site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2861 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 24, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

2
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

What is something that you completely can not understand why it exists?
From time to to time I notice something and I am like wow there is a market for this.

One big one for me has always been Starbucks. I can not imagine paying their prices for coffee. And I generally want a coffee within the first 15 minutes of waking up so the idea of putting on clothing and going to a coffee store everyday seems both a huge waste of time and money.

So for the most part I can’t understand the volume of business at coffee stores.

There is some weird popularity surrounding toy goo or slime putty. Adults have YT channels reviewing/playing with the colored glittering slime. I don’t understand how it appeals to anyone else aside from autistic children with tactile fixations.

I can tell you why childen like that stuff because I can vividly remember playing with these fake snot-like hyper artificial things back in the day. Children are basically gooners for novel sight/tactile/taste experience. You have this non neutonian fluid like thing with bright colors that doesn't behave like anything else you have on hand, it sticks to itself and almost nothing else, of course they are going to autisticlly play with it. I guess some people just never grow up.

Chemically speaking, coffee (well, caffeine) doesn't wake you up so much as it inhibits you from getting sleepy. The reason to drink coffee early isn't that it wakes you up, it's that if you drink it late in the day, it will inhibit your ability to fall asleep come bedtime.

Starbucks is a reliable place to get an outlet to plug into and not be bothered for a few hours. Their food and drink products are inexplicable.

Ok but you doing that doesn’t make enough money to pay the rent. That’s what I don’t understand. They need a lot of people just coming and going.

They make a lot of money off of milkshake products.

If I take a 15 minute break, I look like a slacker. If I take 20 minutes to get coffee, I look like a go getter :marseyshrug:

Even standing around... If I have a coffee in my hand, I look busy. To me, that's worth the $2 for a large coffee

So Starbucks basically serves two markets. It has a lot of dairy heavy sweet beverages young women love. It also served the strongest coffee in the world caffeine-wise.

People talk about strong European coffee, but those are only strong flavour-wise.

For the first 20 years or so of it's existence no one was blasting you with caffeine in the morning like Starbucks. It fuelled the first dot com boom.

on going out for coffee generally - coffee varies between roasters and shops. I enjoy the variety, and DIY can be some effort (e.g. timing cold brew so it's not under or over-extracted). Cafe drinks don't cost that much more than doing it at home, and it forces me to go outside and go for a 5-10m walk, when I might otherwise spend the entire day indoors.

on Starbucks specifically - known quantity, not terrible coffee. Their staff around here get paid decent wages and all speak English as a first language. (unlike Tim Hortons, our budget chain, where 95%+ of their staff are temporary foreign workers on slave wages). I don't go to Starbucks often, but definitely pick up the free birthday drink, and occasionally use it for reliable app pickup because it has locations everywhere.

I make brewed coffee at home, but I can't make a cappuccino at home without buying a bunch of special equipment I don't have room for in my kitchen and only would want to use a few times a year, but it's nice to get one before Christmas shopping or when you're on another fun outing.

My dad loves their drip coffee and it seems as cheap as any other restaurant's version.

With the increasing dominance of expresso-based coffee (paradoxically partly driven by Starbucks), Starbucks is actually one of the best places to get decent drip coffee. At least in London, any of the other major chains will just serve you an Americano without warning you, and the good independents will check you are okay with Americano before serving it.

Paris used to have a culture of decent drip coffee, but I'm not sure if they still do. The last few times I was there I was with kids in a way not conducive to serious coffee exploration.

I've never understood the appeal of espresso over drip coffee, unless all you want is an instant caffeine hit. The whole process is just over so quickly. With a nice big cup of drip coffee, I can have a pleasant chat or get in a solid reading session, I can nurse it through all my morning emails. I can choose to take it to go or spend an hour leisurely drinking multiple cups. It helps keep me warm for an extended period of time on a cold day. An espresso is like 3 sips and you're done.

I mean, I totally get that it's gone quickly, but I personally love a good espresso and I'll tell you why. The idea of espresso is to extract everything that's great about the taste of coffee into that demitasse cup and to leave everything nasty and bitter in the puck of coffee grounds that the water is forced through. A good shot of espresso will light up your senses the moment it hits your palate in a concentrated flavor burst, and can be a whole new level of amazing, especially when getting one from places that know their craft--every single sip will bring that powerful, concentrated flavor. And yeah, the caffeine does in fact hit more quickly when drinking espresso. That said, if you like to sip your beverages leisurely, coffee is always going to be a better choice. But yeah, just talking about it like this makes me want one and maybe I'll treat myself tomorrow!

An espresso by itself, I agree. It's more of "I need to get this in my system quickly" thing than a truly enjoyable experience. I mean, it's good for the couple seconds it lasts and it does leave a lingering aroma on the tongue, but that's still too short for me. But espresso based drinks, on the other hand... Less water than drip coffee; a latté or cappuccino is "creamier", more "milky" than a drip coffee with milk, for the same amount of coffee solubles and overall volume, due to not having nearly as much water.

Musical accompaniment for this conversation.

As someone with an occasional craving for frothed-milk coffee drinks, moka pot coffee with French press-foamed milk scratches the itch reasonably well.

but I can't make a cappuccino at home without buying a bunch of special equipment

It's not tiny, but I bought one of the smallest espresso machines available on Amazon with good reviews for around $100, and I've been slowly upping my cappuccino game with it. It's probably 12"x12"x4", and I was able to find counter space for it. I did already have a burr grinder, though. I'm not sure if it can make the best coffee, but I think it was a fun choice.

I bought this milk frother during (or shortly before) Covid. I use it literally every day. One button, easy to clean, footprint is about the same as a large jamjar.

Thanks all for the suggestions, looks like it might be time to up my foamed milk game.

I make lattes each morning on a little machine with an espresso press and steam wand, and it's lovely.

What model and what'd it run you? I've been considering one now that I'm working from home more.

I don't see the exact model, it was Yabano, with a pressure gauge and about $80 when I bought it three years ago. This looks pretty similar:https://www.target.com/p/anycold-20-bar-espresso-machine-compact-stainless-steel-maker-with-milk-frother-34oz-removable-tank-for-home-latte-cappuccino/-/A-1007776423#lnk=sametab

I did work at a coffee show for a couple of years, and don't mind spending ten minutes making the coffee myself, though that style of steamer does involve running a little litter of milk in circles for two or three minutes each cup.

Yeah if I drank them every day, I'd probably get one. But for something I get 4 or 5 times a year, I'll rent the time and expertise from a coffee shop.

Boba tea. Women love it, I'm perplexed by the appeal. Or matcha, which has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. It tastes like liquid grass.

Sweet matcha drinks heavily mixed in with milk/coconut milk can be pretty good in my opinion, since the grassy taste is softened out significantly by the other components. But matcha proper, drunk the Authentic Japanese™ way, certainly tastes like liquid grass and is absolutely revolting. I like my tea steeped in the Chinese manner.

In any case I think the better green East Asian flavour is pandan. It's like Southeast Asian vanilla, but with a fresher, nuttier flavour.

I like matcha, but I also like glass jelly and root beer, so some of this might just be a raw different tastes thing. That said, there are some fantastic options for boba; most shops will have mango tea and coconut jelly as an option, and so long as you get it low sugar it's very hard to dislike.

I love root beer, but my fiancée thinks it's disgusting, comparing the taste to Deep Heat, a muscle relaxant cream. (Google tells me the American equivalent is called IcyHot.)

It's an entirely apt comparison: it does taste exactly like Deep Heat. But I still love it. Shame it's so hard to come by in Ireland. Part of me even wants to order a case of Barq's just for the novelty.

I just don't get why europeans (and others, I've heard it from south americans say it too) immediately compare root beer to medicine. It's really consistant too, they all think it, even one who likes it like you agrees with it. To my north american palate, it's a completely distinct taste from any medicine I've ever tasted.

IDK, some root beers, like A&W seem to have a little bit of a wintermint note to them, so I can kinda see it, though I'd totally agree that there's a lot more going on there, flavor-wise. Maybe it's something like the cilantro/soap thing.

For boba, some how the tapioca balls and foreign origin let people pretend that they aren't just drinking a warm milkshake.

It's a replacement for alcohol/hookah for a lot of women, just an excuse to hang out. That gets backfilled into an actual habit.

They could just have normal coffee or tea?

They could!

I really like boba tea, but I prefer making it myself since the ones you buy usually have the balls too soft where as I prefer they have some bite to them.

I like tea, and boba is basically just lightly sweetened ice tea, with the balls having interesting texture.

De gustibus non est disputandum. I love matcha, personally, in basically any form -- lattes, shortbread, cheesecake...

Boba tea. Women love it, I'm perplexed by the appeal.

Try Taro flavor, with white-people levels of sugar. It's like a mild, creamy slushy.

I liked the matcha candy I tasted, but I ordered a matcha latte and it really did taste like really bitter liquid grass, accurate description. It was awful. Never buying matcha anything ever again.

Matcha tastes like liquefied salmon to me. And not in a good way, even though I love salmon.

Starbucks in Europe

I have two fond memories of European Starbuckses (Starbucii?) - first, a heatwave in Nuremberg, where the Euro lack of air conditioning meant that the local Starbucks, with its fan and tiled floor, was the closest thing to relief and, secondly, coming to the end of a two-month backpacking trip and finding a Starbucks on the Asian side of Istanbul, and the strange relief of knowing that at least one thing today would be the same as it always was.

Sometimes I just really want Cold Brew and while some parts of Europe have new wave coffee places that have it, in much of Europe only Starbucks does (and even then only in the summer).

While I disdain Starbucks, I frequent local espresso shops and order all kinds of girly drinks. It's tasty, it's fun, it's something I can't entirely recreate at home, it's a fun outing with Mrs. FiveHour or by myself with a laptop to sit for a few hours. I don't think I could go every day, but on the scale of indulgences, I find it perfectly fine.

But I can't understand:

-- Lifted pickup trucks. Nobody drives off-road. Nobody. It's not a real thing people do at the scale where you would need any kind of rig to do it beyond a Subaru Outback with good tires. But I can't go anywhere without seeing trucks that have been lifted to the point where they handle like hell, at a cost of thousands of dollars.

-- The vast majority of DoorDash traffic. I understand the value when one is three sheets to the wind, or ill, or whatever and getting food delivered becomes more valuable. I don't understand how it accounts for such a large share of orders that it's a huge element in the service economy. I'd think the average person would order delivery once a month or less, it appears to be much more than that.

-- Cruises. The whole set-up seems wildly unpleasant, particularly if I'm going to have spend my time on a boat cooped up with other people who wanted to go on a cruise.

The vast majority of DoorDash traffic. I understand the value when one is three sheets to the wind, or ill, or whatever and getting food delivered becomes more valuable. I don't understand how it accounts for such a large share of orders that it's a huge element in the service economy. I'd think the average person would order delivery once a month or less, it appears to be much more than that.

We don't own a car so if we want to stay in and not cook we turn to it once or twice a week. It's roughly as expensive as going out to eat which is another thing we do quite often. It's definitely not frugal but surely the convenience should explain the appeal even if you wouldn't want to pay that mcuh.

Wow we have the exact same tastes I don't even need to write my comment. I wouldn't have put lifted pickups (but they are dumb) but delivery when you live in a downtown city and cruises were my first two answers

My extended family has a lifted pickup that we all sort of pass around. I think it's in my cousin's name. Literally the only thing we use it for is to go up on the Land. Other than a few bike trails that I've cut, it's completely unimproved. It wasn't lifted until the stream washed out - at that point it was either a build a bridge, lift the truck, or add a snorkel.

The use case for something like that is very small, and the brand new lifted trucks confuse the hell out of me.

Lifted pickup trucks. Nobody drives off-road. Nobody. It's not a real thing people do at the scale where you would need any kind of rig to do it beyond a Subaru Outback with good tires. But I can't go anywhere without seeing trucks that have been lifted to the point where they handle like hell, at a cost of thousands of dollars.

The widely accepted theory is that it's to compensate for a small penis.

More and more men have been getting exposed to pornography in their formative years, causing them to view their own average penises as inadequate and to buy a larger, lifted truck to compensate.

Lifted pickup trucks. Nobody drives off-road. Nobody. It's not a real thing people do at the scale where you would need any kind of rig to do it beyond a Subaru Outback with good tires. But I can't go anywhere without seeing trucks that have been lifted to the point where they handle like hell, at a cost of thousands of dollars.

I drive off-road, and my pickup has the pinstriping from scratchy brush to prove it. However, my truck is not lifted. A factory pickup with high-quality all-terrain tires will take you almost anywhere, and you'll need a customized rock-crawling Jeep to go those last few places (watch some Moab off-roading videos for examples).

The lifting you're talking about is vanity and signalling and makes all driving worse. They usually have shit tires, too, so it's extra terrifying when you see one whipping down the road at 85 mph in the rain.

factory pickup with high-quality all-terrain tires will take you almost anywhere

A rwd chevy s10 and a brain will get you 99.9% of the places that 99.9% of the population ever goes.

and a brain

I see the problem with your analysis.

On lifted pickup trucks - not sure how lifted you mean, but around here lots of the access roads get washed out and you need something with good clearance and breakover angles to get through.

Yeah, the number of people that live there and does that rounds down to zero. A tiny fraction of the population does that a tiny fraction of the time. And frankly, they don't need to anyway. Going hiking twice a year in no way justifies spending ten thousand dollars to ruin the ride of your daily driver pickup truck. That would be like if I walked around in my bjj gi at the office.

And anyway, from the video that appears to be a stock bronco, not a lifted pickup truck.

Cruises. The whole set-up seems wildly unpleasant, particularly if I'm going to have spend my time on a boat cooped up with other people who wanted to go on a cruise.

It's basically a resort where you get to wake up somewhere new every day.

The girls I mentioned here love DoorDash, because it lets them avoid interacting with strangers. I also know a few men who use it multiple times per week, but that’s because they’re lazy devils who don’t want to leave the couch.

I don't understand how it accounts for such a large share of orders that it's a huge element in the service economy.

Because, you fool, any female born after 1993 can't cook.

(Joking aside, there's an appallingly large number of people who literally cannot cook themselves a single meal.)

I 100% understand all the sweet girly drinks. It’s like going to Dairy Queen for a treat. Chilling at a cafe while having a coffee drink with some sort of cake for a few hours is a lot of fun, but I don’t believe it pays the bills for them.

But I assume the bulk of their profits come from caffeine rush to get thru the working day. And that just seems like a huge time sink. Even if you work on the 50th floor of mega corp office building then going to get your coffee at Starbucks on the ground floor is still a 20ish minute adventure versus whatever office pot or espresso machine in the office.

Lifted pickups are the same as 80% of the economy. Status games showing yourself spending money. No different than spending $3k in the club whose real purpose is showing every girl in the club that you have enough money to spend $3k frivolously.

Even if you work on the 50th floor of mega corp office building then going to get your coffee at Starbucks on the ground floor is still a 20ish minute adventure versus whatever office pot or espresso machine in the office.

Sometimes you just need an excuse to get out of the office and take a walk, and sadly, in a lot of workplaces "I'm going out to grab a coffee" is more acceptable than "I'm taking a stroll to clear my head." Same thing as having a smoke break, really, but for non-smokers.

Yes. I get all the reasons people are saying. But personally I go to Starbucks or other chain coffee maybe once a year. Usually at the airport or something.

Maybe the logistics are a lot better than I am imagining but my intuition tells me it would take a minimum 20 minutes but probably closer to 30 to get to your chain coffee place, order, and get your product. I think I’ve seen the average office worker spends 3 hours a day goofing off on the internet so maybe it’s not a problem. Or the logistics are much faster than I imagine.

Money is a secondary thought since most offices have a coffee pot for free. But honestly Americans are rich enough and everyone waste money so $5 a day 250 days a year isn’t a huge mental block for me.

My “I don’t Understand” is much more on the financial side in America where rent and wages are high. So you actually need a lot of people with 20-30 spare minutes to get a $5 a coffee a day to support the store. I guess that’s about 1500 daily customer needed to support one Starbucks.

-- The vast majority of DoorDash traffic. I understand the value when one is three sheets to the wind, or ill, or whatever and getting food delivered becomes more valuable. I don't understand how it accounts for such a large share of orders that it's a huge element in the service economy. I'd think the average person would order delivery once a month or less, it appears to be much more than that.

Around 40% of Gen Z and Millennials order food at least once a week. A significant minority, can't remember how many, order food delivered every single day. The wasteful fucking slobs.

Ordering food can be cheaper if you use the apps and wait for a deal. But that's still something you do once in a while, not a an every day thing.

I used to order food about once a week when I was at university. Typically pizza or chinese.

Sure, that's understandable, maybe good even. But every day? Very different situation. That's someone who never bothered to learn a single thing about cooking or how to get nutrition without additives or how to get through a day without over-spending.

Yes, absolutely agreed.

Starbucks I don't know, here they seem to be more around malls and their clientele for their extremely sweetened coffee inspired drinks is mostly affluent women, so it makes sense.

When I go to the office in person, or leave my apartment to head pretty much anywhere in the morning, the Tim Hortons and McDonalds are on the way, so I stop at either one of them every time, at the drive thru, to get breakfast to eat while waiting in traffic. A coffee and a tolerable breakfast sandwich is usually like 5-6 CAD, which I don't mind paying for the benefit of not having to wake up earlier to make myself breakfast at home. So that's between 1 and 3 times a week, I can imagine I'm not alone doing this, I think their business can be doing just fine in that context.

I understand that with McDonalds. But I would not that all their capex is funded thru selling burgers. The egg sandwich and coffee only needs to make more than the labor costs in the morning. And McDonalds is of course very good at execution and getting your stuff fast.

Feel like I’m being forgetful today but I usually have a few things where I don’t quite understand how something gets financed.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats