Both the Catholic school I attended Kindergarten through 2nd grade at and the public middle school I attended in suburban NY had blacktop as the main rec area during lunches and other such breaks, so it’s not just a CA thing, I guess. Neither school was in a very build up area, either. The Catholic school in particular had plenty of land they could have had us play on that wasn’t the parking lot. Had I stayed there for all my schooling, they were even known for sending students into the marsh out behind the school to catch their own frogs for the full experience of preserving something in formaldehyde and dissecting it during high school biology labs.

I just do Auctex instead of orgmode, but this is the way.

Zotero is awesome, and I’d also recommend the browser extension with an account. Account is free, but it’ll let you save any web sources with all the metadata you need and sync it to the main program.

Zotero in combination with LaTeX and Biber have saved me so much time. Especially when I had a crazy professor who would make last minute changes to style requirements. I remember we had a paper to write that they initially said “Just cite with whatever format you want, it’s fine as long as they info is there.” Cool, write my ten pages or whatever with footnotes containing short citations and full citations available in the bibliography at the end. The night before the paper was due, “Actually, I need all papers to use APA citations or you’ll be docked points.”. No problem, just change my citation style at the top of my LaTeX doc and tell it to reprocess the paper, all the citations fixed in about 5 seconds, without even needing to learn the ins and outs of APA formatting.

Even cash breaks down pretty quickly in a hypothetical situation where you have something similar occur that lasts for an extended period. When banks’ systems are impacted, how do I get more cash from my account with them when whatever amount I had when the system went down runs out? I haven’t had a physical passbook for an account in a good 20 years.

I would argue the main benefits are to teach people how to effectively switch registers as the context demands, and to expose them to a range of language they likely wouldn’t ordinarily encounter in their daily lives. English teachers could do to lose the judgmental aspect of “This is the one true way to speak English, the way you talk amongst yourselves is wrong and you need do stop,” but there’s a definite value in teaching students, “This is a way to write/speak clearly and effectively that will be understood by quite nearly every other educated English speaker you might encounter.”

As far as exposure to a broader range of language than one normally encounters in their life, I saw the importance of this first hand with many of my coworkers who were heritage speakers of Spanish. It’s not my native language, but it was my primary work language for a good 5 years, and I wound up getting put on interpretation duties for our safety meetings over a native speaker with pretty limited formal education in Spanish. For topics to do with daily life, family, friends, etc, this guy would be able to speak much more naturally than I could. I might not say something that was exactly wrong, but perhaps I would be too formal or make odd word choices he wouldn’t. The problem was, he completely lacked any technical and professional vocabulary, and had no concept of what words/phrases were unique to his own country and what alternatives might be more widely understood.

We would have safety meetings once a night, and they would have topics like, “When a forklift has its forks in the air, don’t walk beneath it, as hydraulic failure could lead to injury or death.”. He translated that one night as “Cuando la vaina del pasillo tiene esa vaina de en frente en el aire, no pasen por debajo de la vaina. Es peligroso.” Basically “When the thing in the hall has the thing in front in the air, don’t walk under the thing. It’s dangerous.” Best case, he might say “El forlift,” but he would never land on “el montacargas,” or even think to look it up. Some of his wilder attempts at interpretation didn’t work for anyone, and the ones where he just used a Spanglish version of technical terms only worked for other coworkers who already knew at least a bit of English, and probably didn’t really need the translation that much to begin with. Unfortunately, we had a fair number of employees who were monolingual Spanish speakers that he found himself just completely unable to communicate with effectively.

Granted, not everyone takes full advantage of it, but English classes do (or at least should) expose you to a broad range of the language, as it’s used in various contexts and forms, while also furnishing students with the ability to expand upon that and adapt to new contexts on their own in the future. Failure to do so leaves students with stunted linguistic and communicative abilities.

Sure, I was just trying to say that while some people will dislike the flavor of the currently vaunted light roasts, even when properly brewed, I think there is a pretty sizeable number of people who would like them well enough, but just find it too much hassle. Especially outside of the specialty coffee scene, where you see more and darker roasts, in my experience

When Costco or someone puts out a dark roast on the shelves, they generally aren’t competing for customers that drink single lot beans from your favorite café, they’re looking to get the people who find McDonald’s coffee or Dunkin Donut’s good enough, but want to save a bit of money by brewing at home.

Plus often they’re not especially skillfully made and I’m pretty sure some people are reacting to very thin acidic, sometimes woody and vegetal, cups and assuming that if they don’t like this,

Another possibility is just that light roasts can just be too fiddly for most people to want to bother with. Between the money for equipment and time spent brewing it, it’s probably just too great an investment for most people to take something from at least acceptable to them to being great, after a while when you get things dialed in and the stars align.

Probably not photoshopped, more likely just different species and the one on the bottom has been butterflied and laid with the meat touching the ground so it looks much larger. Neither one has really started to change that much at the point these pictures were taken. Towards the end of the season, at least for west coast salmon, they’ll often get a lot leaner and their scales turn a super vivid red. As they lose their fat reserves, the meat also becomes much more delicate.