Rov_Scam
1mo ago
No, it doesn't. It wasn't really something I thought about until I had my own business and tried to switch to LibreOffice to save money, but I started getting flashbacks to when I was in college and doing something that's relatively simple these days meant navigating a ton of menus and submenus to find what I was looking for. I'll never get the ribbon hate. All it is is consolidating menus and toolbars into a series of tabbed toolbars. Not having a ribbon meant that if they wanted to add a new feature they'd either have to bury it in a submenu where nobody would find it or add it to a toolbar where it would take up an inordinate amount of space. Ignoring customization, I can't think of a single thing that's harder to do with a ribbon than it was to do with the mess of an interface Word used to have.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
Unless, like me, you like to watch videos on an actual television, and don't want to figure out how to side load apps. That being said, I don't pay for You Tube, just suffer.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
It depends on what you're using it for. For basic shit, Google Docs is okay. When using it for work, it's impossible. I had a job a few years ago where they wanted us to do everything in Docs so a current edition of our work was always available on the cloud. I flat out refused to do this and just did it in Office and uploaded everything, much to my bosses' consternation. It was a 1099 job so they technically couldn't tell me how to do my work, and now I use Office at work. But my early attempts to comply with Google Docs led to me slamming my head on the desk.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
You still have to use crappy Linux-equivalent software designed by the kind of people who are convinced that Office 97 was the best Office.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
To be clear, he wasn't a backup at that point. Denver had given up their 2nd, 3rd, and 4th round picks to be able to draft him (even though they probably could have drafted him later), and once Kyle Orton was benched there was no expectation that he was going to be anything but the starter. The team received a lot of criticism at the time for giving up essentially their entire draft to reach for a guy who nobody else was seriously interested in. The idea initially was that he could be in some kind of RB/QB/TE/WR combo role, but after he was drafted he made it clear that he was only interested in being quarterback. People who knew football could tell that he wasn't the answer, but Tebow fans only saw the Ws piling up. As soon as the Broncos signed Manning the following offseason Tebow was promptly traded to the Jets in a move that their then-GM admits was a mistake, especially since the circus he would bring was unneeded on a team that was probably going to lose anyway, especially in a media environment like New York. To be fair there were other reasons why they had to trade Tebow that are strictly football-related, but his career fizzle in New York, and even though he had been demoted to third string by the end of the season, he was still the subject of disproportionate media and fan interest.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
I don't even know who this person is or why I should care. I googled the name and nothing about any controversy came up. Google news was all about the woman she portrayed in the movie that flopped defended her performance after someone else involved in the true story criticized it. Whatever this is, it isn't news.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
I was referring to the Epstein stuff specifically and make no comment on anything else that may have happened. I've written about this extensively in the past; suffice it to say that I don't think there are going to be any bombshells, and I doubt that there are any "lists" at all. I don't like Trump but I'm more suspicious of him than I was previously for the simple reason that he leaned into this whole conspiracy until it was time to release the files. There's obviously something in there he'd rather not make public, or, alternatively, he hasn't seen the files and there's something in his past that he's worried may come up. I don't think it would be criminal. My first guess was going to be that he stayed in contact with Epstein well after any decent person would have cut ties, but the recent emails seem to undercut that theory; in the "dog that didn't bark" email he talks about Trump in a manner that suggests they aren't in regular contact.
The thing that's weird to me about the whole thing is that anyone who has studied this closely and isn't a total hack like Daryl Cooper would be of the opinion that it's highly unlikely that anyone other than Epstein and a few select people were involved in the wrongdoing. Nothing about Trump came up in the civil lawsuits, and the 2020 report about the original prosecution made it clear that no one in the Justice Department even knew that Epstein had famous friends until his attorneys told them. To be clear, the "Epstein Files" as it pertains to this case only involve the files from the Federal Investigation, and the only investigation that could have possibly revealed anything spicy would have been the 2019 investigation.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
Any wolf crying on the part of Trump's opponents is a relatively recent phenomenon. The narrative among the conspiracy-minded for the better part of the past five years was that the Biden Administration was concealing the Epstein Files to protect prominent Democrats, and that Trump would release them so these people could face the music. Or at the very least everyone would learn how depraved they all were. The only comments about this I ever heard from IRL friends on the left was that the logic behind this was ridiculous because Trump was close with Epstein and it would take a lot of faith to believe in the conspiracy yet not any involvement from Trump. And it wasn't a topic that came up that frequently. I didn't hear Democrats talking about this much at all until Trump went out of his way to say there was no conspiracy and prominent Republicans started echoing that sentiment. People like Charlie Kirk reversed course on the whole thing. Now my friends on the left started saying that they weren't suspicious before but were now because otherwise why would Trump be so adamant about keeping these confidential?
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
The Tebow hate had very little to do with politics. While he was vocally anti-abortion and his politics were assumed based on his religious affiliation, he never made any direct statements about Obama or anything like that, or even claimed to be a Republican. The religion thing is a bigger part of it, but still not as big as people make it out to be. He won two National Championships and a Heisman Trophy while at Florida, and was about as prominent a celebrity as exists in college football, which isn't quite the NFL but is still pretty big. Even when he was inspiring rule changes after putting Bible verses in his eye black, he still didn't seem to inspire too much hate.
When it came to the NFL, though, Tebow was an athlete, which in the pros is damning with faint praise. He had no special ability to play quarterback, but was able to be successful in college by relying on his natural athleticism. There's a YouTube clip of Ray Lewis and Ed Reed talking to rookies about the importance of watching film, and one of them says that in college they may have been able to run and jump their way to success, but in The League that wasn't going to work. Tebow was successful in college because he was a big guy who could plow his way forward on QB runs or out of a scramble, and played in a system where he wasn't expected to win games with his arm. He was regularly among the leaders in rushing yards among QBs in the top college ranks (and not too far from one of the top rusher's, period), and he led the SEC in all kinds of passing statistics, but pretty much everyone who saw him play could tell that his ability was limited. His footwork was terrible, and his throwing motion was so long it would make Byron Leftwich blush, resulting in high, looping passes that could work if the receiver was "NCAA open" but didn't have a chance at hitting the tighter windows in the NFL. He had no concept on how to read pro defenses. His decision-making was terrible. Even his rushing ability, his strong suit, was built less on speed and more on sheer power.
the NFL at that time was at one of its various low-ebbs when it came to dual-threat quarterbacks. The last one drafted of any consequence had been Michael Vick in 2002. The last one drafted period had been Pat White, the year prior. And though his time at West Virginia was successful enough that fans wore white in honor of him at their last home game, he only lasted one year in the pros, never completing a single pass. The tide would start to turn the following year with Cam Newton, and reach its crescendo after the success of Josh Allen and Lamar Jackson led every head coach to salivate over what could be done with a raw mass of pure athleticism. But that tide is turning now after the failures of guys like Trey Lance, Malik Willis, and Anthony Richardson. And Tebow had less obvious ability than any of them. After he graduated, there was talk that he'd have a future in the NFL as a tight end or maybe a fullback, but Tebow was having none of it. This had been suggested before, but he insisted on playing quarterback. Coaches had been trying to fix his mechanics since high school, but he could always fall back on his athleticism so he had no incentive to change. By the time he got to the NFL, these problems had become so ingrained that they were beyond coaching; even if he made improvement, if under pressure he could only be expected to revert to what he knew from muscle memory.
All that being said, quarterbacks are at a premium in the NFL, and in a draft class thin on QBs, Tebow was taken by the Broncos in the first round. He didn't see the field much in 2010, but the following year, with Kyle Orton being terrible, he was given a shot, and he made the most of it. That isn't to say he was good, exactly, but he won games. He'd pass for like 16 yards in the first half but the defense would keep the game close and Willis McGahee would get yards on the ground and in the fourth quarter he'd get a few good completions, march down the field, and win the game in the final minutes. He even won a playoff game, and though the Broncos promptly lost the following week, he now has more playoff wins than Justin Herbert, Andy Dalton, and hall-of-famer Y.A. Tittle.
In other contexts, this wouldn't have been a problem, but Tebow's existing public profile and relationship with the media did him in. If the same results were had by a nobody like and Easton Stick or Sam Ehrlinger type, the story would be about the defense and the running game and how they're winning despite expectedly poor QB play. If it was a guy like Duck Hodges who was working on a sod farm or something before getting the call to the big leagues, it would be a story about determination and never giving up. If Tim Tebow is the same person, except his personality is such that he's arrested for firing an unlicensed handgun during an altercation outside a nightclub, it wouldn't have made him more likeable, but the story would be about how he's a gritty guy who can take a sack and run for a first down on third and three.
But what doesn't fit is a guy who has won two national championships and a Heisman, who was drafted in the first round, who had a big enough public profile to do endorsements, to play so poorly and be rewarded for it by winning. He was already enough of a national celebrity by that point that whatever he did in a game was going to be newsworthy, and the Christianity threw the whole thing into overdrive. The fact that he was openly Christian wasn't the issue; there are plenty of pro athletes who have made their religious beliefs known. Phillip Rivers is also an Evangelical, and no one seemed to ever give him shit for it. But, aside from being a far better athlete, Rivers was also never as in-your-face about it as Tebow was. He went out of his way to make his religion a story, thanking God in every interview and genuflecting in the end zone. It became cloying, and in the light of the Broncos continuing to win in spite of his poor play, one could be forgiven for getting the impression that he was specifically attributing his teams success to divine intervention. Furthermore, he became a lodestar for people who cared more about religion than sports. His jersey was among the best-selling in the NFL. The people who wished him the most success, though, apart maybe from people in Denver, were those who weren't so much impressed with his playing ability as they were his evangelism.
Tim Tebow was hated because he completely upended puplic perception of what a pro athlete was supposed to be. If he had played better the religion would have seemed less important, and his success would be deserved. If his poor play cost his team games, he'd be another bad quarterback on a bad team and nothing special. Maybe Orton gets his job back.If it turned out his personal life wasn't as squeaky clean as he made it out to be, then the ensuing scandal would overshadow anything about his play or his religion, and the holy rollers who were buying his jerseys would be disowining him, and even if the Broncos continued on their trajectory, fewer people would care. But the right combination of things happened to allow religion to overpower sports, and fans don't like that. I'd talk about Kaepernick more, but it's more or less the same story, except with politics—a player with an existing public profile from (college, making the Super Bowl) ignites a national discussion about (religion, politics) far out of proportion to the player's actual ability. People have limited tolerance for these things being allowed to creep in where they don't belong, and to the extent that it's inevitable, they prefer that it at least involve someone whose value as an athlete justifies cutting them some slack. When the catalyst is a mediocre to awful player, and those most invested in taking the player's side aren't those typically invested in the game itself, things can turn ugly.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
And this is a problem how, exactly? If actual computer scientists didn't know this I'd be concerned, but as much as we'd like to think that a certain base-level of knowledge is required to study something seriously, it really isn't. Those of us who grew up with file structures as an essential part of computing just assumed that they always would be, and are now shocked to find that technology has rendered them unnecessary for a lot of people. If indeed knowledge of them is necessary, then you're going to have to teach them about it.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
I don't know exactly how things are managed on an iPad, but my point is that if some kind of software renders files structures as we know them obsolete, there's no point in complaining about people not knowing how to use them. Not knowing how to steer a car isn't much of an issue if all cars are autonomous, similar to how automatic transmissions have rendered stick shifts obsolete for most people in the United States.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
Let me paint a picture for you: It's about 15 degrees outside and you get into your freezing car to go to work. You give the car a little gas as you turn the key and it turns over but doesn't quite start. Unfazed, you give it another try, and you're closer, but no cigar. On your third try, you pay attention to how much gas you're giving it and, feathering the pedal just the right way, the car fires up. You sit in your driveway and rev the engine for a few minutes to get it warmed up. When you put it in gear, however, the engine stalls. You aren't surprised, but fuck, you thought you let it run long enough so that wouldn't happen. So you start it again and let it run a little longer, revving the engine occasionally, but it still stalls as you put it in gear. You're mildly concerned at this point but not to the point you'd call a tow truck or anything. You fire it up a third time (or a fourth, depending on how lucky you're feeling), before you decide to investigate the problem. You go outside and freeze your ungloved fingers off getting the hood open and sure enough, it's just as you suspected; the so-called "automatic" choke isn't opening properly. You stick your fingers into a running engine to open it up manually, get back into the car, and, if you're lucky, you'll be able to drive away. But you may have to repeat the process a couple times depending on how cold it is.
I used to drive a car from the 70s, and this sort of thing used to be the reality of owning an automobile. People like to bitch these days about how "you can't work on cars anymore!" and I agree, that car was super-easy to work on. And that was a good thing, because you'd be working on it a lot. I'm not talking about major repairs here, either. I'm talking about annual plug changes, annual point changes, setting the spark with a timing light, lube jobs, semiannual coolant changes, reformatting the carb for high-altitudes, and a bunch of other shit that nobody does anymore. It's still better than it was in my grandfather's day, when people would patch tires, carry spark plugs in the car for emergency changes, and cars would regularly overheat, even if there wasn't anything wrong with them. When was the last time your car was vapor locked?
I imagine that you've never experienced any of this before. These days, all cars have multiport fuel injection and electronic ignition and not starting and overheating aren't par for the course but signs of a serious problem. People aren't as knowledgeable about cars as they used to be, but people don't really have to be knowledgeable anymore. Computers had their own switch from carburetion to fuel injection, the switch from DOS to NT architecture. Just as most cars now run when you turn the key, most programs will run after a simple installation process, and run properly. But I can't fault today's kids for not understanding file structures any more than I can fault anyone born after 1989 for not knowing how autoexec.bat or config.sys works, or not knowing how to gap plugs. They might not know how to do things you think are basic, but it's not a problem unless they need to know, and if they never do need to know than the world is better off for it.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
No, you don't get sales tax charged on any of that list, let alone most of it. The only items excluded from the Washington sales tax exemption are prepared foods, soft drinks, and bottled water. And even that takes ten pages to fully flesh out. And sales tax isn't the best example to use because you're talking about an extra charge of what is probably a few cents if you incorrectly select a taxable item over a nontaxable one. What you're proposing is the difference between being able to buy the item at all or not.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
Except it's the exact same logic the Republicans used when they claimed that making the tax cuts permanent wasn't new spending because it was just "maintaining" the status quo, a status quo they voted for to begin with, specifically because of how it became impossible to undo the Bush tax cuts.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
Restrict the eligible product pool to vegetables, fruits, grains, beans, and dairy and you save like 90%, while avoiding the issue of people spending all their cash on day 1 on waygu steak or orange crush, or selling them for spending money.
This simply isn't feasible. Even assuming it's legal for states to deviate from Federal SNAP guidelines (and I doubt that it is), and that eligible items could be agreed on politically, there's simply no way to implement such a system without giving significant advance notice. Grocery stores rely on internal codes to determine what is food stampable and what isn't. If such a change required them to go into their computer systems and change the status of thousands of items, it would be a tall enough order, but it gets worse than than. To avoid having to code each individual item as being eligible or ineligible, they rely on an item's categorization in the relevant department. So in a typical grocery store items categorized as produce, meat, dairy, edible grocery, frozen, bakery, and deli would be eligible for food stamps, while items categorized as HBC, inedible grocery, and prepared foods would not. When you decide to start changing the eligible items you're requiring grocery stores to upend their entire department systems to accommodate the change. What you propose wouldn't affect some departments, but something like edible grocery would be entirely screwed up, and even things like deli would get complicated (what you propose would include cheese but not meat, and some stores categorize certain bread items as deli, but not others).
Conservatives in general like to excoriate poor people for the perception that they spend their food stamps on items they shouldn't be spending them on, creating a sort of triangle with the following three categories being the points:\
- Items that are objectionable because they're inherently unhealthy (fruit roll up, pop tarts, cheese curls, Dr. Pepper, etc.)
- Convenience items that resemble unobjectionable items or are composed of items that would individually be unobjectionable, but are prepared or processed to a degree that makes them both more unhealthy and more expensive than unobjectionable items (Hungry Man Dinners, frozen pizza, etc.)
- Luxury items that would be unobjectionable but for the cost (Waygu steak, most seafood, artisanal cheese, etc.)
There are certain staple items like the ones you probably have in mind that fit right in the center of the triangle that aren't objectionable to anybody. But when you move closer to the edges it becomes extremely difficult to draw the line. For example, you suggest restricting the product pool to grains. But what do you actually mean by that? Let's look at some items:
- Rice, oatmeal, flour: These are more or less pure grains that would presumably fit any definition you want to use.
- Bread, pasta: Processed, premade items, but such basic staples that it would be ridiculous to not include them.
- Prepackaged cookies, cakes, donuts, etc.: Obviously in the snack food category, but they're really just basic grain items with more sugar and fat content
- Boxed crackers: Still firmly in the snack food category, but without the added sugar and fat
- Breakfast cereals: Run the gamut from Cheerios and Kix up to Fruity Pebbles and Count Chocula. I guess you could propose a sugar limit like my mother did?
- Granola bars, breakfast bars, energy bars: Usually found in the cereal aisle. Like cereal, they run the gamut from so healthy as to be inedible up to Pop Tarts, the poster child for oversweetened convenience foods.
- Hamburger Helper, Rice-a-Roni, Kraft Mac-n-Cheese, boxed stuffing mix, ramen: Unobjectional staple items plus flavorings that may or may not make the product significantly less healthy
- Pancake mix: Unobjectionable on its own, except the intended purpose (and only purpose the vast majority will ever use it for) is to drench it in a sauce made of pure sugar, which is sold separately but conveniently located right next to it
- Frozen garlic bread, frozen ravioli, frozen pierogies: Unobjectionable items made slightly less healthy and sold in a form that is typically associated with objectionable convenience foods.
- Specialty breads: An unobjectionable item made in a way that may or may not make it more expensive. Bakery Italian is among the least expensive and best-tasting options at the store I shop at, but you can also get more expensive stuff pretty easily.
I don't doubt that you have your opinions on this and could draw a line somewhere that's both logical and reasonable. That's not the issue. The issue is that disentangling all of this would result in regulations so byzantine that you couldn't possibly expect the average person to have an intuitive sense for it.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
Even for a mega artist like Taylor Swift, that's not entirely true. Marketing is certainly part of it, but there's a lot more that goes into it. Even if you cynically assume that pop stars are all marketing and no substance, labels pay a lot of attention to what gets released. The reason that people like 2Pac seem to have immortality is because they all record a lot more than the record company is willing to release, especially with pop musicians who use outside songwriters. If it were simply a matter of spamming the market with material then they either wouldn't record as much (to save money), or release everything they did record (to maximize revenue). The reason they don't do this is because they need to maintain a certain quality standard and avoid saturating the market. In the 50s and 60s artists were required to put out several ten song albums per year. By the end of the sixties, release schedules slackened, and by the 80s an album a year pace was considered pretty good. Now they can go years between releases, and this isn't due to lack of material in most cases; those 50s releases included a lot of filler.
So yes, they are paying attention to the music, and AI doesn't allow one to pay any attention to the music, especially when it's made by people with no musical experience. It's just spamming in hope they can make more money than they spend, with little control over the content. And marketing includes a lot more than what one typically thinks of as marketing. It includes touring, arranging press interviews, making sure critics review the album, making public appearances, having ins with radio stations, and all of that.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
Some people capturing a non-zero amount of the market doesn't equate to upending the market to the point that it has to cope. Slop has always accounted for a non-zero amount of the market.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
If you're a record executive who has been given a 1 million dollar budget to develop an artist that the label expects to have a hit, what do you think is the better strategy?
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Scout someone whom you think has potential and spend the 1 million signing, recording, and promoting them.
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Sign 100 bands more or less at random and spend $10,000 signing and recording them, and just release the music and hope it promotes itself. You're going to pay them up front for the rights to the recordings so they're just making an album for hire and aren't under contract, and you won't even bother to keep their phone numbers. What they record now is it.
The artist you spent the whole million on might make the money back and might not, but the chances of that happening are much better than assuming that one of the hundred albums you just threw into the market with no promotion is going to be a big enough hit to recoup the costs of all the others is practically zero. The calculus doesn't get any better if you can record 200 artists for $5,000 apiece, or 400 for $2,500 apiece. At that level of investment it's akin to a lottery, and lotteries don't become better investments just because the price of tickets is cheaper. It's actually worse than a lottery because at least the lottery has calculable odds and a guaranteed winning number.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
I don't know how big of a town you're talking about but I checked Pittsburgh's (2 million metro) alternative weekly and, filtering out DJs, cover bands, and open mic, there are 136 music events in town this week. Some of these will be from elsewhere, and some of the stuff like Banjo Night at the Elks isn't really applicable, but most bands aren't going to be playing in a given weeks, so I would assume that it isn't an exaggeration to say that 200 bands in Pittsburgh would record an album with a major if given the opportunity. The point I'm making is that it's not like labels are having trouble finding people willing to sign.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
That's not really much of a shocker, though. We've had similar democratization with the streaming services for 15 years now, and while I'm sure somebody has had a hit by virtue of nothing other than having uploaded their music to Spotify, if you look at the Billboard charts it's almost exclusively artists signed to major labels. Even the artists you're referring to were only able to use Spotify to get enough traction to get signed with major labels. "Rich Men North of Richmond" is the only song I can think of off the top of my head that became a hit despite having absolutely no label promotion, and it's a good example to use because Oliver Anthony refused to sign with a label. Despite touring with name acts he hasn't had any real success since, and despite venting about his ex-wife on Rogan, the song he wrote about their divorce stalled in the lower reaches of the Country chart and didn't crack the Hot 100 at all. Zach Bryan is probably the epitome of the phenomenon you mention, as he was self-released until 2022, but none of his music actually charted until after he had signed with Warner the previous year. There isn't any evidence of a sustainable path to success for a self-released artist that doesn't involve eventually being picked up by a label.
And this is for artists who have at least some ability to self-promote, whether through social media, local radio, licensing to TV/movies/advertisements, or simply playing shows wherever you can. If the strategy is simply to upload as much material to streaming services as possible and hope something catches on, there's no way to engage in even this kind of low-level promotion, since it doesn't make sense to invest anything beyond the minimum that's required to get the song uploaded. It may happen occasionally, but there's no reason to believe that simply increasing the volume will turn it into a viable business model, or allow it to play a significant role in the industry.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
Just before AI music became a thing, Ted Gioia talked about a Spotify fake artist problem he discovered. Bascially, he noticed that playlists with titles like "Jazz for a Rainy Afternoon" wouldn't include any artists that he recognized (and as a jazz critic he would recognize more than the average bear), and further investigation revealed that the "albums" the songs were from would only have one or two songs. Looking into this even further, he discovered that he couldn't find much information at all about these artists, except addresses in the Stockholm area. The conclusion he came to was that since some music styles—jazz, chillout, orchestral, etc.—are driven more by algorithms than individual artists (by virtue of people telling Alexa "Play relaxing music" or whatever), it was cheaper for Spotify to hire studio musicians to record generic slop so they wouldn't have to pay royalties to real musicians.
In the 90s, I was at a discount store with my dad during Christmas season and he bought a CD titled "Jazz for Christmas Eve" for a dollar or something. It didn't have the name of any purported artist, just song titles. The music was entirely MIDI. A few years later the mother of a family friend was going into the home, and we were helping to clean out her house. I took the records, mostly junk, but there was one that stood out. It was called "The Hits of Nat King Cole" or something similar and had a picture of Mr. Cole on the cover. Towards the bottom, in relatively small print, it said "Performed by Bob Gigliotti" or whoever. The liner notes weren't extensive but mostly talked about Nat King Cole. The only mention of the gentleman who was actually performing on the album was a brief paragraph that said that he was, in fact, a singer, and that he does a good job with the material. When I played the record, I was hit with some guy doing an uncanny Nat King Cole impression.
The point I am trying to make is that cheap, mass-produced slop has existed in the music industry for as long as production costs were cheap enough to justify it. An enterprising music historian could probably do a book-length treatment of the subject, but in the end this has only been a minor footnote in the history of music. And even in the limited instances where it has historically gotten a foothold, tides shifted away from it. Consider Muzak. I hesitate to call it slop because, up until the 1980s, it was produced with a degree of professionalism and creativity that belied its status. But this was more for the pleasure of the people making it than anything else; it was always intended to be nothing more than musical wallpaper for stores, offices, and other public places, with orchestral arrangements of popular hits almost algorithmically selected to ensure the proper pacing. In the 1960s it was ubiquitous, but these days the only national chain I can think of that still plays this kind of music is Hobby Lobby. Retail started shifting to name artists in the 1980s, starting with inoffensive "soft rock" but more recently including practically anything that's been popular since the 1960s.
The AI doomers have tried to make the argument that because this music can be generated so quickly and so inexpensively it's trivial to just completely flood the market, and cash-strapped record companies would love it if they could generate product without having to pay the artists, producers, etc. While this may seem like a compelling argument the music industry could have always done this, but they haven't even attempted it in 100 years of existence. Making music is obviously a skill, and making music that people want to listen to (and pay for) is an even greater skill, but it's not a particularly unique skill. Any city is going to have hundreds of musicians who write their own material, practice in their spare time, play in bars in the weekends, and are good enough that most of the people in attendance enjoy the performance. If the record companies wanted to, they could have always signed as many of these musicians as they could, pay for a recording session, pay the musicians a low flat fee, and completely spam the market for little cost. If they get a hot or two out of the deal, great. If not, they're only out ten grand.
In reality, major labels are highly selective about who they sign, and those they do sign usually get significant financial backing. A local band recording at a local studio can get an album out the door for about 5 grand if they're well-rehearsed. A major label will spend, on average, $250,000 to $300,000 to record the album. The label will also pay for promotion, which can run into the millions if touring is involved. And they would always prefer to spend money on a proven star rather than a nobody. In other words, the model they operate on is the exact opposite of the one where AI takes over.
And it gets even worse. In an alternate universe where record labels operated by signing cheap labor and spamming the market, that at least allows for the possibility of being able to capitalize on the hits. AI doesn't even allow that, since there's no guarantee that you'll get output that's plausibly by the same fake band. Even big stars like The Beatles, Frank Sinatra, The Supremes, and Taylor Swift have had occasional flops; there's no guarantee that because an artist is popular that any individual release will be successful. But at least when you got The Supremes in the studio you were guaranteed a Supremes record. With AI you just have to keep generating and hope that you eventually get a Supremes record, and even that doesn't guarantee you anything.
As much as AI doomers talk about how it's going to take things over, it's not. It's going to replace slop, but slop has always existed. The business model doesn't really allow for the kind of dystopian future they're predicting.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
The golden era for everything is always 20 years ago. That's how long it takes society to weed its collective memory of the bad and keep the good. Everything people say about the garbage we have today vs. the awesome stuff we had yesterday was being said yesterday about the stuff we had the day before and so on. That goes for pretty much everything - cars, appliances, movies, etc. Really, it's a mix of good and bad, but given enough time, it all becomes good.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
Pinging in @Jiro. I understand you're argument, and while I addressed the potential adversarial motive in selection of the evidence, it was more as an aside, an observation that would give me another reason to be suspicious. But it isn't essential to my argument, because this failure mode seems to happen regardless of whether the observer has an ulterior motive, and is usually the result of a completely logical chain of events.
The cases I was referring to where this happens with police is where they get a Level 2 Description and become on it to the point that they fail to appreciate how broad it is. Take my example from above, where a witness sees a perpetrator running from a crime scene who is an African American teenager, short and very overweight. Let's suppose that a couple hours after the incident a beat cop canvassing the neigborhood come across a young man of that description who is 5'4" and 200 pounds in a pool hall a few blocks from the crime scene. Detectives question him, and while they don't get much in the way of evidence, they don't entirely buy his story. So they spend the next several weeks investigating him, never coming up with anything useful, but also never considering that he might not be the guy. Years later someone writes a book about the case and talks to an old cop who insists that this kid was the killer but they never had enough to prove it.
The police in a case like that didn't go on a wild goose chase because they had some special reason they wanted to pin a crime on that kid, they did it because they came across him early in the investigation and he matched a description given to them by an eyewitness. They didn't consider that the description could apply to hundreds of people, and that they should have been casting a broader net rather than narrowing the scope of the investigation early based on the description alone. It ultimately doesn't matter if Baker has an animus against the police. Even if he was arbitrarily reviewing CCTV footage to try to find a match, if he found some guy walking outside a restaurant who matched to the same degree and started making the argument that it must be that guy based on nothing else, then it's still just as bad.
I serve on a nonprofit board that does work in a state park, and while I can sympathize with this guy's plight, I understand why the parks people acted the way they did. The explanation they gave him about parks in poorer areas, etc. was bullshit. Not without some truth, but bullshit in the sense that there's more to the story and it was a simple explanation they could give him for why they were saying no. The grain of truth was that if people who live in low income areas (whose parks may be in worse condition) see that a higher-income area is getting new playground equipment, they're going to bitch to the board about it and that's a headache the board doesn't want to have to deal with. But that's not really the reason.
The real reason is that the guy knows that there's no way in hell that this is happening if they say yes and it's easier to just say no and stop it right there than to let this progress any further and waste time and money. The way this guy rambles my thought was that if he came across to the parks guy the way he comes across in the video there's no way he's getting anywhere. I don't know what you mean by him being given the run around for weeks. It's hard to get the timeline down because of the rambling, but it looks like he followed up after not hearing a response for 12 hours, and was then given the option of a phone call or in-person meeting. He then said he declined the meeting because he didn't want to drive to the guy's office, which shows his lack of seriousness right there, and schedules a phone call which he then postpones, possibly because he actually was busy, possibly because he wanted to waste the guy's time, it's hard to tell, and was then disappointed that the guy offered to reschedule it for the following business day.
I honestly don't know what the guy's strategy was, or what he was even looking to do. At one point he seems sure that the guy s going to tell him it's going to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to install a $500 slide. No, not quite, but it's clear that this guy is clueless. You can't just buy a slide from Home Depot, sink a few holes in the ground, and call it a day. I mean, you can, but that slide isn't going to last a full season without falling apart. I have catalogs of various park products our private group orders with their own money for public use, and while I don't normally look at the playground equipment, a slide costs $5,000 on the low end for small one for toddlers up to about $15,000 for a fancy deluxe one. A typical basic 8 foot slide would run around $10k. Then there's installation, which is going to involve digging post holes for concrete footings on the supports, which is going to run at least another few thousand. And that's American. Northernlion, of course, has no idea where one even buys this kind of thing, or knows whether these supply houses even deal with the general public or if you have to have an account and a sales rep assigned to you, or what kind of contractor you call to even do this work.
He wants to blame all this extra expense on bureaucrats lining their pockets, but prices are what they are, and contractors charge what they charge. What does he expect the parks department to do, install a slide and send him a bill hoping he pays it? Waste time going through the equipment selection and ordering process only for him to back out when he finds out he can't afford it? The reason they asked him if he wanted to buy naming rights or ad space or a brick or whatever was because if this guy actually has enough money to pay for a slide installation then he has enough money to contribute to the capital projects the park has prioritized. If he'd expressed interest in that then they may have taken him more seriously about the slide since he'd obviously have the money, and they aren't going to ask how much he's willing to spend because they don't want the meeting to end with him being humiliated or assuming the high totals are due to corruption.
So they give him an excuse that is partially true. One of the things that any private group needs to take into consideration is that the agency they are dealing with is governed by a long-term plan. They have a vision of what they want the parks system to look like in five years, or ten years, or whatever, have an idea of how the vision is going to be funded, and how they're going to implement things. This is a process that the public is invited to collaborate in, but few do. The people who do collaborate are more influential than people like this guy will give them credit for; public comments are taken seriously. Just because you offer to pay for something doesn't mean they're going to let you do what you want. They may be willing to deviate from the plan, but it's not like any Tom, Dick and Harry can just submit proposals and get the green light.
I've spent the last decade trying to get trail built. The park has about 80 miles of existing trail, most of it built in the 1960s on old logging roads. These are in rough shape and vary between swampy and eroded due to poor design. They require a lot of maintenance just to stay passable, and many are beyond repair. The biggest hurdle we had with any proposals that we would build and pay for ourselves were along the lines of "We already have 80 mile of trail we can't maintain, so you have to show us that you have the manpower to take up some of that burden before you can add mileage." This is the kind of goodwill that takes years to establish. They don't want a group that comes in with enthusiasm and builds ten miles of trail, only to have that enthusiasm fade over time and end up with overgrown, unmaintained trail. It's happened in other places. If you want to be taken seriously you have to do it as part of an organized group that demonstrates that it deserves to be taken seriously. This isn't beyond the capability of anyone who is willing to put in the time. But too many people aren't, and bureaucrats are wary of people with ideas that they can't commit to. Saying "If you want to help here are some projects you can donate money to" is easy because he can donate to his ability or desire, and it doesn't require any follow up. Building a playground feature immediately puts him on the hook for more than he likely realizes, and commits him to possible future obligations (Is the park going to be expected to maintain this equipment, or does he have money for that too? Will they be able to send him a bill for repairs? Is he willing to donate to a capital fund? Will he get fixed if it breaks a few months after opening and the park doesn't have money allocated to fix it?)
As for the window thing, the code only requires those guards to be placed on windows that are below 2 feet above the floor and 6 feet above ground; i.e. it doesn't apply to most windows people have in their homes., i.e. it only applies to the kinds of windows a toddler would be liable to crawl out of without the assistance of a chair or something. If your windows do not fit this description than it's on the landlord, not the municipal government. I'm not sure where you're getting the 90 cm from.
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