why would you go to a fancy shop? If anything, it's more likely to work there than going to a multi-course restaurant and trying to order a hamburger. There are other businesses that serve a "no choices" need.

I'm sure there is some influencer/performative aspect to this as well that the author is reacting to, but the complaint strikes me mostly as a "I was ok with the status quo, and I dislike that other people prefer things other than that". Having preferences and choices is not by default some sort of pretentious thing!

Coffee shop or brewery or dive bar culture can vary some place to place, but there's usually core elements of the sort of social contract that are core to it and can provide a sense of routine or homely comfort even when you're staying at a hotel in another country. Having an experience that's 80% the same as the one you'd have back home can make it easier for you to recognize and appreciate that 20% difference sometimes and learn about a new culture.

Presumably OP had seen/visited an Apple Store before and knew what employees wore there, so it's not a mystery what the uniform is, and therefore what is probably meant by "don't wear anything formal". It's not some kind of gotcha.

To be clear, I don't think this is some hidden effort to secretly support Trump, but it's such an obviously bad move that was then defended that makes it hard to understand what he was possibly thinking.

If he'd been deep in the comments talking about how he personally knew this lawyer and laying out why he was convinced she was a good pick, then maybe. But outside of him saying "solid track record", I don't think I saw any actual articulation of the record he's saying she had, and plenty of people calling out the things she did that were as pro-Big Tech as Chuck Schumer's daughters that he called out as marking the decline of his support for democrats.

Which is the additional part of this being horrible judgement. If it was just "This person is someone I think is good" then sure. Maybe he's wrong, but it's a defensible position. Publishing a detailed explanation of why he's disowning an entire political party that had literally just had Lina Kahn doing some of the most aggressive anti-trust prosecutions in decades is wild. There's a space to just cheer for people doing things well that your organization agrees with, but he chose to issue statements condemning entire parties and praising others by name.

Even outside of me thinking it was a poorly thought out endorsement, it's just so amazingly unnecessary. I follow journalists and activists around anti-trust and internet regulation and I literally hadn't heard about this appointment.

That's not really a solid argument to me. No part of the original post or the followup helps me understand why he thinks a former lobbyist for Amazon and Google would be for anti-trust action against them.

Most of the responses on reddit, while overblown, are generally pointing out that most of big tech was funding Trump and Vance's election. If most of the CEO's argument is how much the democrats are in the pocket of big tech, that seems quite relevant. A pretty substantial percentage of the money spent to elect Trump was from Musk and other VC folks, and Bezos notably killed an endorsement of Harris at the newspaper he ran.

As someone said in the thread, it feels like the CEO took a "the enemy of my enemy must be better" in this, when it's entirely correct that both US parties are in the pocket of corporate interests. He's not wrong about the Democrats, but that definitely doesn't mean Trump's appointments are better. He could have just decided to sit this out and say nothing, which makes it all the more objectionable that he decided this was his time to show up and publicly try to get Trump's attention to praise him. As far as I know he wasn't @ mentioning Biden to praise the various anti-trust actions that were taken over the last few years.