If you're in the United States at least, the existence of neighborhood grocers, bakers, or butchers, is ... mixed. (Though I did note "neighbour" so I'm guessing you're not American?). Most grocery stores source goods primarily from the same places. Most restaurants source goods and even prepared foods from primarily the same places. Even if you're shopping at a Co-Op grocery store, some sort of boutique or other high-end grocer, they're all sourcing THEIR goods from the same places too, it's just different products! (I've been in independent grocery stories in probably a dozen different states that stock almost identical products and whose stores look almost identical.)

There's no longer much of a tradition of local bakers or butchers, though quite a few grocery stores have pretty decent butchers attached. I do most of my shopping at coop grocery store with a butcher (though I'm told "meat cutter" is the preferred term today) who I'm on a first name basis with, and I'm not going to say anything bad about it, other than the cost! They get fresh baked goods from a few local bakeries and another local coop grocer that also specializes in baked goods and other prepared foods.

What would I say about Costco? They have good price on gas. I will often buy 20+ lbs of flour, big bags of sugar, etc there. The butchers at Costco are quite good, they have a very good and wide meat selection, they will custom cut things for you, and they often have good sales. They also often have great prices on electronics, computers, video games and system, etc., and Costco is very well known for their very generous returns policy. I very rarely buy any prepared foods from grocery stores, but Costco does have a taco tray that's pretty tasty, affordable rotisserie chickens, etc. I'm fortunate to be able to cook large meals for my family most days, but if my circumstances were different, I'd feel pretty good about eating food from Costco.

I get feeling grumpy about Costco as a kind of icon of American mass consumerism, but compared to most of the other big box stores (Walmart, Target, Sam's Club, etc.) Costco is my personal favorite for quality.

Guy Gavriel Kay (who was hired at a very young age by Christopher Tolkien to complete The Silmarillion) frequently writes on the theme of memory. His most famous novel is probably Tigana, which is literally (avoiding spoilers) about the unreliable nature of memory. Kay wrote in an afterword:

Photographic manipulation, and propaganda, and the manipulation of people and their memories, has been going on for a long time! The difference now, as others have said, is the ubiquity, capacity, low technological barriers to entry, and realism.

That's really not true. There are many companies, such as Costco, that have tremendous stock returns and that also, by all accounts, treat their employees and customers very humanely and well.

MBAs = enshittification.

I encourage all kids and college students I speak with to start their own businesses. I've found more and more over the years that starting businesses (perhaps outside of food services) is just incredibly far from most people's minds. If you are a business owner you are going to have to put in a lot of sweat equity, you may not make much money for many years, and you may fail entirely. But, if you succeed, you get to control your own destiny in a way that many people, even highly paid people, cannot. You also get to make decisions like deliberately avoiding enshittification of your products and treating your customers and employees in a way that you feel is just.

This is VERY different between institutions and levels of institution and majors. I went to a top 20 national university. I had one adjunct professor in 4 years (an English PhD student who taught a small 10-person freshman seminar).

I never had a teacher who was hard to understand. My Calc 3 teacher was German, but that was it. Every single computer science professor I had was native American or 100% fluent and clear in English.

My freshman 101 comp sci class had maybe 60 people, and that was the largest class I ever took. Multiple undergrad professors held parties at their homes at the end of the semester for their students. 20+ years later I am still in regular contact with 3 or 4 professors.

My experience in graduate school was identical. My wife went to a small private liberals arts school and her experience was perhaps even more extreme than mine. She never even had a 60 person class!

This all came with a price tag that has gotten worse since then, of course..

My sister, on the other hand, went to a non-flagship public and her experience was wildly different. I'm not sure she really ever had personal interaction with a professor. It was very much what you said--learn from the textbooks, pass the exam, that's it.

https://9to5mac.com/2025/11/14/new-iphone-pocket-now-available-to-order-but-its-selling-out-fast/

"Many of the iPhone Pocket color and size combinations are already sold out, though."

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/hs8j2zm/a/iphone-pocket-by-issey-miyake-short-black

Since the article was posted, all variations are sold out online.

Not as bad a call as the original Slashdot take on the iPod, but just goes to show that Slashdotters are not an important demographic.

Oh, I don't disagree with that at all. My state is a bit of an outlier, in that our teachers ARE more lowly paid than national averages, but then my locality is one of the higher paying supplements to teacher pay.

Why do I say pay is a problem? I've seen what happens to many good teachers. They get burned out from having to deal with trouble maker kids who if they get disciplined or get bad grades the parents go ape shit with allegations of racism, sexism, abuse, whatever. They get burned out from dealing with helicopter parents. They get burned out from, in most parts of the country, being governed by elected shitty school boards. They get burned out because some miscreant has an IEP and a 504 plan and so his stealing from classmates and being constantly disrupted is considered a manifestation of his disability and everyone else just has to deal with it.

Good teachers have job flexibility. I've seen multiple _great_ teachers go to work for companies like IXL where their starting salaries are always higher than what they were making as seasoned teachers. Others go the administrator route and become principals, superintendents, etc. Others go to teach at private schools where the pay is often better.

What I would propose is basically 3 things:

1. Get rid of habitually low performing teachers--every year get rid of your worst teachers
2. Increase pay for high performing teachers
3. And the kicker that I have no idea how to do--allow schools and teachers to apply standards and discipline without fear of lawsuits.

I think that plays into it too. In many--most--school districts, teachers effectively have tenure--it takes serious malfeasance or illegality to get fired.

Years of bad performance isn't enough.

I think part of the solution has to be dramatically increasing teacher pay but you also have to make the working environment better.

There is basically no, or very little, support for this position, and even stating it publicly would get you called a racist.

I just don't see a solution.

Pretty much all of the US ethnic groups do better than those from the "origin" countries do. US Asians outperform East Asian Asians. US Euros outperform Europeans. US Africans outperform African Africans (though there is a less data for the continent).

You chose to post this anonymously. I don't blame you. Even discussing the possibility of this is a hard thing to discuss. I don't see a societal solution.

I attended a (public) middle school teacher meeting about two years ago. The 8th grade math teacher said "I am supposed to be teaching XYZ for the 8th grade statewide standardized math test. I can't do it. Around 1/3 of my students can't multiply two numbers. They don't know." (She went on in this vein--it wasn't laughing or flippant, it was a cry for help)

She didn't say 1/3 of her students struggled with some of their multiplication tables, or algebraic concepts, it was that they literally didn't know how multiplication works.

I used to quiz my kids every morning with short "head math" problems starting in K and 1st grade. I started simple "2+2" .. "5+5" ... "6+7". Eventually I added multiple steps "1 + 4 + 3 - 2" or "6 + 7 - 2 + 10". I did the same starting in maybe 3rd / 4th grade with multiplication tables.

One of my kids ended up being an academic high flyer. The other still, to this day, struggles with math. He somehow worked his way into an advanced math class, but he has to work his ass of in there for Bs and Cs.

I am very sympathetic to people who aren't mathematically inclined, but these problems are embarassingly easy.

So I have a serious question for you (this comes on the heels of me doing a deep dive on PISA testing results, and it honestly has been weighing heavily on my mind lately).

I 100% believe that socioeconomic factors are probably the single biggest factor in academic success.

Is there any possibility that average population-wide genetics play a role in academic success? (I very much do NOT want to use the word "race" because I think it's basically meaningless). Is it possible that, on average, Americans with a large Far East Asian genetic component perform academically better than, on average, American students with primarily Western European backgrounds? What about those with large sub-Saharan African genetic components? Etc.

The question really is--is it _possible_?

My answer is that yes, I think it's possible. I don't think academic achievement is the most important thing out there, but it's important.

And, if it's possible? What the heck do we, in a free and democratic society do about it?

It's bleak and dystopian to think about!

My oldest son goes to a high school on the other side of the country. It has an award winning Engineering magnet program. Every year multiple students from this school go to Ivies and other top 25 schools.

Simultaneously, ~55% of the school is poverty level, ~45% is low English proficiency, and about 30% of the students are considered habitually absent (meaning a minimum of 10 _unexcused_ absences).

My son is taking APs, very intensive engineering classes, and participating in multiple extracurricular activities.

In the same school building, more than half of the students regularly rank in less than the 30th percentile on both math and English end of grade tests.

What I commonly hear from teachers and administrators--if you're a teacher teaching classes of the poverty level non-English speakers, what good does it do to fail them? They're just going to drop out anyway. Maybe if you encourage the kids along, a few will get something out of it?

It's an awful situation to be in. The school has at least a dozen ELL teachers. The school offers pretty much all the standard freshman courses (English, US History, etc) in both Spanish and English versions. This drains so many resources from other parts of the school. The arts program operates on a shoestring and all the arts programs are constantly fundraising to keep the lights on.

The soccer team is damn good, though..

So everyone and everything is to blame except removing standardized testing as an admission criteria in California (2021), schools in CA being closed for in-person education for ~2 years due to Covid, and perhaps most importantly, California adopting a a radical new math curriculum that focused on equity and removing cultural barriers in math education. (See, e.g., EdWeek

Right, it's Republicans (all those nasty California Republicans who dominate state and local governments) that have put us in this mess!

I was drinking a lot of french press and my cholesterol starting rising fairly dramatically. I've had really good cholesterol numbers my entire life, so this was fairly alarming. I stopped drinking french press and when I had my next test done less than a year later, my cholesterol numbers were back to normal for me. Highly dependent on your individual physiology and the amount of coffee you're drinking, but something to watch out for.

Apparently the paper filters in drip and pour over are effective are effective at blocking the oily compounds that lead to a rise in cholesterol for many people.