Curious as to why? Do you derive your livelihood from your ownership in capital? Or do you have to work, but value private property, markets and liberal economics?
I ask, because when I think of a capitalist, I think of someone whose wealth and power are derived from significant ownership in companies and assets, real or financial.
There are plenty of ideologies that value market economics from the very left to the very right. Examples include market socialism on the left and American libertarianism on the right.
> Spotify did it right; they managed to put together a service that is actually better than piracy in the ways that matter to a typical consumer.
I disagree. As a listener, Bandcamp and Soundcloud fulfill my needs better. Artists are more willing to put their work on those services than they are with Spotify, and it's entirely understandable. With Bandcamp, there is a link to buy albums at their asking price while listening. Spotify listens will pay out fractions of a penny. The result is that other platforms will have new music that suits my tastes, and I will be lucky if rights holders will put the same content on Spotify within the next 5 years.
> It's like an old recipe, an old painting, or an old piece of music. Nobody who is seriously engaged with those things believes in improving them by substituting modern high-tech elements in the course of recreating/restoring an original.
Once knew a talented artist who painted in the style of the old masters and took pride in it. Substitution, or improvement, certainly exists in that school of thought, and in practice.
Evidently your understanding of "recreating/restoring an original" encompasses brand new creative works. That is not what is at issue here: Notre Dame is an original, irreplaceable structure.
This is gobbledygook. You say that the irreplaceable thing is gone and cannot be replaced, but also that somehow we now have an opportunity to modify it?
The cathedral is mostly intact. This is a repair job, just like a repair to an Old Master painting damaged by a vandal. A restorer wouldn't use the latest and greatest synthetic painting materials (acrylics or paints with synthetic binders) to repair an old master. They might use some new technology in the process, but they wouldn't treat the job as an opportunity to indulge their personal creative vanity and leave their mark on the painting. There is more than enough creativity and self-expression in the task of restoration.
What is arguably largely intact (though, per TFA, that's true superficially but not structurally) is the result of multiple changes over a long period for a variety of different reasons (often in the context of repairs, but the past repair efforts weren't with an attitude of “restore the original with no artistic changes”.)
> just like a repair to an Old Master painting damaged by a vandal.
Except it's not like an Old Master painting, as the pre-recent-damage condition was he result of many different artistic visions at many different times, unless you are comparing all the past innovation to the work of vandals, not just the recent damage.
I'm not sure why you've been downvoted for this. Notre Dame isn't just any old building, to carry on the art analogy it's in the same league as the Mona Lisa or Sunflowers etc.
Thankfully the French do have a very strong sense of tradition and cultural identity, something that's sadly being lost in most of the rest of the western world.
> I never saw this in NYC or anywhere else on the East Coast or in the Midwest.
Human beings have a tough time surviving when exposed to the elements, and winter lasts for 6 months in the North East and Midwest. It is difficult to live when you are soaking wet and it is 34 degrees outside.
Companies will often sign shelf-space and display agreements with supermarkets when it comes to displaying their brands' products in-store. There very well might be an agreement between Safeway and Nabisco when it comes to their inventory display.
I don't see how this could lead to the observed results. Nabisco shouldn't be any less interested in selling more Parmesan Garlic triscuits while selling the same quantity of other triscuits than Safeway should be. There is no party who gets a win out of just not ordering/selling the triscuits; this is a pure loss for everyone involved.
Safeway might be required to devote equal shelf space to each of the 24 varieties of Triscuit [1], or perhaps at least the same minimum amount of shelf space to each variety. Nabisco doesn't want some competitor to grab that shelf space. And maybe Safeway doesn't find it worthwhile to train its stockers to restock one variety more frequently than the others.
Brands went on a diversification kick less than a decade ago. If a customer prefers Triscuits Flavor #5, but stores only stock popular Flavor #3, that person might not choose to buy the brand at all when they go shopping. They could reach for, and learn to prefer, a competitor's brand.
If a potential new customer doesn't like popular Triscuits flavors, but sees a newer but a less popular flavor, the availability and visibility of the less popular but still desirable flavors might convert them into a customer.
> If a customer prefers Triscuits Flavor #5, but stores only stock popular Flavor #3, that person might not choose to buy the brand at all when they go shopping. They could reach for, and learn to prefer, a competitor's brand.
...this is exactly the situation I'm complaining about, except that the customer prefers Popular Flavor #3, which the store doesn't stock, to Unpopular Flavor #5, which it does.
Post-Walmart/2008 America is living paycheck to paycheck. It's harder to vilify those who undercut competitors if that means people get to eat this week.
Getting a fat car loan is much easier if your credit is good, you aren't in debt, and your income is relatively high. It's an indicator of relative wealth.
Car's are easy to repossess, it's really not too risky to lend out a car and you don't need to substantiate much more than a half decent income and history of timely payments.
> I believe the previous solution was to err on the side of allowing 24-hour involuntary psychiatric holds, with observation by a neutral doctor, and taking abuses of that extremely seriously.
We have a history of using this policy in multiple countries, and in each one the system was abused to torment and commit minorities, people (including children) who were deemed an inconvenience, and political enemies.
I say this as someone with a family member who went through a very similar experience as your friend. I know just how scary and frustrating it is, and the immense burden of care and worrying it puts on people who care about someone going through mental breakdown like that.
I wish there was a solution to this problem, but I don't know what it would look like.
In the US there was an experiment where a bunch of healthy people were sent for a temporary hold and evaluation, and something like half of them were declared insane for refusing to admit they were insane, and trapped until the experimenters intervened.
> I strongly disagree. Spotify has dramatically increased the variety of music that I listen to and introduced me to lost of tiny artists with great music.
I've used a number of music recommendation applications over the last decade.
With Spotify, I've noticed that it will become "stuck" in what I describe as similar artist troughs and valleys. In other words, the Spotify recommendation engine will pigeonhole your recommendations into certain subgenres, niches, or related artists more so than say Pandora or Last.fm would.
Yup, I've had to work around this. I'll pick a song I like, and do "song radio" to find more like it. But this makes a playlist which is basically 6 more similar artists, and no variety beyond that. But I want to branch out more, several steps beyond that. So I'll open a particular song from that playlist, go to "song radio" for that, and drag a bunch of songs I don't recognize back into the first playlist. Repeat this for a few more songs. Then once I've added a bunch more variety, do "playlist radio" again.
It's super obnoxious. I wish they had a slider for "be more adventurous" versus "hew close to the line". Do I remember Pandora having something like that?
Spotify automatically creates a playlist from songs you've "liked" while they're playing on radio. So just start a certain song radio, like the kind of songs that go into the direction you want, and then start playlist radio on the "Liked from Radio" playlist.
Wholeheartedly agree. While my musical tastes are a bit all over the place, I can say that for the past month or so almost all my generated suggestion playlists consist of music I've not only listened to recently, but many I already liked and saved to my songs.
Curious as to why? Do you derive your livelihood from your ownership in capital? Or do you have to work, but value private property, markets and liberal economics?
I ask, because when I think of a capitalist, I think of someone whose wealth and power are derived from significant ownership in companies and assets, real or financial.
There are plenty of ideologies that value market economics from the very left to the very right. Examples include market socialism on the left and American libertarianism on the right.