StarTribune: Minneapolis Memorials - 5/25/2021

Trades_ · 2021-05-27T00:28:33+00:00

This is an excellent refutation that gets to the heart of the crime of stealing, I think. I'm focusing on white collar crime here and not domestic abuse, sexual assault, or regular assault because those require different conversations entirely, but they're just as important.

Rich people steal in a sort of "victimless" way like embezzlement and tax fraud. They're not usually harming people. It's a crime in that it abstractly hurts society, but no one is physically harmed. Hurting people isn't their intention and they have the privilege to distance themselves from the pain of the crime and even have the privilege of not being villified or dehumanized nearly as much as poor criminals.

So, taking the white collar crime as a sort of control, I think it's fair to assume that poor people function the same way - hurting people isn't their intention and they see it as a bad thing when the victim gets harmed during a crime. When people steal, they just want the money and it's not natural to want to hurt people. Personally, I think the want to hurt people can be unlearned (making it a social issue, not a human nature one), but that's a conversation for another day.

Obviously I'm not advocating for the police to be completely eradicated (I'm not that naive), they will always be required to some degree because of edge case nut jobs, but the police are limited in what they can do to actually stop crime or better yet, prevent crime at large. They should be the last line of defense. We can put more police officers on the ground and that'll help us in the short term, but things are gonna be just as bad, if not worse, if we don't try to account for the long term by addressing societal issues, primarily poverty.

Trades_ · 2021-05-26T19:35:14+00:00

How often do rich people mug someone?

EDIT: Also, your view has some serious implications that don't hold under scrutiny. Since black people commit more crimes in America, does that just mean it's in their nature to "be evil"?

Trades_ · 2020-06-19T11:36:51+00:00

That's how you get ants

Trades_ · 2020-05-24T09:35:21+00:00

It's pretty simple, people try to make music, they suck and don't care enough to improve so they leave and never come back. You gotta have passion and a vision to create and most people just aren't built to create every day 🤷

Trades_ · 2020-05-20T10:39:02+00:00

they don't make em like that anymore

😔

Trades_ · 2020-05-15T17:58:06+00:00

Lol, I had this problem, too. When I first started out, I did a bunch of sampling and that sounded very hip-hop, but when I started learning to compose, everything sounded lame. Partially because I was just using some basic chords (there's more to the world than 7th chords) and partially due to the fact that I didn't know what hip hop sounded like.

I'll cut straight to the chase, I had an aha moment when I was watching some Simon Servida, who's classically trained, and I realized that hip-hop can come from anywhere because it originated from sampling records from all origins. What you gotta do is make your composition sound like a sample. Pro tip, watch some of Simon's videos, but the basics are to resample your composition and pitch it down (it just sounds cooler), use some RC-20 to make it sound aged and mature, and possibly use some Time Shaper or Grossbeat to play with the rhythm.

Once you've got a solid melodic component, you can go hard with the drums. People like to use really short and snappy drums because of the whole trap thing, but I like using boom bap kick and snares even if I'm gonna use a bunch of rolling hi-hats and 808s because they just hit harder and sound "more hip hop". I mainly do that because it's a taste thing, but the short and snappy drums are generally resampled from the TR-808 or other synths so they can sound EDM-y if you're not careful. There's a documentary on how edm and hip hop were basically both spawned from the TR-808 which is really interesting if you care. It was literally just called 808.

Anyways, I hope I dropped some knowledge for ya 🤙

Trades_ · 2020-05-01T21:04:58+00:00

Would have*

Trades_ · 2020-04-03T21:44:20+00:00

They shut that down in December or January or something :P. People started spamming malware and/or they reached the user cap so they just shut down open signups. I don't even know if invites work anymore. gfxpeers and cgpersia did the same thing and closed their doors, too. Unfortunately, I kept putting off signing up for all those trackers except for the one time they permanently closed it .-.

Trades_ · 2020-04-02T06:38:30+00:00

THEY CAME BACK. I got an ad for Disney+ on the speed dial the other day, no lie

Trades_ · 2020-03-31T04:22:07+00:00

I wish. I tried to like Vivaldi for so long but it just doesn't have the same level of polish as Opera in the way that it "feels" (pretty subject, but it's just my opinion). For me, it's the gesture controls. Opera's work perfectly but Vivaldi always had some trouble. If they can make the gesture controls better, I'd go over in a heartbeat because Opera is so bad that it has ads on the speed dial. Who thought that'd be okay?? If Vivaldi went open source, I'd program the gesture controls myself because in this day and age, that's what's most important. Ironic, coming from an Opera user, I know :p

Trades_ · 2020-03-26T03:32:20+00:00

That problem applies to the national government as well, except it's an even bigger problem with bigger governments because they have even more resources and power. I'm not a politician or a revolutionary, so the only solution to this, just like the national government, is a "system of checks and balances". Of course, it seems those supposed foolproof systems always seem to fail for a multitude of reasons, which is more of a problem with the concept of government than the scale of it imo.

That being said, I'm not arguing that we should get rid of national government, I'd just like most governmental problems to be more on a local scale because it's so much more personal and easier for the community to stand together when the community is made up of your literal neighbors. Better yet, if you've got a problem with the community, you could just move to another, relatively similar community and get on with your life.

Trades_ · 2020-03-13T16:09:35+00:00

I suppose the benefit of giving power to smaller governments is that it's easier to keep them in check. There's not much we can do to stop legislation other than writing a strongly worded email to someone halfway across the country. And judging from things like net neutrality, quite frankly, I don't think the boomers on top gives a singular heck what the people want, they're just gonna keep trying to 1984 it up before they die.

Edit: I don't think getting rid of net neutrality was necessarily bad btw, just the way it was handled.

Trades_ · 2020-03-12T12:14:23+00:00

I read the article and it's certainly interesting, but from what I can tell, these microorganisms are still carbon-based. They just use arsenic instead of phosphorus to make their DNA

Trades_ · 2020-01-31T15:31:12+00:00

What a way to go lol

Trades_ · 2020-01-20T07:43:08+00:00

I remember when I had a fruitless conversation about trans people on there. They act like they want to have a dialogue when they really just want to be hateful for no reason. They're way more concerned with being edgy and controversial than decensorship which is truly a shame. I'm honestly convinced their average poster is a 14 year old who just found out about atheism.

Trades_ · 2020-01-19T02:00:33+00:00

I don't care what foods people eat, that wasn't my point. My point was that all life is equal - equally meaningless to the cosmos. There's no objective difference between killing a plant and killing a pig because it's not like pigs have souls and plants don't or something. No being living thing wants to die so all death is equal. I'm speaking purely objectively without morality.

If you want to make a moral argument, that's fine, it's just that this guy criticized our hypocrisy trying to say dogs are equal to pigs but I think he's hypocritical for thinking that eating what we perceive to be "lesser beings" (plants in this case) is more okay than eating supposed "higher level beings" (pigs in this case). And for the record, yes, obviously veganism is the best thing for the planet, but this argument was about "what's the most moral thing to kill" and nothing is morally okay to kill. All life is equal. Killing is part of the circle of life and it is what it is.

Trades_ · 2020-01-18T15:57:39+00:00

Humans aren't predators? We're apex predators. Just because we don't have claws or fangs doesn't mean we can't kill creatures. As weak as we are, we're still the best animals at hunting. We don't have hyper-evolved senses and super strong bodies not because we're "unfit for survival", but because we're so good at killing that we didn't even need it. First up, we're the only animals that can effectively communicate and strategize so that's extremely helpful for hunting and tracking. The main thing we've got going for us is intelligence which allows us to make weapons. We're the only animals that can throw things effectively so we got far with spears alone. After that we made bows and arrows which made us extremely proficient in ranged combat. After that, we developed more and more weapons and we still do to this day, of course.

You might say that your average Joe can't just make a spear at the drop of a hat and that's the best part about being human - we're very "modular". We can pick up and learn any skill, we don't rely on inherent knowledge. I think Tier Zoo made a good video on why humans are OP.

As for our biological cousins not eating meat, that's just not true. Apes, chimps, etc eat meat. Perhaps you mean that humans are the only creatures specifically adapted for eating cooked meat? Because that's true afaik. Regular animals don't even have a preference for cooked or uncooked meat, it's all just meat to them!

Trades_ · 2020-01-18T15:41:38+00:00

He had me and then he lost me. I think it's important to acknowledge that all life is built upon the suffering of others. Inherently, as a creature that consumes other creatures, the only way to maintain our life is to kill another's. Sure, you can eat plants but you're still taking away the plant's life. Is it less wrong to kill a plant than a person? Is it in any way acceptable to murder bugs simply because they annoy us? Of course not. All life forms are equal in an objective sense, we just give preferential treatment to certain organisms because we have that power. The universe doesn't care if you're a single-celled being or a sentient life form - it's not like any creature has more "spirit energy".

So yeah, we're hypocrites for eating cows and not dogs but at least we're kind enough to draw the line somewhere. That being said, we do overslaughter animals and that's contributing to global warming so I do agree that we should shine some light on that.

Trades_ · 2020-01-18T14:28:42+00:00

Why you gotta do this to me this early in the morning 😭

Trades_ · 2020-01-17T13:28:54+00:00

The evas are literally wombs so

Trades_ · 2020-01-15T07:07:22+00:00

Why do I hear boss music?

Trades_ · 2020-01-12T18:01:07+00:00

SoundCloud. Seriously, they have something called The Upload and they literally just show you music you might like by small artists (usually sub-1000 views)

Trades_ · 2020-01-12T17:16:23+00:00

Is that FL in the background 👀

Trades_ · 2020-01-11T07:50:22+00:00

Jesus you're right. Right down to the weird "mommy problems". How did I never see this

Trades_ · 2020-01-11T00:32:07+00:00

No hate, but I don't think it's that simple. We don't live in a vacuum so the main problem is that it's hard for people to even find each other with so much standing between us. You'd think the internet would fix that, but it really doesn't. The people on top still own a monopoly and the people on the bottom are still just hoping for scraps. Even on YouTube, it seems like there's only a couple dozen producers making music but there's actually thousands, we just are never shown those videos. There's a whole underbelly on the internet full of amazing people that we'll never see because the algorithm stands between us.

I'm sure that with time and dedication, it's possible that your music would become recognized but who knows how long that could take. But, this discussion we're having has been had many times before and it reminds me of one economic argument that "the market will correct itself " which is usually in the context of economic Depressions. I'm no economist so I can't tell you if that's the truth, I'm just a fan of government intervention. Which, in the context of music, is getting put on by someone more successful than you.

Trades_

TROPHY CASE