Marching is a highly efficient way to move large amounts of people.

In Europe, most "worker’s " parties have become center with a tiny dash of left for “color”. The sad thing is that real left parties are musty old “real” socialism parties, either populist or tankies.

What we need is a “fourth way” of politics, a system that makes billionaires impossible, that fosters public services, including housing, cares for the needy, etc, but also promotes entrepreneurship, taxes progressively, guards society against the excesses of capitalism, etc.

Planned economies defininitely don’t work.

“Apparently” ?Shroedinger’s weasel?

I agree. The loudness is not what I dislike the least. Most 1st gen CDs were the work of love of sound engineers and producers, given near miraculous equipment, to produce records with unheard of quality. I own several. Dire straits Brothers in arms is one of these, a truly brilliant recording (The album itself is brilliant) The sound quality is truly astounding.

The whole thing took a downturn when they started compressing the recordings to fit FM frequencies. Why they didn’t do the compression at the FM station, and leave the uncompressed stream for us, is always been a mystery to me.

As for the range, it is generally pointless. Most people, even when young, can’t hear above 20 Khz.

That is by design. Unwanted noise is shit. A large part of the electronic pathways were noise and other unwanted signals removers

Shit! I forgot about the life -changing Need to spool with a Pencil

Older dude here:

There is no advantage to listening to something on a cassette, except for the vintage brownie points.

I did the analog to digital transition, and miss nothing. There was an intermediate time, when mp3s came along, and people were lowering bitrates to absurd levels, but digital is simply better.

All the people talking wonders about the “warmth”, “tone”, and other supposedly desirable qualities are very mistaken. What they are fawning over is noise, feedback, muddiness, lack of range, lack of definition, and so on. Vinyl records are shit. They make sound by literally scratching something.

The only advantage of tape was, at the time, it’s smaller size and portability, but sound was worse than records. I still have the last deck I owned, a marvel of technology of the time, a double auto-reverse TEAC deck with Dolby and Dbx noise reduction, auto azimuth, programmable, etc, which is objectively shit compared to a decent mp3 player, provided that the music is encoded in lossless, or large enough bitrate.

CDs were a massive improvement, and the pinnacle were DDD CDs, which were Digital recording, Digital mixing, and Digital mastering, meaning very little analog garbage was introduced in the process.

The objective for audio equipment is to be transparent, to not add or detract anything from the original performance.

“Thanks to Microsoft’s legendary approach to quality control, installing Windows patches these days is getting to be less like Russian Roulette and more like accidentally stepping on a rake left in the grass.”

Oooof!

Cliff Cash, pretty good comedian

The Egyptian kingdom(s) laugh while watching from the couch.

Europe is a superpower, economic and military. Even without nato you don’t want to fuck with let’s say, Germany, France, UK, Italy and Spain working together. These 5 are half of the top 10 arms exporters in the world, for example.

Mmmmm. Nom nom!

My ex wife’s uncle was the director of the south American division of the arm that made coloring and flavorings of one of the big Food/Chem groups, Procter & Gamble, or unilever, or one of those. Can’t remember.

No one in his household ate any processed/ultra processed foods.

Do the math.

I’m a Linux user since it was distributed in diskette images.

I use both Windows and Linux, mainly Linux, but I dual boot or use a VM sometimes because I need to use some programs which are not practical or just don’t work with wine.

I don’t see Linux as an alternative, I see Linux as different tool.

I mainly use cruciform (pozidrive if possible) screws and screwdrivers, but sometimes I have use flat.

No drama, no religious zealotery.

My kids say “Chewbacca!”

The problem with utopian socialism is people, as always. There will always some sumbich that will take advantage of the system, as in all real socialisms, like USSR, China, NK, Cuba…

I think that utopian socialism is beautiful, but it doesn’t take into account human behaviors like greed, hate, rancor, etc… And the people able to capitalize on that.

I generally use the terms interchangeably. Are there fundamental differences?

I’m not judging women, I’m drawing red lines. I’m stating my preferences in dating situations. I also don’t like unkempt women for dating purposes, or overly tattooed, or too far right wing, or religious zealots, etc…

I imagine you have some standards?

Older guy here.

I have always avoided dating women who would plaster shit all over their faces. I’d rather see those pores, freckles (actually I’m sucker for freckles), etc. I do like a bit of eye liner or shadows (or whatever it’s called) lipstick/gloss, mascara. Accents, if you will. But someone with their faces under a coat of primer, paint, and lacquer, like a car?

Also, I want to have a good idea of what they’ll look like in the morning.

I have a few suggestions to alleviate this.

Bear in mind that I find it OK, or even desirable, for people to invest, and have some properties to rent to support them in their later years.

1- build public housing, with a rent equivalent to something like 40% of minimum wage. Building should done in random areas, to prevent ghettos from appearing.

2- tax the fuck out of vacant houses.

3- tax house ownership, by individuals or corps, progressively, to discourage accumulation and speculation.

Have 1 house? 0%, 2->10%, 5->15%, and so on, so that having more than let’s say, 10 units stops making sense.

3- tax productive empty land (developpable, housing/comercial/agri) like empty homes, to make speculation and accumulation non attractive.

Thare are many more, I’m sure but these protect private property, investment, would lower prices, make housing accesible, while normalizing the sector.

This is democratic socialism. Allow capitalism, but keeping extremes in check, while providing a safety net.