I agree wtih you on the superiority of FLAC. However you said:
I assure you that if the Apple iTunes store ran a little ad at the top of their site that said "These are compressed audio files, for uncompressed, full quality files go here" they would get A LOT more hits on the FLAC stuff.
And I can assure you that won't happen because the iTunes player doesn't support FLAC. I have regularly pitched a fit at Apple for this, but they dig "Apple Lossless" which bites.
Melos PreAmp - Phase Linear 400 amp - Watson Lab 10 speakers, Kimber Cabling, Foundation power management.
The playback system:
Windows PC USB - Benchmark DAC - amp system.
Control: CD player: Rotel 855.
Test Files for both formats:
1. Famous Blue Raincoat as sung by Jennifer Warnes from her remastered CD of same name (FBR).
2. Whispering Pines by The Band from the extras on the remastered CD - track 17.
3. Listen to the Silence as performed by Tori amos from the CD "strange little girls"
4. Les Pleurs by Mr. de Sainte Colombe, version viole seule de Jordi Savall, from the "Tous les matin du monde" soundtrack.
5. Omphalos by Cerberus Shoal from CD: Homb
first the CDs were listened to on the Rotel CD player. Then the mp3s, which were ripped at 320 kbps. Then the FLAC files. then the mp3s and then the CDs. After that we skipped around doing blind a/b comparisons.
The result:
We were usually but not 100% reliably able to distinguish the difference between the CD and the FLAC file. We were ALWAYS able to tell the mp3. how?
Imaging stability, soundstage. The 320 mp3s were very good, but on our system, they were definitely lacking certain details. FLAC was way better.
The best was the CD itself. We tracked down the FLAC differences (again - questions of precision in imaging and soundstage were the leading problems) to an issue of jitter in the USB bus of the computer.
To get a system good enough to notice these differences requires time and money, but one you're there, it's plain as day.
"Free will" implies non-deterministic behavior, but it also implies non-random behavior. There's no room for this in our understanding of physics.
you are so wrong, you are not even wrong.
free will requires "time":
unfolding of events present a choice. choice is made.
This requires a unidirectional time dimension for events to happen and for decisions to be made. If time has more than one dimension, then the universe is static and unchanging: completely deterministic, and free will does not exist.
That's why research into string theory and larger-dimensional universe theory is important.
If ONE MORE dumb ass says "music these days sucks", I will personally hunt them down and pee in their butt.
FACT: lots and lots of great music is made all the time.
FACT: human beings "bond" with music in their teens as music has an emotional component and the flood of hormones wreaks havoc with ones emotional make up and ordering. As a result: people "focus" on the music of their "coming of age" or maturation.
FACT: there has been no decrease in talent, nor has there been a decrease in creativity.
So, as people age, the hormone disaster retreats, and they lose interest in music as it is crowded out by careers, marriages, kids, and mortgages. Combine that with a multiplicity of technologies demanding one's attention (TV, Wii, XBox, Movies, Internet, etc.) and it thusly comes as NO SURPRISE that people think "music these days sucks" and "there's no good music anymore", when in fact, it is simply one's perceptions and hormonal predispositions have changed.
I'm an Older Geezer - I saw Genesis with Peter Gabriel, Yes, and King Crimson with Wetton on bass. I saw the Gang of Four, and the Clash, and MX80, Blondie, etc. Then I graduate university and I continued being fascinated by music. I also got married, and I saw my (now ex) wife lose interest, and my friends lose interest, and in the mid 1990s one of them said "yah know, Ralphie - music pretty much died in 75 and 76 when Disco and punk came down the pike" And I responded, "No, dumbass - you graduated high school in 75, and got that soul-deadening job at the air conditioning factory that drained all the life out of you."
I continue to listen to new music, even as I lose my hair and go ever grayer. I have thousands of CDs and LPs (most of which I have digitised or collected digital versions of) and I listen to music all the time and I am always listening for new good music, and I am never disappointed. There's TONS of great stuff gushing out of the world every single day. It's Art. It's WHAT WE DO because WE ARE HUMAN.
so when you say "There hasn't been any good music in 10 / 20 / 30 / 40 years", I say FUCK OFF and OPEN YOUR EARS.
Wanna learn more? get "THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON MUSIC". Read it.
free will doesn't exist because it is all completely predetermined in a higher dimensional universe, and free will is just a kind of "optical illusion" because we only experience time in one dimension.
Based on your logic, I should start investing in horses and drawn-carriages. Both are renewable and sustainable, minimal emissions during use and construction, and minimal nasty chemicals used during manufacturing, much of the world does not have current access to them, and they can travel places other transportation cannot. Think of the demand for veterinarians and blacksmiths, plus tack and riding gear, and carpenters and farmers too. Horses are natural, so we can have as many of them as we need without consequence, right?
It's actually worse than that, IMHO. Hint: the ONLY technology that has been PROVEN by countless cultures all over the world to be sustainable over countless millennia is NEOLITHIC.
As far as peak in oil goes, here is the data from the EIA and the IEA and CAPP. If those organisations are outside what you consider expert, we have nothing to discuss. Read THIS.
I am well aware of the economic clusterfuck that surrounds us. I am not certain that other currencies will *immediately* supplant the dollar. I do think that over the next decade we could see the formation of a "currency basket" where a variety of important currencies trade or value as a control group, say, the USD, EUR, RMB, JPY, and if the Russians can sit still long enough, maybe the RUB.
I've been researching this a great deal since 1998, and I urge you to do the following:
super-insulate your house.
get your heating off fossil fuel.
live close to work where you can walk to it, or ride a bike or take a bus or subway.
learn to grow high calorie value food in your backyard (i.e., beets, beans, carrots, peppers, potatoes, parsnips, etc. Yes. Wheat? No.)
Learn to deal with greater temp variation NOW, so it's not such a shock later.
Use electric assist solar hot water.
See if you can live with a small or no refrigerator. if you MUST have one, get a small SunFrost.
Learn to can food.
Compost your food scraps.
I can guarantee you, the next 20 years will look nothing like the past 20 years. This is well explained here in this Crash Course.
I don't see the AC's plea to boycott shell as Flamebait. I think he's correct. A number of other posters have written that "shell is a corporation, so it only responds to profit points" then FINE:
manipulate the corporation where it pays attention: at its bottom line.
Therefore, boycotting shell is a perfectly logical and REASONABLE response to Shell's profoundly stupid move.
Again, they're an oil company trying to profit. The world doesn't run on good intentions, well wishes, and fairy dust. It does run on money and oil though.
Until when? And then what?
Actually the world DOES run on well wishes - otherwise there wouldn't be any "good faith" and contracts would never be negotiated. It does run on good intentions - without it there would be no Trust and money would collapse. It DOES run on fairy dust- we just call it OIL and it's production seems to have had an initial peak on May 2005, and then a second peak in June 2008, and has been in decline ever since.
So - to all the "realists" out there: reality is demanding tyhat we look beyond immediate "reality" and look at the longer term and invest in THAT. It will create jobs (pulling us out of the recession) and help propel civilisation along to a sustainable state.
In OS X, you will also need X11 or XDarwin in order to launch and run Gimpshop.
I'm not going to dump out to X11 to run something that, while close, is not BETTER than Photoshop. That exceeds my hassle factor. I should click it and it should open, period. Running X11 or XDarwin is NOT why I run OS X. I have better things to do with my time.
It could make for some pretty funny conversation in a few decades when the bat is forgotten.
[spoken in Chinese] Hey Captain - look what I see! A bat! Seriously! right next to us! Look!
(dead bat)
Amazing - how can a bat fly this high? Let's do an EV and collect him.
OR:
Frozen bat carcass, travelling at 17,000 mph slams head on into spaceship travelling 17,000 mph, resulting in an explosion visible from the ground. yay.
I agree - but of course stating the obvious and coming up with a great idea gets modded flamebait... Mustn't ruffle the feathers of the true believers...
and a more intuitive workflow, a lot less of this book would really be necessary and GIMP might actually find some greater acceptance.
As goofy as the Adobe GUI is, Photoshop is the poop, pure and simple, and all other image appas are compared to it. Painter, for example is slower and clumsier, but it has awesome brushes, MS Paint is its own hobbled ugliness but has its uses, GIMP is ugly and retarded, but it's free and it works, etc. The day Adobe puts CS on Linux is the day GIMP gets a stake driven through its heart. Ad that day can't come too soon, IMHO. I'd love to run CS on a Linux box and be done with Mac AND Windows and run on generic hardware.
I've been advocating for YEARS for Adobe to sell Linux boxen with CS locked on and pre-installed. They could give the computer away for practically free. BUY SOFTWARE - FREE COMPUTER!
I would also suggest that Adobe needs to jump on this now, as Linux is gaining greater acceptance, GIMP will also, and they don't want GIMP to rule that platform - first in and all that.
I'll definitely buy this book. I dislike GIMP intensely, but knowing it better might take an edge off.
Government exists for the protection and projection of the ruling class. 300 years ago, the ruling class were post feudalist monarchies. Now it's industrial oligarchies.
Democracy provides the illusion of control, permitting people to act in ways that seem to benefit themselves as political actors, and thus permitting the hegemony of capitalist industrialist relations to continue as the modus operandi of civilisation, unabated.
Thankfully geology and nature get to play last, and will make harsh hash of this ponzi scheme called capitalist industrialism.
Obama is no different than Roosevelt. Contrary to right wing bullshit, Roosevelt SAVED the ruling class from self destruction. Obama is attempting the same.
Why is the question. I think it has to do with several things all working together in the worst possible way.
1. Parenting. Baby Boomers may not be as hard towards their kids, but too often they are just the opposite, which, in some ways, is worse. The Boomers themselves were spoiled by their parents, the "class of 1946", who went through the Depression and then got their asses shot off in WW2. They wanted their kids to never have to do without, and to always have it better and easier, because they remember their own childhoods of the 1930s, and how miserable that was. suburbia was developed so they could live in cartoons of country homes, and the automobile, once the province of the rich and then the middle class, soon became required and the entire society was redesigned around those infernal gas guzzling death monsters.
So, the boomers raised their kids even easier, and spent the 1980s and 90s blowing vast amounts of smoke up their kids asses as they drove them to soccer practice in giant SUVs. These kids feel entitled to this success: it is al they have ever known. It was all based on this one time gift of 3 trillion barrels of oil which will soon cease to be energetically viable as a fuel, but that's a different point.
So, part 1: The Parents spoiled these little fuckers. Horribly.
2. TV. The television is just fiction. As adults we know this, but as children we don't necessarily get it. And even when we do "get it" there is an emotional component in TV that resonates with parts of the brain that are built Not To Get It, which is why we find a show "scary" or "sexy" or whatever lizard brain response the advertisers are trying to pull out of the public. The TV also shows a distorted view of "normalcy". For every "Roseanne" there's a Huxtable or Fresh Prince or dozen other "upward" viewing families presented as "normal". This inculcates a set of false epxectations.
so, 2: they have false expectations of what "normalcy" is.
3. The American School system tracks to university. Very frankly, most of the people who go to university SHOULDN'T. They are idiots. They should never have even gone to High School. They should have gone to a trade school and learned a useful skill. Unfortunately, the USA deskilled itself in the 1970s with its de-industrialisation process, and all the skilled work went overseas. All that was left was the skilled work that couldn't be exported, such as farming, carpentry, plumbing, HVAC, shoe repair, car repair.
And each of those has also seen pressure to deskill as well. Many suburban or exurban white kids would do farmwork in the summer for extra money. Now it is all left to illegal immigrants.
Carpentry, outside of finish or cabinetry, is also left to immigrants who work more cheaply.
Plumbing and HVAC still has work, but the pay has stagnated and the ability for freelance work has suffered greatly. shoe repair has disappeared with the advent of Nike and the export of the shoe industry to Malaysia.
Car repair has been deskilled through technology. It used to be if your transmission made noise, they would take it apart and fix it. Now, they just pull the tranny and stick in a new one. Diagnosis is done by computer, not experience. Raises are given to people who bring in more business for expensive diagnostics. In the mean time, cars have changed as well - tuning a distributor cap is no longer needed.
At the same time, nonproductive work was deeply rewarded - parasites of all stripes flooded the finance industry with results we are dealing with today. Other equally stupid jobs have become "careers". Production assistants. Assistant Administrator for coordination of health insurance sales reps. Don't get me started on the jillions of "psychology" and "public relations" majors pumped into the economy every year.
At the same time, if the kid doesn't go to school, there is NOTHING the school can do. There used to be truancy laws, but those are gone now, or simply not enfor
I agree. Many people have inflated senses of self-importance. My example was just looking at the criteria used by this idiotic HR policy, and finding the logical hole in it - people who put out a lot of email, people who put out a lot of code, people who "do more" at all costs. I see it in academia: people who crank out dozens of papers on utter crap on the one hand and then others who bury themselves in teaching with elaborate rubrics and grading because they have no idea how to do the "research thing" very well.
It's a balance between quantity and quality, and frankly, qualitative judgments are best left OUT of the hands of HR.
My general points about HR stand - it simply shouldn't exist, except as an enabling part of the organisation (paperwork with hiring, benefits, exit paperwork, work related legalities, etc.) Actual "HR" should be done by Management, and if Management is too fucking lazy or clueless or overworked to deal with it, then maybe they need to look at how they're getting their jobs done...
gets me a hit on someone who has a blog that features the music I want and has a link to the music on rapidshare or some other online file repository system.
There is nothing "peer to peer" about it at all.
These links will break, but are often replaced by other links. The download is fast, but not superfast, simply "fast enough".
The whole P2P thing is so 2001. So yesterday. So "who cares? I've moved on from there..."
It presumes that people don't change. It presumes that the set of "desirable" traits are always going to be desirable. It puts quantity over quality, but it is quality that often matters more.
Let's say you have a company that makes widgets. One of the people in the widget design office is a bit of a dork. He's a musician, a quiet and not very sociable bass player. And this is his day job. He works hard enough to keep his job but not much more. One day, he comes up with an idea that is dead brilliant, and then goes on tour. The idea saves the company millions of dollars. And let's see - he always comes in late, frequently hungover, kind of smells, and tries to leave early. He doesn't do that much when he's a round, and he's often not around because of his band.
But, in one afternoon, he has been of more use to the company than all other employees in Widget Design combined, ever.
By the metrics described, he would have been laid off upon return from tour.
Typical fuckwittery by HR bozos.
The best companies don't have HR, except in terms of processing new hires, dealing with benefits, and assisting people on the way out. The rest is left to the departments and managers. It makes for a flatter and faster organisation - ideas M$ has no clue about.
Slashdot Mirror
Read THIS and stop your bitching before I have to pee in your butt.
I assure you that if the Apple iTunes store ran a little ad at the top of their site that said "These are compressed audio files, for uncompressed, full quality files go here" they would get A LOT more hits on the FLAC stuff.
And I can assure you that won't happen because the iTunes player doesn't support FLAC. I have regularly pitched a fit at Apple for this, but they dig "Apple Lossless" which bites.
Yeah. My EARS.
I have actually done the due diligence:
The amp system:
Melos PreAmp - Phase Linear 400 amp - Watson Lab 10 speakers, Kimber Cabling, Foundation power management.
The playback system:
Windows PC USB - Benchmark DAC - amp system.
Control: CD player: Rotel 855.
Test Files for both formats:
1. Famous Blue Raincoat as sung by Jennifer Warnes from her remastered CD of same name (FBR).
2. Whispering Pines by The Band from the extras on the remastered CD - track 17.
3. Listen to the Silence as performed by Tori amos from the CD "strange little girls"
4. Les Pleurs by Mr. de Sainte Colombe, version viole seule de Jordi Savall, from the "Tous les matin du monde" soundtrack.
5. Omphalos by Cerberus Shoal from CD: Homb
first the CDs were listened to on the Rotel CD player. Then the mp3s, which were ripped at 320 kbps. Then the FLAC files. then the mp3s and then the CDs. After that we skipped around doing blind a/b comparisons.
The result:
We were usually but not 100% reliably able to distinguish the difference between the CD and the FLAC file. We were ALWAYS able to tell the mp3. how?
Imaging stability, soundstage. The 320 mp3s were very good, but on our system, they were definitely lacking certain details. FLAC was way better.
The best was the CD itself. We tracked down the FLAC differences (again - questions of precision in imaging and soundstage were the leading problems) to an issue of jitter in the USB bus of the computer.
To get a system good enough to notice these differences requires time and money, but one you're there, it's plain as day.
RS
There's TONS of great stuff coming out every day.
Ignore the "hit" songs. 95% of the "hits" are prepackaged crap.
you have to DISCOVER good music, don't expect to be spoon fed.
RS
Read my post on this, and PRAY I don't pee in your butt.
you are so wrong, you are not even wrong.
free will requires "time":
unfolding of events present a choice. choice is made.
This requires a unidirectional time dimension for events to happen and for decisions to be made. If time has more than one dimension, then the universe is static and unchanging: completely deterministic, and free will does not exist.
That's why research into string theory and larger-dimensional universe theory is important.
The rest of your comment is thusly irrelevant.
RS
FACT: lots and lots of great music is made all the time.
FACT: human beings "bond" with music in their teens as music has an emotional component and the flood of hormones wreaks havoc with ones emotional make up and ordering. As a result: people "focus" on the music of their "coming of age" or maturation.
FACT: there has been no decrease in talent, nor has there been a decrease in creativity.
So, as people age, the hormone disaster retreats, and they lose interest in music as it is crowded out by careers, marriages, kids, and mortgages. Combine that with a multiplicity of technologies demanding one's attention (TV, Wii, XBox, Movies, Internet, etc.) and it thusly comes as NO SURPRISE that people think "music these days sucks" and "there's no good music anymore", when in fact, it is simply one's perceptions and hormonal predispositions have changed.
I'm an Older Geezer - I saw Genesis with Peter Gabriel, Yes, and King Crimson with Wetton on bass. I saw the Gang of Four, and the Clash, and MX80, Blondie, etc. Then I graduate university and I continued being fascinated by music. I also got married, and I saw my (now ex) wife lose interest, and my friends lose interest, and in the mid 1990s one of them said "yah know, Ralphie - music pretty much died in 75 and 76 when Disco and punk came down the pike" And I responded, "No, dumbass - you graduated high school in 75, and got that soul-deadening job at the air conditioning factory that drained all the life out of you."
I continue to listen to new music, even as I lose my hair and go ever grayer. I have thousands of CDs and LPs (most of which I have digitised or collected digital versions of) and I listen to music all the time and I am always listening for new good music, and I am never disappointed. There's TONS of great stuff gushing out of the world every single day. It's Art. It's WHAT WE DO because WE ARE HUMAN.
so when you say "There hasn't been any good music in 10 / 20 / 30 / 40 years", I say FUCK OFF and OPEN YOUR EARS.
Wanna learn more? get "THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON MUSIC". Read it.
nuff said.
Crazy? No - read Barbour.
Based on your logic, I should start investing in horses and drawn-carriages. Both are renewable and sustainable, minimal emissions during use and construction, and minimal nasty chemicals used during manufacturing, much of the world does not have current access to them, and they can travel places other transportation cannot. Think of the demand for veterinarians and blacksmiths, plus tack and riding gear, and carpenters and farmers too. Horses are natural, so we can have as many of them as we need without consequence, right?
It's actually worse than that, IMHO. Hint: the ONLY technology that has been PROVEN by countless cultures all over the world to be sustainable over countless millennia is NEOLITHIC.
As far as peak in oil goes, here is the data from the EIA and the IEA and CAPP. If those organisations are outside what you consider expert, we have nothing to discuss. Read THIS.
I am well aware of the economic clusterfuck that surrounds us. I am not certain that other currencies will *immediately* supplant the dollar. I do think that over the next decade we could see the formation of a "currency basket" where a variety of important currencies trade or value as a control group, say, the USD, EUR, RMB, JPY, and if the Russians can sit still long enough, maybe the RUB.
I've been researching this a great deal since 1998, and I urge you to do the following:
super-insulate your house.
get your heating off fossil fuel.
live close to work where you can walk to it, or ride a bike or take a bus or subway.
learn to grow high calorie value food in your backyard (i.e., beets, beans, carrots, peppers, potatoes, parsnips, etc. Yes. Wheat? No.)
Learn to deal with greater temp variation NOW, so it's not such a shock later.
Use electric assist solar hot water.
See if you can live with a small or no refrigerator. if you MUST have one, get a small SunFrost.
Learn to can food.
Compost your food scraps.
I can guarantee you, the next 20 years will look nothing like the past 20 years. This is well explained here in this Crash Course.
good luck compadre...
RS
I don't see the AC's plea to boycott shell as Flamebait. I think he's correct. A number of other posters have written that "shell is a corporation, so it only responds to profit points" then FINE: manipulate the corporation where it pays attention: at its bottom line. Therefore, boycotting shell is a perfectly logical and REASONABLE response to Shell's profoundly stupid move.
TECHNOLOGY IS NOT ENERGY.
Until when? And then what?
Actually the world DOES run on well wishes - otherwise there wouldn't be any "good faith" and contracts would never be negotiated. It does run on good intentions - without it there would be no Trust and money would collapse. It DOES run on fairy dust- we just call it OIL and it's production seems to have had an initial peak on May 2005, and then a second peak in June 2008, and has been in decline ever since.
So - to all the "realists" out there: reality is demanding tyhat we look beyond immediate "reality" and look at the longer term and invest in THAT. It will create jobs (pulling us out of the recession) and help propel civilisation along to a sustainable state.
RS
idiots.
idiots.
RS
Cool! had no idea. THANKS! I'll DL the latest and see how that goes...
In OS X, you will also need X11 or XDarwin in order to launch and run Gimpshop.
I'm not going to dump out to X11 to run something that, while close, is not BETTER than Photoshop. That exceeds my hassle factor. I should click it and it should open, period. Running X11 or XDarwin is NOT why I run OS X. I have better things to do with my time.
RS
[spoken in Chinese] Hey Captain - look what I see! A bat! Seriously! right next to us! Look!
(dead bat)
Amazing - how can a bat fly this high? Let's do an EV and collect him.
OR:
Frozen bat carcass, travelling at 17,000 mph slams head on into spaceship travelling 17,000 mph, resulting in an explosion visible from the ground. yay.
"Mommy, daddy! Look at the fireworks! Pretty!"
RS
I agree - but of course stating the obvious and coming up with a great idea gets modded flamebait... Mustn't ruffle the feathers of the true believers...
As goofy as the Adobe GUI is, Photoshop is the poop, pure and simple, and all other image appas are compared to it. Painter, for example is slower and clumsier, but it has awesome brushes, MS Paint is its own hobbled ugliness but has its uses, GIMP is ugly and retarded, but it's free and it works, etc. The day Adobe puts CS on Linux is the day GIMP gets a stake driven through its heart. Ad that day can't come too soon, IMHO. I'd love to run CS on a Linux box and be done with Mac AND Windows and run on generic hardware.
I've been advocating for YEARS for Adobe to sell Linux boxen with CS locked on and pre-installed. They could give the computer away for practically free. BUY SOFTWARE - FREE COMPUTER!
I would also suggest that Adobe needs to jump on this now, as Linux is gaining greater acceptance, GIMP will also, and they don't want GIMP to rule that platform - first in and all that.
I'll definitely buy this book. I dislike GIMP intensely, but knowing it better might take an edge off.
RS RS
USA is sans DRM. Canada is not. Nor is europe.
Democracy provides the illusion of control, permitting people to act in ways that seem to benefit themselves as political actors, and thus permitting the hegemony of capitalist industrialist relations to continue as the modus operandi of civilisation, unabated.
Thankfully geology and nature get to play last, and will make harsh hash of this ponzi scheme called capitalist industrialism.
Obama is no different than Roosevelt. Contrary to right wing bullshit, Roosevelt SAVED the ruling class from self destruction. Obama is attempting the same.
RS
Why is the question. I think it has to do with several things all working together in the worst possible way.
1. Parenting. Baby Boomers may not be as hard towards their kids, but too often they are just the opposite, which, in some ways, is worse. The Boomers themselves were spoiled by their parents, the "class of 1946", who went through the Depression and then got their asses shot off in WW2. They wanted their kids to never have to do without, and to always have it better and easier, because they remember their own childhoods of the 1930s, and how miserable that was. suburbia was developed so they could live in cartoons of country homes, and the automobile, once the province of the rich and then the middle class, soon became required and the entire society was redesigned around those infernal gas guzzling death monsters.
So, the boomers raised their kids even easier, and spent the 1980s and 90s blowing vast amounts of smoke up their kids asses as they drove them to soccer practice in giant SUVs. These kids feel entitled to this success: it is al they have ever known. It was all based on this one time gift of 3 trillion barrels of oil which will soon cease to be energetically viable as a fuel, but that's a different point.
So, part 1: The Parents spoiled these little fuckers. Horribly.
2. TV. The television is just fiction. As adults we know this, but as children we don't necessarily get it. And even when we do "get it" there is an emotional component in TV that resonates with parts of the brain that are built Not To Get It, which is why we find a show "scary" or "sexy" or whatever lizard brain response the advertisers are trying to pull out of the public. The TV also shows a distorted view of "normalcy". For every "Roseanne" there's a Huxtable or Fresh Prince or dozen other "upward" viewing families presented as "normal". This inculcates a set of false epxectations.
so, 2: they have false expectations of what "normalcy" is.
3. The American School system tracks to university. Very frankly, most of the people who go to university SHOULDN'T. They are idiots. They should never have even gone to High School. They should have gone to a trade school and learned a useful skill. Unfortunately, the USA deskilled itself in the 1970s with its de-industrialisation process, and all the skilled work went overseas. All that was left was the skilled work that couldn't be exported, such as farming, carpentry, plumbing, HVAC, shoe repair, car repair.
And each of those has also seen pressure to deskill as well. Many suburban or exurban white kids would do farmwork in the summer for extra money. Now it is all left to illegal immigrants.
Carpentry, outside of finish or cabinetry, is also left to immigrants who work more cheaply.
Plumbing and HVAC still has work, but the pay has stagnated and the ability for freelance work has suffered greatly. shoe repair has disappeared with the advent of Nike and the export of the shoe industry to Malaysia.
Car repair has been deskilled through technology. It used to be if your transmission made noise, they would take it apart and fix it. Now, they just pull the tranny and stick in a new one. Diagnosis is done by computer, not experience. Raises are given to people who bring in more business for expensive diagnostics. In the mean time, cars have changed as well - tuning a distributor cap is no longer needed.
At the same time, nonproductive work was deeply rewarded - parasites of all stripes flooded the finance industry with results we are dealing with today. Other equally stupid jobs have become "careers". Production assistants. Assistant Administrator for coordination of health insurance sales reps. Don't get me started on the jillions of "psychology" and "public relations" majors pumped into the economy every year.
At the same time, if the kid doesn't go to school, there is NOTHING the school can do. There used to be truancy laws, but those are gone now, or simply not enfor
It's a balance between quantity and quality, and frankly, qualitative judgments are best left OUT of the hands of HR.
My general points about HR stand - it simply shouldn't exist, except as an enabling part of the organisation (paperwork with hiring, benefits, exit paperwork, work related legalities, etc.) Actual "HR" should be done by Management, and if Management is too fucking lazy or clueless or overworked to deal with it, then maybe they need to look at how they're getting their jobs done...
RS
when I do DL something, it is because I seek it out using google.
"nameOfBand"+"nameOfRecord"+download, inurl:blogspot
gets me a hit on someone who has a blog that features the music I want and has a link to the music on rapidshare or some other online file repository system.
There is nothing "peer to peer" about it at all.
These links will break, but are often replaced by other links. The download is fast, but not superfast, simply "fast enough".
The whole P2P thing is so 2001. So yesterday. So "who cares? I've moved on from there..."
RS
Let's say you have a company that makes widgets. One of the people in the widget design office is a bit of a dork. He's a musician, a quiet and not very sociable bass player. And this is his day job. He works hard enough to keep his job but not much more. One day, he comes up with an idea that is dead brilliant, and then goes on tour. The idea saves the company millions of dollars. And let's see - he always comes in late, frequently hungover, kind of smells, and tries to leave early. He doesn't do that much when he's a round, and he's often not around because of his band.
But, in one afternoon, he has been of more use to the company than all other employees in Widget Design combined, ever.
By the metrics described, he would have been laid off upon return from tour.
Typical fuckwittery by HR bozos.
The best companies don't have HR, except in terms of processing new hires, dealing with benefits, and assisting people on the way out. The rest is left to the departments and managers. It makes for a flatter and faster organisation - ideas M$ has no clue about.
RS
DISTRICT OFFICE
500 Fesler Street, Suite 201
El Cajon, CA 92020
(619) 441-2322, (619) 441-2327 fax
CAPITOL OFFICE
State Capitol
Sacramento, CA 95814
(916) 319-2077, (916) 319-2177 fax
email him At His Feedback Page
He's dork from the exurbs of San Diego. So be firm but polite.