tegs07

Indeed if he was minister for transport (a role he clearly excelled in) we wouldn’t be in this mess. Additionally music in airports, lifts, shops in railways and other mass transport systems wouldn’t be so insufferably sh1te.

It is indeed. That Eno fella was so ahead of his time.

🫢🙈😬

Im pretty sure the technology will be at a point within a few years to allow driverless cars to collect you from home and take you to your destination safely. Your own car will be able to drop you off at the shops and go park itself. At which point we will have achieved the same results as trams and horse drawn cabs did over 100 years ago but with more congestion and less people employed. Progress is remarkable.

Come on. Your just talking carp now.

call the police. - thin lizzy

white chalk - pj harvey

I really didn’t like Roxy Music at the time. Only really seeing the error of my ways now. What was I thinking! Great band.

railroad man - eels

Shocking indeed to a modern audience. The concept of childhood is historically pretty recent. Renaissance paintings for example depict children as mini adults. Life expectancy in the 1860s (USA midwest) was also barely 39 years so by 15 you were middle aged (if you lasted that long). Edit: Another example is Catherine of Aragon. Betrothed at the age of 3, married at barely 15. Would lock up the heir to the throne these days ( Andrew!!)

suck my kiss - rhcp

Well I still enjoy listening to dr dre and admiring works of art by picasso. I don’t have to approve of everything they say or how they live/d to appreciate how much they contributed to modern culture or how brilliant they were/are. Give me a flawed genius over an average puritan any day. It’s a tricky question to answer in truth. An awful lot of really creative and talented people throughout history have been fairly despicable individuals. Hemingway, Picasso, Dali, Wagner, Lennon, Howlin Wolf, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk heck even Ghandi was a bit of an derrière on occasion. Does that negate their contribution to culture or diminish their creative output?

My only contribution to this debate is having spent 20+ years in tech, the lack of technical literacy and outdated workflows in pretty much every organisation I have ever worked in means productivity is always far below its potential. I’m not surprised that the Far East have taken over.

Alright Mr Musk 😂

grow your own - martin harley

april skies - jamc

july tree - nina simone

cars and girls- prefab sprout

Im sure there’s an element of “greedflation” from the manufacturers but if commodities like electricity, oil, gas, wood, electronic components are all going up in price then I would expect those costs to be passed on to the consumer. Some of these costs may be transitory depending upon geopolitics (labour excluded). OPEC and Saudi, Sanctions and Russia, Taiwan and China, the US $ and interest rate hikes etc etc Similarly if a manufacturer wants to borrow money from a bank to expand and increase their productivity (or just modernise, repair and maintain) then those costs are also increasing which will also be passed back to the consumer. Commercial property is also subject to financing linked to bank lending rates. As the lease rolls over the cost will increase. Staff will want higher pay. This is unlikely to be transitory unless the two decades of QE stimulus is continuous in which case any physical good will be a better store of value than the money it’s bought with. All this stuff is interlinked. Prices of instruments are not in some hermetically sealed bubble. I suspect prices will continue to rise until central banks either get inflation back to manageable levels (price increases will stabilise but remain higher) or they induce a recession and curtail demand which will lead to deflation.

I do wonder if rather than things being “mad” we are reaching a turning point where the era of cheap goods and cheap debt is over. I have tried to point this out for several months now.

Aubergine / Chris Rea

It’s been twenty years since I spent any length of time in Asia. Back then conditions in manufacturing and construction were a fair way from what I was accustomed to in Europe. A lot may have changed since, but I don’t have any firsthand knowledge. All I have to go on is reports in the media. They may just be sensationalist eg Foxconn etc.

crash - the primitives

please read the letter - plant/kraus

Yako Musical Instruments Company makes the Chinese produced Fenders I think. I have no idea what the working conditions or pensions are like but I would hazard a guess that offshore production with a 3rd party is cheaper and more transient than being employed directly by Fender in the USA. With the advent of CNC technology labour is the biggest cost involved in production. If the price of labour increases then I would expect the price of the finished product to increase as well.