Limo
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Everything posted by Limo
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Yeah, I don't see the point. On the other hand, Canada is already on China's shitlist* because of that stunt with the Huawei woman, so maybe they figured they couldn't make things any worse. Sucks for Canadians in China, though. Hope things turn out ok for your friend. * I wonder ... does that make China the first country in history that actually hates Canada? Everyone else loves them!
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There was an interesting article in a Dutch newspaper his morning arguing that trying to pin genocide on China, as the Dutch parliament did this week, is likely a losing strategy as genocide involves intent and that is notoriously difficult to prove. “Extensive human rights abuses” are much easier to establish and likely already clear cut for what China is doing in Xinjiang. Anyway, none of it really matters because China isn’t party to the Rome Statute that makes it possible to take a country to the International Criminal Court.
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You will note the United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC) is not normally considered to be an authority on human rights issues.
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if you had to pick just ONE budget synth?
Limo replied to sheatheman's topic in EKT General Discussion
There’s an internet site for everything, it seems. Wonder if that also means there’s a porn version of it ... -
Exactly.
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Every sane person wants to lay around in a blissed out stupor.
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This looks horrible. And I used to program in Perl where s/([a-z]+?)[^\d]$/$1-$0/ is perfectly valid and easy to understand code. Like the track, though.
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Too soon ?
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This very much depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. If flexibility is a concern, then, yes, humans are better, but for a whole class of problems robots can do the job just as well. Car manufacture, component soldering, microchip manufacturing: all super complicated stuff done by robots. By contrast, assembling trinkets is done by hand - and that really isn’t because robots can’t do that. Instead the reason is it makes no economic sense to design, build and test a robot assembly line for this sort of low value work if cheap unskilled Asian labor exists.
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Sorry, I meant to say “if it’s illegal but the government makes sure you can’t break the law (in this case by providing nonsense jobs) it doesn’t matter”. Here in the Netherlands we don’t have them either but we have welfare and pensions so we don’t need such bullshit jobs. Which kind of illustrates my point. In my experience this is an overly romantic view. Lots of low level clerks are just doing busy work - tasks that should just be automated away or pushing paper around that has no useful purpose whatsoever. I know, because I’ve done it. Speaking of automation: you know why stuff gets made in China? Because hiring someone is often cheaper than to build and maintain a robot to do the same job. Talk about bullshit.
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What does that have to do with the USSR (which had lots of professional artists) or communism (which to the best of my knowledge doesn’t on principle forbid professional art) or even capitalism ( where only art that sells well can be made professionally anyway)? But if you must know, if I would advocate a 20 hour work week which would make the question irrelevant as then you could make music as much as you wanted anyway. EDIT: which brings us back to the topic of this thread: in China, professional artists were not held in any esteem. A true artist was an amateur.
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Not sure how big that difference is, really, if the state makes sure there's enough jobs that you will never be unemployed anyway. It ends up being an, admittedly ugly, method to outlaw vagabondism. You will note, btw, that there were lots of writers, musicians and other more or less self employed people in the USSR, so it's not like you were forced to go to an office or a factory. What about security guards at places that don't need them? The people that pack your groceries for you? Not to mention social media content creators, "account managers" and other low paid office drones (for which the Russians have coined the fantastic term "office plankton"). There's lots of bullshit jobs below the level of middle management. You said people were denied instruments by the government, which isn't true.
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Nice video! My French is terrible but I managed to figure out what you were trying to say. That's a good thing, probably. Ain't that the truth.
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The Soviet Union was full of amateur musicians, many of them quite good, so I'm not so sure this was actually a problem.
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I would say so too but anger at wealthy Germans stealing from poor Russians was specifically cited as a motivation by soldiers interviewed at the time. True, which is why there were all sorts of nonsense jobs that people nominally fulfilled. You could do art or literature as much as you wanted as long as you clocked in at your state provided job ("they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work" sort of thing). Notice how this situation isn't all that different from the current situation in capitalism (the very real and very degrading "bullshit jobs" phenomenon).
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Right, because life in Finland, the other Nordics, and Western Europe, was actually better - in no small part because of the welfare state. But come to think of it, the mechanism I outlined above probably holds true more for Western Europe vs Eastern (now Central) Europe as, say East Germany and West Germany or France and Czechoslovakia (yes, really) had roughly equal standards of living at the end of WWII. This certainly wasn't true for Finland vs Russia. Russia has always been crazy poor, of course. Which has been touted as one of the reasons Russian soldiers behaved as harshly as they did during the conquest of Germany: they were shocked to see how wealthy Germans were compared to them and furious that such a wealthy people had deemed it necessary to steal from such a poverty stricken people as themselves.
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Saying that Nordic countries implemented their welfare state due to pressure from he USSR is beyond stretching it, agreed, but it’s not entirely untrue that the Cold War didn’t play a role. The existence of an actual socialist workers paradise right on (or close to) their borders put pressure on governments to make sure their own proletariat would be at least as well off to discourage mass emigration to the Eastern bloc. This was especially important in Western Germany as they had a communist country on heir border which was culturally identical, but all the other Western European countries that could afford them implemented welfare states as well, keeping their proletariat at home simply because life was better there. Of course once the iron curtain came down, there was no longer a need to maintain these costly welfare states so during the past 30 years or so they’ve been quietly stripped down, leading to such wonderful phenomena as the rise of the precariat.
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I'm aware that evolution tends to Progress to Crab but how does Return to Monke work?
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Came across his music last year (yeah, I live under a rock). Now checking out his artwork. It's pretty cool: The second, black and white, image is from a book of his called The Art of Computer Designing that you can flip through in full on the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/satoArtOfComputerDesigning/page/n119/mode/2up).
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Since I'm still on a Renoise bender I went looking for good, fun breakcore and couldn't really find any. Anyone have suggestions? Here's something along the lines of what I'm looking for:
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For the most part ... but I only met my wife in 2000, so ultimately: nope.
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Which is exactly what a false flag sock puppet would say. Anyway, even a false flag sock puppet would probably enjoy Mishra’s writing.
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Finally found the time to read this interview in The Nation with Pankaj Mishra, one of the foremost writers on non-western perspectives on capitalism and imperialism: https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/qa-pankaj-mishra-bland-fanatics/ The guy’s a bit of a thesaurus but the points he makes are solid and the combination of his erudition and broad, non-western worldview make it an interesting read (also one @cyanobacteria, if he’s not actually an alt-right false flag sock puppet, would maybe enjoy). His book “From the Ruins of Empire”, on the lives 20th century non-western anti-imperialist thinkers is stupidly interesting, btw. Highly recommended.
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Really? I thought the concept was great, but the execution was saccharine and sentimental even by Disney standards. Soul, on the other hand, was pretty good.
