(second block, fourth letter of the prisoners' quadratic tap code...)

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...am here to tap through the walls.


Thu Dec, 11 2008

Let Me Explain Something To You

Try to imagine a poker game.

You and four of your friends decide on a friendly game one evening. Sitting down at the table, you decide on nickel stakes, but nobody has any nickels. Everyone has dollars.

So, upon finding a box of paper-clips, it is agreed that they will serve as tokens in the game. Each paper-clip will represent a nickel.

Everyone buys in for a dollar. Each person receives twenty paper-clips.

The game starts. Round & round it goes. Everyone has had a good time, and it's time to cash out. The paper-clips are gathered, whereupon it is now discovered that someone has sneaked ten paper-clips onto the table during the game. There are now 110 paper-clips representing five dollars.

Question: what has happened to the value of each paper-clip?

That is inflation, ladies and gentlemen. It is only the beginning. This problem becomes enormous once you take those tokens out into a market and try to buy something with them. If you extended this dynamic throughout a national economy, what would naturally happen is that because the supply of tokens has outstripped the supply of goods for which they can be traded, those market goods will now compete -- through higher prices -- in order to gain more of them. This is necessary -- it is a natural law which cannot be repealed -- in order to attempt to keep the value of market goods denominated in these tokens.

Burn this into your minds. Realize that whenever you hear someone describing inflation to you as a rise in prices, they are not telling you the truth. Whether they're lying or simply ignorant, what you must understand is that none of it is true. And if you don't know the facts, then you will have no way of knowing what this rotten government is doing to you right now.

Dec 11, 08 | 7:47 am

AxeBites

Various guitars I see floating by, mostly Gibson and mostly eBay.

Early Norlin ES-335 -- 1970, in Walnut ("ES-335TDW"). This is a period-piece look and feel, and arguably the sound as well but that's to cut things very finely. A "classic" 335 would be the original of 1958 in the Sunburst or Natural finish, or the Cherry Red of 1959; the Walnut of 1970 (second year of that finish offering) is not really a "classic" 335. In the history of the Gibson aesthetic, this is analogous to, say, vertically-striped polyester bell-bottoms or Bahama Blue shag carpeting. None of this is to say that they're not cool guitars, and this is a nice one. Excellent photographs.

Chrome hardware, featuring the trapeze tailpiece (like my L-47 and I've always liked it) and ABR-1 bridge with period-typical nylon saddles. Bound rosewood fretboard, with small block markers, and then the crown inlay at the machine head. These would be the T-top Humbuckers. Vintage Nazis would moan that the upper bouts are pointy (the body templates were wearing-out in the factory) and the fourteen-degree machine head with the volute signals a sometimes not-fun era of the line, but these things really do rock or moan or whatever you want a 335-type semi-hollow to do. ...which, of course, is because it really is a 335.


In the months since I've let AxeBites languish all to bleedin' hell, Gibson's Robot Guitar technology has sifted out to other models than the original Les Paul application. I don't know how it's going: I still haven't even seen one of these self-tuners. I don't see piles of them burning on the sides of the highway, nor reverent hangings in display cases over bars, so who knows? This 2008 Robot SG is ready to rock in the Metallic Red. Nickel hardware; it's the stoptail wired for data to send to the tuners, with dual Humbuckers. It's a bound rosewood fretboard, but I really like the single-bound machine head with the crown inlay. That's a real cool old-school look, right there, to set off that crazy-ass color. {nod}