Italy's Longest-Serving Barista Reflects on Six Decades Behind the Counter
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As the story of Italy's longest-serving barista, Anna Possi, sparks a lively discussion, commenters can't help but poke fun at the article's headline, pointing out that she's hardly a youthful Italian. Beneath the humor, however, lies a nuanced conversation about the state of Italy's economy and social fabric, with some commenters noting that Anna's experiences and advice - "work, save, don't depend on anyone" - reflect a lifetime of witnessing the country's transformation. While some see Anna's dedication to her work as inspiring, others hear a eulogy for a bygone era of economic stability and community, with one commenter astutely observing that her story hints at a broader societal decline. The thread's relevance lies in its thoughtful exploration of the human side of economic change.
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Our dogs devour every issue: https://i.imgur.com/P80uqLB.jpeg
This woman lived through fascist Italy and everything that came after, and then says this about the way the world is going.
In Soviet Russia, Rome is a poor city I guess
Once that happens, it's likely to lead to poverty. At least that's what happened in the last USSR
Is this a joke? There is literally no chance this ever happens.
But I don't see Russia's capability to do so. Their kleptocracy has impoverished the country and has repeatedly lead leadership (including Putin) to overestimate their own capabilities. Male population faces attrition from war and alcoholism. Leadership has a habit of dying in mysterious accidents or falling out of windows, reducing the amount of experienced leaders available and discouraging anyone with a brain from rising up too far. And they are barely able to advance in Ukraine.
There are legitimate concerns that Russia might attack other countries once the Ukraine war concludes. They might even make some initial territorial gains because they are in full war economy while Europe has only scaled up enough to support Ukraine, and has depleted ammunition stockpiles. But I don't see them getting very far
Russia has vast natural resources and enough buyers for those resources even if the EU manages to completely stop (at significant cost). Their industry turned to wartime mode, resulting in the fact that they now have more armored vehicles than in February 2022.
Will they actually physically reach Italy? Probably not. Will they try to buy it out and bring a (even more) fascist autocratic regime there? Probably yes.
> Russia has vast natural resources and enough buyers
Not saying that it's not what has kept them standing until now, but the buyers make the price in this case. So who knows what the price could become in the future.
> Will they try to buy it out and bring a (even more) fascist autocratic regime there? Probably yes.
Are you still talking about Russia with their monopoly currency? "Try" as in one probability over one billion to succeed and be disposed of a few days later. This ability to influence foreign countries effectively and not in clownish ways is a nice story for kids.
How would they keep everyone under control? You won't find that many people eager to participate in satellite regimes or new social experiments, like you had in post-WWII.
I don't think Russia will even consider invading western Ukraine. They'll keep the Russian speaking part which they can easily govern.
Through cynicism and propaganda, just like they've been doing at home, and the same way it works in the US now. Everyone can see the corruption and depravity of the current regime, it might as well be a Russian satellite (many people would claim it already is), and yet we all collectively do nothing about it.
only if the near future includes the year 2150 because as of right now the Russian defense ministry is celebrating the liberation of individual bakery plants on their state media
https://tass.com/politics/2041223
But she's probably not wrong. Over the course of her life, the US has gone from mostly farm communities which for good or bad have long-standing social networks, to mostly atomized people in cities. We've also gotten incredibly richer as a society, but we don't know each other. If you don't know each other, who can you rely on? I assume that something similar applies to Italy.
If you feel like you might be on that road, the smart trick is to start thinking early about what kind of work you might want to take up during that stage and plant the seeds for it early.
Some people don't have a lot of choice to prepare, and just end up falling into being barista because the job is there and they find they enjoy it. But the other barista at that same cafe might be the owner who bought it as their own "retirement", filling shifts when they want to, while giving the neighborhood a place to gather.
What does this have to do with capitalism?
Not every culture or community is built so centrally around atomization and transactionality as the prevailing one is. But those things represent the essence of what capitalism is, and are central to what it aspires to acheive. It works its magic when people can negotiate their relationships through currency and through accounts measured against it, and so a society that means to participate in it is one that tends to engender payment, quantified barter, and unburdened individuality over alternatives like filial concern or community enrichment.
It's not really a controversial thing to suggest, and wasn't there to be accusatory or something. It's the world we live in.
But serving your community coffee every day seems like a great way to stay involved in your community doing something useful.
After a lifetime offering a service to your neighbourhood, cutting hair and having a chat, why would you even retire? Just to stare at a wall, useless and lonely?
Was a great story teller and joke teller. That was worth the price of a haircut by itself.
“Contributing” cash to it may not be enough, if the cash didn’t convert into sufficient automation to offset declines in humans due to declining birthrates.
So the question gets more interesting if it’s “Was contributing whatever amount calculated (using tenuous assumptions) many decades ago enough, especially if you chose not to have well raised kids who in turn could provide society with the retiree benefits?”
And then that opens up a can of worms about who was and was not expected to have kids,
I hope we can cultivate more 'blue zones' across the Planet, such as in Japan and around the Mediterranean. We have the capability to do so.
Completely agreed. I took 6 weeks off between jobs a couple years ago, the longest continuous span without work or school since I was 14. My goal was to get bored so I'd be ready to go back to having a job at the end of it. I completely failed, I filled those 6 weeks and would eagerly have filled many more self-directed months. Maybe it'll be different when I'm older but right now, I could easily spend years and years keeping myself busy if I didn't have like bills and stuff to pay.
For like 99% of people, work exists so they can buy a food and a roof over their head.
> the question of: what do we do with our time?
I've got a growing Steam library of games that I've bought but haven't gotten around to playing.
It always surprises me when people complain about being bored after retirement. If you've got disabilities or fading health so don't have the energy or ability to do the things you want, that's understandable. But I'll never understand the people that are able-bodied yet get bored only months into retirement. I just think...what did you do during your free time before you retired? Just stare at the TV?
I can see how, in the absence of responsibilities, it's easy to slowly slide into a rut and become a depressed lump of a human that doesn't want to do anything. I also see that as part of the challenge: how do I stay disciplined enough to be happy, without being dependent on a job to force me out of bed?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41738434
Coffee vending machines? That’s what’s inside the box, it’s nothing new really… There are very high quality ones too. It’s not a particularly skilled job for a human to do, besides the customer service aspect of course, perhaps I am ignorant in that regard.
Here I just stop by a konbini, grab a can coffee and a plastic-wrapped sandwich, and off I go. There is no social nexus, and no neighbourhood for that matter. It's depressing.
I have yet to see a high-quality one.
I've been at two offices that have automated espresso machines. They'll make something that's labeled as a "Latte", but it's just coffee with powdered milk.
But a robot barista in a coffee shop would end up being exactly like normal coffee machines that have been around forever, perhaps just a bit higher-end than an office one. It's not really an idea like OP was implying.
We will rue every decision we make to remove humans from interactions imo.
Get us in, how is it going so far? :-D
I definitely prefer that neighborhood coffee shop feel and at least shops I go to near home don't have that. Even the smaller ones with similar amounts of business and number of employees as the ones in Tokyo.
The other group is like you and I, where we like engaging with the community.
I suppose three - the Starbucks crew that do it for 'likes'.
It’s interesting to see these type of generalizations that I never experience in life. I’m not saying there’s no truth to it, as girls in my circles often talk about “oh, it’s PSL season, I wanna go!”. But it’s hard to believe that all of their customers go for the special drinks.
I used to live in Seoul, and new special food or drink items definitely would cause fad waves and would appear on Instagram feeds (Seoul is notorious for this), but I doubt it was the major parts of Starbucks' business.
[1]: https://www.ft.com/content/ccd7ef60-cef2-4b03-b4a4-63fa32854...
I love living in Italy and being part of the local cafe ritual. It’s one of the things that drew me here.
Modern society, and the push to optimize every single thing that can be measured, in a nutshell.
Robotic baristas - I'm assuming the OP is referring to those 6dof robot arm deployments - are largely novelty or luxury items meant to catch attention. You either see them in touristy areas trying to attract the Instagram crowd, or (increasingly now, after the novelty is starting to wear of) in corporate lobbies trying to impress.
How do they save costs?
Their operating cost doesn't beat gas station coffee, and the margins needed to service them end up pricing them the same as human barista coffee.
Automation only works if it helps reduce your COGS, not increase it, and for a product like coffee with already paper thin margins, the cost of servicing a robotic barista ends up not being much different from hiring 2-3 part time baristas while providing a subpar product.
No evidence and probably full of bias but seems intuitive enough
Recently my parents (in their mid-60ies) were visiting us. At some point I realized that both of them had been quietly sitting at our dinner table for over on hour, eyes glued on their smartphones. They are massively addicted. I have noticed that they get very nervous as soon as the smartphone is out of reach. They mostly talk to friends via Whatsapp and are in constant fear that they miss out on something or that these friends will be offended if they don't reply within 5 minutes to the latest trivia on Whatsapp. It is quite a struggle to even get them to turn off their phones when we are having dinner, the Whatsapp messages just keep coming in.
That said, the core of the message should not be judgments between the young and the old, but the problem that we have introduced digital fentanyl into our pockets.
That said the message, when taken as a general progression between how life was then and how it is now, stands.
TV use was higher in the 2000s than it was in the 1980s/1990s. TV viewing hours steadily rose from 1949 until finally peaking in 2010.[1]
But when TV finally peaked in 2010, did overall screen time go down? No. It kept going up.[2] Obviously, this is when the masses went all-in on smartphones, social media, and the internet.
Screen usage basically never went down. It has only gone up.
So I only see anyone getting tired of smartphones and actually using them less if they've found something more addictive to replace them.
[1] https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/3FzEghXwS-KkIYu1KwG-YyHh... (from https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/when-...) [2] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-free-time-became-scre...
These things rarely happen organically anymore unless "forced" in one way or the other...
It's the same now with fb and these other old format social media sites. People just stop doing it. With that said I literally think fb will be with us for another 50 years as the people who are still on there are great marks and they won't be leaving until they 'age out'.
I don’t have hard data to substantiate it and my theory is based on anecdotal conversations but it seems, e.g., where there is some recovery going on amidst something like American millennials, who have both dealt with their own addiction and were the first generation that is also dealing with the neglect of addicted parents, they are also to some degree recovering (“reparenting” themselves), to some degree probably also spurred on by realizations shot the deleterious effects of phones and SM that come from exhaustion and different life stages. On the other hand, other generations of Americans, like those now elderly parents of millennials, not only are still, but increasing number of them are entering the earlier stages of “phone addiction” (which encompasses many different things), with the most tragic part being that they are in the latter quarter of their life and are unlikely to even realize, let alone recover from the addiction.
I also see this cycle and these stages emerging in other western societies in particular. My theory is that it is a particular effect or amplifier of the underlying culture to some degree, i.e., adoption, degree, impacts. It seems particularly pernicious in America because the underlying culture (if you can call it that, after decades of it being poisoned and corrupted by corporations and the government) was and is fertile ground for the societal rot caused by social media and its amplifier, smart phones, to have taken hold and spread like the virus it is.
It was even all described as “viral”, and yet we still engaged in it as if unfamiliar and investigated viruses spreading in an uncontrolled manner are a perfectly acceptable thing that should not even give anyone pause, especially if money can be made, regardless of whether it is something like HIV, with a very long lead-time, a delayed ETA for the reaper.
What happens now that we are in some kind of middle stage of the “smartphone“/Social Media civilization wildfire, with the first to have been affected looking over the devastation it has left in their wake, Shell shocked by the neglect and destruction, as the inferno is still raging on off in the distance as it consumes their parents and new generations, and even toppling whole countries through the “Color Revolution” playbook?
Good use of that word.
English has ae in Maelstrom but the contemporary word in Danish, Swedish and Norwegian is Malstrøm/Malström. I wonder when it lost it's ae, I see Mahlströmn from 1698, reading the etymology it says dutch but I wonder if they just wrote it down first. Everything about the sea is always filled with mythology.
I think social media needs a less poetic word though.
"early modern Dutch maelstrom (now maalstroom) whirlpool < malen to grind, to whirl round (compare meal n.1) + stroom stream n"
and also thinks Dutch is the origin, with Swedish/Danish etc taking it from Dutch too:
"The use of maelstrom as a proper name (also in French) seems to come from Dutch maps, e.g. that in Mercator's Atlas (1595). There is little doubt that the word is native to Dutch (compare synonymous German regional (Low German) Maling). It is true that it is found in all the modern Scandinavian languages as a common noun, but in them it is purely literary, and likely to have been adopted from Dutch."
40something is not old, despite what Zuckerberg claimed before he himself aged.
My parents were like that, in a different way. They couldn’t sit in a room without a tv on, even if they had visitors and everyone was talking and not paying attention to the TV. Living room TV was on at least 16 hours a day, just about every day, I bet. So weird. Also had TVs in every bedroom, including rarely-used spare bedrooms. Like they had six TVs in their house at peak. WTF.
(Actually, my in-laws also do the TV thing, or else a laptop playing YouTube trash… plus phones)
I wish we could, as a society, have a serious conversation about this effect without resorting to name calling ("Luddist nonsense") and straw men ("but what about penicillin?")
Not all progress is desirable, of course, and smartphones have their own problems, but same was told about younger generations and internet, TV, newspapers, etc. But those generations grew up out of it and personally I'd argue that smartphone addiction is not only young people problem.
Also I don't really like these luddite sentiments, usually shared between the two extremes, old ladies that never used the internet so they don't understand what they are missing, and IT guys that are too jaded to see the benefits and are at the stage of "wanna become goat farmer". Outside addiction the internet is great.
Some argue you're still one, they give you just enough crumbs so that you shut your mouth and bow your head while you work from birth to death, being taxed every step of the way, with more and more limited privacy and liberties. Meanwhile the top 1% still live like kings, laws barely apply to them, they're in charge of everything even though most of them haven't been elected
You means these people who all come out of the same 3 unis, all attend the same parties, have the same networks, &c. ?
So are painkillers, or alcohol. Still we shouldn't simply shrug our shoulders over their abuse.
We need to find a rational way to treat smartphones. As of now, we are fully in the Gin Craze [0] phase of their use and moderation is badly needed.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gin_Craze
This has nothing to do with what you quoted.
Smartphones and their effects are orthogonal to your point. Before smartphones if you were at home you were alone, isolated, and bored, so you went out and meet your friends. With smartphones you are always connected to your friends or others and it seems that it reduces the psychological need to meet in person (it's no longer the only option).
Before smartphone there was TV and cable TV. Young people spent time in front of the TV but TV is passive and does not allow you to connect with others.
Old people spent their time in front of the TV, before that they spent time by the radio, etc.
The youngest boomers are in their 60s now so not sure if your really mean "boomers"...
Books are exactly the same as tiktok brainrot ? That's obviously not true
That tiktok is "active" hence it's objectively better than TV ? Why ? And through what mechanism ?
Ubiquitous smartphones are a fundamental shift irrespective of the big bad capitalists who are doing nothing new.
Perhaps we could add parenting. If parents let their children hold on to their smartphones 24/7 it's no-one else's fault. In general, at least in my case and my friends', TV was highly "regulated" at home.
We had a beautiful conversation about that as it is a topic that I think about a lot, yet whenever I breach it with anyone else the response I get is either a shrug, or denial. Weirdly enough, it is an easier topic to discuss with the younger generations, those that have grown up in the YouTube era, yet deep inside feel there is something crucial that's gone lost in our society and we haven't even started trying to recapture it.
It used to be hushed because people thought nothing can keep young people away from each others bodies anyway. However, now it's apparently happened - social media, woke culture, fight for jobs...
People think it is smartphones and social skills. The real reason is men are blackpilled and stopped trying. What we are seeing is only the beginning.
Beautifully said. And sad.
I take your general point, but I'm interested in what you mean by "we" here - the general population or HN readers? People have been a resource to extract from since the beginning of farming, and particularly so since the beginning of the industrial revolution. The difference is perhaps that the attention of rich, western people is being exploited now and is causing this particular concern. Read any first-person accounts of the industrial revolution and the idea that this is anything new falls apart.
Folks rarely have this choice. What industry wants a barista outside food service? This is why we get stuck wearing a green apron for a decade, or working call center jobs, or any other crappy job.
And becoming a nurse isn’t something you switch to after being underpaid as a barista. It’s a career with real training.