Thoughts Following a Staff Meeting

If you plan in minutes, there's a guy planning in hours who's just holding his breath till you're done, so that he can get on with work. If you plan in months, there's some guy planning in years who's holding his breath yadda yadda... it's always just a waiting game... :)

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Well the management has practically banned me from art direction for now. I do rather much enjoy being anti-editorial in art direction simply for the sake of being horrific, sometimes. 😂 I suppose I'll step back in as soon as delivery slows down. As I always tell them... be on-time first, and on-quality later. And if it's disgusting, well, too bad!

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Service staff would do well to view their work as a performing art. Getting behind the bar / cashier / brewing devices / stoves, is like getting on stage and performing a show. In both cases there is an audience. In the (barista or cook)'s case, the audience actually puts part of the performance into their mouths. Now, if the performer is not confident in their ability to perform, then they will simply not be good performers. So it is part of training to ensure that service staff gain maximum exposure to different audiences, so that they get past their stage fright. They can only gain experience in performing, by exposing themselves to various audiences, difficult audiences, and observing how each audience reacts to each performance. After multiple iterations, the trainee performer will learn to judge the audience, and to help various audiences to appreciate each performance based on the performer's knowledge of the audience. This is the natural way of training in the performing arts (it is one way, perhaps not the only way). The grand takeaway from all this, is that if you find yourself abusing the audience more than pleasing them, then perhaps you were meant to play the piano for pleasure, and not as a profession...

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Specialty Coffee Calibration

In the very near future we will see mass produced commercially available automatic espresso grinder-extractors which are capable of calibrating a coffee against SPOKEN feedback, to target specifice levels of acidity, bitterness, and sweetness. I'm not the kind of employer who's going to con some kid into believing that they have long-term job security as a specialty coffee barista. Which is why the demands for senior staff will always be to manage a coffee supply chain, not to manage a few cups of coffee...

On Qualia

Qualia and data/data-structures are the same thing, if you have a sufficiently analytical mind; if you don't then you're stuck with qualia of gestalten of more primitive elements of sensation... so it appears to you that there is no fundamental repetitive structure in your sensations because you simply cannot brain the smaller pieces without braining the bigger ones. :P

It's all about the gestalten. A concept is the relationship between a set of things and a name for the thing. The only reasonable measure of intelligence is how versatile a mind is in its conceptualisation of data/sensation. By the time an AI rediscovers this point for itself, we don't need to do philosophy... we just need to have the machines lecture us on it. :P