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A Fond Farewell

farmersalmanac.com

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Re: A Fond Farewell

#181

Post by kstrauser »

jacquesm wrote: post #155
kstrauser wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's an interesting - and falsifiable - observation. 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.

That was a synthesized example of how they insert years seemingly for the sake of formatting it weirdly. Now that I’ve pointed it out to you, next time you see this come up, ask yourself if anyone else would have mentioned a date in that context.

If I were them, I might end this comment with “I haven’t seen it done like that since I first got online, in around 01993.”

Re: A Fond Farewell

#182

Post by quxbar »

lumost wrote: post #175
breakpointalpha wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn't need to be transactional spaces, they need to be spaces that attract people regularly. The local chicken farmer who works 16 hours a day to keep his farm running isn't going out of his way three times a week to visit the community center for board game night. He's definitely in the local Tractor Supply store three times a week though... It's about creating community where people naturally gather, not crea…

I suspect this is the major reason for lifestyle premium fitness gyms popularity in recent years.

Getting into climbing was secondarily a health choice, but primarily a social endeavor for me.

Re: A Fond Farewell

#183

Post by hollerith »

localhost wrote: post #170
spijdar wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it’s about being “places of financial transactions” so much as it’s about places of shared necessity. Everyone has to eat, so everyone goes to the grocery store. Community centers are great and I’m not going to argue against having “non-commercial recreation”, but the thing about having local stores as social hubs is they might be the only universally shared place of a community. Not everyone is going t…

I would say that "don't let perfect be the enemy of the good" here. Would universal be better? Sure. But what I saw is so much better than what we currently have here in the US. The point is that OPEN (the name of the Delft library) is really a community center and not a library. Yes, it happens to have books. But it also has a stage for musical performances, art rooms, tables, wifi, washrooms, coffee. I would say th…

Quality Food Centers, Inc., better known as QFC, has 59 stores in western Washington and northwestern Oregon.

Re: A Fond Farewell

#184

Post by wat10000 »

ryandrake wrote: post #152
wat10000 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Collective action problems aren’t solved by individually performing the action 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…

It's a very attractive idea. It gives you an immediate counterargument (people must prefer it this way because they're all doing it), and gives you the satisfaction of calling the other person a hypocrite (you think it's better yet you aren't doing it).

I've lost count of how many times I've had someone tell me, "If you think you should pay more taxes, you can always send the IRS some extra cash."

Re: A Fond Farewell

#185

Post by wat10000 »

DFHippie wrote: post #166
wat10000 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Any problem with externalized costs or benefits is a collective action problem. You get a benefit everyone pays for or you incur a cost which everyone pays. The individual incentive is to freeload on the resources of others. It is functionally theft. Regulation and other government actions can solve these problems by internalizing these costs/benefits. Any solution to these problems involves collective control of ind…

"Pollution is theft" would be a nice way to put the libertarian case for environmental regulation, but it doesn't have quite the same ring to it.

Re: A Fond Farewell

#186

Post by _DeadFred_ »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #141
gaoshan wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Huge sections of America/American's are incredibly poor.

Add that the highest income people were the first to switch to Amazon, and are more online first than community first. It didn't take losing too many of those customers for the economics to fall apart.

I live in a tourist town that has had a huge influx of new, higher wealth people post COVID. Surprising to me our businesses/restaurants are doing worse with this new population with more money, not better. They live here for the amenities, but other than on the mountain biking trails/ski mountain/lake (on their boats or remote beaches, detached from most people) you never see them. They work from home, but our walking trails are the sparsest I've ever seen them. None of them seem to go out to eat, especially not lunch. It's awful. And now that they are here, property prices have gone up, so more locals (and the children of locals definitely) will be priced out and replaced by work from home types who... just disappear into their houses. They buy all their gear online instead of supporting the local shops, the local knowledge, the places help organize/arrange for trail maintenance, more land into conservancy. From my one town observation modern upper middle class American's appear to be a net-loss for the local community. They are the types so into their sport they do all the own maintenance, then expect the local shop to do the 1 or 2 things they can't/don't want to do. The local shop can't survive on that little bit of work on your 'all internet bought, self maintained' stuff. They just don't get it.

Re: A Fond Farewell

#188

Post by jacquesm »

kstrauser wrote: post #181
jacquesm wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an interesting - and falsifiable - observation. 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.

That was a synthesized example of how they insert years seemingly for the sake of formatting it weirdly. Now that I’ve pointed it out to you, next time you see this come up, ask yourself if anyone else would have mentioned a date in that context. If I were them, I might end this comment with “I haven’t seen it done like that since I first got online, in around 01993.”

It's a bit like vegetarians/vegans or people that don't have TV.

It usually gets dropped in the first five minutes of meeting and after that it gets repeated if it is initially ignored.

Re: A Fond Farewell

#189

Post by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF »

kulahan wrote: post #158
KPGv2 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Well that just obviously isn't true. If it were, who'd keep buying the stupid things? If nothing else, natural market forces would simply prop up the farmers who aren't wasting time and money following a completely inaccurate book. 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 statistic…

> If it were, who'd keep buying the stupid things?

The same people who buy books about healing crystals, who donate to televangelists, who go to reiki "healers" and chiropractors, who believe in tarot firmly, etc.

Re: A Fond Farewell

#190

Post by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF »

bluGill wrote: post #121
Spooky23 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The last couple times I cracked open a magazine it was 50% ads and I'm not sure how many articles were PR releases. Thinking of Pop Sci, Psychology Today, etc
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