Ergonomics. Any solid-body guitar that's designed to be comfortable when played sitting or standing will converge on a strat-ish body shape. You can make a computer mouse in any shape, but the shape of a comfortable mouse is constrained by the shape of an average human palm.
The various curves and bevels on the Stratocaster aren't arbitrary aesthetic features, they're affordances to fit the human body. Change them too much and you get a guitar that won't balance on your knee or that pokes you in the ribs or that limits your access to the high frets.
Ola Strandberg set out to design the most ergonomic guitar possible. His design is both radical and basically derivative of the Strat, because Leo Fender happened to find something close to the perfect solution in 1954.
But, for example, are those horns (?) necessary for ergonomics? Do the potentiometers and output jack have to be positioned like that? Does the pickguard has to be the same shape? I do not think so. Les Pauls have different shape and are pretty popular too.
> Ola Strandberg set out to design the most ergonomic guitar possible
It looks somewhat ... not how you expect the guitar to look.
> But, for example, are those horns (?) necessary for ergonomics?
More or less, yes.
If you "fill" the cutways on a Strat you have a typical guitar shape.
You want the upper horn there or somewhere near it because the upper strap lug needs to be about there for balance, but some players (especially those with bigger hands) will want their thumb to be free from being blocked by the top of the guitar while they are playing the higher frets, so there's a cutaway. You then want the lower horn to have some of the classic shape below it if you want the guitar to be playable sitting down.
The slope across the top corner of the Strat beyond the bridge is there so that players (in particular guitarists who wear their guitars a bit higher with the fretboard pointing more upwards) don't have the upper arm of their right hand leaning uncomfortably across the edge of the guitar.
Some of these elements were protected by Leo Fender's original design patent, I think, but I can't remember which.
Precisely this. Ticketmaster's entire business model is based around taking the blame. Artists don't want to set a face value for their tickets that represent a realistic market-clearing price, for fear of being seen as greedy; this leaves a lot of money on the table for scalpers. TM scrape as much of that value back for artists and venues, who get a cut of all the fees and charges and "authorized secondary resale". Selling tickets is the easy part; the secret sauce is selling tickets for as much as possible, while allowing the artists to pretend that they're being sold for a "fair" price.
As a Brit, it seems hilarious that a single person with an income of $97k would be on the poverty line. That's more than double the median income for all households in the UK. A lot of Americans don't seem to realise how fantastically wealthy they are compared to the rest of the world.
That’s a completely absurd number. No single person making just under $100k a year is living in poverty. Even in a high cost of living area.
The article also repeatedly discussed median salaries, but average costs.
And it includes full time daycare costs for young children that only last for a few years.
Also housing prices are high but you can certainly afford an apartment as a single person making $100k a year. But if you want to save, having a roommate doesn’t mean you are living in poverty.
Comparing countries can be relatively pointless because of all the differences. It only matters if you can obtain money in one country and spend it in another.
The main way these numbers are gamed is by finagling with healthcare and post-secondary education, each of which can be as high or as low as you want, depending on what you’re torturing the numbers to confess.
$97k per year isn’t that much when health insurance premiums are $500 to $1,500 per person per month with $5k to $15k annual out of pocket maximums. You have to build up decent savings to ensure you can take care of yourself for when you lose your income.
This doesn't look like too expensive if you compare it with Switzerland or with Germany assuming similar annual income. In Switzerland unlike in US your children stay on your plan until they turn 18, not 26 like in US. In both Germany and Switzerland, health insurance is mandatory and not employer-based - so you cannot simply say "no". In fact, in Germany you pay much more than in US as a share of your income, especially if your income is at least like 30% more than a national median: 1000+ EUR is a minimum per person per month (probably higher today). It doesn't cover dental care - you will pay in full - that's why many people travel to Turkey, or Eastern Europe, or to Baltic countries - just to take some dental care - which is extremely expensive in any German speaking country - we are talking about multiple months of your income after taxes.
> In both Germany and Switzerland, health insurance is mandatory and not employer-based - so you cannot simply say "no". In fact, in Germany you pay much more than in US as a share of your income, especially if your income is at least like 30% more than a national median: 1000+ EUR is a minimum per person per month (probably higher today). It doesn't cover dental care - you will pay in full - that's why many people travel to Turkey, or Eastern Europe, or to Baltic countries - just to take some dental care - which is extremely expensive in any German speaking country - we are talking about multiple months of your income after taxes.
By that definition someone making the equivalent of $100k in Germany could be “worried about healthcare”. And in many countries with public healthcare, people are worried about paying for access to better private healthcare.
So by the metric of “worrying about healthcare access” almost no one is above the poverty line.
There are people in the US making $100k who are genuinely worried about healthcare access. Say someone who retires early at 55 and has enough savings to provide $100k income but is 10 years away from Medicare. But acting like it is at all remotely normal for a single person making $100k to lack healthcare access or to be “living in poverty” by any objective measure is absurd.
Not any more. A new generation of locks have an abrasive-filled plastic layer that aggressively wears down angle grinder discs. They aren't completely immune to angle grinders, but the better locks will take 20 minutes and multiple cutting discs to defeat.
It's notable that adhesives are something that Chinese manufacturers still really struggle with. Companies like Henkel and 3M have a deep reservoir of trade secrets.
The electrical telegraph was integral to the growth and consolidation of the British Empire. Britain acquired more colonies and held on to them for longer than the other European powers partly due to its naval might, but also due to far superior bureaucratic and communications technology.
Technology can be quite useful directly and have significant second order effect, hype is about the second order effects being overblown. Second order effects are difficult to predict when something is actually novel, will LLM’s make programming obsolete is harder to answer in 2023 than 2063.
Home automation like dishwashers really did meaningfully impact how much effort was needed to keep a home livable, but we didn’t predict the kind of helicopter parenting that happened because of more free time especially after smaller families became common. Thus a great majority of incorrect predictions where just hype.
The faster new technology becomes widespread the harder it is to predict those second order effects and thus more hype you see.
Lithium primary cells have a shallower discharge curve than alkaline, but not completely flat; measuring state-of-charge is essentially trivial for any competent design engineer. Medtronic specifically recommend FR6 lithium cells in their insulin pumps.
While the Medtronic pump has a setting to toggle between "Alkaline" and "Lithium" to adjust how it reads the battery percentage, the Dana i is primarily calibrated for Alkaline (LR03).
Eneloop Pro cells have a rated capacity of 2500mAh.
I can't think of any good applications for conventional NiMH cells any more - they're dominated by LSD NiMH cells in low-discharge applications, by lithium primary cells in ultra-low-discharge applications and by the various lithium secondary chemistries in high-discharge applications.
Unless you're doing something blatantly wrong or have a very specific disorder like coeliac, diet just doesn't have very much influence on health. There are a very wide range of diets that are more-or-less equally healthy, within a margin of error. Humans are highly adaptable omnivores that have evolved to survive and thrive on a broader range of foods than pretty much any other species. The data seems so mixed because the effect sizes of reasonable interventions are so small - a tiny signal drowned out by noise.
The entire problem is that most people in high- and middle-income countries are in fact doing something blatantly wrong - they are consistently eating vastly more calories than they use. Some of those people are ignorant of what 2000 to 2500 calories actually looks like, some are deluded, but a very large proportion know damned well that they're eating far too much and do it anyway.
The obesogenic environment that we now live in is partly due to the influence of the processed foods industry, but in large part it's simply a product of abundance. Before the late 20th century, it was simply inconceivable that poor people could afford to become morbidly obese. Agricultural productivity has improved beyond all recognition and the world is flooded with incredibly cheap food of all kinds.
We've spent the last few decades trying to push back against that with all manner of initiatives intended to endgender behavioural change, with very little success. It doesn't really matter what guidance we give people when they have shown a consistent inability or unwillingness to follow it.
If we're actually serious about the effects of diet on public health, I think there are only two credible options - extremely heavy-handed regulation, or the mass prescribing of GLP-1 receptor agonists. All of the other options are just permutations of "let's do more of the thing that hasn't worked".
The various curves and bevels on the Stratocaster aren't arbitrary aesthetic features, they're affordances to fit the human body. Change them too much and you get a guitar that won't balance on your knee or that pokes you in the ribs or that limits your access to the high frets.
Ola Strandberg set out to design the most ergonomic guitar possible. His design is both radical and basically derivative of the Strat, because Leo Fender happened to find something close to the perfect solution in 1954.
https://strandbergguitars.com/en-GB/product/boden-essential-...
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