Bourbon popularity exploded a few years ago but the market is over saturated -- too much inventory and people have moved on to other things. Also anti-American sentiment due to Tariff Man is reducing exports. At my local liquor store, a year or two back if you wanted a bottle of buffalo trace, you had to show up on delivery day (Friday afternoon) and I think they imposed a 2-bottle limit. Now, they've got boxes stacked on boxes filling up the aisles and it's all on sale.
Bourbon sales are in decline. A combination of sales not recovering post Covid pandemic and US tariffs (and presidential belligerence) putting off consumers in export markets.
Huge slump at moment. Folks over-purchased chasing hype/scarcity during and following COVID. Production increased but demand has softened sharply, for several reasons. For a lot of folks I know, it’s as simple as they simply don’t have the physical space to keep accumulating bottles. Others have grown bored and decided to exit the “hobby” and send 90% their collection to places like K&L for auction.
But it is wildly less popular than it was and demand is well below what they built out supply to meet. Even without the tariffs the industry was going to have a major contraction and the tariffs have made it even worse.
Bardstown literally has their production line workers doing yardwork and other random tasks to keep them on payroll while not running production.
Not sure what he’s saying, but some Canadian provinces banned import of USA spirits, as retaliation to tariffs, and allegedly this has hurt bourbon sales.
Windows, especially old versions, were beautifully pragmatic. Think about the things that would need to exist on an open-source OS to match this functionality. You'd need to:
1. Convince people to distribute programs via installers.
2. Provide some way that installers can tell the OS that they're an installer (and not invent 5 different ways to do this!)
3. Convince the creators of installers to actually use that function.
4. Convince library creators to maintain backward compatibility (big ask).
5. Convince people to not fork said libraries, creating ambiguous upgrade paths.
6. If there are multiple distros, convince them all to use the same backup/restore format for libraries (and not treat their own favorite libraries as "special")
They absolutely created 10 different ways to install software; they didn't really advertised they were an installer; the only backward compatible thing there are the MS libraries; there was no common backup/restore format.
Instead, the Unix people made a mechanism for random programs to use their own libraries and not touch the system one. In fact, Windows had one too, but most applications still decided they need to break the system.
One of the biggest pitfalls in understanding the world is interpreting everything as an absolute. If someone says "dogs have four legs", you might think "well, I saw a dog with three legs, so there's no value in the idea that dogs have four legs, and I'll conclude that if I see tracks from an animal that seems to have four legs, it's impossible to know if it's a dog or a giant centipede". It's a pernicious little quirk of our minds that we fall for this kind of thinking.
To wit. The idea that installers on Windows behaved the way I described is an interesting fact. The idea that a few installers did things in unusual ways is a much less interesting fact. Putting them on the same level robs you of the insight, and if this is a pattern then there are a lot of things you simply can't learn, because an exception could be found.
I have a theory that being cash-rich creates an atmosphere of technological cluelessness, or more specifically weaponized incompetence. A cash-rich company attracts sociopathic executives, who are focused on the prestige of working at a top company. These executives display a unified front outwardly, but internally they are all stabbing each other in the back constantly. And any executive who champions in-house software is just giving other executives ammunition whenever said software has the smallest bug.
Milgram gets thrown around as proof that everyone is just a few steps away from being an agent of evil. Finding out that it actually shows that there are psychopaths among us, and most people actually refused (left the experiment), somehow "clicks" and fits with reality a lot better. We see this in historical genocides - not everyone is in on it, and in fact it has to be covered-up internally because only the psychopaths are able to stomach it.
Indeed. Just knowing that the subjects who followed through with the shocks were less likely to obey the rules could be interpreted in many ways, some invalidating the results of the experiment, some just suggesting a mechanistic explanation, and some making the results even more concerning.
* Did the subjects who went full voltage stop caring about the "learning" protocol because they realised it was all fake? Then the conclusions of Milgram's experiment are invalid.
* Did the subjects who went full voltage make more mistakes because they were more anxious and fearful of the experimenter? Then underlying fear might be a mechanism for blind obedience, and further research would be interesting.
* Did the subjects who went full voltage just enjoy electrocuting the dude so much that they stopped caring about asking the questions correctly? Then blind obedience is the least of our worries, widespread sadism is much more concerning.
It says more then that. The "psychopats" were NOT following the rules. The rule followers were not cruel.
The act of torturing was not due to the torturer obeying the rules. Instead, torturers broke the rules and created conditions that allowed them more torture.
The debate in the comment section here really boils down to: upstream freedom vs downstream freedom.
Copyleft licenses like GPL/Apache mandate upstream freedom: Upstream has the "freedom" to use anything downstream, including anything written by a corporation.
Non-copyleft FOSS licenses like MIT/BSD are about downstream freedom, which is more of a philosophically utilitarian view, where anyone who receives the software is free to use it however they want, including not giving their changes back to the community, on the assumption that this maximizes the utility of this free software in the world.
If you prioritize the former goal, then coding agents are a huge problem for you. If the latter, then coding agents are the best thing ever, because they give everyone access to an effectively unlimited amount of cheap code.
What you call 'downstream freedom' isn't very downstream. The real downstream is the end user, who should have the right to know what the software is doing on their computer, to recompile the software so it works on their machine with the software that is already on it, to make changes to the software so it can serve their needs.
Right, well, I'm using the word "downstream" for lack of a more precise term. I'm NOT using the "normal" open-source definition of "downstream". Does that help clarify what I mean?
I wish Anthropic or someone would take a leadership role and re-train their models without any GPL code, or at least stop doing so in the future tense.
There's a long tail of users who still visit out of habit. The last useful thing there was job listings, but between LinkedIn doing nothing to combat bots clicking apply on every job, the "fake job listings" phenomenon, and the job market being atrocious, you're better off playing the lottery.
So, failing social media platform, full of bots, when is Elon Buying it?
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