Crows

The 50-year historical blip in which a tiny percentage of artists were able to get rich off of prerecorded music is blessedly over. With the plummeting cost of recording and mastering songs has come a great democratization in music creation, in which anyone, not just those backed by labels, can create great music. Back in the day, the labels were the investors: recording good music was expensive and difficult, and getting it promoted required paying off the gatekeepers of terrestrial radio, and so labels ponied up the startup capital and therefore got the lion's share of the profits. Today, the startup capital required is several orders of magnitude lower, and the promotion channels are infinite and free or nearly free to access. Yes, it's much less likely for an artist to get filthy stinking rich off recorded music today, but you know what? I'm okay with that. We have an embarrassment of riches in terms of great new music today, being created by tons of people who are ...

I hate when I post a good comment to reddit and it gets buried because either no one noticed it or it was a tangent to the OP. Here's one such case: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/2jp6xz/what_is_the_most_compelling_counterargument_to/cle04wa One of the consequences of MMT is that the national debt is meaningless: it's an accounting fiction. One of the interesting properties of fiat (government-issued paper) currency is that the government must run a net deficit or there can be no money in circulation: if government doesn't spend the money first (i.e., before collecting taxes), how can there be any in circulation for private payments or tax payments? Note that MMT isn't prescriptive, just descriptive. It's critical for people to understand how our monetary system actually works in order for sane policy to be created. Of course what I said above isn't true on a gold standard, for instance; but we aren't on a gold standard, so unless we go ...

Today's blog post is just a link to a post on Facebook where I have a few comments about parking and transit and autonomous vehicles.

"It's not garbage night. Tomorrow's a holiday." That was me yelling to my downstairs neighbor out the window after I heard the rattle of trash bins being pulled down the driveway. Of course, I've done similar things before, and it's perfectly understandable: I mean, really, who actually celebrates Columbus Day? Its main use seems to be as "fall break" for college kids: I've never even had a job that recognized it as a company holiday. So, while I appreciate the movement toward Indigenous Peoples Day as perhaps a more "just" variant on the same holiday... really, no one celebrates that either. ("No one" in this instance is intentionally hyperbolic, for effect; but it's basically a fact that very few people care beyond the philosophical.) So this brings up the question of what holidays are actually used for, which should motivate a redistribution of them to more meaningful or useful times. Is it celebration? There...

Street parking. Why is this so fucking hard? Those of you who live in East Bumblefuck won't understand this, but I must commiserate with my fellow urbanites. When street parking is constrained, it matters where you park. To be a considerate neighbor, do not park 7 feet from the nearest driveway cutout, and/or leave 5 feet between you and the next car. All that does is reduce the parking capacity of the street. Earlier this week, there were two cars parked along a section of curb that normally accommodates 3 or 4 cars. The first car was positioned about ¾ car length from the stop line; then a gap that one might have squeezed a compact car into, with a few floor jacks; then another car about ¾ car length from the driveway cutout. Those gaps add up to almost 2½ car lengths. Be considerate when deciding where to park your car. If you can't tell how far you are from the nearest driveway, or from the car behind you, get out and look.  It's not that fucking hard. Eventually, ...

It's been slightly more than a week since my 14th ProgPower officially ended. Hard to believe on both accounts: that it's been over for a week, and that I've now gone to fourteen of these, having only missed the first one in Chicago owing, I guess, mostly to my general obliviousness at the time. (Actually, I still don't know what motivated me to go to ProgPower II, but I'll forever be thankful that I did.) After digesting the festival's events over the course of the succeeding week, I feel like I'm ready to review the sets with a keen, completely-biased eye toward what I like and what I don't like. And so, with the caveat that my tastes are unlikely to align perfectly—or at all—with yours, I present the official Crows ProgPower USA XV Review Day 1: Wednesday night Mid-week Mayhem show I'll admit to not having paid much attention to either Vangough or Theocracy, as I was mostly reconnecting with old friends I had not seen at Lara's Sausage...

I've decided to try to get back into the business of blogging, but I'm mostly going to limit myself to bitching about things, because I don't really have the patience to write anything in-depth. So, for today, I have two thoughts from road-tripping to ProgPower XV, and an additional thought related to my drive home from the gym tonight: I want the climate control system in my car to be smarter. To be fair, it's already much better than the old style in which you slide a thermostat labelled only with red and blue, and not connected to any actual temperature, and set a blower speed explicitly, and have to constantly adjust them whenever conditions change in the slightest so you can avoid burning up or freezing. At least my car lets me set a specific temperature by degree, which the car attempts to maintain for each of the two zones. The problem is that this isn't quite what I want. Humans don't feel temperature directly so much as heat gain or loss. What I re...