Posts by Stephen Judd
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Patronage enabled a comparatively stagnant class-divided musical culture that moved at a snails-pace compared to the extremely eclectic and rapid development that has happened since the advent of recorded popular music in the 20th century.
In the harsh future I envisage, there will still be recording, and good stuff will spread far faster than it could in the days of manuscript paper and horses.
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arg sorry folks: browser crash straight after posting fooled me.
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You're dreaming if you think that the better sounding records are made for free at home. even an m-box, good microphone, set of speakers, headphones, etc etc costs a swag, not to mention the skill to run them properly just supposing you're not a natural genius at the technicalities of getting tone to disc. It all adds up and someone is paying for it somewhere. As in any business model there has to be a way to recoup costs or it all falls over.
I dunno.
There are six pushing seven billion people in the world. I can find you a bunch of musical geniuses just in Hamilton where I grew up. (Really. Those people never got any kind of break...)
Given the sheer size of the pool of talented people I think patronage and obsession will easily do as well as the current system in terms of getting good stuff out there. Eg, there is enough good music for several lifetimes in the classical Western canon from the 17th to the 19th centuries, from a much smaller population base than we have now. It is all bad news for musicians who want outsized returns from leveraging their intellectual property. The rest of us will get along fine.
Ultimately a lot of people will not be able to pursue their dream of making a living from self-expression, and a very small minority will, just as now - but the selection process will be different, probably more meritocratic, and return to a stress on live performance. Tough shit, I think. At least, when the revolution comes, I'll be all for everybody who wants to being a full-time artist; until then, I'm not buying special pleading for it.
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You're dreaming if you think that the better sounding records are made for free at home. even an m-box, good microphone, set of speakers, headphones, etc etc costs a swag, not to mention the skill to run them properly just supposing you're not a natural genius at the technicalities of getting tone to disc. It all adds up and someone is paying for it somewhere. As in any business model there has to be a way to recoup costs or it all falls over.
I dunno.
There are six pushing seven billion people in the world. I can find you a bunch of musical geniuses just in Hamilton where I grew up. (Really. Those people never got any kind of break...)
Given the sheer size of the pool of talented people I think patronage and obsession will easily do as well as the current system in terms of getting good stuff out there. Eg, there is enough good music for several lifetimes in the classical Western canon from the 17th to the 19th centuries, from a much smaller population base than we have now. It is all bad news for musicians who want outsized returns from leveraging their intellectual property. The rest of us will get along fine.
Ultimately a lot of people will not be able to pursue their dream of making a living from self-expression, and a very small minority will, just as now - but the selection process will be different, probably more meritocratic, and return to a stress on live performance. Tough shit, I think. At least, when the revolution comes, I'll be all for everybody who wants to being a full-time artist; until then, I'm not buying special pleading for it.
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We're off to the in-laws' tonight. Somehow the atheist Jewbag got volunteered to cook on Christmas Day, but in other respects I'll be on holiday for a while, PAS included. Compliments of the season to you all, and a Happy New Year.
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one cannot begin a reasonable enquiry by assuming the answer or explanation to the question at issue. This is not "science" - it is prejudice. This bias makes the sceptic a poor judge of evidence - essentially such a person begins the enquiry with a closed mind and with a predilection to certain kinds of explanations before the factual foundation for those explanations has been established.
I mean this lovingly, but bollocks to that. When the brandy is drunk and the christmas cake missing from the living room in the morning, my very first hypothesis is that it was Dad, not Santa Claus. And if Dad has a satisfactory alibi, I will see if the dog is feeling well. And so on. It is perfectly reasonable to explore simple, obvious explanations that conform to our understanding of the world before we move on to ones that contradict our understanding of the world.
And your co-worker's account of what she experienced is just that -- what she experienced -- it is not necessarily the same thing as what actually happened. When you go to a magic show, you experience the assistant being sawn in half, but that isn't what's happening.
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WH: if you're asking me to believe a third-hand story is believed by the people who recount it, well sure. I have no doubt that everyone involved has the highest character, if you'll vouch for it. And that's the courtesy I owe them. But if you're asking me to believe that the third-hand account has a woo-woo explanation, I'm afraid not. Human beings are very fallible, all of us, and vulnerable to all sorts of brain farts in perception and logic. It's no shame on them to draw unlikely conclusions, and it's no shame on me to say that they're unlikely.
The only moral judgment I have expressed earlier is to condemn people who exploit that fallibility.
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But I'm not convinced that every minor nuisance requires new laws.
It may be a minor nuisance for you, but it is a major cost for anyone who runs a mailserver. ISPs and businesses and other organisations have to budget large sums of capital expenditure for servers and salary expense for staff to stay on top of it.
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Don't you have a cat or something?
He keeps chasing the black swans.
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I have an "almost certainly bullshit" box, and that's where this belongs.
If this stuff were true, it would be a valuable and useful tool, which should be researched, investigated, codified, standardised, and generally exploited like any other technology.
The fact that clairvoyancy never has been put to practical use strongly suggests that there's nothing to it.