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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday November 23 2016, @02:05PM   Printer-friendly
from the while-my-guitar-gently-weeps dept.

Each holiday season, thousands of teenagers tear gift wrap off shiny, new guitars. They giddily pluck at the detuned strings, thinking how cool they'll be once they're rock stars—even if almost all will give up before they ever get to jam out to "Sweet Child o' Mine."

For them, it's no big deal to relegate the guitar to the back of the closet forever in favor of the Playstation controller. But it is a big deal for Fender Musical Instruments Corp., the 70-year-old maker of rock 'n' roll's most iconic electric guitars. Every quitter hurts.

[...]The $6 billion U.S. retail market for musical instruments has been stagnant for five years, according to data compiled by research firm IBISWorld, and would-be guitar buyers have more to distract them than ever. So how do you convince someone to put down the iPhone, pick up a Stratocaster, and keep playing?

Seems Fender didn't get the memo: the music of the future is hip-hop and autotuners.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 23 2016, @08:47PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 23 2016, @08:47PM (#432089)

    I don't have kids but my taxes are paying for every kid's education.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 24 2016, @07:49AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 24 2016, @07:49AM (#432321)

    Here, let me cut your balls/ovaries off you, man/woman! You are a total waste as a human being if you do not procreate! No, not quite right, you pathetic waste of humanity with no fruit of your loins, it is not that you did not procreate, but that you begrudge the children of those who did? Oh, Man, did you not see the movie "Children of the Corn"? No? OK, neither did I. But the point still stands. Are you willing to contribute to the continued existence of humanity, by funding the education of children, even if these children are not genetically related to you, or will you suck yourself into your own self which is probably why you could not have children in the first place, you pathetic fucker. (Many levels to that one there, there is.) So, would you rather pay for the education of the spawn of those who do not share your twisted property-rights view of child-bearing, or have them wandering around like wild savages, eyeing your stash of Soylent, Medical Supplies, and Armaments? Which would you prefer, you sorry excuse for a sterile and bitter homo sapiens. Yes, I just called you "homo", you homo.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 24 2016, @07:32PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 24 2016, @07:32PM (#432527)

      You are quite amusing. What does it matter if humankind continues or not? We do nothing worthwhile, and generally spend most of our time trying to kill each other over superstition or property, or letting millions die needlessly by denying them food, medicine and clean water because no one considers them to be "contributors". I don't mind my taxes paying for the education of "the masses", any more than I do to paying for infrastructure, but don't try to shine on the "nobility of man" or vent your spleen on people that don't share your foul, mindless ranting. BTW, many of us choose not to breed and instead spend our time and earnings/investments doing the things we want to do, not raising yet another generation of humans to perpetuate a mindless cycle.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 25 2016, @10:40AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 25 2016, @10:40AM (#432818)

        BTW, many of us choose not to breed and instead spend our time and earnings/investments doing the things we want to do, not raising yet another generation of humans to perpetuate a mindless cycle.

        Solipcistic DINK! You probably have two dogs, don't you? It is not your time, or your earnings. You are nothing. Mindless egoistic scum of the universe. What difference would it make if you never existed? Oh, then you would not have been able to do the things you want to do! How tragic! For the rest of us, NOT! We're coming for your capital gains, Chuck!

      • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday November 25 2016, @08:57PM

        by bzipitidoo (4388) on Friday November 25 2016, @08:57PM (#432996) Journal

        Ahhh, you have figured out that there is no meaning to life, have you? You're saying you're a nihilist? Yet you season this with a curious dash of moralizing, saying that humanity has done a lot of evil things, as if there's something that does matter.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 27 2016, @02:48AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 27 2016, @02:48AM (#433510)

          No, over my almost 70 years, I've figured out that, as a species, we have chosen to work against rather than with each other. I feel compassion for the thousands that die daily due to their perceived worthlessness. I have no idea if life has any meaning or not, and no one else does, either. It is possible to have opinions about it (see anon above), but no, I do not believe that anyone has ever shown any definitive proof that there is a reason for humankind to be here, and humankind has certainly demonstrated it would rather destroy those it does not agree with rather than "live and let live" or practice tolerance/co-operation (again, see anon above). My opinion is that it has no meaning, that we are biological accidents that climbed out of the ooze and survived, but that is just my opinion. I believe that we could do great things if we worked together, but I also believe that will never happen, so I choose to make the best of life with my friends and family. And anyone who comes after my capital gains will be sadly disappointed, as my retirement investments should (statistically) run out about the same time I do. I do like your thinking, though. I imagine you'd be an interesting fellow to split a bottle of wine and some conversation with.

          • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Sunday November 27 2016, @04:59AM

            by bzipitidoo (4388) on Sunday November 27 2016, @04:59AM (#433540) Journal

            A beer with me? Why, thank you! I do enjoy rabbiting on about this stuff.

            "What is the meaning of life?", "why do we exist?", and variations are the age old questions of philosophy. Perhaps the nihilist answer that life has no meaning is correct. But I find that overly simplistic. I also don't buy the line of thought that this is unanswerable, and will forever be a mystery. The SF novel The Left Hand of Darkness explored this question, and came down on the unanswerable side.

            The Christian mechanistic system view is that life is a test to sort good souls from evil souls. Judaism and Islam have similar views. The universe is then a system created by God for this purpose of sorting. What one can ask of any system is what is the purpose of it? What is all this sorting for? Setting aside the problem that if God is omniscient, He has no need to boot up a universe to sort souls out, He already knows which ones are good and evil, I gather that the answer for why sort good from evil is so that the evil souls can be permanently and utterly destroyed, and the good souls can then frolic joyfully for all eternity in some sort of Heaven or new superior universe built to replace the existing one after God ends it. This of course only leads to further questions about the purpose of having eternal joy in a Better Place, and what this Plan is for, and so on.

            And, why does God exist at all? What is this being trying to do? Play games with Himself? The Christian mystical view, that no one knows or can know the Purpose of God, is a cop out.

            Most people are too close to take an objective look. To aliens, it would probably be blindingly obvious that these monotheistic religions are products of human prejudice and the social customs of the times they arose. To wit, what's with the desire to have a Big Man, Father Knows Best sort of God who is in charge of everything and knows everything, willing to be the Perfect Leader that so many humans pine for? King of Heaven and the Universe and all that. Could there be a Heaven and no God at all? Sure! Or maybe the universe is run by a triumvirate, or a council or congress of equals. Why Heaven should basically be a primitive, rigid hierarchy, as if God is the one and only 5-star (or 6 or 7 star?) General who has never lost a battle, marshaling and drilling the troops for the day Armageddon comes, seems rooted in Iron Age conceptions of government and life, rather than any reasoning about how the universe might be organized, if at all.

            Life is most curious. We value equality, fair dealing, justice, property rights, and so forth, for each other. Yet we depend utterly upon other life forms for our continued existence, and most of the time think nothing of taking the resources other life forms have carefully harvested from the environment. All the time, animals murder plants and other animals and steal and consume everything they have. Isn't that evil? Selfish? But we cleverly rationalize this away. Animals eating plants has been going on for billions of years, with these two basic strategies for obtaining resources and energy evolving ever more complicated, sophisticated, and fascinating mutual dependencies. If the symbiotic relationship between plants and animals was not superior to a plants only kind of world, seems animals probably would have died out shortly after evolving, every single time. How that lead to current conditions, in which altruism and such notions as justice even exist, is a mystery that may take us ages to work out.