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   Scott Williams 🐧 (vwbusguy@mastodon.online)'s status on Saturday, 15-Mar-2025 09:30:30 JST Scott Williams 🐧

   OK, I'm gonna say the quiet part out loud. The biggest reason why American guitars cost more than Mexico, Korean, or Indonesian made guitars is that American companies intentionally sometimes use cheaper parts. I've played some amazing Chinese made guitars and some underwhelming American made ones. The premium on "American made" often comes down to marketing based on racism/nationalism, exploitation, and corporate greed. Tariffs aren't going to fix that.

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     Scott Williams 🐧 (vwbusguy@mastodon.online)'s status on Saturday, 15-Mar-2025 09:30:30 JST Scott Williams 🐧

     in reply to

     This isn't news to anyone who has owned old cast iron. Before the 1960's, American cast iron was amazing quality but it wasn't stamped with "Made in USA" until the 1960s when the quality of American goods went down and as the quality of import goods improved. Before then, you didn't have to market it as American to convince people to buy it because the quality and cost/value was compelling on its own merits.

     Steve's Place repeated this.
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     Scott Williams 🐧 (vwbusguy@mastodon.online)'s status on Saturday, 15-Mar-2025 09:30:30 JST Scott Williams 🐧

     in reply to

     Since the 1960s, American manufacturing turned from making things that were expensive but could last a lifetime or longer to prioritizing cheaper and mass production. The "Made in America" marketing was a way to slowly burn some of the good will from the earlier days that valued quality and craftsmanship, but there's fewer and fewer younger people that see American-made as the apex beacon of quality standards, because things really aren't made as well as they used to be.

     Xenotar repeated this.
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     Scott Williams 🐧 (vwbusguy@mastodon.online)'s status on Wednesday, 19-Mar-2025 06:17:58 JST Scott Williams 🐧

     in reply to

     You want to bring back American ingenuity again? Make education and healthcare accessible to everyone. Make "right to repair" codified in the Constitution. Make Net Neutrality the law of the land. A person's chance of surviving and having a roof over their head shouldn't depend on "generational wealth". Once those things happen, American ingenuity will return in full force again. It's not Canada, Mexico, or Europe's fault we're here. It's our own fault. But we can still do better.