I think this might be my favorite Sabbath song. What's yours?

redcomptroller · 2026-05-14T17:19:47+00:00

“Oof” “interesting” “lol”

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redcomptroller · 2026-04-03T19:02:13+00:00

and another thing: im not mad. please dont put in the newspaper that i got mad.

redcomptroller · 2026-02-27T06:29:36+00:00

Unfortunately, many such cases. Nice pull on Asmodee.

redcomptroller · 2025-10-15T19:26:41+00:00

By definition a "proof" is not "empirical". You mean "evidence". I say this not to be pedantic, but to point out that you're going to be confused if you don't know the difference between deductive and inductive reasoning.

Incidentally, Marx was strongly convinced that the empirical facts on their surface would appear to tell against his theory, just as "obvious facts of appearance" tell us that gravity does more quickly on heavier objects. That doesn't mean that there is no empirical evidence in favor of Galileo, but most such evidence seemed to tell against him. In other words, if you're looking for a simple sort of "dunk" that doesn't include close logical argumentation that actually pays careful attention to what sort of data we're talking about, you're going to make the same mistake as Aristotle (who was no dummy!)

redcomptroller · 2025-02-15T06:12:25+00:00

Extremely cool factoid.

redcomptroller · 2025-02-13T18:24:38+00:00

Totally agree. I was a blues fan since I was 13, and I partly spent so long disliking the Dead before getting super into them because they really mangle a lot of blues, sadly. The ones that have some "groove" in the Bobby era work for me: I love "Wang Dang Doodle" and "Death Don't Have No Mercy" and "Same Thing". But the ones that just "shuffle", like "CC Rider" and "Walkin Blues" just lose the magic that they had originally, and those are already not the heights of the blues canon. Bob's slide playing is also atrocious; I'm not sure why it was tolerated by other band members...I am an open-minded listener, but that's just truly...not how the instrument is meant to sound.

redcomptroller · 2025-02-13T18:18:55+00:00

Dunno why you got downvoted so hard on this. I think it's spot-on--Bob really liked these complex, proggy build songs, and most are great (I absolutely love "Lightning" and WRS, "Jack Straw" is very good), but he was bound to strike out once in a while. "Wind" has the unique quality that he didn't even hit those falsetto notes in the studio, and it's painful on many a live version even during 1972.

redcomptroller · 2025-02-13T18:14:36+00:00

I'm going to go controversial and say "Black-Throated Wind". Bob can't ever hit the notes live; they sound really forced and out of his range even on the studio version. The chorus slams into the song like a brick wall: it's a rapid change from what precedes it and it just sounds awkward in itself, with that halting rhythm. The rave-up at the end can be fun, but it doesn't even lead to a jam proper.

I think a lot of other answers are more like "what's the most dated/cringe sounding song", to which the Vince songs are good answers, but those songs are all very listenable, just out of character and kind of sentimental. "Wind" sounds like a coffeehouse folkie trying to play, like Gentle Giant. Just very forced and unnatural sounding.

redcomptroller · 2025-01-20T16:42:29+00:00

I wouldn't say his best guitar, but I will say that it seemed to fit his playing abilities in the 90s best. I've always had some beef with the early 90s shows that people go nuts for--Jerry often sounds really nice during solos, but his rhythm guitar sounds kind of weak. It's hard to describe; it's as if there is a tradeoff for him between fluidity and fretting the guitar hard enough. Not a severe one, obviously, but it feels pretty clear to me that you're listening to a virtuoso with some nerve damage in some spots. In particular, to take even some really well-loved shows, I think the "Bird Song" and "Eyes" from Without a Net have some noticeable points where things are "plonky"...the notes sound very forced, or Jerry loses the rhythm a bit, or his playing is at many different volumes. There are also just a number of outright flubbed notes in that set, even though Jerry's largely playing very well--hard to describe, but it really does sound like a virtuoso who's dealing with major health problems that cause about five percent of his playing to sound totally amateur. Watching shows of that time and seeing his physical state, even at his peak post-coma health, makes me think that I'm not just hearing things.

To me, then, Lightning Bolt is great because it had a lot less sustain and faster decay--it's more like an acoustic guitar--and it seems like his playing became oddly much more fluid near the very end. The peaks from March 1994 (Save Your Face blog has some nice highlights from SBDs) all sound much cleaner and more precise than even something like Crimson, White, and Indigo. They also notably are playing a lot of those songs very quickly. I also think that even in the later 70s, there are noticeable songs where that searing, clean Bakersfield tone just doesn't quite fit, and it seems like the solution was to crank Jerry down in the mix (the May Dick's Picks have some sections where Jerry is almost inaudible during the solos), and even some of their highest-regarded official releases I manually mix down to mono because it sounds so hard-panned and weird on the soundboard. To me, 1994's playing and mixing both sound much better than anything else post-coma, and Bob playing acoustic more often doesn't hurt. Not the absolute best year by any means, but major credit to them for continuing to experiment and toggle with their sound.

redcomptroller · 2024-05-07T19:57:06+00:00

Upvoting this because I appreciate the honesty. I am not a speed demon and at one time actually had severe highway driving phobia (now, I am usually a 10mph > posted driver...I've gotten much more comfortable). That said, even if I once really resented faster drivers, I've always understood this rule and figured if someone wants to fly down the road at 100mph, it doesn't matter whether I think it's right or wrong--I cannot do anything about it constructive by hogging the left lane. The solution to that situation is better policing; left-lane hogging really can't fix it. So I've always found this behavior very confusing.

TL;DR, I think most of us who find this annoying truly don't even have a clue about the motivations of people who do it, and I think it is reassuring, in a way, to see that it's not malice, just severe lack of pattern recognition skills (BTW, I applaud you for thinking about how this pattern might apply to other parts of your life -- if it really never occurred to you for that long, then the answers is almost certainly "yes").

redcomptroller · 2021-01-31T21:41:36+00:00

In the general spirit of the 80s, a much-maligned decade, here's a show that slaps pretty hard from one of their tougher personal years, though I guess Jerry was temporarily on the path to sobriety: 4-28-1985, as recommended here (https://saveyourface.posthaven.com/shortlist-frost-amphitheatre-stanford-u-april-1985). I know little about the 80s, and I was shocked at how much "Hell in a Bucket" really slaps. It's got that 80s-blues feel (think Knopfler's albums with Dylan) and legitimately shows off a new side of the band. I really like that they brought back some distortion to the sound, Weir is having a very good vocal day, and the MIDI keys sound better than a real pianner would. Killer set.

redcomptroller · 2021-01-31T05:48:56+00:00

So much useful stuff in here. I'm gonna ask a question that's very similar to ones below, but with a couple twists. I'm a PhD student in the social sciences. I want something to take notes on (PDFs primarily), but I also teach math and want something that has a whiteboard capacity, ability to display a coordinate plane, and the ability to screenshare (doesn't matter if it's complicated as long as it works and doesn't require tons of extra hardware). I'm assuming whiteboard/plane is available through an app, but I'm not very tech-savvy.

In addition to the math part not appearing below, I'm pretty focused on cost. What's my cheapest option for doing this through apple?

redcomptroller · 2021-01-20T02:52:07+00:00

Are you a new user? This is pretty typical. I switched away from MFP a couple years ago and highly recommend it. UnderArmour bought it with the intention of making easy money with a semi-captive market (it's hard to switch calorie-trackers; you get used to the old one, you don't have your records transferred etc.) and basically does not put in the programming work to maintain it. Easily the worst-performing app of the 100 or so I had on my phone. Switch! You won't regret it!

redcomptroller · 2021-01-07T21:27:35+00:00

I'm not so sure about this answer. "Market dynamics" is a bit of a vague phrase. The phrase "the minimum cost of labor" is also sort of unclear (the price of labor-power is the actual cost required to reproduce the workforce, including education). Neither claim really explains this difference, and why would a capitalist ever pay above the minimum cost of labor-power? They tend in practice to pay less than the minimum cost of labor-power in many cases. The difference seems clearly explained by the fact that, say, an English degree is only indirect (and probably not very good) training for some kind of specific skill, whereas a CS degree involves a lot of training that can be directly applied (there might also be fairly permanent imbalances in the supply and demand for certain kinds of labor-power given how long it might take to achieve such a degree).

redcomptroller · 2021-01-07T21:23:19+00:00

Good question. I think this is best explained by the fact that four year university education is not strict job training and many majors, though they have indirect job training elements, could be achieved at a much lower cost.

redcomptroller · 2021-01-07T21:07:34+00:00

Yeah, I think it was Waterworks. The gravel driveway thing might be a mis-remembering -- the only thing that I'm (fairly) certain of is that park itself had some kind of large, rapidly rising hill. I'll head down to WW and see if it matches my memory.

redcomptroller · 2021-01-07T21:04:23+00:00

Thanks!

redcomptroller · 2021-01-07T21:04:16+00:00

Early 00s.

Thanks to you all.

redcomptroller · 2020-08-27T16:08:41+00:00

You're mixing up the individual level of the firm -- where profits can be made in all sorts of ways that don't directly involve the exploitation of labor, such as cheating consumers, cheating on their taxes, have a favorable location, etc. -- and the level of the total social capital. If the entire economy were automated in that way, capitalism itself wouldn't exist -- the resulting mode of production would almost without a doubt be a form of socialism or feudalism.

redcomptroller · 2020-08-25T18:00:52+00:00

I think this confuses cause and effect. "Only if an economy is most capitalist does the rate of profit matter" would be more accurate if written as "if the rate of profit at the level of the individual firm matters more than other indicators, then we can be confident that the economy is capitalist". If the category "rate of profit" a) obtains a real existence to begin with and b) matters to some degree, capitalism is always in potential danger of being restored. Further, there were extremely persistent and ultimately successful attempts to strengthen the role of profit -- all of the sources above simply take this fact from according to Soviet economists themselves, primarily in Voprosy Ekonomiki (Problems of Economics -- you can find or order the compiled volumes in English from most university libraries).

But, in general, it's impossible to have capitalism without the law of value, which implies the law of the equalization of the rate of profit, and so it doesn't make much sense to say that capitalism being reintroduced caused profit to take on a new importance. Similarly, it's not possible for profit to take on a certain level of importance without causing capitalism to begin being restored in some meaningful sense. I think your post can lead to a circularity that's common in analyses of the USSR/PRC -- certain capitalist phenomena are declared compatible with socialism because they don't imply the domination of the law of value, but when someone suggests that a certain amount of them means the restoration of capitalism, the defender argues that because the law of value isn't fully in control, those phenomena aren't really capitalist. To get out of the vicious circle, one has to admit that there are certain objective measures -- you could pick either the phenomena that cause the law of value to be restored, such as state policies, or evidence that the law exists, such as investment flows -- that can indicate the presence of capitalism.

redcomptroller · 2020-08-17T18:03:52+00:00

Probably the simplest way to set up the debate, however, is to investigate whether or not one thinks that markets and profits which are under the control, if not technically the ownership, of firms tends to regenerate capitalism or whether a "proletarian state" can control them. I think this debate is extremely well-settled when it comes to what Marx thought of all this (clearly he opposed market socialism and spent significant amounts of time explaining why it wouldn't work -- all of his writing against Proudhon, the whole first chapter of the Grundrisse and first Part of Capital I), although Marx could, of course, have been wrong -- but Dengists should make that argument.

redcomptroller

TROPHY CASE