Upgrading My Music Experience

There's more to the hi-fi listening experience than the sound and the gear and sources that produce it.

Everyone talks about "the room" with its reflections, interferences and standing waves. It's a wonder we can hear anything really. But I'm not thinking about that.

Having a comfortable chair or sofa to sit and listen is important. If you think hi-fi is expensive, try buying a well-made armchair or sofa.

There's also the visual experience: what are you looking at when the music is playing?

And there's another one, which doesn't have a name, but is something to do with not making the best - whatever that means - of one's vast music collection. All those CDs that haven't been played in two or three years, and worse, all those CDs on Qobuz I haven't even found out are there. People with wall-high collections of vinyl will know the feeling of not even remembering they had that album. All that music, and we're ignoring it.

I thought far too much about this stuff (so you don't have to). As a result, I have

a) organised a wi-fi extender for the Hegel H120 so it can use Air Play and I can update it without running LAN cable all over the downstairs 

b) removed all the CDs from the top of the Kallax and put a vase of flowers between the amp and the left speakers 

c) spaced the speakers an extra six inches apart (makes a difference to the sound, really) 

d) turned up the subwoofer a tad (makes even more of a difference to the sound) 

e) accepted that at any given time, I will be playing 1 of about 150 CDs / artists, which is 15% of my collection, hence 

f) I have pruned some of the CDs from the downstairs boxes into the box-room archive 

g) made a directory of the pop / rock / electronic music I have ripped to AAC / MP3 that isn't in the CD boxes, and pointed the iOS Music Streamer at that 

h) resolved to play my Favourites on Qobuz more often 

i) put subscribing to Apple Music (for the classical service) on the to-do list 

j) appreciated that the Sonos app is an excellent consolidator for streaming services and files (the new search looks a lot better)

Which is a lot cheaper than getting a Roon subscription, less time-consuming than ripping everything to FLAC, buying another set of headphones, or upgrading the gear.

See, the problem wasn't the gear. That's as good as I'm going to get for the money.

The problem was the music collection, or rather, the way I was using it. All that music sitting there sulking because I wasn't playing it. No! said Jacob Obrecht, he's not playing Jefferson Airplane again! He did that two weeks ago! What about rotation? Diversity? Equality of playing time?

Anyway, here's a photograph.

Health News

So it's time to follow on with the shoulder problem, which I thought was due to poor posture and adapting to the narrower body of an electric guitar, and or some pulled muscles in my back from doing something silly when turning a heavy mattress.

Yeah. Not so much, it turns out.

I was getting pins and needles down my right arm, waking up in the middle of the night with a shoulder that felt like I'd been abusing it for hours, and otherwise a tonne of pain. This, I was told by my regular osteo, was a trapped nerve at C6/7 (because the pins and needles went to my thumb and forefinger, but not the others).

I went for some regular treatment, and while it improved, I felt it had reached a point where I'd have a good day and two bad ones, and it had settled into a painful equilibrium. After a very uncomfortable and abandoned attempt in the hygenist's chair, I wound up with a recommendation to a different osteo, and Allah or someone be praised, managed to get an appointment two days later. He preferred to get an MRI before starting on something like I had, and the next day I was gritting my teeth in an MRI scanner. He had the results three days later.

West End private medicine. (No, I am not a millionaire. I don't spend money on foreign holidays.)

The radiologist's conclusion was "moderate degenerative disc disease, most marked at C6/C7 with foraminal narrowing and multilevel neural impingement (bilateral C4, C5, C6 and right C7)." So basically my neck vertebrae all all slightly out of whack. Everything else is good: spine is okay, spinal cord is unaffected, and my bone marrow is fine. (MRI can see that?)

I'm now in for a once-a-week treatment, at the moment by electric pads on my back. Pressure-based treatment like massage isn't what's needed. It seems to work. I'm in for probably another three sessions at least and maybe some more after that. But as long as it works... 

I also take the ibuprofen and / or paracetamol. I'm still AA and I don't like to take any kind of drugs if I can avoid it, but a) medical people are suggesting it, and b) it's not mood-altering.

I have to remind myself that the pain is not where my brain / body is telling me it is: there is nothing wrong with my shoulder that moving my neck about carefully won't cure. The nerve is getting pressed and sends all sorts of random signals to the brain, which then thinks I need to massage my shoulder. I don't.

Train, tube and bus seats are especially good at putting me in a posture that impinges the nerve, and I can't sit at a table for long either. I have to sleep on my back with some very carefully set-up pillow support. No raising weights above my head, so shoulder-presses are out.

I can play the guitar, and it is not causing any problems to do so. I have to stand up. Doing that for over an hour a day has worked wonders for my leg strength.

This kind of neck problem happens to much younger people, but as far as I'm concerned, this makes me officially old. Young people don't have to think about their bodies (diet, weight, exercise, sure, but not whether you carry a full watering-can in your left or right hand), old people do.

Nick Timothy on the Boys and Men Crisis

There's a "men and boys are in crisis" article by Nick Timothy in the Daily Telegraph. He's a former political advisor to Theresa May and to judge from his articles seems to have sound views on many subjects. The article is a mixture of Islington Dinner Party appeasement - he actually says "women undoubtedly bear the brunt of the crisis of masculinity", which is right up there with "women have always been the primary victims of war" as a head-slapping idiocy - with some familiar Men's Rights stuff about suicide rates and similar. I quote his final paragraph...

We need to stop seeing masculinity as a retrograde culture from which we must escape, and instead find a way of reconciling the reality of who and what boys and men are with our society today and the economy of the future.

That's what I call having it both ways. Spend almost all the article running men down by listing every way they are doing badly and every way women are doing better, then conclude by saying something that sounds good but is lacking detail.

What the article should have done was start with that conclusion and move to the programme of work.

I'm not the person to do that. We old folk don't give a stuff about the future, because we won't be there, and as for the time we have left, there's not much incentive to take part in the present.

Also, I don't believe in a "crisis of men-and-boys". Everyone I see is doing just fine. Young men have jobs and get married, just like they should, often to women who appreciate what they have taken on as (say) the wife of a builder, because her father was a builder. Men know what they are supposed to be, even when they choose not to go that way. Provide, protect, love your wife and kids, work hard and take pride in doing a good job, be a contributing member of your local community, and play a sport of some kind. Freemasonry is optional. Depending on where they live, military service may be needed as well.

The people who believe in the crisis work in the media. A brief sidebar about the media. Back in, say 1950, the official view of mainstream life was a monoculture with significant shared values, with a lot of shared experience in many people's lives. The media did not need to go too far from the reservation to find a freak-show-from-the-margins story to titillate or distract the readers. In 2023, when the official view of mainstream life is a diverse, multi-national, multi-cultural, multi-sexual, multi-cuisine, multi-lifestyle society with a very few shared values, in that circumstance, the media has to go way into the wild-lands before it can find something that will raise people's eyebrows, without offending some minority culture with a good PR agency.

Indeed, that is so difficult that it is easier for the media to invent marginal social segments. This is where the Mid-30's Girl Boss Who Can't Find A Man comes from. There are about five thousand of them in the whole country, none outside the M25, and everyone just loves the schadenfreude of reading about the inner failure of their outer lives. That's why the media run those stories. It's also why the media discuss Incels, Andrew Tate and the Red Pill - all more deep-in-the-wild-lands marginal activities.

Men are doing as fine as they ever did, which was always a bit patchy. The only Government intervention we need is one that eases the misandrists and misandry out of education, social work, universities, media, advertising, Family Courts, local councils, the Civil Service, and the Houses of Parliament.

And everyone really needs to stop playing the Societal Victim Card, which now I say it, was what I really disliked about Nick Timothy's piece. But until money stops following victimhood, everyone will line up to claim victim status. Except certain groups of men. Those men aren't allowed to be victims, even when they are. They don't want to be, either. It offends their identity. Women are victims, children are victims, minorities are victims. The Victim Money is reserved for women-and-girls-and-minorities. If we want to improve the lot of some men, it has to be done without Victim Money. Men aren't victims, even when we are. Until all the Nick Timothy's start from there, they won't get very far.

No, People Are Not Finding It Hard To Find Partners

One of the myths in my online echo chamber is that dating has become horrible and men and women in their 20's and 30's cannot find suitable partners. Marriage and partnerships are supposed to be on the decline. We are all doomed to atomised lives as single people. The claim is that this has been getting worse since the introduction of social media and online dating apps, which give women an inflated sense of their own worth, and that ol' devil online pornography, which gives men an unrealistic sense of what real women look like and will do in the sack. The Narratives pile up so fast...

The 2021 Census has some figures about living arrangements since 2002. This table is an extract from that report and looks at the 16-29, 30-34 and 35-39 year old cohorts of men by living arrangement in 2002 and 2021. Because the population grew in that time, we have to adjust the 2002 numbers by that growth to get the numbers on green, which can then be directly compared with the 2021 figures in blue.

The next table is a summary of the living arrangements for men and women.

The high proportion of Never-marrried 16-29's is due to the fact that almost no-one gets married before about 22 now. The average ago of marriage has been increasing steadily since the early 1970's - see this report.  (The 2019 version doesn't seem to have these useful time series. If you do take a look, notice that after all the social changes in the last sixty years, most women still want a man who is 2-3 years older.) Increasing age of marriage does not mean increasing age of finding a partner. That, to judge from the table, has remained about the same since 2002.

Cohort by cohort, almost the same proportion of men are in relationships in 2021 as in 2002. By math, it follows that almost the same proportion of men are not living in a couple in 2021 as in 2002. If we wanted to make a headline out of a one-percentage point(*) difference (and generally, we should not), slightly more men in 2021 were living in couples, and six percentage points more women were living in couples in 2021 than 2002.

There is only one genuinely significant change, in the proportion of divorced men and women living on their own: that has halved over the period. A greater proportion of people divorcing in 2020 had the next partner lined up than the divorcees in 2001.

So it's as easy - or as hard - for men and women to find a domestic partner in 2021 as it was in 2002. Despite social media, dating apps, more women having more education than men and earning more, job-for-job, than men, and all the other reasons it has supposed to be getting more difficult.

My take is that what we see in the figures is what happens when much of the social and institutional compulsion to "find a partner" is lifted. Most people still do. (Then four in ten split up within twenty years of swearing never to leave the other person.) Some people stay single by choice. The men who would have made reluctant husbands will not be disappointing their wives, and the women who would have made reluctant wives are spared the effort of trying.

What’s not to like?

Why the complaints about the lack of eligible men and women? I suspect this is an artefact of how the media works. Dog bites man is not news, man bites dog is. Attractive, ambitious, well-paid, well-educated woman in her early-thirties who can't find a suitable partner is news, because these are supposed to be the women who should have long queues of suitors. The Schadenfreude, for readers (and columnists) who lack one or other of the career girl's supposed advantages, is delicious.

(*) A percentage point is an additive difference of 1%, thus 35% to 36% is a one-point difference. A basis point is 100-th of a percentage point, this 4% to 4.5% is 50 basis points. Only people in finance use basis points.

Why Corporates "Support" The Trans Cause (Bud Lite / Anheuser-Busch)

ESG (environmental, social and governance) and CEI (corporate equality index) are smokescreens for corporations who do not give a damn about their customers, products, suppliers, employees, neighbours, regulations, regulators and anyone else with a legitimate interest in the company's activities.

They don't give a flying toss about Trans rights, Gay rights, Taiwanese rights, Aboriginal rights or anyone else's rights. They aren't supposed to. They are supposed to make products that don't come back to customers who do, treat their employees well, pay their suppliers a fair price and on time, and pay a decent dividend to investors while following evermore complex laws and regulations. In reality they do the exact opposite of that, and they need a whole lot of smoke to blow at the public and their own staff. We can't be a**h****s, look, we have an Inclusivity Director and a sticker from a CEI agency saying we have 5-stars for Equality.

Nobody has any idea who the certifying agencies are, how they are financed, who runs them, what qualifications they have, and so on. All anybody needs to know is that the hedge funds will accept a particular agency's certifications. We-the-public assume these agencies must be okay. I mean, look at their client list. Would all those big companies sign up if the whole thing was one huge con-job and grift?

Hell yeah.

These companies pay their fees to the grifters, tick some boxes, and get to put the claim that they are some kind of virtuous something on their corporate literature, and so stay on the good side of Black Rock and all those other ESG-pushing hedge funds.

Those hedge funds are only doing it because they can wave the ESG / CEI certifications to prove that they are not really investing in Bad Companies who make firearms, kill endangered species, or hire contractors who hire contractors who use children in Lahore to make masks for Western nurses. Even better, they use these ESG / CEI certifications to create special funds of "Good Companies" for which they then charge a premium fee.

Follow the money.

This is why the companies whose donations to BLM were used to buy multi-million dollar properties don't care about that. They paid BLM so they could say they support BLM. The corporate donors don't care what BLM did with the money: they were buying the publicity.

There's also this: a company dips its toe into Woke Marketing. If it works, they do more, but most importantly, if it doesn't, they can stop any further attempts dead in their tracks. We tried that and it didn't give us the results we needed. Thank you for coming in and sharing your ideas with us. Gillette is still solvent, last time I looked, despite alienating every man in the Western World with its toxic masculinity ad in 2019. They don't do it now. Anheuser-Busch will survive what may very well be the episode that finally makes senior management understand that social media and influencers are as important as TV and poster ads. Right now the older guys don't really get it. In the meantime, their CEI certification for this year is a shoo-in.

There's no doubt that some corporations do not choose their ESG / CEI grifters well. Some are extremists with ultra-minority causes, a talent for guilt trips and moralising invective, and useful connections in social media, journalism and the big-name management consultancies. As a result, an unsuspecting corporate finds itself co-branding with an organisation that offers their children puberty-blockers at school. Not a good look, but fortunately most of the public will never know that level of detail.

The final point is this. Managers, Head Teachers, sports teams, record labels, publishers and other such are always on the look-out for reasons to get rid of people, preferably at a really low cost, whom they don't want for whatever random reason. MeToo dispatched many an unprofitable artist or under-performing executive: it was hi-jacked for exactly that purpose. Trans rights are just another such excuse.

We take inclusion seriously at ABC Corp, unless you're a fifty-something white man who can be replaced at half the cost by a Gen Z diversity hire, when we will sack you for not using someone's pronouns (which you are going to do at least once by accident in the next three months). That's what we at ABC Corp mean when we say we take pronouns seriously. We don't give a s**t about anyone's rights, but we love a BS reason for cutting costs.

Follow the money.

7 Philosophy Books For Beginners (4)

In the previous post, I suggested that Western Philosophy is an attitude. It does not accept authority, and reserves the right to examine anything at any time for any reason. It also commends that attitude to all of us.

How realistic is this, how does it differ from scepticism and outright cynicism?

The law says that at eighteen we become adults, and are deemed to be competent moral decision-makers, except in certain cases of reduced capacity. An allowance is made for the ignorance and recklessness of youth, but only for minor offences. Most children know when they are doing something their parents might not approve of, which is why they are very quiet when doing so. People know what is right and wrong for most of the eventualities of ordinary life. It's at the edges that the judgements can become ambiguous.

Making moral decisions is something human beings (mostly) seem to be wired for. Making judgements about matters of non-everyday facts, or about the plausibility and verisimilitude of theories, seems to require technical knowledge and skill that only a few people might have. At some point, don't we ordinary people need to defer to the "experts"?

How does someone who left school at eighteen judge if String Theory or Quantum Gravity are plausible theories? Surely this is something only suitably-informed physicists can do? Not at all. Anyone who understands that the test of a scientific theory is that it makes new predictions that are confirmed, can ask one question to determine the value of String Theory. What has it predicted that has been confirmed? When? Where? What was the experiment? What was the prediction and what was the result? If an ordinary person is faced with evasions and odd-sounding claims that physical theories should be judged by different criteria, they will and should conclude that someone, somewhere, is hiding something.

One tactic is to reduce what looks like a highly technical issue to something within one's understanding. Some lawyers are very good at doing this, as they know they will need to explain the core issues to a jury. In the case, perhaps, of pollution by a chemical company, nobody needs a detailed understanding of organic chemistry. They need to know that a) many people suffered symptoms A, B and C; b) those symptoms are consequences of poisoning by substance X; c) substance X was found leaking into the groundwater from the abandoned drums which had the defendant's logo on them, and which the records in Exhibit A show were dumped by the company’s drivers. Nobody needs to know how substance X causes those symptoms, only that it does, and reliably and frequently so. Experts and specialists are not allowed to hide behind gobbledy-gook, and indeed, sustained use of gobbledy-gook and protests that, for instance, the law of financial fraud is too complicated for ordinary folk, are usually and mostly rightly taken as a sign that something is being hidden.

Another tactic is to examine the credentials of the "experts". In some cases, such as ballistics, these can be demonstrable and convincing. In others, such as virus-based pandemics on a supposedly "novel" virus, by definition there can be no experts, since it is "novel" and experience from previous viruses cannot be transferred. In these kinds of cases, expect "expert" status to be justified via the Fallacy of Misleading Credentials: a recital of impressive-sounding official positions, academic awards, research papers and previous appearances as an "expert', which on closer examination have nothing to do with whatever is happening now.

This sort of thing requires an understanding of how the world works. Philosophers in earlier centuries had plenty of this, as they were often advisors and private secretaries to members of the ruling class, and sometimes appointed to public office in their own right.

Nobody can question everything all the time. I can't, and neither could Descartes and Hume. Both recognised that ordinary life has to be supported by a web of beliefs held without question for the time being. However, one should always be prepared to question any of those beliefs if a cause arises.

One does not need to be sceptical or cynical to embrace the spirit of Western Philosophy, but one does need a healthy caution towards the claims of the established, the powerful, the dogmatic, the over-confident, those who claim to have Just and Right Causes, anyone trying to sell anything, and above all, never to have any dealings with anyone or any institution which makes money as long as they don't solve the problem. Anyone who brands an argument or idea with a word ending in '-ism' is not arguing but throwing mud. Mud may be dirty, but it is not an argument. One should always remember that propaganda is what they want you to believe, news is what they don't want you to know.

Happy Easter

Notice how the Woke troublemakers go after Christmas, but not Easter?

Is that because Christmas costs money and has a pile of obligations around presents and visiting family, but Easter has chocolate eggs?