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voynich61

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This is a great explanation. To add onto this, I would imagine a lot of non-musicians would wonder whether there's a good reason for equal temperament, as most songs in every genre utilize it instead of more consonant scales (e.g., just intonation).

There are two main reasons. The first is a matter of switching between scales, as in, many songs will modulate to out-of-scale-but-mathematically-related chords. As 12TET has each scale using the same notes, one doesn't have to tiptoe around shared notes which are 'slightly' off. The second is pure convenience: using a set of notes for each key (or pushing the root note a few Hz up or down) would be a laborious process.

With that being said, an interesting direction some electronic producers take is to experiment with scales, given how ubiquitous waveforms with integer harmonics are. Here's an example from Richard D James: https://youtu.be/pTn1tmhA8L8

Facebook at Work 10 years ago

Never has it been more apparent that morality doesn't come into the equation for Facebook.

Justifying the move as a step to keep America safe is the right move in this political context. America is generally fearful right now, so Obama's political adversaries will attack this move as eroding the safety the prison system attempts to maintain.

"My job is to keep Americans safe" is an acceptable justification for limiting solitary confinement. It would not be an acceptable justification for extrajudicial killings.

Your comment is pedantic.

A school bus driver's job is to get kids from their homes to school and back. If she says her most important job is to keep the kids safe, it doesn't mean that she's not going to do her job! Instead, it means that she'll do her job in such a way that it keeps her safe, and in no way implies a conflict of interest between her job description and safety.

lmao @ ppl taking this guy seriously

Highlights from his wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Ferriss):

In 2001, Ferriss founded BrainQUICKEN, an online nutritional supplements company which made a product that was marketed as both BodyQuick and Brain Quicken.[22] It was claimed that this product would dramatically increase short term memory and reaction speed, taking effect within 60 minutes, but these claims made about this combination of ingredients have never been scientifically validated

Notable works: The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body, The 4-Hour Chef

his campaigns, such as dedicating his birthday to raising funds and heading LitLiberation to increase literacy worldwide

The New Yorker Magazine described Ferriss as "this generation's self help guru"

EDIT: all these downvotes! How doesn't he remind you of this guy?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xg29TuWo0Yo

It'd be easily detectable-- any phenotypic differences would present themselves in the first generation. Unless the rogue actors were able to add gene drive genetics to a wide swath of a plant's population in a short amount of time, this doesn't seem a tangible threat.

You earn $1MM per year. That means either a) you spend way too much or b) you actually would be, even at an 80% tax rate, 'super rich'. I assume you live in an area where housing is expensive? That's a luxury you're paying for.

Of course people who already have large sums of wealth should be highly taxed as well. But you cannot tell me that the state taking 50% of the income of someone who makes a million a year is too much, right?

Edit: downvote storm! When did HN become /pol/?

"I was successful even though there was a long time that I thought I wouldn't be all that successful, and I've gotten to where I am because I believed in myself."

I paraphrase, but Poe's Law is in full effect here.

dangerous

In the extreme, yeah, it's dangerous. We're so far from that point in the Western world that I don't fear it right now.

natural state of affairs

Yes, it is the natural state of affairs that the government have the power to snoop on us with a warrant. Otherwise, law enforcement has their hands tied behind their back. 1st grade civics tbh

A component of the solution might be to take appropriate medication. I tried getting over the shit stew with drugs and no intentional internal change, first with prescribed drugs, then with, uh, other sources. It's so easy to believe that it's completely beyond your control, that it's a neurochemical problem that you cannot solve until the state of the system changes.

Meditate on this one for a bit: youtube.com/watch?v=lGwKXzH6tZY

This reads as parody. Fawning over some self-important VC, doing 'analysis' that amounts to nothing more than shooting the shit with words and graphs that he doesn't understand. Decrying mistakes startups apparently always make, and using Buzzfeed as an example of some apparently satanic definition of success. Pushing a worldview, not a thought.

The music industry is immensely inefficient; the value of a piece is independent of it's economic value. It's smaller than the porn industry [3], and the top earners are not too distant from it artistically. It's a tenth the size of Apple, though much of the money is concentrated on zero-sum executives lacking a moral compass[5]. My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, Pitchfork's best album of the 90's, never went gold, even in their home country [1]. It bankrupt a studio and broke up the band, and to this day is about 1/100th as popular as Drake albums on Spotify [2]. Still, there is a vast swarm of people for whom Loveless means the world, in a way Drake has never meant to anyone. It's a stoic, effervescent, and unmonetizable titan.

It would be fallacy to assert that the developed world is improving emotionally [6][7], and for many in it music is a mood-regulating sidekick, thereby providing added value where TV et al. provide replacement. It is a levee against the disgusting world neoliberalism and tech utopianism has built for us. Final thoughts:

* Never use the word 'consumer' non-ironically.

* Or write that "there are in fact multiple paradigms that exist within the music universe, all of which operate according to very different rules." Amongst a few other choice phrases.

* Or, in your profile bio, "Lover of Art, Poetry, Startups, Music, Journalism // Tech Founder and Deadpan Humorist".

* Walled-Garden doesn't exist on streaming services; your demented Grandma has recordings of her playing piano on her Soundcloud.

* Streaming does work... if only because nothing else does. And no, no one will tell you 'community'/'live' will work for artists who have enough integrity not to become a living meme.

[1]: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loveless_(album)#Certifications

[2]: look it up. There are a few reasons for this, including that MBV listeners probably skew towards torrenting, and that those who stream tend not to leave it on as background music.

[3]: nbcnews.com/business/business-news/things-are-looking-americas-porn-industry-n289431, statista.com/topics/1639/music/

[4]: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.

[5]: celebritynetworth.com/richest-businessmen/ceos/lyor-cohen-net-worth/

[6]: monbiot.com/2014/10/14/falling-apart/

[7]: nytimes.com/2015/11/03/health/death-rates-rising-for-middle-aged-white-americans-study-finds.html

Tech-savvy people often miss the forest for the trees on this one. Once you get past the engrossment in implementation details, the fundamentalist political philosophizing, and the harping on spurious and mostly anecdotal evidence for Western police states, there actually is good reason for government surveillance of W/Obama scale. There is a distinct threat that global terror will increase in scope by orders of magnitude, due to a) gains in message efficacy, b) positive feedback loops for recruitment (i.e., bombing Iraq over and over again), c) weapon availability gains, d) geopolitical posturing, or e) a black swan. Of what has been revealed from Snowden's leaks, the worst intentional (read: potentially malicious) invasion of privacy was NSA employees making fun of tapped conversations. If that and you not being able to torrent 24-bit flacs off of what.cd is the cost we have to pay for security in a future which is less certain than is widely acknowledged, sign me up.

London. Paris. Madrid. New York. Why are these the cities terrorists have targeted? Perhaps because, say, a Londoner who dies in a graphic way will cause more notoriety-- i.e. stir more terror-- than a Bangladeshi. It maximizes their bang for... uhh... their bang. Given the size of the world's suicide problem, starvation problem, poverty problem, rape problem, etcetera etcetera, of course terrorism actually isn't of much relative consequence. It intends to make people like you freak out, viscerally (just as CNN et al does when they cover these so much).

I'm not changing a damn thing in how I live my life, and not even out of courage (i.e. the "we can't let the terrorists win" bromide that took over in America in late 2001). It just shouldn't matter that much to you, and it only prevails insomuch as you let these irrational fears get to you.