aleph

Yup, although that doesn't stop some weirdos out there claiming that CDs sound better than FLAC.

Don't forget digital music stores like Qobuz and www.bandcamp.com.

Artists get more money when you buy their music outright instead of stream it.

This is correct, although it's not the bass that is limited on vinyl; it's the dynamic range compression (or 'loudness') in general.

This. People assume that because it's "compressed" it must sound flatter, less dynamic, or just vaguely worse than uncompressed audio, despite the fact that audio compression specifically uses psychoacoustic models to remove the bits of data that our human ears and brains cannot hear to begin with.

Expectation bias is a helluva drug.

Here's the full complaint, for those who want to read the whole thing.

These are valid points, but I still think what sets apart the current situation from Iraq is 1) the scale and 2) the intent.

With regards to #1, bear in mind that those figures for Iraq are calculated over a period of fourteen years as opposed to just six months in Gaza. For the latter, the daily death rate is four times higher. Similarly, the fact that most of Northern Gaza is now an uninhabitable pile of rubble dwarfs even the destruction that occurred in Iraq. With regards to the genocidal language, the comment from Rumsfeld is a far cry from Isaac Herzog saying “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible,” for October 7th or Yoav Gallant saying "We are fighting human animals."

As for #2, the vast majority of Palestinians are have been displaced southwards and are now basically trapped in Rafah with nowhere to go. The equivalent in Irag would have been for US to build a wall around Baghdad and prevented any women and children from leaving while they carried out their bombing campaigns. Also, the steps that Israel have taken to block humanitarian aid from getting to desperate and starving people sets the behavior apart from the US in Iraq. There's also the sense of "collective punishment" in Gaza that wasn't present in Iraq.

Again, I am still somewhat in two minds about use of the word, but I think there are still distinct differences that makes the current situation what the ICJ terms a "plausible genocide".

FWIW, I have also been personally deliberating over whether Israel's actions in Gaza are technically a Genocide as opposed to, say, ethnic cleansing (which it undeniably is, and has been for decades).

However, I can understand why the term is in widespread use at the moment regarding Gaza:

• The sheer scale of civilian deaths.
• Cutting off water, electricity and aid to civilian areas.
• Indiscriminate carpet bombing of civilian areas.
• Wholesale destruction of public infrastructure.
• Genocidal and dehumanizing language being used by Israeli government officials specifically towards the civilian population.

With Genocide, there has to be a discernable intent on wiping out the people themselves, not just their government.

Clearly the US wanted to remove Hussein and his Ba'ath Party government, not wipe out literally anyone who was in favor of him.

The 2003 US-Iraq war was awful for multiple reasons, but it wasn't a genocide.

Right. Like, why would anyone pay a subscription for that?

Edit: I think I get it now:

Those who buy the MC02 get a year for free, after which they’ll pay around $20/€15/£13 each month (discounted if paid annually) to access a handful of services, including email, a VPN (dubbed “Digital Nomad”), online synchronization for calendar and contacts, secure storage on Punkt’s own Swiss servers and the express promise that there will be no ads or third-party crawlers.

So you can access cloud services without being tied to Google, I suppose. Still, the value proposition is questionable.

I don't get the use case. What does it offer over getting an old phone and sticking LineageOS on it?

LDAC suffers from high latency and very steep degradation once the strength of the Bluetooth connection drops even slightly. In some case it can drop to around 330kbps, which makes it no better than SBC unless you can guarantee a rock solid connection at all times.

Presumably it was using an older/outdated codec then. With modern encoders, especially with codecs like Opus, Ogg, and Apple's AAC, the vast majority of listeners find 128kbps to be transparent, and certainly nowhere near night-and-day when compared to lossless.

Check out the results of this public listening test here:

https://listening-test.coresv.net/results.htm