201–210 of 225 posts
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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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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.
In the early 1990's, during my days as a Comp. Sci. prof, I was so excited about the emergence of the internet. When I saw the Mosaic browser (a precursor to Netscape and later Firefox) I knew the world had changed for the better. Now I have such mixed feelings. Magazines (like the Farmers Almanac) either go online completely or just disappear. They just cannot compete for advertising dollars with Google. And small f…
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…
In the early 1990's, during my days as a Comp. Sci. prof, I was so excited about the emergence of the internet. When I saw the Mosaic browser (a precursor to Netscape and later Firefox) I knew the world had changed for the better. Now I have such mixed feelings. Magazines (like the Farmers Almanac) either go online completely or just disappear. They just cannot compete for advertising dollars with Google. And small f…
If print (and other) media had not been designed around advertising revenue in the first place, things might have gone very, very differently.
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You think you have a choice to buy local. It's more complicated than that. "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…
the McDonald's in our town says "locally owned and operated", same with the stores where everything (literally) is made in China. These sums up the absurdity of the phrase for me.
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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…
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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…
Consider this little anecdote from Kurt Vonnegut: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/kurt-vonnegut-envelope-quo... DAVID BRANCACCIO: There's a little sweet moment, I've got to say, in a very intense book — your latest — in which you're heading out the door and your wife says what are you doing? I think you say — I'm getting — I'm going to buy an envelope. KURT VONNEGUT: Yeah. DAVID BRANCACCIO: What happens then? KURT…
[1] https://www.amazon.com/2026-Farmers-Amanac-Almanac/dp/192872...
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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…
The "shared necessity" factor also means that you regularly meet acquaintances there by accident. It just doesn't happen at the Wal-Mart or Home-Depot 15 miles away anywhere near as often as it would happen at the town general store or the local main street shopping district. Possibly because nobody actually spends time at a big box store or strip mall; they're such deeply unpleasant spaces that you basically just do…