Kabe

This time it might actually be genuine progress. Why? Because Iranian officials are acknowledging it.

Via Dropsitenews on Twitter an hour ago:

NEW: A senior Iranian official tells Drop Site News that Tehran believes it is “very close” to signing an agreement to end the war, and says Israel is mounting a last-ditch effort to sabotage the negotiations.

In a statement shared with Drop Site reporter Jeremy Scahill, the official said “today’s constructive negotiating approach” had made “the prospect of peace in the region highly attainable,” signaling what appears to be the strongest public indication yet from Tehran that a framework agreement may be nearing completion.

The official said Iran recognizes Trump is facing a major political decision that must balance U.S. interests, regional stability, and “respect for Iran’s fundamental rights.”

The senior official added that “Israel is currently undertaking its final extensive efforts and applying considerable pressure” to derail the agreement during its final stages, while expressing hope that the White House would make decisions “independently of external influence.”

Of course, this could all end up being another false attempt at peace from the White House, but Trump desperately wants out and bucking the Israelis and their demands is his least bad option at this point.

Yeah, well renewable energy is for communists so what you gonna do.

No matter what the outcome at this point, this administration is fucked.

If the war continues, more US service members die while oil prices continue to surge and Trump’s favorability ratings continue to tank.

If the US pulls out, the Strait remains closed with Iran in full control of which ships can go in and out. They still have the majority of their drone and missile stockpiles intact and can leverage the flow of oil for years to come, meaning they can continue to put pressure on the US economy. Plus they now have a regime who is markedly more hardline than it was before the US and Israel assassinated all the moderates who might be willing to negotiate.

This has to go down as one of the most mind bogglingly stupid self-owns and worst foreign policy blunders in US history.

www.nokings.org

I also wonder whether or not grapheneos, or open source Linux OSs in general, will face any repercussions for failing to comply to these regulations due to the relatively low user count.

I’m no great fan of Hillary Clinton, but she gave a hell of an opening statement:

Transcript here

And to this bit

Mr. Chairman, your investigation is supposed to be assessing the federal government’s handling of the investigations and prosecutions of Epstein and his crimes. You subpoenaed eight law enforcement officials, all of whom ran the Department of Justice or directed the FBI when Epstein’s crimes were investigated and prosecuted. Of those eight, only one appeared before the Committee. Five of the six former attorneys general were allowed to submit brief statements stating they had no information to provide.

You have held zero public hearings, refused to allow the media to attend them, including today, despite espousing the need for transparency on dozens of occasions.

You have made little effort to call the people who show up most prominently in the Epstein files. And when you did, not a single Republican Member showed up for Les Wexner’s deposition.

This institutional failure is designed to protect one political party and one public official, rather than to seek truth and justice for the victims and survivors, as well as the public who also want to get to the bottom of this matter. My heart breaks for the survivors. And I am furious on their behalf.

I have to say fookin’ aye.

Talarico’s big bombshell: Talking about Christianity. The “Christian Nationalists” don’t want him doing that. He’s talking about the wrong kind of Christianity.

Precisely. Talarico is a Christian who actually takes the part about looking after the needy and the sick, and having empathy for other human beings, seriously. We can’t have that in Texas!

Yeah, it is. Vorbis is the actual codec.

If we’re talking free tier Spotify, then it could actually be due to the bitrate (96kbps OGG vorbis, IIRC). However, if you’re a premium subscriber then the standard bitrate is 160kbps, which is definitely not audible to 99.99% of people.

In fact, after much ABX testing, I found that a noticeable audible difference between a local file and the same song on a streaming service is almost always due to either a loudness differential or because the two tracks come from different masters.

I do the same, as it happens, so I won’t argue with you.

As for “why care?”, I’d say it’s about making informed decisions and not spending money unnecessarily in the pursuit of genuinely better sound quality.

The thing is, dynamic range compression and audio file compression are two entirely separate things. People often conflate the two by thinking that going from wav or flac to a lossy file format like mp3 or m4a means the track becomes more compressed dynamically, but that’s not the case at all. Essentially, an mp3 and a flac version of the same track will have the same dynamic range.

And yes, while audible artifacts can be a thing with very low bitrate lossy compression, once you get to128kbps with a modern lossy codec it becomes pretty much impossible to hear in a blind test. Hell, even 96kbps opus is pretty much audibly perfect for the vast majority of listeners.

Oh, 100%. I actually tested this by recording bit perfect copies from different streaming services and comparing them using Audacity.

I found that they only way to hear a difference between the same song played on two different platforms was 1) if there was a notable difference in gain or 2) if they were using two different masters for the same song. If two platforms were using the same master version, they were impossible to tell apart in an ABX test.

All of this is to say that the quality of the mastering is orders of magnitude more important than whether or not a track is lossy or lossless, as far as audible audio quality goes.

These days I mostly see the placebo audio arguments in streaming service and FLAC/lossless encode fanboys.

The clamour for lossless/high-res streaming is the audiophile community in a nutshell. Literally paying more money so your brain can trick you into thinking it sounds better.

Like many hobbies, it’s mainly a way to rationalize spending ever increasing amounts on new equipment and source content. I was into the whole scene for a while, but once I had discovered what components in the audio chain actually improve sound quality and which don’t, I called it quits.

It’s still a good idea to have your main music library in flac for future proofing, but yeah 128kbps opus or ogg is what I use on mobile devices.

The review will only be of the 3 million files currently available to the public, not the extensive trove of more than 6 million documents in total that the DOJ says it has in its possession.

Still not good enough.

The actual problem is far bigger than Trump; It’s the corporate duopoly masquerading as a democracy that created the conditions necessary for the rise of Trump and the MAGA movement in the first place.

My thoughts exactly, with maybe a sprinkling of Al Capone:

By the way, did you see what the Vanity Fair photographer did to him on the last White House photo shoot? It’s a stroke of editorial genius:

Don’t forget that Universal Blue also offers Bluefin and Aurora for workstation/desktop use. The former is essentially Fedora Silverblue but with a much better set of pre installed packages that makes the out-of-the-box experience far superior.

There are many ETFs that offer broad diversification into international markets. Most US brokerages offer their own mutual funds for international equities as well.

There is much disagreement over the optimum ratio of US-to-international equities, but unless you’re a hardcore US exceptionalist, anywhere between 20-40% of your equity portfolio should be ex-US, according to most researchers.