151–160 of 225 posts
I live in Texas and have never seen this Farmer's Almanac in my life. But the Old Farmer's Almanac has been on the store shelves my whole life, and they're still publishing.
Neither is accurate tho. Both are around 50%.
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But if it’s so valuable… why aren’t people willing to pay for it? Forgoing luxuries like a vacation to support local stores full of people you know and trust, that might charge 20% more for the same product, seems like an obvious thing… That almost no Americans do in reality.
Because if I do that, I lose my vacation and I don’t gain a local store full of people I know and trust. Collective action problems aren’t solved by individually performing the action, and therefore the fact that people aren’t doing it doesn’t show they don’t want it.
This is a truth that a lot of the west, particularly Americans, struggle to accept. We keep trying "the free market and individual incentives must solve all problems" over and over, and fail over and over.
Huge problems require collective action to solve. Collective action requires good coordination, strong institutions, leadership, and most importantly, the societal willingness to not always optimize for the individual's freedom/desires/expectations. None of these are currently present in America.
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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…
Farmers don't even use the Almanac, because it's not accurate. These things are all 50/50. A coin toss in their predictions.
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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.
That's the Old Farmer's Almanac. I don't know where this Farmer's Almanac is on the shelves, but it's certainly not at Walmart, which carries a different publication that's even older.
Confusing names, yes, because one is TFA and the other is TOFA.
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> I like it, I will be formatting all my years to 5 digits from now on. Please don't, it's highly irritating and usually just serves as a way to get people to discuss the leading zero rather than the subject they were really interested in in the first place. Leading zeros aren't a thing for a reason. It's about as useful as expressing the temperature in Kelvin.
It’s big “look at me” energy, coupled with that user citing years way more often than most. Some person: I like yams. Person in question: Me too, since I had my first one in 01985 or so.
Quick check: 1984 rates 15103 mentions, 01984 42. So about 0.3%.
For 2015 it is 69000 vs 89 for 02015.
But not all of those are years, there are some other cases in there as well.
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The aspect of small local stores functioning as a social hub really hits hard. The social hub, such as it is now, can be so much larger and less personal that it really does feel like a loss (a negative even). Is the social hub now something like Instagram or a specific forum/subreddit/space for a school or neighborhood? These are really insufficient replacements and people that grew up knowing nothing else likely do…
But if it’s so valuable… why aren’t people willing to pay for it? Forgoing luxuries like a vacation to support local stores full of people you know and trust, that might charge 20% more for the same product, seems like an obvious thing… That almost no Americans do in reality.
"Local stores full of people you know and trust" is what advertising tries to approximate. Instead of forming lasting human bonds with shopkeepers and employees, we are informed by ads who we should patronize. And we pay, indirectly, for that service.
Private equity also takes its pound of flesh. Try hiring a local plumber. They'll always say they're locally owned and operated, which is a partial truth. But when you're charged $400 for 15 minutes of labor, remember that a lot of that revenue goes to private equity, far far away from your hamlet, whether you like it or not.
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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.
https://shop.racquetmag.com/products/issue-no-8?pr_prod_stra... if you're interested in seeing what a very nice tennis magazine looks like (links to shop because it's the best way to show contents)
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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…
> Do farmers even use LinkedIn? Farmers don't even use the Almanac, because it's not accurate. These things are all 50/50. A coin toss in their predictions.
In statistics, two things are simple: predicting the very next step, and predicting what happens in 100,000 steps. It's the part in between that's tough. Weather is a function of statistics, essentially. It's why we can tell what the weather will be like tomorrow, and why we can tell that La Nina is going to affect us this year, but why we can't tell what the weather will be like on a Thursday 4 weeks from now.
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The aspect of small local stores functioning as a social hub really hits hard. The social hub, such as it is now, can be so much larger and less personal that it really does feel like a loss (a negative even). Is the social hub now something like Instagram or a specific forum/subreddit/space for a school or neighborhood? These are really insufficient replacements and people that grew up knowing nothing else likely do…
But if it’s so valuable… why aren’t people willing to pay for it? Forgoing luxuries like a vacation to support local stores full of people you know and trust, that might charge 20% more for the same product, seems like an obvious thing… That almost no Americans do in reality.
A major problem is consolidation. A small town hardware store may have had access to multiple suppliers at one point. Those all merged together and ultimately started raising their prices in a "go away" sense to small time purchasers. That's made it incredibly hard to be a store. A big box store gets a lot more foot traffic and has more leverage against distributers which allows them to ultimately outprice a small time store.
My hometown went through this. As a kid, it had a restaurant, a grocery store, a hardware store, and an automobile repair shop. 1 by 1 those all died. The restaurant died because the community never ate there. It became a thing where you'd literally call the owner the night before so they could prepare you a meal the next day. Otherwise they had no traffic. They were too expensive for my small town so nobody would buy a lunch there. The grocery store and hardware store died from being priced out. At one point, just to keep the shelves stocked the owner literally had to buy products from Walmart to sell at the store. No distributor would sell to them.
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.