MeadowTheory's comments

An implausible, borderline impossible, tactical sensitivity is not vision and a sense of aesthetics. Cool your jets.

Faraday sure did.

I'm rather partial to the differential form version. Something about the neat almost symmetry (in the layman's sense) of the two equations. And how deceptively innocent looking they are.

I feel like this is a silly question, but what is the reason for all of the return 1; statements at the ends of the mains? I thought 0 as a return code for success was pretty near universal. Is there something obvious I'm missing here? Not really a C/C++ guru.

You do realize the Meyer-Briggs typology has been abandoned in favor of more meaningful tests? At this point it's basically a scientific-ish version of astrology.

You mean some people are uncomfortable in having their place in the social pecking order challenged? News at 11.

Most artists tour for years before signing to a major label, during which time they most likely book all their own shows, do their own promotion (with maybe a tiny bit of help from the venue). They have often released albums on a smaller indie label first, usually recorded on studio time for which they themselves paid. There are many artists that have made a living doing things like this for years and even decades, and they are harmed by a music culture which values artists purely based on the number of units of recordings they can move. It is not a simple binary choice between making things bad for the artists or good for the artists by pirating music or not. I personally think that piracy is the catalyst that will effect a tremendous and positive shift in the music industry, where the artistic qualities of the music and, importantly, the performance of music, take primacy over moving enough album units to hit the quarterly sales goal. Maybe the resulting industry will have a lower overall profitability, but maybe that's not entirely a bad thing, since most of the profits the recording industry has made were based on unethical business practices. The idea that this will spell the end of music because musicians won't be able to make a living is absurd and betrays your lack of vision and historical perspective

So, you think that, because the major record labels have stepped up their game and started exploiting musicians further and through different channels, the right thing to do is keep feeding them cash? Give me a break. Your critique is targeted only at the issue as it pertains to artists working for major record labels. My whole point is that the recording industry was controlled an unstable monopoly based on price-fixing and exploitative contracts from the beginning, and supporting them does not, in any way, equal helping artists.

Although I'd prefer not to dredge this into a petty back-and-forth ad hominem contest, it may be your sense of the industry that is incomplete. Many smaller labels are turning to free digital releases, treating these as a form of cheap and highly effective advertising, and still selling enough physical recordings and merchandise to make a profit, all while giving a larger portion of the revenues to artists. By presenting the situation as false dichotomy between "stealing from artists" or not, you ignore the fact that there may be a better model for the industry as a whole, with more equitable sharing of profits, and you also ignore the incalculable social benefits of free and open access to information and artistic works. In the real world, moral choices are complex, and often you are presented with the choice between two bad things, supporting a fundamentally corrupt and exploitative recording industry that is expropriating profits through collusion and unethical business practices or possibly taking some money away from some people.

No, no, no. Emphatically no.

I am speaking a musician here: by the time you are earning an appreciable amount of money from album sales, you are no longer just "making a living". Most musicians that support themselves through music do it by touring and selling merchandise (including physical recordings), and musicians that get famous have usually been doing this for years before they start making money off of recordings. The only exceptions are "manufactured" pop stars, like Miley Cyrus or Ariana Grande, who get big contracts right away through high-powered connections and nepotism.

And yes, the record "fat cats" earnings are perfectly relevant in this situation. They are exploiting musician's work to become wealthy, and by supporting them, you are implicitly supporting their actions. If you want to support a band, go see their shows and buy their merchandise.

Musician weighing in:

Musicians and bands had been making a living for thousands of years before the recording industry was invented, and they will continue to do so for thousands of years after the recording industry has crumbled to the ground (mostly due to their own greed and stupidity). While the recording industry certainly allowed some musicians to become filthy rich, that was mostly through exposure. Musicians have never made very much from the sale of recordings alone, and have always relied on touring and merchandise for the majority of their revenue. Today, even very popular bands, the ones that get the juicy contracts, are making pennies on the dollar on the recordings they produce (and before this gets brought up, so are the engineers and producers, most of the money goes to marketing and distribution, and then a big chunk to the various executives and agents). The situation is much worse for smaller and rising acts.

The truth of the situation is that the recording industry and their distributors have been exploiting the labor of hard-working musicians for the last 100 years. Many of the old blues men from our earliest popular recordings were never even paid, although men that they never even met grew rich from selling their work. The recording industry has been selling the same snake oil to us sense then, just packaged differently according to the musical tastes of the time. There will always be a collectors market for physical recordings, but it is time that we acknowledge that digital content can be delivered for essentially zero marginal cost, and that free knowledge and art have cultural benefits that drastically outweigh any financial gains that may be made by restricting access to them. (And if you are someone that can only be swayed by economics, I would argue that by encouraging innovation and free exchange of ideas, you will reap greater economic benefits overall, even though certain industries may suffer initially.) Moreover, as an artist, by sharing my music for free, I feel that I am being much more honest and forthright with my audience and that am able to reach far more people than I would otherwise.

The only people really exploiting artists are recording industry executives. If you buy an album you like, instead of pirating it, you're taking advantage of those artists. Go see them play live or buy a fucking t-shirt instead.

Yeah. I am not a medical professional, but I have spent a lot of time around schizophrenics and other folks with paranoid delusions, and this does not have the same highly disorganized and repetitive character that their speech and writing tend towards.

EDIT: To be clear, I still don't really believe the story, but if he is suffering from paranoid delusions, he is VERY high-functioning.