The components are the main upgrades, pickups are easy to change after the fact. Pickups, bridge, and tuners are the main things on electrics in my experience. PRS wrap around bridges or good quality floyd rose bridges for example. Locking tuners and a roller nut is another example. Depending on the sound you want active pickups or coil taps or stacked single coils.
Main three things I want to be better designed is better/easier tuning and tuning stability, quality and versatility of sound, and playability. Neck profile and construction is a another example. Set neck (Les Paul and PRS), bolt on (Tele and Strat), or Neck Through (Jackson, ibanez) all have different advantages.
To me the C/C++/Rust example fits pretty well, Leo's Broadcaster is completely different sounding and playing than a custom built strat or high end PRS. Humbucking pickups as just an example. The Broadcaster had terrible feedback issues at high volume for example and a modern guitar should never have that issue unless you intend for it to feedback. Broadcaster is rough design, few features, and easy to make mistakes on alot like C. Les Pauls and Strats add a ton of features from the Tele/Broadcaster and can be easier to play but can also are more complex in there setup/design like C++. Modern designs are even more complex (active eq/pickups, locking tuners and roller nuts, floyd rose bridges etc...) but just as powerful but setting them up is a steep learning curve at times just like Rust.
Oh for acoustic, I really like the Blueridge guitars and Seagull guitars. Seagull are made in Canada with pretty great materials and designs but much cheaper than most American made instruments.
I'm more of a high end custom guy for acoustics, in my experience you get what you pay for MUCH more on acoustics. If an electric plays well, you can make up a lot of sound from the amp (tube or modeling if you need variety), good pedals, and aftermarket pickups. Acoustics sound great when you play them or not. I always tell people to spend on the Acoustic and balance it out with electric.
Depends on the type of music you play, Overall, I find PRS designs among the better but some find them sterile. Also the crazy flame top designs can be super expensive and many find them over the top. That said, the bridge, pickups, and tuners are all examples of better designs than the big three. Wrap around bridges for example, hold tune better, are easier to setup and intonate, and are easier on the strings than the traditional stop tail style. Locking tuners are a big advance also.
Instead of brands because those are often tied up with the look of an instrument, I'd recommend you look at the individual components. Locking tuners, wrap around bridge or floyd rose (not a cheap knock version), coil splitting or active pickups or other pickup advancements.
I'm a couple years removed from playing so this might be out of date but I really liked the PRS SE line, the mid-pro level Jackson line, and some of the mid-priced G&L line (Leo Fender's second company and set of designs). I tended to play blues and metal so my selections really fit that style.
I came here to type this! As a former (sads) guitarist the big three(Strat, Tele, Les Paul) electric designs are all flawed and compromised designs IMO. Don't get me wrong I love the sound and feel of the better examples but many guitars are far better designed now. It's quite a bit like C vs C++ vs Rust. C is still usable and for the right player (programmer) it's a powerful instrument. Much like a tele was called a truth machine for a long time, meaning the limited design doesn't forgive mistakes very well much like C.
Not a photographer but I'm a fly fisherman and the idea of living on a boat and going up and done the coast to fish is a common daydream of mine. Starlink definitely makes that a more likely possibility.
Only if you use traditional farming. Hydroponics, Aeroponics, and Aquaponics use far less resources (more startup capital but far less inputs), can grow year round (assuming indoor grows), and has 5-10x the yield per sq ft.
>>> It takes 5+ acres in a decently arable region with fertilizer to feed one person. By the time you're providing for a significant fraction of your caloric intake, it ceases to be a "garden".
This is incorrect, it takes around 1/2 an acre if it's vegetarian or 1.5 acres including chickens/ducks for meat and eggs. That's using a traditional organic farming. If you use Hydroponics (Plants grown in water with no soil) or Aeroponics (Hydroponics grown in towers) or Aquaponics (Hydroponics with aquaculture, where the fish provide both protein and the fertilizer for the plants) the yield is dramatically higher (5x-10x per sq ft) can be done year round and indoors. It's not a perfect solution, it takes knowledge to setup and run, a very small capital investment for startup, and a constant power source. That said it IS commercially viable, you can already today buy produce produced this way in almost any grocery store, and it's viable for home production. I personally have several systems running in my apartment ranging from off the shelf commercial systems (AeroGarden Back to the Roots...) to custom built aquaponics systems. On a pure dollar level it's more expensive per lb of food, no doubt but within reason I don't care about that. I grow better and fresher food and most importantly I control the supply chain.
We can and should use these kind of technologies to replace as much of the modern agriculture system as we possibly can. No of the this mentions the MASSIVE environmental improvement that switching to these systems would make, which is reason enough to do it.
That's been my strategy as well, smaller focused subreddit's and instagram only following a few accounts and hashtag's I'm interested in. No influencers or celeb's. I've been FAR healthier since I started that 5 months ago. I'll likely never go back.
That's great and all, probably true for a ton of developers. Certainly is and has been for me. Now show us how that's actually useful, the majority of jobs aren't building useful important things. It's building some dumbass startup idea that is very likely to fail or writing insurance backend code or some generic web form that NO ONE gives two shits about. I'm not angry at you, don't want this to come off that way. This industry is fantastic in many ways, great salary, skill based, no hard labor, etc..... But just like most jobs it's a very lucky few that get to work on something they think is important.
Maybe 20+ years have beaten me down but it's so rare that a job that matters is out there and available. It's so depressing how many web apps for really bad ideas are considered "engineering" careers. Maybe that's what I should build a way to find engineering jobs for causes/things that matter to people. I know I'd love to have a job board/DB to search for Climate Change based positions.
Actually if you look at no-till and permaculture it 100% can have the same or higher yields per acre. The process of farming also doesn't have to be mind-numbing in this case. The combination of AgTech/Robotics and no-till/permaculture could produce vastly larger yields vs Organic traditional farming.
That's for soil based farming, personally I think Hydroponics (raising plants in water with no soil), Aeroponics (Hydroponics but grown in vertical towers), and Aquaponics (closed ecosystem using fish to fertilize the water the plants are grown in) are the only real way to feed a growing population and not destroy the environment. The Netherlands is already the leading European exporter of food, here is a great youtube video that touches on some of the ideas. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5clOYWsNhhk
Bottom line is that traditional Organic farming isn't the answer anymore than modern factory farming. AgTech is something I'm passionate about and I honestly believe that if we don't adopt more modern science will we face a large crisis in our food systems sooner rather than later. Some crops will need to be soil based (grains and related crops mostly) but nearly everything else grows faster, more reliably, and with out the need for chemical treatments. There are a large number of Hydroponic and Aquaponic farms already in operation but the percentage is still very small.
That's a huge part of the problem, farming shouldn't be heavily mechanized in the way we do it. Monocrops, pesticides, fungicides, and huge feed lots all have terrible environmental costs. Even aside of Climate Change, soil erosion is a massive problem.
The debate wasn't about that fact, it was about rather a white man would have died resisting or if him resisting in the way he did justified his death. The data shows that minorities are killed by cops at much higher rate[1]. He was accused of writing bad checks, that doesn't carry a death sentence nor should it. The reason people that express that opinion are often called racist is that it seems obtuse to bring up in the discussion. I'm NOT calling you of racist, I don't think people that state that are by default. Many are just siding with the police for various reasons.
Yes the US supplies the majority of it's food. I was talking about the first world countries in general. Second the monoculture farming system the US is using creates HUGE environmental costs, it's not just about import/export. Beef feed lots with thousands of cattle packed together, chicken and pork farm pollution, monoculture (corn and soy beans) destroying soil, pesticides polluting and killing river ecosystems, and up to 40% food waste. All products of the JIT food systems. The rest of the western countries (except Canada which is similar to the US) are mostly food importers generally from the Global south (with Russia and the Ukraine also supplying quite a lot). I grew up in the midwest in a family of farmers and my wife grew up on a working small cattle farm. There are MAJOR issues with the US system, generally it's not the import/export part though. That's more of an issue in European countries (the Netherlands seems to be the major exception here). Palm oil is also a major factor in rain forest de-forestation, which is a major import in many countries:
And why is obesity rising so quickly in nearly all first world countries but particularly in the US? Most of the research points at three reasons:
1. Modern food systems - fast food, frozen boxed food, and a severe lack of access to healthy whole foods
2. Income inequality - Obesity rates are far higher in lower income people and healthy food is far more expensive
3. Work culture - We work far more hours and far less physical jobs. Less hours to exercise and more cost to exercise.
Sure individuals can find ways around all these issues but the more roadblocks we as a society put in people's way the more that will fail. Which is is exactly what the OP is talking about, major scientific and economic issues cause far worse health outcomes.
Because someone has to know how to grow the potato or raise the cow or plant the corn. Right now we (modern first world countries) export that to fragile processes far away. Generally at great cost, environmentally and to the people/countries we export form. See the Amazon rainforest, slave labor in China or Africa, or un-controlled overfishing.
This isn't progress, it's exporting the work that has to be done, someone has to grow potatoes. We have exported that hard work to poor people across the globe at horrible cost. Cost to the environment, cost to stability, cost to geo-political safety. Someone has to have their hands in the dirt, we act like it's progress because it's cheap and fragile because we don't have to do the work. Is it progress to pay artificially low prices on beef or bananas because poor people in the global south are destroying the rain forests to raise crops? Cause that's the only way the modern JIT system works right now.
Average income in 1960 (as an example year since it wasn't listed) $6000 or 10% of that house.
Average income in 2021 $65,000, well short of the $80,000 to equal 10% of the house. Also, there has been a large increase in other expenses. Most households had a single earner, leaving another adult to generally raise children. That's much rarer today. Two car households, higher utility bills, etc... The evidence is pretty clear that money doesn't go as far today.
It's not even REMOTELY close. They didn't have their bank accounts frozen for saying mean things, they were frozen because they were blocking roadways, damaging property, and making life in general more difficult for innocent citizens. You may not agree that they should have been frozen but it's absolutely not about saying mean things.
The state of media Apps in General is REALLY low. Paramount+ makes me turn on subtitles for EVERY episode and ignores the system settings, HBO Max's app is a dumpster fire, Netflix doesn't integrate with Apple TV or the algo driven listings are terrible, Hulu is a broken mess all around. In fact the only media app I enjoy using is Apple TV+/TV.app.
That's huge pain. I love my Apple TV and I'm much more likely to cancel netflix than not use the ATV. I also really love the TV app and Watch next, for apps that work with it it's such a great UI IMO.
Are you sure? I know a huge number of users that advocate for Users that expose bigoted views or misinformation to be de-platformed. See the recent Joe Rogan podcast push. That wasn't a tiny percentage of users.
No Corporation has decided anything like that. Corporations are responding to their customers requesting those users to not be tolerated. This isn't Twitter banning anyone because they want to. It's Twitter deciding that enough users have decided that tolerance has run its course. They were in response to campaigns of users to deplatform those who we consider harmful.
The US is a global leader?? It's ranked 55th out of 60 in the latest CCPI (Climate Change Performance Index). It literally isn't the best at any part of Climate Change reduction. The countries that rank the highest? Democratic Socialist countries like Denmark and Sweden. Countries with HEAVILY regulated capitalist systems and markets. Besides depending on Innovation that may or may not come is a terrible plan.
That's ridiculous, the smartphone has changed society far more than desktop's or really any form of computer that exists. Vast numbers of people only access the internet via a smart phone. Doctor's visits across the globe, remote working from wherever you are, hand held GPS and maps, access to countless hours of entertainment, etc....
In the last 15 years we got reusable rockets, mRNA vaccines, Crispr, workable quantum computers, AI capable of beating us at Go, and many other numerous breakthroughs. Sure 1900-1910 meaningfully changed the world but the bar form the 1800's was dramatically lower than the 2000-2010 bar from the 1900's. Ironic that such a ignorant comment laments societies ignorance.
Food, I think that Climate Change and population growth will put a ton of pressure on our food systems. There are solutions in place but I think a ton of work should still go into those systems. I am in fact working on that issue, just not full time. I'm also going to be focused on open sourcing any of the work I do, including design and hardware. It's a fairly recent start to the project but I've never been more sure or engaged in this work as I am now. I can't do it full time yet as I have to (and very much want to) support my family. I'm particularly interested in automation of aquaponics systems and using technology to advance agriculture on a individual scale, ie not on a commercial scale. Aside from climate change, social justice movements will require food security at the family and individual level. I hope I can contribute to that in a small way.
I use Apple Maps in Northern New England (Maine, NH, Vermont, Eastern Canada) and it's actually a little better than Google here in my experience. Apple Maps also fully supports no tracking and a better offline mode IMO. If you are on iOS and in a location that Apple supports I'd highly recommend it.