rdj

A caveat being and mentioned in the article, that sailors didn't have access to the safe water of lakes and streams, thus beer. And as someone mentions below, it's safer to drink low alcohol beer than months old (untreated) water. I can see why people jump to the conclusion that beer was safer than water...and it makes for good cocktail hour small talk.

The old machinery (rose engine) and technique (guilloché) sent me down a pleasant rabbit hole, but the tldr:

Self-taught watchmaker turns hobby into profession and hopes to reintroduce "(mostly) made in America" watches. They retail in the tens of thousands of dollars.

The paper does seem to address this:

"Several previous evaluations (Ioannidis, 2021a; Levin et al., 2020; O’Driscoll et al., 2021; Brazeau et al., 2020) have already synthesized information on age-stratified estimates of IFR. Most of those used data from early published studies, and these tended to have information from mostly hard hit countries, thus potentially with inflated IFR estimates. Moreover, several analytical and design choices for these reviews and data syntheses can be contested (Ioannidis, 2021b) and many more potentially informative seroprevalence studies have been published since then."

If it’s security training for developers, architects, and technical teams take a look into the CTF style trainings (hands on keyboard, hacking exercises). We’ve turned it into an annual event (leaderboards, trophies, bragging rights, swag, pizza, the works) and the participants not only loved it, they have started to pregame, plan teams and held live debriefs where they talk through the experience and where it actually impacts their code.

We actually discussed a small train and decided to go with horse and sleigh next year, mostly because of upkeep and the ability to reuse that portion of the property for other things in the off season.

You must have tapped into our meeting...that's on the plan for next fall!

For us, the biggest issue is trying to forecast what additional non-agricultural projects we may be starting in the near future that would be adversely impacted by a specific piece of land being tied up for 10 years. For example, we're building an event center (weddings, meetings, etc) that will also include outdoor space. As we work through what that will be like, we have to anticipate how that outdoor space would be used if there are trees there or not. Other than that specific example, we try to anticipate sales volumes and then map out the experience...then order, plant and maintain new trees accordingly.

This gets into a bigger conversation about business models. For us, we are selling an experience that includes a tree. Artificial trees will not be able to replace that. But selling an experience is a low volume game and the revenue has to either be made up in price or via the addition of alternative revenue streams.

Right now, trees and gift shop.

Our place currently has limited attractions with several planned for next year. There is a gift shop that drives significant revenue, but was closed this year due to COVID. We offer free hot chocolate (small disposable cup). For the gift shop we have a multifaceted approach which includes buying things wholesale, making items in our shop, and partnering with other makers. Drilling and bailing is included in the price of the tree.

We are currently running the numbers to prepare for things like food/drink truck, sleigh rides, reindeer petting zoo, and some events.

It's not an issue on our farm. We have eyes on most of the property most of the time. We also don't stock any precuts, so a thief has to come on the property and do some amount of work to steal a single tree.