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A Fond Farewell

farmersalmanac.com

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Re: A Fond Farewell

#121

Post by bluGill »

Spooky23 wrote: post #114
cowsandmilk wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardly an explanation, what is meant by chaotic media environment?

Their audience is old people who buy the book at the cashier line at Walmart. Both their customer base and sales outlet is dying off. These things are really magazines that run once a year. The notion of a magazine is a weird concept that doesn’t compute for anyone younger than 35.

With all the digital AI slop these days I'm starting to look for magazines again. Ones that put some effort into verification that the stories really are true.

Re: A Fond Farewell

#122

Post by bluGill »

Waterluvian wrote: post #109
conductr wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have to predict the weather for the year in a book that has to go through the publishing and distribution process ahead of time. My local weather news has all the benefits of real time data and weather models yet I think their accuracy rate is just as poor when it comes to producing the 7 day outlook. It’s common to hear a forecast for rain/cold front/etc in 7 day outlook that just never materializes. Also the t…

I didn't study too much meteorology in undergrad, but one thing impressed upon us is that any forecast beyond maybe 3 days is basically guesswork. I think what might be getting observed here is that when forecasting that many days out, the local data becomes so unimportant to the model's outcome that the model is just reflecting historical climate trends. Which kind of makes both the same kind of model. Ie. when fore…

That depends on what you care about. Will it rain at a specific date/time - getting that for tomorrow is hard, much less a year. However you can often predict if this will be a wet or dry year with reasonable accuracy and that is important information (farmers plant different seeds). I doubt their model is very good at this, but science can do well enough.

Re: A Fond Farewell

#123

Post by jrmg »

ajdude wrote: post #62

I'm not a farmer, but I have relied on the farmers almanac before when planning vacations months in advance. It's been surprisingly accurate at determining whether a given week would have rain, snow, or sun. I have no idea how they did it but I would love to see their weather prediction system open sourced if they're going to be shutting down.

Statistical averages and confirmation bias.

Re: A Fond Farewell

#124

Post by cm2012 »

muzani wrote: post #115
cowsandmilk wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardly an explanation, what is meant by chaotic media environment?

I think they simply don't know what to do next. In the past century, you could write a book with good content, put it on a shelf, and people would pay money for it. Then at some point, book stores stopped existing. Some turned into gift stores where the book was some decoration you'd put on the shelf to add aesthetic to the room. So a lot of things went digital. But nobody wants to pay for digital information. You'd…

Bro book sales are at a record high right now and barnes and noble is opening lots of stores

Re: A Fond Farewell

#125

Post by lokar »

bluGill wrote: post #119
muzani wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they simply don't know what to do next. In the past century, you could write a book with good content, put it on a shelf, and people would pay money for it. Then at some point, book stores stopped existing. Some turned into gift stores where the book was some decoration you'd put on the shelf to add aesthetic to the room. So a lot of things went digital. But nobody wants to pay for digital information. You'd…

Despite the name "farmers" I doubt the majority of customers were farmers, at least not in the last 50 years or so.

Over the 200 years, most of the readers may have been farmers, or at least lived or worked on farms. That would have been much of the population back then.

Re: A Fond Farewell

#126

Post by astura »

dannyphantom wrote: post #59
Waterluvian wrote: post #38

What exactly is the Farmer’s Almanac? I always thought it was basically a big set of historical data that helped provide a sort of statistical foundation for choices, even if the why isn’t explained. Which seems like I can completely understand it as a practical tool in the past but fairly obsolete in modern times. Or did it evolve, too, and was essentially modern science and maths, dressed in the trappings of a belo…

Kinda all of the above. It did evolve into a scientific(-adjacent) thing, if that makes sense. My boyfriend’s parents have all of them sitting on a dedicated shelf. Interesting to read through. They definitely leaned into being a cultural artifact. Jokes, anecdotes, stories, how-tos, homeopathic recipes for things like cough syrups, etc. They all look kinda the same so either brand consistency or to keep the nostalgi…

This comment appears to confuse the Farmers' Almanac (published since 1818) with the Old Farmer's Almanac (published since 1792). It's really unclear which one you're talking about.

Re: A Fond Farewell

#127

Post by reaperducer »

Spooky23 wrote: post #114
cowsandmilk wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardly an explanation, what is meant by chaotic media environment?

Their audience is old people who buy the book at the cashier line at Walmart. Both their customer base and sales outlet is dying off. These things are really magazines that run once a year. The notion of a magazine is a weird concept that doesn’t compute for anyone younger than 35.

These things are really magazines that run once a year. The notion of a magazine is a weird concept that doesn’t compute for anyone younger than 35.

Ageism aside, your stereotype of young people today is about a decade out of date. It doesn't sound like you've been to a book store in America since 2015.

I see high schoolers gathered around the magazine racks at the book store every time I visit, which is at least weekly.

In a lot of ways, nothing has changed. Blue jeans, concert shirts, and someone always walks away with a Rolling Stone.

Re: A Fond Farewell

#128

Post by hajile »

atomicnature wrote: post #99
khannn wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I had to hazard a guess I'd say how everyone has the internet in their pocket, news and entertainment being one and the same, and the fact that nobody reads books anymore

Book sales in general (across all formats) are up I think - so there are still many, many readers around. We just have many new formats (EPUB, audiobooks, reader devices, etc.) and of course population is increasing over the globe. I'm pretty sure we have the highest number of readers on the planet right now than ever before in absolute terms.

Audience matters here. Most book sales have been falling. The one increase has been in romance porn with those books accounting for some 50% of all paperbacks sold at this point (they are dominating for the exact same reason porn dominates internet video content).

Personally, I don't count pornhub traffic the same way I count Youtube or Netflix traffic and I think the same applies here.

Re: A Fond Farewell

#129

Post by threetonesun »

profunctor wrote: post #118
muzani wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they simply don't know what to do next. In the past century, you could write a book with good content, put it on a shelf, and people would pay money for it. Then at some point, book stores stopped existing. Some turned into gift stores where the book was some decoration you'd put on the shelf to add aesthetic to the room. So a lot of things went digital. But nobody wants to pay for digital information. You'd…

Book stores did not stop existing. They are everywhere. Book sales are up in recent times.

Print book sales are down, although not as much as people want to believe. Book stores are making a comeback but in terms of number of books on shelves I'd say the average one is ~50% less. We had a real heyday in the late 90s where a Barnes and Nobles would have a copy of almost any book you could reasonably be looking for, plus multiple rows of magazines. We have not returned to that, and certainly books that you'd pick up on a whim like an end-cap item have reasonably suffered for it, or increased their prices to fairly insane levels.

Re: A Fond Farewell

#130

Post by hajile »

conductr wrote: post #77
dannyphantom wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kinda all of the above. It did evolve into a scientific(-adjacent) thing, if that makes sense. My boyfriend’s parents have all of them sitting on a dedicated shelf. Interesting to read through. They definitely leaned into being a cultural artifact. Jokes, anecdotes, stories, how-tos, homeopathic recipes for things like cough syrups, etc. They all look kinda the same so either brand consistency or to keep the nostalgi…

They have to predict the weather for the year in a book that has to go through the publishing and distribution process ahead of time. My local weather news has all the benefits of real time data and weather models yet I think their accuracy rate is just as poor when it comes to producing the 7 day outlook. It’s common to hear a forecast for rain/cold front/etc in 7 day outlook that just never materializes. Also the t…

Even if we had perfect information at one instant in time, modeling a chaotic system going into the future becomes increasingly difficult.

We have far from perfect information and very flawed models too.

Interestingly, there seems to be some success with AI models that almost completely skip the science and jump straight to pattern recognition. It's interesting to think of modern 10-day weather forecasting going back to its old almanac roots.

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