RealMarkDeneen

Keep it rolliing....

I Was recently gifted this by wifey, and was until now caught up in untangling the green energy fiasco. But, having loved my time spent with W&P and Anna K., I am really looking forward to this final Big Novel of Mr. Tolstoy. It's apparently not regarded as being in the same class as W&P and Anna, but that is so rarified a class that I'm hoping a slight discount will still reveal a classic work.

That's very impressive and bold! Congrats. Have you posted any titles or authors? What's your preferred genre? I'm inspired!

Ok, ok, ok! The Internet shall henceforth remain ON! With a respectful nod to my departed friend Dave Mallette I close with his traditional sign off..... ###

Directly manipulating billiions of individual human minds ('specially kids!) 24 hours a day? Yeah, that's a pretty new effect on mankind. To aggregate, stimulate, normalize, and then expand unhealty behaviors and ideations in the population is probably not a long term benefit to society. We'll see soon enough. OTOH, can't you see it already? Just askin' I'm sure most parents believe that the Information Superhighway is perfectly normal, safe, useful for doing homework and so on. I'm sure they have no concern that their 10 year old daughter is following a dozen anorexia groomers on social media and devouring their advice instead of food, because the other girls are text-bullying her about being too fat. Oh well, kids always got bullied, right? Kids don't belong behind screens all day and all night too. Society doesn't give a shite. It keeps them off our backs, I suppose. Keeps them from tossing a baseball through Mr. Wilson's window. Let 'em rot their eyes out watching soft-core porn 18-hours a day on that cute little program, TikTok, or YouTibe Shorts, or Instagroan. Yeah, that will make better kids! Let them sit and drool over thousands of "unboxing toys" videos. That's healthy. Of course, I'm being sarcastic. I can't actually speak the horrors this is bringing to society because it's not allowed. But goodness gracious, look around. And then "get the heck off my lawn!" 🥶 Nice talkin' with you Deano! Been a while. Hope you and the family are doing well in Dayton. Funny as it may be, I've been having "Ohio" on my list of places we might move for our final years. Not sure we have enough water where we are, and the Rust Belt is a constant featured place in those "10-best places to avoid the effects of climate change" lists. Cheers!

The "transportation of data model" doesn't cover the purposes that currently drive billions in capital investment in the Internet. The market cap of just Facebook and Google is $1.5 Trillion. They didn't grow like that by just transporting data. Maybe some ISPs think that way, but that's hardly "The Internet." Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, COX - they move data. Google and Facebook use the Internet to run algorithms that modify billions of human behaviors that will drive incremental advertising and consumption in the consumer sector of the economy - which is 70% of the US economy. In simpler terms, they have "harnessed the minds of their users to pull a very heavy wagon load of consumption." And they skim their massive income from the velocity and breadth of that super-charged consumption.

I could be wrong - - I don't know you very well - - but that sounds to me like you might have grown up in the pre-Internet age, and are not thrilled with the current state of affairs. Or, you meant it as sarcasm, and love your smartphone and debit card, and can't imagine being without them. Either way, nice comment.

I'm not criticising the use of the Internet. Sure, it can be used to benefit people, just like hammers and wrenches can! That's not any part of my position about the Internet. As I have said repeatedly, we "are born into circumstances" and we do the best we can with those circumstances. I AM NOT SAYING THAT USING THE INTERNET IS BAD. I am saying that the creators have very bad intentions and purposes. Where Average Joe believes the Internet is his tool, the creators of the Internet see Average Joe as THEIR TOOL! And that's what the Internet is....it's a system of harnessing human behavior for the benefit of some "kings." And in the end, when the trap goes "SNAP!" the mouse finally sees that he is dead, and the cheese is hanging out his mouth.

Has humanity been a good steward of Nature? Has humanity been generous, loving, and compassionate to all others? Has humanity shared the Earth's bounty with the rest of the living species? Is humanity growing in freedom, dignity, wisdom, self-expression and righteousness? Everyone has their own answers - of course - and that is the foundation of their worldview. I have my answers, you have yours. it's not very complicated.

It is probably hard to see through all the busses, airplanes, cars, skyscrapers, yachts and Lambos - but for 2-1/2 million years human lived quite successfully without all that. 99% of our very successful history is pre-civilization. I'm thinking now of guppies in a home aquarium. They wonder: "How could we have lived without this bubbling pirate chest, this cute little castle with nifty holes in it, and these groovy plastic plants?" They are captured by a force they will never live to understand. They are enslaved to the whims of Little Jimmy Smith, and their destiny is sealed. But hey! They're alive right? And Jimmy dumps food in every day so why fret little guppy? Our fishbowl looks groovy too! And "Little Jimmy Dean" dumps food in our bowl too. And we have nice toys to play around with too! And thinking back to ancestors in the Garden of Eden, that's pointless too! Who the heck cares about freedom, the human spirit, peace, Nature, right and wrong, our fellows in the animal kingdom, our spiritual journey in the Universe? We've got Nintendo man! <---Metaphor for a bubbling pirate chest. We are born INTO a world we didn't make. Others made it to suit their objectives just like Little Jimmy built his aquarium to his standards, for his goals and purposes. Humans have the will to survive and "common humans" (the standard of the species) accepts the idea of "circumstance" and swims through the castle, past the plastic plants and around the pirate chest because that is the circumstance they are in now. They can't jump out and go find a river - Jimmy made sure of that. And we can't jump out and find a mountain - just ask Vicky Weaver about that. But, that doesn't mean we should remain unaware, fast asleep, and unconscious. And it doesn't mean we should commit suicide the way captive killer whales in tanks are doing. The pure genious of the gurus Jesus, Lao Tzu, Gautama Siddhartha, and others, who all made the same discovery, keep the lights on for humanity. With different words from different cultures they all say the same thing: The Kingdom of Heaven awaits our discovery - and it's not behind the wheel of a yellow Lambo. It WAS here on Earth until all the Little Jimmys of the world tried to bottle it up for their purposes. Like humanity needed pyramids? We needed a thousand wars? We needed atomic bombs? We needed to kill all the whales for some lamp oil? We needed to pollute the blood of every man, woman and child in America so some chemical madman could make Teflon pans? We needed to fill the oceans with plastic debris so Mom could put the leftover peas in a little plastic jar? This utter immoral NONSENSE of civilization is peddled to common humanity as "progress". All any person has to do is open their eyes a little in 2022 to see how utterly SICK humanity has become by eating a bowl of "progress" every day for 15,000 years. The mythological accounts of the Garden of Eden have longevity for a reason.

@Zen Traveler "How do we gain control over humanity and Nature?" The "we" in that rhetorical question is referring to those who drive history- the kings, pharaohs, generals, popes, presidents, chiefs, and assorted madmen that drive the narrative. The "1 in 10,000,000" humans with that specific kind of DNA to move mountains. Those who built pyramids, cities, and empires by harnessing the common man. Those who waged wars of unspeakable gruesome death and destruction of the common man. Those who enslaved, exploited, and reduced the common man to mere " human energy resource." Those who turned the Garden of Eden into the Love Canal for a few more shiny beads. Those who wantonly destroyed much of the Animal Kingdom for amusement, trophies, and an outlet for their cruelty. THAT "we" is who i reference as seeking control over man and Nature for the last 15,000 years we call civilization. We are living out their nasty brutal experiment. It is a failure by any measure important to humanity's dignity, and destiny. But, it has to burn itself out, run its full course to oblivion before rebirth, or maybe it's better to say "reboot," of humanity can take place. That hope for rebirth is the reason religion was invented.

Precisely. Like these folks at the Rand Corporation yammering about the "Internet of Bodies" - - WTH? https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR3226.html

Slavery, the Internet, all the -isms you can name, the law, religions, NGOs, and governments are all in the same category of "organizational innovations." They are all systems attempting to control human behavior at scale. That's the entire exercise of "civilization" - - How do we gain control over humanity and Nature? They won the Nature part, and what is left is the human part.

Slavery makes an excellent comparison because for those who believed in it, it was an entirely useful and acceptable benefit compared to its downsides. But for those who did not believe in it, the downsides outweighed the benefits and there was enough of them to overturn the institution and walk away from it. It was replaced with systems of paid labor. Slavery serves as an example of an "economic innovation" that while accepted at first, became unacceptable over time and exposure to the harms. There are most definitely "harms" being accumulated on the Internet ledger. If they grow, I can see no reason people shouldn't seek to end them. The end of one innovation spawns new ones. I'm certain that there will be a long line of innovators ready to offer "new ways to distrubute information" if there's money to be made doing it. I think we're in the early phases of this innovation where the majority is still deriving more benefit than harm. But is there any question which way that vector is pointing?

I don't think the humans of 1975 thought that "life was unliveable without the Internet." It doesn't need to be replaced by anything, does it? If we assume it has "negative net value" to humanity, or we assume it is a "monsterous tool of repression," we wouldn't be thinking about replacing it, would we? Does anyone speak of "replacing slavery"? The world had genius long before the Internet. I don't buy the argument that in general people are getting smarter because of the Internet. I mean really, who the heck would they be referring to? I can see though that it is not particularly easy for people to sense the impending (looming) danger to privacy, freedom, sovereignty, and democracy when the main offering is still all the candy. The gambling, porn, entertainment, games, and all that will slowly dissolve after the IoT links everything in your life to one authority. When you get issued an automatic traffic ticket by mail because your car reported its 75MPH speed in a 50MPH zone directly to the authorities you might start to see the danger. Or, when your ban account is automatically debited by the utility companies before you can even buy groceries, you might sense danger. I dunno?

In pre-Internet times, there was always push-back to anything that had a whiff of "global federation" to it. In those olden days of the 1950s through the 1980s the associated buzzwords were "one world government." There was an incredible amount of intellectual debate about ANY concept of federating national sovereignties. The UN and its various schemes was the persistent bogey-man. But also, the WTO, and pretty much any institution that carried the word "world" in their title. They all failed because they all based on frank authoritarian principles that the publics could see clearly. The Internet took a totally different approach by offering up all the candy first. Many experts believe that "porn built the Internet." There's clearly some truth in that. But also games, gossip, and simplistic entertainment. In 1990s, who DIDN'T want to be on the Internet? Compare that wild world of fun and games to all the incarnation of "-isms" through the ages that tried to round people up into a controllable group. Five Billion people are currently blissfully obeying a set of rules handed down to them from half a dozen crazed billioniares! And said billionaires have opnely described where they are headed into the future of modifying all their "subjects" behaviors in life. I guess I'm being an alarmist.

The Internet is the solvent to dissolve all national sovereignty. As the dimensions of Internet grow and metastasize, national sovereignty melts under the relentless pressure and is subsumed by synthetic organisms of immense power and without public accountability. That's the point. That's the goal and purpose of this unprecidented capital expenditure. The goal of civilization has forever and always been "absolute centralization of power." This is their latest attempt, after many failures like war, colonialism, fascism, capitalism, etc. EDIT: "Civilization" herein refers to the entire 10,000 - 15,000 year experiment in creating a system of world order. I'm not refer to particular localities of civilization like Roman, Egyption, Chinese. I mean the entire enterprise of bringing hierarchal order to mankind.

Is that light at the end of the tunnel a freight train? The Internet I've been describing is only the base of a technocratic pyramid. It's the distribution of information base. The next layer up - now in the early stages is the Internet of Things (IoT) which will integrate all machinery of life into a single data set. Phone, computer, electric meter, car, refer, TV, bank accounts, credit, earnings, etc. All utilitarian aspects of life united into a common data set. The final frontier is the Internet of Behavior (IoB), which is where all individual behaviors are managed, not simply monitored. The easy to understand "demo" for that was the Facebook and other social media algos that drive so-called "feeds" to the user. If that's not understood, it's more clear to say, "users have been spoon fed special diets of information" to modify simple behaviors like "purchasing goods." After all, advertisers didn't give Facebook hundreds of billions of dollars for no reason. Having been wildly successful at those crude, early algos, the IoB will have your "total daily experience" at it's fingertips and the algos will steer (bend) humanity from a single control point to a common end-point. That's the future as imagined today by the technocracy. Concepts like freedom, privacy, democracy, will be a distant memory.

As for the Internet and news, that raises lots more questions. How does an individual at the end of the pipe - where news exits - validate the content? Since the source of all this news content is for-profit companies, aren't they focused on producing the highest profit news at the expense of the lowest, or unprofitable news? How does "profitability" intersect with your ranking of what is important to know about? The more effort a company puts into verifying a news story, the less profitable it becomes. Which way will they lean - towards more, or towards less profit? Isn't news really just "gossip"? The foundation underlying most news "stories" is: "somebody said something." It's not like math or a scientific principle that can be tested independantly. It's a series of "claims" that are made by someone, and then regurgitated into the public bullhorn.

The Internet: Do you act upon it, or is it acting upon you? Is it your tool, or are you its tool? Where did the formation capital come from? In which direction does the wealth (ROI) flow? Who formulates the operational and structural rules of use? Do you consume it, or are you the product being consumed? Is it gloomy to ponder the question, or gloomy to ignore it?

I've spent quite a bit of time listening in mono, and I find nothing objectionable about it. There was a period where I just was sick of fussing with gears, and I simplified it all down to mono. There was times when playing with single-driver speakers where mono was convenient for listening to iterations, adjustments and prototypes. And there were other times when I felt that TWO speakers were creating too much room interaction, and using one speaker actually improved the overall sound coherence.

The Change Paradox Polls consistently tell us that nearly everyone wants “change,” and yet change rarely comes. When it does come, it consistently involves “something more” and almost never “something less.” New features can be added to civilization, but rarely subtracted from the status quo. Subtraction is intolerable. This paradox pretty much explains why there is no meaningful reaction yet to "environmental destruction coupled with climate change" that is leading to mass extinction. Mankind will embrace change by ADDITION, but consistently reject change by REDUCTION. That is apparently why all the current CC actions involve intense additions to industrialization and no reductions of industrialization. Is it reasonable to therefore assume from this paradox that all manifested phenomena are positive, and never negative? TV? Robots? Air Travel? Nuclear Bombs? Internet? Smartphones? Self-driving cars? Bioweapons? Mega-Yachts? Dams? Sugary Drinks? Uber? AirBnB? This would mean all material implementation was good for humanity and never harmful. But then, that begs the question, how have we come so close to destroying the Earth if all change is positive? It's hard to square that circle.

@Marvel What DAW is that? What sort of recordings are you making?