<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0"><tr><td valign="top" style="font: inherit;"><div>Susan makes a good point, and I will add (or elaborate) that as oil increases in price, so will the price of ALL imported goods. EVENTUALLY, it will make economic sense (even for the apparently greedy and short-sighted investors on Wall Street who have by now abandoned their fellow countrymen) to make things here, again. In the meantime, I suggest "diversifying" your "survival portfolio" by growing an organic garden (the orgainc, small-farm movement is about the ONLY expanding sector in our economy!) bartering with friends, and etc..</div></td></tr></table> <div id="_origMsg_"> <div style="font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif:font-size:10pt"> <div style="font-family:times new roman, new york, times, serif;font-size:12pt"> <hr size="1"> From: Susan Kline <skline@peak.org>; To: <pianotech@ptg.org>; Subject: Re: [pianotech] NY Times article on pianos Sent: Mon, Jul 30, 2012 9:28:37 PM <table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0"> <tbody> <tr> <td valign="top" style="font:inherit;"> What I see is one more way in which this country has paid for letting Wall Street put most of the young and educated into indentured servitude via student loans. The young generation cannot afford to become ordinary everyday piano tuners, so the work is going undone. Even if people wanted to get standard piano maintenance, they could hardly find anyone to do it for an affordable sum. So here we have a population fighting unemployment with scant success, but at the same time it's nearly impossible to find people like repairmen, affordable plumbers, doctors who will take the time to practice medicine instead of pushing drugs for Big Pharma, or anyone who will do jobs like repinning an action or even rebushing keys, without doing a total rebuild and charging "California prices." (Sorry, David, I know that's just how it is, living there.) It's the same thing which affects all manufactured goods. Anything solid and long-lasting stopped being made because the people owning production could skim more by using sweat labor and turning out non-durable imports, which purposefully cannot be repaired. If people will step back and take a longer view, they might notice that Peak Oil and Global Warming are neither of them myths, and the party is nearly over. Check the price of corn this week. The national credit card has been maxed out for years, and only the desire to postpone collapse has caused the Chinese to grant us loans we can never repay, to buy more of their stuff which they should keep for themselves. The political cartoons this week are talking about driving toward "fiscal collapse". Does anyone think that people will go on buying cheap keyboards and imported grands after the Euro zone implodes (now in progress) and food stocks worldwide go from thin to empty from repeated droughts? The ability to repair things has not been the flavor of the month (or the year or several decades) but I think its time will come again. In the meantime, we should triage the pianos before they head to the dump, try to find homes for the better abandoned ones, make playable the medium-tired but good, and sadly let the rest go. Anything which we can do to slow down the trashing of pianos, some perfectly good, we should do. I doubt that in twenty years building cheap grands in Indonesia and shipping them here and to Europe will still be a viable business. And maybe by then we'll start making and doing things for ourselves again. Susan Kline Paul Williams wrote: <blockquote type="cite"> <pre>What say you folks? Paul On 7/30/12 2:28 PM, "Joseph Garrett" <a rel="nofollow" class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" ymailto="mailto:joegarrett@earthlink.net" target="_blank" href="javascript:return"><joegarrett@earthlink.net></a> wrote:</pre> <blockquote type="cite"> <pre> However, you cannot put a $ sign on sheer aesthetic beauty of the furniture designs, the musical beauty, and the longevity. Name one thing, other than a house, that continues to last as long, with minimum amount of $ for maintainence? There is none, imo. (not even the $ invested in your kids!<G>) Not to mention the establisment of learning music, scholastic achievement, mental stability, (all of which have been written up in medical journals and such), and a sense of value in those things of years gone by. Joe Garrett, R.P.T. Captain of the Tool Police Squares R I </pre> </blockquote> <pre> </pre> </blockquote> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </div> </div> </div>