birb_cromble
No bio...
User ID: 3236
birb_cromble
18hr ago
Is lionfish any good? Cleaning them seems like such a pain in the ass that I've never tried.
birb_cromble
18hr ago
I think it's more likely that an old man who flew a lot developed blood clots, but at this point I can't confidently rule out the alternative.
birb_cromble
19hr ago
I very nearly took a job with a self driving car startup a decade ago. After seeing a little about how the sausage was made, I've been happy to live so far out in the sticks that it'll be decades before self driving gets any traction.
birb_cromble
19hr ago
I'm in a weird place right now where I intend to relocate and buy a house at some unknown future date. I'm building a... I guess you could call it a "risk ladder" for that money.
Most of it is in an ultra short term Treasury ETF. The next tier is state specific municipal bonds and AAA CLOs. After that it's BINC and JSI.
I'm about ready to move up a risk tier, and I'm plotting out what the next steps are.
I think my immediate next tier between JSI and SCHD is something that involves equities rather than debt. Something like JEPI or SPYI seems to fit the bill fairly well. I'm also looking at PFF, but I don't love the Oracle exposure.
birb_cromble
20hr ago
I guess I could buy that in the "everything is political" sense, but what does that leave? Sports betting?
birb_cromble
21hr ago
What are some of your predictions for the five years, and why do you think you're going to be right?
Hard mode engaged
- No politics
- No war
- No AI
- No immigration
I'm confident that low waisted jeans are going to make a raging comeback in the next couple of years. Not only is the cyclical nature of fashion heading in that direction, but the prevalence of GLP-1 products and will negate the unspoken reason that high-waisted mom jeans got popular.
birb_cromble
1d ago
I'm in a weird place with AI, professionally. They're pretty much worthless in my job for agentic work, but as a better search engine they probably provide low single digit productivity gains to my work as programmer.
Unfortunately, any gain they provide to me, personally, are fucking obliterated but the damage my coworkers inflict on the codebase with it. They uncritically trust it, and they blindly approve AI PRs. At this point, I'm spending more time unfucking the output of gpt and Gemini then I am actually doing original work.
Management is thrilled at how many new PRs and lines of code these new ai-native programmers are creating.
birb_cromble
1d ago
I'd probably start by using Mitchell v. City of Henderson as a template. Start with a heavily armed, hierarchically structured federal agency with an unambiguous power to kill. Have them take over a home for a surveillance operation. Argue that it's not a 3rd amendment violation because of semantic games about what a soldier is.
Boom. Instant drama. Maybe shoot a dog for added pathos.
birb_cromble
1d ago
What are your opinions on covered call funds, like JEPI, vs traditional income investments like bonds or dividend stocks? If you have a shorter time horizon than would be appropriate for something like a whole market fund, they seem to sit at a nice risk/return point. On the other hand, their returns seem to come in the form of ordinary income, which isn't ideal for taxation.
birb_cromble
2d ago
I waited tables and tended bar for years.
I'm thinking more about the restaurant ownership side of things. Unless you own the property, your landlord is going to jack up your rent every year so you're just barely not broke. I know a handful of people who have left the industry for exactly that reason. I might be able to make the economics work with a food truck, but that's about it.
birb_cromble
2d ago
My partner and I are booked for a family dinner tonight, so I made some fresh sourdough bread and hand churned some butter to take with us.
Sometimes I wish that the economics of food service made sense. I don't think I'd mind the long hours and hard work.
Spending is $2,916.38 lower than this day last year. Once the home repair bill goes through this month, I'll probably be even. I hate that I keep losing progress, but at the same time, I've dealt with some very expensive medical bills, home repair costs, and travel due to illnesses in the family without having to cut my savings. I guess I can call that a win.
birb_cromble
5d ago
Firearms are terrible for that kind of thing. Colt, Springfield armory, Kimber, the list goes on and on.
It really seems like "expensive hobby" brands are the worst offenders.
birb_cromble
5d ago
The thing about really big bubbles, and I’m not in any sense calling the top, is that the final run-up is the true test of the investor
I read a biography of Isaac Newton a few years ago, and this is pretty much how he financially destroyed himself. He invested during a bubble, exited his positions at a tidy profit, then watched in envy as his friends with a higher risk tolerance made bank as prices kept going up. He eventually bought back in and things almost immediately collapsed. It really drove home the value of pre-committing to a strategy.
birb_cromble
5d ago
If you ever find that link again, I'd love to see it
birb_cromble
5d ago
At least on the bass guitar side, things have really changed at the lower price points. It used to be that a $300 bass was barely useable. These days, the advent of CNC machining and better QA means that a $300 bass today is probably nicer than a bass that cost $800 back in the 90s. If you're willing to replace the tuners and pickups, it'll compare favorably to an older MIA model.
birb_cromble
6d ago
I'd honestly hold off on Skitarii until it goes on sale. It doesn't feel like it fills any truly unique niche.
It feels like MBA-types are very keen about recognizing a brand-name that has a positive reputation (even or perhaps ESPECIALLY if the brand is all they have, they don't own any manufacturing capacity), and then 'rug-pulling' the fans
Fender is notorious for this. They tend to reshuffle their product lines every year, and this inevitably results in a product line disappearing, only for a new product line with a nearly identical name appearing one quality tier down. It's reached the point where people are starting to catch on, because a lot of buyers on the used market are demanding a manufacturing date now.
birb_cromble
6d ago
Unusual cultivars of beans that you cook with, shipped to your door.
birb_cromble
6d ago
Do you know why the different brands are incompatible? Is it a chemical thing?
birb_cromble
6d ago
You're not exactly wrong, but I'm somewhat concerned about what kind of damage they can do on the way down. They've been doing a lot of acquisitions.
Here's a list of what I can remember off the top of my head.
- Genz Benz (dead)
- SWR (dead)
- Sunn (dead)
- Presonus (declining)
- Ovation
- Charvel
- Hamer (dead)
- Jackson
- Reverb
- G&L (dead)
- Bigsby
- Groove tubes
They're pretty voracious.
birb_cromble
6d ago
How is the volatility and total return compared to just investing it in some broad market fund like VT? Is it worth the effort, or is this more of a "hobby that makes money" thing?
birb_cromble
6d ago
For those of you who play guitar, you have probably played a stratocaster at one point or another. Or maybe you haven't. The "stratocaster" shape (also called the S-body) is one of the most copied and cloned electric guitar designs in history. Back in 2009, Fender tried to trademark the body shape in the United states and failed. However, Fender recently went back on the offensive and filed a new suit in a German court.
The Düsseldorf court - regarded as one of the most influential intellectual property courts in Germany and Europe - confirmed that the Stratocaster® body design qualifies as a copyrighted work of applied art, reflecting original creative expression rather than purely functional design. The ruling aligns with a growing body of EU and German case law recognising that iconic product designs can benefit from full copyright protection, beyond traditional design rights. Crucially, it confirms that offering infringing products for sale into Germany or other countries of the EU is sufficient to establish liability, regardless of where a manufacturer or seller is based.
As a result of the ruling, Yiwu Philharmonic Musical Instruments Co. is prohibited from manufacturing, offering, or distributing guitars featuring the Stratocaster® body shape in Germany and the EU. Any future violations may result in fines of up to €250,000 per infringement, or up to six months’ imprisonment if fines cannot be enforced, subject to statutory limits.
The defendant did not show up, and it appears that Fender has won the German equivalent of a summary judgement.
Why is this in the culture war, you ask? Mostly because it represents another crack in the monolithic corporate-mass media culture that defined the United states from circa 1950 to 2010.
Leo Fender launched the Fender Electric Instrument Company in 1946, and created several iconic stringed instrument designs between 1950 and 1954, including the Telecaster guitar, Precision Bass, and Stratocaster guitar. The Stratocaster, in particular, set the musical world on fire due to its heavily contoured body, flexible pickup arrangement, and and tremolo bridge. Guitarists like Dick Dale, Jimi Hendrix, Eddie Van Halen, and Stevie Ray Vaughan took the instrument and created brand new, incredibly popular styles of music.
Things were going great for the strat, but the Fender Electric Instrument company wasn't having the best time. Leo Fender sold his interest in the company to the Columbia Records Distribution Corporation or CBS. Musicians derided instruments produced under the new ownership, and "pre-CBS" instruments developed a mystique that made them highly coveted prizes.
Eventually, CBS decided to unload the Fender brand, and a car dealership-turned private equity company called Servco Pacific Capital picked it up. This launched ushered in a cambrian explosion of product lines meant to ruthlessly segment the market into every possible price point. Around this time, Fender started running into a real problem. It turned out that other people could also make guitars. Japanese companies started undercutting Fender with clones of their most popular products. Some companies would attempt to double down on quality, but not Fender. Instead, they bought out the biggest clone company and rebranded them as their own "Squier" product line, turned to aggressive IP protection (securing a trademark on their headstock design in 1991), and engaged in a public marketing blitz to make sure that the musical community understood value of a Real Fender™ over an inferior clone. This worked pretty well for a while, but eventually Fender started seeing real competition from above and below. While they could buy out low-end competitors, all it did was incentivize more clone builders to spring up in countries across the world with cheap labor. Indonesia, Korea, Sri Lanka, and China all started cranking out Fender clones at a fraction of the prices Fender was charging. At the same time, "boutique" builders like Suhr started nibbling away at the high end. Fender started losing its mystique. When a $300 guitar with a $50 setup could rival a pre-CBS guitar for ergonomics and tone, enthusiastic amateurs stopped dreaming about the day that they could get a Real Fender™. Instead of shelling out for a Real Fender™, serious musicians (and rich guys) would go straight for the boutique builds instead.
The end result is that the Fender brand is a shadow of what it used to be, largely propped up by a shrinking-but-affluent market, while their leadership is either unwilling or unable to branch out.
The Stratocaster suit, in particular, offends me in a way that's somewhat hard to articulate. If you've ever built a slab-bodied instrument before, you start to realize that there are only so many ways to accomplish the task. If you want an instrument that's comfortable to play while sitting, you need to cut a contour that matches the curve of a person's thigh. If you want to play high notes, you need to cut material out below the neck. You need a projection above the neck to attach the strap at the instrument's balance point, but you don't want to add too much weight, which results in a "horn". You need room for electronics, and you probably want a contour at the top for comfort while playing as well. In the end, there are only a handful of designs that can flow from those requirements. Unless you're a psychopath like Ned Steinberger, whatever you build is probably going to end up looking similar to a strat.
Fender isn't the only company out there suffering from a similar malady. In fact, it's almost identical to the trajectory of the Harley Davidson corporation. Both became aspirational, iconic symbols of Americana. Both started banking on tradition and mystique, while trying and failing to hold back the tide by buying out competition (see: Buell). Both they eventually ended up trapped by their own early success.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately, as I drive back and forth to band practice. I see far fewer motorcycles on the road than I did a decade ago. Musicians still exist, but the community of "instrument players" around me is going increasingly gray. Young people generally don't create music, or they stick to various flavors of electronica that they can produce on their own.
At the same time, the entire concept of "brand" has been eroding. In my youth, a brand generally traded on its reputation and relied on customer goodwill for its continued existence. Broadly speaking, 80s and 90s America trusted "brands". We hung out at the Dairy Queen. When somebody got a new guitar, we'd be excited to hear how that slick new Stratocaster sounded. A guy with a Harley was the coolest guy we knew. Craftsman tools were the last set you'd ever have to buy. Corporate consumer culture was mercantile, but at least it felt like you were getting something out of it.
In 2026, the American consumer/vendor relationship seems broken. Everything is owned by an increasingly small number of conglomerates who wear different skin suits to con suckers into buying from them, and not from those other guys, who are also them. It's starting to feel like a home-grown version of Chaebols, or Zaibatsu, and people are checking out.
This has has some real downstream effects. In a secular, essentially constructed nation like the US, the necessity of commerce and the prosperity that flows from it is one of the few universal experiences that citizens of this nation have. It feels like we're losing our lingua franca, however thin and materialistic it might be. At the same time, I can't tell what is cause and what is effect. Are the "lifestyle" companies all converging into a sleezy car dealer modality because it's efficient, or because Americans have stopped engaging with the idea of "lifestyle"? If it's the latter, is it because of a broader rejection of materialism, or because we're all fuckin' broke?
I don't think I have any answer to this, but if there's a moral to this story, maybe don't buy a Fender.
birb_cromble
7d ago
I didn't know I wanted it, but I did
I live out in the middle of nowhere. I assume it'll take a year or two to make it out this far.
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