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For a Missouri Cassette Tape Factory, Obsolesence is Just a 12-Letter Word (arstechnica.com)
The Missouri-based National Audio Company, reports Ars Technica, is sweeping up in a category that our future-looking selves might twenty years ago have imagined would be dead and buried in the year 2015: making and selling audiocassettes. There are fewer and fewer competitors in the tape-making business, but NAC still has a healthy market for cassettes -- in October, the company noted "a 31 percent increase in order volume over the previous year." From the article: [Company president Steve Stepp] said that as his competitors began bailing out of the cassette business once CDs came to prominence, NAC started buying up their machinery. “It would have been incredibly expensive 30 to 35 years ago when [cassette manufacturing machines] were new on the market, but when our competitors bailed out of the business and started making CDs, we went round the country and bought [them] out," he said. Some artists are still releasing music on tape, but about 70 percent of what the company sells is blank cassettes; there are an awful lot of tape decks out there; my father alone still buys a few hundred blanks each year.
Too much hype right now, I know people who took multiple days off work to see the movie multiple times. Why were the new star trek, avengers, lord of the rings, etc, such big hits? Not because they were good movies. The combined delusion of the masses must be excreting out of their pores infiltrating each others subconscious to create an illusion of grandeur, this is a tale of both caution and opportunity. Caution, yes, they may turn you in to the gestapo. Opportunity, sure, you may never reach the grand consensual delusion that is star wars, do not we all wish to have more power than god? There is little more than trite debate concerning god these days, sure you have wars and killings, but god is an excuse, not the reason. On this holy day of reflection, the only thing open are movie theaters and Chinese restaurants, the pervasive underbelly of the masses drives you, pray to a god of today that can do no wrong, for tomorrow a new god will form, so temporary is the will of the gods in the time it took to take a shit when I came out of the stall there was a new world, new but the same, just another toilet paper roll world that willl not burn because it is covered in shit. Flush it from your mind, in some places they do not have toilet paper, or flushers, quite a conundrum, they probably do not have star wars there either.