Lowyat.NET: Latest topics by ftl1337

Rate my espresso

ftl1337 — Fri, 14 Oct 2022 13:54:10 +0800

Just made another batch of the Ethiopian beans espresso for lunch. It has less crema than regular Brazilian Cerrado but a very strong lemony taste.

20 grams in, 60 grams out. Astaga.

Please rate my homebrew longkang water.

Coffee that taste like fine wine

ftl1337 — Thu, 13 Oct 2022 20:08:18 +0800

Today I am grinding myself a new batch of coffee after my Brazilian Cerrado beans ran out.

And boy, these Ethiopian heirloom beans taste like wine. A bit lemony, very fruity and really unlike any other coffee I have tasted before. It’s 100% arabica just like the Cerrado I had earlier but the Cerrado is very malty, creamy and with a super thick crema.

The Ethiopian beans have crema but less thick and are harder to grind fine compared to the Cerrado. Both are natural and unwashed but it seems like the Ethiopian G1 beans are harder.

I was shocked that the Ethiopians taste a lot like wine. It doesn’t taste much like coffee at all.

What is the best bean or beans blend you guys have tried for espresso? Any unique beans you guys have experienced? Please share.

Best portable espresso “machine”

ftl1337 — Wed, 05 Oct 2022 21:47:25 +0800

The legendary James Hoffman reviews a few portable espresso machines in and around London.

The latest craze is brewing and enjoying a fresh cup of espresso everywhere and anywhere.

With a portable grinder that’s capable of grinding espresso powder and one of these hand cranked machines, you too can make good espresso anywhere.

[YOUTUBE]JT5Rz3QV74g[/YOUTUBE]

Baconateer’s debut movie. Now on Netflix

ftl1337 — Tue, 04 Oct 2022 22:31:54 +0800

[YOUTUBE]jbZ3QDLq4Es[/YOUTUBE]

Help? Espresso not getting enough crema

ftl1337 — Wed, 28 Sep 2022 12:49:18 +0800

I have finally upgraded to a bottomless portafilter and now looking at a sub $3000 grinder, like the niche zero, lagom mini and eureka oro single dose. But in the meantime, am using pre-ground espresso coffee.

The first few times in using the bottomless PF, I experienced really bad splutter, probably due to bad tamper technique. But after a few tries, I managed to get the coffee extracted properly.

The main concern now is that the espresso extracted lacks a thick layer of crema. Am getting a very thin layer of crema at best. Any reason for this? Is it because I have been using preground instead of beans? Or is it because the pressurized PF that I was using before this was easy mode and now the training wheels are off with the bottomless PF?

Any extraction techniques to share for a single or double basket?

Singapore poor people series

ftl1337 — Thu, 15 Sep 2022 16:56:06 +0800

CNA documentary on the lives and struggles of the B40 in Singapore.

[YOUTUBE]Wf6tQcGBpM8[/YOUTUBE]

A bit long but very interesting series to watch.

Zoomers more hardworking than Millennials

ftl1337 — Tue, 13 Sep 2022 10:50:24 +0800

When we look at the teen employment rate — or, as we more affectionately know it, the employment-to-population ratio for ages 16 to 19 — two trends stand out: The millennial collapse. And the Gen Z rebound.

When the first millennials turned 16 in 1997, teen employment was above 43 percent. When the last of their generation hit 16 in 2014, it had plunged to around 26 percent. But as the first zoomers entered the workforce, the employment rate suddenly began to climb again. It now stands around 33 percent and is seeing its first sustained growth in decades.

These trends trigger an obvious question: What the Sam Heck happened with millennials?

Our first instinct, informed by endless stories of helicopter parents and padded college applications, was to look at what economists might call supply factors: Why weren’t millennials willing to work?

Indeed’s AnnElizabeth Konkel, a creative and curious labor market economist and honest-to-goodness millennial, immediately pointed to education as the cause. Millennials set new high-water marks for high school and college graduation, and it’s harder to work when you’re in school.

Our analysis of Labor Department data backs her up. The share of 18-year-olds in school rose about 13 percentage points during the millennial era. But that doesn’t explain the entire drop of about 17 percentage points in that age group’s employment rate. Especially since many students balance school and work, and Gen Z 18-year-olds have seen substantial workforce gains without a substantial accompanying decrease in schooling.

Part of the drop might be due to increased demand for extracurricular activities, according to Konkel and fellow millennial economist Luke Pardue, of the payroll and benefits provider Gusto.

“Within this generation, which I’m a part of, there was so much competition to sacrifice everything and have great extracurriculars and good grades and do everything in school that was necessary to get to some kind of competitive college,” Pardue said.

That argument is persuasive. But, at best, it’s a partial explanation because Gen Z has managed to work even as competition for selective colleges escalated.

So we called Tim Wolfe, dean of admission at Virginia’s William & Mary. He said he’s skeptical of claims that college admissions decisions are behind massive societal shifts. Only a small minority of teens apply to the sort of elite institutions that expect you to be captain of the squash team and a published author by age 17. And even at elite schools, Wolfe said, work experience can be as important to the application as any other activity.

“I would not think that college applications are a driving factor in employment trends for teens,” Wolfe told us.
Teen schedules overloaded with mock parliaments and badminton practices were part of the explanation, but something else had changed between millennials and Gen Z. To figure out what was going on, we called some zoomers. This column isn’t called the Department of Anecdotes, but when the data aren’t making sense, the best move is to speak directly with the human beings behind the numbers.

Dallas 17-year-old Malachi Allen, who kept calling us “sir,” recently started a job at Smoothie King after a six-minute interview during which he negotiated what would eventually be an extra $1.50 an hour. Allen seemed to take for granted that teens with little work experience would jump at a job offer, no matter what generation they came from.

We asked for clarification: Was he saying that teens in 2008 would have been just as eager to work as he was in 2022? And that the only difference is that he got a job offer and they didn’t?

“Yes, sir,” Allen said. “Also, the fact that we’re getting paid more as well, either because jobs are more desperate and trying to give us more money, or just simply inflation.”

About 40 minutes to Allen’s north, in the suburb of Allen, Tex. (no relation), Jason Cabrera, 20, knows the teen workforce inside and out. “Inside” because until his most recent birthday, he was a teen worker himself. And “out” because he’s been a general manager at Layne’s Chicken Fingers since he was 19, hiring and managing a largely teen workforce, first at a store in Allen, and now in nearby Lewisville.

Cabrera used to see dozens of applications each week and could take his pick of industry veterans. These days, he’s lucky if he sees a single application. These worker shortages make businesses like Layne’s far more willing to accommodate the hassles inherent to hiring modern teens, who spend nine months of the year juggling school, sports and outside activities.

But “once summer hits,” Cabrera said, “most of these kids just want to work, and that’s all they want to do.”
The zoomers were consistent: It wasn’t teens who changed, it was businesses. So, we got on the phone again.
Lyn James owns Flowers & Cappuccino by Lasting Visions, a bright spot of floral arrangements and fancy coffees in Bowman, a rural hub of 1,470 on North Dakota’s rolling western plains. (She’s also Bowman’s mayor.)

In the past, James said, she struggled to find teen workers. It’s impossible to build a regular schedule around their myriad obligations at school, in the community, and at their homes and ranches.

But with workers in short supply, teen hiring became a necessity. So James embraced flexibility: She began drawing up schedules that accommodated teen activities and hired a mix of young folks involved in different sports and clubs who don’t all need to be off at the same time.

“We still have good coverage and staffing, and yet the kids can still be kids,” James said.

Other businesses told a similar story. Around the time zoomers started returning to the workforce, the competition for workers heated up, and folks who mastered teen hiring had a significant advantage.

For example, when Chad Simmons and his wife, Carol, started Sugapeach a decade ago, serving soul food — fried fish, fried chicken and sides — in the fast-growing Iowa City suburb of North Liberty, they didn’t need teenagers. “It was easy to find people with experience at the price point that we at the time were needing to pay,” Simmons said. “We could always pay at around the minimum wage and still find people.”

But as the economy improved, older workers were drawn to higher-paying work at manufacturers and distributors. So Simmons got creative. Drawing on skills honed in his previous career as a human-resources professional, he launched Scholars Making Dollars, a program to train and mentor high school freshmen. In just a few years, the high-schoolers in that program have matured into a pillar of his business model.

“We started putting a development component in there, trying to make sure that they’re all set up to do well in high school and then go to college,” Simmons said.

Payroll data from more than 200,000 businesses using Gusto shows a similar trend nationwide. In April 2019, teens made up about 2 percent of new hires on their platform, said Gusto’s Pardue. By this April, the teen share of new hires had more than quadrupled to 9 percent. Wages grew faster for teens than for any other age group.
“What we’re seeing across all industries, really, is that teens are stepping up to fill this gap as older workers age out of the workforce or are either still unable or unwilling to come back,” Pardue said.

So, if school and extracurriculars don’t actually keep teens from working — as long as businesses are willing to hire them — maybe this isn’t a supply problem at all. Maybe millennials’ notorious, generation-defining exit from the teen labor force was always about demand.

When demand for workers changes, teens feel it first. They’re more exposed to the cruelties of the economic cycle than any other group. And millennials have had worse economic luck than any other generation in history.

The job market is beginning to show cracks
Millennials entered the workforce amid two significant recessions and the jobless recoveries that followed, meaning they were always pitted against legions of laid-off, more-experienced workers, said Northeastern University economist Alicia Sasser Modestino.

Millennial teens also faced stiff competition from another huge reservoir of talented, hard-working adult competitors, said Hande Inanc, a Mathematica senior researcher who tracks youth unemployment trends. The immigrant population soared throughout the millennial era, with the foreign-born share of the population peaking in 2018 at its highest level since at least 1850. It has declined since, due in part to Trump-era immigration policies and restrictions related to the coronavirus pandemic.

Meanwhile, many of the entry-level jobs that drew Gen X into the workforce began evaporating as millennials hit the job market, Modestino said. Low-wage teen workers at video-rental stores were replaced by a few high-wage adult programmers at a few video-streaming giants. Paper carriers were similarly phased out in favor of highly skilled adults who make newspapers available online, delivered by internet protocols rather than by bicycle.

TLDR - Millennials gg in the job market once more and more Zoomers enter the workforce as they are more responsible, and willing to take on low paying jobs.

Source of news

Why poor people continue becoming poor

ftl1337 — Mon, 12 Sep 2022 15:17:02 +0800

QUOTE(tikaram @ Jun 6 2022, 04:12 PM)

Again small mind?

[right][snapback]104562727[/snapback][/right]

Discuss great ideas with other people.

People steal your idea and become rich from it.

You cry mother, cry father but still end up poorfag. Sure, your mind is great but your brains are stupid for sharing your ideas in the first place.

Bincangkan.

The coffee enthusiast thread

ftl1337 — Tue, 06 Sep 2022 15:54:16 +0800

Anyone here brew espresso as a hobby?

Any tips on how to use a bottomless portafilter well? Am also looking for a 51mm bottomless portafilter as most of the ones sold here are 58mm ones for industrial coffee house machines. Any place to buy 51mm good quality bottomless ones that are easy to clean?

I have seen a lot of really well tampered shots that pool together nicely. Any pointers on how to pack the shots into the basket properly?

A really good shot of espresso with good centering using a bottomless portafilter.

[attachmentid=11247321]

UAE Dogs get aircon due to recent heatwave

ftl1337 — Mon, 29 Aug 2022 09:41:49 +0800

ABU DHABI – Oscar beats the summer heat of the United Arab Emirates by working out in a gym, hitting the treadmill twice or three times a week. Nothing unusual in that – except that Oscar is a dog.

As the Gulf's increasingly fierce temperatures become dangerous to health amid fears over the pace of climate change, those who can afford not to work outside in the blazing sun stay inside in air-conditioning.

And for owners of pampered pets able to splash the cash, an air-conditioned gym for dogs has become an attractive option.

"During the winters I used to take him outside, but (in) summers he used to stay isolated," says Oscar's owner Mozalfa Khan, a Pakistani expat.

"Because whenever I take him outside he's sick because of the heat."

The resource-rich Gulf is among the regions most at risk from global warming, with some cities facing the prospect of becoming uninhabitable by the end of the century.

Temperatures often soar above 45 degrees Celsius in the UAE, and can remain above 40C even after midnight.

The UAE, like other Gulf countries, goes into partial hibernation during its long, hot summers, with those who can afford it staying cloistered in air-conditioned homes and workplaces.

Heat threat to health

Oscar, a Welsh Corgi, now works out at Posh Pets Boutique and Spa in Abu Dhabi, a shop and grooming salon that offers what's billed as the UAE's first gym for dogs.

Staff carefully secure him with a harness on one of two adapted running machines before he begins to run, with glass barriers on either side to stop him falling off.

Rather than being set to specific speeds, the treadmills automatically adjust themselves to the pace of each dog.

Oscar's owner started bringing him to the gym in the Emirati capital after a vet advised against walking him outside in summer because of the risk of heat stroke.

"Last summer it was really difficult for me because there was no place like this," says Khan.

With the high heat and humidity, "we walk for only two, three minutes and he's done, he doesn't want to walk".

Mansour al-Hammadi, the dog-loving owner of Posh Pets, charges a dirham (25 US cents) a minute for use of the treadmills, or US$7.5 (RM33.5) for a half-hour run.

Dogs should exercise at least 30 minutes a day, experts say.

"So imagine when you can only walk them one or two minutes a day," Hammadi tells AFP.

"We've closely studied the project to make it 100% safe. Everything was chosen with care and not at random, to avoid any future problems and so as not to harm the dogs," he adds.

Destiny, a seven-month-old German Shepherd, is another regular, bursting into the gym and playing with the other dogs.

"For the dog's health, it's better that she does some exercise and tires herself out," says Destiny's owner Fahed al-Monjed. "Using an indoor running machine is the best solution."

Destiny may indeed take some tiring out. In a recent competition on the treadmills, she set the fastest speed.

News source

Malaysian Eatery is a Top 50 pizza in Asia-Pacific

ftl1337 — Mon, 22 Aug 2022 20:22:53 +0800

KUALA LUMPUR – The Italian restaurant Luce Osteria Contemporanea on Jalan Raja Chulan has once again gained international recognition.

The restaurant was listed 44th in the 50 Top Pizza Asia-Pacific 2022 ranking. It is the highest for a Malaysian restaurant and makes Luce one of only two restaurants in the country to make the list.

Before this, 50 Top Pizza, the most influential guide in the sector, had named Luce on the list of the top 10 pizzerias in Asia in 2020. The Asia-Pacific list now considers Asia, Japan and Oceania as one zone.

Luce is located in the burgeoning culinary hub of Old Malaya, where its name and inspiration derive from the warm lights of imported pizza wood-fire ovens and the bright lights of KL Tower.

The acclaimed pizzeria offers a wide range of 60 homemade Italian pizzas. It is complemented by a menu complete with classic and rustic Italian dishes.

Luce, is one of the restaurants under the PETRA Cucina umbrella, the food and beverage arm of the PETRA Group. PETRA Cucina also operates high-end Italian restaurants Zenzero Restaurant and Wine Bar, and Roberto's 1020 Osteria.

PETRA Cucina's chief executive, Roberto Guiati, hails from Ferrera, Italy and said it was an honour to be included on the list.

“We feel so thankful for this recognition and are highly encouraged by it. The recognition has also given us great passion to continue to give a wonderful dining experience for all our customers at Luce Osteria.”

“Thank you to 50 Top Pizza and of course a big thank you to our beloved customers for your great support. We look forward to serving you only the best,” said Guiati, who is also the president of PETRA Lifestyle.

Management of 50 Top Pizza for the Asia Pacific region was entrusted to Vittoria Dell’Anna. Her team of 150 inspectors, along with four local coordinators, allowed a more thorough supervision and inspection of this geographical area.

Source

Gen Z = Generation Sensible

ftl1337 — Sat, 20 Aug 2022 10:38:06 +0800

They have been deemed “generation sensible” for their focus on social issues, healthy living and drinking less alcohol. But therapists say generation Z could miss out on a wealth of life experience due to their overly cautious attitude to taking risks.

Many young people increasingly choose to stay within a comfort zone of a small network of like-minded friends in which much of their social activity is virtual, according to mental health experts.

While this can give them more control over some aspects of their lives, it can also lead to social anxiety when they have to interact with people offline, the experts added.

Natalie Phillips, a psychotherapist who works with children and young people aged from 11 to 25, said: “I’m seeing a disproportionate increase in referrals for social anxiety, professional anxiety, general self-confidence and relationship issues for this generation when they are confronted with the reality of being in an office, being in a nightclub, being in a pub, or being on a date.”

Her comments came after an academic study, published in the British Journal of Sociology, said generation Z claim they drink less alcohol than their parents because they feel under pressure to perform academically, are more health conscious and do not want to lose control.

Phillips said: “I do have the sense that [this generation] are possibly missing out on making mistakes and the sense of being young. I think they’re quite old before their time.”

She added that many of the young people she works with have “restricted comfort zones” because they work from home or largely interact with colleagues online, and have a small number of friends who are of the same mindset.

“They are not in social situations to the same extent that we were generations before them. There’s a danger that your world becomes inward-looking, and that can then cause self-perpetuating anxiety. The outside world is much more scary because you haven’t got the experience to deal with that.”

This trend has been exacerbated by the pandemic, which has led to more young people working remotely and socialising in person less frequently, the psychotherapist added.

The study, entitled More Options … Less Time in the “Hustle Culture” of “Generation Sensible”: Individualization and Drinking Decline Among Twenty-First Century Young Adults, found 70% of the young people surveyed felt they were under greater pressure than their parents to achieve academically and get a good career, leaving them less time to party.

The researchers from the universities of Kent and Leeds surveyed 517 Britons aged 18 to 25 who described themselves as moderate or non-drinkers in 2020.

Seven out of 10 respondents said they felt they did not need to drink as much because they have a better choice of hobbies than their parents’ generation.

Many also said that they reduced their alcohol consumption due to the rising cost of drinks, university debt, and pressure to succeed in academia and their future careers.

The researchers also interviewed focus groups of university students who were members of “sober” societies to understand why they abstained from drinking.

One focus group member, Jennifer, said: “[We are] hyper-aware of the world as it is, and the problems with climate change and the political climate in the world, creating pressure on us to be doing our best to be making the world a better place, rather than just like living for the moment and having fun.”

Jane Darougar, a psychotherapist at Central Saint Martins school of art and design, said she was surprised to discover how many students said they were teetotal.

Darougar attributed this to their greater awareness of the adverse impact of alcohol on their mental health.

“I’ve had students who said, I have underlying anxiety, I know that if I drink my anxiety will be through the roof the next day, and I just can’t deal with that,” she added.

“I remember when I was young people would say dutch courage, and you’d take a drink before you went do something that seemed a bit frightening. I think that’s gone, people don’t see that as a sensible or constructive way of managing.”

Source

TLDR - Gen Z are drinking less, living healthier lives and more responsible than the previous generation.

GG Calsberg & KFC

Meaning of life

ftl1337 — Mon, 04 Jul 2022 10:58:19 +0800

I heard from my local church pastor that the meaning of life is leaving behind footprints in the sand ie. making an impression or contribution to this world so that you would be remembered for it.

Is this true? If so, how many of us here have really made an impact in this world?

On a smaller scale, things like having a kid and making sure the kid grows up well adjusted ie. leaving an impression on your kid is also another way some people leave behind footprints in the sand. I remember that my mom was my role model and I modeled my life after her.