rdiddly

The argument is based on visibility.

Pretty cool! My only wish is that all this kind of work didn't gravitate toward glasses or assume glasses are the default thing-on-your-face now. 3/4 of humans don't wear them, and even some of us blind bats hate them enough that we endure the hassle of contact lenses!

I supported Occupy, but it was a losing effort, so the very mention of its name is discouraging.

Don't have a bank account either then. I didn't for years. We're talking about minimalism supposedly.

If it makes you feel any better, data centers and Flock cameras ARE manifestations of the wealth imbalance.

You could go further, such as not getting involved with cryptocurrency.

Your point is only that the judges have been decreed to be trustworthy by various people. That's fine, and it's right to involve all three branches. But the proceedings being secret means no one has any evidence of their actual (as opposed to decreed) legitimacy. No one can reach any of the same conclusions by the same means. If a tree falls in a secret court and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

The principle upon which courts themselves are founded is basically science - An assertion is only an assertion, and doesn't become legitimate unless it 1) has evidence backing it, and 2) survives adversarial argumentation. That which is proven and can't be disproven is deemed true. Where criminal accusations are concerned, it's what distinguishes a just verdict from mere arbitrary tyranny. That is the favor being done for prosecutors by defense attorneys: giving their wins legitimacy.

But the whole proceeding is public so that the people, the actual legitimate authority in the land, have access to the same evidence and the same arguments, and can reach the same conclusion reached by their agents and representatives in the court. The verdict is just and everybody knows it.

All I'm doing is applying the same principle to the FISA court itself. If they're so trustworthy and secure, so worthy of the job of interpreting laws, it should be no problem to present evidence to that effect, by opening the proceedings. Anything that needs to be done secretly kind of needs to shed the name of "court" and become e.g. "agency" or "department."

If you invade Ireland or France, you are invading the EU, which has military capability, and has other allies like the US that also have military capability. Ireland is probably not big/rich/strategic enough to warrant taking on those costs. An invasion doesn't pass a narrow cost-benefit analysis. Throw in the diplomatic costs and it looks even worse.

Edit: I suppose I've stumbled on some kind of economic or game-theory angle here - Militaries exist to impose costs. They tip the balance of potential invaders' cost-benefit analyses. They also impose costs on their owners though. But I guess the idea is that the benefits (avoiding the costs of being invaded) are supposed to be greater than the costs of the defense force.

The times today are built upon yesterday's times. You can't arrive where you are without passing through where you were. Could the EU have even formed if it hadn't had a nuclear power protecting it from 1945 to 1993 and beyond? We'll never know. But I'm sure you would've had to waste money on an arms race with the Soviets, as the US did.

I'm explicitly not talking about all the Middle-Eastern misadventures here, I find those as baffling and unjust as you do. I'm only referring to defensive and deterrent effects of having a military, which as I said, is the true portion of the propaganda you pointed out. (Good propaganda is always partly true.) The assertion that it doesn't exist and that the US military is only for war crimes is demonstrably false, and to prove it you need only (as I said to someone else) try to fly an airplane into US airspace without announcing yourself.

Is it primitive and juvenile? Absolutely! It comports with those particular traits of homo sapiens, an ape species. Any country big enough, or rich enough, or strategic enough for some other reason, is a target for invasion by the immature and non-cooperative. Furthermore if all the countries of the world were to join in one big cooperative union (which they already do in the realm of trade and commerce to some degree), I sadly don't think it would take long for someone to betray it, the way Trump (Russian asset) is betraying it now.

To assert that the US military has no defensive or deterrent effect whatsoever is at odds with reality, and to prove it to yourself you should try to fly an airplane into US airspace without announcing yourself, and see what happens.

Why stop there? Include Russia in the EU. Surely they'll be impressed by your maturity and cooperation and be inspired to maturely cooperate. Then you can rely on them to protect you from the US, instead of the opposite situation that you've enjoyed for 80 years.

Then Andorra would not meet any military resistance. If you're saying Andorra can't do anything because their military is small or non-existent, you're just proving the point that armies that exist are the ones that do things. But is Andorra defenseless? No, it's protected by all the military force of the EU, and, ironically, allies like the US.

Nobody invades because they know they'll meet an army. Same reason nobody invades France.

It's propaganda, but also true. If the US or any other country had no military, ANY country could invade it. This is why they all tend to have militaries. Also it doesn't have to be Canada and Mexico, this is not a Risk board. The army men have big army boats, toot toot goes the horn on the big army boat! And they have big army planes too, zoom zoom go the army planes!

I agree but I'm starting to think "out of touch" isn't even a harsh enough critique. Out of touch is when you're not aware what's going on in popular culture right now. What do you call it when you don't even know what it is to be human? I think maybe these people are all sad psychopaths.

A secret court is arguably not even a court. It provides no legitimacy whatsoever. It's a bunch of people in a room making a decision. I don't understand why they even bother. Just conduct your dictatorship by issuing decrees over a Zoom meeting.

Always appreciated this Beck song, that has what I assume is a programmed drum beat, for having a kick drum strike near the end of the loop that seems deliberately off the beat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvGjG_cmecU

Funny thing about the Shaboozey song, which I just went & listened to, is that while the tempo might vary humanly, the vocals have been pitch-corrected to within an inch of their life, i.e. the song still sucks.

Someone butthurt enough to downvote the most harmless comments once again I see. Hey I use mechanical timekeeping and beats too, but only as a second-choice substitute for a human drummer. To claim I'm not "gridified" when I do use them is nonsense. The tempo is set, unvarying, and makes no allowances for any spontaneous pushing or pulling of the tempo that any humans in the room might want to do to express something human. If you have a tempo tapper, that helps. Otherwise it's just as much of a strictly gridified tempo as if you went in afterwards and "corrected" it. Oh the numbers will look slightly better because you (humanly) will have trouble landing exactly on every single beat of the mechanical tempo. Instead the effect will show up as an absence of any of those things that were unable to be expressed. Which the listener doesn't even realize they're missing, and which the numbers don't measure. On that note, is this writer not turning directly against his own thesis by saying abstracted numbers are our preferred mode of contemplation? Or by implying that the answer, the truth, is in the numbers? The "data?" But hey what do I know, I've only been making music for 40 years.

Yes I get it, and I'm not replying to the post. I'm replying to the comment that said it was all about saving money and "has nothing to do with it being more listenable." Clearly that can't be true; these producers are trying for some standard of listenability (which I already said could be wrongheaded, to your point). If they weren't, they would not only save money by hiring mediocre talent, they would also save even more money by not doing any post-production interventions at all.

It's cheaper to do what? The thing they're getting for less money is precisely the improved quality or listenability. Their definitions of quality and good enough might be fucked up, but the intent and purpose is clearly to improve it up to some minimal level of quality, otherwise how are they judging a mediocre vs. great singer? How do they know when the great singer is done singing (sang a good enough take), or when they've tweaked the mediocre vocal track enough? The technological interventions change the ratio of cost vs. quality, they don't make quality irrelevant. If they did, you could just record the crappy singer as-is and save even more money.

Charitable of him to exclude drum machines, MIDI and so on, which have been quantizing and automating time for 40 years. We've been on a slippery slope that whole time. And to me there's not a lot of difference between recording yourself in the act of conforming to an unvarying mechanical beat (essentially gridifying yourself in real time) vs. fixing it in post.

Something about this rubs me the wrong way. Making a device to modify another device is on the same moral high ground as the right-to-repair people and the farmers hacking their own Deere tractors etc.

Disappointed this was not actually about paper.

I assume you're being satirical.

Edit: I don't really need it explained to me, I literally just said I assumed it's satire. Also who would downvote this? Calm down.

What "official channels" exist for renaming things that aren't even within your borders? It's less like renaming McKinley to Denali and more like "renaming" the Atlantic Ocean to the America Ocean. It's blatantly stupid, not acknowledged by most human beings, and won't last five minutes in history, and all of these facts are obvious to anyone who isn't stupid or corrupt, so what is the big mystery? What are they supposed to do besides what? You either adopt a frivolous rename or you don't.

That might be why they made a metaphor instead of saying the web page literally raped us.

The claim was that EVs "stop" emissions and I believe we've corrected that. At no point did I claim EVs don't reduce emissions.

Thanks for the tip on what to work on. You too can work on other parts of the stack. And you can even improve the "vehicle" end of the stack, to which it sounds like you confine your actions, by moving around less, and when moving around, not hauling one or two tons of "car" with you. This can be accomplished by, for example, moving close to work (or only working close to home), living only in areas with good public transit, and/or bicycling everywhere -- all of which I did for 30 years, so I know it's possible. (edit: saved a bunch of money too)

EVs don't "easily stop" emissions in the US, since the American grid today is powered about 43% by natural gas and 15% by coal. Converting those sources has to happen too.

He has investors to pay back now, so I don't think he can just do whatever. If that were me, I would consider myself fucked. But in his case I suspect this is already what he wants to do.