Excuse me, but did I even once express opposition to the decriminalization of drugs in my post???
You are in such a rush to get your hackles up against a perceived enemy, that it does not even occur to you that I might in fact favor looser restrictions. I'm merely pointing out that the argument that decriminalization will reduce use is not really supported by the facts.
Why am I concerned that binge-drinking is on the rise among the young? Because, as Charlie Chaplin pointed out, the thing about young people is they grow up to be adults. A trend among young adults, if it continues, becomes a trend of the general population.
People don't drink beer because it tastes good, but because it has alcohol in it.
Correction: People don't drink crap like Budweiser and Old Milwaukee for the taste, but to get intoxicated.
There are a lot of people drinking beer specifically for the taste, as evidenced by the rising popularity of microbreweries and imported beer in America.
Here in America, we are a little behind the rest of the world in discovering that beer is supposed to taste good. We've been drinking horrible beer for so long, that we have come to think that awful pisswater like Miller is what beer is supposed to taste like.
The alchohol is part of the flavor and texture of the drink. If somebody made a non-alchohol beer that tasted the same Guiness, I would drink it all day, every day.
Coffee on the other hand... I drink that mostly for the fix.:)
First, define "drunkeness". What do you mean? The 13 day moving average of my blood alcohol content? Perhaps you mean the amount of alcohol consumed?
Very well. Drunkeness - The state of being heavilly intoxicated.
Total consumption over the course of the year does not mean much as an indicator. Somebody who drinks 2 glasses of wine with dinner every evening drinks more in a year than somebody who binge-drinks every Friday, but the regular wine-drinker is living a more healthy lifestyle, and far less likely to cause a major car accident, isn't he?
Even accepting your numbers, according to your second link, drinking was at its absolute LOWEST during prohibition... If the goal of prohibition was for people to drink less, that would be an indication that prohibition was working.
Thank you for your facts, but they seemed to lend more to support my argument than yours.
Also, yes... We are once again on the fast track to being a nation of alcholics. A good indication is the steady rise of alcholism among young drinkers. Binge-drinking on college campusses has been rising at an astonishing rate for quite some time now.
Actually, drunkenness went down under prohibition. America was on the fast track to being an entire nation of alchoholics (sort of like what Russia is now) prior to prohibition.
The reason it was repealed was not that it did not work, but that illegal booze became a high-profit product for organized crime (much like cocaine is today).
There's no question that cocaine use would be higher if it was legal. You can make a case for legalizing it for a variety of reasons, but to imply that outlawing a drug is going to make it more popular is just silly. If that was true, then alchohol and tobbacco would be the least popular drugs in America, because they are legal... In fact the opposite is true, they are far more popular than the banned ones.
Ever since prohibition, our culture has been one which, for the most part, insists on "responsible" drinking. (The typical college campus being an obvious exception for the last 20 years or so.) Contrast alchohol consuption in America with most European countries, and you will see that we are still relatively dry.
That reminds me of the time I was drinking with some stangers from Finland. When I was about ready to call it a day, they insisted on buying me another round. One of them said to me, "in Finland we say: If you drink, and you don't get drunk, it's wasted."
Gambling is also very profitable online, especially sports betting.
Also, Varient, the company that runs the servers for the online game Everquest, makes tens of millions of dollars EVERY MONTH! Talk about easy money! Just run a farm of about 50 servers, charge the EQ junkies $10 a month to use them, and sit back and watch the money pour in. Not to mention all the cash that Sony makes for selling the game software... Pretty good haul for patching a 3D graphics engine on top of a second-rate MUD.
That said, most people on line don't get rich, because they tend to latch on to ideas that were not as good as they seemed. ("If I become the first to sell wholesale brussel sprouts on line, I'll be a millionaire!")
However, just as in the California Gold Rush, the people who made the most money were not the prospectors, but the outfitters. Selling stuff to those who are chasing easy money can be very steady business. For example, Verisign is making truckloads of money selling SSL validation licenses, credit card processing, and so on. I'm sure that they make many times more money than the vast majority of their customers, who are setting up various e-commerce sites.
The fraud would be known almost right away. As soon as the signal is triangulated, it would be obvious that it was local.
Nevertheless, it sounds like a lot of fun.
But if we reallywant to make it an interesting technical challenge, we could try to follow that up by bouncing the signal off something farther away, like Jupiter. (Perhaps the signal could be Ligeti's 2001 music, for an added touch of irony?)
Kubrick did not go unrecognized. Directing films made him a multi-millionaire, and his films were, and continute to be, praised by film critics all over the world.
He just had the bad luck of having some of his better movies go up against more popular Oscar choices. (Such as "Oliver", which Hollywood loved.)
People treated Mozart like a freak, like a dancing bear. He was the 9 day wonder...
Okay, here is where I point out that "Amedeus" was a work of fiction.
Mozart was extremelywell-regarded as a genious composer. He learned from the best before him, and the best after him learned from him. Everybody who know anything about music at the time considered him a great composer. He died poor because he pissed away all his money.
I seem to recall that Clark and/or Kubrick expressed a desire to create a fictional "alternate" mythology with the monoliths. Personally, I think they were rather successful on that front.
As for the last 20 minutes, I don't think they are as vague as some people make it out to be.
1) Dave advances toward the big monolith near Jupiter, right at the moment of a Harmonic Convergence (a linear alignmet of more that two planets and/or moons, thought to be of some prophetic signifigance in certain belief systems). 2) The monolith transports him to somewhere else 3) He grows old in a strange sort of alien-built habitat intended for him to dwell in comfortably (metaphorically, it might be seen as a womb). A really interesting cinematic device is used to show the passage of time, where Dave keeps looking in one direction or another to see an older version of himself. Each time he looks, sees his older self, then we cut to the older Dave perspective, who sees that the younger Dave is gone. 4) The final shot in the habitat/womb from Dave's perspective is the monolith at the foot of his death bed, about to transform him into the next stage of human evolution. 5) We then see the "star child", the newly evolved Dave, returning to Earth, as the Strauss fanfare plays for the last time and the movie ends.
Another neat bit from the movie that most people don't catch... When the ape man discovers what a great weapon the bone makes, he wins a battle, then throws it in the air. The next shot (skipping over all known human history) jumps from the first weapon (the bone), to a future weapon (the satelite we see is, in fact, a nuclear missile launcher).
And you baby boomers who think the kids today are saps for drinking Disney's poison cool-aid... Just remember that the VW bugs & vans, bell-bottom pants, and nearly everything else about 60's and 70's "counter-culture" was the direct result of people jerking your chain to sell you crap. Even the notorious Acid Tests were really all about selling you LSD, t-shirts, and Grateful Dead bumper stickers. Don't kid yourself... you were part of the machine and liked it.
Actually, social manipulation techniques have advanced far beyond 1984, but the people who know how to do it are not in politics, because there is more money in selling sugar water to children.
The vast majority of what a kid under 15 thinks is cool has been programmed into them by companies like Disney (who owns the ABC network, several pop-music stations in every market, the record label of Britney Spears, and much more). This point was really hammered home when ABC ran a "Special Presentation" in prime time of "Briney Spears, N'Sync, and friends" live from Walt Disney World. It was basically a 1-hour infomercial which simultaniously drummed up tourism business for Disney theme parks, sales of Spears' album, and ABC's demographic rating with young viewers. Pure marketing genious.
Now why would anybody want to waste all that effective propaganda on something as unprofitable as political power? Just get rich, and you can buy power later.
HAL is certainly more capable than even the most sophisticated current computer systems at any price or any speed.
Quite right, AC. The best computer available still sucks at speech recognition, and HAL was actually able to read lips and extrapolate what was said.
Also, HAL was perhaps the most human-like of the characters in the film. The "future" people in 2001 behaved and spoke in a very restrained and mechanical manner. The "quarentine cover story" discussion in the briefing room is one example... In another movie, you would expect people to be pounding on the table and shouting at each other about how their families believe that their lives are in peril. Instead, the whole room sits patiently while one person calmly says "I know that a lot of you are very upset". I think the idea here was supposed to be that man evolved into a less passionate creature, just as we are more restrained than the ape-men the movie begins with.
HAL, on the other hand, is eager to impress people, spiteful when he feels threatened, goes out of his way to be polite to the people he depends on for social contact, and in the end pathetically begs for his life to be spared.
If you thought you were not prepared, imagine how people going to the original release of the film felt.
They would hear that 2001 is a good "head" movie, so they'd get lit up on acid, pot, beer and/or whatever, buy their ticket, and find themselves sitting in a dark room with that spooky music playing to a black screen for 2 and a half minutes... then suddenly they see the sunlight breaking over the edge of the Earth from deep space as the fanfare plays. It really blew people's minds.
I hear that there will be a re-release in American theaters sometime this year. I really hope they keep that intro music.
I agree with most of what you said, except for one small item:
Seti@home is designed to combine people's spare cycles to find aliens
As far as I have seen, SETI@home is a screensaver app for people with nothing better to do with their potential CPU cycles than show off their computer's ability to crunch numbers. It's a popular alternative to the many distributed crypto projects, because SETI is a project that will probably never be completed. (Participate in a crypto project with your overnight cycles, and eventually the message will be cracked, leaving you looking for something else to join in on. SETI@home does not have this disadvantage.)
I've meet many people who participate in SETI@home... none of them said that they expect aliens to be found.
Damn, I can't even count 0's today. That does it, I'm spending the rest of the afternoon reading slashdot, and not writing another line of code until after I take a nap or something.
The other people who correct you were right to do so. I would also add that the Fed has been cutting rates (a full point so far, and another small cut is expected within the next two months), not raising them, during the recent slowdown.
When the Fed was raising rates, it was during a period of very strong ecomomic growth. This controls the rate of growth to prevent runaway inflation, and allows a nice buffer so future rate cuts can be used as an economic stimulus during down times.
Your conspiracy theories concerning the Fed and current vs. "next guy" office holders (it appears you are talking about Clinton and W) simply does not hold up. Alan Greenspan has run the Fed since long before Clinton took office, and has done a pretty darn good job for every president he has served. During the Clinton boom, it was mainly Greenspan's rate adjustments that prevented us from running into double-digit inflation (which surely would have had a negative impact on Clinton's popularity). W has even chosen several of his cabinet members based on their past working relationships with Greenspan.
So, if Greenspan was some kind of political co-conspirator, it would be difficutl to establish which side he is conspiring with... He's been critical to the successes of both.
And yet they sort of manage to stagger by. I wonder how they stay in business at all.
Perhaps because the financial database is not"the lifeblood of the firm" at a women's clothing retailer.
Handbags designed to match shoes and white Oxford shirts priced at 3 times the cost of the same shirt tailored for men... that's their lifeblood.
It's very easu for us techies lose site of the fact that what makes a company rich is not the technology choices they make, but how much product they move and and how high of a margin. That's what pays our checks. That's what allows us to get paid for something as easy and unstressful as hacking out code.
To imagine that our company will sink or swim based on whether we choose mySQL or Oracle, Solaris or Linux, MS-Exchange or sendmail... it's just silly. Yes, the success of our departmenthinges on these decisions. MIS has the capability to save, or cost, huge ammounts of money to a company, but in the big picture it means less than you might think. A company that moves thousands of pairs of capri pants every hour can afford to weather the storm of the occational IT disaster, and one that has the best and most efficient IT department in the world can still go under if they do not make sales.
We programmers should have a "Sales Rep Appreciation Day", when we tip our hats to the grunts who spend all day dealing with horrible people so we don't have to. Short of that, at least take one of them to lunch once in a while. Just a thought.
Unless I meant $40.00 each, which would be very low labor costs, eh?
Damned daylight saving time... It takes me a solid week to be awake during the day again after the time change. (I don't look forward to next week, when I obviously will be cleaning up mistakes like that from the code that I've been writing today.)
4) 5000 people at $40k each is $200,000 per year (plus you save tens of thousands in seat licenses for your software, because there are fewer people using it.
5) Switching software platforms means you need to either hire new specialists or retrain your techies... either costs money.
Bottom line is that a company will change to open source for one reason and one reason only: if they are convinced that they will make more money using it. In every company I have ever worked for, the attitude has always been to spend what you need to in order for your people to be productive. Whether that means dumping huge cash into an Oracle database, or hiring a Postgres DBA, productivity matters more than expenses.
A CEO (or any manager, for that matter) who does a really good job of cutting expenses (mostly via layoffs) gets a reputation for being a great "hatchet man", and all of his job offers start coming from sick companies that need to make cuts.
A CEO who does a really good job of raising productivity and sales gets a reputation that lands him powerful jobs in healthy companies. Think about it: If you were a corporate executive, which type of CEO would you prefer to strive to be?
Oh, by the way... if your friends vinyl records degrade to sub-CD quality after 10 plays, something is wrong. My guess is that either his tone-arm is way too heavy, or he is using a very destructive stylus.
On a properly balanced system, you should get hundreds of playbacks without that kind of loss (most of the wear should happen to the needle, which is easier to replace than some rare records are).
Some vinyl cheerleaders actually insist that records sound better after 3 or 4 plays, because there are sometimes little particles of "flash" from the press mold which get pulled off during the first one or two playbacks. (How true this is, I can't say... I'll leave that for others to debate.)
I'm a bass player and tubist who is trying to save up for a stand-up double bass, so I can totally relate to what you are saying. (Even 3/4 size basses, used, go for over a grand... and that's the cheap ones!)
Slashdot Mirror
You are in such a rush to get your hackles up against a perceived enemy, that it does not even occur to you that I might in fact favor looser restrictions. I'm merely pointing out that the argument that decriminalization will reduce use is not really supported by the facts.
Why am I concerned that binge-drinking is on the rise among the young? Because, as Charlie Chaplin pointed out, the thing about young people is they grow up to be adults. A trend among young adults, if it continues, becomes a trend of the general population.
Correction: People don't drink crap like Budweiser and Old Milwaukee for the taste, but to get intoxicated.
There are a lot of people drinking beer specifically for the taste, as evidenced by the rising popularity of microbreweries and imported beer in America.
Here in America, we are a little behind the rest of the world in discovering that beer is supposed to taste good. We've been drinking horrible beer for so long, that we have come to think that awful pisswater like Miller is what beer is supposed to taste like.
The alchohol is part of the flavor and texture of the drink. If somebody made a non-alchohol beer that tasted the same Guiness, I would drink it all day, every day.
Coffee on the other hand... I drink that mostly for the fix. :)
Very well. Drunkeness - The state of being heavilly intoxicated.
Total consumption over the course of the year does not mean much as an indicator. Somebody who drinks 2 glasses of wine with dinner every evening drinks more in a year than somebody who binge-drinks every Friday, but the regular wine-drinker is living a more healthy lifestyle, and far less likely to cause a major car accident, isn't he?
Even accepting your numbers, according to your second link, drinking was at its absolute LOWEST during prohibition... If the goal of prohibition was for people to drink less, that would be an indication that prohibition was working.
Thank you for your facts, but they seemed to lend more to support my argument than yours.
Also, yes... We are once again on the fast track to being a nation of alcholics. A good indication is the steady rise of alcholism among young drinkers. Binge-drinking on college campusses has been rising at an astonishing rate for quite some time now.
The reason it was repealed was not that it did not work, but that illegal booze became a high-profit product for organized crime (much like cocaine is today).
There's no question that cocaine use would be higher if it was legal. You can make a case for legalizing it for a variety of reasons, but to imply that outlawing a drug is going to make it more popular is just silly. If that was true, then alchohol and tobbacco would be the least popular drugs in America, because they are legal... In fact the opposite is true, they are far more popular than the banned ones.
Ever since prohibition, our culture has been one which, for the most part, insists on "responsible" drinking. (The typical college campus being an obvious exception for the last 20 years or so.) Contrast alchohol consuption in America with most European countries, and you will see that we are still relatively dry.
That reminds me of the time I was drinking with some stangers from Finland. When I was about ready to call it a day, they insisted on buying me another round. One of them said to me, "in Finland we say: If you drink, and you don't get drunk, it's wasted."
Gambling is also very profitable online, especially sports betting.
Also, Varient, the company that runs the servers for the online game Everquest, makes tens of millions of dollars EVERY MONTH! Talk about easy money! Just run a farm of about 50 servers, charge the EQ junkies $10 a month to use them, and sit back and watch the money pour in. Not to mention all the cash that Sony makes for selling the game software... Pretty good haul for patching a 3D graphics engine on top of a second-rate MUD.
That said, most people on line don't get rich, because they tend to latch on to ideas that were not as good as they seemed. ("If I become the first to sell wholesale brussel sprouts on line, I'll be a millionaire!")
However, just as in the California Gold Rush, the people who made the most money were not the prospectors, but the outfitters. Selling stuff to those who are chasing easy money can be very steady business. For example, Verisign is making truckloads of money selling SSL validation licenses, credit card processing, and so on. I'm sure that they make many times more money than the vast majority of their customers, who are setting up various e-commerce sites.
How very sadly true. NT administrators must feel like Sega game console owners sometimes. :)
Nevertheless, it sounds like a lot of fun.
But if we reallywant to make it an interesting technical challenge, we could try to follow that up by bouncing the signal off something farther away, like Jupiter. (Perhaps the signal could be Ligeti's 2001 music, for an added touch of irony?)
He just had the bad luck of having some of his better movies go up against more popular Oscar choices. (Such as "Oliver", which Hollywood loved.)
Okay, here is where I point out that "Amedeus" was a work of fiction.
Mozart was extremelywell-regarded as a genious composer. He learned from the best before him, and the best after him learned from him. Everybody who know anything about music at the time considered him a great composer. He died poor because he pissed away all his money.
As for the last 20 minutes, I don't think they are as vague as some people make it out to be.
1) Dave advances toward the big monolith near Jupiter, right at the moment of a Harmonic Convergence (a linear alignmet of more that two planets and/or moons, thought to be of some prophetic signifigance in certain belief systems).
2) The monolith transports him to somewhere else
3) He grows old in a strange sort of alien-built habitat intended for him to dwell in comfortably (metaphorically, it might be seen as a womb). A really interesting cinematic device is used to show the passage of time, where Dave keeps looking in one direction or another to see an older version of himself. Each time he looks, sees his older self, then we cut to the older Dave perspective, who sees that the younger Dave is gone.
4) The final shot in the habitat/womb from Dave's perspective is the monolith at the foot of his death bed, about to transform him into the next stage of human evolution.
5) We then see the "star child", the newly evolved Dave, returning to Earth, as the Strauss fanfare plays for the last time and the movie ends.
Another neat bit from the movie that most people don't catch... When the ape man discovers what a great weapon the bone makes, he wins a battle, then throws it in the air. The next shot (skipping over all known human history) jumps from the first weapon (the bone), to a future weapon (the satelite we see is, in fact, a nuclear missile launcher).
And you baby boomers who think the kids today are saps for drinking Disney's poison cool-aid... Just remember that the VW bugs & vans, bell-bottom pants, and nearly everything else about 60's and 70's "counter-culture" was the direct result of people jerking your chain to sell you crap. Even the notorious Acid Tests were really all about selling you LSD, t-shirts, and Grateful Dead bumper stickers. Don't kid yourself... you were part of the machine and liked it.
The vast majority of what a kid under 15 thinks is cool has been programmed into them by companies like Disney (who owns the ABC network, several pop-music stations in every market, the record label of Britney Spears, and much more). This point was really hammered home when ABC ran a "Special Presentation" in prime time of "Briney Spears, N'Sync, and friends" live from Walt Disney World. It was basically a 1-hour infomercial which simultaniously drummed up tourism business for Disney theme parks, sales of Spears' album, and ABC's demographic rating with young viewers. Pure marketing genious.
Now why would anybody want to waste all that effective propaganda on something as unprofitable as political power? Just get rich, and you can buy power later.
Quite right, AC. The best computer available still sucks at speech recognition, and HAL was actually able to read lips and extrapolate what was said.
Also, HAL was perhaps the most human-like of the characters in the film. The "future" people in 2001 behaved and spoke in a very restrained and mechanical manner. The "quarentine cover story" discussion in the briefing room is one example... In another movie, you would expect people to be pounding on the table and shouting at each other about how their families believe that their lives are in peril. Instead, the whole room sits patiently while one person calmly says "I know that a lot of you are very upset". I think the idea here was supposed to be that man evolved into a less passionate creature, just as we are more restrained than the ape-men the movie begins with.
HAL, on the other hand, is eager to impress people, spiteful when he feels threatened, goes out of his way to be polite to the people he depends on for social contact, and in the end pathetically begs for his life to be spared.
They would hear that 2001 is a good "head" movie, so they'd get lit up on acid, pot, beer and/or whatever, buy their ticket, and find themselves sitting in a dark room with that spooky music playing to a black screen for 2 and a half minutes... then suddenly they see the sunlight breaking over the edge of the Earth from deep space as the fanfare plays. It really blew people's minds.
I hear that there will be a re-release in American theaters sometime this year. I really hope they keep that intro music.
That's what they are there for.
You actually sat in your chair staring at the screen for the entire intermission!? That's actually pretty funny.
I'm pretty sure that by "open ended", he meant "open to different interpretations", not "open to exploit with more sequels".
Seti@home is designed to combine people's spare cycles to find aliens
As far as I have seen, SETI@home is a screensaver app for people with nothing better to do with their potential CPU cycles than show off their computer's ability to crunch numbers. It's a popular alternative to the many distributed crypto projects, because SETI is a project that will probably never be completed. (Participate in a crypto project with your overnight cycles, and eventually the message will be cracked, leaving you looking for something else to join in on. SETI@home does not have this disadvantage.)
I've meet many people who participate in SETI@home... none of them said that they expect aliens to be found.
Damn, I can't even count 0's today. That does it, I'm spending the rest of the afternoon reading slashdot, and not writing another line of code until after I take a nap or something.
When the Fed was raising rates, it was during a period of very strong ecomomic growth. This controls the rate of growth to prevent runaway inflation, and allows a nice buffer so future rate cuts can be used as an economic stimulus during down times.
Your conspiracy theories concerning the Fed and current vs. "next guy" office holders (it appears you are talking about Clinton and W) simply does not hold up. Alan Greenspan has run the Fed since long before Clinton took office, and has done a pretty darn good job for every president he has served. During the Clinton boom, it was mainly Greenspan's rate adjustments that prevented us from running into double-digit inflation (which surely would have had a negative impact on Clinton's popularity). W has even chosen several of his cabinet members based on their past working relationships with Greenspan.
So, if Greenspan was some kind of political co-conspirator, it would be difficutl to establish which side he is conspiring with... He's been critical to the successes of both.
Perhaps because the financial database is not"the lifeblood of the firm" at a women's clothing retailer.
Handbags designed to match shoes and white Oxford shirts priced at 3 times the cost of the same shirt tailored for men... that's their lifeblood.
It's very easu for us techies lose site of the fact that what makes a company rich is not the technology choices they make, but how much product they move and and how high of a margin. That's what pays our checks. That's what allows us to get paid for something as easy and unstressful as hacking out code.
To imagine that our company will sink or swim based on whether we choose mySQL or Oracle, Solaris or Linux, MS-Exchange or sendmail... it's just silly. Yes, the success of our departmenthinges on these decisions. MIS has the capability to save, or cost, huge ammounts of money to a company, but in the big picture it means less than you might think. A company that moves thousands of pairs of capri pants every hour can afford to weather the storm of the occational IT disaster, and one that has the best and most efficient IT department in the world can still go under if they do not make sales.
We programmers should have a "Sales Rep Appreciation Day", when we tip our hats to the grunts who spend all day dealing with horrible people so we don't have to. Short of that, at least take one of them to lunch once in a while. Just a thought.
erm... yes.
Unless I meant $40.00 each, which would be very low labor costs, eh?
Damned daylight saving time... It takes me a solid week to be awake during the day again after the time change. (I don't look forward to next week, when I obviously will be cleaning up mistakes like that from the code that I've been writing today.)
4) 5000 people at $40k each is $200,000 per year (plus you save tens of thousands in seat licenses for your software, because there are fewer people using it.
5) Switching software platforms means you need to either hire new specialists or retrain your techies... either costs money.
Bottom line is that a company will change to open source for one reason and one reason only: if they are convinced that they will make more money using it. In every company I have ever worked for, the attitude has always been to spend what you need to in order for your people to be productive. Whether that means dumping huge cash into an Oracle database, or hiring a Postgres DBA, productivity matters more than expenses.
A CEO (or any manager, for that matter) who does a really good job of cutting expenses (mostly via layoffs) gets a reputation for being a great "hatchet man", and all of his job offers start coming from sick companies that need to make cuts.
A CEO who does a really good job of raising productivity and sales gets a reputation that lands him powerful jobs in healthy companies. Think about it: If you were a corporate executive, which type of CEO would you prefer to strive to be?
Open Source projects are made up almost entirely of people who enjoy programming.
So anybody capable of creating an Open Source Hypercard program would have little or no interest in ever using it.
On a properly balanced system, you should get hundreds of playbacks without that kind of loss (most of the wear should happen to the needle, which is easier to replace than some rare records are).
Some vinyl cheerleaders actually insist that records sound better after 3 or 4 plays, because there are sometimes little particles of "flash" from the press mold which get pulled off during the first one or two playbacks. (How true this is, I can't say... I'll leave that for others to debate.)
I'm a bass player and tubist who is trying to save up for a stand-up double bass, so I can totally relate to what you are saying. (Even 3/4 size basses, used, go for over a grand... and that's the cheap ones!)