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audio-luddite · 1 year ago

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Myth-information

Like that word? I just thought of it.

I was meditating on the Frank Doris document linked in my previous post. The guy has gobs of experience, but that is tempered by his clinging to myths and misunderstandings to reach conclusions. There always has to be a conclusion.

I heard an effect it must be due to this thing. Or not.

So he likes planar speakers cuz they are low mass and such. Well if they truly were that they would have really good high frequency response and you know they don't. All current units have woofers and tweeter drivers as you do not have a practical true full range planar driver. There are two types of planar speakers. One is the magnetic like the Magneplanar. The other are various flavors of electrostatics. Skipping details he likes the sound (as do I) because they are low mass and fast (which they are not). But the truth is they are very inefficient and non-linear and not that low mass compared to a simple cone driver. The motors of cone drivers are much more efficient for a given mass of moving parts.

All planars either electrostatic or magnetic are non-linear. The forces applied to the diaphragm is from an electrostatic charge on grids or magnetic field which accelerates a thin sheet. BUT practical considerations require the diaphragm to be under significant tension which increases the restoring force the more the sheet moves from rest. A linear signal input gives you a not linear displacement. Effectively it is a signal compression. I know this as I have built them. But they still sound good.

Why do they sound acceptable and even very good? Well they have a large radiating area which couples well to the air in the room. An 8" speaker cone has 50 squinches of area. A modest planar speaker can have 10 times that. My electrostatics had 1500 squinches of area. That coupling is actually an impedance matching effect so the sound is put into the air very efficiently once it has got past all the mechanical limitations. It appears as impact and such. That goodness compensates for most of the inherent badness.

Big horn speakers share this impedance matching effect. The area of the horn outlet is the effective area of the speaker. In big Khorns you are talking square feet of area. But they have phase issues and horns distort, sorry.

There is no ideal speaker solution. Any method can be made to fool your brain. All have flaws.

Interconnect wires can effect sound. Not for the reasons noted in the marketing materials. I had a high end rather long shielded cable to link my front end to my amps back when I placed them right beside my speakers. (Audioquest brand) As they were shielded they were capacitors. Those very long runs dulled the high frequencies. I no longer need that length. I made a set of short cables by braiding four wires just long enough to reach between my preamp and my amplifier. It made a big difference. I cut the fancy cables to the same length and guess what they now sounded identical. Simple and cheap is fine.

All the bumf about speaker cables is bragging about how much money you can spend. Skin effect, time smearing, and all that does have an effect in radio frequencies but none at all in audio frequencies. The only factors that matter are inductance, resistance, and capacitance. All wires have those. Note that some very expensive audio electronics both produce and respond to radio frequencies due to design flaws. Don't buy that stuff. Just a simple heavy gauge wire is all you need.

Remember that the 20 odd feet of fancy speaker cables connects to maybe a hundred feet of fine voice coil wire and 60 odd feet of inductor wire inside your speaker box. The entire loop counts and adds together.

Insert rant here about fancy power cables. If they help, your equipment has a problem in the power supply. All that might change is your grounding condition and perhaps invalidating your fire insurance.

Oh and the eternal conflict between tubes and transistors. Yes that is a thing. They sound different while measuring the same. Does that prove that measurements are meaningless? No just they measure what they can measure. Skilled designers can make either sound like the other. But each tribe has its fan base and those people must be served. My tube amp is different here and there, but overall more similar to my transistor franken-amp than not. The differences are very small. And it is fun to explore.

Anyone who truly understands this stuff just rolls their eyes when the golden ears start to preach. I almost understand this stuff.

#audiophile #audiophile cables #planar speakers #audio myths #high end audio #vinyl

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uboat53 · 1 year ago

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I've read and seen a few things recently that have sparked a thought, LONG RANT (TM) time while I work it out?

INTRODUCTION

So, about a week ago, I read a piece on Tumblr by Cory Doctorow in which he argues that the right side of the American political spectrum has become so enamored of property rights that it cannot focus on human rights. I also recently watched a clip of George Carlin on Real Time With Bill Maher from some time ago talking about the situation after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in which Bill Maher made the following point:

"…as if, in the middle of this crisis where so many people are dying already, what we need to do is shoot Tyrone because he's getting out of Circuit City with some soggy tweeters."

I'll link both of these at the bottom if you're interested in checking them out, they're both fascinating reads/listens on their own.

The thought this sparked in me is this: one cannot successfully promote human rights if they are placed equal to property rights, and this is the fundamental problem with any attempt that the right-wing, be it the MAGA movement, the conventional right, or the libertarian right, to make people's lives better. This gets a bit into the weeds, but let me work through this because I think it's important.

CAPITALISM VS. CAPITALISM

The first thing we have to address is the term "capitalism" which gets thrown around by the right and the left with barely a care in the world. The thing is, they mean two different things when they say it.

When the right says "capitalism", they really mean free-markets. In other words, their capitalism is just the economic idea that supply and demand will determine a natural cost for any good or service and that any other form of intervention will distort that natural cycle. Based on my experience, this is what most Americans think of when they think of the word capitalism.

When the left says "capitalism", on the other hand, they're talking about an economic, philosophical, and political system in which capital is prioritized over labor. For example, it can mean that capital is taxed at lower rates than labor and laws prioritize the protection of capital over the protection of labor. They've had a hard time talking to people about this because, well, that's not what most people think of when they hear the word capitalism and people on the left tend to be terrible communicators in general which is a whole other issue.

The reason I focus on this is because I'm going to be focusing on the left's version of "capitalism". Unfortunately, I don't have a better word for it, so I wanted to very clear what I meant before I started. We're talking about a system where capital is prioritized over labor, not a system of supply and demand.

RENT SEEKING

Before we discuss things in a bit more detail, there's one more concept that I need everyone to have in their heads. One of the main reasons why unregulated markets tend to spiral into oligarchies is a phenomenon known as "rent seeking". Rent seeking is, according to the Wikipedia article, "the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth." This can happen by manipulating regulations, but it can also happen simply by using the power of property to lock out competition.

Here's the Wikipedia article itself if you're interested.

Let's take, for example, someone who owns land. A person who develops capital and wealth by improving that land is not rent seeking, but a person who simply owns the land and charges for its use is. This person adds nothing to the collective wealth of a society and simply siphons the existing wealth into their own pocket by virtue of the ownership of property.

In any functional, real-world economy, there will always be some degree of rent seeking, but when capital is valued over labor, then rent seeking can grow to the point where it threatens the stability of the system. Not only are rent seekers unproductive, they actively drain resources from productive activities, making them particularly damaging to the prosperity of a society.

PREFERENCE FOR CAPITAL OVER LABOR

I mentioned a system that values capital over labor, so let me expand a bit on that. In our system, the highest long-term capital gains rate, the rate at which capital gains are taxed, is 20% for high income individuals. The highest income tax rate is 37%. I should note that "long-term" isn't actually all that long, you only have to hold an asset for a year for it to fall under this bracket.

In other words, if you make over $44,726 (as of the 2023 tax year), you're better off making that income as a capital gain than by working for it.

This is the most obvious thing I mean by a preference for capital over labor, but there are hundreds of small and hidden ways that we favor capital as well. There are tax incentives that state and local governments give to capital investment, there is the fact that wage theft is overwhelmingly the largest crime in dollar value in the United States yet is rarely prosecuted, and there is the proliferation in the last few decades of right-to-work laws which were designed to undermine unions with no similar effort to undermine groups that advocate for capital.

I could go on and on and on but the basic conclusion is this: in hundreds of ways both large and small over the last several decades, the United States has systematically advantaged capital and disadvantaged labor to the point where it is far more advantageous to own capital and even rent seek than it is to work.

THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM WITH ABSOLUTE PROPERTY RIGHTS

Now to property rights. If we look carefully, our system which advantages capital also advantages rent seeking as it does not discriminate between the productive and unproductive use of capital. There are certainly limits, a machine that is unused provides little profit, but things like land, buildings, and even machinery can provide profits to their owners even when those owners take little or no effort to improve them.

In fact, there are many investments in which rent seeking, perversely, may be MORE profitable than productive improvement due to the costs of improvement. In economic theory this is impossible as other productive investments would exist that could provide greater profit due to their productivity. In the real-world, however, inefficiencies exist that mean that this is often not the case.

In a healthy society, these inefficiencies would be addressed by regulation and policy, but a belief in absolute property rights prevent these remedies. When taxation and other, similar, methods are off the table, it makes it impossible to correct for these inefficiencies. This leads to a situation where more and more wealth is eventually captured by unproductive assets and activities, diminishing the overall wealth of society and, thus, diminishing human well being.

THE HUMAN PROBLEM WITH ABSOLUTE PROPERTY RIGHTS

The other problem with property is the simple question of what happens when someone does not have enough of it to meet their material needs? Certainly not everyone needs an X-box, but there are people, for example, who need life saving or even just health preserving care but cannot afford it. I think the rights to life and health can generally be accepted as the most basic of human rights, so how to achieve them?

Well, in just about every system that has ever been able to meet these needs, the solution is simple: property is taken in some form or another from those who have more than enough to meet their needs and used to help those who do not have enough do so. This is true for just about every type of civilization that has ever existed, from simple tribal groups to the modern administrative state, and every failure to meet those human rights stems from a failure to redistribute resources to meet them.

However, once property rights are elevated to the same level as human rights or higher, then this it no longer becomes possible to satisfy human rights. At the most basic level, human rights require some form of currency in order to meet and, if it is not possible to take that currency, it is no longer possible to satisfy those rights.

I should note that there are some who claim that this should be voluntary rather than mandatory, but I think it's a fair point to make that no voluntary system has ever come close to doing as much to meet basic human rights as mandatory systems have and the onus is on anyone who argues this to provide evidence that this is even possible.

THE PROBLEM WITH THE RIGHT

Once you put all of this together, the fundamental problem with the way the right-wing of our political system places property rights equal to human rights becomes clear. A system in which no private property can be taken in a legal way creates a scenario in which rent seeking siphons more and more wealth from the productive economy AND there is no way to use this wealth to meet the material human rights needs of those who will be immiserated by this condition.

I should note that I'm not caricaturing the position of the right here, the belief that property rights are equivalent to human rights is a widespread one. You can see it, for example, when the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire declares that publicly produced, free insulin is equivalent to the enslavement of African-Americans because it interferes with the property rights of pharmaceutical companies or simply the monomaniacal Republican focus on tax cuts and opposition to tax increases to "let people keep what they earn" as the solution to just about every problem.

In every case, for those on the right, property rights have not only become equal to human rights, they have become THE human right.

CONCLUSION

As I said, I'm still fleshing this out, but I think it's clear that treating property as an inalienable right prevents us from addressing basic human rights such as the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

If you've got any thoughts or questions, I'd be very interested to hear them. I hope you enjoyed this or at least found it thought provoking.

ADDENDUM

If you're interested, here is the Cory Doctorow piece I read that discusses this issue from a different perspective.

And this is the episode of Real Time with Bill Maher that I mentioned earlier.

#long rant (tm)#politics #us politics #republicans #libertarians #right wing politics #political philosophy #economics

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dragontrailz · 4 months ago

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YesCymru - The Struggle for Power (Part 2 of 4 - 2021 to 2023)

This is the backstory to what happened when Gwern Gwynfil was dismissed in late 2023 and what's happened since (that will be covered in Parts 3 and 4). Part 1 will cover the 2021 coup (which is summarised briefly in this Part) in more detail and was written in late 2021 and edited recently for clarity.

The detailed story is indeed to act as a historical document in order to inform the membership that restructuring is needed. What happens next is up to the membership. It has become necessary to publish something to stop the paralysis that has overcome the movement and seems entrenched.

Introduction - 2021 to the Gweithgor

I first joined YesCymru in 2020 for a 12 month membership period, as the movement was scaling impressively with the Covid Pandemic bringing more attention to the campaign. Mark Drakeford was perceived to be handling the crisis better than Boris Johnson. A low bar you might think, but it seemed to be drawing attention to how devolved power was allowing us to manage our own affairs and resolve our own problems.

It was during this period of rapid growth that a group of interlopers with a subversive agenda began to plot and to mount a coup. As the May 2021 AGM approached, the plotters saw their chance to create an opportunity where new members could be voted onto the Central Committee, whilst simultaneously targeting two founder members from retaining their place on the committee.

All of this might have remained a secret, if it wasn’t for the online bragging by the co-ordinator of the meeting, a Labour Councillor for Prestatyn called Bob Lloyd.

According to a prominent right-wing third-sector blogger named Mr Jones, the plot appears to have been coordinated by Bob Lloyd, Mark Hooper, Lab4IndyWales co-founder Ben Gwalchmai, ‘All Under One Banner’ founder Llewelyn ap Gwilym (who was on the Committee at the time) and a final plotter, who was a key person at a now defunct Welsh media outlet. For the purposes of the story, let’s just call him ‘he who does not like to be named’ (HWDNLTBN).

They were assisted by Momentum’s Harriet Protheroe-Soltani and Elin Hywel from radical-left IndyWales campaign group Undod. Happy to go along with the plot were a collection of artists who seemed to be using YesCymru as a promotional vehicle.

I verified Mr Jones’ work back in 2021 and it checked out. It was a shame that the research was inflected with some colourful language in places, which seemed to deter some people from engaging in its content. Rather strangely at the time, Nation Cymru, a major rival to HWDNLTBN’s paper, weren’t able to really call out what was happening. I’ve never really been able to ascertain why, but I suspect someone behind the scenes was sympathetic to the aims of the coup plotters.

Once in power the group prioritised trans rights, which they knew could be used as a wedge issue to cause internal tensions within the organisation. Their shift in direction triggered a response, where the wider YesCymru movement made clear their discontent, eventually resulting in the resignation of the Central Committee on August 2021. It was a turbulent 3 months. While Ben Gwalchmai took to Twitter for some epic rants, the wider movement breathed a sigh of relief and Mr Jones, who it was now rumoured to be in retirement in the Dysynni valley, claimed the credit for being the only journalist, employed or retired, to call what was going on.

A prominent tweeter who resides somewhere not too far from this author’s location stated on X that “everyone knew what was going on, but no one was able to stop it”.

Well that was because you never got organised enough to do anything about it.

The Gweithgor

After allowing my membership to lapse for a month, I rejoined for a second year, briefly sitting on the Gweithgor transitional council that attempted to regained control of the organisation. The aim was to put in place a new constitution and legal structure, but it was beset by problems from the start.

At the time, it was clear that YesCymru was going through a period of flux after 18 months, largely dominated by the Covid Pandemic, which had seen the organisation scale beyond what anyone had really expected. The tight timescales meant it was challenging for those who sat on the Gweithgor to attend the meetings, communicate the outcome to their group, obtain feedback, integrate the group’s wishes into the process and be ready in time for the next cycle.

Some members seemed to expect miracles, many others were simply not engaged with the process. YesCymru wasn’t used to operating effectively and democratically across these two tiers, which was a real indication of the trouble yet to come. It seemed clear to me and others I was in communication with, that there were still troublemakers in the working groups obstructing progress.

Despite the obvious obstacles and the rushed timeline, in December 2021, an Extraordinary General Meeting voted to adopt the recommendations of the Gweithgor.

The movement looked forward to a new start in 2022, albeit with a reduced membership. Almost 3,000 members voted to change the legal status of the organisation from being an unincorporated association to that of a company limited by guarantee. This gave YesCymru a strong mandate to proceed and nominations opened for positions on the new National Governing Body (NGB).

The majority of members who were nominated to YesCymru’s governing body were elected automatically, due to a lack of candidates, after the movement moved to a new regional structure based on Senedd regions.

Elfed Williams assumed the Chair and the role of Financial Lead; Nerys Jenkins took the Vice-Chair; Louise Aikman the Legal Lead; Geraint Thomas the Communications Lead; whilst Phyl Griffiths headed up Campaigns and Marches. The organisation issued an update, where it looked to professionalise the movement, increase grassroots participation, drive the Independence agenda in the media and engage key demographics.

Barry Parkin was elected unopposed as Director for ‘Outside Wales’ alongside Louise Aikman, who only lasted until May 2022 as Director, before being removed on a technicality after not attending three consecutive meetings. The solicitor, branded the organisation ‘dysfunctional’, after a clash with Barry Parkin and Elfed Williams, a pairing she referred to as the ‘gerontocracy’.

The removal of Louise Aikman appears to have been the start of a process where Barry Parkin and Elfed Williams began their consolidation of power. Her departure left Parkin as the only ‘Outside Wales’ Director, as she was not replaced until April 2023, when Dafydd Smith was appointed as a new Director for that region.

A month after Louise Aikman’s departure, in June 2022, the organisation took to the streets of Wrecsam, for their first national march in almost three years. It was recognised to be a huge success and there was a general feeling of relief and euphoria, which carried YesCymru through the summer. To most members at this time, the organisation looked to be back on track.

In September 2022, Gwern Gwynfil was announced as the new CEO and he set to work to re-establish YesCymru, stating that the organisation needed to raise its membership in order to be effective.

A second march of 10,000 people took place in Cardiff in October 2022, at which the new CEO addressed the crowd, alongside former Plaid Cymru leader Dafydd Wigley, actor Julian Lewis Jones, novelist Ffion Dafis and Irish comedian Tadhg Hickey.

My impression was that Gwen Gwynfil was popular and he seemed to be doing a good job. The reality was the membership were not engaged with the NGB via the regional group structure and many did not realise how the organisation was being governed. This lack of democratic engagement with the grassroots, was to prove a real limiting factor. However, YesCymru did attempt to address this by organising a National Conference in Aberystwyth during the summer of 2023.

What happened next came as a shock to the membership and raised the spectre that there were hidden problems at the heart of the movement, which had been overlooked when Louise Aikman was sacked.

#YesCymru

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auralammunition · 2 years ago

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Hey just so you know, that tweet you posted about "queer labels from the 90s" is misinformation. Those labels are not from the 90s. They are from a 2013 twitter thread that was published in "My New Gender Workbook." The tweeter of the "90s" misinformation deliberately clipped out responses that included twitter handles so it would seem more 90s.

Why did someone do all this? They did this because there's a concerted effort among the postmodern sexual liberation movement to lie about LGBT history.

I am definitely aware; I've actually gone through the workbook for fun before because it's available as a pdf! (I've also written several trainings about professional LGBTQIA+ sensitivity and about best practices for serving clients with intellectual/developmental disabilities who are gender-diverse, so I know when someone's flim-flamming me about queer history in general haha). I genuinely read it as a joke post and was assuming everyone else was as well, so it's good to know that some, if not many, weren't 😬

Bear with me while I rant for a second: Honestly, we should all know better than to get our education from twitter, or really any sm platform at this point. That's half the reason why people think Marsha P./Sylvia Rivera threw the first brick at Stonewall (not that they weren't revolutionaries, but the brick wasn't them). Misinformation like this can def pile up and become a big issue, and I think individuals need to be responsible for doing their due diligence when it comes to researching anything (particularly anything historical) if we are to combat that.

Like, it's 2023. You type any one of these quotes into google, you can find a pdf of the entire workbook in under a minute. Twitter is not now, nor has it ever been, an encyclopedia, and in my experience, it's good practice to assume everything on Twitter is fake until proven otherwise haha.

As for you beautiful anon, thank you very sincerely for checking in to make sure I wasn't being misinformed - that is such an important part of the work we have to do within the community and not everyone has the ability or emotional space to do it. Not only that, but you are going to reach people who actually don't know this and clue them in to doing some more research which is absolutely awesome, cheers friend!

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shangyang · 4 years ago

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i think this is the last thing i’m gonna say on the whole lindsay ellis thing, but i was scrolling through my youtube recommended earlier today and came across vaush’s video which was titled something along the lines of “lindsay ellis cancelled, deletes twitter” or whatever, and i just want to say that i find...found(?) it interesting how a lot of white folk’s opinions, post the events of lindsay ellis’ string of tweets and her deleting her twitter, tend to paint the events as people just “getting mad because she compared two pieces of similar media.”

i’m not gonna like, die on a hill and say that there definitely weren’t people either overreacting or blowing it into sky high proportions, but i just found it interesting how quickly the matter was deemed trivial and “just another instance of rampant cancel culture”. in truth i don’t really believe this was cancel culture insomuch as it was people - myself definitely included - getting justifiably fed up over a very well known media critic/media analysis youtuber distilling asian american own voices media into ‘just another ATLA knockoff’ when a lot of asian american creatives have been trying for years to stop getting compared to two white men’s culturally shallow takes on what are, in truth, very nuanced and complex, ancient cultures.

i don’t think (most) people, especially asian american voices, upset about lindsay’s initial tweet were simply looking to tear her down, or anything. i think that we got more upset when her “apology” tweets came across as just condescending, dismissive, and didn’t even contain an apology at all, just an “i’m sorry you felt that way, but i was right”. i didn’t really even see people telling lindsay to delete her twitter, or people telling her to d*e or awful shit like that. she deleted because she seemingly couldn’t handle the fact that people were still (in my opinion) rightfully mad at her about both her initial tweet and the shit response she made to the anger it caused.

also it’s just my opinion, but as a media critic: seriously. seriously? media criticism shouldn’t just be based in boiling down the content in a work until it fits into whatever other work somewhat similar to it you have up on a pedestal. again, i’m not a professional youtuber or anything, but that’s my own opinion.

#tweeter rants #shut up ren #lindsay ellis #ATLA #raya and the last dragon #sorry guys i swear this will be the last post about this. just getting the last of it out of my system and then its back to whate #whatever weird bullshit crosses my neurons next

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