wine thinker (robertjoseph on Bluesky)

Offbeat views from wine critic-turned industry-analyst (Meininger's) producer (le Grand Noir, K'AVSHIRI). Consultant Georgia, Moldova

[The_Buyer @TheBuyer11]

In the 1st a two part in-depth interview the @wstauk ceo's @WSTA_Miles sets out why it's better equipped than ever to meet the needs of its members & ensure it has the right policies, strategy and services to lead the industry forward in the years to come. https://t.co/rxkCk5qyGo

[Prof. Katharine Hayhoe @KHayhoe]

This article says climate change is “believed to have played a role” in the UK's extreme heat this week.

As a climate scientist, let me fact-check that.

First, climate change is not a religion. No belief is required. It is about evidence.

And the evidence has been crystal clear for more than two decades: climate change is making heat waves hotter, longer, more frequent and more dangerous.

In fact, science has advanced far beyond saying climate change merely “played a role.” Today, we can quantify how much more likely and how much hotter climate change made a specific event.

Here's the bottom line:

Climate is changing. Humans are responsible. And we are experiencing the impacts now. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that solutions already exist, and the majority of people care - 89%, around the world!

But meaningful action depends on helping people understand not just what is happening: we need to know how it affects our lives (this heat wave being example A today) and what we can do about it.

That’s the opportunity this reporting missed.

https://t.co/vYfPDKcWWf

[Alex Prompter @alex_prompter]

Let me trace the timeline here because nobody's connecting it.

Step 1: Scrape the entire internet. Every book, every article, every conversation, every piece of art, every forum post. Do it without asking. Do it without paying.

Step 2: Train a model on all of it. Call it "artificial intelligence."

Step 3: Go to BlackRock's Infrastructure Summit and announce: "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter."

Step 3 is where you sell people's own knowledge back to them. On a meter.

They took the collective output of human thought, compressed it into a model, and now they want to charge you by the token to access a version of what you and everyone you know already created.

One Reddit user put it perfectly: "They stole all this data from us, the people, our life's work, creativity, art, by devouring the internet and blowing through all copyright laws. Now they want to sell it back to us in the form of a utility."

Imagine if someone photocopied every book in the public library, burned the library down, and then opened a subscription service for the copies.

That's the metered intelligence business model.

And they're pitching it to infrastructure investors as though they invented water.

[Rohit @ai_rohitt]

🚨 Anthropic just showed a 27-minute workshop on how to actually do prompts for Claude.

Taught by the people who built it.

Free. No registration. No paywall.

I've seen $300 courses that don't cover what they teach in the first 8 minutes.

Watch it and bookmark it now.

[The_Buyer @TheBuyer11]

How far are you using AI in your business? Here Kevin Shaw design agency @strangerstuff explains the ins and outs of how it is using AI, and why ultimately when it comes to the world of label and brand design we humans still, thankfully, have the edge. https://t.co/qr8XehlXZY

[Chez Bruce @ChezBruce]

Great Margaret River producer. I find it hard to believe these wines appear not to be imported into the UK. Someone missing a trick here. Love Domaine Naturaliste.

[wine thinker (robertjoseph on Bluesky) @robertjoseph]

There are all kinds of wine producer - from small family estates and cooperatives, to grand chateaux and corporations.

Who's making money?

https://t.co/ZO4X11XIHA

[wine thinker (robertjoseph on Bluesky) @robertjoseph]

The bread really is brilliant. (I'm writing this eating the best pain au raisins of my life)

And he runs a charitable operation, allowing customers to buy loaves (for €1) which are then given, with a can of paté, to some of the city's many homeless

[wine thinker (robertjoseph on Bluesky) @robertjoseph]

One of the rules of living in France is to have a favourite boulangerie that you *swear* is the finest in the quartier, even if you have to go out of your way to shop there.

Louis Lamour's @Bouboulam on Rue Ravaz in Bordeaux ticks those boxes for me.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Paris has removed the paving from its city hall square and transformed it into an urban forest.

[wine thinker (robertjoseph on Bluesky) @robertjoseph]

AI is a tool.

The most sophisticated tool any of us has ever used

You don't need to read the instructions, any more than you needed to read the handbook for your car or the leaflet that came with your food mixer

But doing so might just save you a lot of time

[Rahul @sairahul1]

Two Anthropic engineers spent 24 minutes exposing every Claude Code feature you didn't know existed.

Most people will scroll past this. Don't be most people.

[The_Buyer @TheBuyer11]

Roero, a region that has been a 'dark kitchen' for Barolo and Barbaresco, is now being given the credit it deserves. For a buyer, it offers a better by-the-glass price, faster list rotation and stronger cash flow. Jason Millar reports. Click https://t.co/HxRjyGLljt @WinesofRoero

[wine thinker (robertjoseph on Bluesky) @robertjoseph]

@alifarhat79 Brilliant

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

California's Central Valley produces 80% of the world's almonds. Each almond requires 3.2 gallons of actual irrigation water to grow. Not rainfall. Actual tap water pumped from aquifers.

One gallon of almond milk requires 162 gallons of irrigation water. Compare that to dairy milk at 8 gallons of tap water per gallon, with the rest being rainfall that falls on pasture anyway.

But here's where it gets properly grim. Almonds bloom for exactly three weeks in February. During those three weeks, California needs every pollinating bee in North America transported to the Central Valley or the crop fails entirely.

Commercial beekeepers truck in 31 billion honeybees. That's two-thirds of America's entire managed bee population, all concentrated in one valley for three weeks. The bees are packed into trucks, driven across the country, dumped into almond groves drenched in pesticides, worked to exhaustion, then packed up and shipped to the next crop.

The mortality rate is catastrophic. Beekeepers report losing 30 to 50% of their hives annually. That's billions of bees dead. Not from natural causes. From being used as disposable pollination machines for your almond milk.

The pesticides don't help. Almond groves are sprayed with neonicotinoids which scramble bee navigation systems, fungicides which weaken their immune systems, and herbicides which eliminate the wildflowers they'd normally forage on between almond blooms.

Meanwhile the aquifer depletion is permanent. The Central Valley has sunk 28 feet in some areas from groundwater extraction. That water took 10,000 years to accumulate. It's being drained in decades for almond milk.

Your vegan latte killed more bees and used more water than a year's worth of dairy milk. But it's got "plant-based" on the label so you're definitely saving the planet.

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

This is the best thing you’ll see today

Carl Sagan explains how Eratosthenes of Cyrene, the chief librarian at the Library of Alexandria, deduced that the Earth was round and calculated its circumference 2,200 years ago.

[wine thinker (robertjoseph on Bluesky) @robertjoseph]

@MartinSLewis @Mjhew_1975 Precisely

[wine thinker (robertjoseph on Bluesky) @robertjoseph]

"Maybe the real question isn’t “how do we demystify wine” it’s “how do we make it more fun”.

First class

[The_Buyer @TheBuyer11]

Corkable's Tom Planer says using fun & emotion has to be the way forward if the wine industry is to cut through to the mainstream consumer - as @tomgilbey has successfully done. If meerkats can do it for insurance why can’t we make it happen in wine? https://t.co/brzIEBS1gj

[I am Ken @Ikennect]

Have you ever seen a bubble freeze?
I lived through Pennsylvania winters as a child
I can't believe I never saw someone do this

[Matthew Kupfer @Matthew_Kupfer]

Great quote from this WSJ story that, I think, actually explains the shambolic nature of Trump's DOJ more broadly:

“The better an attorney is, the more process-oriented they are going to be, and that is in direct opposition to what Trump wants, which is someone who is outcome-oriented,” said Sarah Isgur, who served as a spokeswoman for [former AG Jeff] Sessions at the Justice Department. “He can never find a great attorney general because, by definition, they can’t be a great lawyer.” https://t.co/LXLoYLFmRE

[wine thinker (robertjoseph on Bluesky) @robertjoseph]

Great Post
Another Malcolm - Tucker - would certainly approve

[Malcolm Nance @MalcolmNance]

CONSEQUENCES FOR DUMBASSES: You are an F'ing idiot. If we invade Greenland we go to war with 31 nations. NATO stays together but without us. Its HQ is in Brussels, not the Pentagon. Our global reach across the Atlantic will end with our closest refueling base in Israel or Egypt. 100,000 American soldiers will be forced to board civil airliners and sent home or be taken as POWs/Detainee sWITHOUT WEAPONS OR EQUIPMENT. Canada will close its airspace and sea space. US Ballistic Missile Defense at Pettufik and Fylingdales ENDS, which means we see nothing except what space sensors can see. US Intelligence is reduced to Fort Meade, Ft Gordon and Colorado Springs and Hawaii. CIA spies will be rolled up by their former friends in HOURS. NO ONE WILL SHARE ANYTHING WITH US. ALL GLOBAL SHIPPING WILL BE CLOSED TO US. Denmark operates the largest shipping company in the world. SIX OUT OF TEN global shipping companies are in Europe ... Worlds Biggest container ships? DENMARK!
Australia, NZ, Canada are Commonwealth so they will cut ties with us or be neutral too.

PS Denmark & locals tun all life support and generators at Pittufik and Canada resupplies it ... all 150 US Spece force personnel would become POWs to guys on sleds. FYI They have troops there now and 35,000 Caribou hunting rifles.
FYI France and UK have nukes. Hundreds of them so you cannot intimidate them with that.
Oh and they collapse the US economy by sanctioning us and selling off 2.3 Trillion in US treasuries simultaneously. Also no Botox, Ozempic or insulin. Its made in Denmark.
Ya fucking dope.