Or just very dubious timings. Like the other guy from Anthropic that was all over the international news. No followers, no post history but a single post blows up "naturally".
Highly suspect trends that can only make one believe it's marketing.
I don't have the hardware to test this, but being trained to say "I don't know" instead of misleadingly talking confidently about what it does not know is interesting in itself.
My impression is that decline can mostly be attributed to gen Z. They grew up with social media that made a better point to emphasis how dangerous alcohol is. Previous dominant media, at most, had very sterile disclaimers that alcohol is bad for you.
Romania has seen a similar decline in consumption (though still in top 3 across EU in consumption), such as that nowadays we have articles from media outlets (as a voice for the industry) that complain of the downward trend. While in reality we should be celebrating this change in culture!
Of course we should be, but the line went down, therefore we need 600 think-pieces attempting to shame us for caring for our health.
Wife and I used to be avid drinkers but with the expansion of legal cannabis, it's just not as good of an option. I'll still make myself a negroni or an old fashioned on occasion, just because they're delicious, but I haven't drank-to-get-drunk in YEARS. If I'm actually trying to unwind (and who isn't given the sheer STATE of our world!) I'm spoiled for choices of substances that both don't interact with my depression nearly as badly as alcohol and, as a bonus, don't make me gain weight like an inflation fetish character.
The alcohol industry won spectacularly for decades a game of public policy and image where alcohol, a substance connected to industrial quantities of human death and suffering, was somehow the "accepted and normal" way to get fucked up when you wanted to be, even though again, numerous alternatives existed that were better for you. They're going to go through a similar process to tobacco I think, which is to say: it'll still be around, but it will shrink to an industry sized appropriately for the actual demand of it's product.
In the US Gen Z doesn't drink because of social isolation. Drinking was always a social thing and drinking alone has a stigma associated with it. Also, THC use has become much more socially acceptable and that has replaced a lot of alcohol use.
Gen Z still parties and socializes, but their parties are constantly recorded and posted on social media. There's much higher stakes to getting wasted and making a fool out of yourself in the panopticon.
It is a generational thing, but IMO you've got the wrong root cause. Discussion of the dangers of drinking stems from people choosing not to drink, and people are choosing not to drink because they are attending the kinds of social gatherings that are lubricated by alcohol less.
As such, I'm hesitant to point to the decline in alcohol sales as a public health win. If people were drinking less simply because they were choosing to drink less, that's probably a public health win. If people are drinking less because their social lives have evaporated, that's probably really bad.
Your factors are real, but I think both elements are at play. I admit I could be biased as I see gen Z as more disciplined, locked in, from gyms to lifestyle.
Socialisation, or lack thereof, is a great problem for many people and newer generations raised "online", when you get for free at home endless social media distraction.
But even the 20 year olds I've met in bars were likely to stop drinking way sooner than us milenials, which still get plastered, at least on special occasions.
the article also explicitly called out that boomers aging out of the market is a driving factor.
its easy to forget just how freakishly large that cohort is and how they are all steeped in alcohol as the primary way to an altered state.
As they get too old to drink for various health reasons it makes sense that california wine especially would take the hit because boomers also have all the money so they are the ones buying fancy wine.
the younger gens not backfilling the demand contributes but it was never going to be at boomer levels anyway.
Get ready for a lot more stories like this as boomers stop doing all kinds of things... traveling, buying cars etc.
Interesting watch. The article is light on details, as for example it hasn't been put up for a real endurance test even if it's one of the author's worries.
It'd be interesting to know if the watch can sync up with a phone via the usb cable and if the bluetooth component can be removed from the watch while still remaining functional.
I'd also be curious if anyone's working on alternative base board with a slightly beefier MCU inside. The 2.5 MB RAM is likely too small for functional navigation capabilities (the site doesn't appear to advertise any), but it doesn't need too much more RAM to get there.
As a different datapoint Pascal is still taught here in Romania in secondary school just as it was the case 20 years ago.
Bigger problem is that they teach the fundamentals with the abandonware that is turbo pascal instead of using something like the modern Free Pascal Compiler. Which means knowledge of what is possible outside curricula is limited.
Last year I almost was tasked with porting some Pascal codebase to a modern language. Problem was the project had a bus factor of 1, legacy overengineered and would only compile on windows with some proprietary compiler.
Maybe that company would use Claude/Codex or something like that, today, to port the project.
> Bigger problem is that they teach the fundamentals with the abandonware that is turbo pascal instead of using something like the modern Free Pascal Compiler. Which means knowledge of what is possible outside curricula is limited.
FreePascal can compile TP programs with no changes except for the MS-DOS graphics. A student can swap FP for TP and the code will keep running. But yes, I would switch to FP from the start if I were in charge.
> The big question is who is funding the influencer army to gaslight people into thinking AI/data centers will somehow end the world?
It was discussed a while ago on HN, with a more well known source, that I cannot find right now, but on a quick DDG search this is a quick article I could conjure.
Highly suspect trends that can only make one believe it's marketing.
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