After taking university music courses, and then private singing lessons, my observation is that most men learn to pitch their voices into a lower register - in order to sound more manly. Gay men tend to stop pitching their voices downwards and this leads to the perception that gay men use high pitches. Likewise, girls are taught to pitch their voices upwards and lesbian voices seem "mannish" due to stopping to pitch their voices to a higher register. It is my theory that men's natural voice/register is a lot higher and that if boys didn't try to sound macho, there would be a lot more tenors and counter-tenors (which is where my natural singing voice goes - not baritone like I thought it was supposed to be).
I doubt this is correct. Women tend to be mezzos and men tend to be baritones entirely based on the structure of their vocal apparatus, not because they are trying to force a sound (with the possible exception of gay men). In most cases, men who are good singers tend to sing high because that is where the demand is (tenors in classical music and also very high pop music), but as they learn to relax their larynx their comfortable range often drops.
One small company I worked for had a similar mandate come from their large clients - since offshoring was fashionable in business journals, they must offshore the next project for those clients. That company spent more time reworking the offshored software than if we had done the development in-house.
This is just another business fad, but because the execs want to seem to be cool and seem to be doing what their "peers" claim to be doing, well, then by gosh, all of the workers have to do the same fad.
My office uses ZScalar and lots of sites automatically block that because the company running the product make the product seem like an "open anonymous proxy".
Doesn't every musician with money have this problem? Every rockstar owns like 50 guitars. And they don' like to admit they're just collecting. They always got some story about why they need to buy the nth guitar that's missing from all the other tens of guitars they already own.
Almost all of them own instruments and gear they'll touch once and never do anything meaningful with ever again. Then it becomes a fixture on their walls or den.
It all seems wasteful.
But still, by rich people standards, it seems cheaper than other things like buying a huge boat.
Yeah I mean many people with disposable income seems to be doing this, it's just that the music community has a name for it, GAS, and it's a bit of a meme in the community.
I have a friend who seemingly collects mechanical keyboards. He keeps saying he needs them for various purposes, but always seems to be using the latest one, then the old ones go up on a shelf and sit there.
Another friend is obsessed with football, so he has a bunch of shoes, also "depending on the grass/ground" yet keeps using 1 or 2 the most, the others seems to in some cases be "collectors items" and never gets used.
Another friend is a avid golfer, literally has a wall in the garage with clubs, but seems to mostly stick with the clubs they have in their go-to bag.
I'm sure I could come up with more examples, it just seems pervasive among all people who can spend money on their hobbies.
I have a friend who plays tennis. He literally has like 100 tennis balls, all neatly packed and sorted on a shelf. Of course, all you need for a tennis match is like 3-4, since more won't fit in the pockets anyway.
If you're practicing your serve alone it's convenient to have a lot of tennis balls. It's quicker to gather all the balls in a big batch than individually.
I don't currently have any physical instruments while I have had quite a collection and nice studio in the past.
I think it comes down to the fact that it is fun collecting gear and a lot easier than actually making music. Making music is really hard.
I also don't think it even cost me $2k when it was all said and done with all the gear I bought. So much of the gear held its value and one piece of gear I had I sold for 3x what I bought it for so that paid for so much depreciation on gear that didn't hold its value.
Some gear heads I know have money to burn but others just have their savings in gear instead of a savings account at the bank.
Or any community that involves conspicuous consumption. There's always what feels like a majority of people who collect/buy/show off more than they use things
and that's fine in some sense if you're honest about what you're doing.
I have at least one guitar that I rarely play but I keep because I consider it a work of art and a collectible. But, I have others which are workhorses and I play daily.
It gets awkward when collecting is presented as a way to be a better musician, which is clearly false.
It also percolates into reviews, too. When a nontrivial fraction of the community is buying dreams and is about collecting as opposed to using whatever it is, some reviewers style their content towards that crowd and overlook issues or benefits that pop up when actually using the gear.
I don't have a problem with collecting, but I'd love for the distinction to be more upfront.
On that note I absolutely love Matt Johnson (Jamiroquai)'s youtube channel because you can tell he likes gear but spends a huge amount of time actually playing it and making his own patches. So much of the review market is just GAS-inducing paid promo stuff.
It's kind of easy to detect though. I usually read three/four paragraphs before I realize that the person reviewing doesn't actually make music and doesn't consider the music making parts of the hardware, and instead focuses on very generic stuff that basically the manufacturer handed to them and said "make sure this is included".
All this "know your customer" stuff is fallout from 911. We in the US went bonkers as a result of 911 and what used to be tinfoil hat conspiracy thinking ended up becoming national policy.
Checking the requirements, it seems to me that any "first world" citizen would encounter a low barrier for entry, with exceptions for Russians ("second world" citizens).
> why isn't the west's own supply chain options as immense?
Because each city in China has become specialized. You want to have someone make hairdryers for your company to sell? Then go to Cixi. There are dozens of small suppliers making the parts that go into hair dryers. There are dozens of companies making small appliances (just like hairdryers) They're all "just down the street" from each other. This means that the knowledge and infrastructure and workers are all in one place. You don't have to ship a truckload of heater elements across the country to some factory that some CEO decided should be built in the lowest cost real estate. The same reason that all of the America IC manufacturers got started in Silicon Valley.
This sort of specialization/concentration used to happen in the US. That's why NYC had a "garment district" where you could get clothing made from design to ready-to-sell. Los Angeles used to be one of the major hubs for making aircraft because of the large number of small companies making stuff that the aerospace companies assemble into aircraft. Jacobs wrote about this sort of thing in Cities And The Wealth of Nations about how the Shah of Iran wanted a helicopter factory in Iran. It was a flop because none of the seats are made across town, they're made in America, like the blades or engine or windscreen or avionics. All the Shah got for his dream was an assembly plant. There was no transfer of technology so that the parts could be made in Iran.
Before shipping containers were invented, shipping goods was expensive enough that factories making things tended to be located close to their suppliers. That was why Detroit became a center of car manufacturing. Shipping containers made it cheaper to transport some item across an ocean than it costs to drive it across the city.
The NSA has a bad historical reputation for this sort of thing - intentionally weakening crypto standards to make things easier for themselves to break, while keeping them "strong enough" that other agencies outside of NSA/GCHQ/GRU can't. The Crypto AG scandal [0] was pretty bad, with Clipper/Skipjack & Dual_EC_DRBG [1] being more recent ones. The NSA could do what you are asking to do, but they probably won't let us know what the really bad holes are because they want to keep using them.
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