There's a bit of writing in that direction if you're curious. I like Benjamin quite a but and have gotten a lot out of his thinking. Here's the wiki-level entry to it:
Unfortuantely, while I do come here for these kinds of discussions, it's moistly because I've excised the sociopathic and nationalistic folks from much of my medua and it's much easier to find those values among wanna-be venture capitalists.
I "value" their opinions insofar as they have an outsized influence on our world:
I feel like if I want to stay tapped into the progress folks are making on building the Torment Nexus, this website is where I will find folks breathlessly cheering it on.
As a person who organized and participated in the ultimately useless protests against the Iraq war, I think that you're correct- we had a couple of months to watch the BushII folks lie their way into getting wide support for the war.
As far as I can tell, these current assholes don't really care what the folks in the US think about their actions, so they don't spend time making cases- they just go do whatever dumb shit they want to do. Hell, I suspect that even they don't have a firm idea of what they are doing.
I don't think the protests were useless even if they didn't stop the war. It allowed the anti war opinion to solidify, particularly when there were no WMDs found (surprise).
Tony Blair is now widely reviled in the UK, and you can hardly find anyone who will admit to have supported the war.
Fair enough. It was certainly a learning point for me, personally. And it was probably an on-ramp into understanding imperial and neo-liberal politics that set a lot of folks of my generation into Occupy.
At the same time, I wish that protesting felt effective; the stated goals weren't achieved, and that is a fact. I've never been satisfied with being "right" about these horrors, even if I've been "right" a lot in my life.
And protesting is way more fun and less risky than the direct actions that seem to be for more effective in having measurable effects on efforts around ICE.
Doubly important when we're discussing explicit US propaganda efforts, I'd think, which certainly have cast "capitalism" and "communism" as weird and float-y signifiers.
Well, I'll grant you that the folks defending them are certainly making statements worth judging harshly.
I am not sure if I buy the idea that "We" elected them.
I'd be really stoked to know what I personally could have done (or encouraged my cadre / comrades to have done) to prevent this outcome, because I don't recall even being given a choice about who I thought should run against the current regime and I live in a state where I am a political minority (a left anarchist organizing against specific local actions like ICE "enforcement" and flock camera usage, among far less contested actions).
This is an actual question, because I am curious and have read your comments enough to recognize your username in the pile of folks writing thoughtful-ish comments:
is it the case that you identify enough with this government to count yourself among the (presumably judgement-worthy) "we" or is it the case that you count everyone counted by the US government as a citizen as "we"? Or would you state it in some other way? What do you mean when you write "we" in this case?
When I say "we" I mean about 1/3 of us who voted for this, and about 1/3 who decided that either way was good for them. That includes a bunch of people who are diametrically opposed but for whom the main alternative wasn't quite good enough.
That's roughly two-thirds of us. Those of us who took even the trivial effort to oppose this are a distinct minority.
I don't think there's any that minority could have done differently. We are merely complicit in the suicide pact that is the Constitution, whereby we go with the majority and hope the majority would let us try again in a few years. That's an increasingly dubious proposition, and now we have to decide if this social contract hasn't already been broken.
You did have a choice as the democrats held primaries that year and Biden won the primaries. Unfortunately he withdrew afterwards and there was a scramble to find a replacement, but you don’t get to rewrite history that the primaries didn’t occur.
If you didn’t vote for Harris then you were fine with Trump as a possibility. Own your decision.
How about this: if you voted, you signed up in a system that says you're okay with the outcome of the situation.
How is that not true? "I did what I could"... sure. So did I.
But I wouldn't have been okay with either outcome, so I didn't sign up saying that after an election we'd all just be like "whelp, good game guess I should go back to brunch".
So here I am, having to go organize against ICE because of the shitty political system that you reify. Thanks, asshole. If you voted, then you're okay with the outcome- that's what it means to vote.
I work with a lot of audio in a professional capacity. You're correct if you're saying that neither tech is universally "teh best".
And you're correct that wired phones have a lot of advantages.
Tack on that they don't have latency, though I've never really tried to track vocals on wireless cans. I have a pretty nice collection of what I consider to be quality mid-tier stuff for my studio (hd280, dt770, mdr7506, k240), and I think they mostly sound better and I can use them longer than I can use the various wireless stuff I use.
And the "real" UHF wireless audio I use professionally (well, to collect rather than listen to audio) is very reliable and good sounding but also, like, $1000/ch once it's cased and cabled and properly accessorized.
However, for almost all of my day to day listening I use either airpods or a some bluetooth'd 3M ear muffs. I even went back to airpods after going through both wired and other wireless solutions.
I don't enjoy having my in-ears ripped out along with my pocket. And universally the cord ends and the physical connector on my phone are the weak spots that have had me replace stuff- I haven't bought a phone in the 5 years since I got one that could charge wirelessly and never has phones plugged into it, and I don't intend to get another one any time soon (knock on wood that my case keeps the screen from breaking and needing me to repair it).
I have a bluetooth receiver with an analog out that I keep in my workbox, which I used for program music at a show tonight. It's nice to start my truck and my podcast just starts playing, too, without having to get out my phone and plug it in.
You're right that wired stuff is better for some things. I still find wireless stuff to be superior in a lot of situations.
> Tack on that they don't have latency, though I've never really tried to track vocals on wireless cans
The truth is that the OS usually hides the latency of wireless heapdhones, e.g. airpods, by delaying video to keep it in sync. The real latency is somewhere around 100-400ms if the RF environment is crowded. Even worse is that the latency isn't actually constant, but drifts all the time.
At many IT conferences organized by hackspaces, everything is done by volunteers, including broadcast and video/audio postproduction. And that is actually one of the most common issues: our volunteers use wireless headphones even if we ask them repeatedly not to.
We cut talks in postproduction primarily based on audio, e.g., when does the applause start/end, when does the speaker's introduction start/end, etc. Obviously, that doesn't work reliably if the audio latency is nondeterministic.
Even worse, as different venues have different audio setups, there are sometimes real audio/video sync issues that need to be fixed. But if our volunteers are using wireless headphones, they won't just set the wrong offset, but they end up trying to fix issues that don't even exist.
And then you get complaints from viewers that e.g. the livestream audio/video is out of sync, even though it's not. The issue turns out to be caused by the viewer's laptop and wireless headphones not supporting the latency compensation technique I explained earlier. And there's nothing we can do about that.
Wireless headphones tried to fix something that wasn't broken, and made it worse. In German, we'd call that "verschlimmbessern".
> The truth is that the OS usually hides the latency of wireless heapdhones, e.g. airpods, by delaying video to keep it in sync.
Right, but that only works when you control both. I love my Sony and Shure Bluetooth headphones and have 0 issues watching videos with them; they work great even on Linux.
But when people figure they're gonna use BT headsets for conferencing, it just turns into a shitshow of people waiting for the other to speak, then starting to speak at the same time.
I have an old Jabra headset for my video call needs, and it uses DECT. That thing has so little latency that I can use it to play FPS games without issues (I'm by no means a competitve player, so YMMV). At the same time, its range is huuuge. For the life of me, I cannot understand why nobody makes such headsets anymore: they've all switched to BT for some reason. The only models that seem to still use some form of low-latency transmission are some "gamer" models, but I've never tried one.
ugh the most annoying thing about the conversation clash latency is that the person causing the issue just thinks others are being weirdly rude.
wireless headphones externalize the cost of latency to other conference participants. if you think your airbuds are "perfectly fine" it's because you're not the one paying the cost.
> Wireless headphones tried to fix something that wasn't broken, and made it worse.
I think you are going to far here.
Do wireless headphones have problems? Sure. Did they fix some problems wired headphones had? Yes. Yes, they did.
Simply the ability of moving around without having to worry about the cable getting tangled or dragging the headphones or the phone is phenomenal. My wireless headphones are a lot more reliable than my previous wired ones. Somehow the cable and the connector was always the source of failures.
Do you not like wireless headphones? Don’t buy them. I will keep buying wireless headphones because they have clear benefits to me in my usage.
I find it insulting that you represent your preference as some universal truth.
Most of this thread is already exploring the consumer perspective, and as the previous poster said they couldn't talk about the professional perspective, I chose to only focus on the production/broadcast angle in my comment.
Tell me about the 3M ones? I've been considering the AM/BT with AA batteries but they seem sliightly derpy, and I've been happy with the SteelSeries Arctic Nova w/swappable batteries and 2.4ghz for my office work.
AA batteries b/c then it'll "last forever", 3M b/c it's basically passive noise cancellation, BlueTooth so it'll connect to phones (hopefully without that digital static that I'll hear with some BT devices). The AM/FM portion is an anti-feature, but mandatory to get access to AA power.
I made my own, but they sucked balls. I have some Plantronic cans which have ~10db nrr, but they are falling apart now, and I'm looking for alternatives with decent NRR
Well, I have had them for about 2 years and would buy them again.
To be clear, these are for noise protection and are heavy. They are big enough that I have another pair of muffs for shooting rifles and some ($$) molded westone earplugs for working on loud stages.
I mostly use the 3m when I am running a chainsaw or driving vehicles with the windows down (I find that too damn loud for my tastes). For a while I'd track drums with them over my shure se215, but I've started playing quieter and have found that something like an HD280 cuts stuff down enough to track drums while feeling more comfortable.
On one hand, they are kind of expensive, bulky, and the mic isn't great. Also their "ambient sound" is not anywhere near as loud or controllable as the muffs I use for shooting. On the other hand, they pair well, sound okay, have a lot of noise reduction, and they seem pretty rugged. They run on AAs and Battery life is pretty good, too.
You might find it useful to distinguish between right and left libertarians.
All my anarchist (left libertarian) friends are pretty consistently opposed to state and corporate surveillance. There is plenty of theory in a canon of literature that goes back to the mid 19th century, even as there are many subgroups and spurs off that general line of thought all with their own sets of (usually somewhat) consistent lines.
If you want something short and brutal, I am a fan of "Desert" by anonymous, but "A Utopia of Rules" by David Graeber is not a bad thing to read and probably closer to a popular line. Or the CIA-Coded Yale academic James Scott has a lot to say, "Two Cheers for Anarchism" and "Seeing Like a State" both seem to have influenced a lot of people.
Historically "right libertarians" (the US Libertarian political party, for instance) have been, uh, "less consistent" in their thinking, so you might have a hard time finding anything that looks like a "philosophy" in that branch of "thought". Plenty of goofy-ass ideas, but little consistency except a strange ability to begrudgingly conform to GOP politics at the end of the day.
I mean -also- weird to claim that the CCP invented scoring folks, but even if they did, it'd be hella weird to think that somehow they helped a US local power company implement it...
Look, I get that "CCP Bad". It's just always wild to see folks try and make that case when something has literally nothing to do with it, especially while there are plenty of pretty horrific and material mechanisms in play without pretending that the big-O Other is to blame.
The point that you're missing is that, in a system where such abuses are possible, many of us really don't want one more tool in their box for them to fuck us with.
Like, they already prove themselves incompetent- giving the power to track anyone in the US via a distributed ALPR system just makes them more dangerous. Giving them all these "AI" based tools does the same.
What do you think the appropriate set of tools for the police is? All the same but without AI face recognition or ALPR? Or also without DNA? fingerprints? guns? Access to government held data like tax filings? Access to other police departments' data?
I don't think they should even have guns, honestly. I am from Texas where we know that they just up and murder folks like Sandra Bland.
They certainly don't seem to use any of that technology well, as you yourself have admitted.
I suppose what I don't understand is why giving them access to more and easier-to-abuse technology would be a "good" thing.
To be clear, I understand that it's the people who kill folks, not guns, and that at the end of the day it's people who need to be held accountable, not the technology. Personally, I do a lot of shooting with a bunch of other queer and trans anarchist folks lately...
But giving more tech to the folks who are already misbehaving without mechanisms to enforce good behavior seems dumb to me.
I dunno, personally I think it's actively worse; for instance I've read enough WEB DuBois and similar to know that chattel slavery didn't end because of some "goodness" in the part of the government which still is ruling us.
The same government that helped murder 2M folks in Iraq. The same gov that paid death squads to kill nuns in El Salvador.
At least China isn't in a position to have to reckon with how deep white supremacy runs in its culture.
In fact, when I hear folks from the US talk about china without understanding their own history of racism and genocide and how that shit is still going on, all I can conclude is that they are operating under the same racist delusions that have historically brought the US to do such horrific things to the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aestheticization_of_politics
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