Putting the US fighting against Hitler in WW2 alongside US regime change Iraq and Iran is an odd comparison, ngl.

• 14 dead US service members
• A couple of thousand dead civilians in Iran and Lebanon

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!

Same here; Upgraded the old media/gaming PC in the living room back in October.

The same 32GB kit I bought then for $90 is now $430. Utterly insane.

Yeah, it is. Vorbis is the actual codec.

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.

I do the same, as it happens, so I won’t argue with you.

As for “why care?”, I’d say it’s about making informed decisions and not spending money unnecessarily in the pursuit of genuinely better sound quality.

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.

It’s still a good idea to have your main music library in flac for future proofing, but yeah 128kbps opus or ogg is what I use on mobile devices.

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.

CBD by itself shouldn’t cause anxiety, however CBD oils can contain a wide variety of different cannabinoids, including THC (the compound that gets you high and causes anxiety in some users).

Full spectrum oils can contain very small amounts of THC, although not enough that it becomes psychoactive for the majority of people. However, it is possible that people with an acute sensitivity to THC might start to feel some effects.

Broad spectrum oils specifically contain 0% THC, so those are the ones to go for if you want to rule out the possibility of reacting to any THC in the oil.

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.

Sony still cooking up the worst product names in the industry, I see.

Great performance and a very timely speech, given the current situation in the US:

Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,
Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,
Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation,

What country, by the nature of your error,
Should give you harbour? go you to France or Flanders

Why, you must needs be strangers: would you be pleased
To find a nation of such barbarous temper,
That, breaking out in hideous violence,
Would not afford you an abode on earth,
Whet their detested knives against your throats,
Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God
Owed not nor made not you, nor that the elements
Were not appropriate to your comforts,
But chartered unto them, what would you think
To be thus used? this is the strangers’ case;
And this your mountainish inhumanity."

Indeed they do. It’s like the entire Chinese EV industry looked at Tesla and thought “let’s do that, but cram in even more tech features and online connectivity”.

I’m not a fan, either.