American car companies honestly deserve to get obliterated here, sorry it is capitalism shrugs.
If you make shitty cars that are totally out of sync with what the world needs and that makes you massively lose against a country that is willing to actually make practical EVs… then your company deserves to go out of business.
Bro Riker and Zuck exist on polar opposites of the Humanness Continuum.
I’m straight and I don’t think I would be able to resist Riker if he gave me that smile and sat down next to me with an irresistible swoop of his leg over the chair top (??) that showed off his majestic long legs.
Zuck doesn’t even want to sleep with you, he just wants to monetize the advertisement revenue from knowing you and someone else just had sex. He is watching, listening and… stroking his beard? Ewww.
Also, Tasha Yarr knows what the fuck is up, Data is probably a superb lover, don’t matter how awkward he is.
Wow, this is such a biased take ughhh, let me rewrite this in proper newspeak.
“Last saturday an officers gun ejected from their holster after making contact with a dino toy grabber, the man holding the dino toy grabber retracted their arm from the situation and the firearm was taken along with the toy grabber. The man holding the dino toy testified in court the other day that he felt he had no other choice but to retract the dino grabber once the situation escalated from a playful dino bite to a potential non-armed dino bite attack and the firearm was unfortunately stuck in the jaws of the toy dino grabber which caused it to also be retracted. The police officer was not questioned for comment and had $500 dollars in their wallet at the time which was confiscated by local anarchists who believed the money was most certainly involved in some kind of illegal crimes at some point (a practice that surely would not be legal in a civilized society).”
When Bloomberg reported that Spotify would be upping the cost of its premium subscription from $9.99 to $10.99, and including 15 hours of audiobooks per month in the U.S., the change sounded like a win for songwriters and publishers. Higher subscription prices typically equate to a bump in U.S. mechanical royalties — but not...
Gotta love all my friends who are really into music who happily use Spotify and don’t give a shit it is a weapon of class warfare being used on musicians disguised as a music player!
I basically lost all my drive to make something of my love of creating music seeing how little anyone in my society actually values music or musicians in terms of material support and reward, it is honestly pretty scary how broken music has become.
As a musician and composer it really took the life out of my identity as a composer seeing an alternative to bandcamp never really form and then one day waking up to it bought by Epic.
I didn’t cry that day, but I might as well have, it made me extraordinarily sad to see that headline and I imagine there are actually countless talented musicians out there who will never actuate on their creative vision because the environment for music production is at this point, downright hostile towards artists and musicians considering the amount of work music production is.
It takes an obscene amount of work to take a song from something that has promise to being as polished as listeners demand nowadays, and listeners won’t even give your song a chance on actual speakers. You have to twist and warp your music so it sounds good on essentially monophonic phone speakers with shitty frequency coverage or otherwise nobody will give it a try on speakers for actually listening to music. Doesn’t matter though, nobody is going to actually support you for the art you make.
🙃
It seems like resonate.coop is still around tho which seems like a cool idea (a coop owned streaming service where listeners can stream-to-own a song).
🤷♂️ not really, none of these corporations are real in any sense that matters other than sucking up actual companies that actually make the world a better place and mining the goodwill out of them until they are cynical, worthless husks that corporations use to fleece consumers into buying products from before they realize their favorite company/brand is dead in everything but name.
I think you thought of a lot of good things to do!
I don’t mean to be overly cynical about people, this is a problem of systems and normalization of things that shouldn’t be normalized primarily, the people are mainly just trying to survive.
Maybe we will just look back at the period that is rapidly coming to a close as a golden era of music (and video games for that matter) where the tools became sophisticated, affordable and distributed for music production but venture capital hadn’t yet destroyed any last vestiges of the monetary value of musician’s labor (audio engineer’s included) in recording contexts.
Of course, I am sure Spotify and other streaming services are coming around to the value of recorded music being unsustainably low, I mean everybody knows it deep down right? That is why they are going to continue to raise their prices. From the perspective of Spotify, the artists that actually do the work of making Spotify a valuable company aren’t in principle excluded from their share of the pie when the line starts to go back up and the company has a chance to reverse some of the belt tightening and sacrifices everybody had to make to keep the lights on… but every single one of these vapid losers believes deep down in their bones that the rules of the game say that it isn’t the responsibility of shareholders or upper management of Spotify to just hand the musicians their fare share of the increasing profits, or even alert them to the fact that profits are in fact increasing in the first place. Musicians are not the customers nor the shareholders of Spotify, they are the commodified, interchangeable contractors that aren’t much different than the day laborers who hang out outside of most Home Depots in the US looking for handyman work.
This is like when the English saw that the only crop Irish peasants could afford to grow on the side for subsistence farming to feed their families, potatoes, were getting destroyed by a potato blight, and decided that it would send the wrong message to let those Irish peasants have any of the rest of the crops that Irish farmers were growing to sell to foreign markets to simply pay the English rent for their farms … crops that were not significantly impacted by the potato blight because it would make the Irish reliant on handouts and encourage a problematic tendency towards apathy and entitlement stubbornly latent in the Irish population.
Edit: I didn’t really make it clear, my interest in services like Bandcamp wasn’t higher quality music, it was that it was run by at least a relatively benign company that seemed to treat artists like actual human beings who artistic labor was inherently valuable. I would buy craft beer/cider/meader even if Budweiser or Coors Light was actually better quality beer, what I care about at the end of the day is my money going to someone or something good
I have spent a lotttt of time messing around with music production and learning what is pseudo-science (a whole fuckton of it) and what is real science. In all of the ABx testing I have done, read about, and seen demonstrated in person myself a quality MP3 with a decent bitrate encoding (idk 128kps or so?) using a decent algorithm and hell even a sampling rate of 41khz will produce an audio recording that when played back on a hifi audio system and level matched (EXTREMELY IMPORTANT, it is well known in mastering and mixing that a louder mix always sounds better at first glance) is indistinguishable from the source .wav file to the human ear (I don’t care how super human you claim your ear is).
People make this silly mistake of thinking that digitization introduces these sharp staircase edges into audio waveforms, which is actually kind of a hilarious misconception (which I completely understand, not trying to insult people’s intelligence) because the entire idea of converting a waveform (an analog non-bandwith limited phenomena) into a bandwidth-limited digital waveform is utterly reliant on the idea that the analog reproduction of a digital square wave/stair step function with a voicecoil and diaphragm, physical hardware components with shape, size and crucially mass, must necessarily create a smooth analog waveform because physical hardware components have mass and momentum, they aren’t theoretical ideas. It is better to think of a bandwith limited digital waveform as a series of movement commands for an RTS unit in Starcraft 2. The unit will naturally path between discrete points in a way that creates fluid movement, fundamentally it wouldn’t make any sense for the unit to just teleport directly to where you click and then teleport directly to where you click next etc…
I mean let us consider Vinyl records for a second, maybe you like most people have a vague perception they are kind of a hifi audio thing for people that reallllllly care about audio quality and don’t want to listen to chopped up and compressed digital audio files using a gasp consumer DAC that came stock in their laptop.
This quote from an old reddit thread discussing how CDs actually have far better signal-to-noise ratio fidelity than Vinyls (and really all decent quality digital audio files) about sums it up.
As for quantitative audio quality differences between the two mediums, the CD is superior. CDs operate at a sampling rate of 44.1kHz. These are discrete points, versus the continuous signal produced by a physical vinyl groove. However, the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem explains why a 44.1kHz sampling rate is sufficient for completely reproducing frequencies up to 44.1 / 2 or 22.05 kHz (See en.wikipedia.org/…/Nyquist–Shannon_sampling_theor… ). True response will actually be lower than 22.05 kHz due to the various anti-aliasing filters involved in the analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog conversion process to prevent frequencies above 22.05 kHz from aliasing down into the audible range (See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliasing#Folding ).
Furthermore, the CD is recorded with 16 bits of resolution, results in an output with 65,536 discrete voltage ‘steps’ on the output. This does introduce some quantization noise, because the real signal is ‘rounded’ up or down to the nearest of the 65,536 steps. This is another area where some people claim vinyl is superior due to the lack of quantization of the output. But in practice, vinyl only has 9-10 bits of resolution (IIRC) due to manufacturing tolerances. To achieve around 16 bits of resolution, the tolerance of production for the groove would have to be on the order of 1/65,536 or ~0.001%. That’s not going to happen on those tiny grooves. Also, you have to consider the non-zero inertia of the physical pick-up moving across those tracks, which will introduce a separate set of distortions as it moves around.
Many of us here might even be toxic in other contexts (I am certainly not perfect at keeping away from being overly negative or argumentative with people), but what matters is which version of someone we invite in the door to our community.
We can invite in any version of people we want, and I agree in general I think the fediverse invites in the better version of people and it is one of the primary reasons I love this weird, loosely connected blob of non-corporate social media.
Do artists have to pay to be on Spotify? Is that the issue?
The issue is that artists don’t make any actual money on Spotify, they are being forced to put their music on Spotify because that is where you have to put your stuff if you want to be a successful recording musician.
Meanwhile a couple of years ago the Spotify ceo said in defense of completely destroying any semblance of money making from recording music:
“There is a narrative fallacy here, combined with the fact that, obviously, some artists that used to do well in the past may not do well in this future landscape, where you can’t record music once every three to four years and think that’s going to be enough,” said Ek.
Streaming is great, but the structural evisceration of musicians and the value of labor in composing and producing is basically negative at this point given the huge amount of time that must go into a track to get it 100% there and ready for listeners.
Chicken and the egg, be the change you want to be, but also I am not absolutist about using Spotify.
I just think Spotify and other streaming services are vehicles of class warfare against musicians that also happen to play music. I understand if you like the playing music part!
I don’t subscribe to this cynical of a viewpoint, it isn’t inevitable that recording music is not valued labor, it is a cultural choice same as any other.
I live in the richest country on earth, it is a subjective choice to devalue the labor of musicians and decouple it from the profits of music companies.
facepalm we are literally the same species of Homo sapiens we have been for thousands of years, the problem is most certainly inherent in the system and we need to smash the system and make something kinder.
Like I said in my op: it’s good service for the consumer. It might not be if enshittification ensues.
Are you seriously throwing might into this sentence?
I suppose you could say when you throw a ball up in the air it might come back down but that is kind of being disingenuous isn’t it.
Here’s another thought, doesn’t it impact the quality of the service for the consumer if the workers doing the labor to create the substance of the service, the basic thing that gives the service value to customers, are not being rewarded in a sustainable fashion for their time and labor?
Do you really think all your favorite artists are going to keep cranking out music in this environment? More importantly, do you think your favorite artists would have ever been able to invest the time and effort to get big enough to become that 1% of the successful musicians if the environment they began in was as hostile towards musicians earning money as it is now?
The amount of quality recorded music being released is going to plummet as musicians just stop bothering to do it. We will look back on the 2000s-2010s as a golden era where music production tools were distributed and affordable but venture capital hadn’t yet destroyed the ability of up and coming recording artists and audio engineers to actually devote the time and focus to becoming professional.
Your statements paint a picture that you have no idea what I meant by “levels of fame” because fucking no one makes money off music unless you get lucky. There’s just too much because music is fun.
Again I don’t see any quantitative evidence to accept this framing of the status quo as inevitable or reflective of some fundamental tendency of human artists to overproduce art.
Capitalists have systematically stole the labor of musicians and normalized and absolutely absurd vision of austerity where the only way to make money is by doing things that people don’t want to do. It is absurd, and this ideology is pretty easy to locate the motivation behind, it makes us good compliant factory workers.
In recent times, triple-A publishers have repeatedly had their lunch eaten — at least, in terms of mindshare — by more creatively nimble indies. Lethal Companywas last holiday season’s breakout hit, andPalworld followed not long after. https://aftermath.site/the-nerve-of-balatro-for-being-this-goodand...
I really wish the tech industry was unionized because these major cuts, even if they can’t directly reach out and affect indie companies (and in some fashion benefit them by removing AAA developer competition) affect the entire industry of video game development and what it is like to be a worker in it even if you don’t actually directly work for one of these companies.
It is really sad to see game development face a similar fate to the other arts where it is becoming a valueless skill practiced by people in their free time. The word large corporations and execs are using to justify this is “AI” but it really doesn’t matter if AI works or not, what matters is that the identity of a game developer and programmer becomes fundamentally devalued.
It makes me feel a little less bad seeing the hoards of computer people who stilllll believe AI can never come for their jobs or that anything happening in the tech industry can’t be threat to the value of their profession and they have such a smug sense of naive ignorance about class politics, it is like watching a birthday cake get smushed by a steamroller.
At the end of the day though that feeling is self indulgent in an unproductive way, I don’t want birthday cakes to get smushed by steamrollers it isn’t how cake should be treated.
The theory is simple: instead of buying a household item or a piece of clothing or some equipment you might use once or twice, you take it out and return it.
There is a “tool library” sort of service (for profit)
Wait I am confused
library
Alright got it.
(for profit)
What
Ok….Why is everybody using the world “library” like it is an even remotely compatible concept with a for profit rental business??!
Is this just capitalism trying to purposefully destroy any meaning behind the word “library”?.
If your service is to rent tools out to places you are a tool rental company not a “tool library”. You would be a tool library if you were a community governed non-profit that let people borrow tools for essentially no money.
sigh it makes me so cynical how clearly libraries would never have been allowed to exist in a time as nauseatingly conservative and capitalist as this if they weren’t already old and boring concepts, the media, corporations, centrist democrats and republicans would all lose their mind about libraries being too radical of a concept if a leftist proposed them as an idea now.
quoted £245 for a handyman to come in and do the three hour job
Power tools, hand tools, clothes, batteries, heavy painters cothes, gloves etc… do not make the job.
The skill of the handyman who can quickly and efficiently deduce an effective solution (described vaguely by a couple of photos and a description over the phone by someone who doesn’t know shit about the problem they need solved) to a carpentry/handyman repair and do it within 3 hours is what makes the job.
People often make the point about learning home repair as a way to save money, and true it definitely is a necessary skill to some degree as a home owner unless you have a lotttt of money… but learning to do your own home repair really isn’t “saving money” so much as simultaneously devaluing your free time AND labor time to the point that all of the incurred debt is inscribed into your body and lost time with your family or friends rather than in invoices for repairman. This leaves me hesitant to call doing a significant portion of home renovation yourself ON TOP of holding down a full time job “saving” anything even if it helps keeps monetary expenses down.
Biden really, really doesn’t want China to flood the US with cheap EVs (www.theverge.com)
Beards are magic (lemmy.world)
Chicago Man is ungovernable (lemmy.world)
Addiction is a scary thing (lemmy.world)
After announcing increased prices, Spotify to Pay Songwriters About $150 Million Less Next Year (www.billboard.com)
When Bloomberg reported that Spotify would be upping the cost of its premium subscription from $9.99 to $10.99, and including 15 hours of audiobooks per month in the U.S., the change sounded like a win for songwriters and publishers. Higher subscription prices typically equate to a bump in U.S. mechanical royalties — but not...
Big Video Game Publishers Like Microsoft Are Paving Their Own Path To Irrelevance - Aftermath (aftermath.site)
In recent times, triple-A publishers have repeatedly had their lunch eaten — at least, in terms of mindshare — by more creatively nimble indies. Lethal Companywas last holiday season’s breakout hit, andPalworld followed not long after. https://aftermath.site/the-nerve-of-balatro-for-being-this-goodand...
How rental ‘libraries of things’ have become the new way to save money (www.theguardian.com)
The theory is simple: instead of buying a household item or a piece of clothing or some equipment you might use once or twice, you take it out and return it.