Kabe

Well this two-year-old exchange certainly aged like a fine wine

I’m no great fan of Hillary Clinton, but she gave a hell of an opening statement:

Transcript here

And to this bit

Mr. Chairman, your investigation is supposed to be assessing the federal government’s handling of the investigations and prosecutions of Epstein and his crimes. You subpoenaed eight law enforcement officials, all of whom ran the Department of Justice or directed the FBI when Epstein’s crimes were investigated and prosecuted. Of those eight, only one appeared before the Committee. Five of the six former attorneys general were allowed to submit brief statements stating they had no information to provide.

You have held zero public hearings, refused to allow the media to attend them, including today, despite espousing the need for transparency on dozens of occasions.

You have made little effort to call the people who show up most prominently in the Epstein files. And when you did, not a single Republican Member showed up for Les Wexner’s deposition.

This institutional failure is designed to protect one political party and one public official, rather than to seek truth and justice for the victims and survivors, as well as the public who also want to get to the bottom of this matter. My heart breaks for the survivors. And I am furious on their behalf.

I have to say fookin’ aye.

Talarico’s big bombshell: Talking about Christianity. The “Christian Nationalists” don’t want him doing that. He’s talking about the wrong kind of Christianity.

Precisely. Talarico is a Christian who actually takes the part about looking after the needy and the sick, and having empathy for other human beings, seriously. We can’t have that in Texas!

If we’re talking free tier Spotify, then it could actually be due to the bitrate (96kbps OGG vorbis, IIRC). However, if you’re a premium subscriber then the standard bitrate is 160kbps, which is definitely not audible to 99.99% of people.

In fact, after much ABX testing, I found that a noticeable audible difference between a local file and the same song on a streaming service is almost always due to either a loudness differential or because the two tracks come from different masters.

The thing is, dynamic range compression and audio file compression are two entirely separate things. People often conflate the two by thinking that going from wav or flac to a lossy file format like mp3 or m4a means the track becomes more compressed dynamically, but that’s not the case at all. Essentially, an mp3 and a flac version of the same track will have the same dynamic range.

And yes, while audible artifacts can be a thing with very low bitrate lossy compression, once you get to128kbps with a modern lossy codec it becomes pretty much impossible to hear in a blind test. Hell, even 96kbps opus is pretty much audibly perfect for the vast majority of listeners.

Oh, 100%. I actually tested this by recording bit perfect copies from different streaming services and comparing them using Audacity.

I found that they only way to hear a difference between the same song played on two different platforms was 1) if there was a notable difference in gain or 2) if they were using two different masters for the same song. If two platforms were using the same master version, they were impossible to tell apart in an ABX test.

All of this is to say that the quality of the mastering is orders of magnitude more important than whether or not a track is lossy or lossless, as far as audible audio quality goes.

These days I mostly see the placebo audio arguments in streaming service and FLAC/lossless encode fanboys.

The clamour for lossless/high-res streaming is the audiophile community in a nutshell. Literally paying more money so your brain can trick you into thinking it sounds better.

Like many hobbies, it’s mainly a way to rationalize spending ever increasing amounts on new equipment and source content. I was into the whole scene for a while, but once I had discovered what components in the audio chain actually improve sound quality and which don’t, I called it quits.

A pre 2015 will last longer than any new honda.

This is true for pretty much any car manufacturer, not just Honda. And while it’s true that their 1.5L turbo engines are a lot less forgiving of skipped or delayed oil changes than previous engine designs, they are still considered to be more reliable than the vast majority of other car brands.

The review will only be of the 3 million files currently available to the public, not the extensive trove of more than 6 million documents in total that the DOJ says it has in its possession.

Still not good enough.

The Chinese-owned Geely group owns Volvo

I mean, they’re not wrong.

Toyota builds its cars in multiple different countries, but it’s still a Japanese company.

The actual problem is far bigger than Trump; It’s the corporate duopoly masquerading as a democracy that created the conditions necessary for the rise of Trump and the MAGA movement in the first place.

Perhaps we are talking at cross purposes.

I thought it was pretty clear that we were discussing what would happen if the US/Israel overthrew the regime like they did in 1953 and install a modern-day equivalent of the Shah. I wasn’t talking about an actual, grassroots revolution.

I’m sorry, but are you new here?

Surely I don’t have to explain to you how a regime change orchestrated by the US/Israel would necessarily result in a puppet state.

I’m not sure how you’ve come to that conclusion. Aside from Iran’s nuclear development ambitions, which is seen as an existential threat by Israel, Iran has been directly bankrolling both Hamas and Hezbollah for decades.

If the regime were toppled and replaced by a moderate government more open to negotiating with the US/Israel (which would almost certainly be the case, since US/Israel would be the ones picking who ran the new regime), that would be an enormous geopolitical win for Washington.

Human Rights Activists News Agency (Hrana) says it has so far confirmed the killing of at least 6,159 people since the unrest began, including 5,804 protesters, 92 children and 214 people affiliated with the government. It is also investigating 17,000 more reported deaths.

Not wishing to diminish the severity of the situation in Iran, but it’s worth nothing that these numbers come from HRANA, a US government backed NGO, and the organization has been very cagey about its sources and how it verifies its death toll figures.

There are also those within Iran who are accusing US/Israel funded agitators of being largely behind the escalation in violence. Both nations would clearly benefit from regime change, and this wouldn’t be the first time this type of operation has been carried out by US/Israeli agents.

With the information blackout, it’s ultimately very difficult to verify either way.

My thoughts exactly, with maybe a sprinkling of Al Capone:

By the way, did you see what the Vanity Fair photographer did to him on the last White House photo shoot? It’s a stroke of editorial genius:

There are many ETFs that offer broad diversification into international markets. Most US brokerages offer their own mutual funds for international equities as well.

There is much disagreement over the optimum ratio of US-to-international equities, but unless you’re a hardcore US exceptionalist, anywhere between 20-40% of your equity portfolio should be ex-US, according to most researchers.