A Fond Farewell
farmersalmanac.com
farmersalmanac.com
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 not realize just how insufficient they are.
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.
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.
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."
Regulation and other government actions can solve these problems by internalizing these costs/benefits. Any solution to these problems involves collective control of individual actions, which is to say, government at some scale.
There is some irony in the people who say "taxation is theft" ignoring the theft of the commons counteracted by taxation and the government services it supports.
1) the American cult of self-reliance. The idea that people will not value something they did not themselves work for, even if its given to them by a close friend or family member, is basically synonymous with "the American dream". "Socialism" is so bad to Americans that they would rather have diabetics die because they can't afford the lifesaving medicine they need, than to give handouts to such people, just for them to develop a "dependency". There's even an entire health-influencer industry built around the idea that all health problems not directly caused by trauma are because the person suffering just isn't trying hard enough to be healthy, and not, you know, because of a social and economic system that's actively corrosive to human health. "You're sick because you're too lazy to avoid trans-fats" basically the gist of RFK Jr's ideology.
2) Americans are so opposed to thinking more than 3 months ahead that all they see with that 20% price increase is the impact it has on them right now. The easy access to instant gratification is steadily eroding our ability to be patient or suffer any hardship. This has been growing for a long time (c.f. fresh fruits and vegetables of all stripes, year round) but has reached a sort of fever pitch with the advent of same-day delivery for a vast array of bits and baubles.
"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.
Side note: Grocery Outlet if you're in the places they operate, is a completely franchised grocery store chain. In my experience in multiple towns, the local owners do a great job, and one near me donates to some excellent local charities.
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.
Money is meant to be a store of value, 'value' in this case being literally anyone considers valuable. However, it's an abstraction that doesn't quite fit over the thing it attempts to abstract - it really only captures that value if the value is something that is easy to transact. You might value a good conversation with your local grocer, or the smile you get when you pass someone you recognize in your neighborhood, but those things are left out of the money equation. Things the abstraction captures well - transactions of goods, legal representation, contracts, and lobbyists - are all of a particular stripe. Many of these are related to a projection of will; the ability to make things happen the way you want in spite of potentially mitigating factors.
One of the things that money allows is exploitation. Because of the delta between actual value and the abstraction of value, one is capable of strategically manouvering such that they capture more of the abstraction than a straight value:value transaction would warrant. This is compounded when you get tricky with laws and litigation and contracts - hard edges in the problem space become anvils you can use to hammer things to a shape that you like. Cynical strategies are quite successful here.
It is my belief that due to the recursively self-reinforcing nature of this system, it is bound to fail eventually. Because the leaks in the abstraction of value are actually a boon to some few powerful entities, the rules that govern the abstraction will fail to change and adapt and at some point the whole system becomes too heavy to support itself. As a whole, the system will eventually eat it's way to a heart attack.
Liquidity is the velocity of this process, and thus the velocity of consumption. There are pressures and systems and factors that metabolize the effects of the flow of capital, but the higher liquidity is the more burdened those systems become. We are currently in a place where the liquidity factor is > 1, by which I mean money can be spent before it is earned and most of it is (we have something like 5-20x debt to the pool of money, depending on how you measure it). This means that those deficiencies in the abstraction are accelerated and compounded by the same amount, which translates to an equal difference between the things we actually value as humans and the things we are capable of valuing as economic units.
Regional supermarkets are capped by this. The lack of third party distribution means they have to have their own sourcing and distribution. They can’t grow and are slowly being picked off of PE and bigger chains.
It’s even hard for restaurants. When I worked in restaurants in college in my region, we had 6 local produce distributors. Now you have Sysco, US Foods, two regionals, one of which just went PE, and the vertically integrated Chinese markets that prefer to do business within their circle.
I think we are going to have significant political unrest, and the rollup of everything will continue until that federal power is exerted against it. Otherwise, welcome to WalmartKrogerHomeDepot.
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.
So it seems like a flimsy excuse.
I was in Delft recently and I really loved their library/community center. Full of music practice rooms, people playing board games on the ground floor, a coffee bar and it was full of people at 8pm. It is open from 9am - 11pm M-F.
You walk or cycle there (free indoor bicycle parking). There is a movie theater across the "street" (no cars).
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 to want (or be able!) to visit a library, but everyone does need food and other consumables/goods.
It's not just a small towns thing, either. The main street shopping district I had in mind just now is in the middle of Chicago. And it doesn't happen so much there, either, anymore, in the post retail apocalypse era. Now it's all bars and restaurants so people go there for a very reduced range of reasons.
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 that the only thing that is missing is a gym; there are small dance rooms in there but that's not quite the same.
But the essence here is walkable communities. Suburbs and exurbs are hostile to even small local stores because you have to drive everywhere to do anything. There is no community in visiting my Costco or even my QFC.
Take a look for yourself: https://www.opendelft.info
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 creating a gathering space then hoping people show up.
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 VONNEGUT: Oh, she says well, you're not a poor man. You know, why don't you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope.
I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don't know…
And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don't realize, or they don't care, is we're dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we're not supposed to dance at all anymore.
There is no way for producers and consumers to "compete" with intermediaries
If the internet must^1 be full of intermediaries to link producers and consumers, then at least there should be competition _amongst intermediaries_
Google and Amazon have no significant competition from other intermediaries
1. It's possible that intermediaries are unnecessary
If print (and other) media had not been designed around advertising revenue in the first place, things might have gone very, very differently.
Which really surprised me. Ben Franklin's version is a really strong brand so it makes sense it's some other Farmer's Almanac that's shutting down.
https://www.farmersalmanac.com/end-of-an-era-farmers-almanac...
> This decision, though difficult, reflects the growing financial challenges of producing and distributing the Almanac in today’s chaotic media environment.
It's worth also considering demographics. If you narrow the focus to just younger generations (who, we can guess, are more addicted to smartphones) then the numbers look pretty bad. E.g.:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/nov/05/report-fall-in...
2. Don't confuse "enjoyment" with "number of readers". The previous generation may have enjoyed it more - because there were no better options.
3. People over the globe are more educated now, and engaged in knowledge work. They must read to get work done.
4. Don't forget the "pirate book" scene - such as lib gen, Anna's archive, etc. - in developing countries.
Personally, I don't count pornhub traffic the same way I count Youtube or Netflix traffic and I think the same applies here.
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.
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)
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.
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.
That's all transitioning to delivery and self-checkout. 20 years ago, you'd like 30 lanes open with eyeballs on the book. Now, in my area there's like 3-5 lanes most times.
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 think almanacs would be popular in the era of overinformation.
What channel next? YT shorts? TikTok? Do farmers even use LinkedIn? How do you deal with bots that grab all the information you put out there and repackage it into a $20/month subscription?
I don't know if there was ever a bookstore that ever had a copy of almost any book you could reasonably be looking for. Maybe Powell's back in the day if you counted the technical bookstore along with the mother ship. Certainly not Barnes & Noble. There are still multiple rows of magazines at B&N today, including ones on Linux, programming, network admin, Raspberry Pi, etc.
The one I go to is the same size as the ones I went to 20 years ago and an order of magnitude larger than the mall bookstores I went to 40 years ago. Although some of that space is taken up by the coffee shop, Legos, and vinyl records.
And B&N itself is doing just fine, and is opening new locations. Borders is the only major chain that failed to adapt. Other large book retailers are also still going strong, e.g. Books-A-Million.
[1] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/12/do-not-turn-t...
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.
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.
it means that the almanac does not bring in enough profit to make it worthwhile to continue or to find a buyer for the company, and the owners are also aware that many of the same profit related issues are in the public discourse as affecting (formerly-)print media in the now-digital market, so the owners conclude that their financial are part of the general trend in the industry rather than to specific problems with the business formula they have used for over 200 years.
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 beloved cultural relic? Or is it more than ever a collection of stories and advice and other culture, and much less about the actual almanac?
I always enjoy reading through those tabulated stuff; see pp. 280-281.
This is no direct relationship. Just a case of a competitor deciding to compete in the marketplace.
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 nostalgia factor.
Their sun/moon/eclipse is rooted in real math foundations but their “proprietary” weather forecast model was developed when the publication began in 1792.
It’s like 30% hard astronomical data, 30% proprietary models that they’ve been using for generations and 40% storytelling.
edit for context on scientific side:
WRT forecast modeling, the publication claims ~80% accuracy [1] but it’s been found to come out to about ~50%+ under scrutiny [2]
[1] https://www.almanac.com/2026-old-farmers-almanac
[2] https://climate.colostate.edu/blog/index.php/2024/08/23/shou...
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 timing of the event if it does arrive is almost always off by a day or two. Often they have the whole town worried about something that’s definitely happening Friday, they talk about it all week, everyone is preparing, little league games getting rescheduled, etc. then only hours beforehand it’s well looks like maybe Sunday. Then Sunday comes and instead of inches of rain, it’s a sprinkle.
I’m not even trying to be critical of weather reporting, I get that it’s a crapshoot but doing it a year+ ahead of time and getting similar results/accuracy is actually quite impressive.
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 forecasting tomorrow, the current temperature and pressure data really makes a difference. But once pushed to 7 days, those data essentially become a proxy for typical weather at that time of year, possibly down-weighted by a lot.
I just woke up and I feel like I'm doing a very poor job trying to describe this.
One thing that I've found to help a lot is to go to weather.gov and look at the "forecast discussion". Often it will help to understand what types of uncertainties exist within the forecast.
It isn't unusual to see notes that make it really clear that 24-48 hour variations are expected, or that massive differences will exist based upon hard to predict variables. "Hey we think it will rain heavily as far south as X, but actually it might end up staying north of Y in which case X will stay dry"
It is easy to see how hard it can be even if the forecast itself turns out to be fairly accurate at a high level.
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.
If I predict that the weather in my location on November 7, 2076 will be moderately cool and sunny (as it is today), I have a pretty good chance of being correct. I wouldn’t find it impressive, though.
Where is your local source getting their forecast from?
> A seven-day forecast can accurately predict the weather about 80 percent of the time and a five-day forecast can accurately predict the weather approximately 90 percent of the time. However, a 10-day—or longer—forecast is only right about half the time.
* https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/about/k-12-education/weather-for...
There are also 'technicalities': I'm in Toronto, Canada, which is 40km east-to-east and 20km from the lake to the northern border. If rain hits the western half (around 427/Sherway/Etobicoke) but not the eastern half (Scarborough bluffs), is a "it will rain" forecast correct for the city? Some will perceive it as yes and some as no.
I am amazed this publication made it this far.
https://www.almanac.com/old-farmers-almanac-artificial-intel...
Looking at it with an adult’s eyes, it’s absolute twaddle.
But people go for that sort of thing. How much money gets made on astrology?
The Illustrated Phrenological Almanac
https://archive.org/details/illustratedphren1852fowl/mode/2u...
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%.
They do detailed scoring of their predictions and it's based on rigorous physical modeling (navier stokes) so they know that it's better than chance. FA hasn't held up well to such scrutiny.
I’ve tried all manner of weather services and none of them really do a really good job of any level of forecasting. They do however excel at supplying me with information I can get just by looking out the window.
They appear experienced at navigating this confusion
1. the farmer's almanac i thought of when i saw the title and even read the article is not going anywhere 2. i have never before heard of the farmer's almanac referred to in this notice
Would be pretty cool if it was that simple, that reason needs more representation and is how I run my entrepreneurial endeavors
That's some serious forward thinking you've got going on with your date format there. I like it, I will be formatting all my years to 5 digits from now on.
OTOH, if it was just a typo - keep it to yourself, I don't wanna know. I'm all in - 5 digit years is a thing now.
it's creepy cult behavior, and the "Long Now" name and framing focused on the infinite isn't helping
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.
Not degrees. The unit is simply the kelvin.
If they aren't a thing, why are we talking about them? Clearly they're a thing. And not even an obscure thing. If you've ever used commonly used representations like ZIP codes, bank account numbers, or serial numbers you'll no doubt have encountered it before. And that even goes for dates. ISO 8601, for example, requires leading zeros, including for the year component. "1" is not considered a valid year under that standard. It must be represented as "0001". Granted, ISO 8601 only requires a minimum of four characters to represent the year, but expecting at least five characters is conceptually just as valid.
Because someone decided to break convention and use one in a four-digit year.
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.
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 usually gets dropped in the first five minutes of meeting and after that it gets repeated if it is initially ignored.
001852 is safe for a million years!
But I could do this one ;-)
You might also enjoy the Kurzgesagt human era calendar - https://youtu.be/29pN-2KM2DI - https://shop-us.kurzgesagt.org/collections/calendar
I like this.
I wonder what other conventions we could break by being "forward-thinking" in this sense.
Past tense for all proper names ("America was...", "Google was..."), prices pegged to energy equivalents (bananas were priced at 10 kWh). Describing life on the North American Plate under Alpha Centauri aligned constellations...
Those are all awkward. The date thing is just smooth.
Certainly not.
While the Farmer's Almanac doesn't go out of its way to prevent farmers from reading it or anything, it was really geared more towards suburbanites with an interest in things like gardening.
The Old Farmer's Almanac is more geared towards farmers, but there is no signs of it ending publication.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/2026-Farmers-Amanac-Almanac/dp/192872...
I wonder if a changing climate makes the predictions in the almanac less useful too
What is going to be lost is more than an old book for old people: It's the folklore associated with it, the - and I mean that in the most positive meaning of the word - myths. The same kind of old magic that vanished when 'Weekly World News' stopped publication, or when MAD stopped being published monthly.
I mainly read it for the jokes, as I recall.
But yeah, this is a book claiming on the front cover to be able to tell you the best time to get married? lol
I also think that the general purpose nature of the book serves it poorly. It seems to cram together seemingly unrelated topics: life advice, gardening advice, kitchen tips, astrology, etc. This probably made a lot of sense before the modern media landscape, in the days when entertainment was a little more hard to come by.
Some things sadly do have their time and place. We aren’t getting this back just like we aren’t getting back a nation where everyone watched the same 3 channels on their television.
A quick perusal of the "best day" calendar — which is presumably what that refers to — suggests that it believes the best time to get married is on days we call the weekend. Which seems pretty fair. I've never been to a wedding that wasn't on a weekend. That is when most people seem to want to get married. Not exactly ground-breaking information, of course, but practical in some very limited sense; likely more useful than lunar phase schedules for the average person.
> We aren’t getting this back
I'm not sure it was ever lost. The most notable one in this space, the Old Farmer's Almanac, is still going. The departure of The Farmer's Almanac means one less competitor than before, but the "Almanac" genre remains filled with quite a number of publications that show no signs of stopping. Individual businesses step out of their respective markets all the time. That is nothing unusual (although a 200+ year run is noteworthy, granted).
> just like we aren’t getting back a nation where everyone watched the same 3 channels on their television.
Now we all visit the same 3 websites instead...
I would have subscribed if I knew that the Farmer's Almanac still existed :(
Which is a silly assumption; a forecast isn’t a single yes-no event. it’s not obvious to me that 50% is the worst case success rate.
Would be more interesting to compare their forecast to something like a long term NOAA forecast, but I don’t believe such a thing exists because calculating the future is very expensive.
In which case if they're 40% accurate, you can get 60% accuracy from them by assuming it'll be the opposite of what they say
If they could get their accuracy down to 0% you'd have perfect predictions!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Farmer%27s_Almanac
People do know things other people do not. They are fairly notable, though obviously not as much in today's society, hence this one's retirement
Capitalism is unnatural - it allows rapid consolidation of the businesses, leading to colonial style of empires. Colonial empires fell due to local people's assertion of their ownership of the land. Business workers have no such bond with the companies. They can't resurrect their businesses once gobbled up by the mega companies.