The story of (I believe) Paul Allen's personal library is illustrative of the downside of this approach. When he died, the licenses on all of his electronic media died along with him, and his legatees were denied a substantial portion of the library he'd assembled. Maybe this is a matter of little moment to some, but it might matter to others. I offer it merely as a factor to consider.
Professionally, damn near everything I do is on a screen rather than on paper; when something is on paper I typically reduce it to electrons because these are much easier to work with.
Personally, I like reading a physical book because it isn't electronic. It is simply a different psychic experience to have a physical book. I want that experience.
I think he's found that political center here, actually. Normies -- no one posting here is a normie, we're all hyper-informed and hyper-active and hyper-opinionated compared to normies -- are going to be somewhere around "Protest, yes, whether I agree with you or not; but violence and shutting down the universities, that's going too far."
Dude, thanks for this! I rather like the original Anne Bredon version, but I will admit that I probably am unlikely to ever put it on any of my Spotify playlists (unless I make an "unknown originals" which sounds cool but would be a hit-and-miss sort of list I'd only rarely go to).
Joan Baez's cover, which is what I thought LZ was doing, simply feels more fully realized and I probably will add it to my "Earnest Girls With Earnest Guitars" playlist. Which, I feel sort of bad about because you've now educated me about Bredon and she deserves credit (and royalties, even if only the meager ones Spotify pays). But one likes what one likes.
Led Zeppelin wanted to be a blues band. Kind of. They still wanted to do heavy rock. But they wanted to play blues songs. Sometimes they got it just right -- like Babe I'm Gonna Leave You on LZ1 or the cover of When The Levee Breaks on LZ4. But as much as we honor and love them, they weren't perfect. I agree with you that Nobody's Fault But Mine is a miss. And it's great that digging down to the roots revealed a mostly-forgotten gem from Blind Willie Johnson!
So I agree with you about the music. Fallout is really good for that; there has to be someone Bethesda uses who has this encyclopedic knowledge of classic jazz, blues, and bubble gum pop.
But I laughed at the DJ joke in Fallout 76. At least, I did the first time she cracked it. Video games being what they are and my pace of play being what it is, I wind up hearing those jokes repeated a lot.
I haven't read the final rule. The earlier version of the rule I read had an exception for officers or holders of 5% or more of the equity. Did that survive? I haven't read the final rule yet, so I don't know. But that's who you're talking about here.
There is also no prohibition against non-disclosure agreements, non-circumvention agreements, or other members of the trade secrets family of restrictive covenants.
1. Very happy to hear no one was hurt, only property damage. This is what counts the most. Thinking of you and the rest of your wonderful family.
2. Maybe a chat with an attorney who practices in the field of insurance coverage litigation is in order? Unless you're quite convinced that the coverage declinations were righteous. IIRC, yours was one of a handful of states where when I was doing the insurance gig, we had red flags up about the state law penalizing us for not making the right call. (I didn't work many HO policies though; as you know, I was on the EPL and environmental side.)
3. Nature sure has her ways of reminding you who is really in charge, doesn't she?
Yeah, that's a very different meaning than I thought at first read. Apologies for mistaking your message. I'll take to heart that maybe there are levels to seemingly superficial things that can turn deep. Discovering heretofore-unseen levels of understanding is one of the interesting things that can happen when people of different perspectives and opinions interact. So, cheers!
Basically, yeah, that last paragraph. It's a really good thought, in the OP and echoed here, that so many of the things that seem to explode into our brains are evanescent and ultimately not particularly consequential. A good reminder of that. Looking at the Fallout Boy lyrics (I was unaware this song existed at all until today) I see things like:
Sandy Hook, Columbine, Sandra Bland and Tamir Rice
ISIS, LeBron James, Shinzo Abe blown away
Meghan Markle, George Floyd, Burj Khalifa, Metroid
Fermi paradox, Venus and Serena
Oh-oh-oh, Michael Jordan, 23, YouTube killed MTV
SpongeBob, Golden State Killer got caught
Michael Jordan, 45, Woodstock '99
Keaton, Batman, Bush v. Gore, I can't take it anymore
Some of this is significant ("Sandy Hook, Columbine"), some of it actually might not be but I want it to be ("Michael Jordan, 23, YouTube killed MTV"), and some of it's obviously trivial ("Michael Jordan, 45, Woodstock '99"). How much impact has the relatively recent assassination of Shinzo Abe had on us? Damn near none, so far as I can tell.
But we still have to sort through it all and sift what's important from what isn't, and that isn't always easy. Especially in a world as noisy as ours.
Haven't seen the video until today. It's terrifying.
And really really makes me praise the police for getting the bridge shut down in time to minimize the loss of life. Which is no consolation to the families of the workers who died, of course, but that's the terrifying part: how much traffic was moving across the bridge until just seconds before impact and collapse.
Booker T & the MGs "Green Onions" demands at least a mention.
https://youtu.be/0oox9bJaGJ8?si=I1BBjqAFCrduMgQX
In more modern music (I guess this isn't really "new" music anymore) let me remind you of "You Wish" by Nightmares on Wax...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwDOa-lvizM
..and "Intro" by the Xx.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFq6nnw7xg0
See also about half of the corpus of Thievery Corporation's work, e.g., "Facing East":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSoBORS3KZE
Am I saying any of these are better than "Great Gig in the Sky?" Well, no, because the fact that they got "Great Gig" done on the first take with no real vocal rehearsals is damn near miraculous and means that piece will always deserve a mention in any rock instrumentals list. Which is a sign of a plausible claim to primacy. But these are pretty amazing pieces of music IMO, which fit within the now-very-broadly-subgenred category of "rock." (I might include, say, Peter Mancini's "Peter Gunn Theme," but I feel like that's more properly classified as jazz.)
I might want to include "Sirius" but it kind of feels like "Sirius," though yes its own piece of music, still really feels like an intro to "Eye in the Sky." (This Alan Parsons project reference is included for all of my Chicago Bulls fan friends who deservedly remember the glory years.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_NNCNDYEpU
I am also affirming that "Great Gig in the Sky" and other pieces of music are properly called "instrumentals" even though vocals are included. Vocalizing is using the human voice as an instrument, and relying upon the tones and sounds of that instrument to convey emotion rather than articulated words.
Happiness is not a state of existence. Pleasure or contentment may be states of existence, a sensation one might enjoy. Happiness is something different.
Those of who have read your 1970's science fiction will know the concept of the "wirehead," a person who has had a surgical modification to their brains to have the pleasure centers in their brains constantly at a low grade stimulation. While, definitionally, pleasant, we would recoil at saying a person with such a hypothetical device would be made "happy" by it. Indeed, we'd expect such people to sort of drop out of society and slowly waste away in their artificial bliss, and we should feel sorry for them. Because what they're experiencing isn't happiness.
Rather happiness it is an experiential process, a way of living, a relationship that you define between yourself and the world. I think it might be better say you "do" happiness rather than you 'are" happy, but such limitations in phrasing is a poverty of the English language. Perhaps the most natural phrasing to Americans is to be engaged in "the pursuit of happiness." Happiness is a life that is being lived well. I'd agree with Aristotle that a big part of living your life well is living your life virtuously.
Perhaps not so strangely, one of the virtues Aristotle discusses at length is, paraphrased, the ability to distinguish between things you have control over and the things you don't, and limiting the amount of anxiety you invest in a given thing to the degree to which you can affect it. Like a lot of virtues, it takes cultivation and practice before it becomes habitual and integrated into your personality.
It's easy to get anxious about stuff and hard to excise anxiety from your psyche. But doing that hard thing is probably essential to the experience of pursuing happiness. And that does involve putting the damn phone down and touching grass, because constantly staring at the phone and being anxious about stuff that is either going to happen, or not, is sooner or later going to pass from "staying appropriately informed about the world" and cross over to "making yourself feel shitty."
There's Hippie Jesus, who you're talking about here and who I for one kind of like. And then there's Judgey Jesus, who is a different sort of guy entirely. Christian Nationalists don't worship Hippie Jesus.
The internet space of which I speak is Bluesky as I am no longer on exTwitter. "Moral purity" is a condensation, a shorthand of what I see articulated there. It's a combination of revulsion at Biden's response to the war in Gaza and magical thinking that a Trump win in 2024 will somehow pull Democrats to the left such that a future Democratic party will become morally acceptable.
I've plenty of respect for someone who says "No, Biden lost me because of Gaza, so I'm not voting for him, or I'm voting third party as a protest vote." Such an opinion leaves plenty of room for "But Trump is still worse on other issues, which are less important to me, and I'm sure as hell not going to vote for Trump either."
Maybe that's what you're getting at your DSA meetings. It's not what's coming through on my SM feed.
What I get is moral condescension (e.g., "I see; after considering what's at stake, you chose genocide,") and I admit I react badly to that sort of thing. I'm not the guy who's out there in an IDF uniform shooting into crowds of starving kids.
I'm the guy who says "Neither party's candidate is going to break our multi-treaty alliance with Israel, so what else might be at stake?" and is deciding that Biden is, in those other arenas, a much less bad option than Trump.
I'm also the guy who says that the parties traditionally compete for votes in the center, and a strong showing by Trump therefore provides an incentive for the Democrats to move right and compete for those gettable votes. Debatably, that happened in between the candidacy of Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. Further, people whose ideology is so far left that they can identify no material difference between Trump and Biden are, to phrase it much more charitably than my then-irritated self did a few days ago here, unlikely to be persuaded otherwise. There is therefore no incentive for the Democrats to reach out to such people at the expense of reaching towards the theoretically persuadable center.
Thank you, bobtuse. Do you know how long it's been since anyone on these pages explicitly agreed with me or said I was right about anything? I forgot what it feels like. You're my new best friend.
On “The Evolving Act of Physically Reading In a Digitial World”
The story of (I believe) Paul Allen's personal library is illustrative of the downside of this approach. When he died, the licenses on all of his electronic media died along with him, and his legatees were denied a substantial portion of the library he'd assembled. Maybe this is a matter of little moment to some, but it might matter to others. I offer it merely as a factor to consider.
On “Saturday Morning Gaming: Fallout 76 Reviewed”
I don't think any video game experience will ever again capture the feeling of that first look at Hoover Dam.
On “The Evolving Act of Physically Reading In a Digitial World”
Professionally, damn near everything I do is on a screen rather than on paper; when something is on paper I typically reduce it to electrons because these are much easier to work with.
Personally, I like reading a physical book because it isn't electronic. It is simply a different psychic experience to have a physical book. I want that experience.
On “Campus Insurrections?”
I think he's found that political center here, actually. Normies -- no one posting here is a normie, we're all hyper-informed and hyper-active and hyper-opinionated compared to normies -- are going to be somewhere around "Protest, yes, whether I agree with you or not; but violence and shutting down the universities, that's going too far."
On “Musical Complaints and Compliments about the Fallout 76 Radio Station”
Dude, thanks for this! I rather like the original Anne Bredon version, but I will admit that I probably am unlikely to ever put it on any of my Spotify playlists (unless I make an "unknown originals" which sounds cool but would be a hit-and-miss sort of list I'd only rarely go to).
Joan Baez's cover, which is what I thought LZ was doing, simply feels more fully realized and I probably will add it to my "Earnest Girls With Earnest Guitars" playlist. Which, I feel sort of bad about because you've now educated me about Bredon and she deserves credit (and royalties, even if only the meager ones Spotify pays). But one likes what one likes.
"
Led Zeppelin wanted to be a blues band. Kind of. They still wanted to do heavy rock. But they wanted to play blues songs. Sometimes they got it just right -- like Babe I'm Gonna Leave You on LZ1 or the cover of When The Levee Breaks on LZ4. But as much as we honor and love them, they weren't perfect. I agree with you that Nobody's Fault But Mine is a miss. And it's great that digging down to the roots revealed a mostly-forgotten gem from Blind Willie Johnson!
So I agree with you about the music. Fallout is really good for that; there has to be someone Bethesda uses who has this encyclopedic knowledge of classic jazz, blues, and bubble gum pop.
But I laughed at the DJ joke in Fallout 76. At least, I did the first time she cracked it. Video games being what they are and my pace of play being what it is, I wind up hearing those jokes repeated a lot.
On “Dog Gone”
On the other hand, Noem's children grew up exceptionally well-behaved.
On “The FTC has banned (nearly all) non-compete agreements”
I haven't read the final rule. The earlier version of the rule I read had an exception for officers or holders of 5% or more of the equity. Did that survive? I haven't read the final rule yet, so I don't know. But that's who you're talking about here.
There is also no prohibition against non-disclosure agreements, non-circumvention agreements, or other members of the trade secrets family of restrictive covenants.
On “The Trump Tax”
Thanks for bringing the receipts, David.
On “Iran and Israel, and What Comes Next”
Here's a notion to entertain. A depressing one, I realize, but one that maybe demands consideration.
Ready? Here we go:
The existence of a problem does not imply the existence of a solution.
...Sorry about that.
"
Saving face is important in Arab culture. Sure. Is there a culture anywhere on Earth where it isn't important?
On “OJ Simpson: Football Great, Murder Suspect, and Convicted Felon, Dead at 76”
But not wrong.
On “Dispatches from the West Virginia Tornados of 2024”
1. Very happy to hear no one was hurt, only property damage. This is what counts the most. Thinking of you and the rest of your wonderful family.
2. Maybe a chat with an attorney who practices in the field of insurance coverage litigation is in order? Unless you're quite convinced that the coverage declinations were righteous. IIRC, yours was one of a handful of states where when I was doing the insurance gig, we had red flags up about the state law penalizing us for not making the right call. (I didn't work many HO policies though; as you know, I was on the EPL and environmental side.)
3. Nature sure has her ways of reminding you who is really in charge, doesn't she?
On “Who Remembers the Fire?”
Yeah, that's a very different meaning than I thought at first read. Apologies for mistaking your message. I'll take to heart that maybe there are levels to seemingly superficial things that can turn deep. Discovering heretofore-unseen levels of understanding is one of the interesting things that can happen when people of different perspectives and opinions interact. So, cheers!
"
Basically, yeah, that last paragraph. It's a really good thought, in the OP and echoed here, that so many of the things that seem to explode into our brains are evanescent and ultimately not particularly consequential. A good reminder of that. Looking at the Fallout Boy lyrics (I was unaware this song existed at all until today) I see things like:
Sandy Hook, Columbine, Sandra Bland and Tamir Rice
ISIS, LeBron James, Shinzo Abe blown away
Meghan Markle, George Floyd, Burj Khalifa, Metroid
Fermi paradox, Venus and Serena
Oh-oh-oh, Michael Jordan, 23, YouTube killed MTV
SpongeBob, Golden State Killer got caught
Michael Jordan, 45, Woodstock '99
Keaton, Batman, Bush v. Gore, I can't take it anymore
Some of this is significant ("Sandy Hook, Columbine"), some of it actually might not be but I want it to be ("Michael Jordan, 23, YouTube killed MTV"), and some of it's obviously trivial ("Michael Jordan, 45, Woodstock '99"). How much impact has the relatively recent assassination of Shinzo Abe had on us? Damn near none, so far as I can tell.
But we still have to sort through it all and sift what's important from what isn't, and that isn't always easy. Especially in a world as noisy as ours.
On “Sam Bankman-Fried Gets 25 Year Prison Sentence”
25 years is, to my understanding, a SUPER long Federal sentence. This is a thrown book.
On “Bridge Derangement Syndrome”
Often, people come pre-broken as well.
On “Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore Struck By Container Ship, Collapses”
Haven't seen the video until today. It's terrifying.
And really really makes me praise the police for getting the bridge shut down in time to minimize the loss of life. Which is no consolation to the families of the workers who died, of course, but that's the terrifying part: how much traffic was moving across the bridge until just seconds before impact and collapse.
On “Music Monday: Is This the Greatest Rock Instrumental of All Time?”
Booker T & the MGs "Green Onions" demands at least a mention.
https://youtu.be/0oox9bJaGJ8?si=I1BBjqAFCrduMgQX
In more modern music (I guess this isn't really "new" music anymore) let me remind you of "You Wish" by Nightmares on Wax...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwDOa-lvizM
..and "Intro" by the Xx.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFq6nnw7xg0
See also about half of the corpus of Thievery Corporation's work, e.g., "Facing East":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSoBORS3KZE
Am I saying any of these are better than "Great Gig in the Sky?" Well, no, because the fact that they got "Great Gig" done on the first take with no real vocal rehearsals is damn near miraculous and means that piece will always deserve a mention in any rock instrumentals list. Which is a sign of a plausible claim to primacy. But these are pretty amazing pieces of music IMO, which fit within the now-very-broadly-subgenred category of "rock." (I might include, say, Peter Mancini's "Peter Gunn Theme," but I feel like that's more properly classified as jazz.)
I might want to include "Sirius" but it kind of feels like "Sirius," though yes its own piece of music, still really feels like an intro to "Eye in the Sky." (This Alan Parsons project reference is included for all of my Chicago Bulls fan friends who deservedly remember the glory years.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_NNCNDYEpU
I am also affirming that "Great Gig in the Sky" and other pieces of music are properly called "instrumentals" even though vocals are included. Vocalizing is using the human voice as an instrument, and relying upon the tones and sounds of that instrument to convey emotion rather than articulated words.
On “Happiness, Ranked and Revealed”
Happiness is not a state of existence. Pleasure or contentment may be states of existence, a sensation one might enjoy. Happiness is something different.
Those of who have read your 1970's science fiction will know the concept of the "wirehead," a person who has had a surgical modification to their brains to have the pleasure centers in their brains constantly at a low grade stimulation. While, definitionally, pleasant, we would recoil at saying a person with such a hypothetical device would be made "happy" by it. Indeed, we'd expect such people to sort of drop out of society and slowly waste away in their artificial bliss, and we should feel sorry for them. Because what they're experiencing isn't happiness.
Rather happiness it is an experiential process, a way of living, a relationship that you define between yourself and the world. I think it might be better say you "do" happiness rather than you 'are" happy, but such limitations in phrasing is a poverty of the English language. Perhaps the most natural phrasing to Americans is to be engaged in "the pursuit of happiness." Happiness is a life that is being lived well. I'd agree with Aristotle that a big part of living your life well is living your life virtuously.
Perhaps not so strangely, one of the virtues Aristotle discusses at length is, paraphrased, the ability to distinguish between things you have control over and the things you don't, and limiting the amount of anxiety you invest in a given thing to the degree to which you can affect it. Like a lot of virtues, it takes cultivation and practice before it becomes habitual and integrated into your personality.
It's easy to get anxious about stuff and hard to excise anxiety from your psyche. But doing that hard thing is probably essential to the experience of pursuing happiness. And that does involve putting the damn phone down and touching grass, because constantly staring at the phone and being anxious about stuff that is either going to happen, or not, is sooner or later going to pass from "staying appropriately informed about the world" and cross over to "making yourself feel shitty."
On “The New Right-Wing Leftists”
Chris, I really appreciate your taking the time to respond like this. Cheers.
"
There's Hippie Jesus, who you're talking about here and who I for one kind of like. And then there's Judgey Jesus, who is a different sort of guy entirely. Christian Nationalists don't worship Hippie Jesus.
"
The internet space of which I speak is Bluesky as I am no longer on exTwitter. "Moral purity" is a condensation, a shorthand of what I see articulated there. It's a combination of revulsion at Biden's response to the war in Gaza and magical thinking that a Trump win in 2024 will somehow pull Democrats to the left such that a future Democratic party will become morally acceptable.
I've plenty of respect for someone who says "No, Biden lost me because of Gaza, so I'm not voting for him, or I'm voting third party as a protest vote." Such an opinion leaves plenty of room for "But Trump is still worse on other issues, which are less important to me, and I'm sure as hell not going to vote for Trump either."
Maybe that's what you're getting at your DSA meetings. It's not what's coming through on my SM feed.
What I get is moral condescension (e.g., "I see; after considering what's at stake, you chose genocide,") and I admit I react badly to that sort of thing. I'm not the guy who's out there in an IDF uniform shooting into crowds of starving kids.
I'm the guy who says "Neither party's candidate is going to break our multi-treaty alliance with Israel, so what else might be at stake?" and is deciding that Biden is, in those other arenas, a much less bad option than Trump.
I'm also the guy who says that the parties traditionally compete for votes in the center, and a strong showing by Trump therefore provides an incentive for the Democrats to move right and compete for those gettable votes. Debatably, that happened in between the candidacy of Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. Further, people whose ideology is so far left that they can identify no material difference between Trump and Biden are, to phrase it much more charitably than my then-irritated self did a few days ago here, unlikely to be persuaded otherwise. There is therefore no incentive for the Democrats to reach out to such people at the expense of reaching towards the theoretically persuadable center.
Apologies, friend, if I insulted you.
"
Yeah, I knew that. We disagree often, but this was something else. Cheers!
"
Thank you, bobtuse. Do you know how long it's been since anyone on these pages explicitly agreed with me or said I was right about anything? I forgot what it feels like. You're my new best friend.