handystack

Apple trees take years to begin producing fruit. A new orchard is very expensive in terms of labor and the opportunity cost of tying up acreage with non-producing plants.

Some guitarists like to use old tube amps because they can be repaired, maintained, and modified much more easily than their modern counterparts. Old tube amps tend to have point to point wiring, which is much easier to fiddle with than reflow soldered PCBs.

Electric guitarists are often poor, clever, and self reliant. They can regularly find themselves out in the boonies with nothing but duct tape and baling twine to hold their rig together. Choosing a more robustly built older amp is not an irrational choice for such a person.

JJ makes the most reliable tubes on the market now. They are fantastic.

I have mixed feelings about USGS topo maps these days. On the positive side, they are producing revisions much more frequently than in the past and they have made available high quality digital images of these maps for free.

The availability of high resolution image files is really nice if you have a big screen and a powerful computer handy, but not so nice if you are scouting for berries on logging roads in a pickup and need something that you can stuff in your pocket. The USGS stopped doing big lithographic print runs of their maps, and the new inkjet prints are garbage in comparison. Whenever I find a lithographic print of a quadrangle I am interested in, I buy two or three because I know I may not be able to find them in the future.

Also, the newer revisions (the ones including satellite images) seem like they get much less individual attention from the cartographers. Labels and symbols are less intuitively laid out. The difference between the new and old map styles is similar to the difference between musical scores generated by a computer and lightly edited by a copyist, and scores created by a master plate engraver.

I vastly prefer the maps from the 80's and early 90's.