I'd move the bar for bad music to 2000. At least in the 90s we had the entire grunge and metal movements backlash to the sugar pop music you're describing. 93-98 still had quite a few decent and new bands entering the market, along with several notable older bands releasing decent material. From 2000 on, that dropped off considerably.
This is clearly a lot of what's going on here. In the US, in 1969 the top single for the year was "Sugar, Sugar" by the Archies. The Beatles' top single was at #25 - "Get Back". There were better selling singles that year by Tommy Roe, Three Dog Night, The Cowsills, and Tommy James and the Shondells (twice!). How many of those bands have you heard lately?
Well, I haven't heard Sugar Sugar in probably several decades. Get Back, Tommy Roe and Three Dog Night? All last month (I did a long drive through some rather sparse radioland areas) But, to be fair, that list was almost 50 years ago. What's notable is that you will still hear remakes of several of those songs by artists from the 70s and later. Once a popular remake comes out, like for Crimson and Clover, that seems to override the original and the original is no longer played - I heard this one in a restaurant, the Joan Jett version of course. So you may still hear their music, just the redone better version. Much like Tainted Love by Gloria Davis. You never hear her performance. Soft Cell's? You can't get away from it, it plays in stores, restaurants, I think even elevators.
New music used to be incredible. New styles, new performances, different sounds. Now, I dare you to identify a random new "pop" song as coming from what band (or, in some cases, even identifying the specific song) in a limited number of measures and in many cases not even excluding vocals. It's almost like some bad AI was able to select performers on their blandness and fitting into a small predefined set of parameters and cranks out 1 of 3 potentially different base beats. If you've got teenagers in the house, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about.
Now, to be fair, in the past there was plenty of crap music, and even some of the music that you may have thought great doesn't sound all that wonderful when you listen to it now. I pulled out some old LPs you won't hear anywhere anymore, and gave a couple a (brief) listen. Cringe worthy in some cases, a couple of gems elsewhere. Filtering through some of the bands from yesteryear was an interesting exercise where you definitely can see that some were hyped on the me-too bandwagon much like almost all of today's pop "artists" and really were just clones of the originals. How do you find the originals? They're the ones with more than 1 style and show variations and explorations in their compositions. The majority of today's "artists" basically do the manufactured pop songs for a few top 40 hits and if they move on, they go into self-absorbed woe is me crooning, in which they are but a mere photocopy of a pale shadow of Adele (who I don't particularly care for, but she does have talent)
The real issue here is that pretty much 99% of what is considered pop music since 2000 will never be nostalgically played in 20 years. Hell, 99% of pop music from the 2000s isn't played today, instead we get tired replays of music from the 60s through the 90s. They're tired because that's all we get to hear. I mean, where are today's Fleetwood Mac, Beatles, Prince, U2, Judas Priest, Def Leppard, Madonna, Johnny Cash, Metallica, Blondie, Ramones, Ozzy, Run DMC, Nirvana, Soundgarden, Cab Calloway, Green Day, Jerry Lee Lewis, Marvin Gaye, Nine Inch Nails, Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, Salt N Peppa, Led Zeppelin, Berlin, Digital Underground, Concrete Blonde, Lou Bega, or even Tom Jones in his many incarnations or really anyone that stands out not only with a unique sound but truly individual material that's identifiable and usually says something that people can relate to?
That's not by any means a comprehensive list of artists with unique sounds, but since 2000, I can only name a couple of artists/bands that even stand out: Pitbull, Imagine Dragons, Lady Gaga and The Killers. Of those, only Lady Gaga really qualifies in the same category as the top tier of pre-2000 artists. Imagine Dragons is definitely on their way, The Killers may move from 1 hit wonder into the next tier with their recent reinvention, considering anything notable came from their debut album. (I'd love to see a list of artists that qualify for the post 2000 list. This obviously doesn't include recent up and coming artists like Portugal the Man - I find they're pretty unique and certainly not more of the Radio Disney crowd, which is what I find a lot of the post 2000 pop music to be)
As an example of one of today's stars that seems to maybe have leveraged the pop machine well is Harry Styles. Time will tell if his solo career was a one hit wonder or if he'll truly be an artist. At least he's contributed something different to the mix even if I prefer different genres of music.
All that may be true, but I still hold that the police shouldn't have shot him. The police are as culpable as the "prankster" in this case, because it might have been a bad communications, misread map, an incorrect address given, or any number of other possible scenarios that got them hot to trot down to said address. Police shouldn't go around shooting people until they've verified the existence of a weapon and an immediate danger to others. Not either or, not suspected, but verified. That is what we pay them for. As for going home after their shift, that's highly desired and the primary reason they should always work in a minimum of pairs and wear bullet proof vests/jackets.
you know - he was stirring the pot even after being warned to stop. Causing disruptions at work is definitely a reason to demote/release a person. They didn't say he couldn't speak, just not on their internal boards.
That was always its intent - to ensure the party in power stays in power, even if the majority votes otherwise. The Republicans have been extremely successful with this strategy, starting with the states first approach back in the 90s, then redrawing districts to dilute Democratic votes in 2000. You can see the effects in Congress and state legislatures.
According to both wikipedia and various dictionaries, gerrymander was solely to give political gain to the party in power and dilute the representation of the opposition. The word's origin is even listed as being the result of a redistricting effort in Mass, US in 1812 by the Mass gov Gerry and the resulting salamander shaped district.
It doesn't matter the density, what matters is how the districts are drawn and whether 1 vote truly equals 1 vote. You can flip the map to grant more representation to the dense city dwellers if you wish, or by slightly tweaking it, create more low-density dominant districts. The fact that it's a game played every ten years should tell you how unfair that system is. It has nothing to do with its original purpose which was to ensure districts represented roughly equal numbers of the populace in a time of rapidly and unevenly growing population.
Not really. That's the entire point of gerrymandering. It's to allow lower density areas to have better representation than they would have otherwise if you just did a flat, per-capita weighting.
Last I checked, gerrymandering was to dilute political representation of targeted opposition groups (we'll just plunk ethnicity, politics, socio-economic, and all other categorizing adjectives into "opposition") to minimize their ability to gain representation in the next election and maintain power for the status quo. At its core, that's the whole point. It has nothing to do with "areas", low-density or otherwise.
Proving such a subjective negative is almost impossible. Proving it was intended only requires providing some statement that someone intended to do this or evidence of the possibility of this exploit in the past.
I"m still wondering why it took a freakin' Constitutional Amendment to prohibit alcohol and another one to legalize it again....yet, pot and other drugs have been made illegal by the stroke of a pen? What's the constitutional basis for the "scheduling"?
Because hemp plants would hurt DuPont and Hearst's bottom lines, and the newly minted FDA and Anslinger needed something to focus their budget on post prohibition.
That describes most of Marvel's movies and almost all DC's. But even more so than declining actors or scripts are directors like Michael Bay or George Lucas who again IMNSHO shouldn't be allowed near a camera or editing room.
Get real, a horse and buggy is all anyone really needs. Get out here with that petrol powered crap!!
I'd rather have my battery powered crap, hence physical media quality over streaming any day.
I have a 4K HDR+ TV and moved my old 1080P to the basement. 1080P is fine, but there is actually a real and significant difference between the two.
It's most insightful that you do not divulge the technology nor quality of your 1080P set. A crappy 1080P vs a 4K set? No comparison. A top-end 1080P vs 4K, now 4K tech and quality winds up being the most significant issue.
And since pretty much the only way to get 4K HDR+ content is via stream it is indeed relevant.
There are these physical things, disks I believe they're called, that will literally blow you away provided you have the rest of the technology to support them. A TrueHD/DTS-HD sound field is a step up so far beyond what streaming provides, it will open your ears. Dolby Atmos / DTS:X / Auro-3D is another similar step up.
For LCD downsides, it's not so much viewing distance for pixel specific resolution, but more along the lines of ghosting, flickering, and dithering issues, which are viewable at macro levels, especially for those of us with faster than average eyes. And no, 240Hz refresh isn't fast enough to completely remove those effects. These are also subject to the "once you know what to look for, that's all you see" phenomenon. When people ask me why I absolutely won't buy an LCD based tech for my regular TV, I tell them, and usually resort to showing them on a TV. Once shown, more than one has come back to "thank" me for ruining their TVs, as now that's all the see. Others can't see it or it doesn't bother them if they do see it.
I'm merely arguing from the standpoint of the GGP here that what he has is likely insufficient and that he's not looking at the right things. You need upload speeds, whether you know it or not. Without that, a lot of things just aren't available to you, and you won't even know what you're missing, other than that skippy skype messaging you do with whomever. What I do is entirely different, and I'd saturate his connection 24/7 for the month with less than a week's worth of my average data use. And I don't stream or game.
The major draw for 4K viewing (streams) is that 4K content allows many of the detrimental problems of LCD/LED to be hidden to the point that most people aren't annoyed by them. Plasma/OLED 1080P is pretty darn good, 4K is far better with OLED. 4K with LED(LCD) tech? Depends upon what you're watching and the quality of the source. In many cases it's still attempting to approach the Plasma/OLED 1080P quality.
This 4K argument is crap....
720p is a very fine resolution for pretty much everything. You dont need more
Great, get me real 720P streams without compression artifacts. A back of the napkin calculation based on my compressed video sources says that 720P should clock in between 5 and 7 Mbps with DDII sound. Add TrueHD / DTS-HD sound, and you're at 10Mbps min. At that point, 720P BDs could be dispensed with, except all my BDs are 1080P. So up those numbers to a min reliable 20Mbps, and you can service 1 real 1080P video stream. (BTW, general high quality 4K streaming is a pipe dream currently as you need at least a 50 Mbps stream to get an equivalent experience to disks, which is why 4K disks still sell)
symmetric 100Mbps is the minimum I think should be counted as reasonable service, with 1Gbps considered desired. FWIW, I have 1Gbps wired throughout the house although the majority of cabling is capable of 10Gbps for future proofing.
... I have 16 at home... When I lived in-town, I had a 50mbps connection, and comparing my experiences now with what I had then, I don't see any real difference
For download speeds, anything over 10Mbps is fine for 99% of normal users, because they won't notice it as they stream or browse and don't download the latest Linux distro or something equally large or larger routinely. However, they will notice if they're posting larger photos or videos to any site, because upload speeds are generally terrible, and I'll bet yours are in the 1-3 Mbps in both locations, hence no effective difference. Now if you had a 50 Mbps up in town....
Note - that is 1Mbps up. Up is what matters, generally, because it's the most constrained value. 1Mbps up means that loading those pictures to your favorite web site takes more than a minute each. For large prints, it's more than 4 min per photo with stitched photos like panoramas taking up to 30 minutes each in my case. Even simple VOIP calls fail if anything else is happening on the line. Video is impossible even on a quiet network. Sure, it's a claimed 30Mbps down, but what good does that do me? I don't stream video (movies and shows) but I do need screen sharing and video conferencing, which requires that up bandwidth. And do recall, this is on an upscale fiber to the home build out which, when it was connected, had promises of 10/100Mbps speeds. As of last year, they wouldn't even guarantee 1/30.
AT&Ts UVerse service, with fiber to the home btw, runs just like a rock. Solid, unmoving, subject to gravity. It's absolutely the slowest thing around, I think even my cell service when it drops to 3G is faster, for uploads anyways. The reason? The cabinet is over subscribed, and not just oh, we're full, but to the point that they've already multiplexed the upload connections to such a point that if you get 1Mbps up, you're speedy. And that's 1Mbps up on a shared, high latency connection. Does wonders for audio/video conferencing. And no, it's not getting better. In fact, they added more client capacity a couple of years ago by reducing existing 2-3 Mbps connections and downgrading them as well. That's when I noticed how bad it got. I at least have another option - Comcast, also at 1Mbps maximum up. Choices!
Check any story about the great telecom broadband con. US Telecos were provided unprecedented incentives with no controls to provide broadband service. ie, taxpayers paid for that infrastructure, especially given what the telecos spent and what was given to them. Ever wonder why the telecos were in a 10 year bubble ending in the dot-com crash in 2001?
Your ISP for all service calls, who route local cabling issues to your municipality. Various providers would have their own trunks to closets, or rent them to provide service. It would be wildly different, in that you would have access to multiple ISPs and your connectivity of last mile is locally determined.
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I'd move the bar for bad music to 2000. At least in the 90s we had the entire grunge and metal movements backlash to the sugar pop music you're describing. 93-98 still had quite a few decent and new bands entering the market, along with several notable older bands releasing decent material. From 2000 on, that dropped off considerably.
This is clearly a lot of what's going on here. In the US, in 1969 the top single for the year was "Sugar, Sugar" by the Archies. The Beatles' top single was at #25 - "Get Back". There were better selling singles that year by Tommy Roe, Three Dog Night, The Cowsills, and Tommy James and the Shondells (twice!). How many of those bands have you heard lately?
Well, I haven't heard Sugar Sugar in probably several decades. Get Back, Tommy Roe and Three Dog Night? All last month (I did a long drive through some rather sparse radioland areas) But, to be fair, that list was almost 50 years ago. What's notable is that you will still hear remakes of several of those songs by artists from the 70s and later. Once a popular remake comes out, like for Crimson and Clover, that seems to override the original and the original is no longer played - I heard this one in a restaurant, the Joan Jett version of course. So you may still hear their music, just the redone better version. Much like Tainted Love by Gloria Davis. You never hear her performance. Soft Cell's? You can't get away from it, it plays in stores, restaurants, I think even elevators.
New music used to be incredible. New styles, new performances, different sounds. Now, I dare you to identify a random new "pop" song as coming from what band (or, in some cases, even identifying the specific song) in a limited number of measures and in many cases not even excluding vocals. It's almost like some bad AI was able to select performers on their blandness and fitting into a small predefined set of parameters and cranks out 1 of 3 potentially different base beats. If you've got teenagers in the house, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about.
Now, to be fair, in the past there was plenty of crap music, and even some of the music that you may have thought great doesn't sound all that wonderful when you listen to it now. I pulled out some old LPs you won't hear anywhere anymore, and gave a couple a (brief) listen. Cringe worthy in some cases, a couple of gems elsewhere. Filtering through some of the bands from yesteryear was an interesting exercise where you definitely can see that some were hyped on the me-too bandwagon much like almost all of today's pop "artists" and really were just clones of the originals. How do you find the originals? They're the ones with more than 1 style and show variations and explorations in their compositions. The majority of today's "artists" basically do the manufactured pop songs for a few top 40 hits and if they move on, they go into self-absorbed woe is me crooning, in which they are but a mere photocopy of a pale shadow of Adele (who I don't particularly care for, but she does have talent)
The real issue here is that pretty much 99% of what is considered pop music since 2000 will never be nostalgically played in 20 years. Hell, 99% of pop music from the 2000s isn't played today, instead we get tired replays of music from the 60s through the 90s. They're tired because that's all we get to hear. I mean, where are today's Fleetwood Mac, Beatles, Prince, U2, Judas Priest, Def Leppard, Madonna, Johnny Cash, Metallica, Blondie, Ramones, Ozzy, Run DMC, Nirvana, Soundgarden, Cab Calloway, Green Day, Jerry Lee Lewis, Marvin Gaye, Nine Inch Nails, Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, Salt N Peppa, Led Zeppelin, Berlin, Digital Underground, Concrete Blonde, Lou Bega, or even Tom Jones in his many incarnations or really anyone that stands out not only with a unique sound but truly individual material that's identifiable and usually says something that people can relate to?
That's not by any means a comprehensive list of artists with unique sounds, but since 2000, I can only name a couple of artists/bands that even stand out: Pitbull, Imagine Dragons, Lady Gaga and The Killers. Of those, only Lady Gaga really qualifies in the same category as the top tier of pre-2000 artists. Imagine Dragons is definitely on their way, The Killers may move from 1 hit wonder into the next tier with their recent reinvention, considering anything notable came from their debut album. (I'd love to see a list of artists that qualify for the post 2000 list. This obviously doesn't include recent up and coming artists like Portugal the Man - I find they're pretty unique and certainly not more of the Radio Disney crowd, which is what I find a lot of the post 2000 pop music to be)
As an example of one of today's stars that seems to maybe have leveraged the pop machine well is Harry Styles. Time will tell if his solo career was a one hit wonder or if he'll truly be an artist. At least he's contributed something different to the mix even if I prefer different genres of music.
All that may be true, but I still hold that the police shouldn't have shot him. The police are as culpable as the "prankster" in this case, because it might have been a bad communications, misread map, an incorrect address given, or any number of other possible scenarios that got them hot to trot down to said address. Police shouldn't go around shooting people until they've verified the existence of a weapon and an immediate danger to others. Not either or, not suspected, but verified. That is what we pay them for. As for going home after their shift, that's highly desired and the primary reason they should always work in a minimum of pairs and wear bullet proof vests/jackets.
you know - he was stirring the pot even after being warned to stop. Causing disruptions at work is definitely a reason to demote/release a person. They didn't say he couldn't speak, just not on their internal boards.
It's just been co-opted to allow minority rule.
That was always its intent - to ensure the party in power stays in power, even if the majority votes otherwise. The Republicans have been extremely successful with this strategy, starting with the states first approach back in the 90s, then redrawing districts to dilute Democratic votes in 2000. You can see the effects in Congress and state legislatures.
According to both wikipedia and various dictionaries, gerrymander was solely to give political gain to the party in power and dilute the representation of the opposition. The word's origin is even listed as being the result of a redistricting effort in Mass, US in 1812 by the Mass gov Gerry and the resulting salamander shaped district.
It doesn't matter the density, what matters is how the districts are drawn and whether 1 vote truly equals 1 vote. You can flip the map to grant more representation to the dense city dwellers if you wish, or by slightly tweaking it, create more low-density dominant districts. The fact that it's a game played every ten years should tell you how unfair that system is. It has nothing to do with its original purpose which was to ensure districts represented roughly equal numbers of the populace in a time of rapidly and unevenly growing population.
districts are divided by population not area
Not really. That's the entire point of gerrymandering. It's to allow lower density areas to have better representation than they would have otherwise if you just did a flat, per-capita weighting.
Last I checked, gerrymandering was to dilute political representation of targeted opposition groups (we'll just plunk ethnicity, politics, socio-economic, and all other categorizing adjectives into "opposition") to minimize their ability to gain representation in the next election and maintain power for the status quo. At its core, that's the whole point. It has nothing to do with "areas", low-density or otherwise.
Are you sure it is unintended?
Proving such a subjective negative is almost impossible. Proving it was intended only requires providing some statement that someone intended to do this or evidence of the possibility of this exploit in the past.
Ball's in your court - prove it was intended.
I"m still wondering why it took a freakin' Constitutional Amendment to prohibit alcohol and another one to legalize it again....yet, pot and other drugs have been made illegal by the stroke of a pen? What's the constitutional basis for the "scheduling"?
Because hemp plants would hurt DuPont and Hearst's bottom lines, and the newly minted FDA and Anslinger needed something to focus their budget on post prohibition.
You need to check out what's available. All DRM is as broken as DVD DRM.
That describes most of Marvel's movies and almost all DC's. But even more so than declining actors or scripts are directors like Michael Bay or George Lucas who again IMNSHO shouldn't be allowed near a camera or editing room.
Get real, a horse and buggy is all anyone really needs. Get out here with that petrol powered crap!!
I'd rather have my battery powered crap, hence physical media quality over streaming any day.
I have a 4K HDR+ TV and moved my old 1080P to the basement. 1080P is fine, but there is actually a real and significant difference between the two.
It's most insightful that you do not divulge the technology nor quality of your 1080P set. A crappy 1080P vs a 4K set? No comparison. A top-end 1080P vs 4K, now 4K tech and quality winds up being the most significant issue.
And since pretty much the only way to get 4K HDR+ content is via stream it is indeed relevant.
There are these physical things, disks I believe they're called, that will literally blow you away provided you have the rest of the technology to support them. A TrueHD/DTS-HD sound field is a step up so far beyond what streaming provides, it will open your ears. Dolby Atmos / DTS:X / Auro-3D is another similar step up.
For LCD downsides, it's not so much viewing distance for pixel specific resolution, but more along the lines of ghosting, flickering, and dithering issues, which are viewable at macro levels, especially for those of us with faster than average eyes. And no, 240Hz refresh isn't fast enough to completely remove those effects. These are also subject to the "once you know what to look for, that's all you see" phenomenon. When people ask me why I absolutely won't buy an LCD based tech for my regular TV, I tell them, and usually resort to showing them on a TV. Once shown, more than one has come back to "thank" me for ruining their TVs, as now that's all the see. Others can't see it or it doesn't bother them if they do see it.
I'm merely arguing from the standpoint of the GGP here that what he has is likely insufficient and that he's not looking at the right things. You need upload speeds, whether you know it or not. Without that, a lot of things just aren't available to you, and you won't even know what you're missing, other than that skippy skype messaging you do with whomever. What I do is entirely different, and I'd saturate his connection 24/7 for the month with less than a week's worth of my average data use. And I don't stream or game.
The major draw for 4K viewing (streams) is that 4K content allows many of the detrimental problems of LCD/LED to be hidden to the point that most people aren't annoyed by them. Plasma/OLED 1080P is pretty darn good, 4K is far better with OLED. 4K with LED(LCD) tech? Depends upon what you're watching and the quality of the source. In many cases it's still attempting to approach the Plasma/OLED 1080P quality.
This 4K argument is crap. ...
720p is a very fine resolution for pretty much everything. You dont need more
Great, get me real 720P streams without compression artifacts. A back of the napkin calculation based on my compressed video sources says that 720P should clock in between 5 and 7 Mbps with DDII sound. Add TrueHD / DTS-HD sound, and you're at 10Mbps min. At that point, 720P BDs could be dispensed with, except all my BDs are 1080P. So up those numbers to a min reliable 20Mbps, and you can service 1 real 1080P video stream. (BTW, general high quality 4K streaming is a pipe dream currently as you need at least a 50 Mbps stream to get an equivalent experience to disks, which is why 4K disks still sell)
symmetric 100Mbps is the minimum I think should be counted as reasonable service, with 1Gbps considered desired. FWIW, I have 1Gbps wired throughout the house although the majority of cabling is capable of 10Gbps for future proofing.
... I have 16 at home ... When I lived in-town, I had a 50mbps connection, and comparing my experiences now with what I had then, I don't see any real difference
For download speeds, anything over 10Mbps is fine for 99% of normal users, because they won't notice it as they stream or browse and don't download the latest Linux distro or something equally large or larger routinely. However, they will notice if they're posting larger photos or videos to any site, because upload speeds are generally terrible, and I'll bet yours are in the 1-3 Mbps in both locations, hence no effective difference. Now if you had a 50 Mbps up in town....
Note - that is 1Mbps up. Up is what matters, generally, because it's the most constrained value. 1Mbps up means that loading those pictures to your favorite web site takes more than a minute each. For large prints, it's more than 4 min per photo with stitched photos like panoramas taking up to 30 minutes each in my case. Even simple VOIP calls fail if anything else is happening on the line. Video is impossible even on a quiet network. Sure, it's a claimed 30Mbps down, but what good does that do me? I don't stream video (movies and shows) but I do need screen sharing and video conferencing, which requires that up bandwidth. And do recall, this is on an upscale fiber to the home build out which, when it was connected, had promises of 10/100Mbps speeds. As of last year, they wouldn't even guarantee 1/30.
AT&Ts UVerse service, with fiber to the home btw, runs just like a rock. Solid, unmoving, subject to gravity. It's absolutely the slowest thing around, I think even my cell service when it drops to 3G is faster, for uploads anyways. The reason? The cabinet is over subscribed, and not just oh, we're full, but to the point that they've already multiplexed the upload connections to such a point that if you get 1Mbps up, you're speedy. And that's 1Mbps up on a shared, high latency connection. Does wonders for audio/video conferencing. And no, it's not getting better. In fact, they added more client capacity a couple of years ago by reducing existing 2-3 Mbps connections and downgrading them as well. That's when I noticed how bad it got. I at least have another option - Comcast, also at 1Mbps maximum up. Choices!
My guess would be that you'd still have better service under the worst conditions you're proposing than trying to get comcast or AT&T to fix anything.
Check any story about the great telecom broadband con. US Telecos were provided unprecedented incentives with no controls to provide broadband service. ie, taxpayers paid for that infrastructure, especially given what the telecos spent and what was given to them. Ever wonder why the telecos were in a 10 year bubble ending in the dot-com crash in 2001?
Your ISP for all service calls, who route local cabling issues to your municipality. Various providers would have their own trunks to closets, or rent them to provide service. It would be wildly different, in that you would have access to multiple ISPs and your connectivity of last mile is locally determined.