birb_cromble
No bio...
User ID: 3236
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
13hr ago
Unusual cultivars of beans that you cook with, shipped to your door.
birb_cromble
14hr ago
Do you know why the different brands are incompatible? Is it a chemical thing?
birb_cromble
15hr 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
16hr 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
16hr 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
1d ago
I didn't know I wanted it, but I did
birb_cromble
1d ago
Goddamnit. This is what I get for posting before I'm fully awake
birb_cromble
1d ago
I couldn't get medical clearance for the Peace corps, but I still keep in touch with people who did. From my personal experience, two kinds of people really thrive in the program:
- People who don't have the slightest fucking clue about what to do with their lives.
- Mercenary strivers who have set their eye on government and will ruthlessly optimize for success in that field.
It doesn't sound like you're in the first group, since you mentioned the foreign service.
Are you in the second group? Would you drive four hundred miles to be in a united way photoshoot for a chance to serve as John Thune's personal assistant? Would you claim that a coworker you barely know has a cocaine habit if it meant you were 15% more likely to get a promotion? If so, the peace corps might be great for you.
birb_cromble
1d ago
Every time I hear somebody recommend an ARM, I reflexively think of the 2022 rate spike, and the Volcker shock. How did you get over that? Interest rate risk is scary.
I don't know if the post you cite is really the best example of this site's Length Problem, but I'm glad you brought up the Length Problem more generally.
When I started reading /r/slatestarcodex's culture war thread, posts were long for a reason. Posts were frequently written to cover current events. Authors generally understood that their audience might not have the full history and context of the event at their fingertips, so the better posts would frequently provide information to the reader about what was happening, what events lead to the current situation, who the players were, and why the topic was important enough to bring up. That framework helped expose me to a lot of world events, history, and concepts that I otherwise would not have seen at the time. It created a lot of long posts, but the length was a byproduct of an attempt to maximize understanding.
More and more, post length here feels performative. There's not a lot of context; most posters seem to assume that every reader is exactly as plugged in as they are. The broader history is gone. Sure, we know from the post that Jaan van der Grindl went and Said a Thing On Twitter Again, but who the hell is Jaan van der Grindl? Is he somebody in a position of power? Does he have some unique influence over the broader population? Hell if I know. If I click on the link, I'll find out that he's railing about immigrants or birth rate. Awesome. Now I have to figure out if this is something van der Grindl says regularly or if it's out of character for him. Did something happen recently to make this relevant? Hell if I know. Now I get to read bad machine translations of Dutch news articles to try and find out. Maybe I'll get lucky and learn that there are protests in Europe again. What makes these different? Protesting is constant over there. The sense that the modal poster is trying to maximize understanding is gone.
Beyond that, the discussion space has largely collapsed. You'll see topics about Catholicism, declining birth rates, AI, immigration, and... that's broadly it. Somebody is going to reflexively say to "be the change that you want to see in the world", but believe me, I've tried. There's not much engagement outside of a handful of well worn paths.
As a result, I've broadly retreated into the other threads on the board, where people actually talk about things that might be new and interesting. For example, did you know there's a highly coveted waiting list for luxury beans? I sure as hell didn't. It's a window into a culture that's completely alien to mine. There's probably all kinds of room for a culture war post about that. Right now I'm trying to write a post about how Fender is in the middle of a lawsuit that's threatening to upend the entire midlife crisis industry, but I don't know if I'll bother to finish it. If I provide all the necessary context, I fear nobody will particularly care, because they're all busy talking about how AI will fix the European fertility crisis by making all the immigrants Catholic, or something.
Hell if I know what to do about it, though. It seems like it's what the regulars want.
birb_cromble
2d ago
I understand. Guess I can't ask who these non-woke publishers are, without infringing on your opsec?
Look for smaller publishers who release a lot of mil-sf.
I'm wondering why you are drawn to writing and getting published. Is it like, a need?
I like to entertain, and if I'm going to do it with my writing, I need an audience.
birb_cromble
2d ago
I'm going to try to avoid culture warring here, but I filtered my submission list pretty heavily. Most of the outlets I've worked with in the past are having a hard time right now.
A lot of them went full woke in 2020. This meant that unless you could assert some kind of special status, you got put on the bottom of the pile. This sucked for me because I can't claim a special status, and it sucked for the publisher because their existing readers stopped buying, and the new stable of authors didn't pull in the crowds that the publishers expected. The revenue loss meant they couldn't accept as many submissions, which lowered my odds even further.
Concurrently, the AI content tsunami over the last few years hit the industry like a freight train. Historically, the fact that writing takes more effort than reading shielded the industry from bad actors. Once generative text turned that convention on its head, it was almost impossible to get a signal through the noise. Bigger buyers had to shut down submissions for months as they figured out what to do with tens of thousands of nonsense manuscripts pouring in every day.
Thankfully, I've found a handful of publishers who are:
- Technically proficient enough to put basic filtering in place.
- Aggressively politically incorrect, but still left-coded enough that publishing with them doesn't brand me with a political scarlet letter.
It's a small market, so I probably won't get the chance to publish often, but low odds in a small market are better than zero odds in a big market.
birb_cromble
2d ago
Given relatively high mortgage interest rates over the last several years, my partner and I have been been delaying purchasing a shared home and have spent the time building up a stronger financial position instead.
Watching the behavior of the 10 year Treasury, it looks like we're going to be stuck between six and seven percent for the foreseeable future, so I should probably start planning. Are there any good rules of thumb for choosing between a 15 and 30 year mortgage these days? I hate debt, so I gravitate to the 15 in all cases, but I also know that's a preference, and not based on anything rational.
In the last couple years, I've had a pretty bad run of luck with open fiction submissions, after being fairly successful before that. I recently wrote an original piece for an anthology that got shortlisted, and now formally accepted. I'm pretty excited about it
birb_cromble
3d ago
Remember that submission I had shortlisted? It got accepted!
birb_cromble
3d ago
I feel like if I read it on release, it would have been an incredibly controversial mindfuck of a read. These days? Not so much.
birb_cromble
3d ago
How is that going for you so far? Sadly your timezones don't line up with mine.
And the more narrative elements they add, the more I dislike the writing.
For all the faults in the writing, the character of Kayex more than makes up for it. He's one of the first mechanicus characters I've seen that really nails the religiosity and pure wonder of the machine cult. Things that 40k would normally paint as malice come out as alien benevolence, and I love it.
birb_cromble
3d ago
My fondest memory of a fireworks show was in Maryland
Oddly, both of my best fireworks memories also happened in Maryland.
For the first, I was at a lacrosse camp on the eastern shore, and a couple was having a wedding at the same location. They were celebrating with a fireworks display, and they were generous enough to let us kids watch as well. The thing was, they didn't want us mixing with the wedding party, so they placed us directly under the display. I think we might have been thirty feet from the mortars, at most. The experience is completely different at that range. The detonations are tangible.
For the second, a couple of friends and I slipped away from home on New Year's Eve and went to the inner harbor in Baltimore. I sat on the water's edge watching fireworks reflect on the bay, with a pretty girl curled up against me for warmth. It was one of the first times in my life when I realized that I could get away from everything at home and things could be better.
birb_cromble
4d ago
the only people who actively dislike the guy are rabid MAGA who aren't going to vote for a Democrat if it's the second coming of Christ
The Greenberg family may also have a few opinions.
birb_cromble
5d ago
Spending is $1524.36 lower than this time last year. I had a few quarterly and yearly bills come due that bumped up my spending more than I would have liked. Nonetheless, I preservere.
birb_cromble
6d ago
I'm going to second the credit card comment. Not having a credit history made things a lot harder for me when I went out on my own. If you can help set that up, it will be a boon.
birb_cromble
7d ago
No kids. Partner can't have any.
birb_cromble
7d ago
When the game first released, you had maybe 3 talents you could pick, and you were allowed to pick one for about four tiers over 30 levels. Combined with no weapon customization, it was a pretty bland experience.
Eventually they gave each class one skill point per level, and a sprawling skill tree (not path of exile bad) that allowed you to customize your build. Two veterans can play completely differently now. You can also save builds and swap them between missions.
After that, they added weapon customization. You can level up weapons, as well as swap perks and blessings if you've earned enough "weapon XP*, either by playing missions or sacrificing weapons of the same type.
They've also added three new game modes: havoc, which is the "real" endgame, but really requires a four man group, mortis trials, which is a wave mode that has roguelike elements, and expeditions, which suck.
I'd honestly hold off on Skitarii until it goes on sale. It doesn't feel like it fills any truly unique niche.
More options
Context Copy link