Hey, basket weaving and leather work were super fun, and I have all cool ones like shotgun, archery and rifle. The most boring are probably your citizenship badges. Don't knock it till you try it.
Safety was the most boring badge, and quite a bear too. Lots of memorization. It was required afaik too, at least back in the 90s. Had a reputation as blocking advancement to a higher rank, I think Life.
Oh I have the leather working merit badge, I loved it! The particulars of how to work with hide and stamp it was a neat arts-and-crafts activity that I hadn't realized.
Basket weaving was considered the slacker badge (for my troop at least) to work on during summer camp because it had 2 requirements and it generally took a day to complete. I was more interested in rock climbing / canoeing / forestry etc - we're in the wood for a week, why waste it?
Got myself a Nakamichi BX-300, and I'm kinda blown away by how decent it is. With the price old 80's cassette decks go for today, it seems like you could produce a fairly well spec'ed machine for ~300 and have it sell. Agreed though, most of the stuff produced today is rebadged white label junk; go to a thrift store and pick up something second hand, it's probably better.
Cassettes on the other hand may be another story though, I don't know if the chemistry allows for old metal tapes to be produced anymore.
People in my social circle know I like cassettes and often funnel old collections my way. I just received a box with 85 vintage cassettes. Probably 50% will be unplayable from warping of the outer shell (these are often pulled out of an attic or storage with annual cold/heat cycles). A further 20% won't sound very good.
However those that are in good shape typically sound terrific. The quality of the player is key (most currently produced cassette players are truly awful) and older machines can easily be brought back to life in most cases. Sony's old high-end walkman's are also magnificent for playback.
Metal tapes are hard to find new, but i have repurposed used ones to great effect. I would like to emphasize that even the boring stalwart type 1 cassettes can sound really good. The quality of pre-recorded could be incredibly inconsistent fresh out of the wrapper back in the day and I think this gave them a bad reputation.
Some of my vintage Beetles cassettes, and Peter Gabriel cassettes had extremely high production standards and really hold up. "Peter Gabriel's "Security" was digitally mastered and sounds fantastic.
I was watching the new film "Nobody" and the main character steals a hot rod with a cassette player and rocks out while driving. The rattle of the old cassette and sound of it loading really hit a nostalgia nerve but it was plainly cool. This kind of thing appearing in new media might be one reason people are going back.
After the 80s expired, in Germany, long-form audio dramas [1] transitioned from being produced to vinyl to cassette (the transition to CDs happened amazingly late in the 2000s, and for quite some time both cassette and CD were typically released at the same time). Basically, all my audio dramas are cassette or vinyl.
What I was running up to say: whereas the quality of CD masterings typically was consistent and befitting the medium, many of my audio drama cassettes have quite varying physical qualities. It esp. gets noticable with long-running series such as the "three ???" series; over 100s of cassettes, you can make out the slumps and peaks.
It really is a shame that replacement products that are up to par do not really exist. You'd probably have to persuade a local enthusiast or skilled audio electronics repair man to restore an old deck for you unless you can do everything yourself should you get one. At least, the cheap consumable mechanical parts like belts are available for any make and model under the sun, so keeping one deck running with some care is something even non-enthusiasts can do
No, it's not. Having grown up in it, this is a very general gist: Being out ethics, connected with an SP, and probably a few other situation will manifest itself as injury. There isn't really a concept of "sin", just what's best for survival, and the aforementioned actions simply have consequences which endanger yourself and others.
Let's put it this way, yes, people try to audit out cancer and there is an antivax cohort (this is more about external control, distrust of authority outside of Scientology, causing autism, your usual suspects), but it's not necessarily against modern medicine in most ways (obviously a carve out for all things psychiatric). Once that cancer gets into oh shit territory, they are on chemo, and often times too late, but that's a different discussion.
I have about a decade of real professional coding experience. Not going to say I'm excellent, or near the caliber of developer FAANG are looking for, but I can write code. I can count on one finger the number of interviews I've got in the past couple years. Zilch. There is a massive disconnect from what you hear on the news, and the reality, where somebody like me is a pariah and the deafening silence of _any_ interest.
This is just outsourcing 2.0, this time under the guise of a lack of qualified candidates.
What do you mean by "someone like me?" Your reality is not any reality I've experienced.
I work for a company nobody here has heard of, working on a boring tech stack. Absolutely nothing I do day to day would make into any blog post, let alone anything on HN. I, and my ~dozen or so coworkers, get at least one cold recruiter contact a week. Obviously most of them are garbage. But we've all gotten the random contact from an Amazon or Microsoft or Facebook recruiter. The interviews are available.
YC runs workatastartup.com - I submitted my resume and a two-sentence intro to 5 or 6 companies and I think I got an interview at all but one. The interview is the easy part, and if you can't even get that with a decade of programming experience, you're getting caught in some arbitrary filter. Which is to say, respectfully, you're doing something wrong because that's simply not what the market is right now. Or, you're not quite as qualified as you think you are.
I don’t know about cheaper, but Fuji, HP and photography related companies made disks.
Completely unrelated, but the SCSI versions made them pretty much plug and play with tons of hardware. There is an old Roland sampler I have made in ‘88 that uses one, and Zip disks leave floppies completely in the dust. It’s truly night and day on every level.
The rural K-8 elementary school I attended had a lab full of Mac LCIIs up through early 2000, and chose to buy a bunch of Zip drives and use them as external dedicated storage upgrades. I don’t think I ever saw anybody use them for data transfer, just storing stuff like Mario Teaches Typing and DinoPark Tycoon. Us kids were specifically instructed to never try to eject the Zip disks.
Right after I graduated, they found the budget to upgrade to blueberry iMacs. The superintendent/principal was also the only person I ever saw using a G4 Cube in the wild; that Apple salesperson must have done a hell of a job. One of the office secretaries had one of the education-market-only beige all-in-one Power Mac G3s too.
I believe sometime in the mid-2000s, they moved on to a contract with Dell like everybody else. I guess the iPad era has seen Apple regain some education market share, but they used to absolutely dominate schools.
Yeah, it was kids that bought them at a nickel or whatever they were, and were treated as such for a very long time. Same thing can be said of stamps, hot wheels, barbis, baseball cards, pre war Native American handicrafts, CRT monitors, electric guitars... whatever. Even the super high end side of things of art, cars or numismatics had relatively humble origins. Money always cost what the money was worth. Cars were used and tossed; on the luxury end of Duesenbergs or Bugattis being discarded cheaply in their time. The concept of a starving artist has been around for hundreds of years, and the original patrons were picking up impressionist art for cheap.
Collectibility needs a few things in the equation: rarity and here is the _big_ component, some shared nostalgia or cultural history. NFTs don't have that really any of these things.
I would argue too that the scarcity of a collectible needs to be organic for whatever specific reason.
Taking the example of fine art, there is a clear reason that an original piece is unique. When artists release numbered prints, the buyers are aware that the numbering could have continued but the print run was stopped at an arbitrary point. For this reason, they are rarely anywhere near as valuable.
These days “chase” sports cards are often given extremely low print runs of just a few or even one copy. But in my view they will never have the collector appeal of older cards that are rare in large part because few of them happened to survive.
Creating artificial scarcity is an obvious way to manipulate collectors, and NFTs are completely built around that practice.
Absolutely, there is a reason for the scarcity and people will put value on that. One carve out may be things like SUPREME, or some rare Air Force Ones, but that probably boils down the amazing marketing on their part, and may not stand up to the test of time. Clothing is kinda a weird one, as fashion is cyclical and the nature of collecting means you don't use it. The only things I think commanding huge prices are dead stock 1890's Levis or band tour shirts (which I would argue are not so much "fashion", as it more of the cultural relevance of the band). When adjusted for inflation, old high-end haute couture come out to be around what they cost back in the day and this can be said of pretty much all clothing, jeans being an exception.
Eh, it works with video games though. A few companies like Limited Run games release physical copies of digital games banking on artificial scarcity to drive sales, and that scarcity really drives up prices on the secondhand market. This is despite the fact that you can buy the game for $5 on a digital storefront. Something like Celeste for example.
There are other examples where you are right though. Comics in general with variant or the dreaded hologram colors were an attempt to do so, and it's kind of rare to see them valued today.
Researching the full extent of the old AT&T long lines network, the AUTOVON network, L3 carrier systems is a very deep rabbit hole to go down. It's a combination of all the major pre fiber Intercity telecom links in north America plus a lot of amazing military grade underground bunkers in some key locations.
