I'll ensure that from now on my shed is only used for old tins of paint, firelighters, matches, leaky jerrycans of diesel, fireworks, and gas cylinders.
Maybe we need a standard AM emergency broadcast frequency akin to 121.5 on aircraft. Legislate that all fixed and car radio receivers are always tuned to it and activate automatically if there’s a broadcast. Then scrap the rest of the analogue radio broadcasting band.
> Then scrap the rest of the analogue radio broadcasting band.
Please, no. In case of disaster, I could dismantle a tool, take its motor, fix it to a fan propeller, connect it to a rectifier stage and obtain a wind/water generator, then I could take parts from low tech stuff not even remotely related to a radio and build a crude but functioning transmitter to send a SOS.
Problem is that making it work on a certain frequency would be hard without instrumentation, therefore the more ears on multiple frequencies the best chances that some of them will hear my dit dah by mistake.
As it stands, ~nobody is listening to AM radio. The only people listening are radio geeks, and I doubt that number would change if the analogue radio broadcasting band was scrapped.
Having an emergency frequency that devices auto-tune to would at least mean if you did manage to broadcast on that frequency, someone will actually hear it.
Exactly. We are on Hacker News, after all. If there's any place that should be understanding of the need for ears on amplitude modulated frequencies, it should be us.
Roundabouts not good for pedestrians and cyclists. In London we’ve been replacing roundabouts with other types of junction to improve pedestrian and cyclist safety.
We don’t have four way stops though so instead it’ll be min/maj junction or traffic lights.
This is only true of typical UK-style roundabouts which are designed for motor vehicle throughput.
It’s extremely common in the Netherlands to replace crossroads and T-junctions with roundabouts to improve safety, but Dutch urban roundabouts are designed with safety as the main priority. This is achieved through single lanes, sharp entries, limiting forward visibility, and pedestrian and cyclist priority (via what are effective zebras).
We should absolutely be deploying these where we can, but they do take up a lot of space relative to their traffic throughput, and are only really suitable for a fairly narrow range of traffic volumes.
NL seems to quite commonly have this kind of physically large but medium traffic suburban junction, but outside of Milton Keynes and the outskirts of some towns that got heavily developed in the 60s, it's hard to see many places where we could just drop it in.
> That the Dutch roundabout, including the cycle tracks all around it, can be built in almost the same space of a traditional junction is the reason why so many are being converted.
I live in rural Scotland. Every power outage in the last 10 years has been caused by land developers not reading the local utilities plans and accidentally cutting through cables.
To be fair, the UK's "dial before you dig"-type services are next to useless.
I've tried to get plans for my house before digging, and UK Power Networks refused my request as I'm not authorised to see the plans apparently.
National Grid sent me a blank page with an empty square on it.
SGN were the only one that actually sent me a sensible map with what appeared to be accurate contents (insofar as they match where I thought they would be), but even they had a disclaimer on the document they sent me saying they can't be held liable for errors on the map and all digging should be performed by hand to confirm whether a pipe exists.
A lot of the major underground infrastructure owners (including Thames Water, BT, Sky, Virgin) just aren't signed up to the asset search services and you have to contact them manually to even find out if they have assets in your area.
Of those, only Thames Water actually replied to my email, and they said I'd either have to sling them several hundred pounds or drive down to their office in Reading and look at the archives in person. I did the latter, and the plans were just entirely wrong.
Ground Penetrating Radar isn't even an option in my area due to the soil composition. Seems like you just make your best guess and then hope for the best.
FWIW I am in London too and have had several more than that, some for more than a few hours. There was one just the other day where the RAF museum in London was partially shut because the power was still out from the night before, much to my kids' annoyance.
These have usually been down to a local substation going bang/being hit by a bus/curious-but-now-crispy-cat etc though, rather than the whole city going down. These sort of blackouts affect smaller areas, like 1000 houses at once or whatever, and not the entire city or region
Out of anyone, Apple seems to be doing the most to fight this. They have been pushing producers to provide high quality recordings via their digital master programme, and have loudness normalisation enabled by default.
I often find the quality available on AM to be superior to other platforms.
You can't restore what was destroyed in mastering, regardless of the delivery medium.
Apple would have to implement requirements for dynamic range, something that is somewhat feasible now with the ascendancy of LUFS as a measurement standard. But I doubt they'll actually impose rules.
That's too bad, because our only hope to reverse this idiotic trend is for the delivery conduits to say nope to ruined trash. Netflix has set technical requirements for content acquisition; Apple could and should do the same.
What makes this crime all the more galling is that dynamic compression can be applied by the playback device. You don't have to ruin the recording. My mid-'90s Ford CD player had a simple button on it, labeled "Compress."
I respect the idea, but in practice I find that Apple Music sometimes plays tracks from the same album at noticeably different volumes. It's possible (even probable, I guess) that whoever is sending Apple the digital masters messed up, but frankly when I'm listening to an album front-to-back that's one situation where I basically need the perceived volume level to not be messed with.
Weirdly enough, I've noticed this happens with and without the sound normalization feature enabled.
I disagree with the premise, and the article author’s attempt to convince me of it is weak.
I can equally claim we’re living in a golden age of music, both in terms of accessibility and of the diversity of music being made.
There’s likely some truth in the idea of mindless consumption, but I’m not sure that’s any different now than it was in the past. There have always been people who didn’t explore much beyond listening to the top singles chart in the car. That’s fine, not everyone has to have some abstract notion of good musical taste. Meanwhile, there are still vast communities of highly motivated music appreciators willing to travel the world to seek out the best music experiences. Too many, arguably, based on how expensive and crowded festivals and gigs have become.
Personally, I think the 90s-00s were the weakest decades in pop, but taste is subjective.
The convergence of computers and music production is now complete, making any sound theoretically possible at virtually no cost. But
I mean… lol. Cmon. Let’s run through the facts:
1. More music is being made now than ever before, both in terms of genre diversity and absolute amount.
2. The average consumer can access an effectively infinite range of that music, which is up from “a few records a year and whatever’s on the radio”, which in turn is up from “whatever’s on the radio”, which in turn is up from “whatever live music might be played at the local pub on Saturdays, plus church hymns.”
3. Across cultures, people think that the music that they listened to in their formative years — say, 15-25 - is the best music. The mechanisms are fairly obvious to back that up: emotional vulnerability, novelty, and number+quality of peer relationships are at life-long highs. In short, nostalgia.
I would happen to agree re:pop (other than em!) but I think the scientific facts are all we need here. The article (and, presumably, the original video) is well written and in good faith, but I think they’re lacking some serious self-awareness.
As the optimists always say regarding macro timelines: the world is much better than it was, the world is gradually getting better, and the world can be much better. This article would be covered under the first clause!
> in terms of accessibility and of the diversity of music being made.
neither of those addresses music being "worse." There's no "objective" measurement of quality. If you have bad taste, you have bad taste, and you can always find someone to say you don't.
> I’m not sure that’s any different now than it was in the past
Beato explains how it's different. Look at some Top 100 song lists from 50 or so years ago. Here are a couple:
My only real takeaway is “more women and people of color”, and “more genre diversity”. Seems like an ok thing?
The points I got from the article were, roughly, “music was rarer so we liked it more” and “music was harder to make so only good artists survived”, neither of which I find very convincing. I suppose I could watch the video, but clickbait titles are a pretty hard negative signal, lol
This is some kind of a bit, right? You can't be seriously demanding that kind of effort from others, when your own contribution was to just link to a list from 1974 as if that list somehow speaks for itself.
Because it doesn't. Your list has no intrinsic value that's making those songs obviously superior to modern ones. So how about you name the 40 great songs on that list, explain why they're great that's some other reason than being on the list. No?
There aren't 40 great songs on either of the lists he linked... there's maybe 18 on the first and maybe 15 on the second.
On the 2023 list I'd put about 10-11 songs as "great", but that's without the benefit of hindsight of which songs are still played and remembered decades later. And there's going to be songs on the 2023 list (like a lot of the Morgan Wallen stuff) that I don't particularly like but will be heard many times in the future... Personally I hate "Last Night" but it's going to be around for a while.
You appear to be very confused. That was my first and only message to this thread, so it seems extremely unlikely you had any kind of expectation on me posting anything here let alone what I'd say.
Anyway, since you're not only confusing names but forgetting what you wrote, here's a reminder:
> OK, name me 40 great songs from your 2023 list. where "great" is something more than "got a lot of plays on Spotify."
Do you seriously not see that this is you demanding work?
And just to be clear: I'm not demanding that level work from you. I don't actually care about what music you like on a individual song level. I was echoing your request to show how unreasonable it was. You appear to agree it's unreasonable. So why did you make that demand? Why are you pretending that you didn't?
But I am genuinely intrested in why you think these lists are such obvious demonstrations of the superiority of the music you like that just linking to the list should be treated as a mic drop.
There’s plenty of good stuff on those lists, but also a fair amount of trash and quite a lot I’ve never heard of - bearing in mind I’m not American, and also not really much of a 70s fan. I had a listen to Joy to the World by Three Dog Night, and all I can say is I hope it didn’t mess up my recommendation algorithm.
I’m also not sure what playing chart top trumps would prove anyway. It’s conceivable that the charts can be worse by some objective metric, even if the
average of the same metric in the overall music scene is higher, if the diversity and discovery of music is wider. In essence the chart just becomes the lowest common denominator, rather than critically acclaimed music, as it may have been when what we listened to was driven mainly by a cabal of professional radio DJs.
The subjectivity of musical taste is something I mentioned twice, but intentionally tried to avoid passing judgement on because it’s essentially impossible. If a boomer wants to come along and tell an entire generation that his taste in music is superior to theirs, well that’s up to him, but it seems very old man yells at cloud to me.
The reason I mention diversity and discovery is because I figure the closest thing to an objective measurement of how good the overall music ecosystem is, is how satisfied people are with the music they’re listening to. It stands to reason that diversity and discovery is a key part of that. I’m not convinced any attempt to define an objective ordering of musical taste would be anything other than an exercise in nostalgia and elitism.
But even just looking at the current charts for this week, Brat by Charli XCX, Romance by Fontaines DC and Woof by Fat Dog are all fantastic albums. Surprisingly, David Gilmour has a new album that’s at #1.
BTS is a bad example. K-Pop (and also J-Pop) are about as painfully mainstream as you can get (in those respective countries). However, Anglosphere countries rarely import their music, so it loops back into being non-mainstream anyway.
That nitpick aside, while Rick Beato's extremely Boomer, he's vaguely grasping at actual problems. My take on it is that streaming platforms are built to do what the labels want them to do - sell music as a commodity. In the terrestrial radio era, labels would pay radio stations to put specific songs they wanted to push in heavy rotation. This is called payola[0]. It's illegal, but everyone did it anyway.
[0] The term was coined in an era where anything to do with music ended in "ola". Victrola was a brand of record player, Motorola was a brand of car radio, etc.
I mean, i don't like pop music, i dislike disco, and while some rock/rap song have value, i'm not a fan either. To me, since the Big band era (which i doubt anybody here know), music on the main radio stations were always commercial shit (unless you live in Louisiana). At least nowadays i can tune in and listen to Wooz (or other) from anywhere.
> since the Big band era (which i doubt anybody here know)
I "know" it through my parents. Although I don't know how much radio time they logged. They heard big bands live, for dancing.
I could be wrong, but I have the impression that radio stations would have "programs" of music, along with news and entertainment. It wouldn't be music all the time. There weren't portable radios, either -- you'd gather around the radio set.
it is a mixed bag. I think distribution for new artists is easier today with social media etc. Go on Spotify, there is such a huge spectrum of music available. There is literally something for everyone.
Weekly injectable semaglutide is the first generation.
Tirzepatide is already more effective and better tolerated for most people, and there is also semaglutide as a daily oral pill available as Rybelsus. Further generations of obesity drugs are already in human trials, and are showing even greater effects relative to the side effects (e.g. retatrutide and combination therapy with cagrilintide).
Price is an issue, but with multiple pharma companies that have effective drugs, the prices have already come down quite a lot. My tirzepatide is running me less than £200/month now, and I'm saving at least that on groceries and eating out. Not even counting that it's effectively cured a few weight related medical conditions that were costing me more.
Some people do go into remission from a terminal cancer diagnosis, either because the diagnosis was wrong or because they live long enough for an approved treatment to come on the market. Also, that you have terminal cancer doesn’t say anything about how long you’re going to live. You can live for many years with terminal cancer.
I do think we’re overly cautious with drug approvals and I think we should be more open to leaving the decision to patients and their medical teams, but it’s not as simple as saying someone’s terminally ill, so just do whatever. Reducing it down to the trolley problem makes it seem much more black and white and immediate than it really is.
My nitrate film can go in the loft instead.
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